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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/industry-software).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 646 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

There are many software products aimed at the film and television industry, and more in development. But why do the bad ones persist, and why is it so hard for the better ones to succeed? Today on the show, we’ll look at the challenges and opportunities around making things that don’t suck. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at pages submitted by our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, magic, who needs it?

**Craig:** Are we talking the card game or prestidigitation?

**John:** We’re talking about our D&D campaign at the moment. We’re 10 installments into a campaign without magic. Let’s discuss what’s worked and what’s not worked so well, what’s been surprising about that campaign.

**Craig:** Fairly niche topic, but honestly-

**John:** It is a niche topic, but that’s why it’s a Bonus Segment.

**Craig:** It’s a Bonus Segment, and really our Premium Members should be playing D&D. They’re premium, for god’s sake. They should pursue quality in their life.

**John:** I think in a more general sense though, it’s like, what happens when you don’t uphold some genre premises. Take anything. If you took a horror movie and dropped out some of the aspects of what we expect out of that genre. We just saw the movie Bodies Bodies Bodies, which is an example of that, because it looks like a one-at-a-time killer thriller thing, and yet it’s not really that.

**Craig:** I like that idea. If we had an action movie, like a cop action movie, but no one ever fired a gun. It’s an interesting exercise in self-limitation to inspire some creativity and change.

**John:** We often talk about that on the show, how constraints are the writer’s best friends and that when you have constraints, it forces you to work within that. A project that I was approached by the last couple weeks, one of the problems was that it was just a world. There was no other kind of constraints to it. The first thing I had to do is like, “What constraints am I putting on myself?” because otherwise this is just an amorphous blob.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember talking to Scott Frank when he took the job to do the Wolverine movie. He said his condition was Wolverine has to be able to die, because otherwise, who gives a crap? Everyone was like, “But Wolverine doesn’t… ” He’s like, “Mm-hmm. So anyway, Wolverine has to die.”

**John:** In a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about constraints and death, because death is a bigger factor when there’s no magic.

**Craig:** Massively so. That’s an exciting one. What do we have going on with news? Probably nothing.

**John:** There actually is some news here today, because-

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You and I are headed out of town.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** We are going to go to the Austin Film Festival, which we are often doing. We’re going this year. It’s October 24th through 31st. We are scheduled to attend. We’re gonna plan a live Scriptnotes show. We’ll probably do a Three Page Challenge. There’s talk of doing a 25th anniversary screening of Go.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice.

**John:** It should be fun. If you are inclined to go to Austin and are thinking about travel there, now might be a time to think about that.

**Craig:** We haven’t been there in a couple years. Is that right? Did we miss last time?

**John:** Yeah, probably two years.

**Craig:** Two, yeah.

**John:** Because I remember you didn’t go last year, and the year before that was the year you got really sick.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I got so sick. I think I got a stomach bug is what happened. No, let me revise that. I got a stomach bug. It happened. It was that 24-hour stay in bed clutching your stomach in pain after you’ve barfed your world out and then just try and drink a little Gatorade. It was miserable.

**John:** It was bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, so no one breathe on me.

**John:** A stomach bug is probably something you ate though, right?

**Craig:** Look, it may have been something I ate, but it felt like just that nasty gastritis.

**John:** We are so selling the Austin Film Festival. Come for the illness. It should be a good time. It’ll be Drew’s first time going.

**Craig:** Wow. Look, as long as your room has a toilet.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s like those cruises where everyone gets norovirus. No, it’s not like that, I swear. I’ve been there many, many times. The only time I got sick. It’s actually quite fun. It’s raucous. Drew, you will be somewhat of a rockstar there.

**Drew Marquardt:** Weird.

**Craig:** It is a little weird. I gotta be honest with you. That part gets weird. People will be like, “Oh my god, it’s Drew. You sound just like… I imagined you looking different from your voice.” You get a lot of that.

**John:** Megana was a rockstar when she was there, but Megana’s always a rockstar.

**Drew:** Megana’s a rockstar though.

**Craig:** I’m not saying that you’re necessarily gonna captivate people the way Megana did.

**Drew:** I don’t have that charisma.

**Craig:** You know what? You got enough rizz. You got enough rizz.

**Drew:** I’ll take it.

**Craig:** Listen. People are gonna be talking.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, but Google Austin Film Festival and that’s all the information you need. Let’s do some follow-up.

Back in Episode 644, we talked about new federal reporting requirements for loan-out companies like Craig and I have and like what Scriptnotes is. That is for sure happening. But since that time, there was also a bit of a freak-out about, it looked like the California Employment Development Department was going to crack down on loan-outs in a bigger, more general sense. Cast and Crew, which is this big payroll company in Hollywood, sent out this alert right before Memorial Day, saying red alert, there could be huge changes coming here. It looks like that’s been backpedaled, but I thought we might spend a few moments talking about loan-outs, why they’re important, why a change to this would be a big, disrupting deal.

**Craig:** It’s hard to tell if Cast and Crew freaked out unnecessarily or if they freaked out necessarily. The fact is that loan-out corporations function essentially to protect Hollywood workers, duly artists, from being overtaxed, essentially. Some people could argue that loan-out corporations exist to keep artists below the line of fair taxation. There’s a fair debate to be had about it.

That said, literally every single writer, actor, director, producer that is, let’s just say, succeeding is working with a loan-out corporation. It is par for the course. California already has quite a high tax rate. We are taxed twice. You do actually get taxed as a corporation. Then you get taxed as an individual. It really exists because there are a lot of deductions that you can take as a corporation that you can’t take as an individual.

I have no doubt that once this letter went out, the unions and people that donate a lot of money to California politicians called those chips in and said no, don’t do that, and somebody then yelled at the EDD, who was probably some guy there who was like, “What is this all about? [Indiscernible 00:06:59].” Then he got like 15 texts in 12 minutes, like, “You’re gonna die.” It looks like the fight is over.

**John:** The fight is over. At least it’s been stalled or it’ll change a different way of approaching it. Listen. Loan-out corporations are a weird thing. It is strange to set up a system where you have companies that basically have one employee, or sometimes two with an assistant or something. It’s a weird way to do it, and yet the way that we work is just sort of weird.

I can both understand why regulatory agencies might say, “No, listen, these are employees. You should just treat them like employees,” and it’s also strange that above a certain earning threshold it makes more sense to go through a loan company rather than me being paid directly. It is kind of weird, and yet trying to change the system now would be so, I think, disastrous. You’d have to have a real, clear plan for how you were gonna do this.

**Craig:** Yeah, it would cost so much money that you might end up losing some people to neighboring states. It would be that crazy. The name “loan-out,” you might as well say it’s a fake corporation. You might as well use the word “fake.” Yes, it’s a weird bit of paperwork dancing, but it is, what, forever, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How long have these things been going on? Long before we showed up. That’s for sure.

**John:** Oh, yeah. It’s easier for big companies to hire other big companies. For this job I’m just finishing up now, it was on a rewrite for something. It was complicated. But they chose to pay me through their payroll company rather than through just the normal way. It was a mess to do it that way. There’s reasons we do things the way we do things. It’s not just because we’re trying to save dollars. It’s because there’s a structure behind it. There’s a reason why you pay a company rather than paying an individual in some cases.

**Craig:** The system, as far as I can tell, will not be changing any time soon.

**John:** But some potentially good news for you, Craig, because we got some follow-up about your Space Cadet movie.

**Craig:** Oh, fantastic.

**John:** Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Yeah, because you mentioned on Episode 644 that the Space Cadet title, Lucas was sitting on it for a long time. Jose Luis in Puerto Rico says that there is a Space Cadet movie coming out this year, July 4th, 2024. It’s written and directed by Liz Garcia and will be released on Amazon Prime.

**Craig:** I guess Lucas finally got off the title there. My thing was in 1997. That’s a year that Drew doesn’t even understand as a year. I think it’s fair to say that nearly, what is it, 27 years later, that yeah, Lucas probably let it go.

**John:** Which is fair and reasonable.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** Let’s get to our marquee topic this week. Over the past couple months, I’ve had some conversations with two different startup companies who are trying to make software for film and TV productions. Here’s the problem that both of these companies were trying to solve. On a film or TV production, you have all these different departments who need to work together and need to communicate with each other. You have the ADs, you have wardrobe, props, locations, transpo, VFX, everybody working on the same project, and they need information from each other. How do they get that information to each other? What is the central source of truth?

The sources of truth would be the script, obviously, and also the schedule, the breakdown, like, this is the schedule for how to plan to shoot this thing. But there’s no obvious established way to do that, so instead, a bunch of homespun solutions have come up. Some of them work for some places, don’t work for other places. But it’s not hard to imagine that there could be a better way of doing this.

If in the script we know that Scene 15 is taking place at a roller rink, how does each department weigh in on what they’re going to do? Craig, I ask you, on The Last of Us, what is that process? What is the process by which all departments can see what each other is doing?

**Craig:** You really touched on a sore spot here.

**John:** I’m not surprised. There is a problem here. That’s why.

**Craig:** There is a problem. Basically, the way is done is through, I’m now gonna editorialize, endless, repetitive meetings. Endless, repetitive meetings. I found myself in a meeting just the other day. I love my crew. The department heads work so hard. Our show is a massive aircraft carrier. It takes so much time and effort to do everything, and everything is happening all at once, all the time. But I was in a meeting, an endless, repetitive meeting, just last week that brought up a topic that had been already met upon multiple times in prep, which is a half year ago. I started to feel like I was getting punked, like how is this possible? The fact is that there is a certain amount of human, face-to-face interaction and questioning that needs to happen, and I don’t know if there even is a software solution for that.

Beyond that, we do what every production does. The script gets broken down into a schedule by ADs using whatever Movie Magic scheduler or whatever the hell they use.

**John:** Probably that.

**Craig:** Probably that.

**John:** Probably that very old program, yeah.

**Craig:** Which is annoying, because it puts on the schedule thing in a list, the things we shoot, and then at the bottom of that it’ll say what day it was. That’s stupid. It should be at the top of it. Then everything in terms of distribution goes through Scenechronize, which I believe is owned by aforementioned Entertainment Partners, which I believe also owns my least favorite writing software, Final Draft. You start to see a little bit of a monopolization problem here.

**John:** Remind us again, what do you use Scenechronize for?

**Craig:** Scenechronize is a platform that distributes documents to the crew-

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** … electronically. Scripts can only be viewed in super watermarked ways and cannot be downloaded unless you have certain privileges. If you’re a department head, they let you download it. It also releases all communications like call sheets, schedules, preliminaries, memos, everything like that.

**John:** Most of your crew is looking at the stuff that would’ve been printed paper. Instead, they’re getting it through Scenechronize. They’re seeing it on their laptops, on their phones, on their iPads, right?

**Craig:** That is correct. We don’t have any printed stuff, except in the morning we distributed printed sides for very few people, just the ADs, the actors, producers, directors.

**John:** The decision not to use paper for very much stuff, is that because it’s more efficient or because you’re worried about stuff leaking out?

**Craig:** Both. This is Canada, where when you go to throw your garbage out, there are 400 bins. They’re very green. They’re like, before you throw your garbage out, is it soft or hard plastic? Is it a pen? Is it colored blue? There’s so many. I think probably also it’s just about not burning through… Productions used to burn through forests of paper.

**John:** Paper like crazy.

**Craig:** Insane. There is that aspect. It’s certainly cheaper. There are security measures that we can use with that stuff. It’s a little frustrating, I think, for people, because they can’t really have a script and mark it up and all the rest, but it’s just a necessary evil.

**John:** We talked about scheduling. We talked about Scenechronize. What are the other pieces of software that you or members of your team are using regularly to get the show done, both during production and then in post?

**Craig:** I write on Fade In. Then once Allie, who is both my assistant and also our script coordinator, goes through and puts it through the Scenechronize machinery to distribute, she also converts it to a Final Draft file. Why is it converted to a Final Draft file? Because Chris Roufs, our script supervisor, uses a very specific program for his job that only imports in Final Draft, of course. You start to see the problem with the closed system and the proprietary formats. It just begets just this legacy system of misery.

**John:** We have that, and then for while you guys are shooting, what is the software you guys are looking at cuts on? I know you also have the ability to look at things if you’re on another set while one set is shooting. What’s that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** There are two platforms for that. For the distribution of dailies and cuts, we use PIX, which I also do not like.

**John:** Oh my god, I’ve had to do nothing but PIX the last five weeks. I think PIX’s main job is to sign you out as frequently as possible. I’ve been on Zooms where I’m just tapping the screen and wiggling 10 seconds back just so it won’t sign me out.

**Craig:** PIX will log you out if you blink. PIX will force you to change your password if you go to the bathroom. PIX also is poorly organized and difficult to use.

**John:** Oh god, their bins are really tough.

**Craig:** Horrible.

**John:** The equivalent of folders.

**Craig:** I do not like PIX. I don’t. In fact, when I say to the editor, “Okay, everything’s great here, I just need you to change this, this, and this. Can you just send me that little section?” I make them not send it to me on PIX, even though that violates everything. I apologize to Time Warner, Discovery, HBO, AOL. The other platform we use constantly is Box. Box is our digital file management system.

**John:** It’s very much like Dropbox, but it tends to be used in the industry more for various reasons.

**Craig:** There are a few of those. We used I think Frame.io in one season. Maybe for Chernobyl we used Frame, and for this we use Box. We have somebody whose job is to oversee and manage that entire system. We use that to distribute tests, images, proposals, illustrations, previses, all that. Then you can comment, and you can also annotate, draw on it and comment to that. It’s a better system.

But I will say it only functions for me because I don’t actually get any notifications from Box. They all go through a separate account that Allie manages. Then she can compile all the things that I need. Three times a day, I get an email from her with 12 Box links, describing what they are and what I need to respond to, because if you don’t have that, basically you’re getting an email every 12 seconds saying somebody commented, somebody thought, somebody did this.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** A nightmare. That’s what happened to me in Season 1. I didn’t stop looking at it. It was a real problem.

**John:** Let’s talk about email. You are still using email to communicate with certain people, or do you believe in Signal threads? Are you using Slack? What is the way you communicate with department heads?

**Craig:** With department heads, typically I’m speaking to them directly or commenting through Box. If I really, really, really need to get them ASAP, I text. We don’t have Slack. I think that’s probably a good thing. It’s a good thing for me.

Part of this discussion is who are you and what are you doing on the production. If you are in the middle of things, you need as much communication as possible. If you’re the showrunner, you need the most curated discussion as possible, because you will drown in questions and details with three minutes, and you’re trying to do other things and stay in big picture and work on shooting and all the rest of it.

We don’t have Slack, or at least I’m not aware of one. It’s just texts if I need to, or I call somebody. But more often than not, I just say to an AD, can you have somebody come over, and I’ll talk to them.

**John:** Then you also have the ability to look at what’s happening on set. If you have to step away, but you still need to see what is that shot that’s going up or the setup. What’s that that you’re using?

**Craig:** We use QTAKE, which again I believe is the industry standard. QTAKE works quite well. QTAKE is incredibly important. There’s the whole system that Amanda Trimble, our video playback operator, uses. I don’t know what she actually has loaded on her cart there, but it is some special system. There’s a special system that the DIT uses. That’s the guy that manages the information flow from the cameras, because of course it’s all digital. I also use Evercast to edit remotely with our editors.

**John:** A lot of specialized software that’s just for the industry, but also some things like Box, which are just off-the-shelf things that you guys are using because they’re there and they work.

We’ve talked a little bit about the screenwriting side of it, which most of our listeners are involved with screenwriting software. Obviously, Final Draft, or at least the FDX format, tends to be a thing that you go back to. I guess I can understand the FDX of it all, because it is at least an organized format. It is an XML format, so there’s some logic behind using that as a basis of things.

The challenge though is, if you’re passing around files for things, will the files get out of date? It would make much more sense if there was one continuously updated file that everyone was looking at the same file. That’s very hard to do.

There’s a service called Scripto, which Stephen Colbert’s company developed, which a lot of the late-night shows use, because they are all banging together to work on one script. It’s more like a Google doc, where everyone is working on one thing simultaneously, which makes sense for those kinds of shows. You would hope that in the future at some point there could be a centrally updated script that is the source that you don’t have to then redistribute scripts out to people.

**Craig:** We don’t have anything like that. We still operate under the old system of blue revision, pink revision, goldenrod revision, but it’s all done digitally.

**John:** Then there’s the programs that you and I are actually writing in. I’m writing in Highland. You’re writing in Fade In. Those are great single-computer systems. There are some things to try to do the onliney version of that. WriterDuet did that. Celtx did that. Arc Studio does that. There’s ways to do it. It can be overkill for the single writer, but it can be useful for team situations. It’s tough to say what the right solution is. Still, the script and the schedule are at the heart of what productions need. It’s not surprising that people are trying to figure out how do we organize all these things so all these different ways we do stuff can be centralized and make life happier for showrunners, for department heads, for ADs, for everybody else.

In most of these cases, I’ve been talking to folks who are ADs who naturally have this instinct to… They want information to go to places without being repeated and for people to be able to see what the plan is. They look so good on paper. I look at the slideshows and the little mock-ups. I’m like, “Yeah, that seems great.” But what you’re actually talking about doing is you actually have to build Slack, you have to build PIX, you have to build all these things that exist that are really difficult to do.

The problem is there’s not a big enough market for it. You’re not gonna be able to get somebody to pay enough to make it actually worth developing, and much worse, worth supporting, because the expectation of your users is that this has to have basically 100 percent uptime, because if PIX goes down or if QTAKE goes down, that is a crisis. You have to have this crazy expectation for your uptime.

**Craig:** Anything that is served like that has to be bulletproof. You’re absolutely right. It’s why the hammer costs $800 instead of $5, because there’s only 12 people buying the hammer. It is incredibly specialized. A lot of these things I imagine are quite expensive. I don’t know. Things that like Fade In or Highland, that’s marketable to millions of people who want to write things. But Scenechronize, it’s just the people making stuff that use Scenechronize. I don’t know what it costs, but probably a lot.

**John:** I think as we talk about both the problems and solutions, you’re gonna need to find some way to make recurring revenue from your existing customers, because you can’t just find the next customer and the next customer after that, because there’s a hard limit on the number of customers who could potentially use your software. You need to find ways to monetize each time. That means either you are charging per user, per production, per month. There has to be some way that you’re making that sustainable, because otherwise your company’s gonna go bankrupt.

That’s also the reason why it’s very hard to attract the initial kind of money it takes to build the product in the first place, because any investor will say, “I don’t think this is a survivable business. I don’t think you can actually make enough money here, so why would I invest in it?”

**Craig:** You could see a world where let’s say Disney, as large as they are, says, “We’re gonna create our own system.”

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** They are?

**John:** They are. Disney and Netflix both apparently have their own systems they’re developing. That makes sense because they’re doing so much production and they can top-down force people to use it.

**Craig:** You can force people to use it anyway. But what you are always dealing with is the fact that, A, you are at the mercy of those companies, who charge, I can only imagine, exorbitant yearly subscription fees that scale in terms of the size of your company, and B, you’re at the mercy of their features. The way they do it is how you have to do it. But the method of organizing things per production to customize it, there is no customization really like that.

The upside for a company like Disney, which is so big and makes so much stuff, is, yeah, we can completely control it, we can manage it, and we can make sure it is bulletproof and not be held hostage. The downside is people that come into your system now have to use that, which means they have to learn it, which means they have to deal with it. They’re used to using the other thing, and everybody gets very, very cranky. Either there will be a revolt or it will work and it will spread, meaning if Disney and Netflix, in their combined might, create a system like this, everyone’s gonna use it. It’s just gonna happen.

**John:** Agreed, agreed. Everyone’s gonna use it who can afford to use it. Indie films will develop alternate systems. Maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe they can do some different stuff and it would make sense for them on that smaller level. Here’s the subtlety on that. If Disney or Netflix says you have to use this, people will use it, but I also suspect department heads will still go back to their own native ways of doing things and then just have to duplicate the effort to use the other system. They’ll still find off-channel ways to do stuff. I was talking to a British AD who says for their productions, they have WhatsApp channels for each scene or something, which is just-

**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god.

**John:** … ongoing discussions about how stuff works.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It’s like, oh god, that seems so-

**Craig:** That’s horrible.

**John:** Yeah, it’s awful.

**Craig:** That’s just awful.

**John:** This is a person who made a giant Amazon show, and that’s how they did it.

**Craig:** “That’s how I do it,” in quotes, you’ll hear a lot. Obviously, there’s very powerful calendaring software and scheduling software. But also, when I walk into certain offices, in our production offices, I’ll see people who have calendared their wall with post-its, because that’s how they do it, and it helps them. I’m like everybody else. I have a way of doing things that I’m comfortable with. You get set in your ways. By the way, side question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** This is a “set in your ways” question. In the old days when we would print scripts, people would have a script, and then you would make revisions. The revisions would change the way the page count would be, so instead of changing the page count, you would just make A and B pages so that the following pages didn’t change. People just had to open their huge binder, pull out pages 38 and 39, and replace them with 38A, 38B, 38C, and then a new 39. But we don’t print anything anymore, and we have scene numbers. My question is, why do we still do this with pdf?

**John:** Craig, we should absolutely not be doing this.

**Craig:** We shouldn’t be doing it.

**John:** It is ridiculous that we’re doing it. I’m sure one of the showrunners who’s listened to the show says, “No, we stopped doing that.” Let’s all do this, because it’s dumb. It’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** It’s stupid. It’s stupid, because what happens is, on the day, you get there to rehearse the scene and there’s a page with one effing line on it.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. It’s too late for me now. I’m in too deep on this season, but next season I’m not doing it. I’m not locking pages. It doesn’t make sense. People refer to everything by scene number anyway. I am infamous for not knowing what scene numbers mean. Somebody from prosthetics will walk over to me and say, “Question about 533.” I’ll say, “I do not know what that is. You have to give me some context.” But they all have scene numbers that never change, ever. So why? Why?

**John:** Hey, Craig, instead of scene numbers, should we as the writers come up with the three-word name for that scene or that sequence that we all are gonna refer to that thing as?

**Craig:** If you think about it, the scene number really is the ultimate version of that. They really do all think in terms of scene numbers. I have the program make scene numbers and I never think about them again. But what happens is they’ll say, “Oh, it’s Jane and Vanessa are arguing in the library.” “Oh, okay, that’s what Scene 533 is. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, continue with the question.” It’s easy enough to do. But the page thing, honestly, it just occurred to me how stupid it is that we still do it.

**John:** It’s ridiculous that we’re still doing it. We shouldn’t be doing it. Hey, if you’re on a show that has given up locked pages, let us know. By the way, late-night has never had locked pages. I bet there’s other things that have never locked pages. I don’t know if – did multi-cam sitcoms lock pages? [Indiscernible 00:29:02] on that too. It feels like they should’ve.

**Craig:** I don’t know. All I know is that for movies we always had them and it made sense and I understood why, because you printed things. But now, it just doesn’t… Why?

**John:** Let’s wrap this up with some takeaways here. I think one of the real problems we’ve talked about is inertia. There is that first mover advantage. People are used to Final Draft. They’re used to Movie Magic scheduling. So when a better system comes along, like Highland or like – there’s a competing scheduling software out of Germany called Fuzzlecheck, which is a terrible name, but apparently, European productions use it and it’s a lot better and it’s all online.

**Craig:** You’re saying Germans made a great scheduling software?

**John:** That is a shocker. This apparently is great. It’s all online, which makes so much more sense that you’d have multiple users touch things rather than have one person on one computer doing the thing. But I think it’s struggling to break through into the U.S. because everyone is used to the standards. It’s hard to get people to adjust from what they’re used to doing, unless you’re forcing them to or show them this is 10 times better and then they’ll switch, which is the frustration.

**Craig:** It won’t happen from the bottom up. I think your Disney revelation here – it was a revelation to me – is how it happens. It happens from the top down when a bunch of people in a room say, “Attention, all. This is what we’re doing now.” Everyone’s gonna, “What?! No!”

**John:** If you think about it from Netflix’s point of view, Netflix is essentially a software company, and so it would make sense that they would have ways to do these things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. People will complain, gripe, moan, and then they will adjust. But it will never come from the bottom up, because making television shows and movies is chaos. It’s utter chaos. Anywhere you can find some kind of comforting repetition and security, you grab it and you hold onto it forever. You will have to pull it out of their hands and give them something new. They will freak out, but then they will adjust.

**John:** Last thing I’ll say, you have to be thinking about what is a sustainable business model for this app you’re thinking about making. The problem is not that you cannot imagine a better tool or even design a better tool. It’s that you cannot afford to make it and sustain it and to actually keep it up and running. When people get frustrated about per-month fees or per-user fees or all that stuff, it’s like, that’s because that’s how this company can stay in business.

**Craig:** You’re saying that they’re not in business to go out of business?

**John:** They’re not in business to go out of business. That’s the problem with the Final Draft. Because they sell it to you once, they’re like, “Crap, we ran out of screenwriters. Okay, we need to make a new version of Final Draft that adds a useless feature that no one needs, just so we can keep the lights on.”

**Craig:** That’s not great.

**John:** Not great. Not great. That’s how you end up with Final Draft.

**Craig:** That is how you end up with the tragedy of Final Draft.

**John:** Let’s go to something we can maybe help and fix. Let’s talk about some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** For listeners who are new to the show, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their pilot, of their feature. We look through them. We give our honest feedback. These are people who asked for our feedback. We are not picking random people off the street. We are trying to give constructive feedback on what they have sent through.

**Craig:** That would be so cruel.

**John:** What happens is we put out a call for submissions to the Three Page Challenge. People go to johnaugust.com/threepage. They read the little form. They submit their pages. Drew and our intern have to go through 100? How many generally come through?

**Drew:** A little over 100 this week.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Go through a bunch of these to find three or four that seem like they’re good for our show. The criteria are they have to have no obvious spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes. We don’t want to be talking about those. We want to talk about what’s working on the page, what’s not working on the page, what can our listeners benefit from. They’re not picking necessarily the best entries, but the most interesting ones, the things we’ll have stuff to talk about.

We have three really good ones here to discuss. For our listeners who have their phones or their iPads handy, there are links in the show notes that you can read through these pages. Pause this, read through the pages, and join us as we discuss them. Drew, for folks who are not reading along with us, can you talk us through what happens in Planet B by Christopher James?

