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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/alt-universe-panels).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, episode 61, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** “In-ter-esting.”

**John:** Yeah. So, Aline Brosh McKenna will not let me live down the fact that I kind of swallow the T in “interesting.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna, who was our fantastic guest, who we need to thank again for last week at Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** She was excellent. And I like it when we have other people on because I feel like they can notice things about you and me that we probably notice but never say to each other, you know, because we’re such good roommates. So things like “interesting.”

**John:** “Interesting,” yes. No spoiler, but we will have some more guests in the future, and we’ve actually reached out to some people, so I think it’s going to be a fun new addition to the new year of the podcast.

**Craig:** For sure. I thought the stuff that we did in Austin that is still in the pipeline is some of our best podcasting work.

**John:** I agree. Now, Craig, people may notice that you sound a little different, and that’s partly because you just woke up. We’re recording this at 7pm, but you just woke up because you are off on location making this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I’m off on location with Hangover 3 in an indeterminate place. We — boy — we had a hell of a night. So, you know, I think at one point we talked about shooting splits, which is what they generally think of as the worst possible production thing when you’re on a crew, because you’re not shooting all night, you’re not shooting all day; you’re shooting sort of half night/half day, and it messes everybody up.

But, yesterday we did a deal where we shot dusk, so we shot sundown, dusk, night, dawn, sun up, morning. [laughs] That will mess you up.

**John:** That will definitely mess you up. Sorry about that. Sometimes that’s the only way it works. There’s no other good way to get those shots that you need. And when you need that sort of in between light that is going to happen, those sunrises and those sunsets. — Curse the screenwriter who put that into the script.

**Craig:** Well, you know, there was much discussion of that. And it turns out it wasn’t me, on this at least. I think that the director and the DP had a plan to… — You know, I tend to write things like morning, although I have to say, until I had this discussion with Larry Sher, our DP, last night — and I didn’t know this — I always thought that dusk and sort of evening and sundown were the same thing. And dawn and sunrise were the same thing. But they’re not.

Did you know that?

**John:** No. Tell me the distinction.

**Craig:** Okay, see, and he made me feel so dumb about it. So, Dawn is the time right before the sun comes up, so it’s when the sky starts lightening but the sun hasn’t peeked out over the horizon. And dusk is the opposite. It’s the time right after the sun goes down but there is still light in the sky.

**John:** So, there is residual light but there is no direct light?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Okay. Makes sense.

**Craig:** Learned something.

**John:** You do learn something new every day.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My day was going really pretty well today. I had a good notes call. The thing about writing for television is you have these notes calls where they read these documents and they call you. And there are like ten people on the phone call and you hope that everything goes okay. And this time it went really well, so it was great.

But then I was rushing to get sort of other stuff during the day so we could make this podcast scheduling work. And so I’m giving my 7 year old daughter her shower before we could record this, and like mid-shower she goes, “Papa, did you know that people flew planes into building?”

**Craig:** Ouch.

**John:** Literally, you’re going to do September 11th on me like when I have five minutes? And so we had the five-minute September 11th conversation.

**Craig:** Wow, I mean, I love it. I sort of feel like I want to play Name that Tune with you and see if I could do a September 11th conversation in four minutes.

**John:** [laughs] Oh, yeah. It’s tough. It’s important to have factual information, because she’s asking very specific questions about like, you know, “Well how did they get knives on the planes? Where would they hide the knives? Why weren’t the scanners better?” And all these things.

And so it’s a really strange thing, like, “Oh — that was 11 years ago.”

**Craig:** I know. I remember my son was just a baby. He was about five months old. No, that’s not right. I’m the worst dad.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** He was two months old. He was two months old, and I remember I was sleeping in a different room because, you know, Melissa would wake up and feed him and I just wanted to sleep that day. And I remember, and my sister woke me up, called me because she was in New York.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh, now, see now we’re turning into a September 11th podcast.

**John:** It’s a September 11th podcast. I will say that Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant at that time, called me and said, “Man, we’ve got to wake up. Some people just flew planes into the Sears Tower in Chicago.” And I’m like, “Really? That’s so odd.” It’s so odd that he thought of the wrong tower.

**Craig:** And the wrong city.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so you fired him that day…

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** …so, for him September 11th has a totally different —

**John:** And then he went off and made Dodgeball, so it was all good.

I thought we could actually do a little speculative reminiscing on today’s podcast, because while Austin was really fun, we could only participate in a limited number of panels there. There were like 60 different panels there, and we were only part of very few of them.

So, I didn’t even look honestly at the catalog for Austin Film Festival until I was on the plane flying back from Austin. And I was looking through it and I was like, “Oh, those sound like really interesting panels. I would love to have been on those panels.” But we couldn’t have been.

So, I thought today maybe we’d read the description of some of these panels and we could talk about what we would have talked about had we been on those panels. But it will actually be a much faster, more condensed version, because we don’t have to wait for moderators to ask questions or to go down the row of what people would say. Does that sound fun?

**Craig:** I like it; a very good, compressed way for us to embarrass all the other panelists there by just outshining them now.

**John:** I think it’s a nice choice. So, first panel we’ll talk about is Setiquette. “In addition to being able to write quickly and well, the successful television writer, or film writer, must also be versed in how to navigate the complex and often stressful social climate of the show. This requires a skill that empowers the writer to make quick and intelligent adjustments while being able to master the art of communication with actors, directors, and producers. Understanding and respecting the laws of social etiquette on the set, Setiquette, is essential for those who aspire to break into and stay in the writer’s room.”

The other panelists who would have been on this fantasy panel with us: Christine Boylan, who’s lovely; Matthew Gross, a producer; Kyle Killen; and Meta Valentic, who I don’t know who that is.

So, Craig, talk to me about Setiquette, because you’re making a film right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I deal with it every day. I can’t speak at all to television Setiquette, but I can talk certainly at length about film Setiquette. It’s quite rigid actually. Making a movie is very military. Everybody has their jobs. All the jobs have a rank. And everybody is busy and respects each other’s space.

So, it’s not just a question of etiquette; it’s even a question of union rules. You know, if you’re not a grip, don’t pick up stands. If you’re not an electrician, don’t plug stuff in. There are real simple things to do like that. But the most important thing is to have something to do on the set. If you do not, then you are a visitor and you’re in the way.

I try to not be on sets where I don’t have things to do. If I am there with something to do as the writer, then I think it’s just important for me to know the basic protocol. The biggest rule of Setiquette is: Do not direct actors unless you’re the director. Don’t even talk to them about the work. You know, if you want to sit in a chair during a turnaround and chit-chat about the weather or whatever, feel free. But simple rule of thumb: Actors need to be directed by one voice, and that’s the director’s voice.

So, if I have any thoughts or notes or suggestions, I relay them quietly and privately to the director. And another big Setiquette note is don’t talk to the director about directing things in front of other people. Pull them aside and talk to them quietly. So much of directing a movie is about maintaining authority and control of the set, because if you don’t, it just all starts to fall apart. It’s for the best of the movie. It’s not about fulfilling some sort of Emily Post definition of what good behavior is. It really is pragmatic.

Be respectful. Be kind. Don’t get in people’s way. And do not interrupt.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Those are some of the big highlights of Setiquette for me.

**John:** I would definitely underline that sense of, “if you don’t have a job on the set, your job is to stay out of everybody’s way.” And that honestly means kind of stay back; either you stay back, or you stay into a little place they’ve assigned you to stay, which is probably kind of near the producers who are watching at a video village. Don’t sort of wander around, because you’re just going to get in people’s way.

If you don’t have an assigned place to stand or be, somewhere near the makeup people is often a pretty helpful place, because they’re going to be close enough to set that they can actually watch what’s happening, but they’re smart enough to never be in anybody’s way. So, that’s a usually good bet, because they’re not going to be in the way of the grips, or the gaffers, or anyone else who is like hauling stuff to and from the set.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** A little bit I can talk about in television, having shot some TV pilots. If it is your TV show, it’s your pilot that’s shooting or your episode that’s shooting as the writer, many of the same rules apply, but you are going to have a little bit more active hand in saying, like, “That’s not what I think we need for this moment. We need to do that again.” You shouldn’t be directing the actors, but you’re going to probably be directing the director in the sense of like, “This is what I need for this because this isn’t going to make sense with that.”

And you are also going to be responsible for getting this to make sense in the editing room, so you’re going to have a little bit stronger sense there.

One of the things I think you brought up when we were just chatting in Austin is that you kind of have to be careful about things you ask for on a set. Because if you’re an important person on a set — the writer, the producer, the director — you say like, “Wow. I wish we still had more of those Red Vines,” and they’re out of Red Vines at craft service, they will get on the walkie talkie and it will be someone’s job to run out and get those Red Vines for you.

So, don’t casually wish for things unless you really want them.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, and by the way, one of the tricky things about being a screenwriter on a set is that we — it depends. Your job depends. It’s one of the only jobs I can think of on a set that varies depending on who the writer is and what the project is and who the director is. Because every other job is very rigid and very clear. Some writers are on set because they are asked to be there, and they need to be there, and they have a job there.

And some writers are there visiting. Some writers are there and think they have a job there, but are actually just visiting. And it’s important to know which one you are. And if you’re just visiting, you just sit like a visitor and be happy. If you’re there working, it’s a different deal, and you get to know people.

I will say that a great person to get to know if you’re a writer and you’re going to be spending a lot of time on a set, a great person to get to know is the video assist guy. Because generally speaking you’re going to be in what they call Producer’s Video Village; there’s a video village for the director where he watches the monitor, for playback, and then typically there’s a second video village for the producers, because the director doesn’t want people breathing over his shoulder while he’s working.

But, on the other hand, he wants the benefit of his trusted people to be watching the footage as well, to be able to confer with him after take five or take six to say, “Hey, did I get it?” And the video assist guy is the one who sets up your video village, and he can take care of you and let you know what’s going on. And it’s a good person to be friends with, I think.

**John:** I agree. I would also say make some eye contact, make some friends with whoever the sound recordist is, because you’re going to be asking that person for context — the little ear pieces that let you actually hear the dialogue that’s being recorded.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And invariably your batteries will run low. There will be something — you’re going to have to talk to him several times a day, so you might as well get to know his name.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And if you notice something strange in sound, often the director really won’t notice that, so you may be a second set of ears there that are helpful.

**Craig:** In fact, come to think of it, I’m going to make a little noise for a second. I’m sorry, because I’m doing this on my laptop. But our video record guy, John Trunk, who is the greatest — and what a great name, by the way, John Trunk. I’m sorry as I make noise here because I had to search his email. So, John told me that he has a friend who listens to us in Ireland — and here he is — and apparently is the biggest fan of our podcast.

**John:** That’s so great.

**Craig:** And he wanted me to mention his friend’s name. So, so now this is Setiquette. Here’s the way sets work. People take care of you, you take care of them. So, John Trunk, this is a shout out to your Irish friend, Darren Finnegan, Darren Finnegan. Hey, Darren, thanks for listening to us out there in Ireland.

**John:** Oh, so good. Now, another panel we could have gone to, it’s not even really a panel, but it’s here in the catalog so I thought I’d bring it up, would be a conversation with Marti Noxon.

**Craig:** Hmm. I’ve had those.

**John:** I’ve had those, too. And so “Take part in a conversation with Marti Noxon, a prolific television and film writer whose credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men, Glee, and the recent films, I am Number Four and Fright Night.” That was moderated by Barry Josephson.

And so I actually had a conversation with Marti Noxon there because I got to go out to dinner with her and Kyle Killen and some other people who I sort of knew, or didn’t know that well, and got to sort of talk with them some. She’s great. And so, by the way, if you have a chance to have a conversation with her you should have a conversation with her.

I suspect that in the Driskill Ballroom she couldn’t have been quite as revealing about some of the shows that she’s worked on as she was with me. But she has really good stories. And it was fun to sort of hear when things go really well and things don’t go really well. Because when things go badly in television it’s such a uniquely, bad, wonderful crashing down of things, so it’s fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I get the sense in television sometimes things go bad but you have to still keep showing up. At least in movies when they crash and burn it’s over. [laughs] You don’t go back to the ruins.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. I mean, television is just a war, like it just keeps going on. Film may be a battle, but this is you’re going back, you’re going back, you’re going back. So, yeah, I’d recommend a conversation. But, at the same dinner that I had a conversation with her, I had a conversation with Kyle Killen who did the pilots for Awake and Lone Star, a very talented writer, who told me stories of when he was doing his shows for Fox, he lives in Austin but he was working on the Fox lot. And so he decided — originally he was staying with a friend who lived in Silver Lake which is a long drive from Fox. And ultimately he decided, “Well, screw it; I’m just going to stay in my office?”

And so he just set up air mattress. And so he lived in his office at Fox for several months while making those shows.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, the other secret he told me is apparently there is one shower on the lot in like this grips’ area, and so that’s where he would shower.

**Craig:** I don’t like that. [laughs] I don’t like going…

**John:** You don’t like showering below the line.

**Craig:** I don’t like going to Silver Lake, but then showering there is just outright ridiculous.

**John:** That just feels kind of crazy. The other helpful thing that sort of made me feel warm and fuzzy is he was saying when he was writing his TV pilots, people kept asking him for these documents, like his outlines, his pitch documents. And they said, “Well, where do I find them?” He’s like, “Oh, go to John August and he has the things he wrote for the show D.C.” And so he said that he used those as the templates.

**Craig:** Oh, see you have been sowing the seeds of greatest in so many for so long.

**John:** I’ve been trying.

**Craig:** You’re the Johnny Appleseed of screenwriters.

**John:** Aw. That’s so sweet. Thank you. It does feel good that people find helpful things.

Another panel we could have gone to, but we didn’t go to, was Writing for Video Games.

**Craig:** Oh, I would have liked to have done that one.

**John:** Yeah, so we’d meet some of the people on this. “With the success of crossover writers behind such game-changing titles as Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3, FEAR: Extraction Point, FEAR: Perseus Mandate,” I’ve never heard of these.

**Craig:** Me neither.

**John:** “…and Fracture, it has become increasingly clear that video games area popular and lucrative new area for screenwriters. Learn to understand the industry and skills involved in writing non-liner stories for an interactive medium.” And on this panel we would have known Dalan. Is it Day-lan or Da-lan?

**Craig:** Day-lan.

**John:** Dalan Musson.

**Craig:** Day-lan Musson.

**John:** Musson? Wow. I just completely butchered his name. He is a very nice but very intimidating looking writer who we got to hang out with a little bit at Austin.

And writing for video games is fascinating, because it’s one of those things that I’m not going to end up doing a lot of in my life or my career, because I just feel like that’s not likely to come up for me often. But it’s, I think, where many of the next generation of screenwriters are going to be spending some of their time.

And writing for these huge projects where the script can be 700 pages because there are all these different possibilities of things that can happen. And you have to figure out a narrative flow that’s really a web, it’s not a straight line. It is so complicated. And some of them are going to do it really well and some of them are going to do it really poorly.

**Craig:** Yeah. I tend to play narrative video games, so I see a lot of video game writing from a consumer point of view, and a lot of it’s pretty good. The area where I feel they need to improve, frankly, is in direction, because for whatever reason the guys who direct these actors don’t understand pace at all, and oftentimes don’t understand emotion.

They tend to write very reportorially, so everyone is sort of laying out something calmly, usually because a lot of the dialogue takes place in gaps in the action. So, you’ll complete a chapter of action and now you’ll do a cut scene where people will come and talk to you to describe what happens next. And those scenes tend to then be very languid, and we’re all sitting here and chatting.

Rockstar is a grand exception to this rule. Not only do they write massive amounts of dialogue, but they actually understand how to write dialogue for action, or even when people are sitting around, how to make it intense. They’re very good at directing their actors.

**John:** I agree. I really loved StarCraft which I thought had some — granted a lot of it did happen in cut scenes, but the cut scenes were really well done, and then the way that tied into the missions that you would go onto felt really well done. The same Blizzard folks who did that also did the new Diablo, and I criticized that because it felt like you were just standing around and watching other people talk about the plot a lot. It was frustrating. They were like cut scenes.

**Craig:** That’s exactly what’s going on in Dishonored.

**John:** Yeah, I’m sorry about that.

**Craig:** Well, no, the thing is the actual game play of Dishonored is really well done. I like it a lot. I love the world that they’ve built. And they have very good actors doing the performances. It’s just that they put all of them in stand-and-talk situations and frankly they all talk at roughly the same pace with roughly the same intention and immediacy.

So, it just gets sort of kind of dronish. I think they need to think how to goose that a bit.

