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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-journey-the-destination-and-movie-lego).

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

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

**John August:**
And this is Episode 529 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do screenwriters balance the needs of the scene versus the needs of the story? The two are of course interlinked but in practice are often at odds. We’ll wrestle with how and when to prioritize one over the other.

**John August:**
Then it’s another round of the Three-Page Challenge where we look at scenes submitted by our listeners and offer our honest feedback. And in our bonus segment, for premium members, what do you do when you get bored with what you’re writing? Is that a sign to bail or buckle down?

**Craig Mazin:**
We’re going to give excellent advice and terrific feedback. And overall, provide tremendous value to our listeners.

**John August:**
Right. Provide tremendous value to both our free listeners and our premium members who we love a little bit more.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. I just feel like you we’re a value proposition.

**John August:**
100 %.

**Craig Mazin:**
I’ve been watching Succession. So, I have all these nerdy business phrases in my head. I think sometimes they’re just making stuff up.

**John August:**
Sometimes, they probably are. But someone said all those things.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Someone said it somewhere.

**John August:**
Someone said that I don’t love you but I love you.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, I didn’t know what that meant. I got to be honest with you. Sometimes, they are legitimately over my head.

**John August:**
I love succession. And so, we’re going to talk just a little bit on about Succession. I love Succession. But I do feel like that which the intimacy in the tabletop and the next slide dialog will be like, “What the hell did you just say to me? Why would you say that? That was the worst thing you could possibly do.” And yet somehow, they continue on with their lives.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, it is really interesting that they haven’t all just left. I think normally, especially if you can just be bought out of a company, why would you stay?

**John August:**
Why would you stay?

**Craig Mazin:**
If you’re any of them?

**John August:**
So, were of course having a conversation on Friday before Sunday, the finale. So, for all we know, everything’s changed.

**Craig Mazin:**
Do you all love each other now?

**John August:**
Yeah, so my theory going into it, which I can spoil now, is that I think that Tom was wearing a wire through a lot of this season. And that will hopefully be revealed on Sunday’s episode, but it might not. I may have ruined it for other people.

**Craig Mazin:**
If that is revealed, then I assume the government will have to figure out what I love you but I don’t love you.

**John August:**
That’s what it is.

**Craig Mazin:**
I said it backwards. I don’t love you but I love you. Which one was it?

**Megana Rao:**
I don’t love you but I do love you.

**John August:**
Okay. Well, now that just clarified.

**Craig Mazin:**
What?

**John August:**
Yeah. Regardless of interest.

**Craig Mazin:**
I know the difference between I’m not in love, I love you but I’m not in love with you. Is that what they mean?

**John August:**
That’s how I feel about you, Craig. I’m not in love with you. But I do love you as a friend.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sure. I don’t know. It’s a little weak. I don’t like the way you said it.

**John August:**
So, we can have this banter because we are three feet away from each other. For the first time, you’re no longer in Calgary for a brief period of time.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yep. Little hiatus over here.

**John August:**
Yeah. So, we’re here back in our Hancock Park abode. Let’s talk through some news. This is news. Craig, can you tell me what an open writing assignment is?

**Craig Mazin:**
Of course. An open writing assignment is a job that the studios have. They need a writer to write something. It’s often a rewrite. But sometimes, it’s a first draft of some property that they already own.

**John August:**
Or it could be something like how would this be a movie if there was an article they bought, that becomes-

**Craig Mazin:**
That becomes an article. And so, they go to the agencies and they say, this is… and each agency has an agent that covers that studio. And they say to that agent, “We have an open writing assignment. This is the job. This is the producer. And we’re looking roughly for this thing.” And then, the chum is in the water and everybody starts going for it.

**John August:**
Absolutely. And so, in some cases, they may be going out to certain writers, and I say like, oh, we’re out to this writer, this agency, and we’re waiting to hear back this writer. Or, it could be like, this is the thing we’re looking for. Who do you got for us? And the agents reach out to clients and say like, “Is this a thing you’d be interested in pursuing?”

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. When they have an open writing assignment, it usually means they aren’t pursuing anyone in particular. They’re looking for people to come in and impress them.

**John August:**
When an assignment is out there, there are emails exchanged back and forth, or phone calls. And this last week, the WGA introduced this thing called the Project Page, which is a one sheeter that essentially collects all that information about a future project in one handy document. It’s shaking it in front of him. So, we’ll put a link to this in the show notes. But it’s just a simple PDF you download.

**John August:**
The idea behind it is that the Product Page is for the producer, executive, to give those critical details about where the IP rights have been secured, who else has written on the project, if there’s talent attached, who are the producers, and hopefully, at some point, get to a place where you can say, “Can you send me the Project Page?” And that’s the summary of where the project is at this moment in time. Will they fill this out? We’ll see.

**Craig Mazin:**
Because you might as well have a big box on here that says, “Are you lying?” The question are the underlying rights secured. They just lie about that all the time.

**John August:**
They will. And so, I had a conversation with some agents about this, this past week. And all of them want this to happen and also feel like it may be hard to get the producers and studios to agree to do it. And yet, I think it’s very useful for writers and maybe we could talk through what’s on the sheet because I don’t think you should be considering taking a job unless you could answer these questions. So, in some ways, I want to have this by the computer to actually check all these boxes, like do I know this information? Because so many times I’ve actually had to call my agents, email my agents to get clarification on like, “Wait, tell me who the producers are because I have a feeling I know who one of the producers are and I will never work with that person again in my life.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, it is a good checklist for stuff that would be nice to know as long as you understand that you might not… let me revise that, that you will be lied to at least to some extent. So, for instance, when it says, how long has the project been in development, they’re going to lie. The names of the previous writers, they’re going to lie. This is a rewrite, number of previous writers, that’ll be a lie. Can you briefly describe the project’s development history? This is a fresh project. We’re looking for an exciting new voice, lie. So, they’re just going to do all that because it’s Hollywood. But the part that I think is helpful is at least putting them on notice that you’re asking the question. Once an agent starts to ask, then the problem for the studio is, if they lie to that agent, and then another agent comes along, and they hear a different thing, then they have an agency problem. So, it’s a good conversation to have. This is maybe the most useful version of this is one that you put in front of your agent and say, it sure would be good if you could tell me the answer to these questions.

**John August:**
That’s what I really think we should be our first and lowest goal is basically say like, before you come to me with this project, I want to be able to know these answers because I want to know the IP rights are not all secured. Great, but what’s happening here, like is it really based on thing? You and I have a common friend. I don’t think she’s ever shared this story publicly. But she wrote something that she thought was an original that ended up being based on something and wasn’t, so she got to arbitration that she found out like, “Oh, this was actually based on a book.”

**Craig Mazin:**
Which they will do.

**John August:**
They will do that. And so, this will not preclude that. But at least you have some conversation. At some point, they said it was not based on something else.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Once you get hired, they do have to list all the assigned material to you. So, at that point, you should know, it should be in your contract. But certainly, if they don’t have the underlying IP locked up, then not only is there risk for you, but also they’re using you to get the IP.

**John August:**
Let’s also talk about why this is important for any writer considering one of these projects. Because if you are going to go after this thing, that could be not just hours, but days or weeks of your time putting together a pitch, figuring out like is this worth your time to pursue. In many cases, you won’t know if you didn’t have the answers to these questions.

**Craig Mazin:**
Correct. Also, any open writing assignment is usually fraught with a lot of risk. The reason it’s an open writing assignment is the same reason that there’s stuff in the sale bin. It means that it’s not particularly high on the studio’s priority list. It may be something that a producer is pushing really hard that the studio isn’t particularly interested in, but, sure, make 100 people jump through hoops to bide some time before we convince you. We’re not going to ever do this.

**Craig Mazin:**
There’s all problems with open writing assignments. They are somewhat dangerous. They’re like junk bonds. Junk bonds can make you a ton of money as many criminals have proven. But there’s a lot of risk.

**John August:**
Transformers was an open writing assignment at one point. And they came to me with it, like I don’t get transformers, not for me. But it was for somebody and became a huge property. But there have been so many things that across the transom. It’s like, I don’t know.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, the worst version of this, and this is fairly common is they’ll come to you. And they’ll say, “Yes, this is an opening writing assignment. It’s from, let’s pick a studio, Universal, and the producer is, “Let’s just call her Vanessa. And Vanessa has this property that she’s talking to the estate about. And we’re putting a pitch together. The studio is super into this and is a priority for them. And what she’s really doing is laundering things, right? The people who own the rights to the thing, which may be useless, or like, “We’re not going to give you the rights unless we see what the movie would be.”

**Craig Mazin:**
So, they’re going to you, and they’re saying, “Yeah, we can’t give you the job unless you show us what the movie is.” And then, they’re just looking across, share that stuff. And somehow they get money. But it’s all they’re just lying crosswise to everybody.

**John August:**
But I’m pretty sure his job though is just like dream about a movie that could possibly exist and convince folks that you’re building stuff out of smoke, and that’s their job, too.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. I don’t want to imply that that is completely morally treacherous. It has resulted in good things. But a lot of times, open writing assignments are a bit, they’re vaporware. And you just have to be aware of that that they can go away.

**John August:**
I think if I’d had this checklist earlier in my career, there are things that are just like, oh, hell, no, I’m not walking down that road, because I wouldn’t have pursued it. So, if it avoids somehow for some people, it’s a good thing to have them.

**Craig Mazin:**
When you’re young and you don’t have children, what else do you do? Seems like a pretty good use of your time. Practice your skills.

**John August:**
And I think you should practice your skills to the degree that you’re not actually stopping writing original stuff for yourself. And that’s, I think that’s the trap that people fall into this. They’re only pursuing open writing assignments and they’re not actually doing new stuff because they have nothing to show for a year of their writing time.

**Craig Mazin:**
There’s only one writer that’s ever going to get any internal credit from the studio. And that’s the writer that gets this thing, the green light. Everybody else is just somebody that they had to fire along the way. So, odds are that this won’t work out great. So, there’s glum. It’s almost Christmas time. I should probably pep up a little bit. We are out of spooky season, correct?

**John August:**
Yeah we’re in the holiday spirit. Megana who’s here with us, talk to us about how you’re feeling post-spooky season, like we’re still in cozy season. So, is it still a good time of year for you?

**Megana Rao:**
It’s still a good time of year. It’s a little too dark for my taste.

**John August:**
Yeah. My one cool thing is about this darkness. When I asked Siri what time the sunset was and she said 4:45, that’s not okay. A sunset-

**Craig Mazin:**
Do you guys have a little problem with the sunset down here in Los Angeles?

**John August:**
Oh, yeah, we do.

**Craig Mazin:**
Because I wake up in the darkness. And then, I go to lunch in the darkness. And then, I go to bed in the darkness In Calgary.

**John August:**
Yeah, you picked that place.

**Craig Mazin:**
It was selected for us for a number of reasons. I love Calgary. But my goodness, the first thing that happened when we got there in May was we realized that at 5:00 a.m., the laser blast of the sun was going to hit your eyeballs through anything. It penetrates through wood, concrete. And, man, now it’s dark. Oh, wow. Is it dark?

**John August:**
Yeah. People moved to Los Angeles. And I think they don’t… because it’s warmer. They seem like it won’t get dark in some way. But it feels like it gets extra dark here.

**Megana Rao:**
Yeah, because it’s extra bright during the day.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. No, it does not get extra bright no. It’s actually fairly moderate when it comes to that thing.

**John August:**
The main thing I want to talk through today is this idea of scenes versus the whole movie, scenes versus the story and the journey versus the destination. And I think one of the things that’s so fundamental that’s easy to overlook. And we’ve talked about this in various ways over the course of the 10 years of the show. But writers are both creating stories and scenes. And if the scenes are like the individual pieces of Lego, the story is what you build with all those Legos assembled.

**John August:**
But we experience books and movies linearly. So, they are assembled in front of us or watching them be assembled. And the pieces themselves are constructed. They’re little movies themselves are built of these smaller moments, bits of dialogue, visuals, conflict. And so, the tension is that we’re trying to create the most interesting little Lego blocks that are full and joyful to look at and are fantastic. But that will ultimately fit together to build that, the unit we’re trying to build. And sometimes, those are not compatible goals is that we are trying to… both have every moment be spectacular and brilliant and insightful and rewarding and have the whole experience fit together and be what we’re set out to make. And those are real tensions. And you experience it in the movies where you’re experiencing I’m sure the same writing a show right now.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. No, that’s always a challenge. And it’s why I do like to outline early on because it’s the one time where you can engage in very simple scene work like just describing what a scene will be, where is it, and what’s the point, and then look at all of it together. Because what happens when you do all this work is you begin to realize that scenes are always in the context of what came before and what’s coming after. And those things change what that scene feels like to you all the time. You’re guessing how that will work. But it doesn’t always work the way you think. And there are certain things that you… especially once you get into editing, you realize that seems so important. And now, it’s like, yeah, just get rid of it.

**John August:**
Yeah. I think it’s both a craft of making sure the individual later blocks those scenes, those moments as bits are the best possible versions. But also, do we even need that Lego block? Or, no, it’ll all fit together better. And these hold them stronger without that, that extraneous piece is actually breaking the flow of what you had originally intended.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s so hard because you wonder, Am I giving something away that I should hold on to? Is this one of those stories, where if only I’d kept that thing there? And then, you also think, Oh, wait. Am I being precious about this? And does it not matter? You’re making these value judgments all the time. It’s very frustrating. But it does drive home the need for transitions. I do think that as you’re crafting your Lego piece, if you know how it fits with the one before it and the one after it, better chance that it sticks around.

**John August:**
So, let’s talk about planning versus pantsing. Whether you are carefully outlining and figuring out what the whole story is. So then, as you zoom in on this scene, this scene is to accomplish this thing. This is where I need to get into and this is what needs to achieve at the end. And I’ve done that on movies. There’s also been other movies where I have pants it as it’s grown organically out of like, this is what the scene feels like. This is where the energy of the scene is taking us to the next thing. And sometimes, that works, and you don’t know if it’s going to work. So, it’s probably a riskier way to start. It’s that organic, just like what wants to happen next. But some really good movies have come out of that process.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, certainly. I try and do a bit of a hybrid thing, which I think a lot of people do. I’d like to know, just I like to know what the scene is before I write it. I think some people just start typing and then see where it goes from there, which is a bit like auto writing like using Ouija board. For me, I like to know what I’m supposed to be writing. I like to know what the beginning, middle, and end is of the whole story, of the scene.

**Craig Mazin:**
But then, once I’m in it, a little bit of auto writing is good for you. You get surprised by things. It’s fun to be surprised. And certainly, I have had moments where something just happens. And it’s the best part of the scene because it even got me. If it can get me, right, then it’s definitely going to get other people I think.

**John August:**
That’s when writing is working well. We have good writing and somehow, magically, it feels like both these individual pieces and the whole thing, we’re always in unison. They were always going to support each other. But when we experience bad writing, sometimes it really is that tension where like the writing is bad because it was trying to fit this outline, like this outline probably looks really good and you can still smell the whiteboard markers. They were like locked into this thing. And characters are doing stuff that may not feel organic, that the story is moving in ways that don’t feel like the scenes themselves are rewarding. The scenes aren’t funny. They don’t have texture. They don’t have specificity. They’re not unique moments. They’re just functional. They’re just the basic Lego bricks that are going to hold the thing together But they’re not interesting. And we’ve also seen bad writing, which is like, yeah, moment by moment, these things are interesting but it doesn’t go anywhere. And we all have these frustrations of things that just feel like they’re constantly in a loop because these characters are saying brilliant things and yet we’re not actually achieving our goals.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, there is definitely value in occasional wastes of time, all of its precious real estate. But I’m thinking there’s a rambling bit in Shrek, where Shrek goes on about an onion, or the two of them are talking about the onion. It’s just a shaggy dog thing. Everybody remembers it. And it’s an utter waste of time, particularly in an animated film as CG animated film.

**John August:**
Is watching money burn, yeah.

**Craig Mazin:**
That conversation cost many millions of dollars. And maybe people would have been like you don’t… you can get away with saying one quick thing there. Or showing it. Show, don’t tell every dumb rule there is. But there is a value in occasionally wasting time because it is a human thing. A little bit like singers who have beautiful pitch. If they wobble a little bit on a note, keep it because that’s how everybody knows it was an auto tune.

**John August:**
That says a lot.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. So, I think that it’s good to do that. The trouble is when that’s all people have. And then, you just get one of four… I mean, Megana reads how many of these… They’re still doing for Tarantino up there, right? They’re still just blah blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, those aren’t so much scenes as indulgences, which if you are a particular writer and filmmaker can be delicious. But for the rest of us, not particularly.

**John August:**
Well, there’s the struggle of the screenwriter who’s working on their script. And, okay, I’ve got the idea for the movie. This is how all the scenes are going to fit together. I’m writing a scene. I’m working on this. But then, there’s the whole second level of like, Okay, now, you’ve turned this in, and now you have developed, you have notes. And you have people who are trying to optimize this. And one of the ways they’ll try to optimize this is like, can’t we just do this shorter? Can we get out of the scene faster? And sometimes that instinct is correct. You and I both experienced, they’ve just squeezed all the life and joy and then that just becomes a plot machine. You’ve lost the things in those scenes to actually make those scenes worthwhile. You’ve tried to cut a scene so short, the scene barely starts, and you should just get rid of the scene. And that’s the frustration is recognizing you could have this master plan, you can have these beautiful scenes. And then, stuff will happen. And you have to find a way to make it work without those things. It’s like you’re building a bridge, and they said, “Oh, no, you have 30% less steel than you expected.” Work with it.

**Craig Mazin:**
Well, that’s pretty much always because I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten the budget they needed. So, even money-wise, this ends up happening, and that’ll impact you as well as the notes. There’s also this thing where you have to be accountable to your own notes because we just talked about sometimes surprises. So, you’ve planned something out, and then you surprise yourself. And then, you go, “Whoa, hold on a second. This now has ramifications for many things. I have to be accountable to those. I can’t just get stuck here.” And then, all of those subsequent scenes need to be considered in the Gestalt. That’s right, I said Gestalt.

**John August:**
And we’re that kind of podcast. [crosstalk]

**Craig Mazin:**
We say those things. Everything. I feel like we talk about almost one topic in so many different ways. And that is about balancing competing interests. And in storytelling, you just have to balance the whole with the parts, because the individual parts of the ones that people love, in the moment, but they will only remember the whole after.

**John August:**
Yeah, they will remember some certain little moments of that little highlights during that thing, but then they’ll have an experience like, did I like the entire thing? Or did I not like the entire thing? And then, that’s the frustration. And I think our shared frustrations also that in teaching screenwriting, there’s such an emphasis on structure, which is the whole, which is basically this roadmap of like how it’s all going to fit together, and not nearly enough emphasis on the actual writing moment to moment. How do we keep all these balls in the air? How do we keep this moment feeling alive and excited? How to make the most fascinating Lego pieces? It’s just about like, here’s how you click the Lego pieces together to build this dinosaur.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, it’s like we make a mosaic. So, we have to have an image that we’re shooting for with all of our little tiles. But each tile has to be really cool. That’s annoying. The Romans just had the blue in the way. And it was fun. And they made a whale. And it was great. But not us. So, to me, the great majority of the work we do is actually inside of the scenes. But the most inspired work we probably do is about the whole, is understanding what is the story that people would care about, why, what tone is it, and roughly, what is the shape of it?

**John August:**
And that shape is really the journey. So, the other metaphor be the destination versus the journey, like you started here, you got there. But really, the experience of the movie is how you got from point A to point B and what route you took. If it’s a road trip, it’s like the fastest way to drive from LA to New York is not going to be the most interesting way to drive from LA to New York, is not going to be the most rewarding way to drive. But you’re going to have to make decisions about what the choices and compromises you’re going to make, like you can’t see all of America. You’ll have short amount of time. You’ll have a certain amount of gas or electric charge. You’re going to have to make some optimizations. And that’s the choices you’re making as a screenwriter.

**Craig Mazin:**
And as you go, you have to look and see how it’s going. And sometimes your beautiful route has just too man rivers in a row. And then, you have to change it. You have to be very relaxed in a weird way when you’re doing it, although I find myself very tense. Well, to me, it’s like a tense relaxed. I guess there’s the balance. Again, you just need to be able to pivot all the time in response to what’s happening.

**John August:**
Yeah, I’m working on two projects now. One of which is the scene work. And one of which is the big macros, or what is the shape of this whole thing want to be? And it’s exciting to have those two opportunities. But even in trying to figure out the whole shape of it, I need to zoom in on certain moments. I feel like, is this even going to be rewarding in those individual moments? I’m imagining myself a few months down the road, am I going to enjoy writing those scenes or not? And that’s a thing you’re always asking yourself.

**Craig Mazin:**
And eventually become accountable to the world. So much thought and energy is required. And then, people can just go, “Sucks.”

**John August:**
So, on the show, we often do a Three-Page Challenge, which is where we look at the first three pages of scenes that people have sent in. We’ve given our honest feedback. And I think that some of that’s in response to the pressure of ordinary screenwriting books and such talking about the structure as a whole thing. So, we zoom in on this really tight… We’ll focus on just three pages, like what’s happening on those pages. But maybe we should look for a way to actually talk about the shape of stories overall. I don’t know if we want to read treatments or longer things. But I felt like-

**Craig Mazin:**
I can answer that question.

**John August:**
You don’t want to read them at all.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
No.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
Or we could look at, I guess, when we do our deep dives on existing movies, we have a sense of the shape of the whole thing.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And ultimately, there is not much interest for me, at least in talking about story in the abstract. Whereas doing scene work is lovely. It’s very detailed. When you’re in production, it’s the work of the day. You’re doing scene work and you can talk about all little things. For overall stories, the truth of the matter is if somebody told me the overall story for karate kid, I probably would shrug and go, “That just feels like so rocky” but like little rocky with karate, I guess. And then, you see the movie and you experience all those scenes, and they’re wonderful. And they collect up too much more than what it sounds like. So, I think we are probably doing this right. I think, in fact, it is one of the problems with… Well, there are a number of problems with screenwriting schools, not the least of which is just listen to this podcast. Honestly.

**John August:**
I do get frustrated when people ask like, “Oh, can you give us some advice on scriptwriting?” I’m like, “Yes, I have a weekly podcast you can listen to. There’s 500 episodes.”

**Craig Mazin:**
Dude. When people are like, “I just want to take you out to lunch and pick your brain, you don’t have to.

**John August:**
No. I’ve done it.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s picked.

**John August:**
It’s been scraped clean. There’s nothing left on the inside on the scale.

**Craig Mazin:**
We are literally. Why would anyone ask us for screenwriting advice at this point?

**John August:**
No, they shouldn’t.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
No, but they do. They write down the questions. Sometimes, we answer them.

**Craig Mazin:**
They do.

**John August:**
So, let’s get started on our Three-Page Challenge. We’ll start with Firebird. Now, if you want to read along with us, these PDFs are linked in the show notes. You can stop now and look at the PDF and get your sense of it before we discuss what we’re reading on the page. But Megana will give us a summary of what it is we’re about to read.

**Megana Rao:**
Great. So, Firebird by Benjamin Blattberg. The voice of father narrates an animated Russian folktale about a woodcutter who strays from the safe path when he uses his axe to free a trapped crow. As soon as the woodcutter realizes he stepped off the path, the crow opens its mouth, unleashing explosions. We then cut to Stalingrad in November 1942 where 12-year-old Mila steers out of her apartment at burning buildings and bombings. Her Aunt Anya urges Mila to pack and collect her parents’ jewelry, money, and food to help her escape from Stalingrad. Mila refuses saying her Papa told her not to. Anya slaps her across the face and keeps packing. Mila brings a book a fairy tales with an inscription from her father.

**John August:**
All right. So, that’s where we’re at the end of these first three pages. There’s things I want to talk about in this but I was intrigued. I basically got the setup. I got the situation. I was intrigued to read the next thing. It did feel JoJo Rabbit to me just because that was the most recent movie that I saw that had a similar situation happening. But there’s a lot of stuff here that I thought can work. The animated opening can work, the tie in with a fairytale book. It felt tragic and whimsical at times. These are good combinations. What was your first instinct on this?

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, that was really well done. And in the sense of scene work, regardless of how it might unfold, I thought that there was so much here worth recommending to people who are wondering roughly how should these things feel and flow. It looks great on the page. Lovely, broken up. I was-

**John August:**
It’s Courier Prime, so it’s already off to a good start.

**Craig Mazin:**
He’s just a suck up is what he is. But where got me was, I’m following along. I love Russian folklore. So, I’m looking along here and I got a little confused when the woodcutter chops at roots and branches laughing as he frees the crow. The crow flies to his shoulder and they laugh together. I thought, well, that’s very odd.

**John August:**
I didn’t know whether I was confused or whether it hadn’t been clear on the page. What was your instinct?

**Craig Mazin:**
I think it was just tonally bizarre, but that’s okay. Because then, something is coming closer. The crow opens its mouth. But what comes out is the sound of next line, all caps, explosions. Next line, lowercase, far off, coming closer. That’s actually quite horrifying. And then, we are immediately into reality and we realize we’re with a child. She is in the middle of World War II. Her city is being bombed. Her aunt, there’s a slightly clumsy introduction to the fact that she’s the aunt, where she refers specifically to her brother, Mila’s father, she just, my brother was too soft on you. That was-

**John August:**
Well, also, Mila says, “I’m not leaving Aunt Anya.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, we generally don’t do stuff like that. But we’ll figure it out. Eventually, there’ll be a reason to… you don’t need to shove it in right there. I don’t think you can let that develop later. And the conversation between Anya and Mila is pretty good because it’s real. This feels normal.

**John August:**
It feels heightened and rushed in the way that there’s an urgency to it, which is great. And they’re cutting off lines, things trail off when they need to trail off. They dash dash, cut off, when people are cutting each other off. We can improve a little bit here on the bottom half of page two. We run into a situation where between every line of dialogue, there’s a line of scene description. It’s a little staccatoAnd so, you could get some better flow by figuring out when to break that up and when not to break it up, which of those things that go to parenthetical, but that’s a small criticism.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. For instance, where did your father hide money? Mila looks at her blankly, effing hell, where that could just be in parentheses, no response. So, we can absolutely do a little bit of squishing down here. But I could see the space. I could hear it. There was a point of view. I understood that I was with Mila. Certainly, the general concept that her father had left to this book and the book was important that the father had imparted her with a love of fairytales and the fairy tales in theory would help her survive some of this. All that felt there and good. And so, yeah, I think Benjamin Blattberg can do this.

**John August:**
Yeah, I agree. You talk about, so that we’re from Mila’s point of view. And I think that’s crucial. And one of the ways in which we’re seeing it right in Mila’s point of view is when we get to this apartment from the next room, we hear drawers being opened and slammed. Mila just fetches with the buttons and follows code so long and heard that it’s him sweeps the floor. That tells us because we’re starting from her point of view. We’re literally only with her and we’re sitting out here and off camera sounds. We know that she’s the one to follow. If we’d seen the aunt first, it would have been the aunt’s story.

**Craig Mazin:**
Completely, and great use of sound. We talked about transitions. This is full of them. And we’re using all the palette that we are provided, directing on the page, thank God. And also, just like the… things happen with that too much of a Mila being made of them like Anya slaps Mila, that’s a sentence. That’s a perfectly good sentence. Subject, verb, object, done. Great.

**John August:**
Cool. So, let’s go on to our next Three-Page Challenge. This is The Drawing by Todd William Knack.

**Megana Rao:**
Ten-year-old Luke draws a mysterious woman on a piece of paper in his bedroom. It’s Gabrielle Lawson, 38, with a power ponytail, calls to him yelling that it’s time to go. Gabrielle speaks with Officer Raymond Carter in the front doorway. The officer shows her the stakes he’s put in the yard and explains the boundaries of the perimeter. Gabrielle asks Luke where his backpack is, but he doesn’t answer. We learned that Luke doesn’t speak. Twenty-four-year-old Scarlet enters carrying Luke’s backpack. She drops it by her feet where we see her ankle monitor and realize that the new perimeter is for her house arrest.

