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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/intelligence-vs-charisma).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 541 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, which trades are the most important when it comes to a career in screenwriting? We’ll wade into the discourse to help you maximize your stats.

**Craig:** Awesome. It’s like the Elden Ring of screenwriting. I love it.

**John:** 100%. We’re going to min-max the heck out of you.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Then it’s a new round of the Three-Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and tell them it doesn’t really matter because it’s all a social game anyway.

**Craig:** Wait, what does that mean, it’s all a social game anyway? What does that mean?

**John:** We’ll get into that. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, you know who doesn’t do a lot of their own writing?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Composers. We’ll take a look at film and TV scores and how they’re written and ghostwritten.

**Craig:** I want a ghostwriter.

**John:** I want a ghostwriter.

**Craig:** [Cross-talk 00:00:47].

**John:** A ghostwriter feels pretty good right now. Craig, mixed news on the labor front this past week. Gizmodo, which is represented by WG East, reached a new contract with Kotaku and the other websites that they write for. That’s great news. They went on strike. They were picketing around. They got a new contract. Congratulations to them.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** We like when writers get contracts, union contracts. Meanwhile, we still don’t have a deal for the Animation Guild, which represents folks in animation, including animation writers. There’s still ongoing efforts to try to get a new deal there. I recorded a video in support of animation writing, reminding everybody that animation writing is writing. I’m frustrated. I really hope that we can get a better deal for the folks who need to work under the Animation Guild contract. I will remind everybody that writing under a WGA contract is a good way to improve your life as a person who is writing for features and television.

**Craig:** This is going to be a tough one, for all the reasons we said before. In case people are just checking in now, the Writers Guild does represent some animation writing, notably primetime television animation box. The Animation Guild represents most animation writers, story artists who do narrative work, who are unionized at all. The Animation Guild is part of IATSE. There are also a lot of people writing in animation without unique contracts at all. Pixar, for instance, non-union. It’s a tricky fight for the Animation Guild, because they very much are a small Rebel force facing up against a fairly large Death Star, but as you know, there is one exhaust port that leads directly to the reactor.

**John:** A thing I just want to remind our listeners is that if you are creating a new animation project, you got a choice. You got a choice whether you are going to sell that project to a place that will force you to take an Animation Guild deal or a non-union deal, or you can say, you know what, I’m going to take a Writers Guild deal or bust. I think you’re going to find more writers who have the leverage to say that just say that.

**Craig:** You’ll also find a lot of people getting bust. They’re going to be tough about this. I don’t want to make it rosier than it is. I was able to do this once. I was successful in doing it, because what they do is they just can create a company.

**John:** That’s all they have to do.

**Craig:** That is a signatory to the Writers Guild. They create companies all day long, the way that we all generate laundry for ourselves. They can do it, but it’s a precedential issue for them. It’s a big fight. You just have to be aware that when we say… You might have to go in there and say it’s WGA or bust. That bust is a real option.

**John:** Bust is a real option.

**Craig:** They may just say, “Okay, then we’re not doing it.”

**John:** That’s always a choice. Craig, did you follow any of this story? This is a screenwriter who is suing their management company for breach of contract. We’ll put a link from the show notes to this. This is really interesting. This is a writer who had created a project, and his management company said, “Oh, you should sell it to this company. Here’s the deal you’re going to be able to make,” and had not apparently fully disclosed that they were actually a producer and an investor in this company. It feels very breach of contracty to me. It feels like people were not doing their fiduciary duties as managers, to me. Not a lawyer, not a lawyer, reminding everyone, but I can see what the arguments are here.

**Craig:** The problem is, managers don’t hide what they are. I’m not sure it is a breach of contract of fiduciary duty, because they are literally telling you, “We’re not talent agents. We can’t procure you employment,” although they do that all the time, and also we do produce things that our clients do. There is an inherent conflict of interest in that. It’s wide open and blatant for everyone to see, which is why I get so frustrated when anyone recommends managers as the solution for whatever problems we may have with agents. They’re not.

I think management as a whole is a deeply problematic profession in our business, particularly as it relates to writers, for this very reason. They tell you up front that it’ll work out great for you if they produce the work you do, because you won’t have to pay any commission on the money you make. The problem is, once they’re producers, they’re management. They are deeply incentivized to have you be paid as little as possible. You never want to decouple your income from your representative’s income.

I just find all of management, the entire thing to be problematic, and so I am entirely on Kurt McLeod’s side. He’s the writer who’s suing here. I am concerned that a court may look at this and say, “Oh, you went to murderers and then they murdered.” That’s what they do. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how to clean up the management business. It’s inherently troubled.

**John:** We can’t clean up the industry as a whole, but what we could do for a writer in this situation is to say, you need somebody else looking at your deal in your contract. That person who actually has by law, clear fiduciary duties to you would be a lawyer. I do feel that if a lawyer had looked through these contracts and really examined them, would have been in a better position to say, “Listen, this does not feel right, and the cap they’re trying to put on this does not make sense. This does not track with my own experience with what these budgets are going to be. I think there’s a problem here.” I would just urge any writer who’s dealing with a manager who may be involved in these productions to get an outside opinion on this from a lawyer who actually knows what there doing.

**Craig:** Just caveat scriptor. We’ve said it many times. They’ve told you what they are. Believe them. I am extraordinary wary of managers. I had one once.

**John:** Yeah, you did.

**Craig:** I fired him.

**John:** You like to fire managers. That’s a thing Craig likes to do.

**Craig:** Did it once, felt great.

**John:** Let’s have some happier follow-up. We had Jack Thorne on the podcast. He was talking about the need for accessibility coordinators on sets on productions to make sure that folks who need things on set or things in production to let them do their best job would have someone that they could go to for this. It looks like in the UK, ScreenSkills is stepping up to help fund this for productions of a certain size.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Accessibility coordinators will be a thing happening at least in the UK, soonish, the same way that we have intimacy coordinators to make sure that sex scenes and sexual material is handled in ways that are appropriate to the performers and everyone else on the set. We have COVID coordinators who are there to make sure that the sets are safe for COVID protocols. Having an accessibility coordinator feels like a right, smart step for everyone involved in production to make sure that we are thinking ahead about really just fundamental things like where are the bathrooms and are the bathrooms accessible for everybody.

**Craig:** That’s great. We are currently shooting an episode with a deaf actor, the child. We have all sorts of folks that have come and joined us so that we can do this right, including a director of ASL and translator. It’s shocking to me that people wouldn’t have done this already in the first place with anyone who has a disability. Now, with unseen disabilities, we talked about invisible disabilities with Jack, and those are tougher, because sometimes you just don’t know.

When you think of how much money productions spend on things that are just a bit wasteful, honestly, weird decisions, bad decisions, confusion, “Oh, you only wanted one car? We got you 80 cars,” all things like this, the expenses for people to help other people feel welcome and capable and cared for and thought of is nothing. It’s negligible. We should always be doing it. Jack is a terrific person. He’s a saint and he’s done the saint’s work here. I think it’s great that UK has stepped up to fund the training, because that’s the most important thing. We can’t just send people in there who have a title. They need to actually know something, because everyone’s going to be relying on them.

**John:** It’s making sure that these coordinators are actually trained, you’re hiring a person who really knows what the heck they’re doing.

**Craig:** Otherwise you’re just handing somebody an extra $500 a week to pretend to do something.

**John:** Jack is a person we spoke to on the show, but of there’s a bunch of other people behind the scenes doing this. We’ll link after the article that really highlights the work that they’ve been doing too.

**Craig:** I only give credit to Jack. [Cross-talk 00:08:56].

**John:** Craig, this last week my daughter was working on a rewrite for an essay she was doing for school. She was doing an essay on Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was a pretty good essay. She’d done a rough draft that she turned in, and then she had to do a rewrite. She had to do revisions on it. I was talking through with her what my process would be on revisions, and she rolled her eyes, because that’s what a teenager should do. She was rolling her eyes.

As I was thinking about this, I came across this article that Jeffrey Lieber had written about his rewrite map. It’s basically when he gets notes on doing the next pass on something, he tries to avoid that paralysis of just not doing anything by actually really thinking systematically about, this is the work I need to do, creating a separate document that’s like, here’s the checklist of what I have to do. Here are the scenes. Here’s how it’s going to affect every scene. I thought we might spend a few minutes thinking about that in terms of how you approach a rewrite, how you approach a significant revision, so that you are actually doing what you need to do and not moving commas around.

**Craig:** It is its own organizational task. I can see here from what we’re looking at that lists are important, a list of tasks, to-do lists. Those are very good for what I would call the more easily or focused notes to achieve, having to go through this list, ah, in this scene I need to make sure that so-and-so appears, in this scene I need to change that line from this to this. Then there’s just a conceptual rewrite kind of thing which I think comes first. We have your big things and we have your little things. The little things go into lists gorgeously. The big things don’t. The big things just need to take the same kind of time and thought that initial preparation does.

**John:** In some cases, what you may need to do for those bigger rewrites is really think about, okay, what is this episode, this movie, this series, what does it want to become, where is it trying to go to, and really think about where are the big strokes things that I need to do. Once you have this overall plan for this is what the movie’s going to become, then you will be able to make some sort of task list things for the new stuff that needs to happen, new stuff that will change.

I do often find that, and I’ve said this on the show many times, is that it’s going to be most helpful to really think about this from a new document point of view, and what are you going to bring from the current document into this new document versus trying to just make the changes in that original document, because so often then you will find yourself saving too much. You’ll be so concerned about this perfect sentence that you had, that you won’t be looking at what the overall goals are of this brand new thing that you’re creating. It’s really an adaptation of your previous work into the next work.

**Craig:** I think sometimes all it needs, and I feel for Amy, because I suspect she didn’t get this, is time. You just need time to let the other one go a bit, the way that sometimes if you’re working on a puzzle and you get stuck, you come back the next day and you just see stuff.

**John:** You see where all the jigsaw puzzle pieces really want to go.

**Craig:** No, I was talking about a puzzle, John, a puzzle that you solve.

**John:** Yeah, exactly, a jigsaw puzzle.

**Craig:** No. Sorry.

**John:** With all the pieces that go in. Sometimes you get like, oh here’s the bumps and here’s the connects.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You’re like, oh does that row actually fit into that row?

**Craig:** It would never happen.

**John:** [Cross-talk 00:12:00] similar?

**Craig:** Literally would never happen, because it’s just this rote task of just pushing pieces of cardboard into each other. It’s not a puzzle, and time won’t help you. Nothing will help you. Nothing. It’s not a puzzle. It’s a smashed picture.

**John:** Here’s what did help Amy with rewriting her essay is that she came up with her new thesis statement and she went and talked to her teacher about like, “This is what I think my new thesis statement is.” That was a five-minute meeting. She’s like, “Yeah, that’s great. I can see how your essay’s going to revolve around that.” She picked a new thesis that could actually find evidence that was supported in the text and could bring in the stuff that was useful in what she’d already written. Many times really what you’re doing with a rewrite is going back to what is the thesis for this new thing that I’m trying to write.

**Craig:** Yeah, going back to basics. You are writing a new thing, but you get a huge head start. You’ve learned a lot of lessons from the first thing. It’s important to also not forget the good stuff. You don’t want to leave the good stuff behind. There are things that people connected to. It’s fair to want to try and preserve things as you go.

Rewriting is, like everything in writing, a product of experience. The more you do it, the better off you get at it. You get faster. You get smarter about what to keep and what to not keep. You get I think more efficient about not having to go backwards and forwards quite so much. With all the stuff, just doing it… I know we do a podcast, and I know that the point of the podcast, in part, is to help people, but there’s only so much we can do. Really, if you listen to all these podcasts, I think we might save you 1 year out of 20 years of experiencing, which is a lot, by the way, I think.

**John:** Which is a lot.

**Craig:** I think a year is an enormous amount.

**John:** It’s a good amount. I’ve been thinking about, listen, if she could tolerate listening to any podcast, she hates podcasts, but if she could listen to any podcast that was about writing essays for high school, she’d have listened to the podcast and listened to a whole bunch. She could listen to 541 episodes of that, but it wouldn’t get her all that much closer to actually writing her thesis, because you just actually have to learn how to like, okay, how am I going to get these thoughts to stick together, how am I going to make transitions between stuff?

As a person who reads all the stuff she writes, I do see her progressing tremendously in terms of just fluency of sentences and ability to get thoughts to connect right and link this paragraph to that paragraph. It’s still hard work for her in a way that’s just not hard work for you and me, because we have craft. We just have the ability to make these little pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle that she just doesn’t have yet.

**Craig:** Again, just to be clear, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is far more complicated than a jigsaw puzzle, which is just moron’s work. What’s happening is her mind is growing. Her brain is growing. Neural pathways are forming, that we have reinforced over and over and over, over many years. Think of all the things that our daughters have to study in school. We don’t. We’re in one class. Everything else we do is an extracurricular, but we’re in one class.

**John:** I have forgotten everything I knew about chemistry, and that’s okay.

**Craig:** It’s okay.

**John:** It’s okay.

**Craig:** We’re in one class, and that class is screenwriting and deadlines. Her brain’s still growing. Part of parenting is having the humility to say, actually, I’m not doing much here really, which is, again, waiting, and waiting for their brains to finish. Then we’ll see what we got. She’s got a good one. I like the fact that she rolled her eyes at you. I think that’s great. It’s appropriate.

**John:** That’s her job and her function.

**Craig:** It’s appropriate.

**John:** Let’s get to one of our marquee topics here, because this was part of a Twitter discourse. We actually had a good listener question. I think it sets up a lot of this. It’s a long one, but Megana, if you could start us off with what Patrick wrote in to say.

**Megana Rao:** Patrick writes, “Your conversation last week got me thinking about the recent online vitriol about peer writing versus networking as competing imperatives for advancement in this competitive industry. In my own view, these two capacities constitute the inalienable double-helix structure of any viable screenwriting career. It’s fundamentally a false choice. We’ve all known either A, an incredibly talented writer whose command of prose and story craft is undeniable, but simple can’t wrangle a useful meeting or make a constructive social connection to save their life, or B, an average or underwhelming writer possessed with such charisma, social gravitas, and yes, just occasionally connections. They’re able to effortlessly secure prized business opportunities that stubbornly allude most.

“It all got me thinking, what if one applied the timeless RPG character leveling framework to the enterprise of screenwriting. Screenwriter A above, for example, might be a chiseled level 65 tyrant on dexterity, but a paltry level 2 on charisma. I’m curious how seasoned nerds of our distinguished hosts pedigree would rank themselves and what their dream allocation of attributes would be in crafting the ideal questing screenwriter.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I think Craig and I are going to fall back to what we know best, which is the six attributes which you use in Dungeons and Dragons.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** There are three physical attributes, which are strength, dexterity, and constitution.

**Craig:** We don’t need those right now.

**John:** Those are pretty self-explanatory. Strength is how much you can lift and move. Dexterity is how nimble you are. Constitution is your just overall fortitude, your ability to take a blow, keep going, your workhorse-ness. Those are the physical ones. The mental ones would be intelligence, which is your overall genius, wisdom, which is your ability to recognize patterns, to see things as they truly are. Charisma, which has probably been the most retconned in the DnD world, which is your force of personality, your personability, your ability to inspire either admiration or fear among those around you. Safe description of what those six stats are?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s about right.

**John:** I think we could all agree that charisma is what we’re talking about in terms of a person who’s really good at networking and playing that social game.

**Craig:** That’s right. That will be charisma. I suppose we could argue that pure talent would go under intelligence, which is a dump stat for most classes in DnD, but if you’re a wizard or a screenwriter, it’s the one that directly influences your magic.

**John:** Intelligence, it’s not a perfect thing, because you could be… Stephen Hawking is probably not a very good screenwriter. You can be very smart but not a good screenwriter. We’re really talking about verbal dexterity. It’s the ability to string words together. Intelligence is about as close as I guess we’re going to have for that, even though it’s not a writing skill.

**Craig:** It’s not a perfect fit, because intelligence as an attribute doesn’t mean pure IQ per se. Then there’s this wisdom thing, which is the third thing that I think everybody left out in this whole debate, which look, the debate basically boiled down to what’s more important or do you need both. Look, I will go down with this ship. You don’t have to be good in the room. You don’t have to be good at networking. You could have a charisma of zero as far as I’m concerned. You could have a charisma of negative two. It doesn’t matter. If you’ve written a great script, that document, which is completely detached from you as a human being, is going to circulate around and someone’s going to buy it.