**John:** Now, another panel we could have attended but we were doing live Scriptnotes at that point was The First 10 Pages, a panel with Lindsay Doran. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we sat down for a conversation with Lindsay Doran? That would be great if we ever talked with her.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “Join Academy Award-nominated producer Lindsay Doran (Sense and Sensibility) as she explains — using the first ten pages each from pre-selected Second Round feature screenplays — what producers and moviegoers look for in those crucial first 10 pages that either hook audiences or send them running for the hills.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. How true. And I can actually report back from her seminar last year, some of her tips, one of which is so obvious and yet is eschewed by so many: don’t make the first page a big block of text. Because — and her point was actually very simple — Lindsay has a way of portraying things that we might otherwise find offensive in very humane ways, and suddenly we get it. Because it’s a little offensive as a writer to hear, “Look, if you wrote a fantastic script and the first page had no dialogue but was kind of heavy on important, necessary description that was actually well written, still it would be tossed aside.”

It seems vulgar. But her point is: Listen, we’re people. We have a stack of scripts we have to read tonight. We have eight of them. We also have a husband, or a wife, we have children, we have lives. And so we pick up that first script and the first page looks daunting and we put it down, and we pick up the next one and there’s lots of white space and we start reading.

And her point wasn’t that that’s fair. Her point was that’s reality. So part of designing those first ten pages isn’t to punch somebody in the face with a big, huge fist full of Courier right off the bat.

**John:** Yeah. You want to make sure that, especially in those first ten pages, the reader feels like you just can’t put it down. They’re fascinated to see what happens on the next page, and the next page. And so planning for that is crucial. And you want to make sure that you are…yes, you have to do all the work of setting up your world and introducing your characters, but it has to be a great, compelling read in those first ten pages or you’re not going to get them to read to page 11, or to page 33.

**Craig:** Yeah. And she talked a lot about sort of grabbing somebody with something that is interesting, surprising them, be unexpected, make a really sharp character, make that first line of dialogue a challenge — anything really to sort of say, “This script unlike the other 2,000 you read this week might be good.”

**John:** Because here’s the thing: The first thing that a reader comes across that feels like, “eh,” is a reason for them to put it down. So, if the very first line of dialogue is like, “eh, whatever,” then they can stop. They get permission to stop reading. Maybe they get three things, like the third thing that feels like, “eh,” they’re going to set it down and they’re not going to care.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think writers need to understand, and it took me a long time to wrap my mind around this: People who read scripts, buy scripts, and hire writers are looking for interesting, unique voices that are breaking the mold of what they normally read, who are pulling them in and exciting them with something that feels fresh.

On the other hand, they don’t make fresh, interesting, unique voicey movies. Now, you may say, “Well then, explain the discrepancy,” and all I can tell you is they want people with fresh, unique, strong, interesting voices to make the movies that they think people will want to go see.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, don’t be fooled by the product into thinking that’s what you ought to be writing. It’s so important for you to understand that. And I’m not making a judgment on this. I’m not saying, “And that’s a great way of approaching the movie business.” I’m just telling you that’s the way it is.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing to always remember is that whatever script you’re writing, yes, you want to see that become a movie, but at the same time if it’s not a movie it’s going to be a writing sample. And so you want anything that has your name on it to be the best possible thing you could write. And the most interesting thing, and the thing that people are talking about, and the thing that will end up on the Black List.

**Craig:** Now more than ever.

**John:** Now more than ever.

Now, a panel that I did not get to attend but I heard many legends about this panel after the fact was the Popcorn Fiction panel. So, Craig, can you give me a recap of the Popcorn Fiction panel, because it sounded like it was not one of the calmer panels.

**Craig:** Well, [laughs], you know, part of the fun of Austin is that I’m there with my friends. And we spend all year torturing each other, and then we go to Austin and we get to torture each other in front of people.

All right, the Popcorn Fiction, let me just — it was the last panel of the weekend. We were all a little giddy, a little goofy. The panel itself was ridiculous. There’s no reason to have a Popcorn Fiction panel at the Austin Screenwriting Conference. It’s not about screenwriting. It’s about writing fiction. And, frankly, anybody that wants to submit a story to it can, because Mulholland Publishing has that, so you just submit it, submit a story if you want.

And there’s really nothing to say. But when you add a very volatile combination of myself, Derek Haas, and Jeff Lowell, who we basically spar 365 days out of the year with each other. And then poor Eric Heisserer and Christine Boylan, who was great, and her husband, poor Eric Heisserer, who just did not have the ability to control us. We were — we really lost it.

**John:** Really, who was going to be able to control you?

**Craig:** We attacked each other, attacked people in the audience. We had the best time. We laughed. It was great. It was just a free-for-all. It was madness. It was madness.

**John:** Could Aline Brosh McKenna have controlled you?

**Craig:** Well, Aline would have gotten angry and, yeah, probably control. You know, I am scared of her.

**John:** You don’t want to disappoint her, too.

**Craig:** I don’t want to disappoint her because I’m afraid of her.

**John:** Now a panel that we also did not attend but we actually got a good report back from, well not a good report, but a thorough report back from — Amazon Studios had a panel about Amazon Studios, and sort of what it means for writers and what it means for the industry.

So, neither Craig nor I attended, but a reader was generous enough to write up his notes from the panel, and that’s on the blog right now, so there will be a link to that in the show notes. Essentially — we talked about Amazon Studios on the podcast many times — their business model is that any screenwriter in the US, or the world probably, can submit their script to Amazon. They have this process by which they get a free option that can be extended into a very low cost option.

If they like a project, they can do iterations of it. It’s changed somewhat; they’re not having like any random stranger rewrite it, but it’s a very test-driven kind of process for it. And we have questioned whether it makes a lot of sense for most screenwriters to do it, and whether it’s a good thing for writers overall, and if it’s a good thing for the industry.

And it didn’t sound like much of what got said at this conversation at Austin would have changed my perspective on that.

**Craig:** Same here. The big change that happened for you and for me many months ago, or I guess about a year ago, was that they finally dialed into being a union production company. So, people who are in the Writers Guild could continue down a guild path with them, and that’s important.

What’s unfortunate is that frankly they just don’t make much sense for a real screenwriter or — you know, I always look at these things as if you’re good enough to win that, if you’re good enough to make it through that, you’re good enough to make it through Warner Bros., or Fox, or Universal, and you don’t need them.

The philosophical issue that the Amazon rep mentioned that I want to bring out is his notion of testing. He says, accurately, that when movies are completed they’re put in front of test audiences who not only score the movie but sit in focus groups and talk about the movie. And then the filmmakers go and try and fix it then based on the feedback, or maybe don’t get a chance to fix it at all. And his point of view is: Why don’t we do that at the script stage and then we won’t have to do it at the movie stage? And all I can say is: Dude, you’ve got to go make some movies because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

**John:** Yeah. That’s not how it works.

**Craig:** All we do during screenwriting is that. Constantly. It’s shown to so many people. It’s given to readers, it’s given to agents, it’s given to every executive, all the production, their assistants, then the actors. It is read by so many. There are endless comments. Endless feedback from it.

That’s not why the movies go wrong. Movies go wrong because a movie is different than a script. It’s kind of an ignorant statement from somebody that’s running a “production company.”

**John:** I’ve been thinking about where the Amazon Studios business model might make sense, and it occurs to me that, like, children’s animation — there’s probably something good to be done in that space.

**Craig:** I lost you.

**John:** Where you could do, like, a low cost partial pilot for something and see, “Do people like this? Is this the right kind of style for us? Are these the right characters?” Where you can do that sort of like it’s just sort of silly putty that you’re modeling, and you need to have like actual little kids watching something, because little kids can’t read scripts, or you can’t describe things to them.

There are probably models, probably for television, probably for young audiences, where I could see it working out for them. But feature films of the size and scale that we’re talking about, I just don’t see it panning out.

**Craig:** No, because the point isn’t that 100 people out of 100 like the screenplay. We don’t go to movies to read. It’s an entirely different thing. They just — so many people don’t understand that the screenplay is meant to disappear into the movie. The art of judging whether it will translate in the disappearance and consumption process into a great movie is a skill that so few people have.

And I’ll tell you, because it’s so specific, and it’s such a difficult skill, the notion that everybody is sort of walking around born with it is insane. We do walk around being born with an ability to like or dislike a movie. That’s the point. We’re the audience of the movie. But we’re not the audience of the screenplay. I would no rather be interested in most people’s opinions of blueprints as opposed to a building than I would most people’s group think on a screenplay in anticipation that that would somehow forestall problems in production. It will not.

**John:** And the argument that, “Well, we’re going to shoot scenes from it and that’s going to help us know whether people are going to like it” — no, that’s not going to work at all, because you’re going to shoot scenes with like different actors and with scenes out of context. And people are going to give their feedback on stuff. No. That’s not going to help them.

**Craig:** Of course not. And it’s just a scene. We don’t go to movies for scenes. Every bad movie has a great scene in it. Every one of them. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** So, television networks go through phases where they will shoot presentations rather than shooting a pilot. And so a presentation for people who don’t know — a pilot is a theoretical first episode of a series. So this is what we think the series is. This is going to be the first episode. This launches the show.

A presentation is like a pilot but cut down, so it’s a shorter version. So, if a pilot is a 45-minute, 50-minute piece of film, this is a 20 to 25-minute piece of the show. And they’ll do the shorter versions to save money. And so the idea is that, “Okay, it gives us a sense of what the whole thing is going to feel like without spending all the money for the whole thing.”

The problem is it hasn’t worked out very well for most shows. And I shot a pilot presentation for D.C. and we learned some things, absolutely, but what we mostly learned is that maybe we shouldn’t be making this show, and then when we tried to make the show it was frustrating. And then we had to go back through and like piece in the missing scenes from the pilot to shoot the rest of it. It’s kind of a frustrating mess.

And this feels like trying to shoot presentations.

**Craig:** Sometimes in our desire to save us, save ourselves from pain and woe we create pain and woe. There is — there are too many examples of things that initially seemed glum and turned around to be wonderful. You can’t evaluate something by dipping your foot in the pool. You make it or you don’t.

**John:** Yup. It’s also interesting that you don’t hear many stories of the movies that were disasters that turned out to be great big hits. You keep track of — obviously the ones that become the world class blockbusters, you hear of those, and you hear about the disasters. But the ones where you’re like, “Oh, that first cut was actually dreadful and they just worked, and worked, and worked, and then it turned out really well.” Rarely do you hear about those.

**Craig:** I’ve heard about them. [laughs] And it’s very common, frankly, in comedy because comedy is so reliant on a sense of trust in the filmmakers that they’re funny. So, when you run a first cut of a movie and half the jokes aren’t funny, the whole thing collapses. Airplane, the first preview of Airplane was a disaster. The first preview of Naked Gun was a disaster.

I remember talking to David, and Jerry, and Jim about it. They were just aghast. And they thought their careers were over and they didn’t know what they were doing. And then you just edit and take out the stuff that doesn’t work and suddenly they become two of the funniest movies of all time.

**John:** Yeah. When I say that you don’t hear about them, I think in popular culture you don’t hear about them. We hear about them because we are involved with the same filmmakers.

So, the first cut of Go I did want to kill myself. It was just absolutely — I was just praying that maybe they can never release this movie. Because at that point I was starting to get hired for things based on my script, and I thought if people see this movie I’m done. I’m dead for it. And it’s never going to work.

And then we just went back and we cut. We recut, we did some reshooting, and suddenly all of the stuff that wasn’t working fell out and the stuff that was working was better. And it was good.

$3,000, which was the movie that became Pretty Woman, is another situation with an incredibly difficult production and then sort of the opposite situation. I think they had an incredibly good test screening and people were like, “Oh, this movie is really funny.” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s right. We made a comedy.” And then it becomes this thing where now everybody is like, “Well of course, it was Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, how could it go wrong?” But she was nobody. He was a risk.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I mean, the one that always comes to mind in terms of an audience hearing bad things is Titanic. There had been just enormous amount of buzz that Titanic was becoming the world’s most expensive movie, and it was difficult production.

**John:** Fishtar.

**Craig:** Well, Ishtar, and that didn’t happen.

**John:** I know. But they called it Fishtar.

**Craig:** Exactly. I’m sorry. Yes, you’re right. They called Titanic “Fishtar.” So, I mean, that tells you a lot. And you know what’s funny? I was talking about Waterworld today with somebody because we all think of Waterworld negatively because there had been so much bad publicity leading up to its release about how expensive it was and how the star and the director were at war, which is true.

The movie actually made money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, every now and then we — every now and then it happens, but you’re right. It’s fairly rare. Usually bad process leads to bad movie, and vice versa.

**John:** So, the last panel we’ll talk about today which we did not attend is called The Throw. “Terry Rossio will lead a presentation on the Throw, otherwise known as the transition between scenes. He will discuss very practical, actual writing techniques, and show film clips to demonstrate good and bad throws. When shooting scenes and working with a director a lot of thought goes into the transition between from one scene to another, generally ending the scene is harder than starting one. And it is ideal for transitions to be seamless and logical. Take part in this journey exploring numerous types of throws and how to implement them in your own script.”

So, have you heard of this called a “throw” before, or is that something he made up?

**Craig:** I have never heard that called “the throw” before, I just call it “transition.”

**John:** “Transition.” I like it as an idea. Terry is a smart guy and he clearly has an interest in sort of sharing what he knows, which I’ve always respected that about him.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But I thought, you know, without knowing anything about what he actually talked about, I want to sort of speculate and sort of reverse engineer what he might have talked about.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So, I would agree with the thesis that how scenes end is in many ways as important as how scenes begin. And a problem that I notice in many new writers’ scripts is they have a hard time conserving energy across a cut.

Really and honestly, when screenwriting is working well every time you cut you should be gaining some energy from the cut. You’re taking the energy that you had going into the scene, and the fact that there is a cut is giving you a little extra momentum going into the next scene that sort of keeps building your energy.

When I read newer screenwriter’s scripts, too often I feel like I’m reading a play where characters are entering and exiting. And there is sort of like there is a ramp up to action and then there is action, there’s conversation, and then there is a ramp down, a sort of decrescendo as it goes in. You sort of feel like the lights would fade and the lights would come back up on the next thing. That’s not how movies work. And movies have the ability to have blunt cuts from one thing to another.

And figuring out where the right place to jump out of scene into the scene is crucial. So, some things that came to mind for me in terms of how I tend to look at getting out of a scene is trying to answer a question across a cut. So, the horrible example you shouldn’t try to do is, “Well then, who could have murdered him?” And then you cut to the guy with the knife standing there.

Or, “But who is Mrs. Dalloway?” And you cut to Mrs. Dalloway. But, more often it’s that you are asking a question that can sort of be answered in a very general sense by the next thing you’re cutting to. So, “How long will it take us to get to Vegas?” And then we’re on the road to Vegas. The fact that you’re cutting to the next thing is telling you that you’re looking for the answer to that question.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m very specific about my transitions. And I was glad to see that Terry did this, because I think frankly the reason most transitional moments in early screenplays are bad is because they are not transitional moments at all. That the screenwriters don’t even think in terms of transition. But ideally when you’re sitting in a movie theater you don’t notice that you’ve even transitioned per se; the idea that it’s the next scene isn’t something I want you to think about any more than I want you to think about the reel change mark.

I just want you to be in the story. And moving through the time that I’m creating with my intention and purpose, not thinking, “Oh, okay, that’s over. This begins.”

Obviously music across scenes helps a lot in that way. We’re always using music to pre-lap, and drift into the next scene to kind of create a sense of narrative continuity. But I like transitions to be alive in the scene. I like to use noise. I like to use the environment.

Sometimes two scenes have nothing to do with each other and so part of what you do is accentuate how jarring they are with each other by having a train go [TRAIN NOISE], just to startle you into the fact that you’ve shifted. You’re always looking to just feel like you’re not boring. You know, a boring transition is one in which one scene ends and another one politely begins.

**John:** The terms you’re using and sort of what you’re describing, it feels like you’re talking about things you would do at the Avid, and that it’s sort of the sound and shots and things like that. But it honestly does translate back down to how you’re writing on the page, which is if you’re ending on a quiet moment and then you cut into a train barrels down the tracks, that’s energy.

**Craig:** Right. And I do like those things. I write them all in. And, oh, here John, do you feel umbrage coming? Because it’s about to come.

**John:** Go. Umbrage up.

**Craig:** Are you ready? There’s this thing that some screenwriter guru baloney types talk about that makes me crazy. And it’s this deal that screenwriters shouldn’t be directing the movie. We shouldn’t write “we see,” or talk about where the camera is, or create noise. That is insane.

Our job is to make a document that reads in such a way that the reader sees a movie and hears a movie in their head. We’re not directing the movie through the script. We are directing our intention through the script. Frankly, movies would be better if directors — a lot of whom do this, but some just don’t — actually looked for the clues that the screenwriter had put in to manage those transitions.

