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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-noah-baumbach).

**John August:** Hey, so today’s show has a few bad words. There’s a clip, and in that clip an actor is saying some four-letter words. So if you’re in the car with your kids maybe skip over that part. Also, they may not want to hear about a couple going through divorce. But, maybe they will. So, that’s the one language warning for this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Noah Baumbach:** I’m Noah Baumbach.

**John:** And this is Episode 435 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on assignment.

Luckily today we are joined by writer and director Noah Baumbach whose movies include The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Frances Ha, and his most recent film, which is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Welcome Noah.

**Noah:** Thank you.

**John:** It is so good to have you here. There’s a couple things I want to talk to you about today. I want to talk about two handers. So Craig and I often talk about movies that have two central characters and generally those are romantic comedies or they’re buddy pictures. Your movie is neither of those things, and yet you still have to find the balance of those two characters and their shifting POVs. So I really want to get into that. I want to talk about the passage of time, because your movie skips ahead in ways that movies don’t tend to do these days. I want to talk about the passage of time.

**Noah:** OK.

**John:** Your movie is funny. So even though there are big serious topics, it’s really funny. So I want to talk about finding the jokes in those moments and trying to balance the comedy and the drama in your story. You have some great speeches in your movie, but you also have a lot of spontaneous dialogue. So I want to talk about the contrast between writing what characters would say in the moment versus things they kind of rehearse to say.

And we can talk about this because we have the script in front of us. So this is going to be one of those episodes where if people want to print out the script or look at the PDF online we might refer to page numbers. So, this is an episode where page numbers can actually matter. Sound fun?

**Noah:** Sounds great.

**John:** Cool. We have a tiny bit of housekeeping. We’ve been talking about the agency agreement between the WGA. This last week APA signed with the WGA. The week before it was Gersh. So congrats APA. And also Craig will be back with us for a bonus segment at the end of this show. So a reminder that Premium members get a bonus segment at the end of the main show. This week Craig and I will discuss escape rooms. Do you like escape rooms? Have you been to an escape room in LA?

**Noah:** I just heard about what this is. I think I know what it is.

**John:** So escape room, it is a concept where you and a group of friends are kind of locked into a room and there’s all sorts of puzzles and you have to find your way out of it. Craig and I do these a lot. We did one right before the holidays. So we’re going to talk through our techniques and recommendations for escape rooms. So if it’s something you considered doing in the future you’ll want to hear this bonus segment.

**Noah:** So you go to like a mall that has escape rooms?

**John:** Sometimes at malls. In Los Angeles you often find them in sort of industrial districts. And so there might be two or three escape rooms at industrial districts. Generally it’s about an hour to try to get out, if you get out in time. They are tremendously fun. So we have recommendations for anyone who is doing it for the first time, or seasoned pros.

**Noah:** And who creates them?

**John:** Very smart people. Puzzle designers. Listeners of the show, there’s a lot of overlap between screenwriters I think and the narrative designers who are putting together these experiences. But it’s people who want to do that kind of storytelling but in a limited period of time in a limited space. It has overlap with theater, so that also ties in with some things I know you’re interested in. It’s how you give people an experience of being in a place and a time.

**Noah:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll get into that. But, let’s talk about Marriage Story. What is the origin of Marriage Story? What was the first stuff in Marriage Story that you actually wrote down?

**Noah:** It’s hard for me to remember. I don’t know if you have this feeling of often a kind of amnesia. Once you get into the script it’s hard to know how you got there exactly. And often when I look back at old notebooks I’m reminded and surprised by things that I thought I maybe discovered later that I actually had earlier and vice versa. I think it’s often a confluence of things that gets me excited about writing something. And with this one there were various things that ranged from working with Adam Driver again to thinking about new ways of telling a love story, or new to me anyway. And exploring divorce and both the minutia of what that system is and can be.

And then probably hundreds of other little notes and things that have found their way in that sort of gave me a kind of in to, you know, or at least the feeling that, OK, now I can start to write this thing. I don’t know if you have that feeling. It’s like you start writing, or when I start writing it’s like I write and in one sense I feel, OK, this feels like a movie to me and I feel like I can see the movie. But at the same of course you can’t see anything. And so you put one foot in front of the other.

**John:** So you talked about notes and notebooks. How important is that process to you? So you’re sort of gathering up your wool before you knit the sweater.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** Are you methodical about that? Or as an idea hits you you will take some notes? What is that pre-writing process like for you?

**Noah:** Well, I think in general over the course of a day I will just write something down if it occurs to me. What tends to happen – once I start maybe a story or some sort of world starts to form itself then every idea or thought I have I almost will sort of pass it through does this fit in the thing that I’m trying to create. And some do, some don’t. Some come back later.

So, I have sort of notebooks, like little notebooks that I carry with me, and then I have more of like a notebook I have at home that I write longhand in. I tend to like to write longhand in earlier stages. And often I’ll find I’ll even write the same note or idea a few times in the book, almost like I’m trying to work out why it’s interesting to me. And at some point I’ll start transferring notes into a Final Draft document which is sort of when – so at least I have it ready when I feel like it maybe can turn into a script.

**John:** So for Marriage Story by the point where you’re switching from longhand into typing into the computer did you know your characters? Did you know the boundaries of the movie by that point?

**Noah:** I think, I mean, I had the notion that it would be a two-hander. That it would be both her and his story. I had some ideas for scenes. I had some ideas for story. The locations. I think all of that was in there fairly early. You know, all the sort of various relationships or how the story was going to tell itself I didn’t know yet.

**John:** Well how the story tells itself is really surprising to me when I saw it because I think I went into the movie with an expectation that we would see this couple either meet or fall in love and we’d see things go wrong, so the expectation would be there’s going to be a turn and we’re going to see everything fall apart. And what really excited in the opening of your film is you see those moments and you realize later what the context is of those moments. That it wasn’t what you anticipated being.

How early in the process did you write that opening sequence? Those first six or seven pages?

**Noah:** I think fairly early. Because I always knew the movie was going to start at the end of the marriage. And so I was sort of tasked with that challenge of investing you in a relationship that’s already over in a sense. And I wrote those sequences I think to some degree as almost an exercise for myself to kind of figure out the characters. Because both sequences are about both of them. I mean, one is the object, but the one speaking is also revealing themselves as well. They’re revealing what they – it’s what they see in the other person which says as much about them as it does about the person they’re talking about.

And it was a way to kind of get inside their relationship and to – I got ideas for character in that as well, of course, because in coming up with things that he might say about her, you know, that she would be this sort of person and vice versa when she talks about him. It also establishes their sort of milieu, their jobs, their everyday life, their son. But in doing that I also realized it provided me with a good beginning.

And as you say in some ways we kind of pull the rug out from under you. But I also felt like it actually – it also sort of sets you up for what the movie is going to be about which is ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances in some sense.

**John:** So, because this is a podcast we will play this opening scene so people can listen to it, but if people want to read through in the script we’re talking about the first four to five pages is what we’re going to cover in this opening section. So let’s take a listen to the opening of Marriage Story.