**Drew:** Sure. It’s 2055. In the White House Situation Room, President Keiko Pearl is briefed by her advisors on the discovery of a new Goldilocks planet able to sustain life. The head of the EPA cautions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but he’s laughed at. We then cut to a creature smashing through terrain, only to reveal that the creature is in fact a human toddler.

**John:** Craig Mazin, talk us through your initial reactions to Planet B.

**Craig:** We have what hat appears to be possibly a comedy. I think it’s a comedy.

**John:** I think it’s a comedy.

**Craig:** Science fiction comedy where Earth is in trouble, almost certainly because of climate change, and they have managed to find a mirror Earth that they can go settle.

This is a pretty common way to start these things. There are multiple problems that are inherent to this method of starting things. The way Christopher goes about it is he’s using a situation room in the White House to introduce people and concept and character. We have, I think, a bit of an over-stuffed three pages here, because it’s trying to do so much at once that it doesn’t feel like an actual scene with human beings. It feels more like a machined thing to teach us stuff about people.

We meet Sarita Arya, and we also meet Keiko Pearl, and we also meet Anne Reiss, and we also meet Brian Dale. Everyone, by the way, has some sort of race and wardrobe, hair, makeup, except for Anne Reiss, who is none of those. Does that mean she’s white? That’s a weird-

**John:** The default white problem, yeah.

**Craig:** Default white problem there. We also meet Bear “Grizz” Norris, and we meet Ryan Arya and Nowell Arya. In three pages, that’s too many people to meet. That’s too many. Everybody is a person. Everybody is a thing. Everybody has a thing, a vibe, whatever. We’re learning all of these things.

Here’s what I learned. I’m just gonna list the things that I’ve learned here. It’s Earth. It’s 2055 and Earth is in trouble. I learned that in the White House, Sarita Arya has a “steady demeanor and short, spiky hair.” I’ve also learned that Keiko Pearl, who’s Japanese American with “shoulder-length hair and youthful skin-”

**John:** She’s the President.

**Craig:** She’s the President. I’ve learned that Anne Reiss is a science advisor and is “always on defense.” I have learned that General Brian Dale is bald and from the Army and he is a stroke survivor and he uses a cane. I have also learned that Bear “Grizz” Norris is White. Oh, so he’s White. Okay, so Anne, she’s whatever. He is “shaggy haired and bearded.” I have also learned that Nowell Arya is biracial Indian/White and his father, Ryan, is Indian American and athletic. That’s all separate and apart from the plot stuff that I’m learning. It’s too much.

**John:** It’s a lot. I would say I think Christopher is doing almost the best job you could with this kind of shotgun intro problem. One of the reasons why I like this as an example is it shows how hard it is actually to do this.

I can envision a scene. Let’s say this is actually shot and there are recognizable actors maybe in some of these roles that help you distinguish who people are and remember them. But you’re trying to do so much. There’s so much table setting to do about that there is a second planet that has breathable air, who these people are, that it’s 2055, that it doesn’t feel real or legit in a way that even in a heightened comedy setting, which this is, is not going to work especially well.

I want to talk about just on the page. It’s in Courier Prime, which looks lovely. I think the breakups of scene description and dialogue, it all reads well. I’m not terrified to look through these pages. It’s pretty easy to get yourself through them. The use of underlines and single-word sentences, also really good. All these things work nicely.

I don’t mind the character descriptions. I think a lot of times I could visualize these characters better than in many samples because you’re giving me some details that I can actually click in my head. The problem is there was just too many of these things introduced back to back to back to back. Then I got confused and a little frustrated.

**Craig:** Everything has the same importance. Everyone has the same importance, because there are so many. Then there’s the tone itself. First of all, we go from the exterior of space, where we see Earth, and then we’re interior the Situation Room in the White House. The Situation Room in the White House is just a room. You might need to see the White House itself just so we know where we are. Then Sarita, who I assume is President Pearl’s chief of staff-

**John:** Chief of staff.

**Craig:** Yeah, it says chief of staff. Sorry, that was the other bit of information. See, it’s lost in the clutter. Everyone’s talking, and she whistles to make everyone stop talking. I didn’t believe that. I don’t think that’s how it works. They show this other planet, and then President Pearl immediately gets into an argument. “Why didn’t we know about this sooner? What took so long to find it?” I guess she’s just dumb. Is she dumb?

**John:** It feels like a question that is being asked for the audience rather than for herself.

**Craig:** Exactly. Then everybody else has a very… Anne Reiss, the scientist, is very sciencey. General Brian Dale, he’s very military-y. Then Buzz [sic] “Grizz” Norris is very EPA administrator-y. They are their jobs. That’s the roughest part of this.

**John:** I would like to propose a line that is banned from future scripts, which is, “In English, please.” General Dale says it. That feels just the tropey-est, clammiest line.

**Craig:** That’s a clam, especially because what Anne Reiss, 64, nothing else to know, says, “The atmosphere is 19.5 percent O-2.” General Dale, “In English, please.” He’s a general. He knows what oxygen is.

**John:** The actual question is, is that good, because I don’t know if 19.5 is good. I don’t know if that’s appropriate. Then her answer makes sense. It’s, “It means humans can breathe.”

**Craig:** If someone said, “So too much or not enough?” “It’s about right.” That’s fine. Christopher, I’m gonna pitch you a different way of doing this.

**John:** Tell us.

**Craig:** Christopher, what if the entirety of this scene – and you could go to interior, you don’t even need to know it’s the White House yet – is Sarita and President Pearl, and we don’t even know who they are. We don’t even know that President Keiko Pearl, “42, Japanese American, shoulder-length hair and youthful skin,” is the President. We just have two people talking over lunch, and one of them is explaining to the other one, “This is what’s happening.” What that scene is about is not about the information, but rather, their relationship.

There is some relationship here that is the central relationship of the movie. If that’s not the central relationship of the movie, find one and make that the beginning. But if it’s just two people talking and then President Pearl goes, “Okay, got it,” walks out of the room, walks into another room and finds this scrum all arguing, tells them all to shh, then they’re like, “Oh, the President’s here,” and she’s like, “This is it. This is what we’re doing,” I’ll go, “Oh, that was the President, and this is important.” But we have to focus this scene and put it within the context of a relationship, or we just won’t care.

**John:** I think our expectation of the first scene of the movie is that we’re gonna meet characters who are the fundamental most important people. Sometimes that can be defeated, where a bomb can go off and all these people could die. That could be a choice too. My expectation is that Keiko Pearl is probably the most important character. She’s the one we’re gonna follow. We don’t really quite know at the end of the scene whose point of view this scene is from. That is the frustration, if one of these characters is going to be the central character of the story.

I want to talk about, just as we wrap up here, the scene on Page 3 which is basically this monster is smashing things and it’s revealed to be a toddler. That will never work, because we’re seeing something. You’re not gonna be able to hold that premise, that joke for very long. You could have the bom-bom-bom music of something stomping around, but the minute we see his-

**Craig:** Legs.

**John:** … cute little shoes, his legs or something, it’s not gonna really work. You can describe it metaphorically, like, he’s like a monster smashing things, but only on the page could you get away with the, “Oh, there’s a terrible monster smashing things. Oh, surprise, it’s a child.” That’s not gonna be a surprise to people with eyeballs.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** I love that we now have log lines for things. Drew, tell us the log line of what the actual full movie is.

**Drew:** “In 2055, climate change is irreversible and humans live on borrowed time. When Americans discover a nearby inhabitable planet, they must consider what’s worth giving up for a future as refugees in an alien society.”

**Craig:** Just about what I thought. It doesn’t mention what the tone is, but it does feel comedic.

**John:** I think so too. I’m guessing this is a feature and not a pilot. I think something would’ve said pilot on the title page.

**Craig:** Feels featurey.

**John:** Feels featurey. Cool. Let’s go on to The Long Haul. Again, if you’re gonna read along with us, why don’t you pause and read this. But if you’re not reading along, Drew, give us a summary.

**Drew:** The Long Haul by Becca Hurd. Emmy Baxter, 24, is irritated when an Australian stranger named Angus hijacks her karaoke performance at a Chicago pub. But despite her initial annoyance, their banter turns to flirtation.

**John:** I want to start with the title page here. This is The Long Haul. The O in “Long” is a heart. Below this is an image of the country of Australia and the country of U.S. with a line between them and a heart. It’s cute, sure. I kind of get what it’s about. It feels like a lot on this cover page. I would go with either the heart or the image there.

At the bottom it says, “Sydney, Australia, February 2024,” and it has her email address. The “February 2024” generally is over on the right-hand side where she put it, but things like her email address tend to be on the left-hand side. I don’t know why Sydney, Australia is there, other than maybe to tell us she’s Australian. But I don’t know that’s useful information for a title page.

**Craig:** I’ve never actually seen the location of where the script was written on the page there. I think you’re probably right. But I enjoy the graphic quite a bit. I agree with you, the issue with putting the heart in “Long” is that you have two hearts on the page.

There’s a very clever thing. “The Long Haul, Written by Becca Hurd.” The line between Australia and the United States is the old style, when you fly, a little dotted line happens, and the dotted line does a curlicue to become a heart in between. That actually is a beautiful summary of what this is gonna be about. It’s gonna be about a long-distance relationship between somebody who lives in the U.S. and somebody who lives in Australia and flying back and forth, I suppose. But that heart is diminished by the fact that there’s another heart in the word “Long.” Make that heart special, I think, by making the O just an O in “Long.”

**John:** Agreed. Once we get into Page 1 here, it starts with a discussion between Beth and Emmy. Emmy is our central character. Beth is her friend. They are awaiting their time to do karaoke. There’s some chitchat here, which is not great. There are some lines I would love to scratch out here.

Beth says, “Thought you were off the clock.” Emmy says, “Thought you were a vegetarian. But your mouth is full of Meat Loaf?” referring to this guy she’s making out with. Meat Loaf is not a great contemporary reference. I don’t think people are gonna get the joke that you’re referring to the singer Meat Loaf here.

There’s a better joke in the next line, which is, “Where’d you find him, an episode of Stranger Things?” Great, I get that as a joke. That is the better one. If you’re going to start with these two talking, I think that is your better way in.

More trimming here. “Somehow he’s not your worst. You’re too good for these guys, Beth.” If Emmy says, “He’s not your worst,” that tells us more and it’s more efficient.

**Craig:** But they’re sisters. Why are they talking to each other like they don’t know each other? If your sister is constantly making out/dating with guys that she’s better than, you’ve had this conversation before. It feels like we’re having it for the first time.

**John:** Agreed. For a sister, it feels like a stretch. There’s a semi-friend that you could actually have these things with. Craig, I want to talk to you about Emmy’s line near the bottom of the page, “When are they gonna play my song??” question mark question mark. I kind of like the question mark question mark. I kind of hear the delivery in the line with a double question mark. What’s your take on a double question mark?

**Craig:** I’ve never used it myself. But it feels like if a drunk person is asking a question. Then two question marks does definitely indicate drunken questioning.

**John:** That’s an overall note I had on Page 2 is how drunk are these people, because once we actually get to the standoff over the karaoke song, it feels like I need a clear sense of how drunk each of these people are to believe it or get a sense of a reality check on this moment that’s happening.

**Craig:** Let’s roll back to, for a moment, where even are we? The script tells us we’re interior Chicago pub. How do I know this is Chicago? It’s important, because apparently, this is gonna be a movie about an American and an Australian. I need to know where we are. Even if you just, again, give me nice exterior of Chicago-

**John:** That helps.

**Craig:** … it would help. The beginning, Emmy “is speedily typing on her phone.” Then her sister is gonna say, “Thought you were off the clock.” I’ve now got her character down to a post-it note. Works too hard. I don’t like that. Why is Emmy there? Why is she there? If she’s there to just speedily type on her phone, why is she at the karaoke club? Beth says, “Sometimes it’s okay to just have fun and not control every little detail. Wild concept for you, I know.” Post-it note character description. Why is Emmy there?

**John:** Craig, she’s there because she wants to sing karaoke, which is established in the very next line, “When are they gonna call me?”

**Craig:** But I don’t believe that, because she’s-

**John:** I don’t believe it either.

**Craig:** … “speedily typing on her phone.” If she comes to sing karaoke, she’s gonna have a drink or whatever and have fun. But I love the idea of somebody being impatient that her song isn’t coming. That tells me more about their character-

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** … than this other stuff. Also, John, we just talked about the toddler. This is another toddler moment. This is good advice here, Becca. When you’re writing, I want you to see it actually happen in your brain. Here’s what happens. Emmy is “typing on her phone while her younger sister, Beth, sucks face with an ’80s-musician-looking-dickass. Beth takes a breath and glares at Emmy.” No, she doesn’t. She’s making out with a guy. What’s happening is she’s making out with a guy, then stops making out with him to stare at her sister and then criticize her sister.

**John:** Has never happened.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, but when I’m making out with somebody, I’m making out with them. I’m not looking around to make comments. Emmy should interrupt Beth. That I’d believe.

**John:** Yeah, or the kiss breaks off and he goes off to hit the restroom or whatever, and then she can land her sniper comment there.

**Craig:** Yes, but there’s no reason for her to stop. She can’t do both things at once. Also, just a little bit of advice here, Becca. If you do want Emmy to make comments about Beth, she’s sitting there waiting for her song. The bartender or somebody is sitting next to her. The two of them are like, “What the fuck with those two?” “Yeah,” blah blah blah. Then we find out it’s her sister. There’s ways to also just reveal these relationships and who they are, because right now I don’t know that they’re sisters. There’s no way to know, other than that the script told me.

**John:** These are all real challenges. I do think if you’re gonna start with Beth making out with the rocker guy, we know the experiences of when you’re sitting there and someone’s making out right in front of you or right beside you. That is a playable moment. It’s like, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, this terrible person. Please,” willing this person to go away. That’s a thing that can also happen.

But I agree, we’re gonna need to quickly establish they’re sisters or something else there, because it’s gonna be weird if we’re a couple scenes into the movie and we don’t know that they’re sisters.

**Craig:** It is weird. It’s also a little dangerous to introduce a character who is anachronistic right off the bat, because people will just think this is in the ’80s or they won’t know what time it is, because we don’t know what year it is either. It’s in a karaoke bar. People are singing old songs from the ’90s. I think Torn is from the ’90s. We’re gonna be like, “What year is this?”

But then we get to the meat of it. Now, this is a meet-cute. It’s a good idea for a meet-cute, except there’s a logic problem. A meet-cute has to just be solid. We have to buy it. We don’t want to stop and go, “I can feel the screenwriter.”

**John:** “We requested the same song.”

**Craig:** “We requested the same song.” Then Emmy says – great point here – “He literally just said Emmy. Is your name Emmy?” Angus’s reasoning for going up there and taking the mic is, “She’s Australian.” I guess I’m Australian, which means I have the right to just sing the song? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

If his last name was Emory and then, “We have Emmy with Torn,” and he’s like, “No, he said Emory. My last name’s Emory,” and she’s like, “No, he said Emmy. That’s my first name. And we both requested the same song,” then I would be fine. I would be fine. But that’s not what happens here. I wasn’t buying this meet-cute premise.

**John:** There’s a way you can maybe set this up where the thing comes up for the next song and it shows the Natalie Imbruglia, Torn, and the emcee is fumbling a bit to find who it was, and they both go up there. Then you finally get the emcee, like, “Whose song is this?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s Emmy.” Then he refuses to stand down, because, “No, I should be singing this song. I am the Australian. This is part of my culture.” There’s a way you could do that. But I didn’t believe the setup. I agree with you.

**Craig:** I didn’t believe it, and I also really did not like this guy. When you have a meet-cute where two people are arguing, you want to be able to see both of their sides. At that point, you’re like, “Oh, they both pulled into the parking spot at the same time, and now they’re arguing because it was a tie.” But this is not a tie. He’s just a jerk-

**John:** It’s not a tie.

**Craig:** … for doing this.

**John:** He’s a jerk. Page 3, we get after their song. I thought the actual intercut of them trying to do the verses can work. I can picture that on the page. I got the sense of what was actually happening there. On Page 3 they’re talking afterwards. They have electric chemistry. I don’t understand, “I’m a 3 wing 2, because I-” “A what?” “A 3, which is an Achiever.” Do you know what that’s about?

**Craig:** I have zero idea what any of this is about.

**John:** Drew, do you know what that’s about?

**Drew:** I have no idea.

**John:** It’s okay for people to talk about things we don’t know, but we need to have a context of what kind of thing they are talking about. I didn’t get it. At a certain point you feel dumb and you start to resent that you don’t know what’s going on there.

**Craig:** Also don’t care. It’s wasted time, because I’m not learning anything. Emmy said, “You would say that. Because you’re a 4.” What? What does that mean? Anytime somebody makes fun of “neur,” that always… I do love “neur.” Neur neur neur.

**John:** Neur neur neur neur.

**Craig:** Neur neur neur.

**John:** I think we enjoyed the potential of the premise and this as a meet-cute, because as we have discussed on the show from nearly Episode 1, we enjoy rom-coms. We want that genre to thrive. It’s nice to see when movies can succeed in doing this. We want Becca to have the best chance possible to make a rom-com. Drew, tell us the log line that Becca submitted.

**Drew:** “Determined to win back her ex, an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** I assume it’s Angus.

**Craig:** Are those two different people?

**John:** We don’t know. We don’t know from this log line.

**Craig:** Say that log line again.

**Drew:** Sure. “Determined to win back her ex-”

**Craig:** Her ex.

**Drew:** “… an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”

**Craig:** Who would also be the ex.

**John:** I guess so.

**Craig:** How do you sneak into Australia?

**John:** I think the idea of sneaking into Australia for love feels kind of fun.

**Craig:** If you’re talking to the officials of Australia, you’re not sneaking into Australia. In order to stay in Australia… But you can go to Australia for six months.

**John:** I don’t think so, Craig. I think Australia is a locked-down place. No, Australia is basically North Korea, Craig. You have to go through checkpoints. It’s incredibly dangerous.

**Craig:** I don’t understand.

**John:** This is a girl who’d do anything for love, like the song.

**Craig:** Like Meat Loaf. Like Meat Loaf, which Meat Loaf, referenced twice in three pages. I don’t understand. I don’t understand the log line. But there’s something very charming about the idea of this meet-cute. I’ve not seen this meet-cute before, where two people believe they each have the karaoke song, they start to sing to each other, and some little bit of magic happens. That’s a very nice way of doing things. I can see that moment. That’s encouraging.

I would say at a minimum, Becca, we’re gonna want to clean that log line up so it’s nice and sharp and doesn’t raise questions. Log lines should only raise the question you want to raise, not the questions you don’t.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s wrap it up with The Right to Party by Lucas McCutchen.

**Drew:** Captain Albert, a British officer, raises a British flag over colonial Boston. On his way home, he steps purposefully on an American child’s doll that’s fallen in a puddle. At home, his 17-year-old son, Edmund, struggles with chores, due to an injured hand, while trying to appease his stern father. Their tense interaction culminates in Captain Albert shooting at Edmund’s breakfast, inadvertently killing a passerby. Edmund and his brash friend Henry leave for school, where they discuss the dead bystander and girls they have crushes on.

**John:** This is a big swing. What I got by the end of three pages, this is a teen boy comedy but just set in this Revolutionary time, which is actually, I think, an interesting premise. A lot of stuff got in the way of the interesting premise, but I’m eager to talk about it, because I did think it was a clever idea to, again, just smash up tropes and genres and do a teen Apatow-y kind of movie but in this time period. Unfortunately, on Page 1, I have no idea what time period I’m in.

Let me read the first couple lines here. “Exterior Boston Town Square – Dawn. Sleepy merchants and townsfolk slowly begin their morning routines. Stores display their pitiful wares. Flies buzz in circles above the fruit in their baskets.” Finally, on the fourth sentence, “A prisoner locked in stocks stirs.” Until that sentence, I didn’t know that we were in the past. Boston Town Square exists now. I thought we were just in modern-day Boston. This is a problem, because I didn’t know where we were, when we were.

**Craig:** Never before has something so desperately needed “Boston, 1775.” It absolutely needs that. This is a broad comedy. Broad comedy is very, very hard to do. Take it from me. Struggled and succeeded and failed multiple times in my career.

**John:** Craig, you’re a drama writer. What would you know about broad comedy?

**Craig:** I’m a drama writer because I gave up finally. One of the most important aspects of writing broad comedy is logic. It is more of a science than an art. It’s science. Everything is about logic. Everything.

We have this very broad Monty Python-esque moment where Captain Albert, who’s this incredibly over-the-top British dickhead, fires a gun at his own breakfast, not because he’s angry at the breakfast, but rather to check if the sights are good on the pistol. They’re not good on the pistol, and a woman dies, and no one cares about the woman. The kernel of that, great. Logic problems. One, why is he firing the pistol at his breakfast? If the pistol is aligned correctly, he will ruin his breakfast. That makes no sense.

**John:** He should shoot at something in the room.

**Craig:** He could shoot at something in the room. Secondly, if you’re aiming at your breakfast on a table, I don’t care how misaligned the sights are. The most misaligned they could be is you’re off by about eight inches. You cannot be off by seven feet and then go through a window and kill a woman passing by, which by the way, is very difficult to actually film, because you have to shoot in such a way that you can see both the woman outside through the window and the man as he shoots. If this were happening outside, no problem.

**John:** I can envision a scenario in which he’s shooting at a thing on the wall and then it goes out the window and kills the woman. Do you necessarily need to see the woman in that first shot, or could you hear the scream and then that’s funny?

**Craig:** What you want to do is not see the woman at all. You want him to shoot at something on the wall, it goes through a window, and then there’s a pause, and then you hear a man go, “My wife.”

**John:** “Millicent!”

**Craig:** Yeah, “Millicent, no!” That’s what you want, and then people to start crying. Then when you go outside, there’s the guy, and he’s like, “Oh, Millicent.”

**John:** There’s the payoff.

**Craig:** Millicent, as it turns out, was actually a pig. Whatever it is. There’s all sorts of ways to do this. But the concept of being so broad that a guy is gonna kill somebody and they don’t care about somebody being killed is funny. It’s just logic.

Now, the other issue is, in broad comedy we need somebody that we can identify with, especially when you have an uber-jerk like Captain Albert. He has two sons. The problem here is both sons seem just as callous as their father. Who do I like?

**John:** I think you’re supposed to like Edmund, but he’s trying to make his father happy. That’s the journey that the character needs to get past. I think that’s the goal is to have-

**Craig:** The problem is, when they walk by the small crowd around the dead woman and Henry goes, “Jeez… a bit dramatic.” Then he goes, “Your hand alright?” Edmund’s like, “Yeah, I’ll talk about my hand now. I’m not gonna have any comment about that lady whatsoever.” He doesn’t care that a woman died.

Then we’ve got a little bit of an anachronistic vibe, where there’s a cart driver who says, “Don’t hit my effing cart.” Edmund says, “Sorry. Have a nice day,” which does feel like Edmund is a bit of a nice kid. But are they afraid of the British? Are they not afraid of the British? Why is this guy yelling at them like that? Logic, logic, logic.

**John:** Logic, logic, logic.

**Craig:** That’s the key.

**John:** That’s a lot. The other thing I will say is that I was missing some uppercases that would’ve been really helpful. Generally in scripts, the first time you’re meeting a character, you’re uppercasing their name, or even if it’s just a person who’s gonna come back. I wanted those “dirty townsfolk” capitalized. I wanted “child” capitalized. We’re used to those things being uppercase the first time we’re seeing them, just to acknowledge that these are people who are gonna do something specific.

**Craig:** Yes, especially when you are creating very large bricks of action. There’s a seven-line paragraph and an eight-line paragraph. My whole thing is once I get past three lines, I start getting itchy. Seven is a lot.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Eight, people are just skimming.

**John:** Yeah, they are.

**Craig:** That paragraph is the gag paragraph, where he shoots. Oh, I see. He picks the plate up and “sets it on the window sill nearby.” He did do that. I totally missed that.

**John:** You didn’t read that because you skimmed.

**Craig:** Yeah, because I skimmed, because it was an eight-line brick. Then it said, “Edmund cocks his head.” You don’t want to use that. You don’t want to say “cocks his head” when there’s a pistol that can also be cocked.

He picks the food up, places it “on the window sill nearby.” Okay, so now that does make sense, except it doesn’t, because why is he using his plate to shoot at? It’s his breakfast. It’s very odd. It says, “Edmund is in shock as Albert returns and sets the gun in front of him.” Now I’m feeling like if he’s in shock, this has never happened before. But he doesn’t be in shock. He should be more like-

**John:** His father is this guy.

**Craig:** This happens all the time. If this is the first time, then I think Edmund would be vomiting. This happens all the time. Edmund should walk over to the window, look out, and just wince. There’s ways to do this.

By the way, I will say, Lucas, don’t feel bad right now. I’m serious. This is the hardest tone to get right. It is so difficult. If you Google, David Zucker has this lovely bunch of rules that he’s set forth for this kind of work, which are really compelling and useful. Just take a look at those. It’s so difficult to get right. If you don’t, then people just turn their heads. It’s incredible how technical and precise it must be. It looks like you actually did have that logic right, except that you didn’t, and also it was in too long of a paragraph.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Two teenage best friends, an American colonist and the son of a British officer, set out to have the night of their lives before they’re drafted to opposite sides of the American Revolution.”

**Craig:** Such a great premise.

**John:** It’s a really good premise.

**Craig:** It’s a great premise. I don’t think these pages are setting that premise up.

**John:** I think we can do better, but I think it was a really good premise.

**Craig:** It’s a terrific premise.

**John:** Two episodes ago we had that service where you send off a sentence to describe what your script is about. If that was a sentence you sent in, they’d say, yeah, that’s a good premise. Love that.

**Craig:** That’s fun. That’s a fun premise. I really like that.

**John:** Let’s thank everybody who submitted their Three Page Challenges for us to discuss, especially these three entries. If you want to send in your pages for the next time, it is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. We’ll occasionally look through that pile and pick some new ones. Thank you, everyone who did that. It’s very nice of you to do so. It really does help others learn.

Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What is your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a director that I’m currently working with named Stephen Williams. He’s not the One Cool Thing. It’s actually an episode of Watchmen that he directed. I’m sure Watchmen was my One Cool Thing when it was on the air back in-

**John:** It’s a good show.

**Craig:** Was it 2020? I guess something like that.

**John:** 2019, because I remember the Wash-men, which was initially during the pandemic when you had to wash your hands.

