Search Results for: courier

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.