[Clip plays]

**Adam Driver:** What I love about Nicole. She makes people feel comfortable about even embarrassing things. She really listens when someone is talking. Sometimes she listens too much for too long. She’s a good citizen. She always knows the right thing to do when it comes to difficult family shit. I get stuck in my ways and she knows when to push me and when to leave me alone. She cuts all our hair. She’s always inexplicably brewing a cup of tea that she doesn’t drink. And it’s not easy for her to put away a sock or close a cabinet or do a dish, but she tries for me. Nicole grew up in LA around actors and directors and movies and TV and is very close to her mother, Sandra, and Cassie, her sister.

Nicole gives great presents. She is a mother who plays, who really plays. She never steps off playing, or says it’s too much. And it must be too much some of the time. She’s competitive. She’s amazing at opening jars because of her strong arms which I’ve always found very sexy. She keeps the fridge over full. No one is ever hungry in our house. She can drive a stick. After that movie, All Over The Girl, she could have stayed in LA and been a movie star, but she gave that up to do theater with me in New York.

She’s brave.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. So you say that this is setting up the life before the movie starts, before the plot starts, and also functions kind of like an overture. If this was a big old fashioned musical they’d play the themes of the show so that you get a sense to hear what you’re going to hear ahead of time and sort of cue you up for it. So here you have literally Randy Newman’s score underneath there and sort of setting you up for what it’s going to feel like. Musical things we’re going to hear. But you’re also setting up rhymes for things that are going to happen later on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** And about cooking, about what they see in each other, and how they’re different. And things that attract them to each other but can also repel them later on. So, it’s a really smart sequence. You know, I love – the first shot we see of her is framed in darkness and it just feels like big drama. Then you establish that we’re in Brooklyn. That is what their apartment is like. This is the apartment that we kind of don’t go back to once it starts. This is the home that they’re going to lose. You establish that they have this kid, Henry. That he’s going to be the focus. He’s the stakes behind all of this. You’re setting up her family even though we’re not going to meet them for quite a long time, but that she has a family. That she comes from California.

There’s a couple moments that here on the page that didn’t make it into the film. There’s a moment in the theater where Nicole is putting on a song, getting people to dance. Did you shoot that?

**Noah:** Yeah, that’s in there. Where they dance is in there.

**John:** It’s described a little differently on the page than what it is here, but it could just be a difference in the script versus what you originally did. But it gives us a good sense of who these characters are and most crucially the tone. This is a movie that is going to be funny at times. And so the pickles moment. That she is weirdly good with pickles.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** Writer Noah Baumbach as you’re doing this, like it’s so easy to put these words on the page. Did director Noah Baumbach get frustrated with writer Noah Baumbach for these one-eighths of a page that must have been so much work to set up?

**Noah:** Yeah. In some cases it can be a more difficult challenge from a directorial standpoint to do something that’s going to be five seconds of film versus an 11-page scene, which there are in this movie as well. So, yeah, those become scheduling challenges. And there are scenes in that apartment as well, so often it was at the end of the day you’d be like and we’re going to do Monopoly and cooking or something like that. You would have to fit all those things in. Shooting still lives of tea cups around the apartment becomes of course on a film set longer than you’d like it to be.

**John:** But those are often things you can maybe grab when you have like 15 minutes before lunch, or like while you’re waiting for someone in hair and makeup.

**Noah:** Yeah, those you could do because you don’t have actors in them. But, yeah, the others you’re doing, everyone has to change. You have to come back. You have the kid hours.

**John:** Well, the Monopoly sequence. Monopoly is a really short moment in here, but that’s four shots or something to get that Monopoly and different setups. And your wardrobe person is like it has to have a separate change just for that thing. Or is this a day that matches another day?

**Noah:** Well, yeah. You’re sort of balancing the thing, too. Because part of what I like with characters in movies is to see them in the same clothes sometimes–

**John:** That’s real.

**Noah:** It’s real. But we have the sort of storytelling of this that things are different days and different times. The clothes can help illustrate that. And we’re also sort of setting up their wardrobes for the movie that we’re about to see.

What helped a bit which is actually something is the style of this, the shooting style, we shot this handheld which none of the rest of the movie is shot that way. We did it because it sort of emphasized the intimacy of these moments and putting you right inside it. It’s the way I shot all of the previous of mine, Squid and the Whale, was all handheld. And in some ways with that movie, because I had 23 days to shoot it or something, part of it was by design.

**John:** Efficiency.

**Noah:** Efficiency. Because rather than stopping to cover scene you would just sort of move around and shoot. And so that did help us pick up these sequences in that we were last exacting about camera movement and camera angles by design than we are for the rest of the movie.

**John:** So we open with this sequence and we have his voiceover. And suddenly we switch perspectives and we hear her voiceover talking through the same things. And it’s a nice match because when we just hear his we assume like, oh, does he have voiceover power through the whole movie. Is this going to be his point of view? And then once we have hers like, oh, so she has voiceover power, too. And we very quickly come to see like, oh, this isn’t actually a voiceover movie at all. This is just essentially prelap for what would be happening in that therapist’s office that we’re going to experience later on.

I should have said at the very start, of course, there are huge spoilers to everything we’re going to be talking about here. So this is the opening of the movie. We will get to bigger spoilers as we go through this.

So, as you’re writing these first sequences, you write his POV, we have her POV. Did you know that her POV was going to become a bookend? That basically he would finally find out what she wrote in that list? That that was going to be your ending?

**Noah:** It came to me fairly soon after I had it. By the time I had really written both these sequences and fleshed them out and figured it out I did know that it was going to return. I didn’t know how I was going to get there. I didn’t know at what point in the movie, how it was going to fall. But it’s partly what even sort of generated the earlier bits was then thinking of it as a kind of big reprise later on.

**John:** That’s great. Now, how much did you outline before you went into this? How much did you have a sense of like these are the beats of the story? Or were you finding your way through and just finding the scenes as you came upon them? What was your process in writing this?

**Noah:** Yeah. I don’t outline in any kind of formal way, but I often sort of going back to what we were talking about in the beginning, I think as I’m inputting notes and things I start to have at least ideas for where they might fall in the movie. And so they’re often just scenes or pieces of scenes or lines of dialogue that I just have at the bottom of the document that I’m kind of waiting to reach at some point as I go. And sometimes I never do. And sometimes they just never find their way in. Or sometimes I sort of try to force them in and they don’t stay. But there isn’t any formal outline.

**John:** Did you put any restrictions on yourself saying like this is not a movie where this will happen, or these are things that don’t happen in the world of this movie?

**Noah:** Well, everything was going to be from one or both of their perspectives. And this opening sets you up for that, whether you realize it or not, that it is a kind of more very straight forward way of – I mean, it’s literally his voice and her voice, even though we don’t return to any kind of voiceover in the movie. But it always – every scene is either her perspective – even scenes – so there are points in the movie where we’re with her where he enters into it and I always thought of it as almost like he’s part of her movie at this point. And then likewise when – and that’s when she first goes back to Los Angeles. And then when he arrives and she serves him, then we sort of move over to his – I always thought of it as sort of like you could make two separate movies of these stories. And now we’re going to be in his story for a little while and she’s almost like a visitor in his story.

And then once they start mediation and the lawyers come in it’s both of their movie. They’re sharing it now.

**John:** A notable example of that is there’s a scene fairly early in the movie where all the lawyers and everyone is up in this high tower meeting and there’s a discussion of what to order for lunch. And Scarlett’s character is helping him figure out what he wants to order for lunch. And that’s a case where it is sort of both of their point of view perspective. You couldn’t say it’s one or the other one’s scene at exactly that moment.