**Craig:** Stephen is a terrific director. He directed an episode of Watchmen that’s still… It’s stuck with me to this very day. Written by Damon Lindelof, Cord Jefferson, and Dave Gibbons. Damon Lindelof obviously needs no introduction. Multi-Emmy award-winning Damon Lindelof. Cord Jefferson, Oscar award winner.

**John:** Oscar, right.

**Craig:** He’s an Academy Award winner now for American Fiction. We’ve got some pretty big names there working on this, and then directed by Stephen. It is origin story of a superhero in the world of Watchmen. It uses a character that was indicated in the original graphic novel, Hooded Justice, and turns it on its ear and tells a pretty profound story of the Black American experience in, I believe it’s the ’30s or ’40s. Just an outstanding episode of television, beautifully done, moving and subtle, and directed gorgeously.

If you haven’t seen Watchmen, can you just pop that one in and watch it? No, you cannot. You have to watch up to it. I think it might be the sixth episode. Yes, it is the sixth episode of the season. You’ll have to do some watching for that. But honestly, it’s worth it. It’s such a great season of TV. It stands alone. It is the only one that exists. It’s got some so-so actors in it, like Regina King and Jean Smart and Don Johnson. It’s so stacked.

**John:** Despite that, it triumphs.

**Craig:** It’s so stacked. What a stacked lineup, as the kids say. I had watched it again, just because I’m having such a lovely time working with Stephen. He’s just such a great guy.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing is a show that people can also watch. Ripley on Netflix. This is the Steve Zaillian adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Talented Mr. Ripley, the movie, is one of my favorite movies, one of my top 10 movies. I absolutely love it. I was a little bit nervous watching this adaptation, because I didn’t want it to spoil my love for the original or be compared. I really like this adaptation. It’s just so different. Everywhere the movie went left, this goes right. I love that the main adversary in the series is stairs, basically. Poor Ripley is always confronted by stairs.

It’s also, I think, a really great lesson in what you can do with time, and when you have the time of a series, how you can expand these moments that in the movie would be 30 seconds. You can now spend 15 minutes on, like, how do you deal with this dead body. The comedy that Zaillian’s able to find out of that is just terrific. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, and yet it’s still funny, just because it points out the absurdity of human bodies also, which is great.

It’s black and white. It’s gorgeous. Everyone talks about that. It’s all shot in Italy. Looks terrific. Great performances. Really strange casting that works. Just check out Ripley on Netflix if you get a chance.

**Craig:** I wish you’d get Steve Zaillian on the show.

**John:** We’ll get him on the show. I’m sure we can get him on the show.

**Craig:** He’s a lovely man. He is just a towering figure in our business of what we do. There aren’t many people who have demonstrated his kind of consistent excellence for so, so long. He was excellent out of the gate and stayed excellent. Just an incredible writer and one of the best of all time.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** … with help this week by Jonathan Wigdortz.

**Craig:** Uh-uh.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on magic and the lack thereof in our D&D campaign. Craig, it’s always magic talking with you and Drew.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, so the brief for the new D&D campaign we’re playing. We should explain to listeners that for the last four years we were playing a campaign that you were DM’ing. We finally finished that. I was gonna take over the next campaign for our group. I pitched to the crew that, what if we did a Robin Hoody kind of thing where it was a little bit more stripped down. We ultimately said let’s do the really stripped down. We’re only gonna have Humans and Halflings and maybe some Elves, but none of the other fantastical races. We would have a campaign with no magic, where it’s really grounded and you can’t cast spells, or not magic items. Everyone stepped up, and that’s what we’ve been playing.

**Craig:** It’s been kind of a delight. In Dungeons and Dragons, there are these different classes. Some classes are almost, by definition, un-magical. Wizards of the Coast-

**John:** They’re the company who runs D&D, who owns D&D.

**Craig:** They’re pretty clever in that they even will allow variants of basically every class to have some magic. Very difficult with barbarians. But you can have a Rogue, or Arcane Trickster, I think it is, and learn some spells, because spells are very powerful. There’s a spell for every circumstance. People love magic. It’s Dungeons and Dragons. But one thing that is true is that at some point, spells become so powerful and pervasive that they can make the game a little unfun for focus characters who don’t cast spells. They just at some point feel like, okay, you guys will do all this awesome stuff.

**John:** I will hit it with my sword.

**Craig:** I’m gonna hit you with a club, and then everybody else gets to do something extraordinary. Then I’m gonna run in there and, I guess, hit someone else with a club. It’s easy to play, but you can start to feel, as the characters increase in level, sort of like, I guess, the way – what’s the archer in Avengers? What’s his name again?

**John:** Oh, Hawkeye, yeah. One trick, yeah.

**Craig:** You start to feel like Hawkeye. Like, “Okay, so you’re literally a god and you can shoot lasers out of hands, and I have a bow and arrow.” “And what are you gonna do?” “Shoot my bow and arrow again.” It’s nice that we are all basically in that boat, not only us, but also the bad guys.

**John:** Talking about classes, you and I had an interesting discussion where we were talking through what is actually gonna make sense. There are Fighters. There are Barbarians. There are Rogues. There are Monks, but only certain kinds of Monks, because some of the Monks get really, really magical, and so variants that don’t have magic. And Rangers, but Rangers without the magic stuff, because Rangers have a lot of spells they would otherwise cast. But it’s a world without Wizards or Sorcerers, Clerics and Druids. You think about in a Robin Hoody kind of situation, a Bard makes a lot of sense, except the Bards in 5th Edition D&D really are Spellcasters and it doesn’t make sense to do that. Even Paladins, who you think, oh, it’s a brave knight-

**Craig:** Spells.

**John:** Yeah, but with a lot of magic there.

**Craig:** A lot of necessary magic. The thing that makes a Paladin good is that they have their various smites to add damage to their hits. We don’t have any of that, and it’s kind of a joy. When you face a bunch of bad guys, there’s no crowd control spells. There’s a lot of spells in D&D where it’s like, “I’m gonna just put you all in darkness. I’m gonna put you all in something. I’m gonna fireball you.” That’s the thing. You run up against seven guys, one person in your party can kill all of them with one spell. It’s nice to – you have to think more. There’s more strategizing. There’s more planning. The combat feels a little… I don’t know, it’s a nice gritty D&D.

Typically, everyone’s drinking a potion, or you have a Cleric or a Druid or somebody else that has healing spells that can restore all of your aches and pains – rather, alleviate your aches and pains. Here, my character took a feat which I don’t even know why anyone would take in a campaign with magic, that allows you to use an underutilized mechanic of healing kits to heal people, like a doctor would. If you’re not playing a magic-free campaign, why would anyone take the Healer feat, ever?

**John:** I don’t think they would.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** It’s been interesting to see the ripple of changes that happen through this. I think combat speed has been a lot faster, because inevitably what happens is, like, “Oh, it’s my turn. Am I gonna cast a spell? What spell am I gonna cast? Let me look up what that’s gonna do.” Here it’s like, “No, I’m going to shoot somebody. I’m going to slash somebody.” Yes, people may use their special martial abilities to some degree, but it’s just been a lot faster to get through stuff. It can take more rounds to knock down an opponent, but that’s been nice.

I would say on the DM side I’ve been struck by just how much damage you guys can do, because you have these Rogues who can, through various mechanics, get sneak attack, get advantage on things, and they can take down a creature really quickly. I’ve had to adjust the number of monsters I’m throwing at you, just because you guys can do so much damage and take them out so quickly.

**Craig:** One of my DM tricks is – there are a few DM tricks. Now I’m telling you how to hurt us more, which is fun. One is, if there’s a big bad in the party, give him more HP. If the party is just crushing, just give him more HP. Make him last another round or two.

The other one, and this is the most useful one when you really want to mess with your party and you feel like they’re cakewalking, is to give one of the main boss guys legendary actions, because now that is essentially like increasing the number of bad guys without throwing a bunch of weak-asses on the field, who often can’t do that much damage on their own and get mowed down anyway, because our party’s capable of killing a couple of guys, three guys a turn if they’re just scrubs.

**John:** A thing I hadn’t considered until we got into this section of the campaign is that you guys are now underground, and light is a real factor. Often in these campaigns you’ll have more characters who have dark vision because they are Elves or have the ability to see in darkness, but you guys don’t. People would generally have a light spell cast on something, so they have a coin or something is shedding light. Here you guys have torches, and you have to deal with the torches. You as an Archer can’t hold a torch and shoot an arrow. It’s been really interesting to see from that perspective how a lack of magic is impacting you guys.

**Craig:** Light management is fun. I like that. It’s a little scary. You can’t be as stealthy as you want to be. That was one of the things about a traditional campaign that you have to deal with as a DM is that probably everybody’s gonna be able to see in the dark and light no longer becomes a thing. The only time it becomes a thing is, okay, so typical dark vision, you can see 60 feet ahead of you. Sometimes you run into, like, Drow. They can see 120. Now you got a situation. That’s interesting. But making us deal with simple things like not being able to see, especially when we’ve now encountered some creatures that can see in the dark, very interesting.

**John:** So fun. As we said in the setup, it is interesting to apply constraints to things, because we’re all very experienced D&D players. To make something feel fresh, you need to put on some new rules, new challenges to people. Rather than adding stuff, sometimes subtracting stuff is a way to make something more interesting. Do I want to play only this no-magic way forever? Absolutely not. But I think it’s been interesting for this round to try that and see how it all works.

It’s also been challenging to – on the DM level, I’m enforcing that you guys don’t have spells or magic stuff. As I’m picking adversaries, a lot of times what’s baked into these scenarios, they are Spellcasters too. I have to find, okay, what is the equivalent of that spellcasting ability for those characters. In some cases I’ve given them grenades that can duplicate an effect, but in other cases I’ve given them things taken from the Battle Master feats or Battle Master-

**Craig:** Maneuvers?

**John:** … maneuvers, yes, or monk-y kind of things.

**Craig:** You mean monkish?

**John:** Yeah, or monk abilities, because that would be the equivalent in this world for the third level spell they would otherwise be able to cast.

**Craig:** You’re dealing with people who have been playing for a long, long time. We all know what we’re doing. We all know the rules pretty well. Some of us know the rules pretty well, and then others do not, but that’s fine. The point is we’ve been playing for a long time.

I was in one brief campaign that another guy was running with some of the Joe Manganiello crew. The restraint on that one was every character had to be a Wizard. It was the opposite of this. It was an all-Wizard party, which meant that at least when we were starting out, it was like sending children out into the world. We were like, “I can make a light come on. Also, if you touch me, I die.” But by the time you get to Level 3-

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s pretty serious, but if anybody gets close to you-

**John:** You’re still fragile.

**Craig:** You’re pretty fragile. Now, that party, you get an all-Wizard party at Level 18, now everyone’s dead.

**John:** Good lord.

**Craig:** We win. You lose.

**John:** The rules of time and space have changed now.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We’ll continue with our campaign and with the podcast in the next couple weeks.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, good to chat with you as always.

**Craig:** Thanks, John. Thanks, Drew.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**Drew:** Bye.

Links:

* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [PLANET B](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Planet-B-Three-Pages-Christopher-James.pdf) by Christopher James, [THE LONG HAUL](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Long-Haul-by-Becca-Hurd-Three-Pages.pdf) by Becca Hurd, and [THE RIGHT TO PARTY](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Right-To-Party-3-Pages.pdf) by Lucas McCutchen
* [Submit your script for our Three Page Challenge!](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [David Zucker’s 15 Rules of Comedy](https://creativecreativity.com/2017/07/30/david-zuckers-15-rules-of-comedy/)
* [Space Cadet (2024)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21469794/)
* [Movie Magic Scheduling](https://www.ep.com/movie-magic-scheduling/)
* [Scenechronize](https://www.ep.com/scenechronize/)
* [PIX](https://pix.online/)
* [Qtake](https://qtakehd.com/)
* [BOX](https://www.box.com/home)
* [Frame.io](https://frame.io/)
* [Evercast](https://www.evercast.us/)
* [Scripto](https://www.scripto.live/)
* [Fuzzlecheck](https://www.fuzzlecheck.de/)
* [Ripley](https://www.netflix.com/title/81678765) on Netflix
* [Watchmen – “This Extraordinary Being”](https://www.hbo.com/watchmen/season-1/6-this-extraordinary-being)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.drewmarquardt.com/) with help from [Jonathan Wigdortz](https://www.wiggy.rocks/). It is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/646standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-fandom-menace).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 628 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Craig and I will discuss how things get cool, then hot, then terrible. We’ll have listener questions and a ton of follow-up, including about secret projects and alternative screenplay formats, something that Craig is always into talking about.

**Craig:** I’m into it.

**John:** In our bonus segment for premium members, we will look at various fandoms and do our best to absolutely enrage them.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Oh, no. That’s why we put it behind the paywall. If you want to be angry with you, you gotta pay us some money.

**Craig:** Pay $5 to watch us get beat into a pulp. Fun.

**John:** Craig, we missed you last week. Aline was on, and we discussed How Would This Be a Movie. We had some new topics for How Would This Be a Movies. Also, this week, I was looking through the chapter on picking which movie to write, for the Scriptnotes book. I mentioned, oh, a bunch of our previous How Would This Be a Movies have become movies. I had Drew get on the case to figure out how many of those that we discussed actually did become movies. The number is shocking. Drew’s going to help us out, talking through the things that became movies, the things that became documentaries, and the things that are in development right now. Drew.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Talk us through how many of these projects have actually been made since we discussed them.

**Drew Marquardt:** Twelve of these have actually been made as narrative feature films.

**Craig:** Jeez. Wow.

**Drew:** Or series.

**John:** Also, Craig, you start to realize, man, we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so some of them I knew, like The 15:17 to Paris, which is about those Americans who prevented the terrorist attack. That was a Clint Eastwood movie. I knew that happened. Zola we talked about at the Austin Film Festival. That became a movie. Do you remember The Hatton Garden Job, which was the old men-

**Craig:** The old guys, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, the heist. Two of those happened.

**Craig:** They made two of those?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that. You’re making the movie, and someone’s like, “We’ve gotta beat the other The Hatton Garden Job movie.” Oh, business.

**John:** Business, business. But Drew, talk us through some of the other things we had in How Would This Be a Movie.

**Drew:** There was also The Act, which was the Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard.

**John:** She just got out of prison, right? I didn’t really follow that story closely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Apparently, our daughters’ generation is obsessed with Gypsy-Rose and her impending freedom, or freedom. She’s become a cult hero among the children, because she murdered someone or whatever.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** There’s also The Mandela Effect, which was just the idea that we had talked about, but they made into a feature. There’s Stolen By My Mother: the Kamiyah Mobley Story, which was the young woman who discovered she was kidnapped as a baby by the woman she thought was her mom.

**Craig:** I don’t even remember that one.

**John:** I don’t remember that one at all.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Drew:** There’s the Danish series The Investigation, which is about Kim Wall’s murder.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It’s a submarine murder. That’s right.

**Drew:** Six Triple Eight, which is in post-production right now, but Tyler Perry directed it. It’s about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was the predominantly Black battalion of women during World War II in the Army Corps.

**John:** I do remember that. I remember thinking, “Is there enough of a story there?” It was a part of history I didn’t know existed. We’ll see if there’s a story there.

**Drew:** We have How to Murder Your Husband, which was about the woman who wrote the book How to Murder Your Husband and then murdered her husband.

**Craig:** Oh, murder lady. Come on.

**John:** It’s a great title, so that’s why it needed to happen.

**Craig:** How to murder your husband, step 1: don’t write a thing about how to murder your husband. Jeez.

**John:** It could actually go on endlessly, because if you make a movie called How to Murder Your Husband, everyone’s going to suspect you of murdering your husband. It’s perfect.

**Craig:** Now I’m rooting for that person to murder their husband. What else did we do?

**Drew:** Death Saved My Life they made into a Lifetime movie, which is the wife who showed up at her own funeral, because her husband had her killed but not well.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Death Saved My Life, I guess that’s a good title. It’s a good Lifetime title. It’s a good book title, so sure, I’ll get that.

**Craig:** I’m with them.

**Drew:** There’s Dumb Money, which came out last year.

**John:** We talked about that. It’s about the GameStop situation and story. Not at all surprised that happened.

**Craig:** No, considering that I personally received multiple calls from multiple companies about it.

**John:** As did I.

**Craig:** I was like, “Okay, apparently they’re making this thing.”

**John:** Craig, you and I should’ve both taken the job for different companies and just raced to see which one-

**Craig:** Wow. Just go head to head in the theaters.

**Drew:** Then finally, Holiday Road, which I think might’ve been a TV movie, but that was the 13 stranded strangers who all rent a van together when they can’t get a flight.

**Craig:** Here’s my question. Of all of these, how was our batting average on predicting whether or not they would be made?

**John:** That could be good follow-up for Drew, because I don’t think you went through and looked at that. Drew, maybe for next week, can you take a look at, of those movies, how many did we say, okay, that’s definitely going to happen?

**Drew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Similarly, were there any where we were like, “Never in a million years will anyone make this.”

**John:** That’s what I’m excited to see. We’ll put it on the blog so people can see which of these movies happened and which one didn’t. But you also found 10 things that are in development, including-

**Craig:** Jeez.

**John:** … one about Jim Obergefell, the Hulk Hogan Gawker lawsuit, Dr. James Barry, who was a gender-fluid Victorian doctor, which I remember we thought was really interesting, and apparently is Rachel Weisz. Feels like the perfect casting for that.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** There’s the PTA mom for drug dealing. You May Want to Marry My Husband. These Witchsy founders who formed a fake male co-founder.

**Drew:** Brie Larson got that one.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** McDonald’s Monopoly.

**Craig:** That one is a great one.

**John:** The Scottish hip-hop hoax. Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. There’s a bunch of those things. That was also a thing that came to me a couple times. There probably will be a Sam Bankman-Fried movie. I think it’s tough. I think the relative lack of success of Dumb Money is going to very much hurt the Sam Bankman-Fried movie, but we’ll see.

**Craig:** They’re going to make it anyway.

**John:** George Santos, there’s at least one movie. That’s right, we talked about that, the George Santos movie, the one that Frank Rich is doing.

**Craig:** All I need to know is Frank Rich. I’m in. That’s great. This is pretty remarkable. Similarly, I’m interested to see if any of these we thought were not even worthy of development. The conceited question is, hey, are people listening to us and then just rushing out to get this done? But I suspect not. I suspect there is an industry of assistants that are doing nothing but Buzzfeed-style collating whatever buzzy news item of the day is and putting it in front of people, and then there’s just a general race to get rights and make a thing. It is amazing how many of these are getting made.

**John:** I was just surprised at the total numbers here. We’ll also include in the blog post the ones that were made as documentaries, because I think a thing we often talked about is, is the best version of this a fictionalized version, or do we just want to see the documentary series that tracks that, which in some cases may be more compelling.

**Craig:** That’s very interesting. Good to know that we’re not just wildly off, at least with the things we’re considering. I root for all movies.

**John:** Root for movies and TV series. Some more follow-up. We talked two episodes ago about accurate but distracting, so things that, if you put them in your script, they might be actually accurate to what happens in real life, but would be distracting to the viewer or to the reader. We have some follow-up from that.

**Drew:** Richard in Boston writes, “There’s an example of this that historical fiction writers have to deal with called the Tiffany Problem. It was coined by fantasy writer Joe Walton. The Tiffany Problem describes the tension between historical fact and the average, everyday person’s idea of history. If you’re reading a book that takes place in medieval times, you’ll have trouble believing that a character’s name could be Tiffany, even though Tiffany is actually a medieval name that goes back to the 12th century. But in our modern perception of the medieval world, Tiffany just doesn’t fit. Even though authors might research carefully and want to include historically accurate information in their book, like a medieval character named Tiffany, a popular audience likely won’t buy it.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Totally tracks. I love that as a name for that phenomenon.

**Craig:** That really does track. I would absolutely be stopped in my tracks if there was a scene in a medieval story and Tiffany shows up. That would just seem anachronistic. That’s a great example. I guess in the end, it really doesn’t… There’s no victory in saying afterwards, “No no no, Tiffany was a name,” because people are like, “I guess now that I know, that’s interesting, but in the meantime, it screwed up my enjoyment of this story.” Tiffany. All right. I like that.

**John:** Now, I don’t want to get Drew’s mailbox overflowing with stuff, but if you are a listener who has another example of something that really does match the Tiffany Problem, which is basically something that is historically accurate or accurate to true life but is distracting if you were to encounter it, I’d love more examples of that, because it feels like Tiffany’s great, but I think we can find more ways that this manifests.

A thing I’ve talked about on the show a lot is that when I want a bedtime book, I love a book that is really interesting and completely forgettable, that you can read, and the minute you set the book down, you don’t think about it, so you can fall back asleep. I’ve been reading some books on counterfactual history, basically like, what if this thing happened in a certain way.

**Craig:** Alternative history, yeah.

**John:** Love it. One of the stories I wasn’t familiar with was Arminius, who’s also known as Hermann, who’s the German barbarian chief who drove back the Romans at a certain time. In reading this account of Arminius, “That’s a fascinating movie. I’m surprised no one has made a movie about that. Let me Google and see why no one has made a movie about it.” It turns out there’s two seasons of a Netflix show that is specifically about that. There’s just too much-

**Craig:** Netflix.

**John:** … Netflix.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** There’s just too much Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s almost like Netflix has become like Google, but instead of getting a search result, you get a series.

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**John:** I looked at the trailer. It looked great. I’m like, “Great. Someone has already made the thing I was thinking about making.” Congratulations. I will say I’ve not watched a frame of the actual series. They shot it in Latin and in German, which feels great.

**Craig:** Whoa. That’s impressive.

**John:** Kudos to them. Kudos to everybody involved in making Barbarians, which I may watch at some point, I may not watch at some point. But I know it’s out there, and I know that I, John August, don’t have to write it. That sometimes is the greatest relief.

**Craig:** Apparently, we don’t have to write anything, because Netflix did it.

**John:** Another thing I don’t have to write is the Harry Potter series.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Episode 623, I talked about a project. This is when we were talking about bake-offs. I talked about a project that had come into my orbit, and they asked, “Hey, would you want to adapt this very popular piece of IP.” I’m sure, Craig, you were guessing it was Harry Potter. We can now reveal it was Harry Potter. They’re doing a Harry Potter series for HBO Max or Max. Deadline posted a story about who the finalists were who are going through the process. I wish them all well. They did find people who have good, proper credits. I do wish them well. I do think it’s just a very hard road ahead for them.

**Craig:** I have no inside information on this. I work at HBO, but no one has ever talked to me about Harry Potter. I don’t know what it is. It seems like it’s about adapting the books. That was what I initially thought. But then they’re saying in this article, “We’ve heard that the group of writers were commissioned by Max.” First of all, that’s cool that they’re paying them.

**John:** Yeah, they’re paying somebody.

**Craig:** “To create pitches for a series reflecting their take on the IP.” Now, I guess my question is – and this is my dum-dum question – what take? I thought that the idea was, we’re going to take each book and adapt it fully over a season, because those books are big. When they were adapted into movies, very successfully, of course they had to do quite a bit of compacting. I guess maybe there’s more to it than that. I don’t know. I’m fascinated by this.

I would be terrified to be one of these people. They’re way braver than I am. There’s something very scary about knowing that there’s somebody somewhere else doing what you were doing, to try and do what you’re doing, and maybe will do what you do instead of you. It’s scary. But I do think on the plus side, they’re being paid, so that’s actually quite good. On the downside, I could also see where this becomes this cottage industry, where you’re paying people to do these pitches, but you’re not paying that much. The thing about pitching a season is you have to do quite a bit of work.

**John:** Oh god, so much.

**Craig:** That’s definitely an imposing prospect. I guess for something that is as huge as Harry Potter is – and it is – it’s almost as close as you can get to a guaranteed success, as far as I can tell. I can see why it is like this, because I assume also that these people will have to meet with JK Rowling and get along with her, because she’s always part of it.

**John:** If you look at the attempts to expand the franchise beyond those books, they’ve not succeeded. They’ve succeeded in physical spaces. I feel like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, tremendous success, those things, but the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have had diminishing returns. Hardcore Harry Potter fans are not as enamored with those as with the original books, of course. It looks like, based on this article – and we don’t know the inside truth here – is that some of these takes may be moving outside of the books, some of them may be more faithful adaptations of the books.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Those movies, I guess they did well enough for them to make more. They ran into some trouble, because Johnny Depp suddenly was in a situation. They may have not been the size of the original Harry Potter films, but I think they were doing okay. The Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is a phenomenon, our friend Jack Thorne being the primary playwright there. Well, the playwright. I guess, technically, Jack wrote the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an original story by him, JK Rowling, and John Tiffany. Tiffany. Then the Harry Potter video game was an enormous hit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** In the world of video games, there are some enormous hits. When they are enormous, they dwarf what we do. That was one of them.

**John:** I guess I should restate that they’ve had a hard time expanding it out as a filmed franchise, but this is maybe possible, going to happen. For folks who are looking at, oh, what is a popular book series that did not get a good treatment, Percy Jackson. The movies were not a big success. The new series on Disney Plus is terrific. For folks who are curious about that, really worth watching. I thought it was just a very smart adaptation, much more faithful to the books. My daughter, who grew up reading those books, loved it. They really are quite enjoyable. It was well cast. So difficult to get great performances from young actors, and this succeeded in it.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’d recommend it for people.

**Craig:** Great. We wish those folks the best of luck. I don’t know if they’ll want to do this, but when it’s all done and the winner of, what is it, the tri-cup wizard, the tri-wizard tournament, whoever wins the big cup that actually turns out to be a Horcrux or, no, a Portkey, it would be great to have them on our show, just to talk about the process, if they’re willing.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating to me. I get it, but also, it makes me nervous.

**John:** It does. Also, I think you have to look at are you going with people who are familiar with the movie series or new folks. That’s a challenging [crosstalk 16:09].

**Craig:** I could be wildly off here, but I suspect that the Harry Potter books are transgenerational, that people who read them as children are now reading them to their children, that they aren’t going anywhere ever.

**John:** I don’t know that to be the case. I feel like there’s been such a backlash against JK Rowling that I wonder if that’s still the case.

**Craig:** There is a backlash against JK Rowling on Twitter and social media, no question. I don’t think that that has translated into the actual audience and how they interact with the stories and the characters. I will cite the video game again, because when the video game came out, that was thick in the middle-

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** … of JK Rowling and her controversies. People were really angry about the game and angry at the game, and yet it sold a gazillion copies. There is a disconnect, I think, between… There’s a topic. One day we should probably jump on the third rail, John, and discuss the notion of separating the art from the artist, because this comes up all the time.

**John:** For sure. Noted for future discussion is how we separate those things. We’ll find some other good examples of what do you do with problematic people who also make art.

**Craig:** Roald Dahl.

**John:** Roald Dahl, Joss Whedon. It’s tough. There’s that tendency to retroactively discount the thing that they were able to make and do, because we now believe that they’re terrible people.

**Craig:** There’s also this weird phenomenon of feeling guilty about enjoying something. Roald Dahl said a lot of really antisemitic stuff. Not mildly. Very. I love Roald Dahl books. I do. I love them. I really enjoy the Wes Anderson Henry Sugar adaptation. I feel like I’m a little like, “Should I?” Then I’m like, “I really like the stories.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some UK writing credits. In 625, I think we were answering a listener question about UK credits, and we said we know they work differently. Tom wrote in with some follow-up about that.

**Drew:** Tom is the chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Film Committee, which is the WGGB. He writes, “Per the question from the British writer, I thought that you and indeed he would be interested to know that the WGGB and the Producers Alliance of Cinema and Television, or PACT, negotiated the screenwriting credits agreement way back in 1974. This agreement is referenced in the 1992 basic screenwriting agreement between our two organizations. Both these agreements are in the process of being updated, as we seek to bake in some of the gains secured in last year’s WGA strike, so thank you for that. We operate under a different labor framework in the UK, so these agreements are only advisory. Specific clauses can be negotiated out, though obviously we discourage that. Most screen credits are agreed in consultation between the producers and the writers in question. However, the Writers Guild of Great Britain does arbitrate on small number of credit disputes every year, following similar guidance to that used by the WGA.”

**John:** That’s great. It’s good to have some answers there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not surprising. The Writers Guild of America has a very legalistic system to arbitrate and assign credits. It is contractually the sole arbiter and sole authority of credit assignation. Other places, there’s that big bus-sized loophole that you can drive through, which is advisory or in consultation between producers and writers. It is not as strong of a system, presuming one agrees that the Writers Guild has the best interest of writers at heart, which I think it does. It’s just that when you are deciding what credits should be, there are sometimes winners and losers, and people that don’t get the credit are upset. But it’s good to know that there’s something. But I’m not surprised to see that it is not the ironclad structure that we have here in the U.S.

**John:** Absolutely. All these things come down to power. In the U.S., the Writers Guild has the power to basically force this system upon the makers of film and television. But the Producers Guild, for example, does not have that degree of power. But they have been able to negotiate and cajole and get people to take their PGA credits seriously, so that now when you see a PGA after a producer’s name, you can recognize, oh, that’s the person who did really more of the producing job, and it’s just not a person whose name showed up for various contractual reasons.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I am a member of the PGA. I don’t put the PGA thing after my name, only because it just feels a little bit like a odd degree I earned in college or something.

**John:** But if you were producing a feature film, you might be more inclined to use it, I suspect.

**Craig:** Ultimately, I don’t think people at home care, but what the PGA does do is leverage its agreement with the Academies to determine who is eligible to win awards. That is actually quite a bit of interesting power that they’ve garnered for themselves. I think ultimately serves as their most relevant function. When the Oscars are coming, and Best Picture is announced, producers will go up to accept the Best Picture. Those producers have been vetted by the PGA. This works for the Emmys as well. We get a questionnaire, and they ask me, “What did these people do? Just tell us what they did.” And I do, and then they make their decisions.

**John:** More follow-up in Episode 626. We talked about the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize, which I knew was a thing, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Matt wrote in with some more specificity here.

**Drew:** Matt says, “The Ig Nobel Prize already exists, and they celebrated their 33rd First Annual Ceremony in 2023, based on offbeat yet real science. The prizes are often presented by true Nobel laureates.” Matt says, “I personally appreciate their method of preventing long acceptance speeches, where an eight-year-old girl marches on stage to tell the recipients to, ‘Please stop. I’m bored,’ while the audience throws paper airplanes at the stage.”

**Craig:** That is very reminiscent of what happened at this year’s Emmys, where Anthony Anderson, the host, brought his mom. When people talked too long, they put a camera on his mom with a mic, and she just told the people to stop. I gotta tell you, it only really happened once. After that one time, I think everybody was terrified of Anthony Anderson’s mom.

I think she should be at all of these award shows. There’s really no excuse for it. They tell you very clearly you have 45 seconds, which is actually a lot of time. Some people go up there and just don’t seem to… They think, “Oh, but not really.” No, really. We’re in show business. We all understand that there’s timing. It’s remarkable to me that people just don’t do that. In any case, Anthony Anderson’s mom or an eight-year-old girl marching on stage, either way, yes, genius. Much better than the playoff music.

**John:** Craig, I did not watch any of the award shows so far this year. You attended many of them.

**Craig:** You missed it.

**John:** Give us a quick review.

**Craig:** I lost.

**John:** How was it for you?

**Craig:** I lost. I lost.

**John:** You lost and you lost and lost and lost and lost.

**Craig:** I lost. I lost. And then I lost.

**John:** But your show won many awards that were not part of the main telecast, which is great.

**Craig:** Yes, we did. We won eight Emmy Awards, which is one shy, I believe, of the record for most for a first-season show. That was terrific. I would have probably felt a bit more glum about constantly losing all the big awards, had it not been that I was losing to Jesse Armstrong and Succession. He is such a lovely, wonderful guy. Have we not had him on the show?

**John:** No, we’ve never had him on the show. We should get him on the show.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Let’s fix that. He’s wonderful and so smart and so deserving. Also, there’s a nice thing about certainty going into these awards shows, where you don’t really have to worry. I didn’t write speeches, for instance. You go and enjoy that, and it’s actually quite nice. I have a few friends there that are also up for other awards. Quinta Brunson, who we love, won an Emmy, which was wonderful to see. You do get to see a lot of people that you’ve come to like and enjoy.

I made a shorter night of all those things, just because the strikes had that weird impact of jamming four awards things into the course of 10 days. Oh, god, man, I walked out of one of those things. I’m like, “This thing was 4 hours long, and I feel more tired than I do shooting for 12 hours.” I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. It’s oddly exhausting.

**John:** Now, everything has got jammed up, tied together, but the alternative is it gets dragged out over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, which wouldn’t have been great either.

**Craig:** That would be worse. It was a way, at least, for people to go. Everybody’s schedules, once the strikes ended, everybody accelerated into work. Maybe not so much the actors, because there’s a bit of a lag time for them, but certainly writers and producers are working on things.

There will be awards shows coming up. We were very nicely nominated for the aforementioned PGA award. Going to be difficult for me to get down there and lose again, because I’m going to be shooting. I will have to lose in absentia. It was good to get it all done in this crazy pressure cooker 10 days, because it was Golden Globes, and then it was AFI, and then it was Critics Choice, and then it was Emmys, all boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and the Oscars are right around the corner.

**John:** Yeah, crazy. Last bit of follow-up is another Arlo Finch. Karen Finch wrote in and said, “Would you believe my dog is Arlo Finch? He’s nine, so technically, I named him first.” This dog is gorgeous.

**Craig:** Look at this little boy.

**John:** Oh my god, such a good dog.

**Craig:** What a cutie. He’s got his little toy.

**John:** His toy.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. My younger dog, Bonnie, she loves toys. But my older dog, Cookie, no interest in toys. Bonnie, when you come home, she sees you, and then she immediately runs away from you, gets a toy, and runs and brings it over to you, like, look, I have a toy. It always looks like this, just ripped up and gummy and dirty. Aw, look at this little boy, Arlo Finch.

**John:** It makes sense. Karen Finch, obviously her last name was already Finch. Arlo does feel like one of those names that probably starts in dogs and then goes to kids. Basically, it’s a fun name for an animal, and then you hear that name a lot and you start applying it to kids. It makes sense. Cooper was probably the same situation. I know there are a lot of Cooper dogs, and then you started having Cooper kids.

**Craig:** Cooper kids. Maybe Craig. It’s possible. Used to be a Scottish dog name. Craig!

**John:** You know that dog names tend to be two syllables, so you can yell out for them and they come back. Craig doesn’t work well as a dog name. Arlo does.

**Craig:** There’s Spike, Butch. I’m always thinking of the cartoon dogs. You’re right. Fido. Who names their dog Fido anymore?

**John:** It’s a good name though.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, a thing we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, probably from the very start, is that the screenplay format is well established. We’ve been used to it since the days of Casablanca. It’s 12-point Courier. The margins are a certain place. The dialog works a certain way. Character names are above stuff. As the Oscar nominations came out, we always try to make sure that we have all of the Oscar-nominated screenplays available on Weekend Read. That’s Drew’s responsibility, so Drew has been a hero to getting this all to make sure they look fantastic in Weekend Read.

We’ve got all of them except for one, which is Anatomy of a Fall, which is a fantastic script, a fantastic movie. It is not going to be possible to format that in Weekend Read, because it is bizarre. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how it looks. But I also pulled out some screenshots here.

It looks to be maybe in Times Roman, I’m guessing. It’s some sort of serif font. There are scene headers. It’s “8 – Chalet, Extérieur,” “Interior plus exterior/day.” We see that kind of stuff. It’s all in French, but you can totally tell what’s happening there. There are letters for A in parentheses, talking through the scene description. It is in the present tense, like the way we’d expect this to be. There are photos. There are photos of what the chalet looks like. Dialog is blocked over to the right in a way, with the character name above it but not centered. It’s just different. Craig, how are you feeling as you look at this?

**Craig:** I love it. I love this. This is going to start happening more and more. For screenplays that are speculative – and I don’t mean just spec screenplays that people are writing without money being paid; I mean even things in development, that are not necessarily automatically going to be produced – perhaps this would be too much or unnecessary.

But if you are writing for production, what I love about this is how many questions it answers for people, because, look, I’m in prep right now. People that work on movies, to produce the movies, all the department heads, they don’t read these scripts the way people that are gatekeeping at festivals or development executives read them. They’re reading them as instruction sets for what they’re supposed to do. The more information they can have, the clearer it becomes, and the fewer questions the filmmakers have to answer, because answering questions becomes the bane of your existence in prep. You have to do it. That’s sort of the point. But the fewer questions that are floating out there, the happier your day is.

This is brilliant looking at this. It answers so many things. It makes so many things clear. You’re going to end up drawing these things anyway. You’re going to end up taking photos of these things anyway. For a movie like Anatomy of a Fall, which is so specific about a space and what occurred in the space and the relative position of the window to the attic to the downstairs to the outside, this makes complete sense. It’s very easy to read. I have no problem with this whatsoever. None.

**John:** It does French things too, where they tend not to put extra blank lines between paragraphs, which is something I would choose to do. Looking on page 15, for example, there’s a sketch of how this attic space works and which windows open and which ones don’t. Just super helpful for anyone reading the script to get a sense of what the actual plan is here. We’ll try to get Justine on the podcast to talk through this, because I’m really curious-

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** … how early in the process did she know this was the house, this is how it’s all going to work. The other thing, which we always talk about, are alt lines and how you handle that. For this tidbit here, Sandra, in parentheses, “taking time to reflect or think about it,” she answers, “Not always, but often, yes, because of the wood dust.” And then, in parentheses beneath it, “Alt: often, yes, because of the wood dust. Alt: I think so, yes, because of the wood dust.” Here, those alts are there, already in the script there as a plan. Great. It feels very useful for production to know this is the situation, this is what we’re getting into, this is how we’re going to be doing it.

**Craig:** It’s a perfectly good thing to do. At some point, very early on, when you enter production, or let’s say you’ve been green-lit and now you’re in prep, as a writer you are confronted with how unromantic everyone is about creating it. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The makeup people see makeup. The hair people see hair. The clothing people see clothing. The production designer sees spaces, materials, construction. They aren’t necessarily plugged into your grand, romantic, artistic dream. They’re just trying to make it happen. It’s so practical. This kind of work is incredibly practical, including listing the alts, because then your actors are aware. You can have that discussion. You can decide on the day, “Do we want that other line? Which of these do you prefer?” It’s all very practical.

I’m in complete support of it. I think the screenplay format that we use is a perfectly fine format for people to read and decide, “Would I want to invest in this? Would I want to see this happen?” It is not a useful document for, “How do we make this happen?” It’s just not. This is very clever, very well done.

**John:** Also, if we do get her on the show, I want to talk about decisions of when to be in French, when to be in English, because if you’re reading this document, you basically have to be able to speak both French and English to parse it and understand what’s happening there. It’s a French script with just really mostly English dialog in it. It’s just such a fascinating hybrid form.

**Craig:** Yeah, which reflects the reality of the film, where it’s taking place in France, and yet one character is often answering questions that are posed in French in English.

**John:** It’s delightful. Here’s the other thing is, we talked about the Tiffany Problem, like it’s realistic, but would you believe it. As an American, you’re watching these courtroom sequences, you’re like, “Wait, there’s no possible way you’re allowed to do that.” Of course, but no, it’s France, and you can do things that way. The way that the prosecutor behaves, it’s like, “How is that possible? Is she always on the witness stand, and she can just stand up and talk whenever?” It’s wild.

**Craig:** It is wild. I think a lot of people have that natural, like, “Did they just invent this to make the courtrooms seem more interesting?” The answer is no. Then following that, there was quite a discourse of, “What is wrong with France?” The way they conduct a trial just feels bad. It feels bad.

**John:** It feels incredibly unfair to the defendant.

**Craig:** It really does. In a country where there is a history of just chopping people’s heads off for political expressions, it does seem a little like, oh, I don’t like this feeling. But then we know in, for instance, the case in Italy with Amanda Knox, the way other countries investigate, prosecute, pursue, charge, and judge is not like we do. It’s interesting.

**John:** I would love to hear from international listeners, because they must see so much of the American courtroom process, because it’s in all our movies, it’s in all of our TV shows. How much does that color their expectation about how stuff should work in their own legal systems? They must have some expectation it’s going to work similarly, and it clearly doesn’t.

**Craig:** The other interesting thing about the constant presentation of the American justice system is that typically, for the purposes of drama, the stories that we tell are of falsely accused people or people who are guilty in the letter of the law but not in the spirit of the law. That’s what’s exciting to us. But there are times where we do tell stories of people who are guilty. The question is are they guilty or not.

The aforementioned Jack Thorne wrote a terrific miniseries that was centered around an actor who was accused of sexually assaulting people. It became a courtroom drama where you were rooting for guilt. That’s an interesting concept we don’t often see. But even though a lot of American lawyers… If we had Ken White on, for instance, he would run down how inaccurate and stupid American courtroom dramas are. It does at least give you a sense of our process and form, which is way more rigorous than apparently France, which is like, this is a free-for-all. This is kind of exciting though.

**John:** For our main topic, I want to talk a little bit about fandom and the dynamics of fandom. The jumping-off point was a blog post I read, which turned out was all from 2015, so it’s a little dated there. But I really liked how he laid out how subcultures become fandoms become these bigger things and tend to ultimately implode or get warped. This is a post by David Chapman. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. He talks through that generally the dynamic you see is that there is a scene where you have some creators who are doing a new thing. It could be a musical new thing. It could be an artistic new thing. Some sort of cultural product that they’re making which feels new. That then attracts fanatics, who are people who are not making the things themselves, but are so into it and want to follow it and follow those creators. Both these creators and the fandoms are geeks, in the sense that they are deeply, deeply into it. This is more than just a weird hobby. It’s becoming an actual subculture.

Once that gets up to a certain critical mass, you have what he calls MOPs, members of the public, who are attracted to it and start to enjoy it, but they’re not on the inside. They get kind of geeky about it, but they’re not actual hardcore fans. They’re like tourists coming to the thing. Sometimes there’s in-grouping and out-grouping, where these new people you label as posers, because they’re not true believers, they’re not really part of it.

But what I found so fascinating is he also charts it through to generally you get a place where there are sociopaths who become attracted to this movement, this thing that’s more than a scene. It’s become a subculture. They adopt some aspects of it, and ultimately the drive either is for money or to do some other kind of nefarious purpose.

I thought it was just an interesting dynamic. It’s very easy to chart this to the rise of the hippie movement. It feels accurate to a lot of the ways we see things begin, blossom, grow, and fall apart.

**Craig:** This is an interesting dissection of the phenomenon of phenomena and how things catch fire and become a social exercise. There are certain presumptions baked into this that I think are worth questioning.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** For instance, is it better to be a fanatic than to be a casual enjoyer? One of the things I think about as a person that does create things is what do I want my audience to be. If I had a wish, how would I want them to be reacting and interacting with the work I make.

I don’t think I have a great desire for people to be fanatics, per se. What I want is for people to enjoy. I want them to take from it what I intended to give. The fandom itself is separate from what I want. I just want people to watch it and feel things that I hope they feel and think about things that I want them to consider. I am not doing this so that people tattoo it on themselves or go to every show and get signatures and autographs and things like that, but people do. I understand that, because I’ve tattooed myself, so I get that.

I do question the premise that one kind of fandom, there’s a pure, truer fandom than another. I wonder if most creators are really just trying to appeal to what this author refers to as MOPs, members of the public.

**John:** I think that’s a great distinction. Also, maybe we can talk about it both in the terms of the things we write and make, so Last of Us for you, or Chernobyl, versus what we’re doing right now, which is that we have fans of Scriptnotes, who are listening to this podcast that we’re making, and to what degree do we feel like we need to engage with that community that forms around, because we made a thing that the community is around it, or that we want to distance ourselves or not really think about and worry about that.

The answer is different for different things. I think with Scriptnotes, we do engage our community to a pretty significant degree, not a degree to which a YouTuber or a Vine star back in the day might’ve. But we’re answering their questions. We’re meeting them at live shows. Some of them are paying us $5 a month. There is a sense that we are attempting to service that community to some degree by also doing a thing that we want to do, which is different than what you’re doing with Last of Us, which is you’re trying to make the thing, and you recognize that there is a role to which you need to go out and promote the thing and go to Brazil to do a fan launch of the thing, and yet you’re still trying to maintain some boundaries around your exposure to that community.

**Craig:** Because the goal ultimately is the point. The goal of making things is hopefully for people to see it and appreciate it. When I say people, I mean as many as possible. I don’t think anyone makes a show or writes a book or writes a song so that very few people will listen to it.

There’s this thing that happens when something is new – this author refers to it as the new thing – where the first people to appreciate it feel a kind of ownership. They feel special, because they fought their way to it. They found it when it wasn’t promoted to them, when no one told them about it. They had a pure experience with it. Then other people don’t, in their minds. Other people are promoted to. Their friends tell them.

In reality, I’m not sure it matters, because let’s say I’ve never heard of a thing. I remember somebody… I think it was Shannon Woodward. Yeah, it was Shannon. I was having lunch with her or something. She’s like, “Have you seen Stranger Things?” I said, “No,” because you know me. I don’t watch stuff. She’s like, “There’s this girl who plays this little girl who’s just a phenomenal… She’s just doing this stuff that’s just mind-blowing to me as an actor.” I was like, “That’s a pretty good recommendation. I’ll check it out.” Then I watched it, and I was like, “Wow. Millie Bobby Brown is really good at this. The Duffer brothers are really good at this. This is great.” Is my appreciation less valuable because I was told, as opposed to somebody who’s just flipping through the 4,000 shows on Netflix, lands on something, and goes, “Yes, this. I have unearthed it.” I don’t know.

**John:** I think we often have the experience of being champions of a thing that we want other people to see. Our One Cool Things are like, “Hey, take a look at this thing that you may not have otherwise been aware of.” That signaling thing is important. We’re using some of our cache and our authority, to whatever degree we have it, to say this is a thing that is worth your attention. We sometimes seek out people who can recommend good things to us. A lot of the blogs I follow are basically like, I like that person’s taste, and so if they are recommending something to me, I will click through that link, because they don’t steer me wrong, which is absolutely great and true.

I think what’s different though is that the difference between a recommendation and something that becomes a fandom is a fandom requires some kind of organization. Interesting that a lot of times, fandom, it is self-organizing. It’s not the creator who’s going out there and creating that community and organizing that community. They’re just making their thing. That community is creating its own rules and its own structure around it. The relationship between that fan organization and that creator can be great. It can be toxic. It can be problematic. That’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. What this guy is describing is fandom protecting itself, which actually has nothing to do with the art. It’s only about the community that’s built around the art, which I understand. When you find a community, it’s important to you. As we all know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging is the most important of the non-fundamental needs like food, shelter. You find belonging, especially if you are someone who struggles with belonging. Let’s say you’re on the spectrum. You’re on the autism spectrum. It’s hard for you to find belonging in the real-world space, but you connect with other people who have a similar struggle, over your shared joy of this new thing. You get really deep into it. Then your community is now something different and important from the art itself.

What this is talking about is how to protect that, because what happens as things become more popular is a lot of people enter the community that maybe you don’t think have the same depth of connection to the work that you do, or some people – and in this article they’re described just fully on as sociopaths – enter the community for purely exploitative reasons, to sell things, to get attention for themselves. And then they can, quote unquote, ruin the culture, the subculture.

The truth is all of this analysis does matter to a lot of people, because most people are fans, not creators. But for those of us who make things, I think it’s important to appreciate fans, to appreciate early fans, rabid fans, passionate fans, and the community they build up, while also maintaining that what we do is meant for anyone who enjoys it. Anyone. There is nothing exclusive about what we do. There is, however, apparently something exclusive about the people that begin that first community.

**John:** This is a thing I was holding back for maybe a future How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually good to bring up right now. There’s an article by Sarah Viren which ran in the New York Times this past week. It’s looking at this woman whose sister was murdered when she was a kid. Fifty years have passed. It’s a cold case. But this woman said, “Listen, I feel a calling from God. I need to figure out who killed my sister in this brutal way 50 years ago.” She goes to a true-crime con thing and meets these podcasters who had done similar kinds of things, and starts working with them about, “How are we going to try to solve this? How are we going to group-source this?” The podcasters have a plan. They’re going to build up a Facebook group. They’re going to get people involved in working through this. They start putting together episodes. They’re making some progress. The police agree to reopen the case. Things are proceeding.

But ultimately, this woman starts to have frustrations with these podcasters, feeling like they violated some confidences that she had shared with them, and doesn’t go on this one Zoom. And essentially, this whole community turns against her, the actual person who is the instigator of all this, the one whose sister actually died. I found that to be fascinating too, because who’s the creator in this situation? Is it the podcasters who did organize this group, or is it her? And who is the victim in this situation?

True crime fandom is a thing. In this case, it’s a community that was formed around this one murder, and the only thing they have in common is that there’s a curiosity about this, but they’re not making the thing. They’re just contributing. The sense of online communities in particular can be incredibly toxic, because you’re not doing it to someone’s face.

**Craig:** It’s also a question of what is it that you are obsessed with. Here’s a woman who’s obsessed with who killed her sister. That is a fact, and that is a crime. That’s somebody that she loved and cared for. The fandom is obsessed with a podcast, so now they are interested in what is an act of creation. It’s a show.

If you care mostly about the show, I always think of this as the Skyler problem. Skyler White on Breaking Bad. Anna Gunn is an incredible actor and portrayed Walter White’s wife beautifully and had to carry the burden of a very difficult part. There was this thing where the Breaking Bad fandom just started to hate her, hate both Anna Gunn and Skyler White. Why? Because Skyler’s character was in direct opposite to Walter and his stuff. If she finds out what he is doing, she’s going to be angry and make him stop. When she does find out what he’s doing, she is upset. She becomes sort of a co-conspirator, and then eventually just no more. But her character was a threat to the existence of the show. If Skyler wins, Walter White stops making meth, and there’s no more show. What the audience cared about was that the show would keep going, and so they started to hate a character. I find that fascinating.

I think in this case, I could definitely see where if the woman whose sister was a victim became uncomfortable with the show and was threatening the continuation of the show, the community gets angry at her, because they don’t care about her and her justice. They care about the show. And that is where fandom gets a little squiggly, when you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t purely fictional, but rather a presentation of truth.

**John:** Absolutely. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to continue this conversation and talk about different fandoms and the degree to which it feels like the creators have some control over that and the degree to which the creators are being held captive to their fandoms, which I think is a challenging situation, which happens far too often. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, what you got for us?

**Drew:** Brent writes, “My understanding is that if a stage musical is adapted into a film, the songwriter retains copyright, and the songs are licensed to the film. But how does ownership and authorship work with original songs written for an original musical film? Are they considered separate from the screenplay? Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA? And how is that songwriter typically contracted?

**John:** Here’s a question I could actually answer, because I have-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … much experience with this. First, Brett’s assumption that a stage musical adapted into a film, yes, and so that the lyricist composer of the original Broadway or stage production, they own the copyright on those songs, and so those are licensed as part of the package to make the movie. The Mean Girls movie, Jeff Richmond, who wrote the songs for that – and I don’t remember who the lyricist was – those songs were licensed for the movie, pretty straightforward.

When you write an original song for a movie, and so if you’re Billie Eilish to do for Barbie, they come to you and they say, “Hey, would you write this song for this movie?” You write it. It’s phenomenal. There’s a separate contract for that. It is licensed to be in the movie. It’s relatively clean. It’s similar to how it would’ve worked the other way around, like if the song had previously existed.

What gets to be complicated is when you are writing stuff that is fundamentally integrated into the movie. For Corpse Bride or for Frankenweenie and for Big Fish, I wrote songs into the script that became part of the movie. Those, I was not contracted separately. They were just part of the script. They were folded into my writing fee for writing the movie. But those songs, which also Danny Elfman then did the music for, also exist separately, and so I am paid separately for those, for royalties and for all the other music-y things that songwriters get paid for. I get separate checks for each of those things. When it plays in Norway, I get 13 cents, and those checks accumulate separately, by different accounting systems, so ASCAP or BMI.

**Craig:** Yep, I’ve done the same. That’s how it works. You do retain authorship of those songs. I have the distinct honor of receiving checks from ASCAP every now and then for a song called Douchebag of the Year in Superhero Movie, which how many people can boast that, John? Very few.

**John:** It’s nice.

**Craig:** I wrote a rap song for Scary Movie 3, and I get royalties for writing the lyrics. Your outline is exactly correct. Authorship of lyrics and authorship of music will always generate royalties through ASCAP and BMI, and not only if they’re played just on their own, but also if they’re played in the movie. It is an interesting hybrid there, but generally speaking, you do retain more rights and more financial interest with songs than you do with, say, a work for hire as a script, because in that case, you’re really relying on the WGA formula for residuals and nothing else.

