Search Results for: courier

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/feel-the-nerd-burn).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 227 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we have a brand new Three Page Challenge where our listeners have submitted pages for us to take a look at and we will offer them our honest feedback. But before that, there’s an elephant in the room that we have to address.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Craig, I think part of the reason why our podcast is successful is that you and I have relatively equal levels of fame or sort of people don’t know who we are to equal degrees.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that all changed yesterday as we are recording this because on December 3rd, The Daily Show featured a story about your best friend —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Who is now running for president. His name is Mr. Ted Cruz. Let’s listen to what they said.

**Trevor Noah:** With a man of Cruz’s accomplishments, there’s bound to be some professional envy. [laughs] To truly know a man, you go and talk to the people close to him, from back in the day.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz was my roommate. I did not like him at all in college. And, you know, I want to be clear because, you know, Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics. But truthfully, his personality is so awful that 99% of why I hate him is just his personality. [laughs] If he agreed with me on every issue, I would hate him only 1% less.

**Trevor Noah:** Ooh. 1% less. Nerd burn. [laughs] Do you know how much you have to hate someone to do the math on it? [laughs] As you can see, before I met Ted, I didn’t hate him. And after I met him, well, the data speaks for itself. [laughs]

**John:** So Craig, I mean, the data backs it up. You are now a much bigger star than I am.

**Craig:** Well, you are in there. At one point, you go, “Yeah.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I have sort of like my, “Uh-huh.”

**Craig:** I think what’s so funny about this is that all of this was said by me a long time, years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there was an article that Frank Bruni did in The New York Times a couple of days ago that dredged it up. And that created this bizarro domino thing where then it went on The Daily Show where — and then he said that it was a nerd burn and —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He kind of called me a nerd, which I am. I’m a complete nerd. I just didn’t realize it was so evident in that remark. Anyway, and then, Jezebel kind of jumped on board and did a very lovely thing about it. And it turns out, if you want to be beloved in this world, just, you know, don’t like Ted Cruz. [laughs] It’s really not hard.

**John:** Absolutely. I remember when you actually spoke that one time. You just said like, “This is the last I’m ever going to say about it.” And that’s fine. So you don’t have to say anything more about sort of that person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s so interesting that the weird way that stuff you said years ago can cycle back through and create like a new moment of a new blip. Because even like my agent said like, “Hey, did you see this thing?” Like how many people today, Craig, have said like, “Wow. I heard you on The Daily Show last night?”

**Craig:** My phone was blowing up, as the kids say, or maybe used to say and probably don’t anymore. It was bananas. And, you know, of course it’s like, every three seconds you get an email, “Did you know?” “Yeah, I know.”

**John:** Yeah. He knew.

**Craig:** But the funny thing is, you’re right, I don’t actually want to become — I have turned down requests from The Times and from CNN and from POLITICO, and from dah-dah-dah-dah-dah all week long because I don’t want to be that guy.

**John:** You’re not that guy.

**Craig:** Just like showing up to talk about something just because people are paying attention. I have things to say about stuff I truly know about and that’s this. So we do our thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t need to be that guy.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And let’s be Scriptnotes. So while you were busy being famous, I have a couple of things that came out this week. [laughs]

First off, we have Highland 1.9. Highland is the screenwriting app that I make that a lot of people love. We have a 1.9 version which is out just today, as we’re recording this, which fixes a few last little bugs and things. 1.9 will probably be the last version on that whole thread because, the other big news which I’m announcing right here, is that Highland 2 is in beta testing. And we are starting to invite new beta testers in to try out Highland 2. It is a completely new build of the app that does a lot of very new things. I sent Craig a version to test, but he’s not had a chance to test it yet.

If you are interested in testing out the new version of Highland, we are bringing in new testers every week. And so, you just go to, quoteunquoteapps.com/highland, and there’s a place there where you can register for the beta test or just follow the show notes. But, Craig, I cannot wait for you to try this because I think it will do a lot of the things that you’ve been yearning for in a screenwriting app for quite a long time.

**Craig:** Yeah. It sounds great. And I’m going to look through it. I mean, you know, the big learning curve for me for Highland is just the idea of writing in markup or markdown. I guess it’s markdown.

**John:** It’s called Fountain. It’s basically you’re writing in plain text and letting the app do the work for you. The app will do the work for you in a much more fluid way than I think you’re used to.

**Craig:** I just have to learn the — which I think I already kind of inherently know, you know, like asterisking for italicizing and stuff like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I just got to learn those things. But I mean, I’m definitely into it. It sounds great. And I think it’s the future. I do.

**John:** Yeah. So a lot of the things that you’ve been yearning for in an app, the ability to, you know, put images in, the ability to sort of just break beyond the normal screenplay format, this is the thread that’s going to take us there, eventually, I hope. And it’s also the biggest change we made, the biggest pivot we made is while it still writes for screenplays, it writes in Fountain.

I was listening to a podcast that B.J. Novak was a guest on. And so, apparently, our guest, B.J. Novak, who was on our last Christmas show, apparently he does other podcasts too which I’m appalled by. But he was on this other podcast and he was talking about how he writes in Word. And I just found that just appalling.

**Craig:** You mean he writes screenplays in Word?

**John:** He writes screenplays in Word but he also just like writes his books in Word. He writes everything in Word.

**Craig:** Oh, is that bad?

**John:** Well, Word is kind of like, it’s way too much of a thing. It’s like trying to take the space shuttle to go to the grocery store. It’s like it’s the wrong tool for the job.

**Craig:** I know. There’s so much there. Right. And I never use it but it’s there, so I just use it.

**John:** Yeah. Something like, “Do you need to mail merge” No. You never need to mail merge. I mean, it could do it if you wanted to mail merge.

**Craig:** I never, never need to mail merge.

**John:** So, Highland, this new version of Highland and Highland 2, we are a full Markdown Editor, so we can actually do all the just normal plain text stuff you write in, so like all the stuff I wrote for NaNoWriMo, I wrote in the new Highland 2. For the last screenplay, I wrote in Highland 2, the beta versions, the bleeding, often crashing versions. But it’s been great and there’s a lot of new things that beta testers will get to explore and try that I’ve never seen in any other app. So I’m curious for you to give it a shot.

**Craig:** Okay. I will take it for a spin.

**John:** Cool. In our last episode, we did follow-up on Whiplash. And here’s more follow-up on Whiplash. So listener Brad Morticello wrote in with this link to an interview with Michael McCullough, who’s a psychology professor and director of the Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory at the University of Miami. And specifically, you and I had discussed whether revenge is emotionally-driven or intellectually-driven. I had said like there’s no such thing as intellectual revenge. And you said, “No, the Jewish people have a whole version of it.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** What was so fascinating, what I liked about this article is McCullough was talking about how there’s probably an evolutionary reason for revenge because it seems wasteful to pursue revenge because you’re not actually getting anything out of it.

But McCullough makes a really interesting point. He says, “The desire for revenge goes up if there are people who have watched you mistreated, because in that case, the costs have gotten even bigger. If you don’t take revenge, there’s a chance that people will learn that you are the type of person who will put up with mistreatment. That is the kind of phenomenon that you would expect if there’s a functional logic underlying the system that produces revenge.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. I mean, there is a revenge which is a completely irrational Ahab versus the whale kind of thing. But I think most revenge, most pettier revenge is, “I’m not going to let that guy walk all over me.” And underlying that is because then everybody will walk all over me.

**John:** It’s kind of the common advice they give to people who go to prison the first time. It’s like, if they punch you, punch them back in a big public way even if you get really hurt. Like, don’t let everyone know that you’re a bitch.

**Craig:** I really, really have to studiously avoid going to prison.

**John:** Yeah. It’s going to turn out very poorly for you, Craig.

**Craig:** Without question.

**John:** Umbrage is not the trait that’s going to get you through that. I mean, I think you got some street smarts but I also think that you could get yourself into some real trouble.

**Craig:** Well, just the whole idea that — I don’t like it. I don’t want to go. I’m following the law as best I can. Here and there, when I bend or break it, it’s usually in the misdemeanor zone. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I think my best strategy for prison is to be the guy who can fix the warden’s computer. And so, therefore, I’ll be an asset that people will protect because I’m the one person who can do that thing.

**Craig:** I really don’t think you’re going to prison.

**John:** I don’t think I’m going to prison. I’m trying to stay on the straight and narrow, best I can.

**Craig:** Well, that’s what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that you’re trying at the very best.

**John:** I’m doing my very best. [laughs]

Going back to the revenge thing, I guess McCullough is speaking to the public revenge. The private revenge is an interesting, different thing where you’re taking revenge on somebody and they don’t even kind of know that you’re doing it or no one else can see it. I think the plot of Munich could be argued as being a revenge plot. You’re not claiming responsibility for it. Maybe you’re making it clear enough that the people who are behind it would know that you did it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Munich, to me, is actually an example of very rational revenge-taking because it’s entirely about sending a message, “This will never work out for you. We will take forever to pay you back.”

**John:** Cool. Two last bits of follow-up for me. One Hit Kill was the game that we launched for Kickstarter. We shipped out all our backorders to Kickstarter. It’s a big card game with big fantasy monsters and cuddly rabbits. We now actually have it for sale. So it’s actually for sale at onehitkillgame.com. Eventually, it will be on Amazon but if you would like it before Christmas, the one place you can get it is onehitkillgame.com.

Also, you can buy through The John August Store, the Writer Emergency Packs. You can also find them on Amazon. In both cases, your best bet is if you’d like one of those things, get it before December 15th because just our stocks are running low. And it’s also getting very hard to ship stuff out. So, before December 15th, if you would like to order either the Writer Emergency Pack or One Hit Kill which are now available for purchase.

**Craig:** I like that pronunciation, One Hit Kill.

**John:** One Hit Kill. Writer Emergency Pack is a really strange thing because, obviously, we’re a big Kickstarter and so we shipped about 8,000 units out to our backers from Kickstarter. But we’ve had days on Amazon where we shipped 1,000 units in a day, which is just nuts to that —

**Craig:** Is it to one mass buyer or —

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** Just randomly —

**John:** A thousand single orders.

**Craig:** And then you’ve had days where — I mean, that’s way out of the ordinary?

**John:** Yeah. And so those big blips are because Amazon will put us on a special. They’ll put us on a lightning deal.

**Craig:** Oh, got it.

**John:** And so we’ll blow through like a thousand in stock at one time. But the problem is that it also, like, we don’t have that many decks there to ship out. And so, we’ve been scrambling this week to get more boxes of those Writer Emergency Packs there, including just looking around the office, like, how many decks do we have in the office and how can we get them to Amazon.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It’s a weird problem. In making movies, so rarely do the physical logistics become a problem, and especially now even with digital distribution. So, it used to be that you had to literally like ship prints to movie theaters. And that was a whole big thing and prints used to break. Now, it’s all “beep-beep-beep” and it gets, you know, digitally shipped off to the different projectors. And that whole logistics train is gone.

**Craig:** And we never deal with it in production. I mean, there are people who obviously handling logistics in production. There’s waves of them, but not on us.

**John:** I don’t know if you’ve seen any stories about The Hateful Eight. So Hateful Eight, some screenings are in the 70 millimeters —

**Craig:** Yeah. In glorious —

**John:** Which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Glorious 70-millimeter.

**John:** Great. And so, I think it’s wonderful that we have the opportunity to still show 70-millimeter prints. But showing prints is a science and an art. And there was one screening that a lot of people were at, including a lot of early press, that had a problem and had a physical technical problem and focus issues and other strange things because it was film and because it wasn’t handled just right. And it’s a thing we don’t think about anymore. We don’t think about damage prints. We don’t think about focus and hair in the gate and all the other stuff that used to be a real problem with film.

**Craig:** I know. It’s all gone. Gone.

**John:** All gone. From the mailbag. Olivia writes in, “I have recently been faced with a note that is an arbitrary decision made by the director, and that will make the story more predictable and the characters less consistent. I’ve carefully laid out all my arguments and suggested several alternatives but the director isn’t budging, the producers are deferring to him. Now, I either do what the director says or walk away from the job. I can’t afford to do the latter. I need the money. And more importantly, I need the relationships. So what do I do?”

**Craig:** Oh, Olivia, welcome to our world.

**John:** Yeah. Congratulations, Olivia. You’ve crossed into the place of a professional screenwriter.

**Craig:** One of us. Gooble-gobble. This happens on every movie, every movie. So when you say, “I don’t want to walk away because I need the money,” I would retort. You don’t want to walk away because you’ll never stop walking away. This happens every time.

The only comfort I can give you is this. You have the ability to do the very best you can to make this mistake as minimal as you can in terms of its impact on the quality of the movie. Sometimes, when you do it and people read it, everyone goes, “Oh, no, no, wait. Olivia was right. We just didn’t know.” See, we forget as writers because we do the math in our head so fast.

And most other people don’t. So, then they get the script. They read it and they go, “Oh, this doesn’t work.” And you’re sitting there thinking, “I told you it wouldn’t work.” But what we don’t understand is they just couldn’t see it in the way we can see it. And I get that, you know. Everybody has different skill sets.

So, sometimes that happens where by doing the work, you’ll actually make it go away. Sometimes, you do it and the movie comes out and it’s like, “Okay, the thing that was the hill I was going to die on turns out to — I mean, it’s still there. I don’t like it.” I mean, there’s something in The Huntsman I don’t like because they took it out and I wished they would put it back in because in my mind, I’m like, “Oh, you’ve ruined — ” but probably, no. [laughs] Probably people will be like, “Oh. Yeah. I wondered about that. But then, you know, I got to the stuff that I came for and not that.”

**John:** There’s a very famous Broadway director who was staging something and he’s a powerful director but not powerful enough to change the book or change — essentially, he couldn’t get rid of this one thing he wanted to get rid of, this one song, I think it was. And so, he called it his like “cocktail song.” And basically whenever that moment in the show came, he would leave the theater, have himself a cocktail, then come back in and rejoin it.

And I’m not saying that you have to live with things that you’re going to despise in the movie but I think you would probably rather have your movie made and have this one moment that’s not ideal than not have your movie made. So that’s one way to rationalize and think about it.

The other way I’d approach it is don’t do the bad version of it just to point out how bad it is.

**Craig:** Yeah, because that will backfire on you.

**John:** It will backfire. Do the best version you can do to implement the note and actually make the whole project work as well as it can. You might also write that and also on the side write, “And here’s a version that doesn’t do that that would also work,” and give them parallel drafts so they can actually see what the difference is. That extra work at least shows that you are committed to helping them make the version of the movie and to offer them alternatives. But you are going to be facing this the rest of your career. And I hope it’s a very long career.

**Craig:** By the way, Olivia, this isn’t the last time it’s going to happen on this movie.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** And you’re going to get to a place when the movie is shot and done and now you’re watching it and the producers are watching it and now people are saying, “Well, what if we do this, what if we do that?” And you’re about to face a thousand more of these. This is kind of the deal with what we do. And it’s terrible and yet also part of what we do, so you have to accept it to some extent.

Down the line, you’ll read a review where somebody will blame you for the mistake that you fought against with all of your heart and soul. An additional indignity. It’s part of what we do. All I can tell you is that we, John and I and everybody that does what we do, Olivia, we’re with you. What else can I tell you?

**John:** Emotional solidarity.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Do you want to read the next question from Curtis?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, because it’s for you. So Curtis asks, “On this week’s podcast,” when he means last week’s podcast, “you mentioned having briefly controlled the rights to The Man in the High Castle but that they were taken away from you when Ridley Scott decided he wanted them. How does that work?”

**John:** So when you are off to pitch a project to a network or a studio, something that had some underlying rights, if there’s a powerful producer involved, sometimes you’ll actually lock down and secure those rights in some meaningful way. But more often, it’s just sort of a handshake. It’s essentially like, “Yeah, okay, you can take this in to this place. And that’s fine, that’s good.” And that is how a lot of Hollywood works.

Even on like a spec script situation, you’re saying, “Okay, producer A, you can take this script to studio B.” And that is how it all works. There’s not contracts drawn. It’s just basically a handshake and nod saying like, “Hey, you have the rights to do this thing.”

In the case of The Man in the High Castle, for a period of several weeks I had that where I had conversations with the estate and the heirs about sort of how it was all going to work, what the nature of the story was I was going to tell. In my recollection at least, it was on the morning I was supposed to go into HBO I got the call saying like, “You know what, they decided they actually really would rather stay with Ridley Scott who had done Blade Runner.” And I can’t fault them. Ridley Scott is a bigger deal than I am.

**Craig:** Yeah. The thing to understand is we don’t really buy rights. You know, the companies do that. So we will go and pitch these things. John never really had the rights. He never owned the rights. Ridley didn’t take property from him. He just had an agreement that they would sell the rights to a studio that hired you to adapt it.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. So when I say I had the rights or when Ridley Scott had the rights, in both cases, there may never have been paperwork drawn. But essentially, the heirs were leaning towards one place. And so if I had gone into HBO saying like, “I had this whole big thing and blah, blah, blah,” they would have been gone to these heirs and said like, “Hey, do you want to do this thing with John August?” And they said, “No, I think we’re going to stick with Ridley Scott.”

**Craig:** Right. So at that point, why bother?

**John:** Yup. And it’s at that point you cancel the meeting with HBO.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** Aww. This next one has a visual component but I think we can get through it. This is a question from Joe who asks, “Do you ever adjust the line breaks in dialogue so that it wraps better?” So instead of, so imagine this is a line of dialogue, “Give me the medallion and all of this ends,” or “Give me the medallion and all of this ends.” So essentially asking, do you ever hit the character turn earlier so that in blocks of dialogue words stick together better? Craig, do you ever do that?

**Craig:** No. I call this shift-returning because that’s how you do it, you shift-return. You stay in the same element but you put in the break. I’m not that finicky. My feeling is if everything is within its own block of text, then it will be read continuously by people. And the way we read is not consistent with what Joe is thinking about here. We don’t actually read that way. We read in chunks, including the line break chunks. We kind of move ahead. So that part doesn’t bother me. I will absolutely be obsessive about how the page ends.

So if I want something, if there’s a big reveal and I want it at the bottom of the page, not “And then” and then turn the page, babababa, I will adjust that because I think page turning is a thing. But no, I don’t do this. Do you do this?

**John:** The only times I could think of doing this is when I have lyrics in scripts. And I will shift-return in order to get those lines. If a lyric is too long for the line, I will force it to break in a certain place so it’s a little bit more natural and better fits the meter of what the song is.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, I mean, because lyrics are really poems, so I will shift-enter lyrics all day long. But for regular prose, no.

**John:** Yeah, not for regular prose. I’ll also say, if I’m doing lyrics in a screenplay, I will give myself the latitude to cheat the right-hand margin and let it go longer so that things can stay together as a line, because everyone sort of knows what you’re doing and it’s not really cheating if you’re just trying to keep one lyric together on a line.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I mean, lyrics are a special case. But for action descriptions of the kind that Joe is describing here, I just think that that’s a level of specificity that will not be rewarded, ever.

**John:** Yeah. And you’re just going to drive yourself mad thinking about like, “Well, how should this line break?”

**Craig:** Truly nuts, yeah.

**John:** Truly nuts. And not to mention that whenever that line of dialogue goes across a page break, you may be messing up some things about that, too.

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** But Joe doesn’t rewrite anything. He writes, “It’s done.”

**John:** One and done. He’s a top-down world-building perfectionist. So Dustin Box, who works for me, who’s a designer but also is a big fan of the podcast and writing in general, he was listening to our world-building episode from last week. And he was thinking about how some people, that it may be related to the way that people approach screenplays sometimes is they think that it has to be once and perfect. And so they’re going to write this one screenplay and it’s never going to change. And, basically, I’m going to write it from the start to the end and then the screenplay is going to be done.

It’s not being aware of the fact that it is an iterative process, that it’s not supposed to be perfect the first time through. You’re going to keep going back to it. And by its very nature, you’re going to be, you know, rethinking things and discovering things about — writing that scene at the end is going to make you discover something new about the beginning of it.

And so he was drawing the comparison between what we do in a top-down world-building versus ground-up world-building to trying to write the whole screenplay at once versus figuring out what the screenplay is from the bottom-up. And I think what we often pitch on the show is like really looking at the screenplay from one character’s journey one time through and only building as much world as you need for this character to tell his story.

**Craig:** Yeah. The annoying thing about screenwriting is that the only way to get through it is to feel like you’re doing it right but then also hold in your mind simultaneously the knowledge that you’re not doing it right.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And you just have to manage to be split-brained in that way. Because how do you write a scene not right? There’s no way to do that. You have to convince yourself that this is it, but then have just the wisdom to know it’s not.

**John:** I was talking to Justin Marks at a screenwriters drinks this week. And he was talking about the work he’s doing on a project and he had, at a certain point, realized, “I just need to get something on paper that will give people the ability to plan for what’s going to happen next and know that I will have the opportunity to go back and make that thing better.” And finding that balance between making something absolutely perfect and making something good enough that people can do their jobs is a really tough line. And figuring out where you’re at in that process can be so tough.

Television, you’re often having to shoot things that aren’t perfect. You just know they’re not perfect.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that’s the nature of the game because you could spend 10 years on it and make it perfect, but then you’ve been cancelled for nine years.

**Craig:** So, congratulations —

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** On your perfect cancelled show. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s get to some perfect scripts. Let’s get to our Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I was very excited by all of these. But I’m going to start with Jody Russell who wrote End Times Boy. And so on this podcast, I’ve decided that we are going to make our assumptions about people as default female. So Jody could be a man or a woman but I’m going to say Jody is a woman because default female will be our guess here.

**Craig:** I now realize that, yes, there are men named Jody, some baseball players. But, no, I just presumed.

**John:** Wasn’t the kid on My Three Sons also a boy Jody?

**Craig:** Oh, I just know Fred MacMurray.

**John:** And also, Lena Dunham’s cinematographer from Tiny Furniture who also did the first seasons of Girls is also Jody. It’s like, “Oh, she’s really good.” It’s like, “No, it’s a he.” I’m like, “I’m an idiot.”

**Craig:** No, you’re not. I mean, because I think primarily by the numbers, Jody is —

**John:** By the numbers, yeah.

**Craig:** Jody is female.

**John:** Wonderful. I will summarize this one. So this is Jody Russell’s End Times Boy. So we open in an abandoned house. We’re in the hallway. We hear rhythmic breathing. We see two people in respirators, just two faces. They head into the kitchen. Glass is crunching under their feet as they survey the kitchen. They’re searching for stuff. They open up a cabinet. They find three cans of sardines inside. One of the boys pulls out his mask and you can see that it is actually a boy. This boy is Sam. He’s 10 years old, caked with grime and dirt. Eli, who he’s with, says, “We shouldn’t stop.”

Once they get outside and get away from the house, they pull off their masks and gear. So you see that Eli is older. Eli is 12 years old. Eli says, “At least there weren’t any bodies.” And so they get to a chain-link fence and they end up back at a shambled chicken coop where there’s a man named Old Ben who’s only in his 40s. So 40s is not that old, I just want to point that out.

Old Ben, voice wet and raspy, asks if they got anything. They say they got two cans of sardines. They actually got three but they say they got two. Old Ben is pissed at them. He says, you know, “You’re holding back on me. Give me that fish.” Ultimately, Sam pulls a gun on him and we exit the scene with Sam pulling the trigger on Old Ben. And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Well, so I’ve been playing Fallout 4 lately. This felt like mother’s milk to me. [laughs] So this feels appropriately post-apocalyptic. Loved the opening image of two faces in these respirators. That’s such a great like, yeah, I’m going to just keep saying video games like Borderlands and Fallout. Such a good look. And then you have the abandoned house and people scavenging, which is classic post-apocalyptic stuff.