**Noah:** Well that scene is really the first time where I felt like, OK, they’re sharing this – they do in the beginning of the movie, too, when they come home after the theater and they’re in the apartment together. But then we move to her perspective as she cries and goes into the bedroom and then she goes to Los Angeles. And we kind of leave him behind for a time.

The scene you’re referring to is when we’re kind of – I felt like we kind of meet back up and it’s both of their perspectives.

**John:** Now, at what point did you have a screenplay you could show to people or were you talking about the project before you had a full screenplay? What was your process in sort of getting your ideas out to other folks to weigh in?

**Noah:** Well, I did approach – Adam Driver and I had been talking about sort of ideas a few movies back that have found their way into this movie. So he was always going to be part of it as far as I was concerned. So I did let him know at some point I’m writing sort of about this divorce. And we would have conversations, more generalized conversations when I didn’t quite yet know what it was fully about what profession it could be, just various things. And then just even general conversations about relationships and just life stuff.

And then when I brought Scarlett in and Laura as well I would have sort of similar kind of conversations with them. Once I kind of knew what the story was and the script was I talk less about it. Then it becomes a more interior process. And then I wait until I have something that I can show people.

**John:** Singling out just some little small things on the page, stuff that’s scene description and no one is ever going to get to see on the screen, but is delightful. Top of page 10 we meet this mediator. We don’t know very much about him. But he’s wearing a sweater vest with too many rings. Sitting tightly-crossed legged facing them. So, he’s not a crucial character. We’re not going to come back to him a lot, but you did spend the time to give us a very specific description of him so we know what it was we were looking at as we were reading through the script.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** How important is it to you that the screenplay make sense to anyone who reads it as opposed to just you who is going to direct it?

**Noah:** That’s a good question. I think – and I don’t know that I’m always consistent about it – I think there’s probably times where I know much more – I have a lot of visual ideas about it or the way I might want to shoot it that I don’t really feel is relevant for the read of it and so I won’t put that in. Likewise a character. But I find with most characters, even if like you’re saying they’re only in one scene, both for the read but also I think just to give us all ideas later. The costume designer. Even myself again later as a director. If I can put in little things that might spark stuff for us, give the actor something to think about, but also give the reader a kind of visual or an idea that just sort of grounds them a bit more, I will do that.

**John:** So on page 13 it’s an example of a tremendous amount of dialogue on the page. So you do a lot of dual dialogue throughout the whole script. But this was a great example of there are a lot of little small conversations, we’re picking up little snippets. And so your approach to showing us all these little snippets is to do a lot of dual dialogue and have people sort of circle around. Is this exactly sort of what happened in the moment or was this just giving you an overall plan for what you hoped you might be able to capture? Basically I’m asking like did you write this page planning like these are exactly the lines I’m going to get, or I want these things generally said and I’m going to catch them?

**Noah:** I mean, I take time with these lines so I actually do want everyone to say these lines. And to overlap the way they are on the page. Sometimes though when we’re shooting and suddenly now you have a theater group and you have a bunch of people I might find that we either have too much or not enough in terms of covering. Because it’s also like music. It’s like atmosphere in the scene. And particularly with this theater company they are almost like Greek chorus in some senses. And so there were cases where I would add a little bit more later to fill out something, or even reduce stuff. Or switch out and give different actors different lines because the – I would say to your question I think does it need to be actor three saying this and actor five saying that, that was more like well once I know who the people are and I know also what the blocking is and how this is all falling together I might switch out some of these lines and give one actor one of them and one another. Unless it’s a specific line to the character themselves.

But I was conscious too though that like actor three know she’s done with it, know this time it’s really over. He’s more skeptical of things. So I would keep all of that very consistent in terms of when I cast. And also I thought about like Matt Maher who I cast as one of the theater company is a great skeptic the way he plays it, so I was sort of thinking when I cast him he would be perfect for that sort of attitude.

**John:** A thing I noticed about your dual dialogue and I don’t know if you’re even aware that you consistently do it is page 13 has an example. So Beth is speaking. And then when it goes to dual dialogue Beth’s dialogue always moves to the right. So the character who is speaking always drifts off to the right rather than staying on the left. And I think it’s just a way of helping to indicate that, OK, this new person on the left is interrupting or cutting into the flow of an ongoing thing. So Beth is probably one continuous thought, but actor three is the one who is interrupting here. You’re very consistent throughout the script as you do that.

**Noah:** Yeah. I think that’s more intuitive in a way. I’m trying to think in terms of left and right. But, yeah, I mean, I do try to – now that I’m looking at it – I think I do try to keep that kind of consistent, and also for the read so that you kind of know what you’re supposed to follow mainly. Also, by naming her Beth I feel like I feel like you’re also ultimately the other actors have names. But it’s a way for the read – I find it’s always very hard in the script when you have so many names you really do get bogged down and need a glossary. And in this case I put in Actor so people reading would kind of know who to follow.

**John:** Yeah. On page 14 you do a thing where Frank stands and makes a toast to Charlie and Nicole about their move to Broadway and how they’ll miss Nicole and then makes it about him returning to Broadway with the Young Turks. In 1986 he was the Young Turk. So in scene description you’re sort of setting up a speech that is not fully on the page. Talk to me about your decision to do that.

**Noah:** I don’t do that a lot, but I do do that sometimes is put in the direction stuff that I think should probably be turned into dialogue later. Part of this, too, was I knew I wanted Wallace Shawn to play this character who is also a friend and also a wonderful writer. And what we ended up doing in the shoot, too, because I ended up making trims in this scene in the movie, is Wally actually ends up making a toast to Charlie and Nicole as it indicates in there, but also giving you story very straightforwardly he says Nicole is going to California. We’re going to Broadway, she’s going to California. We’re saying goodbye to her.

**John:** Crucial.

**Noah:** And we’re cutting between Charlie and Nicole. We get their looks. And so I was able to actually in his toast and also in the visuals tell the scene faster than I had fully figured out on the page. So, there were other lines in this bit that I cut out of the movie because it felt repetitive in terms of where Charlie and Nicole were going to go from this point forward.

**John:** Absolutely. Well where Nicole is going to go is to Los Angeles. And so cut from a discussion in the apartment, you say we switch over to Nicole’s point of view, and then suddenly she is in Los Angeles. And so we’re establishing on page 20/page 21 new characters who are brand new to us. So actually page 18 is where we make the switch over to Los Angeles. You knew from a pretty early moment that this was going to be a movie that was split between two characters, but also between two worlds, so New York and Los Angeles.

You’re a New York person mostly?

**Noah:** Mostly.

**John:** How much research did you have to do on Los Angeles to sort of figure out the LA part of this all?

**Noah:** Well, I’ve spent a lot of time here and I kind of knew it, or at least had my version of it. And I shot my movie Greenberg here as well and it was a different kind of view of LA, but I had thought of LA in terms of a movie before previously.

**John:** You had a good understanding of what a New Yorker would think of LA coming here. So the frustrations that Charlie might feel trying to adjust to it.

**Noah:** Right. And versus Nicole’s where it’s both where she grew up but a place that she had since been away from for a while.

