Search Results for: courier

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/midseason-finale).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 188 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, if I bring up the term “midseason finale,” what does that evoke to you? What does that mean to you?

**Craig:** Nothing. [laughs]

**John:** Nothing?

**Craig:** Nothing. I have a blank.

**John:** You don’t watch TV. I keep forgetting that. I keep trying to bring up these things that involve television.

**Craig:** I mean, I watch some TV but I don’t, like, I never realized there was a midseason finale.

**John:** I think it’s a fairly recent construct. And what it is, is generally as a TV show, especially a show that has a 22-episode season, they sort of break into two chunks. And so, you’ll go through a long narrative arc that will sort of like culminate after like 13 episodes or something. And this often happens sort of around Christmas time and then there’s a break and then they come back for the second half of the season later on.

And so, the midseason finale I think about sort of wrapping up a bunch of plot lines but also establishing the new stuff that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this episode of Scriptnotes kind of feels like a midseason finale to me because even though we’re not taking a break, even though next week there’ll be a show, there’s a whole bunch of stuff on the outline to go through which is basically let’s just wrap this stuff up and be done with it for awhile.

**Craig:** Well, I like that. I’m a big believer in getting things off the plate. Some of these things I never want to see again.

**John:** Yes, and so some of these things will be buried forever.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk through some of the things we’ll talk about today.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** We will have a follow up on a previous Three Page Challenge. We will talk about the WGA diversity numbers.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll look at Road Runner cartoons.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Gerritsen’s Gravity lawsuit.

**Craig:** Wait, we’ve already done all of these things. Oh, this is the point.

**John:** This is the point.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** More rules on screenwriting.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** But then we’ll be looking forward to the future.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** And so establishing the second half of the season of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Oh, I see, I didn’t even know we had a season. That’s how far ahead of me you are.

**John:** Absolutely. The new thing in podcasting is seasons.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah, so Serial has seasons. We haven’t had seasons to date, but maybe we should have seasons and then maybe that’s a thing we should talk about.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, Serial I presume is going to find somebody else who’s definitely guilty to talk about for awhile about how maybe they’re not guilty which you could do with literally anyone.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fun to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Go back and revisit things that are already decided.

**Craig:** I have stolen my pronunciation of literally from Seth Rudetsky.

**John:** Oh, good.

**Craig:** Yeah, he has his own.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He has — like the English people say “literally” and Americans typically say “literally” but he says, “literally, literally”. It’s his own thing. I love it. Stole it.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s like a lit tree.

**Craig:** Yes, literally.

**John:** As an adverb.

**Craig:** Right, literally yeah.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good. All right, so before we get in to this big batch of follow up, there’s a little bit of actual news. So news on my end, we have a brand new version of Weekend Read out which finally adds the thing that Craig has been asking for the last year for is support for the iPad.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** So the new version, version 1.5 of Weekend Read adds iPad support but also adds iCloud Sync which is very useful. So you can start reading a script on your iPhone, continue reading it on your iPad and it will know where you are and it will keep those files together and in sync.

**Craig:** Great

**John:** It will also let you do folders, which is super handy, so you can group things together. And you can even build a folder on your back, in the little iCloud folder and just drag a bunch of files in there. So, super useful. I want to thank Nima Yousefi who literally went —

**Craig:** Literally.

**John:** Literally ripped his hair out and went insane trying to make it all work. But it works, so thank you.

**Craig:** Do you think he did it for me?

**John:** Mostly he did it for Craig. Whenever he was about to give up, I said, “But think about Craig.”

**Craig:** And he literally went back to work.

**John:** Yeah. And so, Craig, you signed up as a beta tester but we can actually check how many times you installed the beta and it was zero.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s so me.

**John:** That’s so Raven.

**Craig:** That is so Raven. I’m going to — look, I don’t, listen man, now that I know it’s real —

**John:** Now it’s real.

**Craig:** I’m just going to —

**John:** Now it’s on the App Store.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m just going to buy it. I’m just going to literally going to buy it.

**John:** Yeah, that’s great. Thank you.

**Craig:** How much does it cost?

**John:** Yeah, well, it’s free to download and then to upgrade it for all the new extra features, it is a one-time purchase. If you upgraded the original version of Weekend Read, just click Restore Purchases and it would already be there.

**Craig:** And if I upgrade it because I’m going to — you know me, I love to upgrade.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m an upgrader.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What am I looking at here? 400, 500 bucks?

**John:** $9.99.

**Craig:** I can do that. I can swing it.

**John:** You can absolutely do that.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve seen your house. You could totally afford that.

**Craig:** I could totally afford it. And you know what? I’d could have done ten.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I could have just done a flat — nobody does that by the way, right? Is there anyone that does that on the iStore?

**John:** You actually can’t do it on the App Store, there are set price tiers, so.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** They do these price tiers because depending on what country you’re in it’s a completely different amount of money.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And so they set the price tier so it can be convertible to whatever currency it’s in.

**Craig:** And 9.99 is more convertible than 10?

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Everyone understands it’s 10.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It’s actually literally called tier 10.

**Craig:** It’s literally tier 10.

**John:** God, oh no.

**Craig:** I hope that’s Seth —

**John:** I mean, Mathew is going to have to go through this and just cut out all of these.

**Craig:** We have to send this to Seth. I don’t care.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I want him to listen to this. I literally want him to listen to it.

**John:** Our friend, Aline Brosh McKenna, has issued a jeremiad against the term “seriously.”

**Craig:** Well, I’m with her. I mean, “really” and “seriously” both need to go.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Both.

**John:** They’re clammy.

**Craig:** They’re gone.

**John:** The other new thing we put out on the same day as Weekend Read 1.5 is brand new versions of our flagship font. So we make Courier Prime. We are the people who released Courier Prime which is free for everybody but we made it. And we also put out today Courier Prime Sans and Courier Prime Source. And so these are, the Sans version is basically it’s the exact same metrics as Couriers Prime but without the serifs on it so it is more like a Helvetica that there’s not little feet on the letters and heads.

And Courier Prime Source is designed for people who are writing programs who wanted a great mono space font. It is the same font as Courier Prime Sans but the Os have slashes through them so they don’t get confused with zeros. Actually the zeros have slashes —

**Craig:** Yeah, I was going to say the zeros are supposed to have the slashes.

**John:** That would be a huge mistake if we made that.

**Craig:** That would have been, literally, we could have brought the world down.

**John:** Yeah, like literally —

**Craig:** Literally.

**John:** Oh, we’ll never stop this.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Satellites could have crashed because of this one mistake.

**Craig:** Absolutely, a lot of lives would have been lost. I like that it’s your flagship font as opposed to, what, your 10 other not-flagship fonts?

**John:** Yeah, we have a lot of other internal fonts that we use for other things.

**Craig:** Oh, you have internal fonts?

**John:** Yeah. We have a busy font making —

**Craig:** A little font factory.

**John:** Operation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so Courier Prime Sans is actually the same face essentially as Highland Sans, the face that we use inside Highland. We just wanted other people to be able to use it. So Slugline was the first people who came to us to say, “Hey, can we use that?” And we’re like, “Yeah, sure,” but it feels weird that it’s called Highland so we changed the name of it. And then the Source font basically because the font we made as just as a Sans didn’t really work right for programmers, so we fixed some things for programmers.

Things like the asterisk which, you know, for a normal typewriter face you want the asterisk to be a certain way. But if you’re actually coding where you want it to be a much bigger, a more centered thing because you use it for multiplying numbers and such or pointers.

**Craig:** Is there a term, a linguistic term to describe a word in a language that is a foreign source but everybody mispronounces it just as a general — like Sans is, everybody knows that like a font is a Sans font.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s from sans, the French without. And there are words like San Pedro here in Los Angeles.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** What the hell is San Pedro? That’s the weirdest thing. It’s not like we — why would we say that? Why don’t we just say San Pedro?

**John:** I’m sure there is. So, please listeners, if you know the name for the word that Craig is searching for, let us know. Because it’s a special consistent thing, like you have to learn that it’s La Brea, like le, le, but it’s La Cienega, same word pronounced completely differently based on what street it’s associated with.

**Craig:** Le Brea, La Cienega. You’re right. And my wife speaks fluent Spanish, and so she really gets rankled by Los Feliz. That makes her nuts. Because we all know Feliz Navidad, it’s not like we go Feliz Navidad. We all know how it’s supposed to be but we say Los Feliz. And her favorite is in Florida, there is a lake, Buena Vista. But in Florida they call it Buena Vista.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** It’s madness but it’s just the way it is. And I would also argue that Los Feliz and Los Feliz, you hear both being pronounced and it’s partly because that neighborhood in Los Angeles still has a large Spanish-speaking population who choose to call it what it’s actually — more like what its actually Spanish would be.

**Craig:** They have to be so angry every day.

**John:** I don’t think they’re so angry.

**Craig:** I think they, I would be.

**John:** I think they recognize they’re living in a period of language transition.

**Craig:** I would riot. I mean — no, I’m not — listen, when I say I would riot, please understand I’m not trying to instigate a riot. But if I were walking around, I spoke Spanish, I was raised speaking Spanish and someone is like, “Oh, where do you live?” And I said, “Los Feliz”. And they said, “Oh, you mean Los Feliz?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would light a garbage can on fire at that point.

**John:** So, I think in the SNL app that you highlighted earlier, two weeks ago probably, I do recall an SNL sketch where they over-pronounced Spanish words and it’s just so terrible, like “Chimichanga” like, you know, really go too far in pronouncing a Spanish word in a Spanish way. That’s one of the worst things you could do, also.

**Craig:** That’s the local news anchor disease.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** Yes, yes.

**John:** The last bit of news I had that was just sort of news because I got to experience it for the first time is I went to PAX East which is the big game convention here in Boston which happened to line up with the dates that I’m here in Boston for Big Fish. And it was just overwhelming and amazing.

Now, Craig, do you like conventions? Do you like going to big nerd-out bunches of people?

**Craig:** I love nerds and I love so much what happens at those conventions. Like when E3 comes around or when Comic-Con comes around I will definitely look and see what the news is coming out of them. But I cannot explain how much I hate being in an enormous box room with people jammed against me…eh…ah..eh…do you hear that noise?

**John:** Yeah, that’s pain.

**Craig:** That’s my brain every sec. I went to E3 once.

**John:** I went to E3 once too and it was —

**Craig:** Once.

**John:** Yeah. So I would rank this on the whole scale of like these kinds of conferences and conventions. So I went to CES once in Las Vegas and it was one of the most overwhelming and terrifying things I have ever encountered where like I wanted to stare just at a blank wall for like 20 minutes just to sort of get my eyes to shut up. I did not enjoy that. And then I also went to E3 and that was a similar kind of thing but a little scaled back. This was actually much better. It was a huge number of people, just a crazy number of people.

And so as you descend the escalator into it, you’re like, “Oh, my god, I’m going to have a panic attack.” But I realized quite early on that half of the convention floor is all the videogame stuff. And that’s the big, bright, loud, noisy part. And there’s probably amazing things to see and you’re seeing things like Over-Watched the new Blizzard game and there was Oculus stuff and there’s amazing stuff if you’re in to that. I just bee-lined straight through there and went to the other half of the hall where they had all the table-top games and it was just so much more sedate and calm and just delightful.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** One of the best things that I saw there, which I had anticipated is they have these tables where they have a bunch of opened board games and box games and table-top games and you can just check them out. You basically give them your ID. You can check them out. Like go over to a table and play them. And it was just a brilliant, simple idea but the chance to actually see what those games are like when they’re played. And I just commend everybody who sort of ventured over into that half of the arena.

**Craig:** That’s probably where you would find me. I like to go in the quiet place. I like quiet and cool. I don’t like it to be too hot.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** I don’t mind too cold. I’ll put a jacket on.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine. Yeah. So, part of the reason why I wanted to see this PAX East board game space is because we actually are developing a board game in my little company.

**Craig:** What aren’t you doing over there?

**John:** We’re kind of doing a lot. We got a lot of —

**Craig:** Are you guys going to build a car?

**John:** Shh.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m just saying because I, you know —

**John:** We know you love cars.

**Craig:** Well, if you could out Tesla the Tesla. I’m just saying

**John:** Yeah, out Apple the Apple cart.

**Craig:** Anyway, all right. So back, so you’re developing a game.

**John:** We’re developing a game. And so part of the reason why there were some specific people there I needed to talk with about this game we’re developing and trying to figuring out and one of the things we need to do next is actually put it in front of a bunch of people to play test it. So this is a callout to listeners and I’ll also put this on Twitter, but in Los Angeles on which day, on — ?

**Craig:** March 23rd at 9:00 p.m.

**John:** We are going to be testing this game.

**Craig:** That was a wild guess, was I right?

**John:** You were absolutely right. You were looking at the Workflow ahead me.

**Craig:** I might be cheating.

**John:** You might be cheating. We are going to need about 30 people to test this game. So if you are a person who really likes board games, table-top games, card games, that kind of thing, we might really benefit from your just spending 90 minutes and helping us figure out this game. So if you’d like to do that, the sign-up for that is johnaugust.com/game and that would be cool if you want to come join us. So it’s in Los Angeles. It is on March 23rd at 9:00 p.m. It’ll be somewhere in the Hollywood area/Mid-Wilshire area. And we will make sure the game actually makes sense, that the instructions make sense.

**Craig:** Am I allowed to go to that?

**John:** You are allowed to go to that, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m just, like, I mean, because, I mean —

**John:** So we now need only 29 people, so tick-tock.

**Craig:** Well, maybe, I mean, hold on a second, March 29th.

**John:** That’s a Monday.

**Craig:** That’s a Monday, I got — wait, it is?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, I’m looking at April.

**John:** Oh, March 23rd, March 23rd.

**Craig:** March, I’m not wrong, March 23rd, right. Yeah, I think I might do that.

**John:** That’d be really fun. We’d love to have you.

**Craig:** If I go there and I start playing and people are really enjoying it but then I just started saying eh… Is it really that good? Eh?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I start turning people against your game.

**John:** That’s absolutely fine.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** You have to, you know —

**Craig:** Challenge accepted. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Follow your heart, Craig.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** Let’s get in to the meat of our show which is all of this follow-up.

**Craig:** Follow-up.

**John:** So the first bit of follow-up is we got an email from Chris French who was one of the writers from our Three Page Challenge last week. And he’s the guy who wrote the script called Seven Secrets which involved a forest fire.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And if we recall, we were so intrigued by sort of what was happening. And we were really frustrated and confused by some of what we were reading on the page. And so, Chris sent through a much longer description about sort of real things that were happening there. But I wanted to read a little bit of what he wrote.

He writes, “To begin, yes, this is a screenplay where we will never see the faces of an adult. The entire film will frame the camera exclusively on the faces of five 9-year-olds in Big Sur, California. As for the grownups and their lives we’ll see silhouettes hands, feet, clothing, but never their faces. The film focuses on the way these five kids struggle, connect and eventually escape life-threatening circumstances forming unimaginably strong bonds with one another.”

So that was — you and I had that fundamental question because —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The first line of the script kind of says that but was it only a rule for that scene or was it a rule for the whole movie and he says, “That’s a rule for the whole movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah, so, in our little back-and-forth with him, I think he acknowledged this when he wrote to us, he realizes now, yeah, I probably do need to put something between the title page and the beginning of the script that says, “Hey, this is the way this is going to work and this is the rule, the cinematic role of this movie,” because no one would ever — it’s not something you can casually put in there.

**John:** No. Craig, what do you call that page between the title page and the first page? Is there a term you would use for that?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because I — that came up this week. Because the script I — the other reason why it’s a midseason finale, I turned in a script.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** And I ended up doing that intermediary page and I guess intermediary page makes sense. It would be kind of a dedication page kind of.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, people will use that page for quotes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’ll see that fairly frequently. So it’s like a — but in this case it’s really just a — what do they call it, a nota bene page.

**John:** Yeah, a nota bene. So you’re trying to frame the experience of reading it based on that one page that goes before the movie starts. And I had a back-and -forth with the producers about whether or not to put that page in. And I originally left it out and then they had this concern and I said like, okay, right before I sent you the draft, I took that page out. And so this is what was on that page. And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that page needs to go back in there.”

**Craig:** Okay, yeah.

**John:** And it was just a way of framing the read that helps people understand what they’re about to get.

**Craig:** Was it a quote or was it note from you?

**John:** It was a single sentence and I don’t think I can say more than that.

**Craig:** No, no, you shouldn’t say anything more than that.

**John:** It was a single sentence but it basically framed expectation in a way —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was useful. So in Big Fish, that page exists and it says, “This is a southern story full of lies and fabrication, but truer for their inclusion.” And that was always in the script and that never was meant to be filmed or shot, but it was a useful way of sort of framing people’s expectation that like you’re going to see a bunch of really crazy tall-tales and that’s sort of the point, it’s like what’s really underneath those.

**Craig:** Yeah, anytime you feel like you need to put that context there, because remember, when people go see movies, of course, they have the context of the trailer and the commercials and all of the publicity that goes around it. There is a hundred ways to prepare people for a certain kind of viewing experience. There is no way other than what we’re talking about to prepare them for the script-reading experience. So I’m always in favor of that being really direct with people.

In Cowboy Ninja Viking, I didn’t put it in between the title page and the front because I wanted to have the audience experience confusion for a bit, and then when it was time, I broke out a little paragraph in italics and said, “This is how this movie works.”

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** But the one thing, I’m not a huge fan of what I would call the inspirational quote. You’ll see that a lot of times, somebody will throw a quote on there from Thoreau or Nietzsche or Plato, I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I always feel like, “Oh, yes, well, we can’t hire them,” so perhaps you’re just trading on somebody else’s wit and wisdom. I like what you did with Big Fish. You like said this is — because you know, like people are going to read this going, “Wait, is this happening? Is this not happening?” They’re a little confused because they’re not experiencing the movie. You just come right off the bat and say, “There’s going to be a bunch of lies in this. Have fun.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s also trying to tip off the reader that the language is going to be a little bit more flowery than they’re probably used to.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s a very deliberate choice.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah, you’re setting that tone of the tone of tone.

**John:** That said of, you know, maybe 60 screenplays I’ve read, I think I’ve done it twice. So it’s not a thing you do all the time.

**Craig:** No, that is a particular ingredient that you add when required.

**John:** Our next bit of follow-up is the WGA diversity numbers which we discussed in the last episode. Friend of the show Dennis Hensley writes, “On the heels of the WGA’s diversity report, which you talked about in the last show, the WGA offers a writer’s access program which showcases mid-level guild writers from different diversity categories. I ticked the GLBT box. I was one of 11 writers who got in out of 171 scripts submitted.”

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** “I’m one of only two comedy writers, the rest are drama.”

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** “I want to thank you both for the practical tips I learned listening to you as well as the overall morale boost reality checks you offer. It really helped me with the script I submitted.” So there’ll be a link to this in the show notes but this is essentially the WGA TV Writer Access Project, a program designed to identify excellent diverse writers with television staffing experience.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s great. I mean, the downside of the WGA diversity report which is the annual collection of depressing statistics that do not change is that they don’t do anything except point backwards in time and say, “Eh, bad.” This program which has been going on for a bit now, this is what you would want your union to do, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To go out and say, “Okay, well, we’re not going to sit here and just complain. Look at these people. We pick them. We read their stuff. We like it. You should take a really close look.” So I love that. Interesting also that the Writers Access Program does include sexual orientation or gender status whereas the diversity report doesn’t seem to get into that, as far as I could tell, at least, the diversity report is really about race and gender unless I’m missing something, and age.

**John:** And age, yeah. So this program has five diversity categories, minority writers, writers with disabilities, which the diversity report I don’t think singled out, women writers, writers age 55 and over, and gay and lesbian writers.

**Craig:** Oh, so they’re putting the number at 55, which again, probably —

**John:** Makes a lot more sense.

**Craig:** Yeah, a lot more sense than using the 40.

**John:** 40.

**Craig:** Yeah, 40 makes no sense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, anyway, I’m really happy Dennis that we gave you any tips that were helpful to you and we are rooting for you and the Writers Access Program.

**John:** So one of the things they highlight about this program is that it’s all blind submissions. And so the idea of blind submissions I think is really interesting and crucial. And so, I was talking with Andrew Lippa who is here during Big Fish with me, the composer of Big Fish. And they were talking about how many more women players are in orchestras and then how much higher chairs they have reached in the last 10 years. And apparently, the reason why that change has happened has been blind auditions. So essentially, the player is playing behind the screen and the judges are listening but not seeing the player play.

**Craig:** Fascinating.

**John:** And so blind submissions for this project. And also, I’ve read the same thing for like John Oliver show. Everybody came in with just a number on their submission page and it was all read based without names or any other information about who that writer was.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. I mean, I don’t know if you recall. At one point, we talked about that study, the Princeton study where they sent out the same play under a male name and a female name and female authors actually ran aground of discrimination from female readers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This issue of whatever you’d call it, gender bias, whatever, all the bias. Bias, how about that word [laughs]? This issue of bias, it’s not necessarily always the stereotype of the 50-year-old white guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I think that blind submissions are really smart. I love that.

**John:** And sometimes people will make a misassumption based on a name on a title page. So just last week we had, I think it was K.C. Smith. We loved what we assumed was her sample, which was that great script about this guy who really wanted to eat waffles and was not allowed to eat waffles.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so we said, this woman wrote a terrific script and it turns out K.C. is a guy and an African-American guy. And so, hooray.