Love that it was a kid. I mean, that’s always exciting when you see a kid do it. You’ll probably get that sooner rather than later because of the size but it’s still always shocking when you see children in these kinds of situations. Wasn’t quite sure why Eli was marked as off-screen when the line before says that his masked face is hovering behind Sam, so he’s not off-screen. The fact that his mouth isn’t visible because he’s talking through the respirator doesn’t mean he’s off-screen.

They take the cans. I love this line, “At least there weren’t any bodies.” So lines like that are so good. They do so much work for you. They tell you what was going on before the movie began. They tell you about the way of the world. They tell you about how kids are in this world. They tell you a lot. It’s very good.

**John:** Yeah, that should have been the first line of the script. No one should have spoken before that line.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we shouldn’t stop is an unnecessary thing. Although, that also kind of tells you something, too, that there are bad people out there.

Old Ben. I like that Old Ben was 40s because I think that in this world, if you make it to 40, you’re old. He’s injured. He’s dying. There’s a pretty decent exchange here where he’s trying to get — it goes on a bit. I thought it could have been quite a bit shorter but I liked his character. I understood his character. Didn’t quite understand the characters of Sam and Eli here in terms of their voice. I mean, I understood why they were doing —

**John:** I couldn’t differentiate them. And so as I went right through it, I was trying to hear what was different about them and I really couldn’t. At the end of the script, I couldn’t remember which kid pulled the gun on him.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I should know that.

**Craig:** Right. So there wasn’t really a differentiation there in their voices which we could have used. Now, let’s talk about these last two lines.

So Eli is nicer. Now, understand that John and I, I think, can both see that Eli is the nice one and Sam is the tough one, but it’s how they say things when we say voice. Like, how does the rhythm of their speech differentiate? That’s what’s missing. Eli says, “Just give him one, Sam.” Sam cocks his pistol. Now, it’s a little tricky. Sam stares down the barrel of a 22 pistol into Old Ben’s watering eyes. I wasn’t sure who was aiming the gun at whom at that point.

**John:** I was going to say the same thing. Stares down the barrel, to me, feels like the opposite way around.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like if I’m looking at the gun, then I’m staring down the barrel. Because actually, I see the barrel as being looking inside it, so he’s really saying like looks over the top of the barrel.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. Exactly.

**John:** Yeah. Down the barrel means you’re looking into the hole.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s the way. And then I reread it again and went, “Okay.” Old Ben says, “You damn little monster, I’ve kept you alive.” And Sam says, “Now you’re dying too slow.” Now, this is an example of two sentences that do not go together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is a thing that people have to learn one way or another and it’s experience, I think. And this is dinky little craft stuff that anyone can learn. This isn’t talent. And it’s basically matching lines. If you want to do the setup and the pay-off line, they’ve got to match. They have to match tense, they have to match theme, they have to match senses.

“I’ve kept you alive.” “Now you’re dying too slow.” The second line is for somebody who’s saying that they did something quickly. This is not an appropriate response to what he says. It’s a non-sequitur, essentially.

**John:** Exactly. And matching lines, ideally, the contrast should be that last word. Like, you know, it’s alive or dead, fast or slow. That’s a natural way. But also matching verb and verb tense, I think I’ve told this on the podcast before. But I remember we were shooting Go, my very first movie, we were in a supermarket, it’s like three in the morning, and we had shot the scene with Zack and Adam. So we were shooting both sides but we shot the master and now we’re going in for coverage.

And one of them changed one of the lines slightly. And it basically changed from a past tense to a present tense and the script supervisor hadn’t noticed they changed it or hadn’t worried that they changed it. And so I heard it and I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no.” And at the time I got back to the set, I had my contacts on and I heard that they changed the line. They were shooting the other matching close-up but he was still saying his original line.

**Craig:** It didn’t match.

**John:** It wouldn’t cut together. So I had to say like, “Either have to go back through or we’re going to have to change what you’re saying because like you’re not answering the same conversation on both sides.”

**Craig:** And this is that thing where people don’t hear it but we do. And I do believe the audience senses it. So there’s tense issues and there’s word issues. “You damn little monster, I have kept you alive.” I have, in the past, kept you alive. Sam says, “Now you are,” now you’re, “Now you are dying too slow.” This is present tense gerund. [laughs This is ongoing action.

So the tenses don’t match at all. And then ‘alive’ and ‘slow’ are not complementary at all. Now, I’m not sure, I mean, you can come up with easy-peasy bad ways of answering this, “You damn little monster, I’ve kept you alive.” And Sam, I mean to me, there’s no complement to that. I would just have Sam say, “Yeah, thanks,” and then shoot him, you know. [laughs]

When you do these matchy lines, if they don’t match, they’re clunky as hell and no good. If they do match, there’s a ton of pressure on them because everyone senses how written they are. Sometimes you’ll get this note, “This line feels written.” Well, uhh, yeah, they’re all written. [laughs] But it feels written. It’s almost too well crafted.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So this one unfortunately falls into the clunk category.

**John:** Yeah, a clunk for me, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I enjoyed the overall setting and sort of the painting of these pages but I had a lot of problems of stuff on the page. And so I think it just, in service to Jody and to everyone else who’s actually reading the pages, and I should have prefaced this by saying if you would like to read the actual pages that we’re looking at, you can go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes or /podcast. Look for this episode, this is episode 227, and download the PDF so you can read along with us.

Because while I enjoyed so much of Jody’s writing here, there were a lot of problems on the page that would have slowed down and stopped people from enjoying them as much as they could have. So, first line of actual action, “Breathing — almost rhythmic.” Great, that sounds wonderful. He uses a single hyphen as a dash or —

**Craig:** She.

**John:** I’m sorry. She uses a single hyphen as a dash. I apologize, Jody. Dash, dash. If you’re in Courier, use two dashes, just get it long enough because otherwise it looks like a minus.

Third paragraph. “They look towards a closed door at the end of the hall. The larger mask turns to the smaller one. The smaller one moves forward.” At this point, I’d urge you to stop thinking about just the masks and like the figure, person, whatever, because I kept thinking like, “Wait, did the mask turn?” It’s a person that’s turning. So build these people out as little bit more of bodies first.

Throughout this, there were some good sound effects but they weren’t capitalized. And going to uppercase isn’t mandatory, but it is really useful and it’s a tool that’s in your tool box as a screenwriter to capitalize things, to give us a sense of the sound that they’re going to hear.

So “Glass crunches around a pair of small hiking boots shuffling in,” that crunches would have helped that line a little bit to uppercase that. Later, “More shuffling now closer toward the cabinets,” that would have been great.

Craig, how do you feel about, “Inside the cabinet sits three puck shaped cans”?

**Craig:** Not a big fan of that what do you call, like inverted —

**John:** Yeah, the inverted sentence. Also, technically, inside sit three cans.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Just prior to that, there’s a moment where it appears they’re trying to be quiet. And so they “Reaches and nudges open the cabinet door. The cabinet door creaks back, snaps on a busted hinge and crashes to the counter, clangs onto the floor.” Good.

**John:** React.

**Craig:** Exactly. So that of course you can see on the day, the one who opened it and made it fall is going to look over to the other one who’s staring at him like, “You idiot.” You want that.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s another moment right before we go from the hallway into the kitchen. So right now it’s written as, “The smaller one moves forward.” But rather than smaller one moves forward, like why doesn’t it like the smaller one gestures, “You first.” Like, actually have the characters make choices or do something right from the start. You have the opportunity, so like let us see what the dynamic is right from those very initial scenes.

**Craig:** Right. And you could also have it where the larger one hesitates, nervous, the smaller one moves ahead, not scared at all. As long as you give us a sense that this is meaningful character-wise, otherwise it’s just blocking.

**John:** So after they’ve first seen the sardines, “He grasps the rim of his goggles and pushes them back.” But that he isn’t connected to anything. He doesn’t refer to any one person. The last things we’ve seen that have taken action have been these objects. So you need to say like, “The smaller figure — ” remind us who it is that we’re looking at.

**Craig:** Right. The smaller scavenger grabs the rim of the goggles. It starts getting into a — [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. The larger figure pulls up his goggles.

**Craig:** His. See, his. It’s the same problem. At some point, you run into to this pronoun problem.

**John:** But it’s fine. You’re going to see it’s a boy soon enough in the next sentence.

**Craig:** Right, but starting with, “He is,” rough, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. “A young boy’s eyes but the eyes of an old soul.”

**Craig:** Whoops.

**John:** Whoops. Repeating the word ‘eyes.’

**Craig:** You don’t repeat words.

**John:** Old soul eyes, I’m not a huge fan of. But a young boy with the eyes of an older soul, I guess.

**Craig:** Correct. You can’t have a young boy’s eyes and also the eyes of an old soul. So you can be a young boy with the eyes of an old soul.

**John:** It’s a four-eyed boy. Post-apocalyptic.

**Craig:** [laughs] But you see, I have to say that Jody did a really nice job in this first page because I could hear it and I could see it.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** I loved the way that she broke up her actions. It was so readable, lots of good crunchy words that I love. I like words like ‘pouty.’ Just good yummy words like that. Goggles are great and respirators are great.

**John:** I thought she had a very good vision of what this was going to look like and feel like. And I’m just urging her to spend the time on the craft to get those words and periods and spaces to help her paint that picture even better. Space after Sam (10). He snatches the cans deftly. Deftly snatching is like if you’re trying to get them away from something else but like you just take them.

**Craig:** Yeah, adverbs are always — they need to fight their way into a script.

**John:** Next page. ELI (12) chubby faced, hyphen between those probably, with rubicund cheeks and a gentle gaze. Rubicund? Rubicund? I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Well, rubicund, is that a word? Yeah, doesn’t that mean —

**John:** Rosy? I guess. Rosy cheeks?

**Craig:** Rubicund I thought meant like chubby.

**John:** Chubby, but it was also, he was chubby-faced in the previous words.

**Craig:** Well, let’s see who’s right. It’s ruddy. So it’s a color thing. Rubicund is a color.

**John:** It’s a color. Ruby.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** If John August and Craig Mazin don’t know what your word means, it’s probably too fancy a word for a screenplay.

**Craig:** Ruddy.

**John:** Ruddy cheeks. They halt at a dilapidated chain-link fence. Can a chain-link fence be dilapidated?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah for sure.

**John:** Okay. Broken down, rusted. All right. So those are the things I urge her to look at, things like not much loot tho, T-H-O. You could bother to spell that out. You’re not creating a special lingo. There’s not a reason why you’re saying the short version of word that we’re going to hear the short version of it.

**Craig:** I’m starting to get a sense that maybe Jody is British.

**John:** Possibly.

**Craig:** Because I think rubicund, and tho, that kind of spelling, I feel like it might be a Britishism or maybe an Australianism.

**John:** Could be, could be.

**Craig:** So anyway I thought, Jody, you’ve introduced your characters in two ways twice. One is that there’s a larger one and a smaller one and then later one taller and chunky, the other smaller and wiry. That stuff we will have already seen.

**John:** Yeah, we got it. So introduce them once.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So bottom page 2, Old Ben asked, “Anything?” “Some cans of fish.” “Only two of them.” So Sam is the one who says, “Only two of them.” If that’s going to be a moment, then have Eli clock this that Sam is lying because there actually are three and we saw that. It’s like let us know that he’s telling a lie or at least the other character is recognizing it because otherwise it’s just going to pass. It’s not going to be acknowledged.

The same thing with quiet. So Eli says, “Quiet, quiet. We can split it, it’s okay.” And later on he says like, you know, “Please be quiet.” But they’re not acting in a way that makes me believe that they’re trying to be quiet. They’re saying they need to be quiet but I don’t see them worried about other people coming over or that they’re going to attract things. So I think the quiet is deliberate but I just thought he’s like telling him to shut up.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that is deliberate. So the idea is let’s keep our voices down, there are bad people out there or bad monsters out there. So Eli needs to be looking around, keeping an eye on the horizon, always checking, quiet, quiet so we understand what he’s referring to. Generally speaking, when you are going to lie, you don’t volunteer a lie. You lie because you have to. “Anything?” “Some cans of fish.” How many cans of fish? Two.

**John:** Two.

**Craig:** You don’t volunteer. Only two. Because that seems clunky.

**John:** I think part of the reason my quiet got confused is on page 3 Eli raises his hands trying to quiet him. So if you’re trying to quiet somebody, are you trying to calm them down, are you trying to get them to lower their voice and that might have been a great moment to flag to me like they’re keeping their voices low. And then I would know like, “Oh, the stakes have just been raised because other people could be listening to this.”

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I think that is about description, about painting intention. So you just have to apply that test all the time. Will people know what my intention is with these words? Is it clear? Is it not? And that’s a game we have to play every day, line by line. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, and we have to go back and make it clear.

**John:** Yeah. My last little niggly thing would be, “Staring down the barrel of a twenty two pistol.” A 22 or 45, those are things that you tend to actually use the digits for and not spell out.

**Craig:** Yeah, .22.

**John:** Yup. That’s how it is.

**Craig:** Yup. That’s how it is.

**John:** I was interested reading what was going to happen next, so good job on that. I was concerned about stuff I saw on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah, but promising stuff there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’ll go for Celebrate & Behave by Mark S.W. & V.P. Walling. Now —

**John:** I don’t get that. What’s S.W.?

**Craig:** Okay. So his name is — well, I don’t know if he wants us to say his name. Can we? I guess so. Yeah, I’ll go ahead. Just based on his e-mail address, it’s Mark Skeele Wilson. So Mark S.W. stands for Mark Skeele Wilson. But it’s interesting. So he abbreviates his middle and last name and then the other guy abbreviates his first — or woman, because we don’t know. I’m going to assume V.P. Walling is a woman.

**John:** Yeah, the default female assumption.

**Craig:** Like however they to want to do it. Celebrate & Behave by Mark SW. and V.P. Walling. So we open on a black screen and then it’s illuminated by the spark of a cheap plastic lighter. Then blackness then spark again. And we see now a small white pill that is slowly melting and sizzling on tinfoil. And the lighter illuminates as well the youthful but weary face of Michael Walton, a 38-year-old man who is sweat, jitters, and sad eyes. And then we go to black again.

It’s now morning. Michael awakens in his tent. He’s in a tent. Very bright sunlight. Looking for pills in his pill bottles but he’s all out. He gets out of his tent into a forest clearing to go pee and he’s confronted by a brown bear with a cub. And the script tells us that this is Alaska. He falls backward and as the bear moves in on him and he tries to scare the bear off. To no avail, there’s a gunshot.

The bear leaves quickly. The cub sort of stares at him for a while and then heads off. And Michael sees Ray, a 60-year-old man, decked out like a hunter and he’s obviously the one who fired the shot. Ray says, “That was a warning shot.” Michael says, “Thanks.” And Ray says, “It wasn’t for her.” Uh-huh, they know each other. Ray then leaves.

Next, we’re at bourgeois cabin where Michael pulls up in his beat-up truck and all of his stuff has been thrown out all over the yard. And the cabin door is locked. The people inside slam the windows and curtains shut. They don’t want to talk to him. Somebody named Joey is inside but doesn’t want to talk to him. And so Michael gathers up his stuff including an urn with ashes from Danny Walton, Beloved Son & Brother who died in 1996.

Lastly, we are in downtown Sitka which is a town in Alaska. Michael drives into town, pulls up in front of a storefront that says, “Dr. Michael S. Walton, OB-GYN.” And there’s a notice on the door on orange paper saying, “Government notice – premises closed due to ongoing investigation.” And then spray-painted in fire engine red on it misspelled is the word “Faget.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that is Celebrate & Behave.

**John:** I have such tiny little niggly things that I feel silly pointing them out. I thought this was a really promising start. I greatly enjoyed starting this way in this setting I’d never seen before with a character I’d never seen before. I don’t know what’s going to happen next but I’m curious what’s going to happen next. I like that there’s a bear. I like just so much of it. I think I would happily read another 15 pages of this script. How did you take this?

**Craig:** Very similarly. So I remember Lindsay Doran paid me a compliment once and it meant so much to me. Because I was talking about pages and like, you know, “It’s feeling like it might be a little long.” She goes, “It’s not long. You have all this wonderful white space in your pages. You know, it’s like milk. There’s all this milky space.” She loves white space and I love white space, too. And so also do Mark S.W. and V.P. Walling and to their credit. So everything is nicely paced out. They’re not rushing through anything, and they’re getting a lot done here.

There’s this wonderful encounter. The bears, it’s great because there’s something really kind of curious and Coen-esque, Coen brothers-esque about that cub just like, “Hmm, I know you.” I was confused. I understand I am supposed to confused but slightly — well, there was a confusion on a confusion which made me a little annoyed. I don’t mind multiple confusions as long as they’re about different things. My one little picky thing here is I meet Ray and I don’t know who Ray is. I know that they know each other. And I know I’ll find out eventually but I don’t know what’s going on with Ray.

Then he goes to this cabin and there’s somebody named Joey. And I don’t know who Joey is and I don’t know what the story is with Joey. So that was a confusion on a confusion of the same exact kind. So I got a little, eh.

**John:** And I would say there’s a parallel kind of confusion where you both have the ashes, where like there is related to some dead person, and we’re going to go to an office which is closed but has information about some person who’s not there anymore. So there was a little more of that than I would have necessarily loved right there at the very start.

**Craig:** Yeah, especially because I think the implication here is that he is the Dr. Michael S. Walton, that his practice has been closed due to an ongoing investigation because he’s a drug addict but we don’t know his name yet. So we have a Ray who isn’t identified by name. So here are the people we meet. We meet Michael, I don’t know his name. We meet Ray, I don’t know his name. And me meaning I’m in the theater, forget reading the pages. I know Joey’s name but I don’t know who Joey is and I don’t see Joey. I know Danny Walton’s name. I know he’s dead but I don’t know who he is and I don’t know his relationship to Michael because I don’t know Michael’s last name because I don’t know his name. Then I see Michael Walton, I go okay so somebody related to Danny Walton if I know how to read and I remember that, got in trouble but I don’t know that this is him. So that stuff could be helped.

**John:** It’s entirely possible I think the very next action line is him pulling out his keys and opening up his office and then I would probably kind of think, “Oh, this is his office. This is this guy and that’s his name.” But we have to stop where we stopped and that was the bottom of this third page.

**Craig:** It is possible. I don’t think that’s what happened because he’s looking at the sign from across the street and he hasn’t gotten out of his car. It makes me feel like he’s going to just keep driving.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** But one thing that is hard to do in life, easy to do when you’re writing, hard to do when you’re shooting is have a car pull up across the street from a storefront, you have somebody stare at it and then have them read a tiny paper that they can’t possibly be able to read. So the deal is that obviously the camera can go close but if you’re implying that that guy is seeing it then we feel something is off because he can’t. I mean he can see a sign, he just can’t read the words from across the street unless it’s massive.

**John:** Unless it’s massive. And those are things you — they’re not hard fixes but I think they should be fixed. So I, like Lindsay Doran, love white space and I loved the white space in this page. I did actually yearn for one extra return and let’s see if you agree with me here. So middle of page one, Ext. Forest Clearing — Continuous. Michael crawls from the cramped tent door, confronted by the harsh summer sunlight. He starts to pee then looks up to see a huge brown bear with cub.

If you had just given me one more return, I would understand like there’s a tiny jump cut there and he’s not pissing on the very first step outside the door. I wanted a tiny bit of space and break between those two things. Because I felt like he was pissing on his tent.

**Craig:** Oh, really? Okay. [laughs] It kind of flowed for me. Just because, I don’t know, there’s that thing that happens when you walk out of a tent in the morning, the first thing you do is whip it out and pee. [laughs] It’s just natural. It just happens.

**John:** Which is, I’ve camped my whole life so I do get that but like stumbling a few steps and starts to pee and then do it. Just like it happened so fast. I thought it actually hurt the bear reveal because I wanted the pee to be like that pee moment and then like have the bear.

**Craig:** Well, but then again, we want that “A single gunshot” on the bottom of the page there, the way he has it.

**John:** It’s so good. I can’t say that it’s necessarily better. I do wanted to single out “The bear raises up, up, up on his hind legs,” and so those get more capitalized as he goes. And he parallels that structure as he tries to make himself be bigger to scare it off but the gunshot works great. Like the previous script, I’ll point out that dashes in Courier should be two hyphens, not a single hyphen. It just helps sell it a little better. So it’s not a minus sign. These are small things.

**Craig:** Yeah, the only other thing I would say is and this would get you your line return and not lose “Bam! A single gunshot” from the bottom of the page, I would delete this is Alaska because I don’t care. What I care about is that a man is peeing and there’s a bear next to him. When he pulls up in his beat-up, rust colored ’97 Ford pickup, just add with Alaska plates. Now I know where I am.

**John:** Yeah, I didn’t mind the “This is Alaska.” It gave you a breather between like holy crap there’s a bear and stumbling back but I see your point, too.

**Craig:** I would rather — if it’s important for the reader to know it’s Alaska, it’s important for the audience to know it’s Alaska. Show the audience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But good stuff.

**John:** Good pages, really exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our final one from this batch of Three Page Challenges is by Matthew Gentile. Would you say Gentile or Gentile?

**Craig:** I would say Gentile.

**John:** Gentile. It could be Gentile. It could be Gentile. His first name is Matthew so we’re going to go default female again. [laughs] So it’s a woman named Matthew just like Ryan Reynolds’ daughter is named James.

**Craig:** Really? That’s like that model James King.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. And his wife’s name is Blake so it’s all in keeping. No, we’re going assume that Matthew is a gentleman. Our story starts in 1984, Los Angeles. The title over says exactly that, Los Angeles, 1984. On Beverly Hills Street, rain is falling as we look up at a skyscraper. We meet Jake Hughes, a young man in a fitted suit, silhouetted as he exits the skyscraper. Looks around, picks up a pay phone, puts in his two quarters. As the phone rings, we hear his heart beat and he’s kind of calming himself before about what he’s about to do. We have a cut to six months earlier. Uh-oh, cut to six months earlier.

**Craig:** Stuart!

**John:** Stuart!

**Craig:** You think that Stuart, it was just like I imagine that Stuart is reading along and then he gets that and he goes “Ah!”

**John:** His heart. [laughs]

**Craig:** His little hearts stops.

**John:** So for people who are listening for the first time, this is sort of a trope on the Three Page Challenge is like, you know, it’s half a page and suddenly it’s jumping to an earlier time cut. Essentially the opening a story was someplace later on in the script. Stuart does not deliberately pick those. What we’ve heard from Stuart is that so many of these pages that he gets have that thing that it’s just representative so.

**Craig:** I believe him.

**John:** Regardless, our time jump here takes us back to a mailroom. It’s six months earlier. The doors burst open, Jake rushes into a safe. He opens up the safe, pulls a film print from the safe, and he picks up a phone and dials a number. Then we hear at the other side of the phone call, a person named Neil with a Californian accent. They talk. Jake says he’s in the mailroom. “Stay put, don’t let that print out of your sight,” Neil says. They have conversation. Basically, Jake is doing a favor for Neil and he’s going to write him a killer evaluation for HR. Jake is very excited about all this. Neil says he’ll call back. Jake then calls Stella, his girlfriend, and says that he was roped into doing one last task for his boss and Stella at the bottom of the page three says, “But my graduation is in two hours.” That’s the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** All right. So let’s dig into this.