**John:** One other question embedded in here. Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Generally, no. It’s a thing we’ve talked about with Rachel Bloom a couple times is that writing the songs for things like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she’s often writing actual story material. She’s writing everything that happens in the song. It’s like she’s not just writing dialog, but she’s writing a whole sequence. You could imagine there could be scenarios in which the songs are so much of what the actual story is that it crosses into situations where it really should be considered literary material that goes into WGA arbitrations. Maybe that’s happened in the past, but classically, no, it’s not considered literary material in that same way.

**Craig:** Generally, no. If you’re dealing with something that is a recitative, where everything is sung, for instance, Les Mis, then certainly, I think the Writers Guild has the ability, through its pre-arbitration structure and participating writer investigations, to say, “Hey, look, even though this is in a lyric format, it is dialog. It is screenplay material. It is literary material.” We have the ability to be flexible on that front and to pose the questions and ask them. It’s another reason why the WGA’s sole authority is important, because it can, as an institution, allow for some flexibility and exclusions and exceptions. There are ways for it to actually account for unique properties like that.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Kaylan in Alaska writes, “Are there best practices to follow as to not break up scenes or dialog in an annoying way? I specifically mean when a scene begins at the bottom of a page, and only one line of scene description fits, or when dialog gets broken between two pages in a way that feels like it might break up the reading of the line. My brain really wants that soothing feeling of a scene starting at the top of a page.”

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what my brain wants, Kaylan. My brain is trying to anagram and Kaylan and Alaska together. There’s so many overlapping letters. I love it. Best practices are what you feel good with, what makes you happy. Most people reading, my opinion, don’t care. For me as a writer, I care so much. I don’t like splitting up dialog across pages. If I can mitigate that, I do, because, I don’t know, I don’t like it. It just feels bad. If you can avoid ending a scene with a single line of action that’s on the subsequent page and then start a new scene, yeah, do it. Avoid it. It’s actually not that hard to do. As long as you don’t get into a situation where you’re actually hurting things to make it look better on the page, you’re fine. My brain wants that soothing feeling as well, and there’s nothing wrong with a little self-soothing there as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Here’s one situation where screenwriting software, from Final Draft to Fade In to Highland, all the legitimate applications, are going to be doing some of this work for you. What they will all do is they will not let you start a scene at the very bottom of a page. They’ll push that scene header to the next page. If there’s a single line on the next page, they’ll pull stuff across, so that you don’t have a little orphan or a widow there happening. Some of that stuff happens automatically.

What Craig is describing is generally the last looks before you’re printing or turning in a script to somebody, is just going through it one last time and seeing are there any really weird breaks that I want to fix here, and seeing if there’s way you could pull stuff, push it down or pull it across, so you don’t get those weirdos there. I used to be much more of a freak about it. I just don’t let it stress me out too much. I will look for situations where that’s actually confusing because it broke that way.

The other thing you don’t appreciate until you actually have to build the software to do it, most of these apps will also break at the sentence, rather than breaking at the end of the line. If dialog has to break across a page, they will create the break, add a period, rather than just having the line taper off, which is just helpful. It just makes it much easier to read.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Drew:** Not Too Happy writes, “I wrote a script in 2014 that became my calling card for many years. It performed well on The Black List site, found producers, went to all the agencies, got offered to a bunch of different actresses and directors, and spent years almost getting made. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a Deadline announcement that a very famous actor is set to produce and star in a movie with the exact same plot. Normally, that would be an oh well, what are you going to do? But in this case, that actor was sent my script in 2015, along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead. This all went through their reps at the time, from reputable producers on my end, above board, blah blah blah. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of knowingly stealing anything, but I can’t help but feeling like I’m being ripped off. My manager offered a, ‘That sucks,’ and my lawyer advises a wait-and-see approach. I’d rather not. Do I have any recourse, and what would you do?”

**John:** Not Too Happy provided some context here which Craig and I can take a look at, but we’re not going to discuss on the show.

**Craig:** It is quite the context. It is certainly relevant. Not Too Happy, I get why you’re not too happy. Your manager actually here is giving you the proper answer, which is that sucks. Your lawyer advising a wait-and-see approach, that’s the lawyer’s version of, “We’re not doing anything.” Here’s why.

Unfortunately – and we’ve talked about this quite a few times on the show – premises, plots, these are not really intellectual property. They fall under the general heading of ideas. Let’s say I write a script, and it’s about two guys who discover that they’ve grown up separately, but actually, turns out that they’re brothers, and in fact, they’re weirdly twins. They’re fraternal twins. But one of them is really short, and one of them is tall and super strong. They don’t look anything alike. Okay. That’s Twins. That’s cool. What I just described, anyone can write a movie like that.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:58:50].

**Craig:** I could sit down, I could write another movie today with a different title that is the exact same plot, and it is not legally actionable, because unless you get into unique expression in fixed form, there’s no infringement there. If you get a copy of the script that this star is going to be making, and they have taken chunks of your action description or runs of dialog that are non-generic, okay, that’s just straight up copyright infringement. They won’t.

**John:** They won’t.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, this is one of those things where we can’t even say that the person went, “Oh, you know what? I love this idea, but I just don’t like the script. Can somebody else do this idea?” Maybe that’s what happened, which by the way, that’s not stealing either. Is it ethical? No. But is it criminal? No. You can’t steal something that isn’t property. And unfortunately, concepts and ideas and general plot lines, not property.

**John:** We don’t know the backstory on how this actor came to do this project, which is apparently moving forward. My hunch though is someone else had basically the same idea and wrote it up, and the actor said, “Oh yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something that’s in that space,” and said yes to that thing. I suspect that the second writer really did come up with that idea on their own, because it’s a good idea, but it’s also an idea that a lot of people could have, honestly. They wrote their own thing. This star attached themselves to it. If you cannot show that there is a connection between that second writer having exposure to your script and having decided, “I’m going to do this thing that’s basically the same premise,” there’s no case to be made here.

Your manager and your lawyer are saying the right thing. The lawyer saying, “Let’s wait and see,” is also saying you don’t know this thing’s ever even going to happen. If this thing actually goes in production and it clearly looks like there is an infringement case to be made here, that’s the time when she would raise her hand and do something.

**Craig:** There almost certainly won’t be. Let’s also dig in a little bit on Not Too Happy here. When you said, “That actor,” the one that’s now said to produce and star in the movie, “was sent my script in 2015,” so almost a decade ago, “along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead,” now, that sounds impressive. But the fact is, actors of a certain level are constantly getting stuff submitted with an official offer of whatever their quote is, or maybe their quote is less than that. They might not have even read it.

Listen. I get offered things where someone says, “Here’s something. We’ve bought a book, and we want you to write this,” and blah blah blah. I’m like, “No, I’m not interested.” I just tell my agent, “It doesn’t sound for me. No, thank you.” Then four years later, someone that I’m really fascinated by starts talking to me about that book or a different book on the same topic, and now suddenly I am interested, because there’s just a different context to it. Did I do something wrong? No. I changed my mind, or I wasn’t in the same place, or something was more attractive to me about this other version of it.

The point being, what I think you need to do is let yourself off the hook of feeling like you’ve been screwed, because that’s a terrible feeling to walk around with. I don’t think you’ve been legally screwed. If you were somewhat ethically screwed with, let’s look at the bright side. You had an idea that other people thought was worth making. Now, what you need to do for the next step, Not Too Happy, is to write a script of an idea that people like, that is so good they want to make that script. That’s ultimately what separates the steadily working writers from folks who are trying to be steadily working writers. Good idea and undeniable execution, as opposed to good idea, decent execution.

It’s not fun to hear. By the way, your script may have been amazing. But in this case, it sounds like, by your own admission, it went to all the agencies, lots of different actresses and directors, and it just ultimately wasn’t compelling in and of itself to get that next level going.

As John says, in this case, I’m looking at this article that talks about this. There are articles like this every five minutes. “So-and-so is attached to produce some blah da blah such and such,” and then it never happens. Who knows?

**John:** Who knows? Let’s try one more question, Drew. Let’s do Will here.

**Drew:** Will writes, “Before Christmas, I reached out to the representation of a character actor I had in mind for my script. Today they got back to me asking about financing. How do I answer them saying I don’t have financing without scaring them off?”

**John:** That’s going to be the first question you’re going to get back. It’s good we bring this up, because any time you’re reaching out to a specific actor, who’d be the character actor who’s exactly perfect for this, the reps are doing their job. They’re saying, “Okay, is there any money here?” The answer is, “There’s no money here. These are the producers that I want to approach. This is my plan going forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Look. Character actors really should be asking about this. Basically, what the reps are saying is, are you offering us a job, or are you asking us to attach a name? Will, you’re referring to an independent film. There’s a long, glorious tradition of independent films trying to get financing using the actor’s name to help them get financing. The financing is like, “Do you have an actor attached?” Everybody’s basically in a catch-22.

But attaching yourself to a script ultimately isn’t much of a commitment. No actor’s going to say, “Yes, I’m attaching myself to your unfinanced project, and also I’m clearing the decks for these months, and I will take no other jobs for those months.” That’s not a thing.

How do I answer them? Honestly. You answer them honestly. You say, “We are looking for financing. We honestly feel that we will have a much better chance of getting financing if we can say that this actor is attached and happy to play this part, should all of the other things that need to happen line up, like schedule, payment, etc.” If they’re like, “Yeah, no, we don’t actually want to attach ourselves to this without financing,” what you just heard is “no.” And that’s just life.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a future situation where somehow you’re able to find financing, and you come back to that actor, and suddenly they’re interested? Yes, that could happen too. Don’t bank on it, but that’s possible too. You’ve burned nothing to do this. Being honest is the right approach.

Whoever the reps are for this character actor, this is a chance for them to be more in a lead role. That’s exciting for them. There may be ways that you can spin this as helpful. They may also know people who are, relationships that that actor has with producers or something. There may be some way that it could be helpful. So be honest and open to what they’re saying next.

**Craig:** These reps, we don’t know, they may have been yelled at by their client two weeks earlier, saying, “Stop sending me stuff that isn’t financed and isn’t, quote unquote, ‘real.'” Because here’s the thing. They gotta read all this stuff. They gotta read all of it. They gotta get excited by it. And then they do, and someone’s like, “Great. We actually have no money. We’ll talk to you in a year.” Then they’re like, “Why did I go through all that?”

**John:** The same thing happens for writers, of course, is that you get approached, like, “There’s this book,” blah blah blah. It’s like, that’s fantastic. Some cases I’m willing to engage, and I’ll at least try to set this up someplace. Other places, no. If there’s actually a home for this, then I’ll talk about this, but I’m not going to spend three months of my life trying to get this thing set up.

**Craig:** Or, god forbid, help you get the rights, by saying, “I’ll adapt it.” Hell no.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Get your own rights. Otherwise, what do I need you for? Do you know what I mean? I’ll just go get the rights then.

**John:** Yoink. Cool. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I read over the Christmas holidays. For whatever reason, I plow through books during the holidays. I had three this time. One of them I really enjoyed was Going Zero by Anthony McCarten.

So the premise of this is – it’s fiction – there is a joint program between the CIA and a Facebook kind of organization. What they’re trying to do is to be able to track people who fall off the grid, who disappear, and to see how quickly we can find those people, prevent terrorist attacks and other nefarious things. To test this system, they are going to recruit, I believe it’s 10 people, and basically say, “We’re going to tell you one day that you have to go zero. You have to disappear, fall off the grid. If you can stay hidden for 30 days, we’ll give you $3 million.” It’s a good premise. The story’s alternating between the people who are trying to hide and the people who are looking for them. So that’s that cat-and-mouse game.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** Naturally, there are complications that ensue. I read this as a pure, clean, looking for a good read, and of course, as a person who makes film and television, I’m like, “I know how to adapt this.” But I deliberately did not look up the credits of the person who wrote the book until I was finished. I looked him up. Anthony McCarten is actually a very successful, very produced screenwriter, who I ended up emailing him, and he has his own plans for the book. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen next to it. But if you are into a fun, breezy thriller to read, I recommend Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. If you read it now, then you can also see what becomes of it. It’s sort of a how would this become a property down the road.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Good recommendation. My One Cool Thing is full-on nepo baby.

**John:** This is your incredibly successful father who gave you your career. That’s what you’re talking about. You are the nepo baby.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the nepo baby. My father was an incredibly successful social studies teacher in the New York City public school system.

**John:** Without him, you would not have been able to find Chernobyl.

**Craig:** He taught American history, so actually, I didn’t even have that. No. I speak of my youngest child, Jessica Mazin, who is currently attending school at Berklee College of Music in Boston. John’s daughter is also there in school in Boston. She is a budding songwriter and has written some really good songs. She’s written stuff that actually got…

There’s a song she wrote – talk about fandom – that was based on a book series on Wattpad, which I know you’re familiar with, because you also have a daughter. Wattpad’s basically a fanfiction conglomeration site, as far as I can tell. There was this incredibly popular series there. She wrote a song based on characters and things from the series, and it actually got, I don’t know, millions of listens on Spotify. It’s pretty remarkable. She got paid money. She got over a million listens to that. In a nepo daddy way, I also had her sing a cover of a Depeche Mode song for The Last of Us. But I did so because I think she’s awesome.

**John:** She’s really good.

**Craig:** I actually think she’s great. It’s an interesting thing of creating a person who creates things, and then I listen to the things they’ve created, and it’s like this weird echo of creation. She’s written a song called The Devil. She wrote the lyrics and the music, and she performs it, and then her friend Henry Dearborn, who’s an also very talented young guy, produced it and helped add instrumentation and mix and all that. I think it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. I listened to it.

**Craig:** That is a really good song. It’s super catchy. I think the lyrics are really intriguing. I’m making Jessica and her song The Devil my One Cool Thing. It is on Spotify. I think you’ll enjoy it. I actually think you’ll like it. It goes down easy, and it’s got a good chorus. She’s just very good. I actually think she’s really, really good.

**John:** We’ll start playing the song now. It’ll become our outro for this episode. One thing I think is so interesting about Spotify is there’s obviously so many criticisms with Spotify, but the fact that Jessica is on Spotify the same way that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are on Spotify, or Girl in Red, it equals things out in ways that are really fascinating and unprecedented, so that’s nice. The fact that people could discover her – my daughter discovers music all the time on Spotify – is exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is. I’m very proud of her. I’m proud of how independent she is from me. She doesn’t do what I do. She doesn’t ask me for help. She doesn’t ask my opinion. What happens is it just appears, and then I listen to it like anyone else. I think maybe that’s what I’m most proud of is that she doesn’t give a sweet damn what I think. I like it. I love it, actually, honestly, anyway.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Jessica Mazin. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Our list of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so we’d love some more outros coming in here. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on creators and fandom. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. Continuing our conversation about fans and creators, I have a list here in the Workflowy of different kinds of fandoms. I want to think about what is the relationship between them and their creators and the people who own the underlying material behind this.

I’ll start with Formula One, because last year I went to my first Formula One race. I just didn’t realize what a giant community that is, just the money they mint doing that. It’s interesting, because I feel like with Formula One, they’d already had fans, but then the Netflix show really drew up a whole bunch of new fans, including my daughter, to it. Where’s the center of fandom for it? Is it the individual teams? Is it the organization that puts on the races? Is it the Netflix show? It feels like it’s one of those in-between things, and it’s hard to say who’s in control of it.

**Craig:** It’s a bit scary, actually, how fandom as a business can get larger than the core business. This satellite business that grows around it. It is remarkable. One thing that I think really big artists have become very good at is getting ahead of it. BTS, for instance, that group is also its own fandom industry. They got ahead of it. They control it. They run it. Yes, there are obviously a lot of independents that grow up around it, but they’ve created so much of it. It was baked in from the jump, whereas some of the boy bands that we remember from the ’90s, for instance, were just selling records and selling tour tickets and merch, which we used to call merchandise. Merch, it’s like IP. That was like backstage talk that was slightly cynical, and now it’s front stage talk for everyone.

The business now, I think, is such that creators are starting to get more of a handle on it. I would imagine Taylor Swift at some point woke up one day and said, “Why are other people making more money off of me than me?” Because that actually probably doesn’t feel great. It feels a little exploitative, and yet it’s all about the energy of people that are in love with what you do.

**John:** I’d be curious what Jessica’s relationship is like with her fans at this point, because she has enough people who are listening to her music, who are curious about her next thing that’s going to be happening, that they feel some investment in her. They’re rooting for her. They discovered her early on. Maybe Berklee School of Music is the perfect place for her to learn some of this. How should she be thinking about that? To what degree does she need to start thinking about her mailing list, how she’s communicating with the people who are her truest fans?

**Craig:** I think in a healthy way, like any young artist, she’s mostly concerned about getting better, about creating work, getting better, learning. She’s got some gigs now. Berklee’s amazing about how they facilitate this. She’s going to start getting paid to perform live. But she definitely does have the Generation Z TikTok conversation with people who like what she does.

I have a feeling that fandom is a hockey stick chart, where there’s a little bit, there’s a little bit, and then something happens, and then boom, it just explodes. Even in the article we were discussing where the guy was talking about the fanatics, the fanatics aren’t the first people in. There’s always other people that are in first, and then there’s that moment that happens where there’s a big upswing, and then it becomes a real thing. I think she’s got her head on in the right place. There are obviously a lot of people for whom the fandom is the point. Those people tend to head more off into the influencer zone as opposed to trying to create things.

Taylor Swift is a wonderful example of somebody that clearly was about creating art, and it became enormously popular, and now there is an industry. But she didn’t start for that. I’ve never read an interview with her or seen her talk and thought to myself, oh, this was all calculated. No, she’s just a really good artist that people love.

**John:** Yes. I will note Taylor Swift has her challenges with her community as well, like the Gaylor Swift, the people who are obsessed that she’s actually lesbian and that all these songs have coded meanings in them.

**Craig:** Gaylor Swift.

**John:** How does she both refute that without driving those people away in a way that makes them feel unseen and unheard? It’s so challenging, because she’s an artist trying to tell stories, and people, false stories, they’re going to derive their own meaning from them, which is exactly the point. And yet when there’s a community that is obsessed with picking everything apart to discover a secret, hidden meaning behind things, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It would be fascinating to talk with her about this, although we never will, because she now exists on Mount Olympus. But when we start out as artists, we are looking for the outliers, the people who will love what we do, because most people are going to ignore new things. We’re looking for somebody – ideally somebody with some influence –to love what we do. That one special person, even if they’re just 1% of the people that have been listening, helped spread the word, and now lots of people listen. But then, once it gets really big – and Taylor Swift operates on a massive scale – then what you’re dealing with are outlier problems.

Let’s say 99.9% of your fans are healthy people who just love your music, which I think is probably the case for Taylor. That .1% is the problem. They’re the people who are driving an enormous amount of discourse online, who are agitated, aggressive, angry, possessive, parasocial. Those are also the people that are showing up at your house, trying to climb over the wall, sending you weird messages, stalking. The outlier becomes the problem. I think sometimes in our culture, we mistake the outlier discussion for the mainstream discussion when it’s not.

Gaylor Swift is a fascinating concept. I suspect the great majority of Taylor Swift fans are just enjoying the music and are not at that level of, “I need you to like who I want you to like,” which is just I think part of an outlier behavior.

**John:** One of the other books I read over the holidays was Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online, which tracks creators and fandoms and the rise of internet creator culture. It goes back from vloggers and mommy bloggers and the rise and fall of those. But one of the most fascinating sections is on Vine, because Vine was never meant to be what Vine became. You had these young men, some women, but mostly young men, who became extremely famous for doing little Vines, but also just became famous for being famous, in the way that Paris Hilton’s famously famous for being famous. People need to figure out, how do we monetize that? How do we exploit that? They would have these mall tours where they’d put together these Vine stars to perform, kind of. There was teenage girls who were their fans. They really weren’t part of the community.

It was a strange fit, particularly because the platform that they were on, Vine, did not like them. It did not want them around. That tension between the space you’re in and what you’re trying to do can be a real factor as well. It’s a thing we see again and again with studios and their stars and filmmakers and the need to do press and publicity but also feel constrained by it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It is. It is an interesting concept, the notion of a platform that you intend the platform to be used one way, it ends up being used another way. OnlyFans comes to mind.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I don’t know, but I assume that OnlyFans began as a thing of like, hey, this is where people can talk to their fans, because they’re songwriters or they’re visual artists or whatever it is, and this is a way for them to get paid for what they do by the people that love them. From what I understand, John…

**John:** That’s not really where it is right now. I think OnlyFans may have known that sex work was going to be part of it from the start. But there’s wholesome versions of that as well that are just not as successful.

**Craig:** OnlyFans I guess was uncomfortable enough with the fact that it had become a platform for sex work that they said no more sex on OnlyFans, and everyone went, then what the hell are you for? It’s like if McDonald’s was like, “We didn’t mean to sell chicken nuggets. We were hamburgers. No more chicken nuggets,” and everyone lost their minds. Then OnlyFans was like, “Okay, I guess this is what we are now.”

**John:** Credit card processing with anything involving sex work is also incredibly complicated. Let’s wind back to Star Trek. We think of Star Trek was designed to be a delightful show about space travel, wagon to the stars. It did sell toys. It had its own stuff that it was doing, its own merch. But fan culture around Star Trek became its own industry. Suddenly, there’s actors who appeared on one episode now being booked for fan conventions. It’s self-sustained in a way that was important and made it possible ultimately for the renaissance of Star Trek and for the movies and for everything else to have happened after the fact. It was necessary for those fans to exist, and yet they’ve always been in a bit of a strange relationship with the owners and creators of Star Trek.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a pretty famous sketch on Saturday Night Live. William Shatner was the guest host. The sketch was him at a Star Trek convention where people are asking him questions, and he finally just broke down and told them all to get a life. This was very funny to the people in the audience there in the studio, whatever it is, 8A. But a lot of people in the fan community were upset. They were hurt.

Listen. A lot of people – and we’ve mentioned this before – who join these communities struggle to find other communities. Here was somebody basically making fun of them for that specific struggle. They weren’t just there as part of the Trekker community because of how much they love Star Trek. It’s because of also how much they loved and were loved by people who loved Star Trek, as opposed to everywhere else in their lives, where maybe they were being discounted or put down. For the objects, the center of the wheel to behave towards them the way that the jocks at high school behaved had to have been pretty hurtful.

There are certain genres that do tend to appeal more to people who do struggle with, we’ll call non-virtual communities. I think it’s important for people to be aware of that and to be kind, because I have another daughter, who’s on the autism spectrum, and we talk all the time about her special interests and the things that she’s super into and how she finds community with other people that love it, and it’s important to her.

**John:** A community that’s growing very quickly – I’d really be curious what the subculture’s like two or three years from now – is pickleball.

**Craig:** Pickleball.

**John:** The number of people who tried to recruit me to play pickleball is somewhat astonishing. It’s also interesting to watch the fights that are happening in communities about the conversion of normal tennis courts to pickleball courts and, of course, the noise that pickleball creates.

**Craig:** Fricking noise. Yeah, pickleball really came out of nowhere there. Wow. You’re absolutely right. Now, pickleball is an interesting one, because unlike most fandoms we discuss, which are driven by the young, pickleball is driven by the old. Old people – and I don’t say that with any stink on it, because I’m getting there, man. Let’s call them older people. Older people are tough. They’re organized. They have money. They know how systems work.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Fans of a new rap star who comes on the scene, fans of that rap star generally aren’t going to be also serving on city councils or know how hearings work, but the pickleball fans do. They’re lawyers. They’re doctors. They’re heads of the PTAs. Now it becomes interesting. Watch out for the pickleball people. They’ll get you.

**John:** It’s good stuff. The last thing I want to distinguish between is there’s fandom, and there’s also collectors. Watching what’s happening right now with Stanley cups. Have you been tracking that at all?

**Craig:** I sure have. I live in Canada now.

**John:** Just the obsession with these collectible cups. It’s great that you love them, but no one needs 30 of them. That’s the difference between, are you entering into it because you want to be part of a community that collects these novelty cups, or are you doing it because you see a market for it, and that sense of really what is the angle. Are you seeing this in a capitalist sense, like the crypto bros were? Crypto bros saw this as a way to make a bunch of money, but also they had that missionary zeal, like we’re going to convert the world over to this thing. We all know how Stanley cup collecting will end up. It’s going to end up with a bunch of these things in landfills.

**Craig:** This is the bust and boom of these things. When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I would go down to Point Pleasant in New Jersey, which is on the shore, and it had a big boardwalk. The boardwalk had rides and restaurants and lots of little stands that would sell things. Every summer, there was a stand that was selling the new hot ticket toy. It was different every summer. The rabidity was consistent. It was just the thing that people were obsessed with that changed.

When I was really young, my sister, like many young girls, was pulled into the Cabbage Patch doll craze. I have the distinct memory of being in a Toys R Us in Brooklyn, watching adults fighting, almost physically, as Toys R Us employees pulled out a large shipping box of Cabbage Patch dolls, because of the insanity of it.

Humans are not good at valuing things. We’re notoriously irrational about it. Forced scarcity or this belief that something is valuable will drive our behavior. I think Bill Maher once famously said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in LA, people will start lining up. There’s just something wrong with our brains.

I will say – and I’m not boasting here, this is just dumb luck of my brain – I don’t understand collecting. I’ve never collected anything. I don’t see the point of it. It just seems like a pointless accruing. I don’t quite know what it means. But I do recognize I’m alone, or, not alone; I’m rare, I guess.

**John:** I have some cool vintage typewriters, but I have them because they’re individually cool. But I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know anything about the community. It’s not part of anything. I guess what I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s people who collect and enter into a community about those collections, and it does enter into a fandom situation, and then there’s people who are just there to make a buck and don’t actually care about it, which I guess does tie into the whole poser issue of fandom is who are the true believers and who are the follow-ons who are trying to exploit it. It is a good moment for me to remind everybody to buy your Scriptnotes T-shirts on Cotton Bureau, especially the limited editions, which will only be sold for periods of time, because-

**Craig:** So rare.

**John:** When those drop, sometimes it’s only 100 of them that were done.

**Craig:** When they drop. If you’re a real Scriptnotes fan, not a poser, if you’re real. The ultimate posers are the people that sell stuff. Those are the posers. Hasbro.

**John:** There were times out on the picket line where I’d see a Scriptnotes shirt that I’d never seen out in the wild. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to photograph that, because that is a true fan who has that,” or has the Courier Prime shirt, which we only made for a short period of time.

**Craig:** Or maybe that was the brother of a true fan who stopped being a true fan and just left that T-shirt behind when they moved.

**John:** No, I don’t believe it.

**Craig:** I’m so much more cynical.

**John:** When I asked that person who was wearing that very distinct shirt, also, “How’d you get that so crisp?” he’s like, “Oh, I never put it in the dryer. I always hand-dry it.”

**Craig:** Wow. It gives me a little bit of anxiety.

**John:** It’s true fandom for me. Craig, I’ll always be a fan of yours.

**Craig:** Aw, John. I’m a fan of yours too. You know what? Let’s just do this podcast until one of us just drops dead on our desk.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** And hopefully during a podcast. It’ll make a great bonus segment.

**John:** You have to hear that thump.

**Craig:** Yeah, just a thump. And then like, “Oh, okay. That’s Scriptnotes for you.”

**John:** That’s why we turn the Zoom off, so you can’t see when one of us drops. You have to listen for it. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Tiffany Problem](https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/the-tiffany-problem/)
* [‘Harry Potter’ TV Series Zeroes In On Premise As Selected Writers Pitch Their Ideas To Max](https://deadline.com/2024/01/harry-potter-tv-series-premise-writers-set-max-1235798159/)
* [WGGB Screenwriting Credits Agreement](https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenwriting_credits_agreement.pdf)
* [Ig Nobel Prize – “Please stop, I’m Bored”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA)
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Screenplay](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Anatomy-Of-A-Fall-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/magazine/murder-podcast-debbie-williamson.html) by Sarah Viren for the New York Times
* [Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) by David Chapman
* [Going Zero by Anthony McCarten](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/going-zero-anthony-mccarten?variant=40641169686562)
* [The Devil by Jessica Mazin](https://open.spotify.com/track/6mgwrkmCQMfxRj810BOlvB?si=ed91e62ef4cc43e4) on Spotify
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jessica Mazin ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/628standardV2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Well, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode of 602 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at pages written by our listeners and discuss what’s working and what could be working better. We’ll also answer listener questions on verisimilitude in dialog, POV, writing samples, and more. In our bonus segment for Premium members, what can we get away with never having to do or learn?

Craig: Podcasting.

John: Craig and I will discuss the perks of procrastination. An announcement, next week will be some sort of repeating episode, because Craig and I are both going to be off the grid for a little bit, but it’ll be okay. Everyone will be fine. We’ll find a great episode from the vaults to pull up and put into your ear.

Craig: We only have 600 of them.

John: Actually, even more when you consider bonus episodes and other things we’ve done along the way. There’s plenty of good content.

Craig: Guys, spin the big wheel of podcasts and see what you get.

John: Or maybe just listen to this episode extra slow. Give it to yourself in small doses, and then you’ll have more to savor. You do you is what I’m going to.

Craig: You do you.

John: We have a little bit of news. Craig, I texted you last week, because Weekend Read 2, our app for reading scripts on your phone, is now out. It’s in the app store. It’s been in beta for more than a year, but we finally put it out there. It has not only all the For Your Consideration scripts that we always have in there, but it has two old short stories of mine, it has your entire Chernobyl collection, it has all of the Scriptnotes transcripts for 600 episodes, thanks to Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Amazing.

John: It’s there.

Craig: I was looking at this. It’s pretty cool. What font do you guys naturally default to? I’m just curious.

John: The default font for the reader view is Avenir.

Craig: Avenir.

John: Avenir. It’s a good face.

Craig: Is that what you call these things? It’s a good face?

John: A typeface. You call them typefaces. It’s a good face.

Craig: That’s what the kids in the cool font community call it.

John: It really is. That’s my graphic designer background coming back through, because a font is a specific, deliberate. Medium bold would be the font, and the face is the whole family together.

Craig: Nice face, bro.

John: Nice face, bro.

Craig: Somebody walks by your desk. “Sweet serifs. Nice face.”

John: Sweet serifs. The Three Page Challenges that we’re looking at through today will be available in Weekend Read. The point of Weekend Read is that it is so hard to read a normal formatted script on your phone if you need to. You’re pinching into your zoom. It’s not a great experience. This makes it a good experience. It melts it down, and it re-formats it in a way that works really well.

Craig: John, what is the cost of Weekend Read 2?

John: Weekend Read 2 is free to use for all you people.

Craig: $0?

John: $0.

John: It’s a public source we put out there. If you want to have a larger library, if you want to do notes, if you want to have it read stuff aloud to you, then you can subscribe to it. It’s two bucks a month, I want to say.

Craig: What? That’s a pretty good deal.

John: It’s a pretty good deal. That pays for our coding. It also pays for Drew and Halley, our intern, who are formatting stuff and finding stuff to put in there every Friday so we can keep new stuff in that library.

Craig: Nice. We gotta keep Lamberson eating. We can’t let Lamberson starve. Halley, you know I’m going to call you Lamberson, right? Because again, I just want to say, Halley, what a great last name.

Halley Lamberson: Thank you, Craig. I now have people calling me amenably.

Craig: Nice.

John: Aw, the anagram.

Craig: Nice.

John: One thing we added this last round, which is a suggestion from Dana Fox, our mutual friend, is the typeface Open Dyslexic. Craig, have you looked at Open Dyslexic as a typeface?

Craig: You mean is a face?

John: As a typeface. Have you looked at that face?

Craig: I’m confused. It’s face, right?

John: It’s face.

Craig: Wait, it’s called what now?

John: Open Dyslexic. Are you in Weekend Read right now? Are you looking at it right now?

Craig: I’m looking online at Open Dyslexic. Oh, look at that. I can see. Whoa.

John: Some people find it easier to read this.

Craig: Interesting.

John: It has very unusual weights. It’s a little bottom-heavy in a way. Some people find it much easier to read. Our friend Dana finds it much, much easier to read. We put that in there for her.

Craig: This is really interesting. I’m fascinated by the science behind this. I suppose it makes it much easier to understand what the bottom and the top of any particular symbol is. The lower L’s have little uppercase squidgetties coming off them, so they don’t just look like mine.

John: Little feet going the opposite direction.

Craig: It’s also a groovy font. It feels like, hey, man, I’m a little high.

John: You’re just a little bit high. I think the idea behind it is it makes your brain less likely to flip a letter, which is some forms of dyslexia. What I’ve heard about dyslexia more recently, and this is me opining on things I’ve read in one article, is that a lot of it tends to be a brain auditory processing thing much more than a visual thing, but whatever helps a person read and feel more confident and comfortable reading is a good thing.

Craig: Whatever impediment there is between you and what you want, if someone’s helping you get there with technology, then hooray. It’s funny. I never thought about this sort of thing, because I don’t have dyslexia. Nobody in my family or immediate family has dyslexia. It wasn’t anything we had to concentrate on. Once you get there, you go, “Oh yeah, that makes sense, actually.” There has to be at least some difference in fonts. Sorry, faces.

John: Obviously, there’s basic fundamental readability. There’s reasons why you don’t use tiny type sizes. There’s reasons why you want contrast between the letters in the background. There’s a reason why we made Courier Prime the typeface, because it just was a better typeface to read. I guess Open Dyslexic is an attempt to be very aggressive about making sure the letter forms are so distinct that they don’t get flipped in people’s heads. I like people who are trying to solve problems out there in the world.

Craig: Love it.

John: Love it. Love it. Let’s solve some problems out there in the world by tackling some listener questions.

Craig: Segue man.

John: Because we often put these at the end of the episode, and then we run out of time and energy. We’re going to foreground them today. Drew Marquardt, can you help us out with a listener question?

Drew Marquardt: I sure can. Eric writes, “I’m writing a screenplay where the protagonist is an aerospace engineer. I myself am just a humble, lower middle class guy with very little college education. I want my characters to sound real, so I’m asking my older cousin about these topics, since he did go to college and graduated in this field. I sat down with him and recorded us talking about a bunch of subjects and explored the mind of the main character. He gave me these awesome pieces of dialog that the main character could say. I also text him from time to time as I build the script and ask him, ‘Hey, check out this scene. I wanted to talk about blah blah blah. Does this sound?’ He replies in full detail how the character should be saying things. Is this cheating or allowed? Could I use his language verbatim to build this character in this world? Does he get a writing credit, or what type of credit would be given for this, or is it just using a resource like reading a book and pulling out language from it, which I’m also doing?”

John: Eric, I’m sorry. You need to just stop what you’re doing and never, ever try to be a screenwriter again. You’ve broken incredibly important rules about never using any person’s expertise in your script.

Craig: Throw your laptop out, Eric. Throw it out.

John: It’s tainted. Everything’s tainted.

Craig: Set your clothes on fire and leave town. I think you probably have figured out that we’re totally fine with this. It’s actually just a sign that you’re doing your job well, to check with people. No, what they’re doing isn’t writing. No, they shouldn’t be getting a writing credit. It is perfectly reasonable to say to them that you will do your best to advocate for a consulting credit of some sort, like aerospace consultant. You can’t guarantee those sorts of things, because ultimately, somebody’s going to be producing this, and it’ll be up to them. This is totally fine. I do this all the time, call people up like, “Does this sound right?”

John: “Does this sound right?” I think you’re concerned specifically about like, oh my god, I’m using the actual words that he said. In this case, it’s your brother, first off. He’s giving you consent. He knows why you’re asking him these questions. You’re showing him scenes. He’s giving you feedback. He wants you to be able to write the best thing, both because he’s your brother, but he also would love to see aerospace engineering portrayed properly on screen. You’re doing [inaudible 00:08:30] for all these reasons.

Weirdly, it’s only the last sentence of your question that I want to flag here, “Is it just using a resource, like reading a book and pulling out language from that book?” Be more careful about pulling out language from a book there, sir. In reading that book, you might figure out what terms people are using and how people talk about stuff, but just make sure you’re not plagiarizing. Make sure you’re not literally taking the sentences out of that book. Yes, do research. Research is not cheating. It’s never cheating.

Craig: No, it’s essential. When you say language, if you mean nomenclature, terminology, all fine, you want to do that stuff for sure. Yeah, you’ve got a great resource there. It’s your cousin. It’s his cousin. It’s not his brother.

John: It’s one more step removed.

Craig: One more step removed.

John: Less blood in there.

Craig: I feel like people that do jobs that are constantly misrepresented on screen are going to be thrilled if they can see a movie where they’re like, “Oh my god, it’s clear that these people talked to an aerospace engineer.” Have you ever heard, John, the little bit of Ben Affleck’s commentary, the DVD commentary for the movie Armageddon?

John: Yeah, I think you’ve talked about it on the show. It was an amazing thing.

Craig: It’s so wonderful. I’ve talked about it before. Part of what he’s talking about is just this huge gap between what the movie is imagining or presenting and what the reality is, which I’m sure, yes, if a bunch of guys and ladies at NASA were watching, that they would probably just laugh their asses off. You’re avoiding that, which I think is a fantastic thing to do. Eric, I feel like you knew we were going to say, “Eric, you’re okay.”

John: That’s fine too. Sometimes you just want some validation, like, “I’m right here.” Eric, you’re good.

Craig: Eric, you are right.

John: Craig, I have a question for you. Are you close with any of your cousins?

Craig: No, but there’s a reason. There are a couple of reasons. I only have two first cousins. I had three. One of them passed away. My dad was 13 years younger than his sister. My mother is an only child. My dad was a mistake. Therefore, I am the son of a mistake.

John: You’re generationally much farther away from those cousins.

Craig: That’s the point. They were so much older than I was when I was a little kid. There’s Bilya. He doesn’t go by Billy, but we always knew him as cousin Billy. Cousin Billy and cousin Laurie. They were lovely. It’s just that they were just much older. Then also there’s a lot of… My sister and I never quite understood what was going on. In the older generations of my family, there are all sorts of, I don’t know, grievances, things like-

John: [Crosstalk 00:11:13].

Craig: This was in a situation where we saw each other all the time at family reunions. It was pretty rare. I was always excited to see them, because I looked up to them, because they were so much older and exciting. No, I’m not. How about you?

John: I’m not. I’m the youngest of all that branch of cousins. We lived in Colorado. Everyone else was further back east. Growing up, my cousins Tim and Cindy were close enough to my brother’s and my age that we would hang out some. I do have some good, fond memories of that. They all moved to different places. I was never around them. They all got much, much, much more Christian over the years, and so it became harder and harder. We still keep in touch. When my mom died, they were at the Zoom memorial service, and lovely cards and all that, but no, not close.

I always envied people who had cousins in town, because that felt like such a special thing. It’s not so close as a sibling, but a friend plus a blood connection felt like a really cool thing to have.

Craig: I do have that with my cousin Megan Amram.

John: Absolutely, but you didn’t even know she existed until well into the Scriptnotes era.

Craig: I certainly didn’t know she was my cousin until we 23 and Me’ed each other. She’s my cousin. I mean, third, possibly fourth, but yeah, she counts. That’s the cousin I have, Megan Amram.

John: That’s the cousin you want. The cousin of choice.

Craig: Yes, cousin of fact and choice.

John: Love them both. Let’s try a new question. Drew Goddard. Drew Goddard? You’re not Drew Goddard.

Drew: I’m not Drew Goddard.

John: Let’s try a new question. Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Is Drew Goddard here? Is he listening?

John: He’s very tall. We would notice him if he were on the Zoom, because he’s very, very tall.

Craig: Very tall.

Drew: Ricky in Venice Beach writes, “My entire movie is told from the hero’s perspective, and there is never a scene that she’s not in. She also has three family members who have powerful character arcs that I want to resolve by the end of the story.”

John: Are they cousins is my question.

Craig: And how powerful.

Drew: “The problem I’m running into is how to resolve these subplots in the third act when the lead character has traveled far away and is no longer geographically close to them. I would love to cut back to the other characters to see how they changed over the course of the story. Unfortunately, I’ve never cut away from the lead character’s perspective the entire movie. I feel like cutting back to these characters makes sense emotionally and thematically, but it just feels off to me. What advice or thoughts do you have about breaking from your main character’s perspective in order to complete a separate character arc?”

Craig: Ricky, something is wrong. Something is fundamentally wrong, because you are saying that there are three family members who have powerful character arcs. I’m not sure how powerful they can be if they’re never alone and they never are separate from the main character. Do those character arcs connect specifically to your main character? Is there a way for everybody to get together for a little family reunion at the end?

It sounds like you’ve got a problem of, “I want to do this and I want to do that,” and the two things are opposite. It’s what Lindsay Doran refers to as a closeup with feet. You’re trying to do a closeup with feet, and I think you’re going to have to pick one way or the other. That means probably going backwards in your script and looking for where things may have gone slightly awry.

John: In a previous episode, we talked about group dynamics and how important it is for the group as a whole to evolve and for the individual relationships within that group to evolve. It’s possible that I can imagine scenarios where these characters really work together a lot more, and so therefore we did establish arcs that those characters could go through. Just because of the circumstances of Ricky’s story, they’re not going to be around to complete those arcs.

Craig’s solution, basically to go back and really look at do I need these things to happen, that way is entirely possible, or the other solution of just like, we need to get everyone back together at the end to learn and see what has happened and what has changed, because I don’t think you’re going to be satisfied with the first-time cutaway at the end of the story to break POV. I’m sure our listeners can find 10 examples in great movies that do that, but it’s certainly not recommended practice.

Craig: No, I wouldn’t. I’m a little nervous. These character arcs, I just want to know, how are they relevant to my main character? Are they relevant? Do they inform the main character’s experience? Generally speaking, if you have a, like you say, “My entire movie is told from the hero’s perspective,” that means it’s about her. Therefore, all the choices that you make as a storyteller, that put her in the middle of the wheel, and then there are spokes of the wheel, like her family members, all those spokes have to feed back to the hero. They are there for a dramatic purpose that must connect back to the hero.

I have no interest in whether or not Aunt Sally’s marriage falls apart if the story is about Grandpa Joe, and Aunt Sally’s marriage has nothing to do with Grandpa Joe. We just need to connect it. We need to. At that point, that should guide you. If they don’t connect…

John: Let’s imagine a story in which the hero has inspired one of the characters to give up drinking or make a fundamental life change. I can see that being a powerful arc. They went through a whole thing, but they’re not there for the end.

Keep in mind, Ricky, that what’s meaningful to the audience isn’t that that character’s changed. It’s that your hero got to see the results of that character changing. It’s when you’re seeing it from your hero’s eyes, oh, this change happened, and that your hero was proud of this character and feels a connection to this change that has happened. That’s the reward. Cutting away to it without the hero knowing it isn’t going to be satisfying to the audience.

Craig: It’s interesting. I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about this. Storytelling that is built around a character, and that’s the majority of what we do, a central character, is essentially a narcissistic exercise, where that character’s feelings, that character’s experiences, that character’s problems, and that character’s resolutions and actions are what matters to us. We are essentially complicit in their narcissism. Other things happen elsewhere. They don’t matter as much. They just don’t. We don’t mind that. It’s just not a problem.

That’s why it’s so funny in whichever of the Austin Powers it was when the henchman dies and then they go to his family, because it underscores what a bizarre act of narcissism storytelling is.

I think what you’re struggling with is you’re trying to be not narcissistic about it, but here in the audience, all you’ve done is mainline narcissism heroin into my veins. I just care about the hero, because I identify with the hero. The story is for me to feel and appreciate. I want to know who I’m with. I don’t want to ever leave that person. If I do, it’s only because I want to see how it feeds back into the person I care about.

John: Perhaps it was a hundred episodes ago we talked about main character energy and how in real life it can be a dangerous pathological thing. In movies, main character energy, you know what? That’s what you’re here for is the main character energy. That could be, Ricky, what you’re feeling there is that. Don’t run away from it. Drew, what do you got for us?

Drew: Danny writes, “An independent producer and friend came to me with a sitcom idea. I thought it was great, so we developed the characters and plot together. I’m the sole writer of the script, with written by-credit, but he is a co-creator. He supports me submitting it as a writing sample for fellowships, but I list him as a collaborator if I’m submitting that script for incubators. We also have a pitch deck in case we have any opportunities to take it out.

“When I start querying managers after the strike, would it be okay for me to send this pilot as a second sample in addition to my other original pilot? The script definitely shows my voice and writing skills. The concept is not entirely mine, but we’re not a writing team. If I do send the script, should I mention my co-creator? Should I say a producer approached me to write on spec, or should I just focus on writing and polishing another completely original script before querying representation?”

John: Craig, I think where we’re getting confused here with Danny is that a producer approached to say, “Hey, would you write this thing kind of with me, kind of for me, on spec?” This producer person wants to produce this thing, but Danny is the writer. Danny owns everything. Danny can absolutely use this as a sample. There isn’t a problem here. That person is not a co-writer, doesn’t need to have their name anywhere on it, unless the agreement they have is that this person is only producing it, and every script has to say producer attached or something.

Craig: I think this is a problem that isn’t a problem, because what Danny is describing is a producer. A producer says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea for something,” which in and of itself is not, as we know, property. The producer looks for a writer. The writer says, “Oh, I like that. I’ll write it.” What do writers do with producers? Of course, they bounce ideas back and forth. They talk about stuff. Then the writer goes and writes. The producer is attached to produce. That’s it. When it says, “I’m the sole,” quote unquote, “writer of the script with written-by credit, but he is a co-creator,” no, he’s not.

John: Nope.

Craig: No, he’s not. First of all, just so you know, created by is a credit that the Writers Guild assigns as a function of separated writes. It has to do with who wrote the underlying story, and that is writing. What this person is is a producer. That’s great. There’s a whole world of non-writing producers. Danny, when you start talking to managers, you could send them pilot. Why wouldn’t you? You wrote it?

John: You did. It’s your writing. It shows what you can do. Let’s say you sign with these managers, and the managers want to take this thing out. Then it’s maybe a conversation like, “Okay, this producer is attached. Okay, what does it mean? What is the producer actually expecting? Has the producer done other things? Are you going to try to get some more senior experienced producer on board with this? Is the producer going to take it out on their own?” All that stuff has to be figured out. For you, Danny, getting representation, that’s not a barrier in your way.

Craig: Just mention it if you’re talking to a … If a manager’s interested, then you can say, “Oh by the way, just so you know, there is a producer attached to this one.” This one, no, free and clear. It’s not like you can only have one producer. Take a look at the credits for things. Jeez, Louise.

John: Good lord.

Craig: You can have a thousand producers. If a manager’s like, “I wanted to be the producer,” good, you can be the producer. Hey, how about this? Everyone gets to be a producer. Who cares? I’m the writer, and then there are 4 million people that have… That’s why the Producers Guild exists, to basically say, okay, of the thousand of you that have the producing credit, we’ve figured out that you’re a producer and you’re a producer. The rest of you stay in your seats.

John: For folks who are not familiar with the Producers Guild, you’ll see credits at the end of the movie or at the start of the movie that say “produced by,” and you don’t know who those people are. If it says PGA after it, PGA, just those letters, that means the Producers Guild has gone through, looked at who the people are who worked on this, and said these are the people who really produced-produced the movie. It’s a limited subset of the bigger, longer list you see there.

Craig: John, are you in the Producers Guild?

John: I am not in the Producers Guild. Are you in the Producers Guild?

Craig: I am in the Producers Guild.

John: Nice.

Craig: They gave me an award, and I had to join. Here’s the thing. It does make sense to figure out… One of the things that Producers Guild did that was quite wise was… Because they’re not a union. They’re not a labor union, even though they’re called guild. The Writers Guild and the Directors Guild just happen to use the word guild, as do the Screen Actors, but we’re all unions. They’re not.

What they did that was smart was they made themselves essential by I guess contracting with the major awards, to say, “Okay, if you’re giving out best television show or best movie, the people that collect those are producers. Who should get up there? We’ll figure it out. We’re the Producers Guild.”

At the end of each season of television that I do, at some point I get a thing from the Producers Guild, not because I’m a member, everybody gets it, that says, “What’s your title? What’d you do? Check off the boxes if you did these. Don’t check off if you didn’t do these. Then we’ll make our choice.”

John: It’s a thankless task maybe to decide that, but I understand. The producers themselves decided they wanted to do this, because they were tired of having the value of a producer credit devalued by all the people who get those credits for reasons that are not really producing.

Craig: Exactly. They don’t make you join, by the way. You can. It’s nice. It helps them do the work that they do. They do this for everything, because if you want to go up there and get your award, you have to prove that you should.

John: Drew, let’s try another question.

Drew: Gary writes, “In Episode 598, Vince Gilligan discussed today’s over-reliance on IP as the basis for new shows or features. That seems to put even more impediments before fledgling or at least uncredited writers, given the difficulty of being able to option such a property. I have recent experience with this issue. I wanted to develop a script based on a 1956 YA novel, but the literary agency connected to the author’s estate wouldn’t give me, an uncredited writer, an option. What are possible strategies for such writers, or is it hopeless to get an option without somehow acquiring a production company’s backing?”

John: Gary, I feel for you. I think it is going to be hard for you as an uncredited writer to get that, unless you had some special connection with the author or with the material, you were somehow able to break through the, “It doesn’t really make a lot of sense for us,” options to backlog.

I would say hold on to this notion of adapting this book and focus on some other things. At some point you will be signed by a rep, you will be going on the water bottle tour of Los Angeles. That might be an opportunity to say, when they ask, “What else do you want to do?” it’s like, “Oh, I’ve always really wanted to do this book.” Pick which producer you might want to say that to. If it’s really a good fit, then that producer could track down those rights and may get that book for you to adapt. That’s a way that I’ve seen it happen in real life before. Craig, other instincts from on your side?

Craig: I think that’s basically everything I would say, except maybe if this is a fairly obscure novel, you might want to just wing it. Just do it, because they don’t want to give you an option, because they don’t know you, and they also don’t know if the script will be any good. Who knows? They give you an option, and then, oh god, next week, I don’t know, David Koepp comes calling, and they’re like, “Oh, no, we gave it to Gary.” That’s probably not going to happen, is it?

One of the things that Vince was saying is, okay, there’s an over-reliance on IP, and the implication of that is that if something hasn’t been snapped up in terms of rights, then maybe it’s just not really on anyone’s radar at all, or maybe people tried and gave up. It sounds like you’re talking about a screenplay as opposed to a series. Even if it were a series, it would just be a pilot script.

Your job is, you want to write a script based on this novel, maybe write it. Honestly, what you’re really gambling is… Okay, I don’t know how long it’s going to take you to write it. Let’s say it takes you five months. You’re gambling that in the next five months, no one is going to come out with a script for that novel, which I’m going to guess no one has come out with in the last five years. Might be worth it. Then show them the script. Then they might be like, “Oh.”

John: “Oh, this is actually not too bad.”

Craig: “This ain’t too bad.”

John: Is it a long shot? Yeah, it’s a long shot, but it’s not the worst idea, because what you’re going to come out of this with hopefully is at least a good script, a good script people can read and say, “You know what? Gary, he’s a good writer.”

I remember way back when I was in film school, I read a Alien versus Predator script. I have no idea who wrote that. It was just a spec that someone wrote an Alien versus Predator thing. I was like, “That’s a really clever mashup of these two things.” It never got made. Different fork of that whole idea came to be at a certain point. It was a cool idea. I’m sure that person got signed and got some meetings that got stuff started. That could be you, Gary.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: I would also say Craig may be right. If it really is inspiring you to do that more than some other original idea of your own, consider it.

Craig: When you say, “I want to develop a script,” I would love, Gary, if you said, “I want to write a script.” Development is what we do when other people are like, “I don’t know.” A lot of development really starts with a script, whether it’s something you’re rewriting or it’s something you’ve written already.

Maybe write it. Like John says, worst comes to worst, you have a cool sample. Can people make that sample without the rights? No. Do they have other stuff that they would want to do anyway? Yes. Was it likely that they were going to be, “Oh my gosh, there’s a 58-year-old novel that we could do.” Probably not. I wouldn’t worry about it. Go for it.

John: Gary, are you infringing on their copyright to write that script? Yeah.

Craig: No.

John: Are they going to come out to you?

Craig: No, they’re not. You’re not.

John: Here’s the question. You are not doing anything that diminishes the commercial value of the original thing.

Craig: You’re not exploiting it. Look. Here’s the deal. You can sit in your house, and you can write fan fiction about Star Trek or whatever. You can write anything you want. When you sell it or when you distribute it, that’s different. To write a screenplay and not receive money for it and not have it turn into a movie and not put it online and have it distributed around, no, there’s not exploitation.

John: Here’s the infringing part I would say. It’s that if Gary wrote the script, and then he wanted to submit it to the Office of Copyright for copyright protection, no.

Craig: No, you can’t do that.

John: You’ve created a piece of work that you cannot copyright.

Craig: That’s right. That’s right.

John: That’s a risk you take.

Craig: Exactly. It’s a risk you take. Actually, even that is not quite true, because if you write something, somebody else can come along and say, “Oh, Gary wrote this.” For instance, if let’s say the novelist were still alive, which they probably aren’t, the novelist picks up Gary’s script, and they’re like, “Whoa, this is a great script, but Gary can’t copyright this. I think I’ll just rip the cover page off, stick my name on it.” That would be infringing Gary’s… Gary does have protection, but he can’t exploit anything.

John: It’s interesting. That is a fascinating thing.

Craig: He only has protection insofar as this work represents what I did, but it is not exploitable, because I don’t have permission from the original rights-holder.

John: What we’re describing is essentially a chain of titles. Gary doesn’t own the underlying piece of material. No one else owns Gary’s script. In order to make a feature out of this project, you need both underlying material and Gary’s script.

Craig: Yes, I believe that is correct. That said-

John: Not lawyers.

Craig: … if an attorney wants to write in and explain why I am absolutely wrong, I am welcoming of it.

John: We’d love it.

Craig: It is a learning opportunity.

John: Let’s go on to our Three Page Challenge, because we have three entries into this. I want to make sure we spend some good quality time looking through them. If you are new to the podcast and have not listened to an episode where we do a Three Page Challenge, here’s what this is.

Every once in a while we ask our listeners, hey, would you like to send in the first three pages of your script, it could be a feature, it could be a TV series, for us to talk about on the air? Everything we’re going to be talking about is completely voluntary. These people volunteered for this treatment. We are not picking stuff off the internet and poking holes in it. People asked for this feedback.

Those folks went to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, filled out a little form. They said it’s okay for us to talk about it, they’re not going to sue us. They attached a pdf, and it went into a magical inbox that Drew and our summer intern, Halley Lamberson, read through all of those entries. Halley, this was your first time doing this. Can you talk to us about this process? How many scripts did you and Drew look at this past week?

Halley: I think together we looked at a couple hundred. The process was very fun, reading through the submissions over a couple days and talking to Drew about the ones we thought were standout. It made me think about my own writing to read the entries.

John: I remember when I was a reader at TriStar, you learn a lot by reading other people’s writing. You definitely learn sometimes things you never want to do and stuff you see on the page, like, “Oh, let me make sure I never, ever do that.” The sampling that you guys picked, I liked, because they were both interesting ideas and had some issues that Craig and I could talk about.

Thank you very much for all your hard work. Folks, don’t send in those Three Page Challenges until we ask for them, because, man, they really do stack up quick. You guys are really good about sending stuff in.

Let’s maybe start with Skulduggery. This was from Matthew Davis. Actually, in our last live show, one of the raffle items we had was we guarantee front of the line for a Three Page Challenge when we do our next Three Page Challenge. That was Matt Davis. He sent that through.

If people want to read along with us, it’ll be attached to the show notes for this episode, so you can click through and find the pdf, or they’re in Weekend Read right now if you want to read them. If you’re just listening to this on your drive, Drew, could you give us a summary for Skulduggery by Matthew Davis?

Drew: Madame Louvier, a Haitian Voodoo queen with her face grease painted as a skull, moves through the forest of the Louisiana backwater, illuminated by lamplight. She approaches a small home where Jenny, 40s, gives her son $10 and sends him away on his bike.

Inside the house, Madame Louvier has Jenny drink a mysterious elixir and commands Jenny to exhale a blue vapor, a spirit which Madame Louvier inhales and communes with. Jenny’s vision warps. She sees Madame Louvier with a giant boa constrictor, cutting a strip of fabric from Jenny’s dress and fashioning it to a voodoo doll. Louvier’s dagger erupts in blue fames and turns every candle’s fire blue.

Louvier explains that their journey is entwined with Pirate Jean Laffite and threatens to kill Jenny unless she tells her the location of a map, which Jenny only has a faint memory of.

John: Craig Mazin, talk us through your impressions of Skulduggery and some of the things you noticed as you went into it.

Craig: There were some nice visuals to start with. I’m a little fussy about movement issues.

John: I have a lot of movement issues in this too.

Craig: There was a cool beginning. “Frogs and crickets cry out from the swamp. Lamplight illuminates a SKULL. The skull… MOVES.” Oh. Okay. “We realize the skull is a grease-painted face: She opens her eyes with an emotionless, blank stare: ONE EYE GLAZED-OVER – an injury long ago unaddressed.” Oh. Okay. “Draped in a blood-red cloak,” great, “the ghastly figures murmurs as she trudges along… ”

Wait a second. Now, was she trudging or was she just still? That’s a cheat. This is where we run into trouble all the time. This is where directors start to tear their hair out, because you can’t do both. You can’t start with this fixed skull, play the trick that it’s not really a skull, it’s actually a person, but also have them walking. If you are going to say they just started walking, then what were they doing before? Just standing, waiting for the movie to start? These things, they maybe don’t seem like that big of a deal. They’re actually a really big deal.

Let’s get into the meat of it all. There’s Jenny, who is in a backwater home. I don’t know what that is.

John: I don’t either.

Craig: What is a backwater home? Is it a cabin that’s on the bayou? Is it in the swamp?

John: I have no idea what the size or scale of this is. Also, when we’re getting inside, there’s a hallway, so it’s not just a cabin, but I don’t have a sense of this. There’s a porch. Is this a gothic Southern mansion, a Big Fish-y kind of thing? What is this?

Craig: Also, you can’t start a scene with somebody handing someone a $10 bill and saying, “No need to hurry back.” Was he also just standing, waiting? Some of the issue here is that the way these scenes start, it’s almost like people were waiting for somebody to go, “Action.”

There are so many ways to start a thing like this. We could be outside that house, and we could here, “Mom,” and, “Okay, come here,” whatever it is. There’s always ways to do it. It just seems like the actors are waiting, and then someone goes, “Okay, now do stuff,” and then they start doing things. We lose a little bit of the sense of the moment before, which is a really big deal for actors. It’s something that I think about all the time as a writer.

She sends her kid away. He, “Pedals his ramshackle bike away.” Pedals is capitalized for some reason. I don’t know why. He, “Pedals his ramshackle,” ramshackle is not a great word for a bike, “away. He pauses.” Do you mean he stops? He, “TAKES ONE LAST LOOK BACK AT HIS MOTHER… ” Then the scene ends. Does he just stay stopped? There’s movement issues. I’m struggling with the movement. How about you?

John: I’m having many of the same problems you’re describing here. I love that it’s evocative and atmospheric. That all feels great. I like the skull reveal, but I had the same problem with the movement. We didn’t need to “realize the skull is a grease-painted face,” just, “The skull is a grease-painted face.”

The, “She opens her eyes with an emotionless, blank stare,” you’re saying she, but you haven’t even introduced the character yet, which was a little bit of a bump for me. “MADAME LOUVIER — a Haitian-born Voodoo Queen,” I need some matches dashes there to get us out of that little clause.

Matt is using a lot of colons as a punctuation device. That could totally work if we were consistent, but he does a lot in the first page and then stops, so making some choices about how you’re going to get us down the page.

I read Madame Louvier as… She’s “Haitian-born Voodoo Queen,” so I’m reading her as being a dark-skinned character, but then it felt weird to me that I didn’t have any racial information about Jenny Duralde. I’m maybe pulling it in from her last name. I just got a little nervous suddenly that, oh, no, I’m going to be in a trope-y, voodoo-y kind of thing that is uncomfortable. I think just being a little bit more specific would be a great idea.

I had the same problem with JD, the son. Gives him a dollar bill. She says, “No need to hurry back,” but I don’t even know what that’s in context to. I was thinking if she calls JD, and JD is on his bike, he could be on his bike from the very start, and she says, “No need to hurry back,” or, “Get yourself a soda too.” Then I see, oh, she’s sending him away. Because he wasn’t on the bike to start with, I didn’t know what I was seeing for most of the scene.

Craig: There’s also a little bit of a missed opportunity to understand relationship, because she says, “No need to hurry back. I’ll be fine.” Her hand is shaking. He notices her hand is shaking. He knows she’s scared. Also, clearly, there has been some kind of conversation, because, “I’ll be fine,” even though they were just standing, and she suddenly handed him the money.

“Treat yourself to a soda, okay?” Then he goes, “Thanks, mom.” Now, “Thanks, mom,” is not great. You say, “Thanks, mom,” when it’s like, “Hey, kids, there’s Sunny D in the fridge.” “Thanks, mom.” “Thanks, mom” is really weirdly dull for what is happening here. I don’t quite know what this kid is thinking. Also, man, he gets on that bike fast.

John: That’s why I think you start the scene with him on the bike.

Craig: We continue with some movement issues. We start with fingernails diving into a burlap pouch. “They pluck out a VIAL OF ELIXIR.” She’s walking down a hallway. Man, she got there fast too. It feels to me, like, wouldn’t we want to hear the knock, knock, knock? I don’t know, seems like we missed some interesting opportunity.

John: You’re missing a “transition to.” If there were a “transition to” at the bottom of JD going off on the bike, and then we were jumping forward in time, because we are jumping forward in time, because we’re going to come to her. She’s already in the chair, and there’s candles everywhere. A thing has happened. It’s okay to do that. We can compress some time, but give us the “transition to,” because we need some sense this is not a continuous thing.

Craig: Absolutely. Then we get into the meat, which is this supernatural thing. I don’t know what’s going on. I gotta be honest. I know eventually what is happening is Madame Louvier is abusing some sort of voodoo ritual to get Jenny to tell her where the Pirate Jean Laffite’s map is, which is fine, perfectly fine thing to do, I guess, if you’re an evil voodoo ritual person. Prior to that happening, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what Jenny wants.

John: Exactly.

Craig: I don’t know why she’s participating in this.

John: Is she terrified of this woman coming, and that’s why she sent the son away? She seemed like a willing participant, at least at the start of this, because she’s already there, and all the candles are lit. It doesn’t seem like she’s a captive, quite, so she may have called for this woman to come, but she’s scared of this woman. I don’t have a clear read on what’s supposed to be happening here. Mystery is great, but I’m just confused.

Craig: Yes. For instance, if I understood that she said, “My son is sick,” in a more interesting way, “My son is sick. He’s going to die. Can you do some voodoo and make him live?” okay, I know what she wants, at least. I just don’t know what she wants. Voodoo, it’s Haitian. I understand that. One of the languages of Haiti is French. Where we do run into tropes, with anyone that speaks-

John: Oh, god.

Craig: … any language is them saying something in one language and then repeating it in English. Why would you do that? Just say it in one or the other. She’s constantly saying something in French and then repeating it in English, which is…

John: Tropey, tropey, tropey.

Craig: It’s really tropey.

John: I scratched out all the English repetitions. In every case, they can say something in French, and the context is clear based on everything else that’s around it. We get it.

Craig: Exactly. There’s good description of all this cool CGI stuff that’s going to happen, but I’m confused about what is happening with… The context is where I’m really tossed, because the scene begins with, Jenny has already encircled her chair by lit candles. She’s ready to go. This lady shows up and says, “Drink.” That’s it. She just hands her a thing, goes, “Drink.” Then Jenny’s like, “Yep, done.” Then Jenny says, “Thank you.” Okay.

Then all this other stuff happens, and I’m not sure why. A lot of cool visuals. It was exciting. I like the way that Madame Louvier was yelling at her. Cranking up the speed of the scene was really interesting, but we’re missing some key information.

John: Madame Louvier also says, “Drink,” before the vial is seen. There was just orders of how you’re telling the audience and the reader what’s going on. Showing the vial, and she says, “Drink,” great. If you say, “Drink,” and then you show the vial-

Craig: She did. Before that-

John: I guess before, she pulled out a vial of elixir, but we wouldn’t have necessarily seen that.

Craig: That was part of the… If she’s walking, then I don’t know how to show that, or at least in the closeup that’s indicated here. It was cool. She “drops her cloak, revealing a FIVE-FOOT BOA CONSTRICTOR draped around her neck,” although-

John: Love it.

Craig: … we’ll have to make sure that that cloak really does cover the neck well, because your costume designer’s going to be like, “Uh.” The snake-covering cloaks are actually hard to find. When she yells at Jenny to tell her about the map, Jenny says, “I saw it once…as a child.” What? Earlier, she goes, “Our journey entwined with Laffite,” and Jenny goes, “Laffite?” Huh? Huh? Then she’s like, “Laffite!” Then Jenny’s like, “Oh, that Laffite. Yes, yes, I did see that once as a child.”

Then there’s a series of shots, which are “fractured scenes flashing in her mind,” Jenny’s mind. Man, that’s a big shift to go from a scene beginning with Madame Louvier, close on her, and now we’re in Jenny’s mind. It’s hard to pull off that bit without being overloaded. I think there’s probably too much going on here, Matthew, just too much, too fast, too abruptly, and motion issues.

John: Agreed. Just going back to the title page here. Set up as a pilot episode, an Episode 1, that’s all great. I would take the MFA off Matthew’s name. You’re not going to see that. I would take that away.

Craig: Master of Fine Arts?

John: It is Master of Fine Arts. Drew and I both have our Masters of Fine Arts-

Craig: You know who doesn’t?

John: … from the Stark Program.

Craig: I don’t.

John: You don’t. Halley will by the end of next year. Also, “fifth draft,” no. Don’t tell us how many drafts this was. The date is perfectly adequate for this.

Craig: Yes. Also, the date here is June 6th, 2023. Now, because Matthew gets to jump to the top of the line, he gets to send in a thing and then right away we show it. Just do be aware, there is this little thing of you don’t want to send people a script that is from 12 years ago. You sometimes don’t want to send them a script from today or yesterday, because it seems like you were just like, “Hot off the presses. I haven’t thought about this. Here you go.” A couple months, that’s pretty good.

John: Thank you, Matthew, for sending this through. Thank you for buying those raffle tickets there. I’m glad you got your script in here. Drew, can you tell us the log line now? The idea is that we only see these two pages, then you tell us the secret about what the actual script is about.

Drew: “An orphaned Cajun boy and his summertime friends search for a legendary pirate treasure but must outwit a merciless Voodoo Queen merely to survive.”

Craig: I guess Jenny died.

John: I think Jenny dies [inaudible 00:46:36].

Craig: Jenny.

John: Jenny.

Craig: Jenny.

John: Great. I would not have predicted that it was going to be a child-focused thing. That could be great. It’s dark for what this is, but dark habits, that’s fine.

Craig: It’s true.

John: It looks like there’s a bonus here. He included the Skulduggery map, which Craig can download, because apparently there’s puzzles involved on the map.

Craig: I’m looking at it. We have two things. We have some sort of letter that’s written in a cipher, which I could absolutely run through a crypto quote analyzer. It’s my least favorite kind of puzzle solving. Then there is a map that contains various pentagrams and rectangles and also a couple of additional things using that symbol, glyph alphabet. I don’t feel strongly about it. The one thing that’s interesting is that the first line of the cipher includes a lot of Roman numerals, which makes me think-

John: A date?

Craig: … these ciphers are only letters and not numbers.

John: Great.

Craig: Who knows?

John: Who knows?

Craig: I have not dedicated the time to it.

John: You have not. We will include that along with the script, if people want to try to solve that.

Craig: Great.

John: Let us get to our next entry in the Three Page Challenge. This is Scrap by Tertius Kapp.

Craig: What a great name. Lamberson, someone’s coming for your crown.

John: Tertius is a pretty damn good one. Drew, could you give us a summary?

Drew: Sure. Two young men, Sam and Knowledge, sit inside a space shuttle wearing colorful space suits emblazoned with ZSA, Zimbabwean Space Agency. Over the radio, Sarah announces the countdown to take-off, but when a cow’s head rips into the shuttle, it becomes clear that the shuttle is homemade. Sam insists that they rebuild their homemade craft, because he is chasing a girl and wants to impress her with a video of the takeoff. Sarah tells Sam not to pretend he’s an astronaut for this girl, but Knowledge insists Sam needs to lie about his job, girls want an entrepreneur, not a scrap metal scavenger. Sam then expertly drives a trolley full of scrap down the local street and into the scrapyard.

John: I enjoyed quite a lot of this. I would say I was concerned and confused when I read that Sam and Knowledge are both in their late 20s. This felt much younger to me based on just the premise. I also want to make sure that I actually am reading this right, because I took this to mean that they were using their phone to create the video as if they were blasting off, that they were in no ways themselves to see that this was all happening, so that it wsa all to impress this girl who was coming in there. There was some sort of fun misdirection, but ultimately, I got frustrated that the dialog got very premise setup-y and didn’t surprise me with details that let me know this is what Sam is like, this is what Knowledge is like. It was just very much like, here’s a premise. Sam loves this girl that he hasn’t seen for a long time, and is trying to impress her. Craig, what were your takeaways?

Craig: I agree with you that the writing was a bit surface-y in that it was very expository. We were talking about the circumstances. We were announcing our intentions and our feelings without any subtleties, just, “This is what I think.” “This is what I think.” “That is what they think.”

I’m more concerned about the premise, because the idea is I haven’t seen a girl in 13 years. I’m going to go to a reunion. I assume it’s a high school reunion or something. When I go there, I’ll be able to show her this video to prove to her that I’m an astronaut, except Zimbabwe does not have a space agency. Zimbabwe has not sent astronauts into space. One would presume that if they are still indeed in Zimbabwe, that his schoolmate would know that Zimbabwe does not have a space program.

John: Basically, do they believe that this girl is so sheltered that she would have no way of actually ascertaining this to be true or not true? I agree with you there. That premise was concerning, especially that it’s meant to take place I believe in present time, because they have phones and stuff. If this were somehow the ’50s or something, I could see impressing a girl who somehow had no idea that such a thing was impossible or had not happened.

Craig: It’s at least in the ’80s, because it’s Zimbabwe and not Rhodesia. Here’s a few things, just simple things, Tertius, that are easy to address. First, we’ve got, “Inside the command pod of a space shuttle.” Now, you’re cheating, because we’re going to reveal it’s not a real space shuttle. In fact, it’s just something that they’ve built, cobbled together, plastic and aluminum wrapped around wooden staves. How do we not see that initially? You might want to talk about it being dark. Maybe there’s emergency lighting or something just to hide what’s going a little bit.

Knowledge is, for at least Americans, a gender-neutral name, so I wasn’t sure if Knowledge was male or female or otherwise. It would be helpful a little bit.

“A countdown in Shona language is heard over the radio.” Then it says, “Sarah (on comms).” Now, we don’t know Sarah. We haven’t met Sarah. That’s not a way to introduce somebody’s name. You can just say female voice.

John: Female voice.

Craig: They hold hands. They look into a phone’s camera with proud smiles. Now, do you mean I see the phone’s camera? Are they looking into the camera of the movie? If I see the phone’s camera, then I know it’s fake already, because astronauts don’t look into phone cameras while they’re launching. “We’re all stardust, brother. Let’s go home.” They’re not leaving the planet, but this is leaving planet stuff, counting down, “Commencing solid rocket… ” Do you know what I mean?

John: I took that as being they were shooting a video, and in that video they were saying to each other, “Stardust. We’re all brothers.” They would send that video through to the girl.

Craig: I understand, but he says, “Let’s go home.” Wait, where are you? Are you on Mars? Are you on the moon? Why is there a countdown because you’re going home?

John: Let’s go home to the stars. We’re going back to the cosmos from which we came.

Craig: That’s weird.

John: I think it’s kind of poetic. I get why [crosstalk 00:53:21].

Craig: It’s a little doomy. If you’re an astronaut and you’re like, “Let us return to the stars,” I’m like, “Oh, you guys aren’t coming back.” That’s a dark thing to say as you’re heading off into space, I think.

Also, Sarah, when she cuts off the countdown, she says, “Holy shit – what’s that? Stop! Stop! Abort launch! Sam!!” Now, obviously, Sarah is reacting to the cow that’s about to hit them. When she says, “Holy shit – what’s that?” it’s a cow. What happens is, even though going forward in time, because we don’t know it’s a cow, you can get away with the confusion. We will subconsciously do the math backwards. When we do it, even, Tertius, if we don’t, in our seats, go, “Wait a second,” something happens. There’s little cracks in the dam of believability that occurs subconsciously, that you want to avoid.

John: Think about what could Sarah be shouting at the cow to get the cow to run away, that we could misinterpret in the moment.

Craig: Yeah, as if she’s going, “Shanu … ina … nhatu … mbiri,” and then, “Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” and then boom, cow head. That would be fine, because it wouldn’t be enough time for her to be like, “Ah!” Also, if a cow is charging your fake shuttle, why would you keep the premise up? “Stop! Abort launch!” It’s over. There’s a cow.

There’s all these little… You know what? This is a great example, Tertius, first of all, why writing comedy is incredibly hard, harder than drama. The need for constant logic and stress testing of every little thing that happens is so important, because if any of that stuff isn’t really, really solid, you lose credit for the jokes, because people feel like you’re just cheating your way to get to the line you wanted to instead of earning it and surprising them, like magicians. There’s multiple things to think about here. I’ll say this. I’ve never seen that scene before. I’ve never seen a cow bust its head through a space shuttle command thing.

John: I liked the reveal that they were in the field, there was a cow, all that stuff.

Craig: Good invention.

John: It was only when they’d gotten us to the point of, oh, now we’re going to talk about the premise of why we’re doing this thing that I got a little… My enthusiasm flagged. Craig, did it bump for you that the countdown was in Shona, and then everybody else was speaking English the whole time?

Craig: It sure did. It sure did, because again, it’s stressing the logic. Look, obviously, what Tertius is trying to figure out here is, I’ve got people who are Zimbabwean, and they either speak English and Shona or only Shona. We’re making a movie, and we want people that speak English to watch the movie and not worry about subtitles maybe, which is fine. There is a convention where people will speak accented English.

People in Africa do speak with a particular accent. There’s all sorts of accents across the continent. You can zero in on like, okay, specifically, what is the Zimbabwean accent for English, and then maybe just stay there, because if you start in Shona, I’m a little confused, yes, why the person over the radio is speaking in Shona. These two people are speaking to each other in English. It just didn’t make much sense.

John: Agreed. Let’s jump to the very end of this. We have the streets of Harare. “Sam is expertly riding a trolley laden with scrap metal down the street. He has a homemade handbrake to help him steer the heavy load and he whistles to communicate with traffic.” Sure, I get this. I like this.

What I didn’t know though is, I don’t have any visual for what the streets of Harare are like. I don’t know if this is super crowded streets. Should I be picturing Mumbai, or should I be thinking of empty, rural streets? I just don’t have a good visual for this, so I don’t know what I’m seeing around, which really affects what I’m picturing in my head with him steering this cart.

Craig: Look, Harare is certainly not on the scale of Mumbai, but if I were to say the streets of Mumbai, I would also not know what I was looking at, or I said the streets of New York or the streets of Los Angeles. We’ve got a lot of different kinds of streets. Basically, every town has main street, urban center, suburban, sticks, poor, rich-

John: Paint us a picture.

Craig: … commercial, residential. Give us a little bit more a sense of what neighborhood are we actually in. What do I want to know about… All these things will give me information.

Obviously, look, Sam is a blue-collar guy. Even the kids call him Scrapman. He collects scrap metal. This is not a wealthy person. Where’s he collecting it from? Is there a contrast between him and his vehicle and the neighborhood he’s in? Is he riding around in maybe the nicer part of Harare, and even kids are looking down on him, or is this kid really happy and cool? Does he like the kid? Is he glad that the kid… Is the kid like, “Hey Scrapman. Here, I’m helping you,” and he’s like, “Great. Thanks, kid.” I’m not quite sure what to think about that.

John: We were just out in a field with a cow, which felt rural, and now we’re in a city. I don’t have a good sense of what I specifically should be thinking about. This is a situation where I as the screenwriter might throw in a one eighth of a page establishing Harare and giving us a sense of what this looks like and feels like. That may not make it into the movie, that establishing shot, but it helps the reader anchor visually what kind of space I’m in. What is the air like? What does the light feel like? What is this space? Is it noisy? Is it crowded, or is it empty? Tell us in that establishing shot.

Craig: You can also tie it into the end of the space shuttle scene where they’re in the field. He says, “Behind them the shuttle finally falls down.” The camera rises up, and we see in the distance a city, cut to Harare, so I know that the city is far away, but not crazy far away, so I get that there was a journey, or something, because it’s going to be weird to go from cow field to city with no connective tissue.

John: Drew, can you talk us through the log line, the secret rest of the story for these three pages by Tertius Kapp?

Drew: “A janitor’s son discovers an unusual lawnmower part in his father’s store. When he tries to sell it online, offers go into the millions. He’s captured and recaptured by various intelligence agencies but must find his high school sweetheart to solve the riddle. He has unwittingly discovered an extraterrestrial artifact.”

John: That is a fantastic premise. I like it a lot.

Craig: I’m cool.

John: Great.

Craig: You got a good premise. Now execute. Logic. Logic, logic, logic.

John: Logic in comedy. Our final Three Page entry, Drew, can you talk us through Another Life by Sarah Hu?

Drew: A young Taiwanese couple stand in the departures at JFK, the husband, Daniel, says goodbye to his wife, Josie, and their baby, Ava, as Josie and Ava are boarding a plane to travel for a month. He ties a red bracelet on baby Ava, who is wrapped in a red blanket. Meanwhile, at another airport, Anne, a young Taiwanese mother, hurriedly sends her baby girl, Mei, off with a woman in her 60s named Fei, to be delivered to Anne’s parents in Taipei. Mei is wrapped in a blue blanket.

After their first flight, Josie and Ava are at the Narita Airport in Japan, when Josie suddenly collapses waiting outside the gate to Taipei. A gate agent rushes over to help. At the same time, and at the same gate, Fei approaches the gate desk and signals to the agent that she needs to use the bathroom and hands baby Mei over to the agent. The gate agent who had rushed to Josie’s side, now cradling Ava, joins the agent who is holding Mei.

John: Craig, talk us through your first impressions with Another Life.

Craig: It seems like we’re doing a baby switcheroo here. Really, you couldn’t get more of an emphasis on the fact that one baby’s wearing the blue and one baby’s wearing the red.