**Craig:** Yeah, we didn’t know if K.C. or Chris were men or women. But it turns out they’re both guys.

**John:** They’re both guys.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Two guys wrote in with a link to a live action Road Runner short. So last week we talked a lot about sort of Road Runner rules, the rules that the creators of those cartoons had set for themselves about how the Coyote and the Road Runner should function. And so this was an interesting example of trying to do that in a live action world.

I didn’t find it entirely successful. But I found it kind of just fascinating to try to apply cartoon physics and cartoon logic to a live action scenario. And one thing it reminded me of is we didn’t talk about in that list that sense that in a Road Runner cartoon, you only fall once you realize that there is no ground beneath you.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Yeah, which is just crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Falling is a function of awareness, not gravity.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, just odd.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, that’s the best part of those cartoons was when Wile E. Coyote was midair and was still really happy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, huh.

**John:** Huh, wait.

**Craig:** And then he would look down and then he would look at you like, “Oh, you got to be kidding me.” [laughs] And then his body would fall while his head stayed there [laughs]. And his neck would expand, which by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the slow motion video of somebody dropping a slinky, it kind of works that way. Like they let the slinky go and the bottom drops while the top essentially stays and then it drops like Wile E. Coyote.

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** On the subject of gravity, we have some follow-up on the Gravity lawsuit.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So Med writes —

**Craig:** Med.

**John:** “I’m baffled by your continued defense of Warner Bros and Cuarón.”

**Craig:** Baffled.

**John:** “Unless there are significant errors in the revised claims, Tess Gerritsen definitely did get robbed.”

**Craig:** I thank God that this guy or woman is writing because they definitely know what happened. Continue.

**John:** [laughs] “You both seem pretty quick to decide against anyone who is not closely aligned with the screenwriting community maybe due to your union allegiance.”

**Craig:** Good point. Good point.

John “I’m not sure.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “In any case, I suggest you put yourselves in Ms. Gerritsen’s shoes and tell me you would not be outraged.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “She was right to state that writers in general should be ultra cautious in selling properties to Hollywood. For successful writers like Gerritsen, it seems like ‘cash and carry’ with no bonus, earn out, or residual options is really the only bulletproof option. This is a doubly true if writers cannot even depend on their own larger community to support them when they are wronged. Still enjoying your show very much even on those few occasions when I disagree.”

**Craig:** [laughs] So, John, you hear people say, that begs the question all the time but they misuse it. You probably know the real meaning of begging the question, correct?

**John:** Absolutely. Assuming facts not in evidence.

**Craig:** Begging the question, actually, it’s building an argument around something that needs to be figured out by the argument. It’s essentially saying, people are definitely hungry because they’re hungry. This guy is basically saying I’m baffled by your continued defense of Warner Bros and Cuarón because they’re wrong.

**John:** Yeah [laughs].

**Craig:** But you’re supposed to prove that, you see [laughs], your argument. You are begging the question. So going through this very quickly, you say that Tess Gerritsen definitely did get robbed. I have no idea how — we are not saying that she definitely didn’t. I’m not sure what access to the cosmic oracle you have that we don’t [laughs]. No, we are not pretty quick to decide against anyone who is not closely aligned with the screenwriting community. We’re not quick to decide anything. And union allegiance surely has nothing to do with it I think. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing at all. It doesn’t work that way.

**John:** So in our very long and very exhaustive episode about the Gerritsen lawsuit, I recall making it very clear that if I were in Tess Gerritsen’s position, I would probably perceive things the way Tess Gerritsen perceives things because from her perspective, it does feel like that. And so our objective with that episode was to show, you know what, if you zoom out and take it outside of her personal experience, it probably looks quite a bit different. And that was the perspective we were trying to provide.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But a great example this last week of like, “Well, I just can’t believe that happened,” was the Blurred Lines lawsuit. So we are not a music industry podcast or we’re not a show for songwriters and people who are interested in songwriting, but I thought the Blurred Lines things was nuts. And so to summarize for people who don’t know what we’re talking about, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams and another collaborator were sued by Marvin Gaye’s estate arguing that Robin Thicke’s big, giant hit song infringed upon the copyright of a classic Marvin Gaye song.

And if you listen to the two songs back to back, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, they’re in a similar kind of vibe.” But in any sort of like one thing is directly lifted from the other, I was astonished. And most people were astonished who were sort of music industry legal scholars were amazed that they lost this lawsuit.

**Craig:** Well, you know, obviously this comes down to juries and so forth. I, myself, was completely rooting for the Marvin Gaye estate and was thrilled. I, unlike you — so, here, Med, you can see. We do not have union allegiance or whatever the hell. Or even allegiance to each other. I thought the song was a dead rip-off, I really did. I thought it was —

**John:** Wow, that’s amazing.

**Craig:** A straight up rip-off. Look, if they had contacted the Marvin Gaye estate when they were making it and said, “Listen, we want to basically do a version of your song,” because they didn’t copy it directly. What they did was a version of it. I think there was infringement. I don’t know if the — the award seems a little whacky [laughs] but the damages. But, you know, I was on the side of that.

But, look, Med says, “I suggest you put yourselves in Ms. Gerritsen’s shoes and tell me you would not be outraged.” Why? Who cares if I’m outraged or not? Okay, I’m in her shoes and I’m outraged. Whoopty doo.

**John:** Yeah, right.

**Craig:** Outraged doesn’t mean I’m right. In fact, outraged generally means that [laughs] feelings are clouding my logic. She was not right to state that writers in general should be ultra cautious in selling properties to Hollywood. Let me remind Med that she did get paid $1 million, I believe, regardless. She had a lawyer. That’s the caution that you take. This was not her first rodeo, as far as I understood either.

I actually think she liked the way this turned out. But, no, I don’t think any of the conclusions here are correct, nor do I think the larger community of writers is meant to support a writer just because the writer says I’ve been wronged.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Frankly, we supported one of the — we supported the people that wrote Gravity in our estimation. But we are still enjoying your listenership very much.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** Even on this one occasion where we have disagreed.

**John:** We shouldn’t spend too much on the show about the Robin Thicke thing because obviously it’s — several other episodes could be about the Robin Thicke thing. What I found so fascinating as I was reading sort of the reaction to this lawsuit, clearly, the fact that Robin Thicke seems like an incredible douchebag, hurt him. Clearly, the fact that he spoke about his influences hurt him.

But if you look at other songs, though, the same claim could be made against them, they are enumerable. And so the same way that I worry that a success by the Tess Gerritsen lawsuit would have a horrible chilling effect on Hollywood, I feel like this verdict of the Robin Thicke thing could have a horrible chilling effect. Basically, imitating a style rather than imitating the exact notes.

So the thing I’ll link to, Jon Caramanica for the New York Times, wrote a piece talking about how copyright law is focused on the sheet music. It’s focused on like this is literally what is on the page. And by that standard, it doesn’t actually work at all. I mean like there should be no basis for it. Instead, we’re just sort of basing it on like, well, they kind of feel like the same thing. But feeling like the same thing is a really murky, dangerous thing to try to talk about.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, there’s the publishing right and then there’s obviously the performance which is its own copyright issue. And I’m sure the Gaye estate was going on the basis of the publishing as opposed to the mechanical, as they say. But, look, I just call them like I see them like everybody else out there. And I actually thought that that one was overt, which is overt infringement to me.

The second I heard that song, just to be clear, the first time I heard Blurred Lines, I’m like “Oh [laughs]. Oh, that’s Marvin Gaye.” You can’t do that. I mean, even down to the people like chitchatting at a party while, I mean, you’ve ripped him off. That was a rip-off. Now, people can argue about, you know, how you define what was ripped off specifically and what wasn’t, I understand that.

I see you brought up Stay With Me, which absolutely is a rip-off [laughs] of Won’t Back Down. It’s a dead rip-off.

**John:** Here’s why I think they settled quickly and did not actually go to the full-on trial is because they wanted to sort of protect Sam Smith from being dragged into it. I suspect if they actually did the research and proved it, you would find 15 gospel songs that have the exact same chord progression.

**Craig:** It’s not the progression.

**John:** [sings].

**Craig:** It’s not the progression.

**John:** [sings]

**Craig:** It is both the progression and the rhythm. So it’s not only the notes but the dots and the rest. [sings] That is very specific. That is pretty much the definition of unique expression and fixed form.

**John:** Right, so —

**Craig:** And it’s a dead rip-off.

**John:** So that never went to trial, so we will never know sort of how that would have sussed out.

**Craig:** See, I think the opposite. I think it didn’t go to trial because I think they knew that they had screwed up [laughs]. I think they knew were wrong.

**John:** I think it didn’t go to trial because of, you know, Sam Smith’s meteoric rise and just trying to protect him. I do strongly, strongly, strongly suspect that they would have been able to find five gospel songs with that exact hook in it. And that doesn’t mean that Tom Petty took it, it just means that I think it was a thing that exists in the world.

**Craig:** It is possible. But again, I got to back up my ’70s.

**John:** Got to back up Tom Petty.

**Craig:** My ’70s era stars [laughs], you know. Don’t mess with Marvin, not when I’m around. Marvin, I mean, really, truly, I love Marvin Gaye. I love Marvin Gaye. I think the world is so worse off for not having more Marvin Gayes out there. And so worse off, frankly, for more stuff that kind of is like, “Oh, we’ll just do Marvin without Marvin being here.” And I love Tom Petty and, by the way, I love Sam Smith.

I don’t think Sam Smith knew. Did he write that song?

**John:** He did.

**Craig:** Oh, then he knew [laughs]. He knew. He took Don’t Back Down and he slowed it down.

**John:** I don’t think he deliberately did it. But we will never actually be able to suss that out.

**Craig:** We’ll never know.

**John:** But what we can suss out are some other rules that were broken or unbroken. This is from Josh who wrote in with a note about coverage he got, which he described as being, in part helpful and in part maddening. So he writes, “The reader wrote, ‘A few other issues that jump off the page are the use of underlining in slug lines usually done only in sitcom scripts, the improper use of italics and narrative in dialogue, and occasional placement of parentheticals at the bottom of dialogue. Bottom line, to avoid development of one’s own script formatting conventions and confer regularly with Trottier for accepted formats.'”

So he’s referring to the Screenwriter’s Bible which is a book that’s often held up as being the standard.

**Craig:** Oh. I don’t have the Trottier. Trottier or Trottier?

**John:** I don’t know if it’s Trottier or Trottier.

**Craig:** Let’s go with Trottier. I don’t have the Trottier book. But if I did, I would hold it up and then throw it down forcefully into a wood chipper. I underline my slug lines. No, I’m sorry, I bold my slug lines. But, yes, people do underline their slug lines. I don’t care. If I’m reading a great script and the slug lines are underlined, I don’t care.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the improper use of italics in narrative and dialogue are. I will occasionally use italics when I so desire. Not often but when I feel like it. “The occasional placement of parentheticals at the ends of dialogue,” I’ve seen people do that to imply this is unsaid but this is sort of what I want them to act as being unsaid. “To avoid development of one’s own script format conventions.” F-you.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s what I’d say to — and by the way, Josh, your script might be terrible.

**John:** It could easily be terrible.

**Craig:** But the reader really should be concentrating on that because if your script was great and this is what the reader was saying, then I think I would also lift the reader up and throw the reader into a wood chipper.

**John:** Oh, this could be a whole wood chipper festival because that’s all a means of teeing up this article from Script Magazine written by Ray Morton.

**Craig:** Wait, Ray Morton? How did they get Ray Morton? [laughs]

**John:** Well, Ray Morton is a writer and script consultant. His new book, A Quick Guide to Screenwriting, is now available online and in bookstores.

**Craig:** Oh, good. As long as it’s quick because nobody has time for a lengthy guide to something as easy and obvious [laughs] as screenwriting.

**John:** Morton analyzes screenplays for production companies, producers, and individual writers. He is available for private consultation.

**Craig:** Oh, thank God.

**John:** So this is all available online. There will be a link to this in the show notes. And so he has, how many points is this, 12 points to talk through. And I thought we’d talk through them. And because, actually, a fair number of them I agreed with. But some of them were wood chipperable.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So let’s go through it.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Craig, would you want to start reading the first one?

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] You know my, this is great. The script is short, between 90 and 110 pages. If a script runs longer than 120 pages, that tells me the writer does not know the industry standards or worse, thinks that he/she is an exception to them.

This always reminds me of The Holy Grail, you shall count to three, not four, five is right out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So the script is short between 90 and 110 pages. If you’ve gone over that, you don’t know the industry standards or you think you’re an exception to them, or you’re Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo and you’ve written The Godfather again.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So I predict that Craig will say, no, that is poppycock and —

**Craig:** That is.

**John:** Many terrific scripts are larger than 110 pages.

**Craig:** And by the way, some of them are under 90 pages like, I don’t know, The Artist that won the Oscar. This is poppycock. It’s foofaraw and I reject it. [laughs]

**John:** Number two, the front cover is free of WGA registration numbers and fake production company names.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, again, if I see a WGA registration number, I’m not going to go, “What an idiot,” and then never read the script. If it’s a great script, what do I care? It’s like I don’t care. Yes, it’s true that amateurs are the only people that are concerned about [laughs] piracy literally. The only people that are concerned about thievery.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** None of — the rest of us don’t care. Fake production company name, all production company names are fake. They are as fake as, I don’t know, Ray Morton’s expertise. It’s just because you’re saying you’re an expert, you’re an expert. They’re saying they’re a production company, they’re a production company. I don’t care. If it’s a good script, what do I care?

**John:** Yeah, you don’t care. And the only reason why I say I basically agree with this is because if I see the WGA registration number or that goofy production company name, it’s just the first impression. It’s just the first impression like, “Oh, oh, this might be one of the scripts of a person who doesn’t know what they’re doing.” So it’s useful to not have that there because I don’t have any negative thing as I turn to page one.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it is true. Like if you don’t want people to know that you are an outsider, don’t put that. That’s just a fact. If you put your WGA registration thing on, you’re an outsider.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** On the other hand, my guess is people will know you’re an outsider anyway because they won’t know who you are.

**John:** The first page contains a lot of white space. If I open up a script and I’m confronted with big blocks of uninterrupted type, I know immediately that the piece is overwritten, that the author has employed excessively flowery literary style and action lines and/or that he/she has incorporated lots of unfilmable material. Craig, what’s your opinion?

**Craig:** Yes, it is true that if you see big blocks of uninterrupted type that the first page is going to be hard to read which is certainly not what you want. You want people to feel easy reading it. I know that everybody, myself included, if I have a choice of screenplays to read and the first one is just like, “Whoa, lots of text,” and the second one is, “Ah, nice and airy,” I’ll go for the airy one. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to read the other one, especially if it’s —

**John:** It means you’re lazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m lazy. Like every human, I am essentially lazy. I don’t agree with these conclusions. When I open up a script and I’m confronted with big blocks of uninterrupted type before I draw any conclusion, I only make one — I know one thing only, for sure. And that is that this person could use their return key more frequently. That’s all I know. The rest of this may be true, may not.

**John:** Yeah. I know who the protagonist is by page five.

**Craig:** Unless you’re Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo and you’ve written The Godfather again or maybe you wrote Star Wars.

**John:** The premise is clearly established by page 10.

**Craig:** Unless you’re Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola and you wrote The Godfather again or you wrote Star Wars.

**John:** Something interesting/entertaining happens in the first five pages.

**Craig:** Unless you’re Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo and you wrote The Godfather again —

**John:** No, I would basically stand up for him here. I think the overall point is that if by page five nothing interesting has happened, I’m going to have a harder time getting to page six.

**Craig:** Well, let’s —

**John:** I mean, that’s human nature.

**Craig:** Okay, but let’s define interesting.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I mean, so —

**John:** Intriguing. It could be, you know, if you don’t have me curious by page five, I’m less likely to want to read page six.

**Craig:** Look, I’m interested in good writing and then I’m interested in interesting things, right? So The Godfather opens with Bonasera who is the undertaker, in a beautifully underlit single, telling a story in broken English about why he’s come to this man for help. And he tells a story.

Now the story I think is very interesting. But nothing’s actually happening. He’s describing something that has happened. We will never meet the person he’s talking about. What has happened to him, not important to the plot of the movie, particularly at all. He is not a secondary character. He’s like a quadrary character if.

And what he’s describing will contain no stakes in and of itself. It is interesting because it’s an interesting story and then it brings out this interesting relationship with a character who is also not the protagonist of the movie. Point being that this is the dumbest thing to say if you’re a so-called screenplay expert. What you’re really saying is be good. Yeah, thanks, we know.

By the way, how about this? Something interesting or entertaining should happen on every page.

**John:** The first 10 pages contains plenty of action. By action, I mean dramatic action, stuff happening. Not just car chases, although car chases are fine, too.

**Craig:** Okay. So unless you’re Francis Ford Coppola [laughs] and Mario Puzo and you wrote The Godfather because it’s a guy telling a story.

**John:** Or it’s Harry Met Sally.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s not action, per se.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s just, eh.

**John:** Number eight. I can tell what’s going on.

**Craig:** Oh, well —

**John:** I’m sympathetic here. As we talked about pages we’ve read this last week, I had a hard time understanding what was going on. And that can be frustrating, like literally understanding what it is I’m seeing on screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if what the person’s describing is not visualizable, sure. However, if what the person is describing makes no sense to me at the moment, we talk about grace period all the time, right?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** So like I didn’t understand what was going on in The Matrix for the first five minutes. Why was he — who’s talking about the Matrix? Who’s Morpheus? What the — what?

**John:** What? What?

**Craig:** Why is she whispering in his ear? Who’s that lady running from? Who are those guys in the suits? Why are they different from the police? How did she jump across the thing? A million questions, right? I love that.

**John:** Yeah, the dialogue is short and to the point. There’s nothing worse than opening a screenplay and getting faced with a single speech that goes on for a page or two or five.

**Craig:** Unless you’re Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola and you’ve written The Godfather, again.

**John:** Well, also, there’s nothing worse, like literally, nothing is worse? Like it’s worse than Hitler?

**Craig:** And there’s nothing worse. There’s something worse.

**John:** That’s the worst thing that happened to mankind.

**Craig:** Here’s something worse. You open the screenplay and it’s not a screenplay at all, it’s actually like a fake screenplay and inside there’s a little indentation. And in the indentation is anthrax.

**John:** Yeah. Or it’s just a single note saying like we’ve kidnapped your wife and family.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. Or you open it up and it’s some kind of amazing existential mirror and through that mirror you realize that you’ve been living in — it’s a fake world, everyone’s been putting on a play, you don’t actually exist.

**John:** Yeah. That’s actually the line I added to the script or to the page. And in between, is that was we’ve kidnapped your wife and family.

**Craig:** This guy, I swear to God, I wish I could send this guy back to the ’70s so that he could advise Puzo and Coppola on that terrible, terrible script they wrote.

**John:** Well, one of the things he might help with is the script doesn’t begin with a flashback.

**Craig:** Yeah. Except that it kind of does because this guy is talking about something that happened.

**John:** Yeah, it is. It’s basically a flashback.

**Craig:** It’s like amazing how bad this guy is at his “job.”

**John:** There are no camera directions, shot descriptions and editing instructions.

**Craig:** Oh, unless you’re Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola.

**John:** There are no coffins. I once received a vampire script packaged in a miniature coffin, complete with the screenplay’s title on the lid and a spring-lidded bash positioned that would jump out when the coffin was opened.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay.

**John:** I fully agree with him. Do not send gimmickry trash along with your script.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Send your script.

**Craig:** Sure. I can’t imagine this is a common thing. But yeah, sure, thanks for that Ray, you nailed it. Can I just say? Look —

**John:** You absolutely may say.

**Craig:** I don’t mean to beat up on this dude specifically. But let’s say that I were a con artist by constitution. I’m a charlatan. I flit around from con to con looking for ways to bill people out of their money. And my current scam is dried up, I’m looking for a new one.

What I’m looking for is a situation where a lot of people want access to something, but don’t have it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that thing that they want access to is behind a curtain. So I can tell them I’ve been behind the curtain. And if they give me money, I’ll tell them what’s behind the curtain so that they can go behind the curtain. And they’ll never know if I’m telling the truth of not.

And what’s so amazing about all these people is that they never contradict each other. And they never contradict each other because they literally do not have the vocabulary to contradict each other because they, unlike you or me, haven’t been behind the curtain in any real substantive way. So they just write these baloney things and they create this stack of them, this massive whirling stack so that they can basically get people to pay them 200 bucks at a time for information that I have to tell you all is not worth it at all. Stop paying these people. Stop it. Stop it.

**John:** As you were talking, I was thinking about like what other industries have similar kinds of things and clearly the financial industry in general, like investments and stock market. Real estate has a very specific thing because there’s all these little esoteric terms and you feel like, “Oh, this is how you’re going to do it. This is the churn, how you’re going to do it.”

**Craig:** Medicine.

**John:** Medicine, absolutely.

**Craig:** Always, yeah. Because people don’t understand medicine, they don’t understand finance, they don’t understand real estate. And somebody comes along and says, “I’m going to give you the secrets that all those swells are using. And because, by the way, they’re only successful because they know the secrets. And I’m going to share them with you. How about exercise? Same thing, exercise.

**John:** Oh yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s just like every single one of these things has the same deal. And there’s no way for somebody who is ignorant to question what they’re saying because they’re ignorant. That’s the scam.

