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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/hits-misses-and-hedge-funds).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes; it’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, it’s been 10 days as we record this since our live 100th episode. How are you feeling about it now in the aftermath?

**Craig:** Well, I feel great. I mean, we had a great time. That went great. I mean, it’s a little sad now suddenly to be doing it the old way, you know, just you and me, quietly.

**John:** I’m kind of enjoying it though. It’s nice to have total control over things.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** Because what people probably don’t understand is that the live crowd was amazing and like it was great to be in that space, it was a nightmare to edit that episode. And poor Stuart lost his mind because you were the one who sort of noticed, “Oh, there’s sort of a buzz in the speakers.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, before the audience came in, Craig was standing at the speakers, trying to get the stuff to deal with the sound guy to make it all sound good. And we thought like, oh, it’s a speaker problem, it will be fine. But actually it was a soundboard problem. So, there was a hum in the soundboard and so our recording was bad. So, we had to take that out and then we had to make the crowd sound good. And then everything kept falling out of sync.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** So, poor Stuart; he had a rough time. But I was delighted with the end result of the episode.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that aside, and listen, it’s very easy for me to carve Stuart’s pain out of my sphere of acknowledgment.

That aside, it was a great crowd. Obviously the venue was terrific. Bettina and Greg over at the Academy did a terrific job on our behalf. And we had great guests. And it was just a terrific crowd. I stayed pretty late. I didn’t close the place down or anything, but I stayed late talking to people.

Everyone was — with the exception of one person — everyone was incredibly well behaved.

**John:** I do want to talk about behavior, because I noticed also that people were so much better behaved after this than other sort of live things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Probably because I think these were our people, so they had come specifically to see us. And so therefore when we were shaking hands afterwards, they would do like that 30 second thing rather than the five minute “let me tell you all about how I am and what my life story is.”

**Craig:** Right. Or the “follow you around” thing, or the “suddenly there you are again” thing.

**John:** Yes. People were terrific and I really enjoyed that.

**Craig:** Yes. They were. They were great.

**John:** A few things to follow up from the 100th episode. First off, Matt Smith was the guy who won the Golden Ticket.

**Craig:** Congratulations Matt.

**John:** He had the ticket underneath his seat. He apparently just sent in his script to us, so we will be taking a look at that.

**Craig:** I saw his tweet. Yes, very exciting.

**John:** So, we will take a look at it. If it seems like the kind of thing which would be appropriate to discuss on the air, we will discuss it on the air if he agrees to that. I noticed he also has a podcast, so he may actually be a person who could even join us on this. So, we’ll see how that all works out.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** Today, I would like to talk about some developments at Sony Pictures.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You actually sent me an article and I think there’s two interesting things that have happened at Sony Pictures that we need to talk about.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** I want to look at three Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s been awhile since we’ve done that. And, as always, we have to do some housekeeping. So, here is some housekeeping for today. People have been writing in saying, “Hey, you referenced the Raiders episode, or I see that there’s only 20 episodes available in iTunes, where are all the back episodes?”

The truth is the back episodes have always sort of been on the site at johnaugust.com. But we don’t put that whole feed through to iTunes just because it overwhelms things and makes it hard to sort of process stuff. I asked Stuart and Ryan to figure out if we were to take all the episodes, both the normal m4a, which is on iTunes, or the mp3 which some people need, we took all those episodes, took the transcripts, took all the Three Page Challenges, how much space would that be. And they came back to me and said it’s a little bit under 8GB.

And so I said, you know what, let’s just put that on a USB flash drive so people can buy that if they wanted to.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** And so we’re going to do that. It turns out we can actually stick them all onto a little drive. So, if you are a person who has come in late to the podcast and want to catch up on back episodes, or if you just want to go back and have easy reference to them, or have them all in one little place, you can buy that. So, we’re going to start selling that today, as of this podcast.

**Craig:** And how much would that cost?

**John:** That will cost $20.

**Craig:** Ooh! I like it. $20 for the whole back catalog.

**John:** You get the entire catalog of Scriptnotes for $20. And the thing that Nima pointed out — Nima Yousefi, who is my third employee here — the drive itself is actually like a pretty good useful drive. So, even if you just want the drive, you dump all the episodes onto your hard drive, then you have an 8GB flash drive which is super useful.

**Craig:** Normally that’s like ten bucks anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. And please assure me, as you always do, that we’re not actually really making money off of this.

**John:** No. Basically it will cover our costs and it also pays for stuff like the server and for the other little things we need to do like transcripts, which is an ongoing cost for us.

**Craig:** Does any of it get converted into food for Stuart?

**John:** You know, it probably does hopefully get converted into some type of food, some coffee, some —

**Craig:** I like to call that Stuart Feed.

**John:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** Comes in a huge bag.

**John:** You scoop it out. You put it in a bowl.

**Craig:** You put it in a bowl. It clanks —

**John:** If he’s really good then you sort of wet it down and soften it for him.

**Craig:** Or, well, if he’s really good then there’s like a special Stuart treat. But you can only do like three or four of those a day or else Stuart has gastrointestinal problems. I mean, really, Stuart is best with just his feed, twice a day, in a bowl.

**John:** Yeah. I find it so weird that we talk about him and then he has to edit these podcasts.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know. It’s the greatest! It’s the greatest. And he can’t get rid of this. Because the cool thing about Stuart is he knows that this is the best. This is really why people show up. He is, god, what are we going to do if something should ever happen to Stuart?

**John:** Well, Stuart will become tremendously successful. I mean, that’s a thing that’s going to happen. And so at some point he will move on, and it will be sad, but it will be good.

**Craig:** It will be good.

**John:** Progress is progress.

**Craig:** Do you think one day, maybe like 80 years from now, when Stuart finally passes away, that he’ll just disappear and his clothes will just flop away. And then you look up and there will be a new star in the sky?

**John:** It’s entirely possible that he’ll be raptured. He could be raptured this very week.

**Craig:** [laughs] Stuart would be… — Let me tell you something. The worst part of the Rapture is that we’ll lose Stuart. That’s the worst thing. That’s the worst thing. Most everybody else I know will be right here with me.

**John:** So hopefully the Rapture won’t happen in the next ten days, because it’s ten days from now that you have to order the USB drive.

Basically we’re going to take preorders for ten days and then we will make them and then we will ship them out. And so I can’t promise that we’ll make any extra ones. So, if you would like one of these things, you should do it within the next ten days by Friday, August 16th, that would be. Because then we’re going to make them and we’re going to ship them out and that’s probably going to be it. So, that is the hope to get these 100 episodes out the door in a handy package form.

**Craig:** I just have to say, the thought of Stuart being raptured and the smile on his face as he hurdled towards heaven would just be — I just love it. I just love him just hurdling nude towards heaven.

**John:** Did you see This is the End?

**Craig:** No, I haven’t seen it yet. But I heard it’s really funny.

**John:** Yeah. And so the Rapture, of course, is a central idea within it. And it’s nicely done.

**Craig:** Yeah, I got to check it out.

**John:** Yeah. Jews being raptured.

**Craig:** Ha, ha, ha, that’s ridiculous.

**John:** Also, at the same time that we’re going to be selling these USB drives, we have a few — and seriously just a few — extra t-shirts that we will put up there. So, quantity is incredibly limited; some sizes are there, some sizes will not be there. But, if you wanted a t-shirt and didn’t get in on the t-shirt thing the first time through, there are a few t-shirts left.

We’re also going to be putting up some Karateka t-shirts that we just have sitting around and someone should wear it because they’re cool. So, all that stuff is $20 apiece. It’s at store.johnaugust.com. So, get that stuff if you want it.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** Cool.

Today, let us talk about Sony Pictures and what’s going on with Sony Pictures.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You had sent me this article specifically about this investor guy, but essentially some backstory here, Sony Pictures is Columbia Pictures and TriStar pictures. But TriStar Pictures has been sort of inactive for a long time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s also Sony Pictures Classics, which I think still exists? I’m never really quite clear what they’re doing with Sony Pictures.

**Craig:** Sony Pictures Classics, I think has — I don’t think they’re still around.

**John:** All right. It’s never entirely clear.

**Craig:** Or, if they are it is moribund.

**John:** Yes, moribund. Moribund is such a great word.

So, Amy Pascal has run Columbia Pictures and then Sony Pictures for quite a long time. This summer has not been a fantastic summer for Columbia Pictures. They had White House Down, which underperformed, and After Earth, which underperformed, both of which had huge movie stars and seemed like they would be movies that should work and did not work.

So, this has raised the ire and focus of a man named Daniel Loeb, who is an investor. He runs an investment company called Third Point, which bought a 6.4% stake in Sony Pictures. This is where I get really confused by the finances.

**Craig:** I think in Sony itself.

**John:** In Sony overall?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so.

**John:** And so he has been pressuring — he has been pointing to the failure of these two movies, calling them the Waterworld and Ishtar of the day, and basically calling for some heads to roll and for Sony to split the entertainment part off and he’s calling for a lot of changes. And you had sent me an article that was George Clooney’s response to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’ll be honest, usually when actors start talking about things that have nothing to do with acting, my eyes glaze over, or I just get angry. But in this case I think Clooney absolutely nails it, is absolutely correct.

So, the deal is this guy made a choice running a hedge fund to invest in the Sony Corporation. And now he’s making a choice to basically say to the Sony Corporation, “Get rid of your entertainment arm because its ‘perpetual underperformance is embarrassing.'”

And here is what Clooney basically said. He says, “Daniel Loeb is a hedge fund guy who describes himself as an activist but who knows nothing about our business. And he’s looking to take scalps at Sony because two movies in a row underperformed. When does the clock stop and start for him at Sony? Why didn’t he include Skyfall, the 007 movie that grossed a billion dollars? Or Zero Dark Thirty? Or Django Unchained?” Great point.

Absolutely correct. I have no, I don’t — first of all, I think the answer to that is the clock stops and starts for him when it’s convenient, because he’s not about actually saying that Sony “perpetually underperforms.” The people who run Sony aren’t morons. If Sony Pictures lost money year, after year, after year, they would have dumped it a long time ago.

No, this guy is up to something else.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Clooney then says, “How can any hedge fund guy call for responsibility? If you look at these guys there is no conscience at work. It is a business that is only about creating wealth, where when they fail they get bailed out and nobody gets fired. A guy from a hedge fund entity is the single least qualified person to be making these kinds of judgments and he is dangerous to our industry.”

Well, to be fair, a lot of the people that run movie studios also have no conscience either. However, great point in as much as, again, when a hedge fund guy starts saying things like, “Well, the problem is underperformance,” you just can’t believe them. They’re up to something else. And he says what he’s doing is scaring studios and pushing them to make decisions from a place of fear. Why is he buying stock like crazy if he’s so down on things? He’s trying to manipulate the market. Ding, ding, ding, ding! Right?

**John:** There’s your answer.

**Craig:** There you go, okay? There you go. He’s trying to manipulate the market. This is such a load of bull that you’re going to go after two movies, which by the way, aren’t the Ishtar and Waterworld of their day. Waterworld wasn’t the Waterworld of its day, by the way.

**John:** Yes, Waterworld was actually much more successful than people acknowledge.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. And the fact of the matter is that one massive hit, as we’ve often discussed, will dwarf one massive failure, because it’s repeatable. Simple rule of Hollywood bigness: failure is not repeatable and success is repeatable, therefore in the long run you’ll be okay, unless all you do is failures. Right?

But you can go ahead and make John Carter, and you can make Lone Ranger because you’ve made, now it’s going to be five Pirates.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Plus all of the things that spin off of Pirates. So, this guy — and this guy knows this. I mean, Daniel Loeb may be, as George Clooney says, “Conscienceless,” and he may be a joyless individual who has no appreciation for anything in life other than the pointless existentially bizarre creation of wealth for its own sake. But, he’s not stupid. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so lastly George Clooney says, “If guys like this are given any weight because they’ve bought stock and suddenly feel they can tell us how to do our business — one he knows nothing about — this does great damage that trickles down. The board of directors start saying, ‘Wait a minute. What guarantee do you have that this movie makes money?’ Hedge fund guys do not create jobs and we do.”

Well, I don’t know if that’s quite true, that last part. And I think that board of directors are already pretty scared at these studios. But, no, they shouldn’t be given any weight. Smart people in Hollywood should look at a guy like Daniel Loeb and say, “You are basically just a greed head who is saying stuff that you believe will accrue to your financial benefit. And it has no meaning beyond that.”

**John:** Yes. So, a sidebar here to talk about George Clooney, because I’m very glad we have George Clooney in that I think he’s a very good actor, but he’s also a good filmmaker. I’ve like the movies he’s produced. I’ve liked the movies he’s directed. I like that he seems very interested in making good movies, which not everyone seems to be actually interested in making. So, I’m glad we have him.

And if you can sort of imagine the alternate scenario in which we didn’t have George Clooney, things would be just a little bit worse, and I don’t know who would have stepped up to fill his function, but things would not have been as good as they would be. So, I’m grateful that George Clooney exists and that he’s saying these things.

His point about sort of starting and stopping the clock is absolutely true. You can take the most successful filmmaker, the most successful studio, and if you want to make a little time slice, there are moments of great failure in there.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And that’s just the reality of it all. And so you can say like, “Well, they haven’t released a movie in six months,” well, maybe because they released these big giant tent poles in Christmas and summer and they have no released no movies at this time. So, you could say like, “Oh, this studio has lost money over this time.” Well, that’s just the way it’s going to be.

This sort of fear-based moviemaking is also — it’s everything that is dangerous about this kind of guy is that you have to be able to justify the decision to make any movie. And then the only movies you’re going to make are the things that are considered incredibly safe like the sequels.

**Craig:** And you’ll run out of them.

**John:** You’ll run out of them, because you’ll burn through them and you won’t be able to make more movies in the future. You can’t make sequels until you make originals.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, trust me, when they made After Earth, when they made White House Down, they would have loved for those movies to be so successful that they could make a sequel.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** But it didn’t happen. Yeah.

So. A different development that happened at Sony Pictures this last week was TriStar, which has been a very dormant label — they release some movies just for the TriStar banner every once and awhile, but I don’t think there really is a TriStar company — now has a new Chairman. I think he’s called Chairman. His name is familiar because he used to run Fox for a very long time. His name is Tom Rothman.

**Craig:** Wait, let’s cue Darth Vader’s theme. [hums] Well, he’s not such a bad guy really. [laughs]

**John:** I was trying to do the Star Wars thing, but I think I actually did the pon farr from Star Trek.

**Craig:** Oh my. [hums] No, he’s not a bad guy. He’s a really smart guy. He’s just a little, you know, he’s very Foxy, well, when he was at Fox he was sort of Fox epitomized, wasn’t he?

**John:** Yeah, he was. And he was a reason why some people didn’t want to make a movie at Fox.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. So, you and I dealt with him when we were making this deal for writers at Fox.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I thought he was smart to make that deal, so I liked him for that. I don’t quite honestly understand this from Sony’s perspective, because I don’t see Sony saying like, “We need to make more movies. We need to be releasing more movies.” I don’t perceive that as being Sony’s problem that they’re not releasing enough movies. But maybe that’s what they perceive to be the case. They’re trying to make four movies a year at TriStar. And I don’t quite know how that’s going to work.

**Craig:** Well, can I ask, because I don’t know the answer to this — traditionally, did the TriStar brand represent a certain kind of movie for them the way that Touchstone did at Disney?

**John:** Sometimes yes and sometimes no. So, TriStar had a lot of romantic comedies. They had some Julia Roberts comedies kind of things. TriStar was actually my first employer in Hollywood. I worked there as a reader for about a year, during grad school. And so every day I would go into the lot — if you know the Sony Pictures lot, TriStar is at the far end of it. And so it’s this sort of big, modern building that feels very eighties.

And so I would park my car and go in and I’d pick up the two scripts that I needed to cover. I’d go home, read them, write my coverage, bring them back in, and this is all on paper. There was no email at that point at all. And deliver my coverage and pickup my new scripts. That was paying my rent for quite a long time. So, I have some affinity and some affection for the TriStar name.

TriStar was actually where I first met Andrea Gianetti who was the executive who ended up buying Go. So, that was fantastic. And it’s also where Chris Lee was — Chris Lee was running TriStar at the time when we set up Big Fish. And ultimately during the time we were making negotiations for Big Fish they merged TriStar into Columbia Pictures so it became a Columbia Pictures movie. But without TriStar I’m not sure that there would have been Big Fish. So, that’s my little like history and memory lane of TriStar brand.

But, I would say they didn’t have as clearly defined a role as Touchstone did for Disney, where Disney was “we are family movies,” Touchstone was “we can do other things, too.”

**Craig:** Right. So, in a case like this, listen, the bottom line is it’s good for us as writers. Sony, the Corporation of Sony, Daniel Loeb aside, has decided they’re going to make more movies. Great. And by the way, a guy like Tom Rothman I actually believe could be a spectacularly good producer. There’s something funny, you know, when you are asked to run a studio and report to the board of directors and deal with things outside of just making an individual movie, or two, or three, or four, it can certainly bring out the best, or worst, or both in you.

I guess it could send you to extremes depending on the kind of person you are. But, I could also see somebody like Tom being a terrific producer because he is a remarkably intelligent guy. I mean, you can see that right away. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered. And I didn’t spend much time with him. But one of the smartest, evidently smartest people I’ve encountered in this business in my time in it. And that always helps.

And then maybe if he doesn’t feel like he’s responsible for delivering something other than a move that — in the shape it’s supposed to be, that it wants to be in, as opposed to a movie that say a slate needed to be in — I think he could be a terrific producer.

So, good for us. Maybe there’s another good producer out there. Maybe there are four more movies that employ writers and that’s terrific. Yeah, I’m not really sure what the point is, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

**John:** I question though whether producer is really the right term for him, because he really is running a studio. So, is it more like the way that Joe Roth was a producer when he was running Caravan Pictures?

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** So, we talked about Screenwriter Plus the last episode, but this sort of like a Producer Plus, where like you are running a company that makes movies. And so almost more like what a New Line is where they are heavily involved in sort of everything they do in a way that a studio isn’t. That distinction between what a studio head is and what a producer is can get kind of murkiness.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, because, it depends really on if he’s allowed to green light his own movies. I would be surprised if that were the arrangement, but maybe it is. And if he is, then yeah, maybe he just goes back to being the Tom Rothman he was three or four years ago.

**John:** Here’s the question: will his name be on the movies that get released? Because Amy Pascal’s name is not on Columbia Pictures movies.

**Craig:** No. And I would imagine that they wouldn’t be, but yeah, I guess I am sort of thinking of him in that Joe Roth way, Roger Birnbaum way from back in the old Caravan days, or Spyglass, that it is sort of like Producer Plus. But, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.

I mean, I guess if TriStar doesn’t have its marketing department, and TriStar isn’t green lighting movies, and TriStar doesn’t have say a number under which they can just make any movie they want and TriStar has to get certain casting or director approvals from big Sony, then no. But if yes, then yes.

**John:** Yeah. So, looking across the different studios, there are a number of these sort of entirely absorbed sort of second entities within companies.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I’m thinking of Fox 2000 at Fox.

**Craig:** And New Regency at Fox.

**John:** New Regency at Fox. Although New Regency has completely their own money. So they function autonomously but then they also — they release through Fox.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** New Line, which is now absorbed into Warner’s, they still have like a New Line logo, but they feel like they’re really very much a Warner’s company now. New Line which used to — the executives at New Line used to be listed as producers on their movies.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We talked about Disney with Touchstone Pictures, which I think they sometimes dust off that brand. They used to have Hollywood Pictures. And you remember what they always said about Hollywood Pictures?

**Craig:** “It’s the sphinx, it stinks.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Exactly.

**Craig:** And you haven’t seen the sphinx in a long, long time.

**John:** We haven’t seen it. Oh, I kind of love the sphinx though. I wish there were some next sort of Tarantino filmmaker who wanted to make movies at Disney who insisted on using the Hollywood Pictures.

**Craig:** I always wondered why the sphinx, by the way? Why would you call it Hollywood Pictures and then put a sphinx on it?

**John:** Well, isn’t that from Cleopatra, from that kind of —

**Craig:** Is it? I don’t know. I mean, but it seems strange. Is Cleopatra really that — is there a synecdoche — am I using that — synecdoche of the — ? Anyway.

**John:** A synchronicity?

**Craig:** No, I think it’s synecdoche. I think synecdoche —

**John:** Oh, so like one thing stands for the other.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah.

**John:** Okay. All right.

**Craig:** Now it’s just that Charlie Kaufman movie.

**John:** Yeah, that’s all it is now. And so now they’re going to revive this TriStar label at Columbia Pictures. And, yes, it’s an opportunity to make more movies. And maybe you’re going to make some slightly different kinds of movies than you would make at the other place. Maybe a different person’s taste will help balance it out. Maybe some diversity in there is useful. But, I mean Tom Rothman diversity versus Amy Pascal diversity, is that really diversity? We’ll see

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Now, is TriStar the horse that runs towards us?

**John:** Yeah. TriStar is the Pegasus that flies up.

**Craig:** Yes. Got it. Remember Orion?

**John:** I remember Orion had a great little logo. The last Orion movie I remember seeing was Silence of the Lambs, I think.

**Craig:** Was that Orion?

**John:** I would swear that was Orion.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I can Google it right now.

**Craig:** I know that Woody Allen had movies through Orion for awhile. And I remember, let’s see, Orion…oh, listen to you clack, clack, clack, clack.

**John:** Yeah, I have the loudest keyboard on earth.

**Craig:** I’m doing it on my quiet iPhone.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s see who gets there first.

**Craig:** Let’s see. Silence of the Lambs, well done. Well done.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yup. Silence of the Lambs, 1991.

**John:** God, I remember sitting and seeing Silence of the Lambs in Des Moines, Iowa. I was with my friend George Vosness. And at some point, like about midway through the movie I just tuned to George like, “This is amazing.” Just acknowledging this experience like, “This movie is so good.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was so good.

**Craig:** A little side note on Silence of the Lambs. My friend Steve Garrett, this college buddy of mine, he said, “You’ve got to read this Tom Harris book. It’s the most amazing book.” And so I read it, I think, I would say the summer right before Silence of the Lambs the movie came out. Because it came out I think in like January or February of ’91, I think, or something like that. And I think I read it the summer prior. So, I knew everything. I had read the book, which I thought was the most amazing book I’d ever read.

And then I saw the movie and I’m like, “Oh man, this is better than what I saw in my head.” It was one of those things where the movie was better than the movie I saw in my head when I read the book. It’s a perfect movie.

**John:** It’s just amazing.

**Craig:** It’s flawless.

**John:** You look at what they do. I mean, brilliantly cast throughout. Just the right kind of misdirections and surprises.

**Craig:** Everything is just perfect. And it’s also timeless. I mean, there’s not one old fashioned thing about it. Pretty remarkable.

**John:** Pretty remarkable. And even discounting sort of the Hannibal, which some people really like — the TV series version of Hannibal — it had a huge impact on not only how we were making movies for awhile and what a thriller would be like, but you look at sort of the procedurals, the one-hour procedurals and sort of like how that changed. It was just a huge cultural impact.

**Craig:** And you know, last but not least I will say that Anthony Hopkins prior that movie had kind of disappeared for a bit because he had this pretty serious drinking problem. And just fell off the wheel. And then this was kind of his triumphant return in a big way. And I just wasn’t that familiar with him, you know, because I was still pretty young.

And it was just cool at the age of 20 to be hit in the face with an actor of that age who is that good who I just wasn’t familiar with at all. It was pretty remarkable.

**John:** It’s a nice thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, god, man, he was scary.

**John:** Well, folding back through the Orion and sort of like why this sort of matters is it’s important to recognize that studios and labels come into being and then go away. And they rise, and they change, and that is sort of the natural flow of how the business works. You just want to make sure that there are enough places out there, because if there aren’t it feels like, you know, six good studios that are releasing movies, it’s tougher for everybody.

You want there to be some different people out there doing different kinds of movies.

**Craig:** Right. One more advocate on your behalf is a good thing. We have three people who are seeking advocates today in the guise of you and me.

**John:** We do. I think we actually have five, because two of these Three Page Challenges come from writing teams.

**Craig:** Quite right. And for the first time I believe we know everyone’s name. Maybe not the first time, but nearly the first time. We even know somebody’s address, but we won’t read it on the air. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yes. Stuart is very careful to strip out that stalker information from the Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Who shall we look at first, Craig?

**Craig:** You know what? Why don’t we — how about we start with Detroit. Would you like me to summarize Detroit?

**John:** Go for it. I was hoping you would do this one.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. Detroit written by Robert Rue. Thank you, Robert, for sending this in. So, we open in a hospital room and the title says, “DETROIT, MICHIGAN JULY 27, 1999.” Mary in her 20’s is in bed with her newborn son in her arms and her husband, Ben, a little older in a police uniform, holds hands with her but he’s on the phone. And he’s talking to somebody and he’s very upset. “What!? What the hell for?” He’s upset, he’s upset.

And she asks why. And he says, “Barry quit”

“What?”

“Barry Sanders. He quit.”

We then go to the Pontiac Silverdome and we hear the voiceover of a boy. And the boy is describing Barry Sanders’ career and how he quit the Detroit Lions and why and what it meant for the Detroit Lions. And says, “I came into the world the same day Barry disappeared.” So we understand that this voiceover is the kid that we just saw being born in the first scene.

And then we hear, as Ray Charles sings, we see shots of Detroit. It’s a disaster as you would expect. And now we meet our narrator kids who is 14-year-old Doc. And he’s chasing another 12-year-old kid down, grabs him to the ground, takes a switchblade out, and basically robs the kid.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, what did you think, John?

**John:** There are things I enjoyed about this. And I liked the way of painting the city. I thought some of the voiceover stuff with that worked really well. I got confused at times in a not helpful way. And I also, I wasn’t convinced that I was going to be led on a good path, a good story path.

And so let me talk about some things that did not work for me.

**Craig:** Go.

**John:** Right from the very start, Hospital Room, we get that title card that says what day it is. “MARY GILLETTE (late-20’s) lies in bed with her new-born son in her arms. Her husband, BEN GILLETTE (mid-30’s), in a police uniform, holds hands with Mary.”

So, this is, and he’s on the phone, this is meant to be like the baby was just born, yet I didn’t really feel that in the sentence, probably because there’s a lot being thrown at me here at once.

Let’s maybe focus on the baby first so I know like, okay, this baby is the important thing. And then we will talk about the other people. I keep expecting for like Mary and Ben to become the big main characters. And it’s the baby is the thing that I need to be worried about. So, in some ways if I had just heard the phone call more before it actually got focused on the guy, I might appreciate this a little bit more.

We think like, oh, they got just horrible news, just horrible news. It’s Barry Sanders, he quit, then it’s sort of a bit of a joke. Right now it didn’t really feel like a joke to me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** How are you reading that opening scene?

**Craig:** It seemed like a joke to me. I laughed. [laughs] I laughed when he said, “Barry Sanders. He quit.” I totally agree that I would love to see a shot of that newborn kid. We’re going to see this in another script in a minute, in another Three Page Challenge, but “lies in bed with her new-born son in her arms,” you need to show me that it’s a newborn son. It’s not enough even that it says hospital room.

I love your idea of opening on the baby. See that there’s the clip on the umbilical cord, or it’s wrapped in that blanket, evidently newborn, you know. That they’re literally — the delivery people are cleaning stuff out of the room, like this just happened, you know what I mean? But, yeah, I laughed when he said, “Barry Sanders. He quit.” That made me laugh. It’s such a Detroit thing.

**John:** One thing, so it’s 1999, so this is pre-cell phones. He wouldn’t be on a cell phone.

**Craig:** No, no, it’s not pre-cell phone.

**John:** Let’s try to think. No, he could be. Yeah, he could be.

**Craig:** He’s on a Nokia.

**John:** He’s on a Nokia. A little flip phone. All right. But then if it is on a cell phone there are jokes to be had about that, too. Because like you’re not supposed to use those in a hospital. I don’t know. I felt like there could be more — I don’t know. I want a little bit more of a meal here and I want to know who I need to focus on and what’s the important thing.

So, let’s go to what I thought was a more successful, well, first something that didn’t quite work for me. Doc starts his voiceover. And here’s his voiceover: “Barry Sanders walked away from football just 1400 yards shy of Walter Payton’s all-time rushing record. From what I hear, no one saw it coming.”

And then it says, “We see a video clip of a heart-stopping Barry Sanders move.” And it describes the move. But what’s weird is we’re in this EXT. PONTIAC SILVERDOME, and suddenly we see a — wait, is this somehow projected inside the stadium itself? Are we cutting to something? If it really is like a new thing, give us that as an intermediate slug line of like the video thing. Because otherwise I feel like we’re seeing it in the stadium. Or tell us that it’s overlapping somehow.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I just got confused like what I was actually seeing on screen.

**Craig:** I agree. You definitely — my impression is that you’re going to want to cut to, that that’s going to be sort of like a burst. And then back to where we are. The other thing is I feel quite — I like that it — Doc’s voiceover, “Barry Sanders walked away from football just 1400 yards shy of Walter Payton’s all-time rushing record.” Period.