One is coming from JFK, and one is coming from Philadelphia, at I assume the same time, although it’s weird. It says, “Super: 1985. JFK Airport.” Then we do the scene. Then we go to, “Super: 1985. Philadelphia Airport.” 1985 is really long. I just want to know, is it the same day, same week, same month? Is it not? I think giving us a little more information there is fine. 1985, I think it’s going to be frustrating for people, because it’s so generic. I think genericism is a little bit of the issue here.

Look, let’s just first talk about the most obvious issue, which is that everybody has to figure out how to deal with people speaking not English in movies for English-speaking people. You’ve dealt with it. I’ve dealt with it. We’ve all dealt with it.

Sarah’s choice was to say, right off the bat, “All dialog in brackets indicates Mandarin language.” Fine, except literally all of it, except for a couple lines… Actually, one of the lines is in Japanese. There’s one line, and then the VO of the gate announcement is in Mandarin.

At that point I’m wondering if there’s maybe a better way, because what happens is all the dialog ends up in brackets. I got fatigue. I got punctuation fatigue when every single line was in brackets. Let’s put that aside, because that’s a technical thing.

There’s a slightly generic vibe here. The airport feels generic. The time feels generic. There’s nothing about this that says 1985 to me. I have no feeling for 1985. I don’t know what time of year. The conversation that Josie is having with Daniel, who I assume is her husband-

John: I assume so too.

Craig: … is generic. This is the back and forth. “Stop worrying. It’s only a month.”

John: “She’ll be a brand new baby by then.”

Craig: “You can really focus on work now. I’m sorry I’m just… tired.”

John: Then he hands a roll of film over and puts a red bracelet on the baby’s wrist. “Take a picture every day for me. So you remember how much you are loved, Ava.”

Craig: You’ve had a kid. I’ve had a kid. Nah.

John: That’s not a real moment.

Craig: Nah. It’s not a real moment. It doesn’t feel real. When parenting couples are dealing with stuff like this, you get to a moment of truth or honesty after all the other sweating and stuff. I’m not sure, what is Daniel worrying about exactly? She’s taking the baby. What’s the problem? I get that he’s like, “I’m going to miss my baby.”

Also, she’s like, “You can really focus on work now.” “Josie registers Daniel’s hurt expression. ‘I’m sorry I’m just… tired.'” Why isn’t Josie hurt that Daniel’s like, “You’re leaving for a month, and I don’t give a crap about you. I’m just bummed out that my baby’s going to be gone for a month.” Also, a month isn’t that long, and no, she’s not going to be a brand new baby. It didn’t feel true. It didn’t feel complicated. It didn’t feel sticky and tricky.

Then this is compounded by the fact that when we flip over to the Philadelphia side, we have another generic conversation. I’m not quite sure what was going on. Who’s Fei?

John: God bless Drew and Halley for maybe writing up that summary, because I think the summary actually makes more sense than what I was getting on the page. Mei is the baby. It’s complicated that names are all very similar.

Craig: I get that. Mei’s the baby. Adam’s the two-year-old brother. The mom is Anne.

John: Is Anne.

Craig: Who’s Fei?

John: Fei is the woman who’s carrying the baby to visit family or something.

Craig: Fei’s character is 60s. That’s it. When Fei says, “She’s so sweet. What’s her name?” is Fei a flight attendant that is carrying the unaccompanied minor baby? Who is Fei?

John: It’s not clear who Fei is. I suspect we would learn that maybe on Page 4. It’s frustrating to me, because I read this three times and really had a hard time keeping it all straight. I’m not sure I actually did fully understand.

Craig: Maybe she’s hired her.

John: What the purpose, yeah, hired her to take, to see her family.

Craig: Yeah, because it seems like Anne, the mom, it says, “Severe school marm vibes.” Anne seems like she’s like, “Baby, yuck. Here, you take this baby to my parents. Here’s diapers. Here’s formula. Beat it. I’m not going to call you. I don’t need one last look. Just go.” I’ve learned something about Anne there. It doesn’t sound great. I would still need to understand the context of who Fei is to make sense of this scene. Otherwise, Sarah, the issue is, instead of me thinking the things you want me to think, all I’m going to be thinking is, who’s Fei?

John: What’s up here? Is she stealing the baby? I don’t get what it is.

Craig: Who’s this lady, and what’s her job, and why did she do this? Also, when, “Anne watches closely as the gate agent processes Fei’s boarding documents,” in italics, “Will this work?!” Okay, so there’s intrigue, but again, the intrigue only works if I understand who Fei is, because I don’t, so I don’t know what’s going on.

Then we get to the airport. Josie’s made her way to Narita Airport. “She makes her way slowly, with great effort.” What does that mean? Is she already hurt, winded? We haven’t seen any problems with her.

John: We saw her on the airplane. “She braces herself, wincing.” There was some problem in the scene before that.

Craig: Like a bad hip?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like a heart problem or anything. Wincing is like, “Ow, my leg.” It says her POV blurs and distorts. Now it says, “Josie makes her way slowly, with great effort. From Josie’s POV: The Taipei departure gate in the distance blurs, distorts.” Why would she be looking at the departure gate when she’s arrived and is walking away from the departure gate?

John: She’s arrived in Narita, but then she’s going to Taipei. This was a stopover on her way to Taipei.

Craig: Was that established?

John: Not especially well. That’s a good thing that the couple could talk about at the start is, “Do we have enough time to get from that get to the next gate? It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”

Craig: “I’m just nervous because the layover was so tight.”

John: Exactly.

Craig: I think that’s the issue is I got confused there again. More importantly, she collapses. I’m like, whoa. Now I understand what’s going on. Both Fei, mystery 60-year-old, and Josie, mom, are heading probably to the same place. I think they’re going to the same place. They’re both going through Narita. They’re both trying to get to the next leg of their journey when Josie collapses, and then here comes Fei to be like, “Oh, help her.”

John: “Help her. Hold my baby.” Babies get mixed up.

Craig: “Hold my baby.”

John: Craig, before we get to the two-baby problem, which I’m assuming is going to be part of the log line-

Craig: Isn’t that Dan and Dave’s new show, two-baby problem?

John: The two-baby problem, yeah.

Craig: Two-baby problem.

John: From the creators of Game of Thrones is the Two-Baby Problem.

Craig: Comes Two-Baby Problem.

John: On Page 1, we have a two-prop problem. “From his pocket Daniel reveals a roll of Kodak film and a red macrame bracelet, centered by a jade ring.” This actor is how holding two props and will talk about one of them and do something else with the other one. No. You get one prop. Touch the one prop. Forget the roll of film. I think it’s a mistake to have two props that have to do two different things. We can only handle one piece of information at a time.

Craig: If you want to do both, just reach into your pocket after you do the one. Reach into your left pocket after you reach into the right pocket. That should work.

John: Going back to what stuff is in Mandarin, what stuff is going to be in English, brackets are a choice. My guess is that this is set up this way because these babies are ultimately coming back to the US, and so most of the film is going to be in English. With that as a choice, you might want to think about just italics for-

Craig: Completely agree.

John: … whatever the foreign language is, because it’s just easier to read.

Craig: So much easier to read. I completely agree. Italics is your friend here. Just go for that. It will just make the read so much easier. The brackets, it’s weird, even just subconsciously, even though you did a nice job of laying out for us explicitly what you meant by the brackets, what happens is, as you’re reading, everything feels like an aside, because that’s what brackets do in my head. It all feels weirdly un-emphasized, which you don’t want.

I’m curious to see where this goes and is it a two-baby problem. For me, the big issues is I want there to be more specificity and more honesty and truth in the relationship going on between husband and wife. I want to know who the hell Fei is. I don’t need much. I just need to know what is… I’m paying you to do this. Just do it. I get it. She’s paying a lady to go and do this. Okay, but I need something.

John: I haven’t peeked at the log line yet. If this truly about the babies getting mixed up, at some point we’re going to need to actually spend some face time on the babies. I think this script maybe should’ve spent a little more time on that, even just on the plane, or just other people commenting on the cute baby. Some face, some good fat baby face time could be really helpful in terms of setting up the stakes here.

Craig: I love a good fat baby.

John: Drew, tell us what this is actually about.

Drew: “A loner Asian American workaholic befriends a woman with whom she was unknowingly switched with as a baby. After seeing glimpses of a life that could’ve been, the discovery of their switch threatens to destroy the fragile identity she’s safeguarded all her life.”

Craig: It’s a two-baby problem. We were spot on there. I’m a little nervous, Sarah, that it is so telegraphed that we’re just waiting for it to happen, which isn’t great. You might even want to consider just showing one of them. If you were to, say, not show Fei. You just see… It’s Josie, right? Josie?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Josie. Josie’s got her kid, gets on the plane, gets off the plane, collapses. A lady with a kid hands her kid over to somebody else and goes, “Let me help you.” Then the switch happens. We’re like, “What? Oh my god. A switch just happened.” This whole thing with the bracelets, you’re like, “Here comes the switch.” You’re just waiting for it. That’s not what you want, generally, especially not right off the bat.

I’m also a little nervous just based on the lack of specificity of environment and dialog. The log line is describing a fairly sophisticated drama, I think. “Destroy the fragile identity she’s safeguarded all her life,” that’s heavy. That, I would just say as you look at the pages after this, that of course we don’t have, really be on patrol for that, because anything that undermines the realism is going to take away from the drama and can push it towards soap opera in a bad way.

John: I want to thank everybody who sent through Three Page Challenges, and especially the three people who we talked about today. So great and brave of you to do this. I think everyone learns when we can see what you guys did on the page. Reminder if you’d like to do this yourself, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and we will put out another call for adventure sometime in the weeks ahead.

It is time for our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is an essay that I think you will enjoy reading. It’s by Adam Mastroianni. Apparently, it’s a full research paper he presented, but you can read the blog post or the Substack-y post that he did, which is simpler and much more easily digested.

It’s called The Illusion of Moral Decline. What he wanted to study is, do Americans or people worldwide believe that things are worse now than they were before, that people are meaner, less kind, that morals are declining. The truth is, the answer is yes, they always do. They always have believed that things are declining and that things are worse now than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, until you drill down about their actual personal experiences, and the people around them, and like, oh, actually, not so much for me. It really digs into the studies on why that is and what’s really happening.

It has some interesting framing theories about why we always perceive that stuff is getting worse, and particularly that morals are declining. It’s not simply just that it’s a thing that happens as you get older, because even if you talk to people in their 20s, they think things are getting worse. It’s just a set point thing. It probably ties into the degree to which you tend to forget the negative things from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and turn up the brightness on past memories. You can’t do that with the present. It’s a really well-designed paper.

Craig: That’s really interesting. I remember I took a sociology course in college. Was it Emile Durkheim? I can’t remember which famous sociologist it was, but wrote about, and I’m probably scrambling this also, but in my mind the concept was called scrupulosity. The idea was that over time, we confront moral crimes, and the ones that are the most offensive to us, the most upsetting, we drive out, we essentially make deviant. What might’ve been acceptable at some point, like, “Oh, yeah, you can go ahead and marry 10-year-olds,” we’d find that repugnant. In fact, we are now announcing that that is deviant and we’re not doing it anymore. It’s wrong.

What happens over time is that our desire to make behavior on the edges deviant never changes. It is simply moving. As we move forward in a closed-off society, we begin to reassign more and more behavior into a deviant category, because we just keep… We can’t stop and go, “Okay, we’re good now. Everything’s fine. We accept everything.” It’s a related concept. Fun stuff for a college discussion. I don’t know how much I agree with it, but it’s a thought.

I do have One Cool Thing that I guess is also this interestingly philosophical discussion that I also don’t know how I feel about it. I’ll share it with you. I don’t even know how I arrived at it. It may have been through Arts and Letters, which is one of my favorite websites. There’s an online publication called Evergreen Review.

It is a very long essay, long, so strap in, written by Yasmin Nair. It is called No, No, Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, Trauma, and Comedy as Emotional Manipulation. If you’re hearing this and going, “Oh god, no, not another article or essay, think piece yelling about Hannah Gadsby,” you might want to skip this, because it definitely does. She is very critical of Nanette.

However, what was interesting was really where she got. It was like Hannah Gadsby was her way in. Where she arrived, and this is the part that I found fascinating, was a discussion about both the costs and necessities of performing trauma in order to be perceived as authentic, which is a phenomenon that is way more salient to me now in this day and age than it was, say, when I was younger. When we were really young, trauma was not performed at all. It was hidden. You just didn’t talk about it.

John: Or maybe you would say you were processing it, but you were never performing it.

Craig: You were never performing it. Furthermore, no one assigned authenticity to people because they performed trauma. This is not to say that performing trauma is wrong or that you shouldn’t incorporate what’s happened to you in your performance as an artist. What it’s really talking about is us, the audience, and saying, what does it say about us that we assign more authenticity, and are we depriving people of authenticity if they don’t. That was a really interesting discussion.

I’m not familiar with Yasmin Nair, other than to say that she is one hell of a writer. I’m looking at her now. She is a writer and activist based in Chicago. She is also a co-founder, with Ryan Conrad, of Against Equality. What is Against Equality?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It is “an online archive of writings and arts and a series of books by queer and trans writers that critique mainstream LGBT politics.” Whoa, so it’s LGBT inside of LGBT and self-criticism. It’s “an anti-capitalist collective of radical queer and trans writers.” All I can tell you is, I am not queer and I’m not radical, however I am impressed with Yasmin Nair’s ability to put a sentence together.

She is really good, and she made a very… It was just a really well put together thing. It’s worth reading, even just to see what something very cogently written looks like. I put it out there as food for thought and discussion. It is not an endorsement or a lack of endorsement.

John: Fantastic. Last little bits and reminders here. Weekend Read is now on the app store, so download that. It’s on iOS or for iPad as well. You can see all those Three Page Challenges there. Lastly, thank you to Vulture, who gave us a shout-out this week, for the Scriptnotes sidecasts that we’ve been doing with Drew and Megana.

Craig: Nice job.

John: It was really nice. They were just a short, little side project, but it’s nice that people are enjoying them. Thank you, Vulture, for that little shout-out.

Craig: Way to go, Vulture.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: What?

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson.

Craig: Lamberson.

John: Outro this week is by Jon Spurney. Craig, it’s a good one. You’ll enjoy it. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, links to the Three Page Challenges, and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts, and they’re great, and hoodies too. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting away with it.

Craig: Getting away with it.

John: Craig, we got away with it again. Thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, last week we talked about things that our daughters never have to learn how to do, like drive stick shift, or that we never have to do, because we’re at a point in our lives where we can just, “Nope, I’m not going to do that, not going to learn how to do it. I just don’t care anymore.”

Craig: That’s exactly right. We’ve aged out of some things.

John: For me, an example would be calculus. I get calculus as a general concept. I understand it’s about rates of change. I’m never going to learn calculus. I’ve come to terms with that. It’s okay. I don’t need to learn calculus. Calculus is not going to enter into my world.

Craig: First of all, I like the way you pronounce the word, because you say calculus [KAL-kuh-luhs].

John: I said calculus [KAL-kyoo-luhs].

Craig: Oh, you did say calculus. This may be the interesting situation where [crosstalk 01:22:25]. Did you not take calculus in high school then?

John: I did not take it in high school. I took a physics class. I took physics for majors in college, which required calculus. I got the calculus book and read enough ahead so I could get my way through that physics class, which was just complete hubris for me to take. I never really fundamentally understood it. I can’t really do an integral or derivative or all that stuff. I get why they’re important. If I needed to land a rocket, I would use that, but I don’t, so I don’t.

Craig: I did take calculus. I remember none of it. In a sense-

John: We were the same.

Craig: … you got away with it, because we were exactly the same, even though I put in a whole lot of time and energy to get a really good grade in that calculus class.

John: We’re not so different, you and I.

Craig: It turns out, Mr. August, are we that different? This is a great topic, because it reflects our advancing age. When we were younger, like Lamberson, you want to keep up. That’s the point. You’re keeping up. Also, it’s easier to keep up, because you are not just swimming in the current of culture. You and your friends and your cohort are creating it. You are what’s current.

Somebody sent this to me, which is relevant to this topic, and it made me laugh so much. There’s a screenshot of a tweet and then a comment about the tweet. The tweet was from SB Nation. The tweet was, “Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King, or is he just getting rizzed up by Livvy?” Then someone named Damien Owens wrote, “I’m 50. All celebrity news looks like this: Curtains for Zoosha? K-Smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt.” That is correct. I am 52, and that is in fact that Baby Gronk, Drip King, rizzed up, Livvy looks like to me, although I do know what drip is, I just want to say.

John: Yeah, but Drip King is a specific person.

Craig: I thought a Drip King was any guy that’s all glammed up with his jewelry and awesome clothes.

John: Apparently, the actual backstory on that specific quote is that Drip King is an actual lacrosse player somewhere in Massachusetts. It’s all an inside joke and stuff. You know what rizzed up is referring to?

Craig: No.

John: What is one of the key attributes in Dungeons and Dragons?

Craig: Oh, charisma.

John: Charisma. Rizz comes from charisma. Rizzed up, it means to charm, to seduce, charm, flatter, impress.

Craig: It’s like the glowed up, relative to self-improvement and beautification, [crosstalk 01:25:07].

John: When someone rizzes you up, then they’re charming. It feels like a thing that someone would do on Love Island.

Craig: Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King? What?

John: It’s all very debatable. Here’s the thing. We don’t have to hear it.

Craig: We don’t have to. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

John: We don’t have to. We don’t have to care. You don’t have to keep up on all the slang. You don’t need to.

Craig: I don’t even care that people are laughing at us right now for how stupidly old and out of it we sound and are. That’s how great it is to finally get out of the current. They’re all laughing at us, like, “Oh my god, look at them. They don’t know. Oh my god, he thought Drip King was… “ Who cares? We don’t care. Go ahead. Make fun of us. We don’t care. We don’t even hear you. We’re too old.

John: My daughter makes fun of me because I don’t remember her phone number, but I’ve never had to call her phone number.

Craig: If you put a gun to my head, I could not tell you what either of my kids’ phone numbers are. I know my wife’s phone number because it was pre contacts consuming phone numbers.

John: I also have to fill in Mike’s phone number on all sorts of forms all the time for emergency contact stuff. Amy’s not my emergency contact.

Craig: No, and for good reason. Looks like you’re dying today.

John: In the office yesterday, Drew, Halley, and I were making a list of things that we don’t need to think about or worry about anymore, and things that we’re done with. How to repair a car, how to repair an engine, how to change the oil. Halley said she doesn’t need to know how to fix a tire. I still think you need to know how to fix a tire, because sometimes you are going to be in the middle of nowhere, and putting on a spare is a good thing. What’s your impression on tires?

Craig: You can get away with not knowing how to fix a tire, and here’s why.

John: Run flats.

Craig: Run flats are a thing. You can at least get yourself to somewhere with cell service, at which point somebody in a tow truck can come by. If you can do it yourself, that’s fine, but you know what’s more dangerous than not knowing how to fix a tire is almost knowing how to fix a tire. You can injure yourself. You can certainly injure your car. I watched a friend of mine jack his car up, and he did not have the jack in the right spot, and right through.

John: [Crosstalk 01:27:13].

Craig: Right through the bottom. Just right through the bottom of the car.

John: Oh, god.

Craig: It was brutal.

John: I’ve changed some tires in my life, and they worked.

Craig: I’ve done it. I didn’t enjoy it, but I’ve done it. I don’t feel a great need to do it anymore. A lot of cars don’t come with spares anymore because [crosstalk 01:27:31].

John: No, they don’t. It’s true. They don’t. My dad was an engineer. He had a slide rule that I remember loving. I would take out his briefcase and play with the slide rule, never understood how to use it. I’ll never need to use a slide rule.

Craig: Slide rules were already a thing that you and I didn’t have to worry about. Once calculators came along, that was it. Slide rules were done.

John: Christmas cards or holiday cards. Craig, your family doesn’t-

Craig: I’ve never worried about those. Melissa loves them. We don’t send them out, but she loves receiving them.

John: We just get them. We love getting the John Gatins family Christmas cards.

Craig: Those are always the best. I’m not joking about this. She will take every single Christmas card and tape it up to one section in the kitchen so that the wall is covered in people’s Christmas cards. I just don’t know. There are some things that are so fundamentally different between me and her as human beings, that I don’t even bother to say, “Why would you do that?” I’m just like, “Oh, okay.” Not in a million years. I get those Christmas cards. I read them, and I’m like, “Great. I’ve consumed the information. Now into the garbage you go.” Not her. She’s like, “I’m putting these… ” They stay up. They stay up until like January 12th.

John: They all go in a basket that we never look at again, and then we throw them all out, recycle them.

Craig: That would be perfectly fine.

John: A thing we did give up on that we used to do, we gave up on, was frequent flier loyalty. We’d only fly United, so we could be the premium tier of United. Then we got stuck. We got trapped taking flights that were less ideal because of that. It would get stuck in Chicago overnight. It was like, you know what? Stop. We’re giving up on loyalty to any one airline.

Craig: You guys, you are exactly what the point was, like, “How do we get these people to take this crappy flight? Let’s lock them into this loyalty program.” If I have a choice and all things being equal, I’ll fly American, because that’s where most of my points and such are. There are a lot of credit cards that are airline-agnostic. American Express, you can collect points that apply to anything, doesn’t matter, any airline, whatever, so I agree with you.

John: Craig, can you whistle?

Craig: I can whistle in a couple different ways. I can whistle by breathing in. I can whistle by breathing out. I can also whistle like (whistles), which is through my front teeth.

John: Can you do the hail a taxi cab whistle with your fingers in your mouth?

Craig: I cannot.

John: I’ve tried to teach myself that several times. I’ve looked at the videos. I’ve done the practice. It’s just not a thing that works for me.

Craig: I just end up blowing spit.

John: I’ve given up on that. It would be nice. I’ve also given up on Antarctica. I always wanted to visit all the continents. I thought at some point I really want to go to Antarctica.

Craig: That’s just you, dude. That’s just you.

John: Do you want to go to Antarctica?

Craig: No. Why?

John: Because it’s the bottom of the world. It’s exciting to me.

Craig: Are the restaurants good?

John: No, the restaurants are terrible.

Craig: Do they have a casino? Let’s put it this way. There are too many places I haven’t been, shamefully, that I will need to go to before I go to Antarctica. It would just be so insulting to the entire subcontinent of India if I go to Antarctica first. That would just be a slap in the face. One does not slap India in the face.

John: That’s a bad idea. Other thoughts from you about stuff you just don’t ever see yourself doing again? I have on the list mow the lawn. We got rid of most of our lawn, but we have gardeners. That’s fine. That’s good. I don’t ever need to own a lawnmower.

Craig: I mowed our lawn as a kid in hot New Jersey summers. It wasn’t the cool lawnmower. It was the bad lawnmower. It was bad. I don’t need to mow lawns anymore. There are some things I suppose that still in my mind I’m like, I’m going to get around to figuring out how to do. There are certain video games that I’ve just been like, “I’m skipping it.” So many people, including you, are like, “You going to play Diablo? You going to play Diablo?”

John: It’s so good, Craig.

Craig: I’m not saying it’s not. I’m sure it is.

John: It’s not for you.

Craig: At some point, I’m like, I can’t play everything. I know that Diablo is going to be crack. I need to save some crack space for Starfield, and I need to save crack space for the new Cyberpunk DLC, and I need to save crack space for some other things. Man, I’m trying to play Legends of the Tears of Zelda. Breath of the Wild did not grab me the way it grabbed everybody else.

John: That’s my Diablo. I’m not even trying. I’m not even going to try.

Craig: You know what? I am trying, but I’m like, “Oh my god. This is so big and so much.” There are certain things like that that I’m starting to let go. I have absolutely given up on keeping up with new music. I’ve given up. I’ve given up. I remember as a kid thinking, “Why do people give up on this? They should just stay with it.” I get it. You just get tired of keeping up, because you start to realize, there’s no reward for it. At some point it’s okay to just be okay.

John: I also feel like the stuff that is actually going to matter will just break through in popular culture, and I’ll know what it is. I’m going to know who Lizzo is just because I’m going to know who Lizzo is.

Craig: Lizzo breaks through. Lizzo absolutely breaks through. No question. The other thing is, there’s a lot of stuff that I think breaks through for let’s say my daughter, the younger one in particular, because the older one is into a lot of stuff that I’m into, and then such weird stuff that nobody’s into it. My younger daughter is into a lot of music where I’m like, I’m hearing it, and I think actually I’m just not going to ever enjoy it the way you do. It’s just because I think chunks of my brain were already given away to a thousand other bands, and I can’t get them back. They’re gone.

John: Does any of the music that Jessica listens to, do you have to stop yourself from saying, “This could’ve been written 20 years ago?” Some of the stuff that Amy listens to, I feel like, “Yeah, that’s just kind of Sonic Youth.”

Craig: Yes. Definitely the K-pop stuff, I just think, “This was written 20 years ago.” There’s certain things where I think the song is pretty familiar, but the style is fairly new. One of the things that Jessie and I love to laugh about is indie singer voice, because we both find it hysterical. Whenever that comes out, she’ll send me something. Who was on Saturday Night Live and did quismois? Oh my god. It was so good. (singing) I’ll be home for quismois. Who was that? Quismois. I’m looking it up now. It was Camila Cabello.

John: Great.

Craig: She was on Saturday Night Live, and she sang I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and she said quismois. That may have been peak indie singer voice moment.

John: Love it.

Craig: We didn’t have that when we were kids. There was no indie singer voice. That’s new. I liked that. That was fun.

John: Sure, fun. One thing we won’t give up on is the Scriptnotes podcast, because it’s still [crosstalk 01:34:50].

Craig: Hold on a second. At some point-

John: It will never end, Craig. It’ll have to go on forever.

Craig: I don’t like what I just heard. That’s terrifying. That’s a little bit like getting into a spaceship and going, “Let us now return to the stars.”

John: Thank you, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Weekend Read 2
• SKULDUGGERY by Matthew W. Davis (with bonus puzzle map,) SCRAP by Tertius Kapp, and ANOTHER LIFE by Sarah Hu
• The illusion of moral decline by Adam Mastroianni
• No, No, Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, Trauma, and Comedy as Emotional Manipulation by Yasmin Nair
• The Best Podcasts of 2023 (So Far) by Nicholas Quah for Vulture
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Jon Spurney (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.