**John:** Well, but the thing is you have to recognize, you know, within your own ignorance that there is very likely no correct answer. That’s the hard thing to sort of accept is that there may not be a way to do that. So, you know, as we get questions about like, “Well, how do I break in? Or how do I break back in?” Or how to all that stuff?

Part of my frustration, and I suspect you share it too, is that like, there is no answer. There’s no one answer for like how you and me everyone else “broke in.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s no answers for how it’s going to work for you. It’s just like it’s just a bunch of stuff happens and suddenly you are being employed to do this thing that you really wanted to do. But I can’t tell you why it happens for some people and doesn’t happen for other people. There’s no proper answer.

**Craig:** There is no proper answer. Frankly, the vocabulary that has been defined by the con artistry industry, “breaking in,” there’s no breaking in. Sorry. I mean we just talked — did we talk about the case of the screenwriter who ended up living in his car?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean he broke in and then he was in his car. There’s no breaking in. There are these interesting dribs and drabs and suddenly one day you look in the mirror and go, “Am I screenwriter now? I can’t tell, I think I am. I guess I’ll just keep trying to do it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All the things that they’re promising you, rules don’t exist. Breaking in doesn’t exist. Getting rich quick doesn’t exist. Things that you should or shouldn’t do, they don’t exist.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And if they did, trust me when I tell you, John and I, I like to think of you and I like as Penn & Teller a little bit. Although, we both talk.

**John:** And we don’t do magic.

**Craig:** And we don’t do magic. But Penn & Teller were always amazing about saying, “We’re going to dispel the cheesy fake nonsense around magic,” or all those magicians that walk around. I mean this was really started by James Randi who’s one of my personal heroes. James Randi was a magician and he would do things like cold readings as part of his act and people would believe it.

And part of the reason they would believe it is because magicians have always done that thing that Doug Henning would say, “It’s an allusion, it’s a World of Magic. I come from.” No, you’re not. You’re doing tricks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And Penn & Teller always said, “No, no, no, there’s no magic. Trust me when we tell you this. We’re doing tricks. And in fact, we’re going to show you how we do some of them and that’s — and then we’re going to do more and still seem like magic and that’s the real fun of it.”

**John:** Yeah, so classically Penn & Teller like it’s done with string. And so they talk you through the whole thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s like, “Oh, and it’s done with string.”

**Craig:** And then sometimes they’ll do, they did the whole ball and cup thing once with clear cups. And it was still amazing how complicated the whole thing was. You and I, I feel are like that. If we found something, anything that we thought would help everybody that was a magic bullet, we would rush to the microphone and tell you, “We assure you.” But there is nothing. I say this not out of arrogance, but just out of fact, because of the amount of time that you and I have been doing this professionally. Ray Morton, whoever he is, could not possibly know anything more about this than we do. It’s not possible. It’s not possible.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t ascribe — actually, I want to be clear. I don’t ascribe any negative motivation to Ray Morton. I think he genuinely is trying to help people.

**Craig:** It’s possible.

**John:** I want to say that. And I think he’s also noticing patterns in his own response to things. And I think those are valid personal experiences. The frustration I have is that in observing his own personal reactions to things, then trying to go to the next step and codify these out as like these are things, prohibitions of things you should never do. And I think that is incorrect.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean look, you’re right. I cannot ascribe con artistry as a motivation to Ray. I don’t know him. And I can never say what’s in someone’s heart. That said, you and I do not charge for this and he charges for what he does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he writes these things in Script Magazine which has their marketing deal with Final Draft. There’s money involved. And when there’s money involved just really remember my golden rule, screenwriting costs nothing. Nothing. It is free. Don’t pay money.

**John:** Don’t pay money. Which is a great segue to the next thing I want to talk about which is sort of the future and sort of like as we sort of wrap up this midseason finale and look forward to the second half of the season and sort of what is going on ahead. There’s things that you and I need to figure out and sort of our listeners need to figure out.
One of the things that came up was —

**Craig:** Am I getting fired? It sounds like I’m getting fired. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, I’d like you on the phone at 3pm because we have some things to talk through.

**Craig:** And HR will be there.

**John:** So our podcast is like really successful, which is just terrific. We have like a lot of listeners. We have like so many listeners that by most metrics, we’re in the top 1% or 2% of all podcasts out there.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Which is just crazy.

**Craig:** How many listeners do we have? Are you allowed to say that?

**John:** Oh yeah. We have 60,000 listeners a week, which is a lot.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s great. So that’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Oh now, I’m scared. You should have never told me that.

**John:** Well yeah, don’t worry about it.

**Craig:** You should have told me 60.

**John:** We have 60 listeners a week, we count them off.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So we have Malcolm and we have Aline. And we have Rian Johnson sometimes. And Kelly when she’s in town. So we have a great number of listeners and fantastic listeners and we love them all. So one of things unusual about our show versus other shows is we’re like kind of the only show in that group of things that doesn’t have ads. And I kind of enjoy not having ads. But you and I have both talked about like, “Well, should we do ads? And what would be that like? And would it ruin the show?” And I honestly don’t know. And we don’t know what that would be like if we do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. We had a good conversation about it. And, you know, my feeling — I have sort of competing feelings on this. I mean on the one hand, I am, you know, like you I really love the fact that we are essentially editorially as pure as the undriven snow. No, sorry, the driven snow because I used to think the driven snow was that a car had driven through it, but it means the wind has moved around. So we’re as pure as the driven snow.

However, I’m also really aware that you and your staff do all this work that I don’t do. Now granted they are supported by our premium subscribers.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And things like we make a little bit of money on the t-shirt sales. When we say we make money, we actually don’t make money. Correct me if I’m wrong, we are still losing money.

**John:** We still lose money. So we still, you know, through the premium subscribers, through t-shirts and stuff like that, we make enough money to pay for Matthew who cuts the show and bless you Matthew for cutting the show.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And for sort of the basic keeping the lights on stuff. We don’t actually make enough money to pay for Stuart. But Stuart is my assistant normally so like, you know, he has to be sitting at a desk doing some things anyway.

**Craig:** Right. But what about like the hosting?

**John:** Hosting is cheaper than it used to be.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So again, it’s the economies of scale. So we’re much closer to breaking even. So it’s a question of, though, of whether we should just stay and stop at that point or whether we should do the, you know, the Mail Chimp sponsor at the start of the show and at the end of the show, which sort of all the other podcasts do.

And so I don’t honestly have the great answer for that because I don’t want to change the show in any way that’s sort of detrimental to the show. I don’t want to do something stupid. Either to do it or not to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean this is always the dangerous time when you fix what isn’t broken. But I mean look, I think, I’m just going to give you, ‘m going to give you my opinions like I’m a listener because and in a sense I really am kind of a listener because you really, I mean, people need to know that John and his crew over there do everything. I show up and I talk. I hate the idea of losing money consistently only because it ultimately becomes a strain on you and me and that just seems crazy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So at the very least, breaking even sounds good. There are a lot of charities that you and I support, not only writing charities but just, you know, off the top of my head, I support three different educational charities. I support a bunch of medical charities.

So if money did come in, I would pledge to people, you just have to take my word for it, I would give it to charity. I wouldn’t keep any extra. Because the thing is you could say, “Well, we just want to make enough to break even,” but there’s no easy way to do that. You get what you get.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I mean on my end, I would kick it over to charity unless it was millions of dollars.

**John:** Millions of dollars. And it’s not millions of dollars yet. But the thing is it’s actually more money than it was like a year ago. And so the thing, because you don’t listen to other podcasts, you’re not sort of aware of like sort of that the advertising universe in that has actually changed to the point where it’s not like, you know, oh someone will give you $100 for a sponsor read. It’s like a lot more money than that.

**Craig:** And we’re the freaks that don’t do it essentially.

**John:** Essentially, we’re the freaks. And maybe it’s great to stay the freaks. And part of the reason I bring this up in this conversation is because I’m really curious what our listeners themselves feel like about this. And so we always invite you to write into to ask@johnaugust.com or which I thing I always forget we have, what we actually have is a Facebook page.

And so if you actually go to Facebook/scriptnotes, there’s a whole page of Scriptnotes stuff. And no one ever comments on it because we never mention it. But maybe on the link for this episode, basically click on this episode, leave a comment. Just tell us what you actually think because I’m really of two very different minds about what should happen with the idea of advertising on the show and sort of whether it’s a good thing or bad thing for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think a lot of the bigger podcasts also are part of networks and we’re not.

**John:** We’re not.

**Craig:** We are floating alone. So it’s actually, look, on the plus side, it’s pretty amazing that we have this kind of listenership for whom we are truly grateful without the benefit of any promotion, any money coming in, any network, anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we want to do right by people. We don’t want to screw people up. But on the other end, I don’t want to like have to write a check for the rest of my life for this thing either.

**John:** Yeah. The second thing I want to bring up is we floated this idea of, you know, we always do the Three Page Challenges and it’s great to look at the first three pages of a script. But it would actually really useful to look at like a whole script and have an episode where we could take a look at an entire script from something.

But we’re not quite sure how to do that because to sort of open up the flood gates, it’s just like terrifying.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** So I would invite our listeners to absolutely never send us your script. But maybe provide some suggestions for ways in which we could get a script that we could actually all look at. And so perhaps it is a Black List script or perhaps it is some other script that is chosen by some other means to do it.

We had floated this idea of like, “Oh maybe we’ll only take a list from our premium subscribers,” and that also felt weird like you’re paying for access. So I’m not sure what the answer is to that. Although, I would say I think it would really helpful for us to be able to look at a whole script for an episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, I love the idea of giving the subscribers a little something special. Maybe we do like one week, we do a Three Page Challenge that’s only from them. But we don’t just limit Three Page Challenges to just them, you know?

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** For the whole script, also another possibility is maybe we take one of the three pages that we all, you and I were both really enthusiastic about and go back to that person and say would you like the full post mortem? And maybe we go through that whole script.

**John:** Craig Mazin, that’s a very smart idea.

**Craig:** I’m so smart.

**John:** You’re just so smart. See, you think you don’t do anything for the show, but every once in a while, just randomly you’ll have a really good idea.

**Craig:** I don’t like the backwards nature of that. That was very backhanded. You think you’re stupid and 99% of the time, you’re right.

**John:** Yeah. But really, it’s that 1%.

**Craig:** It’s the 1%.

**John:** Yeah. That 1% really makes it all worthwhile.

**Craig:** I’m incredible.

**John:** Anyway, so if you have thoughts about what we should do with either advertising in the future or whether it’s a great or a terrible idea, let us know about that. And if you have thoughts about sort of how we could do a full script for an episode, give us thoughts about that. Please do not send in your script.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Do not. We will delete immediately.

**Craig:** Yeah, we will delete.

**John:** So you can tweet at me or Craig about those things too. But let’s get to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I have two very short ones. First off is Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which was the Tina Fey/Robert Carlock show which was supposed to be on NBC which is now on Netflix. I watched the entire thing here in my hotel room, all 13 episodes. I just loved it. So I would strongly encourage you, if you we’re a fan of 30 Rock, to watch it. Because it’s a very premisey pilot. And so you might watch the pilot and go like, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s going to sustain.” But then you’re like, on episode six, you’re like, “This is just delightful.”

**Craig:** Yeah, 30 Rock was a really premisey pilot too. And then you’re like, “Yeah, it works.” Ellie Kemper is great. A Princeton graduate by the way.

**John:** Okay. She’s just incredibly talented.

Second thing I want to highlight is this thing called Draftback for Google Docs. It’s this really clever — I think it’s a Google Chrome extension. But essentially, if you ever are writing in Google Docs, it’s actually recording every keystroke. And so it’s fascinating. It’s this little plug-in lets you replay the writing of an entire document. And so you can see like all the edits and all the changes you made and it basically creates a video of you writing the whole thing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So it’s fascinating to sort of see what the writing process looks like for different writers. I think it could also be terrifying if you were not the person who had access to seeing you type it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like it. I want it.

**John:** It’s of those things that is both like fascinating and dangerous and troubling. So I will steer you to that for a demonstration of it, not necessarily encouraging you to use it.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a little scary. I mean it’s very smart, but it’s very scary.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing comes from one of our wonderful Twitter followers. I love this thing, it’s called VeinViewer. So smart. So everybody has had the experience of having their blood drawn or having an IV line put in. And if you’re young, or if you’re in good shape, you’re veins are usually pretty clearly accessible, but in some people they’re not. And if you’re older or overweight or if you’re really pediatric, you know, a lot of times with babies, it’s hard to find veins. So what ends up happening is they stick you a bunch of times, they cause bleeding, it’s a mess, there’s pain involved. Nobody likes that.

So this company, VeinViewer came up with this brilliant idea to basically pick up, to scan your arm or your wrist or your elbow with infrared because, you know, obviously blood is hotter, you know, as it’s moving through than say your skin. So they can essentially map your veins because they’re closer to the skin’s surface and then they project it back right on to your arm.

**John:** Neat.

**Craig:** Yeah, so that whoever is sticking you, they don’t have to go hunting for a vein. They can see exactly where your veins are. It’s so smart. And we’ll throw a link on as well, it’s very, it’s just so cool. I love stuff like that.

**John:** That’s good stuff. Because I have high cholesterol, I have to get blood draws a lot. And so I’ve just learned that like it’s like my left arm, it’s exactly this one vein, they’re like, “Really? That’s going to hurt.” Like, “Yeah, it’s going to hurt, but otherwise you’re going to be poking like 15 times. So just put it in that vein.”

**Craig:** I’ve always had like full big easy pipey veins

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re always thanking me when I go through, they’re like, “Oh, thank you.”

**John:** It’s the umbrage. It’s all the umbrage.

**Craig:** It’s like, yeah, my rage.

**John:** Just pushes it to the surface.

**Craig:** I have rage veins, which is great.

**John:** Hulk.

**Craig:** Yeah, I have rage veins. They’re great. You know, cholesterol, so, I mean not that we have to get into your medical history.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But do you take the Lipitor?

**John:** I do take the Lipitor. I was on a different thing first and now I’m on the Lipitor.

**Craig:** It’s a brilliant medicine.

**John:** Yeah, it’s worked out just great for me. And it was one of the situations where I do eat really quite healthy, but just my family will always have the crazy high —

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just the deal.

**John:** Both good and the bad cholesterol, so —

**Craig:** It’s just the deal. You know what, it’s German.

**John:** It’s strongly German.

**Craig:** It’s sausage blood.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Kristian Gotthelf. Thank you, Kristian, for sending in your outro. If you have an outro for our show that uses the [hums theme], theme music for our show, send it to us. You can send a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a great place to send questions or longer thoughts about what we should do with the future of the show.

On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. On Facebook, we are Facebook.com/scriptnotes. So leave us a comment there. Leave us a comment on iTunes as well. That is where you can find the show. It’s also where you can find the Scriptnotes app. The Scriptnotes app lets you listen to all the back episodes if you’re a premium subscriber. You sign up for premium subscriptions at Scriptnotes.net.

And that is our show which is produced by Stuart Friedel, edited by Matthew Chilelli. And we will be back with the start of our second half of our season.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s just ridiculous.

**John:** Next week. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Weekend Read now has iPad support, iCloud sync and folders](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [Download Courier Prime Sans and Courier Prime Source now](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* [PAX East](http://east.paxsite.com/)
* [If you live in LA, sign up to help us test a new tabletop game on March 23](http://johnaugust.com/game)
* [Scriptnotes, 187: The Coyote Could Stop Any Time](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-coyote-could-stop-any-time)
* [WGAw 2015 Writer Access Project](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=3436)
* [Wiley Vs. Rhodes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ5p9WttVhE) on YouTube
* [Scriptnotes, 186: The Rules (or, the Paradox of the Outlier)](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-rules-or-the-paradox-of-the-outlier)
* [Begging the question](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question) on Wikipedia
* The New York Times on [What’s Wrong With the ‘Blurred Lines’ Copyright Ruling](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/arts/music/whats-wrong-with-the-blurred-lines-copyright-ruling.html?_r=0)
* [12 Signs of a Promising Spec Script](http://www.scriptmag.com/features/meet-the-reader-12-signs-of-promising-spec-script) by Ray Morton
* [Email us at ask@johnaugust.com](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) or [leave us a comment on our Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/scriptnotes?_rdr)
* [Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/80025384?locale=en-US) on Netflix
* FiveThirtyEight on [Draftback for Google Docs](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/watch-me-write-this-article/)
* Laughing Squid on [VeinViewer](http://laughingsquid.com/veinviewer-a-medical-system-that-projects-an-image-of-veins-on-skin-to-help-clinicians-insert-an-iv/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kristian Gotthelf ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-tentpoles-of-2019).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 167 Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, huge news on my side. I am finally buying a new computer.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god. So, are you going to get the 5k iMac?

**John:** I’m going to get the 5k iMac.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** And so I’ve been looking at the same monitor for the last eight years.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Had this monitor for eight years, which is a very long time. And I’ve had different computers that have been driving it, but I’ve always been really far behind because I I’ve always thought like, oh well, there’s going to be the computer that’s just right for it.

So, usually I get castoffs from Ryan Nelson who is a designer who needs a much better computer because he’s doing stuff that needs a good computer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But finally I’ll have a good computer.

**Craig:** So, have you been like on a MacBook and a Cinema Display?

**John:** Yeah, I’ve been on an old MacBook Pro and then a Cinema Display. I have a 30-inch Cinema Display which there is just the one year they made that.

**Craig:** That’s big. Yeah, it’s huge.

**John:** It’s huge, but it’s nice. It’s not especially sharp anymore.

**Craig:** Right. Plus I don’t think it was Thunderbolt and all that stuff.

**John:** No, none of that.

**Craig:** I assume that you updated to Yosemite.

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** As did I. And I’m so far very pleased. But the one thing I noticed is that, so I have the most recent MacBook Pro, and a fairly recent 27-inch Cinema Display, so it is Thunderbolt and all the rest. But it’s not Retina or —

**John:** And you notice it.

**Craig:** Okay, I do notice it. It’s a huge difference.

**John:** Yeah. So the fonts in Yosemite are Helvetica Neue and it looks really good on Retina and looks really not so great on things that aren’t Retina. So, I said that I updated to Yosemite, but I’ve only been using Yosemite in the betas on my 11-inch MacBook Air. And that has a sharp enough screen that it looks pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, not so much here. Which is okay, because I split my time between — usually when I’m on the Cinema Display it’s because I’m writing and Fade In looks very nice on it, although I have noticed that when I export to PDF, and I don’t know if it’s just a function of the way Courier Prime is or all fonts are, but now when I export in PDF on the Cinema Display the printed Courier Prime just doesn’t look very good. It’s like jaggy.

**John:** Well that’s not good.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It should look great. And so —

**Craig:** I know. It’s Yosemite.

**John:** It’s that constant challenge. Trying to balance the representation of what the computer knows the thing looks like to itself and how it’s portraying it on the screen are very difficult things. And that’s why these 5k displays have very custom circuitry to hopefully make things look as good as they possibly can.

**Craig:** Well, the bummer for me is I don’t want to get an iMac. I like being completely mobile. So, what I guess I’m waiting for now and I presume is inevitable is a 5k Cinema Display.

**John:** Yes. And those will happen. The challenge is that the actual bandwidth required to get from your computer to that display is huge. And so even Thunderbolt 2 by itself won’t be able to power that.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** It will have to be a Thunderbolt 3, which doesn’t exist. So, it could be a little while to wait. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** But is 5k equivalent to Retina, or better than Retina?

**John:** They’re calling that Retina. Retina is really just I think a term of art for anything that has dots so small that you could not possibly see them.

**Craig:** Right. And so I don’t even know what the Retina resolution is, but —

**John:** It’s sharper than what you’ve got.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s sharper than what I’ve got on the Cinema Display. But everything looks fantastic on the MacBook Pro screen, which is Retina Display. And by and large I think design wise this is pretty great. I love it.

**John:** Yeah. The MacBooks are fantastic, but I love having a big screen, so I’m looking forward to having this and having a nice sharp display.

**Craig:** Well, congrats.

**John:** Thank you very much. It is my Tesla. So, I’m excited to finally get it.

**Craig:** You know, I am getting the —

**John:** Yes, everyone on the podcast knows that you’re getting the new Tesla. Because you have to be able to accelerate to, what was it, zero to 60 in three seconds or something?

**Craig:** 3.2 seconds.

**John:** That’s just absurd.

**Craig:** That’s super car speed. It’s got 691 horsepower. And I just like the idea that I have that many horses. I’m like a horse magnet.

**John:** I love that we talk about things in horsepower.

**Craig:** Well, of course we do.

**John:** Of course we do.

**Craig:** Everything should be in terms of horsepower. Like computers we shouldn’t talk about gigahertz or processing or clock speed. We should just talk about how many clerks the computer is duplicating. Like, the clerks from Brazil with the little visors.

**John:** That’s what you need.

**Craig:** Like my current MacBook Pro is four billion clerks.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s good. Today on the podcast we are going to be talking about superhero scheduling and the 31 superhero movies that slated for this next decade, which is absurd. Not even decade, like seven years.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** We’re going to talk about this great article about copyright. We are going to talk about developing a pitch. And we’re going to look at three —

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, god, you’re going to make me never use the word developer again, Craig.

**Craig:** Developers. Developers. Developers.

**John:** Let’s look at synonyms. So, figuring out a pitch. Perfecting it. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Rowing.

**John:** If our listeners have suggestions for words they can use other than develop, so that Craig never does that again —

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers.