Now, if you are a weirdo, that may limit you to some extent, but it won’t limit you completely. We’ve all known let’s say an incredibly talented writer whose command of prose and story craft is undeniable but simply can’t wrangle a useful meeting or making constructive social connection. I know people like that who are very rich from screenwriting, because they’ve written excellent screenplays. Everybody just knows, okay, that’s the way they are. They have their function, and then at some point somebody else may need to come in to help. Yes, there are also people who can, for a while, surf entirely on charisma, but eventually they cost someone money and that’s the end. It’s wisdom that I think has been left out of this debate.

**John:** Wisdom is a tough attribute to say, because you could start your career with a certain amount of wisdom, but really that wisdom will grow as a function of your experience. Experience is that level 65 of it all. You and I have leveled up enough times that we could just see how things work in ways that it’s very hard to at the start of your career. We got hit by the sword more times and have a sense of when to dodge and when to duck and when to parry, in ways that a brand new screenwriter may not recognize. We should also know, oh, let’s maybe listen at that door before we open that door, because there could be monsters inside.

**Craig:** That’s right. Wisdom helps people decide what should I write. What would be a good thing to write right now? Whose advice should I listen to, and whose advice should I ignore, which is a huge one. A lot of young writers, new writers have low wisdom. Because they have low wisdom, they can be easily charmed by agents who tell them this is what you ought to be writing, and they believe them. Agents don’t know what you should be writing, at all. At all. No one actually knows what anyone should be writing. The only thing they know is that when they read something exciting that’s awesome, they want it. Simple as that. Wisdom.

**John:** What I think we’re saying is all three of these, the mental aspects of DnD, do play very important roles. Intelligence, wisdom, and charisma are all factors there. You could maximize one of them and maybe have some success. People who have maximized their intelligence and are really good at writing that script can be great, but if they don’t have the wisdom to see what they should even be writing, that’s a problem. If they don’t have any social skills at all, that can hold them back to some degree. Trying to maximize for one of those stats is not great.

What I don’t see in this discourse is that, as we know in any adventuring party, it’s good to complement each other’s strengths. That’s why sometimes you’ll see people who, our writing teams, where one person is a really fricking good writer, and the other person’s really good at chatting people up and doing that stuff, and together they are a real force of nature. That may be a situation where if you recognize that you are really not great at one aspect of this, that’s an opportunity for you to partner up with somebody.

**Craig:** Even if you are writing solo, a good agent is serving that role and a good producer is serving that role for you, usually. They can help. That’s why they are there. The original that kicked this all off was someone said, “The screenwriting advice that, quote, you just need a good sample, quote, to, quote, cut through the noise, quote, really isn’t true. At least half of the business is about relationships and it’s better to recognize that and plan accordingly. Lots of people have good samples.” Then David Iserson, a fine writer–

**John:** Who’s been on the show.

**Craig:** He has been on the show, and also a fellow graduate of Freehold High School system–

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Said, “With respect to the stranger on the internet, no. Write a great script. Everything else is secondary.” I agree with David Iserson. I think that is correct. I think everything else is secondary. I think that the notion that half of the business, or as this person said, at least half of the business about relationships, is not correct. I think when we start off, we don’t have any relationships. I didn’t. In fact, writing a good sample that cuts through the noise is true. It’s just incredibly rare. I know that what people want is to believe that if you have enough wisdom and charisma, you can make it. Intelligence is your key stat. Every class has one key stat.

The key stat for screenwriters is screenwriting talent. That is your key stat. Load as much of your upgrades into that as you can. The next two, which are secondary, but important, are wisdom and charisma. I would probably load as much into charisma if you can, because it does help. Wisdom you can accrue along the way. Hard to be pre-wise, although some people I suppose are. You will not go long and last without that key, which is being able to write a good script. That is the rarest thing there is in Hollywood, the ability to write a good script. Lots of people have good samples. Wrong. They do not. I wish that were true.

**John:** I stayed out of this discourse pretty much entirely, but I did see [unclear 00:24:03] tweeting along the way. I think Franklin Leonard was one who pointed out that people overestimate how many great samples there are out there, how many great scripts there really are. I think people see, oh, there’s The Black List, there must be a zillion good scripts. Those scripts never touched the light of day because of some other problem, because that screenwriter has some other deficiency. No, there’s actually fewer of those than you believe they are. They do get passed around when [unclear 00:24:28] is really good. I had that experience with Go. Go got passed around a lot because it was a good script. That helped make my career. Don’t think that you’ll write something that’s pretty good and then your charm will make it happen. That’s not been our experience.

**Craig:** No. What are you supposed to do about it anyway? You’re supposed to sit there and start making relationships or forcing this terrible calculated networking? Honestly, how many people on the internet giving advice about screenwriting are professional screenwriters? Of those, how many have actually been consistently produced and have lasted? I think you and me, and I don’t know, there are probably six others, maybe.

**John:** There are some others. There are some people who are genuinely trying to help, and there’s also producers who are weighing with their experience. That’s great. That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** There’s just a lot of people who, they just want something to be true, and they also just like the sound of themselves giving advice.

**John:** Let’s give some of our own advice to–

**Craig:** Segue them in.

**John:** Folks who have written in with their Three Page Challenges. For folks who are new to the podcast, welcome. Every once in a while we do a thing called a Three Page Challenge, which is where we take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts, sometimes their pilots, sometimes their spec screenplays. We offer our unfiltered advice on what they’ve written and what could be improved and what we’re loving and what maybe they should take another look at. These are all volunteers. These are folks who went to–

**Craig:** They wanted this.

**John:** They wanted this. They went to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. They filled out a little form. They said it’s okay for us to talk about their scripts on the air.

**Craig:** We’re going to.

**John:** It’s all in the spirit of fun and sporting. These are brave folks who have written in. Megana, how many samples did we read this week, did you read this week? I’m sorry. As if I did any of this work.

**Craig:** No, we didn’t do any of it.

**Megana:** I read through about 150 submissions.

**Craig:** Good god. Whoa. 450 screenplay pages.

**Megana:** Correct.

**Craig:** That’s just too much.

**John:** That’s a lot. That’s a lot.

**Craig:** You could probably read through half of those but tell John you read through all of those. He doesn’t even know. In fact, that’s probably what you did. You read through five.

**Megana:** Yeah, I actually only read five.

**Craig:** You read 5, and you were like, “I’ll just tell him I read 900.” We won’t know.

**John:** She made a sampling of these. Remind us, Megana, what is your filtering mechanism? What are you looking for in things that you want to discuss on the air with us?

**Megana:** I’m looking at things that I personally would not be embarrassed if they were out there, so things without typos, things that I think are formatted correctly and promising. I’m reading through a lot of these submissions, and so things that I think are exciting and I’m into the premise, I’m into the world. Sometimes the pages aren’t quite doing it, but I feel like with a few fixes or advice from you guys, you might be able to really help improve the work.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Let’s see how we do.

**John:** We should remind everybody that if you would like to read these pages, we’ll have links to them in the show notes. Also, if you’re on an app listening to this podcast, you can probably just click through and get to the pdf. If you want to read through these with us, you’re welcome to. Megana, if you can give us a quick summary of this first one.

**Megana:** The Man Who Could Be Macbeth, by Daniel Bracy. We open on a call center in the middle of the workday, while Bill Wangley’s coworkers chat and answer phones around him. Bill is haunted by a witch. Bill seems to be the only one who can see or hear her. Bill’s about to confront the witch in the break room when he’s startled by his boss instead. Bill’s boss remarks that Bill’s after-work activities seem to be affecting his performance in the office, and advises Bill to cut back. On Bill’s drive that evening, he tries to play the radio in his car, but instead hears the witch’s voice again. We see a script for Macbeth open on the seat next to him, with Bill cast as the character Lennox.

**John:** Great. Anyone who’s [unclear 00:28:10] is going to quickly realize, oh, it’s like the witch from the start of Macbeth. That’s the witch that we’re hearing. It’s one of those haunting witches that’s setting up the premise of Macbeth. Here’s a plug for the new Macbeth with Denzel Washington, which I thought was terrific. That is not the script that we’re reading right now. Megana, there were more typos in this than I would normally expect. That said, there was something that was interesting, that I think it’s good for us to talk through, because I think there’s also examples of we hears and we sees that I would probably trim out. Craig, what is your first take on The Man Who Could Be Macbeth?

**Craig:** I really enjoyed the concept of this. This is an interesting concept. I think I know where it’s going. There were so many awkward descriptions where there could’ve been elegant, simple descriptions, that it was hard to get any rhythm as I read. I can walk through a few of these. Right off the bat, the very first words, “Heads of hair.”

**John:** I circled “of hair.” What is this?

**Craig:** What is a head of hair? Now, I understand where he was going. He said, “Heads of hair,” I stopped and went, what? “Stick out over the walls of a cubicle asylum.” Now, what he means is we see a bunch of office cubicles, an open office space, and we see all those little cubicles, and we see people’s heads sticking up. One of them is balding, but instead we get, “Heads of hair stick out over the walls of a cubicle asylum.” Asylum is not the right word. “One balding round head,” which I think we need a comma there, “One balding, round head stands out from the rest.” By the way, the odds that only one person is balding… Is two bald guys just a lot? “Phones ringing and light chatter is heard among the workers.” There’s this passive voice that happens, “is heard.”

**John:** Take out the “is heard” and it’s fine. That’s a case where I’m happy with a sentence fragment, “Phones ringing and light chatter.”

**Craig:** Then the next line is, “Over the cluster of office noise.” That’s not the right word again, cluster. Just, “Over the noise.” Then it says, “The deep gravelly.” That should be deep, comma, gravelly, “Voice of a woman is heard.” Again, passive.

**John:** “Of a woman,” not “a women.”

**Craig:** “Of a women is heard.” My brain fixed that typo before me. Well spotted. “The deep gravelly voice of a… “ Also, if you are describing the voice of a woman, and it’s deep and gravelly, you need that to come second. You say, “We hear,” and that would be a perfect thing, “We hear the voice of a woman. Oddly, it’s deep and gravelly,” or, “We hear the voice of a woman–“

**John:** “Oddly deep and gravelly.”

**Craig:** Yeah, just something that sets apart deep and gravelly as interesting, as opposed to the average deep and gravelly voice of a woman. Then we do have a formatting disaster here. You and I are pretty good about formatting disasters. Look, nothing is ever going to kill you, but “witch” and then in parentheticals below the character name is says “V.O.,” then it says the dialog. We just never do that.

**John:** No. V.O., continues, O.S., O.C., we stick this up with the character name, just because they’re not a true parenthetical.

**Craig:** Also, it’s V period O period. It’s not V period O. If V gets an abbreviation, so too does the O. Anyway, this goes on. There are comma issues. There’s a lot of just overwrought, clumsy action description here. Hard to see what was going on, and yet eventually I did see it, and this is a testament to the concept, because I wanted to keep figuring it out, because Daniel had me interested, which is the most important thing.

**John:** Here is the premise to me. It’s like what if Office Space but Macbeth, basically where this guy is cast as a minor role in Macbeth and wants the major role in Macbeth, and so he’s obsessed that there’s a witch haunting him throughout this. Sure, I get that. The office was too generic. I’m happy with the cubicle form. That’s great, but I need some specificity about what it is this company does that makes it not just Dunder Mifflin or whatever the business was in Office Space. I need something there, a little bit more. I was also frustrated that we never got a proper introduction to Bill. Bill’s our main guy. He never gets his name put out in upper case, so we can see this is Bill. What’s his deal?

**Craig:** He’s bald. That’s it.

**John:** He’s bald.

**Craig:** That’s all we know. He’s bald.

**John:** That’s all we know. Craig, you and I are identical, because we’re both–

**Craig:** We’re both bald.

**John:** Two bald white guys.

**Craig:** We don’t even know if he’s white.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** All we know about him is that he’s bald. He could be 80 or 12.

**John:** It’d be fascinating if he was 12 years old.

**Craig:** I know. It’d be cool.

**John:** A 12-year-old bald guy working in an office.

**Craig:** Alopecia.

**John:** That would be specific.

**Craig:** Alopecia.

**John:** Alopecia. It’s a real thing.

**Craig:** Child labor law violations. Also, he’s in a call center. No one’s talking. There was no action in the call center. When it says light chatter is heard, the people are going to be like, “What should we say?”

**John:** Everyone, light chatter amongst yourselves. Both Bill and his boss, they need actual proper introductions and they need specificity, because right now the boss just appears in a line of dialog. These are all problems. The other thing which I would say is an overall thing for our writer to work on is recognizing run-on sentences and when to chop sentences into two bits or when to use the gerund to continue the idea. “He’s an older man with large-framed glasses, his eyes scan over his cubicle wall.” “His eyes scanning over his cubicle wall.” You can’t just stick two independent clauses together and join it by a comma.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It reads weirdly. If we were to read this aloud, I think you would recognize, oh yeah, there’s something wrong there.

**Craig:** That was one of the common problems. I apologize, he is an older man, so he cannot be a 12-year-old boy. The boss is named Boss. That’s pretty bad. There’s a moment, a cool moment where the witch appears, but we see her, then we see her make a cool motion that makes her neck crack, and then it says, “Bill suddenly stands upright in response. A shiver rolls down his spine as his eyes widen, the witch still behind him.” Shouldn’t we flip that around? Also, “suddenly stands upright,” I think “stands upright in response” implies suddenly. It would be better for us to be with Bill, to hear a sound, for him to stand, for him to turn, for us to see the witch when he sees the witch. This is a little backwards. Boss, his first line is, “Hey Bill, how’s it going?!” What? Why is there, “How’s it going?!” What’s happening? Why?

**John:** It’s fun that Bill screams in response and drops his water. Great, but is that the out of the scene? Probably not. You need some beat to react to that. What does the boss do? What is that next moment?

**Craig:** He screams back.

**John:** Yeah, because then we’re going to stay in that break room, which is fine. We could stay in that break room. We’re jumping ahead in time. It’s just a weird out on that moment. The other thing I want to point out is, we see, we hear. Craig and I are big fans of we see and hear when the time’s appropriate.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** At the top of page two, “We turn slowly to see, in the opposite corner of the room, a witch staring at Bill from behind a chair.” We turn slowly to reveal? I’m just a fan of more specific words than “see” when it’s helpful, and revealing is a good choice for this.

**Craig:** It is. Also, we don’t really turn. We can hear things. We can see things. We can notice things.

**John:** Slowly reveal.

**Craig:** Or pan slowly to see something like this. It’s very, very hard, by the way, as you guys walk through these things, to have a scene in a break room and then to cut to a scene in the break room later is extraordinarily difficult to do production-wise without looking bad. How do we know time passed? You need to very carefully describe something. Look back at the episode we did on transitions and think of one, because you’re going to need one. That’s hard enough to do that I try as much as I can to avoid it.

**John:** You try to avoid it. An example would be, if in that being startled, he drops his water and water goes everywhere, and then we cut to he’s on his hands and knees, cleaning up the water with paper towels. That’s an example. We jumped forward to time to do that. That can work. You got to be specific about what it is, because just staying in the same place and jumping forward in time is a real beast there. A lot here to work on. It was actually nice to start with one that actually had some stuff on the page that was a problem, because I feel like our next three, we’re not going to be so focused on mistakes on the page and we can really talk about what we’re getting out of them.

**Craig:** Take a look as you go through, Daniel, these sort of things that may not get through your spell check. Top of page three, “This isn’t the first time its.” Wrong, “it’s.” “Effected,” wrong. “Affected.”

**John:** “Affected.”

**Craig:** Also, Bill’s in his car and he’s listening to the radio. It appears to be FM. He’s pushing the buttons to the presets. What year is this?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Megana wouldn’t even know what that is. She would not know what that is.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Very end, below the title, is a list of the actors’ names. That should be “actors’,” S then apostrophe, as it is a possessive plural. Anyway, lots to do there. I think get simpler, get clearer. There’s certainly an interesting premise here, so well done.

**John:** I’m looking at the log line that was provided. It says, “Bill, an unsuccessful local theater actor working in a call center, is pushed by a mysterious Shakespearean presence into stealing the titular role in a production of Macbeth by whatever means necessary.” We did get the setup. We understood what the premise of the story was.