But we must write that way. Anybody who tells you, “Dear podcast listener at home, don’t direct your script.” Of course, don’t be obnoxious about it, but if you have a moment that means something to you, put it in. Put it in and make those moments interesting.

The worst thing you can do is be boring. That should be the most fearful outcome for you.

Umbrage over.

**John:** Yes. It is a screenwriter’s goal to evoke the experience of watching and sitting in a theater which just 12-point Courier on the page. That’s a very difficult thing to do. But, that’s why you’re a writer. And it’s writing the same way that a novelist is writing in some cases where you’re creating a universe with just your words. And part of that universe is what it feels like and what it sounds like.

And even though you don’t have the ability to describe tastes and textures and things like that, you should almost kind of feel like you’re in that world. The most flattering thing I’ve ever heard someone say about my work, I think it was like, “Oh, I really loved watching that. Oh, no, I guess I just read it, but it felt like I’d seen it.” And that’s what you want.

You want the experience of, like, “Did I read that or did I watch it?” And it should be equally vivid because I’ve created those images in your head and I’ve made this character seem alive to you in those moments.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So other sort of simple techniques to look for is — I don’t want to say exit line too loudly because that’s sort of hacky, but look for what is the last line somebody says before the cut. And there can be cases where that’s going to be a joke, and that joke will help propel you to the next scene. And if it’s done right, that’s fantastic. There will be cases where it won’t be the joke line, it will be the line that comes after the joke that helps get you to the thing. Or you’ll put an extra little layer on it.

But looking for what is the last thing that said that’s going to get you to that next moment. Now, someone is going to say, “Well, I sat down at the Avid and you always end up cutting — you never end up doing sort of what you had on the page there anyway. You end up cutting out of scenes early or you do other stuff.”

Well, fine, you do other stuff, but you have to have a plan for how you think you’re going to get out of this scene and in this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I tend avoid orchestrating elaborate transitions on the page for precisely that reason. Transitions that are elaborate really then become tricks that everybody needs to work on in production to perfect and make happen. And you’re doing it with the hope that it will be just a super awesome transition.

But, then again, you also know in the back of your head, having made a bunch of movies, a lot of times you find that shorter is better, and there is a quicker and easier transition. So, I tend to write transitions that are actually very low key in terms of producibility. Very simple things to do.

Sometimes I also think a transition that might indicate something, even if the scene starts dryly from the next scene. Let’s say you and I are in a car. We’re talking. And you’re saying, “We have to go see mom. She’s not doing great.” And I say, “Oh, okay. I’m sure she’s fine, you know. I’m sure she’s fine.” And then our car just wipes through frame, and then we see a coffee cup. You know? And then somebody, and there’s sugar going in the coffee cup. Sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar. And then we pull back and we see an old lady just pouring sugar into a coffee cup. Way too much sugar for her. And she’s big. She’s a big lady.

And then she puts the sugar down. And then we realize that she’s sitting in a food court now. And everybody is busy with their families and she’s alone at her table like kind of a weirdo bag lady. That’s a transition to me.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** And it’s small, but I just think that if you can, in the moment of starting the scene you can actually do the work of the scene, you’re already halfway done.

**John:** Yeah. So much of how you’re coming out of scene is based on where you think you’re coming into the next scene. And so by setting up and establishing that shot with a coffee cup and all the sugars, you’re giving yourself a nice way into that.

The other thing you’re doing there is by mentioning the mother you are — you put that in our head that the mother is a character that we’re going to be looking for. And so when we see her, like, we’re excited to see her.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In Go, an example is Claire is sitting with Gaines in his apartment, and she keeps getting texts from Ronna. So, naturally the next thing we’re going to cut to is Ronna. And we’re ready to see her again because we’ve been reminded that she’s in this world and we’re curious about where she’s at and why she’s not back in the apartment.

**Craig:** Yeah. You see, one of the nice things about working on transitions — and again it’s why I was very happy when I saw that Terry was doing this, because it’s important; I think it’s important for screenwriters to see this — is that it also starts to remove bad options from you.

For instance, I know that I want to make a point about a character in this scene, so I guess they could be talking to somebody or somebody could be talking about them, or maybe they’re writing it — well, how about no more words. So, let’s just put the words away for a second and just describe in a moment, in a transitional moment what it is I want to get across. And then the scene really is about making me feel it with her.

Now, the scene isn’t about information. The scene is about emotion. Am I connecting with her? Is she making me angry? Is she making me sad? Much more interesting and fun to write that than “I live alone, don’t you understand sir? I live alone! I can’t afford this.” Ugh. Gun shot.

**John:** The last thing I’ll say on transitions is I’ve described it to other people and I didn’t have good words for it. And I think I was reaching for something kind of like a “throw,” but I always describe that the cut out of a scene sort of needs to slant forward. It needs to sort of fall into the next scene. And too often they just feel like blunt cuts, like it’s just like a stack of scenes. Like, “There’s that scene, and now there’s that scene.”

And it’s what we talked about in the Austin Film Festival podcast where scenes need to be connected with a “and because of that,” rather than an “and.” It’s like, you know, it’s the “so” that gets you to the next thing rather than an “and.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Very much so.

**John:** And it’s building.

**Craig:** If you end a scene in such a way that all the characters can sort of sigh and go, “Okay, that’s…well, I guess we said.” Why even — just go. Just leave the theater.

**John:** In grammatical terms, most scenes probably shouldn’t end with periods. They should end with some sort of punctuation mark that lets you continue the sentence into the next scene. So, some double dashes, some commas, some other stuff.

And even on the page, that’s why sometimes you don’t end up completing a sentence at the end of scene. You let it bleed into the next thing. You might bleed across the cut in a sentence. I’ll do that all the time.

**Craig:** And think about size. It’s a funny thing to say, but when I end a scene and when I begin, for the following scene on that transitional moment, I like to change the size of whatever it is I’m doing. If I’m looking at a face I want to look at park. If I’m looking at a park, I want to look at a small pin. I like changing sizes.

I think that’s another helpful way to kind of not make you feel like you’re just lost in a stack of scenes.

**John:** If you’re coming off a 1.5 page scene which is two characters talking sitting down, your next scene should not be two characters talking sitting down.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** You want somebody running through the scene on fire if possible.

**Craig:** Exactly. Or you want a jet plane from the ground, you know. I mean, look at the movies you like and I guarantee you will see very few scenes that move from the same size to the same size.

**John:** And sometimes those are just those one-eighth of a page, like “Tires screech as a plane lands at JFK.” And it’s like, “Well why is that there?” Because you need to change the energy, because you just came from this thing — you need the jolt of that to get you into the next thing.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, that was our Austin Film Festival that didn’t happen. But it was fun to sort of talk through some other extra panels.

**Craig:** Alt-universe Austin in which I didn’t get drunk and wasn’t hung-over for our live podcast.

**John:** You smoked a lot of cigars there, too, I noticed.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it happens in Austin. You know, apparently what happens in Austin doesn’t stay in Austin. Apparently it ends up on a podcast.

**John:** [laughs] It gets out. I would say this was my most fun Austin podcast ever though, Austin Film Festival ever in that I talked with a lot more people than I ever talked with before in terms of sort of writing peers and hung out with more people. And it was just really fun. It was a good time.

**Craig:** It’s a great time. I try and balance my time there between friends I haven’t seen for awhile who are there with me and then just interacting with people. And I mentioned as much in the live podcast, the fact that we do this podcast now, people were walking up to me and saying thank you for this and we are very welcome. We love doing it.

And if you guys in Austin weren’t there appreciating it then it would be sad for us and we would just stop.

**John:** Yes. Craig, I know you’re really busy so do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do. No, I don’t; I take it back. [laughs] I don’t. I do, but I can’t talk about it. It’s in my head. Oh my god, it’s so cool.

**John:** So maybe by the time I’m done with mine you’ll have the words to express it.

So, my One Cool Thing this week is actually very appropriate for this sort of alternate universe Austin in that it’s called What If. And it’s this great website that is a physicist who goes through and answers questions about these hypothetical situations. And so he’ll actually do the math to tell you what would really happen if you were to do these things.

So, two example things I read recently. What if you exploded a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the Marianas Trench?

**Craig:** Hmm?

**John:** Yeah, it was like, “Oh, what would that do? Would it cause an earthquake? How bad would that be?”

**Craig:** Can I guess?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** If you exploded a large nuclear device at the bottom of Marianas Trench I suspect nothing would happen.

**John:** Very little happens. Because as powerful as a nuclear bomb is, the Marianas Trench is very, very big. And so it would create a giant bubble, but it wouldn’t cause a tidal wave. Because the disturbance is right there.

**Craig:** It’s so deep that the force that — the sideways and upwards force would just be dissipated underneath the weight of the Pacific.

**John:** Yeah.

Another question. If every person on earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time would it change color?

**Craig:** I’m sorry, if every person on the earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time would it change color?

**John:** Yeah. Would it change color — the color of the laser pointer?

**Craig:** I’m going to say no, it would not.

**John:** It would not. And so he goes through sort of some of the challenges there. At any given time not that many people on earth can actually see the moon, so that becomes a challenge.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But the issue is like laser pointers, even the powerful ones, they’re pretty powerful, but they’re not powerful enough to overcome the moon’s brightness or darkness which is the sun shining on it.

So, then he sort of amps up in a very good screenwriter way, it’s like, “Well what if we had a — well, we need lasers big enough to actually aim at the moon and light up the dark side of the moon. So, if it is a crescent moon then you want to light up the dark side of the moon, the part that is not lit right now.”

And the laser that would be powerful enough to make that glow would also incinerate the earth. The atmosphere would catch fire.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, we shouldn’t do it.

**John:** No. We couldn’t also generate enough energy to —

**Craig:** It’s funny. I remember years ago I worked on a script at Dimension called The Spy Next Door. And I think eventually they made a movie called The Spy Next Door that was a different company and a different script. And it was sort of a James Bond sort of comedy James Bond thing. And I needed a villain. And I always believe that your villain has to be a real villain with a real plan.

And I love Bond movies and I was trying to think of a good Bond plan. And for a while I was toying with the idea of blowing up the moon.

**John:** I had a whole thing where I wanted to blow up the moon. Everyone wants to destroy the moon. The moon sucks.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everyone wants to blow up the moon. You know, here’s the thing. I found a book on this pre-internet days when you couldn’t do this sort of thing. And I had to find a book. And there was actually a book called What If You Blew Up the Moon? [laughs] I think that’s what it was called.

And the whole book was just chapters of, “Okay, well what if we made the moon smaller? What if we made it bigger, what would happen? What if we blew it up? What if it crashed on earth?” And basically the deal is this: If you change the moon at all, we all die. You make it bigger, smaller, blow it up, move it backwards — it’s like everything just goes kablooey. So, I couldn’t do that one, so I came up with another one which I thought was actually kind of interesting.

My idea was that the villain found evidence of a large fault running underneath the United States in a place where we weren’t familiar. It’s a little bit like the New Madrid Fault, which they say famously could lead to a huge earthquake. And that back in the ’60s, the Soviets discovering this put a large nuclear device in that fault with the idea that they were losing the Arms Race and if they were attacked that would be their Doomsday device in retaliation and America would split apart.

And then they sort of forgot it, you know. [laughs] And so now it’s 1998, or whenever I wrote this movie, and someone has figured out that it’s still there, and they have the codes and they need another code. And if they do then they can blow up — Blow Up America!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of fun.

**John:** Yeah. I like it. It’s tough to find — a villain plot for a comedy is tough because an apocalyptic villain comedy plot is challenging because it has to be absurd yet have stakes so that it actually means something.

**Craig:** Yeah, unless you’re doing a spoof, you know, like Dr. Evil’s plan was ridiculous because he was spoofing the ridiculousness of James Bond’s villains who already larger than life. So, you have these levels of villains. You have Dr. Evil which is the most ridiculous. Then you have Donald Pleasence from, I think, You Only Live Twice, which is also quite ridiculous, [laughs], because he lives in a volcano.

But, serious ridiculous, you know. And then underneath that you have your, I guess, your Bourne Identity style villains and so forth.

**John:** Yeah. But I’m trying to think of who the villain could be in a comedy. That can be challenging, too. An apocalyptic comedy villain is a sort of unique set of requirements.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always like the villain in Naked Gun. Ricardo Montalban’s deal was that he was basically going to charge people to use — he was a hit man broker. So, he figured out a way to hypnotize famous people who have access to kill other famous people and charge money for it.

It’s ridiculous but he was quite serious about it.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a good choice. It offers comedy potential. It’s threatening enough that there are actually enough stakes that you could go through.

So, Phineas and Ferb, Doofenshmirtz often has the most absurd kind of things where like he’s going to destroy all the banjos in the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s interesting when they sort of talk about like evil and it’s like, “Well, yeah it’s evil.” It’s actually sort of like you would be really annoying but you’re not actually evil.

**Craig:** Doofenshmirtz Annoying Incorporated.

**John:** I like it.

Craig, did you think of anything more or are we all done?

**Craig:** Are you kidding? I could go for hours.

**John:** You could go for hours. But you can’t go for hours because you have to work tonight.

**Craig:** No, tonight we’re off.

**John:** Oh, this is your night off.

**Craig:** We’re on a weird schedule. So, tonight I’m off, but now what do I do? And, okay, you know where I am, so there’s plenty to do. [laughs] The thing is I really don’t want to do anything. So, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do a crossword puzzle.

**John:** Crossword puzzles are good. All right, Craig, thank you so much for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir, and I’ll see you next time.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-your-very-first-screenplay).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 58 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, you may be familiar with the sort of classic technique in dramatic writing where you create tension by letting the audience know something that the characters on screen don’t know.

So, an example: you’d have like a spy who places a bomb underneath the table, and then when the hero is eating dinner at that table, some of that dinner is filled with tension, because you as the audience know there’s a bomb under the table and the hero does not know there’s a bomb under the table.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** A good, classic technique. And that’s sort of what I’m feeling right now, because the audience, our listeners, have information that I don’t have.

**Craig:** Right. About Halloweenie.

**John:** Yes. It’s called Frankenweenie, but thank you so much.

**Craig:** I know. [laughs] I’ve been calling it Halloweenie lately. I just like that; I don’t know why.

**John:** I like it, too. So, we’re recording this on a Friday, a Friday afternoon, which is the day that Frankenweenie comes out. But most of our audience will be listening to this on Tuesday at the earliest.

— Maybe we should have, like, people could pay money to hear it early. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, like a Scriptnotes Premium?

**John:** Premium. Yeah, like — we would charge extra money rather than nothing.

**Craig:** Double nothing.

**John:** Double nothing. Yes, exactly. You could pay zero dollars rather than free.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, anyway, our audience is hearing this on Tuesday. So, they are knowing how well the movie did. So, we got great reviews, and that’s all great, but in terms of how we did at the box office, they have information that I don’t have.

They are living in one of three possible futures: the future where we did outstandingly well, the future where we did fine, and the future in which we didn’t do as well as we might have hoped.

And I would love to know which future our audience is living in, but I really have no good sense of that, because the tracking on the movie has been just bizarre. And so, like, the people who you usually go to ask, “How much do you think the movie will make?” they have said like, “Oh, it will make between $10 million and $30 million this weekend.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very, very difficult to track children’s movies. I mean, first of all congratulations; the reviews were outstanding, so it’s always good to see.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** The way tracking works is they call people up at home and they say, “What race are you? What gender are you? How old are you? Here are a bunch of movies. First of all, what are movies you’ve heard of — we’re not going to say any names.” That’s called unaided awareness. “Now, here’s a bunch of movies, have you heard of those?” That’s called aided awareness.

Then, “Which of these movies would you definitely recommend to friends,” or, I’m sorry, “which of these movies are you definitely interested in seeing?” And then, “Can you tell us which of these movies would be your first choice to see?” And then, “Which of the movies that are actually available for you to see — which one of these would be your first choice to see?”

The problem with kids’ movies is that kids’ movie-viewing is driven by moms, mostly, and kids. And a lot of times moms aren’t aware of what their kids want to see until it’s Saturday at noon, so very difficult to get a sense ahead of time what kids’ movies are going to do. They often surprise people. Typically they surprise you in a good way. Sometimes they Oogielove all over you, and then you’re just crying.

**John:** I don’t think anyone was surprised by Oogielove. That was not a surprise to anyone. But, like, the surprise last weekend was the Hotel Transylvania which did much better than people were expecting. And so the second weekend of whatever that movie will be, even if it drops a tremendous amount of money, will be a lot of money. So, people will go see that movie because it’s out there in theaters as well.