**John:** And we’ll be looking at three Three Page Challenges from our listeners.

**Craig:** Do you ever listen, this is going to shock you, but I did listen to a podcast once.

**John:** Oh my gosh. I’m standing up, but still I’m sitting down.

**Craig:** I think it’s called Comedy Bang Bang. It’s the Auckerman, Scott Auckerman, is that right? And they have this ongoing thing, like years ago whenever they started it, whenever somebody would say my — they had a whole thing about how Borat goes “My wife” and now it’s their thing. Whenever somebody is on their show and they happen to mention the phrase “My wife,” one or more of them will just quietly go, “My wife.” And somebody made a super cut of all the times it happened and it’s one of those things like The Simpsons rake gag that just gets funnier and funnier because it never stops.

And I think maybe developers is our “My wife.”

**John:** “My wife.” Either that or it’s “Uh-huh.” My tacit thing. It’s interesting, this last week I was at Singleton and we were talking about podcasts. A lot of people there make podcasts. And we were talking about some people have these long monologues. And it’s that choice of whether you say the Uh-huhs or you just leave it out and just let the person monologue for like five minutes.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And I’ve always done the Uh-huhs because it just makes it clear that I’m actually paying attention and listening.

**Craig:** Have you ever spoken with somebody that does this, they’ll keep saying, “Right, right, right, right,” as you talk?

**John:** So many development executives do that.

**Craig:** Right, right, right. Right.

**John:** Right. I’m checking in with you, yup, I’m with you, I’m with you.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Right. Yeah, and they don’t know they’re doing it. I can tell they don’t know they’re doing it. It’s the weird — and it’s the most annoying thing.

**John:** It’s almost the Tom Cruise like constant eye contact thing, where it’s just like, oh, you’re freaking me out. You’re just too present in this situation.

**Craig:** You’re too present. Exactly. I need you to ignore me just a little bit.

**John:** Just back off just a little bit and then I’m good.

**Craig:** Let your mind wander.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Follow up. This week, and really our next episode, is the Austin Film Festival. So, there’s two things which Scriptnotes listeners may want to participate in. First off, we’re doing a Three Page Challenge, and these entries will all be the second rounders from the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition.

Craig will not be there, but I will be there with Franklin Leonard of the Black List, and Ilyse McKimmie from Sundance Labs. So, they will be up on stage with me. And I picked them because I think they’re going to be great, because they’re reading a lot of scripts and they’re sort of gatekeepers to their respective domains. And I want to talk with them about sort of what they see as they start reading scripts and what their experience is like. And so I think that will be a fun time.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. And, you know, now that you mention it, and I’m so sorry I’m missing it, but for the next time we do something like this together with the Three Page Challenge, we should really think about getting, routinely getting an executive or producer up there, because it is so useful to hear that perspective from them.

**John:** It should be fun, so I’m looking forward to that. That will be Friday at 9am if you’re coming to the Austin Film Festival. It’s an early session.

**Craig:** Early, yes. People will be hung over for that.

**John:** They will be. I will not be.

**Craig:** Yeah you will.

**John:** And then we’re doing Scriptnotes Live on Saturday at 12:30pm. Susannah Grant will be my co-host.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** I’m excited about that.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** And our theme is all about writer-directors. And weirdly like everyone on stage I think will be a writer-director. So, I’ve written-directed, so has Susannah. We’ll have Richard Kelly. We’ll have Peter Gould from Breaking Bad.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** And Cary Fukunaga, just announced.

**Craig:** I mean, how did you? You’re just rubbing my face in it now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Can you please tell Mr. Cary Fukunaga how much of a fan I am?

**John:** He’s a genius. And I actually met him at the Sundance Labs, with Ilyse McKimmie, many years ago when he was doing Sin Nombre. And I didn’t work with him there, but he was clearly one of those, oh, you’re a super talented person. And I’m so happy when my predictions prove correct.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And Peter Gould really is, sometimes TV directors don’t get their due. And he certainly deserves because obviously he was a writer on what I believe is the greatest television show in history, but also a director of that show as well. And you can’t go wrong with Richard Kelly. Please, for those of you at Austin, go see this, if only to look into the unfathomable bottomless cruel eyes of Richard Kelly. Stare into the abyss of Richard Kelly and tell me if it does not stare back into you.

**John:** Indeed. There will also be special guests that I’m not allowed to announce, but I think you will enjoy some of these other people who are going to come to the show. So, please come to that. That’s 12:30 on Saturday at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s a must do. I don’t care what else is going on. If you’re going to Austin and you’re going to be there, and I’m so sorry I won’t be there this time. This time only. I’ll be back next year. But Saturday at 12:30. If you don’t go to this, you’re just dumb.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** So, a little protocol. If you see me at the Austin Film Festival, it is totally fine to say, “Oh, hello, hi.” But know that I may be running from one place to another, so if I am brief with you it’s only generally because I’m trying to move from one facility to another facility and things are sort of spread all out.

But if you do see me, and you see me in a moment where I have some time, I will have on my person this thing called Writer Emergency which is a website you can go to. It’s this thing we’ve been working on for four years. And I actually have a physical thing I can show you. So, if you would like to see it, I will show you this small pack of suggestions that I will be carrying with me. Because we’re sort of beta testing them, so I need to show it to actual writers.

So, if you see me at Austin, I will have it on my person.

**Craig:** I was quite sure that you were going to say if you see me, feel free to talk to me, but do not touch.

**John:** Yeah. Do not touch. Do not touch me. Just maintain a safe distance.

**Craig:** Do not touch John August.

**John:** If you’re wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt, I will probably notice that. So, that’s a thing you might do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My trainer today was wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt. It was the first time I’d seen one in the wild, and I’ve got to say it looked really good. Now, as we’re recording this, Craig, you just said that you have not actually physically gotten yours because you live out in the hinterlands, but everyone else, if by the end of this next week you have not gotten your thing, something is wrong and it’s probably Stuart’s fault. So, you should probably email orders@johnaugust.com and let Stuart figure this out.

**Craig:** Now I’m hoping I don’t get it because I want Stuart to suffer.

**John:** I think we did a really good job shipping everything out. We’ve gotten much better at it. But as we were shipping them out we realized, wow, there is one Highland t-shirt, like one person ordered a small Highland t-shirt, and we were out of small Highland t-shirts. And we realized like after we’d already gone to the post office we put someone who had ordered XXL and we sent them a small.

**Craig:** Ooh, no!

**John:** So, fortunately our wonderful listeners, he emailed us and so we were able to get that t-shirt back and give it to the right person.

**Craig:** Oh good. Good. Good. Good. Because, wearing a too-big t-shirt is perfectly, but a too-small t-shirt.

**John:** That would just not be good. No.

**Craig:** It’s no good. It’s no good. It shows all the soft squishy parts.

**John:** Yeah. Unless you’re wearing Spanx, which is something we learned about from Aline.

**Craig:** Man Spanx.

**John:** Man Spanx. People who may need Man Spanx are all of the actors who are going to be in all the superhero movies that have now been set for the next seven years.

**Craig:** Are you starring in Transition Man? [laughs]

**John:** Oh, I’m Transition Man. That I locked down. But this last week just got crazy. So, I want to just take a minute and talk through all of the superhero movies that are currently on the slate, and then we can talk about the reality here and sort of what’s going to happen.

So, I’m pulling from a list that was at News-a-Rama, but I think these are all sort of officially announced things. For 2015, here are the superhero movies:

May 1 is Avengers: Age of Ultron.

July 17 is Ant-Man.

August 7, the new Fantastic Four that Simon Kinberg is producing. And Simon was a great guest this last week at the WGA.

So, that’s three for 2015.

For 2016 we have Deadpool on February 12.

We have Batman vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice, on March 25.

May 6 we have Captain America 3, which is reportedly Civil War, which is kind of going to be great.

May 27, X-Men: Apocalypse, also Simon Kinberg.

July 8 is an Untitled Marvel film unofficially widely believed to be Doctor Strange.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** August 5 is Suicide Squad, which is a Warner’s project and DC project.

November 11, Sinister Six, from Sony, which I think is Drew Goddard if I’m correct. I hope I’m not wrong.

So, that was, I’m counting up here as we do this, that was seven movies for 2016. Seven superhero movies.

**Craig:** Seven superhero movies in 2016.

**John:** But, 2017, not to be outdone.

**Craig:** Surely there won’t be anymore.

**John:** Oh, there are a few more.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** March 3 of 2017, the Untitled Wolverine sequel.

May 5 is an Untitled Marvel Film.

June 23 is the Wonder Woman movie.

July 14 is the Fantastic Four 2.

July 28 is Guardians —

**Craig:** Wait, they already know they’re doing a 2?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They don’t even care if number one does well. They’re like, screw it, we’re doing 2. I love it.

John. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 on July 28.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** November 3, another Untitled Marvel film.

**Craig:** They should just keep that title. It’s good.

**John:** Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. Just say like the Marvel Movie.

**Craig:** It’s just Marvel. Just show up.

**John:** Marvel. Show up.

November 17, Justice League, Part 1.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Which I think is potentially the expansion upon whatever happens in the Batman vs. Superman.

There are two unspecified in 2017. One is a Sony female Spider-Man spin-off. And also a Sony Venom: Carnage Spider-Man spin-off.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, I’m going to quickly count this. 10. I’m counting ten for 2017.

**Craig:** Great. Yeah. More.

**John:** Ten superhero movies, not too much.

**Craig:** More.

**John:** Yeah. Then, 2018: March 23 of 2018, The Flash.

**Craig:** Hold on a second. This can’t — 2018, they’re just guessing.

**John:** Oh, it’s going to get better than this. Just wait.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, The Flash, March 23.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** May 4 is an untitled Marvel film.

July 6 is an untitled Marvel film.

July 13 is an untitled Fox Mystery Marvel film.

**Craig:** Uh…all right.

**John:** So, I think, I’m talking that to be —

**Craig:** Like an X-Men sort of thing?

**John:** Yeah, something that is in the canon of the stuff that Fox owns would be part of it.

**Craig:** Right. Which will be the X-Men vs. Fantastic Four.

**John:** Oh, that would be great.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable.

**John:** Yeah, they have to.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ugh.

**John:** July 27 is Aquaman.

**Craig:** Oh, finally.

**John:** Jason Momoa.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, I thought it was what’s his face? [laughs] I thought it was the guy from Entourage. Okay.

**John:** No. [laughs] Yeah, it’s James Cameron finally got around to making the Aquaman film.

**Craig:** Finally got around to making, okay.

**John:** November 2, an untitled Marvel film. I think they’re cheating. I think you’ve got to pick some titles. But, all right.

Unspecified date for the Amazing Spider-Man 3.

**Craig:** Oh good. Is that a reboot of the last Amazing Spider-Man? Oh, no, there’s only been two. Okay.

**John:** So, I take all the Sony things with like a huge grain of salt, because who knows what they’re actually going to do because the Spider-Man franchise is in transition. But do I believe that they will make some movies? I certainly do.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, back to a little bit of reason, there’s only seven movies, superhero movies, slated for 2018 right now.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** This is 2014 though still we’re in right now?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Okay. 2019, this is why I wanted to do the list. April 5: Shazam. So, I’m so excited that they’re going to do Shazam in 2019 because back in 2007 when I wrote the Shazam movie, I remember having to scramble because Warners was like on my ass about delivering because they wanted to get in production and do budgets. So, I’m just really glad that I sort of canceled a vacation back in 2007, so 12 years later —

**Craig:** Well, they had to get ready for 2019.

**John:** So, this is supposed to have the Rock, Dwayne Johnson, as Black Adam, which is perfect casting and was also perfect casting 12 years ago when we started this process.

**Craig:** Now, let me ask you something. Is this still your script?

**John:** It’s still my chain of existence. It’s still the continuous development on the same project.

**Craig:** But they’re not, in other words, they haven’t just been sitting with your script for 12 years? [laughs]

**John:** No, I think other people have clearly come on and done this. And this was Pete Segal when I was doing this, who is clearly not going to be directing this now. But it is just bizarre.

**Craig:** That’s insane. Wow.

**John:** May 3 is another untitled Marvel film.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** June 14, Justice League, Part 2.

**Craig:** Yeah, because, you know.

**John:** Because.

**Craig:** Because.

**John:** 2020 is Cyborg.

**Craig:** Oh, good, 2020. Are we even alive?

**John:** It’s really a strong prediction of like what will the world be like in 2020. That is six years from now.

**Craig:** I mean, we all know that phones will be implanted in our ears.

**John:** So, April 3 is Cyborg.

**Craig:** Oh good, Cyborg. Everyone has been begging for that.

**John:** Yeah. And then June 19 is Green Lantern.

**Craig:** Worked well the first time, let’s do it again. [laughs]

**John:** It did! You know what? I think part of the lesson of Green Lantern is that you just jam a movie into existence, it’s going to work.

**Craig:** So, listen.

**John:** 31 movies! 31 movies stretching in to 2020.

**Craig:** First of all, this list is highly suspect once you get past 2017. What happens is the real estate during the prime movie months of essentially March through July, really March through June is truly the big months now, because summer has sort of shifted up, it’s so treacherous to release a big movie because you’re always worried that you’re going to go up against two other huge movies. So, people start squatting on these dates. A lot of this is just nonsense. It’s nonsense posturing, and squatting, and some of these movies will move.

So, for instance, when Marvel says, look, on May 4, which is a huge weekend, in 2018 we’re putting a movie out. What they’re really saying is everybody be worried about us, but maybe they will, maybe they won’t. You never know.

A couple of things come to mind when I hear this crazy long list. One, you know, movie studios are businesses and they’re giving people what they want. People keep going to these movies, so why not? And a lot of them are good.

But, two, and this is really the big one, this is the Marvelization of Hollywood and I’m not sure that other people really are doing it right. Marvel is doing it right. And Marvel has a massive catalog. Massive. The Marvel universe has always been famous for having thousands of characters that are all interrelated in this huge soap opera universe. It’s very Game of Thrones in that way.

So much so that they can even, for instance, Nicole Perlman as we had on our show, picks an obscure comic out of a pile and lo and behold it’s now Guardians of the Galaxy and it’s a franchise.

DC never really had that depth. You can see them trying, because they’re colliding Batman and Superman the way that Avengers collided Iron Man with Hulk and so on and so forth. So, they’re trying, and I get that. And they should, frankly, Marvel should roll out things Dr. Strange and so on. I’m sure they’ll do very well.

Where we start to get to the Justice League I begin to worry because I’m not sure that DC really does have the depth there character wise, interesting character wise. Frankly, even Marvel was struggling a little bit. I mean, no offense to Jeremy Renner or Joss Whedon, who did as good as they could do with Hawkeye, but he’s just — he shoots arrows. [laughs] It’s not really, I mean Olympians do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, it’s starting to get a little thin out there. Certainly by the time we get to Aquaman, your eyes should be rolling a little bit. Shazam, I don’t, I remember —

**John:** Shazam I think, I mean, I will defend Shazam because I wrote Shazam. Shazam is actually a great idea for a movie, because it’s big with super powers.

**Craig:** Right. The little boy can say Shazam and he becomes awesome.

**John:** Absolutely. So, it has the potential for both big superhero movie and sort of comedy. It has the ability to sort of — that wish fulfillment comedy aspect of it. But this is going to end in tears.

**Craig:** I mean, the problem is you and I remember Shazam because there was a television show when we were kids. It was, do you remember, it was paired with Isis.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not the beheading ISIS, but the —

**John:** It was the Shazam/Isis Power Hour. And I remember as a person who was excited to see Isis, there were only like three episodes of Isis, so it was almost always Shazam.

**Craig:** I know. And I loved Isis, too. My sister and I were —

**John:** It’s the power of the pyramid. Come on.

**Craig:** It’s the power of the pyramid. And I thought she was hot. I really liked Shazam and Isis. I liked Isis more. But I don’t think Shazam is particularly — and look, it doesn’t have the cool factor that Guardians of the Galaxy had because the whole idea was that they were kind of bad ass misfits, which is always fun. So, I’m just wondering if that property is going to appeal to a 17-year-old male.

**John:** I should step back and make clear that I don’t that Shazam is actually the problem. I think Shazam independent of all this stuff could be a huge success because I think it could actually do that crossover kind of — you can take seven year olds to it and make it feel like a good family movie, but I think the overall — you were worried about that thinness of the character slates. I just think the real problem here is the thickness.

I think you are painting, there’s just too many superheroes trying to jockey for attention. And people will get sick of it.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, they haven’t yet. They haven’t yet. So, and some of these things we know will do great. I mean, we know that Batman vs. Superman will be a huge movie. I would like to see that. That sounds like fun.

Captain America is sort of on its, perfectly well on its own steam. It’s a good series. I like that they’re calling it maybe Civil War because hopefully the villain this time will be dysentery.

**John:** You know that the actual premise is essentially Captain America vs. Tony Stark.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought it was going to be more just like, oh, gang green set in and we’re running short on black powder.

**John:** Oh, see that would be really good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A little north, a little south.

**Craig:** Right. Oh, oh, we need to amputate. Here, drink this bathtub hooch while I saw your leg off. [laughs] That I would go see.

**John:** Now, Craig, indulge me in a thought experiment because let’s take, let’s step aside and like not look at this as superhero movies, but let’s just say there’s some other genre that was tremendously successful. And so let’s say westerns are the tremendous success, but westerns are really, really expensive.

My worry is that by sinking all of our time and energy into making these incredibly expensive westerns, we are going to be screwed when westerns stop working. Also, we’re limited in our ability to make other kinds of movies, or other kinds of big movies because we’re spending all of our capital making these giant westerns.

**Craig:** I will give you a rosier point of view on it. Most of this stuff is a guaranteed hit. Yes, at some point the bubble will burst, but when the bubble bursts and the sixth Spider-Man movie fails to turn a profit, that’s okay. It will be absorbed by the five that came before it. And the same for all of the Marvel films and all of the — I mean, good, another Wolverine. Thank god, right?

So, the truth is these are the safest bets Hollywood has. And, yes, they cost a lot, but they also know that they’re going to generate enormous profits because they have so far. And they have to the extent that when it finally ends they’ll be okay anyway.

And, I would argue that the profits that these movies generate are essentially what is funding every other movie they make, whether those movies are big or small. These are the things that allow them to take a little tiny bit of risk here and there. It’s not like what they used to take, but without these, I’m not sure they would be in the movie business at all. That’s the scary part.

**John:** So, they’re not actually as guaranteed though. If you look at the ones that have not worked, there are some notable things you can single out. Green Lantern did not work. This last Spider-Man did not work to the degree that they needed it to work in order for it to propel the franchise forward. So, you can’t say that they’re a lock. And, you know, I’m so glad that Guardians of the Galaxy turned out so well, but as you look at that movie, a 20% worse version of Guardians of the Galaxy would have been a disaster. It was one of those things that had to be executed perfectly.

**Craig:** That’s true. And I’m not saying that they bat a thousand. I guess what I’m saying is that if Green Lantern fails, that’s a failed movie. If Green Lantern succeeds, it’s five hits. And so, for instance, Fantastic Four, the first Fantastic Four movie just didn’t really click.

So, what are they doing? They go back to the drawing board and they’re like, no, no, no, we can make this work and we’re going to put Kinberg on it. It’s going to be a different kind of vibe. And my guess is it will work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re learning how to make these better. And there are two twin pillars of superhero success. No, three. Three triple pillars of superhero success.

There’s what Bryan Singer actually deserves a ton of credit, I think —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** For kicking this thing off with X-Men. And to me those were the first superhero movies that got out of pure cheese mode and really went great. Obviously you’ve got to give Nolan a ton of credit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Nolan, however, they’ve tried to Nolan other movies. Doesn’t work as well because Batman is perfect for Nolan. Batman is unique. Really no one else is like him tonally. And then you’ve got to look at what Whedon in collaboration with Kevin Feige at Marvel has done. Right?

So, they’re all learning from each other.

**John:** I would say Whedon is fantastic, but I would say the arc of Iron Man into The Avengers is already sort of well, you know, you make The Avengers because you actually already made Iron Man.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, Kevin Feige deserves — Kevin Feige may be the greatest movie business genius in the last, well frankly since I’ve been working in the business.

**John:** I would give the Pixar folks a bit of that, too.

**Craig:** Pixar folks are creative geniuses who are business successful because they’re so brilliant creatively. Kevin Feige doesn’t write and he doesn’t direct.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** He’s like, you know, you have to go all the way back to like, I don’t know, Thalberg, and guys like that to find these really powerful, very smart guys that actually made like a good creator-like impact on the movie business. He may be our generation’s, I don’t know, whatever you want to call it, Zanuck or Thalberg. One of those guys.

**John:** Yeah. Okay.

**Craig:** Look, I’m not a huge superhero movie fan the way that a lot of other people are, but I pick and choose ones I like. Business wise I think this actually generates money for them to make other kinds of movies. They do make other kinds of movies. Without them I worry that movie studios just start to stop down to more of a Disney-like existence of two or three movies a year.

**John:** So, let’s take a look at the range of studios here and sort of who’s not making them and who might be able to prosper by just doing something else. So, Sony is trying to do things in the Spider-Man universe. And so female Spider-Man, Venom, that kind of stuff. Sinister Six is theirs.

You have Fox with X-Men and Fantastic Four, which love them, grateful for that.

Over at Warners you have this whole DC universe that they’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** At Disney you have the whole Marvel universe of things they’re trying to do. That leaves Universal without a superhero —

**Craig:** Well, but they’re trying. And you know what they’re trying with.

**John:** With the Monsters.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s not the same.

**John:** And maybe that will work that it’s not the same.

**Craig:** Because it’s not the same. And I know that Chris Morgan and Alex Kurtzman are shepherding that. And that’s obviously something that they are well aware they don’t have. And it’s interesting that all the studios essentially are saying how can we Marvelize stuff. How can we Marvelize — let’s just look through our catalog. Find intellectual property with multiple characters in it and then Avengerize it. They’re all doing it right now.

**John:** And then Paramount. So, Paramount has Star Trek. I’m trying to think what else they have that is I that vein?

**Craig:** Well, they had Iron Man but they’ve lost it. Is that the idea?

**John:** Or Dare Devil, right?

**Craig:** Dare Devil I thought was —

**John:** Oh, Iron Man was always Marvel, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** No, Iron Man was Paramount.

**John:** It was Paramount, but I think maybe they still have some distribution rights on it, but it’s back now in Disney’s hand I think.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, they had it and it’s gone. I think Paramount doesn’t have any. They have Transformers. Well, Transformers are kind of theirs.

**John:** Yeah, that’s at DreamWorks/Paramount, right? Or is it Amblin/Paramount? It’s all confusing.

So, yeah, the challenge is, and maybe the opportunity is if you are not in that business, maybe you stay out of that business and find ways to thrive in some other —

**Craig:** Yeah, like you know Lions Gate’s superhero franchise?

**John:** Twilight.

**Craig:** Tyler Perry.

**John:** Oh, that’s true. But they also had Twilight. They also had —

**Craig:** Well, Twilight and Hunger Games are there, but they’re limited. They’re like Harry Potter. They end because the books end. I mean, obviously you can see now that Harry Potter is not ending.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** When you talk about like a character that can renew over and over and you can just making new episodes with that character, Tyler Perry, Madea. Madea is their superhero.

**John:** Madea is the superhero. Speaking of Tyler Perry, did you end up finally seeing Gone Girl?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, you didn’t.

**Craig:** No. But I’m gonna.

**John:** You’re gonna. You’re gonna sometime. Because then we’ll have a special podcast just about that.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yay. Anything more on superheroes before we move on to the next topic?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Next topic. Copyright. And so copyright is fundamental to the things that we do. There was a good article this last week by Louis Menand — who knows how he chooses to pronounce his name — but it was in The New Yorker. It was an article called Copywrong. And there will be a link to it in the show notes.

And I thought it was an interesting assessment of where we’re at now and really how we got to this place. And his thesis is that, I’m just taking a thesis from other folks, but is that copyright was established with this idea that you want things to be protected for a short time, but ultimately fall into public usage so that everyone can benefit from them. And that has been changed and altered in a way that is sort of the opposite of that. And so it’s holding stuff to the individual, to the creator of things for such a long time that things never fall into the public use.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, it is an interesting article. I mean, the root of copyright ultimately was to encourage works for the public benefit. The idea being if you could give creators some exclusive right to their work for some period of time, it would be enough of an incentive for them to then do those things so that they could eventually move into the public domain for everyone’s use, a bit like the way that drug companies are allowed to own their drugs for awhile and then it becomes a generic.

What’s happened since then is a collision of two different forces, both of which I don’t think the initial copyright theorists could have foreseen. One was the rise of corporate intellectual property. And the other is the information revolution and the prevalence of cheap, easy, quick piracy.

So, on the one side we have companies that have used their influence over the legislature to extend copyright far beyond what it was initially intended to be, sometimes out of pure greed, a lot of times out of a kind of cultural panic that Mickey Mouse will be in the public domain and that doesn’t seem right. But really ultimately it’s about protecting the pockets of the people who pay for and distribute intellectual property.

And for us, of course, that interest is aligned with ours in a purely selfish way because that’s what puts money in our pockets.

**John:** Yeah, I want to step back to that idea of the public benefit because it is in the public benefit for people to write things, to create things because that is moving culture forward, it is dissemination of ideas. And so the idea behind public benefit in those initial years is really valid, because you want people to be incentivized to make things and share things and publish things so that it can enrich sort of everyone.

And so it’s in people’s public benefit for those creators to be able to charge for things and be paid. That makes sense.

The question becomes how many years after that is it more than public benefit for people to be able to use and share and reuse and do new things with that material. And originally it was like 17 years and it’s now up to 95 years because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act. And the issue that’s come up, and Howard Rodman from the WGA has actually sent a survey around asking us about things, like have you ever encountered dead books. And by dead books it’s meaning like books that you would love to adapt or love to do something with, but it’s impossible to figure out who actually owns this. Sometimes things are copyrighted, but there’s no actual way to find out who it is.

**Craig:** They’re called orphans.

**John:** You can’t publish it. They’re orphans. And that is a situation that has come about almost uniquely because of these extensions of the copyright term is that normally these things should have easily clearly fallen into public domain and yet they are not.

**Craig:** In fact, the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild have worked together to petition Congress to assign the copyright to orphaned movies to the writers and directors of those movies, which is not the same thing as saying put it in the public domain, but rather, no, no, we should have — keep the copyright, but we should get it. Copyright can last a very long time, particularly when it’s framed as a certain amount of time after the death of the author.

For instance, the movie that I’m writing right now is inspired by the general genre of Agatha Christie’s works. I mean, it’s based on a different book entirely, but the idea is that it’s an Agatha Christie style whodunit. There are only two Agatha Christie books in the public domain, the very first two books she wrote. And they date back to the ’20s, I believe. So, you could see how long copyright lasts.

Now, on the other side of the equation, you have this fact that the vast majority of intellectual property that is downloaded over the internet is pirated. The vast majority.

**John:** Okay. The only thing I’ll push back on that is that pirated in terms of this is a completed work of art and you are downloading the whole thing and using it. The challenge is like when you’re using a snippet of it, something that should be fair use, something that should be I am using this in order to make a statement on it, or to do something with it that is useful new work, it becomes very difficult to know whether that is a legal use or an illegal use.

And companies are, especially now in the age of corporate copyright, companies are extraordinarily aggressive at stomping down on anything they perceive could be an infringement on their copyright. So, it creates this chilling effect that new work is not happening because you are terrified that someone is going to come after you.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll push back on that a little bit. Fair use is really about use. It’s about the duplication or sampling of the republication of. But it’s not about the purchasing of. So, I can make a fair use argument that I’m allowed to put a clip from The Dark Knight on my website.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But what I can’t make is a fair use argument that I’m allowed to download The Dark Knight for free. We know that, for instance, there are — I mean, god knows, millions of pirated copies of Game of Thrones globally. So, what we have now is a weird storm like collision of a cold front and a hot front of this hyper-extended legal copyright and this hyper-truncation effective copyright.

And we are trapped in between right now. And so the people that follow the laws are being unfairly injured, I think. The people who are creating property are being unfairly injured, I think. Everybody is suffering right now. And I’m not sure what the answer is other than to say this: as somebody that creates intellectual property in conjunction with corporations, I must be on behalf of myself and my family ever mindful of the other sides, I guess I would call it hypocrisy when companies — the distribution companies or the provider companies like Google or Amazon bang the drum of copy fight and intellectual property freedom when really they don’t care about that at all and, in fact, defend their own intellectual property brutally. They just want to make money.

**John:** What this article points out though which I’ve also noticed is that you have tremendous legal teams with vested interest in maintaining the current copyright laws and extending them even further. You don’t have — to the degree you have Silicon Valley who wants to sort of make things free, whatever — but they’re not organized in a way to push for lower, like to rein back the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, to bring it back from 95 years to something much more reasonable.

There is no business model for that and therefore you don’t see the organized fight of lobbying and trying to get some of these copyright laws written a little bit more sanely.

**Craig:** Well, I think the sad thing is that they don’t have to because they know it doesn’t matter. I can go on YouTube right now and watch, you know, big chunks of all sorts of the movies that I’ve written that have just posted on there. Google owns YouTube. They’re distributing the content. They know they’re breaking the law. They don’t care.

**John:** But, Craig, I’m talking about the things that you and I do. So, exactly the situations where I would love to adapt this book, but I cannot adapt this book because it is still under copyright because of craziness. And so things that should have fallen in to popular culture that I should be able to use and adapt and work with are not available. And I think, and we’re talking, also I would say you and I will make the distinction between fair use and sort of piracy, but if you are a Disney company, you will come after both with the same hammer because you have one hammer and it’s an incredibly effective hammer.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, in the end the people that suffer are the wrong people. There’s no reason that you and I, if I wanted to work a little more freely with a novel that was written in 1931, it sucks that I can’t. It also sucks that my residuals are impacted by the fact that people can just go on YouTube, a Google Corporation company, and just watch that stuff illegally uploaded for free.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, once again, John, you and I are getting screwed.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. I wanted to debate it. I don’t think we’re going to find any meaningful answers. What I would love to see though is — I would love to see the Elon Musk of copyright law who is going in and saying, okay, this is crazy, this cannot continue along these same lines. We have to both protect copyright from piracy, from real piracy during that initial period of profitability on a new work, but then recognize that copyright is designed to protect new work and not to give you a century of profits.

**Craig:** Yeah, well…

**John:** I don’t know that we’re going to find that person.

**Craig:** I’ve got news for you. If we can find the Elon Musk of legislation, there are other things I would like him to work on first.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** We are in dire straits. Dire.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s not zoom out too much. Yes, things are bad.

So, next topic.

**Craig:** Next topic!

**John:** Next topic. So, I’m going to set this up and you will tell me like this is just the classically bad situation. I got sent this thing to look at. It was an adaptation and they’re like, “Can we just get on the phone with your really quick and just sort of talk through it. I know you don’t have a lot of time.” And so I got this thing on like a Wednesday and I’m looking through it and I’m like, oh, it’s sort of sparking and I can sort of see what the movie might be here. And it’s like is there any way we can get on a conference call, like four of us on a conference call, like me and four other people on a conference call on a Friday afternoon at 4pm.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Would you say that’s a good idea or a bad idea?

**Craig:** Well, considering that the Sabbath is right around the corner, John, I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.

**John:** I think in general you don’t want to have a first pitch or kind of meeting on something to be on a conference call with four people you don’t know, especially Friday at 4pm.

**Craig:** You don’t want to be on a conference call. You don’t want to be with four people you don’t know. And Friday at 4pm, everybody is essentially done.

**John:** They are done and they are dead. And so classically a bad idea, but I was traveling, I was going to be traveling so I was like, uh, it’s the only time I can do it. So, I did it. And, remarkably, it went really, really well.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** Which is great. Which is very exciting. And I think maybe partly because expectations are so low at that point, that I could just do it. I think, also, the fact that you and I do this podcast every week, I’ve gotten much better at just sort of like talking on my feet.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I talked through it. So, anyway, that went great. And so now I actually have to go in and pitch the real thing. Because on that first phone call I could just pitch like this is what I’m thinking. I think it’s more like this, I think it’s like this, I think this is the world, this is the universe. And that was sort of kind of easy.

I could sort of do the elevator pitch of it really, really well. So, now I have to go through and figure out the whole pitch of it. And that’s a very different skill set.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** And so I just want to talk a little bit about sort of moving from that “here’s the idea” to “here’s the expectation of what you are going to be delivering when you go in and talk through a pitch.” And I know you just did that pretty recently, too.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I thought we could give some helpful tips for people.

**Craig:** Well, there’s different kinds of pitches. So, the first thing you’ve got to figure out is what’s the kind I’m doing. For most people starting out, they do need to deliver a fairly detailed pitch. The purpose of which is to convince the other person that you know what you’re talking about.

There are times when people don’t really need you to give them the whole movie. They just need the big points. They need the big data for what’s going to kind of happen in the movie plot wise, act breaks, and twists and reveals, and the general idea. Every now and then you get to kind of just talk conceptually, which is always the best thing. But, you know, for instance, in your case you kind of did the conceptual and now it’s like, okay great, at least give us the big data.

So, when I think about putting these things together, I try and — I keep in mind who I’m pitching to.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s not a movie audience. It’s not my friends. The people that are listening to this are going to make decisions based on marketing, they’re going to make a decision based on how they feel in the moment and they’re going to make a decision based on how they can conceptualize this movie in the context of other movies that have made money.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, I do try and pitch the concept with an emphasis on the characters which I think plays better in a pitch than “And then, and then, and then,” which gets really boring. I try and pitch with an emphasis on the big moments that I know in their minds they’re already putting in a trailer. And I also try and pitch with any context, so I can say in many ways it’s like this movie except that it’s not because of this.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s classically that thing you hear in sort of the elevator pitch is like, “It’s like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but in Space.” Or, you know, it’s this but it’s that. It’s not exactly this, but it’s these other two things combined.

And this thing I pitched, there are movies that I can sort of do that two things handoff with. And it’s very glib but it’s helpful because it provides a frame. It’s like the kinds of things that would happen in these kinds of movies —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Is useful. And then you end up distinguishing but these are the things that sort of make it unique and different. These are the unique elements that are going to be helpful for marketing, but also sort of make this movie a movie worth making. Like why you’re going to have the kind of response you want from this.

And so for me with this pitch, weirdly I’m going to be pitching quality because it’s a genre that you don’t necessarily associate with quality that often and sort of detailed character work. Hopefully it’s the kind of movie where the expectations about sort of what characters are supposed to be doing in it are incredibly low, but then so to push beyond that will be useful. It’s the kind of movie where the characters hopefully don’t recognize what genre of movie in they are in.

**Craig:** I think that’s always a good idea. I think that when you’re pitching something, you are in that wonderful moment where you are on your first date and you and your date partner can fantasize freely about the life you live.

Later on down the line when you wake up in a doublewide, and you’ve both gained weight, and you’re out of work, you can confront reality. When you’re pitching, it should be ambitious. It doesn’t have to be ambitious — budgetarily it should be creatively ambitious. It should be audacious. You should be willing to say I want this to be great. Because everybody wants it to be great. Nobody wants to, “Well, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to deliver pretty much just what you’d kind of ho-hum about.”

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s that moment to not be cynical at all. Like, I’m going with really the expectation of like, you know what, I think we can make something really, really, really cool here that will be surprising. And the same way like Guardians, again, was surprising in that it was doing things like, wow, I didn’t necessarily anticipate you were going to do that. And this movie succeeded so well in large part because you did these things. That’s a crucial thing.

I often describe the great pitch is really as if you just saw a fantastic movie and you’re trying to convince your best friend that they have to see that movie.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s that level of excitement that you’re trying to communicate.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s why it’s also good when you’re doing “It’s like this thing” to say something that’s surprising. When you hear something like, “Well, it’s like Raiders in space,” people go, okay. So, it’s Raiders except that they’re in space.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if you say something like, “It’s a romantic comedy and it’s Raiders,” you go, well wait, how does that work? “Let me tell you.”

But I can already feel people leaning forward. It’s like, well, how does that work? You want to tweak curiosity. I mean, I always think that the Matrix must have been the best, I mean, I don’t know if they pitched it or spec’d it, but what a great pitch. Like, “Imagine this kind of Blade Runner-y, sci-fi world with this incredible martial arts. Yeah, it’s that, and also it’s not real. It’s Philip Dick. It’s this. It’s that. Now, let me explain how that’s going to fit together.”

And if you can pull off how it fits together, well, that’s what movies are. It’s basically — you know, we always say you put your character in an impossible situation and then you get them out of it. Put your pitch in an impossible situation and then get yourself out of it and you will be rewarded, I think.

**John:** Yeah. So, anyway, that’s going to be happening in these next couple of weeks, so.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I will let people know what the outcome of that was. But it was one of those sort of fun situations I think people don’t — writers of all levels will find themselves in a lot, where you had the sort of initial, you know, oh, that’s a really good idea, come and pitch me the full thing, and stepping from that whole like, oh, I think this is potentially really interesting to here is the whole movie I’m going to try to right is a challenging transition sometimes, because you start to recognize like, oh, that’s actually going to be a lot of work. And so it’s going to be a lot of work for me these next two weeks, but I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** It will. But I will say to you that I’ve never, even when they say we would love to hear the movie, they don’t really want to hear the whole movie. So, like everybody at some point starts to — they love listening to the first act. They love hearing how the second act works. And by the time you’re done with that, they just want to know, oh, so like what happens in the end?

**John:** Yeah. And this is an adaptation. So, there is already expectation about like these are some of the kinds of things that are going to happen, so it’s really I can tell them about like this is how I’m going to do this thing. And that is great because it’s both they have the expectation like, oh, he’s going to need to be able to do this thing. Oh, that’s how he’s going to do it.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. They just need to be able to say to the person that runs their life, “No, this guy has got it,” you know, “she knows what she’s doing,” which is why frankly if I had a choice between knowing every single scene of the movie or being able to deliver three moments that they would think, oh my god, those are great trailer moments, I go with those three trailer moments.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Always.

**Craig:** Because that’s what they’ll end up pitching.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s all it’s going to take.

**John:** Yes. Craig, are we going to do these Three Page Challenges, or are we going to save them for another week?

**Craig:** I see we’ve blabbed a lot today.

**John:** We blabbed a lot this week.

**Craig:** So much blabbing.

**John:** So, should we save these for another week?

**Craig:** I think we should save these for another week.

**John:** I do. Because I don’t want to rush through these because they were interesting things to talk about and I don’t want to sort of slam through them. So, I’m going to save my notes in these and we will get to them another week. So, we apologize to — fortunately we never even mentioned the names of the people, so they will never know that they could have possibly been a part of it.

**Craig:** But they will be. They will be.

**John:** They will be.

**Craig:** Do we need to do any questions and answers? Or should we just —

**John:** I think we’re good. Let’s do our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great. Oh, should I do mine?

**John:** I can do mine. So, my One Cool Thing is this app that a friend of mine who was at Singleton who I didn’t know was going to be there, but she was there, and she recommended this thing that her daughter loves to play on the iPad. And I checked it out and it really is just great. It’s called Dragonbox. And it is a game for iOS, both on your iPhone and your iPad. And it looks like a simple pattern matching game, where you’re trying to clear these levels by moving these tiles around.

And there’s sort of the board is divided into two halves and so anything you do on one half of the board you have to d the same on the other half. And so it becomes a sort of logic puzzle.

What’s so ingenious about it is it’s actually algebra. And they’ve sort of abstracted it all away. So, you think you’re just moving these colored tiles around, but as you go through levels you sort of realize like, oh, this is actually algebra, the same way you have to balance both sides of the equation.

Then eventually they start to introduce some tiles that sort of look like numbers. And you go through and it’s like, oh, wow, you’re actually doing algebra and you’re actually solving for X but the X is just a Dragonbox.

So, I played through, you know, almost all the levels now and they keep introducing concepts that I would say like, well, they’re never going to be able to deal with things in parenthesis or distribution of stuff. And they have these ingenious metaphors for what that’s like. So, parenthesis are like these bubbles and so it’s everything inside a bubble. And then you can break the bubble and pull the stuff apart, but you have to do it a special way.

It’s really quite ingenious. So, everything up through single variable algebra is actually presented in it, but I think you can actually — a kid could get through all of it and not really know they’re doing algebra, which I think is smart.

**Craig:** I think that’s awesome.

**John:** So, it starts, you know, there’s a version for like five year olds that’s obviously very, very basic. And then there’s the version I’m doing now, my daughter is nine, and she can totally do this. So, Dragonbox.

**Craig:** My daughter is nine. I’m going to start her on it today.

**John:** And weirdly I’ve been playing it like while watching stuff on TV. And it’s kind of fun.

**Craig:** I just sit down and do proper algebra when I’m watching TV.

**John:** Well, that’s always a good choice.

**Craig:** I will say that one thing that’s kind of funny, were you a good math student?

**John:** Yeah, I was good. I wasn’t brilliant, but I was good. I was always honors.

**Craig:** I loved math. I just loved it. But it’s been so long. And my son who is 13, he’s now in algebra and occasionally something will come up and I’ll just think, oh, I’ve just got to — like the other day he was working on some simple trigonometry, tan, cosign, etc.

**John:** You will never use that again in your life, unless you’re a scientific.

**Craig:** But here’s what’s so cool. So, I’m like, okay, he needs some help on his homework. I haven’t done that in forever. Give me two minutes. And I sat there and I just flipped through and I’m like, oh, okay, okay. And what doing that now as an adult teaches you is that we’re so much smarter now than we were when we were kids because we know how to read things and understand them.

It’s not fair. Literally I relearned that stuff in two minutes. I was like, oh…

**John:** Reading the actual stuff in the book, you were able to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because we’re used to reading things in books. Like when we were kids we were forced to and it’s just like, oh my god, a book, and I better wait for them to tell me how to do it. Now you can just do it. You can teach yourself anything. We’re geniuses now.

**John:** We are geniuses. All of us.

**Craig:** Compared to when we were 13.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, speaking of geniuses, Transition Man, Lockheed. So, okay, I love fusion. I love nuclear fusion.

**John:** I was hoping you were going to talk about this. So, we’ll see if it’s real. I’m worried it’s not.

**Craig:** Well, a lot of people are worried it’s not. So, fusion reactors are the dream, unlike fission reactors which are all the nuclear reactors that work today, fission reactors work by basically neutrons colliding in to each other and smashing atoms apart, which releases an enormous amount of energy, but has some inherent dangers, see Chernobyl and Fukushima.

**John:** And they always leave horrible stuff at the end.

**Craig:** And they do leave horrible stuff at the end that lasts, that remains horrible, for basically longer than we’ll probably be here on the planet. There’s problems with it.

On the other hand, nuclear power doesn’t release a single bit of carbon into the atmosphere. Has zero impact on global warming and climate change.

**John:** To be fair, you actually have to get the ore somewhere. So, you’re doing some carbon by getting the —

**Craig:** It’s so minimal.

**John:** But much less.

**Craig:** It’s much less. So, it’s vastly preferable to burning coal. So, fusion reaction is entirely different. Fusion reaction is when two light atoms collide together and form — they fuse together to form one big one and in doing so release a lot of energy. What’s interesting about that is that the fuel itself ultimately comes from seawater. So, you don’t need to go mining around.

The fusion reaction has to take place under such specific containment that if there was any kind of failure of the containment the reaction would stop immediately. So, there’s no melting down. There’s no release of dangerous radiation. I think the worst case scenario would be minor radiation within the fence line of the property of the fission reactor.

And also the byproducts in the end while somewhat radioactive, maybe are dissipated within 100 years or so. So, at least they’re not going to be there forever.

Problem with fusion reacting is that it takes an enormous amount of pressure to smash these atoms together and up to date it’s been very hard to get more energy out then it takes to actually smash them together.

**John:** So, we’ve been able to make bombs out of it, but not make a sustainable fusion reaction.

**Craig:** Correct. Sustainable fusion reaction, it’s hard to run at a surplus of energy, which is the whole point. You certainly don’t want to run it at a deficit. They’ve had these large things called tokamak reactors, tokamak fusion reactors, the ITER which was a prior Cool Thing of mine which is the French version they’re working on.

But Lockheed all of a sudden comes out and goes, whoa, whoa, we actually figured out a way to make this really small fusion reactor and because it’s so small it’s going to be way more efficient and we think in ten years we’re going to have a perfectly well-functioning fusion reactor running on seawater that would be the size of a truck that could power a town or something.

**John:** Yeah. So, if — let’s just stipulate — if this could actually happen, that would be incredible. It would be incredible for the future of energy, for the future of American industry, for the future of — it would be incredible.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would be the single greatest industrial impact on human civilization. Period. The end. Because what we would do is eliminate the notion of energy resources. The one thing that we are not running short on on the planet is ocean water and frankly even then the reaction is very efficient.

So, essentially what we would do is we would say, globally, no globally, we have a safe pollution-free, endlessly renewable source of energy that we can put everywhere.

So, oil, done. All of it. Just oil, natural gas, coal, all of it, done.

**John:** There are some things, okay, so to be fair there are some things which fusion power is not great for. It’s not great for flying planes.

**Craig:** I disagree.

**John:** All right. How do you make a nuclear jet? A fusion jet?

**Craig:** Oh, if the Lockheed engine is correct, it would be no bigger than the big gas-powered engines on planes. You would have, absolutely. In fact, planes would be the first thing that would probably go, would be a fusion-powered plane.

Look, we already have fission-powered submarines. They’re dangerous. We have them.

If you have a small fusion reactor, yeah, for sure. You would basically tank up your plane with seawater and off you’d go.

**John:** Well, I mean, Craig, I know that you are looking forward to charging your Tesla off of this. I don’t blame you.

**Craig:** For sure. Now, here’s the downside. They may just be full of crap.

**John:** There’s an incredibly high likelihood that they are.

**Craig:** Right. So, let’s look at the balance sheet of the full of crapness. On the plus side in their favor, it’s Lockheed. It’s not like Ponds and Fleishman going, “Cold fusion,” which was nonsense. This is Lockheed. They’re pretty big and they’ve been around for awhile. And they don’t tend to just make stuff up and lie.

On the downside, there are a lot of scientists saying we don’t even think that’s theoretically possible. And the more concerning thing is that Lockheed is asking for private investment in this project. And as one scientist pointed out, that would sort of be like if the White House wanted a military project, them going to like a small town Savings & Loan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s weird.

**John:** It’s weird.

**Craig:** Why isn’t Lockheed just funding it themselves? They have billions of dollars? So —

**John:** Yeah. If they started a Kickstarter for it then Craig would be really, really furious.

**Craig:** Oh my god, I would lose my mind.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** My mind! But anyway, I hope that it does change the world forever, and ever, and ever.

**John:** I like to have hope. Hope is a nice thing.

**Craig:** I sure do like hoping about these things.

**John:** Well, I hope I will see many of our listeners at the Austin Film Festival next week. That will be our episode for next week. Assuming nothing goes wrong with the audio that will be our episode for next week.

If you would like to tweet something at Craig, maybe wishing him a very happy attendance at his wedding —

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, it’s not my wedding. I mean, I’m already married.

**John:** At the wedding he’s going to.

**Craig:** At the wedding I’m attending. It’s going to be a great wedding.

**John:** He is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We actually have this new Twitter account set up for a thing we’re working on here called @writeremergency. If you tweet Help to @writeremergency, we will tweet back to you. And we have interns standing by who will write back to you with hopefully helpful suggestions.

**Craig:** [laughs] No.

**John:** [laughs] No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You should give up. Give up on your dreams. That’s what they’ll say.

**Craig:** Quit now. Quit now. You’ll never make it.

**John:** Never. Never.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you have longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also, johnaugust.com is also where you’ll find show notes for the things we talk about. You can sign up for the premium feed. We are so, so close to getting 1,000 subscribers on our premium feed at scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** Dirty show.

**John:** If we hit that, we’re going to do the dirty show, and man, we have some really good ideas for special guests for the dirty show. That will only be available for the premium subscribers. So, that’s yet another good reason to do the subscription.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes. Thank you, again, to the iTunes Store for highlighting us as one of the best podcasts. That was terrific. And that’s also because people who subscribed left a comment and the iTunes people notice that. So, that’s lovely when you do that.

That is, I think, it for the show.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Oh, sorry, it’s produced by Stuart Friedel, who is actually not here today, but he does produce the show, so thank you, Stuart. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who does a masterful job making us sound coherent. And that’s our show. So, thank you. And join us next week.

**Craig:** Have fun in Austin.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* The new [iMac with 5k Retina display](http://www.apple.com/imac-with-retina/)
* [OSX Yosemite](https://www.apple.com/osx/)
* [Retina displays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display) on Wikipedia
* [Comedy Bang Bang](http://www.comedybangbang.com/)
* John’s schedule at [the 2014 Austin Film Festival](http://austinfilmfestival2014.sched.org/speaker/john_august.1sssegfs?iframe=no&w=i:0;&sidebar=yes&bg=no#.VDMKbCldVjc)
* Help is on the way at [writeremergency.com](http://www.writeremergency.com/)
* If there is a problem with your shirt order, [reach out to Stuart](mailto:orders@johnaugust.com)
* The [31 scheduled superhero films](http://www.newsarama.com/21815-the-new-full-comic-book-superhero-movie-schedule.html)
* [Copywrong](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/crooner-rights-spat) by Louis Menand, from the New Yorker
* [Dragonbox](http://www.dragonboxapp.com/) secretly teaches algebra to your children
* [Does Lockheed Martin really have a breakthrough fusion machine?](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531836/does-lockheed-martin-really-have-a-breakthrough-fusion-machine/)
* [Tweet “help” to @writeremergency](https://twitter.com/writeremergency) for assistance
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jackie Ann ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/critics-characters-and-business-affairs).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode has the F word in it like four times because we read this letter aloud. So if you have your kids in the car, maybe don’t listen to this episode with the kids in the car because it’s kind of not safe for kids or for work. But it’s safe for almost everywhere else. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is episode 166 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this was a really busy week. I saw you a lot.

**Craig:** You did. We first delved into a cavern together that contained a Nothic.

**John:** Indeed. We did some virtual spelunking and did some D&D. It was fun.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was fun.

**John:** We kind of made a mistake with the Nothic.

**Craig:** We made a huge mistake.

**John:** I’m not sure we —

**Craig:** We made a huge mistake.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We have a tendency as a group. Not my character. My character is [laughs] to a fault wants to love everyone.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But as a group we seem to want to just kill everything we see. And I don’t think we should have attacked that thing.

**John:** Perhaps we shouldn’t have. I mean, it looked gruesome and so therefore we killed it. But that may not have been the best choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was kind of racist.

**John:** Yeah, it could have been a little bit racist.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was racist because he had one eye.

**John:** Speciesist, yeah.

**Craig:** Speciesist, yeah. So we did that but then we also saw each other at the Live Slate Culture Gabfest event —

**John:** In downtown Los Angeles.

**Craig:** In downtown Los Angeles. And that podcast has already aired. They turned it around right quick.

**John:** They did. So that was a tremendously fun evening. It was at The Belasco Theatre. We had a good crowd. It was us. It was Jenny Slate. It was Natasha Lyonne.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There were the hosts. So thank you, Slate, for having us there. Thank you, Andy Bowers and Julia Turner and Dana Stevens, Stephen Metcalf. It was fun to be a guest on someone else’s show.

**Craig:** It was fun. They ask good questions and we had a lively discussion.

**John:** Mm-hmm. It was fun for me not to have to segue all the time so that somebody else could be the person responsible for “And now let’s move on to the next topic.”

**Craig:** Yeah, he wasn’t necessarily better at segues than you.

**John:** Well, I think it’s one of my true callings is the ability to get from this place to that place.

**Craig:** The Segue-ist?

**John:** I am The Transitioner.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that transition is a good way for me to get into talking about today’s show which will feature our little package from the Slate Culture —

**Craig:** [laughs] You just did it, you did it.

**John:** I can’t stop transitioning.

**Craig:** The Transitioner.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s like Marvel’s worst movie in 40 years and they’re really just out of everything. They’re like, um, The Transitioner.

**John:** He’s really good at the cocktail conversation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or it can also be like, you know, it’s the next thing after Transparent which is apparently a really good Amazon show. It’s like they could make The Transitioner who’s like constantly moving from one thing to the next thing.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**John:** So today, we are going to have the audio from our section. So in case you didn’t hear it in Slate, you can listen to it on our thing and then we’ll talk a little about what we talked about after that. But we have some new topics as well including something you and I talked about after our segment on the show which was that I was writing something this week and I realized that the problem I was having is I had sort of one character too many.

It’s a recurring theme that I’ve seen again and again, it’s like sometimes you have too many characters and rarely too few characters and figuring out what that problem is can be a real solution for many screen emergencies.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And then we’re going to talk about business affairs.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** And that’s going to be a happy conversation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Argh.

**John:** But first, some follow-up. Tonight, October 14th, if you’re listening to this the day the podcast comes out, Tuesday, October 14th at 7:30 PM, I’m going to be talking with Simon Kinberg at the WGA as a benefit for the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** And we’re going to be talking about X-Men: Days of Future Past, Sherlock Holmes, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, Star Wars Rebels and producing movies and writing things and it will be a great conversation. So join us if you’d want to join us. There’s still like maybe 10 tickets left?

**Craig:** Well, you should grab those tickets. Simon Kinberg is a rarity, I believe, in our business in that he is a very good writer, he’s a very good producer, he’s extraordinarily successful, and he’s really nice.

**John:** He’s a really nice guy.

**Craig:** How about that? Just a good egg. I really like Simon a lot. You know he’s English?

**John:** I do know that he’s English.

**Craig:** Yeah, but you wouldn’t know it because he has no English accent.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m very —

**John:** Just like you, you had a New York accent growing up —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you completely lost it.

**Craig:** Just completely lost it.

**John:** He shed his —

**Craig:** He shed it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He shed it, but that’s an extreme shedding.

**John:** It’s an extreme shedding. Well, you can’t talk about British accents without bringing up the Nolan Brothers because one of them is British and one of them is not British and it’s so odd.

**Craig:** I know. It’s weird. And I always think to myself, well, if somebody’s lost a truly foreign accent, that’s verging on sociopathic behavior. [laughs] They have the potential to be a villain.

**John:** They do or they are a Canadian actress because we actually had a Canadian babysitter this last week and I detected something like — something is — you’re really, really nice in a way that you’re probably not American. And she was in fact Canadian. But she was an actress and so she had very — I asked her like, you deliberately got rid of your accent? She’s like, yes, I worked really hard for a year to get rid of all my Canadianisms so that people can’t tell I’m Canadian.

**Craig:** Losing a Canadian accent is a bit like losing a New York accent. In fact, a strong New York accent is probably more violently different than standard American English than a Canadian accent.

**John:** A strong New York accent is pretty much an assault.

**Craig:** It’s an assault and I had one and then I lost it. So I guess I’m one of those sociopaths, too [laughs].But I’m fascinated by people… — We were talking about this, people who can and can’t lose accents. You know, there are people who have lived in, like Dr. Ruth Westheimer is a good example. Brilliant woman, speaks many languages, has lived in New York for decades, has the strongest German accent.

**John:** Another great example is Arianna Huffington.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who, you know, incredibly successful in the US and yet, she’s thoroughly Greek in sort of how she talks and presents herself. And it’s become sort of her signature. You can’t imagine her without that accent.

**Craig:** Right. And then you have Madonna who spends four days in England and suddenly she’s like, [British accent] hello mate.

**John:** Yeah, there’s that middle of the Atlantic situation that happens sometimes when Americans cross over and it doesn’t all together work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So last bit of follow-up is if you ordered one of the Scriptnotes t-shirts, they’re in and they’re actually out. Stuart and Ryan are packaging them up as we speak and so they’re going to be leaving the Quote-Unquote offices because that’s where — they really are offices but our company is called Quote-Unquote Films.

They’ll be leaving the offices today, so you should be getting them this week, the week that you’re hearing this podcast if you’re in the US, maybe a little bit longer if you’re overseas, but thank you so much for all the people who bought those because those help keep the podcast going.

**Craig:** And, of course, reduce the amount of money that we lose but not to zero [laughs].

**John:** Never to zero.

**Craig:** Never to zero.

**John:** All right, first segment. Let’s talk about the Slate Culture Gabfest. So let’s just set it up for listeners so they know what it is they’re going to listen to. Craig, could you set the scene for us, like let us know where it is that this event is taking place and what it feels like?

**Craig:** Sure. So The Belasco Theater is downtown, it’s a small theater but it’s very typical for Los Angeles downtown. You don’t know it’s there until you arrive. You walk inside and you think, oh my god, what a great space. It’s old, it’s obviously been around since I would guess the ’20s, gorgeous space, very dark and cavernous. There was a green room downstairs which, in fact, was illuminated entirely with red light bulbs, so it was a bit like, I don’t know, what I imagined No Exit to look like or something.

Large stage, very nice audience with a bar in back to keep people liquored up. And so we sat up there on stage with the hosts of the show. It was a little hard for me to hear. They didn’t have monitors. So when you’re on stage, usually you want a couple of speakers that are facing back towards the people talking so they could hear themselves.

All I could really hear was the echoey sound that was traveling above my head and out. So in a way it kept you on your toes and you had to really pay attention. But it was terrific. Jenny Slate was very, very funny and we did our thing and Natasha Lyonne was very, very interesting. So we had a nice chat and you can hear the audience, you know, fairly, they were —

**John:** Yeah, Craig got laughs and it was good that you got laughs. I liked that.

**Craig:** I got laughs, yeah [laughs]. Well, I was trying to, well look, I was trying to be on my best behavior. And I really did think I was on my best behavior. I got a couple of little shots in but they weren’t really shots as much as just —

**John:** Yeah, they were playful taps.

**Craig:** They were playful jabs. Playful jabs.

**John:** And so the other thing I should set up for our listeners so they understand is that each guest was up sort of in their own segment but not the other segments, so you’re going to hear me and Craig but you’ll also hear Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner and Dana Stevens. So let’s go to that and then when we come back we’ll have a little recap and wrap up.

Julia Turner: I’m such a fan of your podcast.

**John:** Thank you.

Julia: It’s so fun to have you guys on the same stage. I’m sorry Stephen.

Stephen Metcalf: Please, dig right in. Actually, I want to start by saying I had my very — this is actually a true story. I had my very first Hollywood pitch yesterday.

**John:** So how did it go?

Stephen: Do you know the phrase, “Bought it in the room?” That didn’t happen. [laughs] You know what, I’ll give you, and I had another one today. I’ll give you a very honest response was, there was — I kind of loved it for the reason that it was like nothing I’ve ever seen depicted in all the silly movies that depict Hollywood. And in fact, they were just professionals who knew their business and it was no drama Obama.

**Craig:** No Weimaraners, no crack, no OxyContin.

Stephen: Exactly right. And no Jaws meets this or whatever. It was like very, very, very intricately smart people who understand the relationship between narratives that work and people who will pay money to go see them. I mean, right —

**Craig:** And so they rejected you? [laughs]

Stephen: Mazin. I just want to say, Craig, I love the movie Go.

**Craig:** Oh yes, I heard that.

Stephen: That movie is —

**Craig:** I heard, yes.

Stephen: Perfect, it’s like Swiss watch work.

**Craig:** It’s the most adorable thing you’ve seen ever.

Stephen: It’s Swiss clockwork lubricated by butter.

**Craig:** Yes.

Stephen: Just gorgeous.

**Craig:** John’s films are gorgeously lubricated.

Stephen: It went by like that.

**Craig:** No question.

Stephen: Anyway, we want to get into the subject of who authors the film which is a rabbit hole we can kind of go down, half down, or ignore completely but it’s an interesting one to me. But I want you to just, if it’s okay, really quickly to describe your careers and how you got where you are. You’re having a dream career. How did that come about? John, why don’t we start with you?

**John:** I was a journalism major. I went to journalism school at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. I realized halfway through that I didn’t really want that major but I loved the writing I was doing. I loved that sort of structured writing that journalism is. And I found out there was such a thing as a screenplay, that there was such a thing as film school and I applied and got into USC, moved out here with my rusted Honda and started, you know, reading scripts for people and I started writing. And I started writing Go, the screenplay that first got made, while I was still in film school. And so it was very much that experience of being 26 years old and seemingly immortal. And that became my first movie.

Stephen: That is fantastic. And the Weimaraner was suddenly seated next to you in the car.

**John:** [laughs]

Stephen: Craig, what about you?

**Craig:** I was a pre-med student in college and around my senior year, it became very clear that I just did not want to spend — I was going to be a neurologist and I just… — I still am fascinated by the brain and by neurology but not by people with neurological disorders.

It’s a bummer, I don’t know how else to put it. They do die on you a lot. And I was fascinated by the entertainment business. I was fascinated by entertaining people. I loved movies and I loved television shows. And so, and you had a rusted Honda, I had a rusted Toyota. I drove out here, I didn’t know anybody and I got a job because I could type and sort of worked my way into a position where I could pitch movies and write movies. And I’ve been doing it since 1996, now, 1995/1996.

Stephen: That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

Stephen: Okay, so you’ve just watched a movie, let’s say the credits come at the end, you admire it, you think it was, you know, in some ways, narratively elegant, the characters were very alive, you got lost in the world, no fat to be trimmed, and the name comes up and it says, Screenplay by, you know, and it’s a single credit, a credit to a single person. How confident are you that what you just saw was authored by that person?

**John:** You don’t necessarily know whether that screenplay credit reflects what actually made it on to the screen or not. Credits for films are determined by the Writers Guild and there’s a whole process you go through. It’s as good as we can make that process but it’s still not perfect. That you’re competing, there’s two competing forces. You want the credits to accurately reflect who wrote the movie but you also want to not dilute the credit by sharing it among a bunch of people who, if 12 writers did little bits on it, you don’t want to sort of necessarily make it seem like 12 people did little bits on it.

So what I will say is different is when we see that credit going by, we already know. We sort of, actually everybody really does know who did the work on the movie. And so there’s lots of movies that will not have a certain writer’s credit on them but everyone in town knows they’ve worked on it and that’s very helpful for their career.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think it’s actually gotten better. We have changed. I’m one of three co-chairs of the credits committee that reviews the rules and then puts rules changes to the membership. And we’ve had about two or three rounds of rules changes that have been successful. And they’ve been good changes and I think that they have made the credits more accurate. It’s a difficult situation. There have been miscarriages, no question. But John’s point is absolutely true. We know who wrote the movie. We, who are in the business, we know.

Stephen: And what do you — I’m curious what you especially admire about a screenplay, what makes you wish you had written one when you get to the end of the film or you read it on the page? What elements of story or character or shape or —

**Craig:** Well, you know, when I think of movies where I’ve really zeroed in on what I thought was fundamental to the screenplay, it was a question of harmony of elements. That there were scenes that internally were using plot to reveal character, character revealing plot, plot and character revealing theme, conflict revealing potential resolution. And then taken as a sum, those scenes all work together to create some sort of thematic whole out of that. That often is what I admire, but sometimes I just am entertained.

And more than anything when I go to the movies it’s to be entertained.

**John:** When you read a screenplay, you recognize that it’s a form of incredible efficiency. You have to be able to convey with just a few words in 12-point Courier what this whole world feels like and what these characters are like and so every word counts in ways that doesn’t necessarily in a novel. A novel can spend three pages talking about how soft the sheets were. The movie doesn’t actually have those senses, you can’t describe things you touch or feel. It’s only what you can see and what you can hear. So you’re finding ways to describe and set up this whole world with just these very limited windows into it.

And so, the best screenplays I’ve read, they have these characters that take these amazing journeys through amazing worlds and you can’t believe that they did it all just on the page there.

Stephen: Give me a couple of names of movies that you wish you had written or that you especially admire?

**John:** You know, it’s one thing to see a movie on the screen because that’s the finished product and you have to remember that a screenplay is really the blueprint for this building that’s not built yet. And so one of luxuries, we sometimes get to read screenplays well before they’re filmed, or things that never got filmed. And so I remember in film school reading Quentin Tarantino’s original script for Natural Born Killers. And it’s just brilliant. And I got to the end and I flipped back to page one and started reading it all over again. It was incredibly important.

People, you know, these guys might not recognize that like Aliens is an incredibly important script for people in our business. We read that script and it actually transforms sort of like how you describe action on the page.

Stephen: And this is the second in that —

**John:** This was James Cameron’s Aliens.

Stephen: And James Cameron did the screenplay as well as directed it?

**John:** Yeah and so the way he described action was incredibly important and so all action movies from that point forward probably owe some debt to sort of what he was doing on the page.

Female Voice: Wait, so what was the innovation? What did he do differently?

**John:** There was innovation, there’s a way of talking about the camera, talking about like how we’re moving through things. Cameron wrote both a scriptment which is like a 70-page document of the movie without the dialogue, sort of. And then he wrote the full version of the script and sort of everyone of my and Craig’s generation who read movies at that time, read action movies, that was the one we sort of kept going back to.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, John is making a really interesting point that the question that you’re asking is a little impossible because the truth is I never see a movie and think I wish I could have written that movie. You can’t write that movie. That movie is not just written, it was written and it was then rewritten and it was performed and captured and edited and scored, so it’s not possible.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what we can do is we read screenplays. Jerry Maguire is one of the best screenplays I’ve ever read. Absolutely just perfect for me. Not objectively perfect, but for me, it was perfect. I saw Ocean’s Eleven, I saw Out of Sight, and I thought I would love to meet the guys that wrote this movie, you know, and I did, that was great. But I understand that it’s not possible to say, well, I wish I could have written that experiences.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dana Stevens: That brings me to something that’s seems like, it’s key to your podcast which is really great for somebody on the critical end to read which is, I mean, to hear on your podcast, which is that, you’re sort of anti-auteurist, right? I mean, you are really not so focused on a movie as the production of one director and you really know from the inside out that it’s a collaboration and that vast numbers of people have to be on the same page in order to make a good movie.

**John:** There was a podcast that you guys did about two weeks ago with Jeff Koons, the artist and the visual artist, and you guys saw Balloon Dog and all that stuff. And it was amazing as you’re walking through with this curator and he was talking about sort of the intention and sort of how things came to be. It was a great episode. But it struck me that you can talk about a virtual artist that way because even though he has a team of people doing stuff, it’s really all his vision, like that thing is one person’s thing. And I think there’s this instinct sometimes for press and for critics to think about works as having a single creator. You guys are almost creationists sometimes.

And really the process of getting movies made is almost like this Darwinian survival thing. There’s all these movies competing to get made, and you’re only seeing the ones that sort of got made. And it doesn’t mean they were the best ones. It doesn’t mean it was like clean or pretty how they happened, but they are the ones that made it to the theater.

**Craig:** And even the product itself is the function of an internal evolution among a lot of people fighting. I mean, for instance, you guys just had a discussion about Gone Girl and you disagreed about some things. You really thought one passage was cool, you thought that was weak. You liked the parents, you thought they were not so great. These fights happen constantly on every movie except that one of you is the boss.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. This is a problem obviously but some decision has to be made. The movie is — anybody who thinks that movies are authored by one person is higher than the highest crack can take —

Stephen: Has never gone anywhere near the moving-making process.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re just so divorced from the process of what it means to make a movie.

Stephen: Okay, but I have a question for you. Sorry, I’m stepping on you, boss, lady.

Julia: Go for it.

Stephen: Because I’ll forget it if I don’t ask it right now. Okay, so we are all post-modernist Darwinian evolutionists, anti-authorship, you know, post-auteur, cognoscenti.

**Craig:** Stipulated.

Stephen: And yet, it begins with a room of one’s own. It begins with you doing the paradigmatic writer thing. You’re alone with the blinking cursor and your own conscience and the Internet and email and on and on and on. I mean, you have all the, you know, classic struggles of self-battling that a writer has. How is it to then also be in a medium that’s utterly collaborative and evolutionary and your darlings are going to get killed, but not even by you?

**Craig:** Well, it’s an endless struggle. And this is why screenwriters are stereotypically whiny. I mean, watch Adaptation, you know. It’s very difficult and it’s incredibly difficult because it’s emotionally painful. We are required to create something that we believe in that is entirely within our control and is in fact authored.

And then we are required by the nature of film making to cede control of it and to see it re-authored because unlike any other form of writing, screenwriting is not meant to be read, it is not meant to be consumed by anyone, it is meant to in fact be transformed into something else entirely. So we are always on the razor’s edge of this emotional pain. And then of course somewhere down the line after we’ve survived the many, many —

Stephen: You get paid $900,000.

**Craig:** I get to Dana’s review. That’s my reward.

**John:** [laughs] That’s the reward, yes.

Stephen: You made me laugh so hard that my gap flashed the whole room. That was good. Okay, well let’s end it on a positive note. I could talk to you guys all night but unfortunately we’ve got to move on. But Craig Mazin and John August, thank you very much for coming.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you for having us. Thanks guys.

**John:** Great. So that was lovely and there were applause which is always a fun thing. I really enjoyed being a guest. It’s so nice to be able to have the chance to like make my own points and not have to elicit points from other people.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I thought it was very valuable. It was a good conversation to have. I think frankly the more that critics can personally interface with the people writing and directing movies, the better they will be at their jobs.

**Craig:** I agree with you.

**John:** I don’t think it’s going to make our jobs any better or worse but it’s going to make their jobs better. Frankly, one thing that kind of surprised me was the discussion was predicated on this question, what is it that we critics don’t know but should know about the way movies are made? And I found the question fascinating because, mostly because I thought why are you asking this now? I mean wouldn’t you have thought to ask it a decade ago or 20 years ago or whenever you started doing this?

There is such a gulf, I mean, even in the beginning of the show before we came on, Stephen and Julia Dana were talking about their, what they called LA alter egos and it was essentially their spin on what they thought Los Angeles is all about. And it was very cartoony, but you could tell really that they are quite proud of the fact that they’re out there and we’re out here and the gulf is cultural.

There is a cultural gulf. It’s interesting. It’s very interesting and worth studying.

**John:** I think it comes back to the question of intentionality is that you’re looking at this work as it’s finished and then you’re trying to ascribe intentionality for like this is what they meant, this is what they were doing, this is what the artist was attempting to voice or achieve. And ultimately I think that’s sometimes unknowable, or if it’s knowable, the only way you’re going to actually find that out is by asking the person who made the thing.

So instead what you’re really doing is you’re looking at your own reaction and saying, well, this is my reaction to this thing and that’s completely a valid experience but it doesn’t necessarily give you any insight into what the intention was behind something. It goes back to what we talked about before, the difference between journalistic writing and academic writing. In academic writing, you often find yourself trying to ascribe intention and motivation to things that are not really part of the text because you’re just desperately searching for something.

And so you find reasons to believe that the plot of this book is really about this other thing that you wouldn’t necessarily notice. And it’s like you’re trying to ascribe, trying to create logic after the fact.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right and what was driven home for me more than anything by interacting with them is how academic they are. And I imagine that for many film critics, I’m not even talking about reviewers but people who are doing film analysis, that their background is academic. And in academics, you’re precisely correct that the whole name of the game is to take some arena and find some angle on it that you can make your thesis and support it. So it’s rhetorical.

However, it’s a very poor instrument in my opinion, academic analysis. It’s a very poor instrument for something like movies which defy the meaning of which is really not in that kind of literary analysis or academic analysis, for me at least. And certainly the process of it makes many of the literary analyses absurd.
And even, you know, I mean, you could see they’re trying, like… — By the way, it’s partly our fault in the business because when there’s a success, somebody will attempt to take credit for it and say, me, me, me, I am the author of this, it all comes down to me. But that’s not ever true.

**John:** The other thing I definitely noticed is you’re talking about cultural criticism, but culture is a thing that is constantly moving. So I sometimes get frustrated when I read a film review and they’re talking about current events in relation to this movie and seemingly unaware that this movie was green lit two years before those events came to be.

So there’s, you know, if there’s a school shooting and this movie comes out, it’s in reference to this school shooting or, you know, Gone Girl in the reference of like this domestic violence case. I understand that it’s cultural criticism because you’re looking at sort of how does this movie fit in to the current cultural conversation. But you can’t therefore take a time machine back and say like, well, that is the reason why this movie exists. The movie is coming out at a certain place and time but it doesn’t mean that this movie is reacting to those events or this place and time.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ve, because I’m going to see Gone Girl this weekend and they have a big discussion about Gone Girl and I’ve been seeing essentially headlines of gobs of critical essays about Gone Girl and what it means about, or what its implications are for marriage, for misogyny, for the relationship between men and women, domestic violence. And all I keep thinking is these people are talking to each other. I don’t know who else cares.

The people that got to see, the people that read the book, appreciated the book for what it did for them, it’s a personal experience, it is not an academic experience. No one goes to a movie in order to contextualize the world around them. They go to a movie for the opposite, I believe, which is to contextualize something within them. It is a personal experience.

This is why movies are made the way they are. You can go see Argo and what you are taking away is something about what’s inside of you. It is a personal story set against the backdrop of the world. But a lot of times I think critics and film analysts ignore all that to talk really about what they’ve been trained to talk about. In the end, I think they are talking to each other. I think they are engaging in a kind of a cross debate.

**John:** Well, oftentimes, I think they’re talking about the conversation rather than the thing itself. And so in the case of Gone Girl, you’re talking about misogyny or what it means, or the feminist meanings or anti-meetings in the film. The degree to which it’s worthy to talk about in a culture context isn’t necessarily the film itself, but why we are talking about it.

So, the degree that Gone Girl being the incredibly successful popular movie out there in the world right now is sparking a cultural conversation, yes, sometimes by just the people who are writing these articles. But I also think just actual audiences are coming out of the movie thinking like, wow, I’m not sure how I feel about the characters I just saw and particularly that movie which has, you know, again no spoilers, but an unsettling ending and sort of a resolution that is unexpected does provoke things. And so the degree to which a movie can provoke a conversation, well, that’s a thing that’s happening in culture, so if your job is to write about culture, then it’s great to write about that movie. But you have to be mindful: are you really writing about the movie or are you’re writing about people talking about the movie which are sort of different things.

**Craig:** And the movie exists specifically to inspire people to examine their relationship with it. Individual relationship, how did that movie make me feel? Did I feel anything and if I did, what did I feel? Do I agree with it? Do I not agree with it? A good movie isn’t supposed to be like a good historical explanation of why things happen.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not supposed to be, whatever, a Doris Kearns Goodwin book explaining how Lincoln’s cabinet worked. It’s entirely about individuals.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I don’t think that’s the way they approach it sometimes. And they can’t because what does that come down to? It’s sort of exposes the fatal flaw here which is, well, so you have your opinion? Good. I do too, you know.

**John:** I guess, it’s a chance for people to listen in on what someone else’s opinion is and sometimes a very well-articulated opinion can get somebody thinking about what their own opinion is. So that is, I would say, as a defense of the kind of work that they’re doing both in writing and in the podcast is they’re having a conversation about their reactions to things and sometimes that may trigger a person to have their own reactions or give new thought to something else. And if that happens, then that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s fun listening to smart people talk about stuff.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I tend to like to listen to smart people talking about things that are not cultural because I do experience culture in a very personal individual way. I like listening to smart people talk about politics, economics. But, and I was very struck by how their conversation between the three of them was no different than any other kind of conversation people have about movies.

I mean, essentially, regardless of the level of their vocabulary, they talked about the movie and then one person said, I really like this and then another person said, really? That was the part I didn’t like at all. Well, these are exactly the kinds of conversations we all have.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And ultimately, that’s all there is. There is nothing more to it. It’s supposed to be individual and personal, which, again, I think is the fatal flaw sometimes of the — it’s not of criticism, but rather it’s the fatal flaw of the critical style which is to say, this, let me illuminate you as to what is happening here. That is a fatal flaw because in fact, you can’t. Because what at least on our side, what we are intending to happen is for an individual to have an individual relationship with the movie. We know some of those are going to be bad and we know some of those are going to be good. But we also know there is not one illuminated correct response.

**John:** Absolutely. So, again, I want to thank Slate for having us on. It was just tremendously fun to be there and it was a really great event. And thank you for people who showed up for it because it was really neat to have some of our fans in our t-shirts out there in the audience.

**Craig:** For sure. Always good to see. And, boy, a very lovely woman came up to us afterwards and she — I won’t go into her story, but she said some very nice things. So she’s gone through some hardships and happily she’s better now. But it was very, very sweet. It’s nice to hear, and look, honestly, endlessly surprising to me that anyone listens to the show at all [laughs] but that for a lot of people who do, they really get something out of it. It’s very, very uplifting for me and I’m sure it is for you.

**John:** It is. Now just to cut into that tender emotion, I thought this might be a great opportunity for us to read a letter we got from one of our listeners.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s the best letter ever.

**John:** It really is the best letter ever. So people sometimes will write in, sometimes on Twitter — I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. Or they’ll write longer emails that they’ll send to ask@johnaugust.com. And this is one that we got this week which I thought was great. So I shared it with you and you said in all caps MUST READ ON AIR IN TOTALITY.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know. So it’s a little long, so bear with us. The subject essentially is we talked a couple of weeks ago on the podcast about a video that somebody put on the Internet. It’s very funny. All they did was they stripped out John Williams’ score from the final scene of Star Wars: A New Hope where Luke, Han and Chewie are getting their medals.

And it’s a very long scene and there’s no dialogue. And so when you take away the score, it actually becomes this beautiful opera of awkwardness. [laughs] It’s fantastic. It’s very funny. And I thought frankly the spirit, I mean, we had a whole discussion about why it was interesting. And my whole takeaway was, hey, directors don’t panic when you see your footage that’s intended for score because it’s going to really look weird. But then look how great it will look when it’s done.

**John:** Yes. And so perhaps we didn’t stipulate as clearly that we thought the scene as it shows up in the movie is fantastic. And I would not change a thing. But Patrick from London, England did not take it that way.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And in fact, well, why don’t you start, Craig?

**Craig:** Sure. “Subject: Star Wars Umbrage.

“Dear John and Craig, I have to take extreme umbrage at your mocking the final scene in Star Wars in your last podcast. I get that it’s mildly amusing someone took the music off the final scene and it seems strange because it’s so iconic. You could do that with any number of famous films and achieve the same effect.

“What is distressing is your assertion the final scene in Star Wars is somehow strange/weird/bad because it has no dialogue. That scene is one of the things that makes the film iconic for fuck’s sake!” Exclamation point. “Sometimes when I think about that scene it baffles the brain. What major blockbuster film would end on a scene driven entirely by visuals and score? None.

“We’re always told film is a visual medium, show don’t tell, blah, blah, blah, yet when a film achieves a satisfying conclusion through moving images and music alone like a silent movie, you mock it as strange/weird/bad. What more did the film need to do? They blew up the Death Star. Obi-Wan said the force will be with you always. Han came back and displayed some honor and loyalty. I emphasize displayed. He didn’t say it. The end. What more did you want?

“Did you want a speech like the end of Independence Day? We will not lie down. Today’s our independence day against the empire. God bless America, blah, blah, blah. Would that have approved the ending of Star Wars?” [laughs] You want to read the second half?

**John:** “I think the problem is you work in Hollywood where everything is decided by committee. So anything idiosyncratic or unusual is viewed with suspicion or derided as strange/weird/bad. I noticed on your Raiders podcast when you pointed out that today the opening five-minute exposition scene wouldn’t fly and would be watered down by committee. And that this was perfectly acceptable.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I don’t think we said that at all.

**Craig:** No, I think the point was that it was not… it was unacceptable. [laughs] Oh man, this is great. Keep going. It’s awesome.

**John:** “When the final scene in Star Wars was produced, maybe someone said, err, is it strange/weird/bad?”I love the strange/weird/bad.

**Craig:** I know. So he —

**John:** I’m omitting the slashes —

**Craig:** I know. It’s this thing that he does when he goes strange/weird/bad all as one thing. And it’s like his mantra.

**John:** “That there’s no big speech at the end. And maybe George Lucas said, ‘It’s my film and that’s how I want to end it. So fuck you.’ Or George and Spielberg said, ‘We want there to be a really long exposition scene at the beginning of Raiders and if you don’t like it, money men, you can go fuck yourselves.'”

Well, so now we have to have this — I have to record a little warning at the start of the podcast —

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Because he said fuck three times.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** “Depressingly on your podcast, you seem to advocate conformity — ”

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** “And do not encourage idiosyncrasies’ originality. It’s kind of like don’t rock the boat. This is what is expected of you by the committee, so this is what you should do? The final scene in Star Wars should be something you celebrate, not mock. Star Wars is one of the most exciting and amazing films ever made and definitely the top 10 most influential. So it doesn’t need my or anyone’s sympathy or support. But it’s sad that one of its fun quirks is derided on your podcast because it doesn’t fit the present day studio formula you bow to.”

**Craig:** We bow to.

**John:** We bow to. “However, the controversy over why Chewie didn’t also receive a medal has not gone away and is a troubling aspect to the film’s conclusion up for debate.” Well, good. I’m glad we got to the Chewie of it all because that’s really what I’ve been focusing on.

**Craig:** [laughs] I like that this guy’s like, well, let me let you off the hook on the Chewie thing, great point.

**John:** “Anyway, end umbrage. I’d like to echo your other listener who praised the podcast for informing and inspiring people. It’s a great thing you do and an essential resource for anyone who’s interested in writing films. Cheers.”

**Craig:** Cheers. [laughs]. Okay. Well, Patrick —

**John:** Patrick is great. So, I genuinely thank you for writing this letter.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’re really kind of not mocking you but just one of those things we’re like, oh, I can’t believe you thought we were —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You know, slamming on that scene because we weren’t at all.

**Craig:** No, I think, Patrick, the reason I wanted to read this entire thing is because I think unwittingly you managed to satire an unhinged Star Wars fan. [laughs] Look, to be clear and I think it was clear because, frankly, out of all the people that listened to the show, you were the only person that had this issue or at least spoke about it.

No, we love the ending of the movie. All we were saying was that it was funny to watch it without the music because it is funny. And I remember specifically saying, in fact, I said — I sent that video to Rian Johnson. And I said, Rian, when you see your first dailies, don’t freak out, right?

Because a lot of times, science fiction, epics, when they don’t have all of the post-production trappings laid over it, can look ridiculous. I mean, for instance, there’s footage of Darth Vader when he first enters the diplomatic ship and he interrogates Princess Leia. And it’s the actual dailies. And so I think it was David Prowse I guess is the guy who was in the actual, so it’s his voice.

And it just sounds like a bunch of English guys and it seems ridiculous. And the point is, but okay, as filmmakers, we deserve to have faith that the full process will make it come to light. That was our point. I don’t think it’s weird/strange/bad. I don’t want everything to be decided by committee. [laughs] I don’t want there to be a speech at the end about God bless America. I do love —

**John:** I think it would be kind of great if there were a speech about God bless America —

**Craig:** God bless America.

**John:** At the end of Star Wars.

**Craig:** It actually would be cool.

**John:** I think Star Wars is not American enough.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I want to start a whole campaign about that.

**Craig:** Like there should have been —

**John:** No one is wearing a flag pin.

**Craig:** Like if they had unfurled a big American flag behind them as they got their medals, it would have been awesome.

**John:** Visual effects, we can do it.

**Craig:** Visual effects, we can — he can get back in there, you know, if Greedo shot second then we could do that. No, I love the, I wouldn’t change a frame of Raiders and I wish modern movies would take more time in their opening exposition. No, I don’t believe that John and I advocate conformity or discourage idiosyncrasies’ originality. Quite the opposite.

We don’t really like the committee. We do celebrate the [laughs] last scene of Star Wars. It’s amazing how wrong you are, Patrick. I mean you really are, I got to give you credit. You’re batting a thousand so far. [laughs] But really, why I wanted to read it out loud was this bit about Chewbacca because that was just — you’re like, okay, you got through your umbrage but then you’re like, well, now, granted there is a serious [laughs] debate about why Chewie didn’t get a medal. Dude, no one cares why Chewie didn’t get a medal, whatever.

**John:** Once again, racism.

**Craig:** Yeah, nobody cares. No one cares.

**John:** Chewie is the Nothic of the whole Star Wars saga.

**Craig:** You know why Chewie didn’t get a medal? Chewie don’t need no medals.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Chewie doesn’t care about medals. Maybe that’s why he’s yelling. Anyway, fantastic. Thank you for the kind words at the very end. Patrick, I’m sorry, you just got it all wrong here. But we love you anyway and we thank you for listening and please come on back and just know that the people that you want us to be, we already are.

**John:** Awww. So our next topic, so after we did our segment at the Slate Gabfest, we found this little outdoor terracey patio thing which is really nice at the theatre.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so you and I were just sitting and chatting for a bit. And I brought up that the thing I’m writing right now — we’re both in our first drafts. And the thing I was writing, I was sort of stuck because I was trying to — I realized it was because I was trying to service a bunch of characters and things just weren’t fitting right.

And so there’s an exercise I do every once in a while which I’d recommend to anybody is basically, what happens if I killed the hero? Like right now, what if the hero died? And I would go through it like, I thought through like what would actually happen if the hero were to die right now. And that didn’t help the situation so I just go sort of one by one and I kill off all the characters and sort of mentally run through what would happen.

And I realized if I killed off this supporting character, life would be so much easier and happier because it would force the other characters in the rest of these sequences to do more of the work. So I didn’t end up killing her but I ended up just getting rid of her because she could do her function that she needed to do and we kind of just didn’t care anymore. She had recurred, she was done, she’s gone.

And it was incredibly helpful and useful. And I thought in a general sense it would be great to talk about sort of how many characters you need because — so I read scripts that aren’t working. A lot of times I find they’re trying to service characters, too many characters too long in the script and they just sort of get muddled.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, have you found this to be the case?

**Craig:** I have. And this is another reason that I do like to outline beforehand because every character — I think that there’s times when we get a little, our appetites get a little big. You know, we have this idea of all these wonderful characters. And the problem is that every character has to be there very, very intentionally. They each need to serve some very important purpose.

Some characters are single-use K-Cup characters. They show up and then they’re gone. We talked about the Ghost —

**John:** I like, Craig, I have to single out the K-Cup metaphor.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Terrific.

**Craig:** K-Cup.

**John:** One shot and they’re gone, throw them away.

**Craig:** One shot. Throw them away. So they show up, they do their thing and they’re gone. Movies are full of great characters that show up like that. But for the characters that you’re going to be traveling with, they need each of them to have their story. They need to fill a place. They need to provide you with a tool to tell your story.

There are all sorts of tricks. I mean, some people will tell you, well, every character is just an aspect of the protagonist, which is, you know, it’s interesting. Sometimes I suppose in some kinds of movies that might be true. But for the most part, it’s not. So the questions you have to ask yourself are this. What does, for every character, what do they want? What’s their problem? Who are they really into? Who do they have a big problem with? How are they going to end?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then if I understand those things and on top of that I know what they do for the plot, they must do something for the plot, then, well, I’m not going to have a problem writing them am I?

**John:** No, you’re not. And in my case, you know, I had outlined up to a certain point. But I sort of knew who the characters were going to the last section, but I hadn’t thoroughly figured out sort of who was responsible for what things. And it was as I was trying to write the outline for this section that I realized like, argh, something’s not working right here.

And I wouldn’t have singled out that this character was the one who needed to go away because she served an important function and I thought I would need to bring her through to the end of the movie. What should have been my tipoff is that I didn’t really have any specific place I wanted her to end.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** There was no sort of great way to send her out of this movie. And that was a good sign that maybe she didn’t need to make it to the end of the movie, that maybe she could leave. And the functions that she would have been doing in this last section of the film, someone else could do them. And probably someone more important could do them and would have more reason to be in those moments because it’s a challenge for her to be performing these actions.

So a lot of times I’ll avoid having too many characters in a scene, but a lot of times if a scene isn’t working it’s because you have too many people in them because you’re trying to service these characters who don’t have enough time to speak. This was a case where I had too many characters in this whole sequence and one of them had to go away.

**Craig:** And sometimes in a circumstance like that you can fold some characters together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You can reassign a duty to another character which can help a lot. One of the danger signs that you’ve triggered here is the too many people within a scene because there’s too many people in general. But then there’s the other problem with too many people in one scene. And you can feel it when suddenly you realize a bunch of people aren’t saying anything.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And on set, I’ve seen this happen and it’s a very scary thing. When you’re writing a scene, you may say the five of them sit down, you know, at the table. The person that they’re talking to begins talking and then the leader of the group begins talking back to them. And it reads fine because what these two people are saying to each other is fascinating and moving the story forward and all the rest.

And everybody is like, cool, great. There is a, you know, a second AD who’s going through the script and going, okay, let’s see, who’s in each scene because I need to make sure they’re there that day. Okay, they’re in that scene, they’re there that day. And there they are. And then everybody looks and goes, why are all these people here? And why are these actors sitting around? How do I shoot the scene so it’s not the most awkward thing in the world while a bunch of people are sitting there quietly?

Naturally, as an audience, if we see you, we want you to do something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not like real life [laughs] where we sit around do nothing all the time. If the camera is on you, it needs to be on you.

**John:** Yeah. There has to be an intention.

**Craig:** Right. So that’s a warning sign that you’ve got too many people in your scene.

**John:** Yeah. And you’ll see that happen a lot. And there’s cases where you want all those people around that dinner table because that’s part of the stakes and the drama of that scene is people’s reactions to those things. Wedding Crashers has a great, really complicated dinner party scene where a bunch of people are around the table and each of those reactions is important.

And, by the way, if you’re trying to ever shoot one of those things, you will go insane because you’re having to shoot angles for everybody looking at each other and trying to match eye lines and you’ll go mental. But sometimes that’s really, really important.

Other times, it’s not and you need to look for ways to sort of get those people out of the room so you can have moments between two characters be between two characters or three characters. I think one of the reasons why we have this instinct to now add a lot of characters to things is we’re used to great TV dramas. We’re used to things like Game of Thrones where you have these giant casts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, you couldn’t have that giant cast in the feature version of Game of Thrones. It wouldn’t make any sense at all. The feature version Game of Thrones would focus on like three guys and like Daenerys and John Snow and somebody else. It wouldn’t be all those people. It’s because you have 20 hours to explore all these characters that you can do that in a one-hour show. You can’t do it in a movie.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely correct. I mean, you’ve called out an interesting thing about the dining room scene because we’ve all done those. And for those of you, if you’re going to write one of those, obviously everybody needs to be there. And John’s right. Not everybody needs to say something, but everybody needs to have a reaction.

So if someone’s there and they say nothing, they’re there because they’re the person who’s going to deliver a key reaction and you should write those reactions. It’s a big thing with me. That’s how the actors even go, okay, I understand, I’m participating in this, I’m there for a reason, the camera will be on me and I have a job. Actors understand that their job goes beyond mouth moving, sound coming out. Reactions, I mean look, comedy-wise, people tend to laugh at the reactions to lines, not the lines themselves.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So write those. Then what you’re talking about with Game of Thrones is interesting to me because in television, since you have essentially endless episodes — they’re not endless, but as many as you want — you get to carve your space up and then drill down. So Game of Thrones does have a hundred characters, but really it has four characters. And the four characters are the characters within that segment.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if there’s a story going on with Tyrion, that has to do with Jaime and his father and his sister. Those are the four characters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they’re only, they’re reducing down as well. In movies, when you have large casts, inevitably what happens, because there’s no other way to keep people’s attention, is you have a protagonist, like at the top of a pyramid, right? And they have the most focus, the most depth, the most richness. Then underneath them are two people that have a little less. And then underneath them are some other people that are little less. And eventually you get to people that are one note.

So eventually, like for instance if you think about Police Academy [laughs], you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, so at the top you’ve got Steve Guttenberg and he’s, you know, for a broad comedy, he’s a typical broad comedy protagonist, a man-child who doesn’t want to grow up. He wants to crap out of this thing, but he’s kind of into a girl and lo and behold, he starts to find that he is going to grow up and he is going to live up to the expectations of all the people that believe he’s something special and he’s going to win the day.

At the bottom of the pyramid, you have somebody whose entire character is making funny noises. That’s it. Because that’s all you can bear after, you know, you’ve placed your 15 people in the script.

**John:** The story could not have withstood that guy having a whole plot line and whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If it were a TV series, yes, give them business, give them ongoing things that, you know, let us know who he is as a person. But for the feature version, he’s the guy who makes funny noises and that’s all you kind of need to know.

**Craig:** Like in the TV version, he goes home —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** We actually see that he’s got this like really tough life. He’s got a girlfriend, but she’s been, like she’s actually been sick and he’s taking care of her.

**John:** And she’s deaf.

**Craig:** Right, so —

**John:** So she has no sense of what noises he makes.

**Craig:** Which is really troubling. He tells her that he’s doing great there and everybody really is impressed with his intelligence, but he knows that’s not true. And then he sits there at night alone and learns new sounds because that’s what the guys kind of like.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But he’s so sad and morose because he really doesn’t feel like he’s good at anything except that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That would be, that’s a cool, that’s the —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let’s watch it.

**John:** The saddest Police Academy movie ever.

**Craig:** I like sad Police Academy, so I should make that movie. [laughs]

**John:** And just to circle around again to the movie you haven’t seen, in Gone Girl, I’d read the book and I saw the movie, I like them both very, very much. Gone Girl, the author, Gillian Flynn, she removes one character, Ben Affleck’s best friend, from the movie entirely. And I didn’t even know he was missing until someone pointed it out. And that’s a great example of like that character was important for the book because it gave Ben Affleck’s character some grounding and lets you know sort of what was going on there. But he would have gotten in the way in the movie. He would have just been standing around for too much of the movie. So getting rid of him made a lot more sense.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. And so you can see there is a case of an author. It’s her book.

**John:** It’s her book. And she’s smart enough to know.

**Craig:** Yeah. She meant that character to exist, but she also understands that a movie is different. Now, there’s the opposite syndrome which is the not enough character syndrome.

**John:** We talked about that with Ghost.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Ghost feels a little light.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. So what happens is the movie begins to feel a little small. You’ll hear this from executives sometimes. And they’ll say, the movie feels small. They sometimes say this if the movie is, it’s very located in interiors. They’ll start to say it’s smaller, claustrophobic or if there aren’t enough characters, the movie feels small. And what happens is, if you’re telling the story of a movie and you’re shooting in the great wide world of planet Earth and you only have three characters that are really noticeable as human beings at all —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It starts to feel a little bit more like a play.

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

**Craig:** And that’s a little rough. I mean look, Ghost wasn’t off by much. I think it was really off by one, you know, one other character to make that red herring work and all that stuff. It would have been great. But if you start to feel like your movie is just three people and no one else feels real or fleshed out or purposeful to the story, you know, you have to sort of stop and ask yourself, are there enough obstacles here? Is this is world well-fleshed out? Who am I one-noting that really should have some life in this because a movie can bear more than that?

**John:** Yeah. These are challenges I think you find when you have too few characters in your story is that the audience just gets away too far ahead of you because we start to be able to figure out everything that those characters could do. And so then when they do them, it’s like, well, well yeah, we sort of knew that was going to happen. It becomes harder to surprise your audience because we kind of know who all these people are and what they’re capable of doing.

**Craig:** John, that is a genius point. That’s a genius point.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right, because when we only have three people to look at, we are studying them so carefully, yeah, of course we’re not going to miss anything. Part of misdirection is shifting our focus, just like magicians are constantly misdirecting you, they’re waving their hand around or yapping while they’re stuffing a bird in a vegetable or something. [laughs] I don’t know whatever they’re doing, cutting up cards behind their backs. Your ability to misdirect people is vastly reduced. Excellent point.

**John:** Thank you. So our last topic of the podcast of this episode is business affairs. And this is something that you and I both talked about. So let me explain what business affairs is. If you are hired to write a movie for somebody, so it could be a first draft, it could be rewrite, it could be sort of anytime that you are employed as a writer for a studio, business affairs is the lawyers who make your deal.

So your agent and your lawyers are talking to business affairs at Sony or Fox or some place and trying to come to a deal for your writing services. And that may just be scale. You may not be getting sort of above the normal rates. But you have to get that all figured out, basically how long you have to write, what they’re going to pay for each step along the way, other sort of deal points. There’s boilerplate, but it’s not all one standard deal.

So these business affairs people are important. And they are vanishing. I’ve become increasingly frustrated. I think over the last few years, that it feels like takes longer and longer and longer to make deals. And it’s not because we’re being difficult or they’re being difficult. They’re just not there. They’re overworked. And it feels like there’s not enough business affairs people.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is the general squeeze down on the business. We know that there are fewer and fewer movies made, fewer and fewer executives. And yes, I’ve felt it too. I don’t have numbers obviously. We’re not privy to the payroll of the companies. But it does seem that business affairs has been narrowed through fewer and fewer attorneys. And it is frustrating. Look, it’s a frustrating thing to deal with business. The phrase business affairs is unique in our business because other than the fact that it sounds almost sexy and yet so it’s the opposite of sexy.

**John:** Ooh affairs.

**Craig:** Ooh, business affairs. It’s a great title for like a Skinemax movie, but in fact it’s not sexy at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it has this incredible binary emotional impact. When you are trying to get a job or trying to sell something, when you finally hear okay, business affairs will be calling, you go hooray.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s happening. I’m getting paid. I’m being hired. I got a job. And then business affairs makes you hate them. [laughs] Because, you know, you have, and this is by design. Just as we separate creative from business by hiring agents, the studios separate creative in business. So the creative people say, we love you, we love your idea, love, love, love. Artists come here and let us kiss you all over your face. And the business affairs people are like, uh-huh, according to my spreadsheet you get half of what you think you deserve or so on and so forth.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you start to grind your teeth.

**John:** But that’s how it, I would say that’s how it’s supposed to work in a weird way.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** And it’s supposed to be that horrible, uncomfortable, like it’s negotiation. And no negotiations are fun. That’s just the nature of it. What is frustrating is that I feel like the negotiation it just doesn’t even start because there’s just no one to actually even begin the negotiation or you end up waiting a really long time because those poor guys are just overworked.

Now why does this matter? Well, it matters because as a writer, you’re not getting paid. Well, that’s obviously a huge headline concern because you can’t get paid until the contract is figured out. They’re not going to cut you a check until there’s a contract to sign.

But more importantly, I think this is actually the bigger crisis in the industry right now is, you know, projects will just stagnate for a long time while these deals get done. And so you could go in and just like kill them with a pitch and it’s just fantastic and everyone is so excited to have you start writing this thing. And then it’s six months before they actually get these contracts figured out.

And in that six months, you haven’t been able to start because you’re not sure the deal is going to be possible to make. And that is awful because by the time you actually get to start writing the thing, it’s done, like your motivation has —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Has left.

**Craig:** I haven’t experienced that kind of lag, but I certainly have experienced more of a lag than has been there before. There are some tricks you can do. If all the major deal points have been agreed on then you can sign a certificate of authorship, get paid and then everybody works out all the inky-dinky details in the long form contract. But the wheel does seem to turn much slower than it used to.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I do sympathize. Business affairs people are in a tough spot. They know that they have to be the heavy. They also know that sometimes they’re being used. So creative people will give everybody a big hug and tell them that they love and then turn around, call business affairs and say, we do love them but we can’t really, we don’t want to pay more than this. So can you please just be the heavy?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because the deal is, if we do end up making a deal, I have to work with these people and I don’t want them to be angry at me the whole time. I just want them to angry at you. [laughs] So —

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** A little of that goes on. But yeah, it’s gotten slow.

**John:** Absolutely. I completely sympathize with business affairs people. I know they have to be heavies. I kind of in a way just want there are going to be more heavies. And I wish studios would hire more people to do that job because I think they’d be able to move faster and more nimbly if they actually could make deals for the things they want more quickly and get their scripts back faster.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So often, studios will say like, oh takes us forever to get this, we’ll make a deal and it takes, you know, eight months for us to get the script from the writer. It’s like, well you know what, it took six months for you to make a deal. So maybe you could speed up a little on your side.

**Craig:** And to give folks out there context who are maybe attorneys, these are not complicated deals.

**John:** They really aren’t.

**Craig:** They are nearly boilerplate contracts by the time you’ve been — either you’re a new writer and it’s fairly boilerplate or you’ve been around for a while and your deals have a ton of precedents and they’re fairly boilerplate. And what it really comes down to is how much are we paying you? The rest is baloney, you know, like how many tickets you get to the premiere and do you fly first class or business? I mean whatever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not hard.

**John:** And ultimately, you and I both had the experience where deals are dragging on for a long time then finally in one afternoon, there’ll be a bunch of phone calls back and forth and it will be done. And that afternoon of phone calls could have happened several weeks ahead of time. And it didn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah, which also makes me feel bad for business affairs because then I feel like they’re living their lives in a constant state of crisis because they’re understaffed. So the deal that they’re doing today is the one that’s about to literally blow up because they couldn’t get to it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So every day is a crisis. It’s no way, but this is what these companies have done. They’ve just cut, cut, cut everywhere. And, you know, the other thing that’s rough is like, it’s hard when you’re negotiating deals because, you know, if you’re like a new business affairs lawyer, you know, I don’t know what you’re getting paid. I don’t know what the starting rate is for a brand new business affairs attorney, but my guess is it’s, you know, I don’t know, a couple 100 grand or something? And, you know, some writer is like, “What, $300,000, screw you, you’re a jerk.” And they’re like, “Ugh, am I, am I the jerk?”

You know, it’s a tough gig. And I feel bad for them.

**John:** And do too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. We won’t solve this problem, but I just wanted to bring it up and shine a spotlight on it. Craig, and it’s time for One Cool Things, do you have a One Cool Thing this week.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** Oh you forgot about it.

**Craig:** I totally forgot.

**John:** Yeah. I’ll stall for you and I’ll tell you what my One Cool Thing is.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Mine is this movie that I’ve meant to watch for a long time that I finally watched on the plane. I’m in Montreal as we’re recording this. I’m asked to give a speech at Çingleton which is a great conference. But on the plane, I watched Indie Game: The Movie which everyone had recommended and they were right. It’s a really good documentary about these guys making indie games, indie games for, in this case, Xbox.

And it follows the ups and downs and the travails. And even if you’re not a gamer or a person who would make video games, it’s a great look at sort of that part of the creative process where, you know, you’re living that delusion of like, okay, there’ s a game out there that I can make, that I can deliver and it’s going to happen and then you have a launch day and then you just see.

And that’s what the experience is of making movies and the experience of making Broadway shows and all sorts of creative endeavors is that you are so internally focused for so long and you’re killing yourself to make this thing and you’re exhausted and then finally that day comes and you can’t believe it’s finally here. But you have sort of both excitement and post partum depression and it’s all out of your hands. And the variables are unforeseen.

So it’s a really well-made documentary. If you watch it, then you can look up about the people involved. You’ll see there’s other controversy about sort of the nature of the documentary, but I thought it was just a terrifically a well-made thing. It’s on Netflix right now, so if you have Netflix streaming it is free for you to watch.

**Craig:** Awesome. Well, I guess my One Cool Thing, it’s, you know, we try to make One Cool Things accessible to people. This is not, but it is so so cool. So did you see that Tesla came out with the Tesla P85D model?

**John:** I have no idea what it is. So tell me all about it.

**Craig:** They took a Tesla. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They took the model S. They added a second motor to it. So it’s now all wheel drive, two motors. They added a ton of driver assistance features that essentially make the car able to drive itself.

**John:** Great, love it.

**Craig:** It reads speed limit signs. It sees the lane markers. It keeps distance from the car — basically, I think Elon Musk said, “If you punch in your address and fall asleep in the car, it will get you there,” which is pretty amazing.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** But more importantly, it goes from 0 to 60 in 3.1 seconds. It is as fast as a McLaren F1. It is in fact a supercar.

**John:** Well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Craig, how does it feel to have a shitty Tesla now?

**Craig:** Well, the thing is I just already, [laughs] begun the process of seeing how it might work on a trade-in because —

**John:** Oh, that’s good. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we’re a very accessible podcast here. I talked about free movies on Netflix. And you’re talking about supercars.

**Craig:** I’m so sorry.

**John:** It’s fine. If you would like to ask Craig more questions about his supercar, you can tweet at him.

**Craig:** I don’t have it yet. I don’t have it yet.

**John:** He’s @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust on Twitter. Longer questions like the one we got today, well it wasn’t really a question? It was just a venting of umbrage.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s so great.

**John:** You can send those vents to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re on iTunes. So if you’re subscribing to us through iTunes, that’s awesome. If you’re not subscribing to us in iTunes, like maybe you’re just listening to us at the johnaugust.com site, go over to iTunes and click subscribe and leave us a comment while you’re there because those are lovely.

You can find show notes for the things we talked about on this episode and almost every episode at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. We have a premium app on iTunes and for Android. There’s a premium site at scriptnotes.net. If you sign up for that, you’ll hear all the back episodes and little bonus things that we do every once in a while. That’s also where you’re going to hear the dirty episode when we hit 1,000 premium subscribers which we’re getting pretty close. We are going to do a dirty episode. So people sent some really good suggestions for who we should have as a guest on the dirty episode.

**Craig:** I thought the funniest one was Mike Birbiglia because he’s so not dirty.

**John:** He’s not. He’s the sweetest, nicest, not dirtiest man.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But we’ll find somebody. I have some hunches about some really great people we can have on the show.

**Craig:** All right, good.

**John:** All right. And I think that is our show for this week.

**Craig:** Awesome. Good show.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [A few tickets remain](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/writers-writing-simon-kinberg/) for tonight’s Writers on Writing event with John interviewing Simon Kinberg
* [The Belasco Theater](http://thebelascotheater.com/) is gorgeous
* John and Craig [on the Slate Culture Gabfest](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest/2014/10/slate_s_culture_gabfest_is_live_from_l_a_the_critics_talk_to_jenny_slate.html)
* [Star Wars Minus Williams – The Throne Room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-GZJhfBmI) by Auralnauts
* [Çingleton](http://cingleton.com/)
* [Indie Game: The Movie](http://buy.indiegamethemovie.com/)
* Jalopnik [on the Tesla Model S P85D](http://carbuying.jalopnik.com/will-the-tesla-model-s-p85d-be-the-best-overall-car-you-1644727868)
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jonas Bech ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))