**John:** Take it off.

**Craig:** I don’t think that what I saw here is worth three pages by and large. Let’s begin with our cold open. It does not deserve to be here and then show us six months earlier. Generally speaking, when you do this and it is tropey and we’ve seen it a billion times, what you’re looking at is something incredibly dramatic. I’ll take like John Wick did it. So John Wick opens with a car driving into a dark parking lot and smashing into a pillar and Keanu Reeves gets out and he’s bleeding, he’s been shot, and he lies down, he prepares to die. Then we go, six months earlier, okay. How did he get into that awful, awful situation?

This opens with a guy putting quarters into a payphone. I wonder how he got into that situation. Who cares?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, it just doesn’t deserve what we’re doing here.

**John:** Well, here’s what I’ll say. I’ll say that that kind of time cut we’re doing, the audience has an expectation that like, “Okay, because we’ve seen this in so many other movies,” there has to be a big reason why that’s such an incredibly important moment and there’s nothing you’ve given us in that first moment that leads us to believe that it could be an incredibly important moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean we get that he’s making an important phone call but that’s not the high drama that is required to pull the old six months earlier Stuart gambit. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Similarly, the space that’s burned up here doing it is a bit overwrought. Geography-wise, I got very confused from the start. Here’s the first paragraph. “Rain falls as we look up at a skyscraper. Move down and pull back to reveal a payphone across the street, looming in the foreground.” The payphone is across the street and it’s in the foreground?

**John:** I think it was a big crane shot that was aimed up then pulls back to reveal the building and then moves so that the payphone is in the foreground and he’s going to rush in to that payphone and do something.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So I think he was trying to create the drama of like what that moment is like he gets to the phone and puts in the quarters.

**Craig:** You don’t want your crane shot to end up on a payphone that’s just sitting there. If I’m looking up at a skyscraper and there’s a ringing and I’m coming down through the rain and pulling back across the street and now there’s this payphone that’s ringing for no one, okay.

**John:** Yeah, that’s some drama.

**Craig:** Okay, I get it. That’s why I’m looking at the payphone. There’s no reason to look at this payphone. And then he runs across the street and he puts some quarters and okay. So anyway, you get the idea there, Matthew. I just don’t think that that’s worthy of the old Stuart gambit.

Now we go back to the movie proper. Another problem. The opening showed Jake running frantically across the street to the payphone. We go back six months earlier and what’s Jake doing? Running frantically towards the safe. [laughs] This is just what Jake does. He runs frantically towards things.

**John:** Jake runs and he talks on phones.

**Craig:** And he talks on phones. So that doesn’t work. You need a contrast if you’re going to do the Stuart gambit, a big contrast. He opens up the safe and inside there’s a film print. What is a film print?

**John:** I don’t know what a film print is. Is it a film can? Is it like meant to be 16 millimeters, 35? How big is this thing? Is it a reel? Oh, my gosh, maybe he needs to take it to The Man in the High Castle.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. Is it one of those like old film, like those little film containers that you’d put 35-millimeter in for a personal camera? Is it a reel of movie film? I don’t know because I don’t know what film print is. Also frankly film prints and safes feels very just super old fashioned. I know this is a period piece but — anyway, so in 1984, I would imagine a video cassette but if it’s still pictures, if it’s still images then I could see that little film roll container. Anyway, I don’t know what it is. So that’s a problem.

He calls Neil. Now here’s what it says, “Many voices will come over the phone during this story. The first is a man in his late 20s with a Southern California accent, Neil.” Now, a couple of things, Matthew. One, when I read that I presumed this story meant the story that I’m about to hear on the phone like many voices are going to be on the phone for what’s coming right now because I haven’t read your script yet, I don’t realize and later I piece it together that there’s going to be a lot of phone stuff in the movie. So I got totally thrown. I was like, okay, I guess there’s going to be a lot of people talking on the phone. A Southern California accent, I defy you, defy you to make that a real accent that people know.

**John:** Oh, come on, it’s The Californians.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a real — exactly, that is not an accent. [laughs]

**John:** “I took the 405.” I can’t even do the fake California accent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Take 405 to…” Anyway, no one talks like that. So they have this conversation. Throughout the conversation, Neil who’s on the phone, is indicated with OS. Personally, I’ve seen this happen. It’s not a deal breaker. I like to put in parenthesis, phone.

**John:** Yeah, I put on phone, yeah.

**Craig:** Or on phone, exactly. Because OS really means they’re in the space. The camera is just not pointing at them. They are off screen.

**John:** Yeah, and it’s not just that they’re not in a single. It’s like they deliberately should not be shown on camera at this moment.

**Craig:** Exactly. So this would really be more of on phone. But in that way, right next to the character name, Neil says, “Good. Stay put. Do not let that print out of your sight.” Jake says, “I won’t let it out of my hands.” That’s like repeating. This is not real to me. That’s not a real response, “Do not let that print out of your sight.” “I won’t.” Not I won’t let it, let it, let it, okay. Then Neil says, “As soon as I get Russell’s exact address, I’ll call you back, he lives in Westwood.” “Okay, I’m right here.” “Just letting you know, I’m going to write you a killer evaluation for HR.” “Really?” “Yup. With your track record, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the first of your class out of that mailroom.” This doesn’t feel like it’s appropriate for what’s going on at all.

When you’re doing something wrong for personal gain, the person on the other end, it’s like this guy is talking like he’s never heard of a wiretap in his life. Nobody just spills this baloney like this so overtly. It’s got to be, “I won’t forget this. Trust me, this is going to work out really well for you.” Neil isn’t a real person right now. He’s just saying this stuff that I don’t buy. Jake says, “Thank you.” And Neil says, “Well, let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks just yet.” That’s from Pulp Fiction. You can’t use that line. It’s from Pulp Fiction. Mr. Wolf said it. That’s that, can’t do it. “Sure.” ‘Talk soon.” Like what a casual conversation. [laughs]

And then here’s what it says, ‘Neil cuts the call. Jake dials another number. It rings.’ “Bunny, it’s me,” says Jake. And then that was the dialogue. And here’s the action line. “We hear the voice of a young woman and Jake’s girlfriend, Stella. I’m thinking, “Oh, Bunny and Stella are on the phone together.” [laughs] Like we hear the voice of a young woman and Jake’s girlfriend, Stella. No, we hear the voice of Stella, Jake’s girlfriend whom he calls Bunny so you’re going to need to say, we hear the voice of Stella. Jake’s girlfriend. His pet name for her, Bunny, is his pet name or something. Otherwise —

**John:** Or AKA Bunny.

**Craig:** AKA Bunny, exactly. Like these are the phone conversations I just don’t want to see in a movie and don’t have time to sit through. “Bunny, it’s me.” “Hey love, I’m leaving.” “I’m at the office right now.” “What? Why?” Just argh, just do it, just get into it. [laughs] “Bunny, it’s me. I got roped into making a quick drop off for my boss.” “I know, I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not happy but” — there’s no sense of sweatiness, no sense that he’s doing something wrong, there’s no urgency.

**John:** So it’s the difference between how people speak in the real world and how the slightly optimized version of how people speak in movies. And just once you sort of come to accept it, this is what Craig basically just pitched is, “Bunny, it’s me.” “Hey, love. I got roped into making a quick drop off at the bosses.” “Look I’m not happy about it either but don’t worry, we’ll be on time, all right?” And then if her first real line is, “My graduation is in two hours,” then that’s funny. That actually tells you something.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So cutting will make that just so much sharper.

**Craig:** Yeah, nobody’s speaking as if they are in possession of the facts they’re in possession of.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She’s not talking like somebody whose graduation is in two hours, really, hey love, I’m leaving. If her graduation is in two hours and he’s not with her, why isn’t she like, where are you? You know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he’s certainly not talking like somebody that just committed a crime. Neil’s not talking like somebody that just roped somebody into committing a crime. So I had multiple issues here with Assist by Matthew Gentile. I think that I would say to Matthew, I wouldn’t get discouraged here. It’s not like I read these and I go, “Oh, Matthew can’t write.” I just think that you’ve made a lot of classic rookie mistakes and you just got to get them out of your system.

**John:** Yeah and you got them out here so next thing is going to be better.

**Craig:** The next one will be better.

**John:** It’ll be better. I want to thank all three of our brave writers and everyone else who writes in with their Three Page Challenge samples because they’re so useful and instructive and they give us things to talk about because it’s so hard to talk about screenwriting when you don’t have screenplays in front of you to talk about.

So if you have a screenplay, three pages of which you’d like us to take a look at, the first three pages is usually the most helpful. It can be a screenplay, it can also be a pilot. We’ve done those too. You can go to johnaugust.com/threepage and that is where you’ll find a page listing how you submit your scripts. There’s a little form you fill out. You click and say that it’s okay for us to talk about it on the air. You’ll attach a PDF and they end up in Stuart’s inbox. And Stuart sorts through them every once in a while and gives us these scripts to take a look at. So again thank you to these three people for letting us talk about their scripts on the air and to everyone else who has written in with them.

**Craig:** Absolutely. You guys are very, very brave, so thank you and hopefully we are of some help.

**John:** Yep. It’s time for One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time.

**Craig:** Time after time.

**John:** It’s a fantastic pop song from 1984.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The Washington Post — I’m sorry, actually Wall Street Journal did an article about how they wrote that song. So she wrote it with Rob Hyman and it just charts through sort of the process of writing a song. And having written many, many songs, I found it really fascinating sort of how songs come together because this was a case of there was sort of an idea that got thrown out, it was originally a calypso number and you can see all these influences are still in that song even though they made fundamentally different choices. And things get pieced together, it’s iteration, there’s bursts of sudden inspiration but then it’s also the hard work of figuring out like what does this song actually really want to be.

So this is one example for a really good song, Time After Time.

**Craig:** Rob Hyman, Philadelphia guy, was one of the main members of a group called The Hooters.

**John:** Oh yeah, I know The Hooters.

**Craig:** Remember The Hooters? So they did, ‘And we dance like a wave on the ocean romance,’ and they also did, ‘All you zombies hide your faces.’

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** But I’m always fascinated by these guys that then just like go sideways like, you know, Someone Like You, the big Adele hit, that’s co-written by a guy who was the main songwriter for what was it called Supersonic, I can’t remember the name, but the guys that did ‘Closing Time.’

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah or Linda Perry quite famously 4 Non Blondes who is now a big singer-songwriter.

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**John:** A big songwriter for other people. My other One Cool Thing is Secret Hitler which is a game that is on Kickstarter right now.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It is from Max Tempkin and the Cards Against Humanity folks. He has created a game that I got to test play quite really on and it’s really fun. It’s a game for 5 to 10 to ten people. We played it with 10 people so it’s our office and the Exploding Kittens office and we all got together and played it. It’s really fun. And Craig; you would love it because it’s all about manipulation and lies and how to convince people that you are not who you clearly are.

**Craig:** I mean that’s — I wake up doing that.

**John:** Yeah, so you’re a natural at it.

**Craig:** So this is like a card —

**John:** No, so this is — it’s a game — have you ever played Mafia —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or Werewolf?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s that but it’s more sophisticated in a sense that it’s set in sort of pre-World War II fascist-leaning in Germany and so you’re either the liberals or the fascists and so you get a card saying who you are. So either you’re a liberal or fascist or Hitler and —

**Craig:** Oh you can be Hitler in this game?

**John:** Yeah, so it’s essentially the fascists are trying to elect Hitler as Chancellor and in that they win if they do that.

**Craig:** So it’s like oh we did it, we won and six million Jews are going to die. [laughs]

**John:** So what’s so fascinating about the mechanic of it is that like Mafia or Werewolf, there’s reasons why you will lie and cheat to sort of manipulate people and make people think that you are clearly on their side when you’re not on their side but it becomes so much more complicated because you’re trying to pass these policies. And there’s an element of randomness which is like you might have no choice why you had to enact this fascist policy but everyone will then think that you are fascist.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** So we quite enjoyed it and yet I will say it strained some friendships so —

**Craig:** Oh really? It’s one of those type of games?

**John:** Yeah it’s not as bad as sort of the Diplomacy which of course is the game that destroys friendships.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** So great, it’s beautiful. So it’s not that. It’s only about an hour. With 10 people, it’s a little bit more than an hour but it’s really well done so if you’re curious about the game, it’s on Kickstarter, it’s cheap and you should consider backing it.

**Craig:** Used to play Diplomacy with my friends in high school and it was — it really was — it only works when you play with people who are smart and who just acknowledge right up front that winning a game is more important than anything else. [laughs] And so you can respect it.

**John:** Yeah totally.

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is rather large and corporate but I used it today and it was like, “Oh God this is so ridiculously awesome.” [laughs] And I feel bad about it in a way because there must be abuse on the other end of it but Prime Now — have you used Prime Now?

**John:** Yeah, it’s like the same day delivery?

**Craig:** I mean it’s not even the same day delivery; it’s like delivery in an hour.

**John:** How does that even work? I’ve never done this.

**Craig:** So Prime Now — so if you’re an Amazon Prime member which, you know, lots of people are, you download an app so you can’t make your purchases through the desktop, it’s only through their app. You download their app and their selections are rather large and it’s basically items that they have in key depots in major centers. So where we live, sure. There’s a minimum purchase amount of I think $20, not that crazy but yeah you can’t have them fetch you like paper clips. But you type in like, okay, like today, I put in I want low-carb tortillas, Aquaphor skin care, and Diet Coke. [laughs]

**John:** That is so revealing and diet coke and not Dr. Pepper?

**Craig:** No, I just went for Diet Coke because I have that my son also loves that. He likes that more than Diet Dr. Pepper. I love Diet Dr. Pepper. And then boom it’s there and it’s crazy.

**John:** That’s Insane.

**Craig:** It’s crazy. And you put a tip on, you know, for the delivery guys so it’s not like Amazon Prime where there’s no tips because they’re using UPS, whatever. They’re using their own employees but it’s nuts.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the scary part is they’re just — they’re assaulting these boundaries that we’ve come to expect between I want something I have something. They keep chipping away at it until the point where it’s like, you know what I want, oh it’s already there, I didn’t even say it. [laughs]

**John:** So my question is, what is the uniforms these people wear and can you see the little shock collars that they get zapped if they don’t actually deliver there fast enough? [laughs]

**Craig:** This is what I’m worried about like I just — I hope that they’re not — you know, because Amazon, eh, not the best rep when it comes to this stuff. [laughs]

**John:** Well, I’m the one who’s selling thousands of units of Writer Emergency Pack through Amazon so I really can’t be complaining about your low-carb tortillas.

**Craig:** You know, there was this great article about the Amazon warehouses.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know, so part of the article is like this abusive internal. [laughs]] But the part that was fascinating to me other than the human misery of it, just the logistics aspect of it was that one of the great breakthroughs they made with Amazon is that typically a warehouse would be designed where you put like products all together —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which makes since right? Okay, we sell 80 vacuum cleaners, put them all in row AB12 where you go if you need a vacuum cleaner. And then some genius over there was like, no, put them nowhere near each other. It’s like the keyboard model of QWERTY like the keys will stick together. Fling them all over the place, this way when you get to an aisle and you’re looking for a vacuum cleaner, there’s only one there, you can’t mess up. You can’t pull the wrong vacuum cleaner off the shelf.

**John:** Right. Yeah, that sounds fair. I mean I’ll say Amazon did screw up when we first started selling Writer Emergency Packs and they would send 12 instead of one because they looked at the inner cartoon. [laughs] And they thought that the whole inner cartoon was one unit. So that may be a breakdown. But essentially Amazon also does things where like you don’t go to the shelf, the shelf comes to you. And so the little robots pick up the shelf and move the shelf to you and turn the shelf so you basically just reach forward and grab the thing and put it in the van.

**Craig:** At some point Amazon’s going to create a service for Amazon employees. [laughs] So that you can hire a guy to go get your things so that you have your thing as the Amazon guy so you could send the thing to me.

**John:** And the New York Time piece or was it New York Times or New Yorker or New York Magazine? One of the New York publications had a long piece about the corporate jobs at Amazon are not any better — I mean they’re better in the sense that you’re not in a terrible warehouse and risking, you know, overheating or dying.

**Craig:** Yeah, but those — like their evaluation system was, ugh.

**John:** Yeah, because we have that same kind of evaluation system here in our own office where you can anonymously talk about the other employees and sort of rate them and how they’re doing but only I see them and then I punish people.

**Craig:** I mean, don’t you know that everyone’s talking about Stuart?

**John:** It’s usually Stuart’s fault. [laughs]

**Craig:** Oh Stuart, poor Stuart. [laughs] Six months earlier…Ah!

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo.

**John:** And you may see one or both of them at Scriptnotes Live which we are recording this — God, it’s tomorrow as people are listening to this, which is insane.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** There’s a link in the show notes if you follow the link in the show notes. It’s possible they’ll release more tickets on the day, who knows.

**Craig:** But currently we’re sold out.

**John:** I think we’re sold out.

**Craig:** Like Jon Bon Jovi?

**John:** Like Jon Bon Jovi. It’s one of the situations where we’ll be sold out but then because they were holding that stuff for us, sometimes they release those, who knows.

**Craig:** Oh I see. I don’t have any friends.

**John:** I don’t have any friends. But our show should be great and it should be fun and that will be next week’s episode if you are going to be listening to our show next week. I hope you are.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you would like to subscribe to our show, please join us on iTunes. Just click on subscribe in iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes first, that helps. You’ll see two things on iTunes, you’ll see the Scriptnotes app through which you can download all the back episodes and of course, Scriptnotes the Podcast, subscribe to that and leave us a comment because we love to read your comments. Maybe we’ll read comments for our Christmas episode. We’ll just read nice things people say about us. [laughs]

**Craig:** That doesn’t sound self-serving at all. [laughs]

**John:** But what we would love for you to write in with is your questions about things that are not related to screenwriting, so a very long time ago we did one random advice episode.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think it’s time to do another random advice episode.

**Craig:** We should totally do that.

**John:** So that’d be a fun thing to clear the cobwebs out at the end of the year. So if you would like our advice on a topic that has nothing to do with screenwriting about I don’t know, work, relationships, food, diet.

**Craig:** Don’t forget our specialty: female reproductive health.

**John:** That more than anything we want to answer your questions about female reproductive health. Write into ask@johnaugust.com. That’s the place you can write in with all your larger things. But you can even ask one of those questions on Twitter, so I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. Our outro this week is composed by Roman Mittermayr. If you have an outro that you would like us to consider for our show, write to the same address, ask@johnaugust, and give us a link to where we can find the file. Craig, thank you again for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

Links:

* [The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, December 3, 2015](http://www.cc.com/full-episodes/95di1k/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-december-3–2015—idris-elba-season-21-ep-21032)
* Craig in [The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/opinion/anyone-but-ted-cruz.html?_r=0) and on [Jezebel](http://theslot.jezebel.com/fuckin-craig-mazin-an-appreciation-of-ted-cruzs-colleg-1746278435)
* [Download Highland 1.9 now](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) and [sign up to be a Highland 2 beta tester](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2-beta/)
* [Does Revenge Serve an Evolutionary Purpose?](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/revenge-evolution/) from Scientific American
* [One Hit Kill is now available for purchase](http://www.onehitkillgame.com/)
* [Projection Problems Plague 70mm L.A. Press Screening Of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’](http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/projection-problems-plague-70mm-la-press-screening-of-quentin-tarantinos-the-hateful-eight-20151203) from Indie Wire
* Three Pages by [Jody Russell](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JodyRussell.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Mark S.W. & V.P. Walling](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MarkSWVPWalling.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Matthew Gentile](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MatthewGentile.pdf)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* The Wall Street Journal on [How Cyndi Lauper Wrote Her First No. 1 Hit, ‘Time After Time’](http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-cyndi-lauper-wrote-her-first-no-1-hit-time-after-time-1448985798)
* [Secret Hitler](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxtemkin/secret-hitler) is now on Kickstarter
* [Amazon Prime Now](https://www.amazon.com/primenow) offers one hour delivery
* [Email us](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) or tweet [John](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) or [Craig](https://twitter.com/clmazin) for advice on things that have nothing to do with screenwriting
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Roman Mittermayr ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/only-haters-hate-rom-coms).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi. This is Craig. If you’re in the car with your children or at home with your children, you may not want to play this episode too close to their delicate little ears. We’re going to be using some bad language, some R-rated language. John asked me to do this warning this time because he was concerned that usually when he does it, people think at first that I might have died, but I didn’t. I’m alive. Now get your kids out of the room.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 225 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we have Tess Morris, the writer of Man Up, and she’s here to talk with us about romantic comedies. And we’re so excited because we just saw her movie and it’s really great. And so everyone can see her movie but we can also talk about the thing that her movie is which is a romantic comedy and it’s not a shame to be a romantic comedy.

Craig, you just watched it so I know you have so many things you want to say to Tess.

**Craig:** Fresh in my mind, the tears have just dried on my freshly bearded cheeks.

**John:** Yeah, people might have a chance to see that beard on December 9th. We’re doing our live show in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Hi, I’m Segue Man. Natasha Leggero, Riki Lindhome, and Malcolm Spellman will be our guests for that show along with some other folks who are not quite confirmed yet, but who I think are going to be fantastic.

People have been writing in with questions, questions like is there a Three Page Challenge at this live Scriptnotes? No, there’s not. Do I need to reserve a specific seat? And my belief is that no, it is general admission. But the most important question is, where can I get a ticket? And the tickets are available at the Writers Guild Foundation website, wgfoundation.org. They are $20. The proceeds benefit the great programs of the Writers Guild Foundation.

So you should come see us because as we’re recording this, we’re more than halfway sold out. So we might be sold out by the time you listen to this. You should probably pause the podcast right now and get yourself a ticket to the live show.

**Craig:** Fools, fools for waiting.

**John:** They are fools.

**Craig:** I mean do they not know that we’re the Jon Bon Jovis of podcasting?

**John:** Yeah. I mean the younger people might not even know what that reference is but, you know, they might think that is important.

**Craig:** Hey, kids. We’re the Jon Bon Jovis of podcasting. If that doesn’t motivate you, you’re right, we’re old.

**John:** Yeah, Wikipedia that. In the mail bag this week, a couple of questions came in about Amazon Storywriter. Do you know what Amazon Storywriter is?

**Craig:** Not only do I know what it is. I went and actually fiddled with it even though you suggested on Twitter that I never would, I already had, by that point.

**John:** Congratulations, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So what did you think of Amazon Storywriter? Or do you want to describe what it is for people?

**Craig:** Well, as far as I could tell, I mean I didn’t go in-depth, but it appears that Amazon has created their own screenwriting software. So it’s basically a word processor that formats automatically in our screenwriting format. All the standard stuff. It’s Courier. It’s got all of your basic elements. And it works pretty much like they all do, combination of tab and return.

And it’s free and it’s Cloud based so everything saves on their servers and then you can then very easily pipe it through to their Amazon Studio thing for submissions. Also, it does export to FDX which is the Final Draft format. This whole thing by the way, side note, Final Draft I believe, I believe that company is going to die. The format will survive and I hope that we eventually kill that format too because it’s nasty, but the format will survive.

Anyway, back to this. It actually worked quite nicely. I mean, it’s not fully featured in terms of revisions and production work and all the rest of it but it was quite elegant. It worked very nice. It was smooth, looked nice.

**John:** Yeah. So you say it uses tab and return but really it’s more like — it’s based on Fountain, which is the format that I co-created the syntax, so you’re just typing in plain text and it’s interpreting what you’re doing and figuring out what the different pieces and parts are. And that part actually worked reasonably well.

**Craig:** Wait, Amazon stole your shit?

**John:** Didn’t steal it. Actually, it’s a public format that we created called Fountain.

**Craig:** They don’t have to even acknowledge that they took it?

**John:** No, no. That’s what open source is. It’s like it’s out there in the world for the world to use. And so their implementation of it is actually pretty good except they left out some kind of important things like bolds or italics or centering.

**Craig:** Yeah, I noticed that I couldn’t bold slug lines, and also I couldn’t, like there’s no way to automatically set it. So for instance, I like to have two line breaks before a new scene header, and it didn’t seem like that was automatable.

**John:** Yeah, that’s not automatable yet. So it does some of the stuff that Highland does where you can throw a PDF at it and it will melt it down and bring it out as plain text so you can edit. So that’s kind of nice. It’s just trying to do a lot of things that Highland is trying to do or that Slugline is trying to do or really any of the other screenwriting apps are trying to do and it does an okay job with it. It’s all online. It’s free-ish.

I don’t really think that many people are going to use it in any meaningful capacity. Though I think you’re going to have a lot of people who write like two scenes in it and then never touch it again. That’s my hunch.

**Craig:** We’ll find out. I mean listen, you know, my whole thing is, I’m basically rooting for whoever Final Draft is playing against so if it doesn’t hurt anybody, I’m all for it. I mean I still think that there are better options. I get very squirmy about the Cloud based option. Just the idea that it’s only Cloud based, I know that you can export it and save it locally but I don’t like it so much.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll see what happens. Next bit of follow up in the mail bag is from Pam. And Pam writes, I have this one-woman crusade. It’s futile, but I persevere nonetheless. I would love if people would stop using the word dick derogatorily. My dad’s name is Dick. He’s an amazing, wonderful, caring man. One of the most important people in my life. Whenever I hear people using the word dick pejoratively, it hurts me on his behalf. You guys use it a lot especially this [laughs] — that’s the voice of Tess Morris breaking through, not even —

**Craig:** [Laughs] Tess, you’re not even on the show yet. You have to wait for your spot.

**Tess Morris:** I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** I’m glad you’re here.

**Tess:** Sorry.

**John:** It feels like it’s been increasing exponentially in film lately actually. Craig, what is your opinion of the word dick?

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**Craig:** It’s one of my favorite words. It’s weird but this whole thing is basically delusional except for this one moment of awesome clarity where she says, “I realize it’s futile.” Yes, Pam, it’s futile. The word dick exists simultaneously as both a pejorative for penis or a person who’s a penis-like person.

**Tess:** Thanks for clearing that up, Craig.

**Craig:** Right. Or it is short for Richard. Your dad’s name is Dick. I know a lot of guys named Dick and they’re cool guys. And I mean Dick Cook was a beloved executive at Disney. Everybody loves him still. And the thing is, if your dad, trust me when I tell you, whatever pain you’re feeling on his behalf, he’s heard it way worse, way worse. If he’s made it all the way to this stage of his life, I’m assuming that he’s at least middle age, if not older, and he’s still going by Dick, this is a hardened man. He’s going to be fine. He knows the world isn’t going to stop using the word dick. That’s crazy.

**Tess:** My dad’s called Richard.

**John:** Oh, yeah. And is he okay?

**Tess:** He’s fine. He’s absolutely fine. But also, I think one of my favorite quotes ever from a film is 37 Dicks from Clarks, you know. “Was it 36 dicks?” When he finds out how many dicks that his girlfriend —

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** Has and he just can’t get it out of his head, can he?

**John:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And it always makes me laugh.

**Craig:** I think that dick is a great counterbalance to some of the pejorative words that we toss on people that are related to female genitalia. Dick is our kind of cool balanced way of saying, no, no, no, if you’re called either male or female genitalia, we’re saying we don’t like you.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to Pam’s dad. I feel like —

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**John:** The challenge is how we —

**Craig:** You mean Dick?

**Tess:** You mean Dick.

**John:** Yes.

**Tess:** We don’t know Dick.

**John:** We don’t know him at all. And so Pam —

**Craig:** Some of us know him more than others.

**John:** Pam’s objection to us using the word dick pejoratively, well, it’s been used his entire life anatomically. And the anatomic thing is probably actually worse or sort of more annoying than pejoratively because I think when we’re saying dick, we’re saying like don’t be a dick.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** It’s quite a British word I must say. I don’t hear it that much.

**John:** Oh, yeah? We use dick all the time.

**Tess:** Yeah, I hear it much more at home.

**John:** Craig and I are both Anglophiles. So we try to be British.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Where did it come from? I mean what is the dick?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Tess:** What is it? We should find out.

**Craig:** You know what I love is, in England, I love spotted dick. I mean I don’t love the actual food. I just love that it’s called spotted dick.

**Tess:** Yes. Yeah.

**Craig:** Sounds like a venereal disease. I love that.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s a pudding or dessert as you call it.

**Craig:** It’s a pudding or dessert. Exactly. Like would you like some spotted dick? Absolutely not.

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**Craig:** Nobody, by the way nobody, I don’t care how much you love dick, if it’s got spots on it, you don’t, you just don’t. By the way, Pam’s realizing now this is backfired terribly. Look, Pam —

**Tess:** Pam’s regretting it.

**Craig:** It’s just funny. What are you going to do? Funny is funny. I’m sorry that you’re hurt. You need to get over this. You need to accept that this is the world and nobody is going after your dad. And I think if you talk to your dad about it, he would probably say, “Pam, I love you. You’re awesome. Thank you for caring about me but it will be okay. We’re good. We’re good.”

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Tess:** I like that this is how we started though.

**John:** Yeah, this is very important, your introduction to the podcast was discussion over dick.

**Tess:** Thank you. My laugh about dicks.

**John:** Last week’s episode, we talked about Whiplash. And so we had a bunch of listeners writing in with different things. One of the questions was good and maybe you will have an opinion on this as well, Tess. We talked on the podcast about there was a scene that was around a big dining room table and how scenes around tables are actually much more difficult to film than you would think they would be because you have to match so many eye lines and angles that it actually just takes forever to do.

And so listeners wrote in to ask, what are other scenes that you think would be really easy to shoot but end up being like really difficult to shoot?

**Tess:** Ooh, that’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, do you have any thoughts about scenes that are deceptively difficult to shoot?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you listed a couple of great ones. I mean the ones that are I think most deceptive are montages of any kind.

**Tess:** I was just about to say a montage, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, because a montage is like shooting 20 minutes. It’s basically the work equivalent of shooting 20 minutes of finished scenes for 30 or 40 seconds. And of course the stupidest, meaning the most work inefficient montage of all time, I still maintain was Allen’s flashback in Hangover 2 where he remembered all those events, but as they were all children so we had to film a montage twice but with children.

**Tess:** I think the easiest montage is probably the Rocky montages, though. I imagine that they were not stressful to film.

**John:** No. But I think looking back at your movie, Man Up , there’s one —

**Tess:** Two montages.

**John:** Yeah.

**Tess:** Montage, montage.

**John:** Yeah, montages.

**Craig:** Deux montage.

**Tess:** Montage.

**John:** Deux montage.

**Craig:** Deux montage.

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**John:** So I was thinking there’s a montage in which they’re bowling and that’s actually a fairly — and you’re shooting a scene, so it’s a bunch of different little setups.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**John:** But you’re all in one place. The really killer montages are things that look like it’s just two-eighths of a page on your script but you’re going to a whole bunch of different locations.

**Tess:** Yeah, we did that for the second one. The first one was the bowling one that we shot that the first week of filming as well and we just played loads of loud rock music and got Simon and Lake to, you know, get on down. But the one when she does the triathlon through the streets of SoHo, that was quite tricky.

**Craig:** And that one looks so, it’s just like, okay, she’s running down a street, she turns down an alley, swims through some bachelorette party girls, then asks a guy for his bike then bikes on over. It’s like, yeah, it goes by —

**Tess:** No.

**John:** That was probably two nights of filming.

**Tess:** That was, I think it was two nights, we had to obviously shoot — Lake had a stunt, well, also a funny story. The bit where Simon like legs her in the taxi with her, she’s our taxi driver, a stunt taxi driver actually crashed into the car in front of him during filming.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Tess:** So that delayed things slightly.

**John:** It does. So montages are a time suck. He goes to over the window is my example. So like you’re in a scene and then like characters just move around in a room. You’re like, oh, the characters are moving around the room, but you don’t realize until you actually need to film one of those things is that like once a character has moved over from this place to that place, all the other angles in the room have changed and, you know, you may be crossing a line. There’s complicated things that may have happened because those characters have shifted their position.

And it may be the right choice to have those characters move around, but it’s taking up extra time. That’s why you sort of, you know, instinctively love to have characters just like find a place and park.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it saves you time and geography problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ll sometimes and this is something that DPs will, it’s fun watching DPs and first ADs fight because of course the first AD is like shoot it as fast as you can and the DP is like, “I want it to look great.” A lot of times for things like this, you know, you have a scene of people in a room, and that’s your master and then you start covering it, but if somebody moves and changes position, well you need to — now you need a new master, and new coverage. So what they’ll do is they’ll lay down some track and as the person moves, they’ll move the camera along the track and so they’re repositioning their master as they go and then they try and do on the opposite side the same thing so they can reposition their coverage as they go.

Sometimes it doesn’t work and then yeah, you’ve screwed yourself especially if somebody goes to the window and looks out the window.

**Tess:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Oh my God, now you got to be outside looking up at them looking out and you got to see their POV, you got to be pointing it down. Ugh.

**Tess:** Talking of tracking in two shots. What nearly didn’t, well we did — our DP, he’s called Andrew Dunn. He’s incredible. If you look him up on IMDb, he’s just got the most brilliant, eclectic CV. And him and our director, Ben Palmer, knew that they wanted to shoot everything with two shot, absolutely everything so we got all those little comedy reactions that you really need obviously in a romantic comedy, but we nearly didn’t get Waterloo Station because it was so tricky to film there. And then our DP went down there with the director and just was like, “Okay, we can do this, but we’re going to do it at 3AM in the morning with 50 extras and we’ll have a tracking thing and we’ll just move with them the whole way through right up until she’s under the clock.” So otherwise it would have been like with — I think us and Bourne are the only two films to have shot in Waterloo Station.

**Craig:** I know, it’s actually amazing because when — it’s such a different scene.

**Tess:** What are you talking about? Bourne is very similar.

**Craig:** I mean, I just love the total — I mean — but it’s the same setting, and it actually looks different because it’s a different scene. I don’t know. It’s just a funny thing.

**Tess:** Well, he goes up all into the scene.

Well, he’s all angles. Like everything in that scene is all sniper angles. Like either it’s you’re looking up where the sniper is going to go or you’re looking down at the sniper and this thing is all eyes and misconnections and straight aheads and so.

**Tess:** We didn’t need a sniper. Yeah but I like that that might go down in sort of Wikipedia facts.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The two movies shot there. The last thing that comes to mind for me that seems really simple but is actually really complicated or at least requires complicated decisions is anything with driving. So usually with driving, you have two choices. You can have a real car, or you can green screen it. And so green screening it saves you a lot of time because you can park it on a sound stage, and just shoot whatever angles you want to shoot and then just like put the windows in in post. And a lot of things do that these days and they do it so well that you don’t really notice.

**Tess:** Yeah, I mean nowadays you don’t know the difference, yeah.

**John:** It looks so much better.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that’s often a good choice and sometimes it just means like not moving around. So the other choice is to put the car either on a trailer or really drive an actual car and mount the cameras to the car and that can look more realistic but it also limits your ability to move around in the car. The thing you also realize once you actually have to start putting cameras on actors in a cars is that there’s a limited number of ways that you can get both actors into a shot or to sort of cut back and forth between reactions. So that’s a reason why don’t you see movies that have a lot of time in the car.

Or you see rare exceptions of movies like that Tom Hardy movie which was entirely in the car.

**Tess:** In the car, yeah. I always think about Thelma and Louise, and I think about those driving shots because I always wanted to know how they did that. I’m sure there is a behind the scenes document.

**John:** But there’s a really good reason why they were driving a convertible.

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** They could get shots —

**Tess:** Keeps it open, yeah. But it’s also very cool as well.

**John:** It’s very cool, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Most of your road trip movies at some point or another, I mean, nowadays, you will do a lot of it with green screen. It saves you a ton money and time and effort. You can go so much faster. It’s brutal shooting processed cars where either they’re on a flat bed or you’re driving ahead of them and the actor is actually driving just because you got to do an entire take. You need a run of road. You have to have the cops shut it off. There’s noise. But, there’s nothing like it for the reality of getting in and driving and getting out, you know. So you build an enormous amount of time for those things and enormous expense beyond it. Driving, to me, is number one. The thing that seems the simplest and is the most annoying.

**Tess:** It’s almost like a movie is quite hard to make isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah, you think so. I think writers never quite appreciate.

**Craig:** Well, here’s another question that we got in from Brian from Syracuse. And he writes, “After following along with this week’s script to screen exercises involving Whiplash, and hearing you guys quickly discuss how both scenes really underline the dramatic arguments posed both in the micro sense of the individual scenes and in the macro sense of the entire film, I was wondering if it might be possible for you to elaborate a little more on the subject and maybe provide a couple of examples how these types of scenes pertain to your own films. Do you usually have the dramatic argument of the entire film and then look for a way to include a scene that specifically addresses or accentuates this argument/conflict?” Brian —

**Tess:** It’s a long question.

**Craig:** Yeah. But you know, like he put a lot of thought into that question. I appreciate it.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s a good question.

**John:** I would say that in my experience, I won’t necessarily know what the dramatic question or argument of the film is as I’m starting to write it, but it’s there already. Like, it’s the reason why I’m writing the movie and it’s sort of central to the DNA of the movie. And so that if I’ve picked the right movie and I’m approaching it from the right way, that central question — that central theme kind of permeates every scene regardless. And so, if a scene isn’t about that central question, it’s just not going to last in the script, it won’t last in the movie.

**Tess:** Yeah. I would say, it usually takes me the first draft to find my axiom — my central axiom.

**Craig:** Good word.

**Tess:** Thank you. I know especially because I write mainly romantic comedies, you are sort of always wanting to look for the bigger question for your leads or your leading lady or leading man. So I think — yeah, at the moment, I’m writing something, I remember I got my axiom about two drafts in which was when is the right time to meet someone, is there a right time to meet someone, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think mine comes about as I get into the — probably the same as you, really. I have to get into it a bit.

**Craig:** I think I’m a little different than you guys.

**Tess:** Of course, you are, Craig. You got to be different.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I mostly just ask what you two do and then I think, “Do the opposite.” I do try and start before I begin crafting scenes, I do need to know. It doesn’t have to stay this one. It can change and evolve. But I need to at least begin with some central question because I need to know that my character believes the opposite of that central question. And I need to start designing scenes — and he said, like, do you look for a way to include a scene that specifically addresses? Yeah. I try and design scenes to test the character and lead them towards the truth or punish them for —

And by the way, your movie does this beautifully. Like, every time — like, I always talk about two steps forward one step back. Your character moves towards something, the possibility of an entirely opposite way of living, and for a moment it’s working and then you punish them. This is exactly how I approach these things. So I do need to kind of know. And over time, the question might change and thus the scenes might change. It’s just hard for me to start unless I have something there to build off of.

**Tess:** I mean I have — I think with Man Up, because I wrote that on spec. And I really did know, probably from the very beginning, I knew what I wanted to say about life. But then I need to — what I have to do — Philip Seymour Hoffman had a really good quote which was that writers need to fill up and then they can kind of write. And I think I sort of — I have to take a few more years to fill up again, to write again, if that makes sense. Because I sort of put everything into one script. It’s not very financially a good thing to be.

**John:** That’s not a viable strategy.

**Tess:** Yes. It’s not a viable strategy.

**John:** I was watching a friend’s cut of his movie. And it was a very early cut and so it was a place where a lot of stuff was still fungible and could change. And this idea of stating your central dramatic question, that’s I think my underlying note for him was that I had never heard any of the characters articulate what the movie was about.

**Tess:** Yeah, But you sometimes think as well, I mean I’m so into that. But I do sometimes think as well that you have to — when you’re just starting your first draft, I think there’s also opportunities to not be so sort of like regimented with yourself as well. Because I think newer writers sometimes say to me, you know, “I know exactly what’s it about.” And I’m like, “Oh, you know exactly what it’s about and you haven’t even started to write it yet.” You know, like, I think sometimes, especially if you’re writing in a comedic sense as well, like it can suddenly jump up at you what you actually were trying to say within a scene and then you go, “Oh, great. Now, it is thematic. Hooray.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it’s fair to say, “I know exactly what it’s about for now.”

**Tess:** Yes, that’s totally fair. Yeah. But then allow yourself the freedom to you know —

**Craig:** Always. Always.

**John:** I think what I’m trying to articulate is that it’s good that you know what it’s about. But if you’re not letting any of your characters speak to the theme —

**Tess:** Oh, yes.

**John:** Or speak to what it’s about or actually ask the question, or take actions that invite the question, then maybe you’re missing an opportunity.

**Tess:** Yeah. Sometimes I put the actual question in. But then you realize that you’ve put it maybe in the wrong scene or at the wrong time. And then you’ll get to the point where you go, oh actually now I can have them say that.

**John:** Yeah. We talked in the last episode about how sometimes you will overwrite a little bit knowing that you can always pull it back.

**Tess:** I overwrite so much.

**John:** But it’s very hard to sort of put stuff back in the movie if you didn’t actually shoot it. And so having a character state the central thematic question may be a really good idea. And if it becomes too obvious, you can always find a way to snip out but it’s going to be very hard to stick back it in.

**Tess:** We thought long and hard about whether he should actually — anyone should actually say the phrase, “Man up,” in Man Up. And then I went for it but I went with the man saying it to the woman rather than the way around. But it was a real sort of thing about do we actually say the title of the film?

**John:** So everyone clapped when —

**Tess:** Yeah, everyone cheered, like, “Yay — ”

**John:** “He said the title.”

**Craig:** They did it. They know they’re in this movie.

**Tess:** They know they’re in the film acting.

**Craig:** Are you familiar with the Book of Mormon?

**Tess:** I haven’t seen it, you know. And I need to see it. I’m probably the only person in the world who hasn’t seen it.

**John:** I’m probably the only person in the world who has not seen Hamilton.

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to see Hamilton.

**Tess:** I’m obsessed with that.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the greatest.

**John:** Man up.

**Tess:** But you haven’t seen it yet?

**Craig:** Man up is the —

**Tess:** Man Up the musical which I would like to do, obviously, next year because I think it could work really well as a musical.

**Craig:** You want to do Man Up as a musical?

**Tess:** I’d love to do it as a musical. Do you want to do it with me, Craig?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I like it as a movie. I don’t think —

**Tess:** Yeah. Give it five years.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t see — I don’t think it needs music.

**Tess:** No, that’s true. But I just like the idea of doing it. Come on, humor me.

**Craig:** Let’s just make a new musical.

**Tess:** That’s true. Okay.

**John:** There’s a dance fight in Man Up and that would work very well on the stage.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Tess:** And you know, it’s quite a chamber piece of a film, two-hander.

**John:** It’s a heightened chamber piece, and that’s a musical.

**Tess:** It is. Thank you.

**John:** Aaron writes, “I really appreciated your most recent episode discussing Whiplash. I totally agree about your take that Fletcher obviously offers Andrew the performance slot in order to embarrass and ruin him. But would Fletcher really put his reputation further on the line to ruin Andrew? Especially since Andrew was nowhere on the scene anymore, not at the conservatory, not playing clubs, nobody knew who Andrew was, and certainly nobody in the music community.

“He would be ruining a non-entity who already seemed to have given up. And yet Fletcher decides to get his revenge on this guy in a public performance at New York’s largest jazz festival in an ensemble he’s conducting. Sure Andrew would look terrible, but Fletcher is the person standing at the forefront of the crowd. He’s already lost his job, his reputation remains intact enough that he was asked to lead this ensemble performance, and now he’s out to give a crap performance. I just had trouble seeing him as that selfless in his vengeance. To sacrifice himself and his reputation in order to embarrass someone nobody knows.”

I thought that was a really interesting point. I never really thought about Fletcher’s choice to set up Andrew at the end. We’re spoiling the movie Whiplash for you.

**Tess:** Spoiler alert.

**John:** It is really an interesting idea that like Fletcher is going into this knowing he’s going to publicly embarrass himself, but he’s going to get a lot of blowback from that himself. If things go as disastrously as it seems like they’re going to go.

Tess; Yeah. I mean I don’t remember feeling — I remember just feeling so like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards in a good way after I saw that film. You know what I mean, I don’t know what you guys said about it last week because I unfortunately haven’t listened yet, but I will listen obviously.

**John:** Leave the room immediately.

**Tess:** Leave the room immediately. No. But I mean, it’s so visceral the whole film. There are things that you can pick apart. I understand why he’s questioning that. But in my heart of hearts, it’s such a film about being bullying and this whole journey that actually because he is such a bully, I kind of do believe that that’s sort of part of his awful journey. Do you know what I mean?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no way — let me offer our listening audience some certainty. There is absolutely no way that the intention there was that the character of Fletcher rigged the whole thing to bring some great performance out of Andrew. He absolutely did that.

**Tess:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** He did that to humiliate Andrew and punish him because he truly believed Andrew had cost him his job and he was a revengeful bad person. And you can tell because Simmons’ performance shows joy, true sadistic joy at ruining him.

**Tess:** Yeah. Exactly, yeah.

**Craig:** And then also shows absolute shock when Andrew comes back and starts doing what he’s doing. And then epiphany when Andrew becomes something. And that is not the performance of somebody who goes, “Good. This is what I wanted to happen.”

**Tess:** It’s so incredible that performance because you still like him. It’s bizarre, isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah. So I loved Aaron’s phrase of selfless vengeance. I just think that’s a great, you know — it honestly was circling back to the question of the central dramatic argument. Is there such a thing as selfless vengeance? Because Fletcher is not acting in his own best interest at the moment. Like vengeance is actually kind of never in your own best interest. A rational person would never probably seek vengeance.

**Tess:** Rare. Well, Craig is —

**John:** I mean, is vengeance only emotional or can vengeance be intellectual as well?

**Tess:** I think it can be intellectual. I think you can play the long game in terms of vengeance.

**Craig:** You see, what’s going on here, John, is that you have a full Jew and a half of a Jew.

**Tess:** Oh, God. Yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** Both of us are like, no, no, long term vengeance is part of our culture.

**Tess:** It’s part of our life.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s what our parents did to us. I think that vengeance is always selfish. It can be self-destructive, but it’s selfish.

**Tess:** I think in the creative sense it can be very liberating. You know, write who you know, not what you know. So you know, I think there are times when it can be incredibly helpful. But it shouldn’t be to your own detriment or anyone else’s detriment. You know, you should just be secretly vengeful.

**Craig:** Well, we all know as writers that it’s fun to write characters who are looking for vengeance. And we also know that characters who are obsessed with revenge either die in the fire of their own self-destruction or finally let it go. We all know that’s kind of that’s the deal.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s the journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the journey. And I’m amazed all the time at how many times I will meet writers who behave in ways that they would never allow their characters to behave. It’s like they haven’t learned those lessons at all.

**Tess:** It’s bizarre behavior, but we are all weirdos, that’s the other problem isn’t it? Most writers are —

**Craig:** You have no idea.

**Tess:** We have issues. So we write about them and then we pretend that we’re okay afterwards.

**Craig:** We’re not.

**John:** So Tess Morris, tell us about your issues. Maybe that’s a good segue into —

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Talking about romantic comedies. So our special guest who’s not said a word yet in this whole episode —

**Craig:** Yeah, who’s just rolled over tradition, steam-rolled.

**John:** Is Tess Morris, she’s the writer of —

**Tess:** Hi, I’ve been here for a while, yeah.

**John:** She’s the writer of Man Up, a new romantic comedy which you can see on demand now everywhere.

**Tess:** Yes. In theaters this weekend, wider, this is my pro language that I’m using.

**John:** Yeah, nice.

**Tess:** Thank you. In about ten or 12 cities, I think, LA, Grand Rapids, which really excited me.

**John:** Grand Rapids, Michigan. Come on.

**Tess:** Houston, Dallas. Yeah, but on demand as well on your special iTunes box.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Tess:** To purchase.