Anyway, it shouldn’t really matter that much. I’m delighted the movie did so well. It’s not going to help me or hurt sort of how much it does, but you want people to come see the movie. You want it to be successful.

So, I’ve been trying not to… — I know that the reviews are good because I sort of the scan the page of Rotten Tomatoes. This time I’m trying not to actually read the reviews because I find I can just sort of get sucked into a K-hole of reading all the reviews, which is just not helpful or productive to anyone.

But, my new time suck has been going on Twitter and just doing a Twitter search for Frankenweenie.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** And so you see all the people who are just seeing the movie right then. And so at midnight on the east coast, or two in the morning on the east coast before I went to bed, I could see all the people who were just coming out of Frankenweenie and crying and talking about how much they liked it, which was really nice.

**Craig:** That is terrific. I totally know where you’re coming from. I used to be obsessed with reviews, and obsessed with this, and obsessed with that. But Twitter has not only supplanted the importance of all that in my mind, I think frankly it’s just eliminating the actual practical value of critics. I’m not talking about their theoretical value, or their intellectual value, or cultural value, just their practical value of “Should I go see a movie or not? Let me check a particular critic. Let me check Metacritic. Let me check Rotten Tomatoes.”

It seems entirely driven by Twitter. So, even when the Identity Thief teaser hit, I went and searched and was getting — just kind of rolling through the reactions. And people are super honest, which is great. And it was a good reaction, so it’s always good to see.

But, you should be — eyes glued to Twitter, all weekend. But, you also know — I don’t know if people know this — but I mean, I guess most people by now know by Saturday morning or even frankly by tonight you’ll have a pretty decent idea of what the movie is going to do.

**John:** Absolutely. By tonight we’ll know whether sort of grownups, how many grownups went to see it. And based off of that they can do their little metrics and figure out with this kind of movie what they could expect for a Saturday, which would be a much bigger day for families, and Sunday, which is also a big day for a family movie.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, exactly. So, they just sort of compare it to a similar film and use the same multiplier and you should… — But, I would be shocked if it were on the low end of that. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were on the high end. So, good luck.

**John:** Yeah. Fingers crossed. But, I thought we might escape from this stress by reverting to a simpler time in the podcast today and really think back to what it was like when we were writing our very first scripts. Because before you have a movie that you have to worry about NRG tracking, you have this first screenplay that you’re trying to write. And so I thought today would be a walk down the hallways of history back to the time when we were not screenwriters yet, and we had not finished a script, and we were just getting started.

And so I don’t think I know — what was the first screenplay you ever read?

**Craig:** Screenplay I ever read? It was probably, oh, that’s a really good question.

**John:** As a related question, when were you aware that there was such a thing as screenwriting?

**Craig:** Pretty early on.

**John:** You grew up in a neighborhood with writers.

**Craig:** I knew in high school that there were screenwriters. I don’t know if I knew in middle school.

**John:** So, what do you think was the first time you started thinking about the script behind a movie? Because to me, I’ll give you my example first, is my brother and I had rented War of the Roses on VHS. And so we watched it and I was like, “I love this movie.” And then we rewound it and my brother went upstairs and I, like, I started just playing the movie again and started writing down everything people said.

And, I realized, “Oh, you know what? Someone must have written the things they’re saying. Like, there’s a whole plan for this.” Which sounds incredibly naïve, but I guess I just didn’t really realize that movies were sort of like plays. I’d read plays, but I didn’t realize that movies must have worked the same way. And so, just on a sheet of legal paper I was like trying to figure out what scenes were and what — I was trying to reverse engineer War of the Roses.

**Craig:** Huh. I actually remember before ever reading anything, I actually remember writing a script in — I wrote a script in eighth grade. So, I must have been aware of it. I didn’t write a script with proper FADE IN, and INT./EXT., or anything like that, but we were supposed to do a skit in our drama class and I wrote the whole thing.

**John:** Yeah, but that was a play, though. Because you’d experienced plays before. So was it more like a play, or was it really meant to be a script for filming something?

**Craig:** No, it was definitely more like a play, because we could not film anything.

— Hold on, I have to pee. If I don’t pee now it’s going to be a disaster.

**John:** Okay, go pee.

**Craig:** I can feel it. I’ll be right back.

**John:** So, Craig thinks we’re going to cut this part out of the podcast, but no; I’m actually going to just leave it in. So, this is a chance for us to talk about Craig while he’s not around.

Yup.

Just talking.

**Craig:** Uh! So much better.

**John:** Good. I talked a lot while you were gone. So, Stuart may leave that in, or may cut it out.

**Craig:** I think it’s great.

**John:** Yeah. Honesty in the podcast at this point.

**Craig:** I had to pee.

**John:** Yeah. We’re at episode 58. We’re not going to hide anything here.

**Craig:** No. Because if I try to pee in a bottle or something like that — I mean, if they can hear an electronic cigarette, they’re going to hear pee.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true. You shouldn’t try to pee in a bottle.

So, you were saying that you wrote this little skit, or sketchy kind of thing. So you had a sense of what a play was like. But to me it was a weird change, because I had a read a lot of plays. I’d read Shakespeare and I read sort of The Importance of Being Earnest, but I just hadn’t associated that movies were written the same way.

So, the first script I was able to find — this is Boulder, Colorado; this is early ’90s — the only script I could find was Steven Soderbergh’s script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, because that was published in a book. It was his production diary and his script. And so I bought that, I read it, and then I read it like while the movie was playing. And I was like, “Oh my god, everything they’re saying is in there, and this is what a scene is. And this EXT must be exterior and INT must be interior,” which sounds so hopelessly naïve now, but this was a time before the internet was everywhere, and before you could sort of find that information.

I had maybe, like, Premiere Magazine as my only source of film information. And that was just a revelation. So, first off, thank you Steven Soderbergh for making that movie and publishing your script. But it actually was one of the reasons why on my own website I do publish as many of the scripts as I can, because I feel like I want people to be able to see what the scripts were like behind the movies.

**Craig:** I think probably the first screenplay-type material I ever read — I guess it was more teleplay material — was in 1991, the summer of 1991, I had gotten an internship through the Television Academy. And I came out to LA that summer between my junior and senior year, and I worked in the current programming department. And that was the first time I was exposed to teleplays. So, I was reading scripts for The Simpsons.

**John:** How lucky are you?

**Craig:** — And I was reading scripts for their other sitcoms and their not-sitcoms. And I distinctly remember being surprised at how dead it all seemed on the page. That was interesting to me. Learning how to fill that in, just from text to images in your mind. It’s weird; you almost have to learn how to read before you can learn how to write, because screenplays are such a strange animal. That was probably the beginning, yeah.

**John:** It was also a strange situation reading Simpsons scripts because the scripts for an established TV series tend to be much less detailed in terms of scene description, because you don’t have to introduce who Homer Simpson is. And so you were reading a very dry version of what a script would be.

What was the first script you tried to write?

**Craig:** Well, I started — the very first things I tried to write were television scripts. I thought I would break into sitcoms. So, the very first script I ever wrote was a spec script for Frasier I believe. And I did that with my partner at the time.

**John:** The very first thing I tried to write was, well, I sort of transcribed an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So, literally, I recorded it and then I wrote it all down. And then I tried to sort of reverse engineer what the script was like. And, so, all the dialogue I used from the dialogue that I saw in the show, but I tried to make the scene description feel like what the actual scene description probably was for it. It was a good exercise. I would recommend it to any high school student who’s listening who wants to sort of figure it out.

So, I was obsessed with, like, “Oh, I’m going to write a spec episode of Star Trek and…” you know, because sometimes Star Trek at that era would take a spec episode and actually produce it. That was my first obsession. And then I decided I was going to adapt Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s not at all ambitious.

**John:** No, not at all. And so I got through about two and a half pages of that, because it’s a simple little story of the American south when told with multiple narrators and many flashbacks. Easy.

**Craig:** Yeah. No problem.

**John:** No problems. But, when I finally came out to Los Angeles I had the opportunity to read a ton of screenplays and realize sort of all the things I didn’t know. And one of the great luxuries of the Stark Program that I was in is that we had at USC a great film library. So, you could check out all these scripts, you know, James Cameron’s Aliens, but like everything you could possibly ever want.

And Laura Ziskin, who taught our very first development class, she had her own library, so everybody could check out two scripts from her. I learned how to write up coverage. You could even go and compare two different drafts. So, you could see, like, an early draft of Hero and the shooting draft. You’d see sort of all the changes that happened along the way. And that was fascinating. And that got me over some of my fear of it. Because when you first encounter the screenplay form, it’s just alien. It’s not like any other kind of writing you’re going to experience.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So in addition to these great scripts we had to read at USC, I also started interning. And so I wan interning at a little production company called Prelude Pictures that was based at Paramount. So I would read scripts for them and write up coverage. And at first it was free, and then I got a different job where I got paid for it. But I was reading a bunch of honestly terrible screenplays. And that was really useful to me, too, because I was reading these great screenplays in class of these like produced movies, and I was reading these bad screenplays. And to be able to compare and contrast the two of those was fantastic.

And at the same time, I was starting to write my own screenplays. And it taught me a lot of what I didn’t want to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly. You know, the thing about comedy — and I remember at the time, this is when I started thinking about writing comedy screenplays. It was 1994/1995, in that zone, and PG comedy was sort of ruling the day. Family comedy was ruling the day at the time; at least it seemed that way to me.

And I just sort of thought, “Well, you know, I’ll try my hand at that.” And so many of those scripts were bad. And, so, in a weird way I had the kind of opposite instruction. I was reading scripts that I thought were goofy but they were successful. And I kind of [laughs] wandered down a weird path there for awhile because I thought, “You know, in that kind middle class-ish, sort of 24-year old way I should probably just write what they’re buying, shouldn’t I?” I didn’t know any better.

**John:** Yeah. Very much the high concept PG comedy was the sweet spot at that time, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** So, I want to talk about some of the common characteristics I’ve noticed in people’s first screenplays. Over the years I’ve read a lot of people’s first scripts. And they’re often like, you know, friends of colleagues. Classically sort of like your gardener’s sister wrote a script and would you read it? And I try not to read those, but I do sometimes need to read them. Or, just other people who I think are smart overall, but they’re just new to the format.

So, some characteristics I’ve noticed of first screenplays, and in listing these hopefully people will recognize them and try to move past them. And you can add to these as you hear.

If I see a scene that’s three pages long, it’s probably a first script, or a very early script. Produced screenplays tend to have short scenes. They don’t tend to go on for a very long time. Three pages of, you know, a speech. If a speech goes on for more than a page, that’s unusual.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have a general rhythm where scenes should — the typical scene, not big ones, but typical scenes should fit in a day of work. And a day of work on a major motion picture film is 2.5 pages. And any time I get past 2.5 pages I start getting a little itchy.

**John:** Well, and the experience of watching a movie, if you actually were to pull out your stop watch and as you were clocking a movie, you would recognize that very few scenes are more than three minutes long. There will occasionally be some scenes that are more than three minutes long, but three minutes in one place and one time with two people talking feels like an eternity in most movies.

**Craig:** For sure. And I just want to point out that there’s a distinction between scenes and sequences. So, when you’re thinking about the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s one big sequence that begins with a shot of a mountain and ends with Indy flying away on a plane. But there are a lot of little scenes within it.

**John:** Yes.

Another characteristic of first screenplays: shot-gunning characters. So, if I see, if you introduce eight characters in the first page or two pages, that’s not going to be a happy outcome most likely. If you’re trying to overload us with a bunch of people all at once and tell us everything about them we’re not going to be able to keep them straight. More sophisticated screenplays tend to sort of understand the readers and recognize, “I’m going to highlight these people who are important and save other people for later on in the story.”

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Same token: when you over-describe a minor character. So, that doesn’t mean everybody needs to be Security Guard #2, but if you’re giving a lot of description to a minor character who’s never going to appear again, that’s not a good idea. Because we as the audience and the reader are going to think, “Well, this person must be really important so I’m going to ascribe a lot of mental energy to remembering this person,” when they’re never going to come back again.

**Craig:** Another good one.

**John:** Weird formatting is always a standout for me, because people tend to freak out about formatting, but if it is wrong it feels wrong.

When did you feel like you understood the formatting of scripts?

**Craig:** Well, I think I started basically by just mimicking the formatting that I saw in actual screenplays. I picked up a copy of Syd Field’s…it wasn’t the Syd Field book that people normally read. It was a book called Syd Field’s Workbook, or something like that. And it was very technical and really just about where-do-you-put-the-margins and interior and exterior. And so I just sort of copied that faithfully. So, I don’t think I ever went down a weird formatting hole.

**John:** What were you writing in originally?

**Craig:** Believe it or not, Final Draft.

**John:** Oh, you started on Final Draft?

**Craig:** I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing all the work of writing in Microsoft Word like that, and it was — I want to say it was 1993. And I was working at an ad agency and a guy who was working there was friends with this dude named Mark Madnick who had invented this really cool program called Final Draft. And it was on floppy disks. And I drove to Santa Monica and they had a little bungalow there. And I bought it right from them. I bought it from Mark Madnick. [laughs] I wrote him a check and he gave me two floppies for Final Draft 2.0.

**John:** That’s fantastic. How much was the check?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Was it like $200?

**Craig:** I mean, my guess would be something like $40. I’m just guessing.

**John:** All right. Because it’s now up to like $199.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was nowhere near that. I couldn’t have afforded it.

**John:** I started in Microsoft Word. And so in preparation for this podcast I was looking at early script and it is in like an ancient version of Microsoft Word. It’s very easy to sort of slam on Final Draft for some of the things that have gotten frustrating over the years, but if you try to write a screenplay in just Microsoft Word and do all the formatting yourself it is really maddening. Like when you have to do a page break, that becomes just a brutal, brutal exercise. So, it was a good innovation.

But my first, up through Go, I never had Final Draft. And so that was all Microsoft Word.

**Craig:** Awful.

**John:** Awful. Awful stuff

A common feature of many first scripts is what I call D&D descriptions: “There are,” “there is.” You’re talking about a room as if you were the dungeon master describing the room in which the player characters have come into. And so it’s very much like, you know, “15 feet to the left there is this,” as if characters need to figure out how to avoid traps on the floor. They’re not sort of painting the scene the way a screenwriter does.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another thing I sometimes see is a weird over-appreciation for one’s own dialogue. The characters get very florid and a little too over-literate as they speak. And you get these long — I think first time screenwriters love speeches. They all think that the movie is going to be chock full of those great monologue moments. And, if you have one monologue in a movie that’s a lot. Most movies have none.

**John:** I also notice first time screenwriters have a hard time getting a character into a scene. There is a lot of like walking through doors.

**Craig:** Yeah. Shoe leather.

**John:** Yeah, they’re shoe leather. Characters will say hello and goodbye and do all of this stuff that people do in the real world, but there’s ways you find how to do in screenplays where you don’t need those intros and outros and you can just, you know, get to the meat of the scene much quicker.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** By the same token, a lot of times these movies will spend 20 pages setting stuff up, and you will have no sense of where this is going. And in most movies, quite early on you get a sense at least that you’re on a path to some place. You don’t need to know all the details, but if you’re just spinning your wheels, you have no idea what the next, what the characters are trying to do after 20 pages, there’s a real issue.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also a thing I’ll see a lot in first scripts or relatively early scripts in someone’s path is an abundance of plot and almost no character at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the movie becomes about exciting sequences, and I couldn’t care less about any of the people involved.

**John:** Sometimes you will often see the flip, where it’s just exceedingly low ambition for a script, where it’s just a bunch of characters hanging out, talking about marital problems…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …but not in a fascinating or interesting way. So it’s like: put a little more story in there, like actually have your characters do something rather than just sit around and kind of complain.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the whole idea is that the story should be matched to the character, and the character should be matched to the story in an interesting oppositional way. A lot of times you just get, like you said, people talking, or frankly what’s even worse to me, people acting but not actually being people.

**John:** Ideally you want to match the character to a story in a way that is answering both questions. Who is the most appropriate character for this story? And who is the sort of least appropriate character for this story? Who would this story impact the most? Who would this idea have the biggest impact on and thus, you know, that character would be a fascinating person to see in this world and in this universe. And too often they’re kind of matched too perfectly.

Like, “He’s a schlub who wants to impress his wife.” It’s like, eh, I don’t care.

Another, sort of like the walking through doors problem, is when one character tells another character something we as the audience already know.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, I see that. “As you know, to review…” I was just going through these the other day with somebody. There’s “As you know, to review,” and then there’s one of my favorites: “Wait, wait, wait. Tell me that again?”