Do not say, “From what I hear, no one saw it coming.” That’s just a weird thing to put in voiceover. “From what I hear.” Who are you, A; B, what do you mean “from what I hear?” What do you mean? “No one saw it coming.” No one say it coming, right, you could say, “No one saw it coming,” but we know no one saw it coming because we just saw your dad not see it coming. Just lose that line. Just don’t need it.

**John:** I agree. A thing I liked later on in this page, “We hear the sound of an iPod SHUFFLING through the choices and a faint CLICK.” I know what that sound is and that’s great, too.

I don’t know that we necessarily need all of that sentence. “We hear an iPod SHUFFLING though choices and a faint CLICK.” But anyway, that’s a nice way just to introduce the fact that we are going to be starting a track, in this case it’s a Ray Charles track, which is great. And so we’re going to be overlapping this Ray Charles track with his voiceover and this is all very stylized, poetic, and it feels like some credits are going to be probably happening at the same time, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. That works. Tonally I’m a little jarred, because the first scene is comedy, frankly. And the second scene feels like we’re in The Blind Side, replete with footage of an NFL game. So, tonally I’m a little jarred. Also, by the way, on your second voiceover paragraph, “The Detroit Lions have never played in a Super Bowl.” You could lose that line, too. I mean, voiceover really needs to be as sparse as possible. “With Barry, the Detroit Lions made it all the way to the NFC championship game. Without him, they’ve never even come close.” That covers that it’s also not a Super Bowl.

But I like that he ties it to, “I came into the world the same day Barry disappeared. Let the Detroit curse continue.” That’s interesting, you know. You don’t need to say “a beat.” “Beat” usually works there in parenthesis.

And then sort of continuing to stomp on the tone of the first page, we have what happens on page three.

**John:** Yeah. The bottom of page three is really my issue and my challenge. So, Doc, who is our narrator, so here’s what’s described:

Uh, okay. I now do not want to be in a movie with this kid Doc.

**Craig:** Well, let me say this. I really liked that he says, “It’s not just Barry. People disappear around here all the time. Sometimes I think about disappearing, too, just to find out where everybody goes.” That’s a really good line. I like that. I’m not exactly sure what it means, but I like it anyway, you know what I mean? It just feel evocative. It feels like something a very dramatic 14-year-old kids would say. I did not like that he then actually says “Let me know if you want to disappear” out loud.

**John:** Exactly. It’s one of those sort of poetic lines that can work in voiceover but sound bizarre coming out of an actual person’s mouth.

**Craig:** Bingo, right. So, you get away with stuff in voiceover. Everybody in voiceover is Morgan Freeman. Everybody is Maya Angelou. But the second you start talking like Maya Angelou in the street, they’re going to arrest you for being insane, unless you’re actually Maya Angelou. And even she probably doesn’t do it over lunch.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that doesn’t work. There is a version of this story where you’ve got this 14-year-old kid who is an absolute criminal and he is, I don’t know, he’s going to join the football team and he’s going to find his way. Who knows? I don’t know where it goes from here. I’m not willing to judge it just because Doc is a jerk. Not yet, you know. I need to see sort of where it goes.

But, I guess just from a craft point of view, it was just that line. Just dialogue wise, that’s a no-no.

**John:** So, to me, when I had a voiceover philosopher talking to me for two pages, and then suddenly he’s pulling a knife on some 12-year-old kid and throwing him down to the ground, I have this cognitive dissonance that makes me not trust the storyteller.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny. I had the other reaction. I kind of liked that the omniscient wise narrator turns out to be a jerky kid. That to me was exciting. So, there you have it. This is why we need more than one person running a studio.

**John:** Exactly. Maybe Tom Rothman would like the script and Amy Pascal wouldn’t. I can guarantee you Amy Pascal would not like this script.

**Craig:** Yeah, Tom’s not going for it either. But, you know what? That’s okay. When I run my studio I’ll go for it unless I don’t like what’s on page four.

**John:** Mm-hmm. It’s all about page four.

**Craig:** Yes, but Robert I think there was really good stuff in here, Robert. You just need to kind of clean up a little bit of these — some of it is a little overwritten, I guess.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. And I think there is something provocative and interesting that you’re setting up here. It’s a matter of just getting it to, you know, making sure we are with you on every page and every sentence.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Let me summarize our next script which is Blood from a Stone, by Catherine Grieve & Dylan Wagner.

We fade in on a desert settlement at dawn. It’s a world beyond repair. A solitary ghost town tucked against the sandstone canyons. We’re going to be following a lone child who is six years old who hurries through the square. And we hear this — we see other inhabitants of the town in a straight line, talking amongst themselves.

We hear this thud, this thud keeps happening. He’s going to follow this line through. He comes up to his mother. She clutches him close, but she tells him to sort of stay silent. There is a woman buried up to her chest in the dirt. And the people in this line are each taking a turn throwing a stone at her. And so we see one woman stop. This is Aponi.

She steps forward through a pile of stones, searching for blunted edges. She throws the stone and the women’s temple, dazing her.

We then go to see sort of more of the town life. Various women gossiping, going about their lives, gathering water. There are men with guns, they’re goons, who wander through the settlement as protection but also as sort of authority. As we close the story down, as we get to the end of these three pages, we are at the old town hall with a semicircle of seats. And the nine elders of the town, the Council. And right as we end at page three, Elder Pulvers, who is the most senior of these people, is about to speak.

I should say this: throughout these three pages, no one has spoken the whole time, so this is just a silent sequence.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig Mazin, tell me about this.

**Craig:** Oh boy. Well, I really struggled with this. I really struggled through this. And I’ll go through the reasons why, but here’s just a large bird’s eye impression. There was something about the rhythm of the way that these two wrote this that was so boring to me.

You know when you’re writing without dialogue you can make it really interesting, but it just seemed like everything kept starting dry. Every new bit just was like, there was no flow to anything. And I mean, we’ll go through why, but it just felt like everything just stopped and started, stopped and started, stopped and started. And nothing seemed exciting. Everything seemed sort of weird and lifeless.

I’ll just walk through some, first of all, the amount of facts not in evidence problems in this is just remarkable. I mean, let’s just start. “The world beyond repair.”

So:

Uh, what?

**John:** Yeah, so here’s my biggest issue with this. I don’t know if I’m on Tatooine, or if I’m in Iraq, or if I’m in Afghanistan, or some sort of African village. I have no idea where I am.

**Craig:** I don’t know what year it is. I don’t know, is this Mad Max? Is it post-nuclear apocalypse? Is it Afghanistan right now? Is it Detroit? [laughs]

**John:** It’s Detroit. [laughs] The big surprise on page four, they pull up, “You’re in Detroit.”

**Craig:** No, I mean, but no matter, the fact that we don’t know where we are in and of itself isn’t necessarily a crime, because we may find out in an interesting way on page four. But, when you start your script, showing me a desert settlement and then telling me “the world beyond repair,” I don’t know what the rest of the world looks like at all. You can’t say that.

“A solitary ghost town tucked against sandstone canyons.” Fine

**John:** Again, Tatooine.

**Craig:** Right. Now basically Bartertown from Mad Max, rundown buildings, we’ve seen this world. The Book of Eli town. We’ve seen it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then there’s a lone child and we’re using this child the way that people use waiters to begin banquet scenes in movies. It’s basically just a kid running through so we could see other stuff. And either this lone child, six years old, is going to be very, very important — I doubt it because the character’s name is Lone Child — or you’re just using a gimmick and you’re forcing me to watch the gimmick for an entire page. Gimmick kid, you know, is not worthy of my attention.

The problem is you know that gimmick kid is just gimmick kid. I don’t. I’m sitting here waiting for something to happen to this kid. And if the kid is important, give him a name, and then I’ll feel a little bit better about it. But there is an entire page to reveal this woman buried in her chest getting stoned to death, Sharia Law style.

And it was exhausting to me, frankly.

**John:** Yeah, it was.

**Craig:** Exhausting.

**John:** So, here’s another problem of lack of specificity. Halfway through page one, “He sees the settlement’s INHABITANTS, waiting in a straight line, softly MURMURING amongst themselves.” So, inhabitants? Well what is an inhabitant? I don’t know what these people are like. How are they dressed? Are they men, are they women? Who are these people “softly murmuring amongst themselves?”

If they’re talking, they’re talking. So, are we going to hear what they’re saying, or we’re not going to hear what they’re saying?

**Craig:** Right. Is it English?

**John:** Is it English? Like what language are we in now?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that just made me lose a little bit of faith in the script and it was only a half a page finished.

**Craig:** Yeah, keep going.

**John:** So,

Well, am I going to know that’s his mother? I don’t know that we’re going to know this.

**Craig:** Facts not in evidence. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. It’s a woman who does that. So, unless she says something to him or we get some special information, but we don’t even know that this boy is important. So, this boy doesn’t have a name. And the mother is just a mother. So, I don’t know what this is.

Finally on page two we get a character with, okay, well actually the start of page two I need to point something out.

**Craig:** Yeah, here we go. [laughs] Stone in stone.

**John:** Yeah. “Her STONE FACED HUSBAND (60s) stands a few yards away.”

**Craig:** By the way, facts not in evidence. Don’t know that he’s her husband.

**John:** But, “Her STONE FACED HUSBAND (60s) stands a few yards away.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and…

**John:** “A STONE strikes her in the face, and she gasps for breath.”

**Craig:** Oh boy. How do you miss that?

**John:** Yeah, so you’re using stone in two very different ways, not in a clever way, just sort of like, “What? Huh?”

**Craig:** It’s just jarring. Here’s the thing: you could make a movie and the movie could be awesome and it could have a “stone faced husband,” and then the next thing could say “a stone strikes her in the face.”

The problem is for the people reading your script, when they see stuff like that they think, “Well, this writer, either they’re a little tone deaf or they don’t care.” Literally the word “stone” is capitalized right underneath the other stone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** So finally we’re going to meet a woman named Aponi. So, this is who we get to know Aponi.

But, we haven’t been given any — the filmmaking and sort of the words on the page haven’t given us any reason to why we’re going to focus on her rather than all the other people who we’ve seen in this line. And so she needs to do something. There needs to be some reason why we’re story-wise focusing on her. So either something needs to, an interaction needs to happen with her, she needs to take some action that puts the spotlight upon her, because just like the camera revealing her as the next person ain’t gonna cut it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Okay, so you’ve had a little boy, a mother, sorry, lone child, mother, woman, stone faced husband, thrower, teen boy. Oh, boy, all right. So, this is like a procession of inhabitants. Now this stoic woman — which by the way is the same thing as stone faced — she gets up and if she picks up this rock and she has this moment, “Their eyes meet, the woman stops digging as they stare, lost in a moment.” If that woman buried in the ground mouthed her name, something, so that we knew that this woman was something. You know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Also, again, just facts not in evidence, “A stoic woman, slender and tanned from a life spent working,” we don’t know that. She could just be thin and in the sun. “Seemingly without affect.” Okay, seemingly doesn’t work. [laughs] And again, you’re cheating. Either without affect or not.

**John:** I will say that if Aponi is a major character, you are allowed to cheat on her character description to some degree. If there hadn’t been so much cheating already happening.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s why. I’m just so cheat, you know, yeah.

**John:** So, middle of page two.

So, I had to read this like three times. So, “lost in a moment. Before Aponi hurls the stone.”

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**John:** Wait, is it a time jump? What will happen, really the before needs to be in the previous sentence so we know that Aponi hurls the stone. But the before, that’s a weird sentence fragment that makes me think we’re going to do a time jump here.

**Craig:** Also, let me give you another thing that’s impossible to shoot. “Aponi steps forward to the pile of stones, searching for blunted edges.” How will we know? Please tell me how I know on screen someone is searching for blunted edges.

**John:** So, here’s the confusion. Is she trying to find a stone that will hurt her more or will not hurt her more? That what we need —

**Craig:** Even if, you’re absolutely right, that is a question. Like even if I knew — even if you flashed on screen, “Aponi is searching for blunted edges,” it would still leave us with a question. The problem is we’ll never even know that anyway. All we’re going to see is a hand mushing through stones, [laughs], see.

**John:** Let me give you an example of how we could do that if she wanted to find a less hurtful stone. She could pick up a stone and it’s like pretty small, and then someone could take it out of her hand and give her a bigger stone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that would let us know that she did not want to hurt someone.

**Craig:** Or she could pick up a stone that’s sharp, look at the woman, then put it down and take a smoother. Then a choice has been made. But, come on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right, there’s a lot of impossible things here. Yes, before Aponi hurls the stone, very strange. “It finds the woman’s temple, dazing her.” The stone didn’t find. I mean, you throw a rock at somebody, it hits them, you know.

**John:** I do love when things like, “It finds purchase,” like I love that sort of archaic writing, but in normal prose. It just doesn’t work in screenwriting. Screenwriting is very much the present tense and written like it is today.

**Craig:** Impact. A rock hits someone in the temple. That’s impact. Write with impact.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “The next stone lands, knocking the woman unconscious —
And the dead rap continues behind…”

What’s that?

**John:** I think that’s the thump, thump, thump, thump.

**Craig:** Oh, okay, that’s weird. It’s just a weird phrase anyway, “dead rap.”

**John:** I want to point out word choice in the next block here. “A gaggle of 30 women.”

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Gaggle is a funny word. Gaggle makes me think, ha, ha, ha, giggle.

Don’t use gaggle in a serious situation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So a group of 30 women can be better than a gaggle in that situation.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** Gaggle or geese. Another funny word: goons.

**Craig:** Yeah, what is that?

**John:** Goons is funny. G words are kind of funny. And they’re not meant — honestly, goons might kind of okay, but just don’t put it out there by itself.

**Craig:** I’ve got to go back to another one. There is so much going on here. “The entire settlement bustles.” So, you say, “EXT. SETTLEMENT – TOWN SQUARE — DAY” Settlement is a place, right? I know you could also say it is the corpus of people themselves, but “the entire settlement bustles” is an awkward sentence. These sentences are weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, “Maybe 500 people in all.” Maybe? Maybe? [laughs] Tell us! How many people live here? Maybe? Eh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know what, the entire settlement bustling. Every single person is bustling.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** D’oh! All right, yeah, goons is the worst possible word here. A good is an old fashioned heavy that works for a mobster. A goon is like a weird guy who’s the fifth banana in a gang. You know? This is different. And there’s no specificity to goon at all. Goon.

“Protection from dangers without and within.” How do we know that?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now we have, and see, this is what I meant by also this kind of weird rhythm. So, we keep starting and stopping. We had the scene with the rocks. Then a gaggle. Then the settlement. Then the patrols. Then a collection of cars. Then a well. Then a settlement. Then a hall. It’s just uh-uh-uh nothing is happening. I feel like we’re looking at still photos almost.

**John:** I honestly feel like, you know, I took a trip to the Middle East and here’s all my slides. I’m going to click through them one at a time.

**Craig:** Yeah! It’s like a bad slide show.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s like a bad slide show here. There’s nothing that’s leading us anywhere. Like how do you cut — we talked about transitions — what’s the cut from this settlement outside to suddenly a truck depot, which by the way, how would will we even know where we are at that point? We’re suddenly at a truck depot.

I guess if we saw the truck depot or we saw somebody running with gasoline toward a truck depot, “a collection of late model vehicles.” Please describe what that means. Late model what?

**John:** Well, at least I knew we weren’t on Tatooine anymore, because they were like normal trucks and there were no Starfighters.

**Craig:** Right, so like 2013? 2012? Huh? I mean, “a collection of late,” this is really where my mind started going kazonky. “A collection of late model vehicles arranged in a row. Relics of an old world.” Explain — please to explain. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, so late model, so are we in the future? Maybe we’re in the future.

**Craig:** If we’re in the future, how are they late model? They’re ancient. They’re ancient — like a collection of ancient 2010-era vehicles, or 2000-era vehicles arranged in a row. Relics in an old world. I’d understand that. But if they’re late model vehicles, how are they relics of an old world? What’s happening?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then…oh, I’m sorry. I know.

**John:** I feel like we’re just piling on. Because, a lot of this doesn’t work. So, I want to go back to sort of — there was some instinct to write this thing, because I believe they’ve written probably more than just these three pages. They wrote this together. There was some instinct and some idea that caused them to write these things.

And so I want to tip them into a place in thinking about how to get those ideas or those instincts into something that is going to look good on a page.

So, they have this instinct to write a story of a woman buried in the sand and people throwing stones at her. That’s a very provocative image. And I’ve seen reports of that, but I haven’t actually seen that portrayed on film, and that’s a very potentially powerful thing to start with in a script.

But, I don’t think you start that kind of story with a kid running around in sort of the clichéd “let me show you the town” kind of way. I think you have to kind of get to that image. And then when you’re painting the nature of the town, you have to anchor us places and let us know what kind of world, what kind of movie this is. Is this Iraq, is this Afghanistan, is this Somalia? Where are we? Because we’ll get incredibly frustrated, just like Craig and I did, if we don’t know by that point.

You can start with this image that is sort of like you have this limbo kind of place. That’s great. I think the woman in that thing could be great. You can get right to your woman Aponi. But then Aponi should be our guide for what the rest of this world is like.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, there is always, there is story and there’s screenplay. And the story here may be spectacular. The problem that Catherine and Dylan have is a simple craft problem. They are not conveying what they see appropriately through the words here. And so the problems that they need to address, aside from story problems, which aren’t necessarily in evidence here — problems of tone, for instance, again, goons whacking each other upside the head, two pages after a woman is assassinated with rocks.

So, there’s problems of tone. There’s problems of facts not in evidence, which is a real situation. And in general there seems to be a disconnect between what the purpose of a screenplay is and what this screenplay is doing. Really ask yourselves guys how will people shoot this — how can they shoot what we’ve written? And if we really want them to know something, how can we put it in the screenplay in a way that they can actually shoot?

But, more than that, don’t be boring. Don’t be boring. And, you know what? Unfortunately this was boring.

**John:** Yeah, and I do wonder if sometimes it’s a writing team problem with this. It doesn’t feel like it has one voice. And maybe that is a problem of sort of these two writers trying to come together and negotiating word-by-word how they’re going to do stuff. But it didn’t feel like it was one — I didn’t have the confidence that I was hearing one person speak.

**Craig:** I will say that it’s certainly better than the first three pages I ever wrote. [laughs]

**John:** Ha!

**Craig:** So there’s that!

**John:** There’s always that.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t let this define you. The fact that we didn’t like these three pages doesn’t mean that you’re bad writers. It just means that you’ve got work to do on these three pages.

**John:** Let’s end on a happier note and let’s talk about — I hope it’s a happier note — The Dead Never Die, by Sarah Carman & James Roland.

**Craig:** It is. It is a happier note.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Quick summary here. We open on 1865. We’re out somewhere in the Old West. And a little girl, Loretta, eight years old is holding water and she’s holding water for her father, Moses, 50 years old, who’s digging a hole for a dead pig. And while he’s digging and drinking another pig keels over and dies and he starts digging another hole.

They’re in Central California and a lone rider approaches their home. His name is Frank Martin, he’s in his thirties. He enters their house, they’re not in the house, they’re away by the pigs. And he goes up into Moses’ room where he finds all these crates and chests full of stuff and he’s looking for something.

And Loretta sees some light coming from the room where this guy Frank has pushed a little wind chime around. And she goes into investigate. Frank spots a case, like a mysterious case, painted blood red with strange symbols. The little girl comes in. He gets her. He doesn’t hurt her, he just says, “Don’t scream or make any noise.”

And Moses realizes she’s gone. He heads into the house. And we realize that while Moses is entering the room that Frank is looking for a set of six shooters that have ivory handles. Moses enters. Frank draws his gun. Loretta knocks Frank’s arm away and the shot goes wild.

**John:** I enjoyed these three pages.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** So, let’s talk about sort of, I hate to say specificity, but like I knew the world that we were in. It was familiar, but it was just familiar enough. I sort of know what 1865, I know what the West is supposed to feel like. Our first image is “Two CORN HUSK DOLLS lie forgotten on a tree stump, dressed as boy and girl, a narrow gap between their outstretched hands.” Even that’s not necessarily and important image for the story overall, it puts me in a time and a place that I sort of get like corn husk dolls. That’s useful.

The dad is burying a pig. I get what that is like. This isn’t a rich — there are issues here. Some drama is going to be happening here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** One thing, for simplicity sake, I think you can cut out Loretta’s from all the scene headers, because every scene header says “EXT. LORETTA’S HOMESTEAD — DAY.” We don’t need, just homestead, we don’t need Loretta’s homestead. There’s no other homesteads we’re going to see.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So, just give us HOMESTEAD. We don’t need to know anything more important than that. Also Loretta’s made me think that it was an older character at the start that I needed to, so.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I like that Loretta takes some action. She’s curious. She’s a good girl who is there to help her father but she sees something. I love that she sees the reflection of the light in the room that makes her curious to go in there.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s how we connect things. Yup.

**John:** That’s terrific. And so early on, so this guy, this thief sort of comes to the — Frank comes into the house. Right away, near the top of page two: “Frank spots a case covered with a BURLAP SACK and whips it off, revealing: a STEAMER TRUNK, painted blood red, decorated with STRANGE SYMBOLS and locked tight. Yep, that’s the one.”

So, come on, you give me a trunk with strange symbols on it in an Old West setting, I’m intrigued. I really want to know what’s inside that chest. I want to know what kind of — I have enough information that I know what the Old West is, and now I think this is Old West Plus. There could be something supernatural happening here and I’m desperate to know what it is.

**Craig:** Yeah. These are really well done pages. The first thing that, yeah, I love the corn husk dolls, and I suspect that they are, as is often the case, thematic. There’s some thematic value there. But I really liked that while he’s digging this pit for this dead pig another pig wavers and falls to the ground. Even if that’s just meant to be like, “Ugh, life sucks out here. My pigs are sick,” in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “What’s going on with the pigs?” Something is up with the pigs.

**John:** There’s some poison. And now that we know that there’s something supernatural…

**Craig:** Well, and also the title is The Dead Never Die. And I’m thinking, hmm, virus, animals, dead, zombies. Who knows, right?

But something is up. I just like that it just — but the point is the writers just allowed that to happen and had faith that that was going to interest me. They didn’t make a big deal out of it. In fact, the main character just sighs and continues digging, as is appropriate.

The other thing that I really like, first of all, I always like it when characters, you know, little things, little writing things like “This must be the place. Frank begins his search.” That’s good. And I like that they’ve put it in italics, that’s smart.

**John:** Not only italics. They put it in Courier Prime. That’s why it looks so good. This whole script is in Courier Prime.

**Craig:** You’re so easy. You’re so easy.

And, yes, when he gets to that moment at the top of page two where he reveals the steamer trunk, what’s great is that they spent the first page not doing anything like that, just setting us really grounded in this world of the West. And now a new little thing. But then it’s right back to the rest of the world. The dialogue is sparse but makes sense.

I learn about Frank’s character through his actions, not through action description telling me what I’m supposed to think about his character. The action description doesn’t say anything about this dude.

He is 30. That’s what it tells us. That’s it. He’s 30. And then everything what I find out, he’s looking for something but is he bad? Well, I know this much, I know he’s confident. And then when he sees her and he grabs her, he’s actually okay with her. Right? Yeah, he threatens to kill her, but he doesn’t. Right?

**John:** At least on this page he doesn’t.

**Craig:** That’s right, he doesn’t. So, he’s not all bad. I have a feeling that Frank is not all bad.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re probably right.

**Craig:** And the fact that I have a feeling about that from this is good. That’s a good sign. And then, “I bet a little girl like you has poked her nose into every nook of this house. I bet you know about every secret thing. Am I right?” It’s interesting. It’s just good stuff.

And then Moses is going to come in and then our first gunshot goes off at the bottom of page three. It’s tight, good writing, kept me interested. I really liked it.

**John:** I really liked it a lot. So, if I had small little points of suggestion, on page one, the description of the interior of the house. “The house is a thief’s paradise, crammed with dusty ANTIQUES and odd, exotic KNICK-KNACKS.” Thief’s paradise did not work for me. And the reason why is I don’t know if that’s meaning that the people who own the house are thieves or that this guy is a thief.

I would scratch that out because the next block of description we get into Moses’ bedroom. “The room is a dragon’s lair of treasures.” Dragon’s lair of treasures is a much better description. I know exactly what that is that you’re talking about there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I would get rid of that thief’s paradise.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** But the fact that I can focus on such small little things is because it’s all really nicely done. And in terms of cheating, the italics that they’re using here, “STRANGE SYMBOLS and locked tight. Yep, that’s the one.” Yup that’s the one is completely a playable moment.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes!

**John:** We know how to do that, so that’s not cheating to say that there.

**Craig:** No, you can act it.

**John:** That’s a completely actable moment.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, just really well done you guys.

**Craig:** Same thing, “Did he see her?” Right? That’s actable. That is in fact how directors direct actors. There’s nothing wrong with writing the subtext like that.

**John:** If it’s a playable moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** So, let’s talk about this as what we think the script might end up being. Because people will come to us saying, “Oh, should I write this script, should I write that script?” This seems to be like a supernatural western. Are supernatural westerns the hottest thing in the world right now? No. And this could be a challenge to make. This could be an amazing read. And you should focus on writing the script that you really want to write, because I think they really love what they’ve written here. And I think the script is going to probably be great.

Even if they can’t get this one made, I bet people are going to read it and like it. And people reading and liking your stuff is tremendously helpful in terms of getting work and getting other things happening in your life.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, I suspect we will hear more from Sarah Carman and James Roland at some point in the future.

**Craig:** I agree. And you know, remember folks, it’s a marathon. Scott Frank just finished — he’s editing A Walk Among the Tombstones. That’s a script that he wrote in 1997 or something. Sometimes these things just sit in a drawer for awhile until they get cool again. And so okay, yeah, supernatural westerns, maybe there’s a stink on that right now. No biggie. There’s not a stink on good writing.

**John:** No, never is.

**Craig:** Never. Never. So, somebody has something that they think you guys would be great at, they’ll hire you. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for One Cool Things. Craig, I would like to go first.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this movie called The Spectacular Now which opened this past weekend. It is written by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, based on the novel by Tim Tharp and directed by James Ponsoldt who is actually one of my WGA mentees sort of people. I got assigned to him and he’s terrifically talented. He also did Smashed, which was a great movie.

So, everyone should just go see this movie. These are the same guys who did 500 Days of Summer.

**Craig:** Yeah, very nice guys. Well, I’ve met Scott. Scott’s a really nice guy.

**John:** Maybe Michael could be just a total jerk.

**Craig:** He might be, but Scott is a super nice guy.

**John:** Yeah. And so you can hate them for their success, but you could also celebrate them for making good movies. And so they’re known as sort of book adapters at this point. They’re also doing The Fault in our Stars, which will probably be a giant hit coming up down the road. But, the reason why you should see The Spectacular Now is it’s a movie without a villain really. It has a classic sort of two-hander structure where each of the main characters is the other character’s antagonist. They’re causing change in each other.

Amazing performances by Miles Teller.

**Craig:** Oh, Miles Teller is cool. I like that guy.

**John:** He’s great. And Shailene Woodley who is great and honest and sort of simple in a way that you just wish more performances could be. So, highly recommended. Try to go see it in the theater while you can because it’s great.

**Craig:** Terrific. Well my One Cool Thing is for those of you out there that like wine. Are you wine drinker?

**John:** I love wine.

**Craig:** So, I’ve been getting into wine, but I’m not a big drinker. Usually I’m good for, well, you know, anywhere between one and two glasses. One and 1.5 glasses. So, what happens if you’re just not basically a big wine guzzler, you open a bottle of wine and you pour yourself a glass or two, maybe your pour your spouse a glass or two, but there’s some left over and what do you do with it. So, there’s an industry around that. And the idea is that oxygen is bad for wine.

Well, it’s good for wine until it’s bad for wine. So, over time, you know, some wines can stay out for a couple of days, some sort of need to be drunk that night. You could put your wine in the fridge; that seems to slow the degeneration down. And then they have these little vacuum stopping things. Do you have those?

**John:** We have them. I don’t find them useful.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, it’s interesting. There’s a whole debate about whether they work or not. Some people, basically the conventional wisdom is they work better than nothing but they don’t work as well as they should.

Enter this genius, this engineer wine drinker and his device which is available now for sale called the Coravin. And what I love about this is so he’s drinking wine he thinks, like an engineer, “Really, what I want to do is teleport the wine out of the bottle without ever opening it.” Right? [laughs]

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** So, how do you do that, right? He comes up with this brilliant device, the Coravin. And the way it works is it’s basically a needle that pushes through — you don’t even take the foil off — pushes through the foil, through the cork, into the gap in the bottle, right, between the cork and the wine.

And then it injects a little capsule of argon. Argon is a…

**John:** It’s a noble gas.

**Craig:** It’s a noble gas. It’s inert. And it uses the same kind of cartridges that they have in like those fancy whip cream things, or even like a paintball gun. And so it fills that space with Argon, which doesn’t interact with the wine at all. And then when you tip it over it basically forces the wine out through this little needle that you’ve pushed through, and out through the needle into your glass.

And then when you’re done you just lift it back up and the Argon basically is filling that space and no air is getting in at all. And then you take this thing when you’re done you just remove it and essentially the needle is so thin that the cork just seals up behind it and air never gets in.

And when you watch the video of it you’re like, “Oh, that’s cool. That is cool.”

So, what you’re doing is, A, you’re getting rid of having to deal with ever taking a cork out of a bottle again. And, B, the whole pumpy vacuum things, or your fridge, or any of that stuff is gone. So, it’s very expensive. I think it’s like $300.

**John:** [laughs] Oh my god, Craig.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not buying it. I’m just saying it’s cool. I mean, look, here’s the thing: if you’re just an average wine drinker, no, of course not. But if you’re a person that buys $100, $200 bottles of wine because you’re a big winey guy, well this makes total sense.

**John:** Yeah, I disagree. I don’t think it makes sense in almost any situation. Because here’s the solution to this problem: finish the bottle.

**Craig:** But sometimes you can’t, you alcoholic.

**John:** Invite some friends over and finish the bottle. If you have a bottle of wine that is that that good, you should have someone over there to celebrate that bottle of wine with you. I got a bottle of wine for my birthday and I’ll have people over and we’ll finish it.

**Craig:** Oh, did you get something good?

**John:** I think it’s pretty good. My agent sent it to me. It’s French.

**Craig:** Ooh!

**John:** It looks kind of old.

**Craig:** Is it from Burgundy? Is it [French accent] Burgundy?

**John:** I actually haven’t looked that closely at the label. But it’s probably delicious.

**Craig:** All right. Great.

**John:** So, what would also be delicious is if people want to find out more information about the things we talked about today on the show you can follow the show notes at johnaugust.com/podcast where you’ll fine show notes for all our things.

If you are listening to this on iTunes or for some reason your feed did not update, you could delete what you have now and just re-add us in iTunes. That’s the best solution for people who seem to have trouble following us after the server update.

While you’re in iTunes, leave us a comment, because that helps other people find our show. If you would like to buy the 100 episodes of Scriptnotes that existed before this point, you can do so now at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Totally you should do that. That’s just a no brainer.

**John:** You should probably just do that because that’s a good idea. And we have a few t-shirts left, so those are only while supplies last. Literally while supplies last. So, those are $20 a piece.

We are available on Twitter, @johnaugust and @clmazin. And then if you need to send us an email about a Three Page Challenge you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out.

And if you need to send an email to me or to Craig, you should send it to ask@johnaugust.com and we will answer questions at times.

**Craig:** [sirens in background] Listen, listen, it’s the first one. So, we didn’t have any for the entire time and then one just came by. You know what that is? That’s the birthday siren.

**John:** Mm-hmm. A very special siren indeed. And I also want to thank all the people who have been sending through their outros. So, a couple weeks ago I said like, “Hey, if you want to write us an outro for the show send it to us, or send us a link to it, even better, at ask@johnaugust.com. I just ask that you use the underlying theme, the sort of opening them. [hums]

And people have sent through these really amazing ones. So, I’ve been using a couple of them. Every time I will put a link to who the person was who sent that through.

And, Craig, thank you again for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And Happy Birthday.

**John:** Thanks!

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* George Clooney tells Daniel Loeb to [stop spreading fear at Sony](http://www.deadline.com/2013/08/george-clooney-slams-sony-investor-daniel-loeb/)
* The New York Times on [Sony hiring Tom Rothman to revive TriStar](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/business/media/sony-hires-rothman-to-head-revived-tristar-unit.html?_r=0)
* Three Pages by [Robert Rue](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/RobertRue.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Catherine Grieve & Dylan Wagner](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CatherineGrieveDylanWagner.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Sarah Carman & James Roland](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SarahCarmanJamesRoland.pdf)
* [The Spectacular Now](http://spectacularnowmovie.com/) is spectacular
* [Vanity Fair talks to](http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2013/08/the-spectacular-now-writers-miles-teller) Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber
* [Coravin](http://www.coravin.com/) lets you enjoy your wine without ever pulling the cork
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

And, Craig, it’s a special episode today because…?

Craig: We, well, a couple of reasons. One, we have a guest.

John: Yes.

Craig: So, that means we’re doing it live.

John: Yes.

Craig: It means I get to look at you. Always exciting — I get to see your face.

John: Also, we are in your offices in Pasadena.

Craig: That’s right.

John: So, I cannot wait for the fire trucks.

Craig: Yes, the fire trucks are coming. And we can’t do anything about it.

John: Yes. So, we’re on the fourth floor of this building in Pasadena and as I was walking over here from the parking garage I kept thinking, “This is the loudest place on earth.” It is truly a very loud street. Like they could be making cement outside.

Craig: That’s right. In fact, they are making cement outside because right down the street it was always loud here; this is ground zero for Old Town Pasadena, right there on the corner. And then they decided to convert a parking lot into a large building that they’re building, so they get to weld and hammer while the fire trucks are going by, and somehow I find this very soothing.

John: Yeah. It’s the perfect place to write and record a podcast.

Craig: Perfect place for that. That’s right. That’s right.

John: Now, Craig, you have some follow up from an earlier episode that you wanted to start off.

Craig: Yeah, very quickly. We were doing our big question and answer episode and somebody was asking about registering screenplays with the copyright office and whether that was advisable. And the one thing I wanted to check on, I knew there was something funky about selling scripts with the WGA, and I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t messing around with anything if you did that with the copyright office.

And the answer is no. The deal is when you sell a screenplay, whether you’re transferring copyright or you’re selling it without that and they’re just saying, “Okay, well we’re commissioning the sale,” so on and so forth, it’s the same. The trick is that the companies don’t pay pension and health on the sale of literary material because it’s not really employment. To get around that, what the Guild does is they require the company to hire the seller of the literary material for the first rewrite — that is employment. And, the P&H on the first rewrite is the normal P&H that’s due plus the amount that would have been due on the sale.

So, they lump those two prices together…

John: Let me try to re-explain this in a way that might make sense to someone.

Craig: Not a chance. [laughs]

John: Backing up here, we’re talking about if you registered copyright on your spec screenplay before you sold it to your studio; the question originally was is this going to mess things up.

Craig: And the answer is no.

John: The answer is basically no.

Craig: That’s right.

John: And there are sort of weird backhanded ways that you can get around sort of the issues of copyright transference and pension and health. So, it’s happened before. Feel free to register copyright on your spec script if it is useful to you.

Craig: That’s right.

John: Go for it.

Craig: That is correct. That is the follow up.

John: Wonderful. Today we are excited because we have a special guest and we love it when we have special guests.

Craig: Yes.

John: And our special guest is Dennis Palumbo. And, Craig, this was your idea. So, tell us why we are talking with him today.

Craig: Well, Dennis is a therapist; he works as a therapist, a psychotherapist. He was my psychotherapist for awhile. I’m not in therapy currently, but I did see him for awhile. And while I think he treats lots of different people, his specialty is with writers and with screenwriters. And, for good reason: he himself was a screenwriter. He worked for Welcome Back, Kotter — “Oh, Mr. Kotter!”

And he co-wrote a wonderful movie called My Favorite Year, which if you haven’t seen, you’re stupid. I’m being judgmental but I think it’s fair. If you care at all about the history of comedy you should see My Favorite Year. It’s a wonderful movie. So, a very fine writer in his own right and he also is a novelist. He writes a series of crime/thriller, mystery thrillers with a character named Daniel Rinaldi, which sounds a lot like Dennis Palumbo, who is a psychologist-crime fighter-mystery solver. And his latest novel, Night Terrors, is available now.

But today we are welcoming him, I would suspect, mostly to talk about the weird, weird stuff that goes on in our screenwriting minds. So, welcome Dr. Dennis Palumbo.

Dennis Palumbo: Well, thank you so much. It’s nice to be here, John. It’s nice to be here, Craig.

John: Talk to us about why you got started as a therapist working with writers and what was the inclination behind that and how did you make that transition?

Dennis: Well, the transition was long and involved, which I’m going to reduce down to the two-minute version, which is essentially I had gone through kind of a personal crisis in my life. My marriage had ended. I had been really lucky in the film and television business, which I started at 22. I mean, I was on Kotter — I was 23, I think, when I was on that show.

And so I ended up literally doing the razor’s edge experience: I went to the Himalayas, climbed mountains all over the world, meditated, the whole thing. Came back and thought, “I think I need to change my life.” So, while I was still working in the business, writing pilots and rewriting scripts, I was going to school at night and on the weekends, not necessarily saying to myself, “Boy, I want to change careers,” but I was so fascinated by psychology because my own experience in therapy had been so good.

Craig: Right.

Dennis: And so after awhile, I mean, it takes six years to get through the program, to become an intern. I worked as an intern on the weekends and in the evenings at a low-fee clinic and at a private psychiatric facility. And then one day, I know it’s kind of crazy, but I had one of those “Road to Damascus” experiences.

I was at a restaurant — I don’t even know if it’s there anymore — called Le Dome on Sunset. And I was talking to this producer about a movie he wanted me to do. And I kept looking at my watch because I was going to be late for the psychiatric hospital where I was doing group psychodrama with schizophrenics.

And driving down La Cienega I’m thinking to myself, “What’s wrong with this picture? I think I want to change my life.” So, I sat for the tests and I passed and there was an interesting afternoon where I called up my agent, my lawyer, my business manager, and my creative manager, and I fired all four of them.

Craig: Oh, that must have felt good!

Dennis: And it felt amazing. And I said, “Look, it’s not you guys, it’s me. It’s not you, it’s me.” You know, the classic breakup line.

But, I’m out of show business. And so because I had been in the business I thought, well, this will be a good specialty. You know, people come to me and they have anxiety attacks if they have to pitch to NBC. Well, I pitched to NBC 5,000 times.

Craig: Right.

Dennis: Wouldn’t do it now. But I knew those issues. I knew about procrastination. I knew about writer’s block. I knew about fear of rejection.

Craig: Well, we’re going to get into all of those because I think I…

Dennis: I felt that’s why it would be a good specialty for me. So, that’s what I did.

Craig: I’ve had all those things, I think. I’m pretty sure we all have. And I want to talk through some of those, because I have a feeling that people listening are like, “Okay, get to the part where you help me.” [laughs]

Dennis: All right. Absolutely.

Craig: So, we’re getting some free advice from the show.

Dennis: You’re going to get some free therapy.

Craig: But I have a question first, because I know that part of your practice deals with a very interesting thing that people go through and not a lot of people consider it as a thing, which is interesting in and of itself. And that is a big career shift, a big life transition in terms of your profession. I’ve been doing this, I’m supposed to keep doing this, this is part of my identity, and then I stop and I start to do something else. And you did that.

When you did that, I’m just curious, was there a stretch there where you got scared, where you felt, oh no, what have I done?

Dennis: A stretch? There was a long chasm where I thought literally I was crazy. My friends thought I was crazy. My parents, who had finally gotten used to the idea that I was in show business, now had to get used to the idea I was talking to crazy people. And so I was scared to death. I thought I wouldn’t make a living. And, you know, I also was very clear, I mean, I was very lucky in show business. And lightning doesn’t strike twice, I figure.

Craig: Right.

Dennis: You know, who am I? And, in fact, a good friend of mine who is a writer-director said he was really mad. He even said, “Look, I feel like you’re leaving the fox hole. You’re leaving me in here where the bombs are dropping.” I mean, he’s very successful, but as you know, everyone feels like they’re embattled in Hollywood.

Craig: Yeah, we are.

Dennis: And he said, “So you’re going over the wall.” And I had some of that response from some of my friends. So, it was really hard at first. I did that thing where someone would call me and they’d go, “Well, do you have any available times?” And I’d be flipping through blank pages going, “No, I don’t know, maybe Thursday at 4?” And they’d go, “I can’t do it at 4.” And I’d go, “Wait a minute; I found another one. Friday at 10.”

Craig: Slowly but surely.

Dennis: Slowly but surely they all filled up. And I’m very grateful. Actually, to be honest with you, I think I owe most of it to the Writers Guild Magazine, Written By.

Craig: Well, that’s where I encountered you. Do you remember reading those?

John: Absolutely. I remember reading your columns monthly in the Writers Guild Magazine.

Dennis: That built my practice essentially.

John: Absolutely, talking about the kind of issues writers face.

Let’s talk about this. What are the kinds of common things you see in clients who are coming to talk to you, who need help, that might be unique to writers or highlighted in writers that you wouldn’t see in a general population as much?

Dennis: Oh, yeah, well certainly the two biggest issues that people come in talking about are writer’s block and procrastination, which are not the same thing. And the thing that I think is so terrifying about both those issues is not even so much the issue itself, but the meaning you give to it.

If you’re a writer and you feel blocked, it’s hard enough to be a writer — doing good work is very hard. Good writers get blocked. But if the meaning you give to it is, “Well, I bet Steve Zaillian never gets blocked. Or I guess my parents were right about me and I should have gone to law school. Or, maybe this means the story is no good.”

What I find very quickly in working with a patient who is struggling with writer’s block is that the issues are so inexorably bound up in their personal lives, in how they feel about themselves. So, if you go, “Gee, I’m really blocked. Man, this script is tough. Let me maybe take another approach,” that’s the craftsman-like approach.

If you go, “Wow, I’m really blocked. I guess this was a stupid idea anyway and my agent is going to dump me. And no one has liked the last three scripts I’ve written, so maybe I got lucky and now my luck is over. And I wonder if I can still get a job in my dad’s faucet factory?” I mean, you go there.

Craig: Oh, I go there so fast. I don’t have a faucet — what’s your faucet factory? I know what mine is. What’s yours?

John: Oh, there’s always that rip cord to some sort of programming or some sort of other….

Craig: Mine’s Ralphs. I always go right to Ralphs. And not even like a day shift at Ralphs. Night shift at Ralphs.

John: Definitely.

Dennis: Yeah, see I worked in a steel mill to put myself through college, so I always know now if things collapse I can always work in a steel mill. Now, there aren’t any steel mills in America anymore, so I’d have to go to Japan.

Craig: Right. Where they are hiring gentlemen in their fifties…

Dennis: Yes, that’s right. That’s right.

John: Pass yourself off as a robot.

Dennis: That’s right. And the thing that’s important to remember, too, is no one lives in absolute isolation. And so if you’re struggling with writer’s block and then you’re telling yourself, you know, you’re assigning certain meanings to being blocked, it’s not like a day at the beach for your mate either, or your children, or your friends.

And you feel like, you know, if you have this idea that everything is depending on you, and every time you stumble or get stuck the whole ball of wax could collapse, then it becomes harder and harder to navigate the block.

And the thing that I think is most unique — most people think writer’s block is bad. I think it’s good news for a writer. Because, if you look at the kind of biographical narratives of some of the greatest artists you’ve ever known, they all have like five or six periods in their lives where the work is repetitive, where they feel stuck, where they seem to be going backwards.

And then all of a sudden there is this burst of inspiration. And so, for me, I think writer’s block is very similar to the developmental steps we all go through as people. You know, like a toddler who gets up, falls down, gets up. He has to navigate walking. And I think that’s true for a writer. I think when you’re blocked, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re about to make a growth spurt in your work.

And I think the proof of the pudding is I’ve never had a patient who has worked through a block who didn’t think they were a better writer on the other side of the block. And so I do think if you conceptualize it as something that’s going to change in your work, you know, that this is something — that maybe you’re doing something that’s personal for the first time.

Maybe you’ve always written comedies and you’re trying to write a drama. Or, maybe you’re writing something about your family and you’re thinking what they’re going to think and all that stuff. There are all sorts of reasons why you might be blocked. But if you can navigate that block, you not only usually think you’re a better writer on the other end, but you defang the idea of a writer’s block as being so devastating that it will stop you.

John: I want to stop for a second and unpack what we’re talking about with writer’s block, because I think you’re using the term in a specific way that is really quite helpful. A lot of times people will say writer’s block when they really do mean procrastination, when they really do mean, “I just don’t feel like writing it, or I don’t know what that next scene is.”

Dennis: Yeah.

John: We were talking at a very specific, sort of like on this project I don’t know how to do this next little bit. And the phone keeps ringing and just all that stuff and I can’t get this next thing going. That is a very situational sort of in that moment you don’t know how to do this next thing. But there are other options for how you’re going to do that.

What you’re really talking about is more the bigger image of the person just doesn’t know what to do, so it’s not even — they may start with one project, but they have a general kind of fear of failure, or the impostor syndrome may be kicking in.

Dennis: Sure.

John: Where they believe, “Not only can I not write this. I can’t write anything.”

Craig: “I fooled everyone.”

John: Exactly.

Dennis: “I fooled everyone.” It’s all those meanings that I mentioned that, you know, I always think, like when I write my mystery novels, they have a lot of twists and turns. And every time I start one I think, “I don’t know how I’m going to make this interesting. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

But I’ve been writing for so long. I’m such a gray beard that I don’t think that feeling means anything.

Craig: Right.

Dennis: One of the things I’ve tried to help my patients see is that their feelings don’t predict the future. If an actor has stage fright and he throws up in his dressing room and then goes out that night on stage and gives a great performance, so obviously his anxiety did not predict a bad performance. But we have a tendency to see our feelings as predictive. And they’re not.

Craig: Right.

Dennis: I did 92 columns. I used to joke about this with the editor of Written By. I did 92 columns for the Written By column, The Writer’s Life, and every month I sat down to write one I’d go, “I don’t know how to write a column. I don’t know what to write about. I’ve got to call Richard and get out of this.”

And after about column 62 or 63 I went, “Where have I heard that before?”

Craig: Right.

Dennis: I heard that from my head once a month for the past six years. So, obviously it’s not predictive of anything.

Craig: That’s a great — that theme comes up over and over. And it’s something that I talk about. I do a thing at the Guild every year about development and how to make your way through development. And I talk about basically and thinking about what the villain is. If you imagine yourself as the hero of a journey, where the development process is a journey and you’re the protagonist, who is the antagonist? And I always ask them, “Who’s your enemy?”

And your goal is write a movie. Who’s your enemy? And they always say, “Director. Actors. Studio. Producers. Executives.” I’m like, no, no, they all share your goal. They’re your allies. That’s the scary part! So, who is the antagonist?

And to me the antagonist is our emotional pain. That’s the antagonist. And you feel it. It’s a real thing. We all feel it in those moments. It’s not assigning a meaning to it. That’s the hard part. But that’s kind of where you do the big boy growing up stuff.

Dennis: That is. I mean, look at myself. I’ve been in personal therapy on and off for like 18 years. I’m as neurotic and insecure as I ever was. I just don’t hassle myself about it anymore.

Craig: You should change therapists. He’s terrible.

Dennis: No, no, I’ve changed therapists three times. I don’t mind being neurotic and insecure because I don’t think the goal is to become some perfectible version of yourself.

Craig: I have to stop you there because that’s so great. When I saw Dennis it wasn’t for writing stuff. It was actually just personal stuff that I was working through. And I remember, I don’t know if you remember, the first day I showed up — I’m one of many patients — I had sort of written out everything and kind of presented it to him. It was really well organized. And we had a very good session. And then on my out you stopped me and said, “I just want to make sure that you understand this isn’t something you perfect.” [laughs]

And it was great to hear. Like, oh yeah, that’s right…

John: “I’m really good at therapy now.”

Craig: Yeah! “Did I do okay?”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: “I’m here for my perfection issues. And did I do well?”

Dennis: Yeah, “Did I do well? And about how long will this take?”

Craig: That’s right, yes.

John: I think possibly one of the challenges of writers and screenwriters — this is really our topic — we can hold others up to that perfection standard because we don’t really see them.

Dennis: That’s right.

John: And so we see that all of these struggles are my own and I’m the one who has all these unique challenges and problems, because we’re not around those people all the other times, whereas if we were professional athletes we would see those professional athletes struggle around us all the time. And we all go up to our little rooms and write in private. And it seems like, oh well, whatever is uniquely your problem is uniquely your problem.

Dennis: Right. And our fantasy is that all the writers we admire are just knocking stuff off untroubled.

Craig: It’s insane.

Dennis: And it’s insane. I always say to new writers, I say, “Look, every successful writer used to be a struggling one. And all the successful ones still struggle.”

I mean, most of the writers in my practice are very, very successful. And they all struggle. In fact, it was so striking for me as a former screenwriter, some of my patients are my former idols as a writer.

Craig: Right.

Dennis: And it was amazing for me to see the struggles they had, which I found comforting, because I spent 18 years in show business thinking, “Well, if I were only smarter and more talented this wouldn’t be so hard.”

Craig: Are there, because, you know, we have a lot of people who listen who are professionals. We have many, many more, just by the nature of our business, who are not but who want to be. And I wonder, are there unique writer problems, or do we really all… — I mean, because I kind of want to be able to somebody working in Alabama right now, “We actually have the same problems.” Are there unique problems, or do we all share the same stuff?

Dennis: I think we all share the same stuff. I mean, we’re talking primarily about screenwriting, but look at what we’re talking about. We’re talking about being blocked or procrastinating, being afraid of rejection, being afraid of failure. I don’t know too many lawyers who don’t struggle with stuff like that, or Supreme Court justices, or directors.

I mean, anyone who achieves bumps up against the idea that who they are inside is not in concert with who they are presenting in their mind to the world. Anyone does. And so as a result, I think the difference for writers is writers talk about it.

See, trial lawyers get depressed. William Styron gets depressed, writes Darkness Visible, about his depression. So, we have this idea that creative people are more depressed and suicidal than others. And, in fact, we’re not.

Craig: We just talk about it more.

Dennis: Yeah, we just talk about it more.

Craig: Right. Those guys just drink in that bar.

Dennis: And they drink and they jump off of buildings. I mean, the thing is…

Craig: They’re good at that.

Dennis: Dentists are the number one profession that is suicidal.

Craig: Wait, wait, is that really true? Dentists?

Dennis: Yeah. And number two is psychiatrists.

Craig: Well. [laughs]

Dennis: But number one is dentists.

Craig: Why, because it’s a bummer to look in mouths all day?

Dennis: You know, god knows why.

Craig: Teeth.

John: There have been theories that maybe it has something to do with traditionally like the chemicals that were used in dentistry.

Craig: Oh really?

John: That they’re constantly around all the time.

Craig: Like the mercury and stuff?

John: Absolutely. There could be actually like a poisoning reason why that’s happened.

Dennis: It’s interesting you mention that, too, because one of the changes in therapy in the last 20 years is how much neurobiology has come into it. The more and more we find out about the elasticity of the brain, the more we’re finding that depression, anxiety, spiritual belief, faith itself, aggression, these things have seats in the brain pan.

And talk therapy is still crucial, but they’re finding that there is a larger biochemical and neuro-chemical component to how we feel about ourselves, including our self-experience in the world.

Craig: It’s hard because writers, you know, you brought up the analogy of athletes. So, I can watch an athlete make an error, but I can also watch an athlete succeed. I can see it happening in front of me or not in front of me in different levels. But, writing is — especially screenwriting — there is something so evil about it because the entire process of screenwriting is failure until the very last moment, which also might be failure. [laughs]

Dennis: Yeah.

Craig: But there is definitely, failure is a requirement. And it requires, it seems, a lot of psychological health, or endurance, or whatever you call it to survive the endless grind of the failure.

Dennis: Yeah. I think being a screenwriter requires the Bushido Warrior Code of risk, fail, risk again. I mean, my TV writers who are on staff, you know, they break a story in a room. Everyone agrees on the story. You go off, you write it, you come back, everyone gang writes it and makes it funnier. It’s a little more communal. It’s a little bit more, “Oh, I had a nice day at the office.”

Craig: Right.

Dennis: I remember as a screenwriter, when I shut that door in my office at home to work, it was just me. And, you know, you start to wonder if what you’re feeling and thinking about what you’re writing has any validity at all. Which is one of the reasons, by the way, people procrastinate.

You know, we were talking about writer’s block and procrastination…

Craig: Tell us why I procrastinate, would you?

Dennis: Well, I can’t tell you specifically — I don’t think there is one size fits all for everyone. And I can give you some anecdotes that would surprise you about why people procrastinate. But on the whole, it’s a fear of shameful self-exposure. Most people procrastinate because they think the finished product, if they got to finish, would either in their minds or in the minds of an agent, the studio, director, would not be good enough.

And it’s easier to tolerate the small shame of procrastinating. I remember when Dutton’s Bookstore used to be here. And I would walk around and I swore that Doug Dutton would be looking at me essentially thinking, “Why aren’t you writing?”

Craig: Right.

Dennis: And so I couldn’t even enjoy my procrastination. But as painful as it was, it was less painful than putting the script out. See, then you want to look at a person’s childhood experience. I mean, I had to get all straight A’s. You know, I was a big honors student and stuff like that.

And so I’m one of those people that you can never love it enough. I’m already evaluating while we’re talking how well I’m doing.

Craig: I might also be — I might be one of those people, too. By the way, you’re doing very poorly.

Dennis: Okay. That’s what I thought.

Craig: Yeah. [laughs]

Dennis: But luckily at these prices why should I get so upset.

John: [laughs]

Craig: [laughs] Yeah.

Dennis: But the point is is that that kind of thing feeds the procrastination. And what’s really difficult is for people to understand that the shame of self-exposure will always be there as long as you don’t feel engaged with the process itself. As long as you’re only concerned with the result in terms of what it says about you, what clinicians call “the external locus of control.” You’re always better off going, “I’m having a great time writing this,” and hope that Tom Cruise wants to be in it than go, “If I write this and Tom Cruise doesn’t want to be in it, it isn’t good, therefore I’m not good.”

Craig: Does that sound familiar to you?

John: I would say that most of my procrastination is fear that I won’t actually hit flow. And that I won’t actually hit that moment where it all becomes easy. So, I’ll put it off, and put it off, and put it off in the hopes that like, well, maybe suddenly the engine will kick in. Because the times when writing is really good and natural and easy and wonderful are amazing and you just hope that those come back.

And I also do notice that I find writers kind of ritualizing their way into procrastination. So, they will say, “Well, I can only write from these hours to these hours. And I have to have this kind of pen, and this kind of paper, and this kind of situation. If I don’t have those things then I can’t do the work that I need to do.”

And so what you describe as sort of the root cause is the underlying pathology that might bring about procrastination, there’s a whole host of behaviors that sort of kick in that sort of feed on itself and sort of create this system in which they can’t not procrastinate.

Dennis: That’s right. I had a similar one when I was a screenwriter. I always thought of it as going down a ramp. And then I’d get up in the morning and I’d go, “Well, you know, I made some notes, and I returned some phone calls. Well, it’s going to be lunch time in an hour. And I can’t go down the ramp till lunch is over.” So, then I’d eat lunch and go, “In two more hours the mail comes. I’ve got to wait for the mail to come.”

And then I knew my agent was calling me back at three. And if I did it correctly, the entire day would go by, and it would seem totally reasonable to me because I couldn’t have gotten that block of five hours. And that fantasy of having a requirement of structure like that really dooms a lot of people.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, are there interventions that if a client came to you with this problem of procrastination, what are some techniques you might propose?

Dennis: Well, here’s what I would suggest. First of all, as I said before, I don’t believe there is one size fits all, so I would need to know a little bit about their childhood, a little bit about how they dealt with criticism, what their expectations are. You know, there are people who want to write who at the same time don’t feel entitled to. And so if those two things are hitting, you know.

I had a guy procrastinate, to be honest with you, because — he was a novelist. His first novel was kind of well received. And the second novel was starting to get a lot of heat from the publisher and they were thinking this is going to be a big book. And he kept procrastinating and we finally found out it’s because his brother was a failed writer. And he was not able, at a very deep level, to do that to his brother, to be more successful than him.

But, in general, when someone says, “Look, I just need pragmatic tools.” The first thing I say to them — you need to feel good to write. Because I don’t think your writing cares how you feel. And so if you came to me, Craig, and you said, “Jesus, I feel, I don’t want to start, I feel sluggish, I feel I’m wasting my time. My best years are behind me. What am I doing?”

I’d say, “Okay, let’s put a character named Craig in a diner. And let’s have him sitting opposite somebody he knows, someone he likes, someone he respects. Give him this dialogue. Start talking. Tell me how you feel. Tell me what you think about the project you’re going to write.”

And as you start doing that the log jam breaks a little bit, because you’re telling yourself, “Oh, this doesn’t count. This isn’t real writing. This is just telling how I feel.” And sooner or later what will happen is you’ll start slipping into ideas. You’ll go, wait a minute, I want to write that line down, because if I do write this thing, this would be something I would use.

And I find that if a patient is willing to be uncomfortable writing, they’ll break through the procrastination. If they need to feel like they’re ready to write, they may have to wait forever.

Craig: Right. Well, it’s funny. I listen to you guys. I have a little bit of both. I know exactly what you mean about that fear of the lack of flow, because the first couple of lines sometimes are excruciating. And also just because of the way I approach writing, there are certain things I need to know to feel like I can get, well, what does the room look like, what’s going on, what’s the weather, what are they wearing, all the visual stuff.