**John:** So Nicole has moved to Los Angeles. She’s going to be working on this pilot. There is a really good and really funny sequence of her shooting this sequence with this baby and it’s going to be CGI and all that stuff. And as we’re looking at this, as I was first watching this scene and thinking like, oh, this is going to be a major focus of the story and it’s sort of a misdirect that it’s actually not about this scene or this science fiction at all. It’s all really about a setup to like, oh no, you need to get yourself a better divorce attorney. Did you feel any pressure at any point to trim, to get to the lawyer part of that faster? Because it’s just so funny, but I’m wondering whether even on the page or in the edits did you feel any pressure to sort of get through that stuff sooner?

**Noah:** Well, I thought of it in some ways her hair and makeup test or her TV, the stuff done on the TV lot, I was thinking of it a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, how the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion all kind of echo – they’re played by the same actors – the farm hands, so that there’s this sort of familiarity in a new place. And I was also thinking about this, it’s actually a conversation I had with Scarlett at an early stage and we were talking about how when you go through a divorce or a kind of major life transition how the world feels weird to you. And you often find yourself in places – you might be more likely to go to some party you wouldn’t normally go to, or something. That you always find yourself in strange – and everything feels a little bit stranger.

And so I thought of that sort of TV experience both as an echo of the theater company, because we have, again, sort of all these overlapping voices that are disembodied and she’s meeting people rapid fire and they’re all new and they all may be a big part of her life going forward, but we don’t know. We don’t know if this show is going to get picked up. We don’t know what it is. And everything is kind of happening rapid fire.

And so I thought it was actually a good introduction to the lawyer thing because it was funny. It was a way to also bring, like you say, have some humor. But I also in a way felt like it kind of captured a certain kind of mindset for Nicole who has kind of done something somewhat radical. And she literally wakes up in her childhood bed. It’s like everything is familiar but unfamiliar. And I thought this sort of added to that.

**John:** Well it’s also a moment of her being very competent. She’s the center focus, again. She’s not in a periphery of her husband. And she’s actually speaking up for like is that the right thing. I think this is not actually how you hold a baby. And should that character actually be killed off? She’s actually starting to assert some authority which becomes important later on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** So even though the TV show is not a major player in this it’s showing her finding herself in this element. She’s not completely thrown to the wolves. She’s not overwhelmed by it. She’s actually pretty good at it.

**Noah:** Yeah. And I thought it was a way both as you say for her to sort of start to find voice. And she even pitches herself as a director and at the end we’re going to find out that she is directing. But also in some ways you could also read it as she’s taken some Charlie with her. And so in a way there’s still the kind of connection there. And how when things end, which I think the movie is in many ways about, it didn’t mean because it ended it failed. And that there are many wonderful things that she’s bringing with her from this experience even though it’s an experience that she no longer wants to be part of.

**John:** At the end of this sequence we’re going to move into meet Nora for the first time. And she has an amazing introduction. So at the bottom of page 28. This begins an eight-page scene. So, Noah Baumbach I need to tell you that the lords of screenwriting say that the longest a scene should ever be is three pages. And so you’ve now broken the rules of a three-page scene.

**Noah:** Well there’s an 11-page scene coming up.

**John:** Yes, I know. You’re setting yourself up for some long scenes. This I think is a great example though of prepared speech versus spontaneous speech. Because Nicole is going to be talking a lot, but all of what she’s saying she’s kind of saying for the first time, or it’s the first time she’s putting it all together. Versus Nora who believes what’s she’s saying, but she’s said this exact same thing a bunch of times. And the contrast between the two is just so nicely drawn and so well done.

You know, an eight-page scene, what was the process of you working on this scene?

**Noah:** Well, the scene also, and this is something that Jen Lame, my editor, and I talked a lot about when we were cutting the scene is how Nicole, because Nicole has this long monologue–

**John:** Page 35 is just a column of text.

**Noah:** Right. She starts in on 33 and I guess speaks all the way to 36. The monologue relies a lot on the rhythms of the previous part of the scene. So that was a balance in the editing which we were always very conscious of. But I’m glad I didn’t know about that they tell you that you shouldn’t be longer than three pages. But to what you were saying which I think is very interesting, somebody said to me, one of the women I interviewed to sort of research for the movie, she said it’s very hard to leave without momentum. And I thought it would be compelling to create a scene where in some ways you watch the momentum develop in front of you.

And so I thought in a lot of cases like with this monologue that you could see her, as you’re saying, she’s putting things together. It’s the stuff of her life, but she’s in effect kind of creating a narrative out of life that’s giving her reason and momentum to move forward. Because she’s in a place right now where she’s sort of done something. She’s now feeling bad about it. She doesn’t know if she’d done the right thing. And Nora in the context of this scene gives her an opportunity to find voice.

But as you say there’s also this interesting juxtaposition of the fact that Nicole is the actress who by design says scripted lines. We’ve seen her act earlier in the movie. And Nora is the lawyer, I mean, you could say a non-performer, but of course in this context Nora is the performer and Nicole is speaking in an unprepared way.

But then you also have this thing, I thought of this monologue, well, and this is something actually – I always knew how I wanted to shoot this, even though it doesn’t specify it in the script, because in the script as you say it’s long columns of dialogue. But I always felt like it should be – we shouldn’t see it coming. Of course when you’re reading it you see it, so you know what – you’re like, wow, this keeps going, and probably most people reading the script turned the pages before they even went further just saying like, wow, OK.

But in the movie you don’t know how long it’s going to be. And that’s something I felt like, well, it’s a great opportunity to sort of create a situation you don’t realize it until you’re midway through, oh, this is still happening. And a lot of that is in the way we blocked it and framed it, which you wouldn’t get from the script.

**John:** Absolutely. So the script makes it clear that there’s moments where she stands, but it doesn’t make clear like that monologue involves a whole trip to the bathroom where she’s off camera for a while and coming back in. It’s not just one single close up the entire time. It actually has a real plan and a real shift in things. So, Nora’s character, her motivation is clear from the start. We know when the scene opens what she wants to do. She wants her to be a client and she wants to comfort her, but also she wants her as a client.

It’s a little more challenging to figure out what Nicole wants at the start of the scene, and it shifts over the course as the conversation goes what she actually wants changes. And what she wants in that moment but also what she wants in the very near future and the long term future. You can see her starting to form a different kind of plan for her life.

A challenging thing to figure out on the page, but I also imagine a detailed conversation you’re having with an actor as you’re figuring out the beats of the performance. What is that conversation like and does it start – are there rehearsals? How are you going through this to figure out how to make all that work?

**Noah:** Yeah. We rehearsed it. And one thing I always felt strongly about and talked to Scarlett about was in effect I felt she should live it as she says it. In another movie we would flash back to these scenes. And that she should give us that experience–

**John:** She is the flashback.

**Noah:** Yeah, she is. And because the telling of it is as important as what she’s saying. And so – and it’s something she does brilliantly in the movie is that when she’s telling the happier times you feel her inside those times. You feel that exuberance. You feel that being seen by him and what that meant to her. How falling in love, the rush of that. And then you feel, you know, at the point where she says “I got smaller” you feel the shift. You feel the sadness, the disappointment, the self-realization. So, that was something we were all very clear about.

And what she could do brilliantly is she could make adjustments two pages into that monologue, you know, when we did take four. And if I had an idea for later she could make these sort of hair pin turns and still stay in the emotion of the scene which was kind of – was really kind of wonderful.