**Craig:** That’s really smart. Macbeth is a bad ambition. This makes sense. Hopefully he has a girlfriend who convinces him to stab someone. Anyway, so onwards we go to Pizza Boy written by Mick Jones.

**John:** Pizza Boy. Talk us through, Megana.

**Megana:** Dimitri and Clara flirt over dinner at a Beverly Hills restaurant. Their banter slowly turns to dirty talk. Suddenly, Claire’s voice warps into a man’s voice, asking Dimitri to confirm. We cut to Dimitri’s car outside the restaurant, where Dimitri sits in the driver’s seat. He’s picking up a brown takeout bag of food. The waiter has interrupted his fantasy to confirm that Dimitri has picked up the order.

**John:** Great. This is an example of a surprise situation where it’s not a Stuart Special. What we just saw was a fantasy and now we’re coming to the reality of it all. Are we going to name this for Megana? Does Megana get to claim this trope?

**Craig:** We need something that implies… A Megana Mirage.

**John:** A Megana Mirage, of course. It’s all a Megana Mirage.

**Craig:** This was all a Megana Mirage.

**John:** Spoiler, we’re going to have another Megana Mirage in a future three-page challenge here, our next one. Let’s talk about what Mick Jones did here in Pizza Boy and where we’re at in the course of these three pages. The idea of a guy picking up food at a restaurant and fantasizing that he’s at the restaurant, sure, I get that. I was a little bit frustrated that I didn’t feel like his flirtation with Clara was being paid off really, because Clara’s not in our scene. Clara does not appear to be the waiter who he’s talking with or the person who’s coming to confirm the order. I just got a little frustrated by the end of page three, that everything I’d been through wasn’t… I didn’t have an immediate payoff. There didn’t seem to be a pattern that was being fulfilled here.

**Craig:** This is the danger of the Megana Mirage is that the mirage has to, in and of itself, fascinate you and interest you and work for you, without you knowing it’s a mirage, because if you know it’s a mirage, it’s boring and it doesn’t matter and the stakes are irrelevant. If you don’t know it’s a mirage, but it’s not working on its own, the reveal that it’s a mirage just makes you go, oh, okay, that’s why that was that way. That’s not what you want from people. You don’t want them going, “Oh, okay. Okay, I guess that makes sense now.” Making sense isn’t the same as good.

The issue here is that the flirtation between Dimitri and Clara, it’s very arch. It feels very written. You could argue, Dimitri is writing it in his mind, which is fine. When people have fantasies in this way, I tend to find that it’s most interesting when one of them seems very grounded and real, and the other one is exciting, smart, interesting. In this case they’re both doing this thing that it’s sort of like bad porn writing, where everyone’s clever and everything is a double entendre and all the answers are witty. There’s some difficult description that happens early on.

**John:** “Manner born.”

**Craig:** Manner born is correct.

**John:** It’d be M-A-N-O-R.

**Craig:** Actually, the first use was… Manner born, M-A-N-N-E-R, is how it started.

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, in Shakespeare I think, but then manor born, it may have even been a pun. I was reading about this actually the other day. It’s the weirdest thing that the manner born thing happened in this thing. Manner born may have been a pun on manor born. I tend to use manor born. They are both fine.

**John:** Is that appropriate for a Beverly Hills crowd?

**Craig:** No, it’s not. If it were, you would still want a dash in there. You wouldn’t want “manner born crowd.” “Dimitri is aloof, feigning interest,” but he also grins and “never breaks eye contact with Clara.” Now, how do you do that? You never break eye contact, but you’re aloof and feigning interest. That’s just impossible. Basically, I was annoyed by the conversation. I didn’t like either of them, because I didn’t believe either of them. It all felt fake. She said that he’s funny. He hasn’t done anything funny. There’s an example of a good Megana Mirage in, I believe it’s the first… I think it was the pilot episode of Ozark, yeah, maybe the second episode, where we see Jason Bateman’s character having a Megana Mirage with a woman in his car and she’s saying all these things to him. You believe it. He’s a wreck, and she’s telling him these things that he needs to hear. It’s lovely and then you realize that she’s a prostitute and it’s not working like that. You need to believe in the scene itself. I think that was the biggest issue I had here with this particular, I’m just going to keep saying it, Megana Mirage.

**John:** A thing I noticed on the page here, on the bottom of page one, Clara says, “Why don’t you just imagine that I’m not?” The “imagine” is not underlined, but it has asterisks around it. Sure. In Highland or other apps, the asterisks would actually create an italic.

**Craig:** A markup thing.

**John:** A markup thing, yeah. That’s fine, but also people do speak with little asterisks around them, so it didn’t bug me. It’s another way of creating a sensation of like there’s a spin on that word. Great, I’m happy to see that. I think English is constantly evolving, so using things like that is absolutely fine. The joke at the bottom of page two, which goes into page three, Dimitri says, “And what do you find attractive?” He says, “Confidence, red, curly hair, a beautiful smile.” She says, “Do you want to F me or Carrot Top?” Carrot Top, the visual works, but also Carrot Top is not a person you refer to in 2022. It felt like a clam.

**Craig:** It is a clam. Also, weirdly, there is that… I had no problem with the asterisks as well, but then suddenly he is emphasizing words not with asterisks, but with italics and underlines at the same time, which is a very strong emphasis. I think a simple italic there would be fine. I tend to find those underlines seem a bit yelly to me, whereas italics feel like stress. I think, “What do you find attractive?” just could’ve taken an italic, and simply later then when it says, “Then I’m going to pull your panties off with my teeth.” Oh, Dimitri. Which actually just is awkward. No need for the underline there.

Here’s my advice. Let’s be positive and constructive for a minute here, Mick. I think my advice is this. Clara can be this person. She can be tricky and she can be mean and negging him and she can be beautiful and she can suddenly be seductive. She can be all these things, as long as Dimitri is as confused and low power status as I am when I’m reading it. Do you know what I mean? She scares me and I want him to be scared and I want him to be confused and I want him to not be able to follow her. Then I want her to take a little pity on him or decide that he’s adorable enough for her to take home. That’s what I want. I want something that feels real and will help me learn something about Dimitri, since he’s our character.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the log line that Mick provided, which is, “To pursue his dreams of becoming a comedian, a young man must endure untold humiliation as a delivery driver in Los Angeles.” We got delivery driver in Los Angeles in these first three pages. That’s great. I wouldn’t have known that he’s a comedian. I think there’s an opportunity for this. If we see him trying jokes in this, I think there’s… I could imagine a version of this scene where we see that he’s trying to make her laugh and he’s trying material on her. There’s something you could do in this that would get us to that he’s actually a comedian, because I think that’s important information for us to get out in these first three pages, and I don’t see that happening.

**Craig:** No. The first few pages tell us what’s important to somebody. I think we’re starting with our I want song, in a way. What this tells me is that he wants a girlfriend.

**John:** Clara, yeah.

**Craig:** He wants a girlfriend. He wants to be a Romeo. He wants to be that guy that all the women want to date. What it’s not telling me is that he wants to be a comedian. If you did the same exact concept and it was a party and we’re in a backyard of this beautiful mansion and Dimitri is the center of a group of people, he’s telling a really funny story and he’s really good at telling it. He’s confident, and everyone’s laughing. Then you cut to or reveal that he’s actually standing there on the edge watching somebody else doing this who’s an actual comedian.

**John:** He’s going to hand the bag of food to take somewhere else.

**Craig:** He’s just there to deliver something for the party. That guy is the guy whose life he wants. Then I would understand what this movie is. I would get it.

**John:** Let’s go to our next Three Page Challenge. Can you talk us through Evergreen by Heather Kennedy?

**Megana:** Great. Frank Harrell, 80s, white, swims in the pool of the Evergreen Estate, a 1950s Bel Air mansion. A member of the staff, Joel Garner, 50s, Black, reminds Frank that he’s not supposed to swim alone. A woman’s cry calls him inside, where they find Margaret, 80s, white, has just discovered the dead body of Joe Johnson. Joel calls the police and tells them a guest has been shot dead. We pull back from the estate as an ambulance appears, revealing that we’re actually in modern Los Angeles.

**John:** That’s the Megana Mirage. We thought we were in a period movie, but it’s actually modern day Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s a mirage. This could be something else, because it’s not a fantasy where the bubble gets burst.

**John:** It’s a Rao Reveal is what it is.

**Craig:** It could be a Rao Reveal. That’s exactly right. This could be a Rao Reveal.

**John:** A Raoveal.

**Craig:** A Raoveal. This may have been a Raoveal. Just a quick disclosure, I’m friends with Heather.

**John:** Oh, nice.

**Craig:** She and I are both puzzle solvers.

**John:** You’re puzzlers.

**Craig:** We’re solvers, John.

**John:** When you’re putting pieces together.

**Craig:** She lives in Austin.

**John:** Shaking that puzzle dust out of that little box.

**Craig:** Never. We’ve done some escape rooms and we frequently talk to each other about puzzles. Lovely person. There’s something that could be excellent here. There’s a Pleasantville possibility I think is what’s going on. We have trouble in these first two lines. This is where I think so much could be solved, because I’m not sure what I’m actually seeing. Okay, some possibilities. One, that when these people are walking around, they’re delusional and they think they’re in a 1950s black-and-white movie, because they’re old.

**John:** Some sort of memory care thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, or this is a weird bubble of reality, where once you cross the line you are in 1950s black-and-white Hollywood, or this is just a funny opening to introduce us to what will be a story about a regular old age home. I’m not sure. I would love to know better somehow. The first few lines say, “As the first light flickers onto the screen, we discover this is an old Hollywood black-and-white film.” There’s not much discovery there. You could just say, “This is a black-and-white film.” Black-and-white. Or you could just say, “Black-and-white.”

There is an interesting tonal issue that occurs, because on the second page we meet Margaret. “Margaret speaks in that mid-century, mid-Atlantic movie accent prevalent at the time. Oh Joel, it’s awful, just awful.” She’s great. She also says, “Oh Gwennie. Please. You mustn’t,” which made me laugh out loud, because that’s just so funny.

In the prior page, which is in the same black-and-white universe, Frank, who is floating in a pool, says, “I can’t be blamed if Joe didn’t see fit to join me this morning. Asshole’s afraid he’ll lose.” No one said “asshole” in these 1950s black-and-white movies. That was just simply not available to them, and it wouldn’t fit.

Also, he says, “Did I ever tell you that Johnny Weissmuller taught me how to swim?” “Yes, sir, once or twice.” Now, that makes me think, okay, so that was a long time ago, but Johnny Weissmuller was… “Johnny Weissmuller’s teaching me how to swim,” might help, because then I would think, okay, I’m in that… It was hard to pin down exactly what the concept was here. I know what I want the concept to be here. I just don’t know if it is.

**John:** Like you, I enjoyed the things that felt like ‘50s period and I enjoyed the mid-Atlantic accent. I enjoyed that kind of voice of it all and recognizing that race was a factor here as well. Starting as a black-and-white movie just felt kind of like cheating. Am I watching The Artist? I just didn’t know what I was actually experiencing and how seriously to take it. I didn’t know when I was going to transition to full color to show that we are in present-day time. Just remember, Sunset Boulevard, which you’re also referencing here at the very start, you don’t need to shoot things black-and-white to make them look old. You could actually just shoot them in present-day things and if the production design feels like 1950s, we’re going to believe it’s 1950s until you break that illusion. That’s going to be a better solution for you for most things.

**Craig:** I couldn’t agree more. To me, costume and hair and makeup and speech patterns, dialog patterns, furniture, all these things can absolutely convince me that I’m in period Los Angeles. The reveal is not from black-and-white to color. The reveal is period Los Angeles to 2022 Los Angeles, which is not at all like that. Once you get past the gates of this place, you realize, oh, we’re in the middle of now. Again, the question will remain, is this just a memory care type facility, where people just think it’s in the ‘50s, or is this some weird time bubble? It’s hard to say.

I love the fact that there’s a murder mystery in the offing here, because those are always wonderful. I thought things were fairly well described. I could see things. I saw, for instance, the bottom of page one, “A woman’s scream startles them. They pick up their speed.” That’s great. That’s a nice transition. “Interior Evergreen Estate. Joel and Frank follow the commotion.” I thought, okay, I’m going to go to the next page, but what is this living room, and boom, there it is, the interior of the mansion. She lets you know. Then there’s a very funny line. Then I could see exactly the body. I could see what the body looked like. I could see how he was shot. I love that there were feathers everywhere from the pillow. All that stuff felt great. It’s just conceptually we need to know what we’re supposed to understand, because kind of don’t.

**John:** It gets back to our confusion versus misdirection, and I just got a little confused. Don’t name a character Joel and a character Joe. We’re going to get those names confused.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t even name a character Joe and a character John. We got to watch that. Also, there is an errant I-T-apostrophe-S when we should have an I-T-S at the bottom of page three. I know that Heather will be kicking herself at that. I know her well enough.

**John:** As a puzzler.

**Craig:** Yes, solver.

**John:** Fortunately, we do have an answer about whether this is a time-space bubble. Her log line that she submitted says, “When LAPD homicide detective Keiko Sanjiko [ph] discovers the bigoted elderly residents in a home for the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age won’t answer her questions, she hires the spitting image son of their beloved TV private investigator to be her proxy. The two uncover a decades-old feud and love affairs, but will that help them solve this locked-room mystery with a surprising emotional twist?”

**Craig:** That’s a really fun concept. I think that concept is terribly served by beginning this in black-and-white. In no way, shape, or form should that be what you do there. You just start it, we think we’re in the ‘50s, and then we realize, oh, these people, it’s just a memory care thing. I think there’s an opportunity to actually have a secondary reveal, which is Interior Evergreen Estate Office Day. This is Joel, who’s looking after them. “He walks into his office, closes the door behind him. Now that he is alone, he is visibly shaken.” He would be visibly shaken also seeing a dead body prior. He’s not an actor. “He walks to a nearby desk and dials 911 on the rotary phone. Someone on the other end answers. Yes, I’m… My resident, a resident has been shot. He’s dead.” To me, if he walked into that office and we were like, “Oh, whoa, this office has a computer,” that’s [cross-talk 00:53:15].

**John:** He’s pulling out his iPhone, yeah.

**Craig:** Then he just picks up the phone, dials it, and he’s like, “Yeah,” and he just speaks without any kind of mannering and 1950s nature. He’s a more interesting reveal than the city. Then you can show the city, which is perfectly fine. A human and his mundane things. He could pull out his iPhone. He doesn’t need a rotary phone.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** He could be like, “I’m going to go get you your tonic.”

**John:** Bloop bloop bloop.

**Craig:** He goes to the room and goes into another room, and in that second room he unlocks the door and that goes into just a regular office and he pulls out his iPhone and dials 911. I think that would be more interesting.

**John:** I agree with you there. Let’s get to our final Three Page Challenge. Megana, will you talk us through Scavenger.

**Megana:** Great. Scavenger by Phil Saunders. A boyfriend records his girlfriend opening her birthday present from him, when the entire building is suddenly rocked by an earthquake. The footage cuts to black as we hear the room collapse. The handheld footage picks back up with quick shots of the couple running through the Santa Monica Pier as the earthquake wreaks havoc. The Ferris wheel falls and crushes the girlfriend. An office tower collapses. We pull back to reveal Edgar Corman in his 50s in a private jet watching the footage under the caption “10 years later, the quake through the eyes of its victims.” He video chats with Thania Redrick. They’re surprised that the footage was recovered. Thania tells him a scavenger found it. We cut to Fin Lorca in her 20s diving through underwater ruins. She swims past a barrier and discovers a sunken carousel.

**John:** Great. Craig, a thing I like about these pages is that it can be so hard to show a bunch of chaos happening. A bunch of chaos happens, and people just basically track what’s going on. I see this is all found footage. I’m getting a sense from these glimpses about what this must be. I felt like it was live and present in ways that did make me want to… It kept me actually reading through the stuff. Even if I didn’t have to read exactly, I didn’t need to look at each bit of time code, I got a sense of what was happening. That can be tricky to do on the page. I did like that about how these pages started.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I really enjoy the first page. I really enjoy the third page. I struggled mightily with the second.

**John:** I did as well. Let’s talk about why, because it’s when we get to this reveal, like, oh, here’s the person on the private plane watching, it’s like, wait, I don’t get why this footage is so important here. I just wanted that scene to go away and get ride to my scavenger having found a thing or jumping ahead to this is what the sunken city of Los Angeles is like.