**John August:**
Craig, start us off here. This is again, we have a story of a young kid. You have a parent authority figure. We have some mystery about what’s going on. How did this work for you?

**Craig Mazin:**
I spent most of these pages utterly confused.

**John August:**
Yeah. I was confused too.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, about what was going on. First of all, there’s the view of an oncoming train and then we reveal it’s actually just a toy train, but that’s a reality shift. And it’s so short. I’m not sure what we’re getting from it exactly other than it’s somewhat clever, but there’s not enough of it to make it feel like it’s a thing.

**Craig Mazin:**
Formatting notes, a ton of capitalized words here in this one paragraph where we see the things in the room. Weirdly, there’s Edward Gorey posters. Edward Gorey is not capitalized, but posters is. Most of the stuff, you don’t need to capitalize like art supplies.

**John August:**
It’s uppercasing and that doesn’t need to happen.

**Craig Mazin:**
Right. And then, we meet this kid and he’s scribbling a picture of a shadowy figure and then we hear a woman off-screen, “Luke time to go.” Who is that woman?

**John August:**
The woman is theoretically Gabrielle, but it’s weird that we don’t identify her here.

**Craig Mazin:**
But also, if she’s yelling to him, she’s also talking to a police officer at the same time. Interior front doorway, that’s not a location. You could be by the front door. You could be foyer. The police officer, here’s the description, crop dark hair in perfect unison with his short beard. Okay.

**John August:**
How are things in unison?

**Craig Mazin:**
Well tidy, I guess, weathered. Never told a joke. But if he did, it would be quality.

**John August:**
I don’t know how to play that.

**Craig Mazin:**
What is that?

**John August:**
I can’t do that. It’s not a playable thing.

**Craig Mazin:**
If you’ve never told a joke, how could it be quality?

**John August:**
So, Ashley Nicole Black, when she was on the show she was talking about, she’s also an actor, and she talks about when she’s going out for a role she reads the character description there and she gets frustrated when it’s just like, that’s not a thing I can actually do or play.

**Craig Mazin:**
No one can do that. But even if you could, you couldn’t because it’s contradictory. Never told a joke, but if he did, it would be quality. That’s like never drove, but if he did, he would nail it. But no, because you’ve never… what?

**John August:**
Yeah. So, never told a joke period. I get that. That’s a playable thing.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes. So, the sticks in the yard, again, not really sure why they need to be there exactly. But that’s fine. And then, Luke shows up and she says in the pantry, honey, but wasn’t she just calling him telling him to go?

**John August:**
That’s what I’m confused about too.

**Craig Mazin:**
So, if she’s telling to go, but was it maybe, was it Scarlet that was saying time to go? I don’t think so. Because Gabrielle eventually says, “Ready? Where’s your backpack? So, Gabrielle yells, “Time to go.” We don’t identify her by name. And then, she does not seem to have any sense that it’s time to go. Still not a word, huh? Just more drawings. No. No.

**John August:**
You’re setting up too much that this is the fundamental thing. That’s strange about this character. We don’t know how long he’s been involved in their life, which seems strange to. So, let’s talk about the stakes because the literal stakes have been put in the ground by Officer Carter. They’re already in by the time it started. If you were putting the stakes in, that would be intriguing to me. What is he doing that? And then, I was like, “Oh, the fact that it’s about her house arrest and the perimeter, then we’re in the middle of something that’s great.” But they’re just standing having a conversation about a thing that’s already happened. I don’t know the context of it.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And it’s putting a lot of pressure on this reveal. She’s under house arrest. But there’s probably a more interesting, casual way to drop that in there. I do struggle when characters have this openness with each other. Someone says, still not talking. Yeah, no, just drawing. Typically, a parent of a child who has any struggles will be far less forthcoming than that. Still not talking, huh? No.

**John August:**
Let’s also talk about point of view. So, in the last thing we were looking at, it was clear that we own the little girl’s point of view. I’m not sure who’s…. We’re not in the boy’s point of view.

**Craig Mazin:**
We’re no one’s point of view. So, I don’t know whose scenes belong to. If I were directing the scene between Officer Carter and Gabrielle, I’m not sure what they want. They don’t seem to want anything actually. This is a problem. So, in scenes, typically, people are trying to achieve something. Is he hitting on her? He’s not doing a particularly convincing job of it. Does she want something from him? Does she want him to leave? She doesn’t seem like she does, nor does she want him to stay. Everyone’s mild.

**John August:**
Yeah. And mild is usually not a good sign for a first scene.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
So, let’s go back to our earlier conversation about the Lego pieces. And it’s like it’s entirely possible that Lego piecewise that this is actually building up, stacking up something interesting in the fact that they’re under house arrest, the stakes are going to be useful down the road, but the actual scene work that we’re seeing, the Lego pieces that we’re looking at, they’re confusing, and that’s not helping us.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, even if this exists just to set up that there’s somebody under house arrest and there’s a kid and he’s drawing a weird picture. And maybe there’s some, who knows what’s with the picture. The problem here is the conversation between the cop and this woman. The two of them don’t seem to have any reason to be talking to each other. It’s almost like we’re watching aimless small talk, which you tend to avoid like on planes and in lines.

**John August:**
So, we actually have a logline for this one. So, we now ask for a logline. So, here’s the logline for the whole thing, which I do believe this Lego thing. After mysterious and tragic incident, artist Scarlet finds herself on house arrest at our strange aunt and silent 10-year-old cousin’s big empty house. Soon she begins to experience supernatural events, all of which she suspects is linked to her cousin’s artwork.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sure. And you get a supernaturally vibe from the description of the artwork itself.

**John August:**
But I don’t feel like she’s the central character of the story. It’s showing on the three pages you’ve given us.

**Craig Mazin:**
No. No, this would be… There’s the answer. This should be from her point of view. She’s the hero. Everything that’s happening here is boring. So, if she’s watching all this and she’s watching a cop describe the perimeter and her looking at it-

**John August:**
That’s interesting.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, that would be interesting, yeah, perspective. I would feel like she would have feelings about that. She’s trapped. So, that’s a good thing. And she’s trapped and then she turns and there’s that little kid staring at her. That would be scary and weird. There’s a lot of ways to go. But the key is her. And we get nothing from her except this very bit at the end, which is like-

**John August:**
Her description is-

**Craig Mazin:**
Cold and distant but without angst.

**John August:**
I don’t know how to play that either. I could play cold and distant without angst.

**Craig Mazin:**
Well, angst is incompatible with cold and distant, right? So, I don’t know what the word but is doing. So, I just think cold and distant would be enough. And then, he adds detached, which I think was covered by cold and distant. And she’s-

**John August:**
But also, cold and distant is a hard thing to stick on your central character. That’s the hard first thing to give us a character who is the one we’re going to actually be following through the course of the story.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. I think it’s also something that is the thing you can get from the execution of the character in the scene with the kid. So, if the kid walks in there and he’s like, “Hey, can I… and she just says one word answer or doesn’t answer at all, but just looks away, that’s cold and distant. Better to do that probably.

**John August:**
Yeah. And use that character description line to give us some visual, some specificity about who this character is versus anybody else who could be in this movie.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Last thing, Todd, I would say just on when you’re on mild patrol. On page three, Officer Carter chuckles and tips his hat and then at the end of the page, Scarlet chuckles. Chuckling is just for like grandpa. Yeah-

**John August:**
As Megana laughs.

**Craig Mazin:**
And then, you like to chuckle. That doesn’t count as chuckling. That was a proper laugh. I was thinking of chuckling as like [demonstrates chuckling].

**Megana Rao:**
I see. I see.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Usually, your ruffle a little. Your grandson’s hair because he took him fishing and he said something funny and you go. Chuckling is mild.

**John August:**
Yeah, it’s very mild. All right, let’s get on to Perdition by Terry Rietta. We’ll get a summary from Megana.

**Megana Rao:**
We’re in Cullman, Alabama in the 1830s. Thirteen-year-old Duncan narrates the pastoral setting as he comes upon, strangled 16-year-old Eily’s body by the creek. His father, Loren tells him to go get Pastor Haig. As Duncan runs to the pastor’s house, he flashes back through memories with Eily. Loren and Pastor Haig discuss next steps as they look at the body.

**Megana Rao:**
The sheriff is too far away to reach that day, so they take the corpse to Eily’s home where her mother Eustace falls to pieces at the site of her daughter’s dead body.

**John August:**
Alright. So, yet again, we have young people and dark things happening around them. There were moments here that I like. I liked the idea of finding a body in an older time. We have a sense of what a modern day kid finding a body is. But I liked that it was awkward. And there wasn’t a natural thing to do. There wasn’t police to call. I liked all of that. And yet what I was actually seeing on the page didn’t feel like the best version of this scene in the sequence to me, and there are a lot of small things on there I want to talk about in terms of showing vernacular dialogue, showing accent, showing regionalisms in a way that is suggestive, but not annoying to read, and sometimes just got a little annoying to read in terms of the “gittins” and the “aint’s and the “gahs.”

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And I don’t know, Megana, if these are all linked together by little fantasy moments perhaps because this is the third one in a row now, where there’s a slight fantasy aspect to it because he sees himself playing with the girl when they were younger, and she was choked to death, which I found confusing.

**John August:**
I am confused too. And I don’t know how…. So we’re talking about on page two as he’s running. He sees these things as like, I don’t know that as a viewer. I would get that he was seeing an earlier version of this. And also, it’s weird how the, a teenager, a young person that’s imagining a younger version of himself. That doesn’t happen.

**Craig Mazin:**
It doesn’t happen. And generally, people aren’t looking at themselves in memories. They can see other people in memories perhaps, but happy memories just seemed like we were hit with a pretty tonally shocking thing. And then, on top of that, we were hit with this gimmick. And then, writing over all that is voiceover.

**Craig Mazin:**
So, we have three competing interests. And I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look and feel, but I can tell you what I wanted. To me, what’s really cool is this, a peppercorn snail, and I don’t know what a peppercorn snail is [crosstalk]. But I loved it, a peppercorn snail.

**John August:**
Daddy, I want a peppercorn snail.

**Craig Mazin:**
I want it now. A peppercorn snail crawls up her porcelain shoulder, revealing deep purple bruises around the girl’s neck. I didn’t love it was her and then the girl’s because it sounded like two different people. But what I loved was that there was a snail on a person, and that’s how we find out they’re dead. And that’s really cool and weird. And I wanted basically the kid to shut up. Now, I don’t have anything against voiceover. Sometimes it’s brilliant. In this case, it’s turning everything rather corny.

**John August:**
It is. So, let’s read through the voiceover here. So, it’s labeled as Duncan’s voiceover. I’m confused whether this is Duncan, the 13-year-old kid or an adult. And as I read this aloud, I think you’ll be confused with me. “Cullen, Alabama, was a pretty place anytime of day. Old oaks leaning down, big moss feathered slabs of stone, soft grass will take the print of your foot and hold it. In the spring, the bubbles don’t seem to rise but rather hang like a string of beads. And Eily Jurdan looked the part of it just lying there like a girl in a tale.

**John August:**
Now, in a book, great. I love that. I actually think that’s good writing. And I really do enjoy it. I don’t believe a teenager can say that. So, it has to be an older version.

**Craig Mazin:**
It says a boy, 13, speaks with a soft southern accent.

**John August:**
Yeah. So, I guess that’s him talking but it doesn’t track for me.

**Craig Mazin:**
It doesn’t sound like what anyone would say to anyone. It does sound book-like. It is an omniscient narrator description of things. But if I were describing my town to you and I started talking like this, you would walk away. There’s something wrong with me. Soft grass, it’ll…

**John August:**
I’m going to start doing that.

**Craig Mazin:**
Take the print on your foot and hold, you’d be like, “What? What are you talk… what? Just where are you from?” Staten Island. I think that it’s a bit purple in terms of its prose, which again, in a novel can work. But coming out of someone’s mouth will sound corny. And on top of that, a 13-year-old boy who talks like this should be studied in a lab because it’s just too much.

**John August:**
A very specific on the page note here. So, in that block of dialogue I just read, this voiceover, and Eily in parenthesis, it says rhymes with highly. I like that we have that clarification here. But I was so tempted to read the parenthetical aloud. So, maybe put it in brackets, put it above this if you need to. I didn’t mind knowing how to pronounce it. We also run into problems with Eily on page three. We’re in this open cart and Duncan is in the back. Duncan sits with Eily holding her head in his lap and I had to think like, “Wait, is she dead?” So, I think Eily’s body is really what we needed to have here.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah.

**John August:**
On page three is also where we see, the first line is, outta get the sheriff. It should be an oughtta to get sheriff. That oughtta is spelled differently. Half days ride to Huntsville and it’s getting dark. Animals will get at err if we just leave her out. You don’t need the errs in that situation. I think at a certain point you have to stop dropping on all the “g”s. We get a sense of what the sound is supposed to be. But it gets to be frustrating to read that all the time.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes, you don’t need it. And the actors will generally do that. If you give this to them, you run the risk of really getting a lot of-

**John August:**
But things like animals will get her if we just leave her out. The animals’ll, I like that.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. The animals will get at her. You can say that too. It’s just the err. It does seem a little much… I get immediately confused on page one. First of all, he’s describing things as if they were in the past. But he’s there looking at them in the present. So, I don’t understand quite how that functions.

**John August:**
I don’t know when we are in time.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And then, Loren is this guy who is staring at her. Now we’re going to presume that unless Duncan sounds like a boy boy, that’s who it is because that’s who’s staring at this girl. And it’s the first person we see. Loren it says blends into the setting, granite face, stoic and sporting blood on his pants. Okay, a couple of things. That does not going to blend into the setting, too. You don’t really spurt blood on your pants, blood-stained pants. But when I see a dead body and then I see a guy next to it with blood-stained pants, my mind goes to weird places.

**John August:**
Pretty natural connection. They’re somehow connected that there’s blood on that. Yes.

**Craig Mazin:**
And yet after reading it over a few because I get very disturbed. And then, he said, “Oh, a few freshly caught rabbits dangle from his belt.” Okay.

**John August:**
Maybe start with rabbits.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, maybe start with the rabbits because right now, oh, bloody pants. Nobody wants that.

**John August:**
Page one. Afternoon sun kisses the foothills of the Appalachians, dangerously purple but okay, I’ll allow it. Next slide, hills, pastures, pines, and hardwoods. You said foothills in the previous sentence. I don’t think you need to say hills twice.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes, I agree. And when we go into this next section, there’s the promise of Eustace. Before we get to Eustace, there’s a preacher. Duncan has been told to run to get the preacher. And Duncan says, is she dot dot dot? And obviously she is. She’s dead. Clearly. He’s 13. He’s not nine, right, or eight. He should know that she’s definitely dead. She’s not breathing. She’s pretty dead-looking. Regardless. And because it’s always this fake-ish. He finally gets to the preacher’s house. He pounds on the old oak door, a weathered… this is second weathered. The other script had a weathered.

**John August:**
Everyone’s weathered.

**Craig Mazin:**
Everyone’s weathers. Kindly man opens it. A cross around his neck and round spectacles on the end of his nose. A bit central casting there for the old person. This is preacher Haig. The preacher’s face falls at the sight of Duncan standing there, tear-stained and out of breath. What happened? Duncan throws himself in the preacher’s arms. Well, this is a whole different type of movie now. What? So, I think maybe he meant collapses into.

**John August:**
Yeah. Yeah. I’m not buying that either. I’m not buying that moment. I don’t mind buying that as an out. So, what happened is a good exit line in general.

**Craig Mazin:**
You don’t need what happened. How about just uh-oh, right? He reacts to this kid standing there. And then, the two of them are chit-chatting. And then, they get to Eustace who I assume is his mom.

**John August:**
Eustace is a man. Eustace looks past the preacher and sees his little girl. So, last thing I want to talk about is there’s a dedication page. So, after the title page before the real script, definition of the word perdition in Christian theology, a state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unpenitent person passes after death. Great. I’ll take it like, yeah, I’m fine with that. And that’s a good use of that dedication page.

**Craig Mazin:**
I did not like that perdition was printed out in syllables.

**John August:**
I’m going to allow it because I could see people pronouncing it strangely or getting tripped up on it. If it weren’t for the Road to Perdition, the Sam Mendes movie I wouldn’t know.

**Craig Mazin:**
You wouldn’t know about perdition. So, I think Terry, less novelistic here probably less than general seems like you’ve got a great eye for visuals. You can really see this place and I can see it with you. You probably are over describing in spots. When I say probably, I mean definitely. And given that you have such a good eye for visuals, don’t clutter it quite so much with extra stuff.

**John August:**
I will be fascinated to see the version of this that basically has no dialogue which is all just visuals telling the story and then fill out the scenes you need to. Here’s a logline, 1830s Alabama, after discovering that a small town’s golden girl has been strangled by in a creek and her friend Isaac, a boy 18 with down syndrome has run off with a stolen horse.

**Craig Mazin:**
What?

**John August:**
It’s a confusing logline. A posse is organized by the girl’s wealthy father to bring back the boy to account for the crime they think he committed.

**Craig Mazin:**
I see.

**John August:**
So, it sounds like there’s a posse going after the presumed killer of this girl.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sure. And that’s fine, but that’s not what this is giving me.

**John August:**
No, it’s not.

**Craig Mazin:**
And it feels a little bit, Terry, like you’re forcing To Kill A Mockingbird on us here. It just feels To Kill A Mockingbird-ish. It’s that vibe. And that’s that vibe. And honestly, it’s an old fashioned vibe.

**John August:**
Yeah, to strangle a sparrow.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s a great book but it’s an old book. We honor the things that come before but then the fact that they get popularized and then recycled and redone a bunch, you got to move past that and I think this feels a little too Pepperidge Farm remembers.

**Megana Rao:**
Can I ask you a question?

**Craig Mazin:**
Sure, of course.

**Megana Rao:**
On page two where Duncan’s sprinting and as he passes the field, he sees himself much younger with Eily playing in the high grass .Say Terry did want to keep that, would you recommend doing another logline or like a flashback? Would that help?

**John August:**
Yes, I would recommend keeping our kid out of it and just seeing the younger version of the girl. I have a hard time imagining how that’s going to help tell the story. I don’t think it works with the Lego piece but I don’t think it’s going to actually help him and the entire thing is trying to construct is to have flashback moments.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s also the wrong time for this information. I just saw her dead. Give me a moment or two. Let me learn a little bit about… let me at least hear what supposedly the deals with her before you start showing me things that are maybe private things like her kissing some guy behind the barn. At a church, he sees Eily kissing a man behind a barn. Maybe there’s a barn near the church, usually aren’t.

**John August:**
No, shouldn’t be.

**Craig Mazin:**
No. Regardless. It’s too soon. Oh, I see. He’s running by the church. And then, he sees Eily kissing a man behind a barn. Now, how would you do that?

**John August:**
I don’t know how you do that.

**Craig Mazin:**
I don’t know how you do it.

**John August:**
So, we’re having a hard time visualizing what we’re actually going to see on screen. And that’s a real problem, especially on page 10.

**Craig Mazin:**
Plus, why is he thinking of this at all right now. He’s got a job to do, which is to get to the preacher.

**John August:**
Do your job. Get to the preacher.

**Craig Mazin:**
Throw himself in the preacher’s arms.

**Megana Rao:**
Okay, second question. So, in the last script and maybe in this one, it feels like a thing that you guys are bumping up against is the fake reveal, like false suspense. So, do you think in this script, like with that line is she dot dot dot, if they just said is she dead, that would have been better?

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes. Yes, that actually would have been better because then you would have had an opportunity for the other character to look at him like, what do you think, idiot? And then, that kid could hang his head because that was a stupid question. It gives you an opportunity for humans to interact.

**John August:**
Yeah. And the “is she…” doesn’t… it’s false. Doesn’t feel real. You could say almost anything else would make more sense in that moment. She’s dead, right? Or what do we do? I really don’t have anything. It’s probably better than like the is she because we’re just assuming she’s dead.

**Craig Mazin:**
Is she?

**John August:**
Yeah.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes.

**John August:**
Is it time for the next sample? Let’s take a look at Helen Sedwick’s pages for Ten Million.

**Megana Rao:**
We open on the San Francisco Bay and close in on an upscale home at Dawn where Patti Wendecker rushes down in her bathrobe to greet a SWAT team of FBI agents pounding at her door. Patti reminisces about the old days in voiceover as we watch federal agents restrain her and storm her home. Patti’s teenage daughters Abby and Monica are escorted downstairs where they’re seated next to Patti. Patti insists the agents have made a mistake until they dragon her husband, Sam, 45, an attorney, whom the agents caught trying to escape in the backyard. Sam apologizes before he’s escorted away. The dFBI asked Patti if she has any firearms in the house.

**John August:**
Great. I like these pages. And I like the situation that was being created here. I’m going to have a lot of very specific notes about things I think could be improved. But meeting this character in this situation, I think feels interesting and right and appropriate. I was a little confused about the time period and start. For some reason, I assume it’s modern day, but it feels like could also be ’80s or ’90s. So, I was a little curious about that. But I was with it moment by moment, which I think is a good sign for these pages. Craig, what was your first instinct on this?

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. There is a good reveal here, which I liked. Because she sold me on the fact that they were in the wrong house. And then, turns out they’re not in the wrong house. And that’s interesting. However, there’s a little bit of a thing that happens here early, which lost me a touch and that is Patti in voiceover says, and this is what we hear first as she’s coming downstairs. “If you ask me, the FBI should let you finish your first cup of coffee and run a brush through your hair before they pound on your door with warrants, rifles, and bulletproof vests.” Pound pound pound.

**Craig Mazin:**
Then she opens the door, shakes her head in disgust. “I told them right off you’ve got the wrong house. By noon, FBI idiots would be trending on TikTok.” Now, a couple things, one, shaking your head in disgust. Nobody shakes their head in disgust at the FBI unless they’re like a mob wife and this is the 12th time. This is new. This is weird. Second, by noon, FBI idiots would be trending on TikTok. That makes it sound like that’s exactly what happened. But it isn’t what happened. And also, I don’t see them say you’ve got the… I don’t see her say you’ve got the wrong house. They slam her to the floor. She says sometimes, “I miss those days” in voiceover which I was okay. So, something is interesting.

**Craig Mazin:**
But I was already nervous that I was disconnecting from a normal human reaction to a situation. And I got particularly nervous when the daughters were taken. And towards the end, the agent says to Patti and her girls… and how old are the girls?

**John August:**
They are 16 and 14.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sixteen and 14. Monica is 14. And Daddy has already been dragged off by the FBI and apologizes. Something’s gone terribly wrong. The agents say to Patti and her girls, “Now, don’t move.” And Monica says, “What? And missed all the fun?” Excuse me?

**Craig Mazin:**
You’re 14-year-old mouthing off to the FBI that just apparently justifiably dragged your dad out. And you guys are all on the floor and tied up. No. So, tone was a problem for me. But the layout of things was really interesting. It was a cool scene to start with.

**John August:**
Yeah, I agree. So, I think let’s talk about the daughters because this is about what we hear. Girls scream, Patti’s daughters Abby, 16, and Monica, 14, stumble down the stairs, their hands bound behind them and a behemoth in a black helmet on their tails. Patti tries to stand but with their hands tied behind her, she topples over. The behemoth sits the girls beside Patti and tips her back up.

**John August:**
So, I love Patti trying to stand up. I love the daughters coming down. I don’t know if I believe that they had their hands behind them. Maybe they do. Maybe not.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
I don’t see it. They’re juveniles. But then, being freaked out is great. But I’m only seeing them as this collective unit. I don’t know anything specific about who they are because they’re not going to be the same girl. And so, give us some visual that distinguishes this. So, who they are, what are they wearing? Are they still in their pajamas? Well, just what’s happening here? Because these are supposed to be important characters I’m taking and I am just getting names for them.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And they screamed, and they are tied up. And yet they’re sassing the FBI. It just didn’t seem to make sense. This is more where the scene ends. But there is a fairly chunky description at the end of this about what’s on the walls.

**John August:**
Let’s about that because I think there’s actually some good stuff there. And maybe it is the right time to wait and hold back where we can sit for a second where we can actually see some of the stuff. The way that their home reflects affluence, but not true wealth, a wall of glass facing the San Francisco Bay, other walls are lined with shelves holding a chaotic assortment of art and mementos, handmade pottery, Mexican alebrijes, bolga baskets, most of which has been tossed to the floor.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, they were tossing stuff earlier. I think it probably would have been better to integrate that into the action. So, it didn’t feel like we stopped things just to get a little cataloging.

**John August:**
Let’s talk about the difference between how Patti is responding in her voiceover and what she’s doing in real life. Because that’s some of the tension that I think you hit on it at the start. She’s not actually saying, “I told them right off, you’ve got the wrong house. She’s not saying those things. And maybe it’s okay that her reporting of what actually happened is different than what we’re seeing, but maybe it needs to be more dramatically different that she actually didn’t really is freaked out and crying.

**Craig Mazin:**
Which she’s not because she’s having it both ways. It’s like, you guys don’t belong here. You have the wrong house. None of that should be happening, which normally, first of all, why is she… when she opens the door, she’s not surprised. So, I’m confused by what her context for them is.

**John August:**
If this felt like a home invasion almost from the start, which is probably what it would feel like, then her natural reaction to that is probably going to be interesting and compelling. And I can imagine there’s a version of this voiceover that is a good counterpoint to it. But I think to reveal the husband can be done better, because right now the husband’s coming in, for whatever reason. It’s morning, but he’s already dressed in a suit. I don’t understand where he was.

**Craig Mazin:**
And he was in the backyard. Right? That’s where they caught him, in the backyard.

**John August:**
Yeah. He’s trying to get out.

**Craig Mazin:**
Right. But how did he even know to get out like… Anyway, there’s a lot of logical issues here. Patti is incredibly not forthcoming with these agents. And I’m not sure why. Everything that she’s describing here sounds like she’s a mob wife, like she is…. So her husband is a criminal. And she knows it. But she’s getting sassy with the feds. This feels Carmela-like a little bit. But that’s not what she’s saying in the voiceover, really.

**John August:**
I’m going to cheat and look at the logline. Because we don’t look at the loglines before we do this. The logline is a woman’s safe suburban life has shattered when the FBI raids her home and arrest her husband, a high price attorney, for stock fraud. So, it’s not a mafia situation.

**Craig Mazin:**
Then this is not correct. Just tonally speaking. Helen, you’ve got a really interesting situation here. But what you’ve done is you’ve shoehorned in an attitude that doesn’t necessarily comport with even if Patti is just that person who’s got that cold ice water in her veins. Her freaking daughters couldn’t be like that. And plus, if your mom and your two daughters have been tied up and thrown downstairs by the FBI, you’re going to be emotional. She’s just very-

**John August:**
Yeah, so I’m going to take this moment to, again, talk about how amazing Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers is, but one of the things that Hustlers did so well is the characters comport themselves when they’re being interviewed in formal situations. And they present the story of what happened in a very different way than what we actually see in them happening. And so, I would be fascinated if the voiceover that we’re getting in that character that should present yourself at the end, we’re going to learn through how she became that thing. And it doesn’t match up with the character seen at the start. That can be really-

**Craig Mazin:**
That could be really interesting. Unreliable narrator being proven right in front of us.

**John August:**
Yeah. All right. So, as always, we want to thank our four writers who sent in their Three-Page Challenges. But also, everyone who sent us a Three-Page Challenge. Megana will read through how many for this session.

**Megana Rao:**
A bunch, yeah.

**John August:**
A bunch, a bunch. So, thank you, everyone who sent them in.

**Craig Mazin:**
Five.

**John August:**
If you have pages you would like us to look at on the show, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. And you’ll see a forum, which you can fill out the information and click to attach your script. And it goes into a magic mailbox that maybe we can look at and pick things for our next Three-Page Challenge. But, again, thank you, everyone who sent that stuff in.

**John August:**
Now, it’s gotten dark as we record it and it is time for one cool things. My one cool thing is this cool little thing that I got this last week that I found very helpful. Craig, can you describe what this is?

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh, this is one of these things. So, this is a flexible strip that you can snap onto your arm. And it lights up. That’s cool.

**John August:**
Yeah, so it’s like a slap wrist.

**Craig Mazin:**
Slap wrist bracelet.

**John August:**
This bracelet thing, but it has an LED inside of it. So, it reflects but also it glows. And so, if you’re running at night or walking your dog, I find it actually really helpful because cars can see you. It can be set to just be a steady light or it can blink and so people can see you because I just find that this time of year, both as a driver and as pedestrian or a runner, it just becomes a little bit dicey because you don’t know that people can actually see you. So, I recommend this. This is cheap. I’ll put a link to it on Amazon. This is the Nite Ize SlapLit, SlapLit.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sorry. SlapLit.

**John August:**
SlapLit, LED Slap Wrap.

**Craig Mazin:**
SlapLit.

**John August:**
Yeah, there’s other ones that-

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh, SlapLit.

**John August:**
SlapLit.

**Craig Mazin:**
I thought it was Slap Let.

**John August:**
SlapLit.

**Craig Mazin:**
Like a Slap Let like a bracelet.

**John August:**
SlapLit.

**Craig Mazin:**
So, SlapLit.

**John August:**
So, I would just recommend this if you’re going to be outside walking in a place where a car can hit you.

**Craig Mazin:**
How much does that cost?

**John August:**
It’s really cheap.

**Craig Mazin:**
I’m looking up right now. The SlapLit is currently going on Amazon for $10.59.

**John August:**
So, to not be hit by a car, I think it’s money well spent.

**Craig Mazin:**
My one cool thing is slightly more expensive than this.

**John August:**
All right, tell us.

**Craig Mazin:**
If you’re in the market for a new computer. And we are writers, it is our instrument. I don’t necessarily recommend this for everyone, of course. It’s a bit of a budget buster. However, in the sense of the technological aspect, the new MacBook Pro 16 with the Apple, this one has the Apple M1 Max, is spectacular. It said return to a chunkier MacBook Pro, which I actually like. I never needed it to be the MacBook Air. I never needed it to be slender. It’s a little heavier. They got rid of the glowy bar that was a wonderful gimmick that literally nobody wanted or liked. The screen is brilliant. But my God, the speed on this thing is remarkable. And the fan doesn’t run. It also uses way less energy so the battery lasts way longer. It’s just everything you would hope for has been put in here. I was telling Megana that the thing that I use that’s the most processor-intensive is when we play Dungeons and Dragons.

**John August:**
And so, last night when you’re playing you were using on this machine and your ability to hang on an app, which is much, much faster.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh my god. And so, did it read faster-

**John August:**
Oh, yes. Faster, yeah.

**Craig Mazin:**
Because normally it would be like wuuuuuuuuh, and now it’s like poink, which is awesome. And my side, because I’m the DM, my side is always going to be the hardest one to run because it’s seeing everything. So, it’s rendering everything all at once all the time. And it’s also showing me all of your lines of sight. So, it’s basically doing five or six times the work that your computer’s doing. Plus we’re running Zoom. It’s great. So, just a huge thumbs up on these suckers. My favorite computer.

**John August:**
On my home office here, I have an iMac which is my main one. But of course, the MacBooks are much faster than my iMac is at this point, which is frustrating. Megana and I both have the M1 MacBook Air, which have been great. They’ve been super-fast and reliable. Again, you don’t appreciate how nice it is to not have your fan run for anything but the battery lasts forever. It’s smart and good. It’s good.

**John August:**
That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by added by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask @johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send the longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have t-shirts and they’re great as well as hoodies, too. You can find my Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes @johnaugest.com. That’s also where you find the Three-Page Challenges that we talked about today. You can find transcripts and can sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptsnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. And starting this week, you can also listen to us on Spotify.

**John August:**
So, if you’re a premium member and want to listen to it through the Spotify app, there are instructions for that. We emailed it to you but you could probably figure it out. It’s not that hard. But if you’re confused, we’ve sent you an email. So, search your email history because we sent you screenshots on how to sign up in Spotify, if you want to listen to the premium feed in your Spotify. Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

**Megana Rao:**
Thank you.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you.

**John August:**
All right. For this bonus segment, this is a question we got from Kyle in New York City.

**Megana Rao:**
I’m an amateur screenwriter who started writing during the pandemic.

**John August:**
We don’t believe the word amateur screenwriter.

**Megana Rao:**
I’m represented but hope to eventually get to the point of being paid for my work. I’ve encountered an issue where I can write really well when I’m excited about a project. But I tend to get bored easily. And once something bores me, it’s nearly impossible for me to find the energy to keep hacking at it. I could be wrong since I’m new to the craft. But I imagine one of the traits that separates amateurs from professionals is the ability to keep going even if you’re not feeling what you’re writing. We can’t all be on 100% of the time.

**Megana Rao:**
Do you have any mental tools or tricks you’d recommend for getting back to a place of energy around a project to make sure you give it its due diligence? What do you do when you need to finish a project but are sick of it?

**John August:**
Kyle, I have to embrace you. You’re the only person who’s ever felt this way. Literally from the moment I start a project to the moment I finished project, I fall more in love with it. I start out really liking it. And I realized, no, I’m deeply, deeply in love with it. This is the best thing I’ve ever written. And I cannot wait to get to it every morning.

**Craig Mazin:**
Do you have more sex with your spouse now than you did when you first met?

**John August:**
100%.

**Craig Mazin:**
Through the roof.

**John August:**
It’s crazy.

**Craig Mazin:**
There’s not enough time in the day and it gets worse year after year.

**John August:**
So, it’s the right equivalent, where I just can’t get my hands off the keyboard. I’m so eager to get back to this project and just keep writing it. I have hypergraphia is really what it is, is that compulsion to write is really this one idea that is just so good. And really everything I’ve ever touched, it’s been that experience.

**Craig Mazin:**
Well, Kyle. So, look, good and bad news. The good news is, yep, you’re like us. You’re like human beings. I don’t know if there’s necessarily anything you can do to get back to that original feeling of excitement. Nor should you need to or want to. Because the original feeling of excitement is a fresh romantic vibe. It means your brain is buzzing because something new has collided into it. The work that we do is to execute carefully and steadily. And that is sometimes rather boring. It’s certainly rigorous. But you’re not going to get that excitement. It’s gone, it’s over. And it will never come back. And like I said last week from beloved Polish poet, even success feels like failure. So, really, this is a goal-oriented process. It is a process process and that you need to learn how to sustain yourself through the process, which is not particularly exciting. But you must be driving toward the goal of finishing.

**Craig Mazin:**
The difference between professionals and amateurs is not that we have the “ability to keep going even if we’re not feeling what we’re writing.” The difference is we’re paid. That’s literally the difference between professionals and amateurs. And it turns out that when you are paid and there are lawyers and contracts, you don’t have the option. You have to do it. And this is actually quite valuable.

**John August:**
There have been times on projects where I’ve just been so frustrated that actually I calculated. This is early in my career when I wasn’t making much money, but I was like, I’m going to calculate how much I am being paid per page. And that’ll get me through this day’s work.

**Craig Mazin:**
But there’s also times where I thought, what would happen if I just gave the money back, every writers had that moment. And lately, sometimes I’ll just think to myself, if I’m in an elevator in a tall building, I’ll just turn to… if I’m with Jacq or Bo and I’ll just say, “Well, if the elevator just plummets, I won’t have to write these episodes,” just get out of some writing, which should be nice. This is the deal.

**Craig Mazin:**
But then, you have moments where you do well. And you will not have those moments until they have happened. They do not happen before they happen. So, you have to do the work to make them happen without having them happen.

**John August:**
So, Kyle’s experiencing intrinsic validation, where he was loving the product, he’s loving doing this because of the excitement about the idea and it was all internally generated. And eventually, it just faded away. And he’s waiting for that moment where there’ll be external forces that will tell him like, “No, no, it’s good. It’s exciting. You’ve done a good job. “And that hasn’t kicked in yet. That’s the reality of being a new person at this.

**John August:**
The other thing I will say is that as you have more experience and no one’s an amateur screenwriter. You’re a newer screenwriter. You don’t have the experience to be able to tell like, “Oh, is this a crush, or is this a possible relationship”, when it comes to a project idea. And so, sometimes you have a crush, like, “Oh my god, I’m so excited about this.”

**John August:**
But Craig and I, you and I both have enough experience to know this is a crush that will pass and I can see what the problem is going to be. And I will fall out of love with this versus there’s some ideas because you’re like, “Oh, that’s a genuinely good idea that I can build a relationship with this project.” This is a thing that can actually sustain and build.

**John August:**
And so, the choice of whether to buckle down or bail, we can make a different calculation because we know how this all goes and we know where this is. But we can only do that because we’ve been in other writing relationships with other projects that know how we react, how projects react. We just know how it all works.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And I think Kyle probably like most people, his relationship with movies and television is he sees finished products. He doesn’t have a finished product. And even worse, he has to dive into every little grain of this thing over and over and over and over again. It becomes mind-numbing. I can be maddening. And wait until you get into the editing bay. And then, you’re really going over and over and over and over.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s just the nature of the gig. It’s very foreign to everyone. I think nobody experiences this for the first time it goes, “Is this process been my whole life?” It’s grueling.

**John August:**
Let’s go back to a word he says. I get bored easily. So, let’s talk about boredom. And so, boredom is it happens when it’s no longer new. It’s no longer exciting. It’s no longer fresh. But also, it’s because you don’t know what to do. It’s not intriguing, or the problems in front of you are not interesting, solvable problems, are actually just difficult problems you have to grind on and get through them.

**John August:**
And so, I would say try to look for ways to make that day’s work less boring. Make some challenges for yourself. How can you approach this scene, this Lego piece, and make this the most interesting Lego piece it can possibly be? And once you tackle that, then you get on the next one, the next one eventually. You might fall back in love with it because you see something in this that you didn’t even see when you were first crushing on it.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Megana, do you have any tricks for yourself when you’re feeling bored or unmotivated?

**Megana Rao:**
I usually have a playlist associated with a project and sometimes listening to that helps, or getting external feedback can help me, I don’t know, relive excitement about certain parts of it. Okay, I have a question for you guys. So, in talking about having a crush on a project versus a long-term relationship. So, I was recently working on a project where I felt like I was banging my head against the wall for so long. And it just felt like endless and I should just walk away from it. Because I’m never going to figure out these problems.

**Megana Rao:**
All of a sudden, it felt like the wall broke open and there was sunlight, and I could see my way out. I’m just confused how I make that differentiation. Do I trust that that’s going to happen always because it happened this time?

**John August:**
I don’t think you can necessarily trust. There’s been projects like that for years. Where I just got to a certain point I just couldn’t quite crack what that was, or that there’s something that I knew was not working quite right. And it just was wrong. And so, even though we have experience with these writing relationships, we can’t know how it’s all going to go or work and how it’s going to really be on the page.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, again, balance. You just wait and hope. But there is a difference, I think between a project where you are stuck but you wish you had the answer, and a project where you stuck because you don’t care what the answer is. And if you’re in that space-

**John August:**
You can stop writing.

**Craig Mazin:**
… it’s over.

**John August:**
Yeah. So, I think the only case you made for finishing that project is if you’re pretty close and you just think you need to have the experience of having finished the things, that makes sense.

**Craig Mazin:**
Which is-

**John August:**
Something.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. There is a resilience that’s required, obviously, to do all of this. But I think if it gets hard, don’t confuse hard with bored. Don’t confuse I think I’m maybe not good enough to do this with bored. Boredom is an all-purpose term for dissatisfaction. But you have to interrogate a little bit why you’re dissatisfied with this. And here’s the tricky part for people who are starting out, a lot of their ideas are bad.

**Craig Mazin:**
And a lot of times, even if the idea is good, their method of executing is bad. So, they should stop because it’s bad. But then, if you don’t finish, you don’t get better. So, balance.

**John August:**
Yeah. You got to work through it. There’s a case we made for finishing those things. The other thing I’ll remind people is that a lot of times, newer screenwriters were always really good at school, for example. They’re always really good writers. And everyone’s like, “Oh, you’re a good writer.” And so, they approach this thing. And they have the sense of like, “I know what good writing is. People tell me I’m a good writer.”

**John August:**
And then, something that’s been comparatively easy for them versus other people, they’re in the middle of it like, “Crap, it’s really hard to write. This is actually exhausting. I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I’m just bad. Or maybe it’s this project.” And you’re just not used to struggling.

**John August:**
And sometimes, what you’re saying is bored, it’s actually you’re just struggling and it’s new and it’s uncomfortable and you’re not used to be uncomfortable writing. But that’s what writing is.

**Craig Mazin:**
And our culture encourages everybody to be a jerk. So, everybody grows up. If you’re interested in film, if you’re interested in TV, perversely, you are encouraged by culture and like-minded people to crap all over everything all the time. So, you become rather convinced that it is easy, because look at all the garbage. This is what Ted Elliott has always called crap-plus-one, your job, you think is to just write one better than all the crap out there.

**Craig Mazin:**
But the truth is, with the rarest of exceptions, if you are a new writer, you are actually not good enough to write the crap. That’s how bad you are. And that’s how hard it is. It’s so much harder than they think. So, when they get into it, there is a cognitive dissonance between this thing that’s supposed to be so simple and how hard it is.

**Craig Mazin:**
And I think maybe the brain convinces you that you’re just bored. Because the only other explanation is, you’re not good enough. But you’re not until you are. And unfortunately, you’re never good enough, because you’re just as good as you could be on that day. You try and get better. And then, it’s over.

**John August:**
I’m thinking about Megana and Megana’s metaphor for you and your writing group has a chance of accountability. And so, where you have to do stuff and that might be actually a humble thing for Kyle to find at some group of people who he can be accountable for. So, he’s actually getting some work done. And he also recognized like everyone is struggling at the same time in the same ways. And he can get a sense of how it all fits. And if you could find the right group that might get him on board.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And you can always pick somebody that if you vibe with that person and say, “Look, we’re going to spend two hours. For one hour, I’m going to talk to you about my problems about this script. And then, for the other hour, you’re going to talk about your problems with the script.” And the only ground rule is that nobody can say, yeah, I thought of that but. Or, yeah, I tried that but. Because that’s just annoying to everybody. Just pretend you didn’t talk it through. Talk everything through.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sometimes just talking makes it clear. If you write alone, you can go deep into your own weird mind and get totally lost and you can confuse feelings with facts.

**Megana Rao:**
One more pitch for writers’ group. There have been times where I’ve gotten so bogged down in the weeds and really unexcited about a project but the people in my writers’ group who have seen it since the inception have reminded me what excited me about it and that can be really helpful.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes, something was there. You had something that made you do all of this. Certainly, Kyle, if you are writing by the seat of your pants and you feel you have a tendency to get bored, I would strongly recommend plotting the whole thing out first. It’s hard to get bored when you know exactly what you’re supposed to write that day,

**John August:**
Yeah, if you had a good outline and then you could really approach how to make this piece the most awesome scene it could possibly be and not going to waste the work, that might help him.

**Craig Mazin:**
Precisely.

Links:

* [WGA Introduces Project Page](https://www.wga.org/members/employment-resources/wgaw-project-page) check out the [pdf here.](https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/members/employment_resources/project_page.pdf)
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/513-writing-for-stars).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 513 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off somewhere in the Canadian wilderness this week, but I am very excited to welcome back a writer whose career we’ve followed from Saving Mr. Banks to 50 Shades of Gray, and the upcoming Venom: Let There Be Carnage. I speak, of course, of Kelly Marcel. Kelly Marcel, welcome back.

**Kelly Marcel:** Hello. Hello.

**John:** It is such a delight. And thank you so much for coming in to fill in for Craig while he’s gone.

**Kelly:** My absolute pleasure.

**John:** So last I spoke with you you were in England I think because you were working on Venom. But I talked to you this week and you are in Louisiana?

**Kelly:** Yes. I’m here in New Orleans which is an incredible city because I have a TV show that’s probably about to shoot here.

**John:** Oh great.

**Kelly:** We’re actually trying to decide whether it’s going to be here or New York. And I happen to have family in New Orleans, so in the pandemic I came here knowing that I was potentially going to be here or New York at the end of the year. And they’re very close to one another.

**John:** So I was surprised and delighted to have you in a closer time zone which makes this much easier to do. But last I texted with you or spoke with you I was asking you a very writerly question in that I had a character who needed to live in a London neighborhood. I needed to know what London neighborhood this specific character would live in. So thank you very much for weighing in on that. Because how am I going to know London neighborhoods if I don’t have great London friends.

**Kelly:** I’ll always help you with anything British-y.

**John:** Excellent. Well, you can help us out on the podcast today because we have a lot to talk through. I want to talk about the experience you and I have had which is a little unusual which is writing with and for an actor, when you know who is going to be in that role and that person is helping you work on the script.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** I also want to talk about translating action on the page to the screen, which is something that you and I have had a lot of experience with and you have had really firsthand experience with both the first and second Venom. So really going from what three pages look like in your script to what the experience is of shooting those pages and producing those.

And in our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk about visas for international writers. We have a blog post that’s up where we asked some writers to contribute their experiences about getting a US work visa as an international writer. And Kelly Marcel has experience on that, too. So I’m going to ask her what she can tell us about that process.

**Kelly:** That’s something I definitely have experience. I’d love to talk about.

**John:** Wonderful. Thank you so much. Unlike the people who want to listen to the back episodes, we have one episode where you and Craig and I were playing this roleplaying game where my character ended up being killed. I don’t think I will die in this episode. But there’s no promises this time.

**Kelly:** That episode was so fun and I’ll also add that we were all quite drunk.

**John:** We were. I think the ideal amount of alcohol for a Scriptnotes recording is like one to 1.5 glasses of wine. More than that was consumed during the recording of that episode.

**Kelly:** Definitely more.

**John:** But first we actually have some news to talk about. So this was in Variety, an article by Kevin Tran, where they’re looking at a report based on how theatrical movies are streaming online. Basically the movies that were supposed to go to the big screens but actually showed up on streaming services, how they really did. And the answer is they seemed to do pretty well. They actually outperformed a lot of the series that were there. And it’s the first kind of insight we’ve had into what these big movies that were supposed to go on the big screen but showed up on the small screen during the pandemic, the numbers they actually generated.

So, with Venom, you have a movie that at this point is planning to come out theatrically, but I’m sure as a producer there were discussions the whole time through about whether you were going to get your theatrical release.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I mean, look, I’ll say that I think that Tom Rothman is really sticking to his guns on this. And I kind of admire for it. I think he’s really invested in preserving and protecting the theatrical experience for audiences. And there are just some movies that you have to see in a room, on a big screen, with a bucket of warm popcorn on your lap. And, you know, he is such a cinephile and a true movie lover that I think he believes in that religiously. And so actually with Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage he has always said it will be a theatrical release.

I mean, obviously the world is changing and we’ve had to move the date a couple of times because of COVID. And we’ll see, you know, if we are able to stick to that. But I kind of love him for really, really, really holding firm on allowing audiences to see this in the theater.

**John:** Well you’ve had experiences earlier on with Cruella. So basically every writer who worked on Cruella has been a Scriptnotes guest, which I’m really proud of. But with Cruella that was both a day-and-date. So people could watch it on Disney+ as a premium entry or they could see it in theaters. And so you had the chance to do both. And you were saying you actually got to see it on a big screen in New Orleans because you got yourself a theater for it.

**Kelly:** We did. And Cruella is actually one of those movies that did well streaming. And so who knows. But I definitely wanted people that I knew to see it on a big screen. And I wanted to see it on a big screen, too. And there is this incredible little one screen movie theater in New Orleans called the Prytania Theater which is actually the oldest operating theater in New Orleans that dates back to 1915. It was the first theater to come back after Katrina. And the only theater that they had for a while. And it’s been made famous in books and it’s just this gorgeous kind of magical place.

And it had been badly hit, you know, during the pandemic because it had had to close as did everything. So, I rented it out for an evening and invited all of – this was during a period where everything was open and high vaccination rates, etc. Invited all of our friends, 50 of them, to come and see the movie on a big screen. And it was so lovely and magical to get to experience it that way in this small theater in this little part of town.

And, again, that’s an experience that can’t be recreated in your home I don’t think. And so I’m really glad that we were able to do that and I hopefully will do it again with Venom 2.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve had a chance to see some movies in the theater since started opening back up. The first thing I saw on a big screen was a test screening of a friend’s movie and that was still like really locked down and everyone was incredibly socially distanced and it was still at the time that we were putting on hand sanitizer a lot.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** But then I got to see A Quiet Place in theaters which was terrific to see there. I saw In the Heights on a giant screen at the Chinese which was just amazing and it’s a movie you want to see on a big screen. And I got to see Free Guy on a big screen, too, which was all terrific. And yet data like this coming out of this report shows that the studios are making some good money, or at least getting good viewership when they put stuff on streaming. So it’s going to be really interesting to see as we move out of this next wave which of these films sort of keep to they’re strictly theatrical and long windows and which ones go back to this 45-day window which seems to be sort of where we’re settling on now, where 45 days after the theatrical release it’s showing up on these services.

It’s really an open question how much we’re going to move back to the pre-pandemic way of releasing movies.

**Kelly:** Is it 45 days after the theatrical release that it goes to streaming? Because I thought it was a much shorter window now between the theatrical release and then putting it on streaming.

**John:** From what I understand it sounds like the Free Guy model was still 45 days, which I think they’re also trying to do for the next Shang-Chi Marvel movie. But I think there’s still open questions for that. And I think it also matters whether it’s free streaming versus the $20 whatever–

**Kelly:** Paid streaming.

**John:** Yeah. The paid streaming. And we haven’t talked a lot about paid streaming on the show, but premium video on demand, which is what Cruella was when it came out there, is a really good deal for you as the screenwriter. You got actual real money on that that you wouldn’t have gotten off of just theatrical.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So it’s an interesting balance for screenwriters as well.

**Kelly:** Yeah. And I was reading that it wasn’t so brilliant actors. I don’t know what the Scarlet thing is with Black Widow. I haven’t really followed it closely, but I’m wondering why it’s not as great for actors because box office bonuses I guess?

**John:** Yeah. Really it comes down to box office bonuses which you and I would probably have in our contract as well, but hers are a lot bigger.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** And so I say the premium video on demand is good for a WGA residual, sort of that automatically calculated thing. But her argument is that by releasing it on streaming and theatrically it lowered how much it could make theatrically and therefore she should be compensated for the money she lost out of that.

**Kelly:** Right. And I think that’s why Netflix just paid Daniel Craig a big bunch of money, right, because he won’t make those theatrical bonuses.

**John:** Those negotiations are going to be tough. And it really comes back down to knowing how many people saw this movie which the studios and streamers have been loath to sort of share. And this report that came out in Variety Premium talks through basically another way to get at those numbers which is doing kind of like what Nielsen does. It’s called T-Vision which is surveying 5,000 US households to see what they’re actually watching. And through that they can see that, oh, Raya and the Last Dragon was a big hit in terms of viewership.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** Or that Luca was a huge hit for viewership, which is not surprising. These are the animated movies that would generally be big family drivers of viewership.

**Kelly:** I’ve been hearing a lot about these short term windows that we were just talking about and wondering actually if that’s going to be good for creators because the shorter the window now between a theatrical release and streaming means that theaters will probably need more content. And so my hope, I guess, is that we see more content being needed to go into theaters. And my hope for that would be smaller indie movies going into these slots and us kind of trying to claw that back a bit.

**John:** It would be fantastic if some of these smaller movies that kind of can only now get a streaming release can find some big screen time, just because there are available screens for it. We’ll see if that happens. It’s going to be challenging. But it’s possible.

You know, if you look back to the rise of indie films in the ‘90s and sort of what happened there, it was because there was capacity. There were actually screens that they could show these on. And so the movies that would have otherwise never made out to other than New York and Los Angeles could actually make it out to deeper markets. And that’s why you have Clerks being able to shown at theaters across America which 10 years earlier would never have happened.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen, but things will definitely change as we move out of this pandemic. And it’s important that we have some people actually finding the data to see who is watching these things because obviously Disney and Netflix and HBO Max know these things but they’re not sharing that.

**Kelly:** Why don’t they share that?

**John:** Because it’s their secret sauce. Because if they were able to show how much people were watching these things you and me and Ryan Reynolds and Tom Hardy would be insisting on a bigger cut of that. [laughs] Which is a natural segue to writing for and with some actors, because this is an experience that you and I have that not a lot of friends do. Because you and I have definitely come into movies for rewrite situations where a script was written and then a star is attached and we have to sort of tailor the part towards that star. And that’s common, but you and I have had the experience of from scratch we are working on a project that we know is going to a certain actor and that actor is involved in the development process, which can be great, but it can also be challenging.

So I thought we might spend a few minutes talking through the pros and cons and best practices for writers who find themselves in that situation. For you Tom Hardy was a friend from way back, from way back in London days, right?

**Kelly:** Mm-hmm. Tom and I have known each other for nearly 20 years.

**John:** And so when it came time to work on something with him, because you came in on the first Venom, but it’s really Venom 2 was the first time you were coming in from scratch. What is that relationship like? What is that discussion like? Because he obviously knows a lot about the character, but you know a lot about the character and you know a lot about writing. How did you first sort of approach that process of figuring out how you’re going to do the sequel?

**Kelly:** Well it’s important to know that Tom and I have always been collaborators. So how we came together is he was setting up a theater company in London. He asked me to come and write for that theater company. So we’ve always worked together in this capacity. So we know it very well. Venom wasn’t the first thing that I came into rewrite specifically for him. We worked on Bronson together. We worked on Mad Max together. And he’s always been an extremely creative powerhouse. He’s always had ideas.

So when it came to Venom 1, having worked with him before I knew coming in that he would have a lot of ideas and that he would have creative input, which he does. And, you know, Venom 1 was kind of a scramble and there was a preexisting script and we were rewriting on set. And we were kind of like making that movie as we made that movie. And kind of finding out what it was along the way. So when it came to Venom 2 we really knew that it had this very strange tone, sort of this balance between comedy, kind of horror, and typical Marvel action. And we kind of knew as well what the audience had loved about Venom 1. And so we very much wanted to double down on those things.

Tom immediately sort of came to the table and said, “Look I’ve got an idea for the story for Venom 2 and a character that I would love to bring into Venom 2.” And we kind of started there. And we were breaking the story together over FaceTime because I was in LA and he was in London. So, poor guy was doing some very, very late nights. And as we started to break the story together it became obvious that this was half his story and he needed a Story by credit. And so we immediately kind of made sure that he would have that credit, which is unusual for actors. Although I think Ryan has one, right?

**John:** He does. And so he actually had a writing credit on Deadpool stuff before then. So as we started this project we’re working on now we actually negotiated for him to be a writer on the project as well as being an actor and a producer from the start, which was important for this.

But my actual first experience with writing with and for an actor was on the first Charlie’s Angels. So Drew Barrymore was attached to star and to produce. And with that, you know, she had a clear sense of the tone we were going for and really the initial conversations were all about tone and what it should feel like. And so that collaboration was very much a let’s describe the world. Let’s paint what this ultimate movie should feel like. It wasn’t so plot intensive. It wasn’t so down to the nitty gritty details of this thing. It ultimately got there, but in the blue sky stage of it she was really important because I would have probably written a different movie if it hadn’t been Drew Barrymore involved. The tone of it would have been really different. And the vision for what we’re headed for.

So that is definitely a huge advantage to having that actor, that performer, involved from the very start is because you can sort of sense what it is you’re headed towards. Having a director onboard obviously early on is also a similar kind of experience because you know what they are aiming for in terms of the movie they want to shoot and in terms of what they actually feel like they can deliver. Challenging to have both, in my experience, having both the actor and the director onboard, because their visions may not match and then whose lead you’re following can be really difficult.

**Kelly:** Yeah, that can get very confusing. And very tricky because you’re very much in the middle as the writer at that point. I think we were very lucky on Venom 2 because we sort of had the freedom to write the script first before we had attached a director. So when Andy Serkis came onboard he came onboard with a full script. And that was kind of great that there weren’t kind of two voices. Although Ruben Fleischer on the first movie and Tom I think saw the movie very similarly, so we didn’t really have any of those problems on Venom 1. But it can be like that. I’ve experienced that elsewhere and that can be very tricky.

**John:** Let’s talk some other cons of the actor being involved. Because there have been times where I’ve had conversations where someone is objecting to a thing or feeling nervous about a thing and it can be hard to suss out whether are they talking as the producer of the film, are they talking as the actor in the film. Are they talking about this character as a character or as someone they’re going to be playing? And that balance between there can be really challenging. They very reasonably see everything in the story through the eyes of their character because that’s the character they’re going to be playing. But it can challenging to sort of get them to focus on this is everything else that’s around this.

And I don’t know if you’ve had that experience, not necessarily with Tom, but on other projects which you had to come on and help. It can be challenging as the writer who is responsible for the whole movie to make sure that their focus on their own character doesn’t dominate things.

**Kelly:** Yeah, absolutely. There have definitely been rewrites on other projects where I’ve experienced that. With Tom it’s more about I think things that he thinks are going to be really fun to play. And you’re like but does it fit in the movie? And also don’t forget that Tom is seeing through the lens of two characters, not just one.

**John:** Yes. Because he’s playing both himself as the human, but also playing Venom, the actual alien symbiote who has a completely different personality.

**Kelly:** Completely different personality, which by the way, this is one of the pros of working particularly with this actor is that when I write a scene Tom is literally there on FaceTime performing it back to me, as both Venom and Eddie. It’s quite extraordinary actually watching him do it. He does both voices and he plays against himself. But it means that I immediately know if those lines are working. Or if they don’t, which is an incredible gift.

But, yeah, there are definitely things that are like oh you want to do that because that’s just really fun kind of like action, but actually you know what why not put things in that are fun? Why not go to work and actually have a great day because you got to do something so crazy and amazing? I have to say that Sony were incredibly generous with us in the freedom that they gave us to play in this Venom sandbox and this Venom 2 movie I think you’ll watch it thinking oh my god they had so much fun doing that.

**John:** Yeah. You’re making the kind of movie where you really want to have that feeling. And so that’s great that you could actually do that.

Let’s talk some downsides of writing with and working with actors or with the star. Because – and this is not necessarily about, well it can be about their involvement in the writing, but also one of the blessings of big stars is that people want to make movies with big stars. And they’re attached and that movie will get made more likely. One of the challenges of big stars is that they are so busy and they’re offered so much that the project you’re working on could get pushed and pushed and pushed until you just don’t know where you are on their dance card.

Obviously it’s better with something like this where he is the main star and there’s a huge priority to make it. And having him invested in the writing of it probably pushes it further ahead. But it’s always a thing I warn newer writers about who are like, oh, I have this star attached. I’m like, wow, that’s exciting, and could be a challenge when Leonardo DiCaprio has 10 movies stacked up that he can pick between.

**Kelly:** Right. So many friend of mine, directors, big directors and big writers who have big stars attached to their movies and have had them attached to their movies for years. And their movies keep getting pushed and pushed and pushed because these people are very much in demand. I mean, you know, we just to push a little bit on a TV show that I’m doing because it has a very, very big star in it. And he got offered a massive movie. And that movie is very – it’s not Tom – but you know that movie is very appealing.

And so he’s going to do that first and it pushes the entire shoot. We’re really lucky that he’ll definitely come onto ours next, but I’ve seen movies sit around for years.

**John:** Oh absolutely. Things that are on the edge of production and it’s about one actor’s availability, or suddenly this movie is running long and then you’re going to lose the other actor because of this thing. It becomes really challenging. And so having an actor attached is a blessing, but it can also be a curse. And you’re always asking yourself is it worth it. When is it worth it? And when do you need to move on to another actor to sort of get the thing to happen?

**Kelly:** I know. I know. And that’s always such a tricky decision because you’ve lived with the idea of this person in your head. And it’s very hard to let that go. I would say as well the power of having a big actor like Tom or Leonardo or anybody really of that caliber, and Ryan, particularly if they are involved in the creation of your movie it means that they are really, really, really attached to that movie and invested in it. And so they protect the work. And when you have a star that’s protective of the script then, you know, you’re in a really great position.

**John:** They’re invested in the movie, but they’re also invested in the movie’s success, which is hugely important, too. Because having a giant star in a movie that they don’t really care about or like does you no good when it comes time to promote the movie, when it comes time to do everything else. When you have the star who has been in there since day one making the movie work when it comes time to promote it they will promote the hell out of it. And that really pays off. I mean, there’s a reason why Ryan Reynolds is sort of marketer of the year. He’s really good and works really hard at pushing things out there in the world. And that is worth more than anything in terms of the publicity and promotion you’re able to get out of them is crucial.

**Kelly:** Yeah. He’s particularly brilliant at it.

**John:** Yeah. And not every actor is going to be that way. But let’s talk about one thing which is that I think there’s this perception that if you write something for a specific actor then that role is inevitably locked to that actor. In my experience there have been so many times where I’ve worked on something where really it was tailored for one actor and then that person can’t do it and someone else does it and it works brilliantly.

**Kelly:** Yeah.

**John:** And in some ways just the fact that one actor could play a thing makes the character work enough that you could swap somebody else in and it actually just does brilliantly.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. I mean, that happens all of the time. I don’t know about you, John, but for me it’s really helpful to have somebody in mind when you’re writing. I really love to kind of plaster my walls with pictures of who I think this character is, whether it’ll actually be that actor or not, and think about cadences and tones of voices and facial expressions and body movement and the whole sort of being of a person as I’m putting the words that they’re going to speak and the actions that they’re going to do on a page.

I did it on Saving Mr. Banks. 50 Shades of Gray. And it really, really helps me to have that visual in my head to really know who it is. And then, you know, inevitably it doesn’t end up being that actor. But I still know who that character is having sort of seen them play it out in my head if you know what I mean.

**John:** But I think it also translates to the page. There’s something about the scripts you read that really work you sort of feel like you saw the movie. If you ask two years later did you see that movie it’s like I’m not sure. Wait, did I just read it? Because with really good scripts you feel like you saw it. And it’s because there’s just a consistency of that character and you really felt like you saw an actor in that role even though there was no actor. It was just the words on the page.

So, yeah, I think it’s great to pick actors you want to be in this thing, even if they’re unrealistic choices for the small indie drama you’re going to make.

**Kelly:** Of course.

**John:** Just having the consistency of voice and tone and body movement and just approach can be really, really helpful. And so I always – I do sort of cast out my movies as I’m writing them knowing that they’re not likely to be those actors in the final roles.

**Kelly:** I think you should think big because I think those big actors that you know so well are the ones that you can imagine more easily as you write these things because you’ve seen them do a million different movies. You’ve seen the way that they walk, the way that they talk, and different characters that they’ve been able to play.

**John:** Julia Roberts has played a ton of different characters, but I do have a sense of how her face works and how her energy is. And it’s useful to be able to write to that. Same with Will Smith. I’ve gotten to work on two movies with Will Smith and I do have a sense of what is going to be funny coming out of him. But if it’s somebody else put in that role I think it will still work because there’s a consistent thought and approach to it.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know and that’s how it is with Tom. It’s really like a shorthand writing for him now because I’ve seen him do so many different things. And I kind of know his cadences and his tones and how something is going to come out of his mouth and his body as he moves it. And so it’s really a joy.

**John:** So you were working on the script from the very start and so you delivered a script, you got a director, and all that worked. But I suspect there was also a lot of writing on the set, or things that would come up. What was the relationship between you and Tom writing stuff during production?

**Kelly:** Well, it’s a really unique experience on Venom. So how Venom works is Tom starts his day in the makeup trailer obviously and then he comes onto set. And the first thing that he does is record Venom. So we have this sound guy, Patrick, who basically plays Venom back to Tom through his ear on the set. So Tom has an ear wig. And the Venom lines, which we treat, so it sounds like Venom in his head.

**John:** Oh that’s great.

**Kelly:** Are played to him so that he has himself to kind of play off of on the set. And we’ll have Venom in our cans. So everybody can hear what Tom is hearing. And then Andy will have a mic and I will have a mic. And those mics are directly connected to Tommy’s earpiece. No one else can hear what we’re saying to Tom through his earpiece.

As you know, it’s all very well sitting reading a script and reading out the lines, but you stand it on its feet and you start moving it around a set and it somehow just doesn’t work because now you’re up on your feet and now you have to put physical movement into this scene, or the blocking doesn’t fit the line, or there’s a million things that cannot work about a scene because it’s now suddenly a physical, living, breathing thing. And Tom really is a perfectionist and he wants every scene and every line to be the best line that it can be. And there’s a lot of comedy in Venom as well. So we’re always trying to beat ourselves. We’re always trying to beat the line. And so the luxury of him having this earpiece means that he has this incredible ability to follow you live in a scene and respond if you jump in with new lines for him. So, you can keep the camera rolling and I can throw new lines into his earpiece as Venom, which he’ll respond to, or give him Eddie lines so he’ll take a beat and then he’ll start the scene again with the new Eddie lines.

And we got so used to it on Venom 1 that it was kind of like second nature. But on Venom 2 when we had Andy come in and we had Bob Richardson who is this incredible DP. He’s Quentin Tarantino’s DP. Incredible.

**John:** An icon.

**Kelly:** A new producer coming in. They were like oh my god how is he doing that? And Andy would be able to say, “Tom, walk over to that draw and open it.” And then we’d plant things in there for him so that he had surprises and was kept on his toes through scenes. I really have never seen another actor do it. And weirdly there is this scene in Bronson where he does play two characters. He plays a nurse and himself and he turns his face to the makeup side of the nurse when he’s doing the nurse lines, and the Charlie Bronson side of his face when he’s doing the Bronson lines. And he did that all in one take and it’s incredible.

And so when we came to Venom it really reminded me of that scene in Bronson. And I was like, yeah, I know he can do this. Like I know he has this unique ability to switch between characters right there in the moment live and can take lines from you while he’s acting. It’s extraordinary.

**John:** That sounds great. Now my question is as you’re doing these improv bits where you’re changing stuff around, you have to make decisions about I think that worked or I think that didn’t work just in terms of coverage, right? Probably you’re doing some of that stuff in a master, but then you have to decide which of those things worked well enough that we want to make sure we get coverage on that. Was that ever a factor you had to remember, oh, we need to get more of that so we can actually make that work? Or are these really master decisions?

**Kelly:** You know, it’s sort of a bit of both. If something is really, really working and we know that it got the right response on the set then that’s the thing that we’re going to come in and collect. We’re going to collect as much as we possibly can. And so if we’ve shot something in a master and we’ve shot it a bunch of different ways and we’re going to try and shoot it again in the close-ups with the different lines as well. And he’ll just roll those out.

And by the way sometimes it isn’t live through his mic. Sometimes a scene isn’t working and you know how this goes. Then it’s a huddle in video village. Everybody is around the laptop. And we’re all there scrambling to fix a scene. Often Tom and I will write a scene three different ways and know that we’re going to go in there and shoot it three different ways and then decide having done it which one we think works best.

It’s quite fast paced this shooting of these kinds of movies. And we do find the time to be able to do it different ways.

**John:** Cool. So Venom is of course an action-comedy, but the action part of it is incredibly important, too. So I thought we might take a look at the script for the first Venom and take a look at a couple of pages early on in the first act of this. And just sort of see what an action sequence looks like on the page and talk through sort of how that translates to what we’re finally seeing on the screen. So, we’ll start with what was there in Courier and what that becomes on the day. And then where the choices that have to happen in post and sort of figuring out what the final version of this is.

So, we’re going to put a link in the show notes to just these three pages, page 31 to page 33 of the Venom script. And let’s talk through what’s happening here.

In the first movie Eddie is finding Maria, this journalist he’s been looking for. She’s in this detention cell.

**Kelly:** She’s actually the homeless–

**John:** That’s the homeless person. That’s right. So she is in this detention cell and clearly something is very wrong with her. He’s trying to break her out of this and she is actually infected by this thing we’re going to find out more about. And Eddie is also infected and doesn’t sort of know it at this point.

The action writing here is really good. And it’s kind of dense on the page and yet I’m never struggling to get through it. And all caps. You’re using italics. You’re using underlines to sort of keep us focused on what is important happening moment by moment.

“Maria LEAPS ON EDDIE, knocks him down and with surprising strength, PUNCHES HIM repeatedly in the chest and face. Maria, atop Eddie, wraps her hands around his throat, CHOKING HIM. Eddie struggles, gasping for air—“

That’s all one paragraph and yet it doesn’t feel like too much. And it probably is an accurate reflection of the amount of time we would be seeing onscreen.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So talk to us about this sequence. Were you on set for this sequence?

**Kelly:** I was on set. I was on set every day.

**John:** Every day. Tell me what you can remember about this as you wrote it, then the discussions with blocking and how this came from just the page to talking with stunts, talking with director, figuring out how to shoot this thing. Figuring out what you’re actually going to build here. Can you just describe this environment and the decisions that went into shooting this action sequence, the stuff that’s happening here in this complex?

**Kelly:** Yes. Well this was an incredible set that was built with all these kind of lasers and crazy strobe lights. And so as you can see on the page none of that is indicated. That’s all done by our incredible production designer imagining what this thing will end up looking like and working with Ruben to build that set.

We also had the amazing DP Matthew Libatique on this movie who with this movie kind of kept the camera moving the whole time. He really brought an energy to the entire movie by constantly keeping it moving. So we knew that Matty would be moving the camera around during the scene. We knew that he had all of these strobe lights going. And crazy colors. And then we also had this brilliant actress, Melora Walters, playing Maria, who worked really well with Tom.

And so they’re friends in the movie, so they have a history prior to this scene. He cares about her. We’ve established that. And as we started to talk through this scene we realized that she having been infected would be incredibly powerful. And completely different to the Maria that Eddie already knows. So we knew that there would be shock, fear. You know, Eddie is not your typical action hero either. The way that Tom decided to play him was not a tall, this big–

**John:** Dashing knight. He’s sort of not mousy but he has a–

**Kelly:** He’s scared.

**John:** Yeah. He’s scared. He’s a coward.

**Kelly:** Yeah. He was like the reality of being taken over by an alien is that you will be completely terrified. And not know what is going on. And so he gets into this very physical fight with this woman who is incredibly strong. And of course she’s winning. Because Eddie Brock is a journalist, you know. And so we definitely wanted to play with that. We definitely wanted him not to be able to win easily. We knew that Matty wanted to move in and out of whatever the action was taking place in this scene. And then once he had been infected by the symbiote we really wanted to see a complete change in Eddie’s physicality and to see that suddenly he can climb up walls. Suddenly he can run faster than he has ever run before. And climb a great, big, huge tree as well.

And so in this scene as we were writing this scene these were all thoughts that have been right there at the beginning of writing this script. And I’ll add that Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg also wrote this script. And so some of this scene preexisted and some of it didn’t. And so this is definitely a mismatch of all of our writing, as is the whole script. And those guys are amazing and they’re actually really brilliant at action.

And so I took a lot of inspiration from action that they had written for this movie, because I loved the way they write action. It’s concise. It’s clear. I really think they’re absolutely brilliant at it.

**John:** Some things I want to point out that are good on the page, too, is on page 32 about two-thirds of the way down, “The Guards drop. Eddie stands there for a moment, incredulous at his own fighting skills– “Did I just do that?!” In quotation marks and italics. And it’s a thing we talk about on Scriptnotes a lot is that sometimes you have to sort of speak the thought because that is a very playable moment. So he doesn’t need to say that, but we can see that in his face. But if can see it on his face it needs to actually be in the script. So it was so important to put that there.

**Kelly:** Yeah. You’ll see a lot of WTFs in the descriptive passages of Venom 2 if we ever get to release that script. Yeah, I really like to do that. I think it’s really helpful for the actor. I think it’s really helpful for the reader. And it’s just very clear and concise. Rather than writing a whole sentence about he can’t believe he just did that.

**John:** So let’s talk about, we’ll just go on this sequence with Maria and Eddie, just that sort of first moment. So this is where he’s breaking her out of the cage and then the first time the symbiote is sort of going into Eddie here.

On the day, or on the days because this was probably more than a single day of shooting, talk to us about how you figure out the blocking for who is going to be where. Was all that blocking done in advance? How much was handled on the set as people were first showing up? What was the decision process there?

**Kelly:** Well obviously this is stunts. So, first of all Melora is a very athletic actress. So all the way back to casting you’re thinking about casting somebody that can do the physicality of this part. It’s very important. So then Melora is brought in as is Tom and as is Tom’s double, Jacob, into fight rehearsals. And so a lot of this blocking is done not on the day but weeks prior. When you’re looking at an action sequence it isn’t just blocked in the morning and then you shoot it. It’s very thoroughly and carefully and safely worked out weeks in advance. And so what will happen generally is you will have stunt coordinators with their own stunt people doing sort of a practice version of the scene which you will then see. They will film, they’ll show it to you, or you can see it live if we all happen to be in the same building.

And then once that is signed off on by the director you, and producers, you will then bring the actors in to see what that scene is. And generally Jacob and Tom who have worked together for years, and years, and years will have their own ideas that come from character. And then they will kind of incorporate those ideas into the fight sequence. And then Melora will be there also with her ideas and then they will start to work this thing through, beat by beat. But it will take days, maybe even a week to really fully flesh out this scene from top to bottom and the fight from top to bottom which is always done in a kind of slow-mo, you know, up until the last minute when you can move it to real speed.

Then once that’s worked out they’ll bring it onto the set. And that’s when we’ll show Matty and the rest of the crew what this is going to look like so that he can then light it and decide where his camera is going to be. And obviously that’s very important because you’re in an action sequence. You know, you have to think about safety all the time. And so Matty needs to see where he can get in and where he can get out with his camera.

And we’ll run through that and block it a couple of times in the morning and then hopefully we’ve added the dialogue to it as well. And then we’ll shoot it and we’ll shoot it a bunch of different ways. And this scene is how many pages, three pages. This probably took us – I think this probably took us two full days to shoot.

**John:** There’s a lot happening here. And there’s visual effects happening here as well.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** There’s the symbiote, there’s the goo. Stuff like that is happening, too. And so on a production design decision there was probably a discussion of visual effects in terms of like what set you’re building versus what’s going to be virtual beyond a certain point. But then with all the creature effects what’s practical, what is CG, how you’re going to do this, where is the handoff between this, how much is makeup on her before she sort of fully goes out obviously. And very early on in visual development you had to figure out how you’re going to handle Eddie and Venom and the manifestation of Venom, what is that all going to look like. So all that had to happen, which is informing the decisions you’re making as you get there to shoot just this one small sequence at the top of this bigger action sequence.

**Kelly:** Yes. You have all of our effects people in there as well. There are these incredible things they can do where they sort of bring in these iPads but place Venom in a scene so you can look at the iPad and see Venom moving around the scene even though he isn’t actually there in real life. And it’s kind of crazy, but obviously we have fake Venoms and, you know, all kinds of stuff that–

**John:** You probably have folks who were in the costumes and the little tracking balls and things like that, too, for placement. So there’s lot of tools there at your disposal.

**Kelly:** Complete hysteria when the tongue gets brought in, because you have this enormous silicon Venom tongue. Yeah, and that gem really causes a little bit of shutdown on the set. It’s hilarious.

**John:** So I bring all this up because we don’t talk very much about the nuts and bolts details of shooting action sequences because it all started with the writing and then it goes into all these other decisions and yet it’s so important that you are there along with director and Tom who has been involved from the start to remember like, oh that’s right, this action sequence is actually serving a story purpose that goes all the way back to the script you started writing. And that can be one of the things I’ve found to be frustrating sometimes working on big action movies is that you sort of forget what was the actual story point we were trying to tell in this action sequence and it’s so important that you’re there to help remind those folks.

And you’re reminding them again as you go into post. Because you’ve shot this thing 15 different ways but with that same footage one editor could make a sequence that works a certain way. A different editor would make a completely different sequence. The thing we learn as writers working with editors is how transformative a skilled editor can be on the exact footage, the exact same thing that we saw being shot.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. Look, you’ve always got to be pushing story as well. But you can’t have an action sequence for an action sequences sake. And obviously we’ve seen that in movies. But this is actually a really sad moment in the movie. It’s a really upsetting moment. She dies and she’s his friend. And she infects him. This is the moment that he gets Venom. So it’s a very important scene within an action sequence. But the story is still the most important thing in these three pages.

**John:** Absolutely. So, Kelly, thank you so much for talking us through Venom, both sort of the initial kind of thinking about it, but also the really nuts and bolts of shooting stuff. It’s really cool to get that full education.

**Kelly:** Oh, my pleasure. I could talk about Venom all day.

**John:** All right. Now it is time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing is a really useful but useless thing called Meet the Ipsums. So if you’ve ever done graphic design you’re probably used to Lorem ipsum text which is fake Latin that you put in as text for layouts. And so it’s just gibberish Latin that takes the place of stuff so you’re not actually reading real copy. You’re reading fake copy. And so Lorem ipsum is fine and good. But my friend Nima pointed me to a site called Meet the Ipsums which is alternate Ipsums. It’s bogus text you can put in that’s in different flavors.

And so my favorite one is called Corporate Ipsum. It’s done by Cameron Brister and SquarePlan. And it’s ridiculous and it’s just so funny. So here’s an example of a Corporate Ipsum. “Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews. Iterative approaches to corporate strategy foster collaborative thinking to further the overall value proposition. Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation via workplace diversity and empowerment.”

So it’s just paragraphs and paragraphs of nonsense boilerplate corporate nonsense. And I just love it. I just love that it exists. I love that someone took the time to actually write it and make a website so we can download it and stick it in our layouts.

We’re working on Highland for the iPad and so we have a lot of screens where we have to have bogus text in it. And it’s just been a joy to kind of half-read this in all the different Highland versions we’re working on.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I looked at it and it kind of exploded my brain. I was like oh god. I don’t know what this is.

**John:** And there’s all sort of other weird flavors, too. So you can just find something that fits the project you’re working on. Kelly, you got a One Cool Thing for us?

**Kelly:** I do have a One Cool Thing. It’s called the Loóna App. Well I guess you’ll put the link up. And it won the Apple Design Awards. And I don’t know about you, or anybody else, but I’ve found this past year, year and a half, a little bit challenging. And I’ve been going through this weird thing where I’ve been waking up at 2 and staying awake till 4.

**John:** Yeah, that’s me.

**Kelly:** What is that? It’s bizarre.

**John:** It may be the changing of seasons a bit of that, too. But, yeah, I’ve definitely felt that. Especially this last couple weeks. So yeah.

**Kelly:** I just haven’t been able to figure it out. Anyway, I was looking at meditation apps and sleep apps and I came across this thing called Loóna which is basically a sleep scape. And I like to do it in the dark. So I turn the lights off and I load the sleep scape and they basically tell you a story as you find these particular things in the sleep scape that they’ve drawn for you that is beautiful, by the way, absolutely gorgeous. They’ve designed for you. And you find each thing that they’re talking about and you tap it and it sort of comes alive.

And at the end you have this beautiful landscape that you’ve created. But you’ve also been lulled into this very kind of sleepy state. And so it’s really working for me. I think it’s beautiful. There’s one that is set in Brooklyn that I think is my favorite. And I love that story. And it’s just gorgeous.

**John:** That’s great. Previously on Scriptnotes we’ve talked about the sleep casts that are part of the Head Space App, which are deliberately so kind of boring. They cram so many details that your brain just sort of gives up and you fall asleep. But this seems very, very cool, too. I’m eager to try it out. Are you doing this before you go to bed or if you wake up at two in the morning?

**Kelly:** I’ve been doing it before I go to bed and it’s been helping me not wake up at two o’clock in the morning.

**John:** That’s what you want.

**Kelly:** That’s what you want.

**John:** Hooray. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is a classic outro by our own Matthew Chilelli. But 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 shorter questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Kelly, I don’t know if you check Twitter. Are you on Twitter?

**Kelly:** I am. I very rarely check it. But I am @missmarcel.

**John:** All right. We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We have our anniversary.

**Kelly:** Ah, t-shirts.

**John:** Are you wearing your t-shirt?

**Kelly:** I want a t-shirt.

**John:** Oh, well we’ll send you a t-shirt because we have our 10th Anniversary t-shirt. Our 10th Anniversary is next week. We’re so excited. So you can wear your 10th Anniversary t-shirt as you listen to the podcast.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting where we talk about writing things. It 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. You can listen to Kelly and Craig and I play fiasco and get a little too drunk, if that’s appealing. And other episodes where Kelly Marcel has been wise as always.

Kelly, thank you so much for joining us here on Scriptnotes. It’s so great to chat with you again.

**Kelly:** Oh, it’s so nice. So nice. It feels like it’s been forever.

**John:** It has been too, too long. So we won’t have you gone for so long.

**Kelly:** Yes, please don’t. It was great.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, we’re back. So Kelly Marcel, if people couldn’t guess by your accent you are not from the United States.

**Kelly:** I am not from the United States.

**John:** So how did you become legally eligible to work here in the United States? I assume you’re not just sneaking in.

**Kelly:** No, I’m not. I’m actually allowed to be here. So I did the visa application. I’ve been here for nearly a decade. Initially I was here on an O1 visa and now obviously I have a green card. But it is a real process. And the O1 was a lot. It’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of time and can be very stressful.

And so I think the O1 is the one that you get if you have extraordinary abilities.

**John:** So not like Venom, but extraordinary abilities as a writer, as an artist, as a unique talent.

**Kelly:** You have to prove that only you can do the thing that you need the visa to do. And, of course, with writing it is very specific to your voice, so only I can write what I write. And so with the O1 I think I had actually – had I been nominated for a BAFTA at that point? Because that really helps as well if you have any kind of nominations or awards or stuff like that. I can’t remember whether I had it or not.

But what I did have was Terra Nova. It had been sold here in the states. And another show that I had at Showtime. And I was very lucky in that I had an incredibly famous producer on Terra Nova and was able to get a letter of recommendation from Mr. Spielberg. And so that kind of did it for me on the O1.

But I’ve written those letters for other people as well. And I’m certainly not that person. And those letters have worked as well. Where you talk about somebody’s extraordinary ability. You talk about how you know them in the industry. And kind of just how brilliant and unique they are. And so that’s one way to come into the United States to work.

**John:** We get so many questions at the website about working in the US as an international writer that we decided to reach out to a bunch of our colleagues who are international writers and ask them if they could anonymously tell us about their journey and their experience getting that O1 visa which seems to be the visa that almost everybody is using to get.

Some writers will come here on student visas. And if you’re here on a student visa there’s ways you can get an extra year after your student visa which is super helpful because then you can actually get work experience and get those connections so you can actually gather together all the materials and recommendations you need to get that O1 visa.

The biggest piece of advice we got from everybody is that you have to have a lawyer do it. Because it’s just not a thing a person can do. How did you find a lawyer? Was it something that the producers you were working for could steer you towards? What was your process of finding an immigration lawyer?

**Kelly:** It was London agents, Casarotto, who have a ton of British writers who were working in the states. And this was a lawyer that they had used a number of times. I’ll email you his name so that anyone can call him if they’re looking for someone to represent them in getting a visa. He is brilliant. And he actually got me my green card, too, which was a much different process. It was actually easier to go from the O1 to the green card.

**John:** Tell us about that, because I don’t have a great sense of how green cards work.

**Kelly:** I got my green card as a result of having – so I had my O1 – I think you can have the O1 for is it three years?

**John:** And it has to be renewed every three years apparently.

**Kelly:** Yes, I think it’s three years. So it was coming to the end of my three years. You know, I was very much living in Los Angeles at the time in the house that we did Fiasco in. It was time to either renew or get a green card. And I decided to get a green card, or try to get a green card. You know, that was when I had had the BAFTA nomination and at the time I was doing 50 Shades of Gray and so quite high profile work.

And I think Alan, who is my lawyer, Alan Klein, I think really didn’t have much of a problem moving the O1 into a green card. You do have to go for these sort of in-person interviews where they ask you all sorts of questions about what you’re doing in the US. With the O1 you actually have to be in your home country to be able to get that visa. So you have to go to an American embassy. You have to have your passport stamped in my case in the UK. With the green card you don’t have to return to your country to get that done. You can do it from within the states.

It took about, I think it probably took about eight months for the visa to turn into the green card. I know it’s taking so much longer during the pandemic. I know a ton of people whose visas have been kind of stalled because of what’s going on in the world right now. So, I know it’s much, much, much more difficult unfortunately.

**John:** Now with your green card situation can studios hire you just like any American writers? Is there anything different that a studio needs to do to hire you as a writer with a green card?

**Kelly:** No, nothing. I’m now a permanent resident of the US. Well, you have ten years on your green card. And then after that you either apply to become a citizen, or you renew – I think you renew your green card. But I think if you’ve been here ten years they like you to then decide to become–

**John:** To officially become a US citizen. So at that point you’ll be on Venom 9. You’ll have a pretty big work history there and things will be set.

**Kelly:** I think it’s going to be OK. I think it’s going to be OK.

**John:** And one thing we should clarify. Sometimes I know folks who deal with casting. And there’s a process for getting actors over here for a movie, which is a little bit different than the other things. And so the advice we’re giving is for people who want to work as writers. There are other ways, sneaky ways, to do things if you’re just coming in for one thing. But it’s not quite the same process.

**Kelly:** No, it isn’t. And also, look, I would also say the pandemic has changed a lot. You know, before I would have said you have to be in LA. You absolutely have to because you do the water tour and there are so many in-person meetings. But I think the world has changed.

You know, I have a great friend, brilliant screenwriter Jack Thorne, who has a very, very active American career, but he lives in the UK, and always has, and has never moved to Los Angeles. And has continued to work consistently in America without needing a visa or a green card because he doesn’t live or work within the US.

**John:** That’s a really good point. Because I think coming out of this pandemic it became clear that needing to actually go in to sit in a room to talk with people is so much less important than it was even for you and Tom working on this script. That was a FaceTime conversation. So it was challenging to be in different time zones, but it could absolutely work.

And I think are there some advantages to being in Los Angeles at the start of your career? Yes. Is it essential? No. And certainly not as essential as it was even ten years ago.

**Kelly:** And maybe that’s different for TV writers and as writer’s rooms start to come back then I would say that may be different. But definitely for movie writing I don’t think you need to be in LA anymore.

**John:** Well Kelly Marcel I’m glad you were in LA for a time so I at least got to know you here while you were in Los Angeles. And drink too much wine at your house.

**Kelly:** I mean, having said that, I’ll always have to come in and out of Los Angeles, so I will always have a place there. But I just think for new writers and people worrying about whether that’s something they need to do, they should worry less.

**John:** Sounds good. Kelly, thanks so much for your guidance here.

**Kelly:** Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Links:

* [Original Movies Are Becoming Streaming’s Most Popular Content, Led By Disney+](https://variety.com/vip/original-movies-are-becoming-streamings-most-popular-content-led-by-disney-1235037636/) by Kevin Tran for Variety
* [Foreign Writers on Getting a Visa](https://johnaugust.com/2021/getting-a-visa)
* [Venom Excerpt](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/venom-excerpt.pdf)
* [Meet the Ipsums](https://meettheipsums.com/)
* [Loóna Sleep App](https://loona.app/)
* [Kelly Marcel](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0545150/) and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/missmarcel)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast), check out our special [10th Anniversary Shirts!](https://cottonbureau.com/products/for-all-time#/10278066/tee-men-standard-tee-military-green-tri-blend-s)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael O’Konis ([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/513standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/notes-on-notes).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 399 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, this afternoon Craig and I did something different. We went over to Amblin and spoke to a group of about 30 development executives to discuss what it feels like as a writer to get notes. And to offer them suggestions for how to give notes that will actually achieve what they want.

In many ways this episode reminds me most of Episode 99 where we sat down with therapist Dennis Palumbo to talk about psychotherapy for screenwriters and the weird ways that writers process emotion. In the first half you’ll hear me and Craig sort of giving a presentation. Then we open up for discussion with the whole group. Enjoy.

Ah, so nice. So this is theoretically going to be Episode 399 of our show. 399 episodes of our show, which is crazy – crazy, crazy. And on one of these episodes Craig proposed you know what we should go in and talk to studio executives about how they give notes because we as people who get notes a lot could give them insights in how to give notes. And so Craig made this offer. Someone took us up on this offer. We went and talked to some folks at Disney.

**Craig Mazin:** Yep.

**John:** It was a good conversation. A much smaller conversation than this group. Ben, thank you for bringing us in here to talk with this larger group about our notes on notes. Because usually we’re coming in here to hear these notes and we are filled with sort of this emotional response sometimes to these notes and we’re trying to figure out how to do them.

But I thought if we talked through the process of giving notes and hearing notes we might honestly be all able to do this a little bit better. So that’s the impetus behind this presentation.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is mostly to help you guys help us. I mean, it’s always self-interest really. Because we are kind of allies, whether we realize it or not, there’s a little journey that we’re all going on to try and make something which is impossible to do, as we know. And so we are allies and that means we have to figure out how to help each other along the way. And I think sometimes in everyone’s zeal to help the opposite occurs. I won’t say what that word is. It’s hurt. You’re hurting people.

So, anyway, we know that all the intentions are good, but hopefully we can give you some practical advice just so you can hear how things filter through our minds when we have these experiences with you.

**John:** Yesterday Craig emailed me to say, “That thing we did at Disney, did we have a script? Did we have anything we were working off of?” And I said I don’t think so, I think we just winged it. He’s like, “No, no, I’m pretty sure we had some sort of script.” And then Craig texted me last night saying like, “I found it. I found the shared Google doc.” So this is the shared Google doc we’re working off.

**Craig:** Should inspire a lot of confidence in the two of us.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. So these are the notes on our notes on notes. And it keys in with this slide show, so that’s why I was hoping we could stick a little bit on this first–

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do it. Where should we start?

**John:** Why is it so hard to get notes? Craig?

**Craig:** Got it. So, when our work, and I include all of you – your work, everything you do – when it is exposed or critiqued we feel emotional pain. That’s common to every human being in all circumstances. I don’t think that that is a sign of weakness, even though you may have been taught that, particularly if you grew up in the ‘70s. But rather it is a sign of being human. So congratulations.

But here’s a question that might seem obvious until you really think about it. Why? Why should being criticized or critiqued make us feel emotional pain? Well, it turns out there’s a good answer. Let’s talk about a little science. This is the last bit of science you’ll have to deal with today. So Chernobyl – no – neurologists know that emotional pain doesn’t come from this part up here. So our neocortex or frontal lobe, this is all of our rational human thinking/processing/reasoning brain. Emotional pain comes from this little lump underneath called the limbic system. I can’t get there because it’s underneath. But it’s basically an inheritance from rats and lizards and birds. And all it really does is control our fight or flight response.

And this fight or flight response happens before the human smart part of our brain even knows what’s happening. A little bit like if you touch a hot stove your spinal reflex will have your hand moving back before the rest of your brain goes, ow, that’s hot. Well, similarly when you get negative threatening input the limbic system is going to fire off messages before the front of your brain even has a chance to process what has happened. And unfortunately the limbic system only has one alarm message to send. It’s very stupid. Again, it’s from rats and birds. And the message it sends to you, to the front of your brain is you are in danger of dying. That’s the only phrase it knows. You’re in danger of dying.

So, start fighting or starting fleeing. Now, that may sound a little dramatic, but if so–

**John:** Craig, it sounds a little dramatic.

**Craig:** I can make it more dramatic.

**John:** But honestly I’ve had that response to notes in a room where I felt like the floor was collapsing underneath me. And so therefore I have to do something. I have to take an action right now which is not just sitting and listening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another writer we know told me a story once that in the middle of a notes meeting she just asked if she could take a break to go to the bathroom and then she vomited. And then she came back. This is – I understand this.

Here’s what’s happening. When you’re writing or directing or creating something you’re creating a kind of external expression of yourself. We put ourselves into these things. And what you’re doing is essentially recreating the contents of your mind on page or on screen. And the more you care the better you are at it frankly. The more you invest of your own humanity and passion and love, the more enmeshed you become with it. It becomes hard to figure out where you stop and it starts.

If you have kids, and I don’t know, it’s a pretty young crowd, but if you do have children you will understand this. The children are not you, but if they are threatened well then you will feel fear and pain and adrenaline. The limbic system is pounding its alarm system. You made the so they are you. Rationally we understand that the script isn’t us, but the limbic system sees no difference at all.

**John:** Yeah, it’s sort of the mama bear syndrome. You see your cub being threatened and therefore you must protect your cub. And so how do you get past that sense of like I must protect this thing that is partly me that is in danger.

**Craig:** Yeah. And to try and connect it a little bit to what you guys do, if you’re not also writing things, I want you think of how you feel when somebody criticizes something that is inherent to your identity or your being. There they are. I want you to think about how you feel when somebody criticizes your appearance. Your weight. Your sexuality. Your race. I want you to think about how you feel when someone essentially says you’re not good enough the way you are. I’m talking about your parents basically.

That’s why you’re here in Hollywood. You’re not good enough the way you are. Here’s a bunch of things that are completely wrong with you. Let me enumerate them and go into detail. Here’s what you should be instead. And please listen carefully.

Well, when these things happen it’s quite likely you’re going to want to run out of the room or wring their neck. It’s fight or flight. And in these instances now switching back to writers when they begin to feel emotional pain writers will get angry, they will get sullen, they will get argumentative. They’ll get snippy or passive-aggressive. Does any of this sound familiar? Have you seen this happening? It’s fight or flight.

**John:** From the writer’s perspective, this sort of is a natural reaction. They feel like they’re under attack. From the outsider’s perspective it’s like why are they being so weird about all of this. We all have the same goal. We’re trying to make a better movie, a better pilot. We’re trying to – theoretically rowing in the same direction. Why are they acting so weird?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s actually a great sign. I know it’s annoying to deal with in the moment. If you’re dealing with a writer who is like, oh yes, who is reacting to your notes as if they didn’t write the script at all, that’s a psychopath. And also probably a bad writer.

But John is absolutely right. That the irony is all of that emotional pain and the response to that emotional pain has nothing to do with making the movie better. And this is where writers kind of start to circle and cycle a bit because the more emotional pain we feel the worse these meetings and encounters get, which leads to worse interaction, which leads to more emotional pain. And we could even start to become viewed as the D word. Difficult.

And it’s hard because the front of your brain is saying, “Hey, they’re going to start thinking of you as difficult.” But underneath there’s this little blurb saying, “Kill them.” And that’s a rough one to correspond. Yes, you will look at it from your side as somebody trying to make some sort of intellectual or angry defense of what they’ve done, to deny what you’re saying, to essentially negate everything you are putting into this. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s just somebody who is terrified that they’re about to die and they’re trying to stay alive, whether you realize it or not.

So, John, how do we do this better for us and for them? Can we get into some practicals?

**John:** Let’s do some practicals. Let’s talk about some dos and some don’ts, which are almost always going to be sort of opposite reflections of the natural instinct versus what’s probably most helpful at the moment.

So let’s start with owning an opinion. And so when you have an opinion and you’re sharing an opinion, really take possession of that opinion. Really feel it. Have it be a meaningful opinion to you that you think will actually improve the project. Not just an opinion you’re repeating because you’re supposed to be passing it along.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s essentially why you have your jobs. You have your jobs because somebody says, “Look, you’ve got good taste. I like the way you respond and react to things.” So it’s really important that you own that opinion. But what you should not do is convert your opinion into a fact. It’s OK. Opinions are good enough. It’s just good enough. I think sometimes there’s this game that happens in these rooms. You’ve probably watched it or maybe even participated. It’s called the battle of examples.

Here’s my opinion. And someone says, “No, because they did that in this movie and it didn’t work.” And then someone says, “But, they did it in this movie and it did work.” Someone says, “No, that movie is different.” Someone says, “No, because of this.” No because of this. Everyone is trying to [empiricize] an opinion.

Here’s the deal. The first person to do something well in a movie that works – that’s original and they win. And the first person to do something poorly in a movie that doesn’t work – that’s stupid and it was a bad idea. It doesn’t matter what happened before. There is no way to turn your opinions into fact. You might as well just say it’s how I feel. That actually is good enough.

**John:** Yeah. And when you try to make your subjective opinion into an objective fact or presented as an objective fact we immediately go defensive because we can see logically that’s not actually an objective fact so then we start to doubt everything else you’re saying, too. So saying your opinion as an opinion, as your subjective take on a situation, is great. And it also reminds the writer that they’re being hired for their subjective opinions, for their subjective skills and sort of negotiating this emotional terrain. So keeping it in the realm of opinion is really helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A do. Do share your reactions and your questions. You are often one of the very first audiences for a script so share what you felt. Share what you felt as you were reading through it because as we’ve been writing a thing we’ve been living with this thing for months and so we don’t have clean eyes on stuff. You guys do have clean eyes. So phrasing what you find in what your first read was, what it felt like to you to be sitting in an audience watching it on the screen of your mind is really helpful because particularly when there’s things that aren’t clear or places you thought the story was going that it wasn’t going that’s great for us to hear.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you guys have all been in focus groups in screenings and there are people in those focus groups who say when this happened I felt this, but when this happened I felt this. And we think, OK good, we’re getting our NRG money’s worth. And then there’s that guy who, you know, “Actually,” because he goes to cinema school and he’s thought about this during the screening. You’re like that’s useless. What we need are true honest human reactions, right?

So what you want to do is hold on to those for sure, but try to avoid announcing the conclusions of your reactions. Because that’s where you’re sort of short-circuiting a natural process. If something worries you in a script as you’re reading it or confuses you or makes you annoyed or bores you that’s really valuable. We need to hear that. Tell me where it got annoying. Like right here, or this is where I got confused. Where it becomes less useful is when people say to us as writers, “You know what, she’s too angry. This character is too angry. She’s too mean. She’s a turn-off.” That’s a conclusion. And we don’t know quite what to do with it.

And what it really sounds like is, “And that’s a fact and somehow you missed that.” When what is useful is to say, “I don’t understand why in this scene she’s so harsh with him given the circumstances. Can you talk about what you were going for because what I felt was put off?” That’s a discussion. That’s a conversation.

**John:** Absolutely. Because now you’re talking about what your reaction was to something that you read and we can discuss that moment. We can discuss what our intention was behind that rather than she’s too mean. We can’t do anything with that. There’s nothing we can write that fixes “she’s too mean.”

**Craig:** You’re kind of just inviting us to say, “Well, I don’t think she is.” And now we get into an argument over a fact that is not a fact at all.

**John:** A suggestion, speak towards the passion. What you’re interested in. Speak towards what you want. Even if it’s in the context of criticism. So always be discussing where you want things to be going rather than sort of where things are right now that aren’t exactly what you want. So speak towards what is getting you excited about the project, not what is turning you off.

**Craig:** Yeah. You wanted to do this in the first place for some reason. Something excited you about it. If the script isn’t there say, “Listen, when I got to this place I wanted it to go here. How can we get it there?” That’s a thing where you can move toward.

What we really don’t know how to process as writers is how to write away from something. There is really no way to write away from a thing. So, here’s an example. Don’t make this scene so talky. OK. You’ve probably felt that a lot of times. Don’t make this scene so talky. This scene is way too talky. That’s writing away from something. Don’t bother with all this plot language. There’s too much plot language. Less. That’s writing away from something.

And these notes are generally born of fear. That’s not a knock on you guys. That’s really useful. I mean, that fear is necessary to kind of evaluate this material. You’re scared that an audience, to whom you’re accountable to, is going to get bored, or turned off, or confused. Your fear is completely warranted. Just please keep it to yourself because we are drowning in our own fear and we cannot handle your fear as well.

And also to help us write towards something just re-contextualize these things. For instance, OK, this scene is too talky, please write it less talky. Write away from that. Not as helpful. But what you could say is, “These two characters have this great vibe in this scene where they say almost nothing, when they’re kind of just reading each other’s minds because it’s clear that their relationship works like that. They don’t need as many words as two other people might. And so they’re intimating things like for instance this point.

This scene here, how can we move this scene more toward that? Then the writer goes I know how to do that. It’s not even about buttering them up and saying, “Look, you did it really good here.” It’s not that. It’s just giving them something to write toward.

**John:** Absolutely. And you’re giving them characters to write towards. In all your conversations talk about characters and talk about the choices the characters are making. Talk about it in terms of these characters being living creatures within the universe of your movie or your TV show. And what they are literally doing. And so that way you let the focus of choice less on the writer and more on what the characters are doing.

**Craig:** Yep. Because characters are talking. Characters are boring. Characters are beautiful. Characters are interesting. Characters are illogical. What we weirdly don’t know how to work with effectively is discussion of the scene or the script, which seems odd. But the scene or the script is this other thing that is a function of characters. So, when we hear talk about scenes in scripts and stories we’re weirdly jarred out of the mindset, the writing mindset, where we solve problems. Because where we generally solve problems is in the realm of character. Well, OK, if this isn’t working how can I make it a better function of this character? Or how can I change this character to get more like something else?

If all you do – if literally all you do – is write the notes as you would normally write them and then say now let’s just funnel this through a filter of characterize it. Let’s just put all these notes now within the context of character notes, you’re already going to be literally 50% closer to getting what you want.

**John:** When you’re giving notes, give the notes that can lead to meaningful changes in the screenplay. So here’s an example of the most meaningful note I ever got on a screenplay. And so this was right here at Amblin. It was Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen. I was up in their office, they were in one of the bungalows. And it was the second draft of the script. And in the script I’d written Will tells a story of how his father died, but he tells it at the funeral rather than telling it to Edward Bloom while he was in the hospital bed. So their note was what would happen if you told that story to Edward rather than about Edward. And it was just – I did have that immediate like, “oh no, they want me to change something,” but then the light went on and I was like, “oh, that is just so much better.” That is a meaningful change. It is not a huge change, it’s not a huge amount of work for me to do, but it is a huge change in sort of how this all works. And it was just – it was a fantastic note. And it was a meaningful note that changed a lot of things in the script.

There were other small things which wouldn’t have been as impactful. So be thinking about what is the thing that opens up possibilities.

**Craig:** Quality. Not quantity. Here is another kind of note which you and I have seen. This is an actual page note that I received from an actual studio. “Let’s cut Elena saying please at the end of this scene.” Well that’s just stupid. And it’s stupid for so many reasons.

But the most – I guess the most prominent reason is anybody that has spent any time on set or in an editing room knows that of all the resources that are required to make motion pictures and television the amount that is expended to add one more word to the end of a scene is zero. You are already there. That’s dumb. And when we get notes like that it kind of starts to undermine our confidence.

It may be that you think I really don’t like that she says please there at the end. Fine. When it comes time for the editing room if people have still left it in you make that argument there. That’s a meaningful note in the editing room. But it is not a meaningful note when you’re writing the script.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s some meaningful notes that are meaningful on set but not in the script. So this is an example from me. “Page 71, Aladdin’s line at the middle of the page, ‘I want to show her I’m someone worth knowing,’ feels a bit too direct and declarative. Can we find a way to say this with more subtext?”

I get why they gave the note. They were trying to be specific and kind of creative and helpful, but it had no relation to the actual we made. There is not a single moment in Aladdin that is anywhere near this subtle or with this kind of subtext. I can guarantee you.

**Craig:** I mean, that’s already way more sub textual than the rest of it.

**John:** Oh yes. Oh yes. It’s a very declarative movie. And this was like an actor line reading. Honestly it was trying to get way too detailed on a moment that was not – we just weren’t at that place. And so trying to use really fine pens on something where like we’re still kind of at Sharpie level here. And that was the wrong note for the moment.

**Craig:** We understand, by the way, that in many ways the notes process is your last attempt to exert control over this material before other people come and kind of start doing things that you cannot control. And we know that that is terrifying. But just be aware that controlling the script is really a thin substitute for controlling the shooting of the script and the editing of the script and the performance of the script and the direction of the script. It’s not going to get you what you want.

So the real thing is how can you work together with the writer to build in those protections so that you do get what you want?

**John:** How do we set up the world of the movie where this note makes sense? That’s sort of the macro.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Do – present a unified set of notes. Try to give one set of notes to a writer rather than three conflicting sets of notes to a writer.

**Craig:** He said try.

**John:** Try.

**Craig:** Try.

**John:** And the converse is don’t pretend you’re giving one unified set of notes because that’s even more frustrating.

**Craig:** That’s the worst. Because sometimes you will get like the three groups of notes. They don’t overlap whatsoever so you are essentially paralyzed. By the way, paralyzed after reading three different documents explaining why essentially you’re stupid in different ways. So then you call up, say can you guys just agree on why I’m stupid. That would be fantastic. And then they send you an agreement of why you’re stupid and then they call you afterwards and say, “No, no, no, that’s not why you’re stupid. You’re stupid because of this, not because of that.”

And so it goes. Again, you’re trying to do your jobs. And we know that your jobs are difficult. We understand that there’s a lot going on back there. We don’t know what to do. We are – I mean, I will tell you this much: we’re naïve about how the situation works back here. And you want us naïve. You don’t want us thinking about that stuff. We just don’t get it. So if there are battles to be fought and battles to be won, fight them and win them, but do them before you get to us. Because it just stops us dead.

**John:** When you make a note stand by your note. If you truly have an opinion on material it shouldn’t change based on outside opinions or based on what worked last week at the box office. And so we’re going to believe your opinions if your opinions are consistent through time rather than they feel variable. Because if it feels like it’s a moving target it’s tempting for us to just kind of wait and see where the target is next.

**Craig:** It takes effort on our part to get past our pain to absorb the value of your reactions and your opinions, your honest thoughts and your honest opinions. Then we do. And we take them in and we become enmeshed with you and with your opinions. And then someone else comes along, like a director, or an actor, and they say, “Nah, what if we did this instead?” And you say, OK. And it’s all gone, like that, in an instant.

I’m not accusing any of you individually of doing this. But it has happened to me many, many times. And you start to think well then why am I ever listening to you about anything. If you’re not going to stand up for this, if you’re going to be so fastidious and insistent and specific with me, and then so flippant and casual once somebody else comes along, why bother?

**John:** Yeah. And I’ll say that sometimes it just naturally does happen that a director or some other powerful person has a note that directly conflicts with everything else you’ve been trying to do. In those moments acknowledge it to us privately. Otherwise it feels like we’re being gaslighted. That this was all – they never said that thing before. No, they did set it. This really is a change and this is why we’re making the change.

**Craig:** This is a really important point because I think sometimes it’s a natural instinct to think if I call up a writer and I say to them, “You know that thing that I was really on you about that I finally convinced you of that you believed in too that I just rolled over on completely?” If I call that writer up and admit that I’m going to look weak to them. I assure you it is the opposite. You only look weak to us when you pretend it didn’t happen. We know it happened. We know it happened. And we know why it happened. And if you call and say, “I fought as best I could but this is the deal, so I’m saying my powder for another bigger fight. And I apologize, but this is how it’s going.” We get it. And then we love you again.

**John:** Indeed. A do – do make it your goal to love the script. And that your notes are on a path towards loving it even more. The converse would be don’t attempt to win the who-can-complain-more game, which is a thing that happens. Sometimes it has happened in rooms where there’s multiple people all trying to fix a problem. Or sometimes it’s not a thing that I’ve written but it’s a project that I’m being brought in to rewrite and it just becomes this who can bitch most loudly about this thing that’s a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. A little bit like those nature movies when the gazelle gets brought down and then all the hyenas come in and it’s just like fun at that point. It’s happened. The dam is broken. Let us tear this thing apart. Obviously if you’re doing it to a writer and she’s written something and everybody in the room is tearing it apart that’s incredibly traumatic. And it also begins to feel cruel.

The whole point is that we’re trying to improve something. If the point of the meeting is let’s all try and outdo each other to see who hates this more, why are you having the meeting? Just fire her and move on. You know?

But if you are going to have that meeting then you have to sort of get back to first principles. Why we loved you. Why we hired you. What we hope for you. And it may be that she can’t get there. But she’s definitely not going to get there if the tenor is a kind of one-upmanship of critique. Somebody among you must be the advocate in one way or the other.

**John:** Do ask writers how they like to receive notes. And so what is most helpful for the writer. And so you may have a process that’s your normal process and maybe that’s going to work great, but ask them first. And if there’s a way that you can actually communicate with them better try doing it their way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, some of us like conversations. My preferred mode is a conversation. I don’t actually read the printed out notes. Just totally admitting it. I don’t read them. It took me a while also to realize that they’re not real. That they are a representation of a lot of – like some sort of power-brokered consensus among a lot of people. And that eventually you get to these notes and you’re like well this is a weird one. And then someone goes, “Yeah, none of us really agreed with that, but X wanted it, so it goes in.”

And the reading of it just for my brain when I just flip through and it just becomes like mush and it doesn’t work. But if I have a conversation, if I can see your eyes, and I can feel your emotional response, because those things are so dry. They’re so dry. Then I feel like I’m getting somewhere and I can have that conversation and you’ll actually get way further with me just talking than handing me the document.

But other people do not get – like the face-to-face thing tears them apart and they run into the bathroom and throw up and they really do need that document to kind of ease them into the process.

**John:** And also because we’re writers we will dwell on a specific word choice far too much. And so “it feels gloomy,” I’m like gloomy? Gloomy? What does he mean by gloomy? Foggy London gloomy? And so I end up getting on the phone and I’m like what do you mean by gloomy? And he’s like, “Well it feels like serious.” And I’m like, oh, serious, OK, serious. That’s not gloomy. It’s like you went through your thesaurus and found gloomy because you didn’t want to say serious, but–

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re bad at wordsing.

**John:** Yeah. You are bad at wordsing. So, that’s why actually conversation is so much more helpful usually than a document.

Finally, do reread your last set of notes before you get the next set of notes before you give the next set of notes because we will and we’ll remember and it’s not a good sign. But at the same time don’t feel like you have to defend your old notes with the new ones. If they’re bad ideas don’t feel like you have to defend them. You can move forward. Just make sure you’re moving forward in a consistent direction.

**Craig:** You’re allowed to be inconsistent. You’re allowed to change your mind. Just don’t pretend that you’re not. That’s the most important thing. It’s the gaslighting factor that makes us feel like we’re going insane. Just say it. I changed my mind. I change my mind all the time. I change my mind while I’m writing. I’ll do an outline and then I’ll do the script and some things are going to change because I changed my mind. It’s totally fine.

But if I was like, “No, that’s what I said I was always going to do.” What? It’s insane.

And, you know, that will kind of get you out of a lot of problems, too. It’s also OK to admit that you made a mistake in notes. Very frequently what will happen is because we know the script better than you do just because we wrote it – that’s not a knock on you – it will say, “On page 86 she says this, but she couldn’t have known that because she never ran into so-and-so.” Yes, she did, on page 5. You just missed it.

“Oh, OK. You know what? My bad.” I’ve been in meetings where they’ve been like, “Yeah, but not really.” And I’m like we’re going to change the movie because you skimmed? Nah. That’s bad policy. Yeah.

**John:** Let’s imagine some perfect notes. So if we could ever see some perfect notes in the world they might describe a movie that you want to green light, not a draft you want to read. And that’s really helpful for you talking in general about notes, it’s like always talk about the movie, don’t talk about the script. The script is a way to get to a movie, but don’t get so focused on this 12-point Courier. It’s always talking about the vision you have for a movie that’s going to be in a theater.

**Craig:** Yeah. I refer to it as the document. And I know that it’s tempting in those meetings to talk about the script, the script, the script, but in every other meeting you have you will talk about the movie. In casting, in pre-production, in budget, in hiring directors, in lighting, locations, movie, movie, movie, movie, movie. You sit in the room with the writer, document. The writer will go along with that completely. The writer will follow you right down that document hole and perfect a document. That’s not what you want the writer to be doing.

What you want the writer to be doing is to helping you perfect a movie, the theory of a movie, the imagination of a movie.

**John:** Perfect notes celebrate what’s working and not just what works in the first paragraph of notes.

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**John:** Yes, congratulations–

**Craig:** On a terrific first draft.

**John:** There’s so much stuff we love here.

**Craig:** However, we have a few remaining concerns.

**John:** Yes. I have to tell you, you know, 20 years at this and very rarely do I get notes that midway through will say like, “This is a fantastic moment. We’re so happy with this scene.” And they may feel that. There’s moments that they’ll independently say it, but they don’t ever acknowledge it in a notes session about how much they love a moment. Telling us what you love about a thing is so helpful because it lets us steer the ship towards something. And lets us know that we’re not crazy. We actually were able to do something good here.

**Craig:** This may be the biggest piece of advice for you guys. Because it does two things at once. Obviously we are desperately craving love and attention that we didn’t get from our parents. And so you can help provide that. In a very real way in the psychological phenomenon of transference you become our parents in this process and we are desperate for your approval, no matter age we are. No matter what level we are.

So, dropping those things in the middle makes us feel good. But John is absolutely correct when he says us knowing what you love is just as useful to us from a writing towards point of view as us knowing what you aren’t responding to because now we get like, OK, there is an aesthetic that we are forming together as part of our relationship. We had an opinion, you had an opinion, we’re finding points of commonality. And from there we make more points of commonality. And the notes process somewhere along the line just became a Negative Nelly list. Which is fine. We’re not running away from Negative Nelly. But we need to know Positive Patty because if we don’t all you really are doing again is writing away from something.

**John:** Finally, perfect notes inspire the writer to explore and create. The times in my career when I’ve had just great notes I’m excited to get back to that next draft because I’m seeing all the new things I can do. I don’t have the answers to things, because the notes didn’t provide answers. They provided really good questions that made me want to explore new things. And they got me past some of my hang-ups. They got me to realize like oh you know what if I did cut all of that then I’d have this space to do all this other stuff. They got me excited to build new things. And that’s what notes should ultimately do is it’s a plan for what is possible to create going forward.

**Craig:** There’s a phrase in family therapy, “Do you want a relationship or do you want to be right?” And that’s kind of how it works with this. You want a relationship. And you can be right, but through the lens of the relationship. If your goal at the end of a notes meeting is to make sure the writer has heard every single thing that you want to change, shape, control, move around, or alter, you haven’t done it right.

Your goal at the end of that notes meeting should be that the writer is excited to get back to the computer to make this new thing better. And that takes effort. And it also means you’re going to have to kind of sublimate some of your needs and your desires, too. But just keep in mind in the emotional tally sheet we’re taking it much harder than you are. Even though you’re the guys that paid all the money. We’re still emotionally taking it harder than you.

**John:** So this is not meant to be just a lecture. It’s meant to be a discussion and a conversation.

**Craig:** I wanted a lecture.

**John:** Yeah, he wanted a lecture.

**Craig:** I’m all about the lecture.

**John:** So now we’d love to talk with you guys about sort of about your response, questions you have, push back on anything you want to push back on. Who would like to ask a question or raise a hand? A silent group.

**Craig:** We also may have just been perfect.

**John:** Yeah, it’s entirely possible.

**Craig:** Oh, no, not perfect.

**Male Voice:** What do you find the note that comes up again and again most frequently in a general sense that you guys either don’t like or you don’t know what to do with? And I know that you’ve given some examples here, but something more specific that, you know, the scene isn’t working, or yeah. Go head.

**Craig:** The, and I think we’ve said this on the show before, the note I hate the most, the note I respect the least, and the note I think should be stricken from everyone’s development vocabulary is “this character isn’t likeable enough.” Good. Those are the good ones. Every movie I’ve ever loved was full of unlikeable characters. We are here – are we allowed to say where we’re doing this? We’re recording this at Amblin, the home of Steven Spielberg. Go watch Jaws and find me the likeable character. It’s wonderful.

So, it just has to go. And I know that it comes from places. Marketing has wormed their way into things and so on and so forth. But just fight back. Fight back as hard as you can. And if you can’t, if you lose that battle, then preface that note by saying, “I am so sorry to say this and I don’t believe it myself, but I am forced to say this. This character isn’t ‘likeable’ enough.”

And it’s particularly bad when it’s about a female character. I find that at that point we’re starting to drift into the whole like trope, you know, she’s got to be, you know. That one.

**John:** My biggest one is probably “faster.” Basically like can we get to this moment faster and basically like can you not do all the stuff that you’re doing to set up the world. And somehow have everything already be set up so we can get to this moment faster. And I think so often because we are rereading scripts and rereading scripts again we know what’s going to happen, and so therefore we’re always anticipating the thing happening and we forget that for an audience watching it they have none of that information. And so they are coming into it at a speed and they have to get that information.

So, I would say that we are constantly in push to get to those moments faster and faster and faster in ways that are not helpful usually for the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. The classic one is the first act is too long. And this ending is a bit abrupt. And I’m always like the first act should be longer and the third act should be shorter. I love first acts in movies. It’s when the people are meeting and I’m discovering them and this world is being built. And when I get to the climax I just want them to blow stuff up as fast as they can and get me back to the relationship because I know like, ugh, [croaking noise]. So yeah, rushing the first act in particular, I think try and fight that one as best you can. Because it does translate into movies where you end up reshooting because people don’t connect with the characters.

**John:** Funny how that works. Yeah. Moments you cut out. Other questions.

**Female Voice:** When someone gives you a note of like this is the bad pitch.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Female Voice:** Is that a more or less preferable note in general, and also do you prefer having more specific direction or the response and then you guys decide?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Great questions. So I would say the bad pitch or the bad version, so the bad version is this, I can hear that and understand why it’s being said that way, which is basically don’t do this thing that I’m telling you to do because I know how incredibly cloying it is or how it is just clunky. But the effect that I’m hoping we could get to is this, so that I can take that really well. Some people will bristle more at it, but I’m actually fine with the bad version.

It’s kind of like giving an actor a line reading. You’ve got to be a little bit mindful of that. In terms of specifics, specifics help if they are giving – if it’s specific to what your response was. But if it’s trying to provide a solution then we’re going to be like then why do you need us in a certain way. So it’s trying to be really clear on sort of why you are feeling this way, you’re feeling it as you’re reading it, but not sort of like therefore this must happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s exactly right. It’s a little bit writer dependent. I mean, the only thing I’ll caution about the bad version is it’s the bad version for a reason. And so John’s right. You’re trying to get at kind of an effect, but just make sure that you’re policing yourself that the effect that you’re not going for is also just bad. In other words, sometimes it’s like, god, that would really solve this here and also make it boring and same-y. Right?

And for suggestions, I find that if someone says, “Here’s a solve, and take it or leave it if you want, but maybe in my proposed solve you find some interesting thing to take off and blah, blah, blah,” that’s great. If it sort of comes down as, “Here’s what I want you to do. Do this and this and this.” Then you begin to just lose your will to live.

**John:** You feel like a typist rather than a writer and that’s frustrating.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** More questions?

**Craig:** Yes, come on down.

**Male Voice:** Honestly, I kind of want to dive in more to the likeable character question, because I think I gave that note yesterday maybe.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**Male Voice:** And it’s not that I want a perfect Disney princess as the protagonist, but I usually will be feeling that when I’m not connecting to the character. I’m not engaged in their journey.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And so there is a mistake that happens in our brains when we are not connecting with a character and that character has qualities that are difficult or confrontational or testing we associate it with that. But those aren’t the problems. I love a great villain. I feel deeply connected to great villains. Like I watched The Little Mermaid again the other day and Ursula is the greatest.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** She’s not likeable. I mean, she’s a bad octopus lady.

**John:** You understand exactly why she’s doing what she’s doing.

**Craig:** Correct. And so the issue is how do you find a way to make that person’s unlikableness relatable. Relatable is not likeable. Relatable means that I understand it. You know, a lot of Melissa McCarthy characters work this way. And we just talked about this with Mari Heller. She was on the show talking about How Can I Ever Forgive You. Is there an Ever in there? No. How Can I Forgive You? Can I–

**John:** Can You Ever Forgive Me?

**Craig:** Can You Ever Forgive Me? Will she ever forgive me? And the entire process was managing someone who is not likeable. And about finding moments where you can relate to the not likeableness because all of us go through our lives having moments. I mean, unless one of you is just a saint everybody has moments. And so you don’t want to push things into likeable. You want to push things towards relatable, meaning make me understand and sympathize with the conditions that make her or him unlikeable.

**John:** Yeah. Mari Heller was also talking about Diary of a Teenage Girl and how important it was for that character to have a voiceover at the very start, or not even a voiceover, where you’re picturing the world through her eyes so you can see how she perceives herself before she tells you that she’s having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend. So, you know, that is an unlikeable character thing to do is to have that relationship, but we loved her before we sort of knew that thing that was happening. And so it sounds like what you’re describing in this note that you said unlikeable is that you were having a hard time connecting with the character to see the movie through that character’s eyes and to really want to sign up for the journey with that character.

And so Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day is very unlikeable.

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** But also funny.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because he’s funny you’re willing to go on this journey with him and sort of see him grow and change. So, phrasing things as not being able to click into them is I think going to be much more helpful to than saying unlikeable because then a writer is going to be like, “Well, can I just spackle something on them? Can I just spray a little likeability perfume on them so that they’ll pass the test?”

**Craig:** Or sand off the edges. Unsharpen the pencil.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And then everything just gets sort of generic and soft. And we just lost interest.

**John:** Or you give them a puppy to make them likeable.

**Craig:** Give them a puppy.

**John:** Give them a puppy. Other questions or things you want to push on?

**Craig:** You can tell us we’re wrong. We’re OK with that. You can give us notes.

Yeah, so the question is what do you do when you’re developing a comedy and people, meaning the producers, the executives, don’t like the jokes versus the story. So that comes down to sense of humor. And there is no note. The note is we don’t think you’re funny. The note is you’re fired, I’m pretty sure.

Now, there is obviously a lot that goes into a comedy, but I’ve always felt from the work that I’ve done that if the plot and characters aren’t connected inextricably with the sense of humor and the comedy and the jokes and the set pieces then just something is wrong. I don’t know if you can properly write a comedy using somebody over here dumping character and plot sauce on it and someone over here doing the jokes.

I mean, I’m sure you guys have been in a lot of those roundtables where we do like the punch-up. And everyone just laughs for six hours and maybe get one usable joke out of there because none of it is connected to anything. It’s just floating on top. Like that goop on top of soup. So, I think in that case the note is you’re fired. I just feel so bad about saying that, but I mean why torment somebody. They’re not going to become funny the way you want them to be. I don’t think that’s how it works.

**John:** No. The other thing to remember about comedy is that if you’re reading the same script ten times, 15 times, it’s going to stop being funny. And nothing changed about the jokes, it’s just that it’s not fresh to you anymore. And comedy is about surprise and unexpected twists and characters doing things you couldn’t expect. And once you expect them it’s not funny anymore.

I’ve been to so many test screenings where suddenly the audience is laughing, they’re like, oh that’s right that was a joke. I completely didn’t remember that that was a funny thing, but that’s a joke apparently. And that absolutely happens.

One of the most edifying experiences for me was I did the Broadway version of Big Fish and I’d have to swap out jokes from one run to the next run to the next run. And you’d just see like what gets a laugh and what doesn’t get a laugh. And you just don’t know until you try it. And that’s the hardest thing about comedy. You won’t know if that script just in 12-point Courier is funny until you get it on its feet and sort of see it with people. That’s why if you can get a reading together that’ll help.

**Craig:** I will say for comedy features that generally speaking the people that write them are technicians. And so they’re way more concerned about getting laughs than you guys are. Way more concerned. I mean, every first screening of a comedy I’ve ever done I’ve gone with a Xanax in my pocket, right here, and I’ve had to take it a couple of times because when you’re not getting laughs it’s the worst feeling in the world. So, partly I would say if they have a track record trust the track record. If they’ve made people laugh in a dark room before, they’re going to make people laugh again.

You may not necessarily see the connection from the page to the room but they’re working it and they know what they’re doing in theory. So, some of it is an act of faith. Which is scary.

**John:** So the question is what are the best practices for when a writer is brought on to rewrite a different project. How can you set them up for success as an executive? So what I always tell writers who are being brought on to a project is if at all possible talk to the previous writer. And that way you can sort of know where the bodies are buried. What things were tried that didn’t work? It’s a cleaner handoff. It won’t always be possible. Sometimes it’s not a happy situation and it’s just not going to be realistic.

But for you as an executive who is like bringing in a new writer to the project I think having a discussion about some of the things that have happened before, but most importantly is where you see this headed and sort of what the overall goal is and what the intention is. Again, talking about what the movie is going to be rather than what the script is right now. And the times that I’ve come on to rewrite projects where it’s gone well I could take a look at the script and say like I can see what the intentions are here. I can also see where there was a bunch of just crud that built up over time. A lot of my job is just to scrape away the crud and get you back to what the clean movie of it is and make it all read better so you can see like, oh wait, we had a really good movie here and I couldn’t see it anymore because so much stuff had been built on top of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. When a movie works it all seems just intentional, like it just fell out of a camera in one big chunk. And there it is and it’s done. And sometimes when you arrive as a rewriter what you’re looking at is a script that’s more like, you know, the way the city looks in Blade Runner. It’s like a city built on top of a city with a thing that’s sticking out this way. And it doesn’t look intentional at all. Nor will it ever look intentional. And it has to be kind of torn down.

One thing that helps me when I come in is an understanding that the people involved are aware that they’ve gone wrong. I mean, unless it’s one draft – unless it’s one and done, and even in that case there has to be some shared culpability for kind of it just didn’t work. We’ve made mistakes. We as a group have made mistakes. There is no shame in that. And being able to say, “You know what? We think our mistake is this, but what do you think our mistake is? And we definitely shouldn’t have done this, and what do you think we should do?” That’s all fine and good.

But the dangerous thing is when you come in, the jobs that I will routinely turn down are ones where people say, “It’s just two weeks. We just need two weeks.” And I go you do not. You need all of this – there’s no way to – “Oh, we just have to fix the first act. That’s it.” What? Oh, we’re going to change the first act and everything – all we have to do with this house is fix the foundation. That’s all we’ve got to do. That’s all we’ve got to do. The rest of it will stay just fine. We’re just going to undermine everything and it will magically float and then we’ll put…

No. And so owning it a little bit I think and just being honest about the work that’s going to be required and thinking about your rewriter as a craftsperson. You know, like if a plumber says to me, “Look, I could do this, but you don’t want me to do this,” then I go, you’re right, I don’t. Don’t do the thing that you don’t think I should do. Let us be plumbers. If we say, “You need to do this the right way,” and then you go, “OK, do it the right way.”

**John:** Sir?

**Craig:** OK, so the question is how do you breakup with someone? It’s coming to an end. You can’t continue working with the writer. You would love to. That was your intention. But it has to end. What’s the sort of best way to end it and still stay in a relationship and maybe something in the future will happen?

**John:** The best example I can give you is Dick Zanuck. So Dick Zanuck produced a zillion things but the first time I met him was on Big Fish. And I remember he called me on Dark Shadows. And he called to say, “John, I’m so sorry to tell you but Tim and Johnny decided to bring on a different writer to do this next pass. These are the things that they said they want me to do. I talked with them about it, but I wanted to make sure you heard it from me before you heard it from anybody else.”

And he was so awesome and such a gentleman. I was upset and he let me be upset and angry, but I wasn’t upset and angry with him. I was upset and angry with the situation and sort of the stuff that was going on. But I would have willingly worked on another movie with him tomorrow because he was so straightforward with me about what was going on.

What kills you is when you’re just ghosted. Or when you find out from somebody else. When Craig texts me and says like, “I can’t believe they hired this writer.” I’m like, oh, on that thing that I thought I was still on. That’s–

**Craig:** I didn’t know that that was happening. I swear to god. I thought you knew.

**John:** Yeah, I know. And I didn’t know. And like that is what kills you when you find out, you’re like I assumed this was my movie and it’s no longer my movie. That is what sort of really kills you. And so just as soon as you can and being really clear that you value them and the work that they’ve done. And that you would like to work with them again. I think that’s the message you want to–

**Craig:** The spirit in which you ask the question is your answer. You feel something for this person. You have a natural empathy for them. Let them know. It’s OK. I mean, this is business. Things happen. Things are going to happen to us. Things are going to happen to you guys. But let them how you feel. And let them know that you tried your best and they tried their best and if it’s your decision let them know why and how it’s sad for you, too, but it’s what needs to happen.

It is always I think about intention. And if we feel seen and heard and treated like a human being. Of course, there’s no way to make us not feel sad if we want to stay, but at the very least we know that the relationship that we had with you it was legitimate. Because you’re feeling something, too. That’s why I would come back because I know, OK, if you’re all puppy dogs and sunshine and then one day it’s like ghosted, bye, or oh, sorry yeah, we’re moving on, OK, well why would I ever go back to you? The puppies are not real. That sunshine is a lie.

So, just, yeah, and that requires you guys to be vulnerable. And I’m sure somewhere there is a kind of like executive and producer school where they’re telling you don’t be vulnerable and don’t show any of this stuff and don’t get embedded with these people. And stay like tough. And all I can tell you is it’s not going to work well with us. You won’t get better work out of us that way.

It requires you to feel. I mean, my favorite development person in any capacity is Lindsay Doran. And Lindsay Doran feels more for my work than I do. The hardest arguments I’ve had with Lindsay are about things that I wanted to cut. I’ve literally had a discussion with her where she read it and she said, “Well, you cut that one line and now I just don’t care about the characters anymore.” I’m like that’s not possible! It was a line.

But she is so emotionally invested and, you know, we have a movie together that’s set up here and we had a director on it that we loved and then the studio just wanted to go a different way. And we had to say goodbye to somebody. And we both felt a lot. And we shared that with that person. And I would like to think that that mattered. It may have not made things better at that moment, but it means that we showed what is true which is that our relationship with this person was real.

So, do that. And you will be rewarded with repeat business.

**John:** Cool. Last question.

**Craig:** Oh, she’s reading a question. Oh, this is a great question. Boy did you just stand in front of a target and ask us to wheel a cannon in front of you. So the question is what should be achieved in a producer’s pass. And the answer John is?

**John:** Ah! I mean, we should just stop on the term “producer’s pass.” Producer’s pass does not exist. You won’t find it in any contract. You won’t find it written down anywhere. Here’s the reality from a writer’s perspective is that we think we’re done. We hand it into producers. I think I’m done. And they’re like, great, there’s just a little fix up. And it’s like, OK. And so we do this little bit and it’s like, oh a little bit more, a little bit more. And then we find out they actually did turn it into the studio and we’re actually getting the studio development executive’s notes back. And so it’s a whole extra pass before we’ve turned it in.

I get this at my level, but when I talk to newer screenwriters it’s endless drafts for them to actually get a thing in. And producer’s passes are a useful way of pretending that it’s not a real thing but it is a real thing. So here’s what I’ll say is that if a writer is choosing to give it to this producer for a weekend or whatever for sort of last looks/clean some stuff up, that’s fantastic. But it can’t be about profound changes to the script. It can’t be a week’s worth of work or two weeks’ worth of work. That’s just crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is no producer’s pass. And producers have gotten away with murder. They really have. Congrats. Good job.

**John:** I will say some sympathy for producers. I think they have a really tough job right now too because they are scrambling to get movies made in a tough environment. They have tremendous expectations on them. Writers are often dealing with one-step deals which is a problem.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** I don’t want to slam producers for trying to get too much free labor out of us, even though I sort of am slamming them for getting too much free labor.

**Craig:** Well, but it’s logical. I mean, look, the economics of producing are such that you don’t really get paid unless the movie gets made. Development isn’t a job. Getting movies made is a job if you’re a producer. That’s where all the money is. And everybody deserves to make a living. And then on top of that the studios have taken away two-step deals. They give you one step. You now have one shot with this person that you argued for to make it work. And if you don’t maybe this whole thing dies. So of course you want a thousand drafts for that one draft.

The problem is that’s not fair to the writers. What we should be saying to our partners at the studios is make two-step deals. If you want a producer’s pass how about we all get the pass together? It’s called the second draft. There used to be a thing called the second draft. It’s less important honestly for me or for John than it is for new writers. I really strongly urge you guys if you know a writer is getting paid less than twice scale, which is lot of writers, give them two steps.

It removes this panic. And then you’re able to get the draft. If you want to do your three days of twinklies, do your three days of twinklies. And then turn it in and then everybody can talk about it. And everybody can have the conversation. And then they write a second draft.

But if that’s not there what ends up happening is people do get abused. So, that’s my big thing there. For me, when it comes time to – and look, we’re going to have this experience. You and I are about to have this experience. I’m going to hand over a script to Samantha. You know, if you need a couple days here or there, no problem. A couple days, here or there.

**John:** But let’s say you need more than a couple days. Let’s say you have a writer who is making scale or twice scale, but not a lot of money. And you do need more than just a couple days. It’s gone into the studio and they’re like, there’s just this little thing before it gets up to our top boss before we can actually get it – we just need a little bit more work.

There’s already a provision in there for a little bit more work. Everyone has a weekly. And there’s a scale weekly which is not expensive. Pay that writer for the one week or the two weeks of work it takes to get that next thing in between their real steps.

**Craig:** Pay them an optional polish if you want.

**John:** Move stuff out of order, but it’s when you hold somebody on with the promise like maybe they’ll get to that second draft that’s where it becomes exploitive.

**Craig:** And the say like, “Look, if you don’t do this then you’re going to get fired and the movie is not going to get made.” And it just becomes this kind of thing of, well, if what you’re telling me is I’m going to get fired unless I work for free, yeah, I’m fired. That’s what fired is.

**John:** You’re taking a person who is making scale and making them the villain in the situation, which isn’t good. Them not doing that free thing is–

**Craig:** We just got all Che Guevara on them. I love it. That’s great.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** But it’s true. It really is true. And I will also say that for – if you can – if you’re working with a writer and they agree early on, before deals are made or anything, if they agree early on to write a treatment, some writers don’t write them. I don’t think you’re a big treatment guy. You know I’m a huge treatment – I love a treatment. I’ll write a 60-page treatment. I’ll write the hell out of that thing. You’ll know what the movie is before I ever write in Fade In or Final Draft.

If that happens, then your producer’s pass is baked in because you’ve had a chance to discuss and go through that. And I like to do that specifically so that when I’m done with the draft I’m done. There it is. Now you know what the weekend is going to be like. But you’re going to like it. It’s good. It’s good.

**John:** Thank you guys very much.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** And thank you for putting this together.

**Craig:** Thank you guys so much. Thank you guys.

**John:** And that’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Ben Simpson and Samantha Nisenboim for putting this session together and for the folks at Amblin for hosting us.

Our outro this week is by Mackey Landry. 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. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs.

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If you’re doing either of those things you may want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to find out which episodes our listeners recommend most. Thanks. We’ll see you next week.

Links:

* Episode 99, [Psychotheraphy for Screenwriters](https://johnaugust.com/2013/psychotherapy-for-screenwriters)
* Episode 394, [Broken but Sympathetic](https://johnaugust.com/2019/broken-but-sympathetic) with Mari Heller
* Now accepting recommendations for updating the [Listener’s Guide](johnaugust.com/guide)
* Submit to the Pitch Session [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch)
* Watch Chernobyl May 6th and listen to [The Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981) with Craig and Peter Sagal
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Mackey Landry ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_399_notes_on_notes.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/getting-staffed).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 390 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we welcome back former Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell. Welcome back, Megan.

**Megan McDonnell:** Thank you.

**Craig:** As you can see, she was such a valuable employee for her strong voice.

**John:** Well today you’re not producing because you are in fact our guest. We want to talk to you all about how you got staffed on your very first show. Then it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at the pages sent in by our listeners and discuss what’s working and what could use some work.

But first off, Megan, how does it feel to be back here doing – you did so many Three Page Challenges. You probably read – how many Three Page Challenges do you think you’ve read over the years?

**Megan:** Hundreds.

**John:** Hundreds. Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Megan:** Not a thousand.

**John:** Not a thousand. But hundreds.

**Megan:** Hundreds. Certainly.

**John:** So you were the culling mechanism to find the very best of them. Now Megana Rao has that job, so she got to go through a whole bunch of them yesterday to try to find the three that we’re going to do today.

**Megan:** Yeah, I mean, it was so fun to read through all the Three Page Challenges. It’s the making the decision of like, OK, which ones are John and Craig going to like and that was the hard part.

**John:** I used to be a reader at TriStar and at another company before that and in some cases reading things that don’t work is really helpful because it gives you a sense of like, OK, I’m never going to do that because I just see that never works. Do you think reading all the Three Page Challenges helped you as a writer or hurt you as a writer?

**Megan:** It definitely didn’t hurt me as a writer, I hope. I think it’s extremely helpful to see what people are doing, not only to see like what works so well and what’s so good, but also just what the trends are out there and like what I see a lot. OK, that’s a thing that’s probably being seen a lot, so avoid that thing.

**John:** Avoid that thing. Megan is going to be back after we do some quick follow up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Last week we had Chris Keyser on the show to talk about agency negotiations and the problems of conflict of interest, all that stuff is still happening. But on Wednesday we got word of a major payout in another conflict of interest situation. Craig, do you want to talk us through this.

**Craig:** Oh boy, what a mess this thing is. And this is not something that hasn’t happened before. This is kind of a pretty dramatic outcome though in terms of how it unfolded. So this is about the show Bones. This is a show that was airing on Fox. And it aired more than 10 years. And basically what it came down to was the people that were the profit participants in the show Bones essentially said that Fox had kind of self-dealt. I guess what do you say like–

**John:** Undervalued?

**Craig:** Underestimated? Undervalued. Perfect word. They had undervalued the value of Bones when it was kind of self-dealing the reruns to itself and the programming to itself. So, what happens is you’re making a show. Very typical way this would work is in the old days a studio, let’s say Paramount, would make a television show like Star Trek. So they produced that show. They then sell that show, meaning they license it, to a network. I think Star Trek was on – oh boy, I’m not going to say it because they’ll get angry at me, the Star Trek people. They license it to a network. The network pays them a fee. And then over time if the show does well then it goes into syndication and all that rerun money kicks back to Paramount, the studio that made the show. But they weren’t airing it.

What happens if you have Fox Television creating a show and then licensing it to Fox Network? Ah-ha. Now you have all sorts of opportunity for skullduggery because Fox doesn’t necessarily want to have to pay out profit participation to the people that are participating in the profits. And so the lower they say – the worse the show is doing, the better it is for them, because they’re actually keeping all the money. They’re just reporting on paper it’s just not doing that well.

But it is. So, the people that felt cheated by this took Fox to arbitration and they didn’t just lose this arbitration, they lost in the most spectacular manner. The arbiter essentially awarded them $180 million, most of which was him saying Fox is a bunch of liars. They have a culture of lying. This is egregious. So, first you’re getting essentially what you were asking for as kind of the money that they had ripped you off essentially. They were saying look they ripped us off about $52 million. He said great. Here’s your $52 million and here’s another $128 million in punitive damages because of the egregious manner in which they approached their accounting.

This is not a new story. This is Hollywood everywhere all the time. And I wonder if something like this will actually change the business or if this is just going to be another one of those, well, every now and then we have to pay $170 million but we’ll make more if we keep lying.

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s important to note that this is going to go up for appeal so we don’t know what the final decision is going to be. But what I found so interesting about this story is that we’ve had this situation before where for reruns they were undervaluing the thing, so X-Files the reruns were about that situation, syndication, that situation. But here it was the initial broadcast of the show. So the show aired – it was made by Fox. It showed up on Fox Broadcasting. Also Hulu and Fox’s foreign affiliates. And they were pricing it below market value is the argument that they should have been charging more for the show in all those situations. And they’d actually gone to the executive producers and the stars insisting that they not challenge the license fee issues over this time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s really fascinating because you don’t – it’s one thing to say like, oh, it’s creative accounting. But it felt like there was actual deliberate manipulation and talk about we’re not going to pick up the show for the next two seasons because the show is not successful and it really was quite successful.

**Craig:** Exactly. They’re saying, look, you have to go along with this and take these reduced things because otherwise we’re not going to bring the show back. Meanwhile they had already made a deal with the showrunner to continue making the show. They were lying flat out. You can’t threaten to cancel a show when you’ve just made a deal with somebody else to keep making the show.

And then there’s the Peter Liguori thing. Did you read about this?

**John:** You know, I got a little bit lost in all the weeds of it, because I read – we’ll put a link to the actual decision, but there’s so many different articles. Tell me about the Peter Liguori of it all.

**Craig:** So Peter Liguori was the president of entertainment at Fox Broadcasting Company which is the network. And he was the president until 2009. So, 2009 he leaves Fox and he happened to be around when a lot of these initial things were happening. He was apparently meant to testify in these proceedings. And seven months before he is brought in to testify Fox makes a new deal with him, an outstandingly good deal with him to produce shows at FX.

And this did not pass muster with the arbiter. It says, “Liguori’s deal came with fixed episodic fees and contingent compensation far exceeding that of top executive producers in Hollywood despite the fact that the executive Peter Liguori had ‘virtually no experience whatsoever as a producer.’” That feels like a buyout, right? That’s essentially what the arbiter is implying here is that Fox basically paid off Peter Liguori to not testify against them.

Now, that’s obviously what this guy is saying. I’m just reading along with it. But the arbitrator, Peter Lichtman, apparently is a very well-respected arbitrator. They’re going to try and I guess appeal this in court. Good luck, I think? I don’t think that’s going to work.

So this is a fascinating one. I’m interested to see if it sticks. If I had to bet I would bet it would stick.

**John:** Yeah. I think some version of this will stick. But I think it’s also worth looking at it in the larger context of conflicts of interest. And so this is Fox for Fox, but as we talked about last week we have these agencies that are also becoming producers and that’s going to be really awkward. You can imagine a ton of these lawsuits over like, oh, did you really find the best deal for this project or did you just take the best deal that you could make internally?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And follow up is over. Megan McDonnell, you’ve been the Scriptnotes producer for a year and a half, 14 months?

**Megan:** A year and some change.

**John:** Year and some change. You were also the producer of Launch, the podcast we did about the book. But you’re only a name at the end of the show, so people don’t really know you. I guess they could have seen you at the live show, or in Austin. But talk us through your background. Did you always want to be a screenwriter? How did you come to this?

**Megan:** I’ve always loved to write and it kind of never occurred to me that I could be a screenwriter until I went to grad school. So I went into grad school thinking oh I’ll be a producer, I’ll be a network executive, and then once I was there and doing internships and taking writing classes I was like, oh gosh, I’ve really got to give this a try. And I’m so glad I did because now I’m writing.

**John:** So where did you grow up?

**Megan:** I grew up in Long Beach, California, so a Southern California person.

**John:** All right. And school here? School in Boston, right?

**Megan:** I did undergrad at Harvard, studying English and Chinese.

**Craig:** As one does.

**John:** As one does. And then did you know you were going to move to Los Angeles directly afterwards?

**Megan:** Yeah. Because I knew I wanted to be in the industry.

**John:** Great. So you end up going to the Stark program at USC.

**Megan:** Yeah.

**John:** But did you have a job or an internship before Stark?

**Megan:** So I went straight from college, but while I was in college I had some internships over the summers.

**John:** So talk us through the Peter Stark program. For people who don’t know it’s a two-year graduate producing program. Why pick that rather than a screenwriting program?

**Megan:** Because at that point also I was like oh I’ll be a producer. This is my track. But also, I mean, all the programs at USC are wonderful, but also I think that for what I want to be doing ultimately anyway I’m very thankful that I went with the Stark program because it does teach you skills that you’ll need as a showrunner in addition to just being able to write and all of that.

**John:** So Craig is usually down on film programs overall, film school overall.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sell Craig on film school. What were the things you took out of film school that you think you wouldn’t have gotten if you hadn’t gone through them?

**Megan:** A huge part of it, of course, is the friends you make there. Being able to make a short film, like using your friends as crew, and actually making stuff I think it’s helpful to go to film school. And I do think it’s like a big decision that isn’t for everyone.

But I feel very grateful that I went. One for all the people I met. Two for all the internships I had and the friends I was able to make through that. But also you just learn a lot. And it’s certainly stuff that you can pick up while you’re working, while you’re at an agency or any of that, but just like learning how things fit together in a very straightforward way I think is extremely helpful. And it’s stuff that comes up while you’re an assistant even where you just have answers to things. And it helps add value to what you’re doing.

**John:** Yeah. I will say a good film program, and Stark I think is a very structured film program, it gives you a sense of the entire process. And so a screenwriting program can teach you this is how screenplays work, let’s write our screenplays, but doesn’t give you a sense of how movies are made and sort of from the idea to release date to home video. That sense of it is useful and you can learn that in an academic setting.

**Craig:** I mean, listen, no question that there’s advantages certainly to a program like this. So we’ve spoken about how if you are going to film school in a graduate program, or an undergraduate program at NYU or at USC, I get it. I do. I can see just the value of the people you meet alone probably – I mean, I have to weigh it against what it costs. Like for instance, my friends, you know, I got my friends to work on my movie. I’m like you could have also paid a crew of people and that would have been half the year’s tuition maybe for one year of film school.

But I get that part. I do. I wish that there were fewer programs. I don’t know how else to put it. I honestly wish there was some kind of cap on how many programs there can be because sometimes we’ll get emails from people saying, “Listen, my professor of screenwriting at East Tuscaloosa Bible College says that,” and we’re like do they need a screenwriting program there? I don’t know if they warrant one. Do you know what I mean? Just fewer. I’m all for fewer programs.

**John:** Now, Megan, an interesting thing which is different than any previous assistant is that in addition to school you also were participating in writer’s groups. And so you had regular writing sessions with other folks. So talk us through that. How did you find those people and what did you actually do in your writer’s groups?

**Megan:** I think the biggest thing for me getting stuff written has been writer’s groups. It’s such a game changer. And I was lucky, the first writer group I really participated in was organized through my alumni program for undergrad. And so they put us with a group and it was a semester-long thing where at the beginning you have an idea, at the end you have a script. And just the value of deadlines is huge. But in addition to that just being around people that have smart ideas about your script and bring different things to the table and can help you out.

And just like you learn things from people when you get to meet with them every week and talk about writing.

**John:** So that continued after school. I know that you would have every week, every two weeks – how often were you meeting up with these writer’s groups?

**Megan:** I’m in two writer’s groups. One is weekly, the other is every other week.

**John:** And what are the expectations of what you’re going to do in a weekly group?

**Megan:** For the weekly one, we would just create assignments that we would have to turn by the next week with room to read them. But it would be like, OK, figure out your log line and then your structure, or have a beat sheet by the next week, or write ten pages. And then by the end, stacked in such a way that by the end you had a canvas script that you’re proud of. And then for the other one it’s just like whatever anyone is working on bring it in and we’ll see.

**Craig:** How many people were in these writing groups?

**Megan:** Six or seven.

**Craig:** OK, that’s not too big. Sometimes I think if it gets – if there’s a group rather large it always seems to turn into some weird political mess, you know, because writers not always great in groups.

**John:** So you said the advantages are deadlines. I guess there’s a sense of like social pressure. If you don’t do this thing everyone is going to notice that you didn’t do this thing. And you won’t just feel bad personally, you’ll feel like you’re letting them down. Is that it?

**Megan:** Social pressure, yes, definitely that. But also just the energy of being around people that are excited about it, about what you’re writing but also about what they’re writing. I think that energy especially when you’re an assistant during the day and you are kind of creatively burned out by the evening then to be around people that are very excited to be doing this, I think is a helpful thing.

**John:** Well let’s talk about your day jobs. So, during Stark, it’s a two-year program, but the second year all your classes are at night so you could in theory have a normal job. When did you have internships? When did you start working full-time for a place?

**Megan:** So, during Stark I think I always had full-time internships. Not full-time internships, but I’d stack internships in such a way that I was using all my time, which actually I’m really grateful for that system just because working all day and then heading straight to class and getting home at 11, now that’s just what I have as a baseline. OK, the workday is that many hours long and I think it’s helpful as far as then being trained to do the assistant job and then at night do the writing part of it.

**John:** So when you say stacked internships, so you might have two, or three, or four internships over the course of a week? So on Mondays you’re this, Tuesdays you’re that?

**Megan:** Yeah. Usually two at a time.

**John:** Two at a time. Great. And talk about internships. Classically it was making copies, but no one makes copies anymore. So what does an intern do these days?

**Megan:** It’s a lot of script reading, which of course is very helpful for a writer. And also just understanding like mandates, what people are looking for, what belongs on kind of what network. But for me it was always development internships or programming internships.

**John:** Great. So you’re reading scripts. Are you writing up coverage? What do they have you do?

**Megan:** Yeah. Writing up coverage.

**John:** Were you paid for these internships or were they credit?

**Megan:** 50/50 I think.

**John:** All right. And were you paid enough that they were actually survivable, or was it just sort of token pay?

**Megan:** Whenever I did get a paid internship it felt like holy moly, like this is so exciting.

**John:** One of the classic knocks against internships is you have to be able to afford to take an internship.

**Megan:** I think it’s a huge problem. Yeah.

**Craig:** The whole system stinks. We were talking about this on Twitter, I think Aline McKenna mentioned that the standard – and I was talking to Bo Shim who is my new assistant, and she came out of CAA. And she said early on they just say, “OK, are you OK with the industry standard of,” and I think it was $13.50 an hour or something like that. That’s just unconscionable. I really – in the middle of our argument with the agencies about package fees and all the rest of it, you know, I’d also like to start arguing with them about what they pay assistants. That’s stupid. And it’s mean. It’s cruel. It’s a bit like that old system – which is still in place – where medical students fresh off getting their MD are sent to hospitals to work 19-hour shifts. It’s dumb. It’s hazing.

**John:** It’s dumb and it’s dangerous.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s literally down to hazing. Except in this case it’s hazing plus cheapness. It’s really gross.

**John:** But also it creates a system where the only people who can afford to work for that little money are the people who can sort of afford to not have a job. And so people who actually really need to pay rent, good luck.

**Craig:** Yeah. And not only have these things not kept up with inflation, but housing costs have far outstripped that. So, it’s a mess. And I’m angry thinking about–It’s upsetting to me. And so you know let’s put that on our list of things to yell at the agencies about.

**John:** [laughs] All right. We’ve got a long list here.

**Megan:** Yeah. It’s also across the board, too, right? Agency assistants certainly don’t get paid a lot, but also assistants on shows and PAs and stuff also don’t get paid a lot.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When was your first real job-job that wasn’t an internship? What was that?

**Megan:** It came from an internship where over a summer I had a job at Fox in comedy, the network, current and development–

**John:** We should clarify that for folks. So current means the shows that are on the air right now. Development is shows they’re trying to figure out how to get on the air, or they’re going to make pilots and they’re going to figure out which ones go. That handoff is always really weird. So you start in development and then if your show keeps going then you’re handed off to current. Is there more prestige in current or development?

**Megan:** So I don’t know because I felt very lucky to be at Fox Network because it was the same person, like when you start with a project in development you get to keep it through current. So, the executives did both, which I think is relatively rare. Most places it’s split up. But I think it’s also just very different skillsets, too.

**Craig:** That was my first internship, too, was current programming at Fox. And I remember that – you know, they had I don’t know three, four, five current programming executives, so they would assign everybody a few shows. And their job was to go to the table readings and to give network notes and so on and so forth. And the least seasoned of them, he was a fairly new hire, I think this was his first executive job, he was given The Simpsons. And I asked my boss who was the head of current programming, I was like just out of curiosity why would you give that guy The Simpsons? And he goes, “Because it’s The Simpsons. We don’t need him to do a good job.”

**John:** It’ll be fine.

**Craig:** It’s gonna be fine. They don’t give a damn what we say anyway. The sort of prestige portion of current programming is when you’re kind of put in charge of a rescue mission I think.

**John:** Yeah. Now, Megan, this is a question I never thought to ask you but when did you start listening to Scriptnotes?

**Megan:** I think I started listening during Stark. I don’t have a sense of what episode I came in on or anything, but as soon as I started listening I backfilled.

**Craig:** I really wanted you to say, “Oh, I’ve never listened to Scriptnotes.”

**John:** I’ve never listened to your show. Even though as I produced it—

**Megan:** I just assume they’re fine and I publish them.

**Craig:** Yeah. The wave form has come through, so I’m good. Yeah.

**John:** How did you find out about this job and what was the process there?

**Megan:** I found out about this job – a friend of mine, thank you friend, forwarded the blurb about the job and was like, “Hey, is this the kind of thing you’re interested in?” Because they knew I wanted to transition to a writing thing. And I was like yes I am. And so then I was lucky enough to be able to go through the process.

**John:** You sent through the email, the resume, we talked and you did a little assignment. And then you were hired into the job. What does a writer’s assistant do? What did you end up doing when you were doing this job in addition to producing Scriptnotes? Like what are the things that you think a good writer’s assistant is doing for a feature writer mostly?

**Megan:** I think it’s so, so different job to job because you’re so self-sufficient, so I feel like the standard part of a writer’s assistant job was much less for this. For me besides doing Scriptnotes the majority of the time was just on tech support for Highland2.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Megan:** Which was delightful.

**John:** Yeah. We are a software company as well, so there’s a lot of tech support that you stepped up and helped us out with that. But you were also writing a lot. And so what were you writing before you came here and what were you writing during here? What were you thinking your career was going to be about? Were you trying to do TV? Were you trying to do features?

You had directed a short that was great, which we linked to very early on in your run as a producer. But what was your plan getting here?

**Megan:** First of all I was just so thrilled to have this job because I mean obviously the best writer’s assistant job you can have. But as far as next steps/game plans, I had just started talking with my manager who is wonderful, Scott Stoops. Mostly I’m focusing on TV, so I had written a couple of TV scripts, a couple anthology specs which is kind of cheating. And then while I was here I was working on a feature, a couple more pilots. But I think the sample I’m using now is one that I actually gave to you–

**John:** Yeah, I read your pilot.

**Megan:** Right at the beginning.

**John:** Back then. And so I wasn’t hiring you as a writer, but I just wanted to see like does this person have the ability to put words together in a meaningful way. Does this person get it at all? So that was the goal behind that.

You very quickly skipped over this like “oh, and a manager.” So talk to us about how you came across this manager. Because it was a transition where it wasn’t quite clear whether you were represented by him or if it was a friendship. So talk about how you met this person and how it develops.

**Megan:** Yeah. I mean, I was so lucky, again, for this one through one of my writer’s groups we would organize every semester like a practice pitch thing where you would practice pitching in like a very fast way your idea to people in the industry. And so my manager Scott was among the people that would come in and listen to our pitches and give us notes on them. And I pitched him my project and he’s like, “Wow that sounds really interesting. Is it written?” And I was like yes it is and it’s printed out and here you go. And I gave it to him and he read it that night. And called me at work at the office. I told him who I worked for at the time. Called me at her number the next morning and was like, “Hey, just want to say I read your script and I loved it. Would you want to work together?”

We really hit it off. At that time I had kind of been talking to a couple people. There’s a strange thing where–

**John:** Was it about the chemistry or did you just trust him? Was it you felt that he was the right person or you weren’t even quite sure at that moment?

**Megan:** Well, no, I really got great vibes from him. And I had been talking to someone else, so I didn’t know when things become official and like that kind of thing.

**John:** Let’s pause here because Craig–

**Craig:** Are we dating? Are we exclusive?

**Megan:** I wanted to say that but I was nervous.

**Craig:** Are we boyfriend/girlfriend, or are we just friends-friends? Or like where are we?

**John:** You and I had this conversation about him because it wasn’t quite clear for a little while there. But, Craig, I want to sort of wind back here because a lot of what Megan is describing feels really familiar. And so it’s that sense of like, oh, I must be really lucky, and she’s not noticing how much hard work she did.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like how many things she wrote.

**Craig:** Shall I punish her for this? I mean, you’re not lucky. You are no luckier or less lucky than anyone. I think that certainly the way life functions there’s going to be circumstances and things, but I think in general we – you know, once you get past the luck of where you’re born and what kind of family environment you’re born into, when you get to Hollywood there’s just not enough luck. There’s literally not enough luck possible to make you have a career.

So, and by the way, I would also say there’s not enough bad luck possible to keep somebody brilliant down. It’s not going to happen. If you are talented and you are hardworking and you are a person of conscience, an honorable person with a work ethic, then you’re going to make it. Chance favors the prepared mind, and so on and so forth.

So it’s not luck. In fact, if anything I could argue that you are unlucky that somebody that was talented enough as you were to get hired and be put on a show as you are now – it should have happened sooner. You are unlucky. [laughs] So I’m glad that even as unlucky as you were you were able to finally get a job. See, that’s how I do it.

**John:** That’s how you do it. I would say that I’ve actually seen a lot of people in exactly your chair sort of moving up through. And what I recognized was there was a time at which you would have some phone calls where you’d have to step outside to take the phone call about a thing, or you’d say like is it OK if I take this meeting. So, your manager is setting up these meetings and you’re going to just general meetings and see who you hit it off with. And I saw that happening and I saw it happening more frequently and more frequently.

And so I would say to Craig I think she has about three months left before–

**Craig:** Yep. He would.

**John:** Before she’s out the door.

**Craig:** Before she gets really lucky. [laughs]

**John:** So you have a manager. At one point do you have an agent?

**Megan:** Now I’m getting confused with my timeline because it just feels like, you know, god I’ve been working ever so long now. But I think there gets to be a point where it’s getting close to like time to get staffed, time to do this, and that’s when I started meeting with agents. And also my agents are wonderful at Verve. But, yeah, the kind of thing where it’s like, OK, if we’re going to put you up for staffing jobs it’s helpful to have someone else to follow up and to find opportunities and covering agents and stuff like that.

**Craig:** Covering agents for those of you at home are the agents who are assigned a studio or place of purchasing. So they’re like, OK, I cover Warner Bros. I get a call from Warner Bros saying we have an open writing assignment for so and so.

**John:** Yeah. Or on a specific project. But how did you get to Verve? So this is your manager sending your script to people at Verve saying like I represent this young woman, she’s fantastic, you should read her? Is that the process?

**Megan:** Yes. It was for me.

**John:** Great. And so then you go in and you talk to the agents there. You see if you hit it off. But when you say you’re being put up for shows is it just the agency sending it in or is it also your manager who is talking to folks? Is everybody sort of working together to do it?

**Megan:** I think, yeah, everyone is working together. They’re always in communication. My agents will submit me to some shows. The show that I’m working on now I think initially my manager was the one to kind of initiate it, which I’m very excited about.

**John:** So there was a moment about two months ago where I came back after a meeting and you stayed back late and like I could tell you were really, really excited. And so what was your excitement over?

**Megan:** This is when I was called – it was after work on like a Friday evening and I was packing up to go. But I had a call with my team planned and it was like, oh, you have a staffing offer. And I was like oh my gosh. What it was was Scott being like, “Hey Megan, you know, on this thing, you know, they really liked you. I’ve got some bad news.” And I’m like, OK, yes, of course, like I never expected to get this job. Of course. And he’s like, “The bad news is you’re going to have to quit working for John because you got staffed.” And I was like oh my gosh.

**John:** So talk to us about the show that you ultimately ended up signing onto?

**Megan:** So the show that I’m staffing on now is a Marvel show for Disney Plus about Scarlet Witch and Vision.

**Craig:** Ooh, cool.

**Megan:** And it is just my dream job. It has been – it’s too good to be true, where like I’m loving every minute of it but also like very anxious that it’s too good to be true.

**John:** Yeah. So we should have said earlier on that the stuff that you’ve been writing has classically been science fiction or sort of like Twilight Zone anthology-ish. It’s very much in that sort of mode. And so this felt like, wow, that’s a great show for her to be staffed on.

**Megan:** Yeah. It feels like a really good fit. And everyone is so nice to each other. It’s going to be good. I can’t wait for everyone to see it.

**Craig:** You know, I’m telling you these kids growing up now in an age where people must be nice. And I feel like they’ve weeded out the real psychos. I hope they have. You know, back in our day Megan it was just psychos. You’d open your door and it was fields of waving psychos everywhere you looked. Ugh. Now you guys, I love it. I’m happy. I’m glad that it’s that way. It should be that way.

**John:** Yeah. I’m really glad it’s that way. Talk us through that first day being in a writers’ room, because that’s got to be just a completely different experience for a writer who has always been working by herself. So what is it like?

**Megan:** Besides just totally magical, I had met with some friends in advance who had been staffed on shows before to be like, OK, give me all the tips, what should I do, what should I not do. And so I thought I was like, OK, I’m going in and I know vaguely how much to talk and how much to not talk. And I felt all set. And as soon I get into the room I realize oh my gosh, like I don’t know what seat to pick.

I was one of the first ones there, of course, because I was new and nervous. And I was like this is definitely a thing. Like when I was in China I learned much too late that the seats where you sit at a dinner table is like meaningful. And that was very embarrassing to me then. So now here I am in this room being like I just have no idea. So I picked a seat and everyone was nice and it ended up being fine.

**Craig:** Again, I wanted you to be fired on the spot, just like, “Oh, you have to go now. You can’t come back. You picked the wrong seat. You picked the wrong seat.”

**John:** You picked the wrong seat. Are you still sitting in that seat today?

**Megan:** Yes I am.

**Craig:** That’s how it works.

**John:** And so right now you are in the room, you are breaking story, you are figuring out all that stuff. So you’re not writing on a script yet? It’s all secret because it’s Marvel.

**Megan:** Yeah. Everything is very secret. That’s one thing we learn the first day.

**John:** There’s a red dot moving across the wall. I don’t want it to land in the middle of your chest. Well, anyway, Megan, we are so, so happy that you are on a show and a show that you’re very excited to be on. We were so sad to lose you, but fortunately we found Megana who is great.

**Megan:** Yeah.

**John:** And so this is so confusing to everybody. Megan’s replacement is named Megana. And she is fantastic and she’s a friend of yours from before this.

**Megan:** Yeah.

**John:** So she’s been great. So she’s been on the job for a couple weeks. And you’ve trained her how to do all the Scriptnotes-y things.

**Megan:** Yep.

**John:** Let’s move on to our Three Page Challenge. You’ve done a bunch of Three Page Challenges. We have three this week. Our first Three Page Challenge comes from Christopher Cramer. For folks who have never listened to a Three Page Challenge before, here’s the deal. So we put out a call to our listeners saying we will read the first three pages of your script, your screenplay, your teleplay, whatever you want to send us that’s script-like and give you our honest feedback. And so Megana looks through them all and picks things that are going to be interesting for us to talk about. So they’re not necessarily the best things she’s read, but the things that had the most interesting stuff for us to talk about.

So three very brave people, actually four because it’s a writing team for one of these, have sent through their stuff and we are talking about them. These people have volunteered for this, so just reminder to everybody – everyone wanted us to do this. They went in full knowing that we were going to do this.

If you want to read along with us you can follow the links that are in the show notes. We have PDFs that you can download for these things.

All right, our first script is called Three Weeks Gone by Christopher Cramer. It’s morning on a ranch in Wyoming. Jim Young, the owner of the ranch, checks the progress of the farmhands repairing a fence. Through their conversation we learn that Jim’s nephew Mason has been having a hard time adjusting to the farm and that he damaged the back hoe recently.

Mason hasn’t come to help yet but was seen going into the barn. The conversation is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot, presumably Mason scaring off Coyotes. Then Jim goes inside to see his wife Laura. He grabs a bite and asks what Mason was shooting at. Jim leaves to check on his nephew. After a standoff with a coyote outside of the barn, Jim enters the barn to find his nephew dead. And that is where we’re at at the bottom of these three pages.

Megan, we’ll start with you. What was your first impression reading through these pages? What did you get out of this?

**Megan:** I think it does set up a story. Like you understand kind of what we’re doing here. You understand the relationships I think really well right from the beginning. Something I noticed before, through reading through hundreds of them, it used to be that sexual violence was the thing that was in so many of the scripts. And then more recently for all the scripts I’ve been reading suicide is now like in so many of the scripts. And that’s not to say that it’s not used perfectly well here. But something to look out for as you’re writing.

**John:** So this one ends, the reveal with the body at the end. And it may be because we’re asking for three pages that there’s the pressure to get to a big showcase moment at the bottom of three pages. Rarely is it just sort of trickling out at the end of three pages. But it sort of a big moment. Craig, what was your first take on this?

**Craig:** My first take was that I was bored to death. And, look, here’s the thing. Christopher, it’s not that your pieces of story are boring, they’re not. But the way you’ve laid it out you’ve forced me to wait for something that clearly is bad. There’s no surprise here. The second there’s a gunshot that goes off I’m waiting for somebody to be dead.

Everyone is acting like, oh, he must have been shooting a coyote. No he’s not. I know that the – because really here’s the thing, Christopher, do you really think that any of us are sitting there going, hmm, yeah, it’s probably a coyote. No. We know it’s a show or movie, so we know he’s dead. We know. Or someone is dead, right? So you’re just making me wait for this thing that I know is there.

So I was bored. And also I thought, and this is a theme I’m going to bring up in all three of these, I could have written all of this in a half a page as far as I’m concerned. You’re not using this precious space very well. There’s a lot of just yapping. There’s yapping about posts. There’s yapping about where’s my nephew. There’s yapping about him being in the barn. Then he gave me a heart attack. What was he shooting at? I don’t know what he was shooting at. How was he? Yeah, he didn’t eat much. It goes on and on.

And as far as I’m concerned you have a bunch of guys that are working on a post. They’re hitting the post with a hammer. Ping. Ping. Ping. Someone goes where’s Mason? Don’t know. Ping. Ping. Bang. They all look over. Somebody starts running. I’m watching that. Do you know what I mean? It’s just dragging this out. There’s not enough drama to warrant these three pages.

I mean, I have a lot of other small things that I want to mention, but that’s sort of my tough love beginning for you here.

**John:** Yeah. From the moment we hear the gun shot I sort of know that Mason is dead, and so I’m just waiting for everyone else to catch up with me, which is a really bad place to be on page two.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So there’s more here that I did kind of like and I want to highlight some stuff that I thought was possible here, it was possible to sort of enjoy here. So the overall setting of the world is not bad. We’re on a ranch. I like that there’s people working on the fence. I like that there’s a lot more fence to be building. I liked the moment on page – it’s really page two here. His page numbering is off. But Jim says, “Take it easy on him. Your first three weeks here weren’t nothing to write home about either. He’s a good kid.” That’s a pretty good way of giving me a sense of who Mason is.

Now if I had seen some of that and I’d seen Mason walking around, or I’d seen Mason walking with a gun that is scaring off coyotes I would have been fine. In a weird way if you’d set up Mason with a gun before all this had happened, or we just see him walking by in a shot that would have been fine. I wouldn’t have assumed that he’s dead. But because we’re talking about this character and then we’re hearing a gunshot we’re naturally going to assume that Mason shot himself.

**Craig:** That’s what a gunshot means. It means Mason shot himself. There’s a bunch of things that stylistically I think it’s important to take a look at because this is somewhere in the – it’s Wyoming, right? So we’re dealing with ranchers, cow hands, and so on and so forth. Everyone kind of talks a little bit like a robot for a while. And then they start talking not like a robot. First of all “Its” possessive does not have an apostrophe. Please proofread your work.

Jim says, “How is it coming along?” That’s really weird and stilted. How is it coming along? Not how’s it coming along. Things like that are a bit odd. And there’s a bunch of them actually in the action description as well. It is summertime. Even in action description if it’s not dialogue, if it’s taking place on a ranch in Wyoming there should be a slight familiarity there. The contractions are going to help you.

There’s a long conversation with a ranch hand and his name is Ranch Hand. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’re going to hit that on another script today, too.

**Craig:** Exactly. I think also it’s important if you – Jim says, “How’s it coming along?” I’ve already done the contraction for you there, Christopher. And Ranch Hand says, “Oh, you know, one post at a time.” OK, a mild ranch joke I guess. But then the next thing you say is, “Jim cracks a smile. ‘There is no other way to approach such work.” Is this like a computer is explaining the joke to us? It’s very odd.

**John:** Yeah. So here’s a way to do that kind of joke. So, first off Jim is capitalized there for no good reason. But you could say Jim cracks a smile and then in italics go, “How else you gonna do it?” That sense of like you can give the unspoken line that he would be saying if he was going to say the line. But as it is right there it doesn’t help.

But then the idea of he reacts to that and then we reveal how much more of the fence there is to build, that’s fine. That’s great. To the degree it’s a misdirection about what is going to be happening next that can work.

**Craig:** Yes, I agree. Although it seemed like then everyone ignored the reveal. In other words if you’re going to make a reveal it usually comes at the end of something, not at the middle. So this is the moment where suddenly the scene has to stop so that we can do a reveal, and then it picks back up again. That’s not how it’s going to work. I mean, camera-wise if you think this, look, you know us we’re a big defender that writers can use the camera, but if you’re using the camera you got to use it right. So we pull out to see the expanse of the field and just how far along the fence isn’t. It is going to be a long day. Great.

Then the next thing. Ranch hand, “Haven’t seen your nephew yet this morning.” Well he’s a mile away from you now because I’ve pulled back. Like what’s happening? So that comes in the beginning or it comes at the end. But I don’t think you can put it in the middle here.

**John:** Megan, talk to me about geography in here. Did you get lost at all sort of where things were? Like the barn was close – he’d driven up in the truck but he said he’s already seen him go into the barn. And then we also have people walking through doors. Is this a thing that you notice a lot in these Three Page Challenges? I just felt like our confusion of geography is a thing that hits for me.

**Megan:** Yeah. On this one it didn’t bug me. I think I got more attentive to that after the Austin Film Festival Three Page Challenge where you guys talked a lot about geography and now I really look for it. In this one I saw it all pretty close together. But–

**John:** So let’s say that this is somebody in one of your writer’s groups who delivers these pages. What is the feedback you give to Christopher who is a friend or at least a colleague? What would you tell him to focus on?

**Megan:** There are just some things that he stylistically – he does a lot of things that are in all caps that I wonder like why is this in caps and why is this in caps. So *hot day*, *restless huff*, *long day*. And I can totally – it works really well, like sound of a gunshot. Yes, I definitely cannot miss that.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Megan:** But for some other things it just like if there’s too much capitalized or bolded then I don’t know what I should really be paying attention to.

**John:** For sure. So like on page three there’s a coyote is uppercase and bolded. Sure. Great. We’re seeing that it’s a big thing. But if we hit a bunch of those before then we don’t know what to pay attention to.

Let’s talk about the cut to-s on the second page. You didn’t need them. And so you can have cut to-s in your script. You can leave them out. But they didn’t feel like they were providing anything new. Because it was a kind of continuous action and you could get rid of those cut to-s and nothing would have changed.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m a big fan of using cut to when you really need to signal to the reader this is a big shift. We’re really going to a new place and time. Otherwise drop them out, because just doing the scene header is going to give you the sense that you’re cutting to a thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Cut to-s are really there to just say look there’s an interesting cut happening, not a cut. Similarly at the end, smash to black, that’s not a thing. I don’t know how you smash to black. You can cut to black. But there’s no smashing.

**John:** No. Can’t smash it. And then the blood on page three, there was just a long time on the blood. All the bottom half of the third page could have been done in two lines.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s movies and television, so we have seen blood 14 billion times by the time we’re 12. So, when you want to show blood I think the last thing you want to do is all caps and bold and underlined – a pool of dark red liquid. It’s blood. I mean, it’s not that, do you know what I mean? Just say he notices something on the ground. He cocks his – I would cut it. Just literally cut the next three lines and just say, “He cocks his head to the side and then looks towards the barn. It’s seeping out from under the large door.” I would say it. Let people – we’re good at this sort of thing. We want to play. We want to be invested. We want to get to fill in a few little blanks. So why hit us over the head with something as mundane as blood?

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. All right, last thoughts for Christopher. I would say the idea of the world is good but I don’t quite know what movie I’m going to be following on page four. Like if I’m reading page four I don’t know what movie I’m in. And so I don’t know if this is going to be a crime thing. If it’s going to be a family dealing with the death of their son, or their nephew. I just don’t know kind of what movie it would be on page four and that’s kind of a problem.

I have a sense of the world but I don’t have a sense of like where this could go next. Fair?

**Craig:** Fair for me. I mean, I don’t know where it’s going. I assume it’s a ranch drama. But it’s too – it’s flabby. These are flabby pages I think.

**John:** Craig, do you want to take Am I a Man Yet?

**Craig:** Sure. Am I a Man Yet by David Koutsouridis.

A day before his 21st birthday David confesses to his budget psychologist Xavier that he is not only a virgin but that he has never been kissed. Xavier suggests David take out Xavier’s younger sister tomorrow night. Xavier says she has definitely broken up with her boyfriend. We then cut to David’s birthday dinner with his overbearing mother who gifts him a framed portrait of himself as a cherubic angel. David storms upstairs where he discovers the phone number of Xavier’s sister and decides to call her. He shows up for the date where Xavier’s sister, Renee, initially assumes that he is her waiter.

So, John and Megan, what did you think of I am a Man Yet by David Koutsouridas?

**John:** This was a good example to me where pages don’t have to be perfect to be enjoyable. And that you can see that person has the ability to do this thing called writing even if not everything is really working right. What was your first take, Megan?

**Megan:** Yeah. I think it has some very funny moments. I think a thing that I got frustrated by was there would be a very funny joke and then the next character would explain the joke which wasn’t necessary because we got the joke.

**John:** Yeah. It’s very joke-joke-jokey. And that can be great. But I had a challenge on page one where I didn’t believe the psychologist for most of page one. And then when we got to the bottom of page one, “A framed certificate print-out on the wall. It’s been poorly made in Word.” Oh, I kind of get now more what this cheap psychologist is, but I didn’t – because I didn’t get that earlier on I couldn’t read his dialogue with any sense that it could possibly be real.

**Craig:** Yeah. I had the same reaction. Actually I would say also to get rid of the Word thing because I don’t know – he’s a therapist and so you can’t do it. It’s illegal to just print something out. So that’s kind of a tone violating thing where the world doesn’t even make sense.

So tone on page one, page two, page three of broad comedies is incredibly important. It’s also where everyone I think early on at least washes up on the shore and their boat smashes apart because it’s tricky. So in this case, actually there’s a really funny bit here and what I would do is just eliminate some other things. I mean, he’s saying, “I’m a 20-year-old kiss virgin.” And Xavier goes, “What?” I would just keep him like a psychiatrist. “A kiss virgin.” “Well, yeah, it means that I have never been kissed. Also I’m a full virgin.” And then the psychiatrist, or psychologist, could do this line which is really funny? “Well, if you haven’t been kissed, I’d hope so. I’d hate to think you hadn’t kissed someone but you fully penetrated them. How do you even initiate something like that?” That’s funny in the context of a guy who is not doing other wacky stuff.

**John:** Yeah. Just that run of dialogue if you took out all of Xavier’s lines between that and let David keep talking, a character who keeps talking can be a lot funnier. So this might be a situation where you do some beats or something just to break up that thread so it’s not so dense to read. But I believe one character talking through all of this. And all those jokes play better if Xavier hasn’t spoken.

**Craig:** 100%. There’s a little bit of a – again, we giveth and we taketh. We are empowering all of you to use the camera, but then we are demanding that you do not make the camera do things cameras can’t do. For instance we are close on baby face David. We pull back to reveal an oddball psychologist, Xavier. That’s not possible. Because unless Xavier is not facing David, if you pull back you’re going to see the back of his head. You know what I mean? That’s not a thing you can do.

You can’t just use pull back as this like reveal. If you want to reveal, reveal.

**John:** Say reveal. You’re allowed to capitalize reveal. That works.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In many ways I questioned the nature of like his being so babyish. On page three we also get into his bedroom which is “Bed-sheet with dinosaurs, plush toys serving as throw pillows. He grabs them, throws them into a garbage bin.” I didn’t quite believe that character because if the character is at the start of this thing frustrated that he’s never even kissed a girl and he’s 21 years old, but he just got frustrated today? Like why has he not sort of fixed his bed before this? Why does he still have dinosaur sheets?

**Megan:** Yeah. Someone who is frustrated with being read as a younger person would try – would overcorrect for that.

**Craig:** I feel like based on his name that he’s Greek and so he’s writing hopefully something that’s familiar to him with the character of Nancy, his mother. But we have seen this mother many, many times. We’ve seen her actually as a Greek mother. We’ve seen her as a Jewish mother. We’ve seen her as a Chinese mother. We’ve seen her as an Italian mother. This is the most clichéd of clichéd moms.

And I was a little confused because it began with David cheerily sits at the kitchen table. So he’s happy. And then she hands him this thing and he just doesn’t like the gift. At which point I’m like what’s your vibe, dude? If you’re super happy to be having your 21st birthday alone with your mom you can’t really flip out when she gives you a present that is consistent with that. Do you know what I mean? Like if you’re glum, if you’re depressed, if this whole thing is just like a total death of joy moment and then she makes it worse by handing you this gift I understand. But I’m like you, I’m confused. How aware is he that he’s like a child? Has he just become aware? That was a little tricky.

That said, I do agree with your initial point which is that these do feel like there’s promise there with polish and time and thought. There’s an intelligence behind this. There is some legitimately funny things that are happening. And so it just needs the usual thing that I would say to everybody that is starting to write comedy: logic, logic, logic, tone.

**John:** Absolutely. So the logic I would really stress is that you can have this scene with David and Nancy, with the mom and David. I don’t think it can be the first time that we’re meeting them because it doesn’t give me enough information to process how these people could possibly fit together. So I need a different thing that even if you’re not telling me everything I can believe it can fit into this universe and this world. Because I didn’t buy this first time you’re really starting at a deficit when it comes to later things.

But what Craig has pointed, like I see moments of really promising writing here. Page three, so he’s stormed off. Then David suddenly reenters, maintaining his anger, as he quickly finishes the last bit of his cake. He storms off again. That little tag on things, we’ve seen that kind of thing before but it worked in this scene and it felt like the right thing. It told us something about David and his impetuousness. And if I had a scene that set up how codependent he is with his mother or sort of like what their relationship is it could have even landed better.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** One last typo, page one, first word that isn’t INT is psychologist but it’s misspelled.

**Craig:** I mean, guys–

**John:** Got to proofread.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly. They have machines that do it for you now.

**John:** Yeah. It would be underlined with a little squiggly. So just look for the squigglies here.

**Craig:** Remarkable.

**John:** Our third Three Page Challenge is Chow by Carrie Wong and Herman Ming. Helen and Michael Chow, a Chinese-American couple in their 50s, shop for custom cut tablecloths at Home Depot. Helen questions Michael’s claim that the cheaper tablecloth has the same quality as the more expensive tablecloth. He convinces her that they’re the same and they check out.

A Home Depot employee tells them not to buy the cheaper tablecloth and that they are in fact not the same quality. The employee had bought the tablecloth herself and it quickly ripped.

We then cut to their 20-year-old son’s bedroom where their son Jimmy lies sleeping. And that’s as much as we know at the bottom of page three.

I’m going to start with a question specifically for Megan McDonnell. What typeface is used in these three pages?

**Megan:** I’m going to say Courier Prime.

**John:** It is in fact Courier Prime. You can tell by the lower case Ys.

**Craig:** Kissing up.

**John:** She doesn’t have to anymore. She doesn’t work here.

**Megan:** Right.

**John:** But this is a product I make.

**Craig:** Oh no, she’s not. Carrie and Herman are kissing up.

**John:** Oh yes.

**Megan:** And it worked.

**John:** It worked. It worked. They got picked. Just yesterday I was explaining to Megana how to tell which is Courier Prime and which one is not. So, yeah, now she knows.

**Craig:** Now she knows.

**Megan:** It’s so beautiful. If you guys haven’t seen it, read these pages.

**John:** Beyond the beautiful font what was your first impression, Megan McDonnell?

**Megan:** I really liked the dynamics in this. I really liked the characters. I think the way that they’re kind of looks are juxtaposed is really nice. I do think that the employee takes up such a huge percentage of the talking that maybe isn’t necessary, maybe slows the pace down a little bit.

**John:** The employee is just set up as “A moment later, a Home Depot EMPLOYEE (early 20s) approaches them.” But we don’t get a gender on the employee and later on it kind of becomes important because apparently she says, “When me and my boyfriend moved in together, he, like, bought the same…” And so not having any more information about that employee made it tough because that employee speaking probably has the most lines in these three pages and is just employee.

**Craig:** Yes. Employee. [laughs] This was another one where I thought I could have probably done this in one page. It just goes on. And I don’t know why. There’s nothing interesting happening here. The value is that the wife, Helen, is suspicious that Michael is pushing her towards a cheaper option. And it turns out he is. This is not high stakes, nor is it particularly interesting, nor is it something I haven’t seen before a billion times. This is almost the province of commercials. You know, dumb husband. And I’m fine with dumb husband, but three pages of it?

And the employee is just rambling. So sometimes we’ll call this shaggy dog. It’s rambling, rambling, rambling. The story that she’s telling is nowhere near interesting enough to warrant all this time. This story would have to go to some amazingly f-ed up placed where literally Helen and Michael are just staring with dropped jaws to justify the amount of time for which it goes on. This is the beginning of your movie. And what you’re telling me is that this movie is going to be sort of mumblecore like low-stakes chitchat. And I don’t like that.

And I think honestly that Carrie and Herman have done themselves a disservice because I think they’re good writers actually. The writing itself in and around these things is executed nicely. It’s just it has not been compressed. It has not been shaped. There’s not a lot of interesting things going on. People just arrive slowly. There’s no interesting ins and outs. There are two zoom outs which we’ll get into in a second. But this was sort of my trouble with this, like the first pages we went through, it felt like a prodigal use of what is incredibly precious real estate.

**John:** Some things I admired about these pages. We always talk about hair and makeup and really describing your characters. And so you look at the descriptions of Michael Chow and Helen Chow, they’re really good, and I can picture them in my head. And to skip out on that for the employee is sort of one of the big problems here. But to me this kind of felt like you have this writing team who has an idea for these two characters and just sort of gets them talking, or puts them in a situation and watches what they do. And this would be great practice for how to use these characters or practice for how these characters interact. But I don’t think it’s a great first scene in a movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s not setting them up on a big adventure. I’m more of a fan of the mumblecore, like stuff happens and people just talking and it’s loose, and that can work really well. But the things that work best it feels really loose but it’s actually getting to a point.

**Craig:** Exactly. I mean, when it’s done well people say, well, it’s mumblecore, but when it’s done well that’s just kind of the affect of the performance. But what’s happening is fascinating. So you have two people mumbling-coring at each other while somebody is watching and doing something else. The frames are interesting. The storytelling is good.

You know, you’re not going to get the movie made if it’s just boring talk. And this kind of is in the boring talk zone.

Small thing, in three – I think three different places, yes, bowl-shaped, gold-rimmed, mild-mannered, these things take hyphens. If you don’t put the hyphen in it’s just weird to read.

**John:** Yeah. You want to do this. Did both of you watch Master of None? Did you see the series Master of None?

**Craig:** Not completely but a number of episodes.

**John:** There’s an episode that I’m pretty sure Alan Yang directed where it’s this deaf couple in a store trying to buy something and it’s basically just them trying to have – the whole segment was just them trying to have this negotiation about what they’re going to buy. And it reminded me of this. But it’s the shaped version of this where you see their entire relationship is sort of summarized by their decision of what they’re going to buy here.

And I kind of feel like our writing team here could get there with the husband and wife because there’s something really interesting there that’s underneath this, but the employee is just dominating the whole thing. To see sort of what the manipulations are that they play with each other could be great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It just doesn’t – there’s no twists, there’s no turns. You know, there are versions of this where it seems like a normal thing and she’s like, oh yeah, no, because it rips. And then Helen just starts crying because this is the straw that broke the camel’s back and then the employee is like, “Oh, but it’s not the worth tablecloth.”

There’s all sorts of things you can do to justify these things, but you can’t do none of them. That’s the one that you’re not allowed to do.

**Megan:** I’m also curious about the way that this is opened, which is, “DARKNESS, A SERIES OF THIN GREY STREAKS, We SLOWLY ZOOM OUT to reveal…The bowl shaped hair of MICHAEL CHOW.” And I think it’s really interesting, an interesting visual, and I’m wondering are we supposed to be very curious about what it is. Are we going to come back to this? Because it is a pretty bold decision to start your film on something we don’t know what it is right away.

**John:** It reminds me of the start of Roma where you just see these squares and there’s water and eventually there’s mopping and eventually you sort of get to a thing. It can totally work. And maybe that really is the tone of what this is going for. Maybe we think it’s a mumblecore comedy but maybe it really is Roma and we’re supposed to be appreciating all this stuff around it.

If that is the case I think we would need to see our universe a little bit more and get a better sense that we are living in this space with these people and that we’re doing the slow pans through things, we’re really following them all the way up to the counter. And maybe it’s Roma. Maybe we’re missing that.

**Craig:** I don’t think it is. And if it is, this is not the way to start it.

**John:** The employee is written as a comedy.

**Craig:** The employee is written as a comedy. Let’s talk briefly about the difference between zoom and pull out or push in or those moves. So, typically in modern movies we don’t use zooms ever. A zoom is when the lens is doing the moving, not the camera itself. So as you’re zoomed in you’re looking at a small thing and as you zoom out the image essentially is like zooming out like on Google Maps, right. Whereas when you’re moving the camera itself, pushing in or pulling out, that’s more of a sense of you get parallax and motion and all the rest of it. And generally speaking zooms are bit ‘70s and a bit cheesy. They can occasionally be cool.

But in this case I’m guessing we don’t want to zoom out here, because if we did it would just be like one of those weird science movies where it’s like, look, you know, a tiny bug, and now the city, and the planet, and the galaxy. I don’t know.

Look, if you know the difference between zoom, and dollying in and dollying out, then cool, I apologize. But it’s important for people to know that there is a difference. I also – I have a question about at the end of this we arrive at the son. I assume this is their son because he’s got the same last name. Chinese-American, and then in parenthesis ABC, which I had to look up. It means American-born Chinese. The deal with this one is ECU, so now we’re extreme close-up on a yellow earplug. We slowly zoom out, again, so it’s the same gag. Is this on purpose? To reveal – and then the undersized ear of Jimmy Chow. I have no idea what that means.

What’s an undersized ear? I mean, like deformed?

**John:** Yeah. We don’t’ know if it means that he’s just a person with small ears or if there’s something really weird that’s going to actually be a factor. I agree. Undersized draws your attention without rewarding you for drawing your attention to that.

**Craig:** Perfect way of describing that. Yes.

**John:** Let’s talk about the ABC, American-born Chinese. I knew that term but you didn’t know that term. I think a safer bet for this script going out the first time is in that parentheses you say American-born Chinese, ABC, or ABC, American-born Chinese. And then once you’ve defined it you can use ABC after anyone else’s description if it’s helpful to you. Because in the nature of this project there could be lots of Chinese people with Chinese last names and it might be important to distinguish who was born in China versus who is born in the US.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. Yeah.

**John:** Cool. All right. So those are our three samples, so our three Three Page Challenges. Thank you to all of our writers who sent them in. And to everyone who didn’t get picked, you’re still in the queue so we may get back to them.

Now, there was a question that came up on Twitter today asking, “Hey, last time you said that you wanted to have a bunch of female entries to the Three Page Challenge,” because historically those numbers have been low. Megan, you actually counted at one point and it wasn’t great. It certainly wasn’t 50/50. And so we want everyone to send in their three pages, but we’d really love to pick more women for these because the percentages are not fantastic.

If you have three pages you want us to take a look at you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And there’s a button there. You click the button saying it’s OK for us to talk about your thing. You attach your script and it goes into a queue and we will take a look at everything that gets sent in.

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** Neat. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Megan, have you ever done a One Cool Thing on the show?

**Megan:** No.

**John:** You get to start. What’s your One Cool Thing?

**Megan:** This is thrilling. My One Cool Thing, I saw my friend Hunter’s setup. I love a second monitor when I’m working and his setup had the second monitor but it was like portrait, oriented portrait, which I had never seen before. This might be very obvious to everyone else. But I’ve got to say I set it up myself and Highland2 looks beautiful on a vertically-oriented monitor.

**John:** Nice! I love that you’re still selling our software.

**Craig:** Always be promoting.

**Megan:** Everywhere I go. People, yeah.

**John:** All right. So you write in Highland2, but you’re saying it works well done vertically.

**Megan:** Yeah. And you just can see so much more of your script and I think it’s really helpful for me.

**John:** Great. Fantastic. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is this tiny, little, dorky novelty item, but I saw it in my producer Jacqueline Lesco’s car. And I was like, ooh, what do you got there. And she showed it to me. It’s a charger. It’s a phone charger. That’s it. It’s a phone charger except – this is so dumb – but it lights up. So it’s got like these LED swirlies going around the cable and when you plug it in it lights up. And you’re like, OK, cool. But then when it’s charging the lights move.

**John:** Oh my god. [laughs]

**Craig:** It delights the child in me. It really does. It’s like you’re watching electricity flowing into your phone. It’s just delightful. I just stare at it. It’s hypnotizing.

**John:** Megan and I are going to watch the little video that shows what it looks like as it’s doing and, yeah, it does. It sort of snakes around.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look at that.

**John:** It’s like Vegas in your car.

**Craig:** Yeah. Vegas in your car. It’s the El-Aurora Lightning, it’s a USB cable. 360 Degree Light Up Visible Flowing, Glowing LED iPhone charger cable. I suspect that Amy August would love this.

**John:** OK, so are you using this in your car or in your house?

**Craig:** In my house.

**John:** All right. I guess it would be distracting in your car possibly. You could line your windshield with it and so everyone would know that you’re charging your phone and that you have this thing.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Now, Craig, I’m noticing that it has 286 customer reviews but they’re three stars. That’s not a very high – but it doesn’t matter?

**Craig:** Well, you know, some people can’t be pleased. I mean, you just like – you know, they just – apparently for a lot of people it didn’t work. But you know what?

**John:** You know what? It set your house on fire. But it looks so cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Somebody in their review, “Anchorman: 60% of the time it works every time.” [laughs]

**John:** Ah-ha. Good stuff. My One Cool Thing is a thing that probably everyone has talked to you about already. It is Russian Doll, the show on Netflix. I thought it was just fantastic. Megan you said you watched it all in one sitting?

**Megan:** Loved it. Yeah. One sitting.

**John:** Loved it. Oh my god, nothing could be a more Megan-y kind of show because it’s a puzzle box show. It’s like a cross between Lost and Girls. I don’t know, but it’s just so great. Craig, did you watch it?

**Craig:** I have it queued up. I’m going to watch it this weekend because I’m doing a little traveling this weekend. And I’m very excited for it. And I do think, you know, Natasha Lyonne should come on the show. I can’t believe we haven’t had her. How have we not had her on yet?

**John:** Well we crossed paths with her because remember when we did our Slate Culture Gabfest crossover she was the guest after us. But we’ve never had her on the show.

**Craig:** She was so cool. I remember when we were walking off the stage from that, because we went on and then she came on, and when we were walking off the stage she is like walking on the stage and she just gives me the fist bump. It’s just like what a cool person. Just look boop, my turn.

**John:** Boop.

**Craig:** Yeah, we should have her on. It’s actually fascinating watching the evolution and kind of progression of Natasha Lyonne over time because she’s been doing this since she was a kid. And I’m always fascinated by those people because I feel like I’ve kind of been weirdly growing up with them myself. It’s like knowing Jason Bateman is a fascinating thing because he doesn’t know it but I first met him when we were both 10. Do you know what I mean? And just like watching this thing happen is really cool.

And she’s just doing some really, really interesting work right now. Everybody loves the show. I know I’m going to love it, too. I can just tell. So I’m very excited.

**John:** Yeah. So it was created by her, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland, a great director who directed a lot of it, but Natasha Lyonne directed it as well. It’s just really well done. It’s one of those rare cases where everyone was hyping it up a lot and then you watch and it’s like, oh yeah, it’s really good. It didn’t actually diminish from everyone’s hyping it up. So, now that I’ve set the bar way too high–

**Craig:** No, no. I will.

**John:** Enjoy Russian Doll.

**Craig:** I’ll love it.

**John:** You’ll love it. Cool. That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond. It’s called The Stuart Special in honor of our original producer, Stuart Friedel. Our producers have done pretty well. Godwin Jabangwe set up a show at Netflix.

**Megan:** So exciting.

**Craig:** I know. How about that?

**John:** If you have an outro of your own you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Megan, are you doing Twitter?

**Megan:** No.

**John:** No, Megan is not on Twitter. Don’t try to tweet at her. But you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four to five days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. Craig, just today I realized only 10 more episodes and we hit the big 400.

**Craig:** I know!

**John:** 400.

**Craig:** It’s almost too much.

**Megan:** Is it going to be a live show?

**Craig:** Oh, it should be. Well…

**John:** Actually I’m thinking ahead and it could end up being a live show.

**Craig:** It could be. Because we’ve got a little something planned. And I will give you a little teaser, not to give away too much, but I recently recorded something that is associated with Chernobyl and I did it with somebody who is a prominent radio person. And the people who were producing it were, you know, I think they were concerned somehow that, I don’t know, that we needed help or something. And I was like, look, he’s a pretty big radio guy. And then I realized – and I’ve done almost 400 podcasts. I think I’m also pretty good at this by now. I get it. I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing.

**John:** You do. Craig, it’s always lovely talking to you, but especially nice to talk to Megan McDonnell again. We miss you but we’re so happy that you’re doing so well. And continued success on everything.

**Craig:** Welcome back and good luck.

**Megan:** Thank you so much for having me on.

**Craig:** It was a pleasure.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Bones Decision](https://deadline.com/2019/02/bones-award-profits-lawsuit-emily-deschanel-david-boreanaz-fox-appeal-1202564758/)
* [The Peter Stark Program](https://cinema.usc.edu/producing/)
* Three Pages by [Christopher Cramer](https://johnaugust.com/Assets/3WGCramer.pdf)
* Three Pages by [David Koutsouridis](https://johnaugust.com/Assets/Am-I-a-Man-Yet-3-page.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Carrie Wong and Herman Ming](https://johnaugust.com/Assets/Chow-Three-Pages.pdf)
* [Megan’s Desk Setup](https://johnaugust.com/Assets/Vertical_Monitor.png)
* [Light Up Phone Charger](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075WSSFV8/ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
* [Russian doll](https://www.netflix.com/title/80211627) starring Natasha Lyonne
* Submit to the Three Page Challenge [here](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Submit to the Pitch Session [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch)
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) The Stuart Special by James Llonch & Jim Bond ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Scriptnotes_Ep_390_Getting_Staffed.mp3).