But I think because the earlier part of the scene as you were saying is in effect a seduction scene. It’s somebody trying to get a job. But what she’s also doing is she is giving Nicole permission to tell her story. And to take control of her story. And I mean I’ve had a lot of interesting responses and people’s interpretations of these things or how they feel about Nora. But many people have held very strongly about the fact that Nicole wouldn’t have ever gotten what she needed if it weren’t for Nora. It doesn’t matter whether you like Nora or not. She was necessary.

And I certainly felt that was true in this scene. And we actually – one thing, too, is that we shot the monologue, it was always one take, because I wanted to have the option of just never leaving her. But it actually we felt like you do want to see Nora listening, because the listening is important. You see the invitation in Laura’s face.

**John:** Let’s focus in on one little moment, that moment you cited where I got smaller. We have a clip of that.

[Clip begins]

**Scarlett Johansson:** In the beginning I was the actress, the star, and that felt like something. You know, people came to see me at first. But the farther away I got from that and the more acclaim the theater company got I had less and less weight. I just became who, well you know, the actress that was in that thing that time. And he was the draw. And that would have been fine, but I got smaller.

[Clip ends]

**John:** So you’re saying that in the actual shooting of it that might be take four. You would have discussion about sort of nuances of sort of where you get to and what moments. Are you directing that with verbs, with a scale of one to ten? Like how do you fine tune where you want to be at different moments in this long monologue?

**Noah:** It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge for her, obviously, but it’s a challenge, yeah, for me as I’m watching it to be able to find those moments and mark them.

So, and of course the success of the monologue as I was saying is its own momentum. And the fact that it feels, it’s all live action in a certain sense. And so it isn’t as simple as saying do this part this way, this part this way, this part this way. I mean, that wouldn’t have worked. Even my perfect version wouldn’t have worked. So, I found myself somewhat specific about where, if I felt things. It really was more about keeping them on storytelling I think. And making sure it was clear where we were in the story as she’s telling it. And also keeping that sense of momentum because it is – it’s a scene that has so many beats just anyway so that when it’s still going – and I knew that in effect part of what was going to work about it was that there is a point of like, wow, this is still happening.

**John:** Where the character herself is aware that she’s been talking for a long time and she’s still talking.

**Noah:** And she’s still talking. And by the time she’s on the couch it’s like a different part of the story. And things that I did in the direction for instance is that we actually move in on her while she’s talking and she’s on the couch. It’s the only time until Charlie sings Being Alive that the camera moves unmotivated by physical motion. Because I felt it was an internal development that’s motivating the camera.

**John:** Her monologue is very much like a song without lyrics.

**Noah:** Yes.

**John:** She’s saying what she sort of can’t dare to say otherwise. And, of course, songs in musicals are those moments where like words fail you and suddenly a melody is supporting you.

**Noah:** Right. And in both cases the character is in a different place at the end then they were at the beginning. Another thing we did in this sequence in the clip you played, it starts earlier when Nora is talking to her on the couch and she says what you’re doing is an act of hope. The central air kicks on in the room. And when she says I got smaller it shuts down. And so that’s that sort of silence when you’re in a place where you’re hearing white noise of some sort, when those things do go off suddenly it feels much quieter than you realized.

**John:** Now, one of the things I wanted to talk about today was the sense of time and sort of what you did so smartly at the start and jumping us ahead in the story. But also as it goes along it feels like we’re getting these bigger and bigger gaps where we’re suddenly catching up with characters, like wait, how much has happened in the meantime.

An example at the top of page 73, this is a moment that really caught me, Charlie and Henry are off going to meet lawyers and Henry says, “I remember those fish,” which was just a great moment where it’s like, oh, well of course kids think of all fish the same. And then you realize like, oh, one of our characters has been doing a tremendous amount that we haven’t seen. So basically Nicole has been visiting with a whole bunch of lawyers that we didn’t know about. And it’s such a rug being pulled from underneath us. We thought we sort of knew everything that was going on with Nicole and we realize we didn’t know everything that was going on with Nicole.

So it’s both time had jumped forward, but our assumptions about how much information we had about what each character are doing are not quite correct.

**Noah:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Did you in your head map out sort of what both characters were doing in the scenes we didn’t see? Or were you just kind of only working on the scenes that we did see as an audience?

**Noah:** Well essentially yeah. That time off camera is built into the structure of the script. So the fade outs that are also scripted, those were – between fade out and fade ins there’s always some gap in time. And so I would always sort of essentially figure out what happened off camera, I don’t know everything, but I would know what was going to at least be revealed in the next sequence like the fact that she’s seeing other lawyers.

I didn’t know that necessarily while I was writing it all the time, and there were scenes that I entertained writing or wrote versions of that I decided were more effective just alluded to and not seen. You know, in the early stages I’m sure I thought about writing, if I didn’t write a draft of Nicole visiting a lawyer and choosing not to hire them.

**John:** What draft of the screenplay did you shoot? I mean, how many drafts did you go through before you were in production?

**Noah:** I often work in sort of perpetual revision in a way. I don’t move too far forward unless I revise what I have. I edit that way, too. I’m always kind of like moving backward to move forward a lot. So that by the time I get to the end of something, like if I have a draft of the script, it’s often – I mean, I’ll change it, you know, of course after that, but it’s at least in the ballpark generally of where I’m going to get. And I don’t really know then how many drafts. I mean, there are many because I’ll always sort of – you know, any changes I make I always sort of make a new draft and work off that. But I don’t know exactly.

**John:** While you were in production how much did Noah Baumbach the writer come back and do work? Were there new scenes, new pages, new anything?

**Noah:** Rarely. Only in like I’d say in those moments like I was saying, like if I feel that some of the incidental dialogue that I’ve written needs to be either developed further or trimmed down. I mean, a little bit more in rehearsal. I mean, when I work with the actors thinks might adjust a little bit. Or an actor may say is it OK if I say this. Do you think maybe I could say this? Or this might be a better way of saying it.

But once I’m shooting it’s pretty much the script.

**John:** How much rehearsal did you have with your principles and with other folks? How many days did you have with them?

**Noah:** I had like two official weeks of rehearsal because Scarlett and Adam and Laura were involved. And I cast even some other parts earlier. We had sort of unofficial conversations or like they’d come over and we’d read together and talk about stuff. So I felt like everybody had a good sort of base even once we went into the two weeks. And the two weeks of rehearsal I mainly focus on the rhythms of the dialogue and just making sure everybody sort of almost speed a lot of the time, of just like – and how these overlaps might work. And then blocking. And I try to get into all the locations as much as we can to block the scenes out so that when we get there on the day of shooting we’ve sort of explored it already.

**John:** Absolutely. So people aren’t walking into a space they’re supposed to be knowing intimately for the first time. So they get a sense of that. You’re not doing really basic stuff, wasting time. You can really focus in on those scenes themselves.

**Noah:** Yeah. And where I can I like to bring in – not in the very beginning of rehearsal – but once they’re up on their feet and moving around a location I like to have the DP and the editor and script supervisor and production designer even there for part of it to give them ideas. They can see what we’re doing, but also give them ideas. And often it can also give the actors ideas, too. A prop can give the actors ideas. Or the placement of something on a wall or whatever it might be.

**John:** I want to jump ahead to page 90. This is a scene, Charlie is calling Nicole. She is at a Hollywood party. He is at his apartment. It’s one of the few long phone calls in the movie. And they’re arguing. We have a clip to listen to here.

[Clip begins]

**Adam:** Are you moving out here?

**Scarlett:** Did you find a lawyer?

**Adam:** Yes. Henry says you’re moving here?

**Scarlett:** Have your lawyer call Nora.

**Adam:** I want to talk about it as us.

**Scarlett:** Who the fuck is us?

**Adam:** Let’s just get in a room, you and me. That’s what we always said we’d do. It’s not up them. It’s up to us.

**Scarlett:** My lawyer would never let me sign anything.

**Adam:** It’s our divorce.

**Scarlett:** They say I could later sue them for malpractice.

**Adam:** What am I walking into?

**Scarlett:** What are you walking into?

**Adam:** Yes, what the fuck is going on?

**Scarlett:** I read your fucking emails, Charlie. I read them all.

**Adam:** When?

**Scarlett:** I don’t know. Recently. You’re a fucking liar. You fucked Mary Ann.

**Adam:** It was after I was sleeping on the couch.

**Scarlett:** It was bullshit about working on us. You know what? I have been working. I’ve been doing the work alone.

**Adam:** How did you read my emails?

**Scarlett:** I hacked into your account you dumb fuck.

**Adam:** I think that’s illegal.

**Scarlett:** Don’t give me this shit about being surprised about LA. Surprise, I have my own opinion.

**Adam:** How do you even know how to do something like that?

**Scarlett:** Surprise. I want things that aren’t what you want. Because, surprise, you were fucking another lady.

**Adam:** One time. I think you’re conflating two different things. Mary Ann has nothing to do with LA.

**Scarlett:** I am conflating mother fucker. You watch me conflate.

**Male Voice:** Did you just stamp your foot? I don’t think I’ve ever done that before.

**Scarlett:** I’m just so angry.

**Male Voice:** You look like you needed me.

**Scarlett:** Yes, I do. Thanks.

**Male Voice:** You know the Japanese are making really interesting tequila right now.

**Scarlett:** That’s exciting, I guess.

**Male Voice:** What are you so angry about?

**Scarlett:** My fucking ex-husband. I spent all of this time feeling guilty and he’s so self-absorbed it’s pointless. It’s a game I’m playing with myself.

**Male Voice:** Oh, hey, Pablo. We met at the—

**Scarlett:** You held the bounce board.

**Male Voice:** The flirty grip.

**Scarlett:** Here’s what I want you to only do. OK?

**Male Voice:** What?

**Scarlett:** I want you to finger me.

**Male Voice:** What?

**Scarlett:** Just finger me.

**Male Voice:** OK.

**Scarlett:** That’s all we’re going to do. Just fingering. OK? I’m changing my whole fucking life.

[Clip ends]

**John:** All right. And that is why we have a language warning on this episode. Some strong words being said here. Why I wanted to use this clip is I thought it was such a great example of two characters are having a serious argument and saying some real things to each other for the very first time and things we knew separately they’re saying to the other person for the first time and it’s getting really heated. And then we stay on her point of view and she’s having a comedy moment right through and out of it. And I just really loved it. It was a character you had set up earlier. He’s perfectly cast. And one of the biggest laughs you got from me was her reaction to his tequila line. It was just a really great moment.

Talk to me about the bounce though of comedy and drama. And at what point are you mindful that you’re not stepping on the drama by trying to go for the joke, or worried that you’re going to be too serious if you don’t lighten up. How do you find that balance?

**Noah:** I don’t think about it so much, I guess as much as it feels intuitive to me. I guess I think of it more like these things live side by side anyway. So, it’s sometimes they reveal themselves or not. I mean, I think, you know, in the case of this I thought of her, too. In the storytelling of the movie a thing I was always aware of is like you have on one hand this sort of high drama of this divorce and then just ordinary life is always – you know, once you hang up the phone you’re back in your life. And she’s furious, but she’s also at this Halloween party. And she’s with her new group of people and she’s still sort of feeling her way out there.

And I also thought it said a lot about where they are at this point in the movie. I mean, she’s sort of active and having new experiences and he’s in this hotel room alone, totally out of his element. So I think I thought of it more that way. And then bringing Pablo back just seemed like a good opportunity. Less about the tone balance and more just about the sort of reality of the situation.

**John:** Well, it sounds like the drama is both of them trying to figure out their future and also dealing with all of their past versus the comedy is very present tense. It’s like what’s right there in front of them. It’s the very day daily life, the stuff that comes up. And, you know, the minor annoyances that are in front of you and the possibilities in this case in terms of like Pablo and people say dumb things. And so you can respond to them.

**Noah:** Right. And it’s not that different thematically from ordering lunch in the meditation. These things still have to get done. And maybe in another movie you’d not show them and we’d just assume at some point they all ate lunch, or you assume at some point the lawyer would tell you what they charge, or that you wrote a check to the lawyer at some point. But I thought for this movie all that stuff was part of the story. So I wanted to include all of these sort of ordinary quotidian things.

**John:** Well, an example is there’s the inspector who comes to the apartment and so Charlie’s character has this sort of parental inspector person sent by the state or sent by somebody to watch them do really basic stuff. And so it’s all the tension, the high wire tension of being watched while you’re doing all this stuff, where just normal daily stuff is happening, and suddenly there’s a magnifying glass on what normal stuff would be. And how you cannot act normally when someone is watching you.

**Noah:** Right. Well Charlie’s apartment, a lot of what happens in Charlie’s apartment speaks to that. I mean, because it is – he actually set decorates it to make it feel like a home and then he’s supposed to act like ordinary life with somebody watching. And it does sort of go with this notion of performance which is set up at the beginning of the movie in that they’re actually part of a theater company. And then here he is performing as dad, as human being on the planet in front of somebody. And in an artificially set designed place.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a little terrarium for a father.

**Noah:** Yes. And so it’s, you know, while also a potential step and stage in divorce proceedings, and it’s very real, it’s also – the movie has kind of set you up for something.

**John:** Well it’s a really thematically dangerous moment, and yet in the character of this woman who is coming to inspect him she is a comedic character who just underplays everything so dramatically that like you want to laugh and you do laugh while not neglecting the stakes that are there for him. And that she cannot be pleased. And so you’ve given him a central sort of very classic comedy where he’s trying to please a person who clearly cannot be pleased.

**Noah:** Right. Right. And with Martha who played the part so beautifully, she’s absolutely unreadable. And that is in a sense what all the divorce proceedings are in every stage is that there is no clear answer. This sort of notion of court as a court but no court – I mean, he and Alan Alda’s character Bert, I always thought of those as like an Abbott and Costello routine. It’s like this sort of perpetual – I mean, it’s why Kafka was such a genius, or one of the many reasons why Kafka was such a genius, but it’s these journeys where you keep feeling like you’re coming to some sort of conclusion or answer and there isn’t any. But then there’s some strange logic in that.

And so yeah this scene sort of furthers that notion and if you think about marriage or the fact that their theater company, there’s performance, but of course there’s also what comes up in the divorce proceedings is, oh, you said you were this person and you never were that person, which is also other notions of persona and misrepresentation and who we say we are versus who we are, or who we want to be versus who we are. And so here you have some sort of strange playlet, the playing out of a guy simulating being a father.

**John:** Simulating perfect divorce dad.

**Noah:** Yes.

**John:** So talk to me as you get through the end of this story as a reader, as the writer, as the director, what thematic goal posts were you aiming for? What were some of the thematic things, questions you wanted to raise and hopefully answer and what new ones came up as you were working through the process? Going into it what did you think it was about and coming out of it what did you think it was about?

**Noah:** Well, when I was writing, and I think generally when I write I think less thematically and more I really try to tell the story as entertainingly and as effectively as I can. What I find is if I’ve done that successfully the thematic stuff all starts to reveal itself. I don’t know if you have this experience. And often it really is just structuring it right.

I mean, I feel that way working with actors as well. It’s like if the blocking is right, if the lines are right and the blocking is right it really gives them a lot of freedom and access to playing the scene in the most effective ways possible. And I think that’s also true I find for me with themes is that they tend to reveal themselves only when I’m actually telling the story correctly, or at least – correctly is probably the wrong way to say it – but I mean when I’m telling the story effectively. That the themes start to – I start to see these themes. I didn’t choose a theater company because I thought, oh, this is really about performance and the lawyers will become performers later. I chose it because it seemed – I liked it visually. I liked that milieu. I liked the idea of having a theater troupe. And I liked the director/actress relationship.

I also liked that they collaborators. I thought well that raises the stakes for them in the breakup.

So, but of course as I’m filling it out I start to see, oh, these things kind of relate to each other in some way.

**John:** And things also rhyme. So he starts as a director. She ends up getting an Emmy as a director.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** As you go through this story you sort of see what each of them wants and becoming what they want to be to some degree. You see Charlie trying to just get back to a thing that he had before and finally accepting that he’s never going to get back to that thing that he had before and he has to move on.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** He could’ve done that right at the very start of the story, but he wasn’t ready for it at that point.

**Noah:** Right.

**John:** We as an audience are sometimes frustrated that her character is not willing to sort of read that list aloud at the start. That she’s not able to acknowledge at the start sort of what she has. And she eventually finds her way to that point. But you didn’t know that all when you were doing your pre-writing, as you were starting. You just had a shape of ideas that could become a thing. That you felt had stuff that connected them together, even if you didn’t know quite what those connections were.

**Noah:** Right. And I knew in a sense – I was referring to The Wizard of Oz – I mean, I was also thinking of things like The Odyssey that I knew that they were going to go, you know, two people going on both an adventure together and separate. And that they were going to meet all these interesting characters along the way. I mean, it sort of goes to the rings. Like I want, you know, to make everybody compelling who they meet because I thought it’s like you’re going to learn something from each person. I mean, sort of like you do in those, like 18th Century novels, like Clarissa or Pamela where they go on these sort of adventures and they seem kind of wild and sometimes kind of horrible, but they end up sort of OK at the end. They get through it.

And so I was in a sense really trying to follow that story. And then also be true to at least a – tell the story of these divorce proceedings. Sort of going back to your earlier question about drafts, I would say the biggest thing I learned in the first draft, the first full script I had, was that scenes that didn’t stay within that narrative of getting them through this divorce process to the end were all the ones that felt extraneous. So things of running into – I had things at Henry’s school. I had things of Charlie running into friends, like another couple that had been their friends that was taking Nicole’s side. I had some stuff with Nicole and Henry that again was sort of off the topic of this.

Because what I realized in telling it was that – and this goes to the ordering lunch and to the Pablo sequence – is that ordinary life is just there anyway while they’re getting divorced. So I can do both simultaneously.

**John:** Yes. Fold those moments into things that actually have to be there for plot, otherwise they could be cut away, you’re going to probably end up cutting them away.

**Noah:** Exactly.

**John:** Yeah. Your script, at least the one we have printed out here, is 152 pages, which seems long. So 120 is sort of what we leave it at. But your movie is not long at all. So tell us about why that one page per minute rule does not apply.

**Noah:** Yeah. I mean, I’ve discovered that over the years that often having some quite short movies when I – I mean, this movie is long for me.

**John:** What is the running time on your movie?

**Noah:** It’s two hours and 15 or 16 minutes or something.

**John:** Yeah, it doesn’t feel long.

**Noah:** But that’s still shorter than the script count would be if it were a page a minute. Yeah, I mean, The Squid and the Whale was 81 minutes. And I remember hitting like the hour mark and realizing I was almost at the end when I was cutting it and I thought like, oh man, I hope I have a feature film. You know, Frances Ha is like 84 minutes. But those scripts were all over 120 pages. So, I just discovered, you know, I do tend to write at least in sections of the movie quite a lot of dialogue. And you know I play it very fast, generally play it fast.

Although this script did have things like Charlie singing Being Alive is just a line. It’s in there, but it’s a line of–

**John:** You’re not sticking all the lyrics there.

**Noah:** Yeah. I didn’t put the lyrics in. So, of course, that was longer than the page count would indicate. But at this point going into this one I sort of have much more of a sense of how my scripts play, so I wasn’t overly concerned by the script length. Although I knew it was going to be a longer movie than I’d done before.

It also has longer pauses. The pacing is a little bit I’d say different than many of my previous movies.

**John:** Well with your nominations I think you officially have dispensation so you can have 11-page scenes and have a longer script. You are allowed, Noah Baumbach.

**Noah:** I’m grandfathered into it.

**John:** We were talking about Charlie’s apartment being sort of like an LA terrarium. And so we got a question which I think you may actually be able to speak to really well. Adam asks, “All the recent assistant talk and advice for the gentleman moving from New York to LA has got me thinking about a weird social science phenomenon. LA housing favors coupledom. In my day job I’m an entertainment industry drone who doesn’t make very much more than an assistant, but I’m not rent-burdened. I share a one-bedroom apartment with my wife. An LA one-bedroom is comfortable for two people sharing a bed, but not for roommates. When we lived in New York the apartments were so much smaller we needed a two-bedroom not to kill each other. Being coupled is no cheaper than having a roommate there.

“Being an Angelino while poor-ish incentives coupledom. Is this why New Yorkers seem to have more adventurous sex lives? How many dissatisfied Angelinos stay together for housing? Should all the 20-something single assistants shack up with the first warm body?”

So, I look at Charlie’s apartment and compare Charlie’s LA apartment to his New York apartment. And his New York apartment seems much lovelier and cozier, but his LA apartment is bigger. And it’s a recurring thing that people say in the movie is like there’s so much more space. What do you think of Adam’s suggestion that LA is cheaper for couples? Does that make sense to you?

**Noah:** Well, I think about it in terms of the movie, your observation is interesting because it is like the LA apartment by all accounts seems bleak, but it is actually bigger than how he would be living in New York. But, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** You never lived in sort of Charlie’s apartment here. Charlie’s apartment here is a real apartment. Is that correct?

**Noah:** It’s a real apartment. I actually wanted to build it but we couldn’t afford to build it. So it took a long time to find it.

**John:** And so you have to rent that apartment. You have to deal with all the neighbors around it. There’s always noise. I mean, in my movie Go we shot that, again it’s an apartment, in a real apartment. And it was a nightmare for everyone involved. And I feel so bad forever. I should still to this day be baking them cookies for all the nights we were shooting there.

**Noah:** Well fortunately I think that that complex didn’t have a lot of long term people in it. And had enough space that we actually ended up renting like – like we had holding rooms upstairs. There was nobody next door because Adam had to hit that wall so many times that I guess apparently it went through to the – like the wall in the apartment next door broke off, too. So, but it’s was interesting that it was that hard for me to find an apartment to the specifications of both conveying what it should be but also having the visual interest and being, you know, both realistic and also because of the amount of scenes we have in that apartment, something that was big enough to shoot in.

**John:** Yeah. Doug Liman often will say if you want to shoot – it’s tough to shoot a boring a party, because you have people standing around and not having fun, well that’s actually not going to be interesting to see. So in this case you needed a drab, boring apartment, but it needed to convey that message but without actually being so uninteresting to the eye that we didn’t want to spend time in there when we were in there. So, finding that balance can be tough.

**Noah:** And that was a challenge of the movie. Because of the story there are so many scenes in offices, both personal offices, then conference rooms, then the windowless room off the conference room. Even Charlie’s theater company is in a rehearsal space. There’s all these sort of transitional spaces which of course worked for the movie because the movie is about one giant transition in some sense. And his apartment was that as well.

But I like that challenge of making something that by design is supposed to have no personality sort of finding beauty in that. And we had all these sort of different versions of white that we would bring from some of these rooms to other rooms, and Charlie’s apartment being one that we tested a lot of different versions of white for that.

It’s also why shooting on film I thought, I mean, I love shooting on film just anyway. But I felt particularly in this movie because there are all these blank walls of sorts to have the grain.

**John:** Give some motion, yeah.

**Noah:** Gives them, yeah, gives it a kind of body that it’s hard to find digitally.

**John:** Yeah. At the end of every one of our episodes we do a One Cool Thing. Were you warned about the One Cool Thing?

**Noah:** Yeah, I was told. Has anybody recommended David Byrne’s show in New York?

**John:** No. So tell us all about that.

**Noah:** it’s called American Utopia. I think it’s a version of what he toured with, but he’s been doing it on Broadway. And Greta and I saw it and Rohmer my son saw it over Christmas break. I mean, it’s just a fantastic show. It’s a concert essentially, but it has not unlike Stop Making Sense if you’ve seen that, he’s kind of created a kind of concept for it which is really beautiful. But he told a story in it which I thought is very interesting about – I think about it a lot with sort of script and directing and script. There’s a song in the show called Everybody is Coming to My House. And he tells the story about how a children’s choir I think in Detroit or somewhere recorded a version of the song. And he said, you know, it’s the same lyrics, it’s the same arrangement, and it’s a totally different meaning when they sing it to when he sings it.

And he said you know when I sing it it’s clear I’m not so sure about everybody coming to my house. I’m worried they might stay. Or won’t leave. And when they sing it it feels like an invitation. It’s about inclusiveness.

It’s also in his telling of it I felt – he seemed so touch by that notion that something that he had really been thinking about, his version of it could be interpreted that way. And of course we’ve experienced that with covers of songs and all the Halleluiahs that are out there. But I think about that a lot. And I’ve talked about it a little bit in terms of people asking me about sticking to the script. Because I do find that there’s actually so much room for interpretation. If you create a framework actually I feel like it gives the actors all the freedom.

**John:** Yeah. Greta was saying that same thing when she was in your seat saying that even having come out of an improv background she feels as an actor she just has so much more permission to go further because she has the words to back her up. There’s something holding her up as she goes and explores things.

**Noah:** Yeah. And I love improv and I have an improv background a bit from college. And I actually think I employed a lot in writing. I think I’m improvising with myself in some way. But I feel the same way she does is that when we’re going to do it, but it’s also why the script has got to be ready and you have to spend that time getting it there, yeah, that there is more freedom.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is also about getting a script ready. So ten months ago back in Episode 390 we said goodbye to Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell who had just gotten staffed on a TV show. This past week it was announced she’ll be writing Captain Marvel 2, a big giant Marvel movie that she is now in charge of. So congrats Megan.

**Noah:** Fantastic.

**John:** That will be a big thing. And I don’t think that will be a big improv movie. I think that will be a very scripted movie and a very different process than even I think you went through on Marriage Story. I think it’s going to be a very different kind of screenplay and very different requirements. But I’m excited for her and really proud of her.

Noah Baumbach, thank you so much for joining us on this show. It is a pleasure to have you here with us.

**Noah:** Thank you. It was really fun.

**John:** Reminder to our Premium members that we will be back after the credits with Craig to talk about escape rooms. But this episode is produced Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Alex Winder. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Noah, you’re not on Twitter are you?

**Noah:** No.

**John:** No. Good plan. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We get them up the week after the episode airs.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Noah, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on Marriage Story.

**Noah:** Thanks John.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus segment begins]

**John:** Craig Mazin, I just finished talking with Noah Baumbach who has never been to an escape room.

**Craig:** Well, my opinion of Noah Baumbach just plummeted.

**John:** Well, he was at least curious about it. So I was trying to describe what it was and he had a sense that there are things that are in malls and you go in there. But I promised him in this bonus segment we would talk through our experience with escape rooms, our guidance for first time escape room attendees so that he can have the best experience. He and Greta can both go to an escape room and really maximize their enjoyment.

**Craig:** I mean, that would be nice. Right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Everybody should go there.

**John:** But between all the award show stuff, I mean, they can do an escape room. The little PR limo can stop there and they can have an hour to do an escape room and then go on and do more press.

**Craig:** Award shows are actually the worst escape rooms ever. You’re just like, well, I’m trapped in this room. There’s only two ways out. Winning or losing. But either way I’m trapped.

**John:** The good thing about escape rooms though is it has a timer on it. It’s only going to be an hour and then you’re out. They can’t go long.

**Craig:** Oh man. What I would give. What I would give to have these things be an hour. Oh my god. I’m so ants in the pants, ugh. Man. Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s define our terms. So what we mean by an escape room is this is a business that you go in there. Oftentimes they have multiple rooms but you’re going in to do one specific room. You signed up for it. You and a group of four to eight, sometimes a little bit more, people/friends of yours hopefully are going into this room. They give you instructions and then they close the door and then you have usually an hour to find your way out of this room by solving puzzle after puzzle after puzzle, each one sometimes more difficult than the last. Is that a general definition of escape rooms that matches your expectations?

**Craig:** That’s pretty much accurate to me. Yeah. Some rooms have a slightly different measure of how many people. Some rooms are a maximum of only six. There are a few rooms where they say you can’t do it with fewer than two people because there are people that sometimes just go we’re crazy, let’s do this, just me and you.

Some rooms sometimes have puzzles that require multiple people working at the same time. Fairly common. But, yeah, what you just described. It’s always organized around a theme. Typically there is some kind of narrative. So before you go in the room the person who runs the game will give you a little backstory. And then off you go.

**John:** Yeah. And so you and I got our chance to do our first escape room together, because I’ve done a bunch, you’ve done a bunch. The first one we did together was right before the holidays. So it was all the Quote-Unquote, the podcast folks, and your folks all together in an escape room. We solved a Jumanji room. And I had a really good time. It was not the best room I’ve ever done, but it was really fun doing it with you. You I thought had a good combination of leadership but also inclusivity which is I think two crucial qualities for a good escape room experience.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. And, you know, the thing about escape rooms is only one can be the best escape room. So they’re always, like every escape room to me is a little bit like the way I approach crossword puzzles where I think, OK, you know what, overall I generally liked it, or I generally didn’t like it. But here were some highlights. