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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode has Three Page Challenges in it that use some F-words, so if you’re listening to this in the car, there’s a very good chance we will end up using some of those F-words in the podcast. So, just standard issue warning for explicit language. Thanks.

Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 202 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I’m in Vancouver Canada. You’re in La Cañada. So, in some ways we are straddling the border, but also in the same semantic space.

**Craig:** Yeah. La Cañada is the sister city to all of Canada. I love Vancouver.

**John:** One tiny little village in California. One giant country that is very close to the US border.

**Craig:** It’s massive. What are you doing up there?

**John:** Just vacation. Just a week’s vacation.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like it.

**John:** We picked one of the weeks of the year in which Vancouver is absolutely stunningly beautiful and sunny and it’s been terrific. So, I tweeted and you probably saw this tweet. I jumped off a bridge, which was quite fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. I saw it and I think you’re out of your mind.

**John:** Yes. I am insane, but it was actually tremendously fun. And it was because my whole family, or actually four people in my family decided, hey, let’s do it. And so I said, you know what, that’s a really good idea. We should do it. So even my nine-year-old daughter did it, which was again, questionable parenting if anything had gone wrong. But because everything went really right, it was empowering for her as a young woman who could take charge of her destiny and jump off bridges.

**Craig:** You know, it’s not. It’s not empowering. It’s sick. I don’t understand why you would do it. I don’t understand why she did it. I don’t understand why anyone does that. This bungee jumping thing — anything jumping, bungee jumping, jumping out of a plane, jumping — base —

**John:** Jumping on a trampoline.

**Craig:** Base jumping. Jumping off of a couch. [laughs] But you know, here’s the thing, I do believe that there’s some kind of genetic thing where some people appreciate that feeling of falling and other people hate it. And I’m definitely in the hate it camp.

My daughter is — she loves it. She loves rollercoasters and all that stuff. I can’t. And my son is like me. We can’t. You know, that feeling I’m talking about right?

**John:** Absolutely. It’s that feeling of being completely out of control, but at the same time knowing intellectually that nothing bad can actually happen to me.

**Craig:** I’m not talking about the psychological. I’m talking about the physiological feeling. Do you not get that sensation?

**John:** Oh, I absolutely get that sensation. But also I know that the endorphin rush that happens after is also tremendously great. So, I’m looking past that terrible moment to the great moment.

**Craig:** A couple years ago I was in Florida with my in-laws. We were having dinner and my wife’s grandmother, who is still alive, god bless her. Even though I think she’s 97 now. So she was about 95. We’re all sitting there eating dinner and this topic comes up, the topic of falling and that feeling.

And my mother-in-law said where do you feel that feeling. And I said it’s in the pit of my stomach. And we were all talking about where it was. And then my wife said, Gamma, because that’s what she calls her grandma. “Gamma, where do you feel that feeling?” And she looked up from her baked fish and she said, “In my clitoris.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It was the greatest moment of my life.

**John:** And I have a suspicion that because of that she enjoyed the feeling of falling. I hope she enjoyed the feeling of falling.

**Craig:** No. [laughs] She wasn’t actually a big fan of it. No, because not all clitoris feelings are good feelings. There’s good clitoris and bad clitoris, I guess. But when a 95-year-old woman refers to her clitoris in any context, it’s spectacular.

**John:** Craig, we’ve just found a title for this week’s episode. There’s good clitoris and bad clitoris. It won’t be controversial at all.

**Craig:** No, no. Twitter won’t erupt.

**John:** Not a bit. So while the title of today’s episode might be about the clitoris, the actual topics we’ll be discussing today really have nothing to do with female genital health. We’ll be looking at three Three Page Challenges. We’ll be looking at a system for writing your screenplay that must work because the guy gave a Ted Talk. We’ll look at everyday heroes. We’ll look at what happens when a union threatens to sue a filmmaker.

But first, we have follow up. Craig?

**Craig:** Just a touch of follow up. I heard from a couple of writers on Telltale Software’s Game of Thrones app, because that was my One Cool Thing last week. And I did leave one name off, Zach Schiff Abrams who actually ran the writing room early on when they were breaking the story. They were very happy to be called out on the podcast. So, I just wanted to make sure that we acknowledged Zach because he was obviously a big part of the development of that product.

**John:** Craig, I played the first two episodes of it on this trip. I played one on the plane. I played one last night. They really are just phenomenally well done. So, a great recommendation from you, but really just a great experience for anybody who is jonesing for a little bit extra Game of Thrones in their lives.

I really want to make some House Forrester like t-shirts. I want like a House Forrester team shirt because I’m really rooting for the Forresters. And I just feel like more bad things are going to happen to them.

**Craig:** I mean, even Jesus is like, come on. Come on, you’re being a little hard on those people.

**John:** Now, Craig, have you gone back and made different choices along the way? Because for people who didn’t follow the last episode, these Game of Thrones games done by Telltale games, they’re sort of like Choose Your Own Adventure where you get to make choices along the way. They’re more sophisticated than the simple book kind of choices, but you can kind of make some choices that are going to affect the plot, but you also get the chance to rewind and make some different choices if you want to.

Have you just stuck with the original choices, or did you go back and change anything along the way?

**Craig:** I’ve stuck with my original choices. I suspect now that I’ve played through four of these things that it’s really the allusion of choice.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** They carry over some things. They’ll say things like, well, you did do blanket-blank. But those things really still are contained within the rails of the story. The big things that happen, you cannot avoid happening.

**John:** I was curious whether the song the girl sings — this is not a spoiler at all — the song the girl sings incorporates some of these specific events that you did or didn’t — it was generic enough, so we’ll see.

**Craig:** No, I think that song actually is a good example of how your choices do impact things, because it’s those areas where they go, okay, we’ll reward you and make you feel like your choices matter. But your choices don’t matter. [laughs] Not really. You’re really just watching TV. You’re just watching a side series of Game of Thrones. That’s the way I feel about it. I think they’ve just done a great job.

**John:** So, while that game may be slightly on rails, this guy has a system that can break you out of your rails. This is a system for writing a screenplay quickly and, Craig, this is your entry to the Workflowy, so tell us about this guy and why we should maybe stop the podcast right now.

**Craig:** Well, someone on Twitter who just likes winding up — I mean, that’s what’s happened now. I get it. People go, “Oh, this will make him crazy.” And they’re right. I’m not complicated. They sent me a link to a website called FAST Screenplay. Fastscreenplay.com. And the gentleman who runs Fastscreenplay.com, Jeff Bollow, gave a Ted Talk, well, it’s a TEDx Talk —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In Dockland, which I think is —

**John:** It’s Australia.

**Craig:** Australia.

**John:** And so he’s not Australian though. That’s a fascinating thing. I kept waiting for an Australian accent and it never came.

**Craig:** Right. I don’t understand the deal with TEDx. The deal with TEDx is pretty much anybody who can write the word Ted on a banner and stick it behind them gets to give a TEDx talk? I don’t understand any of it. Anyway, I went over to this website and I just got infuriated.

And here’s the thing. So, look, he’s selling a system. It’s the same old come on that we’ve read in a million different ways, in a million different places. He’s got a system to help you write a screenplay. It’s a system to help you write a screenplay that reads fast and eventually if you master his system you can write fast. Obviously, the system is not good enough to get him to sell screenplays for millions of dollars apiece. He would prefer to just take your money. Always interesting.

And you get this lifetime membership. Lifetime membership for a limited time only, $600. What?! And that regular price is $1,300. But, you know, it’s a special right now because it’s celebrating the release of his Ted Talk. But here’s the thing, all right, so whatever, it’s baloney, of course. I mean, he says things like, “FAST Screenplay is a yearlong step-by-step professional screenplay development system worth over $30,000.” Uh, yeah, if you also get like a Kia with it or —

[laughs] I mean, I don’t — how do you come up with that number? And then he says it’s designed to replace a three-year university program and ten years’ worth of real world, hands-on skills and insights, which as you know are incredibly quantifiable.

It includes over 1 million words of content. Oh boy. That must mean it’s good.

But here’s the thing that really snagged me in my little umbrage gland and started squeezing it. He says, “Please note FAST Screenplay is entirely not-for-profit. Every dollar that comes in is poured right back into the system, which is why we keep our price so low.” What the hell does that mean?

**John:** It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** So, of course, I immediately went, wait a second. Not-for-profit, that’s not just a phrase. That is a status. That’s a tax status here in the United States. It is an IRS tax status. So, I started looking to see, well, what is this company? Well, according to their website, FAST Screenplay is trademarked and copyright by Embryo Films in Sydney, Australia. Embryo Films seems to be just a — seems to be a for-profit film production company that is turn owed by another media company of some sort.

I see no information indicating that they have any kind of tax exempt status as a non-profit or not-for-profit corporation. But also if it’s not-for-profit, why are you charging anyone anything? Why don’t you just put it out there?

**John:** There’s a subtle distinction between not-for-profit and unprofitable. And there are many businesses that are unprofitable, but not actually not-for-profit. It’s an important distinction that seems to be really swept under the rug here.

I found the site and his whole video kind of fascinating. And I had to sort of keep skimming through the video because it was just so empty and vacuous and it’s just like a bunch of buzz words strung together in a way that had the qualities of human speech without actually having any content.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And the site is very much the same thing, too. But, honestly, you could switch out the word screenplay for almost anything else on any page and it could be about like investing in real estate, or how to do almost anything. So, it felt like there was a template kind of behind the whole thing.

That said, I thought it was all really well executed template stuff. And so I found myself sort of fascinated and repulsed by him as an individual and what he was trying to do. And as a character I found him kind of fascinating. As a person who is trying to take money from screenwriters, I found him, of course, just to be horrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is a new twist on the generic horribleness of these sorts of people and these sorts of ventures. And it’s the, oh, we’re not-for-profit. Does that mean — do they pay themselves salaries? Like what do they do with all of this money if they’re not for profit? Is it to run this website? That can’t cost that much. I mean, each person is giving them hundreds of dollars, even if you just go month-to-month, which is an option.

A three-month subscription is $300. That’s their minimum, as far as I can tell on their website. So, everyone is giving them somewhere between $300 to $1,300. What are they doing with all that money?

Are they paying themselves salaries and so that’s why it’s not-for-profit? None of this makes any sense. I don’t know what this sentence means. “Every dollar that comes in is poured right back into the system.” What?

**John:** Well he says very clearly, “Our goal is not to make money off writers. It’s to generate screenplays which we can turn into films and lift the overall quality of screenwriting to empower individual voices and visions around the world.” Parenthetical, it’s the “variety of imagination that expands our thinking.”

**Craig:** What the hell does that mean?

**John:** I don’t know what it means. But I found it all kind of just amazing, as if some sort of bizarre AB tested kind of system developed the perfect like I’m going to get money off of screenwriters system.

**Craig:** I think you’re actually onto something. This really does feel like a brilliant application of a standard get rich quick template. That you could plug in real estate or investment or work from home or penis enlargement, or any of these things, and lay it out like this and it would work.

I’m just baffled.

**John:** So, here is why — I’m trying to always play my devil’s advocate. Like, well, what if he really is sincere, and what if he truly believes what he’s saying. And on some level he might truly believe what he’s saying. But if his overall goal is to improve the lot of writers and to do the things he’s saying in these dreamy kind of speeches, there are many other ways to do that. And there are many sources he should be looking for those screenplays rather than trying to create a new class of brilliant screenwriters from scratch.

That’s the part that feels so incredibly disingenuous. He’s saying like, oh, I searched throughout Australia and could not find any good screenplays, so I must now make more screenwriters. That I just don’t believe on any level.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. If he doesn’t care about profit and he wants to help screenwriters and he has this brilliant system that will transform you into a genius, just publish it on the web for free.

**John:** That would be great. You could either do that, or you could fund the very needy Australian screenwriters who have things they want to make, and they cannot make them in Australia because it’s challenging to make films in Australia. That would be another great way to do that.

**Craig:** I just — I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m tired.

**John:** Let’s switch to a happier topic. This is another great suggestion from Craig Mazin. It’s an article by Jordan Crucchiola called Bring Back Everyday Heroes. It ran in Wired Magazine. And it’s talking about the nature of heroes in our movies and how they have literally gotten bigger. And as the movies have gotten bigger, literally the men in these movies have gotten so much bigger in a way that is strange and perhaps dangerous. Craig, take it.

**Craig:** Well, every now and then you come across an article that says something that you think is immediately obvious and yet no one has pointed it out yet in this kind of way. And this was one of those articles. So, Jordan Crucchiola, I’m going to go with the standard Italian pronunciation, I don’t know if that’s right. So, what he says basically is that we used to have a certain kind of American action hero, a male American action hero who at least physically was roughly like the average guy.

He uses the example of Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. Kurt Russell, he’s in decent shape. You know, he’s not overweight, but maybe he had gone to the gym a bit. There’s not a ton of muscles there. And that’s kind of the point. But now he says take a look at the evolution of Hugh Jackman from the first X-Men movie, where he played Wolverine, to now. And it’s astonishing.

I mean, truly astonishing. It’s like looking at the before and after pictures of Barry Bonds when he was playing as a rookie for the Pirates and he looked like he was basically 170 pounds soaking wet. And then eventually after all the ‘roids and the HGH, he was like the Incredible Hulk. It’s a very similar thing when you look at Hugh Jackman’s body. And I don’t know if there’s any kind of chemical shenanigans. I just think it’s insane amount of working out.

And what he says, at least the point he’s making, is this isn’t just a superficial issue. It’s actually affecting stories, and that’s what really fascinated me because the truth is when an actor has a certain physicality it limits or it certainly influences the choices you make about that character.

**John:** Exactly. So, a lot of times you’ll be writing a character who is supposed to be like the ordinary guy next door. So, an ordinary man forced into extraordinary circumstances. But the Rock isn’t an ordinary person. He is sort of by definition special from the very beginning. And the characters who we are seeing in these kinds of movies these days are these just larger than life and sort of impossible people. So, you don’t have the Kurt Russells as your action heroes. You don’t even have the Keanu Reeves as action heroes. You have these super human gods.

He does single out like some movies really call for gods. So you look at Captain America, well I mean he’s Chris Evans because he’s supposed to be this sort of larger than life character. He’s like this ordinary man who got transformed. That’s great. Or you have Thor. And Thor is supposed to be a god. Great. Chris Hemsworth is perfect for that.

But you have these other people that are supposed to be just kind of normal folks. You end up casting the Rock in it, suddenly you have to change the backstory to make some reason why that person is in this movie right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, here’s what I think silently goes on when I see a character who is just an amazing physical specimen. A certain amount of drama is immediately diminished. Here are some things that I think can’t be true about that character. They can’t be lazy. They can’t be unmotivated. They can’t be undisciplined. They can’t be depressed. They can’t be resigned to life. They can’t even be uncool, because it’s essentially impossible to become that freaking awesome if you’re held back in all of these other ways. And so you start to lose dimensions of that character. You also start to lose a certain amount of risk.

So, when you look at The Terminator, obviously Arnold Schwarzenegger is supposed to be massive because he’s this possible robot. But playing against him you had Michael Biehn who basically was like a 165 pound guy.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that made it better, you know. I mean, you don’t want — and eventually you could see how those movies then turned into bigger against bigger. You know, we had what you’d call great everyday heroes. Harrison Ford, who kind of elevated fear as the epitome of heroism. All of his characters were always afraid. And that made them more believable. Charles Bronson was skinny but super angry, which I thought was really cool. Steve McQueen sort of embodied whatever the non-physical dimensions of a classic masculinity are. And then you had Sean Connery who was all about charm and confidence instead of brawn.

You see the difference between Sean Connery’s body and Daniel Craig’s body. It’s not even close.

**John:** Absolutely. You look at Harrison in Indiana Jones. Now we would make Indiana Jones with Chris Pratt who has also transformed from schlubby guy into super-hot guy and sort of action star big muscle guy. And that changes the nature of that character.

Now, it would be a question of when Chris Pratt plays that character, is he going to keep this new Chris Pratt body, or is he going to go back to an ordinary size? I don’t know. But it does change our approach to that character if he’s already the biggest guy in the room.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, is this the worst thing in the world? No. There’s still actors that portray a kind of an everyman sense. But there is a dark side to this. For every article about the latest fashion for women or the latest fad diet for women, there are three articles saying this is not good for women and for girls.

But these things that are happening now in movies I think are probably also not good for boys and for men. And there’s some interesting — I started looking around, some interesting statistics. Over the last three decades, the percentage of men that said they had body image concerns has gone from 15% to 43%, which is a rate comparable to those currently found in women.

And when you look at what they call the muscularity of ideal male body representations, from 1979 to the 1990s it went way high. And is currently still way, way up there. I think it’s not great for boys to look up to the heroes and see these absolutely impossible to achieve bodies. I mean, they’re not impossible to achieve. Well, from where I’m sitting they are.

**John:** So, here we’re taking a look at how male heroes have become sort of giant and larger than life. In many ways I’d say that women in movies have always been sort of these impossible to achieve ideals. They’re always like they’re a great cook and yet they’re hot in the sack and they’re stunningly beautiful and they can do all these things. Women are always supposed to be perfect.

And in some ways we’re maybe falling into the same trap with our male characters where what you said before, if that guy is that ripped he can’t be lazy. By his nature he couldn’t be sort of the slack off. I just worry that we’re going to end up with these characters who are so perfect from the beginning that they’re not going to have any journey to go on.

You know, you look at Linda Hamilton in The Terminator. We talked about Michael Biehn, but Linda Hamilton in the first Terminator, she’s just an ordinary woman. She’s not — there’s nothing special about her. She’s a waitress. And then because she’s ordinary, she’s really fragile. And then in the second movie she can become hardened and tough because of the events of the first movie. And she can be ripped in that movie and that was a great transformation. That was a change.

Now, I just worry that she’s going to have to be sort of jacked from the very start and that’s not the same kind of movie. That’s not the same kind of experience.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s a little bit of the superhero-ization of human characters. I think for a lot of these actors, they realize that in Hollywood today the apex of our business and the apex of how you are employed as an actor is to be a very popular superhero. And so you have to have a certain kind of body.

And the problem is that you have that body while you’re making that movie and other movies. And you can’t stop, because there’s going to be four action man movies and you have to be jacked up for all four. So, looks like when you’re doing the other movies in between, you’re going to also have to be jacked up. And that’s becoming an issue.

**John:** It’s limiting the kinds of movies you can make. I was trying to think of some movies that wouldn’t be possible to make because we don’t have the right people anymore. Like kind of any movie that Burt Reynolds was in. You know, you don’t make Smokey and the Bandit kind of because I don’t know who we stick in Smokey and the Bandit who is that sort of — maybe you just go with like the guy who stayed schlubby. Maybe go with like a Josh Gad kind of character because there’s just no other choice to make that.

Or the counter example, you look at Melissa McCarthy in Spy this last weekend, a huge hit. And maybe that was in some ways a reaction to everything we’ve been forced by like what a hero is supposed to look like. And that’s maybe the reason why Melissa has become this force in popular culture is because she’s not representing all those other ideals.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, she is one of the few women onscreen that represents that what a good third or more of American women actually look like and are ignored. And whereas no men are ignored. I mean, there’s an actor I can look at for every male body type onscreen, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep an eye on — it’s like well what we did to women and what we’ve always done to women onscreen is wrong, and now we’re starting to do it to guys.

So, how about we don’t do it to either men or women. [laughs] That would be nice, right? There is one interesting thing I noted was the casting of Paul Rudd as Ant Man which reminded me very much of when they cast Michael Keaton as Batman. And I thought, oh, you know, yeah. Like, that’s a regular person. Like the whole point of a superhero movie is that you are wearing a suit that makes you awesome, or that you have some sort of particular kind of training or attitude that makes you awesome. You don’t necessarily need to be massively jacked up. You can be a little bit more representative of a wish fulfillment.

**John:** I would say if you look at the Iron Man movies as they tracked across, I think they’ve focused much less and less on Robert Downey, Jr.’s physical health over the course of them. You know, you don’t shirtless shots of Robert Downey Jr. anymore. And maybe that’s great. Maybe that’s okay.

But, again, that’s a character who has a suit of armor, so therefore doesn’t have to be, I don’t know, doesn’t have to be ripped and doesn’t have to rely on his own physicality. And it would be great to see more movies with heroes who are relying on their physicality and its ordinary person physicality rather than sort of super seven days at the gym physicality.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that one.

**John:** So, how do we fix this, Craig? We can’t just point out the problem without correcting the problem.

**Craig:** I think that these problems are always fixed the same way. A hit movie comes out that shoes a different possibility. So, every movie Melissa McCarthy makes is that movie right now. I mean, she has failed to fail. From Bridesmaids through to Spy, every movie she’s starred in has been a hit. Every single one. And she has this extraordinary fan base that is very broad and very deep and that’s a testament to her. And I think that’s opening a lot of eyes. That’s the way Hollywood works. They just respect money. They don’t actually have any real belief system. I think people think they do.

They don’t. Their only belief system is what will put money in my pocket. So, I’m hoping — I’m actually rooting for Ant Man. I was really rooting for it when I knew that Edgar Wright was doing it, but I’m still going to give this one its fair shot because it does seem like an everyman kind of deal. That’s the only thing that’s going to help.

**John:** I agree. And I think as we find heroes who aren’t the classic — the sort of new ideal of this sort of Superman thing, we just need to sort of point that out and make sure that people are aware that this is a good thing that we’re doing this.

The upcoming Fantastic Four, Miles Teller is in that. And Miles Teller isn’t a giant, ripped guy. Maybe that will work, and maybe that will be another sort of indication that there’s not just one type of person we stick in these kinds of movies. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the better test are the guys like the Wolverines. Because, you know, Mr. Fantastic is supposed to be like a slender, stretchy kind of guy. It’s the brawlers, you know. The Kurt Russell used to kick butt and he didn’t need to be massive.

**John:** Where is our Roadhouse going to come from?

**Craig:** Exactly. Although he was really cut in that movie.

**John:** It’s tough. So, while we’re figuring out who should star in the next Roadhouse, Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA are working to make sure that we don’t see another aspect of the film industry portrayed. This is a lawsuit. Craig, talk us through this.

**Craig:** Oh boy. What a mess this is. So, a woman named Amy Berg has directed a documentary about the sexual abuse of child actors in Hollywood. The film is called An Open Secret. And it is currently platforming right now. I suspect like most documentaries it will not have a big theatrical life. It will mostly exist on video on demand.

And I have not seen the documentary, although it is about a topic that is sorely needed to be aired out. There is a legitimate issue that’s been going on for years and years about the sexual abuse of child actors. And one of the people that she interviewed was a gentleman named Michael Harrah who is a, or was a, manager of child actors and a former child actor himself who had been a longtime member of the SAG Young Performers Committee which he co-founded in 1975 and chaired from 2001 to 2003.

And when she sat down to interview him at SAG I believe she confronted him with the fact that this guy Joey Coleman, who was a former client of Michael Harrah’s, is accusing him essentially of making advances toward him. Having him sleep in Mr. Harrah’s bed. Mr. Harrah touching him in a way that he did not want. And when — since Michael Harrah apparently acknowledged that he might have done something unwanted. He said in the interview, “That was something unwanted I shouldn’t have done. And there’s no way you can undo that, but it is certainly something I shouldn’t have done.” Yikes.

Okay. Well, that’s not good. But here’s a really ridiculous outcome of this. SAG, feeling somehow like they’re being tarred with this brush because this guy is being presented as somebody who sat on a SAG committee and created a SAG committee, which he did, SAG has now threatened to sue Ms. Berg and is attempting to block her film because they do not want any references to SAG, SAG/AFTRA, or any SAG/AFTRA committees to be included in any portions of the documentary.

Then, they claim they didn’t do that. But they did. This is just terrible behavior by the union in my opinion.

**John:** So, we don’t have any more information about the actual nature of the allegations of the actual abuse way back there. So, this is just us talking about sort of what is the function of a union in sort of threatening a filmmaker for essentially defaming the union or saying anything untoward about the union or making sort of allegations about the union.

You can understand an organization trying to protect itself, but this felt like really tone deaf in terms of what they were trying to do. If you are a union representing actors, you want to embrace the idea of filmmakers tackling difficult subjects and try to sort of come to clarity. You want to sort of publicly state it is our goal to protect all actors. Like that’s the first thing you should probably be doing, rather than sort of coming after saying don’t dare use our logo in your film.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, here’s the deal. From what I understand from this article, Miss Berg’s film does not accuse SAG/AFTRA institutionally of any crime. What she’s saying is that somebody who was a co-founder and member of their committee, the Young Performers Committee, seems to be admitting, at least on tape, to very questionable behavior at best. And at worst, child molestation.

And SAG’s reaction just seems really, really out of whack. And I think sometimes unions do stuff like this because there is a certain amount of paranoia and monomania as a cultural default. They are so used to the fight that they fight with the companies that they go into this defensive stance where anything that is “not good for us” will therefore weaken us at the bargaining table and be bad for actors. Anything. So there is this closing of ranks when bad news arrives and I just think it was a huge mistake, huge mistake. And I would ask anyone over there that’s involved in this decision to think twice, thrice, and quadrice, because this is not what you want to be doing as a union, threatening to sue a director for a film that frankly is getting to the heart of something that’s hurting your members.

**John:** It very much feels like the memo went to the wrong department. And if the memo had gone to the public relations department, they would have had a response to it which would have been maybe the correct response. But instead it goes to the legal department and the legal department does what legal departments do. They respond in legalistic kind of ways. And they don’t necessarily have a good sense of how something will play out in the broader world. And that really feels like what happened here is that if your first instinct is, well, we have to threaten a lawsuit because that’s what we do, that’s not going to necessarily be the right outcome here.

So, again, that speaks to leadership and sort of who you put in charge to sort of make these decisions about how you handle situations that come up.

If I were SAG, if I were running SAG, and lord knows I would never want to run SAG/AFTRA, but if I were running that I would look at this as a really good test case for when bad stuff happens, how are we going to make the decision about who should handle it and the ways we should handle it. And this was just really bungled.

**Craig:** It’s bungled. And I think you’ll see a little bit of what they call the Streisand effect. Where very famously years ago somebody found out where Barbra Streisand lived and put her address and a link to — a Google Earth photo of her home on the Internet on some small unattended corner of the Internet. She found out, went crazy, sued, and suddenly everybody knew where she lived. [laughs] And everybody saw her house. And I think that SAG/AFTRA is just making this so much worse because now when I hear about Miss Berg’s movie I immediately think, oh yeah, that’s the one that SAG/AFTRA is suing her over. That’s crazy.

What a bad decision. Bad decision. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. So, no good SAG/AFTRA. Big mistake.

**John:** All right. Now we get to go to some good things. We get to look at three Three Page Challenges. So, it’s been a while since we’ve done this. God, maybe ten episodes. But if you’re new to the show, every once and awhile we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay or their pilot of a TV show and we look through them on the air.

So, if you would like to look through these pages with us, you can find links to the PDFs at johnaugust.com. Just search for this episode and Stuart will put the links in there. You will also find them on Weekend Read if you are on the iPhone and want to download them on there.

So, we have three of these. Thank you to everybody who submitted them. If you would like to submit your own scripts to be looked at for the Three Page Challenge, just those first three pages can be sent to johnaugust.com/threepage, and that is where you will find instructions for sending us your three pages so that we can look through them on the air.

We get about 100 a week or something, and Stuart has to go through all of them. So, if we don’t get to yours that’s because of just sheer numbers. It’s not because we don’t individually like you or love your writing. Stuart tries to pick a representative sample of what we get in and sometimes the best of what we get in, but sometimes just things that have interesting things to talk about. And I felt like all three of these Three Page Challenges had really interesting things that people can learn from.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, which of these should we hit first?

**Craig:** Well I’m holding Get One Free in my hand by Zach Kaplan.

**John:** Let’s do it. Do you want to — ?

**Craig:** Summarize this?

**John:** Yeah, recap that for us.

**Craig:** All right. I’ll give you a little recap. So, Get One Free, written by Zach Kaplan. It opens on black and a voiceover, a man that we’ll know as Sadler is talking about how even in suicide brand loyalty matters. And then we fade in on a convenience store where Mr. Sadler is buying a pack of cigarettes from a low key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, Barry. And he identifies that his brand is Camel Crush. And then while Barry goes to get his cigarettes, Sadler looks around and imagines different kinds of people and the different kinds of cigarettes that they buy and smoke. And in voiceover comments about how blue collar types smoke Marlboro Reds and sorority girls smoke lights. And housewives smoke Parliaments. And depressed 65-year-old men smoke L&Ms.

And then at last he gets his cigarettes. He goes out into the parking lot, sees four teenager skateboarders, teenage skateboarders around his car. And they ask him if he could buy them some cigarettes. And that’s essentially our three pages.

**John:** Absolutely. So, this reminded me a bit of, because this had the nature of a character who is in the scene and we also had his voiceover through a lot of it, it reminded me a bit of Fight Club in that sense of where you have sort of the narration of the moment in addition to the things happening within the scenes.

If I had a frustration, it’s that while the voiceover felt like it was happening in its own space and was sort of its own movie, the actual action happening onscreen wasn’t that compelling in our first three pages. It was a lot of just standing there, waiting around, looking at things. So, I felt a little under-excited about Sadler, our hero, based on what he was doing. Basically the only information I had was this ongoing voiceover from him and it wasn’t giving me a great sense of who he really was, or why should we be looking for what he does on page four.

That was sort of my first instincts here. The actual writing of the voiceover about sort of the different kinds of cigarettes, sure, I totally get that. But in some ways it felt like it would be a more interesting Tumblr post than a voiceover setup for what we’re seeing right here on the screen.

Craig, what was your instinct?

**Craig:** Similar. I thought that it was — first of all, I’m not one of these people that has a voiceover problem. You know, we hear this all the time, “Don’t start your script with voiceover, blah, blah, blah.”

No, go ahead. It’s good. I like it. I thought it was a mistake to start the voiceover where he did. So, Zach has the voiceover begin over black. That little speech that he does there is disconnected from any visuals so unless it’s something a little epic and poetic and specifically expository like say the beginning of Lord of the Rings, it’s just going to feel a bit of a mistake to hear just that much talking over darkness. Also, it’s not necessarily.

Because we’re going to go back and we’re going to have voiceover in a bit, I’d rather just open with a guy buying a pack of cigarettes. And the man says what kind and he goes, “Oh, I’m sorry Camel Crush.” And then he begins to think about what he just said and about brands. That would be more interesting to me. I would actually just recommend cutting that first chuck of VO.

A little bit of a problem for me, I actually got a lot I thought about who this guy was from his VO. He seems nihilistic. He seems too cool for school. He seems bored with life. He’s got that tone of a person who observes without feeling like he’s part of humanity.

A little bit of a problem is I don’t actually believe what he’s saying here. I don’t believe what he’s saying about these brands. There’s a little bit of a facts not in evidence. He’s telling me that plastic surgery infused housewives in their 40s are all about the Parliaments. Are they?

And if they are, who cares? I mean, there’s a little bit of a who cares factor to that. When he goes outside and these kids ask him to buy them cigarettes, it ends really well. I like this. There’s a certain wit here. The kids ask to buy cigarettes and then they hand him a $5 bill and the kid says, “Here’s five bucks. Wait, haven’t I seen you on TV,” which is interesting. He must have been on TV.

Sadler says, “No. And you can take those five bucks and buy a time machine, because it’s not 19-fucking-95.” And that’s really smart.

So, I think that Zach has a really good sense of how people talk. He’s got an interesting rhythm. I think he’s trying to be cinematic here which is cool. The content may be, I don’t know, I’m interested. I’m curious to see where it goes. This may be the wrong topic for a good writer. Because it feels a little forced, but it may also work out pretty smartly.

**John:** So, I agree with you about the voiceover and that by starting the voiceover over black, it makes it feel like that is the framing for the entire movie. But the voiceover speech is just about the cigarette thing. And I can’t believe that the whole movie is going to be about brands and cigarettes. So, by starting it within the scene I think you’re going to make a stronger case for here’s a guy and now we’re going to hear his voiceover while he’s waiting for his cigarettes. That’s going to probably get us better started on this specific thread of who he is.

Because there is so much voiceover and it feels like this is a thing he’s going to do throughout the script, that it’s not just going to be the situation where there’s some voiceover at the very start and then it goes away for a lot of it, and there’s also going to be situations in which Sadler is going to both be talking within a scene and when he’s going to be voiceover-ing, I would consider putting all of Sadler’s voiceover in italics just to make it really simple and clear to the reader which things are being said to a character and which things are being said just to the audience.

An example is on page three. “The kids turn to him, nervous. ‘Hey man, um…can you buy us a pack?’ ‘Welcome to the team.'” That’s a voiceover and I think it’s great that that’s in voiceover, but it would be very easy to skip over that voiceover little tag because you just become blind to it. So, sticking in italics might help us realize that the moment didn’t stop. We just had a line of voiceover there.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a really good idea. Plus, there is a little bit of a formatting — I’m going to call it a mistake.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** It’s not a killer, but he’s putting VO in a parenthetical where the so-called Riley’s go, like thoughtfully. He’s putting it under the character name. Typically what we do is put a (VO) in parenthesis next to the character name. So, it would say, SADLER (VO) on one line, and then his VO.

**John:** Most people would call that a character extension. So, if it’s a parenthetical, something that’s in parenthesis right after the character’s name, that would usually be voiceover, OS, or OC for off-camera. Sometimes I’ll do that for On-Radio, just to be clear it’s a different kind of speech but it’s not talking about the delivery of the line, or not clarifying sort of the action that’s happening there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Especially in a script where, you’re right, I think your suspicion that there’s going to be a lot voiceover is correct. You’re actually going to save a lot of space.

**John:** Yeah. Helpful.

**Craig:** It’s a ton of lines, yeah, that you’re just wasting there.

**John:** I had a bit of an issue with the shopkeeper. “A low-key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, BARRY, tends to him. Sadler stares at the cigarettes.” So, you call this guy Barry, but is Barry going to keep coming back? Because it felt weird to me that we’re giving this guy such a specific name, a name that doesn’t really fit a 50-year-old Indian man description. And so I have to keep track of these two names. And Barry and Sandler for some reason feel kind of similar.

So, by the time I saw Barry again, I was like, wait, who’s Barry? I had to go back to figure out that it was the shopkeeper. If it’s not an important character, I would maybe just keep him shopkeeper if we’re not going to be circling back to see him again. How did you feel about that?

**Craig:** I agree. There are a couple issues here on Barry. One is that, yeah, you’re right, if he’s not a recurring character, call him Clerk I think would be fine.

I wasn’t quite sure why he was so hostile. It seemed like a pointless hostility unless they have a preexisting relationship which doesn’t appear to be the case, because Barry doesn’t know what his brand is.

Also, if you look at this paragraph, this is something that I see a lot and I would make a suggestion here, Zach. “SADLER, 35, slightly hipster-ish, dirty blonde hair, stands dead-eyed in front of the counter.” And then I would do the line of dialogue. “Sadler: Can I get a pack of smokes?” Then say, “A low-key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, BARRY, tends to him.” “What kind?”

Because when you do it all at once is happening is I am imagining, when I read action I’m imagining it happening. What I’m imagining happening the way you’ve written it, Zach, is a guy standing there and another guy is tending to him. I don’t know how that means. I just feel like two people are staring at each other and then finally someone says, “Can I get a pack of smokes,” which I don’t think is what you —

**John:** I agree with you there. Splitting that up is going to make that read a lot more clearly. So, page three is where I had the most issues with action lines and figuring out the best way to arrange our sentences to get the effect across. So, “EXT. PARKING LOT – SOON AFTER Sadler’s walking to his car, but he sees a group of four adolescent, skateboarding degenerates around his car.” In this sentence we’re using the word car twice, which isn’t awful, but isn’t maybe the best we could do.

We also need to capitalize FOUR ADOLESCENT SKATEBOARDING DEGENERATES or some part of that to indicate that these are actually people.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’d capitalize DEGENERATES.

**John:** I would agree. That’s the best choice. And I’d write around one of the cars, just because it’s more important that as Sadler is walking out he sees a group of four adolescent skateboarding degenerates around his car. Just get rid of the second car. Repeating a word within a sentence without effect is not your best choice.

Next paragraph down, two paragraphs down, “Sadler takes a few steps back, unsure, then keeps walking toward his car.” It’s mean to be a character moment, but by keeping it all as one sentence you sort of lost the flow. So, if you broke that into two sentences, “Sadler stops, unsure. Stills himself. Continues walking towards his car.” Breaking that was two separate things makes those actions you can actually play. As one sentence it’s like I don’t know where it began or where it ended.

**Craig:** I think that beat is clashing with what’s going on anyway. I mean, what I took from that was that he was nervous that these kids were there to beat him up, or rip him off, or something. But in fact the kids themselves are nervous because they want cigarettes. They’re waiting for this guy to come out so they can ask him for cigarettes. If you see a bunch of nervous kids around your car, you’re not nervous. I think he probably should just say, “Can I help you guys with something?” and we could skip this beat.

Remember, in a movie we’re going to have to watch this guy stop, see them, take a step back, then walk towards them. Then “Can I help you guys with something?” It just feels like it’s going to get cut. It’s not informing what’s going on.

**John:** I agree with you. So, Craig, what’s your verdict after three pages here?

**Craig:** My verdict is that Zach has some skill and I like the way he writes. I like his dialogue. I thought that he’s — and there’s an interesting. I will say I’m particularly pleased with the fact that he’s clearly writing about something, even if the voiceover at the top is perhaps out of place. The notion of brand and what brand means for yourself as you are self-harming is interesting.

I don’t know where it goes. I don’t know what the point is yet. I just like that there’s going to be a point, hopefully. So, it’s ambitious. I don’t know if any of it works out well. But, no, I was pleased.

**John:** I would agree with you. I’m curious enough to see what this movie becomes, because after the end of page three I really have no good sense of where it’s going to go. You have a sort of nihilistic hero and we don’t know sort of what the next step is for this movie. So, I think I would get to page ten and if it was — I’d hope by page ten to know what kind of movie I was in.

The last thing I would say is most people who send in Three Page Challenges put some sort of contact information on the front page. Just a generally good idea to put an email address or some way that people could get ahold of you if they love your pages. Zach didn’t have one. But if you are sending this in, it’s useful, because you want people to like this and reach out to you to tell you that you’re a great writer. So, put some sort of contact information on your title page.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Great. Our next script is called Not Dark Yet, by RM Weatherly. And RM is a woman. Stuart confirmed this for us. It is a script written in Courier Prime, so therefore it’s already about three steps ahead.

**Craig:** Oh lord.

**John:** Oh lord. Let me give a summary of this. So, we start in a well-ordered street of cookie-cutter McMansions. Just outside this neighborhood we see Damon Carol in his 30s who is standing over a dead body. He’s in his pajamas. He has his dog. And he’s come across a body. And he’s really not freaked out by it. He sort of kicks it with his foot. It reacts a little bit.

He tells the dog, “No, no. We won’t call the police yet. The police are sleeping. We’ll wait till they wake up.” And he convinces his dog to leave.

Next we’re in a diner in the morning. And we see our guy, who is evidently a detective, talking with a potential client. Her name is Eva. And they’re talking about her hiring him to do some recon on her husband who might be having an affair with somebody. She’s not convinced that he is having an affair. It’s sort of more idle curiosity. And they talk about sort of that there aren’t many detectives left in his line of work in this area.

So, that is where we’re at at the end of three pages. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of confusion in this for me. And so I was working hard to try and figure things out. And failed in spots. I think I succeeded in some spots. But let’s talk content first. The contrast of the cookie-cutter McMansion neighborhood, wealthy suburb, to a forest — now it says just outside the town. I have no idea how we’re supposed to know that it’s a forest just outside the town, unless we see the forest from the suburb and then cut to the forest.

And then we see Damon Carol who is there with his dog. He’s wearing matching monogram pajamas under an overcoat. He’s staring at this corpse. He’s at ease.

Okay, interesting. Fine. He touches the body with his foot, then cringes as the corpse has a phantom reaction. I don’t think that’s how corpses work. There is some sort of stuff like that shortly after death. But not like when you’re in the forest and somebody touches you with your foot, you’re not going to sit up. And even if you did, Damon should freak out because — and then realize that it’s phantom reaction.

He then says to his dog, “I thought I smelled something.” Now, I don’t know if that’s “I thought I smelled something,” or “I thought I smelled something.” I don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** It feels like it’s in the wrong place. I got really tripped up by that line, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was so confused by it and I even thought like, wait, is this one of those things where the corpse has evacuating its bowels? I literally had no idea what the hell was going on that point.

Then, some headlights approach and he covers the body up. It says, “Suddenly, at the sight of HEADLIGHTS approaching in the distance, Damon picks up debris to create a leafy sheet over the body.” Well, he’s certainly speedy, isn’t he? This is a car driving by, and he’s going to cover a body with leaves before the car gets past him? I don’t think so. That didn’t work.

Then, he says, “We’re going to come back.” And he says to his dog, “The po-lice don’t get in till 7.” At this point I’m like, okay, wait, so that’s sort of like an African American dialectic affectation. Is he black? And the name Damon is a pretty common name for black men. So is he black? I don’t know, because no one is telling me. But am I supposed to know from that? Or is that just an errant hyphen?

**John:** Is it affectation? Is that some weird way that he’s talking for an affect?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** We have no idea. We don’t have enough information about him to know what the hell is going on.

**Craig:** Right. So, at this point, now I understand the point of a scene like that is to create mystery, but there’s a fine line between mystery and confusion. I need to know that I’m not supposed to know things. I can’t think I’m supposed to know things but I don’t. That’s confusion.

So, okay, we get to this diner. Now, this is an interesting conversation. This woman, and all we know about her is that she’s robust and big-boned. I don’t know what that means exactly. Does that mean fat? Does that mean tall? Does that mean fat and tall? Big-boned is a euphemism, that’s sort of a meaningless euphemism. Regardless, there’s an interesting dynamic here. This is where I started to perk up.

Essentially this woman is saying, I got from this conversation that he was a detective. And I got from what her comments were is that the detective business is sort of done. He’s the only detective around because there isn’t really any crime around here. And then she suggests that she will hire him to tail her husband because he might be up to something. And you know what? She’ll even pay him double. And at that point Damon realizes she doesn’t suspect her husband at all. She’s taking pity on him. She’s essentially trumping up a job to pay him.

Now, that’s interesting. But it came out all wonky. It’s a good dynamic. It’s a good subtext to arrive at. The problem is I only determine that from the action lines. I don’t think I get it from the dialogue.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it’s wonky. It’s off.

**John:** I agree it’s wonky and it’s off. And I actually had a challenge with that whole diner scene because the line that leads into right now is, “Are you alone?” And then we cut to a diner. And so my natural story brain goes like, oh, whoever is asking that question must be the person who is like seating him at a table, or something like that.

So, I read Eva as a waitress the first time through. And it wasn’t until I got to the end of page three that Damon motions for the waitress for another cup of coffee and I realized like, oh wait, they’re sitting at the same table. And I didn’t catch that here. Because there’s nothing that indicates that they’re sitting at the same table. All we hear is “The voice belongs to a robust, big-boned EVA KEYS, in her late 40s. Damon takes a sip of coffee, considering his answer before speaking, but Eva has a mill of questions. She continues:”

So, I didn’t get that they were sitting alone at a booth. I didn’t know anything about the space. And so I just made the wrong assumption based on the prelap getting me into here.

I got confused a lot, too. And let’s talk about the nature of the setting. The suburb and then the forest. Right now, RM, she has Wealth Suburb — Night and then Ext. Forest — Continuous. Continuous isn’t really the right choice here. Continuous is if it literally is a continuation of the same action. And that’s not where we are. So, just give Night here. So, we’re traveling to a new place, put the city lights in the distance if you want to. Do something to let us know where we are in relation to that previous place you set up.

I’m not convinced that cookie-cutter McMansions is going to make sense for this character ultimately with the conversation we have later on, but regardless, if the forest needs to be near, show us where the city is and tell us that it’s important.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing. You’ve touched on something important. What Eva and Damon are discussing essentially is that he’s the only private eye that’s left. And he says, “That’s right. Damon Carol, the only one in the book.” And I don’t like lines like that where somebody clearly announces their name so the audience knows. There’s better ways to do that.

But, why would there be any private eyes in a McMansion suburb? That’s not where private eyes are. Why would anybody be surprised that there’s only one left? Frankly, they should be surprised that there’s one at all.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It just doesn’t make sense.

**John:** If it were like a dying town, if it were a Cincinnati or like something that used to have private eyes and they all left because everybody left, that would be great. Or if it was some sort of like it was a boom town that people moved on from, that would be great.

I like the idea of the last detective left in a town. That’s a great idea for a character. And I sense that this Damon guy could be really fascinating. And I’m projecting forward, but I’m guessing the reason he hides this body is so that he can actually discover it later when the police are there and get credit for it. He has a whole game plan. But I’m not getting it through the scenes that I’m actually seeing on the page.

So, even this thing about the phantom reaction. I have a sense that RM has an idea in her head of what that reaction is. Describe it. Be specific rather than just say a phantom reaction, because I don’t know what that is. Does it shit itself? Does it pass gas? Does something pop? Is there spontaneous spasm? Anything would be great. But phantom reaction, I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to make a suggestion, RM, too. I’ve been thinking about this diner scene. The idea that someone is hiring a private eye out of pity is really interesting. I think the scene would probably work better, and I don’t know if this ruins the story or not, if he’s sitting in a booth with this woman and he’s saying, “Are you ready?”

And she says, “Yes, I’m ready.”

And he opens up a folder and he shows pictures of her husband. And he says, “I’ve tracked him here, I’ve tracked him there. I’ve checked his texts and all the rest of it, and this is where he’s been going.” And he shows her. And it’s — he’s going to the library.

And she’s like, “Oh, so he’s not cheating on me?”

And that’s when Damon leans back and says, “No, he’s not cheating you. And that’s when I decided to follow you.” And then he shows pictures of her and how she, or texts that she called him and said, “Look, just do this, the guy needs the work.”

In other words, let him be a real detective to the point where he detects using his detective skills that this was a pity hire. Which is — because I want to know that he had to find out, that he didn’t immediately know it, but that there was that moment of sickening realization that somebody is giving you a handout. Like you thought you had a real job and it turns out to just be pity. That’s awful. So, find a way to demonstrate that a little more dramatically and with a little more surprise for the audience.

**John:** Agreed. You’re also describing a scene that has changes over the course of it. Where we approach the scene with one bit of information, we approach it with everything we know about detectives, and so therefore the next thing is that the detective is going to show us that the man is having an affair. Oh, but the surprise is that he’s not having an affair. The second surprise is that you actually hired me out of pity and the scene can build and change.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. So, that’s what you’re going for. And I think particularly in an early moment when you’re establishing a character, showing that they’re competent is important information. I suspect that you’re going to want Damon to be competent. Demonstrating that they are in dire straits through their competence would be interesting, too.

So, anyway, I think there’s a lot of work that needs to happen there. And really do take this to heart, RM, that mystery is good, confusion is bad.

**John:** Agreed. We were talking about sort of the dialogue scene, but let’s also back up to the discovery of the body scene, which I think should play as a completely silent scene. I don’t think there’s any reason for a guy to talk to his dog. It feels forced to talk to your dog.

But, that moment of suspense where he’s like is he going to be able to cover up this body in time, give us some real — give us some time there. Give us some sentences to describe the sort of growing — the headlights getting closer. He’s trying to cover it up. He’s trying to find the right kind of leaves to go over it. The dog keeps knocking the leaves off it, like you know, there’s moments of suspense, or comedy, or something else there that’s going to be fascinating and we’re going to watch it because it’s such an odd choice to like find a body and then try to cover it up.

That could be great. And we could be with him in suspense and knowing will that car see him. Will that car stop? Will there by anything strange happening? Is he going to wave to the driver as it goes past? There could be something really great there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And maybe just so that you have the time to play that moment, don’t make it a car. Make it a couple on a date going through the woods.

**John:** Someone on a bike, nice and slow.

**Craig:** Yeah. Something. You got to think about real time. This is where screenwriters — it’s normal, we do it all the time. We compress time and space in our minds with such ease, but we forget that somebody at some point is going to be out in a freaking woods at two in the morning going, wait, ugh, the car has to be going like one mile an hour. We won’t even be able to see it until it’s there.

We need all this time for him to do all this stuff. It’s just never going to work. You got to think ahead to those moments. Those are the worst moments where you just think, oh, who cares. The audience. They care.

All right. Well, why don’t we move on to our third Three Page Challenge? This one is called Youth on Fire by Olufemi S. Sowemimo. And I’m going to summarize this as best I can, [laughs], because this is —

**John:** This is where you’re earning your big bucks today, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to get a good paycheck out of this. We begin, again, with voiceover over darkness. Someone named Castor saying, “It takes three things to start a fire.” We then are in a college lecture classroom at night. We see two people in the center of the rooms, Sarafina Wyngaard, 19 and beautiful, drenched in some sort of viscous yellow goop. And holding on to her a beaten man, Castor Pollack, 22, and geek-nouveau.

Around them in the room there appears there’s been some kind of huge fight in here. And all of this yellow goop is everywhere. It’s on the walls. It’s coming down into puddles on the floor.

Outside the window, there’s smoke and fire, a college campus set ablaze. Sarafina is holding a Bic lighter in her hand, twirling it around. And so Castor in voiceover says, “It takes three things to start a fire. Oxygen.” Then we cut to a burn ward. He says, a different voice, male voice, Ken, says, “Heat.” And we see a burned figure on a bed with oxygen tanks. And then we go to a grassy field and we hear Sarafina in voiceover saying, “Fuel,” and we see two silhouettes making love, a burning gazebo directly behind them, casting their intertwined shadows.

Then we cut to a city street and an angry mob of teens and twentysomethings fighting with police, overwhelming them. And in voiceover, “All it takes to set it off is a spark.” Sarafina, back in the classroom, places her thumb on the lighter. And before it sparks we cut to black. And then we fade in on Arizona Institute of Technology, AIT Campus Day. It’s apparently finals day and Congrats Graduates.

There is a large bear. This is the school mascot. He’s on his hind legs and a placard says the AIT Great Bear. And a distressed student comes out of the building and he looks at his final exam, it’s terrible, he’s gotten a terrible grade. And he freaks out and starts attacking the bear, yelling at the bear about how upset he is and how much he hates school. And while he’s doing that, Castor in voiceover talks about how school basically screws everybody.

And that’s —

**John:** That’s our three pages.

**Craig:** That’s a lot in three pages.

**John:** It’s a lot in three pages. So, I love movies that start with provocative imagery and gives us a sense of sort of the flash forward of where is this all going to get to. And so that’s very much what he’s doing here is setting sort of some moment from probably quite late in the story where this couple is together, something terrible has happened, the school is on fire. There’s yellow goop for some reason. These provocative images invite us to ask questions and therefore we are intrigued to get the answers to those questions, and therefore we’ll keep watching the movie.

The challenge I face is that I got just really lost and I lost some faith in this movie’s ability to make me want to follow all the way to those answers. Especially when we got into this student who comes out and has all his interactions with the bear. That’s where I was like I don’t — I didn’t feel confident that I was in good storytelling hands based on the things that we’re happening, and especially in that last page.

Craig, where were you at with this?

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. I mean, so, look, lots of good things to talk about here. Olufemi has a terrific sense of how to create a mental image with text. And that, boy, that’s a big part of our job. And so I saw everything on the first page and a half. There was a hundred things going on. I saw it all. And that’s great. And I was really interested. And I understood that there was a mystery there. I wasn’t confused.

I was fascinated. And it was so interesting. I think that voiceover wise, you’re going to run into trouble moving voiceover like this between three voices because in particular I don’t think anyone is going to know that Castor and Ken are different people. Male voices, even when they’re different men, will often sound the same if there’s a continuity of voiceover like that. Particularly when we’re not seeing a different voice. And we don’t. There’s a burned figure on a bed. So, that’s a little bit tricky.

I thought the order, oxygen, heat, and fuel, was wrong, because we start with a lighter, then we go to oxygen, then we go to fuel. So I thought it should have been heat, oxygen, fuel.

But I was so like, oh my god, this is crazy. What — how — and I understood that I was definitely going for another Stuart special, [laughs], where we open at the end of a movie and then go to the beginning. And that’s because Stuart loves that. Don’t keep doing it just to make Stuart pick your scripts. But then, oh man, did it fall off the rails. And the reason it fell off the rails was tone. Tone, tone, tone.

So, the first page and a half is dark, and moody, and poetic. I mean, the character’s name on page one, and I don’t love things like this.

**John:** Sarafina and Castor.

**Craig:** Well, and also Castor — his name is — where is page one. Castor Pollack. Which is sort of a hammy reference to Castor and Pollux, the Roman twins. You know, all right, fine. He went to school, I get it. But the tone is mood and poetic and visual.

Then when we get to this scene, where the student, the first thing he does is yell at this bear and says, “Fuck you, rape bear. Screwed me right up the ass, you stupid bear. You like that? Did you like it, huh?” This — I’m like, wait, wait, it’s like I started watching Fight Club and then I cut to black and then the next scene I’m watching Neighbors.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s going on? I was so confused. And then Castor’s voiceover seems completely irrelevant because all we’re really watching is a student freak out and Castor’s voiceover saying, “Students freak out.” This did not work.

**John:** It didn’t work at all. And I lost a sense of where this voiceover could be connected to. So, if you’re giving me these provocative images and you have a voiceover that’s sort of establishing like, you know, to make a fire you need heat, fuel, and oxygen. Like, I get what that is. That’s like a movie telling itself. But then to have that voiceover and have multiple voiceover empowered people feeding me more stuff just made me frustrated and sort of confused about what was going on.

But I really want to talk about the stressed student, because what he’s doing is so crazy cartoonish, but even the setup feels really strange and sort of not specific to our shared understanding of how college campuses work.

**Craig:** Wait, you didn’t buy that his final exam was graded instantly? [laughs]

**John:** So, his final exam, and “red marks cover the page like battle wounds. Nonsense. Absurd. You can go do better, etc. Up top a score of 13 out of 50.” We have the macro lens out for that, because we’re reading a lot apparently. If we see this guy freak out, we’re going to get why he’s freaking out. And this felt like the kind of scene that should have taken place entirely without him talking or without anyone else talking. And so if you want to do some cartoonish things, don’t also have him say cartoonish things. You can have him take cartoonish actions or like, you know, get fucked by the bear, or sort of do that stuff that he wants to do, just let’s not talk about. Let’s just sort of show it.

And if you want to comment on it, maybe have real characters in the scene commenting on it, because the voiceover was just not working for us.

I also want to talk about the specificity of campus. Like what is campus? Colleges are big and I don’t have a sense of where we are on this campus. I needed a little bit more scene setting, because apparently this is where most of the story is going to take place, is my guess, since we’re ending there and we’re starting here. Give us more. Tell us, are we in the main quad? Give us a sense of what kind of school this is. Because you say Arizona Institute of Technology. It’s like, am I supposed to think ASU, am I supposed to think MIT? Those are very different vibes and very different kind of feelings of what those students are like.

In general, like since we’re going to end on sort of a war scene, is this supposed to be normal days? Is the calm before the war? Show us some calm before this guy storms out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, when you have a character doing something like this guy is doing where he’s mimicking being raped by the bear, no one does that on their own. It’s just simply not — at that point you’re mentally ill. That’s crazy. You would do it in front of a friend to make them understand how you felt possibly. I mean, I don’t love it at all, but you would not do it alone.

And it’s being commented on, again, by Castor, Ken, and Sarafina in voiceover. We have these three disembodied voices like a Greek chorus suddenly now talking, like having a conversation in VO. Look VO can be terrific. A conversation in VO, when we have no idea who is doing it yet, very difficult. And when the tone of the conversation is in polar opposition to the tone of what we’re looking at, you end up with a disaster.

So, this is so interesting to me because I feel like page one through 1.5 is fantastic. And page 1.5 to three is horrendous. And so I guess I would say that’s good news, because if you can make 1.5 fantastic pages, you can make 110 fantastic pages. But, something went rapidly awry.

**John:** I also want to think about what is the audience’s expectation after this kind of opening. So, when we do the flash forward opening and then we’re coming back to sort of the real start of the movie, my instinct is the first person I see, or the first person I should be focused on should be one of the important people. And so when you tell me in the script “distressed student,” and then I get a page and a half of just distressed student doing stuff, I’m thinking well is this our hero? Is this the guy I’m supposed to be focusing on? Because as a moviegoer, I would assume like, oh, this must be our main hero person. But the reason I know it’s not is because you didn’t give him a name. He’s just called Distressed Student.

So, I’m really conflicted about sort of should I be paying any attention to this guy? Is one of these other people going to step in, oh wait, they’re being voiceover, so who knows. And that’s a real frustration. Stories don’t always have to start with your hero. Obviously many great movies start with characters who are not your hero, who are sort of disposable and you never see again, but movies that start with this sort of flash forward structure and then come back to reality, I would bet 90% of them, one of the very first people you’re going to see if your hero to establish, ground you in the reality of this is the character’s journey.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. In fact, I’ll go a step further. When you start with voiceover over a tableau like this, sort of a — I imagine this is all very tableau like, these first 1.5 pages. When you come out of it, you’re close on someone. You want to be physically close on a face. I could easily see the first thing we see being Castor’s face not beaten, and we hear over his face some cry. And then we reveal that he’s looking out his window at a girl who is sitting under a banner that says Congratulations on your Finals, or Good Luck on Finals, and she’s just sobbing.

And we go, oh boy. You know, I would get that. But you’re so right. You have to come back to a face almost to understand even time wise what the hell is going on. If you’re going to play the time game, help me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Great. So, as always, I want to thank everyone who has submitted for the Three Page Challenges, especially these three people who were brave enough to have us talk about their three pages on the air. If you have your own three pages you want us to take a look at, it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, and you can submit your own. If you want to read through the ones we’ve talked about, they’re on the show notes, so just johnaugust.com.

It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a video that everybody on the Internet said I should watch, but I avoided watching it because it’s 15 minutes long. Now I watched it and it’s really, really good. It’s called The Fallen of World War II by Neil Halloran. And what he did is a great data visualization of —

**Craig:** It’s so cool.

**John:** It’s so good. It’s all the deaths of WWII. And sort of showing in sort of a great chart form of like how many people died from each country, both military casualties and civilian casualties. And it sort of shows you how big WWII really was and how it sort of out-scaled everything that had come before it, and really everything that’s come after it.

And so it was harrowing but it was also — ends on a surprisingly hopeful note in the sense that you recognize that since the horror of WWII we’ve not had anything approaching that in terms of death on a global scale. So, really just spectacularly well done. Just a great example of what’s possible to do with great data visualization. It also reminded me way back in episode 30 I talked about The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronical of Atrocities by Matthew White, which if you liked this visualization, I would urge you to read that book. Because what it does is it talks through sort of all of history’s great atrocities, some of which are in Halloran’s video.

But it gives you a sense of like what is the context for these great deaths that have happened in history and the kinds of things that lead to these big catastrophic events.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s great. Anytime somebody says how bad things are now, and the world is getting worse, I perversely want to punch them and make the world worse because we’re not even in the same galaxy of badness that existed in the middle of the 20th century.

When you look at Russia alone, it’s astonishing. When you think about what it means for millions of people to die, and then you think about tens of millions of people. It’s unfathomable. And there are all sorts of theories as to why it hasn’t happened since, one of which is kind of obvious, because it can’t. Everybody has nuclear weapons. You simply can’t do it anymore. You can’t have a war like that anymore. But I think also the war itself was proof that we shouldn’t have a war like that anymore.

It’s unreal. It’s just hard to fathom living on a planet and yet, you know, my parents were alive when that was happening. It’s just remarkable. Just remarkable. So, yeah, an amazing video.

My One Cool Thing is like on the other end of the spectrum. It’s on the loose end. So, I’m not a big wine guy, but any time I get a bottle or something I just want to say like, oh, is this crap or is it okay? And I think I mentioned this to you. There’s a website called CellarTracker where people can write their opinions of wine and it’s actually kind of useful because people that know about wine — and I am not one of them — will say things like, you know, this is a good wine, but don’t drink it now, drink it three years from now. Or leave this out for an hour, or just go ahead and drink it.

And they have an app now, it’s free, and one of the coolest things about it is you can take a picture of a wine label and it will search some database somewhere in the sky and show you that bottle of wine exactly from that year with all the reviews and thoughts on it. It’s so cool.

It will even give you a sense of what it should cost. So, if you’re in a store and they’re like, “This is the best and it only costs $120,” well, maybe it really only costs $50. So, very cool, and it’s free. They ask for a voluntary payment, which I have yet to do. Actually I just noticed that it said that. [laughs] I feel super ashamed. I will send my voluntary payment in. CellarTracker for iPhone and possibly for those other phones that others talk about.

**John:** Yes. The engine underlying it is the same thing that does Vimeo, which is an app I’ve used for a while. And I think it’s actually so smart because it’s a great use of like you have a limited data set. Although there’s thousands of wines in the world, there’s only thousands of wines in the world. So you can actually just digitize all of the labels out there and then figure out like these are the wines. And you can match those up to reviews of them and actually provide a useful service from that data set.

So, I thought it was just a really smart use of cellphone camera technologies, scanning, the power of the computers that are in our little pockets all the time to do it.

**Craig:** What a world!

**John:** We live in a great world. Better than WWII. So, this is all —

**Craig:** Yeah, and in WWII people were dying in the millions and now in 2015 my phone gets me drunk.

**John:** Ha-ha. And that’s our show this week. If you have something to say to Craig Mazin, you should write him on Twitter. He is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions, write to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you would like to leave us a review on iTunes, that would be fantastic. Just search for us there at Scriptnotes. That’s also where you can download the Scriptnotes app for your iOS device. We’re also available for Android devices on the appropriate app stores.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel who picked these Three Page Challenges. Thank you, Stuart.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli, and man, did I make his life difficult this week. We had Skype dropouts and my brain did not work very well. So, thank you, Matthew. If you have an outro for our show, we love to have great musical compositions as outros, things that incorporate the [hums], but in clever new ways. Matthew writes a lot of them, but we also have great people who have written other ones for us. So, if you have one of those outros, just send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com and we will get that into the queue.

For Craig Mazin, I’m John August. Guys, thank you so much. See you next week, Craig.

**Craig:** Bye John.

Links:

* [John jumped off a bridge](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/608473352420925440)
* [FAST Screenplay’s Jeff Bollow at TEDxDocklands](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH6AyjGgcns)
* [Action Movies, Stop Taking Away Our Everyday Heroes](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/action-stars-impossible-man/) on Wired
* NEDA’s [Statistics on Males and Eating Disorders](https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/statistics-males-and-eating-disorders)
* [SAG-AFTRA Threatened To Sue Director Amy Berg Over ‘An Open Secret’](http://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-open-secret-director-amy-berg-1201438339/) on Deadline
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Three Pages by [Zach Kaplan](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ZachKaplan.pdf)
* Three Pages by [RM Weatherly](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/RMWeatherly.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Olufemi S. Sowemimo](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/OlufemiSSowemimo.pdf)
* [The Fallen of World War II](https://vimeo.com/128373915) by Neil Halloran, and [fallen.io](http://www.fallen.io/ww2/)
* The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities by Matthew White
* [CellarTracker](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cellartracker/id893759800?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Adrian Tanner ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 189 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

I almost forgot the name of our podcast.

**Craig:** I noticed.

**John:** It was an odd gap.

**Craig:** You see, you’re focusing on that and I’m focusing on the fact that we had a chance to talk about episode 187. You know, 187, anyway, we didn’t do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We missed it.

**John:** Yeah, so many blown opportunities as we go back through the numerology of our podcast. There’s things we could have really dug into and we just didn’t. We didn’t even do a little “hehe” on episode 69.

**Craig:** We didn’t even do — and I had a chance two episodes ago to be gangsta and I failed, which is weird for me because I’m street.

**John:** Everyone knows you’ve gone hard.

**Craig:** I was born hard.

**John:** Yeah. I’m back in Los Angeles after two cold but wonderfully nice weeks in Boston. It is so nice to be back standing at my desk, looking at the Hollywood sign in the distance. It is a warm afternoon in Los Angeles. God, you know what? LA is pretty damn great.

**Craig:** I’ve never understood the people that hate LA. Everybody gets their opinion so I’m not telling them they’re wrong but for me, East Coast kid grew up in New York, the minute I got out of my car in Los Angeles for the first time in 1991, I was like, “Oh, man, why don’t I live here? This is great.” I mean, then there was a riot and also then there was really a bad earthquake. But, you know, there hasn’t been a riot or a major earthquake in a long time.

**John:** No, absolutely. So come to Los Angeles because, you know, we’re almost20 years without a riot.

**Craig:** [laughs] Come to Los Angeles, we’re due. [laughs]

**John:** You know that of course that you’re never actually due for a giant storm or a giant earthquake.

**Craig:** I know, it doesn’t work that way. Pass, pass. Yeah, we know. The probability is — well, it’s a little different for earthquakes because there is something to the notion that earthquakes occur after a build-up of unreleased friction.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And so over time the friction does build up and the odds do go up.

**John:** But it’s the misunderstanding of probability that I find incredibly frustrating. And actually being a good test for how I will interact with certain people in my life. And so, a little sidebar discussion about, this was a person who was brought in to help represent The Nines when we were trying to sell it at Sundance.

And so, I was having a conversation. We were at a dinner and we were talking about flipping a coin. And so I was talking about, like, you know, if you flipped a coin 99 times and it came up heads every time, how much money would you bet that the next one will be tails. He’s like, “Oh, I’ll bet every cent in the world because like it’s due to be the opposite thing.”

**Craig:** Stupid. He’s stupid.

**John:** And I realized like, “Oh, man, you’re the person who’s going to be representing this and now I’m really concerned.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because the answer is 50-50.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The other acceptable answer I would take is that, “Well, it’s going to be the same thing that’s been in the last 99 times because for some reason it’s not a fairly balanced coin.”

**Craig:** Yeah, presuming —

**John:** There’s something else going on.

**Craig:** Presuming that it’s a fair coin, the odds do not change, past probability, post probability. I mean, when somebody says something like that, I have a desire to put my hand on their shoulder gently. Look them in the eye and say, “You’re a dummy.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And how does that work out?

**Craig:** Well, I certainly am not — my life is uncluttered by excess people. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s uncluttered by ignorance.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s uncluttered by all sort of — yeah, I have a blissful friendlessness.

**John:** [laughs] This is a good life to have.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, as we are basking here in our warm Los Angeles weather, let us enjoy our lack of ignorance and try to enlighten some people who’ve written in with questions. We’ve had a huge mailbag full of questions that have come up. And so we’re going to try to plow through as many of those as we can. But we also have a lot of follow up because in our last episode we asked our listeners about the future of the show and we wanted to know what they thought we should do on two topics.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The first topic was we’d really love to do an episode that was about an entire script, like an unproduced script where we actually talk through sort of everything we saw. It would be a script that we’ll be able to publish so people can read the script and sort of read along with us and see, like, this is what’s working for us, what’s not working for us.

And so we asked our listeners how should we do that? What would be the good way to do that because we can’t just open the floodgates and have everything come in?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the most consistent suggestion is a really good, simple suggestion. We should pick somebody who has a Three Page Challenge that we liked a lot and ask him or her to send in their scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah, that makes total sense to me.

**John:** I think it makes total sense. So let us decide on this episode right now that that will probably be what we’re going to do, so I don’t have a time frame for when we’ll do it but at some point we will go back to one of our previous Three Page Challenge people and ask him or her to send in their script and see if we can go through a whole script that way. And I think it would kind of feel like, you know, our episode on Raiders of the Lost Ark, our episode on Frozen, where we’ll just really dig in on sort of what is actually happening throughout the whole movie. And we can do some stuff specific on the page but really talk about, you know, how the storytelling is working.

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually think it’ll be surprisingly different from those episodes because those episodes are dissecting something that is complete and finished that’s the —

**John:** And also already really good.

**Craig:** And also already really good. I mean, this is the hard part of what we do is that what we do can always be changed. So a lot of our job is trying to figure out what should we and what should we not change, but when we discuss this script, it will be a lot like — I think it’ll actually be the best glimpse for our non-professional listeners at the life that you and I lead on our end of things when we turn scripts in.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** This will be the kind of discussion that we have.

**John:** Yeah. And I just turned in a script this last week.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** Thank you. But I can tell you from firsthand experience that you don’t necessarily know what people are going to see in the script that you have turned in. And so I think it’ll fall somewhere between one of our Three Page Challenges and when we look through a whole movie because we’re responding to, “This is what I got off of what I read, is this your intention?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s a very different thing than watching a final movie.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** The other thing we asked in this last episode was this idea of advertising on the podcast and would it destroy the Scriptnotes that we have come to love?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or would it be okay? And so we asked people to send in their thoughts on that. A lot of people wrote in with emails. People tweeted at us and a lot of people actually used our Facebook page for the first time ever.

**Craig:** Didn’t even know we had one.

**John:** We have a Facebook Page. We have about 70 comments in that thread there.

**Craig:** And what about our LinkedIn page and MySpace?

**John:** Oh, my lord.

**Craig:** No? What about our Geocities page?

**John:** Every once in awhile I get a LinkedIn friend request from someone who’s dead.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that just tells me that it’s not actually the best service.

**Craig:** I think it’s amazing like LinkedIn can actually cross the great divide.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Granted that person was a powerful wizard and maybe he’s surviving in death as a lich.

**Craig:** Never, oh, a Lich or a, god forbid, a dracolich.

**John:** Oh, the absolute worst kind. But I think it would have to be a dragon first in order to become a dracolich.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I don’t know. I’m not saying.

**Craig:** [laughs] And? Your point?

**John:** My good friend the dragon who died.

**Craig:** I like that that was where it got too unrealistic for you.

**John:** [laughs] The dragon.

**Craig:** The wizard and the lich thing, that was okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s fine. So on the topic of advertising, people were surprisingly sanguine on us going and getting our cash.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that was really interesting to me because there were a few people who said like, “No, no, don’t do that.” But I would say they were maybe 3% of people who responded were that and everyone else was like, “Yeah, fine, do it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And a lot of people, you know, had suggestions for if you do it, do it this way.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So I thought I’d pull out some of the ones that were just from email because the Facebook ones, anyone could read. But these were some people who wrote to us directly. So I thought we’d take some turns reading through what some folks wrote.

**Craig:** Great. Okay.

**John:** So Tom wrote, “I prefer not to hear ads from mattresses, glasses, or any of the other common podcast advertisers. I’d ideally like to hear ads that are relevant to the content like an ad for Fade In.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

**John:** And I get that and at the same time, you know, you have to understand the people who are big enough advertisers to come in and do support show tend to be the, you know, the Warby Parkers and the Stamps.com. So I don’t know that we can promise those wouldn’t be those.

It gets weird with like the Fade Ins and sort of things that are too screenwritery because I worry that we’re endorsing something that, you know, we —

**Craig:** I agree. Yeah. I would say, I mean, I love Fade In and I personally endorse it but I don’t want the show to dribble into like, oh, screenwritery things. I mean, I don’t really have a great desire to advertise for mattresses. I have nothing to say about mattresses. My whole thing is that I’d love for us to talk about if we’re going to advertise something, talk about something that we have some connection to personally or out of interest that isn’t particularly screenwritery.

**John:** Yeah. Lord knows I love nerdy things. Lord knows Craig loves any bit of technology that is thrown in his direction.

**Craig:** Yup, exactly.

**John:** He loves it. So if it’s like a special pair of gloves just for Tesla owners —

**Craig:** Right, Tesla gloves.

**John:** That is what Craig —

**Craig:** Tesla gloves.

**John:** Tesla gloves.

**Craig:** Teslagloves.com.

Liam writes, “Acknowledge your brand. You’re not Serial. You have a fan base with a very particular set of interests and those don’t include saving time at the post office. Two, advertise companies you support. Nothing in podcasting makes me as uncomfortable as when Dan Savage just finishes telling you to shop at a local female-owned sex shop, then gives out a promo code for 10% off at Adam & Eve. And three, mix it up. There are a couple of podcasts that I’ve actually rewound when I missed the ad. The docu ads on Start-Up/Reply All, co-hosts competing to make an effective news item. I don’t know how this sentence works, but regardless, I get the point, don’t read the same script every week. Just improv.

So, I think those are three good points with the caveat on that first one that, you know, our interests and our fan base’s interests do expand beyond strictly screenwriting.

**John:** Yeah. And so when you and I first had the conversation about ads, I brought up the ones on Start-Up podcast and on Reply All in that they’re not obnoxious. They’re very clearly — they’re ads and they will tell you very clearly that they are ads. And yet like you don’t have this temptation to skip them because they’re interesting enough that you actually want to listen to them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Finding a way to do that, I don’t know what that’s going to be for us if we end up doing it.

**Craig:** You know, you and I honestly, I do believe, could talk about anything.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Anything.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** As long as — that’s the thing, like we should pick, we have all these people that we could theoretically do ads for and if they’re interested in being on our show, then we can go through and say, “Yeah, we know how to talk about that. We could talk about that.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, the interesting thing is I think Adam & Eve would be great, but the problem is —

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** I know the problem is that we do have kind of a rated PG show. I don’t know if it would fit this.

**John:** Yeah, so maybe we’d have to find a rated PG way to talk about Adam & Eve products.

**Craig:** Right, tushy plugs.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Do you guys like tushy plugs?

**John:** Everyone loves tushy plugs.

**Craig:** Tushy plugs, yes.

**John:** Dan writes, “Great idea to have advertising on the show. I’d been listening since episode 1 in real-time, not catch up. I’ve been hounding podcast advertising companies for months now asking about whether it would be possible to advertise on Scriptnotes. If you guys decide to do it, please let me know. I have industry-relevant products to share. I will be first in line.” So one guy wants to buy an ad.

**Craig:** I think that Dan should advertise on the show but the product should never be known as anything other than industry-relevant product.

**John:** I love that.

**Craig:** Like, John, do you have one specific industry-relevant product you use or do you sort of bounce between them?

**John:** I use only Pen brand pens.

**Craig:** Oh, well, let me tell you something. Have I got news for you. DORJ writes, “Scriptnotes is a good enough podcast to warrant a good minute or three of ads before I’d be sad,” I love that. “Savage Love has tons of ads and I still listen every week.” Well, thank you. That’s very nice of you to say. I don’t suspect that we will have tons of ads. I don’t even know if we’ll hit three minutes of ads or two minutes or — I think, you know, our intention is to not get in the way. And certainly if we start to do it, we will wade in softly.

**John:** Ryan writes, “I can’t imagine Craig saying, ‘And now a word from our sponsors,’ that would get old really quick and you would be the one handling it.” Like, basically, I would be the one handling it.

**Craig:** Ryan, you are so wrong. Ryan, in all your life, think of all the wrong things you’ve said, there’s a lot. There’s a lot. That is the wrongest. Ryan, do you not listen to the show? Do you not understand the percentage of my brain that is ham, pure ham, pure cured honey-baked ham? I would love to do this. It would be so much fun. The only reason that I’ve been resisting is just because I didn’t want to, you know, be a jerk. Ryan.

**John:** Ryan.

Let’s wrap up with Kelly. Kelly writes, “If you did go with advertising, you might consider a model like Slate Plus, one where you offer an advertising-free feed for your premium subscribers. If you decided to forego advertising, you might consider a tip jar approach with semi-annual reminder that exist for those who want to support without having to sign up or buy anything.” So, Slate Plus and we’ve been on the Slate podcast and we love all the Slate folks. So Slate Plus has this separate sort of feed where you can get all of their podcasts without the ads in them. And it’s lovely and I’m a Slate Plus member and so I support Slate by doing that. And I like that.

We looked into whether we could do that with the Scriptnotes premium feed and we basically couldn’t with how it’s currently set up. So basically, everyone would have to re-subscribe to a new feed which would be kind of a nightmare. So I’m not leaning towards that as a strong possibility but I definitely understand that instinct. So it’s certainly something to consider.

**Craig:** The good news for the premium subscribers is that they would still have access to the back catalog which will always be a benefit to that premium subscription. I personally don’t like tip jars. I don’t want to —

**John:** Nor do I.

**Craig:** I don’t want to put my hand out to anybody. It’s weird, you know. Because the problem with a tip jar is —

**John:** Because that feels like a Kickstarter, doesn’t it?

**Craig:** Well, it’s not so much that as that you’re going to say it once, nobody is going to do it. And then you’re going to feel this weird need to keep saying it. I think it’s nice that at the end of every show we say, “Hey, you want to give us a tip, go to iTunes. Give us the amount of stars that you think are appropriate. Give us a review.” That’s our tip.

**John:** That’s our tip.

**Craig:** That’s all we need. No money required.

**John:** So last week on the show we were also searching for a word. And the word we were looking for is something you brought up and I couldn’t think of the word for it and neither of us could think of a word for it. It’s when the mispronunciation of a word has become the default pronunciation of a word.

And so people wrote in with suggestions and a lot of people were writing, “Oh, you want shibboleth,” which is that sense of, you know, a word that defines insiders and outsiders. And that’s not really what we were looking for.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So I still feel like probably that word is out there. But people also wrote in with this great series of articles about the specific thing we were talking about which is Los Feliz. And so, that’s a neighborhood in Los Angeles. And it’s classically sort of mispronounced but there’s actually a long history behind its mispronunciation. So I will link to these two things in the show notes.

Marisa Gerber from the LA Times has an article about the progression of, it used to be Rancho Los Feliz and it’s named after a guy named Jose Vicente Feliz. So it wasn’t for the word “happy”. It was for a guy’s name.

**Craig:** But his name was Happy.

**John:** His name was Happy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Like Pharrell Williams, if you want to get back to the Blurred Lines Lawsuit.

**Craig:** It’s like the guy that invented the toilet was John Crapper.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s why it was called The Crapper.

**John:** We’ve talked before on the podcast about how the Smart & Final grocery store chain is named after a Mr. Smart and a Mr. Final.

**Craig:** That’s right which is insane.

**John:** Which is insane.

So the other link I’ll put in here about Los Feliz is this sort of a shibboleth kind of thing which is the suggestion that if you moved into the neighborhood or an adjacent neighborhood in the last five years, you would say, Los Feliz.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you moved into the neighborhood 20 years ago, you would say, Los Feliz, so basically throw the accent on the Los rather than —

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** Take the stress off of the other two. And then if you are trying to pronounce it in Spanish or you’re trying to re-Latinize the word which is an interesting sort of concept is to take a word that’s been sort of mid-Westernized and put it back to its Spanish, you would say, of course, Los Feliz

**Craig:** Los Feliz.

**John:** Los Feliz.

**Craig:** I’m a Los Feliz guy.

**John:** Yeah. You’re a Los or a Los Feliz?

**Craig:** No, I’m Los Feliz. Sorry, I’m a Los Feliz. So, I guess, I am. I’m the — I don’t know. I’m a newbie, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Los Feliz, yeah.

**John:** I suspect that it is the more common pronunciation. In one of the articles, I think it was the LA Times article they talked about Garrett Ono who’s a local news anchor, and if he’s debating on how to pronounce a word, he will call the City Hall of that city to ask like, “How do you say your word?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It also reminded me of how in Big Fish we had a pronunciation expert and her trick was to call a small town library in that region and ask the librarian how to pronounce something because those women who are basically the librarians there tend to have a good handle on how people are actually talking.

**Craig:** You know, one day there aren’t going to be librarians.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And people will —

**John:** One day Google will take all of it.

**Craig:** Google will take them all. We have all these wonderful questions. We have a big bursting question bag, so why don’t we get into them and maybe, who knows, we might be able to get through all of them.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Let’s start with Paul.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Paul writes, “I was hired to adapt a novel into a screenplay based on my short film sample script. It’s going into production later this year and the producers and original author both loved my translation.” Translation I think he means adaptation. “My question is can I use the adapted script as a writing sample as well, crediting the based on original author on the title page of course?” What do you think, John?

**John:** Of course, you can.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** So, a writing sample is anything you wrote. And so if it’s based on something, that’s great too. So you’re saying it’s based on this thing. That’s absolutely valid and fair and, you know, half the writing samples in this town are probably adaptations.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, considering that frankly studios are looking for stuff that has some kind of built-in audience or proven IP track record, it would help, I think, in a weird way. So, yes, of course, you can use that as a writing sample.

**John:** And there certainly are cases where you cannot use that for certain competitions. There’s maybe other reasons why you can’t do that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But for a writing sample, someone to say like, “Oh, can this person sling words on the page?” Absolutely valid.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Josha asks —

**Craig:** I think it’s Yasha.

**John:** Oh, okay. Yasha.

**Craig:** I would say Yasha.

**John:** We’ll say Yasha.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yasha asks, “Is it cool to change the font on the title of the title page of your script or is that considered lame and unprofessional?”

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s lame or unprofessional. Lots of people do it. I don’t, personally. I’m kind of an old-school purist that way. But, yeah, people do that all the time.

**John:** Yeah, it’s absolutely fine and I would say, a good 20% of scripts you’re going to read that are actually really out there in Hollywood will do something like that. First time I probably ever did it was for Go and it’s probably because the word go is just so incredibly tiny.

**Craig:** It’s so tiny, yeah.

**John:** And so I needed to blow it up and I just blew it up but, you know, Courier didn’t look good at all. So I did sort of special little logo for it. And it was absolutely the right choice for Go. So don’t worry about it. Just change the title of it. Put everything else in Courier. Keep everything else normal and the same.

**Craig:** Yeah. And do avoid — it’s not in and of itself it’s lame or unprofessional but if you do it lamely and unprofessionally it will be. So avoid cheesy fonts, obviously comic sans, half-moon baloney like that.

**John:** Zapf chancery.

**Craig:** Zapf chancery, yeah, or any zapf dingbats would be particularly amusing. But, you know, also, just don’t get really obvious, you know. Because the truth is, it might come off a little cheese ball. Yeah, I’ll say this much: you can’t go wrong with Courier.

**John:** Courier is a good solid choice. I think Emoji would be —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s going to be the next spec trend.

**Craig:** That would be nice.

**John:** There was that trend towards having really filthy titles for spec scripts.

**Craig:** Yes, yes.

**John:** So I think 100% Emoji is going to be the way to go.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a trend for filthy titles and then there was a trend for really long, complicated titles as if that meant the script would be good. I hate that. Anyway, Lee asks, “I am writing a thriller screenplay set in Mexico. Although the script is aimed at an English-speaking audience and most of the script is in English, for authenticity, some characters speak in Spanish. This would be subtitled for the final movie and is used sparingly. In writing the script dialogue, I give the Spanish-speaking character’s name, for example, Hernandez, then directly under that in parentheses, Spanish with subtitles. Then I write the dialogue in English. Is this the correct way to do this?”

**John:** I think that’s a fine way to do this. What I’d say, if you’re doing that a lot, it’s going to be a tremendous amount of waste of time and space to always say “In Spanish” underneath all these things. So you may want to, the first time you do that, if this character’s going to be doing that a lot, put it in italics. And so therefore, we’ll always remember that that’s going to be in Spanish if that becomes important. It may not really be that important. And we may just not need to remember that it’s all in Spanish.

**Craig:** I agree. If you have a character that never speaks English, always speaks a foreign language and will always be subtitled, you can indicate that in an action line before they start speaking. You know, Hernandez speaks Spanish. Note, all of his dialogue will be subtitled. And then you can put all of Hernandez’s dialogue in italics to sort of indicate to people or just don’t. It depends on how important it is for the vibe.

I mean, obviously, if in the scene Hernandez is saying something and someone’s looking at him and then turns to their partner and says, “What did she just say?” and then they translate, it’s important. Then we do need those italics.

**John:** Yeah. I was going to say exactly the same thing. So, you know, essentially, if characters are having their own conversation in their foreign language the whole time, don’t do anything fancy.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Next question. John asks, “What is a scene in a movie? The reason I ask is when I write a script it calls every setup, cinematography-wise, a scene heading. In other words, every time you change the position of the camera, it’s a new scene heading. But this isn’t — ”

**Craig:** Oh know. [laughs]

**John:** A scene in the movie term analysis.

**Craig:** Oh know.

**John:** John is fundamental in his understandings here. “I think I have a very loose idea but I’m not fully in the picture and I’m wondering if you could clear this up because sometimes it’s a confusing point for me. Sorry if I come across as thick on this one, but there are probably a lot of people who would like the answer on this one. A brief definition of what a scene actually is. There could potentially be many scene headings in a scene, I think.”

**Craig:** Okay. Well, you know what, don’t appreciate the very polite way you ask the question.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re not thick, you just don’t know. And now you will. The way you’re doing it is wrong.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So the idea of setups, that is to say the camera changes position, we don’t have to indicate that at all. We can if we feel it’s important for the telling of the scene and the telling of the story, but we don’t have to. The slug line or the scene header, INT.BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.DAY, we do that essentially when we change our location, or if we stay in the same location but maybe jump ahead significantly in time. That’s pretty much how we use those. What do you —

**John:** Yeah, I think to encapsulate Craig’s description, a scene is a moment of story that is happening in one place in one time. And, really, in one place and one continuous time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so we use scene in a screenplay, usually it’s headed up by INT or EXT to indicate interior or exterior. And all of the stuff that’s in there doesn’t have to have its own scene header or slug line or anything to differentiate like these are the shots. Back in the very, very early days of screenwriting, very early days of movies, they would literally list every shot because it was really much more of a shot list kind of way to do things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now we only break those things out if it’s really important for the understanding of how the scene would play.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s exactly right. Remember also, John, that the idea of the interior and the exterior indication is there for clarity for the reader and, of course then later on, for the production. It would be very unclear and confusing for the reader if you constantly did that every time you imagine the camera moving. And of course, it’s impossible to tell really when the camera position will change repeatedly through the course of say two people sitting across the table from each other.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because, ultimately, you shoot both sides continuously and then edit them together later.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s how that works.

**John:** In previous episodes, we’ve talked about the difference between a scene and a sequence. And a lot of times, what people refer to as a scene, they really mean as a sequence. It’s a collection of scenes that together accomplish some story point. And so it could be a person moving through the rooms of a house searching for something. And it’s a scene but it’s also a sequence. Really, it’s a collective group of little moments that are adding up to one bigger moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Another example that happens a lot is you have two sides of a phone conversation. Those would be kind of listed as two different scenes in your script, but they really are one moment. And so you’ll find, as you’re doing this, you will be talking about scenes in a way that doesn’t necessarily match exactly to what is there on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sequences tend to involve a change in locations through continuous time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. So our next question — so, anyway, thanks, John. You’re not thick. Hopefully that sets that straight. Sam writes, “Over the last few years, several of my scripts have advanced in the major screenwriting contests including the semifinals and quarterfinals of Nicholl, the semifinals of Austin, and good marks on The Black List site.” Congrats.

“Despite this limited success, getting anybody else to actually read my scripts has been excruciatingly difficult. A smattering of managers and producers request my scripts after the contest season and sometimes I get a meeting or two that quickly leads nowhere. The others, I never hear back from even after a follow-up email a few months later. Cold queries, no success either. It’s not to say that I’ve been entirely without success. One manager danced around me for a while before suddenly dropping off the planet.” That’s dramatic.

“A producer I met through a personal connection wanted to option one script for a good sum of money and a contract was even drafted but the deal fell apart at the last moment. I try to network when I can. This usually gets a few reads here and there, but that’s about it. So my question is, how do I take the next step? I’ll obviously keep writing and improving. I’ll continue to submit to contests because it can’t hurt and I’m financially able to do so, but there has to be something else I can do to advance my career, right?”

**John:** I wanted to include this entire question is because that is honestly the experience of trying to sort of get your career started. It’s like there’s all these little things. It’s like, “Oh, well, that happened.” Or like, “This person wants to option my script.” Or “I now have a manager.” And you always think like, “Oh, I’ve managed to get this next level and then some things just dissipate.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The experience Sam describes is incredibly common and incredibly frustrating. So I put it in there without having a great answer. But to really illustrate, like, this is sort of normal.

**Craig:** It is normal. And I’m sorry to say, Sam, I’m not sure there is anything else you can do. You’re on The Black List which does get your script read. Look, you have to be realistic about certain things. The semifinals of Nicholl, the quarterfinals of Nicholl is actually not that significant of an achievement in the eyes of the industry. That is to say in the eyes of people that are purchasing scripts or employing writers. It is a very real achievement, don’t get me wrong. It’s a very real achievement for you and it’s encouraging. It’s an indication that you have promise.

But on the other side of the aisle, they’re looking for finalists and even then, they’re looking for a couple of the finalists. The semifinals of Austin, likewise, doesn’t really mean much for them. Good marks in The Black List site is nice but, as we’ve often mentioned, it’s not about your average. It’s about that one person who would give you a 20 if they could.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So this is normal. It can be very frustrating, especially when you don’t have context. So when these little things emerge like a manager dancing around, maybe there is going to be a deal but it didn’t happen, you begin to think that you’re cursed. But in fact, you’re not cursed. That’s just the way it works for all of us. You know, for John and for me, if somebody says, “I love this script. I want to make this movie,” and we’ve been doing it long enough to go, “Uh-huh. We’ll see.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because we know that that’s kind of just talk. And that most talk is just talk. That’s the deal. So when you’re starting out, you grab these things like, you know, like that piece of door in Titanic that you can stay afloat on. But they’re not real until they are. Sorry.

**John:** Yeah. So when you ask like, “Is there anything else I should be doing,” it’s like, well, there’s not any one specific thing other than everything because you don’t know what is the thing that’s going to actually lead you to that next step. And so, you say you get out there and network, which is great, and so we could — you know, different definitions of what networking is.

Going out and meeting other writers who are actually working is great, you know. Helping out your peers is great. And the only thing I’ll come back to which I said a thousand times on the podcast is that as I was first starting in screenwriting, the people who were most helpful for me were not those people who plucked me out of obscurity and said like, “Oh, you’re really talented.” It was all of my peers who were trying to do the same thing I was trying to do.

And so the degree to which you can find other people who are trying to make movies, that will be useful. So if that’s a thing you’re not working on right now, that might be something you can add to your workflow.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll only add this last little bit for me, Sam, that worrying will actually not make it any better. Being frustrated, which is a natural state, you can be frustrated and it’s okay to feel bad. But don’t think that through sheer effort of feeling that you will change things. In fact, they will happen as they will regardless of your worry and your concern and your nerves and your anxiety. That’s a hard thing to kind of wrap your head around because it implies you have no control. You don’t.

The only control that you exert on this process is the quality of the work on the page and the reaction of any individual reading it. So, keep writing. Just keep doing your best to express yourself uniquely. And what will be, will be.

**John:** Jennifer writes, “I was contacted by a producer who has the life rights of someone whom I would call an important historical activist. The producer got my name from the quarterfinals script placing at Nicholl. So even a quarterfinal placing has got me a little traction here and there, if you want to mention that to your listeners.” So, a good counterexample.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** “The story takes place in a highly conflicted area, an area that all governmental sites I could see say don’t travel there as an American. There are documented kidnappings of tourists in the region. Part of the research for the screenplay would most definitely require a trip to this region to feel out and/or view where this figure lived out his life. Writing a script without ‘walking in his shoes,’ so to speak, wouldn’t be an option. And I totally get that, nor would I want to write a script like this otherwise. I’m an American, I’m female, I’m blond and white. I would stick out.

“The fact that I’m a mom to two little kids isn’t helping me with the decision either. I’m by no means asking you to make a decision for me. But I’d really like to know your thoughts and suggestions for a situation like this.

“I’m not sure you’ve covered a topic about personal safety in screenwriting before, maybe because it’s not a necessary topic usually. My husband thinks this is funny and not because it could be a killer script and a killer opportunity for me. And of course, it takes place in one of the few places on earth that I shouldn’t travel as an American. He’s useless for advice, so I turn to you two.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Once again, Jennifer’s husband, you are useless for advice. God.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Being a husband is awesome.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, fascinating question. This actually has come up for me before. Not in the context of a original script that I was writing but, believe it or not, for the third Hangover film. We situated a sequence or long stretch of scenes in Tijuana and we were not allowed to go. And we would have but the studio said, “No, we just can’t. The insurance basically won’t. [laughs] I mean, you can’t take Bradley Cooper to a town where there are kidnappings and we just can’t do it.” So we had to go to a wonderful town elsewhere that kind of doubled as it.

But I would be deeply concerned. I mean, look, first of all, I question the premise. I question the premise that you cannot write this script, at least initially, without going to this place. We live in a time where there is an incredible access to research material through the Internet and I just wonder if what you’re saying is true. You know, I’m going to be writing something for a miniseries that it’s situated in a place where there was a terrible disaster. And it’s dangerous to go there. And, you know, I might.

But it’s not politically dangerous. So there are ways to protect yourself. It’s hard to protect yourself against chaos. So, look, I mean, my advice personally, and this is just personal advice, hell no. You’re a mom to two kids? No.

**John:** Yeah. I think my advice to her as a parent is absolutely not, because there’s nothing — you’re not a journalist. You’re not a person who is responsible for reporting from the frontlines about an ongoing situation. And so I think journalists who are doing that work are putting themselves at risk for a very clear end goal.

As a person who may be writing a movie, your responsibility is to tell the story. And telling the story is telling about the characters. And I suspect you will be able to learn what you need to learn about the characters by doing firsthand research with people who knew this person, people who know what it’s like to be that kind of person. What you really need to find is like what is it like to be this historical figure. What is it like to be in that situation?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, you know, you don’t have a time machine either. And so, if you were writing the movie Selma, is it incredibly important to speak to people who were involved in it? Yes. Is it important to build a time machine and travel back and walk across the bridge? Not as much. And if you were writing Braveheart, you don’t have the firsthand research to be able to do there.

So, I definitely understand the sensation and the need to see what things feel like and be in that place. When I write, I always try to travel to the place where I’m setting something. But there are limits to that. And you’re not going to be able to travel to Mars and it sounds like you’re not going to be able to travel to this place because it’s simply too dangerous. And so you need to be able to figure out how to create the experience of going to those places and the inner life of being in those places without risking your life and your family’s safety.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, I’m presuming that this is somebody that — someone else has been interested in it at some point. There will be a documentary. If not about this individual, at least about the place or about why that place is dangerous. There will be first person written accounts, which I find extraordinarily helpful. Those things will exist. And if they don’t exist, I guarantee you that somebody who has lived in this place and who knew this person is still alive and not living there. And you can call that person and talk to them.

**John:** Yeah. A project I did really recently, I was able to find people who I could email or actually just text. And as I got to a very specific question about, like, what would the brand of sandals be that this person is wearing, and I could text them and get an answer back in 30 seconds. And that was invaluable. And that came after a period of like sitting, you know, at a lunch and just asking them thousands of questions about sort of things that would seem really unimportant.

They kept asking me like, “Why do you want to know this stuff?” It’s like, because I don’t know what’s going to be important and I would just pull as much as I could in. And that’s the research you probably need to do more than anything else, is to figure out what it feels like to be in those situations, not what it literally feels like to be standing on that ground.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I think we’re in agreement there, Jennifer. Don’t go. God, I hope she hasn’t already gone.

**John:** This question is super old.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** It’s been sitting in the mail bag for a long time.

**Craig:** Oh, god, she’s probably sitting in a prison right now.

**John:** I hope not.

**Craig:** Oh, boy. Well, sorry, Jennifer’s husband, if we took too long there. Anthony writes, “My two-question part deals with race. I am a white guy.” Hey, Anthony, me too. “I’ve written a romantic comedy and my protagonist is a woman, Anna. I’ve decided that I want to make Anna black. There’s no particular reason for this change other than the fact that I don’t see many black female protagonists. First, I’m just going to ask the uncomfortable question. As part of the character description, do I write black, African-American, dark-skinned, or something altogether different?

“Second, since I’m explicitly calling out Anna as black and the love interest is white, what do I do with the five other smaller but very active characters? I don’t want to fall into the default white trap by not acknowledging their race but I also feel it might be overly specific by writing in race for every single character.” Well, what do you —

**John:** I think these are lovely questions.

**Craig:** Good questions.

**John:** So to answer the first question, I think you say African-American and you say it in that first bit of sentence description where you’re first describing the character. And just put it in there and let her be African-American. Is that what you do, Craig, too?

**Craig:** I don’t. I write black. I find African-American to be clinical sounding.

**John:** I’ve written black at times and I’ve written African-American at times. In this most recent script, I single out a character as African-American rather than black. Do whatever. It works.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a personal preference of mine. But I would not say dark-skinned.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I don’t know what that means.

**John:** I don’t know what that means either. And I think that’s a stopper. It’s like, wait —

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like are you either a racist or are you super not racist? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Or you can do that sort of Rashida Jones problem where you’re like, how — yeah, what are we saying about — ?

**Craig:** Yeah. The truth is, when you say, “I’m going to ask the uncomfortable question,” it’s okay to be uncomfortable about race because it can be an uncomfortable topic in our country. It’s just not okay to exhibit that discomfort in your screenplay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just be comfortable and confident in what you write.

**John:** Absolutely. “Since I’m explicitly calling out Anna as black and the love interest white, what do I do with the other small active characters?” I think it goes back to what we talked about in this last episode where Craig wanted to know whether the waitress was white or black because it actually mattered in the scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think, you know, if it matters, yes, single it out. And if it doesn’t matter, yes, there’s a danger of the default white trap, but if you’ve already made your protagonist black, I think we’re going to be reading the script with the assumption that some of these characters will be or won’t be different races. I think picking names that can tip the reader towards a certain assumption could be helpful to you as well. So we’re not going to assume that —

**Craig:** Yaakov is not black.

**John:** Exactly. He’s not black.

**Craig:** He’s Jewish. I think, though, in this case, that if you are writing an interracial romance, it’s not out of bounds to casually remark on the races of other characters because, and this may not be the case, but I suspect that race may be a topic in your movie. Now, it may not. Your movie just may simply posit a relationship between two people who happen to be different races and there’s no comment at all. Just as frequently, I would argue almost always there’s no comment in real life, in which case, it doesn’t matter.

You write the characters you want to write. I would just say if it matters to you that she’s black and he’s white, then you have to think, “Well, does it also matter then who her friends are, who his friends are, who the boss is, et cetera?” You have to think, “How important is race in my script?”

**John:** Yeah. And realistically, you’re probably picturing some of these characters as you’re writing them. And so as you’re writing them, if things come up where the race factors in, then yeah you’re going to need to identify it. If it doesn’t come up that the race factors in, then it’s a decision about, you know, what the overall movie feels like with those characters singled out or not singled out for the race.

**Craig:** You could always have a character say, “Well, as you know I’m black.” So [laughs] that’s good writing.

**John:** That’s good writing.

**Craig:** That’s good writing.

**John:** And so I was thinking about my own scripts. And so in Go, and this is sort of not secret knowledge because it’s been talked about before, Ronna’s character was originally described as 18, black and bleeding. So in our initial instinct to try to cast the role, we were looking for a black actress. And we didn’t find one that we really loved for that part. And so the producers awkwardly asked me to take out the word black so we could look at other actresses and we cast Sarah Polley and she’s magnificent.

**Craig:** She’s also like so not black. She’s the whitest white.

**John:** She’s maybe the whitest. She’s basically transparent.

**Craig:** She glows.

**John:** Yeah. And so in that case, changing the race had zero impact because her race was never acknowledged anywhere in the script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Whereas the four guys who go to Vegas, Marcus has to be black because otherwise it doesn’t make sense because Tiny’s relationship with him is all predicated on race and sort of, you know, a white guy trying to act black. So there were incredibly important reasons why we needed to have Taye Diggs be black.

**Craig:** Well, which is good because Taye Diggs is black.

**John:** He’s an African-American man and just a damn sexy one. So he’s a —

**Craig:** He’s a hunk.

**John:** He’s a hunk. So there are cases where it makes sense and cases where it doesn’t make sense. But I didn’t single out everybody else’s race in a script because it wasn’t super important. And as we looked at casting the rest of the people in the movie, I had the luxury of being involved in the whole casting process, we looked at a wide sampling of people for everything.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think I mentioned before on the show that the characters of Jason Bateman’s coworker and the police detective who takes his case, I did not signify race in the script one way or the other. And so we ended up casting John Cho in one role and Morris Chestnut in another. So we didn’t fall into the default white trap.

**John:** Yeah. Rob writes, “I was listening to a recent episode with Aline Brosh McKenna,” oh Aline, “and really intrigued by one line of hers. Towards the end, she said, ‘Your movie’s got to be about something. They’ve got to be about something.'” So she repeated herself which is absolutely fair.

**Craig:** The way that that quote is written, it sounds like she’s from the ’30s. “Your movie is just got to be about something. They got to be about something, kid.”

**John:** “Does a movie need to have a clearly defined arc or theme? Does it need to be truly about something or one thing? I find myself enjoying movies much more when they do. But I don’t want to discredit more artistic and experimental ventures that are not.”

**Craig:** Say, that’s a great question. I’ll just do this all — I’m never going to stop.

**John:** [laughs]You know, your movie is going to be about something kind of no matter what. It doesn’t have to necessarily have some great giant thematic conclusion. But the fact that people have spent two hours in your movie, they’re going to take something from it. So it needs to be about something.

If it’s just a bunch of random stuff that happens and then it’s over, that’s not generally a recipe for a hugely successful viewing experience.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean you’ll say, “I don’t want to discredit more artistic and experimental ventures that are not,” which I take umbrage with, sir. Umbrage! It is not more artistic to not have an arc or theme. It is not frankly even more experimental to not have an arc or theme. And frankly, for people who do make let’s just say movies that are targeted at a narrower audience and perhaps are more cinematically daring, I think that they would be the first person or people to say to you, “Hey, no, no, no. This movie is definitely about something.” It may not be immediately discernible to you. It may be a far more subtle expression of a something. But of course, it’s about something.

No, I totally agree with her. “Your movie just got to be about something. They got to be about something, sir.”

**John:** Even some of the most experimental movies, you know, like Under the Skin doesn’t seem to have conventional plot to it, but it’s definitely about something. And it’s really unsettling what it’s actually about, you know. Tree of Life, which is sort of deliberately meandery, it’s fundamentally about something even though it doesn’t arc in sort of normal ways. So yeah, I don’t think you can get away with your movie not being about something.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It just doesn’t work that way. Par Dhonsi, the coolest name. Par Dhonsi in the UK. So Par, Par Dhonsi writes, “After a screenwriter has written a script, which he or she intends on directing, how do they go about creating a realistic budget for it? Does the script need to be broken down into tiny sections and depending on what is happening in the scene, you determine how much you think it will cost? I’d like to direct a short script I’ve written but I want to create a good standard product with a great story and visually aesthetically pleasing on screen rather than to half-ass it and create something that no one is proud of.” I don’t blame you Par Dhonsi.

“I don’t want to guess what it will cost.” [laughs] Nor should you. “And then midway in principal photography run out of cash, uh-oh.” I love how anyone who ends a question with uh-oh, is the coolest. I love Par Dhonsi. I don’t know if Par is a guy or a girl, but I’m in love with Par Dhonsi and may want to marry them.

**John:** [laughs] So yes, there is such a thing as breaking down a script. And it literally is called breaking down a script. And that is where you are going through scene by scene, moment by moment. You’re figuring out what things you need, how much time it would take to film that, what you need to film that, how many people you require on the set to do things. There’s a whole separate podcast that some AD out there can probably make about like, you know, film budgeting.

So in studio land, budgeting films is a science and an art. And there’s a whole structure for it. There is specialized software that helps these people break down scripts and put together schedules and budgets that can magically plug in union rates and all these other sort of specific things that are way beyond the ability for me and Craig to talk about.

But what you’re talking about, Par, is making your short film. And that is a lot more kind of — it’s not guess work, but it’s figuring out like, “Well, we have this amount of money, what do we do with this amount of money?” Rarely is it a case where you say like, “Let’s figure out how much this is going to cost and we’ll raise exactly that amount of money.” That’s unusual that it happens that way for a short film.

**Craig:** Yes. Although, if you’re going to go out and ask for money, you do want to have a budget because people that are investing want to know that you’re actually asking for the appropriate amount.

John is absolutely right. This isn’t something you do, just as we don’t ask the unit production manager, that’s what we call the person here in the US, or the line producer. We don’t ask them to write a script. They don’t ask us to budget the script. That’s what they do and there is so many moving pieces to a budget that you haven’t even thought of like craft services and what it costs to buy a parking lot for the crew. I mean there’s a million things. Even a tiny movie, a crew of seven people, you’re going to have costs you haven’t even anticipated.

You have to get somebody who knows what they’re doing to do this. If you are low on funds and you’re going the independent route, then you find somebody that does that. I mean there are people that do this in independent film and you look around in the UK and I think UK is kind of cool because my guess is that there are probably some public resources there they can steer you to the right person maybe more so than are here.

But absolutely, your instincts are correct. You do not want to guess and then midway through principal photography run out of cash. Uh-oh, is right. You want a professional to budget your script.

**John:** So I’ll ask Stuart to look up online and find some sample budgets for like little teeny tiny short films and some bigger things. We’ll see whether we can show examples of like what those budgets look like. Definitely, like, you know, I’ve made short films like the short film I made with Melissa McCarthy called God. That was just us kind of figuring it out. And so Dan Etheridge, who was my line producer, and I, we figured out how much it would cost. We, you know, we wrote a check and we were able to make the movie.

But I needed somebody with some experience to sort of talk me through like these are the realistic things we’re going to need to spend in order to do that stuff. This is back in the day. It’s like we shot on 35mm film. You had to pay for processing. There were like huge crazy things.

Some little short films you are literally just going to run out with your, you know, tiny camera and shoot them and you don’t need anything. Somewhere in between those might be an example of Matthew Chilelli, who edits our show, who just went off and made a short film.

And so he had a budget and he had to raise the money on Kickstarter. So he needed to actually show that like this is how much money I need to bring in order to make the movie that we’re trying to make. And, you know, that’s when you start to recognize what becomes incredibly expensive, like sometimes some locations become incredibly expensive or visual effects and what things are actually kind of nearly free.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that doesn’t stop as you sort of scale up through, you know —

**Craig:** It never stops.

**John:** Your screenwriting career. Because what Craig did just this last couple of weeks was honestly largely budget-related wasn’t it when you were working on this big draft to a big movie to turn in, a lot of what you’re doing is sort of figuring out how to make this movie for a certain price.

**Craig:** Well, you’re sort of tasked with doing two things at once. You’ve got all these creative things that you need to fix with the movie. So all the normal movie stuff, what should these people be saying, how do we fix this story point? This character doesn’t sound right. This relationship blah, blah, blah. At the same time, somebody else will be saying to you, “Here’s the locations that we have, we can’t do this, and we can’t do this, and we can’t do this. It would be great if you could combine these two things into one thing. And is it possible to dadadadada?”

So you have to, as a screenwriter particularly working on studio films, you need to be able to have two completely different conversations with two completely different kinds of people. You have to be able to get on the phone and talk to an actor about their character and then an hour later, get on the phone with the head of physical production which is what we call the people that manage the budgeting and the actual purchasing and spending of money and talk about how you’re going to accomplish what you’re going to do within their framework.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of the great things about going through the budget process, Par, is that a good line producer or budgeter will be able to save you, you know, you don’t have to but if you relocated this scene from here to a place like this, you could save an enormous amount of money and you might think, “Well, sure, I didn’t need it to be there. I just picked that because it seemed like a decent thing, but yeah, that would work perfectly fine.” That’s the kind of thing that really helps. So definitely go find yourself an expert.

**John:** Yeah. All right, our final question comes from Kathleen in Los Angeles. She writes, “I’m working on my first features script which is about two best friends during a vacation from college. I am debating whether to have it set during their Thanksgiving or Christmas break. Does it automatically end up in the genre of Christmas movies or can it just exist on its own that it happened to take place over Christmas? Would it be wiser for me to make it occur over Christmas or even put the word Christmas in the title? Are Christmas movie any more or less marketable than others? Do they have to be narrower or can it be a broader audience?”

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. There are movies that incidentally contain Christmas in them. But if you are writing a movie, just extracting here from your question, that is about two best friends during a break from college and it’s a Christmas break from college, it’s quite likely that a studio or a major distributor would want to think about it as being a Christmas movie and release it around Christmas time.

Very famously, The Ref, which is one of my favorite movies, written by Richard LaGravenese, directed by Ted Demme. It takes place over Christmas. It’s a kind of a retelling of Ransom of Red Chief. And it takes place over Christmas. It’s very centered around Christmas. And Disney released it in the summer. It was just bizarre. And it flopped, unfairly flopped. So yeah, are Christmas movies considered more or less marketable? They’re considered more marketable, I think, by studios because they understand the people are in a certain mood, just as horror movies feel like they fit the mood of Halloween.

They do have broader audiences but in the broadening of that audience, you have to be careful because Christmas does bring a certain family crowd and it’s a little more difficult to release something that is R or really focused towards adults that is set in a Christmas background. That’s my opinion.

**John:** So my first movie, Go, is set in the Christmas time, but it’s not a Christmas movie. And so sometimes it shows up in lists as like, you know, 15 best Christmas movies, but sort of as like as an asterisk because it doesn’t really feel like a Christmas movie.

I think sticking Christmas in the title puts it in the special bin in a way that may be helpful to your movie, but may not be helpful to your movie. So really look at it. If Christmas is not important to your plot, I wouldn’t try to single it out because it’s just going to feel frustrating. It’s the difference between National Lampoon’s Vacation and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It sticks it in that world of Christmas movies. And that’s not necessarily the happiest best place for you to put something if it’s something really great and original.

I sort of think about Hallmark Hall of Fame movies that sort of go in that Christmas bin.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there are wonderful Christmas movies.

**John:** Oh absolutely.

**Craig:** And, you know, I guess it’s interesting that you’re talking about — there is a Christmassy kind of theme, you know. So even for instance, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a Thanksgiving movie which is essentially the same kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s rated R, which a lot of people forget.

**John:** Oh yeah. I forgot.

**Craig:** But it is built around a very Christmassy kind of theme. So more important almost than the fact that your movie takes during Christmas break is, in the end of the movie, is there some kind of spirit of giving, spirit of love, that kind of vibe? Or is it off of that entirely? And if it’s off of that entirely, then I wouldn’t worry about this Christmas stuff. Put it where you want or put it in Christmas. It won’t matter, it will never feel like a Christmas movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Certainly, do not put the word Christmas in your title unless you are, A, Christmassy themed in both what we’re looking at and what the story is selling thematically, and, B, you want a family audience.

**John:** Yeah. I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this Reddit thread I read this week about a guy who started to doubt whether his wife and his kids were who they said they were and whether they’re real and he got obsessed with his lamp. And then he woke up on the sidewalk with his teeth knocked out and basically he’d been punched out and had fallen unconscious. And he dreamed like years of his life or sort of imagined the years of his life.

**Craig:** It’s the Star Trek episode.

**John:** It is like the Star Trek episode. And so there is a Star Trek episode of The Next Generation called The Inner Light.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** It was one of the best episodes of Star Trek.

**Craig:** Oh, so great.

**John:** You know, it also reminded me of parts of the movie I did called The Nines which is also that sense of unreality like what if this is all actually not real? And so I just recommend this Reddit thread because it’s a lot of people sharing their experiences of like those moments that felt like I lived my whole life and then I woke up and I was really missing those moments because they felt incredibly real and true to me.

**Craig:** I had this crazy dream once that I directed a movie. It was a spoof movie about superheroes but it was for Bob Weinstein and he just got really involved and meddled with it and it came out not very good. And it was so embarrassing, but then I woke up and it was okay.

**John:** That’s great. I’m really glad that, you know, you recognized that it didn’t actually happen.

**Craig:** It didn’t happen. Thank God, because if it had happened, what would I do?

**John:** Yeah, I know, because one of the first things you did is you IMDb’d yourself and you saw that, “Oh, that’s right. That’s not actually there.”

**Craig:** I had a dream that IMDb was a thing. It’s not. Thank God. But I had a dream that it was.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I had a dream.

**John:** So long ago.

**Craig:** Time gone by. I mean One Cool Thing. I got nothing.

**John:** Craig, you didn’t —

**Craig:** What?

**John:** No One Cool Thing? You’ve gotten much better about always having your One Cool Things.

**Craig:** I know. But well, I just didn’t. You know what, here’s the deal. My wife and my daughter are away this week because it’s my daughter’s spring break so I’ve been waking up early and driving my son to school every morning. I am not meant to wake up at this time. I’m not meant to wake up at 6:30, period, the end, it’s wrong. I’m all weird and funny. I’ve actually written some awesome stuff this week because I feel like my brain was really plastic and gooey. I haven’t written as much as I normally do, but it’s really cool. So I might want to force myself into this weird sleepy state anyway.

But for things like One Cool Thing, my entire brain failed.

**John:** Don’t worry about it. Craig, you were a huge help on the podcast today. Thank you for reading all your questions. Thank you for all the people who wrote in with their questions. And thank you to everybody who wrote with suggestions about, you know, how to do a full script challenge, which we’re going to pick a new title for that because that’s not the real title for it. And suggestions about advertising. So we still don’t know what we’re going to do with advertising. But if we do it, we’ll try to make sure it doesn’t suck and doesn’t ruin the podcast.

**Craig:** Tushy plugs.

**John:** Tushy plugs, that’s what we’re going to sell.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s my One Cool Thing.

**John:** As always, our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can tell Stuart and Matthew how good they are at their jobs. If you want to leave us a comment on iTunes, look for Scriptnotes, that is the place where you could leave a comment for them. You can also download the app there or in the Android app store. The app will connect you into Scriptnotes.net which is where you can get all the back episodes of the show.

Our outro this week is by Jon Spurney. If you have an outro you’d like to send to us, just send it to ask@johnaugust.com, same place where you’d send questions like the ones we answered today. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. This episode comes out on Tuesday, but on Monday we would have done the first play test of this game. Craig, will you have been there or not have been there?

**Craig:** On Monday?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know. It depends because my wife’s coming home — what’s today? [laughs]

**John:** It’s all a blur for Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** My wife is coming home in a couple of days. And she’ll tell me.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** [laughs] Trust me. Like who has that great question, my husband, Jennifer. He’s useless for advice. I’m also useless for scheduling.

**John:** So your wife and your daughter travelled to some dangerous location where they were not kidnapped, I hope.

**Craig:** Oh, it was so dangerous. Yes, you can’t imagine how dangerous. I mean, my God, there was a chance that the mimosa might come with quite enough orange juice.

**John:** Well, there’s a chance that I may see you on Monday night. But if not, I will talk to you next week on another episode of Scriptnotes. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [‘Los Feliz’: How you say it tells about you and L.A.](http://www.latimes.com/local/great-reads/la-me-los-feliz-20130507-dto-htmlstory.html) from the LA Times
* [How To Pronounce ‘Los Feliz’](http://atwater-village.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-to-pronounce-los-feliz.html) from the Atwater Village Newbie blog
* Screenwriting.io on [what constitutes a scene](http://screenwriting.io/what-constitutes-a-scene/)
* A [sample short film budget](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Shortworkingbudget.pdf)
* [u/temptotosssoon’s story of waking up and realizing he’d dreamt the past decade of his life](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/oc7rc/have_you_ever_felt_a_deep_personal_connection_to/c3g4ot3) on Reddit
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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