And sometimes it’s hard to see it and you get tense. It’s like all your muscles tighten, you know. So, I have that.

But I also do have that kind of, well, you know, something about this scene, I can imagine somebody reading it and going, “Uh-huh,” and now I’m thinking about them. I’m thinking about the reader. I’m thinking about the director. I’m thinking about the movie. I’m thinking about the audience. I’m thinking, “God held me, the reviewers.”

Dennis: Well, that’s the shameful self-exposure. The funny this is perfectionists often have this problem because they want to be in the flow, too. And just as a pragmatic tool, and again, I’m a therapist, I’m not a writer instructor, but just as a pragmatic tool I often remind them, you know, when I was a screenwriter I assumed I was going to throw out the first 20 pages of my screenplay. That when I got to the end I knew who the people were and what the story was. And they didn’t talk like themselves in the first ten or 15 pages. So, I knew they were going to go.

And if you can get a person who struggles with perfectionism to really understand that it doesn’t count, the first 20 pages, and they can discover what it is and then go back and change that. It’s like a revelation. Because for perfectionists it’s like, “INT. HOTEL ROOM. What kind of hotel?” I would say, I don’t care…

Craig: That’s me, though.

Dennis: Go 20 pages and by the end of the screenplay it’s going to be a Motel 6 anyway.

Craig: Well, and it’s funny, because all those decisions that I sometimes sweat over so intensely, when we get to production someone is like, “Hey, you know, I just want to show you. We did some scouting. Here are the motels. But look at this place. It’s not at all what you call out.” And I’m like, oh, that would be awesome.

Dennis: Yeah.

Craig: And then you realize, oh yeah, that’s right — there are people to help. [laughs] You know? It’s not just me. It’s not just you. And that’s a wonderful feeling.

And part of what I think is interesting about the way you approach how you talk to writers from your articles in Written By and just from knowing you as I do is that you do preach a certain amount of “let yourself off the hook-ness.” I mean, it’s almost like we put ourselves on a hook because we’re procrastinating, and sometimes the answer to procrastinating is, “Okay, so you don’t have it today. That doesn’t mean you won’t have it tomorrow.”

As long as you don’t think that that’s permanent, that that state is permanent, there are times when I’m just like, “Not today. Pen down. Taking a walk.”

John: Yeah. The other common advice I end up giving is you will get to a place where, like, I don’t know how to write this scene, I don’t know what this scene is, I’m flipping out over it. So, write another scene. And the thing about a screenplay is it’s about 120 pages, so there’s going to be some other scene you can write.

And so if I have an extra 15 minutes in the parking garage at FOX, I’ll write a scene, I’ll just scribble it down on paper. And it may not be the most important scene, it may not be the most perfect scene, but it’s something that’s written.

Dennis: Right.

John: And if you can consistently be doing some work you’re going to get over that bump. And eventually you’ll write into that scene. You end up a lot of times sort of painting the corners and painting into the middle. And that’s okay.

Craig: Totally.

Dennis: That’s absolutely okay. It’s like the thing is that I’ve learned over the years is writing begets writing. I think thinking about it doesn’t beget writing. Worrying about it, you know. Frederic Raphael, one of my favorite screenwriters, said that for a writer there is only one real definition of work: pages that are there in the evening that weren’t there in the morning. He didn’t say good pages. He just said pages.

And, again, one of the things I try to work with people who are procrastinating, particularly if they’re perfectionists, is to get into this sort of benign relationship with their writing, because otherwise they’re demanding their writing mirror back to them that they’re great.

Craig: Yeah.

Dennis: They’re demanding their writing mirror back to them that they’re entitled to be a writer. You know, your words can’t take the weight of that. That’s way too much weight. You want your script to validate your leaving Dayton, Ohio to become a screenwriter instead of going into your dad’s pharmacy business. There’s no screenplay on earth that can do that for you.

Craig: I hope that people at home who are in Dayton, or places like Dayton, get that. Because it’s really, one of the things that we talk about a lot is the weight that people put on themselves to become a screenwriter, which is harder and harder to do. And how tragic, frankly, it is for so many of them who just aren’t going to be screenwriters.

And I want people to absorb this — it’s important — it’s an important lesson.

Dennis: Well, actually, I was at a seminar and somebody asked me one time what’s the most important trait to be a screenwriter and I said an ability to tolerate despair.

Craig: [laughs] That’s pretty much right.

Dennis: And I meant it seriously.

John: One of the things — circling back to something Craig said earlier — what is different about treating screenwriters or writers versus other people, one thing that seems like it would be different is that we are in our heads a lot in completely fantasy worlds. And so unlike a normal, you know, accountant, we have this fantasy life and this fantasy world that we have to maintain and live and keep sustaining.

This movie I made, The Nines, the middle section of it is about Ryan Reynolds’s character having the sort of nervous breakdown for this TV show. And it’s based on a real thing that happened to me. My very first TV show I created was a thing called DC. And I had to sort of keep the world of DC alive in my head at all times, so those characters had to be running at all times. And there was essentially a second world I had created inside there.

And ultimately the boundary between what was real and what was fiction was incredibly thin. And so I’d hear a song on the radio and I would snatch that song, like that song will be in the show, because I had to sort of constantly hunt and gather for that show.

Now, TV, I think, is its own unique beast and the way that we make TV is probably not healthy for anyone involved in television. But movies to a large degree can be the same thing where you’ve worked out this whole world and these characters and this is their universe, and you’re responsible as the creator for maintaining that universe for a long period of time.

Do you end up encountering writers who have that problem of and face challenges with this second world and their sense of responsibility to what they’ve created?

Dennis: Oh, all the time. In fact, it’s interesting. One of the reasons, you know, I have had executives and producers and directors as patients as well, and they often complain that writers don’t take notes very well, they’re often very resistant. And, see, I know from my own experience and that of my patients that they so live in the world of their screenplay that it becomes a kind of context in which they live.

And so the notes makes no sense. It’s like if somebody says, “Oh, you know, your son would look a lot better if he had spiked hair.” And you go, “I love this kid exactly the way the kid is, you know, not because I’m crazy or a narcissist, though I may be crazy and a narcissist.” But the reality is it’s because I know this world really, really well.

The problem is, unlike a brick layer or a carpenter, the raw materials of a writer’s life is his or her imagination and feelings — things that they live with moment to moment to moment. When you’re a brick layer, you’re done at 5 o’clock. You put the bricks down. You go home and watch a ballgame. There’s no bricks on your lap.

A writer goes home, those bricks are on his lap, or her lap, they’re in his pocket, they’re on their head. They’re putting their kids to bed and the kid will say something and the writer will think, “I can use that,” because a brick just fell out of their pocket. That’s not the way most people live. So, it is particular to writers to carry around their imaginative life.

To me, it always reminds me of what Margaret Mead said when she was doing research in Samoa. She said, “Well, my job was to be a participant observer.” And my experience of writers is they tend to be participant observers.

I’ll have a patient come back from their wedding and they will describe it as though it’s a scene from Portnoy’s Complaint. They were in it, they were glad to be getting married, but they were watching the wedding as though it were a scene.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Craig: We’re kind of addicted to narrative.

Dennis: Very much so.

Craig: That’s why I try and talk to writers in narrative terms because I feel like it’s something we understand. But I really like what you’re saying that the idea that, because it’s true, when you get those notes that drop the bottom out from under you, when you feel like you’re literally falling through the floor, sometimes it’s because there is this incredible dissonance between what they’re suggesting and what you are perceiving as reality, as real. Like, that’s not possible.

You can say, “Well, what if — what if — water was actually hard and sharp.” You don’t understand what you just did to the world. I’m looking at the water. I drink it. It’s in me. That’s wrong.

Dennis: Yeah.

Craig: And if you were to say to somebody in their regular life, and have the ability to actually change things around them that way, like, “You know, you have three sons. What if they were girls?” How violent — people would respond so violently to that. And the funny thing is you’d think that other writers would be sensitive to this, but they’re not. Because one of the things I find so fascinating is when you look at — I do arbitration sometimes for our credits. So, people will write their statements: This is why I think I deserve credit.

And a lot of the statements are like, “So, this is what my script is. And then I read this, and it’s just a version of my script.” No, it’s just a version of your script to you because these are words to you. That other person had like lived in their world. Like they went into your script, which was just a script to them, and built their world.

Dennis: Right.

Craig: And it’s so funny how we can’t see that.

Dennis: Well, it’s because you’re talking about the fantasy of objectivity. See, the reality is we are only conscious of our subjective experience. So, we look at everything through our own glasses. And so if a script, we’re rewriting someone else, we look at that other person’s script — we’re not in their subjective experience of creation.

Craig: Yeah. It’s words.

Dennis: It’s just a bunch of words. And you go, “Well, who would use a word like that?”

Craig: Right. Exactly.

John: Reading that script you say, “Well, I took this character that was named Karen and made it Susan, but she looks the same,” because she looks the same in your head.

Craig: Exactly right, yeah.

John: We forget that this whole world that exists in your head. And so I have seen this whole movie before.

Craig: “All they did was change the names and do a thing. And all they did was, okay, so it was a train and now it’s a boat. But it’s the same! It’s a train or a boat.” [laughs]

Dennis: I know.

Craig: It’s wild. Isn’t it amazing?

John: The classic advice to writers who are sitting down with directors or executives for the first time is just to remember that the writer is the only person who has already seen the movie. And so they’ve read your script, and they like your script, but as good as you were in sort of evoking the spirit of the movie with those 12-point Courier sounds and actions, it’s not the same as exactly what’s in your head. And it can never be quite that.

Dennis: That’s right.

John: And so a lot of times when you have those first meetings where you’re sitting down with a director, what you’re really doing is you’re just trying to communicate what it is that you’re seeing there and get a sense of what he or she is seeing there and making those align as best they can.

Dennis: Yeah. It’s hard for people to realize that if three people read a script there are three different scripts they read, three different movies they saw in their head. I mean, I remember so often just dealing with, especially early in my practice, dealing with patients who just could not deal with the concept that someone would read their script and not see what they saw. You know?

And it’s just the reality that we see everything from our own subjective lenses.

John: Do you deal with writing partners often in your practice?

Dennis: Mm-hmm. Oh yeah.

John: And so it feels like the interpersonal tensions there must be…

Craig: Couple’s therapy.

Dennis: Yeah. I do couple’s therapy with writing teams. Sometimes they’re married to each other, which makes it much more intense. But most of the time they’re not. But the issues are exactly as if they were married. They’re power issues, control issues. One will be late. Which one is the funny on? And which one got to return their agent’s phone call and does the agent like one of them better than the other?

It’s very fraught. I mean, the value — I started in television with a partner, a comedy writer named Mark Evanier, and there was enormous value in having a partner, because I was 22 and scared to death. And, you know, it’s a lot easier if a pitch goes badly to go outside and go, “Well, those guys are morons.” And have someone to share the disappointment with.

But it’s also enormously fraught, because again, there’s no two subjectivities are the same. And invariably when I’m working with a team I’ll get a call from one of them going, “I’m working on a script by myself. When do I tell him?”

Craig: Yeah.

Dennis: I mean, this happens all the time.

Craig: Right. And what do you do with that?

Dennis: I say, “I don’t have any private conversations with you. You come into the office with your writing partner…”

Craig: And we’ll talk it out.

Dennis: “…and we will talk it out.” I don’t carry secrets like that. And I have never had a writing team that didn’t try to have a secret, a one-on-one conversation with me.

Craig: Wow.

Dennis: Yeah, but you know, everyone feels as though who they are, and what they believe, and what they need to say. They want it to come out as unfiltered as possible. You have to get through a director, a producer, a network executive, a star. You also have to get through your writing partner.

Craig: I know.

Dennis: And Mark and I worked together pretty well, but I remember arguments we would have that just seemed ludicrous. I thought to myself, “Jesus, we’re arguing over punctuation.”

Craig: Yeah.

Dennis: But we weren’t arguing over punctuation. It’s power.

Craig: That’s a more reasonable argument than the kind I used to have with my writing partner. We would have some crazy arguments. And the truth is it was, at least for me and for Greg, well, I can’t speak for Greg, but for me it’s because I’m probably not supposed to have a writing partner. I’m one of those guys…

Dennis: Yeah. And the arguments are never about what they’re about. They’re about all the unspoken stuff in the partnership.

John: Yeah. I’m not supposed to have a writing partner, either. And so Jordan Mechner, who is a good friend and a terrific writer, he and wrote a pilot for Fox together. And the power disparity between us just made it really ridiculous for us to do it, because any argument we would really get into I would just sort of trump card him, and that wasn’t fair and it wasn’t good for the concept.

Craig: “I’m John August, dammit.”

John: Slam!

Craig: [roars] And flip the table. Have you ever seen him flip a table?

Dennis: No.

John: I Hulk out all the time.

Dennis: Oh really? Cool.

Craig: All the time. Absolutely. He gets 4% bigger.

Dennis: But, yeah, this is Craig’s table, not mine. So, feel free to flip it if you want to.

John: It’s a very heavy table.

Craig: Yeah, he can’t flip this one. No, I’m thinking more like Bridge tables. Lighter fare.

John: Yeah, this is the arts and craftsy kind of thing, suitable for Pasadena. It looks quite heavy.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But I would say my only good writing partner experience, not that Jordan was bad or anything, but the only one I feel good about was Andrew Lippa with Big Fish in that he had a completely different skill set and so we complemented each other in a way. But it has been that issue of recognizing that it’s like a marriage and that you have to sort of sometimes talk about yourselves and what your relationship is so that it’s all good.

Craig: Sometimes you have to have sex.

John: No, that doesn’t work.

Craig: Oh, it doesn’t work?

Dennis: No, I found that’s actually very effective.

Craig: Okay, no matter who they are?

Dennis: No matter who they are. Yes.

Craig: I agree with you. The most fruitful writing partnership that I’ve had is with Todd Phillips. And I think in large part it’s because even though we write together, he’s the director. And we’re writing together, we’re coming up with the story together, but usually I’ll start and then we’ll kind of go through it together. There is a division of labor that’s natural, and frankly also there’s a division of labor just in terms of where we’re going to end up. That ultimately we can start together, but we will diverge and then I’ll be over here looking at the script and he’s over here doing the billion things that the director does.

And it makes it somehow okay. It’s like a partnership that’s not a partnership, and that’s fine. And we also then can go and go our separate ways. My fortunes aren’t tied to this person. That’s so much of the like I can feel the choking stuff.

Dennis: That’s so much of the dynamic, right, is that for writing teams, particularly longstanding writing teams, their fortunes are tied together.

Craig: Right.

Dennis: And it’s very, very, very, very difficult. And yet so many of them, either one or the other is clandestinely writing something. It’s just…

Craig: I have like, I want to talk to you about, I want to do another podcast on my own. Just me.

Dennis: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Craig: Not with this guy.

Dennis: Not with this guy.

Craig: But can I talk to you about it separately or do I have to do it with — okay, I’ll do it in front of him.

Dennis: I had a great story. I was working on a film when I was in the film business with a very well known comedy star and his writing-producing partner. And the three of us would work every day. And at one point the producing partner went to the bathroom and the comedy star turned to me and said, “I can’t deal with this guy anymore. I have had it with him. I can’t deal with him. He’s such a pain in the ass.”

So then the producing partner came in, and after a few minutes the comedy star went out to go to the bathroom and the producing partner turned to me and said, “I’ve had it. This is the last film I’m doing with him.” And so I was afraid to leave the room. [laughs]

Craig: Those situations, I’m always very scared, because I always feel like they’ll do that, and they mean it in the moment, but if you dare get in between those jaws, they will close on you.

Dennis: That’s right. That’s right.

Craig: You’ll be the — it’s like, “Oh, I knighted you by…” The Weinstein brothers are notorious. Harvey and Bob fight like cats and dogs, but…

John: Don’t try to come between them.

Craig: People that have got in between them have just been crushed.

Dennis: Yeah, addendum: they’re still together.

Craig: Well, we’ll see how that goes.

Dennis: No, no, I mean…

Craig: Oh, those guys?

Dennis: The two guys. And this goes back 25 years. They’re still together.

Craig: Nice. See, there you go.

John: So, a practical question. Let’s say a writer who is a working screenwriter, is in the WGA, needed to see someone like yourself for some issues, is that a thing that insurance covers? How do they come to you and how does that work?

Dennis: Well, they come to me primarily now through referrals. They used to come to me through my column. People would read it and call me. I work fee-for-service. People, I bill my patients, and then they pay me, because I want to liberate them from me talking to their insurance carrier about their issues.

So, what happens is they pay me and then take the invoice and send it to the Writers Guild, or the Directors Guild, whatever, and get reimbursed. And the reimbursement is very, very good.

Craig: Yeah, it’s the same. It’s just really that you handle your own paperwork.

Dennis: Yeah, you handle your own paperwork. Because if you go onto one of their preferred providers they’ll tell you how many sessions you can have. And to get the assigned benefits you have to talk about their issues. And I don’t trust corporations not to share that material. So, you know, I’m an old ’60s guy, I guess, whatever. But that’s how that works. It’s fee-for-service.

Craig: And you just call you up. Just call Dennis Palumbo.

Dennis: Yeah, just call me up. Or you can find me through my website cleverly named dennispalumbo.com. And you can email me and we’ll set up a time to talk on the phone. And I’ll try to make sure it’s a good fit. I think people should be really good consumers of their own therapy. Regardless of what they thought about what I said here, if they come in and it doesn’t feel like a good fit for them they shouldn’t work with me.

They should find the person with whom they feel comfortable.

John: One thing I’ve noticed in the past few years is writers who when you get them talking will talk about Adderall or some other sort of performance enhancing drug. Is that something you see in your practice?

Dennis: Constantly.

John: And that’s a growing thing, is that correct?

Dennis: Yeah.

John: Can we talk about some of the reasons why writers start on that and your experience with writers who use that and whether it’s, you know, is it helpful, is it harmful? What is the spectrum of what you see?

Dennis: It runs the gambit. There are people who just use Red Bull because they’re using the caffeine hit. And there are people who, I mean, for a long time Ritalin was used, very small milligram percentage. And then now Adderall a lot. And it’s the same as in the ’70s when I was on TV shows and everybody used coke because they thought it made them funnier.

I think there’s kind of a placebo effect with Red Bull and Adderall because if you’re interested you have energy.

Craig: Right.

Dennis: If you’re engaged with your writing you can do two, three hours. Unless you have severe ADD, I think it’s become like a — it’s sort of like 25 year olds who take Viagra, just to put a little topping on it, you know? Well, that’s what I see with some of my patients. And you have to be careful because the stuff can get really addictive, particularly psychologically, telling yourself that without this you can’t work.

Craig: Without it I can’t do it. I hear also people using this Provigil. Have you heard of this one?

Dennis: Yeah, I’ve heard that one, too. You’d be surprised how many people still use grass for that reason.

Craig: That’s a great ’60s term. Grass, man.

Dennis: Well, weed, whatever you want to call it. But they really do feel that it sort of lowers the Portcullis Gates and allows their creativity to come in. I’m exactly the opposite.

Craig: Exactly. I’m such a Boy Scout. I can’t even handle music playing while I’m writing, unless it’s orchestral film score, like low. I can’t write after a glass of wine. I can barely write after a Tylenol. [laughs] I’m like I need to be so sober…

Dennis: Yeah, if I have a glass of red wine I’m done for like the week.

Craig: Pretty much, yeah.

Dennis: I’m a real lightweight.

Craig: Have you ever dabbled?

John: I can’t. And I have to be really quite sober. I glass of wine, I can still function. But, I think honestly alcohol for me is that thing that happens at dinner or after dinner that says like, okay, the night is over. It’s a signal to my body saying, “You are free now to stop thinking about your work.”

Dennis: Yeah. That, to me it’s like “it’s Miller time.” That’s what the one glass of wine is.

Craig: Alcohol, definitely. And it makes sense because alcohol is a central nervous system depressant. It’s generally not a good idea to depress your central nervous system that you’re relying on to write. Although I will — an occasional cigar does miracles for me, I have to say. I little bit of nicotine there does seem to kind of…focus in.

Dennis: I have some very successful patients who go off cigarettes for months and months and months until they get their next screenplay deal. And then they smoke for the four months they’re writing the draft, because they can’t write without cigarettes. And then they go off again.

Craig: [laughs] That’s…they should stop doing that. That’s bad.

Dennis: I know. But they’ve been stopping and starting for 25 years.

John: Couched in what you were saying earlier about Adderall is you say like people can get their two or three hours in. I think it was nice that you said two or three hours, because I think there’s this belief that like you should be able to write like eight hours in a day. And no one does that.

Craig: Two or three.

Dennis: When I was a screenwriter I wrote every day from 9 to 1, and the first hour was rereading what I had written the day before. And I wrote two or three hours, max, and I felt like I was doing my job.

See, I’m very blue collar about work, about writing, I really am. I don’t think you sit and wait for inspiration or any of that crap. I think you sit down and you put in your three hours.

And when someone says, “Well, I’ve got to write for eight or ten hours if I’m really inspired,” they’re telling themselves that they’re not a craftsman and they’re not a professional. They’re telling themselves that some lucky bolt of lightning came through the window and is helping them write. And if they stop they’ll never have that again. And I think that that sends you a bad signal about your own sense of craft.

Craig: I agree. I’ve always approached it as there is the preparing to write, which is quite lengthy for me, and then there’s the writing, which is a sprint. And sometimes it’s a two-hour sprint, but it’s a sprint. And it’s a very focused thing. When I’m done, I’m exhausted. I’m physically exhausted, you know, because I’m acting it out, I’m seeing it, I’m gone. I’m in some weird fugue state while I’m writing. And that’s important. That’s part of it.

But I’ve felt it, like when I get to like that fourth or fifth page, I can feel it going away. And I’ve come over time to recognize — Stop. I mean, I want to stop anyway. I want to stop after a half a page. But there have been days where I have. I’ve gotten to a half a page, and I stop. And you feel a little bit like a baby, but the important thing is it’s okay to feel like a baby as long as you don’t decide that means you are a baby.

Dennis: Are a baby. That’s right.

John: Another thing I’ve noticed with writers is because we can do our work at any place at any time, a lot of us tend to do it from like midnight to 6am. And at what point do you say like well that’s getting your work done, or at what point are you saying, well, that’s not healthy for you and your family and for your life. Does that come up?

Dennis: It comes up all the time. See, I have kind of a different view. My view is you need to have a benign relationship with your process. So, if you like to write in the morning, or the afternoon, if you like to write after midnight, then do it.

What I think is a mistake is to go, “Gee, I just read that Aaron Sorkin writes from midnight till six, so I should write from midnight to six.” The fantasy that there is some technique that frees you from the struggle of writing.

On the other hand, we live in the real world. I mean, if I were a screenwriter now, I could never write from midnight till six because I have a wife and a kid and a dog and cats.

Craig: I’m too old to do that anymore.

Dennis: Plus, my body won’t tolerate it. It just won’t. And so I think you have to find the process that feels the most congenial. But, again, writers don’t live in a vacuum. They’re often in a relationship, they often have children, or siblings that they’re dealing with. One of my most successful writers has a severely handicapped sibling. And she’s in charge of this sibling. And that’s a big aspect of her life.

So, there’s not going to be any of these 12-hour writing days for her. That’s not going to happen. But she still gets a lot of work done, because there doesn’t have to be 12-hour writing days.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Dennis: There doesn’t have to be anything.

Craig: Ah!

Dennis: And I think that’s the key for new writers.

Craig: That’s good. I like that. That’s a great place to end, don’t you think?

John: I agree.

Craig: It doesn’t have to be anything. Oh, boy, I always feel better after I talk to you. Well, thank you. That was spectacular.

If you feel like joining in, we have our One Cool Thing. Do you have a One Cool Thing?

John: I do have a One Cool Thing.

Dennis: I do, too.

Craig: All three of us have a One Cool Thing. We have Three Cool Things.

John: My One Cool Thing actually ties in pretty well to some of our topics today. It’s a movie that I saw because the filmmaker was up at the Sundance Labs. And so his film had already been on my list of movies I want to see at some point. I have a long list. But I needed to see it because I was going to meet with him.

The movie is called The Imposter. And it’s terrific. And so the conceit behind The Imposter, which is not a spoiler because in the first three minutes you’ll know what’s happening. There is a boy in Texas who disappears. And his family looks for him. A big search, flyers everywhere. Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Years later he shows up in France and they find him in France — I’m sorry, Spain. He calls back and, they call back and are like, “We found your son.” They come and get him, they bring him back. And what you realize is it’s not the same kid at all. It’s just an imposter, a guy pretending to be their son. And you think like that can’t possibly have a third act. Because you know what the third act is going to be. They’re going to find out that’s not him.

And yet it has this amazing third act. And it’s a documentary that’s really ingenious in that…

Craig: Oh, it’s a documentary?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, it’s real?

John: It’s real. And what’s so fascinating about the technique the director chose is you’re intercutting between these very Errol Morris, static, beautifully lit interviews, talking heads with recreations of what’s actually happening in ways that are so seamless and transfixing that the central conceit, the metaphor of the imposter feels perfect because you’re watching these doppelgängers sort of move between documentary and dramatic film.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

John: So, it’s highly recommended. It’s on Netflix right now, streaming.

Craig: Excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing is an app. Now that we have our Twitter army that supports me, because I never have One Cool Thing, this is what happens, because I never think about it, and then I go, “Uh, I don’t know.” So, I’ve asked them to help me with One Cool Things. And it’s great because now people are constantly Tweeting me with these cool things.

And almost always they’re cool, but this one was cool! It’s so stupid, but I love it. It’s called Paper Karma. It’s an app. You have an old school phone, you can’t use this, but we have cool phones.

Paper Karma, genius. You get junk mail. The junk mail is addressed to you. You launch Paper Karma, it turns your camera on, and you just take a picture of your address on the thing and you hit send and it goes to them and they see, “Okay, so this catalog sent you this thing that you don’t want, now we’ll take it from here. We’ve got your name and your address and the catalog. We’re now doing all the paperwork for them to tell them to stop sending you stuff.”

Dennis: Oh my god. What a great app!

Craig: It’s awesome. So, now like every day I got the mailbox excited about junk mail, so I can take pictures of it and send it to Paper Karma.

John: I am so dubious, Craig. I feel like they are just giving your address again, and again, and again.

Craig: No! No way!

John: Because they verify that a person is actually there receiving that mail.

Craig: No, they’re good people.

John: Oh, okay.

Dennis: Oh, yeah.

Craig: Check it out.

John: I love that Craig believes in random people but has huge distrust in belief over other sets of people.

Craig: If I can see you, then I don’t trust you. [laughs] That’s basically how it works. But if I don’t see you and you have a name and an app and an icon, then I totally trust you.

John: There’s someone in India who is like, “He’s sending us his address again. He must really be there.”

Dennis: Yes!

Craig: Well I don’t care. I’m going to keep doing it. I’m very, very, very…ah, and listen. [fire truck sirens in background] There they are. Ah, the children of the night.

John: I was worried we weren’t going to have any sirens.

Craig: I know. It would have bummed people out. So, this is what goes on usually three or four times a podcast.

Dennis: Is that because of the bomb threats?

Craig: It’s because the fire station is down the street. And, also, sometimes when I’m bored I phone in a bomb threat or two to Cheesecake Factory.

John: I was really hoping that the maintenance worker was going to come in and empty out trash. That’s the best moment.

Craig: She’s my favorite.

Dennis: Oh yeah?

Craig: She’s not here today. So, Dennis, what about your One Cool Thing?

Dennis: My One Cool Thing is a film, a Spanish film, and the reason I mention it is because as someone who writes crime novels and I’ve read like five million of them, and I’ve seen practically every crime thriller ever made, there’s a Spanish film called The Secret in Their Eyes that is one of the most beautifully written and acted crime procedurals I’ve ever seen and has the most surprising ending I think I’ve ever seen for a crime thriller. The combination of humanity, yearning, regret, all the stuff in the human condition, even what we think of as what appropriate justice for a bad guy would be, all of it gets turned on its head.

And I recommend it very, very highly.

Craig: What was the title one more time?

Dennis: It’s called The Secret in Their Eyes.

Craig: The Secret in their Eyes.

Dennis: And it’s Spanish and it’s quite remarkable.

Craig: Excellent. Excellent.

Craig: Dennis, thank you so much for coming. This was a lot of fun.

Dennis: this was a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

Craig: It was great, thank you. I think you’ve probably helped quite a few people today.

Dennis: Well, I hope so.

Craig: I will return to hurting them, again, next week, and that’s it.

John: That’s it. Take care.

Craig: That’s it. Fantastic. Thanks.

LINKS:

• Dennis Palumbo, author and psychotherapist
• Dennis’s book Night Terrors: A Daniel Rinaldi Mystery on Amazon
• Impostor Syndrome on Wikipedia
• The Imposter
• Paper Karma helps you control your mailbox
• The Secret in Their Eyes