**John:** Oh my, yeah. So, those are all things, like, trying to summarize stuff. It’s easy to understand the instinct. The screenwriter needs the audience to know that the other characters are also aware of this fact or information, but the actual scene in which you’re doing it is terrible, and you will try to find a way to cut it out when you actually make the movie. So, don’t write this scene. And find some way that we’re running up and we’re getting ahead of that, because those things are deathly.

And weirdly I find I don’t encounter that nearly as much now as I used to. I think subconsciously I’m already avoiding those scenes way ahead of time. I’m doing the judo so that those scenes can never have to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, to me it’s just a sign that your story is all wrong anyway. I mean, if you find yourself in a spot where suddenly one character has to explain a bunch of stuff to another one, something is just in your story. If it’s important for one character to know it’s important for me to watch it happen or see it. So, figure out a way to illustrate it dramatically to me, whether it’s a flashback… There are always creative ways to get this information across.

**John:** Agreed. Although you say flashback; unnecessary flashbacks are also pretty much the pinnacle of first screenplay-ness. It’s just like, you know, “Here’s a big flashback to tell you about how bad my dad was.” It’s like, that’s not important.

**Craig:** Well, unnecessary flashback, unnecessary narration.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** These are the crutches we use when we’re not quite sure how to tell the story that we have, because maybe it’s not the right story to be telling.

**John:** Yup.

So, Craig, are you ready for this now?

**Craig:** Dude, I was born ready!

**John:** Ah! So the reason why we’re talking about this: it’s been so nice that so many of our listeners, more than 200 of our listeners have written in with their three page samples. And so Craig and I are actually going to give you three page samples from our very first screenplays.

**Craig:** Very, very first. And so, you know, I had such a… — When you suggested this I thought, “That’s a great idea/that’s a terrible idea.” [laughs] Because it’s so embarrassing and it’s so awful.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. It is. It is so awful. So, it was my idea, so I’ll start first just to rip the Band-Aid off.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, my sample is from my very first script. I wrote it while I was in grad school. And I’ll give some back story on when I wrote this. Between my first and second years of grad school I was interning at Universal. And I had a job for the head of physical production. And I was the intern below three assistants. Like, there was nothing that they actually needed me to do. It was very nice of them to give me a little job, but there was nothing for me to do. So, I would file a couple of papers a day.

So, I would come home from work and I had not used any brain cells, and so I would just write at night. And so I hand wrote at night, and then during my lunch break I would type up the pages. And actually wrote most of the screenplay during that summer at Universal.

The script I wrote is called Here and Now. It was originally called Now and Then, but then there was a movie with Demi Moore that was called Now and Then while I was writing this, so I had to change it to Here and Now. So, these are the three pages from Here and Now which you will find on the website, along with all the other three page samples.

A summary of what happens in these three pages: We open in a crowded parking lot of a shopping mall. It’s snowy, Christmastime. Two passing women talk about someone’s sudden death. We meat Karen Miller, a young woman. She’s in her car. She’s trying to back out. Another car slams into her. Her airbag blows. She’s not badly hurt, but as she looks into the window’s reflection she sees someone behind her, someone who is not actually there.

We cut to one year earlier, and we’re at the University of Colorado. We see some background action describing the student body. And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a pretty good summary, and if you had written that summary I think you’d be in good shape. [laughs]

**John:** Ha-ha-ha. So…

**Craig:** Do you want me to go after you because you get to… — I mean, I want to go after myself, too. So, maybe you want to go after yourself first?

**John:** Yeah, I’ll go after myself first. So, a lot of the stuff I talked about in the criteria of like first scripts, you see some of that here. There’s a lot of over-description of things. And our protagonist, our Karen Miller, first off we say her name but we don’t’ actually give her any description whatsoever. So, there’s nothing to sort of signal that she’s actually who she is as a person. She’s just a young woman in a car. And so we don’t know anything special about her. She’s not driving this introductory scene. She’s not doing anything interesting. She’s just a passenger in the scene.

And she’s a passenger who gets hit in the scene. And that’s not a terrible opening, but it’s not a great opening. It’s setting up that there’s some mystery there. And it may be a bit of a misdirect in terms of sort of what the tone of this is going to be. It feels just sort of wintery and snowy. And then by the end we get to the University of Colorado a year earlier and it’s just, you know, a picture postcard. It’s just painting, “this is what a campus looks like.” And it’s like, “Oh, but that is probably what a campus looks like.” But we haven’t really gotten any story started and we’re three pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look: the truth is I like your pages better, your first pages better, than I like my first pages. That’s the awful thing about comedy is when they’re not funny, that’s just — that’s the headline…

**John:** I wasn’t aiming for funny.

**Craig:** You don’t have that sort of objecting, “ugh.” However, there’s just nothing really happening here. I mean, she gets hit by another woman, and there’s a lot of description of what’s happening with the cars and the geography of the space and how she actually gets hit, although it’s really just a fender bender so the car crash itself isn’t that interesting.

There is one interesting thing buried in there, which is that she sees somebody that isn’t there. So, you sort of like made a real meal out of all these mundane things that frankly just aren’t that interesting and then kind of, like, da-da-da, passed the one thing that really is interesting. And so the scene has this lack of focus. And I always like to say — and this is a classic new writer thing: You are not directing my attention to where it’s supposed to be. You’re directing my attention to where it’s not.

So, there is a paragraph, or descriptions of what the engine sounds like as the car stops. [laughs] But, then, you know, very little thing — I mean, you underline “Someone is standing directly behind her.” There’s no one there. But then we’re back and then there’s just more discussion of the woman. And then, yeah, some of the description is awesome. I mean, I got to hand it you. “Brown mutant icicles hunched behind the wheels,” is spectacular.

**John:** But it’s novelistic. I mean, I think you can get away with some of it. And I think “brown mutant icicles” could last if there wasn’t so much other stuff around it.

I don’t like these five sentence blocks of scene description. They’re intimidating to read, and so people skip them.

**Craig:** Thank god I didn’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Thank god you didn’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s the worst. But we’re getting there.

**John:** On page two, midway, actually near the bottom of page two, I actually finally do give a description of Karen. So, “She’s really very pretty, a page torn from a J. Crew catalog, fresh-faced and a little delicate.” That’s actually not bad description. But that should have come when we first met Karen Miller, and not, you know, two pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also feel like we have this — we’re concentrating on what these two women that we will never see again — I presume, because they’re Woman 1 and Woman 2 — are saying, when really what I wanted desperately is a moment before Karen Miller gets in her car and starts to pull out and gets hit. I just want to be contextualized with my protagonist, not with weather and extras.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** But, here’s what’s good. I want to sort of say, “Okay, but here’s the sign that the guy who wrote this would one day write Halloweenie.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I just love saying Halloweenie.

**John:** Yeah, that’s fine.

**Craig:** There is a specificity to the way you’re writing this. And, more importantly, it is visual. It’s not always interesting in terms of what you’re visualizing, but you’re being visual. And you’re also being very sparse with the dialogue. The dialogue felt real to me.

And, you know, these are things like pitch that you can’t teach. Either you can or can’t sing. Either you can or can’t feel rhythm. And so I see that there is somebody writing this who has an ear, and somebody who has a rhythm. And, you know, this was — can I say what year this was?

**John:** Oh yeah. This is 1994.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this was February of 1994. And that’s 18 years ago, actually. And you can see there is something going on here. There is an intelligence behind this. And there is a voice. And also little things, like for instance, just to show that you understand the language of cinema — as the sequence ends, Karen looks up at the Donna Karan woman, gives a half a laugh, smiles a little to herself, which I like the sense of mystery. “In the distance, CARILLON BELLS ring, continuing as we cut to:
TITLE OVER BLACK
One year earlier.”

And there are the Carillon bells. That’s how I pronounce it, right? Carol-on?

**John:** Yeah. Carillon bells.

**Craig:** And so you got already that there was a language where sound could sort of play oppositional to time stream. And these are things that are precise.

**John:** It was my very first pre-lap. And lord knows I pre-lap the hell out of things these days.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I’m not embarrassed by these three pages. It’s just that they’re not the way I would have written them right now.

So, reading these three pages, what kind of story do you think this is?

**Craig:** I would suspect it’s some kind of supernatural — what I got was a supernatural love story.

**John:** It is a love story, but it’s actually not supernatural. It is a weepy. And it was my first weepy. So, it’s actually good that it’s on a Frankenweenie release date. Because it was the first time that I made people cry. And that was actually the thing about this script is I could kind of consistently make people cry. And that got me an agent. It got me sort of started, because people weren’t used to actually reading a script and crying.

So, it’s a tiny romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado, which is my hometown. Again, a very sort of first script thing where it’s like you write things that you know so well that they might not be interesting to other people. And it suffered from another first script problem, which is that I tried to cram everything I knew about everything into it. Because, like, “Well maybe I’ll never write another script, so I should shove everything I know about everything into it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. A lot of speeches.

Well, great. Thank you for looking at that. I’m not horrifically embarrassed. Let’s take a look at Craig’s script. The Stunt Family.

**Craig:** Yes. The Stunt Family. Just a year later, February of 1995. And the background on this is I was working at Disney in the marketing department. And my boss was Oren Aviv, who would later go on to actually run Disney and now is the head of marketing at Fox.

And Oren took a shine to me and suggested that I try my hand at writing a movie and then he could produce it. And he had an idea for a movie. And his idea was called The Stunt Family. And it was going to be a big, broad, physical comedy for kids about a family of stunt men who live their lives as if every day and every moment were a stunt. And they would go on a grand adventure and kind of use their fearlessness. But one of the family members, of course, just didn’t really feel like he fit in.

And so I wrote it with my then partner, Greg Erb, and it was the first screenplay I’d ever written. These were the first screen pages I’d ever written. And so, I mean…God.

**John:** [laughs] Well, for people who are just listening who aren’t on the page in front of them, do you want to give the summary?

**Craig:** Sure. So the summary is: We are on a backlot of Maxwell Studios, which is essentially like Universal Studios if any of you have visited Universal Studios where you take the tour of the actual backlot of the studio in the little tram. And they’ve kind of combined the actual working backlot with attractions. Like at Universal there’s a fake earthquake and then Jaws comes out of the lake and stuff like that.

And so you’re sort of on a tour with a tour guide who apparently is on his first day and isn’t very well prepared. And they pass by the stunt house and we start meeting members of the Stunt Family who are waking up to their morning routine. And their morning routine is sort of a very Addams Family combination of living in the middle of a working attraction. And it seems like they are living in a rather dangerous life, and yet they seem kind of curiously okay with it.

**John:** Yeah. And we get to the bottom of page three, we’ve met — have we met all the family by that point?

**Craig:** No. You meet sort of the [laughs], this is probably not a great idea. But you meet the protagonist on page 4 who is the one who doesn’t feel like he fits in.

**John:** Okay, cool. So, Craig, do you want to pull the Band-Aid first? I mean, how are you feeling?

**Craig:** Well, I feel pretty bad.

**John:** [laugh]

**Craig:** And this is when I talk to some of the people who send pages in who are writing comedy, and I say, “Listen, I’ve been there. I’ve done these mistakes.” I really have. And you can see it here, even though this was 17 years ago, it hurts to read. First of all, you have these huge chunks of description. And even though they’re not particularly prosy, it’s just a ton of unimportant detail.

We have a run, a page and a half run of back and forth dialogue between the tour guide and some people on the tour that is really broad, poorly written, not at all funny, illogical. Just bad. Really forced and awful.

**John:** And I would assume, just as the movie starts, that Zeke is actually our hero because he’s the guy who’s given a name and give, you know, he seems to be the center of the story but he’s not.

**Craig:** No. You sure would think that. And he’s not. And nothing is grounded. Not even the name of the studio and their mascot is grounded. It’s Zeke’s first day and yet apparently they don’t train people there, so he’s overly stupid and doesn’t know what anything is and makes ridiculous mistakes in order to set up bad punch lines.

So, the first page and a half is an unmitigated disaster. It gets a little bit more interesting when we actually get inside the stunt house, because you do have this kind, I guess I would describe, as sort of Addams Family setting. And even though, again, way too much description, there’s some interesting things happening.

This old man wakes up, and as the clock goes from 7:59 to 8:00 his eyes open up and this huge rot iron spiky chandelier plummets from the ceiling, puncturing the bed, and he rolls out the way and looks at his wristwatch and says, “I’m getting slower.” So, that’s kind of interesting, like, okay, they’ve rigged the house like Cato and Inspector Clouseau. A kind of constant test for them.

And on the third page you can see that their house is actually — and this is of course unfilmable; I mean, this comedy would have cost $400 million to do — the house literally is besieged by a fake flash flood. The people inside kind of amusingly know how to work with it. They’re using the flood waters to clean dishes. More terrible lines. It’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah. I do like, at the start of page three, the idea of the bus tram tour and the inept tour guide is funny. And there’s reason why, like, Kenneth the page works on 30 Rock. There’s a way that can work; where things go a little bit wrong, he’s saying the wrong stuff.

So, I did like at the top of page three it’s like, “‘Rumor has it that Wilford and his family still live in the old house, but I sure hope not, because I smell SMOKE!’

A simulated FLASH FLOOD is unleashed.

‘I mean…water.'”

That’s a good joke. The scene description line didn’t really help us there. But it is a nice idea. You set the wrong expectation and suddenly a flood comes by. You get a joke for that, the unexpected.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wouldn’t call that a joke. [laughs] I just think it’s awful. I mean, I hate it. And I think it’s really just juvenile and even more juvenile than for me. It’s really juvenile.

I mean, I don’t know. The only thing I look at this, I mean, I would have said had I read these pages, “This guy is never going to make it,” personally.

**John:** I see competence in there. I see, you know, I see you setting up sort of — trying to setup a world, trying to get into something. I see the instinct behind t”his is how we would set up a studio by giving a studio tour.” So, you had a sense of what the Universal thing would be. And once you get to Wilford’s room, and since you said Addams Family, I get that more now. I just didn’t get it on the page. But I can see where that would be.

But partly why I want to talk about first scripts is you kind of have to get one out of your system. You kind of have to get through it, just so you can get familiar with the format and just finish a document that’s 120 pages long, which is going to be the longest thing that most human beings will ever write. So, it’s just that process is an important part of getting started.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. I think doing this script, one of the things it drove home for me, if I can remember that accurately that far back, is that there was a lot — it was really important to take care of the fundamentals that weren’t related to comedy. To make sure that the story was well told and the characters were real and relatable and that the plot moved in an interesting way.

And even though the next script I wrote with Greg was also very ridiculous, and broad, and family-oriented, it was a movie. And they made it. And that was the second thing I ever wrote. So, I surely needed to do this.

**John:** Yeah. And I couldn’t have written Go as my first script. Go was too complicated. I needed to be confident with the format. Although I will say I wrote the first section of Go at about the same time I wrote Here and Now. The first section of Go was X, which was a short film which became the whole movie, but it’s really just that first act of Go. And if people are thinking about trying the format, writing something short might be a really good idea, because at least it will get you familiar with the format and you’re not juggling all of the complexities of how-do-you-tell-a-story-over-two-hours. You’re just trying to tell a story over a shorter period of time.

That’s a small bit of advice. But, eventually you do have to write a full lengthy script and there are going to be all of the challenges that come with writing a full length script. And it won’t be perfect, so don’t expect it to be perfect.

**Craig:** No. It will likely be absolute garbage.

**John:** Yeah. But people don’t remember the first time they wrote a school report. People don’t remember the first time they wrote a paragraph. This is such a bigger step that it’s hard to expect that it’s going to be great the first time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think I want to actually wrap it up today because this was actually sort of meaningful and touching. And we’ll save other Three Page Challenges for a future time.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. I’m glad you find it meaningful and touching. I just find it awful and depressing.

**John:** Well, see, we’ve come full circle then. Because I started the podcast sort of stressed out because of Halloweenie, and now I feel actually kind of better about myself, because in a slightly Schadenfreude way my pages were better than yours. So…

**Craig:** Well, I mean, honestly, you could have wiped your butt with three pages and roughly assembled the fecal smears into Courier shape and they would have been better than that. I mean, that’s just the worst. When I look at that stuff and I just think, “Good lord, what was I thinking?”

**John:** Yeah. Clearly your co-writer is the problem.

**Craig:** No. I can’t really blame him at all. [laughs] I can’t.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** No. I mean, the one thing when we talked about doing this, I did think, “Well, you know, it might not be fair because I did write it with somebody, and maybe the better way of approaching this would be for me to submit the first three pages of the first thing I wrote on my own.”

**John:** That’s not fair at all.

**Craig:** But that was kind of a cheat, because frankly that was a really good script. And, even though it didn’t get made, it’s probably why it didn’t get made because it was good. And I really love those first three pages of that thing. And I thought, “Well, this is just cheating. I’ve got to actually go back and just pull up The Stunt Family, for the love of god.”

But, I was 24 and foolish. You apparently were 24 and wise.

**John:** Yeah. Wise beyond my years. I decided to write, like while everyone was writing the high concept comedy I was writing the weepy, which didn’t get made either, but it got me started. So, god bless those first scripts.

**Craig:** I guess that’s the way you’ve got to look at it. This one got me going, too.

**John:** Every once and awhile a producer will ask for, or a development executive, will call my agent and say, “Hey, do we have any of John’s old scripts? Can we read some of his early things?” Or they will ask for the script specifically. And I had to say no. I don’t want that out anymore because it’s just not me anymore. There’s a reason why it’s not part of my active file.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I would say that the one script I just brought up that was sort of the first one that I wrote on my own I would love to see made. I think it still is an interesting one that works. Scott Frank is prepping a movie right now to direct that he wrote called The Walk Among the Tombstones, which he adapted from a Larry Block novel. I think. And he actually wrote that in ’97, I think, or ’98. And sort of it’s always been there and he’s kind of dusted it off and polished it up and gotten it ready to go.

**John:** That can work. Often there are bad examples, but there are also good examples. Unforgiven was an old script that sat around for a long time and someone said, “Hey, let’s make that script.”

**Craig:** Well, actually, Clint Eastwood bought when — David Peoples wrote that script. Clint Eastwood bought it, I think it was in the late ’70s or early ’80s I want to say. And put it in a drawer on purpose because he knew he wasn’t old enough to play the part. So, he bought it and just aged it like wine until he was ready.

**John:** I’m sure David Peoples was delighted.

**Craig:** You know what? He should be, because it’s one of the greatest movies ever made.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. But at the time, I mean, do you think for those 30 years David Peoples was like, “I’m so lucky that Clint Eastwood hasn’t made my movie.”

**Craig:** It wasn’t 30. It was like 12.

**John:** Everything feels like more time.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, Craig, our last piece of housekeeping. Scriptnotes Live in Austin, at the Austin Film Festival, is October 20 at 9am. So, people have written on Twitter to ask, “Hey, can I just get a ticket for that one event?” And I don’t think you can. I think it’s actually part of the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Austin Film Festival would be silly if they started to do things like that. I mean, the whole point is that they break even. And I don’t think it’s a profit organization, so they do need people to buy their passes to actually put on these things and support these events. So, no, you can’t just go see it. You have to buy a pass to the event. They are still available online. And there are a lot of other wonderful things to go see there.

**John:** Great writers there.

**Craig:** I mean, we will be, spectacular, no question. But…

**John:** And we have Aline Brosh McKenna is really our secret weapon.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think I’m our secret weapon.

**John:** Well, yeah, you’re right. That too. And if you want to talk to our secret weapon, Craig Mazin, on Twitter, you are @clmazin?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I am @johnaugust. That’s a good way if you have like small questions for us. If you have bigger questions, or if things you need to send in or ask us about, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a whole form on the website, johnaugust.com, about how to write stuff in.

And, thank you very much for listening to our podcast. Subscribe in iTunes if you don’t.

**Craig:** Wait! I have a Cool Thing, finally, and you’re just blowing right through it.

**John:** Oh, I blew right past it. Tell us your Cool Thing, Craig.

**Craig:** I’ll be really fast. It’s an App. It’s a game. It’s called The Room. The Room. It is for the iPad. It’s spectacular. I like these puzzle games. I like games that are sort of Myst-like if you remember that one.

**John:** I love Myst.

**Craig:** This one is gorgeously done. It’s beautiful. It’s in the perfect space of not too hard, not too easy. A really good hint system if you need it. Incredibly simple. You don’t know who you are. You’re in an attic and there is a box in front of you. And you proceed to examine the box, and open the box up, and then open the box inside the box, and a house inside the box, inside the house. It is spectacular. It’s so well-done. Download it.

**John:** Hooray. If you’re doing yours, I’m going to do mine. Mine rhymes with yours. Mine is called Moom. And it is an app for the Macintosh. And what Moom does is a very simple thing. It resizes windows in a very specific grid-like way. And so if you’re trying to have multiple windows open, like I am right now while we’re recording this podcast, that little green dot in the title bar of every window, which is mostly kind of useless, now when you hover over that with Moom it pops up a little gird and you can sort of draw how big you want that window to be.

And it just stacks your windows really nicely. So, it’s very helpful on a big monitor, but it’s also really helpful on smaller monitors as well, when you need to have two windows side by side. So, Moom for the Macintosh. It’s in the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** Room and Boom.

**John:** Moom.

**Craig:** Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Done. Podcast.

**Craig:** Podcast. Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Mic drop. Now.

**Craig:** Good luck, John, with Halloweenie and I’ll talk to you next week.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/action).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 53 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, right before we started recording this you were going to tell me the history of “D’oh!”

**Craig:** D’oh! So, I said “D’oh!” or you said “D’oh!” because I hit the button wrong. And so you pointed out correctly that “D’oh!” as popularized by Dan Castellaneta, the actor behind Homer Simpson, is never actually written out as “D’oh!” in the scripts. It’s written out as…

**John:** Exasperated gasp or grunt?

**Craig:** Annoyed grunt.

**John:** Annoyed grunt.

**Craig:** Annoyed grunt. It’s always been “annoyed grunt.” No Simpsons script ever says, “D’oh!” And there was an interesting interview with Dan — an awesome guy, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever met him; the nicest guy in the world. And he, when they asked him to come up with something there for annoyed grunt, because there was nothing there, they didn’t even know, they were just thinking that it would just be some kind of annoyed grunt. He remembered that there was this actor, I believe his name is Jim Finlayson — I think it’s Finlayson — who is a Scottish actor who played the straight guy in a lot of old Laurel & Hardy movies.

And he would go, “Doohh!” and usually it was because the idea was that he was trying to say “damn” but you couldn’t say “damn” back then.

**John:** A-ha. Yeah.

**Craig:** So he would say, “Doohh!” [laughs] And so Dan Castellaneta sort of converted that into “D’oh!” and gave us this wonderful annoyed grunt that we have today.

**John:** Yeah, the world is better for having “D’oh!”

**Craig:** Oh for sure.

**John:** It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Doohh! I like the old Scottish word, “Doohh!” It’s somewhere online. You know what? I’ll send you a link and you can put it up for the podcast. There’s actually a very brief clip of Jim Finlayson saying, “Doohh!” on YouTube. It’s quite educational.

**John:** Very good.

Craig, today I thought we would talk about action.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so I’m not talking about action like a genre, so we’re not talking Lethal Weapon movies, but action as stuff that characters do. So, anything a character says, well that’s dialogue. Anything a character does, that’s action.

So when you look at it at that level, really almost any script you’re going to write is going to be full of action. I guess maybe some genres, like a romantic comedy or like My Dinner with Andre, wouldn’t have a lot of action, but most movies are going to have a tremendous amount of action. It’s the kind of thing we don’t pay necessarily as much attention to because you never really get credit for it as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** If there’s dialogue people will say, “Oh, well somebody wrote that funny dialogue.” If there is a well-constructed sequence of action, no one really thinks about the fact that the screenwriter had to write that. But somebody did write that, and this is going to be talking about writing that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, there are certain movies where action is just sort of peppered in between things. And so, you know, a lot of comedies there will be action, but it’s mostly about the talking. Some genres, you know, horror movies, war movies, will have big set pieces that are all action. And writing those is incredibly draining and difficult, but rewarding when it’s done just right. So, let’s talk about making those awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. What should we do? How do we make it awesome?

**John:** Well, I think the first thing to think about is: think about reading the action sequences. And obviously the first thing a screenwriter needs to do is read a ton of scripts. And if you read a lot of scripts that have long action sequences, you’ll start to recognize what does not work on the page. And what tends to not work on the page is the stuff that makes you want to stop reading it. Either you stop reading the script all together or you just sort of skim the page and you don’t really read the action.

And if a person isn’t really reading the action in a comedy, it’s probably going to be okay, because that’s not really the meat of it. But if you’re writing a war movie and they stop reading the action, or a horror movie and they stop reading the action, you’re sort of dead. So…

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of the most frustrating things about writing action in the screenplay format. Because you’ve made two interesting points. The first point is that it is incumbent upon us as screenwriters to actually create the action that we intend to see on film. It may not work out exactly like that, but ultimately the — For instance, let’s take Die Hard: So he’s on a roof and he has to get off the roof because there is going to be a bomb going off and he sees that there’s a fire hose, a water hose for fire. And he takes that and he wraps it around his waist. And he jumps, and he goes down, and then the thing goes against the thing. And then it falls over…

**John:** It breaks.

**Craig:** …and he shoots his way through the glass. That’s an idea that the writer has to invent. So you are responsible for what’s on the screen. But, your second point: very well taken. You are responsible up to a point. The point where you have to stop being responsible is the point where it gets really boring to read. So we are forced to be both creative and incredibly economic in the way that we get those ideas across. It can be a challenge.

**John:** Yeah. So some suggestions I have for any action sequence or any bit of action that you have to describe: Keep your sentences short. Long sentences are more likely to get skipped and short sentences feel short; it feels like you’re getting right to it.

Keep your blocks of action scene description short. Three lines is probably a lot. You can vary them up — some can be one line, some can be two lines, some can be three lines, but if you have action blocks that are four lines, five lines, ten lines, people are going to skip them. They just will. So, as you’re going through your script and you see blocks of action that are more than five lines, see how you can break them up. See if there’s ways you can make them… either by cutting inside there or by just breaking them in half so that they not so intimidating for a reader to read.

Now, that’s not universal. Some writers love big blocks of action, and they get away with it. I read a David Koepp script that was like a half a page solid of action. But, in general, as I find the scripts that I’m actually willing to read, they keep those action lines short and tight. And they keep the blocks kind of small.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another tip is to think about how the text actually looks on the page. I get very OCD and finicky about it, particularly when the action leads up to something. Every action moment should be its own microcosm of beginning, middle, and end. And the end should be something that is surprising, and a revelation, and interesting, and moving us forward to the next thing.

You don’t want to necessarily have that thing drop off and end up on the top of the next page. You want it to pay off in that moment, and you want to use white space on the page to create suspense and tension. It actually works very well that way. Sometimes the best way to write action is to actually use more space, so take away some of the text and use some of the white page to really create impact.

And you can also — and I hesitate to say this because I don’t want people to go nuts with this — but I have seen some scripts where people use interesting formatting choices to kind of sell the action. I read a script from a young writer named Adam Barker, he’s very talented, and he did a very cool thing. There was an action sequence where someone is stalking somebody in the woods and our stalker has a bow and an arrow. And he pulls the bow back and he…

LETS…

IT…

FLY…

And “Lets” was its own line. And then “It” was kind of indented in. And “Fly” was indented even more. Like you could see the arrow flying just from the way he indented the words. Very clever. And it was fun to read. And it evoked — in its own way it evoked what his intention was, was for that arrow release to be a real release, instead of just, “He picks up the arrow and fires.”

**John:** Exactly. Remember, you’re always trying to create the experience of watching and hearing the movie in the theater just on the page. So, breaking those into three separate lines makes it feel like you’re really in that moment. You’re trying to create this hyper present tense as you’re working with the words on the page.

A script I did pretty recently, there is this very giant mechanical sound that preceded just really bad things happening, and so it’s a DWAAARRRM. And so for that DWAAARRRM I wrote it out as a big long onomatopoetic word. And that’s one of my rare sort of bold underlined words with double exclamation points at the end. But it’s saying, like, this is a really important thing. You are really going to pay attention and everyone is going to really notice this thing.

It’s important the first time it happens, but it becomes an important rhyming device, because later on in the sequence when you hear that thing happening you know stuff is about to get much, much, much worse. So, keeping in mind sort of how — not just how the reader is going to read that one page, but how you are structuring the sequence overall so that there is give and there is build.

And talk about white space, one of the most useful things I have found is using intermediate slug lines. So, a slug line is just a word over in the left hand margin, or a couple of words on the left hand margin, all upper case, that highlight a new moment within the action. So, it’s not that you’re moving to a different scene usually, but you’re going to a different moment in the action, or you’re highlighting a certain aspect of what’s going on there.

It replaces a lot of times, used to do “Angle On” or “Close-up Of.” A lot of times the slug line just by itself can give you that feeling of what the camera is doing next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also like capitalize. And I don’t have a specific set of rules for when I capitalize or not, but sometimes in action if there’s something I want people to pull out of it, assuming they’re skimming, I give it all caps. He FALLS. “Falls” might be in all caps. Grabbing onto a ROPE. Swinging down and landing with a crunch, he looks up, BLOOD. And “blood” is in all caps. Something just to engage — you know, you can actually see this in children’s books. Children’s authors have gotten really good at figuring how to capture young readers’ imaginations just through the manipulation of text font size, style, and even though we don’t quite need that level of ADD-oriented writing for our readers, it’s nice to at least throw them some things so it’s not all just a stream of Courier.

Because, your script is the fourth script they’re going to read today, of twelve maybe.

**John:** Yeah. To clarify, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t be writing in Courier. You should write in Courier. Your script should only be in Courier. I don’t think I’ve ever read a good script that used anything other than Courier, have you?

**Craig:** I’ve never written a script that used anything other than Courier.

**John:** There was Gus Van Sant script at one point that like every line was sort of in a different font, and it was as crazy as it sounds.

So, you’re still using Courier. What we’re saying is that there may be special cases where you are breaking out the bold or you’re breaking out the underline. But those should be special treats.

If you need the reader to focus on something, you can give it upper case. You can sort of break the lines in a certain way that they’re going to be noticing that special thing. I’ll put down a script if I see page after page where things get, like, asterisked and double underlined and bold faced. If you are shouting that everything is important then nothing becomes important.

**Craig:** Correct. Yeah. You don’t want to turn it into something ugly. And this comes down to taste. And now suddenly the writer has to be visually aware of what the page actually looks like.

There is sort of a trope that you can sort of tell if the script is bad just by flipping through it and looking at the way the pages look. And, it’s not always true, but there is something to it, that well-composed pages that have a… — You know, for instance, I don’t like pages to just have dialogue on them. And I see it all the time.

I’ll add action lines just to break up the dialogue, even if they’re not technically necessary, because I just don’t like the strips, you know?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** There’s just something about the way the page looks that becomes more pleasing and inviting to the reader.

**John:** When you have a lot of pages that is just dialogue, it looks like a bobsled shoot, like you’re just going to shoot down the page and nothing is going to stop it. And you want something that just breaks it up in the right place. You know, actual people speaking does have give and take and starts and stops. And just adding that bit of sort of throwaway action that people aren’t really even reading the action, it’s just stopping them enough so that it has some texture to it.

**Craig:** And it reminds you along the way that maybe you’re missing an opportunity for something to be going on beyond two people talking. You know, Ted Elliott tells this great story about how he and Terry Rossio were hired to work on Aladdin. And it was their first animated movie. And so they wrote this scene where Aladdin meets the princess in the marketplace and she’s disguised as a beggar and he doesn’t know she’s a princess. And they wrote the scene, it was really good dialogue that they liked between the two of them.

And then the story artist showed them what it looked like and it was basically his face, her face, his face, her face, his face, her face. And they looked at each other like, “Oh no, that’s really boring.” And that’s when they decided to… — Then they said, “Okay, well we have this monkey; maybe the monkey is jealous? Maybe the monkey is doing something behind their back while they’re…”

And suddenly the scene became a scene. And that’s a great lesson to think about when you’re talking about live action, too. Sometimes just ping-ponging back and forth between faces is boring. And if you look at a script at you just see strips of dialogue, in your mind that’s what will be happening. Ping-ponging.

**John:** The point you’re making there is it’s crucial because we shouldn’t just be talking about action like this, action sequences. Action is what’s happening within the scenes. It’s all the stuff that the characters are doing. And so you had a scene that the dialogue was fine but you still have to be able to write all that action of what that monkey is doing that’s making that scene interesting and alive. And making sure that however you’re writing the action for the monkey is really interesting, but it’s not going to pull the reader away from what’s actually happening in the dialogue.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so finding that balance is really tough, so that it can both be about the dialogue and be about the background action that’s happening as part of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally they’re both interrelated and that’s how you get layering.

**John:** Yeah. Another sort of technique you can think about for when you need to write action is what I call parallel structure, which is that sometimes you can find — if you have a lot of sentences that start like, “He runs down the alley. He breaks open the door. He charges up the stairs.” You can often lop off your subjects of those lines. So, “He runs down the alley. Busts open the door. Races up the stairs.”

You can often use fragments once you’ve established what the subject of those sentences is going to be. It’s a way again of just making you feel very present in those moments by losing little bits of it. You can often still lose punctuation. So, a lot of times when you have action sequences, a couple action lines, especially if they’re feeding into some dialogue, don’t end the sentence. Give it like two dashes or a dot-dot-dot that feeds into the next line of dialogue.

So, just don’t stop things. Let them keep running.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. It’s rare that I put a period on the end of anything, really, I mean unless it’s sort of a final thing. You should just ask yourself what am I supposed to — what do I want the audience to be feeling right now? If I want them to feel anxious sometimes I’ll run a bunch of words together and take the spaces out from between the words, like the paragraph is on coke, you know?

There are all sorts of things you can do. You don’t want to overdo them. You just want to be aware. And you want to ask yourself is this action paragraph or action sentence conveying a sense of my intention or is it just boringly descriptive, or is over descriptive, is it prosy? That’s the other classic rookie mistake is to write action like you’re writing a novel, describing the shade of the light as it passes over the glistening due covering the flowers, the blah, blah, blah.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s not just an adjective problem. I find a lot of times it is people use really poetic verbs to describe some things that are like, wow, that just pulled me completely out of the moment. It’s too much — the sky is always being painted by things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And a little of that scene description can be lovely. Too much of it becomes really, really frustrating. I find characters also have a hard time walking in scripts. They’re always “approaching,” and “advancing,” and “skulking.” And sometimes that specificity is really important and sometimes people should just walk. Or sometimes people should just be where they need to be.

**Craig:** I like “crossing,” because at that point… — See, sometimes what I don’t like about the purple prose is that it is giving me the sense that the writer isn’t really into the movie. They’re into their document of the screenplay. And I want the reader to be into the movie. So, I like crossing because that’s in fact what’s happening.

“He crosses over to her.” We’re blocking now. We’re making a movie. Sometimes you do need to be more descriptive about how people move, but yeah, the skulking stuff and all that, it can get a little much.

**John:** So, general advice for all of these kinds of situations is to read a lot of scripts and read scripts of movies you like and try to find styles of stuff you like. For me, and actually for most writers I think of my generation, the James Cameron scripts were incredibly influential and incredibly helpful. So you read James Cameron’s Aliens script and you have a really good sense of what this world is going to be like and how it’s going to feel.

And the kinds of things we’re talking about — the keeping the blocks short, keeping sentences short, only talking about the camera when you really need to talk about the camera — that’s a very James Cameron kind of thing to do. And that was an incredibly important thing for me. The Aliens script, the Point Break script were both hugely influential.

But we have some different scripts that we can talk about today because we are actually going to do four samples…

**Craig:** Four!

**John:** …of the Three Page Challenge. So, it’s a groundbreaking episode in that we’re going to talk about four. And we specifically chose these samples because they’re about action. And so we can talk about what these scripts are doing terrifically well in action, and what they could do a little bit better in action.

So, we’ll talk about them overall and our impressions, but we’re really going to focus on the action in these scripts and what’s there and what could be better.

So, the four scripts that we’re going to talk about, if you want to read along with us they are all going to be in the show notes for the episode, so johnaugust.com, and podcast, and find this episode. And let’s get started.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** We’re going to start with a script by Ben Jacoby. And I’ll give you a little summary here of what happens. So, we open in an alley in Plav, Montenegro where we meet Terry Redding, who’s in his 40s. He meets up with Ian Morris, who is also in his 40s. Ian tells him that the target is upstairs and alone. So it feels like some sort of assassination or something is going on here.

We see Terry walking down a hallway. He passes some assault agents who are apparently on his side. From outside there are thermal sites that look through the brick wall and show that a man is sitting in a certain position in a room. Terry knocks on the door; there is no answer. He opens it to find General Aliyev bound to a chair. He’s dead, electrodes through his body, and there are these pipes that are pumping these colored fluids into him.

Terry realizes it’s a bomb. He runs for it. There is a huge explosion, blue flames that melt flash. At the bottom of page three we have an aerial shot of the CIA headquarters of Langley, and it’s snowing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I enjoyed it. I thought it moved along pretty snappily. I mean, there is a cool idea in it which I like, and I thought that the idea was revealed well. It was setup well and revealed well, so there is this concept: “We’re going to lure these guys to get someone and then we’re going to blow them up. But we know that they have thermal imaging and they can see if someone is alive or not, so they’re going to see this dead body in there and not fall for it. But what if we take this body, heat it up, and make it look like he’s alive with the very stuff that we’ll then use to blow these people up?”

So I thought it was actually setup well. There was good suspense. There was an explosion. I was a little confused by the nature of the explosion, which almost bordered on supernatural. Perhaps that’s intentional.

But, I wasn’t bored by much. I thought it was, you know, set the — I liked it. What do you think?

**John:** I liked it, too. There’s some really good stuff there. I actually really like the description of the explosion because it was sort of supernatural. It was clearly supposed to be a very unique kind of explosive device happening, and so I liked that the description took its time for that. And I liked the description of the machinery that was pumping the stuff through. I thought it was all really well done.

Just some style notes. This one, he uses bold slug lines, which is fine. If you like to bold your slug lines, go for it. And so there is no right or wrong bolding or not bolding it.

I thought he did a great job keeping his blocks of action pretty short.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I was never tempted to skip over stuff because I’m not making too much of a commitment to read two or three lines at a time.

I got confused by some stuff. On page two — I’m sorry, actually — On page one, “Terry advances down a dilapidated hallway.” Okay, “advances down” is one of sort of my, like, well he’s walking. I just felt like we could do better than “advancing” because it makes me think of, like, “What does advancing really mean?” I stop to think about it; and you never want me to stop and think.

**Craig:** Right. “Moves” would have been a perfectly good word there.

**John:** Yeah. “Moves.” “Makes his way down.”

“Pre-Soviet floorboards creak under each footfall as he passes ASSAULT AGENTS, one after another, nestled in nooks, Vector machine-guns at the ready.” Couple issues. First off, that’s a really long sentence that is bringing together a whole bunch of different stuff. So, are we focusing on the creaky floorboards, that it’s Pre-Soviet Russia, Assault Agents? I don’t know what Assault Agents are so I felt like I needed that broken into two sentences and, like, tell me who assault agents are. Are they soldiers with Kevlar and night vision goggles? I don’t know who these people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I was confused and, again, I had to stop and think about it. Oh, and there was a bit of poetry at the start that I wasn’t crazy about. “Gray autumn wind strokes the streets with dead leaves.”

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. I mean, don’t need that sort of thing. It’s not the end of the world but, I think… I mean, ultimately here’s what happens: It doesn’t get read. It becomes literally whitewash for your eyeballs.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing I’d say: We can’t see wind. We can see dead leaves. And so if you really want the leaves blowing down the street, like, “Dead leaves scrape across the street as we reveal Terry Redding.” I mean, you can have those dead leaves there, but we can’t see gray wind, so give us the leaves if you’re going to do that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An overall general note: I liked sort of what happened in this teaser, but it felt like an Alias teaser to me. It felt like, okay, this is the first opening act thing and then we’re going to get to Langley and then we’re going to sort of start the story. I didn’t know anything about these characters, and I wanted to know a little bit more about what was unique or special about these people given these three pages. Just something more specific about them, because all the dialogue that we have here is very sort of standard boiler-platy for this kind of genre.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s true. Of course, page four could be spectacular and we could find out about these people and what happened. I hesitate to judge on that basis. I mean, yes, it’s true: many, many action movies open this way with guys on a mission and then something explodes. But, in terms of the way he crafted it, I thought it was well done. There is an interesting idea at the heart of it.

And I liked on page two, just to circle back to my point about white space, “Terry pauses. Deep breath.” Return. “HE KNOCKS ON THE DOOR.” All Caps. Return. “No response.”

I like that. He took the time on the page, and that creates anticipation. You know, what you can’t teach, what no one I don’t think can teach to screenwriters, is rhythm and dramatic rhythm. You know that this guy is going to walk up to a door. He’s going to knock on the door. And you know as the writer that on the other side of that door is something that is quite the opposite of what he expects, of what everyone expects. That justifies a sense of anticipation.

And that justifies writing it out this way. So there’s a good, innate sense of rhythm and how this should be executed. So, all told, I think it’s a good example of how to write action well. And good job. What was the writer’s name again?

**John:** Ben Jacoby.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** Yeah. Hooray. Congratulations, Ben.

Let’s move onto our next sample. This is by Trevor Hollen. And it’s a script, the title page on this was Everything Means Nothing to Me.

**Craig:** Great title.

**John:** It’s a great title. What a great title. It feels like a good dark anthem, or like sort of a punk rock emo kind of awesomeness. I like it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really cool.

**John:** So some description about what’s happening here. So, we open with a beaten up woman named Max. She bursts out of a warehouse, handcuffed to a dead man, which she drags behind her. There are some headlights. She looks up as brakes squeal. We cut to Max watching a movie at a theater. This is obviously, evidently before, because she’s not beaten up. Then we’re with her in the lobby where she looks at a poster for a movie called Streets of Fire.

She checks her phone. Two missed messages. The battery dies. She drives and she smokes. Then, earlier that night, we have a scene at Meltdown Comics — which I think is where they record the Nerdist Podcast —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** — where we meet a new guy named Johnny who shoplifts, and then he exits. We crosscut this with Max, and then we go back to Johnny, who is pursued by two guys. And that’s the end of page three.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it’s hard to critique this on the basis of the way that the action was written out. It wasn’t that the action was written out poorly per se; it’s just that I was bored. I mean, and I shouldn’t have been bored because it starts with this woman — she’s not dragging a body; she’s got a body slung over her back, which immediately stops me. It’s not easy, assuming this is an average weight man of 175 pounds — 175 pounds of dead weight over a woman’s shoulder as she’s walking is a little bit of a tough one to buy, especially because she’s tiny.

And then these headlights light up her face. She turns. Brakes squeal. Okay, and now we’re in this theater. I got a little confused. I thought, okay, this is actually set in the ’80s because she’s watching… — the Streets of Fire is going to be coming up, but then I know she’s got a cell phone, it must be a retro theater, I guess, that shows old movies.

Now she’s in the car. I’m not sure if the scene, Int. Max’s Car, where she’s driving and listening to South Pacific, is necessary. Nothing happens in it.

We go to Johnny. Johnny is reading a comic book. He walks outside. And now he’s being followed. We cut back to Max’s car; she’s still singing — not sure why. And then now these other people are following Johnny and, oh my gosh, here comes a truck, which I just saw on page one. I just saw trucks. [laughs] This is a different truck, by the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If it were the same truck I’d think, “Okay, there’s killer trucks out there,” but there’s two box trucks on the first page. There is a pickup truck that is about to hit Johnny on page three. The whole “I’m about to get hit by a truck” thing is a tough one to pull off anyway because it’s a little bit cliché. To try it two times in the first three pages, you’re starting to push it.

**John:** When you first said that you got bored, and it seems like it should be really hard to get bored in three pages, but I kind of got bored, too. And it’s because I got confused. I got confused. I lost faith that my rapt attention would be rewarded.

I felt like the script wasn’t connecting, like the dots weren’t connecting, and I didn’t believe the dots necessarily were going to connect, especially while it’s sort of line to line. And it honestly starts at the very beginning for me, is that as I gave you the description I told you, like, this girl Max, but as it’s actually on the page, “Door flies open. MAX exits bloody as hell. Right eye is swollen shut. A (very dead) man is handcuffed to her left wrist and slung over her back.”

Okay, wait, so she’s a girl but the only way that we know that she’s a woman — Max feels like a man’s name — but we know it’s a woman because of “her left wrist.” But, why are you burying that here? Why did you let that go through… — You already gave us an image of her right eye being swollen shut, so we saw that in our head, but we think it’s a man. So, now we have to go back and replace that image in our head with a woman.

If you had just gave us like, “A young woman exits, bloody as hell. Right eye swollen shut. A man is handcuffed to her left wrist and slung over her back. This girl is MAX.” Then, like, okay, so we know it’s a woman first, and then we know her name. Then this would be a little bit more into this first moment that’s happening.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. That’s a really good point, John, because you know what: it’s funny — when I read that paragraph I just didn’t understand why, but you’ve put your finger on it, of why I stopped. My impression was that, “Oh, the author is being a bit clever here,” like, “Look, I’m just going to subtly point out she’s a woman this way.” And I thought, “Eh, don’t be clever, I hate that.”

But actually your point is the right one. I had to rebuild the image in my head. And that’s on the top of page one. That’s a bad feeling.

**John:** Yeah. Also at the top of page one. “FADE IN:”

“EXT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE — NIGHT.”

Next line. “The Warehouse District of L.A.”

Okay, so you said warehouse twice in two lines. That doesn’t actually give me anything else. So, rather than sort of saying, “The Warehouse District of L.A.” that line could be something that gives me a sense of what this place is like. If you want to say that we’re in Los Angeles, that’s fine, but give us a sense of what this actual space is rather than just like “Warehouse District” because I don’t know what the Warehouse District looks like or feels like.

So, give us some color of light. Give us some dogs barking in the distance. Give us something else that gives us some color to it rather than just, like, giving me a thing that I don’t know.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** There was some stuff I did like, and I want to point that out. I felt like the writer had some interesting detail stuff that made me curious about the characters. I liked that her car stereo is ripped out of the dash, and so she’s listening to a boom box instead. That’s cool.

I like that we’re in specific places, like Meltdown Comics. But where I lost faith was we were cross-cutting between… — So we start in, it feels like, the presence tense, and then we move back in time, and we’re sort of catching up for awhile. But then we move to Johnny, that’s apparently earlier that night. And, like, okay, so we’re still moving back further in time, okay, but it’s not clear then — is he in the same timeline as Max at this point? And it’s only three pages in.

**Craig:** God, I didn’t even notice that. In my mind, literally in my mind, I just assumed that this was happening simultaneously. You’re right, it does say earlier. That’s insane; you can’t do that. You can’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** It’s unclear to me whether that “Earlier that night” means earlier than the very first scene we saw where she was dragging the body, or if it means earlier…

**Craig:** No, no.

**John:** …It should be earlier than the last thing we saw. And the last thing we saw was Max driving. And so, wait. Are we in a third time sequence here?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re apparently going… — Maybe this is one of those going…No, it’s not a going in reverse movie because it starts after, and then we go back, and then we’re moving forward because she walks out of the theater. I don’t understand what’s going on now. Now I’m really confused. I also have to say, you know, you don’t want to read the first three pages and think there’s two scenes I could just cut here because they’re not doing anything for me. This is precious real estate; everything has to be earned.

Wow, you’re right. That is earlier. Yeah, no, you can’t do that.

**John:** So, Go, my first script, my first produced movie, it opens with something that happens later in the movie, so we see Ronna in the ditch and she’s “18, bloody, and bleeding,” and so that’s a description of her. And so we’re like, oh, we know that something interesting is going to happen there.

And then we have Claire giving some dialogue, which sort of sets up the question of the movie. And then it does start moving forward in time. But it’s not trying to be incredibly clever or sophisticated at that point. It’s like it is setting up sort of a world, and then the story starts. And I just didn’t have faith that this story was going to be starting here because just a bunch of stuff was happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a bit of a confusion that’s going on in there. So, I think this one needs a little love, a little help.

**John:** Needs a little love.

Next, go to a script by Randall Knox and Jason Zahodnik called Dog Tags. So, some description on Dog Tags. We begin at an infantry camp in North Africa, 1942 — I love period movies —

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** — where a private slides a field report under Colonel Mason’s door. Inside the Colonel’s quarters we see a man in silhouette who is smoking. He looks through the field reports. A hand pulls out a handgun. Then a single gunshot. Only then do we realize there was a second man in the room and he’s staging this to look like a suicide.

We cut to a British transport plane roaring through the sky. Inside a few dozen soldiers. The copilot says they’ll be down in 20.

On the runway we single out a British officer, Jack Sherman, and an American military police officer named Richards. They introduce themselves to each other. The British Officer has, surprisingly, a southern accent. He’s here to investigate the Colonel’s death. And that’s the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** Right. Well, so this is sort of a prime example of overwriting action. Here’s the good news — I’ll lead with the good news. I really liked what was happening. I like the trick of what happened in the room. I thought there was a really good idea behind it. It was interesting. And I liked the final exchange between the guy who runs the outpost and the man who’s been sent to investigate this crime. It had good promise.

There are some dialogue issues. You made a point a couple of these, when we did one of these, remember there were three pages where the first line of dialogue was on the third page? There’s a little bit of dialogue on the first page. The second page is all dialogue-free. And then the third page, this copilot comes out and delivers very clunky dialogue. And similarly then Major Richards has clunky dialogue. And a lot of people announcing stuff that everybody in the scene already ought to know, that kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this could be improved greatly by just thinning out the action descriptions to get to the meat of what we need to know.

