Search Results for: courier

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/villains).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 75 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, originally we were supposed to be airing a different episode this week, one that we’d already recorded with our dear friend, Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I saw her this last week and I said, “Oh, we’re going to air you episode this week.” And she’s like, “That’s so great and so exciting.” And now I feel like she’s become the Matt Damon to our Jimmy Kimmel Show.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re so sorry. Apologies to Aline Brosh McKenna; we ran out of time.

**John:** So, we do have an amazing episode saved and banked, and that’s partly why I can sleep well at night is knowing that we have this great episode to share in the future. But this week a lot of stuff happened suddenly and we realized like, wow, if we didn’t talk about it this week then it’s going to be two weeks until we talk about it, and it’s going to be far too long to talk about it.

So, we’re doing a new one. We’re recording this actually on Sunday night, after the Super Bowl, but I haven’t even seen the game, so I have no idea what happened.

**Craig:** It was amazing.

**John:** Oh good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stuff happened in it.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** With that kind of precise description we could have just recording this on Saturday.

**Craig:** I know. I really want to talk about it, but I can’t spoil the game for you because you have it TiVod so, alas.

**John:** Cool. I’ll watch it and I’ll skip through that part where they throw the ball until I see the commercials and that will be great.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know. Kevin Williamson had a pretty funny tweet. It was something like, “I don’t understand all this stuff that’s surrounding the Beyoncé.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh, Kevin.

**Craig:** Oh, Kevin.

**John:** So, this is a busy week for a lot of reasons. First and by far most importantly, your movie opens this week. Your movie opens this Friday.

**Craig:** That’s right. This Friday, in theaters near you.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Please, all of you loyal listeners, we don’t charge you for this, and you all are so nice to give us nice reviews, and you send us tweets and emails. But, nothing says love like a little bit of money. So, would you consider this wonderful weekend, beginning on February 8, Friday, seeing Identity Thief, of course if you are 17 or older, or if you’re not, accompanied by a somebody who is 17 or older.

**John:** That would be very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I’m proud of the movie. And I’d love for you all to see it. And we will, probably a couple of weeks after the movie comes out, maybe I’ll wait for three or four weeks just so it sort of has it’s run in theaters, I will put the script up on your site so people can check it out.

**John:** Oh, that’s very nice of you. Very generous. Now, tell us a little bit more about Identity Thief and what we should be looking for as we’re watching this movie. Is there anything that people who are fans of the podcast should really keep an eye out for?

**Craig:** Well, you know, in general I think people should just watch the movie and enjoy it and not think about it in any other way. But, I will say that of the movies that I’ve done, this one is probably the closest to being… — Well, I guess it’s probably the purest expression of what I’ve wanted to do in movies for a long time. And as it turns out, you often just don’t get the chance. Sometimes you are either writing movies that, because you can, and people have asked you to do it, and you’re happy to do it, and you want to do it, but it’s not necessarily your thing.

Sometimes you write screenplays that are your thing and they don’t get made. And so I’ve been doing this for a long time; I have a decent number of credits. This is the first one we’re looking at and I go, “Okay, well, it’s mine.” You know, even Hangover II, it’s not mine. Those characters were there. I came along, and I love that movie, and I loved working on III as well. But this one is mine, in a sense.

And, so, I’m very pleased with it. It’s very funny, I think, but it’s also very sweet. And there’s some nice emotion to it. So, I’ll be happy to talk about it more. I mean, obviously, when we do our next podcast we will have the verdict.

**John:** Yes. Both critically and…

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs]

**John:** …financially.

**Craig:** Critically I’ve given up. [laughs] I just have to say I’ve given up. I mean, I don’t think this is the kind of movie, I don’t expect that critics will beat this up. My expectation is that they will like it, but I’ve had that expectation before and been, you know, bathed in icy cold water of rejection.

More than anything, I just want the audience to enjoy it, and I want people to go see it. Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy are spectacular in it. And so go out and check it out. And then we can talk sort of about the differences between — and there aren’t many, you know — of what I wanted to do and what happened. I mean, there’s not too many of those. But, you know, we’ll go through it.

**John:** Cool. Also on today’s podcast I wanted to talk about some other bits of news. Big Fish tickets are on sale.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** I want to do some follow-up on Courier Prime. The TV show that Josh Friedman and I set up at ABC, Chosen, did not get chosen, and so it’s not going to pilot.

**Craig:** Aw…

**John:** But, I want to talk through what that process was like, because it was actually really interesting to see what TV was like this season versus like five seasons ago was the last time I tried to do a TV show.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I want to talk about villains, because both in trying to do Chosen and this other project I’m trying to set up, and actually a lot of listener questions this last week were about villains. And I want to sort of dig in on villains. And then get to some One Cool Things.

So, let’s start.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Big Fish. Tickets for the Broadway Musical version of Big Fish in Chicago, which is where we’re doing our out-of-town tryout, they’re on sale right now. And you’re going to hear this on Tuesday, and so they went on sale yesterday, which was Monday.

If you live in Chicago, or if you’re planning to head to Chicago this spring, you should come check out Big Fish. Our first performance is April 2 at the Oriental Theater. We run for five weeks and five weeks only, because another show comes in and takes over for us. So, if you’re a fan who wants to see what Big Fish is like as a musical, with singing, and dancing, and lights, and hopefully some tears, go visit broadwayinchicago.com and get some tickets.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Next topic. Courier Prime. So, last week on the podcast we talked about Courier Prime, which is this better version of Courier that we made. Alan Dague-Greene designed it and did a fantastic job. And people seem to really like it. And nice people wrote up nice things about us in Boing Boing and the New Yorker blog and Paris Review.

And that’s fantastic. And thank you so much for sharing it and it’s been weirdly the most popular, successful downloaded thing we’ve made.

A couple people have written with questions. I wanted to talk about a few common pitfalls and see if I can talk people through before they become pitfalls.

So, Craig, if you are going to be delivering a PDF to somebody, how do you create that PDF? What is the method you go through?

**Craig:** Well, you’re going to tell me I’m doing it wrong.

**John:** Okay. Usually, probably. That’s how I function.

**Craig:** Usually because I use a Mac, and so I find the simplest thing to do, typically, is to print the document and then select “Print to PDF” or “Save as PDF” and then I save a PDF. Although I think in Final Draft sometimes I run into trouble with that method. So, they have an actual menu option to print to PDF.

**John:** Yeah. You should always do your first choice there. Going to the print dialog box is almost always your best bet on a Macintosh. The reason why is that when you go through print the system really treats it like, “Okay, you were sending it to a printer and we will send all the information that we need to send to a printer to this document that we are making.” And that’s really helpful, especially when you’re using a different font because it sends that font information along with the file.

So, when you go through the print dialog box and print that way and do the “Save to PDF” as part of the print process, you’re much more likely to have a great outcome. And if you send that file to somebody else who doesn’t have your fonts installed, who’s on a different system, who’s on something else, there’s a very good chance it’s going to look and print perfectly.

If you go to Movie Magic Screenwriter’s “Export as a PDF” or “Save as PDF” in Final Draft, a lot of time it will work, but a lot of times it won’t work because it won’t have quite set all the information right. So, I would encourage everyone who is experimenting with Courier Prime, do that. If you’re going to send somebody a PDF that you’ve made with Courier Prime and you want them to actually see Courier Prime, do the print method of that.

Here’s a question for you, again. If you are in Final Draft and you want to change from another Courier to Courier Prime, how do you do that?

**Craig:** I think that there’s a set font command in there. You can change everything globally, I think.

**John:** There is. And it’s a little bit buried. Here is what you typically do in other programs. You might do a select-all, and then just choose a new font. That’s unlikely to have a very good outcome in Final Draft. And so the best way to change your fonts in Final Draft is you go into the “Elements” dialog box, and Elements being like scene headers and character names and dialog.

Go into that dialog box, pick General, or pick of the things, change that to Courier Prime or whichever face you want to use, and then there’s a button that says, “Apply font size to all.” And that will tend to do it globally.

Where people often run into problems and run into page count problems or other weird, spazzy things where suddenly like scene headers are in mixed case or they’re not all uppercase/lower case, is that they just try to globally apply, if they try to do a “Select All” and change the font.

So, especially in Final Draft, do that. I would recommend — you will have a good outcome that way.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Cool. So, Craig, what are you writing right now?

**Craig:** Good question. I’m actually, I’m in that fun place. This is the most fun time for a screenwriter when I’ve finished my writing assignments. So, I finished Identity Thief which you think, well yeah, because it’s coming out on Friday. But, the truth is that movie was supposed to come out in May and then they moved the date up because Melissa McCarthy’s other movie, I think it’s called The Heat, tried to jump in front of us into April.

**John:** How dare they!

**Craig:** So, of course, Universal properly said, “Well, wait, we want to be the first Melissa McCarthy movie. We don’t want to be the leftover.” So, they pulled the date up all the way up to February. And then Fox went, “Well, okay, if you’re going to be in February we might as well go to July.” I think they moved the other direction. [laughs]

But, suddenly, this movie that was supposed to be released in May had to be released in February. So, actually, I didn’t really stop working on that movie in terms of just all the stuff that happens even during production and post-production until, I don’t know, maybe a month ago.

So, I’d been working on that. And, of course, I’ve been working on The Hangover, and I’m working with Todd right now in post, just helping out in the editing room. But, I’m starting to look at what the next thing is. And it’s fun because now the way the agencies work is there’s sort of a red light/green light system. Either the writer is available, or they’re not available. And when they switch to green light, then you sort of feel like a, [laughs] like a newly single woman walking into a bar, and everybody is saying, “Well, would you like to write this? Would you like to write that?” And so I get to look at all these things.

It’s fun. So, I don’t know. I’ll probably figure it out in the next week or so what I’m going to do.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m in a sort of similar situation. There was a book that I was going to adapt and the deal took an incredibly long time to get to happen, and ultimately it just didn’t happen, which sometimes is the best situation where, “You know what, this just doesn’t feel quite right.” And so something didn’t feel quite right, and so the deal did not make, and so suddenly I had a free spot on the dance card.

And so there is this possibility that the TV show that Josh Friedman and I did, Chosen, was going to get picked for pilot, and it did not. And so I am kind of free right now, which has actually been kind of remarkable and nice.

So, there are these looming things like, “Oh, I would work on this, but then I have to do this other thing first.” And so actually this last week I got to do some stuff that I really wanted to do that had been pushed back for quite a long time.

I do want to talk a little bit about Chosen going away because that’s one of the weird thing about television is sometimes things just stop and they really are done. And I really kind of like that. One of the things about being a feature writer is that you work on these projects, and you work, and you work, and you draft after draft, and you’re just never quite sure if it’s going to happen.

You get a green light, sure, but there’s a large sort of like yellow light period where it’s just like, maybe, maybe, maybe you get an element attached, maybe something happens. Because TV has a season, and they have to decide like, “We’ve got to start shooting some pilots,” if they don’t decide to shoot your pilot, well, then you’re done. And it’s actually a lovely, nice thing.

**Craig:** There is a lot of built-in certainty. And there is a conclusion in television. I mean, well, if they do pick up your pilot then you’re right back into the yellow light zone because they won’t necessarily say that your pilot is going to get a series order. And then if you do get a series order then you don’t necessarily know if it will be back for another season, or is it going to get a full season, or a half a season.

But, you never get this in movies. Never once has anyone ever said to me, “We read your script. We don’t want to make it now, and actually we’re never going to make it.” [laughs] It just doesn’t work that way.

They’ll keep… — I was talking to a producer just this week about a script I wrote five years ago that he’s trying to get started again. It never ends. But in television, I mean, if we’re going to find a silver lining I guess is that there is a finality. You get to actually take a breath and say, “Well, that chapter is done. Let’s move on.”

**John:** Exactly. So, the TV show that Josh and I did, and I didn’t talk a lot about it on the podcast before, and we really never released the log line and we still are not going to quite release the log line, but it is a family drama with a supernatural element. And the sort of space it occupies is kind of like My So Called Life with Rosemary’s Baby quality to it.

Like, there’s something very, very wrong in the world and yet you’re following this family that’s entering into the situation. And it was a good experience. I wrote it. Josh executive produced it. Josh did an amazing job with the notes and getting everything to make sense and sort of helping me get the best version of the script together.

What was different this time than previous times, for this project I was writing it for 20th. And in television you call the part of Fox that makes TV shows, you call that 20th. And you call Fox the part that actually airs the shows. And so this was 20th, but instead of being for Fox it was 20th for ABC.

And so the studio was 20th and the network was ABC. And so every draft you turn in, I turned in a draft to Josh. Josh reads it quickly, gives me good notes and feedback. Both, sort of these are my notes and these are the notes that I would anticipate getting down the road. And he was always spot-on accurate with the notes that were down the road.

I would do some work there, turn it into the studio. The studio would call with notes. And in feature land when studios call with notes, it’s like, “Oh, give us a week or two and we’ll give you notes.” It would be like later that afternoon. Like you turned it in the morning and, like, whoop, here’s the notes call.

You might do some work on that. Once again, they’ll give you their notes and they also give you what they’re anticipating the network’s notes are going to be. Then you go into the network. They read it over the weekend. They call back with notes.

And, so, there’s a really fast churn through these things, but it’s also kind of exciting. And partly because the form of a one-hour drama, it’s only 60 pages, so you really can do some major changes on things if you want to.

We ended up collapsing two acts down into one act, building a new fifth act. And it was a good, rewarding experience. And it was all very, very fast, up until the point where it just became this waiting game where everyone had turned in all their pilots. And so the studio gets to look through all their pilots. And then it just became this game of listening and hearing people talk about what the network was looking for.

And so you’d hear these words like, “Oh, they’re looking for these four qualities of things,” or like, “they only want one-word titles.” And it was sort of amusing, but it was also sort of pointless to sort of pay that much attention.

So, once I stopped hearing a lot about our show, I was like, “Uh, you know, I don’t think we’re going to happen.” Also, we started to see what other shows they were picking up. You’re like, “I don’t know where we fit into this world. I don’t know how they would put us with these other shows.”

So, it wasn’t a big surprise when we got the final call that it wasn’t happening. But I just like that there was a call. I have so many movies that I’ve written over time where like eventually you just stop getting calls back from the producers and you just know that the project is probably not going to happen. Here there was actually some closure and everybody who I worked with could call and say, “Hey, great job. This didn’t go.” From the studio’s level, at some point they go to cable and they go to other places, but like this part is done. And that was nice.

I did enjoy that part of the process this year.

**Craig:** It’s good that you can. There is an art to dealing with bad news.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we have it all the time. And it’s very easy to internalize and to take it personally. And that’s simply no help at all.

**John:** One of the things that came up in Chosen, and it’s also come up in this other project that I’ve been working on this last week, is the idea of who the villains are and what the villain’s goal is. And so I thought would be something we could dig into this week. Because many properties are going to have some villain. There’s going to be somebody else who has a different agenda than our hero, and our hero and that villain are going to come to terms with each other over the course of the story.

What happened in the discussion on this other project, they kept coming back to me with questions about the villain, what the villain’s story was, and what the villain’s motivation was. And it became clear that eventually they were really seeing this as a villain-driven story rather than a hero-driven story. So, I want to talk through those dynamics as well.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, who are the villains you think of when you think of movie villains? Who are the big ones?

**Craig:** Well, you know, immediately one’s mind goes to the broadest, most obvious back hat villains, like Darth Vader, and Buffalo Bill, you know, people like that.

**John:** Well, it’s interesting you say Buffalo Bill. It’s like Buffalo Bill versus Hannibal Lecter.

**Craig:** Hannibal Lecter is not a villain.

**John:** And I think that’s an important distinction. I want to get into that as well.

When you think about villains, you need to really talk about what kinds of genres can support a villain that is actually a driving force villain. Because Identity Thief has bad guys, clearly; I’ve seen them in the trailer. But, do they have their own agenda that could be thwarted by our heroes?

**Craig:** No, they don’t. I mean, that’s the part of the movie that I think least reflects what my initial intention was. And to me those villains really are obstacles. To me, the villain in the movie is Melissa McCarthy. But, she’s an interesting villain that you sort of overcome and find your way to love. But she’s the villain.

**John:** Yeah, she’s the villain. She’s the antagonist.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Dramatically she’s the villain.

**John:** Yeah, so I think I want to make that distinction that almost all movies are going to have a protagonist and antagonist structure. So, you’re going to have a protagonist who is generally your hero. It’s the person who changes over the course of the movie. You’re going to have an antagonist who’s the person who is standing in opposition to the protagonist and is causing the change to happen.

So, sometimes, just based on the trailer, you can see, “Well, there’s two people in the movie.” They are going to be those two people generally.

A villain is a sort of different situation. A villain is somebody who wants to do something specific that is generally bad for the world, or bad for other people in the world. So, we could talk about sort of general categories of what villains could be. There’s the villains who want to control things, who want to run things. So, your Voldemorts, your Darth Vaders, your General Zods. I would say Hal from 2001 is sort of that kind of controlling villain where he has this order that he wants to impose on things. And if you don’t obey you’re going to suffer for it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have your revenge villains. You have Khan. You have. You have De Niro in Cape Fear.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would argue the witch in The Wizard of Oz is really a revenge villain. If you think about it, this outsider killed her sister and stole her shoes and she wants revenge.

**Craig:** She wants revenge. She also sort of falls into the power-hungry model also.

**John:** Yeah…

**Craig:** Dual villain motivation.

**John:** She does. But I think the power hungriness is something we sort of put on the movie after the fact. If you actually at what she’s trying to do in the course of it, like she doesn’t have this big plan for Oz that we see over the course of this movie.

**Craig:** You’re right. Basically, “You killed my sister and I’m going to get you. And your little dog, too.”

**John:** “And your little dog, too.” And, speaking of animals suffering, we have Glenn Close who is sort of the great villain in Fatal Attraction.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Who wants revenge. I mean, basically, “How dare you jilt me, and this is what I’m going to do to show you.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Then there’s the simpler, you know, this villain wants something and is trying to take something. So, you have Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I love about Hans Gruber is Hans Gruber probably sees himself as he’s Ocean’s 11. He probably sees himself as like, “We’re pulling off this amazing heist. And it would have been an amazing heist if not for John McClane getting in the way.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have Salieri in Amadeus. And Salieri is like he’s envy — he wants that thing that Mozart has. You have Gollum who wants the ring. Like those are really sort of simple motivations.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The last kind of villain I would classify is sort of the insatiability. And these are the really scary ones who like they’re just going to keep going no matter what. The Terminator. You can’t — unstoppable. Anton Chigurh, from No Country for Old Men, he scares me more than probably anybody else I’ve seen on screen.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and they embody the same sort of thing that attracts us to zombies as a kind of personality-less villain, and that is inevitability. They basically represent time.

**John:** They represent time and death.

**Craig:** Mortality. Exactly.

**John:** You will not be able to escape them. So, Freddy Krueger is that, too. Michael Myers, he’s the zombie-slasher kind of person.

**Craig:** Freddy Krueger actually, I think, is really revenge.

**John:** Oh yeah, that’s a very good point. His underlying motivation for why he hates — why he wants to kill all the people he kills is a revenge by proxy kind of.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they burned him, because all he did was rape some kids.

**John:** Yeah. Come on. Can’t a guy have some fun?

So, one of the challenges with screenwriting I’ve found is that you’re trying to balance these two conflicting things. You want your hero to be driving the story. And yet you also want to create a great villain and that villain wants to control the story as well. And finding that sweet spot between the two is often really, really hard. And this project that I was out pitching this last week, I pitched it as very much a quest movie, and here’s our group of heroes and here’s what they’re trying to do, and these are the obstacles along the way. And this is the villain. And so all the questions sort of came back to the villain.

And the questions are sort of natural, fair questions to ask, which I hadn’t done a good enough job explaining and describing was: What is the villain’s overall motivation? What is the villain trying to do? And because we had just done the Raiders podcast I kept coming back to like, “Well, in Raiders what is the villain trying to do?”

**Craig:** Well, he’s trying to do the exact same thing that the hero is trying to do, which is kind of interesting. He just has far less moral compunction. And I guess really the point there is that what the hero was trying to do initially wasn’t what he should be doing. And you can see that that chance occurs.

And this is how I tend to think of really good villains. What they want… — It’s a good topic, because I think there’s a very common screenwriting mistake, and it’s understandable. You have a character, your protagonist, and you have perhaps his flaw, and you have the way he’s going to change. And then you think, “Well, we need a villain.”

And you come up with an interesting villain. The problem is the villain’s motivation, and the villain’s villainy has to exist specifically to fit into the space of your main character of your protagonist. They are the villain because they represent the thing that the main character is most afraid of, or is most alike and needs to destroy within himself.

And if you don’t match these things together dramatically, then you just have kind of a kooky villain in a story with your character.

**John:** Yes. One of the challenges to also keep in mind is that you want a villain who fits in the right scale for what the rest of your story is. You want somebody who feels like the things that they’re after are reasonable for what the nature of your story is.

Let’s go back to Raiders. And so you could say Belloq is the villain. And Belloq wants the same thing that Indy wants. He wants the Ark of the Covenant. But Belloq is actually an employee. He’s really working for the Nazis. And I felt like this pitch that I was going out with this last week, people kept asking for like, you know, it was also a quest movie, so you could sort of think of like Raiders in the sense that it’s a quest — you’re after this one thing.

Well, they kept pushing me for more information, like, well basically who are the Nazis and what is their agenda? And you can’t really stick that onto Raiders of the Lost Ark. I mean, I guess with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we sort of know what the Nazis are and you can sort of shorthand them for evil. But you can’t literally stick Hitler there at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. It just wouldn’t make sense. It’s the wrong kind of thing.

**Craig:** It would be bizarre. Absolutely. You need to, and in that movie, they very smartly said, “Okay, we’re going to have a character who is obsessed objects and needs to become more interested in humanity, so let’s make our villain just like him, except that guy won’t change at all.” And so we watch our hero begin to diverge from the villain, and that’s exciting. And that’s smart.

And I have to say that there’s a trend toward this. You can find villains like this throughout film history, however, even in broader genres, like for instance superhero films, or even James Bond movies, there was a time when you could just put a kooky villain in because they were interesting. There is nothing thematically relevant about Jaws for instance from The Spy Who Loved Me.

There is nothing particularly relevant even about Blofeld. You know, they’re just mustache-twirling villains. Sometimes people will get this note, “This villain is too much of a mustache-twirler,” meaning he’s just evil because he’s evil. “Ha, ha, ha.”

And if you look at Batman, the Batman villains were very typically just kooky. They were nuts. The Riddler is a villain because he’s insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s so insane that he spends all of his time crafting bizarro riddles just because he’s criminally insane.

But, what’s happened is, for instance, take Skyfall. And whatever people’s beefs are with Skyfall, I think honestly one of the reasons the movie has done better than any Bond movie before it, in terms of reaching an audience, is because the villain was matched thematically to the hero. The hero is aging and he is concerned that he is no longer capable to do his job.

And along comes a villain who is aging, who used to do his job and was thrown away. And so all of the internal conflict and sense of divided loyalty that our hero has is brought to bear by the villain. And so suddenly things begin to suggest themselves. Maybe the opening sequence should be one in which the hero’s life is tossed aside by the person he trusts. And then he meets a villain whose life was tossed aside by the same person.

And they just take different paths to resolution. Look at, the Nolan movies I think very notably have taken Batman villain out of the realm of broad and silly and thematically matched them specifically to Batman. The first one, you have Scarecrow, who is right on target. Batman is a hero born out of fear, and your villain is a master of fear.

**John:** Yeah. Fear personified.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, it’s a trend. It’s a trend to do it more and more. And I don’t think it’s going away any time soon. And, frankly, I think it makes for better stories.

**John:** What I would point out is the challenge is you can go too far. And so I look at the second Batman movie, in which we have the Joker who is phenomenal, and we love it, and we love every moment of it. In the third Batman movie I became frustrated by sort of villain soup. And I didn’t feel like there was great opportunity for a Batman story because we’re just basically following the villains through a lot of our time on screen.

It’s also dangerous because it raises the expectation, like, “Well, the villain has to be this big, giant, magnetic character.” And any time your villain is driving your story, then your hero is going to have a harder time driving the story.

What it comes down to is, like, movies can only start once. A movie can start because the hero does something that starts the engine of the film. Or, it can start because the villain does something that starts the engine of the movie.

In many movies with a villain the villain is really starting things. And so even Jaws, like you know, the shark attacks. The shark is the problem. The shark happens first. It’s not that you can envision a scenario in which a scientist found the shark and tracked it down and became the whole start of things. But, no, the shark happens first.

Where I ran into this, both with the TV show and with this other project we’re pitching, is this fascination of who the villain is and what the villain’s motivation is, it’s good to ask those questions, but in trying to dramatize those questions on screen you’re probably going to be taking time away from your hero. And your hero should be the most interesting person on screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I just don’t know enough about TV to… — I mean, I watch TV, but I don’t watch it the way that I watch movies. I don’t think about it the way I think about movies.

But certainly if you have a very oppositional kind of show, where it really is about one person versus another, they both ultimately will occupy a lot of screen time, I suppose. But, you know, that’s why I think it’s pretty smart what they do in Dexter, for instance. Every season there is one new arch villain who thematically tweaks at some part of Dexter.

But when that season is over, they’re gone because they’re dead.

**John:** Yeah. Did you watch Lost? You probably watched Lost.

**Craig:** I didn’t. My wife watched it and I should say on behalf of our friend, Damon Lindelof, my wife loved the final episode and cried copiously. I don’t know anything about it. [laughs] I know that there was an island, and a smoke monster, and in the end they were in a church.

**John:** Yeah, okay. The point I was going to make about Lost, which I could also make about Alias or many other shows that have elaborate villain mythologies, is that while it become incredibly rewarding that you did know what the villains were and why the villains were doing the things they were doing, if you had known that information from the start of the project — if you’d known what the villains whole deal was at the very start — it wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting.

Or, you would have spent so much time at the start explaining what the villain’s motivation was that you wouldn’t have been able to kick start the hero’s story. And so I guess I’m just making a pitch for there can be a good cause for understanding what the whole scope of the villain is, but you have to realize in the two hours or the one hour or the amount of time that you have allotted, how are you going to get the best version of the hero’s story to happen and service the villain that needs to be serviced.

**Craig:** Yeah. I tend to think about these things in a somewhat odd dichotomy. So, forgive me if this sounds bizarre, but villains — hero/villain relationships are either religious or atheistic in nature. Meaning this: The case where there is a villain who is doing an evil thing, and there is a hero who is trying to stop them is basically religious in nature. It’s a morality play. And good tends to win, obviously, in those morality plays. And, in fact, the satisfaction of the morality play is that good does triumph against seemingly impossible odds.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And we want to believe that about the world that we live in, that even though oftentimes it is the evil who are strong and the good who are weak, good still triumphs. So, there’s a religious nature to that struggle.

But, there are also atheistic type of stories. Or, actually they’re areligious types of stories, because they’re not making a point about the existence of god, but rather they are saying the drama that exists between the hero and the villain is one of absurd dread, the kind of existential nausea.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** For instance, the classic PBS series, The Prisoner, where the nature of evil was Kafkaesque. It was uncaring. It was inexplicable. It would simply emerge out of the ocean like a bubble or oppress you by simply being a disembodied voice. It was essentially that kind of unquantifiable dread of mortality and death. And so that will color — if you’re trying to tell a story that is steeped in existential dread, don’t over-explain your villains, because the point is there is no explanation. It’s absurd, as absurd as existence is, which is scary in and of itself.

**John:** Yeah. I think the root of all slasher films which, you know, Terminator is sort of an extension, like a smarter extension of a slasher film, but it’s that wave is coming for you and you will not be able to get away from it. Zombie movies work in the same situation, too. It’s not one zombie that you’re afraid of. It’s the fact that all the zombies are always going to be out there and the world is always a very, very, dangerous place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Zombies aren’t even evil. They’re just — they’re like the shark basically.

**John:** Yeah. They’re like the shark.

**Craig:** They just eat. And you can’t stop them. That’s why, by the way, so many zombie movies end on a downer note. They don’t make it. Heroes just don’t make it. You can’t beat zombies.

**John:** So, what I would say though is if you look at, regardless of which kind/class of villain you’re facing, you’re going to have to make to make some decisions about perspective and point of view. And to what degree are we sticking with the hero’s point of view and that we’re learning about the villain through the hero? And to what degree do we as the audience get to see things the hero doesn’t know from the villain’s point of view, and from the villain’s perspective?

And making those decisions is a very early part of the process. How much are we going to stay in point of view of our hero and to what degree are we going to see other stuff?

In Die Hard we stay with John McClane through a lot of it, but eventually we do get to see stuff from Alan Rickman’s point of view, and we see like what he’s really trying to do. With slasher movies, we tend to stay with our hero’s point of view for most of the time because it’s just actually much more frightening to not know where the bad guy is and what the bad guy is trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you have a villain who is smart, if you have a Joker, at some point you will want to see them explain themselves and have that moment at which they can talk about what it is they’re trying to do. And ideally you’d love for them to be able to communicate that mission and that goal to the protagonist. That’s often very challenging to do.

In Silence of the Lambs, to the degree that Hannibal Lecter is a villain. Hannibal Lecter is a person you fear in the movie. He’s in jail, so he can talk to her through the bars and we know that she’s safe and it’s reasonable for her to be in that situation and not be killed.

When we talked about Raiders, Belloq and Indy have that conversation at the bar. Indy’s able to get out of it, but Belloq is able to explain himself. If you can find those moments to allow those two sides to confront each other without killing each other before the end of the story, you’re often better off.

**Craig:** Yeah. You need some sense of rationality. It is discomfiting to watch a villain behave randomly. Random behavior is inherently undramatic. Even if your villain’s motivation is, in fact, just mindless chaos, they need to express that that is their motivation.

The Joker in the second Batman movie, they say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” and the Joker can express that. But, okay, that’s a choice, you made it. Your job now is to create chaos because you love chaos. But you’ve articulated a goal.

And if we don’t have that, then we’re just watching somebody blow stuff up willy nilly and we start wondering why. And you never want anyone to stop their engagement with the narrative.

One of the great things about all of those wonderful scenes between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter is that while they are doing this fascinating dance with each other, and falling in love in a matter of speaking, what Hannibal Lecter is promising her, and in fact the entire context of those meetings, the plot context of those meetings, is he is explaining to her why the villain of the movie is doing what he’s doing.

He is grounding that villain in some kind of rational context.

**John:** Yeah, which is spooky.

What I would recommend all writers do is if you have a story that has a villain, especially like a bigger villain, like someone who is doing some pretty serious stuff, take a second before you begin and write the whole story from the villain’s point of view. Because, remember, every villain really does see himself as the hero of the story. So, if you’re making Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton sees herself as a savior trying to protect this company, and protect herself. But she sees herself as the good person here. And if she’s being forced into doing murder or whatever to protect herself, she will.

Even, god, the Queen Mother in Aliens, she is protecting her brood. From her perspective, these outsiders came in and started killing everything. She’s going to protect. And when you see things from their perspective you can often find some really great moments.

Figure out where the story is from their point of view. But, remember, you’re probably not going to tell it from their point of view. You’re going to tell it from our hero’s point of view, and make sure that you’re going to find those moments in which our hero is going to keep making things worse for the villain, and therefore the villain is going to be able to keep making things worse for the hero. And there is going to be a natural confrontation, but that the final confrontation won’t come until the climax that you want to have happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a nice way of approaching certain villain stories where the movie is in many ways about figuring out the rational context for the villain. You’re trying to unearth a mystery, and that in fact if you figure out why the villain is doing what they’re doing you can stop them.

Mama, which is out in theaters right now, I don’t know if you saw it. It’s a good horror movie. It’s very thoughtful and is very thematic. It’s about something. I thought they did a good job. And that movie is sort of a good case-in-point of if you can figure out why Mama is so violent and evil, then you might have a shot at getting rid of Mama. So, you build the mystery in. And the mystery is, why is this bad person doing these bad things?

Se7en sort of worked like that, you know, with a kind of nice nihilistic ending.

**John:** Great. Well, fun to talk about villains. And our villain talk fits very well into what I want to bring up for my One Cool Thing, which is a book, a bestseller, so it feels really weird for me to be hyping a bestseller because people are buying this book anyway. But it’s Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

And I read it just because I wanted to read a fun book that I didn’t have to think about adapting, because so much of what I read for fiction is something that has been sent to me, like, “Oh, would you consider working on this?” And this one was just a fun book that I just bought on the Kindle. I was like, oh, I’ll read it on the plane. And I loved it.

And, of course, I couldn’t turn off that adaptation part of my brain. Because I loved it so much and was thinking, oh, this is a clearly a movie. And I later found out that Reese Witherspoon had the rights and now David Fincher is probably going to direct it.

But, the reason why I’m recommending it on this podcast for people who are interesting in screenwriting is it’s a great book, but it’s also a really fascinating exercise in figuring out how you would adapt this book. Because, the book is structured as alternating chapters about a woman’s disappearance. So, you have Amy who is the wife. And her chapters go forward in time from when they first met, when she first met her husband, Nick.

And so it’s how they fell in love and how they moved to a small town and everything that happened, up to the point of the day that she disappeared. The husband’s chapters start at the day that she disappeared and move forward. And so you’re alternating between the two of these chapters.

And so, when you first start reading the book you’re like, oh, well this will work really nicely. I can see this working as a movie because you would probably start the mystery, of her disappearance, and go forward in time, and you could intercut it with this backstory stuff. And you find out more stuff about the real nature of their relationship as you’re intercutting it.

But then Flynn, to her credit, does something really, really difficult and smart at sort of the midpoint of the book and you realize that, wow, this thing that you thought you could do so straight-forwardly is just not possible. So, I highly recommend it. It’s really nicely done. It’s a good, fun, quick read. So, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

**Craig:** Yeah. My wife read it and loved it, too. I guess I will put it on my iPad Mini.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** Sounds like a good one.

**John:** Great. And, Craig, you have a One Cool Thing, too, which is sports-related.

**Craig:** It is. It is Super Bowl Sunday when we record this. And I don’t know how much you follow football, or football-related news stories, but for the past, really the past few years, but accelerating there has been a rash of serious medical concerns and studies surrounding football.

And it basically goes like this: Large men smashing into each other at high speed is not good for their brains. They used to think that concussions were sort of the worst of it, and if you got a concussion in the old days they would have you sit down for two or three minutes, make sure you didn’t throw up, and then send you back into the game.

Eventually they figured out that was a really bad idea, that concussion and concussion related illness is very serious and the brain is even more susceptible to permanent injury if you get hit again while you’re in a state of concussion.

So, they treated that more seriously. But what they failed to consider was that head injuries that don’t result in concussion are still actually quite bad for you. And even worse, they are cumulative. One study suggested that even in a high school football game the average kid on the line who’s either a defensive linesman or offensive linesman smashing into each other, that it’s like being in four, or five, or six car crashes in an hour. It’s just not good for you.

And, here’s the really scary part is that as they’ve been doing studies, bad things have been happening. Specifically, former NFL stars have been killing themselves. And suicide and severe clinical depression is one of the side effects of what they call cerebral encephalopathy, which is just basically brain damage.

And very popular, I mean, Junior Seau — who was an amazing player, and also, you know, for a league that’s full of surly types, just a smiley happy guy, sort of famous for being smiley and happy — killed himself. And he’s not the only one. And these guys that are killing themselves are, now there’s this weird thing where they’re shooting themselves in the chest or stabbing themselves in the chest because they want somebody to study their brain. That’s how involved they are in their own illness.

There are also a lot of cases of just elevated, what you’d call other neuropathies, Parkinson’s and ALS, and it’s a bad deal. In fact, we have a friend, I’ll tell you once the podcast is over, whose father-in-law played in the NFL. And he had fairly early onset Alzheimer’s. So, everybody is looking at football and they’re wondering what are we going to do. And this is why I don’t let my son play football. But he does play baseball.

And in baseball no one is running into each other, but one thing that’s been coming up is that pitchers are getting injured by hit balls. So, basically they make a pitch, the hitter sends a line drive right back to the mound, it strikes the pitcher in the head. There have a been a couple of big cases recently in the MLB where pitchers have been severely injured, nearly blinded, shattered jaws.

Bu there’s at least one case I know of where a little league player got killed. And part of the problem is that really up until the major leagues, or their farm systems, even all the way through college, players can use aluminum bats. And they love aluminum bats because not only are they cheaper, and they don’t break, they send the ball back much, much quicker.

There’s just more energy. They impart more kinetic energy to the ball. And so the speed of the ball off the bat can be over 100 miles an hour. It’s scary. There is a product now that they’re starting to look into. So, this is sort of a One Cool Thing for hopefully this season, that’s basically a pitcher’s helmet.

And pitchers don’t want to wear helmets because they’re goofy and it’s hard to pitch, frankly, with this big, chunky piece of metal, or rather plastic, on your head. But it almost looks like the top of a bike helmet, you know, that sort of foamy part.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it can go underneath your cap and basically protect you from the worst of it, should you get hit in the head. And I know Easton, which is a very big sports supply company — sports equipment company, I should say — is developing one of these. I think Wilson is developing one of these. And so I kind of keep track of it and I’m hoping that they do bring it to market and that it is available for my son to wear, because I do get worried about that.

So, for those of you out there whose children play football, please be careful and monitor them carefully. And for those of you out there whose kids are pitching, look into this because I think it’s, frankly, I think Major League is going to have to adopt something. It’s just getting too dangerous out there. Protect your brains, people. It’s all you got.

**John:** Absolutely. What is the center of a person? It’s their brain. And so any trauma that is hitting you there is not going to be a — you’re going to be in trouble. You look at the boxers. You look at the boxers who got hit a thousand times, and there’s a reason why they’re not able to put a sentence together.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Boxing is essentially the worst thing you could do for your brain, but it is odd to me that in Major League Baseball for the last, I think, 30 years, you know, if you walk into the batter’s box you must wear a helmet so that if you got hit by a 90-mile-an-hour baseball you wouldn’t get brain injured. But, the pitchers…

**John:** The ball is flying in the other direction, they’re not worrying about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they’re sending the ball back just as fast at their heads, and they’re not wearing anything but a wool cap. Scary.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** There. Sleep on that.

**John:** There we go. Very good.

So, we’ve talked villains, and so the inevitability of death. This is a way to possibly avoid the inevitability of death.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’ve talked about affairs and murderous husbands, possibly in Gone Girl. Big Fish.

**Craig:** Big Fish. Tickets on sale.

**John:** Identity Thiefy.

**Craig:** Tickets on sale.

**John:** People can go see that. And Courier Prime, which is available for downloads. It’s at quoteunquoteapps.com, if you want the Courier font.

Links to everything we talked about on the podcast today are going to be at johnaugust.com/podcast. And, Craig, thank you for another fun episode.

**Craig:** This was a good one. And it was our 75th.

**John:** 75th. So, what is that, Diamond Jubilee?

**Craig:** You know, we are now that old married couple that’s the last one on the dance floor at a wedding when the DJ does that, “All right, everybody who’s been married for 50 years.” You know, we’ve got to do something for 100.

**John:** Oh we will. It’s going to be a blow out for 100.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I should be back from New York by then, and we’ll do something great for that.

**Craig:** Maybe a big live one here in town.

**John:** I think a big live one here in town. People seem to like that idea. So, if you are a listener with a suggestion for something we should do for the 100th episode, please let us know. And thank you all for listening.

**Craig:** Awesome. See you next time.

**John:** Thanks.

LINKS:

* [Identity Thief](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/identitythief/) trailer on Apple
* [Big Fish tickets](http://www.bigfishthemusical.com/#tktsinfo) on sale in Chicago
* [Every Villain is a Hero](http://johnaugust.com/2009/every-villain-is-a-hero)
* [Writing Better Bad Guys](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-better-bad-guys)
* [Screenwriting and the Problem of Evil](http://johnaugust.com/2010/screenwriting-and-the-problem-of-evil)
* [Gone Girl](http://www.amazon.com/dp/030758836X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Gillian Flynn
* [Researchers Discover 28 New Cases of Brain Damage in Deceased Football Players](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sports/concussion-watch/researchers-discover-28-new-cases-of-brain-damage-in-deceased-football-players/)
* [Easton-Bell Sports unveils pitcher’s helmet](http://www.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/22297882/27795470)
* OUTRO: [Last Dance](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oAkDLsvI3g) by Ariana Grande

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/three-hole-punchdrunk).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 74 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I hope you have Diet Dr. Pepper in hand, because we have a very busy show this week.

**Craig:** I’m opting for Diet Coke.

**John:** [gasps]

**Craig:** I feel like that gives me a little extra boost.

**John:** Well, you may need it, because we have five main topics today.

**Craig:** Oh god. Oh, god!

**John:** Can you handle it?

**Craig:** Yes! [laughs]

**John:** We’ll go through some feedback on the Raiders episode we did last week.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ll segue to the results of the listener survey that we put up. And we had a bunch of people who wrote into that, so we want to get to some of the responses.

There’s a new report that just came out this last week that tallies up all the spec sales and pitches from 2012, which is kind of crazy that someone did that, but good for them.

I want to talk to you about a brand new type face called Courier Prime.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** And we have three listener questions.

**Craig:** Great. That is a full docket. Let’s get to it.

**John:** Let’s get right to it. Well, let’s start with Raiders. So, last week we did a special episode which was just about Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it was just sort of a trial run, like what would it be like if we just talked about one movie the whole time. And people seemed to really dig it. I got a lot of good response on Twitter about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I saw a lot of it. And I think my favorite comment was somebody was like, “Oh god, they’re just going to talk about a movie the whole time and it’s Raiders, and everybody has seen Raiders so who cares?” But they were like, “No, actually, it was really good.” [laughs] So, that was great to hear.

And I love talking about Raiders. I wish every podcast were about Raiders.

**John:** Yeah. Some podcasts should probably be just about Raiders. I’m sure there actually is a Raiders podcast. And we’ll find it and Stuart will link to it. But, what I really liked is people would write in with their theories about sweater guy. And sweater guy is the guy who puts the apple on the desk as he’s leaving, and they’re like, what is his deal, is he gay, what is it?

And so my favorite response was from Christopher Wilson who tweeted, “Raiders sweater guy has written ‘I love you’ on the apple, which Brody then reads and wipes off on his sleeve before pocketing it.”

**Craig:** Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. It’s not true…

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** …but I wish it were.

**John:** That would be fantastic if it were. And I think in the ret-con version, I think if we were to go back and sort of redo it or see Indiana Jones from sweater vest guy’s perspective, that would be a very good explanation. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, that would be a feature film.

**Craig:** And what happened the days leading up to the apple incident. How he dealt with the aftermath of the apple incident.

The other thing that someone tweeted which I really liked, and I had never noticed it, and it’s funny how you just don’t see the things — and no matter how many times you’ve seen a movie you just miss these things. The famous shot of Indiana Jones going under the — in the beginning, when that wall is closing down on him and he rolls under it at the last second, then reaches back, grabs his hat, and then goes through again, the hat is actually dropped from above.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And somebody put a GIF on there and you can just watch it over and over. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Just ruined it.

**Craig:** I mean, everybody knows the shot of the snake that’s reflected in the protective glass between Indiana Jones and the snake. Everybody knows that goof. But that hat, how did I miss that? Incredible. Just incredible.

**John:** Sleight of hand. The GIF has ruined it for you. Or the “JIF.” And I guess you can pronounce it either way.

**Craig:** I say “GIF,” because it’s graphic interchange format, so it should be “GIF.”

**John:** I agree with you, but apparently the people who make it say it’s “JIF.” We’ll never resolve that issue as we will never resolve many sort of big, important movie issues.

**Craig:** I disagree with you; I think we just resolved it. And it’s “GIF.” [laughs]

**John:** So, one of the other things that happened on Twitter is I asked, well, if we were to do another one of these movie-centered episodes, what movie should we do? And, of course, a lot of people wrote in with responses.

It was interesting, a lot of people wrote in with like, “Do North by Northwest.” “Do Casablanca.”

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**John:** And I say, “Oh, come on,” because realistically those are fantastic movies, but no one is going to be writing those movies now. I don’t think it’s actually a helpful exercise. And that’s why I get so frustrated when I see those brought up in, like, How to Write a Screenplay books, because those aren’t movies that people actually get made.

So, I think if we are to do another one of these in the future, and I think we should, it should be a more modern movie that reflects the kinds of movies that listeners are actually making these days.

**Craig:** Yeah. Plus, also, if you want to read insight or analysis of Casablanca, go pick up every single book on film ever written. It’s been done. We get it. There’s nothing left to say about those movies.

It’s far more interesting, I think, to hear an analysis of a film that perhaps academics don’t think is worthy of analysis or isn’t sufficient for analysis, but we who write movies for large mass audiences do think is valuable for analysis. Why would we ever, ever waste our time analyzing North by Northwest? What else is there to say?

**John:** Yeah, instead of Casablanca, I think it should be Caddyshack.

**Craig:** By the way, it would great to have fun with… — I mean, the thing is Caddyshack is actually really hard to analyze because the story is all over the place. I mean, for instance, if it were me, if I got to pick the next one, Groundhog Day. That would be fun to go through.

**John:** That is a great one. But Groundhog Day is done a lot, though. There’s a whole book on sort of — there’s a lot of stuff written about how Groundhog Day was made. That doesn’t mean it’s not a great movie and you can learn a lot from it. It’s a high concept comedy. That’s a good choice; you’re right.

I was going to — if we we’re going for comedy — I was going to go for Clueless which is just a brilliant movie. Or Animal House.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, there are so many that we could talk about. But, what we should never do is analyze the same old movies that everybody else analyzes, for all of the reasons that you’ve mentioned, and all the reasons I’ve mentioned. So, there — there is your dose of umbrage for the day. Come on!

**John:** Now, one of the readers also sent through this script page which is apparently from Harrison Ford’s actual script from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I guess the backstory is that at some point this original script was up for auction, and so online there were scans of some pages, or photos of some pages. Now, I haven’t found a link yet from some other site that has it, because I kind of want to post it up ourselves, something that’s not really supposed to be out there in the world. But this page was really interesting, and what I liked about it was it was actually a page that we talked about in the podcast.

This is the moment where Indiana Jones is talking to the two Army guys and they’re in the big lecture hall. So, I want to read a little of what’s actually written in the script and then we can talk about some of the notes that Harrison Ford has scribbled on the script which I think are important as well. So, this is page 18, at least what I’m reading.

“…through rings in the corner of the Ark. The painting is…” So, he must be talking about the book. Basically the book has been flipped open and you see the Ark and the painting of the Ark. “The painting is very dramatic, full of smoke, tumult and sinewy dying men. But the most astonishing thing in the picture is the brilliant jet of white light and flame issuing from the wings of the angels. It pierces deep into the ranks of the retreating enemy, wrecking devastation and terror.”

So, it’s a very kind of literary block of scene description there, but it really gives you a very good sense of what that drawing is ultimately going to be in the book, and why the other characters are responding to it in that way.

This is the section where Indiana Jones says, “Lightning…fire…the power of God.” What I like about the handwritten notes in this is it says, “Imp,” which I think means important, and the question is, “Is Indy a believer?”

**Craig:** Oh! There we go!

**John:** “Where in bible?” And it’s scratching out some lines and it’s suggesting alts for things. And it’s just fascinating to look at while they were making the movie, these are the kind of questions that do come up on set. And as you’re on set working on Hangover II, or Hangover III, that kind of stuff does come up and that’s why it’s so valuable to have you as the writer on set is that you can say like, “Why am I doing this right here? What if I did this thing? What’s important about this scene?”

Even as you’re making a movie you’re asking these questions, and sometimes those questions get reflected in the text of the scene you’re shooting probably that day.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and first of all the question that he asks, “Is Indy a believer?” goes right to the heart of what you and I were talking about last week. That is the core of the movie. And the answer to that question, for me at least in that point in the movie is, no, he’s not, but he will be.

And it’s interesting that… — If you want to be a screenwriter, this is the way you have to think about movies. It is quite likely that no one sitting in the movie theater, save for a very select few people, ever watched Indiana Jones and thought this is a movie about faith, and belief, and this is a movie about one man’s journey from skepticism and scientificism to religiosity or spirituality.

But that’s what it is. For the actor who has to play the part, he must understand in those moments why he’s saying the things he’s saying, or else it just will be bad acting. And no matter what the movie is, actors need to understand what they’re saying and why they’re seeing it in the moment.

And because they are performing the character, inevitably they’re going to come to a line that is not consistent with the way they’ve been performing everything else. And in those moments, those lines get tested by everybody before you shoot, you know, on the day. “Why am I saying this? It doesn’t feel right.”

And when you’re a screenwriter on set, the last thing you can say is, “Well, I don’t care how it feels. That’s what I wrote. I believe it’s right. Just do it.” You’ll get a terrible line reading, or you’ll get an angry actor. Either way, it’s not productive. So, the question you have to ask yourself is: Is this person correct? Is the line reading incorrect for…is it inconsistent with the character I intend? Or, is the line inconsistent with the character that I intended as currently being portrayed by this actor? Or, is the actor just wrong?

And if the actor is wrong, part of our job is to explain our intention and see if they agree. Sometimes it’s that no one is wrong. It’s just that this other person is a human being and they need to make it feel real. And if it’s not real to them, you have to rewrite it so that it is real to them. Otherwise it’s going to stink.

So, for instance, at the bottom of the page, why don’t you read what it says there.

**John:** “Indy goes and shuts window, lost in thought.” That part? Or, the “Oh, please.”

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. [laughs] So, what Indiana Jones as scripted is supposed to say…

**John:** “Most certainly.”

**Craig:** …in response to the CIA guy. And Harrison Ford wrote next to that, “Oh, please,” because in his mind he’s like, “That’s not how Indiana Jones is going to talk. That’s not consistent with the character that I’m building in my mind. That’s not going to be consistent with my performance.”

Now, sometimes as screenwriters this hurts. You’re Larry Kasdan. You’re an amazing writer, and here’s a guy going, “Oh, please,” in response to some line you’ve written. But, by the same token, it’s an emotional response, and it’s just as emotional for them as it is for us when somebody suggests a line to us and we think in our minds, “Oh, please. That’s ridiculous.”

But, you have to be able to trust the people you’re with and even give them room to be a little brusque, because everybody… — The thing that scares us the most — and “us” includes writers, directors, and actors — is being embarrassed by the totally wrong thing. And that fear oftentimes comes out in a bit of a harsh way.

**John:** That’s true. What I’ll go back to with actors needing to change things on set is the challenge as a writer, and a director, and a producer, when you have actors who are trying to change lines is the actors are sometimes not aware, or sometimes they are aware but they’re being sort of deliberately blind to the fact that if they change their lines then all of the other lines change, too.

And that can be a very difficult situation on sets where writers just have to sort of negotiate between these actors who are starting to change their lines and suddenly it becomes a less-than-happy situation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** On good sets, with good actors, it’s a delight. And everyone is finding the exact right moments and they’re handing lines to other actors because they’re like, “I don’t need to say this, you can say this instead,” and everything is happy and joyful.

Sometimes it’s not that situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. And what you’re looking for, hopefully, in your creative partners and the main cast certainly fits that bill, you’re looking for people who act in good faith. We don’t always agree about things, but everybody should be working towards the notion that they want the movie to be good.

There are times when actors, and writers, and directors, behave badly. And they put their ego first, or considerations that have nothing to do with the movie first. And when those things happen they are toxic and they often ruin movies.

And they are scary. I mean, we’ve all — anybody who makes movies has been through those situations and they’re very, very difficult. Very difficult. I would so much rather have an incredibly, physically arduous shoot of difficult material with people that are working together than an easy, slam-dunk, walk-in-the-park movie production where the two main actors don’t see eye-to-eye about what the movie is supposed to be, who the star is, who the hero is.

I mean, I’ve sat in rooms with actors while they explain to me what their vision for the character was, and I thought in my head, “Oh no! They think they’re the protagonist. OH NO! What do I do now?” That’s a rough one.

**John:** Luckily in this situation we have Harrison Ford who is playing Indiana Jones. He is clearly the hero of the movie. And he seems to be making the right choices and asking the right questions. So, maybe it’s just one more sign of how Raiders of the Lost Ark became so good.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can even see on that page that he circles a big chunk of dialogue and gives it to Denholm Elliott.

**John:** Yeah. Nice of him to do.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Topic two. Two weeks ago on the podcast we asked, “Hey, we are trying to do a survey of who our listeners are and figure out what is interesting to them about the podcast, what we could be doing better, where these people live.” We asked like eight questions and so many people wrote in with responses.

As we’re recording this show we have 1,811 responses, which is nuts. So, thank you so much to everybody who chimed in and gave us their opinion. If you still want to do it, the survey form is still up there. It’s johnaugust.com/survey. And you can weigh in with your thoughts, and there is also a free response section.

But I thought we’d run through some of the stats. There will also be a link to the PDF that shows all the stats at johnaugust.com.

Geography: This was different than I would have guessed. So, we asked, “Where do you live?” And 30% roughly of our listeners live in Los Angeles, which is understandable because that’s where a lot of movies are made. Somewhere outside of Los Angeles but still in the US is 46%. The UK is 9%. And somewhere else in the world is 16%.

**Craig:** That’s still pretty high though, right?

**John:** It is high. But I would have guessed the somewhere-else-in-the-world would have been higher than that. That’s just based on the questions that actually come into the podcast are, I would say, almost 50% sort of international readers. So, I was surprised that we are still so North American centric.

**Craig:** Well, maybe it is that for those people who live elsewhere we are the most convenient place to ask questions.

**John:** That’s a very good point. See, you’re providing answers. I like that, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I’m here for solutions.

**John:** Most of our listeners listen every week. 72% said they listen every week.

**Craig:** That’s gratifying.

**John:** That’s so gratifying. So, I wondered whether people were cherry picking based on the kinds of things we talk about, but it sounds like most people really do listen every week. And most of our listeners have been listening since the beginning, or nearly the beginning. 62% said they’ve been listening right from the start, which is great.

**Craig:** That is good.

**John:** At least 62% of the people who filled out this survey, I should say. There could be a selection bias there because it’s our really dedicated listeners were the people who filled out the survey, but still, that’s awesome.

This was surprising to me. “Do you currently make your living in film or television?” 32%, yes.

**Craig:** Now, I am surprised that that’s actually that high. Are you surprised that it’s that high or that low?

**John:** I am surprised it’s that high.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too. And it’s cool. I mean, look, you know, sometimes we talk about stuff that really is only applicable to people that make their living in film and television. And I think, “Oh, what are we doing if only 4% of people listening actually care?” So, it was very cool to see that the number was as high as a third.

And, you know, the great majority of the rest want to work in the business.

**John:** Yes. 57% want to work in film or television. I guess, keep in mind that the “yes”s in that 32%, those could also be people who are working as assistants at places, who are working in those very entry-level jobs, which is great too. So they can also be people who are still aspiring screenwriters, but they are currently working at least in some aspect of the industry.

**Craig:** You’re right. Yes, you’re right. We may have a lot of assistants there, but they count.

**John:** Assistants count. Assistants are awesome.

Next question was, “How do you listen to the show?” 23% of listeners listen directly on johnaugust.com. That is, they go to the blog, they press play there, and listen to it playing in the browser. 16% listen to it just directly on iTunes. 47%, so almost half of the people, are listening to it on the iPhone or i-gizmo. Android, only 5%.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know, because Android stinks. And I like to think that the people that listen to us are cool and understand that things that are technological and aesthetic rip-offs should not be rewarded. [laughs]

**John:** See, what’s so unfair, Craig, is that I’m the one who actually has to check the email account, so when people write their angry things I’m the person who sees all those. Actually, well, Stuart sees them. Eh, Stuart can deal with it.

**Craig:** You know what, Stuart? Enjoy. Enjoy the avalanche from the 5% on their goofy Android devices.

**John:** They’re a very loud 5%. I will say that your Twitter handle is @clmazin, so if Android users want to talk to you about Android usage they can do that right there.

**Craig:** Yeah, bring the noise from your little pieces of plastic. Go ahead.

**John:** This was also important and surprising to us is that 35% of people do read the show’s transcripts, or at least sometimes read the show’s transcripts. So, every episode of the show has a transcript where Stuart and other folks have actually typed out everything we’ve said — god bless them.

And so we were wondering, “Well, is that good? Is that useful? Are people finding it helpful?” And people are apparently finding it helpful. So, if you don’t look at the transcripts, here’s what I can tell you: Every Tuesday we come out with an episode. Usually by Thursday, sometimes by Friday we have the transcript ready and up. That transcript shows up as a link at the bottom of the post, the original post on johnaugust.com.

You click through that link and it shows up as a special post that has all the text. And so if you are someplace where you can’t listen to the podcast but you want to read up on it, that’s an opportunity.

**Craig:** By the way, how do you listen to the show?

**John:** I listen to it on my iPhone with Instacast, which I think is the best podcasting app for the iPhone.

**Craig:** Interesting. I’m one of the 23% that listens to it directly on johnaugust.com, although I’m also one of the 35% that sometimes just reads the transcripts.

**John:** Ah. And how do you find the transcripts, because I honestly don’t read them. I just don’t have the time in the day to actually look through. Stuart sort of proofs them. Do you find them largely accurate?

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I mean, occasionally you see some slightly goofy typo or something in there, but by and large they’re very accurate. And I have to say the two of us come off so well in transcript form.

**John:** Ha! [laughs]

**Craig:** There’s something about the text that strips away all the goofiness. And I will also say you and I have a tendency to speak in complete sentences, which isn’t something you always see, or hear.

**John:** I want to answer in a complete sentence somehow because you just said that.

**Craig:** And you just did.

**John:** I did. Thank goodness.

Next question was about the Three Page Challenge, because I was curious whether people like it, don’t like it so much, they get sick of it. We try to space them out. We try to never do two Three Page Challenges week after week, because that’s just a lot we know. And some people don’t want to be able to do it.

But 35% of people say they love it, so that’s great. And 60%…58% of people say it’s just fine at the current levels, so don’t do it any more, don’t do it any less. And so we will keep doing them, but I think we will keep spacing them out; so, we don’t want to do it every week.

Some people had suggested like, “Oh, maybe just do one at the end of every show.” That doesn’t feel right either. I think we will keep them as sort of blocks, and some weeks we’ll have some of them, and most weeks won’t.

**Craig:** Sounds good to me.

**John:** People have asked for more guests. Well, you’re in for a treat because we are going to have more guests coming in soon, as soon as next week in fact.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This was an interesting question we had to do a little more digging on. So, we asked, “If we were to do another live session like the one we did in Austin, would you come?” And 54% of people said probably not. But then when you actually looked through the responses of people who live in Los Angeles, a ton of people would. So, it sounds like we could probably schedule one of these for Los Angeles, and we should try to do that at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be fun to do. It would be nice to meet the Scriptnotes Army. Should we have some…you know, like Lady Gaga has her Little Monsters and stuff, shouldn’t we have some sort of name for the people who listen to us, other than nerds, you know, ScriptNerds.

**John:** ScriptNerds, yeah. We could also probably have tee-shirts. I’ll talk to Ryan about tee-shirts, because tee-shirts are awesome.

**Craig:** Sell tee-shirts like we’re at a concert. I like it.

**John:** I like it. We need a big tee-shirt cannon to shoot it to the back rows.

**Craig:** That’s the vibe we’re going for!

**John:** Totally. It’s a party vibe. And finally we asked about how old people were. And our audience is largely, like 47% is between 25 and 35. 38% is over 35. So, we don’t have a lot of teenagers, which is great.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because, frankly, teenagers are annoying and stupid.

**John:** Yeah. That’s @clmazin on Twitter.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. All these teenagers with their Android devices. We don’t need you. Keep not listening. Don’t want you.

**John:** Now, we also had a section for sort of free comments, where people could write in and say whatever they wanted to say about anything. And so the most common thing filled in the little box was “Thank you.” It’s like, “Oh, how lovely!” People are so nice.

There were a couple of comments that sort of came at both sides a lot, so, more umbrage/less umbrage. I think we have plenty of umbrage.

**Craig:** [laughs] The great thing about umbrage is I just don’t care. I think the only way to have gotten more umbrage out of me is if 98% of people had said less umbrage.

**John:** Yeah, some common comments, I had Stuart sort of go through, because there were so many to look for. So I asked Stuart to sort of find common themes and threads. So, here’s his sort of sampler platter:

He said that some folks say we’re too kind. We shouldn’t be afraid to disagree with each other or say when we don’t like something. I think I speak up when I don’t agree with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I’m pretty sure that you hate my guts. I’m not sure what they’re talking about. I mean, sometimes they may think that we are over-agreeing with each other on these Three Page Challenges, but I think that’s only because usually there’s a right answer to those Three Page Challenges. Usually they are good or they are bad. I mean, we both do the same job. We’ve both been doing it for awhile. There’s a reason we have a podcast together.

I mean, and you know, I like you.

**John:** Aw…Craig!

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Some listeners said that they wanted to bring back comments, and that must be reflecting the blog, because I used to have comments turned on on the blog. I turned off the comments on the blog and I’m just so much happier without comments, so those aren’t coming back.

But, if you want to respond to something that happens on the podcast, send us an email ask@johnaugust.com, or just tweet us directly: @johnaugust or @clmazin.

People asked for chapter marks or section time stamps.

**Craig:** That’s a good idea.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a good idea. I did that for the flashback episode, the one where we did stuff from previous episodes. So, we’ll try to get chapter markers in, and maybe this episode will actually have some chapter markers in it.

People said that Lindsay Doran is amazing, and gosh, she really is just great.

Since the show started people say that they’ve had various things of success and they couldn’t have done it without us, which was lovely. So, thank you. If you have a success story and we’ve been helpful, a lot of you have been writing nice emails. And so thank you for that and continue to write those nice emails, because it does give us warm fuzzy feelings.

**Craig:** Yeah. And tell us your story, too. I mean, it would be cool if somebody had a success story and we actually did have some slight bit of help with it, tell us the story. We’ll read it.

**John:** Regarding the Three Page Challenge, a common comment was something like, “I don’t read along with you. Instead I read them myself and then I see if I agree with you.” That’s a great strategy. So, if you’re tuning in for a Three Page Challenge and you have the opportunity to, I might stop the podcast, print those pages, read them, and then look along with us. Because if you are just listening to what we’re going to say, by the time you read the PDFs you’re probably going to agree with us. But it’s great to sort of develop your eyes and your ears for sort of what the good and the bad things about some of these scripts are. But, looking at them yourself and then seeing if we agree with your opinions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Smart idea.

**John:** People asked for a ten-page challenge, an act one challenge, a full script challenge. That’s not going to happen.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Sorry. That’s a terrifying amount of work.

**Craig:** Not as long as I’m on this podcast!

**John:** [laughs] People have said, “Do an episode with some of the worst Three Page Challenges submitted and why they’re bad.” And this is a misunderstanding of, I think, the point of the Three Page Challenge. And also Stuart really is picking some of the best ones. And so he’s not deliberately, like, throwing the turkeys in there. There are some really, really bad ones. And I don’t think that really helps people.

I think what probably helps people is saying like, “This is what was promising about this, and this was what didn’t work about this.” Or, “This was just so fantastic and here’s why it’s fantastic.” It’s easy to write something terrible.

**Craig:** I saw that suggestion and I have to say part of me thought it might not be a bad experiment to try, and what we’ll do is we can leave off the names of the people so it’s not so personally gross for them, but the possible value is if people are listening and they hear us say, “Okay, so let’s talk about why these are huge, fundamental mistakes,” maybe they’d think, “Oh, I’m making that mistake right now.”

So, that’s one reason that we might want to do just like a horror show Three Page Challenge one week, just to kind of talk about some of the real glaring mistakes people make.

**John:** But here’s my problem with that. Anyone who sent in that Three Page Challenge, they are a listener to the show, so of the — who knows how many listeners we have — that one person is going to tune into that episode and see us saying that this a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible sample, and how is that person going to feel?

I just feel like there’s sort of compact of trust that has been entered into by sending it into us. I just don’t want to…

**Craig:** That’s a good point. You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** All right. I’m the nice one.

**Craig:** [laughs] So true.

**John:** People wrote in to say do a prompt-based challenge, which I think is sort of going back to — I used to do on the blog the scene challenge, where I would say, “Write me a scene that takes place in a laundromat and involves this kind of thing.” And so people would write in, in the comments, they’d write in this little scene that did that. And I would get like 200 of them. And it was exciting to do for awhile, and then it just got to be such an incredible drain.

I worry that with as many listeners as we have right now, it would just be unmanageable.

**Craig:** I don’t even like that kind of stunt writing anyway. You know, that’s like…I don’t like it. [laughs] That’s as articulate as I can be. I don’t like it.

**John:** So, we had a couple topic requests that I wanted to respond to. One topic was what to do when you first move to LA — where to live, where to get a job, how to approach your contacts out there — which I think is a really good general topic. So, we should do that sometime, sort of that first, you-just-arrived kind of thing. And that might be a good topic for a special guest, like a newer writer who is just getting started.

We had a lot of requests for certain kinds of guests, for directors, and writer-directors, and people in different things. And you’re going to see a lot more of that this year.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We had a specific request to do a cross-panel with the Nerdist Writer’s Panel, and that’s something we actually talked about with Ben Blacker. And that show is great. We love them. So, if we can find something to work out this year to do with them, that would be great.

And last topic was they really want Stuart on the podcast at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, at some point it does seem like he’s got to be on the podcast.

**John:** I just feel like Stuart is sort of our Maris from Frasier. And that if you actually reveal who she is at this point it sort of spoils everything.

**Craig:** Well, what if we just have Stuart on the way that Marcel Marceau is in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie. You know, he was the only person that said something and he said one word or something, [laughs] and then left.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing. Stuart actually is in every podcast. He’s just downstairs, you just don’t hear him. So, he really is part of every podcast.

**Craig:** He lives and breathes through ever second of this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Good point. Yeah, maybe, see, I’m the nice one now because I’m feeling like, “Oh, it would be nice to talk to Stuart.” But then, you know, I also feel like here’s what’s going to happen: People are going to listen to Stuart and they’re going to go, “Nah, I liked him so much better when he was a man of mystery.”

**John:** Yeah. Stuart is sort of a man of mystery, but this last weekend I went to a party at his house, and there’s a whole separate podcast which is just talking about Stuart’s crazy, insane house that was clearly built by 1980s drug dealers and is somewhere on the top of a mountain in East Los Angeles. It was just fascinating.

It was also fascinating to do some introspection on myself as a 42-year-old at a party of like young 20-somethings and what that is like.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, you can’t go back.

**John:** No, you can’t go back. But, we can go forward. And let’s go forward to our next topic which is…

**Craig:** What a segue!

**John:** I’m just getting so much better a year into this whole podcasting thing.

A reader — thank you so much reader for sending this to me — sent this thing called the Scoggins Report. And it’s done by Jason Scoggins and Cindy Kaplan. And there will be a link to it, and there’s a PDF you can download.

But what it is is they’ve taken all the spec sales and pitch sales from the year and calculated them up by studio and by agency and sort of genre and sort of what happened over the course of the year. And god bless you for sort of quantifying this information that would otherwise go missed. They call it a “terribly unscientific analysis of Hollywood’s movie development business.” And I think that’s the way to really look at it. I wouldn’t look for the exact percentages, but you can definitely notice some trends among what’s actually selling in Hollywood.

So, you got a quick chance to look at this, but I want to highlight a few things. The top buyer of spec scripts this last year was Paramount, and spec scripts and pitches was also Paramount. So, Paramount bought 20 specs and pitches this year, tied with Universal when you factor in pitches as well. That’s a lot. And that’s compared to like the lowest of the big studios was Fox with six. So, Paramount was buying a lot more.

The agencies that sold specs, William Morris sold the most specs according to this listing. UTA, then CAA, then APA, then Paradigm.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was actually interesting to me. The studio buyers, I think, kind of wobbles up and down each year. Sometimes one is on top, sometimes the other. I mean, for instance, they called out Warner Bros. as having really reduced the amount that they bought and suddenly Paramount really increased the amount they bought. And sometimes that just has to do with their own development cycles. So, sometimes they have a development cycle where they’re like, “We’re short on original material. Let’s just buy stuff this year.”

But that means next year they won’t as much. The total number of spec sales for 2012 was 132. In 2011, it was 132. [laughs] So, there is actually incredible stability to the overall appetite for specs. I was surprised by the sellers, the piece of data you just called out there. William Morris sold 35 specs. UTA sold 24. CAA only 16. That’s a fascinating number. I suspect that part of that has to do with the fact that CAA represents a lot of writers who do a lot of assignment work. And that William Morris may be willing to take more of a flyer on writers who are younger, or breaking in, or newer, or just more oriented to selling speculative material.

That was an interesting number to me. I mean, CAA’s numbers are quite low, frankly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when you look at combining specs and pitches, CAA’s number comes up quite bit, but William Morris doubles — nearly doubles — to 62. So, William Morris seems to be far and away the most entrepreneurial agency when it comes to selling specs and original material.

**John:** Now, one thing to keep in mind is that it’s not always clear how they’re getting their data. Are they getting data based on what gets reported in the trades? Or are they talking to individual people at studios?

For example, Fox only listed six scripts sold, but is mine one of them? Because I have a project that’s sort of at Fox that’s, you know, it’s a spec, it’s at Fox, but it’s sort of a special/unique situation. So, am I one of those six or am I not one of those six? It’s hard to know.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I guess I could probably look at the end notes and figure it out, but I’m just spitballing.

What is probably more useful for most of our readers is to take a look at spec sales by genre, because what they do is they break down into six rough categories and see what percentage of sales came from the different genres. So, the most common genre for a sale this last year was thrillers. 27% of spec sales were thrillers. 22% were action-adventure movies. 21% were comedies. 11% were science-fiction. 10% were horror. And 8% were drama.

So, that 8% drama, that feels true. Selling a drama spec is very, very tough these days. Horror and thriller, I think, kind of overlap a lot, so I’d be curious sort of where the distinction is made between those two. But, I would say those numbers feel kind of true to what gets sold, not necessarily always what gets made, but to what gets sold among specs.

**Craig:** Yeah. And one thing to remember when you’re looking at numbers like this is that the numbers are skewed somewhat by the nature of the original material versus material that’s adapted. Thrillers tend to be original because there frankly aren’t a lot of underlying properties that specifically fall into the thriller category. So, we know that when it comes to things like comedy or action-adventure or sci-fi, a lot of times there is underlying material. There’s an article, there’s a remake, there’s a sequel, whatever it is.

Thrillers, there’s not — it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of, for whatever reason, thrillers that people are interested in adapting. Most of the stuff I see out there for adaptations are sort of in the adventure area, or sci-fi, or comedy. So, that may be part of why thrillers are so high. I mean, in short, they buy more thriller specs because they have less other avenues to generate thriller material.

**John:** Yeah. I also have to say: dramas, even though we make very few dramas over all, I would say most of the dramas we make tend to be based on books and sort of big sell, big books that sold out of New York. So, it’s not surprising that of spec script sales there aren’t going to be a lot of them.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And I just did a quick check, and no, the script that I have at Fox did not show up on this thing, so there could be seven for Fox. The numbers could be off a little bit.

**Craig:** Bump Fox up to seven.

**John:** So, if you are thinking about a spec, if you are thinking about a pitch, I think it’s worth taking a look at. This is just how the movie business worked this year. I would say most writers these days are doing both film and television, so your career is not sort of pigeonholed into one or the other as much as it used to be, but useful to take a look at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I just want to give one final caveat, because I was talking about this actually on DoneDealPro the other day in terms of specs: You could look at this report and say, “Well, if I wanted to be a spec selling machine I would have an agent at William Morris, I would have a manager at Energy,” — which is a company with which I was up until this day unfamiliar — “I would be selling that script to Paramount or Universal. And it would be a thriller.”

However, please note that Paradigm sold the fewest specs, and say Fox bought the fewest specs, and say drama represented the genre of the fewest specs, and yet they exist and sales occurred. In the end, this is interesting to look at, but honestly irrelevant to you, because if you’ve written something that you love, that’s what you write. And if you love your agent, that’s who he is. And if there’s a company that’s really into it, that’s the company.

So, don’t chase. I guess that’s my advice: Don’t chase this stuff. The best agent to sell your spec is the agent who represents the spec you’ve written who loves it. Simple as that.

**John:** I agree. I would also remind listeners that a spec script might sell, but if the spec script doesn’t sell it is a writing sample that gets you a job, and gets you hired for another bit of work. And so writing the thing that you can write the best is always going to be your best option.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. So don’t chase.

**John:** Don’t chase.

Topic four. I think we’re at four. Maybe it’s five. Our next topic is type faces. And so, Craig, I think we may have talked about this on the podcast before. In my career and life before I became a screenwriter I was actually a graphic designer. And so I was the kid who walked around campus with the box of fonts. I had like the 3.5-inch floppies. It was full of fonts. And back in those days you had your bitmap fonts and you had your laser writer fonts. And I was the one who had sort of the alternate versions of things.

I was a big font nerd. And then I entered into a career in which my entire output is 12-point Courier, which is just…I don’t know if you can really say it’s irony, but it’s just sort of sad. It’s just sort of sad that I love fonts so much and most of my work was coming out in a really not-attractive Courier face. To the degree that when I bought my first laser printer, which was back when I was at USC, I hated the Courier that was in it so much because it was super really thin Courier, that I actually had this utility that pulled the outlines out of the printer and I used Fontographer to make myself my own Courier, which I called Dorphic. And my first scripts are printed in Dorphic.

So, if you actually look at my original things, like Here and Now, they’re printed in a face that basically looked like Courier, but it’s a little bit jagged, it’s a little bit off, and it’s Dorphic. And that was like my own little type face.

And so I used that for several years and then eventually Courier started looking better. I liked the standard Mac Courier. It was fine. And for awhile I was just satisfied with that. But now I’m not really satisfied. So, a couple months ago a very talented font designer named Alan Dauge-Greene wrote to me. He said, like, “Hey, would you ever be interested in doing a custom font for any of your app stuff?”

I said, “You know what I really want? What I want more than anything else? I want a much better version of Courier.” And so I’m so excited because now it exits. We made a type face called Courier Prime. And I had just sent you the webpage that sort of announces it, so you’ve had a chance to take a look at that.

**Craig:** I have. And John, how much is this new Courier type face going to cost me, the consumer?

**John:** Would you believe that it will cost you absolutely nothing?

**Craig:** What?! [laughs]

**John:** It’s completely free.

**Craig:** I mean, how cool are you guys? It is a really nice looking, I mean, I also — it drives me nuts. And I hate Courier. Courier is aggressively ugly. It is a pointless tradition as far as I’m concerned. I would love for you and your elves to figure out how we can get a fixed width font that looks cool and doesn’t look like butt, which is what Courier looks like. But while we’re all stuck with Courier, it is a much nicer Courier.

And the Courier marketplace is getting really confused, because when I started writing screenplays it was just Courier. And then there was Courier New. And there was Final Draft Courier. And there was Movie Magic Courier. And there are all different Couriers. And I never understood what’s the difference between all of these.

And they didn’t always match up right, you know, like suddenly if you changed Courier and then you moved to another program you get pages moving up and down. So, this sounds like a great universal solution to all of that.

Your Courier is cool. I already have it installed on my computer and I think it looks great. But can’t you just make a better one? Like a better font?

**John:** So, here’s the thing: I think Courier gets knocked because it so often is so incredibly ugly. And it was designed for an age of typewriters. And it is a mono-space font. Mono-space fonts have great qualities to them that things will always line up and every character can actually fit the same space. But they have some drawbacks.

They tend to be not as readable because your eye likes to see some differences between letter widths, and there’s not a lot of color on the page.

I think Courier for — first off, if you have Courier New installed anywhere on our computer, just get rid of it. It’s just the worst the worst face ever.

**Craig:** So bad.

**John:** Just the worst. A couple sort of unique challenges for any type face that is designed for screenwriters, and Courier Prime is specially designed for screenwriting. So, you could use it for coding. You could use it for a letter you’re sending to your grandma. But the reason why we did it for screenwriting is if you actually look at page of a screenplay, there’s actually not a lot of text on the page. There’s a lot of white space.

And so most Couriers look kind of thin and the page looks kind of — doesn’t have a lot of good color to it. You want something a little bit bolder. So, we were able to beef it up just a little bit more than you would normally see for a Courier. The letters are just a tiny bit fatter. The other thing we could take advantage of is like resolution of not just printers, but also your screen has increased as well. So, we’re able to open up the space inside letters a little bit more, and it just gives a little bit more — I don’t know — it helps the readability and it makes it look a little bit nicer and more inviting on the page.

The other thing we did, which I’m surprised that more Couriers haven’t done along the way, is right now Courier, basic Mac Courier and Courier Final Draft, for their italics they just slant the letters. What we did is we created a true italic where the font actually looks better and different when you go into italics.

**Craig:** I know. It’s cool. I like that a lot.

**John:** So, the lower case “f” is sort of the classic example of this, is that it really sort of leans forward in a kind of scripty sort of way. And yet everything matches fine. So, we had to pick metrics so that things wouldn’t break and that you could feel safe swapping it. So, we matched the metrics of Courier Final Draft. It just looks a lot better.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good job. I mean, and what a lovely service for you to provide to the screenwriting community. I hope it is wholeheartedly adapted by many.

**John:** Thanks. Cool. And so if you go to Apps, there is a link there for Courier Prime. It’s free to download. You can install it on Mac or on PC. If you’re installing it on Windows, it works great. If you’re using it with Windows Final Draft, there are some special warnings because Final Draft does crazy things, because Final Draft has to do crazy things. So, there are some special caveats for you there. But, you’re free to use it in any way you want to do it. And we have it on a very open license, so if you are an app developer who wants to use it inside your app, you can do that with immunity.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Cool.