**Craig:** I agree. There’s something very smart and very poetic about the way Phil has laid out his first page here. A young woman wakes up, stretches like a cat. 23, bedhead and bleary eyes.” Thank you. Wardrobe, hair, makeup. “Smiles at us as we get closer. The mirror behind her catches her boyfriend’s reflection.” I can see this. He says, “Happy birthday, lazybones,” capturing it on his phone. It’s “Corrupted like a bad copy.” I know something’s going on already. I like that it’s corrupted like a bad copy. “His hand reaches out with a wrapped gift. The size and shape scream jewelry. Lazybones, tired smile, wakes up.” That was really interesting, because he decided to name her Lazybones, even though her name is Young Woman, which I think is correct. It’s smart.

There’s this little banter back and forth with them that is very mild but believable, didn’t bore me. She says something that feels like the kind of thing people say. It’s not too clever. It’s not too boring. It’s just fine. The way the disaster happens is really interesting. It felt real. Then I had no idea what the hell was going on. To start with, it says, “Interior Aircraft Cabin.” It took me a while to understand that this was a private jet. It doesn’t say private jet. It just says, “The jet’s only passenger.” I’m assuming that he’s in a 747 when I see “Interior Aircraft Cabin.” The first action line is, “10 years later, the quake through the eyes of its victims.”

**John:** Where am I seeing that line?

**Craig:** Then it says underneath, “A tabloid website streaming on a screen in the hands of… “ When we say screen, do we mean tablet? What is that?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Tabloid websites streaming? What does streaming mean? Do you just mean that that’s the headline of a tabloid website? What tabloid website? Then we have this guy, who we’ve heard prior. There’s this prelap of people talking. By the way, it’s not V.O. In that case it’s probably something else, off screen. I don’t know if it’s V.O. Voiceover is when people are narrating things.

**John:** People are talking directly to the audience.

**Craig:** I think this is something else. Also, he has to figure out what to do here, because one of them is talking in a scene and the other one, her voice is coming over this feed. I have no idea what is going on. I don’t know what any of this means. I know I’ll find out later. Sometimes jargon as mystery makes me crazy, like, “You had to pull me out for this.” Pull you out, what does that mean, pull you out?

Then, “Someone made it in. How far? Far enough to recover that footage. Christ, this could save us. Who?” No one says, “Christ, this could save us.” No one, ever. I don’t know what they’re talking about, but John, if you and I know that if we had something that could save us, and we watched a video, and it seemed that somebody might have that thing, I would go, “Oh my god. They might have it.” I wouldn’t say, “John, that is the very thing that we have discussed a thousand times that could save us.”

**John:** “Christ.”

**Craig:** “Christ.”

**John:** “That could save us.”

**Craig:** “Goddammit.” No. I completely agree that I want to be in the next page. I just want to skip page two. I just want to go from this crazy moment of Los Angeles being destroyed to underwater, and then seeing this woman come through and having her scavenging. We get it. It’s many years later, because everyone’s a skeleton now.

**John:** Yeah, so cool. There’s something in this footage that is the McGuffin. There’s something that they are seeing in this footage that is important. I would say maybe spend that top of page two focusing in on that thing that is important, and that let us as an audience know that that thing is important. We don’t need to go to the guy to say that thing is important, because you’ve told us as an audience that thing is important. Great, we’ll be getting back to that. As long as you held on that, we’ll know there’s a reason why we held on that.

**Craig:** When we meet Aleta, who is scavenge diving, there’s all this really cool imagery and stuff. She’s looking at a driver’s license. “She pulls a driver’s license from a rotted walls, compares the faded image of a woman to a skeleton, as if trying to imagine it in life.” That’s wonderful. Such a great visual. “It’s one of many littering the ruins.” I can see it now. “Aleta traces a cross over the corpse and begins to rob it.” What a great sentence. Love that sentence. Then there’s this science-fiction thing happening. “A liquid electric fence known as the Barrier stretches sea floor to surface between high-tech pylons, emitting a deep bass thrum you can feel in your gut. It sparks and flashes warnings, restricted, keep out.”

Now I know it’s not actually saying those things, and I know that there’s no way for us to know it’s called the Barrier, but I get it, because I know when I watch it, that will be clear. A fish swims through it and dies. She sees something on the other side and takes the pain of reaching through that thing to reveal that there’s a carousel horse buried there, and that means something to her. In fact, it means so much that she forgets her arm is in this thing and she pays for it with some burns. She’s found something. She goes up to the surface. She’s going to tell somebody she’s found something.

This is all good mystery. It’s very beautiful and it’s visual and no one’s talking to each other with this stuff. I’m nervous, Phil. I’m nervous, because I think you’re a good writer. I’m just worried about your dialog, which is its own kind of writing, because the dialog was not strong here.

**John:** That’s a thing he could work on.

**Craig:** That is a thing that he can work on. It may be that his dialog is fine. It’s just that he’s trying too hard with these guys to be clever, mysterious, provocative, confusing. If you want to keep it this way, Phil, I would suggest making it clearer and just doing a little bit less. Do less here.

**John:** Actually, the dialog on the first page was appropriately less. I believe those moments as authentic. Here’s the log line we got sent for this. “In the sunken ruins of post-quake Los Angeles, a cursed salvage diver finds redemption when she goes up against a military epidemiologist to save her refugee community from a deadly outbreak.”

**Craig:** Whoa, that is a lot of stuff.

**John:** That’s a lot of stuff.

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** Deadly outbreak is a surprise to me. I like the universe that we’re playing in. I would certainly have kept reading to see what was going to happen next, because we haven’t heard Fin speak yet.

**Craig:** We haven’t. I think no matter how this turns out, Phil clearly has a way with words. He can do this. He can make pictures with words. That’s a huge part of this. He also understands the interesting contrasts of things. I’m hopeful.

**John:** I’m hopeful too. Thank you to everyone who submitted, all 150 people who submitted, especially these four who we talked about on the air today. Three out of four of these were written in Courier Prime, which is why the italics look so nice. Thank you for using some Courier Prime. This was a good exercise. Thank you, Megana, for going through all of these entries.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is The One, which was built as the most expensive house in the United States. I do not recommend anybody buy this house. It was originally sold for $295 million. I will recommend that people take a look at this video of the touring of it, because it’s a half-hour long, and I’ve never seen such an impressive building that I wanted to live in less. It is essentially, at a certain point you build what is like a museum, that is not an actual house. The primary bedroom is bigger than any normal person’s house would ever want to be. It looks so uncomfortable to live in this space. After you watch this video, I’d also recommend, I think this is a previous One Cool Thing, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen of Versailles.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Is so amazing. It’s about this woman’s quest to build this giant house in Florida. You see her current already giant house and how hard it is to live in a giant house and how her husband just wants to live in this one little small room, because big spaces are not comfortable. I just wish people would understand that no one wants that kind of space and rooms of that scale. It was so fascinating and so uncomfortable to watch.

**Craig:** Obviously, John, if you do buy the house for 295 million, you know you’re going to spend another 30 or 40 million just fixing up the little things.

**John:** The small things, yeah, because I’ll be honest, the little golf course on the roof, it’s fine. It could be better.

**Craig:** Obviously.

**John:** The indoor saltwater pool, it’s fine.

**Craig:** It’s fine.

**John:** It’s not the best.

**Craig:** Because it’s Los Angeles, if you do buy it, and then you bring an interior designer or architect over, they will just explain to you why it’s all wrong and needs to be redone. Doesn’t matter what you buy, all wrong.

**John:** There’s four bowling lanes, but really, you’re going to have to split lanes, you’re going to have to share. Come on.

**Craig:** Just do it right or don’t do it at all.

**John:** I see what you have here and I have the same recommendation.

**Craig:** I can’t even get it out. My One Cool Thing this week is Elden Ring.

**John:** After we ranted about it last week. I switched classes and you switched classes. I think we made the right choice to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, we did. I was really struggling, obviously. We could hear it last week. I was just so confused.

**John:** It is confusing.

**Craig:** It’s outrageous how they just don’t care about you in this game. It is undeniably gorgeous and massive. I was just feeling like, oh my god, everyone’s just saying it does get better. I did a little research, because mostly, I understand that even though the game requires dying, I don’t like dying. I am a coward. I’ve always been more of a ranged fighter than an up-close guy. I did a little research and finally understood that if you are a ranged fighter, there’s one class. There’s really one class to take, and it is curiously the best caster. Even though you could be a bandit and shoot arrows, not as powerful or as good as the astrologer, which is their name for wizard, essentially.

**John:** A wizard, a spell caster. I also switched and made myself an astrologer character.

**Craig:** So much better.

**John:** It’s so much easier to fire equivalent of [unclear 01:06:02] fireballs from a distance. You eventually run out of mana, whatever that mana is, but it’s just easier.

**Craig:** Some recommendations if you’re starting, choose the astrologer. The next screen will come up. You get to pick a name. There’s also a little starting gift you can have. Always pick golden seed. Always, because that gives you an extra jar of mana restoration.

**John:** Yeah, a little extra flask. Then you can set your flask so you regenerate two mana flasks and two life flasks [cross-talk 01:06:32].

**Craig:** I would actually go for three and one. I don’t think you need health much, because you’re not going to get close to anybody. Battles that were incredibly difficult for me became trivialized. I did even, in my first try at the big first boss, Margit the Fell, I did kill Margit the first try.

**John:** Congratulations. I’ve not tried to do that yet. I think it is the right overall approach. You’re spamming from a distance, but that’s fine too.

**Craig:** Look, I’m not playing this game to be humiliated, because mostly, here’s the thing. I am a story mode guy. I like the stories, which granted in this thing I don’t think are going to be particularly compelling, but still fine. I mostly like discovery. I like to go to new places and see new things. It’s hard to do that when you can get one-shotted by almost anything. It’s become way more enjoyable. I can tell I’m going to be into it. Astrologer. Take a little bit of time to level up.

**John:** [Cross-talk 01:07:35].

**Craig:** Get your intelligence to 20 as fast as you can. Get your mind to 20 as fast as you can. Intelligence increases the damage you do with your staff, and mind increases the amount of mana you have to cast, so you just cast and cast and cast.

**John:** The other recommendation I’ve seen is that dexterity is also helpful too, because that helps you just avoid getting hit. That could be another [cross-talk 01:07:55].

**Craig:** You hopefully aren’t so close that you’re getting hit. Once you get Torrent the horse, you can ride around to really avoid getting hit. Dexterity does impact how fast you can cast. After you hit, you send one glint, pebble, shard, whatever it is, how quickly can you send another one. Even with your dexterity being fairly low to start, you can cast pretty quickly. Vigor will help boost your HP a bit, which is nice, keeps you from dying too quickly. Again, you don’t want to get near anybody. You want to stay far away and just blast from a distance. Astrologer in Elden Ring if you are a baby like me or John.

**John:** In Elden Ring we are recommending that you maximize your intelligence, your dexterity, and perhaps your vigor. As a screenwriter we recommend that you maximize your intelligence, your wisdom, and your charisma.

**Craig:** Yeah, intelligence first.

**John:** Intelligence first.

**Craig:** Just like the astrologer.

**John:** Astrologer.

**Craig:** Then for screenwriting, you’re going to want to then go for charisma and then wisdom.

**John:** Wisdom, yeah. We love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Joe Palen. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. I will not get involved in the screenwriter discourse, but Craig might. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies that are wonderful. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 supposed to record about composers. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, that was an example of music being composed really unspecced, just for fun, by Joe Palen in that circumstance. I want to point you to an article that’s talking through the way in which film and TV music is written, because so often you’ll see this is the named composer, but there’s actually a whole stable of sub-composers who are working for that person who are doing the actual work of coming up with all the cues. Is this something you’re familiar with coming into this conversation?

**Craig:** Yes. The composer can’t do everything. Some composers also are not particularly good, for instance, at taking the music that they’re composing, which they often do on one instrument, and transposing it, or I’m sorry, I should say transcribing it into notation for an orchestra, nor are they expert in arranging it for an orchestra. Arrangement and instrumentalization and notation is a huge part of this.

Hildur Guðnadóttir, for instance, who did our score for Chernobyl and did the score for Joker, her husband is a guy named Sam Slater. He’s also a composer and a producer. He is very much this kind of partner for her to help take the musical thoughts and ideas and themes and then help her practically create tracks out of them and build them into larger things as need be and engineer them and produce them.

There are teams, certainly, of people. When you look at how much work some composers are doing, it would be impossible for them to be doing it all on their own. I could argue that if you’re John Williams and you come up with (singing), then you’ve done it. If you hummed the theme for ET or Star Wars or Jurassic Park and then told people to just spool it out for me and then listen to it and then you change some things, you’ve done the hard part. That is the genius part.

**John:** This article we’ll link to by Mark Rozzo from Vanity Fair, weirdly John Williams is apparently the person who actually does do all the stuff himself.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** He’s the exception. Hans Zimmer is the person who’s most known for it. It sounds like over the years Zimmer’s been better at crediting and acknowledging all of the people who work for him and who are doing some of that real work in terms of putting those keys together, because you’re right, these people are sometimes working on four projects at once. They’re like those artists who become factories, that just do all the stuff. He might be coming up with the main theme, but everyone else is building out that stuff.

Where it’s become a crisis though, is that classically, the work that was done for a movie or for a premium cable show, there could be a reporting of that. There could be royalties. The other people who are credited there could get a percentage of that stuff. In the streaming age, those royalties are becoming harder and harder to access. People are really struggling. Folks who are getting some portion of that money down the road are not finding that same money in a Spotify universe.

**Craig:** This is not something that you or I tend to have any experience with. When you’re a writer, you are writing. If you’re running a room full of writers, then they’re all writing as well. On a television show, most of them almost certainly will get some kind of credit on a script, an episode. There will be residuals. There will be an acknowledgement. For this area there does seem like there’s a gray zone. One would hope that composers, particularly the most successful and well-known, would be compensating their partners fairly, treating them fairly, and if they are working significantly and adding a lot creatively, that they should be rewarded for that on an ongoing basis, not just as a buyout, which I suspect may be the case.

**John:** We as screenwriters and television writers, we are represented by a union. Composers and lyricists are not represented by a union, so they don’t have the same kind of workplace protections and workplace standards and minimums that you and I benefit from. I think we’ve talked about, with Rachel Bloom, I think on the show before, is that there’s also this weird thing where she could be hired on to write a song for an episode or for a movie, and she’s creating literary material, she’s creating story for that. She’s creating a moment. She’s creating that scene in which that thing happens. She doesn’t have the Writers Guild protection over that work. She’s not considered a credited writer for having written something that could be a really significant portion of what’s happening there in that dramatic work.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great thing for us to draw attention to, not only to acknowledge that other people are doing this work and to help people understand the way things are. There’s no shame in this. This isn’t a secret or anything. Nobody’s pretending that those people aren’t there. Hopefully they are being taken care of. I haven’t noticed any major lawsuits or things, so one would hope that everyone is being taken care of and treated appropriately. That said, wish in one hand, poop in another, and see which one fills up first.

**John:** You and I both know of a screenwriter who is notorious for having had a room of writers who were apparently doing the work for him.

**Craig:** Who knows?

**John:** I think the fact that you and I are both thinking about the same person probably means that it is really exceptional.

**Craig:** It’s rare. It’s really rare.

**John:** It just doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** It’s a very rare thing. It’s not endemic to what we do.