**John:** I agree. I felt that the opening was overwritten for what it was. All we’re seeing is a private delivering a folder to his commanding officer. And so there was a lot of stuff sort of happening that didn’t really get us very much of anything.

So, if you want to setup a world, maybe we should have walked through the camp a little bit more, seen a little bit more of sort of what this universe was. But it felt like a lot of shoe leather just to get a folder underneath the door.

Then, once we were inside, I actually kind of dug the description of what was going on. It felt very Hitchcockian, that it’s a very limited focus in that the camera is looking at this, the camera is looking at this. One thing I would point out though: there’s a lot of “we sees” and “we hears,” and some people hate “we see” and “we hear.” I actually like “we see” and “we hear” when used judiciously. Here I thought there was a little too much of it.

**Craig:** I agree actually. Yeah, I’m a big fan of “we see” when it is called for. But, for instance, “We see a limp arm dangling from a chair,” you could actually just say, “A limp arm.” Or, “we see” is okay there, but I don’t know…

**John:** On page two, it starts with, “We hear him sigh as he sets his glasses on the desk.”

**Craig:** That should be, “He sighs.”

**John:** “He sighs.” And I would make the…

**Craig:** “He sets his glasses on the desk,” you know.

**John:** I would make — “A limp arm dangles” is fine, too.

To me, here is the criteria for when I think you are justified using a “we see” or “we hear:” If the cause is invisible, a “we see” or “we hear” may save you. It might say like, okay, “We hear a tremendous rushing of something,” or a lot of times I’ll use the “we” for if we are describing how the camera is moving. So, like, “We float over the camp as we slowly descend into something.” I’ll use the “we”s for that, but a lot of times — I would always look for if I can take the “we see” or “we hear” out, and it makes as much sense, then cut it out.

**Craig:** Yeah, I tend to use “we see” for things that I want the audience to be aware of but also for the audience to be aware that other characters aren’t aware of. So, “A man rises. Behind him, we see a killer with a knife.” Because if you don’t say “we see” sometimes it is implied that he might know that there is a killer with a knife back there.

But, everybody has their different cause for it, but in this case what sort of pops out to me about the way this was written — I’m not surprised that you liked the action description of the part in the tent, because aside from the fact that it was innately interesting, we are more forging of description of big ticket items: murders, suicides, sex. We are far less forgiving of long descriptive paragraphs of sleepy military camps while folks snooze.

And, frankly, the biggest crime of the first paragraph is that by overwriting about the moonlight and the smoking cigarettes and the quiet and the sleeping, is that he’s burying — the writer is burying an important thing that he has put in there, which is that artillery is going off in the background.

**John:** I completely missed it.

**Craig:** And the reason that’s important, is because I believe now that someone could get shot and no one would flinch because they just think it’s just an artillery. So, if I were doing this I would probably say, “SUPER: North Africa — 1942. A military camp. Rows of tents. Men are sleeping. In the background, pop, pop, POP. Artillery goes off. The men barely flinch. They’re used to it by now. A private walks across to…”

You know what I mean? Make that something, so that we get that it is important later. You’d be surprised, screenwriters, how often the rest of the producing world, the directors and ADs and prop don’t ever get that that was important. [laughs] Do you know what I mean? So you make it important.

**John:** Looking back at that first paragraph, which I’ll admit I did skim because it was seven lines long, I missed that the artillery was going off partly because it wasn’t capitalized. And we’re sort of past the stage where like, oh, all sound effects and have to be capitalized. We’re not doing radio plays anymore, so it’s not that that’s important, but the artillery is really important. That’s the most important thing that’s helping to set up the scene there, so that should be capitalized.

I also feel like all the other people that he’s passing, or groups of people, capitalize them too so that we see that there are more people in this world. Because just looking at that first paragraph, I sort of assumed that the private was the only person that we’re seeing in the whole scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just very quickly on dialogue — because I read it and might as well help you out here if I can: What the private said was fine. And then we get to this copilot. “All right, you lot. We’re twenty minutes, give or take a tick, from the base, so be prepared to get out and unload sharpish. We’ve got to keep the runway clear.” That’s a lot of talking from a guy who’s talking to seasoned — what appears to be — seasoned people, or at least people who know what their job is. It’s not like they’re jumping out of a plane for the first time or getting off a plane for the first time.

To me it could be as simple as “’20 minutes.’ Slams the door shut.” Do you know what I mean? “The guys all look at each other.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Then, when they land, Jack, our hero I assume, who is going to be investigating this, comes out of the plane. And there is a pudgy military officer, Major Richards, and he says to Jack, “Major Sherman, I’m Major Richards. I’m the head Military Police officer here at the base. Welcome to Algeria.”

I’m pretty sure that he’s been expecting him. “Major Sherman. I’m Major Richards. Welcome to Algeria,” would be fine. “I’m the head military police officer here at the base” — eh, that’s probably unnecessary. We should be able to tell from his stature or from something that’s not spoken that he’s in charge.

“Given how quickly you were flown out here, I’m sure you’re wondering what the situation is.” Perhaps maybe just, “You’re probably wondering what the situation is.”

And then Jack says, “Y’all have a dead colonel on your hands and you need me to confirm how it happened.” “Oh, so you’ve been briefed.” “No.” I like that. I like the fact that he hadn’t been briefed, but somehow he knows what’s going on. That’s kind of cool.

But just watch the overdone dialogue, particularly when you’ve done such a good job of creating silent, interesting stuff — meaning dialogue-free interesting stuff.

**John:** Agreed.

One more thing I’m just catching on page three: So we’re at exterior runway, “20 minutes, give or take a tick later,” which is kind of funny. The copilot was saying, “Give or take a tick later,” and he uses that, that’s fine. But the actual scene description here, “The plane touches down and taxis to a halt. The men inside file down the staircase and unload their cargo from the rear.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That’s — you both have the plane landing, taxiing…

**Craig:** And taxiing.

**John:** And the men have disembarked and gotten their gear. In two sentences. So that is fast. And while it’s true that once upon a time we used to do, “Atlanta burns” for like Gone with the Wind, and there wasn’t more description, it’s like…that is a tremendous amount to pack in two lines. So, I would question whether, do we need to see the plane land? Okay, let the plane land in a scene header and then let’s get right to the people that we want to pay attention to disembarking.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Don’t setup all the background action.

**Craig:** Yeah, the way that’s going to be in the movie is, “A plane comes down for a landing. Cut to…” I mean, whether you want to write “Cut To” or not, “The men are offloading the plane.” We’re not watching planes land and taxiing. You might as well write that they unbuckle, send their service items to the aisle, etc.

**John:** Yeah. There are movies where all that specific detail is really important. This is clearly not that movie, so I would say: edit it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Our final action sequence for this batch is by David Stripinis. And let me give you some description here:

We start in a South Boston bar in 1984, where everyone is watching Mary Lou Retton win the Olympics. Fire trucks outside take us to a brownstone fire. One of the fire fighters, Kavanagh, is going through the house. In the nursery he finds a dead woman cradling a baby. The baby is still alive. Part of the house collapses, apparently trapping Kavanagh and the baby as we end page three.

**Craig:** Right. So, well, there’s a very, very, very generic thing going on here. It doesn’t start that way. I had hopes on the first page. There’s this bar scene; it’s very Boston. People are watching Mary Lou Retton. They’re getting excited. I understand completely what time it is because of that, which I thought was very nice.

And suddenly these fire trucks are going by, people run outside, and that carries us to this fire. Now, page two just comes from the generic fire book: men going through, saying things that firemen say like, “Get out of there,” and, “We’re out of here,” and, “No, I’m not leaving until I check this room. Someone is here.” “Get out of there.” Very, very rote.

And you have to be aware of the movies that have come before you and not simply just do exactly — I mean, that is the fire scene. Everybody has done that fire scene. But it’s not that it was written poorly — I mean, there are some interesting touches. A teddy bear that’s melting. That’s kind of cool.

So, in terms of action description, “Flames whip around a nursery. A large TEDDY BEAR melts, it’s polyester…” Now, “it’s” with an apostrophe is a problem. “It’s polyester guts oozing out.” If you had put a period there I would have given him a gold star. But he says, “It’s polyester guts oozing out like the lava of Kilauea.” So that’s what we call a mixed metaphor folks. [laughs] That is the definition of mixed metaphor. Try not to do that; it’s unnecessary.

And this man finds this baby, which is really horrifying. This is the other thing, is tonally I have no idea what the hell is going on, because we started with this kind of funny scene in a pub, then we go to a very standard B-movie firefighting scene, and on page three we are literally looking at the most horrifying graphic thing I’ve ever seen.

And if this movie rests on being super horrifying and graphic, okay. But truthfully, you have to be really aware when you get this graphic and gross. And you have to give it credit and you have to honor it. I mean, like in Silence of the Lambs there are moments that honor it, but they don’t come on page three. And you’re really putting people back on their feet with something this — that is, I mean, you’re going to get people walking out.

**John:** It’s a really gruesome image. I think it’s an effective image, it’s just really, really gruesome. And your point about Silence of the Lambs is key, because in Silence of the Lambs we have invested interest in Jodie Foster and these characters by the time the gross, gruesome stuff comes. So we’re not going to, like, turn off from the movie when it happens.

But here it is happening so early, like, oh my god, I don’t know if I want to keep watching that.

**Craig:** Well, also, there’s no reaction to it. I mean, in Silence of the Lambs you have people looking at photos and turning away and reacting and being human, even in small ways, because they are disgusted by what they see. This man looks at something that’s the grossest thing ever and no response from him whatsoever in the pages. And that’s the most important part is how the characters respond.

Just as a thought: in the beginning it seems to me that if you’re going to show this bar, you probably don’t need three-quarters of a page of bar stuff and then have trouble, unless you were going to interrupt it in an interesting way. For instance, they’re all sitting around, woo-woo, they’re all cheering for the Olympics, and then BOOM, something rattles the window and they all turn up and look. And then they move to the glass and they see in the distance, BOOM, another fire ball. And then three fire trucks go by. Something that’s a little more astonishing than — I mean, anyone who listens to this podcast hears three fire trucks going by on any given day. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. We don’t even look anymore. We just know that they’re going to pass by.

**Craig:** Exactly. They’re going to pass by.

**John:** I agree. To me that first sequence, I like that it is setting up 1984. I think Mary Lou Retton is actually a very smart way to tell us exactly when this is happening and sort of what our world is, but I want to get out of there right after the bartender’s first line, either with some explosion or just the passing lights that lead us to that thing to let us know that this is just to setup the world and the time and now we’re going to follow these fire trucks and we’ll be in a firefighting mode.

The dialogue is an issue, and I felt so many of these lines could have been in our podcast last week where we talked about those sort of, like, the lines that you keep hearing way too much in movies. “Someone’s in there. I’ve got a live one.”

**Craig:** Even “Pull your team out.”

**John:** Yeah, “Pull your team out.” That’s in every firefighter movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Get out.” Just, “All right, everyone out.”

**John:** Since we’re talking about action, I do want to talk about the action, because even some of the stuff felt a little cliché to me, the actual description of stuff happening was kind of nice. And that moment that was described was really gruesome, but it was well-described. Our block length is really short. I was never tempted to skim because most of these times I’m only committed to reading one and a half lines at a time. So, you’re going to get me through the page that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And a pretty good breakup of sort of dialogue — I wasn’t happy with some of the dialogue but I was happy that the dialogue was interspersing the action. So, it’s not just I’m going to commit to reading a line or a block of scene description, but if a page is nothing but scene description I will panic a bit because it is like, “Oh my god, I can’t read that whole page.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But because you were interspersing and you were doing other stuff on the page — in this case it is dialogue breaking up the page — I’m more inclined to actually read every word of it. So, that stuff I liked. And so to me it felt like a pretty good version of a scene that I’m going to probably see in Derek Haas’s firefighter show. But when Derek has his firefighter show I will know who these characters are ahead of time and will have a vested interest in their safety, and security, and what they’re doing in that scene.

Here I don’t because it’s the first time I’ve met this guy Kavanagh.

**Craig:** And I would be surprised if Derek’s show had this level of clamminess. “Get out of there.” “I told you get out of there, man.” You know, maybe it will, but hopefully not.

**John:** I think it can do better than that. But, at the bottom of page three right now Kavanagh is saying, “Sorry little guy. Guess I wasn’t meant to be a hero after all.”

**Craig:** Oh yeah. That’s brutal. Brutal.

**John:** What?! Maybe if you set up 15 pages before that his father never believed in him, or I don’t know, or where he’s going through training or something. But, like, what?!

**Craig:** It’s crazy. Who’s the screenwriter again of this one?

**John:** David Stripinis.

**Craig:** David. Okay, I like to talk to people by name. David, here’s the deal: This man just saw a burned alive woman with no eyes. Her eyes were melted away. He has found a live baby with a charred forearm. And injured babies are horrifying things for us to look at. He is facing death, and he has this very calm moment where he just sort of says, “Sorry little guy. Guess I wasn’t meant…”

I mean, no. Now here’s the thing: You don’t need that line at all. “He slumps down, back against the wall defeated. He pulls off his respirator.” That’s great. He’s giving up. I love it.

“The infant looks at him with a startling amount of clarity in his eyes. He looks back.” That’s all you need. No talking there. You’ve got to know when to talk and you’ve got to know when you don’t talk. And you don’t talk when you’re alone with a charred baby about to die.

You can get away with no talking there if you eliminate some of this other stuff. I would also argue, David, that you don’t need the whole “Get out” stuff. Because if you think about it, all you’re really doing is giving away what’s so shocking about what you’ve written. This should be quite the opposite. It’s a house fire, but it’s pretty standard. Everybody should be under control. We’re just doing what we do. It’s a fire. It’s dangerous. “How are we doing in there?” “Okay, just checking the last hallway.” “We gotta go man; this doesn’t look too good.” “Um, yeah, just give me one second.” “Boss says we gotta go now.” “Yeah, I said one second.” Opens up a door. There’s no one in there. And he walks over and he finds the baby. “Holy shit.” “We gotta go.”

And then suddenly out of nowhere, KABOOM.

It just would be so much more interesting than somebody explaining to us before we ever meet this guy, you’re about to die. Don’t you think?

**John:** I agree. Surprise. Because the minute we hear “Pull your people out,” it’s like we know the whole thing is going down.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And the whole “Pull your people out,” the whole thing is going down — that is usually used as surprised stuffing. It’s like filler surprise. It’s not really surprise. It’s fake surprise because we’ve seen it so often, but that’s what it’s there for.

You don’t need that filler. You have an actual surprise: A baby underneath a burnt-alive woman. Yikes. Yuck. So, I mean, use that.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** So, again, I want to thank our four people who wrote in with their samples, because these were amazing and you guys were so brave to write in and let us talk about your work. And I hope it was helpful.

Most people who have gone through this process seem to have enjoyed it. I’ve gotten good feedback from the people we’ve reviewed before, so I hope these four felt it was helpful and useful in their further writing careers.

**Craig:** And I just want to add, for our four people who sent things in, I just want to add for them that I thought each one of them had something that was very encouraging. There wasn’t one of them this week that I thought, “Oh, you’ll never be able to do this.” So, is that encouraging? Did that sound encouraging?

**John:** That did sound encouraging.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Oh my god. I keep forgetting that we have One Cool Thing.

**John:** Yeah, that’s okay. I’ll just give you my One Cool Thing and we’ll wrap it up early.

My One Cool Thing is a movie that’s in theaters right now. It’s called Sleepwalk With Me. It’s by a guy named Mike Birbiglia, who is a comedian who starts in and co-wrote and directed this movie. And it’s really charming, and I would highly recommend it. It feels very much like Annie Hall as a structure, in that it’s a guy analyzing a relationship and talking to camera at times while the story is being told. But it’s really funny and really well done.

I first recognize Mike from he’s in Lena Dunham’s show, Girls. He plays the guy who — Lena does a job interview, and he’s the guy who may hire her. And they have a very funny just one-off scene. And the scene was so good just by itself that I’m like — he’s on my radar.

And, god bless him, he made a really good little movie. Ira Glass of NPR fame produced it and co-wrote it. And I highly recommend it. So it’s playing in like 140 theaters across the country and I think people will really like it. I think it’s going to be the one little movie this year that could really break out. So I would encourage you to see it if it’s in your neck of the woods.

**Craig:** Fantastic!

**John:** Great. Craig, thank you for a week full of action.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was, oh, I mean, I’m exhausted.

**John:** I know. Tiring.

**Craig:** Exhausted. Should we do another one? Should we stop the podcast and never do another one? Or should we keep going?

**John:** No, I think I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** All right, screw it. Let’s do it again.

**John:** Talk to you soon. Bye.