Lastly, we’re getting into some questions. First question comes from April in Ohio. She writes, “A few months ago a friend of a friend of a friend said he would help me make some industry contacts, but I would have to contact them through Facebook. Their friend followed through and I’m currently Facebook ‘friends’ with several people working in the industry. Most of them are mainly actors, but a few work in other areas as well. I haven’t had any ‘conversations’ with these contacts via Facebook because I’m not really sure how to approach them. What’s the proper etiquette to reach out to somebody through social media?”

**Craig:** Oh, I mean, you know, you just send them a message and just say, “Hi, my name is so-and-so. I’m a friend of so-and-sos. I’m sorry to bother you.” You know, just be very humble and polite. And just ask your question and don’t expect an answer. And if you get one, you know, respond politely. Don’t stalk. Don’t be a weirdo. You know, the usual stuff.

**John:** Yeah, that’s exactly my approach. And I’m barely on Facebook. I don’t sort of accept friend requests from people on Facebook, but I’m very much on Twitter. And so sometimes people will send me something on Twitter and if I’m in the right mood for it, and it strikes me right, I might watch their little movie on Vimeo or read their blog post. That kind of stuff is fine as long as you feel like you’re just being, you know, appropriately respectful to what the relationship is, then it’s great.

So, I wouldn’t be afraid of doing it with those people. If they are, you know, friends of friends of friends, and they’re some actor who like occasionally works on a TV show, it’s unlikely that that person is going to be a huge asset to you as an aspiring screenwriter, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t like their video when they show up in something, or just participate a little bit in their online life.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, the Twitter thing is great because everybody is forced to write as concisely as possible, so you’re never stuck with these long screeds. I mean, if you send somebody this long thing they’re just not going to read it.

And the other thing is, I want people to understand that this is not about ego or we think we’re so cool we don’t have to respond. You cannot imagine the asynchronous aspect of people who want to send material and talk to people who are in the business and the available amount of time we have to do that. And frankly the available amount of will we have to do that.

I mean, we’re reading and talking about movies all day long. It’s our jobs. And then we go home and all we want to do sometimes is watch TV, or talk to our children, or take a nap, or just play a game, you know. And so at some point, it’s unfortunate, you start to get forced into being rude. Not overtly rude, but rude in the sense that sometimes I just don’t answer people because I just don’t have time or the will. I’m sorry.

**John:** Yeah.

Next question comes from Pat in Stamford, Connecticut. She or he…we’re going to say it’s a he. “I reached the point where I occasionally have to send out physical scripts, not just PDFs over email. The only hole-punchers I can find that would cut through an entire screenplay range from $180 to $300 and up. This seems far too expensive for something I will only use a few times a year. Is there another possibility I’m simply missing? Is there a model you recommend?”

**Craig:** [laughs] This can’t be real.

**John:** No. It’s completely real. “I feel slightly foolish asking, but somehow I don’t want to make sure I miss something somehow.”

**Craig:** He definitely missed something.

**John:** No, but here’s the thing Craig. I actually have two really good answers for this, and this is why I picked this question.

**Craig:** This can’t be real! [laughs] It’s just impossible.

**John:** No. It’s going to be great. I have three good answers. While you’re laughing I have three good answers.

**Craig:** Okay, good. Give them.

**John:** First off, the simple solution by far is if you go to Staples just get the three-hole punch paper.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Get that. That’s by far the easiest solution.

**Craig:** They did it for you!

**John:** They did. They already drilled the holes for you. It’s perfect and it works great. And honestly, you can kind of leave it in your printer most of the time because most of the stuff you’re printing out, eh, it’s still on three-hole paper, who cares.

So, first choice: Three-hole paper.

Second choice: This is something I actually found out about through Big Fish is there will be times where you have to do like colored revisions or you have to do something and you just can’t find the three-hole paper that’s already been drilled. They make a really big punch that can actually punch up to 130 pages at a time. The one that we ended up getting is a Stanley Bostich 3200 Heavy Duty Hole Punch.

This thing is actually kind of terrifying. You have to lean on it with your entire body weight, but it does punch through all of those pages at once. And if you had to do it for a bunch of scripts, that would be a solution. But, really, you’re going to use the pre-drilled white paper if you can possibly be on white paper. It’s really only if you’re going to do it on colored paper, something that you can’t find pre-drilled that it makes sense.

**Craig:** I just can’t believe that this person was not aware that they manufacturer three-hole punch paper. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that they knew enough about computers to send us this question, but not enough to Google “three-hole punch paper.” I can’t believe it. It’s a setup. It’s not real. This can’t be real.

**John:** I think it’s absolutely completely true.

**Craig:** Good god.

**John:** My last solution for you is this: You know, you don’t have to punch through the whole thing at once. You can just take ten pages, punch them, take ten pages, punch them. That’s what honestly you had to do back in the day.

**Craig:** That’s what I used to do, but you missed a fourth option which I have done which is you take your screenplay, and this is an extreme — when you don’t have the three-hole punch paper and you don’t have a hole puncher or anything — you take the script and you put it vertically like on a music stand or something. And you get your rifle.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re going to want to use a high caliber, but not hollow point or anything. You want to make sure that there’s no spread on the slug when it impacts the script. And naturally a laser site is really helpful here. And you’re going to fire three times. And, you know, for typical brads I think you’re going to want to maybe do, like 22 sometimes is just not big enough. Try a slightly higher caliber. Avoid ammunition manufactured in the Middle East or China. It’s just not reliable.

**John:** So, what I would say: make sure you really aim right, because there’s nothing more embarrassing when you’re just a little bit off and like, oh my god, it won’t actually fit in. And then you have to make a second hole right next to it. And that’s a tough shot, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And everybody knows what happened. And, of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t make sure if you do have a friend or assistant that’s helping you with this that they are not behind the script when you do discharge your weapon.

**John:** If they’re holding the script in the music stand, then you can sort of crouch down behind the music stand, not right in the line of fire.

**Craig:** I mean, listen. I’ve done that in a pinch. Don’t be like me. Don’t be stupid. I mean, I got lucky, but don’t do that.

**John:** You never know what’s going to happen. I would also say they do make the very powerful green lasers which are somewhat controlled, like you’re not supposed to shine them at an aircraft, because they could blind a pilot. But, when you’re not blinding a pilot with them you can use them to burn holes through the paper.

And so, again, the challenge may be that it’s a white paper, so you may need to find some sort of solution to actually make the paper dark enough so that the laser light will burn through it. But I can imagine you can build some sort of, like, sled, possibly out of Lego, that could slide in the right ways and so it could burn through a hole. And then you slide it to the next, they can burn it through the hole.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not a bad idea. I mean, the other option is if you’re friends with Cyclops from the X-Men, you could always have them come over and just give a quick, you know.

**John:** Well, Craig, I just don’t think you’re taking it seriously anymore. I mean, Cyclops is a fictional character.

**Craig:** No, he’s not. Oh, he is?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That’s James Marsden. And James Marsden is hugely talented and a very handsome man, but he can’t actually shoot light out of his eyes.

**Craig:** Oh, really? Oh.

**John:** Anonymous writes, “I’m a writer from the UK and have optioned two screenplays to people in Los Angeles.” Congratulations, Anonymous.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** “One of these options is now 14 months old and I’ve done several rewrites for the producer, and the producer hasn’t asked for any more rewrites. There’s a director circling the project, and I was wondering if there’s an action I can take other than sending emails asking what’s happening to move the project forward, or is it just a matter of waiting?”

Simplest answer of all: It’s waiting.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty much waiting. I mean, you can occasionally lob in a check-in email, but just understand it’s not paused because you haven’t checked in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s paused because it’s paused. They don’t have an interest there, or the person that they need to get interest from has not turned their focus upon it. The amount of waiting that occurs in Hollywood is extraordinary. It almost seems sometimes that this town has two speeds exclusively, just nothing is happening in a weird purgatorial way, or things happen so fast you can’t even catch your breath.

Nothing ever seems to proceed in any kind of regimented, expected way.

**John:** I completely agree. And that happens at every stage of your career. You just have to sort of get used to it.

One of the nice things about writing this pilot for ABC is that things do come more quickly, but then they just come way too quickly. And as we’re recording this podcast, I don’t know if the show got picked up or not for pilot, so I’m just waiting.

And I can lob in a phone call and say, “Hey, what’s happening?” But the answer is they don’t really know. Nobody really knows. There will be a decision and we’ll shoot a pilot or we won’t shoot a pilot, but my asking the question, I’m powerless to change anything at this point.

**Craig:** One thing that comes to min — sorry to jump back to the other question — If you have a large drill press you could drill press three holes through your script, but just wear eye protection.

**John:** Yeah. That’s actually what Kinko’s would do for you. Kinko’s actually has a drill and they can do that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. That’s very practical. A nice thing.

Speaking of practical things, do you have a One Cool Thing this week, Craig? I forgot to email you to remind you.

**Craig:** I mean, no, but the truth is now my One Cool Thing is Cyclops. And here’s the deal: I refuse to believe what you’re saying to me, because I’m a believer. And I do think, and I’m going to find James Marsden and I’m going to bring a script that was printed not on three-hole punched paper. And watch what I do, buddy.

And I’m going to take pictures of it and we’re going to put it on johnaugust.com. James Marsden, call me. We’re going to do this together.

**John:** I would just argue that if such a fantasy creature existed, Triclops would be much better because he could do all three holes at once. I’m just saying.

**Craig:** You know, now you’re not taking it seriously. [laughs] Okay, because Triclops is ridiculous.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is actually a video that, well, I posted a video that a reader sent in about a casting director named Pat Moran. And she is sort of a legendary casting director from the Baltimore area. And I just loved it because it’s something we don’t really talk about on this show that much is sort of everyone else’s sort of jobs. And casting directors are so great and wonderful and can make your life so much better, or so much worse if they’re really bad.

But I thought she was a fascinating example because she is a casting director for a small market. So, she gets to know everybody who’s available in that market, and that’s just a great insight. So, there will be a link in the show notes for this video about Pat Moran. And everything else we talked about it the podcast this week will also be in the show notes.

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

**Craig:** I think this may have been our best podcast, frankly.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Pat, wherever you are, I love you. Thank you for that gift. This was a great podcast. And I’ll be back with Marsden. I will be back!

**John:** Cool. Thanks sir.

**Craig:** Thank you. Bye.

LINKS:

* [IndyCast](https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/indycast-indiana-jones-news/id275916349?mt=2) on iTunes
* The truth about [Indy’s hat drop](http://pikdit.com/i/indiana-jones-hat-didnt-fall-off-someone-off-camera-threw-it-at-him-cant-be-unseen/)
* [Harrison Ford’s shooting script for Raiders](http://bid.profilesinhistory.com/Harrison-Ford-heavily-annotated-complete-shooting-script-for-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark_i10030668)
* [Scoggins Report](http://scogginsreport.com/2013/01/2012-year-end-spec-market-scorecard/) on spec sales for 2012
* [Scriptnotes survey results](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/scriptnotes_survey.pdf)
* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime)
* [Stanley Bostich Heavy Duty Hole Punch](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000H0XFSC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000H0XFSC&linkCode=as2&tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* Casting director [Pat Moran](http://www.thecredits.org/2013/01/the-queen-of-casting-meet-emmy-award-winning-baltimore-legend-pat-moran/) from The Credits
* OUTRO: [Ben and Kate](http://www.fox.com/ben-and-kate/) opening theme by Michael Andrews