**John:** This is a romantic comedy starring Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. And it is just delightful. So I saw it at the Austin Film Festival.

**Tess:** I was so excited that you sat behind me but I was also obviously really nervous. I was like, “Oh, shit. John August.”

**John:** It was really quite funny. And Craig just saw it through the magic of Internet connection.

**Craig:** But I knew that it was going to be good because my wife, Missy, went with you, John.

**Tess:** She did.

**Craig:** To see the movie and she loved it, loved it, loved it, and cried a lot.

**Tess:** She’s a big laugher. I loved her a lot.

**Craig:** Yes. She’s a big laugher, she’s a big crier. That’s why I married her, for the emotional extremes.

**John:** And the critics seemed to have laughed and cried in appropriate numbers. And it’s certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so congratulations on that.

**Tess:** We are certified Fresh.

**Craig:** I don’t care about that. You know that I actually hate that.

**John:** Do you have questions for Tess about what it’s like to get reviews like that?

**Craig:** No. I have no interest. I don’t care. I hope that you choke on those reviews. No.

**Tess:** Oh, you know what, we only remember the bad ones as well.

**Craig:** Well, of course the only review that I care about is my review.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** My review.

**Tess:** It’s the only one I care about for you, Craig, about Man Up, as well.

**Craig:** It’s the only one of my reviews that you care about is my review.

**Tess:** Yes, your own review.

**Craig:** Well, I loved it.

**John:** So Tess, as you were introducing this movie at the festival up on stage, you talked about how this was a romantic comedy and people shouldn’t talk shit about romantic comedies.

**Tess:** Yes, I did.

**John:** So tell us about romantic comedies and what do you even mean by romantic comedies?

**Tess:** Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because ever since I wrote this film and it got made, I’ve become like the spokesperson for defending the whole entire genre. My big thing with it is that people sort of dismiss it so quickly. Like no other genre in the history of film. It’s quite a strange phenomenon that people are all, “I don’t like romantic comedies.” Or “Rom-coms are dead.” Or “Rom-coms are alive.” And et cetera, et cetera.

And I find that incredibly frustrating because there have been some brilliant ones in the last sort of 10 years or so. And I think also what happens is when they win awards, they’re suddenly not romantic comedies. So Silver Linings Playbook and As Good As It Gets and those kinds of, you know, brilliant movies.

I mean when you talk about romantic comedy, you’re just — you’re talking about something that has probably I’d say 72 percent — 68 percent comedy ,and the rest is romance. If you take your central love story out of the film and it falls apart, then you don’t have a romantic comedy, you know well you do have a romantic comedy on your hands rather. And I just adore them as a genre and I always have and I like all the ones, the hybrids. Like I love Romancing the Stone, the ones that are like the action rom-coms.

So I wonder if Long Kiss Goodnight is technically a rom-com? No, it’s not — her and Samuel L. Jackson, it’s not, that was a stretch. But yeah and I mean I love Sideways which is a rom-com between two men and I love Bridesmaids which is a rom-com between two women and Muriel’s Wedding. And I think like people sometimes forget that they’re watching one, and the art of a good one is that you don’t realize sometimes that you are as well. So yeah I’ve become sort of like this strange irritating person that constantly is like “I like rom-coms” and get annoyed when people you know say that they don’t.

**Craig:** I think you’re making a terrific point because I don’t — I personally love rom-coms, I mean and I really agree with your point that what we think of as romantic comedy is across almost every comedy genre. Identity Thief is a rom — it’s like an asexual rom-com, it’s like a platonic rom-com.

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** And I happen to love the genre and I miss it. I don’t know what went wrong exactly but and maybe we can figure out why —

**Tess:** I think I can tell you, yeah. I can tell you what went wrong actually.

**Craig:** Okay, what went wrong?

**Tess:** Well and it’s — and this is not me talking, this is me using the voice of Billy Mernit who’s a good, brilliant friend of mine and also wrote this book called “Writing the Romantic Comedy” which I’m addicted to and obsessed by because it’s the one book on screenwriting that I’ve read that just really inspired me and unlocked lots of structural points for me and thematic things. But I had a big chat with him about this. And he works for Universal actually, is a story editor, and he was saying that essentially what happened in the sort of late 90s, early ’00s, is that they had these huge hits with you know, the kind of Katherine Heigl set of vehicles and made loads of money, the studios made a ton of money.

But then they essentially killed the golden goose because they then started to make identical versions of those films, just probably like they do with most genres but for a longer time period with romantic comedies, which caused everyone to say the romantic comedy is dead which only really people started saying in the late ’90s early ’00s, before then, you know you didn’t really talk about it like that because they have such a rich history of movies that are romantic comedies. So I think there was just this you know, lazy time period where everyone started to say that and now people just resort back to that whenever there’s a new one they go, “Oh the rom-com is alive,” or something bombed at the box office, “It’s dead.” It’s like, give it a break.

**John:** Christopher Orr had an article called Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad, and the sub-head is, the long decline from Katharine Hepburn to Katherine Heigl, which I thought was —

**Tess:** It’s a great — it’s click bait — it’s a great title, great headline, but it’s not true.

**Craig:** Good anger. Anger.

**John:** Anger. We like that.

**Tess:** Can you feel it?

**Craig:** Umbrage. Umbrage.

**John:** We’ve got dual umbrage in this episode.

**Tess:** Vengeance.

**Craig:** Vengeance will be ours.

**John:** But he actually raised some interesting points in terms of what has changed. And one of the points he brought up was that actors will sometimes do one romantic comedy and they’ll just stop —

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Because they don’t want to be pigeon-holed as doing that, so you look at Will Smith in Hitch, who was fantastic in Hitch.

**Tess:** He’s great in it. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great romantic comedy and he will not do anymore of them. You look at Julia Roberts and she made her start in romantic comedy but didn’t want to keep doing that so they want to do serious roles and —

**Tess:** Although I read an interview with her recently that said if she read a good one for a woman who was whoever old Julia, lovely Julia is now, I’d happily write you one, because I love her. Yeah, I mean I don’t know whether that’s because they feel like they don’t have as much integrity. I mean comedy as a whole thing and you all know this, both of you from writing yourself, that it doesn’t ever get the kudos that any other line of craft does.

**Craig:** No. It’s crazy.

**Tess:** And I would argue that to write comedy is far harder that to write drama overall.

**Craig:** Because you’re right.

**John:** So, a theory I want to posit is that part of the reason why it’s looked down upon is because almost definitionally a romantic comedy is going to have one woman in it, and like one prominent actress who has a major role in the movie. And we sort of don’t want to write for women anymore — or we don’t want to make the movies for women anymore.

**Tess:** Yeah, but I mean It’s so weird because I’ve done so many interviews about Man Up and someone ask me the other day, “Oh is your character a hot mess?” And I was like, “Oh piss off, she’s not a hot mess. She is a messy person.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Who’s just going through some stuff and I think —

**John:** And she’s literally a very messy person —

**Tess:** Yeah literally a messy person. And I think also like you could switch the roles in Man Up and very easily either/or could play you know man or female roles. I do worry when people sort of think that there aren’t still stories about sort of romance to tell, because especially in the modern world.

**Craig:** I actually feel like were telling romance in every genre now. Part of what’s happened is everything — it doesn’t matter what it is.

**Tess:** And actually it’s too much, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, like no matter what the genre is, even if it’s like a wrestling movie, there has to be some sort of love story.

**Tess:** Or a Marvel movie.

**Craig:** Yeah by the way exactly, superhero movies like Ironman has to have Gwyneth Paltrow in a romance story. And we put romance into everything.

**Tess:** You know what, someone said to me recently that Superman wasn’t about his love for Lois Lane, and I got so angry.

**Craig:** Right well from the start —

**Tess:** That’s all that the film is about.

**Craig:** By the way that’s all Superman is about like —

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I’m going to get some more angry letters, I don’t like Superman. I like that relationship. And I think It’s a really good relationship story and I don’t care about his powers but —

**Tess:** But it’s not a rom-com to be fair.

**Craig:** No, It’s not a rom-com, but I do think that we actually are more interested now, it seems to me in writing comedies for women that we have been in a long, long time. There are really prominent female comediennes that are stars now, whether it’s Tina Fey or Melissa McCarthy —

**Tess:** Kristen Wiig, yeah.

**Craig:** We’re getting a lot of them and — but were not doing the traditional romantic comedies in the sense maybe there’s a vague feeling that they’re old fashioned but I disagree. I don’t think they — I think that they are old-fashioned only in the sense that movies used to be awesome and like I thought what Man Up reminded of is a good — a movie like the kind they used to make and that’s not to say stodgy or old but —

**Tess:** No, no I take that as a huge compliment because that’s what I — the screwball kind of element and the kind of classic structure and whenever I read the bad reviews which I obviously I always do. Whenever I read the ones that say “Oh God It’s just like so obvious,” I’m like, no, you’ve totally missed the point like we’re embracing all the tropes because that’s what any good genre film does, embraces them but then turns them into — gives them your own sort of angle on it. So —

**John:** Let’s talk about the tropes because I think that’s actually one of the things that people sort of single out romantic comedies for, it’s like “Oh these tropes,” and we sort of slam on these tropes. So let’s talk about tropes. The meet-cute, is that —

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah I mean like — I mean there’s technically you know, seven —

**John:** Oh my gosh, there’s seven tropes —

**Tess:** Well they’re not really tropes, actually that’s wrong they’re more like the beats of a rom-com.

**Craig:** Can I try? I don’t know them I just want to take a stab at it.

**Tess:** Do it.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m going to start with a woman who is single and vaguely unhappy with her life.

**Tess:** Can be a man as well. Woody Allen.

**Craig:** Correct, I’m just going with the — I’m going to do the female version.

**Tess:** Do it.

**Craig:** She has given up on — she’s tried to — she’s gone through bad relationships and is about to give up.

**Tess:** Correct.

**Craig:** There’s a meet-cute — so far so good — there’s a meet-cute where she or he runs into a person and they have sparks but they aren’t — the circumstances are such that they can’t just say fall in love. There are circumstantial things that are keeping them apart, obstacles.

**Tess:** All together. Yeah.

**Craig:** Good exactly. But they then start to — they go through a honeymoon phase where things are kind of exciting and they both think is it possible that this person, nah, we’re just friends, it couldn’t be, so they’re like kind of moving towards and away from each other out of fear because there’s a problem — the problem that they had in the beginning of the movie isn’t resolved. There’s a lie that one of them tells —

**Tess:** Correct.

**Craig:** They get caught in the lie, they break up, and in the breaking up they return back to the world they started in, but no longer find that world satisfying and then one of them goes running.

**Tess:** I would give you a B-minus.

**Craig:** Okay, the B — by the way B-minus is not a bad grade because I never — I mean, you know — what did I — tell me where I went wrong and tell me what I left out.

**Tess:** No you didn’t, It’s all there really, I mean essentially what you’re talking about in terms of the girl who’s single — I’ll talk about Billy Mernit’s beats because that’s how I write. And he talks about the chemical equation which is the thing that in all writing you’re looking for your leading characters, what they’re missing in their life, what they are not doing. So in Man Up she is not getting out there, she is not putting herself in a position to meet someone. She is closed down, shut down. Yeah, then you got your cute-meet. I mean, in the history of time cute-meets are the hardest things to find original ways for your two leads to meet each other.

And I always love it, I always try and think about how do — like say you said to me how did you meet your partner, and I said, well I stole his date from under the clock at Waterloo Station. If that’s going to make me laugh, then that’s a good cute-meet. And then what you’re talking about in terms of your — Billy calls it the sexy complication turning point.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**Tess:** Which is your end of act one, which is when — really in a romantic comedy you’ve got to find emotional obstacles to keep your two leads together. And really at the end of act one, in lots off these films, they’re not the great examples of it, they could just walk away and the film could end. Sorry, I don’t fancy you anymore, bye.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** So you have to find either a plot driven thing but obviously what’s much better is an emotional obstacle or thing —

**John:** So either literal handcuffs or emotional handcuffs.

**Tess:** Exactly. Very good analogy, John August. And then you keep them together all through to your midpoint which is in terms of romantic comedy, you want to, in the smack bang of your middle of act two, you want to send them in a different direction to where they thought they were going, emotionally speaking.

And then they kind of start liking each other, but then you’ve got to get into the end of act two, your swivel second act turning point where someone makes the wrong decision. Someone always makes the wrong decision in a romantic comedy. It can be both of them and actually in Man Up, both of them don’t Man Up at the end of act two. And then all is lost from there onwards and you just have no idea how you’re going to get these two people back together and then in — you know When Harry Met Sally kind of did the brilliant run.

Weirdly now when I think about it, probably if you wrote that montage into a script now, someone would go “Nah,” wouldn’t they?

**Craig:** Of course, they say nah to everything.

**Tess:** And then he has a flashback so all of the moments in the film. And then he realizes that he loves her and then he runs.

**Craig:** Right, someone’s always running. I got that right.

**Tess:** Yeah, but you know what, they can be running metaphorically, they can be actually running. In Man Up, he does do an actual run, but I tried to sort off find a unique way without spoiling it for him to do that run.

**Craig:** Yeah and you did.

**Tess:** So it wasn’t just traditional —

**John:** Well you were calling out the trope.

**Craig:** Right exactly, you’re acknowledging, oh this is where they run, so we’ll give you a little something like a present.

**Tess:** Yeah. I mean you know, were quite on the button with the beats in Man Up, but hopefully, and I was saying to John actually when I first got here, when I wasn’t actually here, when I was pretending not to be here. I really — I sort of like love the fact that we are unashamedly saying, here they all are, you know, that I have no sort of fear in admitting. And I also think when you watch it again and this is not a plug to watch it twice, but the second time around, it’s a very fast movie the first time you watch it. When you watch it again, you can relax a bit more and understand some of the — you know catch some more of the jokes and more of the humor. So I think the first time you watch it, you can be like “Oh my god what is happening?” It’s like one night of kind of you know craziness.

But yeah and I mean I love — I just get so bored and tired of people sort off saying — the amount of times I get emails going would you like to talk about defending the rom-com for this, this, this? And I’m like yes.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s like —

**Tess:** I will talk about it.

**Craig:** I mean, I feel like the movie is a great defense. And what you’re describing when you say —

**Tess:** That’s my exhibit A.

**Craig:** Exactly, thank you. If you said look, I have a collection of tropes, and the job is not to throw them out, the job is to execute them in fresh new ways —

**Tess:** Yeah and hide them.

**Craig:** Well that’s what we’re supposed to be doing anyway.

**Tess:** I know

**Craig:** All of us.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s the point. So to me, I loved how traditional it was, and proved that a traditional romantic comedy still works because in the end — you know Lindsay Doran has this great remark, she says that movies are about what we care about at the end of movies, is relationships. And if you watch a movie, no matter what that movie is, the last scene is almost always about the relationship even if the movie is about robots blowing each other up, the last scene is the boy and the girl, or the boy and his car, or something, and it’s about the relationship. And you know the last scene — she always points out the last scene of Dirty Dancing. Everybody thinks Dirty Dancing ends with —

**Tess:** Oh, let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** She — you know, everyone says, “Oh, how does Dirty Dancing end? With her leaping?” No it doesn’t. It ends with Jennifer Grey talking to her dad.

**Tess:** No. To her dad exactly.

**Craig:** The relationship.

**Tess:** When I’m wrong I say I’m wrong.

**Craig:** Right. And so what Lindsay says is, what’s interesting is, they make these movies for boys and men about robots exploding, but then they put in this little relationship thing at the end to sort of say, okay, but also, you like movies about relationships. She said, when we make movies so called for women, that are about relationships, we’ve kind of said you’re smart enough to know that what you’re here for is the relationship. That’s the part everyone cares about anyway. The exploding robots, meh.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? So romantic comedies are the purest form of that, I love that.

**Tess:** They are because like my favorite thing in the world, I love people, like even if I meet someone that I don’t like, and I’ll be able to use them at some point in my writings, so I’m like I’ll talk to you, even if you are dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. But like I sort of feel like — especially like when people sort of say, oh, you know Lake’s character in the film, because she is very, you know, it is very autobiographical. I’m not going to lie. But like — but she’s a person, not a woman, if that makes sense you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And I think that’s the key to sort of — I mean, I know lots of men that have seen Man Up, and I get random messages on Twitter all the time sort of going “God, I really love that film,” like you know, I really like this and I love Simon’s character in it, and Simon Pegg is so brilliant in it and actually very underrated actor, I think genuinely in terms of like his actual dramatic chops. I mean obviously he’s not underrated comedically, but he’s very vulnerable in the film, and he’s very, you know, effed up, and all those sort of things. I’ve already sworn. I don’t know why I did an “effed up” then. I could have just said it, couldn’t I?

**Craig:** Say it.

**Tess:** Yeah they’re two people and no one really wants to be on their own, do they, in life, whether you want to be in a relationship or just be with your friends or be with your family, you know, that’s what life is about for me, being with people.

**John:** So one thing that occurs to me though about the nature of a romantic comedy is that, the — you can have a central dramatic question that is about sort of like, can men and women be friends, you know what is the duty to think — you can have central dramatic questions that aren’t necessarily specifically about that relationship, but the fundamental plot question that the audience is going to expect to have answered is like, will this couple end up together?

And the answer in romantic-comedy generally is yes. And so the challenge of the screenwriter is like how do you believably keep them apart?

**Tess:** Yes. You know your ending already, so in life, in writing, you’ve got to be so full of questions, I mean, that is just a part of the job, do you know what I mean? So it always really fascinates me when people, with romantic-comedies, they don’t think they need that, they think they just need two people who are they/aren’t they — it’s like, no, you’ve got to have these huge, big emotional things that kind of are running through it.

**Craig:** That’s, I mean to me, all the differences that keep people apart that are circumstantial, I think of as MacGuffins, they are the glowing stuff in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. I kind of don’t care about those things. I always care about the things that are internal to them, and their fears that are keeping them alone, or keeping them apart from this person, that if they only could take a risk with, things would go well. Why I think, to me, the joy of a romantic-comedy is not in wondering, will they/won’t they, because the answer is, they will.

**Tess:** It’s how they. It’s how they.

**Craig:** It’s really, it’s being reminded, this is why men should always go to romantic-comedies with their significant others, is because it’s reminding everybody of the joy of falling in love, and the value of falling in love, because over time, I mean, you know, John and I have both been in monogamous relationships for years and years and years and years.

**Tess:** All right, don’t rub it in.

**Craig:** Sorry, you can’t maintain a heightened level — and you talk about this in the movie, a heightened level of passion for all that time. If you did, your brain would explode, and you would be mentally ill. It’s just not possible.

Going to romantic-comedies, revives it, it makes you look at the person you’re with, and makes you remember the risks you took with them, and it also reminds you of the value of what you built together because in the end, when you watch a movie about somebody stopping the world from exploding, that’s never my job, but at the end of a romantic-comedy, when I see a man and woman come together and make an agreement to mush their lives together and build a thing, and I always love in romantic-comedies when they’re old couples too, like in yours, it reminds me that I did something really good.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s worth it, you know. I think that’s the value of the —

**Tess:** That’s the job, isn’t is? I mean actually, it’s funny because someone was asking me the other day whether they think that Nancy and Jack, the two leads in Man Up, stay together. And I actually said, “No.”

**Craig:** You’re terrible.

**Tess:** Well no, I said no because I feel like the film is actually about putting yourself out there and taking chances. That’s part of her mantras within the film, and it’s something that I struggle with myself, you know, I’ve been single on and off now for bloody years, and I go into a very closed in kind of environment and I don’t want to kind of like take any chances.

And I think the film for me, is trying to say to people like if you do something, enjoy it, and see where it goes, but don’t try and maybe over-analyze it and worry about, okay, is this the man I’m going to marry and is this my life I’m going to have? So I love that they get together in the end, obviously. I would always get them together at the end.

But strangely, with Annie Hall, when they are not together at the end of that, I actually love that film, but that’s the only thing I find slightly dissatisfying, although you know, arguably, from the beginning of the film, you know that they’re not very well suited.

**Craig:** Well, I mean that movie, you know, the original title of Annie Hall was Anhedonia.

**Tess:** Yes, good fact. Nice fact.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Tess:** Fear of what?

**Craig:** Fear of pleasure.

**Tess:** Fear of pleasure. Exactly.

**Craig:** And so it really was a meditation on — definitely more Woody Allen in the —

**Tess:** Exactly and then it became her story, I mean you know.

**Craig:** That’s an existentialist movie, it’s in a weird way, people talk about it as a romantic-comedy. I don’t think it’s a romance at all. I think it’s actually an existential drama crisis movie.

**Tess:** Well, I think it is a romantic-comedy, but I think it’s fascinating that once the title changed to Annie Hall, you don’t really think about him as much in that film as you do about Diane Keaton. And I think that’s what turned it around, you know, he then probably hopefully realized, ah okay, this is actually much more about the breakdown of a relationship between two people that are a bit mismatched.

**Craig:** I do think that your characters, they get married, and they grow old together —

**Tess:** That’d be nice.

**Craig:** And then when one of them dies like at 92 —

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** The other one just sits down in a chair and dies like 10 minutes later.

**Tess:** Like six months later? Oh, 10 minutes? I was going to give them a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Yes, because that was just the way it was going to be. I believe that. I believe it in my bones.

**Tess:** Well, I have to believe to write it. Otherwise —

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think by the way, that you’re going to have this.

**Tess:** Thanks, Craig. You know what though, I’m fine though, like I think that like being single, I keep an edge.

**John:** Yes, absolutely, you get more writing done when you’re single.

**Tess:** It keeps me writing, yes.

**John:** Here’s a question for both of you. Do we think that romantic-comedies are by their nature dual protagonist stories, or can you have a romantic-comedy that has a protagonist and just an antagonist who does not change? Do both characters have to change?

**Tess:** Well Trainwreck kind of did that recently.

**John:** Yes, so Bill Hader’s character just barely changes.

**Tess:** He clearly doesn’t change. I would argue, actually I would — I liked it as a film, but I would have quite liked him to have a little bit more of a sort of journey, to use that word.

**Craig:** Yes. I think that the best of them, I always feel like there’s one protagonist. The dual protagonist thing to borrow a Tess Morris thing, I always feel it’s like 68, you know, 32. In this movie, it’s Nancy who is the protagonist.

**Tess:** Yes, she’s — I mean it was originally much more her, actually, and then I turned it more into a two-hander and brought Jack’s character in a bit sooner.

**Craig:** So I’m going to argue against sort of that because if you look at what Nancy is actually doing, especially in the bar scene where she’s like getting him to actually stand up to his ex-wife and that like, he is a character that has the most growth. He does the most things over the course of a lot of the movie to change.

**Tess:** He does, yes.

**Craig:** So ultimately, she is the person who has to do something at the end. He is the guy who does the big romantic run at the end, so he fulfills that Harry function.

**Tess:** Well, it depends where they meet as well. With When Harry Met Sally, they meet in the first scene, you know. And they’re together, they’re in every pretty much every single scene together about bar five or six or whatever, and I think with Man Up, it’s Nancy’s story for the first 12, 13 minutes, and then it’s entirely both their sort of journeys, but obviously she has more, I think it begins with her. She is the catalyst for the things that happen in the film.

**Craig:** I also think that, I mean you’re right, there’s the quantity of change that happens for Simon’s character, for Jack, but the profundity of the change, and the resistance, he’s already somebody who feels he’s defined as passionate, somewhat plastic in that nature, he’s emotional, he’s honest, he’s free with his feelings, he just needs to get over something. She’s bottled up to me that it’s like it’s the — he can make 12 changes over the course of the movie, but for her to uncork is like the hardest thing because it’s so — see, my problem with the single protagonist, and this is another thing I actually think hurt romantic-comedies is that for a long time the model was one person meets another person, the main character is flawed and can’t see that this other person’s perfect for them.

And they continue to fail in front of that person until finally, they succeed, and that person is essentially fixed in place as a moral ideal that you’re just waiting for them to grow up enough to earn. And that’s not quite satisfying for me as a moviegoer.

**Tess:** All my favorite rom-coms I would say are dual protagonist, you know, As Good As It Gets, and Silver Linings, actually, which is a great example of like something that begins with Bradley Cooper’s character, and then she just comes along and changes his whole life. And there’s a great sort of sub — I read a thing recently about how in the first scene when he meets her, when he says to her, you know, I find you — you look nice, I’m just saying that, I’m trying to get back with my wife, it’s not that I’m trying to come on to you, and actually, that’s the moment he falls in love with her, the first time he sees her.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** And then she just bowls in and they have that brilliant kind of Hepburn/Tracy-esque kind of sort of dialogue between each other. And then it becomes their film, like once they meet, it should become a dual thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** To wrap this up, so romantic-comedies, we’re saying they are not dead. We are saying that the things that people identify as being formulaic about them, are the tropes that are common to the genre, but you could say the same things about the tropes in any genre. And so we don’t slam on superhero movies for having those tropes and genres, I guess because they’re wildly successful.

**Tess:** Can you imagine if everyone got upset about set pieces in superhero movies.

**Craig:** How about like, how about the part where they discover their powers and don’t have control over them at first? How about the part where they make their suit for the first time. God.

**Tess:** I love it when they make their suit. I’m like, how are they going to make their suit?

**Craig:** Who cares? So boring, I’m so done.

**Tess:** Yes, sorry, John.

**John:** So we’re also saying that romantic-comedies are comedies which we are expecting to see one or two characters grow and change, but you can say that of course with any movie.

**Tess:** Any movie, yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Tess:** And I think sometimes when people really hate a genre, I’m suspicious of them as a person.

**Craig:** Me too.

**Tess:** I’m like, “You hate romantic-comedies? Have you got no joy in your life that you — ” I mean I get a bit like —

**John:** That’s why I think you actually need to question them on what they’re defining as romantic-comedy because I think what they really mean to say, like I hate Katherine Heigl movies. It’s like, well, that’s fair, it’s fair to hate Katherine Heigl movies.

**Tess:** That’s fine, yes. I mean, I had an argument with someone recently about How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days. They hated it like with a passion. I was like, you know what, dude, it’s fine. I quite enjoy that film when I’m a certain kind of mood, but this kind of like association that it’s a chick flick, that I’m going to sit there in my track suit bottoms, well, I don’t know what you call them. Do you call them track suit bottoms?

**Craig:** Sweat pants.

**Tess:** And eat a massive bag of Maltesers. Do you have Maltesers?

**John:** I have no idea what you’re saying.

**Craig:** Here it would be sweat pants and a pint of ice cream

**Tess:** Yes. Like don’t get me wrong, I love Bridget Jones, she’s a fantastic creation and always has been, but like we’re not all just doing that. I might do that when I watch Con Air, and that doesn’t mean, you know, it’s what is making you feel a certain thing, and I don’t know.

**Craig:** Also, why are we apologizing for things that are true? Like there are moments in movies when men are depressed and they do male depressed things.

**Tess:** Yes, and they’re allowed to do that.

**Craig:** They’re allowed to do it. Nobody goes, “Oh my god — ”

**Tess:** Exactly. In Sideways, no one went, “Oh,” which is one of my all-time favorite films, no one said, you know, “Oh god, he was so unlikeable.” The whole point is that he’s brilliantly unlikeable, you know?

**Craig:** We just did a whole episode on how angry that gets me —

**Tess:** Did you?

**Craig:** Unlikeable. The worst note. I believe it’s the last episode that you didn’t listen to.

**Tess:** I would say it’s the worst note particularly when you’re talking about female stuff when they go, “She’s just not likeable enough as a woman.”

**Craig:** For all genders, even if we’re dealing with genderless aliens or androids, it’s the worst note.

**Tess:** Do you think they got that note in Marley and Me.

**John:** The dog’s not likeable enough?

**Tess:** The dog’s not likeable enough.

**John:** Can we see the dog smile a little bit more?

**Craig:** Yes, people are going to want it to die.

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. CG that smile in.

**Craig:** You know what that dog is?

**Tess:** What?

**Craig:** That dog’s a dick.

**Tess:** He’s a dick. [laughs]

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. Tess, we should have warned you about One Cool Things.

**Tess:** Oh shit.

**John:** So you could be the third to go. You could say something that’s cool about your time in Los Angeles, because you’ve been here for a couple of weeks. My One Cool Thing is a profile of Nick Bostrom who is a scientist and a philosopher. He writes a lot about AI and sort of doomsday scenarios. And so the profile I’m going to link to is in The New Yorker.

And the things he was talking about are really interesting, but I thought it actually more interesting as a character profile, so just sort of digging into sort of what it’s like to be that sort of scientist guy who’s warning you about doomsday. It’s the character who in movies would be played by — I’m trying to think who is —

**Tess:** Kevin Spacey?

**John:** Kevin Spacey, yes, somebody like that who would be like, you know, I told you this is going to happen, this is going to happen. But the actual character that they outlined here is actually really fascinating and I think worth looking at.

**Tess:** Liam Neeson may be more —

**John:** Liam Neeson might be — Jeff Goldblum would be —

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Goldblum is sort of the classic —

**Tess:** You didn’t stop to think whether you should.

**John:** Exactly, indeed, so be it Day After Tomorrow or Jurassic Park, he’s the guy who’s going to warn you about that. You’re playing god.

**Tess:** I’m with him. I’m with him.

**John:** What is so fascinating about this profile though is it goes into sort of this early decision to sort of like, you know, I am going to change my life completely. And sometimes we’ll see this in movies, but it’s so rare that you see this actually happening in real life where like you sort of have an epiphany and sort of like wrote like this is how my whole life is going to change and sort of did that.

And so a really interesting character profile, and also some good science in there as well.

**Tess:** Some good science.

**John:** Some good science. And if you like what they talk about in the fermi paradox stuff part of this, I’m also going to put a link in the show notes to this really great Wait But Why article on alien civilizations and what the fermi paradox is

**Tess:** Can you see my face? I’m just like what is he talking about?

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like you’re talking about crisps. I have no idea. And track suit bottoms?

**Craig:** Crisps. Crisps. I want Crisps. Look, you know what I think about all this. We’re living in a computer simulation.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** We’re not real either.

**Tess:** No.

**Craig:** End of discussion.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Did you say, “Thank you?”

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** Like I had put you at ease with that horrible proposition.

**Tess:** I felt suddenly like really relaxed.

**Craig:** That’s the opposite of what I wanted. You were supposed to start gazing up —

**Tess:** No, because I’m worst case scenario person. It’s the way I live my whole life in a state of panic, so when someone just says like, well, it’s over, it’s going to end, I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well fine. Good.”

**Craig:** Great, yeah. I get take a nap now.

**Tess:** Yes, that’s good, excellent.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, I would have done it last week, but I did the whole blood brain barrier business last week, so this week, my One Cool Thing, how could it not be Fallout 4?

**John:** You’re enjoying it, Craig?

**Craig:** A little too much.

**Tess:** Is this a game?

**Craig:** It is a game, well done, Tess Morris.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Fallout 4 — everyone else knows what it is, so I will just say this, the crazy thing about Fallout 4 is that it is exactly the same as Fallout 3. I mean, with like one tiny change that’s actually kind of semi-fun, it’s the same damn game, and I don’t care, I love it.

**Tess:** Is it shooting?

**Craig:** It is shooting, but it’s mostly, it’s quest-based, so people — yes, so you have missions and you go on and you find things, and sometimes you have to kill people, sometimes you have to talk to people.

**Tess:** Like the Fall Guy, then?

**Craig:** Like the what?

**Tess:** The Fall Guy, the show that was on in the ’80s?

**Craig:** Not at all like the Fall Guy. Literally not anything like the — so think of the Fall Guy —

**Tess:** There’s no Jacuzzi that you jump in at the end with some ladies?

**Craig:** No. It takes place in post-apocalyptic Boston.

**Tess:** It’s nothing like the Fall Guy.

**Craig:** It’s more like Mad Max than The Fall Guy.

**Craig:** Thank you. It’s more like Mad Max. But I don’t know, whatever it does to me and my brain, because I love following storylines, I can literally feel the dopamine squirting out of my brain while I’m playing it. When I’m done, I can feel the lack of — I know I’m taking drugs, I know it. I know I’m smoking crack when I play this game. And it’s disrupted my sleep this week, but it’s been great.

**Tess:** It’s been great. Like MacGyver?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Goddamn it.

**Tess:** Good storylines, though. My One Cool Thing, now I’ve had two minutes to think about it.

**Craig:** Is it either The Fall Guy or MacGyver?

**Tess:** It’s the A-Team.

**Craig:** It’s A-Team? I love that you watched all those.

**Tess:** Oh my god, of course. So my One Cool Thing, since I’ve been living here, I’m coming back because I love it so much, but I’ve had my little six weeks here, and I’ve been living in Los Feliz — you say Los Feliz?

**Craig:** You can say both, actually.

**Tess:** What would you say?

**John:** I say Los Feliz.

**Tess:** Los Feliz. Los Feliz.

**Craig:** You did it right.

**Tess:** Los Feliz!

**Craig:** Never that.

**Tess:** Never that? So I’ve been living there which I love because I can walk everywhere, because I’m British, I love to walk, so I’m like, brilliant. And I discovered the Vista Cinema since I’ve been here which I think is the coolest cinema I have ever been in. And it’s just at the bottom of Hillhurst and Sunset and I just — it’s like my dream cinema, I mean not only was True Romance, I think the opening sort of scene is filmed there, but it just has everything I need.

You do cinemas so well here when you have that kind of old-fashioned sort of like art deco-y kind of sort of thing. And I got quite drunk with a friend when we went to see Spectre, and we arrived so late, so we couldn’t sit together and we were like, oh, god, what’s going on?

And then they brought out some folding chairs for us.

**Craig:** Oh, how nice.

**Tess:** So we sat drunk at the back, and then realized it was two-and-a-half hours long. Let’s not even —

**Craig:** But you know you can walk out at the last half hour, and —

**Tess:** At one point, I did turn to my friend, I was like, should we go? And he said, I think we need to see it through, we just need to see it through. And I had sobered up by then, so it was fun, but anyway, I just love how there’s just one film on there, once a week, and it’s just got a beautiful atmosphere to it, and I just — if I could be in there every night, but the only thing is that they have only one film a week, that’s the only thing. So I can’t go every night, but I just love it.

**Craig:** You could go every Saturday night.

**Tess:** I was like a pig in shit when I was in there.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** What a great guest.

**John:** Tess Morris, thank you for joining us on the podcast this week.

**Tess:** Thank you. It’s on my bucket list now, I’ve done it. I’ve been on Scriptnotes.

**John:** So is it no longer on your bucket list?

**Tess:** I’ll just keep coming back. I’ll just keep annoying you.

**John:** The buckets confuse me.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** John can’t handle it.

**Tess:** His whole face just went, what, uh?

**John:** I’m so confused. My programming won’t allow for this.

**Tess:** I won’t allow for this.

**Craig:** Literally, you divided by zero, just froze. You can find us at johnaugust.com, for show notes, where we talk about a lot of things we have discussed on the show today.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. Tess, are you on Twitter?

**Tess:** I am @thetessmorris.

**John:** She’s @thetessmorris on the Twitter. If you have questions like some of the ones we answered on the show today, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. If you would like to listen to back episodes of this whole program that we’ve made, you can find us at scriptnotes.net, you can also find us through the app. There’s a Scriptnotes app on the applicable app stores.

While you’re in iTunes, you should subscribe to Scriptnotes because why not? It’s free. And you should leave us a comment which actually helps us a lot and helps other people find the show. So thank you for doing that.

You should come and join us on December 9th for our live show with our special guests. And if there’s still tickets, hooray. Well, or, I don’t know, but you should come to the live show on December 9th.

Last but not least, we have a few of the USB drives left of all the 200 back episodes of the show, so you can find those at the store at johnaugust.com, and we will send you one with all 200 of the first episodes of Scriptnotes.

Our outro this week is by John Spurney, and it is a really good one. So John Spurney, thank you very much. We’re not even going to talk over it because it’s so good. And Craig and Tess, thank you so much.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Buy your tickets now for the 2015 Scriptnotes Holiday Show on December 9th](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-with-john-august-and-craig-mazin) with guests [Riki Lindhome, Natasha Leggero](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period) and [Malcolm Spellman](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [Jon Bon Jovi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bon_Jovi) on Wikipedia
* [Amazon Storywriter](https://storywriter.amazon.com/) and [Fountain](http://fountain.io/)
* Scriptnotes, 224: [Whiplash, on paper and on screen](http://johnaugust.com/2015/whiplash-on-paper-and-on-screen)
* Tess Morris on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2208729/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/TheTessMorris), and [Man Up](http://www.manupfilm.co.uk/) on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Up_(film)) and [Rotten Tomatoes](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/man_up_2015/)
* [Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad?](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/why-are-romantic-comedies-so-bad/309236/) by Christopher Orr
* CinemaBlend’s [30 Best Romantic Comedies Of All-Time](http://www.cinemablend.com/new/30-Best-Romantic-Comedies-All-Time-43134.html)
* The New Yorker on [Nick Bostrom](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom)
* Wait But Why on [The Fermi Paradox](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)
* [Fallout 4](https://www.fallout4.com/age-gate), and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016E70408/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [The Vista Theatre](http://www.vintagecinemas.com/vista/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/one-handed-movie-heroes).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 210 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program, we will be talking about one-handed movie heroes, the last things you should do before handing in a script, and we will look at three new Three Page Challenges. A big show.

**Craig:** I would say so. I mean, maybe too big.

**John:** Maybe too big. We’ll try to compress it into the space allotted by the infinite boundaries of the Internet.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** See, you don’t listen to any other podcasts but some podcasts have been known to go on for like three hours.

**Craig:** Well, that’s crazy. That’s just dumb.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who wants that?

**John:** Although, I will say that when we were first talking about doing this podcast, there were other screenwriter friends who said like, “Yeah, you know what, maybe like limit it to 20 minutes.” I can’t even imagine this as a 20-minute podcast.

**Craig:** I can’t imagine any podcast. [laughs] That’s the God’s honest truth. People say, “Hey, I listen to your show,” and I think, “That’s awesome.” But then quietly to myself I think, “Why do you listen to podcasts?”

**John:** Yeah, because they’re wonderful.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Podcasts are delightful. Craig, what do you do on planes when you’re on like a long plane trip?

**Craig:** I do the crossword puzzle. I usually have some sort of iPad game that I play. I’ll read a book and then I try and do a little writing.

**John:** When you are in your car, when you’re in your Tesla driving from your house way out in La Cañada to, say, Sony, what do you listen to in the car?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, I don’t go to Sony. Too far.

**John:** That’s true. [laughs]

**Craig:** But I generally listen to music, oftentimes Broadway.

**John:** I can imagine that. On Sirius do you listen to Broadway?

**Craig:** I love Seth Rudetsky on Sirius/XM. In fact, Seth Rudetsky, it’ll be too late when this show comes out, but he will have been in town and I’m going to go see him at Largo.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** He’s my favorite.

**John:** Oh, he’s wonderful. All right, let’s get to our topics for today. So this was a thing that occurred to me just this morning. And it was based on a conversation I’d had last week or the week before with a person I’m going to call the Polish director, who’s not in fact a Polish director, but I said that I would refer to this person as the Polish director.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So I was having a conversation with the Polish director and she asked about this character and sort of what this character was trying to do at this moment, what his goals were, and what the character thought about the situation. And I responded from the character’s perspective saying like, “Well, on one hand, he’s thinking this but on the other hand, he’s also aware of this situation.”

And as I was saying that, I started to make a realization about a crucial thing that is different about movie characters and actual real life people in that me as a real life person, I can have complicated, complex views that embody different opinions simultaneously. A movie hero doesn’t.

And I recognized I was sort of wrong in trying to describe on one hand and on the other hand for this hero because there wasn’t going to be space for this hero to have these interesting, conflicting views or to express them. That in a movie, a hero kind of needs to be able to have one thing.

And if I wanted to make a movie that had these complicated views, I probably needed to split those views among two characters that could actually have a dialogue rather than try to have them embodied in one character.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think that you’re arguing that a character can’t have some sort of internal conflict over something.

**John:** Oh, no, not a bit.

**Craig:** [laughs] We’re not really interested in these hyper rational characters who can rationally see both sides of an issue and then try and find some sort of reasonable middle ground consensus. [laughs] We like that in, say, our local city planner but not so much in a movie hero. You’re absolutely right.

Part of it has to do with what actors do best. And what actors do best is portray a singular intention. Now, that singular intention may be one that causes them anguish.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sophie’s Choice, she has to make a choice. It’s an anguished choice. Her intention ultimately is to save a child. It’s just that it hurts, you know.

**John:** I would say most movies involve characters making a choice and decisions. Sometimes both decisions have a cost associated with them. They’re working through those costs but that’s a different thing than having sort of this morally complex way of approaching a situation or scenario.

Like a lot of times, if you’re wrestling with something, you need to wrestle with somebody. And in movies, you generally don’t see one character wrestling with him or herself for a long period of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. The movie can be ambiguous.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So the movie can refuse to take a position on something. But the way it refuses to take a position on something is by presenting different characters who have a position, who make their cases well.

**John:** So I would say that this is a thing that is true about movies but it’s not necessarily true about other art forms or other literary art forms. So there are plays in which characters have complicated simultaneously divergent opinions. I was thinking about John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in that, our lead character, she’s grappling with the issues of to what degree does she pursue or hold back from this allegation of childhood sexual abuse. And the play is ambiguous but her reaction to it is similarly ambiguous in a way that is not commonly found in movies.

And of course, books have all the time in the world. Books have the ability to have introspection. So you can go into a character’s head and really explore these complicated feelings that the characters could honestly have. That’s very challenging to do in a movie.

**Craig:** It is. And Doubt is a terrific example because in a way, what that play is about is the difficulty of being the two-handed thinker. Everyone in that play, and there’s not many characters — you have a priest who is accused of something and has perhaps been accused of in the past as well. You have a young boy. You have the boy’s mother. And then you have this nun.

And the boy, the priest, and the mother are presenting points of view that inspire doubt. And the nun has none of it. Oh, and I’m sorry, she has her — there’s a younger nun.

**John:** There’s the assistant, yeah.

**Craig:** Right. Everyone is kind of saying this is morally weird territory we’re in. And we’re afraid that we’re going to make the wrong choice because it’s difficult. And she doesn’t see it that way. She is clear, clear, clear, clear, clear until the very, very end when she breaks down and says, “I have doubt.”

And for a nun to say I have doubt, I mean, obviously it’s profoundly about faith itself. But it shows that the notion that a movie character can’t have a clean point of view on a topic is so disruptive to them that it’s a breakdown. It’s not something that you’d want to watch a character just carrying around for a whole movie because they would be a ditherer.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we don’t want people dithering. We want them doing, and then perhaps being confronted with the cost of not dithering.

**John:** Yeah. In looking at other media and sort of how they’re able to deal with these things, musicals have, again, introspection. So you look at Into the Woods and the Cinderella character, she’s on the steps of the palace and her song on the steps of the palace, she’s wrestling with this like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. On some levels I’m attracted, on some levels I’m repulsed.”

These are true human emotions that are very challenging to get out of a character without a song that lets us get inside her head. And she can be simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by this possibility, scared of herself, scared of her feelings. These are really difficult things for a movie hero without songs to communicate.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m experiencing the gift of this right now because I’ve started breaking a story for this movie musical and I have to retrain the way I think because normally a huge part of the job is externalizing what is internal. And here, that would be a failure. If you have something internal, that’s an opportunity. And you get to reveal it. And that’s exciting.

So it’s just a retraining process, you know. You have to think in a way that you don’t normally think for movies because you want to be inside someone’s head. And when you’re in their head, you want them to be conflicted and you want them to be two hands or three or five because that’s what makes the song interesting.

**John:** Exactly. So contrast this with, you know, an Aaron Sorkin movie. Classically, you will see these different points of view but they’re embodied by different characters who hold on to their one point of view incredibly strongly and articulate their single point of view with great authority and with tremendous conviction.

So you see very few characters in Sorkin’s screenplays where like, “I don’t know how I feel about this.” It’s like, no, that’s not a Sorkin screenplay. It’s a very different perspective on how they’re approaching the reality of their world.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think you’re right that Sorkin does it in a very demonstrable way. But in practically every movie, what you’re looking at is somebody who thinks a certain thing. They may be resisting. And oftentimes, they are resisting a truth. And so what they are articulating is the opposite of what the bravest version of themselves would do.

So for instance, in A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise has a certain core of bravery that says stand up for justice at any cost. And he’s running from that as fast as he can. His whole life he’s been running from that as fast as he can. And at long last, in the way the story unfolds, he finally decides to run at it.

But if you think about it, all he’s done is switch the needle on the compass. He was always hurdling steadily in a direction.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that is very typical for practically every movie character.

**John:** I’d agree. Because you’re with these characters for a short period of time, you don’t have the opportunity to look inside their heads or to see them grow and change over a long period of time, over seasons of a show, and become a different thing. They have to sort of be the thing, to some degree, that they’re going to be at the end of the story that has to be embodied in them at the start of that.

You have to have a way to go from what I saw there to where the story is going to take me. You’re on a very short journey with them. And so a character who is wrestling internally with these things that can’t be externalized, who’s trying to hold two competing ideas simultaneously, you’re going to have a very difficult time exposing what’s going on inside their head for these things.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But this internal wrestling is a thing that a real person like me deals with all the time. And so I was looking through what are some issues which I have complicated, overlapping, contrasting beliefs about things.

So if you look at, you know, pretty much any political topic. So from GMOs to abortion to the balance between religious liberty and civil process, there are shades of gray in there. I’m not an absolutist about any of these things. And you kind of don’t want your politicians to be so absolutist about these things because they have to be able to deal with the subtle realities of what those things are.

**Craig:** Well, unfortunately, this is where movies have hurt culture. And I guess to let movies off the hook a little bit, our natural human obsession with narrative has hurt culture, because we can’t handle it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We want the certainty that a good story gives us. This is right and this is wrong. These are good people, these are the bad people. And in movies, you don’t end with a, “Gee, I wonder. You know, everybody’s got an interesting point and there is no clear path to action.” You know, that’s a bad narrative.

In politics, they have cannily seized the tool of narrative to advance their own agenda. And they do. They do regularly everything. Everything from politicians on both sides of the aisle is pushed through a narrative filter. And it is destroying our government’s ability to behave like intelligent, rational adults in a world that does not conform to the rules of narrative. The whole point of narrative is to give us relief from a world that doesn’t conform to narrative.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And so you look at a candidate like Donald Trump who is in some ways the manifestation of a movie hero who has absolute certainty that everything he’s saying is exactly the truth and that this is the way that the world is constructed. And so he will say exactly what he’s thinking at that moment. And you can definitely see why it’s attractive to people but why it’s also a challenging thing to envision in an elected political official.

**Craig:** And he’s not even running for President, he’s just running because he’s telling a story. He just likes being on TV. I assume that we all know, right? Don’t we all know what’s going on? [laughs] Don’t we get it? I mean, who doesn’t get the joke?

**John:** Yeah, but I think we’re, to some degrees, horrified and fascinated that we’re living in the reality in which like, “Oh, but yeah, but really? No, really?” And so it feels like we’re living inside this Onion story and we’re like, “Oh, but we’re going to realize it’s a joke at some point.”

**Craig:** But we can’t possibly proclaim our innocence here or our surprise. When we live in a culture where there are TV shows in which actual human beings compete to marry a stranger and a world in which Donald Trump himself gathers celebrities together and has them fight over nonsense and fires them one by one, that is the narrativization of reality. And so we escape from reality through narrative.

And now, we like narrative so much we want to change reality to conform to narrative. Well, reality will not change. Reality will always be anti-narrative. Like I remember when we went through the strike in 2007 and the years leading up to it, in 2005 and ’06, Ted Elliott and I would talk about this thing we called screenwriter bleedthrough where writers in particular were susceptible to thinking about reality in narrative terms.

And in narrative terms, the Writers Guild wins. We’re the underdogs, you know. I mean, the bosses don’t — they shouldn’t win that fight, right? We come from behind, we win the day, we claim a victory. But the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn about narrative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At all. And just believing that you should win and being the underdog doesn’t mean a damn thing.

**John:** So I don’t have a solution here. I just wanted to sort of share my observation that in some cases, a thing I was trying to do to make this character feel real to me was not in the best service of this movie. And yet, the greater macro point is I think the frustration that because it is so challenging to have heroic characters who have to deal with subtle complexities and sort of the give and take of reality, I think we can sometimes negatively steer our popular culture in a way that believes that like any sort of ambiguity, any sort of compromise is a failure.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no question. I mean, between the rise of television and then the kind of pervasive nature of narrative in our culture and then reality television which further confuses these things, it gets harder and harder to put up with the bad storytelling of the world. And so we try and deny it.

But the truth is that bad storytelling is irrelevant to good outcomes in the world. Well, that’s my soap box for the day.

**John:** [laughs] What a depressing start to the podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s go on to something that’s we’re on much firmer ground. And so this is a topic I’m going to call last looks.

So when you are making a movie or a TV show, you’ll hear a call from the first ADs saying, “Last looks,” which means we are just about to start filming this shot, this scene. If anyone has any last things they need to do, do it quickly because we’re about to start rolling. And so this is when the hair and makeup people race in and do one last little touchup on the actor. This is when the final tweaks are done on the lights and everyone starts to clear the sets.

So I want to talk about last looks for the screenwriter which are, what are those last things you do on a script before you send it out to someone else to read.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s such a great topic because if you’re doing it right, you should be panicked while you’re doing it that you’re going to forget something. I mean, for me, it starts by printing the script out on paper because your last looks at the paper will be far more accurate then they will as you’re scrolling blithely by on the screen.

**John:** Yeah. So the things I’m taking a look for when I’m about to turn in something is I’m looking at like, if there is a header, like a header because there are colored pages or there’s other changes, is the header correct. Do I have the right date in there? Do I have the right draft in there? Because that’s one of those easy things to sort of overlook as you’re doing the work. It’s like, “Oh, I never changed the date on that thing.”

Also, I’m checking the date on the title page, making sure all the stuff on the title page is actually accurately reflecting what’s going on there because especially if you’re working in Final Draft, the title page is a whole separate document, essentially, so you’re not really looking at that. And it’s very easy to create the PDF and send it through without having looked at like, “Oh, crap, I never changed the date on the title page.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ve made that mistake.

**Craig:** Certainly if you’re in production, the amount of things that you have to keep your eye on expands quite a bit. So you want to make sure that your pages make sense, that you haven’t somehow managed to put some blank C page in there that you don’t need. You want to make sure that your revision level is correct, that you didn’t accidentally continue to make revisions in the old revision which is a disaster. So there’s also the first looks, you know, making sure you do that stuff right, making sure you didn’t mess up your scene numbers, check it against another draft. And then check that title page really carefully.

And I wish I could say that I rarely catch mistakes, I catch mistakes all the time.

**John:** All the time.

**Craig:** And I have to say that I feel like I’m one of the few writers that really cares about this stuff because I will see messes all the time. And, you know, nothing is more bothersome to a production. And what they’ll do is they’ll just take the script away from you, essentially. And they’ll be in charge of the script.

And I hate that. I want to be in charge of the script because it’s my script. But there’s a responsibility that goes with that to understand how it works. You’ve got to learn how it works if you’re in production.

**John:** So on the 200th episode, if you’re curious about that, we did talk through a lot about the fears and challenges of production and color pages and sort of the nightmare scenarios of like, “Oh, no, I started typing with revisions on or off and things got screwy.” So let’s talk about sort of like any normal draft you’re sending through to the studios like just a development pass.

One of the things I’ve noticed sometimes is it will switch to the wrong Courier at a certain point. So I use Courier Prime for everything. But if I’m copying and pasting from something else, every once in a while, old Courier will show up there. And sometimes kind of hard to see when you’re going back and forth. But it’s enough different that I don’t like for that to happen.

So a quick thing I like to do, if I’ve not used any other fonts throughout the whole document, there’s no reason why I had any special character in there, any sort of weird things, I will do a select all and choose Courier Prime again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just to make sure that it all got through with the right typeface. Classically, what I used to do and I do a little bit less now but especially if I’m really mindful of the page count and that I’m worried that someone is going to perceive this as being too long, if there’s going to be an issue, I will go through and do like one last check for widows and orphans.

So, widows are classically those little bits of text — they’re basically the first line on a new page. If it’s just a word or a few words, that’s a widow. And you can often find ways to pull that to the previous page.

An orphan is the last little bit of text below a text block. So let’s say you have some dialogue and there’s one line that just has one word on it. You can often find ways without rewriting just by nudging a margin, doing something to pull that one word up.

And it seems like, well, you’re only saving one line. But because these documents are so long, saving one or two or three lines early on in the script can suddenly pull a whole page out of your script.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a ripple effect. Mostly, I do this because I want certain things to end in a certain way on the page. So if there’s a line that I — I don’t want to break up, you know, a big reveal, like there’s a set up moment, a thing and then — so someone says, “Wait a second. I know who stole it.” And someone says, “Who?” And then I turn the page and the first person says, “You.”

Oh, well, I want that [laughs] — I’m interrupting a rhythm, a moment, you know. So I’m mostly concerned about that stuff. I mean, yeah, I don’t like the orphan thing either with one little word sticking at the end. I’ll just fix that as a matter, of course. And I do get kind of obsessive about — and I also have a thing like I really, as much as I can, I try to not break up dialogue speeches across a page break.

**John:** Yeah. So the software we’re using will look for ways to fit as much as possible onto a page. And that’s good. And most of the times, it does a pretty smart job with it. If you have a scene description that’s a couple of lines long, if it has to break the scene description, it will break it at the period. It will break it at the sentence rather than like put a half a sentence on one page and half a sentence on the next page. That’s a good thing.

It’ll do the same stuff with dialogue. But if you can avoid that break, all the better because you’ve kept those lines together for a reason. And if you can keep them together, you know, rather than having them break across a page break, all the better.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to ruin your script but it’s really just about, “Hey, I’d like you to read this the way I intended it to be read.”

**John:** Craig, do you do spell check anymore? I find I basically have stopped using spell check.

**Craig:** I do as a very one final, final thing. Generally speaking, I know how to spell and I’m a good typer and I’m reading my stuff over a lot, so I’ll catch almost every little dinky thing. But every now and then, it’ll find something. So I do it at the very, very end.

**John:** Yeah. And one last thing I do, and I’ve talked about this on previous shows, I went from two spaces after the period to a single space after the period. And so if there’s any question in my head that I may have accidentally put two spaces after periods, I’ll do a global find and replace. I’ll search for period space, space and I’ll change that to period space. And that compresses those all down to single spaces if there are any of those out there.

**Craig:** Welcome to the right way of doing things.

**John:** Yes. So I converted, you know, eight years ago but every once in a while, something will still get off or for whatever reason an extra space gets in there and just it’s better that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So those are some last looks and maybe we’ll notice some of these issues as we look through the Three Pages that people have sent in.

So if you’re new to the podcast, every once in a while, we will do a Three Page Challenge. And what we do is we invite people to send in their pages, the first three pages of their script, their pilot, whatever. And Stuart looks through all of them and picks a couple of them for us to look at on the air.

So if you’re interested in sending through your pages, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage and there are instructions about how you do that and how you attach your files. If you would like to read through these samples with us, you can go to the show notes at johnaugust.com and there are links to the PDFs so you can read along with us and see what we are talking about when we talk about these pages and samples.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Stuart picked these and we don’t influence his decisions at all ahead of time. We don’t tell him what we’re looking for. He just picks three. So I’ll start with The Hitchcock Murders by Andy Maycock. So let me give you a quick summary of what’s happening here.

So we open on “Black: The RATTLE and PUNCH of a manual typewriter”. There’s a narrator who speaks who says, “The first thing you oughta know, it’s all fiction.” We’re in the Hollywood Hills, it’s dusk, it’s 1953. The narrator keeps talking about the Hollywood Dream as we meet David Morgan, a young studio executive who drops a cigarette to the ground. There’s a movie camera whirring away on a tripod in the dying bushes. There’s a single gunshot, birds fly away, and Morgan’s body lands in the scrub, blood pooling under his head.

The camera catches and pings, out of film, still aimed at the body, a thin layer of smoke. The narration finishes. We smash cut to the inside of a movie theater, same time period. The crowd is watching Kiss Me, Kate. It’s a 3D movie. The characters we’re meeting here are Lyle Tabbins who is a would-be heartthrob and his date, Veronica, with starlet-raven hair and short dressy Audrey Hepburn gloves. She likes the movie, he’s not so much a fan.

Leaving the theater, Tabbins says he has someplace to be, he’s not going to be able to go on with their date. But he says, “No, no, there’s no other woman for me. Takes all my effort just to be no good to you.” She leaves off. This is Christmas Eve 1953, the title tells us. Tabbins goes back into the movie theater lobby, talks to Rosalind, the cigarette girl. And he says to her, “You’re awfully quiet.” “The Creep’s still calling me.” “Wife probably kicked him out.” And we leave with their dialogue, their conversation at the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** All right. So, Andy, good job. There’s a lot to like here. And overall, I think the good news is when I read this, I felt like I was reading a real movie script. It didn’t seem like an amateur movie script. Things, the pages look right, there’s a good balance of action and dialogue. And character, character, character. So I’m getting a lot from your characters.

And also, interesting, in these three pages, a lot happens, which I like. It means that you’ve written tightly. So let’s just quickly go through some of the things that were good and maybe some things that you need to think about.

We hear, it begins with the sound of a typewriter and then a Zippo opening and flaring and closing, which is very “Ooh, ahh”. And then a narrator speaks and right here, we’re getting a little sense of, you know, that you, Andy, like you’re trying to kind of give us that noir feeling through your action, which I think is okay because the script is clearly stylized to be noir, so it’s okay to say, “His voice long marinated in bourbon and Pall Malls.” Pall Malls, a particularly appropriate cigarette for that.

Now, the narrator begins talking here. And he says, “First thing you oughta know, it’s all fiction.” Okay, that’s provocative. We then go to the Hollywood Hills and he continues talking about the Hollywood Dream. And it’s good voiceover. Then this man appears, he is a young studio executive, he drops a cigarette to the ground. I like, “But not for long.” Good. You’re confident. You don’t care that I know that he’s going to die. It doesn’t matter.

And then he says, the character, this guy, David Morgan says, “Guess I believe it now,” to no one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But there is a camera whirring away which, theoretically, he’s put there to film his own death. Then the narrator continues talking to you and the audience about the difference between the East Coast and the West Coast, referencing gun powder. And then Morgan kills himself in a kind of a nice romantic way in terms of the description, you know. “His fingers spread wide, empty and pleading.”

So, look, the good news is you know how to write, you understand words. I don’t understand what this voiceover is actually doing for you here.

**John:** Yeah. I got really confused here. I got confused to the degree to which Morgan is responding to the voiceover. Is Morgan hearing the voiceover? I got really lost in this first section. I’m about to get lost again.

So I thought it was all provocative. I thought it created a good world. And yet, I didn’t know what I was supposed to know at this point.

**Craig:** I mean, what I took it as is that the narrator is talking generically to us and the audience about whether or not you should believe success stories. Morgan says something to himself that kind of thematically echoes what the voiceover is saying. And then the voiceover continues.

That’s not a good idea because it’s going to create that confusion. My bigger issue is while I liked what the narrator was saying, I know for sure that this scene would work really well if nobody had any narration whatsoever. And that instead of the kind of super stylized opening, we began with this valley, we had this guy setting up a camera and starting it filming and then walking out there and then saying, “Guess I believe it now,” which we would be like, “What? Who are you talking to?” And then he killed himself, “Whoa.”

Okay, that would work better to me than this version with the voiceover.

**John:** Yeah. I think there was aspects of just too many things happening simultaneously. So we’re having to deal with like, okay, there’s a camera running, what is the camera supposed to be filming, was the camera already going, do I need to be worried about there’s somebody else in the scene, you had this voiceover. It seems like he’s talking back to the voiceover. It just felt like there’s too much being thrown at me all at once.

And I agree with you, I don’t even think you necessarily need Morgan’s line of dialogue, too. I think if that’s just a silent scene where like this guy sort of takes one last look, camera is running and then he kills himself, that’s provocative.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the other option is get rid of that Morgan line. So you kind of can have one or the other but not both, I think, because it doesn’t work. Then we go to a movie theater and now we’re kind of that iconic shot of an audience, a 1950s audience and their 3D glasses. I like the description of Lyle Tabbins, “A square-jawed would-be heartthrob in a shirt and tie.”

I actually learn a lot just from that. And I think “would-be heartthrob”, it’s sort of like, I don’t know, I got something from that description. He seems a bit grumpy. And then it’s after the movie, he’s with his date, Veronica. And he essentially puts her in a car. She has this sort of vampy, noirish way of talking. “Well, don’t leave me home all alone on Christmas. I don’t know what I’ll do, nothing to unwrap.” You know, okay, I like that, you know. It feels right.

And then he kind of sends her on her way. It says, “SUPER: Christmas Eve, 1953.” Well, she just said, “Don’t leave me home all alone on Christmas,” and the slug line said 1953 earlier, so I don’t know, just maybe not repeat that. Also, we should know that it’s period. I don’t know if 1953 the specific year is important, let me know. But the movie is going to be telling me this is in the ’50s. I don’t know if we need that super.

He goes back into the theater and does in fact, it seems like there is another girl here, Rosalind. And they have an interesting past. It seems like they have this relationship, I can’t quite tell if they’re lovers or not, but she’s obviously been dating a married man who has beaten her in the past. And Tabbins, apparently, had gotten revenge on her behalf by punching him in the face.

All decent noir stuff. And I kind of liked the way it was going back and forth. I picked up what was going on, at least I think I did. So it was enjoyable. I mean, I don’t know how much of this movie I could take but that has nothing to do with Andy. That’s just my taste. You know, like neo noirs are tough.

**John:** So I got really lost in the cut from the guy’s death to the movie theater because I think because I saw a camera running, I assumed that what they were watching was somehow related to the thing I had just seen. And the smash cut to I think partly influenced my confusion there. But I had to go through it like three times to make sure like, wait, no, so they weren’t watching the scene that was there.

If the very first image I’d gotten was a Kiss Me, Kate image that makes it very clear that it’s not this moment I just saw, that would have helped me here. So right now in the scene description, “The crowd, in their red-and-blue 3D glasses, squeals as Ann Miller tosses her red glove in their direction during her production number in Kiss Me, Kate.”

If I had started on Ann Miller tosses a glove, then I would know like, okay, I’m not watching that same movie. I’m not watching the scene that just happened. And what I saw before wasn’t a scene in a movie. And I immediately kind of went there I think partly because I had been thrown off with like there’s a narrator but people seem to be able to talk to the narrator. I didn’t quite know what the rules of this movie were.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So that’s what was tripping me up. So literally, if the first image was not the movie theater audience but was what we were seeing on screen, I would have known what was happening here a little bit faster.

I thought these are great names for these characters.

**Craig:** Yeah, I like them.

**John:** So Veronica, Lyle Tabbins, we get to Rosalind. It’s like they’re all very specific period names that make me feel like, okay, we’re in this space.

And the other, again, specificity, we say this every time, but her camelhair coat, a tray of smokes, a pinup figure, blonde hair cascading over one eye, these are all details that make me feel like, “Oh, I know what this movie is supposed to look like and feel like.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And so, again, I’m not a huge neo noir person. That’s not sort of my genre but I feel what this movie is wanting to be. And that’s a very good thing to be at three pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, this might just be noir, you know. Like I don’t even know if it’s neo noir. But I agree. I thought that, look, the big headline for me is that Andy can write and he seems to understand how to tell a story visually.

Like everyone, and especially with noir which is notoriously subtextual and detail-oriented, hard to follow — I remember when I saw The Maltese Falcon, I was like 15 and I was like, “All right, let me watch that again now because I don’t know what the hell just happened. [laughs] Like, why is that a fake and what happened?”

But it is remarkable to me how often when you and I discuss these three pages, so many of our problems come down to clarity. And that’s a big wrestling match for the writer because they don’t want to be on the nose. But then they don’t want to be confusing. It’s a tough one. So, you know, adjusting that balance is the name of the game. But overall, very promising.

**John:** Two episodes ago, we had Alice on and she was the person who worked doing audio descriptions for the blind. And we were talking about that ambiguity. And I was thinking about that as I was looking through that scene in the script where he’s looking over the valley and there’s the narrator and he has the gun. And that came up as like, “Well, what would she actually say? And would she actually know what she’s supposed to be interpreting at that moment about whether he’s answering back or not answering back,” you know, in some ways thinking about like, how she would describe it might be a useful way of figuring out like, “Am I being clear enough here about what my intention is?”

**Craig:** Right. I’m with you 100% on that.

**John:** Cool. Our next one. Do you want to read this one?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I’ll do Time Heist. I’m debating whether I should do a prologue or an epilogue on this. I’m going to go prologue.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So Time Heist, as you might imagine, is about people traveling in time and stealing things. I’m guessing and you’ll see and I’m right. I just got pitched this idea. [laughs] So I just got pitched this idea about somebody — so I just want to say, Brian, I swear to God, I’m not stealing your idea. I don’t know if I’m going to do it. I probably won’t. But just in case, you should know, the idea of time heisting is I mean of course, time bandits already established that that idea is an idea. But I just wanted you to be aware that someone had spoken to me about it. Okay.

**John:** So here’s what he can take a good sign is that people who are actually making movies think that that is a world of movie that should be made.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so good job.

**Craig:** Good job. Okay, so let’s summarize. We are in the German countryside, 1945, night. And a armored Nazi cargo truck is heading down the road. Half asleep Nazi soldier at the wheel. His superior is napping away in the passenger seat.

Behind the Nazi cargo truck, a military jeep appears but its headlights are not on. And at the wheel of that jeep is Kristof Wexler, 30, also in a Nazi uniform. And he speeds up closing the gap between the two trucks.

Underneath the truck, we see a flicker of light and then we reveal that that is Blake Gardner, 30s, charming and confident. Holding a small propane torch. He’s under the truck like on a dolly, strapped to the undercarriage of the truck.

And although he is dressed in 1940s fatigues, he’s wearing this futuristic time piece on his wrist. So he begins cutting into the bottom of the truck with his torch. Then Blake begins talking to somebody in his earpiece and we reveal that he’s talking to Dr. Nicholas Halligan, 30 — everyone is exactly 30. Tweed coat and glasses. And Dr. Halligan is in a parked Volkswagen Beetle on the side of the road. He’s studying charts and documents and he’s warning them, 90 seconds until impact.

Unfortunately, Blake drops his torch because the truck hits a pothole. Halligan hears about this and says, “You have to abort.” But Blake has a better idea. Even though there’s only 45 seconds left, he starts moving down the undercarriage of the Nazi cargo truck towards the front. And then before we find out what he does, another truck is heading barreling toward them from the other direction. Those are the first three pages of Time Heist.

**John:** Time Heist. You get what is supposed to be happening here. I was able to follow the general flow of the action. So there’s a guy underneath the truck. He’s trying to get into the truck. Something goes wrong. He’s going to have to change his plans, but he’s going to stick with it and go through it. This is a movie hero doing movie hero kind of things.

I had a weird thing. I am curious whether this happened for you too. We’re on dirt road. It’s established that we’re on a dirt road. And then the minute we got to the dolly underneath the truck. I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t work.” The dolly under the truck feels like such a modern slick paved road kind of thing. I was having a hard time visualizing like, “Wait, how was this all going to necessarily work?”

The reveal that this people are — you know, he’s a time traveler because he has this sort of glowing watch. Well, okay. But it felt like a lot to suppose the audience is going to be with you about what that information means when they see this glowing watch on him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It felt like it’s supposing things of the audience that I didn’t necessarily know you could count on happening properly.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, the fact is it’s announcing the concept in a time when I’m not sure you want to the audience to know what the concept is. I mean, let’s just start with this. Since somebody mentioned this movie idea [laughs] to me, I mean this is not how I would do it. To me, if you’re going to do a time heist movie, you start with a heist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In a time period. And they are — so three guys are stealing something out of the back of some Nazi truck. And we don’t know — time doesn’t have anything to do with it whatsoever but —

**John:** Because nothing involving time travel is important at the time that this is revealed.

**Craig:** That’s right. And they should get caught. In fact, they should almost — when they get caught, they should be totally unconcerned with being caught because once they’re locked up in the paddy wagon, they know the timer is going to go off and they’re just going to go sucked back through time again. I mean, one way or another, you’ve got to introduce the concept to the audience like it’s its own character.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can’t just plop it on them and go, “Well, they’re going to know it’s about time because it’s called Time Heist, so let’s just start with, you know, them going through time and heisting.” No. I mean you need to build, you know, build to your concept.

**John:** So let’s take this exact same action sequence and look at ways so we can implement this idea. So this guy is trying to break into a truck. That’s great. You don’t need to be a time traveler to do that. So he’s going to do this, something goes wrong, he has a propane torch. Even though he’s a time traveler, he still apparently has sort of like old fashioned kind of tools. He doesn’t have like a laser cutter.

So he has his propane torch. He’s trying to get in there. We don’t know anything about time travel so far. This goes wrong. We could still say like you got 90 seconds, like, no I can do it. We believe there’s 90 seconds because maybe there’s — they know that there’s an intervention coming or they had the road block or something. He gets up in. Again, we saw the movie is called Time Heist. So it’s not going to be a surprise that our hero ultimately becomes revealed as a time traveler.

The potential for surprise is that the driver of this other car or van is also a time traveler, that there’s something else going on that’s an actual level of surprise. So I think there are moments you can get to it. I kind of push back that the first reveal that our hero is a time traveler, that the villains are time travelers until it’s a really interesting, crucial, make or break moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, you have to think about how to delight people, tease them and surprise them. And you just can’t dump stuff in their lap like that, you know. The description of the action — I was able to follow it pretty well. Got a little lost around exterior side of the road, continuous to parked Volkswagen Beetle. And then interior VW Beetle. Because you’re not separate — you know, I like to separate my slug lines with an extra line break above it. And I also like to bold them.

But you don’t. That’s fine. Except when you have a parked Volkswagen Beetle on all caps, now I got this like three lines in a row of a lot of all caps and then, I’m sorry, four because of Dr. Nicholas Halligan. That’s a block of four all caps. And I got a little skimmy on that, which I think is a natural thing.

I’m a little concerned that the stunt that’s going on with the truck is exactly out of Raiders of the Lost Ark in which your hero is trapped underneath a Nazi truck and is moving towards the front of it by going under the undercarriage. So I don’t love that.

**John:** I just feel like that overall climbing under truck has become the new air duct. And we just see it so often and, you know, we saw it in the most recent Mad Max as well. I just don’t know that’s going to be our best friend for action sequences for a while.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And let’s put it this way. It’s never going to be your best friend in a spec script. You know, if a director — if you guys are making a movie and a director says, “Oh my god, I have this amazing way of doing the old under the truck trick,” sure. But, you know, that’s not the case here.

I’m going to call out just an odd — so look, not everyone can be 30. I think 30s is fine. But it’s like a weird thing that everyone is exactly 30. Dr. Nicholas Halligan has an odd way of talking.

**John:** He does.

**Craig:** “What is the matter?” And then he says, “That settles it. We must abort.” ‘We must abort’ and ‘What is the matter?’ are a little robotic.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe he’s a robot.

**Craig:** Oh, maybe he’s a robot.

**John:** That would be fun.

**Craig:** That would actually be awesome. I don’t think he is, though.

**John:** No. It would not be so good if he were. Craig, did you watch the show Voyagers! growing up?

**Craig:** I did watch Voyagers!

**John:** I love that show.

**Craig:** With Jon-Erik Hexum.

**John:** They had a little time piece. Got to get back in time.

**Craig:** In fact, hold on a second, I’m going to try and pull the name of the kid. It’s Jon-Erick Hexum — and I feel like the kid’s last name was like Peluce or something.

**John:** Yeah, it was some Italian name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like Lorenzo or something.

**Craig:** I think it was — I don’t know, Peluce, that doesn’t sound right — but maybe it is. Yeah, no, I love that show. And that’s just the whole genre. There’s that. There was Sliders. There was —

**John:** Quantum Leap.

**Craig:** Quantum Leap. Exactly. I mean so this is all very familiar territory. All the more reason to really think like a magician.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, magicians understand how to misdirect and they understand the value of surprise. And you just want to do that as much as possible particularly in a movie where you have the benefit of this huge high concept.

**John:** Yeah. Meeno Peluce was the character.

**Craig:** My God, I was pretty — Peluce. Yeah, okay.

**John:** Nicely done. Meeno is a great name also.

**Craig:** Meeno, I know. And poor Jon-Erik Hexum.

**John:** Jon-Erik Hexum, so sexy, so dead.

**Craig:** So dead. Do you know what his last words were? This isn’t even a joke. His last words were, “I wonder if this will hurt.” Because you know how he died, right?

**John:** Yeah, he was firing what he thought was a blank and —

**Craig:** It was a blank.

**John:** Oh, it was a blank.

**Craig:** It was a blank.

**John:** You can’t fire a blank into your temple because it will actually shatter your bone and —

**Craig:** Yeah, because there’s a concussive force that comes out of it that basically is like being punched really, really, really — it’s like basically being hit in the head with a hammer at full force. So yeah, you’re going to die. I mean — and so, “I wonder if this will hurt.” It did hurt.

**John:** It did. It was terrible.

**Craig:** Bummer. Poor Jon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Erik.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Hexum. So we have one more to go. You want to read this one?

**John:** I’ll do this one. So this last one comes from Len Anderson IV. It’s titled One White Flint North. The tile page includes address, phone number. But not his actual address and phone number. So that might be a thing —

**Craig:** I did try calling him. I tried dialing phone number.

**John:** And it’s weird because you think like, you do the thing where on the keyboard like you dialed the P and the H and the —

**Craig:** Guess what? Worked.

**John:** It worked. Actually, it’s so amazing that we got to him.

**Craig:** Got to him. I’m actually going to hang out with him tonight at address.

**John:** [laughs] All right. We open in the teaser. So this looks like a TV pilot. Over black, tactical ops radio jabber. We are following a truck. It’s semi-modified, tire pressure status, GPS, it’s a high-tech truck. The driver is 35. Hands at ten and two. And next to him is Brent Voss, 28, a SWAT team member. They’re scanning the landscape. They ain’t hauling Frosted Flakes.

They are talking on the radio. They’re communicating with their team. And so we see the other people who are watching this truck as they move. So we’re on I-15 in California. There’s a helicopter tracking them from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And the team lead, Brendan Burks is watching them, communicating through to Rachel who is at the ops center for NRC.

There are wall screens. They are going through all the technical stuff of like tracking this truck as it moves down – -there’s a convoy of three vehicles, light Interstate traffic.

Rachel Alvarez, 35, is the NRC Securities and Safeguards Department. She’s given the go ahead to move on ahead. And there’s chatter back and forth between the different team members as they are moving with the truck down the road. That’s honestly kind of all that happens in these three pages.

**Craig:** Yes, all right. Well, let’s get into it, Len. [laughs] I like to call these tough guy quipping movies because that’s basically what’s going on. Tough guys are all quipping. So let’s start. I mean there’s perfectly good opening visual. Although, I wasn’t sure how we were supposed to tumble to face. So it says, “A SINGLE FLOWER waves in the wind — WIDER: shoulder of an INTERSTATE FREEWAY — A BLACK SEDAN whizzes by — move with the breeze, tumble to face — the grill of a SEMI TRUCK.” So the camera is tumbling to face? I don’t know how that works exactly. Unless we’re on the dandelion cam. So that was just weird to me. But okay.

Then we go into this truck. And it says, modified. Duress button. Tire pressure status. GPS track. Now, I read that like three times. So I’m like, okay, modified is an adjective. And then duress button is one of the things that they’ve modified in there. But I don’t know how I’m supposed to know it’s a duress button. Does it say duress over it? Because I think it’s just going to be a button.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what am I looking at? I’m looking at a button? And then it says tire pressure status. Most cars have that now. GPS track, every car has that. So I wasn’t really sure like how am I supposed to know that this is a special truck other than that there’s a button? Okay. Button.

We have the driver who’s wearing a flight suit, okay. And then there’s a guy next to him in SWAT team gear. Fine. Got it. And then the radio crackles. Brent chimes in, “Checkpoint Chargers.” Now, no one said anything to him. So all that happened was there’s some static and then he decided that that was meaningful static and then talked to somebody.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he says to the driver, “Just like rehearsal. Another Sunday driver heading to grandma’s house.” And my reaction to that is to say, “No.”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You can’t do this stuff. We are in 2015. This stuff was old in 1986. This is like Golan-Globus dialogue. You can’t do it. People don’t talk like this. We now live in a time when we see military movies that are hyper realistic.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they are practically like journalists embedding themselves, right? The movies are like embedding themselves in a fictionalized world of soldiers. And they are very real. There’s an enormous attention to detail because everybody knows what fake is now. Everybody.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this is it. That is fake. Okay, then we come back to this flatbed trailer. It says black rubber covers the cargo, which in this case [laughs], it’s a nuclear waste cask.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How do I know? Because isn’t the black rubber covering it? And then it says an orange cylinder, capped with three feet of rubber on each end. Is that underneath the other rubber? Or is the black rubber covering the ends?

And then it says 8,000 pounds of concrete. Orange concrete? I don’t understand. It’s impenetrable. I would have no way of knowing that because a pamphlet hasn’t been handed to the audience. See, so much information that just isn’t possible to get. Like is it a duress button. Who am I talking to on the radio? Is it impenetrable? What’s inside of it? How the hell would we know any of that?

**John:** We wouldn’t. So let’s take a step back and look at this clearly on page four, God, I hope on page four, something is going to go horribly wrong. And someone is going to interrupt this convoy. And bad stuff is going to happen. And it was unfortunate it didn’t happen before now. But that’s where we’re at.

But let’s take a look at if you are starting a movie with the truck and before the bad guys approached, your first three pages are so precious and so to only have truck set up and not to actually get to know about your characters feels like a real mistake. Or at least to not have something to tell us what is special about your world or what’s at stake, really honestly what the cargo is that you’re holding feels like a real challenge.

**Craig:** It does. And there are all sorts of ways to get into this. And maybe the best way is this, I don’t know, to just start with them on a truck talking. But it felt like, again, we were just dumping the premise in people’s laps. And there was no sense of surprise or discovery to be had. You know, there was no cleverness to it. It’s just we’re in a truck with nuclear waste.

Then, oh boy, okay, now, this whole thing here, now they’re in some kind of like a datacenter, this is the Jason Bourne datacenter. Let’s just call it that, the Jason Bourne datacenter for an international monitoring of objects. They’re in it. I don’t necessarily believe that such a thing exists. Maybe it does. I doubt it.

**John:** Well, I bet it does within the TV series that he is describing because I think I need to remember that this is meant to be a pilot for a TV show. And so within this world, I wouldn’t be surprised if this headquarters is a crucial thing. And some of these characters we’re meeting are crucial people involved here.

But I haven’t been convinced by the end of page three that, “Oh, wow, this is going to be a cool world of people I want to see.”

**Craig:** I agree. We have an ops assistant saying, “Copy Chargers.” So I believe he is responding to Brent who said, “Checkpoint Chargers.” So Checkpoint Chargers is in the middle of page one. Copy Chargers is in the middle of page two. So that’s quite a long pause before he decides to answer.

And then he says to no one in particular, Chester — maybe Chester saying to the ops assistant or maybe saying it to the guy on the radio, “Welcome to the show.” What show? I mean, come on. You want to say welcome to the show. It better be some sort of bad ass thing like you’re, you know, I don’t know, Seal Team 6 or something. I just don’t buy it.

**John:** So let’s try to envision what this pilot might actually be about and sort of what is going to be happening over the course of this. So let’s say that this is the team that deals with emergency nuclear situations. I’m just going to spitball and guess here. And so maybe this ops center becomes a crucial thing.

Then it’s actually great and fine to start in a truck and then we move to the ops center. But what we’re doing in the ops center should probably be a better indication of sort of like normal daily life, but also be giving us character information about who’s sort of in charge of what things, what is the normal sort of daily activity going to be like? Are there any sort of like character details or character runner jokes that we’re starting to set up here that makes us feel like everyone is expecting this to go okay, but also have a plan for if things go poorly. Then I’m engaged and I’m leaning in.

Also, by the end of page three, I need to feel some threat and some stakes, like I need to know that the bad guys are going to be picking up. Or I need to see like that motorcycle revving behind the billboard, the whatever that’s going to be happening here.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like the opening sequence needs to justify why the central premise of the show should happen. I don’t want them to already be in place and doing stuff and then something extraordinary happens. I want to see why some new group is necessary to monitor these things. I want to see something go wrong because of inattention or because of a bad guy or whatever it is, but it could have been prevented if. It’s why I still think like the opening scene of WarGames, one of the best opening scenes in history — do you remember the opening scene in WarGames?

**John:** I don’t remember WarGames at all, so —

**Craig:** WarGames opens with two guys in a missile silo. And they’re just chitchatting. And then they get a little thing. It’s like, “Oh, probably another test.” And they get the message and it’s not a test. It’s the launch codes.

And there’s a younger guy and an older guy. And the younger guy is like, “Oh my God, this is really happening.” And the older guy is like, “Calm down. It’s okay. I’m just going to call.” And the phone is not working I think because they automatically shut it down in case of launch codes. And this is it, it’s really happening.

So they both put their keys in. And on the count of three, they have to turn their keys. And on the count of three, the young guy turns his key, but the old guy, it’s just his hand is on the key, he can’t turn it. He just can’t do it.

And the younger guy says, “Turn your key, sir.” And the guy doesn’t. And then the younger guy pulls out a gun and aims it at the old guy and says, “Turn your key.” And then we go, boom, cuts to black. And then WarGames, we’re like, “Oh my God, what the hell just happened?”

Then you see a scene where all these generals are meeting in NORAD and they’re saying, “Well, we ran kind of like a special test where we gave everybody real codes that we knew wouldn’t actually work to see how many of them would actually do it if they thought it was real. And it turns out that like 38% of them did not launch, which is why we need a new system where we don’t rely on human beings to make those decisions.

And you’re like, “Yes.” You just figured out how to justify this ridiculous concept that [laughs] a computer is going to be in charge of our nuclear weapons. And I believed it. So this show needs to do that. It needs to justify why there should be a show about monitoring trucks with nuclear waste.

**John:** Now, I’m putting that assumption on the show. So it is entirely possible that this is actually a serialized show rather than a procedural show that it’s actually, we’re going to follow this nuclear waste as it gets transported around the world. It can be possible that I’m completely wrong of what the intention was here.

But I would just say like my reading of these first three pages and what this action sequence seems to be setting up, feels like that kind of thing. So if that’s not the intention, you need to pull me out of that intention probably quicker.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if our sympathy is actually going to lie with the people who are stealing it, then I need to see those people before now.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** If our sympathy is going to be with like ordinary pedestrians or ordinary sort of people in the world, then maybe you are in a car with a family bickering and like this giant convoy moves past, like “What the hell is that truck?” And one of them says like, “Oh I think that’s, crap, like that’s nuclear waste, like they’re hauling stuff.” And like, oh, now I have this information. And I’m ready for things to go horribly wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s also just talk about characters. I’m going to read some lines here. Brent says, “Just like rehearsal. Another Sunday driver heading to grandma’s house.” Chester says, “Welcome to the show.” Then Rachel is described as “Doesn’t have time for Twitter. She’s just good.” And Casey Stack is described as “Former army, deals with PTSD on his own dime.”

Well, my goodness. Everybody is just so damn cool, aren’t they? I mean I — ugh, no.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, no. They’re caricatures. They’re not characters.

**John:** Yeah. That’s why you’re paid the big bucks, which it says on page three.

**Craig:** Yeah, she says that she goes — and they’re having this thing that we’ve seen a million times of two people doing, you know, scary military stuff that would freak us out having this, you know, very mundane conversation. You’re not sticking me with an after action report on this on. That’s why you’re paid the big bucks.

So, you know, this feels very ’80s. It feels like ’80s. It feels really broad. And not intentionally broad. So I think you have to really ask yourself these following questions. What is the kind of show that you’re trying to do that’s like on the air right now? Where would it fit like if you could have a, you know, a show come on and then your show come on. What would be a good match?

Ask yourself, would these characters fly on that show? You have to earn your premise. You can’t just dump it on us and say, “Yeah, see? Nuclear waste is the problem and we have the team to solve it.” No. Make me believe that it’s a problem. And then answer the problem with your show.

And I think you got to also comb through the writing here and look for things that are ambiguous or confusing like this are covered, but we can see them. Things are impenetrable, we have no idea. A button means a thing, but it’s just a button. You know what I mean?

**John:** The other thing I want to say is that, if you’re writing this as a spec pilot, your intention probably is not that this gets produced, but this is as a writing sample. This just shows like, “Oh, I can write a really good episode of a one-hour TV show.” And so this hopefully something you’re writing in order to be staffed. And that is a great good thing to be doing.

And even people who are currently staffed on TV shows will continue to write spec pilots just for those reasons so they can get staffed on other shows, they can show the different kinds of things that they can write.

But as you’re writing these, yes, you’re looking at the TV landscape, you’re looking at sort of what shows could be on the air, where this could fit. But you’re not going for the lowest common denominator like, “Well, it’s better than that worst show that somehow made it on to the air.” It actually has to be great because the people who are staffing these TV shows are reading 100 scripts to try to fill their staff.

And so they’re going to respond to things that are like innovative and great and smart and brilliant and somehow manage to feel like TV, but better than TV. And so anything that feels like this, honestly, that feels like it’s just kind of going through the motions is not going to result in a happy outcome.

**Craig:** Yeah. And look, Len, I know I just beat you up there. And I do apologize if that came off as harsh. And I know you probably don’t feel particularly good. But just know this. Through that process, you are now part of our brother and sisterhood. This is what we all go through. And we’ve all been there before. I’ve been on the other end of this many, many, many, many, many times. And don’t get discouraged by that. Take a week off from it. [laughs] Then take it to heart and start again.

**John:** To me if felt like it’s somebody who is for the first time learning the form and the format and learning how to communicate things they see in their head on the page. And so they’re trying to write the kind of sequences that they used to seeing. And not realizing that the kind of stuff that’s in here, not only is it really familiar, but it would done much more quickly and efficiently in an actual script.

And so reading a bunch more really good action scripts would probably be a great start. Reading more TV pilots will be a great start, too.

**Craig:** I concur.

**John:** Cool. I want to want thank all three of our people for writing in with their samples and letting us talk about them on the air. And everybody else who has sent things through, even if we haven’t talked about it, you are all very brave people because you never know which scripts Stuart is going to pick.

Again, if you would like to send in one of these Three Page Challenges, go to johnaugust.com/threepage and there’s the instructions for how you send those things to us to read. So again, thank you to these people for being so brave.

**Craig:** Yes. Thank you to everybody who sends these in. And, you know, yeah, God, you’re braver than I am.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Mine is a simple little article by Caroline Moss about Logan Paul. Craig, do you know who Logan Paul is?

**Craig:** I read the article, so I do.

**John:** Awesome. Craig did his homework. Logan Paul is a star on Vine. And if you don’t know what Vine is, it’s little six second clips. Twitter bought the company. And what I found so fascinating about it — because he can come off poorly depending on how you read the article. But I was thinking about how, if you were to read a profile of Will Smith or Mark Wahlberg at the time where there were just trying to break through, they would probably sound a lot like Logan Paul’s thing. So that’s not saying that he is going to break through and become some giant success. But he has the kind of ambition that I associate with some people who became famous later on.

So it’s so fascinating to be a star in a nascent medium and to be grappling with the kinds of things that he is now facing.

**Craig:** Well, it’s an interesting phenomenon that has emerged. There is a wall between new media — I’ll call it new media independent stardom and traditional stardom. So do you know who PewDiePie is?

**John:** Of course, PewDiePie, a YouTube star.

**Craig:** Right, great. So PewDiePie makes millions and millions of dollars a year. And he is famous the world over. But no one is going to put PewDiePie in a movie. And I don’t think they’re going to give PewDiePie his TV show and not that he would want it anyway, he is doing pretty well on his own. Because it doesn’t feel like that’s what it’s about. That fame is a different fame.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When we look at movie stars and television stars, we’re looking for people to occupy hero spaces. And those are certain kinds of people. And they’re not always beautiful people or strong people. They come in all shapes and sizes. But they occupy hero spaces.

The new media independent star occupies a traditional space. They are like us. That’s the point. And we just happen to like what they’re doing. So it is interesting to see what’s going on here. The piece was a little side-eye-ish towards him. I thought, you know, they kind of — they didn’t make him look too good in that segment about him and his acting class where basically the article said, “He’s not acting very well nor is he taking direction very well. But he still thinks he did a great job.”

And you have to kind of take it with a grain of salt because it’s the reporter’s point of view. That’s probably not a good thing.

**John:** But I thought she was actually more generous with him about the song he’s trying to do and how hard he’s working in a way that I thought was refreshing because so often, you see like, you know, “Well, why does PewDiePie make $12 million a year?” Or “Why does this guy have all these fans?” It’s like, “Well, they’re actually working really hard.”

And so I found it nice to see that the things that seem like casual one off flippant things were actually a lot of planning, a lot of work to try to make them happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, these guys — I’m the last person in the world to do the, “Well, why is that guy making all that money for stupid Vines or videos about video games and…” Well, you know what, I believe in the marketplace. If they’re making millions of dollars a year, they’re doing something right. Obviously, they’re connecting with a huge audience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And yeah, those Vines actually look really complicated. There’s another guy that does them, a similar kind of deal.

**John:** Yeah. Avery Monson does these really — I’ll link in to some of his stuff, too — these really complicated visual illusions that are —

**Craig:** That must be who I’m thinking of. Is he Asian?

**John:** I don’t think so.

**Craig:** There’s an Asian guy, Asian-American guy who does them. And they’re awesome. So anyway, yeah, no these guys deserve their stardom. The question is, can it crossover? I don’t know. I don’t know. My One Cool Thing this week, another Twitter suggestion is called Thync, spelled T-H-Y-N-C. Haha, like Thync, Thync.

So I mean [laughs] if this thing works, I’m so tempted to get it. I might just get it. So it essentially is a device that you put on your head [laughs] —

**John:** It looks amazing, Craig. I just loaded up the site.

**Craig:** It does look amazing. It’s like, it’s very Star Wars. It looks like a Lobot sort of thing. And it essentially sends wave forms through your skin into your brain.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And essentially it’s a frequency. They’re just using frequency outputs. And in fact, that is a legitimate thing. People do this for muscles a lot, you know, you’ve heard of like tense devices and things like that, electricity and so on and so forth.

What they are saying is that this device, actually there’s two modes. One which is to calm you down. And the other one is to essentially stimulate you into a state of non-anxious alertness. Naturally, my BS detector went straight up. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Naturally. But they published a paper and I read the paper. And if the data is correct, it kind of works. There is a strongly statistically significant difference between the placebo control which I thought they did well and their device. And they have a quote on their page talking about blurbs from a professor at the City College of New York, Neural Engineering, brain stimulation and medical device design, Dr. Marom Bikson.

So then I went I’m like still like [laughs], so I looked around for some reviews and a couple of people have reviewed it and they said, “Yeah, it works.”

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So should I try it?

**John:** You should absolutely try it.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Craig, you got to spend that money.

**Craig:** I got to spend that money.

**John:** So a similar or kind of related thing, I have the Muse headset, which is a sort of meditation kind of thing. Like basically it’s tracking your I want to say brain energy, but that’s a really poor way of phrasing it. But it has an app that goes with it and you’re able to sort of like calm yourself down and you could actually measure sort of like as you’re calming yourself down. And you can change the pitch of things. And you can feel these birds standing on your shoulder.

And it’s impressive, but it one of those things where I used it like four times and like I haven’t touched in a long time. I’ll be curious what your experience is with this and whether you find it useful enough that you’re using it often or you use a little bit and then it goes into that same drawer with your Google Glasses.

**Craig:** Oh, the Google Glasses, what a piece of crap.

**John:** Well, but I think it’s good that you helped keep that company in business because they’re a struggling startup.

**Craig:** It’s a Kickstarter.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That was a great show.

**John:** That was a good show. So thank you very much. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel, as always.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth who has done some of our best outros. So thank you for sending in this one.

If you have an outro to send in, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send in questions about things we talked about on the show. Short things are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

As always, you can find us on iTunes. You can download the podcast there. You can also leave us a review which is lovely. If you would like to get a USB drive with all 200 episodes — the first 200 episodes of the show, those should be in the store now, hopefully, by the time you get this podcast. And you can go to store.johnaugust.com. USB drives are $20 and have all of the episodes of the show including the dirty episodes which is always fun.

And that’s our show for this week.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

* Today is the final day to [submit your Fall 2015 Scriptnotes shirt design](http://johnaugust.com/shirt)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Three Pages by [Andy Maycock](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AndyMaycock.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Brian Vidal](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BrianVidal.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Len Anderson IV](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/LenAndersonIV.pdf)
* [Logan Paul has conquered the internet, but he can’t figure out how to conquer the world](http://www.techinsider.io/vine-star-logan-paul-profile-2015-7) by Caroline Moss
* [Avery Monsen](https://vine.co/AveryMonsen) on Vine
* [Thync](http://www.thync.com/)
* [Muse headband](http://www.choosemuse.com/)
* [A limited number of 200 episode USB drives are back in the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))