**John:** Agreed. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* Follow alone with our Three Page Challenge selections [The Man Who Could be Macbeth](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FThe-Man-Who-Could-Be-Macbeth-first-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=966ed6db27560a1e5248d4684aa3146ac99d688911bdcb6a6772792247a6aebc) by Daniel Brace, [Pizza Boy](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FPizza-Boy.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=b44cfadd9bbd1cd9a3eaebec7895a2df7236effe3476b09341bfcb26bbba234d) by Mick Jones, [Evergreen](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FEVERGREEN-by-Heather-Kennedy-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=04d28a15776ebee0415aa8362aad6fa04df7782a7f0ecbd58bc5f67ded5341c7) by Heather Kennedy, [Scavenger](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FScavenger_1st3pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=f4b2401ba8d366f6414ee2f8aa5276338fc77d22672536f60f2b1e2229ed77fd) by Phil Saunders.
* [WGA East Settles Five-Day Strike Against G/O Media](https://deadline.com/2022/03/wga-east-settles-five-day-strike-against-gizmodo-media-group-1234972332/)
* [RSVP for the Animation Guild Rally](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf1nAG5CQeIl-UT2VoZB4kMXaoC7XH3EGppg4tIU9J-YVtFHg/viewform) Sunday 3/20 at 2pm in Burbank, CA
* [‘Copshop’ Screenwriter Sues Zero Gravity Management For Breach of Contract](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/copshop-screenwriter-sues-zero-gravity-management-for-breach-of-contract-1235107246/)
* [ScreenSkills To Fund Accessibility Co-Ordinators For British TV](https://deadline.com/2022/03/screenskills-to-fund-accessibility-co-ordinators-for-british-tv-1234975989/)
* [Behind the Tweets: “Rewrite Map”](https://www.wga.org/news-events/news/connect/3-11-22/behind-the-tweets-rewrite-map) by Jeffrey Lieber on WGAW Connect
* [Scriptnotes Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-one-with-jack-thorne)
* [David Iserson’s Tweet on Great Scripts](https://twitter.com/davidiserson/status/1498832466575912961?s=21)
* [Touring the MOST EXPENSIVE HOUSE in the United States!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8Cd_McCdow) on Youtube and [The Queen of Versailles](https://www.magpictures.com/thequeenofversailles/)
* [The Astrologer on Elden Ring](https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Astrologer)
* [“The Minions Do the Actual Writing”: The Ugly Truth of How Movie Scores Are Made](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/the-ugly-truth-of-how-movie-scores-are-made) by Mark Rozzo for Vanity Fair
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Joe Palen ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/541standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/we-see-and-we-hear).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 533 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are so many screenwriters worried about the word ‘we’?

**Craig:** Why? Why?

**John:** Craig and I will hopefully drive a stake to the heart of the “we hear/we see” prohibition, as we talk through some screenplay fundamentals, before looking at some of the scripts up for awards this season.

**Craig:** We will see some of those scripts. We will see them, we.

**John:** We will see them.

**Craig:** We see.

**John:** And if we were listening in a room, we could hear them-

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** -because we can hear and we can see. We have the sensors.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Then, we’ll get into some listener questions. And our bonus segment for premium members, we will discuss what is the screenwriting equivalent of bootcamp?

**Craig:** Ooh, that’s interesting.

**John:** We talk about soap operas being like actor bootcamp. Is there a boot camp for writing?

**Craig:** Oh, I see what you mean. Got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Understood. Okay.

**John:** A place where you’re doing so much work that you’re really picking up your skills, you’re developing your craft.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. All right. [crosstalk]

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** That’s only if you pay us.

**John:** If you pay us, you can listen to us talk about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you pay enough money, you could own The CW, which is apparently up for sale.

**Megana:** [chuckles]

**Craig:** [chuckles] Wait, what? [chuckles]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The CW is for sale?

**John:** It was announced this last week or the week before that a CW may be up on the auction block. CW in the US, for our international listeners, is the home to a lot of great programs, including where Crazy Ex-Girlfriend used to air. It was a joint partnership between Warner Brothers and CBS. So, there were some shows that were CBS shows which was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and some things. There are a lot of Warner Brothers shows that were there. Now that Warner is more focused on HBO Max stuff, and CBS is focused on Paramount+ stuff, it’s not quite clear how The CW fits in. So, it may end up becoming a new thing, it may change. But anyway, the head of CW said, “You know what? Yeah, we’re probably up for sale.”

**Craig:** The sentence you just said there, if we had just rolled back to when we started this podcast, would have made utterly no sense to us.

**John:** No. [crosstalk]

**Craig:** The HBO Max and– What?

**John:** Paramount+.

**Craig:** Paramount– CBS with Par– what? What? Para+. But it’s remarkable how much things have changed. I guess, similarly, it’s remarkable how oddly adaptable we are as human beings. We are terrified of change, but we’re really good at absorbing it and accepting it when it happens. We’re odd little creatures, aren’t we?

**John:** Obviously, it feels everything’s accelerating, but I think at any given moment in time, we would probably feel it’s accelerating to all these new things. It’s always strange to think back to 100 years ago, cars were new, the time between the first flight at Kitty Hawk to man landing on the moon was so much shorter than you think it would be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s right. We are witnessing the acceleration of things in our lifetime. But everything that happened before us just feels like history that took forever.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see what happens to The CW. One of the discussion points is that CW airs on a bunch of local stations, obviously, and the local stations are part of bigger groups. And that group might just buy out The CW instead of [crosstalk].

**Craig:** Do you have any interest in it?

**John:** Honestly, I don’t. I feel at this point, I’m all in on streaming. The normal linear broadcast and stuff is just not so appealing to me.

**Craig:** I mean, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was on it, right?

**John:** It was. It was great.

**Craig:** We could own that.

**John:** Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was originally going to be a premium cable show.

**Craig:** Showtime. Yeah.

**John:** And then, they retooled that. You can go back and listen to the episode where we talked to Rachel and Aline about the show back when it was a Showtime show before it became The CW show. It was filthier. There used to be a handjob in it and then the handjob became a kiss.

**Craig:** Ultimately, you’ve summed up the difference between Showtime and The CW.

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** It’s just that whatever mathematical equation converts a handjob into a kiss, that’s it.

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** That’s the difference between a broadcast and premium cable.

**Craig:** You’ve got it.

**John:** Do you remember Stuart Friedel?

**Craig:** Sorry, who?

**John:** Our first Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel?

**Craig:** I mean, Stuart’s a part of our lives.

**John:** He is. Stuart is the reason for a lot of how Scriptnotes used to work, and of course, the reason why Scriptnotes t-shirts are so soft is because-

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** -Stuart is so sensitive and has this Stuart’s sense of softness. Stuart talked to me last week. He said, “I just had a mentor conversation with a Nebraska kid, who is my mom’s hairdresser’s nephew,” which is classic. “This guy mentioned the movie that he wanted to write. And he described the opening as a Stuart Special. He doesn’t know why it’s called that, but that’s what it’s called on Scriptnotes,” he says.

**Craig:** [chuckles]

**John:** He has no idea that it’s called a Stuart Special because of Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** How did he miss that?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a kind of amazing that there’s a generation of people who are going to call that a Stuart Special. The way in lore, the last shot of your day is the Martini. But the second to last shot is called the Abby or Abby Singer, because there was a first AD named Abby singer, who would call for the martini and he was always one shot off. And so, the second the last one became the Abby. And people will call it a Stuart Special, and then every now and then somebody, “You know why it’s called that by the way?” That’ll be a bit of trivia for people.

**John:** Yeah. And, of course, it’ll be like, it’s named after Stuart Friedel, who used to be a producer on Scriptnotes before he became a titan of children’s television.

**Craig:** Before he became the CEO of The CW.

[laughter]

**John:** Before he bought out The CW and turned it into–

**Craig:** I want to know what the Megana maneuver is?

**John:** Oh, yeah. Well, it has to be a term that Megana will coin here. But, Megana, I’m curious, do you know what the Stuart Special is? How would you define it as Stuart Special? Or, is it just all alien territory for you?

**Megana:** Stuart Special, I think, it’s something I encounter a lot when I read threepage challenges, which is flash forward in a script, and then, by the end of two or three pages, it’s like one week ago or six months ago.

**John:** Right. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the Stuart Special.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s showing the moment right before the climax. And then going back like one month earlier. Exactly.

**Megana:** Right.

**John:** Record scratch. I bet you’re wondering how this all happened, and let me talk about this.

**Craig:** [chuckles]

**John:** Flashing back to just a few weeks ago, we had Jack Thorne on the show. We had a great conversation with him. He was talking about disability and also invisible illnesses. This last week, Annie Hayes wrote in. Annie Hayes is a friend of Scriptnotes. She has helped us out at Austin Film Festival. She had such a great letter that I thought, “Oh, it’s much better as a blog post than for us to try to read it on the air.” But Annie Hayes writes about her experience. She’s a staff writer on The CW show In the Dark, and she’s had cystic fibrosis this whole time since [crosstalk] she had cystic fibrosis. And writing about sort of the challenges of living with a chronic illness and working with a chronic illness, a lot people can’t see that you’re fighting this. She started off as an assistant. I think she was assistant at Verve before she started working as a staff writer, but it’s a great overview of what her experience has been.

One of the things she really stresses is that she’s been very open about it, but she also tries to make sure she’s always presenting a solution rather than a problem, which seems good advice in general.

**Craig:** That is. It’s funny, a little bit after that show, I talked with Jack, because he was curious, because I did mention that I had been dealing with chronic pain for a long time. He was like, “What is it?” He was actually, I think, maybe the first person I’d really talked to about it, because I’m me. I’m not that guy. It’s not related to any feelings about disabilities or physical challenges as much as just my general sense that, “Just shut up, Craig,” [chuckles] is mostly what I struggle with all the time, but it is interesting that you have to make choices when you have an invisible disability or illness or challenge. Whereas you don’t have that choice when it’s visible, at all. Both things come with their own unique difficulties. So, I appreciate Annie writing in about this.

**John:** Megana, we got another question from a listener about the Jack Throne conversation.

**Megana:** Great. Alok wrote in and said, “Your recent episode with Jack Thorne was amazing. I love Jack’s Edinburgh TV festival speech. As a person with invisible disabilities, I find his advocacy work really empowering. But I’m looking for a recommendation. My disability forces me to read text documents while simultaneously listening to them using a text-to-speech software. The one I use is called Read Aloud, which is a Chrome plugin. It’s a free software with minimal options that reads documents back to me in a deathly robotic monotone.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Megana:** “It’s not at all suited for reading scripts.”

**Craig:** No.

**Megana:** “I was wondering if anyone at Scriptnotes was familiar with text-to-voice softwares that professional writers with disabilities could use to read their scripts. Again, it is text-to-voice that I’m looking for, not voice-to-text. If there is something on the market that you recommend suitable for script reading, I don’t mind shelling out some money to purchase it.”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s an interesting thought there. John, this seems like something you would probably know, if you knew you would know. Not me.

**John:** A couple things I can point you to. I do have friends who will listen to scripts in the car with some read aloud software. I think having similar experiences where it’s a little bit awkward, because it has no idea that you’re reading a script. Some things that could be helpful. In Highland 2, we have what’s called a narrated script. And what it does is, it’s looking at the same script, but it’s changing it to rather than like:

Tom: Welcome to my house, Mary.
Mary: It’s so nice to be here.

It says, “Tom says, ‘Welcome to my house,’ Mary says this.” It’s adding in the says and things, and it actually has the sense of like int and ext become interior and exterior, that may help you. It might make it a little bit easier for you to read. So, it’d just be a matter of throwing that PDF in there and exporting it as a narrated script, that could be a little bit better solution for you.

The Weekend Read beta has text-to-speech that’s actually really good, where you can actually set voices and do things so you can set the male characters to a certain male voice, female characters to a certain female voice. That’s great. It’s still in beta. So, I can’t offer that to everybody. We’ll send a copy to Alok, who can test it. And we’re also doing some new stuff in the new Highland beta that should be a little bit better for folks who need some accessibility things. We’re working with Ryan Knighton who’s our blind friend about making sure that’s fantastic for blind writers to use.

**Craig:** Well, that’s all sounds pretty useful information there. Turns out, you had all the answers right there, John.

**John:** I don’t have all the answers though, because I feel we probably have other listeners who are in similar situations. So, if you are like Alok who needs stuff read aloud, scripts read aloud, write into us and tell Megana what you’re using, and we’ll share that on a future episode.

**Craig:** It’s good idea.

**John:** Fantastic. All right. Well, let’s talk about screenplays in general and screenplay formatting, because this feels such a giant, fundamental question that we’ve addressed many times over the years. But even just this last week, Craig-

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** -you and I were both a little bit dumbfounded by someone who wrote to us and said like, “Hey, can you explain why you’re so upset against ‘we hear’ and ‘we see’?” And you replied with a GIF of–

**Craig:** [chuckles] Not sure if serious.

**John:** Not Sure If Serious. He just had fundamentally like mis–

**Craig:** Misunderstood, yeah.

**John:** -what we’re talking about here. So, just to make sure we will reiterate this a thousand times during the podcast. It’s absolutely fine to say “we hear” and “we see” on the page in screenplays. It’s also fine to not use it. You can be a writer who chooses not to use it, that’s great. But it’s an available tool for you, and you should not feel at all bad about using it. And if anyone smacks you down for using it, they’re being dumb.

**Craig:** They’re bad.

**John:** They’re bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, I use it all the time. Like John says, it’s not that we recommend using it. It’s just if you like it, great. I find it to be a useful tool. We’ve talked quite a bit about why it does something unique, that other presentations of actions do not so that it’s not simply a stylistic choice or a bit of decoration, but it has–

**John:** It’s not lazy. No.

**Craig:** No, it has purpose. I am mystified. I wish I could go find the patient zero of no one should ever write “we see” in screenplays. I don’t know who started this terrible virus, but it’s wrong. And it is metastasized throughout all of these mediocre schools. And the mediocre schools, I mean [chuckles] they’re all mediocre when it comes to this sort of thing. Waves of human beings have just keep arriving on Reddit, like teeming onto Reddit shores to explain to other people why you can’t use “we see.” And the two of us have just been standing there trying to rescue people from this nonsense because, I guess we can’t. But let’s try one more time.

**John:** We’ll try one more time. As we get into this, we’ll answer a bunch of listener simpler questions, and that’ll hopefully stack up together to a broader understanding of what we’re trying to do here on screenplay page. Megana, if you start us off with Adrian in Dublin here.

**Megana:** He asks, “I’ve been writing for years, but I’m still puzzled by the question when to use action in the quote ‘action section’ of a script and when to use it as a parenthetical.”

**John:** Adrian’s wondering, and this is a thing that every writer still makes choices, kind of every line is like, “Okay, is this going to be better as an action or scene description on the left-hand margin? Or is just the kind of thing that it’s better tucked underneath the character, the header, in parenthetical saying a small little thing that as part of that character’s direction or as a part of the overall scene direction?” You’re always making choices? for what that’s going to be. Craig, what general guidance are you thinking through when you’re making a decision about whether to use parenthetical or an action line?

**Craig:** Almost always, I’m going to use an action line for action. Parentheticals are the orthodoxies. Parentheticals are for terms that influence the way the line is read, or are there to imply that there’s a pause. However, every now and then, if there is an action that is super tiny, and is necessary to understand the dialogue properly, and the dialogue would be best served if we didn’t chop it up into two bits, then I will use the parenthetical. If I’m running a bit of dialogue and between two lines, someone lights a match, I might put that in parentheticals (lights a match).

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And then, they keep going. But it would have to be, we’re talking about an action that could easily be described in a couple of words, and more importantly, would feel really dumb and tiny if it were its own action line.

**John:** Agreed. It’s how short the action is both in screen time and in words, because parentheticals that go on for 6 or 7 or 10 words, that should have probably been an action line. In my whole writing career, I’ve probably written two parentheticals that were that long and it was for some very specific purpose that I needed to keep them together as a parenthetical, rather than moving them in as an action line. Parentheticals, if it’s affecting how that line is going to be read, it’s really affecting the tone, the tenor, the intention of that line, that’s great for a parenthetical. If it is something that a single character is doing that is breaking their dialogue block, like a sneeze, that can fit great in a parenthetical, but anything that’s between multiple characters, beyond offering a handshake, that becomes action.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the reasons why you may mix it up occasionally or decide to make something parenthetical versus a longer line is, you and I both have a preference against long columns of just two characters talking. Therefore, we’ll both look for opportunities. It’s like okay, this is a dialogue scene, but I would love to have some moments where over on the left hand margin in an action line, just to break up visually on page and not make it feel like this is just a tunnel of text.

**Craig:** Yeah, I call it ticker tape. Ticker tape screenplay page where it’s just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and just run out of things down the middle. If you require that you break it up, it forces you also to start thinking about, “Well, where are they? What are they doing? How are they moving in the space? Is there anything I can do to make this visually interesting?” Otherwise, it’s just going to be bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong.

**John:** Great. Another question for us, Megana.

**Megana:** Nick in LA asks, “Over the last few months, I’ve been listening through all the back episodes of Scriptnotes, and there was a string of episodes in 2014 where John and Craig brainstormed ideas for a top-to-bottom reimagining of the screenplay as we know it. This new format included things like embedded music, images, more clickable links, etc. In general, a more interactive and dynamic document than the current standard. My question is, now that we’re sevenish years later, do you still feel the same way about the standard screenplay format? Has any progress been made in terms of what is permissible to include in your script, and is changing anything a fool’s errand? What you described in those episodes sounds great and made a lot of sense to me, but it seems little has changed since 2014.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Very little has changed. I do see links in screenplays more often. I have seen clickable links in PDFs of screenplays that will link out to an image or something that explains something more fully. But no. I think you and I both had a little bit more utopian idea of this is what’s going to change, and it didn’t.

**Craig:** Well, I think we thought this is what we would like to change. This is what we would hope for change. But no, it hasn’t happened, and I think it’s still a great idea. It hasn’t happened at all. Part of the problem is Final Draft. It’s just this monster that sits on top of Hollywood and keeps this entire format back. I really do believe that. No one is sitting there at HBO or Universal or Disney saying, “We really love this 100-year-old method of putting screenplays down.” They don’t. Unfortunately, Final Draft, which is now owned by a payroll company, which is perfect, has essentially cornered the market on the format of screenplays as connecting into the format for budgeting and scheduling. There’s just no appetite for it, because everyone’s just stuck using it. It’s the Windows problem.

**John:** It’s the Windows problem. I’m not going to put all the blame at Final Draft’s feet, because I do think if Final Draft were to suddenly just explode and go away, it wouldn’t change quickly, because I think everyone’s just so used to scripts looking a certain way. You’re doing your show right now, and you could do your scripts a different way. You could choose to do something different. You’re not using Final Draft, you’re using Fade In, and you could do something different. But it’s easy to keep people doing the same thing they’re doing and it’s working for you. What I do think has changed since 2014 is, and this is also, I think, because the pandemic, because of Zoom, I see screenwriters doing a lot more work in Keynote or PowerPoint. A lot of early presentation stuff is now being done as slides. I think slide decking has become a more important part of describing a project early on. It’s not like I’m turning in a script and add a deck for things. But for some stuff, I might because it would at least show this is what this is meant to look like.

There’s a big world-building project that I may or may not do. I think if I were to take on that project, my script might be accompanied by, “Here are the images that go with it,” because everything I can describe on a page, so helpful. But to me being able to show it to you, it’s going to be more instructive.

**Craig:** I would do something else. I would write my show now in a different way if the tool were available. It’s not.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** There’s just no tool, and I don’t think there’s going to be a tool available until someone feels the amount of time, energy, and resources to create something like that would be rewarded, because it just takes a lot. If Final Draft disappeared tomorrow, there would be a period where people would have to use other things that would basically be the same thing. But there would also be a massive opening. I think you would see a lot of people trying to become the next Final Draft, and figure out how to fill that space, but do it better. If there were a tool while we were writing, there was a way to create a document that wasn’t a PDF– by the way, that’s the other issue is that PDF that format is just kind of useless. It’s useful, but useless.

**John:** Yeah, the good thing about PDF is it’s baked in and locked down. The bad thing about it is it’s baked in and locked down, and it’s hard to do anything else with it.

**Craig:** It’s a printed piece of paper, except it’s on your screen. That’s all it is. It’s static. If there were a software platform that created a document that people could open and view that was dynamic, that would be amazing, and I would use it all the time, but there isn’t.

**John:** I will tell you that for Late Night and Variety comedy writing, especially the daily shows, they are sometimes now using fully online writing software where you can– the monologue, it’s constantly updated by everybody all at once. It’s a better version of Google Docs.

**Craig:** Yeah. What’s that, Script 2.0? Ah, what’s the one–

**John:** It’s lot like WriterDuet.

**Craig:** WriterDuet, yes.

**John:** It’s like that, but very deliberately multiple users can really work on it. It’s not just you and your writing partner. Everyone can tag in. You can see who’s made what changes. And it works, but it’s very specifically set up for that kind of show to do. I think Colbert’s show does that. Some of those changes are working in places where they really need. They have very specific, very time-based needs. And so little of what we do is urgent in that way. But I will say, Craig, you’re working on a show right now that if you could update everyone live in terms of, these are the changes, it would be fantastic. But you’re probably doing some version of this just distribution lists of things go out.

**Craig:** Well, it’s Scenechronize. Scenechronize is the other big behemoth, and Scenechronize is the standard distribution software for things. Scenechronize could distribute anything. I think it’s just that there is the file format that I would love, the kind of method of creation of a screenplay document that I would love just doesn’t exist. Where when you’re talking about a song, there is a little note icon, you click it and it starts to play that song, and brings it up in a soft window, up to the right, that you can minimize or get rid of, or just click away if you chose to. There are little icons and things to say, “Okay, I want to see what this looks like.” We can’t do that, because there’s no document that we can release that other people can look at that works like that. That’s the biggest issue.

**John:** Okay. Yeah, as a person who builds the software for a living, I can see some of the solutions, but I can also see some of the issues. It’s what the shape of that container document is. Are you sending the document? Are you sending a link to something that lives on a server?

**Craig:** For privacy purposes and all the rest of it, whichever would be fine, whichever people would want. But the problem is, there isn’t the receiving thing on the other end. It’s going to be hard to create that because you’re asking people to download and they don’t want to [chuckles] and you’re asking them to try a new format, and it’s new. Change is hard. Tip of the hat to the screenplay format, as we’re talking about it, it has lasted longer than most human beings. In fact, it’s lasted longer than almost every human being.

**John:** Absolutely. I think we should also stress that what we’re describing in terms of changes to screenplay format is not the words on the page. We’re not talking about the “we hear”, “we see,” we’re not talking about the job of the writer. We’re talking about the container in which this is going out there so that your words can be accompanied by other useful material and be updated in real time in ways that aren’t so torturous. Because right now, how we handle screenplays, especially as we go into production, with star changes and such is so linked back to when we had to xerox pages and send them out, that it’s maddening.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty weird.

**John:** Another question for us, Megana?

**Megana:** Scott asks, “I’ve been working on a spec script based on a true story that feels like it’s taken on the scope of a Godfather-esque crime epic. The question of whether to expand this into a longer miniseries-type structure has come up before. But my producer and I both agree this feels like a feature film. As we’ve gone back and forth on drafts, the length of the script has fluctuated from 140 pages at its longest down to 125. I’ve always been taught no one wants to read a spec from an unproven writer longer than 120 pages and I’ve tried to reach that magic number, but the notes we keep getting from colleagues is to dig deeper into the characters and to explore more, not less. So, my question is this. In our current climate with the line between film and TV forever blurring, is the 120-page rule the end-all and be-all, or 132 pages reasonable for a decade spanning crime saga? Follow-up question, why are gangster movies always so long?

[laughter]

**John:** They do seem longer as a rule. Let’s take this last part first. I think because we have expectations of the genre, that it’s going to be a bunch of characters and there’s going to be complicated family dynamics in addition to the A plot, that there’s just going to be a lot happening, and so we just allow them to be long, and also because the Godfather is long.

**Craig:** Yeah. It may have something to do with the fact that the directors who have made these things have come out of a school where length wasn’t a problem. There have been mobster movies forever, but the big ones were coming out in the 70s. But then again, you look at like Martin Scorsese’s first movie, Mean Streets, I think that was his first movie, it’s under two hours. So, it’s not necessarily always the case that they need to be super long, but I think John is right. If you’re telling the Godfather saga, then it is marked by an epic nature. They’re very Shakespearean in this regard. They are telling long family dramas, and they’re telling involved crime plots, and we seem to enjoy– otherwise, it becomes an action movie. Part of it is the opera. It’s opera. By the way, Godfather III is that– you’ve seen Godfather Part III, I assume.

**John:** I have seen it. I have seen all of them now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love that operatic third act. It’s just lovely. Anyway, I think that’s what it is. Scott, here’s the deal, man, if the first 10 pages are awesome, people will keep reading, they really will. Especially these days, I just think the rules are not the rules anymore. They’ll be reading it wondering, “Well, maybe I could turn this into a limited series.” You never know what they’re going to be thinking.

**John:** Craig is right. Obviously, if it’s good, they’ll keep reading and you should not worry about that much. A 125-page script is a lot different than 140-page script. 140-pages, people start to go, “Oh, okay, wow. This could be a problem because it’s going to probably be longer when that one’s actually shot.” I would say that my expectations of movies are things you can watch in one sitting and we always had a sense of like it’s a story that can only happen once.

But as we look now at limited series that also feel like they’re things that can only happen once, maybe there’s nothing wrong with thinking about, does this story really work best for me sitting in a chair for two hours watching it? Or does it have natural parts in installments that build out in ways that it could fit a limited series? If the first 50 pages or 60 pages of what you wrote has a natural cliffhanger, it can be a phenomenal writing sample for you, and a phenomenal spec to take out there in the world for people to see like, “Oh, this person can write really well.” And they’re more likely to read that one-hour thing versus a two-and-a-half-hour thing, because the one-hour thing can get made because people are hungry for the one-hour thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also, we’re in a weird time, you could maybe make just two-hour longs or three-hour longss. You say, “Okay, it’s at 140 at its longest.” So, you’re talking about 45 pages-ish, 43 pages-ish per episode of a three-episode thing. Well, you’re probably squeezing yourself in 140 anyway. Expand a few things here and there, write some endings so that each episode has an ending and each episode is beginning. So, there you’re filling some things out. Before you know it, you’ve got three-hour long episodes.

**John:** Yeah. My one cool thing this week is going to be a six-hour thing that feels like a movie. It is cinematic and tightly focused, but it could only work a limited series, and it works really well as that. Keep that in mind.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a look at some movie movies, like actual movies that showed up on big screens this past year.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** I saw many of these but not all of these. But the good thing about 2021-2022 is you can read the scripts for all these movies online for free because they put them out there for award season. We will have links in the show notes to all the scripts that we’re talking through. I really encourage you, if you’re a person who’s interested in screenwriting, to read through these. You don’t have to finish them, but just look at what they actually look like on the page, either before or after you see the movie because you’ll get a real good sense of, this was the intention on the page and this is how it translated.

In most of these cases, these were the writers directing. In a couple of cases, there’s different screenwriters and directors. But they’re all really good and interesting in different ways. They’re all chock full of “we hears” and “we sees.” And we’ll not just cherry pick the ones that had them. Most movies, I would say probably do use “we hear” and “we see.”

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s incredibly useful.

**John:** It’s incredibly useful. I want to start with a young writer named Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** This early work, this is called Being the Ricardos. This is a story of behind the scenes of I Love Lucy. I actually really enjoyed this, I actually tweeted a little screenshot of a scene that I really liked a few weeks ago. This is all a backstage drama of an imagined week on the set of I Love Lucy and the conflict and controversies behind the scenes. The thing I tweeted about was, there’s a scene on page 5 that goes on for a long time. And it’s all OS, it’s all off screen. Basically, we are focused on a radio while Lucy is off screen and she’s listening to this thing, but having conversations with other people, and we don’t see people’s faces for a long time. It’s a deliberate choice on Sorkin’s part just to not show Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem for a long time, so we’d be invested in them as characters before we saw their faces and had to make a judgement of like, “Oh, does she look enough like Lucille Ball?”

**Craig:** Yeah. What I love about these pages, and well done, young writer Aaron Sorkin, is how much whitespace there is. Even in scenes where there’s huge blocks. For instance, on page 5, the announcers has just got this big huge– what is it nine-line bit of dialogue all because he’s reading advertisements, and he’s doing an intro to radio stuff. All fine, because then there’s just these wonderful seas of white, as Lindsay Doran would say, “Like milk.” And it’s so useful. It’s really useful. Interesting choice, by the way. This is what the Academy voters see, is that correct, John?

**John:** Mm-hmm, it is.

**Craig:** Interesting choice. When you go into production, inevitably, they’re going to be revisions that you want to do. Just as a holdover from the old days where people would have to have binders where they would insert pages into, there are A pages and B pages, and there are pages where there’s only stuff on half a page, because they get rid of the rest, but the page numbers don’t change. I would imagine that a lot of people would just do a collapsed page unlock version. But he just sent over the other one. He also does something that I don’t do, which is at the top of the page, it says “Continued:” and then the scene number, which I don’t do.

**John:** Which we don’t. This is a thing that Final Draft and Fade In can do for you. I’ve never found it especially useful. It’s never tripped me up. So, I’ve never done it. I want to get back to the scene where we have this radio announcer talking and we’re not seeing their faces. We come out of it, and the broadcast continues as we hear the front door open.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** The next minute or so, we’ll see no faces, just out of focus arms and legs and other shards of movement as they pass through the frame, which remains on the radio, the only thing in focus. We hear and we see in the same paragraph from Mr. Aaron Sorkin, who’s won many, many awards for being a good writer.

**Craig:** How else would you even do this? I’m top of page 6, “We HEAR his face being SLAPPED–” In this case, Aaron Sorkin has capitalized word ‘HEAR’ just to stick it to all of you, ding dong “professors of screenwriting,” because how else was he supposed to describe that? Someone hears his face being– the sound of a face being slapped? Like what do you say? Of course, we hear it. We hear it.

**John:** Love it. I think that Sorkin does, which another one of our writers that we’ll to talk about today, he capitalizes every character’s name, even in scene description. You can do that, that’s not common. I would say that’s maybe 5% of scripts I would see do this, but he does it. And you know what? It’s fine. But I wouldn’t leap on that as an example, but you could do it.

**Craig:** Clearly, and because the truth is I read through some of this, and I didn’t even notice it, because it just doesn’t matter.

**John:** He doesn’t use a ton of seeing description in his things. And there are ticker tape pages where it’s just all dialogue down the page. You know what? It’s really good dialogue, that helps.

**Craig:** It does help. And if you do have pages of ticker tape, for instance, page 12, the lines are short. The longest line is three lines long. Then, okay, actually, in a weird way, that’s a ticker tape conversation, snappity, snap, snap back and forth. I like it.

**John:** We were talking about A pages and B pages. An example is page 22A. At scene 24, and it’s just one line goes over the edge of this. Lucy has a single block of dialog there. It’s a good reminder that this all comes from a time when you were distributing physical pages. So, rather than having to send people a brand-new script, when there’s a tiny change, you just send in the pages that changed. But if there was too much to fit on one page, you create an A page or B page, and it would fit in between. So, his script would go page 22, 22A, a 22B if there needed to be and then there’d be a 23. That’s historically how we’ve done it. We could still do it that way. Craig, on your show, are there A, B pages, how do you do that?

**Craig:** You know what? There are. I’m starting to wonder why I’m bothering, because I have not seen anyone with a printed script on my set. Everyone used to carry binders around, but our script supervisor, the incredible Chris Roufs, he uses an iPad, as I think almost every script supervisor at this point uses an iPad or laptop. The first AD isn’t walking around with a binder with pages in it. I’m starting to wonder if I should just get rid of that. And just [crosstalk] do it anymore.

**John:** Here’s the issue. If you were to then unlock pages, you’d have to talk about what scene it is and never talk about the page numbers again, because the page numbers will keep changing.

**Craig:** But we never talk about page numbers anyway, we just talk about–

**John:** Yeah, because they’re [crosstalk] scenes.

**Craig:** And we talk scene numbers which never change. By the way, it’s so weird. It’s been a while since I’ve worked just a couple of years now on a feature script in production. Scene numbers here looks so tiny, because in television shows you start with scene 101, because that’s Episode 1, scene 1. And then, by the time you get to your 10th episode, it’s starting with scene 1001.

**John:** On these shows, do you have scripts that have more than 100 scenes?

**Craig:** No, that would be insane. I don’t even know how– [crosstalk]

**John:** Yeah. I was just thinking really complicated Game of Thrones episodes where you’re constantly cutting back and forth between a bunch of different things, but you’re not really-

**Craig:** You would just sort of–[crosstalk]

**John:** -picking those individual scenes, because they’re all a part of–[crosstalk]

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll just pull a random script here. I’ll take episode 5. Let’s see what the number is of this particular– how many scenes I hit. 56. I have a feeling that’s probably pretty standard for me.

**John:** Yeah, that makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last thing I want to say about Being the Ricardos, this is on bottom page 23. The scene description reads, “We’re going to start to go in and out of LUCY’s head as the reading goes on. She’s imagining what each beat will be like in its final form the way a chess master can see the board twelve moves ahead. She can also see and hear what the audience is going to laugh at.” Basically, so the idea is, we’re intercutting between the table reading of a script, and Lucy’s imagination of how it will actually be staged. It works really well in the movie, but it’s done very simply on the page. And Sorkin trusts that the reader is going to pay attention and follow what’s happening here, and you do.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is an area where– because sometimes people will say, [in mimicking tone] “Well, if you’re directing–” and that’s yes, to an extent, that is true. He can shorthand things somewhat, because what he doesn’t have to worry about is a director coming along and going, “I don’t know what the hell it is. I guess I’ll just make something up.” When you’re writing for other people directing, and I typically am, I will at least try and put things in there to make sure that the stuff that I need to happen or want to happen is there. That said, there’s always some amounts of confusion or things that can be cleared up. And that’s why we have 4000 meetings [chuckles] before we start shooting. So many meetings. Oh, my Lord.

**John:** [crosstalk] -obviously, there’s a tone meeting, which is really talking through what are we actually going for scene by scene? What does this need to feel like? But we have so many logistical production meetings to just figure out every department what do they need? What is the intention behind this? What does Craig want? What is the director need? All these things.

**Craig:** Yes. There are questions that are legitimately, “Can you explain this?” There are questions of, “Okay, we think you’re saying this, but are you saying that?” Then, there are questions that fall into the general category of, “I don’t want to be yelled at on the day.” It says here that he stabs him. Is that meant to be through the clothes, because if it’s not, then we have to build a prosthetic. And on the day, I don’t want you to show up and be like, “What the h–?”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** They ask, and it’s reasonable. They should ask. [chuckles] Making television and movies is basically a game of how many questions can I answer today without falling apart?

**John:** Let’s move on and take a look at The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal. This script is based on the Elena Ferrante novel. Obviously, she has that to draw from. As I’m looking through this, especially this opening sequence, there’s not purple prose, she’s not painting every sunset, but it’s very effective, especially in terms of describing the house that the character is renting, the house that she’s moving into, and giving us a sense of the geography inside the space. I felt like, “Oh, I can see where things are.” I can feel how would I generally get from one place to another, and how this character specifically is approaching this space. I really liked what they did there.

There’s also a man who’s like a– I was in the movie, so I think it’s interesting, a supporting character man, but I liked his character description is just his white hair. From the initial description, I felt I could see him, but then he was doing very specific things along the way and saying specific stuff. That was helpful for grounding him but also the space, this [unintelligible [00:38:22] that we’re staying on.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is an example of a script that generally does things differently than I do, and I don’t care. I like to bold my scene headers. Maggie doesn’t. I like to keep my action description chunks really tiny. She will occasionally roll off one that’s 12 lines long. I don’t care. As long as it’s interesting and I can make it through it, then I’m fine. She uses CONT’Ds. When a character talks, then there’s an action description, then the same character talks. I don’t do that, don’t care.

**John:** I generally do that if it’s going to be unclear. So, I will do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t it. It just doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the point is you set yourself free, people, it’s all good. Everything works fine if the script is good. The other thing that Maggie will do, she puts up– getting back to our parenthetical question from earlier, she puts a lot of stuff in parentheticals. She’ll have two-line parentheticals, and that’s fine. There is nothing better than a good script. And there are no formatting issues that a good script can’t overcome.

**John:** One small thing that I would do if I’d had access to the script, is do a search and replace for double spaces and make them one space because there’s places where there’s one space and places where it’s two spaces, and it’s just a little bit off. That’s a personal little pet peeve of mine, that does not influence the quality of the writing.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. Look, the very title page, there’s a comma after the word ‘based on’ that shouldn’t be there. [chuckles] I would say, Maggie, John and I are available for basic stuff like that.

**John:** Punctuation consultants, that’s all we’re asking.

**Craig:** Mostly, we just want to hang out with Maggie Gyllenhaal. [crosstalk]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We just want to hang out. We want to be your friend.

**John:** I met Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal a zillion years ago back when they were children because they used to live down the street from me.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** It’s nice to see that they’ve made something of themselves.

**Craig:** They’re doing all right. They’re doing all right, those crazy kids.

**John:** The other thing I’ll say it’s important about, as we’re reading through the script, is right from the very start, it sets up the rules of how this movie is going to work, and that we are going to be going back and forth in time, and that is important. It’s important to do that early enough in movie, so we get a sense of like, “Oh, this is this kind of movie where the back and forth will matter.”

Mitchells vs. the Machines is a film I’d love from this past year. It’s written by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe‎. I just really adored it and I was happy to see that so much of what I adored, starts on page 1 of the script. It is one of the busiest first pages I’ve encountered. And yet, I could follow it and really get a sense of what this movie was going to feel like. It was chaotic, but ultimately with a point.

**Craig:** The script on the page feels like it’s on cocaine, which is correct.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Lord and Miller as producers have a really good record of both kinds of paces and things, but this has that kind of fantastic growing up in the 70s, we ate way too much sugar cereal in the morning, and then just sat down and watch these strobe lights of terrible cartoons, and our attention spans are shortened to nothing. Obviously, here’s just this wonderful quality that Mike and Jeff have put down on the page, but it does also have that just crazy snap to it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s almost exhausting reading these pages. You can feel yourself like, “Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.” [onomatopoeia] [chuckles]

**John:** And then the movie does really trade on that. In the end, the movie eventually does settle into some quieter moments so it’s not this frenzy all the time, but it does kick off with a tremendous amount of energy. There are so many exclamation points on this first page, but none of them feel gratuitous. The word “we” is used constantly because we’re always there with them. Basically, it’s inviting us to be a part of this journey with the characters. I really dug it.

There is a shotgun introduction of all of our main characters. In one paragraph on page 2, “The VERY stoppable “warriors” are: RICK (40, Bearded, nature-loving Dad), LINDA (38, colorful, yet nervous Mom, worn out from trying to keep everyone together), AARON (8, nerdy blonde Muppet who wears exclusively dinosaur shirts), delightfully round pug, MONCHI. And KATIE (17, exploding with creative energy- nerdy now, but will be cool in college).

Generally, shotgun intros are not my favorite, and it works really well here because they boldfaced all the character names, so you see that, “This is important, pay attention here, we’re really going to see these people. This is our movie, is these four characters, plus this pug that looks like a loaf of bread. That is who we’re going to follow in the course of the story.”

**Craig:** The introductions feel they’re part of the tone. If you stop and did standard introductions, you’d be like, “Oh, what happened? Did you guys get tired?” Because, they’re just like, “Bah,” on page one, and then page two like, “Bah,” and then they’re like, “Okay, now let’s talk about dad is a–.” It’s wonderful, because they’re going to make a point of stopping this madness on page 4, when it literally says, “We go from this manic energy to,” boop, “a quiet, boring suburban neighborhood.” And that’s where they slowed down a bit, because they can.

**John:** It’s an animation script, and writing is not different than normal writing, there’s no fundamental difference here. This could be a live action script as well. So, we just reminded that animation writing is writing. The only thing you may notice is that parentheticals, here in this case, have been tucked in to the first line of dialogue, rather than having their own separate line. You see that more often in animation. Nothing would change if we were to do normal parentheticals here, you could absolutely do normal parentheticals in this case, and nothing would break or change. We’re not seeing scene numbers here. Numbering scenes and sequences in animation is its own special, unique beast. My advice is to do whatever they tell you to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s practical. There’s no magic to that. If you find yourself as you’re writing, dwelling on these issues of formatting, just make a mental note that you are trying to avoid writing.

**John:** 100%.

**Megana:** [laughs]

**John:** A film I greatly enjoyed watching was Passing. This is a film by Rebecca Hall. She adapted it from a novel by Nella Larsen. Here’s what I want to point out about Passing, is that the movie and the script have this kind of hallucinatory, too bright, kind of uncomfortable, kind of stagey artificial feel to it. That really works for the film. There are moments in in it I felt like, “Wait, is this somebody’s 16-millimeter project from the 90s?” And then, you realize like, “Oh, no, it’s actually the incredibly well-made best version of that film aesthetic.” I really dug that the film, partly for just how strange it is, and it feels strange on the page too. It radiates from the page to how they actually shot it.

**Craig:** Lots of little short bursts of things, then there’s longer stuff. There’s an interesting thing that happens on the bottom of page 1 where there’s a scene header.

**John:** Yeah, I saw that too.

**Craig:** Then the same starts in the next page, which we never really do. We always combine the scene header with at least the first line of the scene itself.

**John:** And who do we have to thank for that? Final Draft. Final Draft, honestly, one of the few things Final Draft did well early on in its incarnation is, making sure that scene headers don’t flow at the bottom of pages, so they always carry through the next page. It just automatically does that, and so is Highland and so does Fade In. Everyone does that.

**Craig:** That wasn’t something about the steno pool of Warner Brothers and– [crosstalk]

**John:** Oh, the steno pool did it, but, I think-

**Craig:** Oh, okay. Final Draft turned it into an automatic–

**John:** Automated, yeah. You and I don’t think about it because you and I never have to manually do that.

**Craig:** We don’t manually do it, which made me wonder if Rebecca had written this in Microsoft Word or something, because [crosstalk] notes, which is totally fine. Again, doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

**John:** It just doesn’t matter. And she’s capitalizing all the character names like you might in a play. It works fine.

**Craig:** Also, in the second paragraph of the first page, it says, “Dissolve to Light flaring in a static frame.” She’s capitalized the word ‘light.’ Not all caps, just the L. Um, okay. [chuckles] It’s fine.

**John:** Yeah. If we’re doing a three-page challenge [crosstalk] we’d then point out that’s unusual.

**Craig:** It’s unusual. It doesn’t kill anything, and maybe it’s intentional. I can’t tell if it’s intentional or just Rebecca is one of those people– because there is a whole generation of people, they don’t care about capitalization or punctuation. That’s all fungible to them.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** We’ll see.

**John:** I’ll quickly get through Belfast. This is a script by Kenneth Branagh. He’s a person who’s done some [unintelligible 00:46:40] movies, it’s not his first here. This is labeled as “Shooting Draft.” It’s also in Gill Sans rather than Courier. I strongly suspect that this is something that some studio put out and said, “Oh, it shouldn’t be in Courier.” I’d be willing to bet $100, this was a Courier script that’s somebody down the road ultimately put it to Gill Sans for us to read, because it’s weird that it’s in Gill Sans. I don’t think it’s helpful that’s in Gill Sans.

**Craig:** It is odd, only because of all the things that people can and can’t do, Courier is the one that just about everyone does, 99.9%. So, when it’s not in Courier, there’s a little bit of a, “Oh, so I guess you don’t need to get in line like the rest of us.”

[laughter]

**Craig:** Special, feel special, do we?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a little tricky, but it also makes me yearn for a different time or a different day where we wouldn’t have to necessarily be in Courier, because actually on the page, it’s rather pretty. It’s just different.

**John:** It is. I wouldn’t have picked this typeface. I love a sans-serif typeface. This, I think it’s actually a little bit hard to read. I think Gill Sans is a great face for certain things. All uppercase doesn’t look great in Gill Sans. Some things are harder to read than they necessarily need to be. Again, character names are being uppercased through the whole thing for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a British thing. Maybe that’s why Rebecca Hall is doing this as well. A thing I really did appreciate about this though is there’s on page 3, the description, “The camera is high above and behind BUDDY as he starts to walk down the middle of the street. You can see clearly all the way down to the other end, where it meets a road going horizontally across, making a T junction.” Great. I can see that. Also, weird, we got a “you” rather than a “we?” Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m fine with it, because “you” and “we” are doing the same thing. They’re just saying in the audience, whether you feel like you’re a part of an audience, perhaps at this point in his career in life, Kenneth Branagh, when he watches movies, just buys up the entire thing. [chuckles] [crosstalk] So, he just presumes that everyone watches it alone.

**John:** Yeah. He doesn’t want to share armrest with anybody.

**Craig:** There’s no one else there, but you see the following.

**John:** It’s also important should point out that, we’re following a young boy through this, all the action is character limited to what he can see and experience until a certain point. Basically, there’s a mob that’s descending, and we’re only getting limited information from what he’s encountering until the mob is upon us. And then eventually, we break that limited POV and see everything, but that’s just good technique. It’s a technique that works on the page, that translates really well to visual medium. [crosstalk] -thinking of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s another thing that happens on page 7, which is cool. He’s doing a montage really. It’s not so much a montage, it’s just a rapid sequence of things, and he uses CUT TO: for each one of them, which he doesn’t use for other scenes. It makes everything spread out really big on that page. But in a sense, that also helps me see each one of those things. I actually quite liked it. Generally, I don’t do it even in something like this, because I’m always scrambling for paged count time, but the truth is, this is probably more accurate. Again, no problems. It’s fine.

**John:** No problems. Last one I want to look at is Tick, Tick… Boom!, a film I really enjoyed. This script is by Steven Levinson. It’s based on Jonathan Larson’s musical, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. On page 1 and 2– the thing I think the film does really crucially, and you see this here on the script, is it has to set up, okay, this is who Jonathan Larson was, this is why he’s famous, and we’re not going to get to that stuff at all. This is all going to take place before then. And that’s a lot to do in two pages, and it does it really, really well. Basically, framing this is how much of the story we’re going to tell, and only this part of the story is really important. I thought they did a very effective job here, starting off with making sure you understood why you’re watching the movie, and what movie you’re going to watch.

**Craig:** Yeah, totally agree. Quality-wise, obviously, great. There’s an interesting choice here that I struggle with a little bit format-wise on a script that is only 104 pages. So, you have the time, meaning you have the space, to not put that extra line break before each scene header. It just makes everything– and to not bold, the scene headers, it’s harder to read. I just find it harder to read. I get confused a little bit as I’m going through or the transitions don’t feel quite as crackly or sharp because it’s just a smudge. For me, and this is really a pure readability thing, I think people should put that extra line break before the scene header or bold the scene header, but to do neither is rough. That said, doesn’t stop things from working.

**John:** It could work. Your choices are one or more of extra line space before the scene header, underlining scene header, which some people do–[crosstalk]

**Craig:** Yup, that works.

**John:** -are choices. There’s underlining here which I think it’s really important in top of page 3. “NOTE: Throughout the film, we move back and forth between Jon in 1992 performing at the show, and the events he is narrating as they occur in 1990.” This is something that is completely obvious when you’re watching the movie, but could be perplexing as you’re reading the script. What the script does, INT – LOCATION – DAY, and then will say either 1990 or 1992, because they’re two different timelines and we can see it when I watch the movie. But on the page, it could get confusing. So, it’s important to put that note out there for the reader.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Great. These are some pretty good scripts. So, congratulations to all of our writers here. I think you did a good job, I think you have promising careers ahead of you.

**Craig:** [chuckles]

**John:** But I really do strongly encourage our listeners to click through the links and take a look at the pages that we’re discussing and describing because that’s how you learn, is by reading scripts and reading good scripts is a great way to learn how some good writers’ work.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have time for maybe a question. I see one here from Johnny. Megana, can you ask us that one?

**Megana:** Johnny asks, “I have this question for John about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie inherited the chocolate factory from Wonka because of his good nature/personality/traits, honesty, kindness, compassion, etc. However, in the beginning, he bought the chocolate using the $10 bill on the street. He didn’t try to find the owner or turn it in. Does this behavior contradict his good nature?”

**John:** Craig, I have a question for you before we get into the actual script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you find $10 on the street, do you have an ethical duty to find its owner?

**Craig:** How the hell are you going to find the owner?

**John:** That’s my question.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Money is fungible. I can’t tell you whose money that is. If I find a wallet, I’m going to find-

**Craig:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** -the owner of the wallet.

**Craig:** Of course. But if you find money on the street, there’s literally no way to identify who that came from. None. If somebody came rushing back around the street was like, “Oh, my God! Did you find a $10 bill on the street?” I’d say, “You know what? I did. Here it is.” Because there’s no way they would have known that it was a 10 or on the street if they weren’t there. But otherwise, no. That’s that’s a weird question.

**John:** It’s a strange question. But I wanted to point to Johnny to say, just go to the library, go to my johnaugust.com Library, and you can just read the script, that’s not actually what happens. And I realized like, “I’d never actually posted the scripts for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I posted the working scripts, and then a final script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And just like our Aaron Sorkin script, I put in the change pages so people can see this was the white draft, here’s the blue pages, here’s the pink pages, and here’s the final script all together so you can see how this fit in. I also put in the memos that go out with those distributions so people can see like, “Oh, this is why these things are changed.” And this, again, back in the time of physical pages going out. I would put a list of, “This is the order of pages that you should see,” because sometimes it gets confusing. All those things are out there.

The reason why I point to the original script though is that doesn’t say like you won it because you were good. He says, “I invited five children to the factory, and the one who is least rotten would be the winner.” Charlie doesn’t have to be good, he just has to be the least rotten. It’s also important to share my version of Charlie and Chocolate Factory. Wonka is going through this existential crisis and self-doubt and all sorts of weird things are crashing down on him. He doesn’t really want to give up his factory. So, that’s the point of like, Wonka is protagonating over the course of this and really going through this crisis. He’s not even quite sure why he’s invited these kids in here. But it’s not because he wants to find a good-hearted kid, because that’s not even how Wonka is wired.

**Craig:** Other than getting everything wrong, Johnny’s question was great.

**John:** What Johnny’s question did, is it did motivate me to actually finally put up the scripts, which I’m not sure why I didn’t put up the scripts before, so people can read how Charlie and Chocolate Factory looked on the page. All right, I think it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** As promised, my One Cool Thing is a limited series that I enjoyed and really loved called Vigil. This is a British show that in the US is on Peacock. I guess this is on Peacock, you don’t even have to subscribe to Peacock. Even the free Peacock would have it. It’s created by Tom Edge. Personally, I follow him on Twitter. George Northy described it as “Mare of Easttown on a nuclear submarine.” And that’s actually probably what it is. You have a female police detective investigating a murder. It’s on this British nuclear submarine, but she has family custodial drama. There’s just a lot happening in her personal life [unintelligible 00:56:11] being a claustrophobic character on a submarine. I just really dug it. I love everything that has a submarine, but I really thought it worked especially well. The twists and turns were great. There’s that classic sense of Mare of Easttown. At a certain point, you suspect that every character you’ve seen on screen somehow was involved in these murders. That’s the show, and I really, really dug it.

**Craig:** Fantastic. My one cool thing this week, is the MIT Mystery Hunt, which you cannot– Currently, it’s a week later now when you’re hearing this or five days later, and it will surely have been solved by some group of incredibly brilliant people. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with the MIT Mystery Hunt, John.

**John:** I don’t know what it is.

**Craig:** MIT Mystery Hunt has been going on for quite some time, maybe 20 years. It was always a physical hunt that took place on the MIT campus that involved solving lots and lots of puzzles, which would feed into meta puzzles. It’s like an incredibly complicated, long version of the thing that David Quang and I did at The Magic Castle that you attended.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It would take place over the course of a number of days. It would involve moving physically around the campus and finding a coin, and then you won. If you found the coin, you were the team that won. Over the years, it’s become more and more complicated. The last couple of years, it’s been virtual for obvious reasons, including this year.

One of the interesting things about the MIT Mystery Hunt is that the team that wins is responsible for creating the mystery hunt for the next year. When I tell you that this is like a full-time job, I’m not kidding. Last year, a team named Palindrome or Team Palindrome, they won, and they have won before, a couple of times, I think. Some of my friends are on it, including Dave Shukan and Mark Halpin. There’s also a guy that I’ve occasionally solved puzzles with named Eric Berlin, who I think was their captain. These folks, along with dozens of other people, this is a very large team, by all accounts created quite the hunt, and I think it legitimately took them all year to create this huge event that teams are currently working on and solving right now.

To give you a sense of how complicated it gets, the team last year, Galactic Trendsetters, they were the ones that won the year before us, they created the puzzle hunt last year, they literally created their own MMO for this event. Because you’re dealing with MIT people. They can do anything, anything. They’re coding. They created their own proprietary software for this. Anyway, it’s very exciting. I’m a decent solver. I’m just not at this level. I can solve the first tier of their puzzles, but the later tier, beyond me, definitely beyond me. It’s going on right now. I don’t think anyone’s won yet. But my guess is probably by– we’re recording on a Saturday. Probably by Sunday, there will be a winner. So, I just wanted to say one cool thing to Team Palindrome for creating all that working, so hard. It’s not a paid job. And then, congrats to everyone that solves it and participates in it. And of course, a special congratulations to the team that wins. I don’t know who they are yet.

**John:** I was going to say, I wonder why someone would do something like this when they aren’t getting paid for it, and all they could do is have some sense of satisfaction of how they made a thing, after– [crosstalk]

[laughter]

**Craig:** Well, we get to do this one hour a week. The sense I got was that this was practically a full-time job that required its own organizational structure and methods, and just review– I actually test solve quite a few puzzles for them. I think they were nice to only have me test solve the ones that I was capable of solving, but they were all really interesting. There are rafts of test solvers that are being worked on. They have this point system for evaluating. It’s incredibly com– it’s like producing a show. It’s something else. Great work on that, everyone. I’m hoping everyone’s enjoying it. I’m sure they are. Dave Shukan has told me that he will send me a collection of good ones that he thinks I [chuckles] can solve that I haven’t already solved. So, thanks, Dave. I appreciate that.

**John:** Fantastic. Also, it might be a good moment to shout out a congratulations to a friend of the show, David Kwong, who is now engaged.

**Craig:** That’s right. David Kwong is finally going to be an honest man.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** We’re incredibly happy for him.

**John:** Yeah, please don’t saw your wife in half. That’s all we’re asking.

**Craig:** Those are the people that are doing all the hard work on stage. You know that, right?

**John:** Yeah, of course. They’re the contortionists.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Brink. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you can also find the links to some of the scripts we talked about today. You’ll find the transcripts there. And you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts, and they’re great. They have Stuart’s sense of softness. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The hoodies are great. Now, Craig, did you pick up your hoodie while you’re in town or not?

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t think I did.

**John:** Okay. Well, we’ll ship it to you up in Calgary so you can keep warm.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you.

**John:** They turned out really well. 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, talking about the screenwriter equivalent of bootcamp. Until then, relax, stay chill. And we’ll see you next time on Scriptnotes. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[music]

**John:** Hey, Megana, we got a question from Andrew. Read the question that Andrew has?

**Megana:** Andrew asks, “I’ve heard many former or current soap opera actors refer to working on the soap as a bootcamp for them, mainly because of the production schedule and the need to get everything right the first time. Soap actors who find work elsewhere are praised for their ability to memorize and always get things right quickly. Is it the same for writers? Do writers who worked on soap operas have an insane work ethic and the ability to turn out content? If not, what is the writing equivalent of a writing boot camp?”

**John:** All right. That’s an interesting question. There obviously are. There are actors who started out soap opera actors who are now some of our best actors out there. Not everyone who works on a soap opera is going to be the best actor out there. But that sense of being able to show up, do the work, get it done, get it right the first time, memorize a bunch of lines, that all feels great and crucial. Craig, can you think of examples of high pressure or writing jobs where there’s so much quantity that you actually do pick up good skills?

**Craig:** Sure. I think I went through it, and it’s called advertising. Copywriting in advertising is pretty brutal. You have to do a lot of different kinds of writing, is to do a lot of idea making, which is important obviously. You have to talk a lot about how to get into something and what the purpose of something is, so you learn about purposefulness. And then you have to write a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of versions. Versions, and versions and versions. And they all have to fit to time. You’re dealing with a very limited amount of time to get your idea across, the purpose, the point, structure, beginning, middle, end. And then, you have to do it again, but for a shorter amount of time to do multiple versions of it. When you’re cutting things together for marketing like trailers and things, you need to start asking which of this stuff is emerging as important or salient or notable. And you also learn which movies are harder to market because they don’t know what they’re about either. All of that is pretty great bootcamp. You learn audio, you learn visual, you learn how to write, purpose, revisions, rewrites.

When you come out of it, you’re pretty well set up to go on to the next thing. I’m not recommending that people go seek it out as the basis for a screenwriting career, but having gone through it, I think boot camps is a pretty darn good term for it.

**John:** My freshman year of college, I was a journalism advertising major. My J54 was the basic news writing class I had to take. It was famously difficult class, it was exhausting class, because it was 8:00 in the morning, you’d show up and the professor say, “Okay, I need each of you to find a story on campus and it needs to be delivered in the next 90 minutes.” So, you’re like, “Argh.” You’re running around, trying to find something to write about. Get introduced, get notes, get back, sit down at a computer and write the story. And then, he would hover over you as you’re writing. It really made you focus in on just getting it done, getting the words out, thinking about that pyramid style, like the most important stuff at the top and being able to cut off the story at any point, and breaking some of your preciousness are the way that you can get in your own way with stuff. So, I had to learn how to write those kinds of news stories. And yeah, I did learn a lot there.

But that kind of news writing is different than longform journalism. When I would actually have the time to actually do more work and to do more than just reporting, but actually think about synthesizing and putting stuff together, those classes were much more useful in terms of my actual screenwriting, in terms of thinking about how I’m going to go from, “Here’s a bunch of ideas,” to, “Here is the way I’m going to structure and tell these ideas in a way that is interesting.” I think we have to have both. I just stayed doing news writing, it would be like when I was working at Tristar and having to write coverage on two scripts a day. It would burn a hole in your brain and limit you from doing other kind of writing.

**Craig:** That’s one of the downsides of working as a young person in something like advertising, is that the people who have remained, you can tell that they have been scarred and changed by it.

**John:** Yeah. [chuckles]

**Craig:** It’s because there is something brutal about writing that isn’t about the writing itself. That whatever you write is in service of a purpose. You learn to write with purpose, but only purpose. Whereas when you’re writing things to entertain people, there is its own intrinsic value. The point is watch this, not watch something else, or learn about something else. When are in your 20s and you’re working at these things, you often are working for people that are maybe a little roughed up. I remember meeting some wonderful people. It’s possible also that my experience and your experience was strongly informed by the year it was. The 90s, people were meaner in the 90s.

[laughter]

**Craig:** They really were. People were mean.

**John:** Well, let’s think about things that are closer to what we are actually doing for a living. People do write soap operas obviously, and soaps are covered by the WJ. There’s WJ writers who are writing soaps. I don’t see a lot of people who are moving from writing soaps into other things. It feels almost like game show writing. It’s a very unique specialty, because you’re just having to crank out so much and there’s just not time to do the kinds of other work you could be doing. But there’s obviously people write on network one-hours that are like procedural shows, and there’s a whole way procedural shows work. There’s TV sitcoms, which have a very different vibe in how it’s all geared up towards the weekly taping of the show. Those are very differing experiences, but you are on the hook for generating a lot of material each week. And it’s going to get you out of some of your preciousness about everything having to be perfect at all times.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can pick up skills in these things. Accountability is a big one. It would have been really hard as a 21- or 22-year-old to start writing a screenplay with no sense of accountability whatsoever. When you are paying your bills because of the stuff you’re writing, you learn accountability. You also learn frustration.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The frustration of being a writer, I don’t want to say it’s a good thing, but it’s a helpful thing that we get frustrated so frequently, because we get better and better at dealing with it. There are other categories of artists in our business that I don’t think have been exposed to the frustration we’ve been exposed to. It’s harder for them to deal with. We are weathered.

**John:** We’re talking about these early jobs as being you’re accountable for doing stuff, and you haven’t just turned stuff in. Schools can be accountability mechanisms, where basically you are having to turn stuff in and therefore having to get work done on a regular basis, and be able to show it to people and actually have a conversation with people, which could be great. But, Megana, I’m thinking about the writing groups that you’re a part of. A large part of that is accountability, where you’re getting better because you’re being forced to generate stuff for each week’s meeting.

**Megana:** Absolutely. I think the social pressure of it is really helpful too. I think you lose your preciousness really fast. One thing my writing group implemented, which has been helpful during the pandemic, is that you have to say what your goal is for the next session, and if you don’t meet that you have to contribute a certain amount into a pot that we use at the end of six months to take ourselves out. So, there’s a financial repercussion if you’re not meeting your goals.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**Megana:** That is helpful. It’s like, “Ah, okay, well, I’ll send something in that I feel unsure about because I don’t want to spend 20 bucks on missing this deadline.”

**Craig:** Hmm. You don’t want to give me that option of buying my way out of writing though.

[laughter]

**John:** Well, let’s talk about– Craig and I have been bought many times. I want to think about when we do weekly work, and I’m not doing as many weeklies as I used to, but for a time I was doing a fair number of weeklies, and it wasn’t very classically that pick two motto. Something could be fast or cheap, or good, and you’re going to pick two. They would pay me really good money. I was not cheap, but I was fast and I was good. It was my ability to recognize what they needed, to be able to deliver what they needed within this short period of time that they had. If I could write great pages but I couldn’t turn them in on time, that was not helpful to them. If I was fast and I wasn’t delivering what they needed, it wouldn’t have worked. So, I did learn a lot having to generate pages that could shoot tomorrow on that timeline.

**Craig:** Everybody has their own internal clock. If you find yourself in a situation where writing has to be done really quickly and really well in a short amount of time, it may not be for you. You may not have the ability to write well that quickly. You may not have the emotional ability to write that well that quickly. One of the things that happens when you’re working on a weekly, and it’s very similar to when you’re working on short term, impulse projects like advertising and so forth, is you’re also going to be getting the same amount of compressed reviewing and critiquing in the short amount of time. So, you work on something for a week, you’re readily expecting to be rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and hearing and talking and back and forth and back and forth for the week, it’s intense. And you need to be able to do all that, and have the emotional fortitude and the mental stamina, and your mind just has to work quickly. It’s not for everybody, it really isn’t.

I love doing weeklies because they actually don’t have the level of accountability that other things have. And I don’t mean to imply that I write a bunch of crap and walk away laughing. I care very much. But it’s focused, it’s so focused, I’m not responsible for the entire movie. I’m just trying to fix the first act. And then, I’m gone. I’m doing everything I can in that moment to help, but I am not raising this child. I’m just watching them like a grandparent for three days.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s more like you’re the emergency room doctor who’s keeping the patient alive and stabilized and getting them so they can walk out of the hospital, but you’re not responsible for like, “Oh, that other thing which we detected,” you’re not going to fix all those problems.

**Craig:** I did. There was one project I’m working on where I was like, “I’m not the emergency doctor trying to stabilize this patient. I am the undertaker just trying to get you into open casket funeral.”

[laughter]

**Craig:** That’s all I’m doing. This thing is dead. I just wanted the parents to be able to see it when you wheel it out there because right now, oh, my God.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve all been there. We’ve seen some of those movies and early things. I say yes, there are some bootcamp situations. Do you need to enroll or list yourself in a bootcamp situation? I would say to our friend who wrote in, Andrew, assess what you need. Is your problem that you’re just not getting stuff done? Is your problem accountability? Then, signing up for a class or getting into a writing group might be good interest in terms of getting you to generate more pages. If the problem’s that you’re just not generating a lot, that’s great. If you’re a person who’s generating a lot of stuff, it’s just not very good, maybe what you don’t need is a bootcamp. Maybe you just need some quality control. Maybe you need to slow down a little bit more and focus on refining some stuff, and getting some people to read you, who can really help talk you through what’s working, what’s not working, so you can actually polish rather than just generate the most you can generate.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

LINKS:

* [The CW is for sale!](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/the-cw-sale-nexstar-1235073465/)
* [Annie Hayes on Writing with an Invisible Illness](https://johnaugust.com/2022/writing-with-an-invisible-illness) on John’s blog
* [Being the Ricardos](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Being-The-Ricardos-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Aaron Sorkin
* [The Lost Daughter](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-Lost-Daughter-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Maggie Gyllenhaal
* [The Mitchells vs. the Machines](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-Mitchells-Vs-The-Machines-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Mike Rianda And Jeff Rowe
* [Passing](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Passing-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Rebecca Hall
* [Belfast](https://focusfeaturesguilds2021.com/belfast/Belfast.pdf) by Kenneth Branagh
* [Tick, Tick, Boom](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Tick-Tick-Boom-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Steven Levenson
* [Willy Wonka Script](https://johnaugust.com/library) at the johnaugust.com library!
* [Vigil](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11846996/) show
* [MIT Mystery Hunt 2022](http://puzzles.mit.edu/nexthunt.html)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by William Brink ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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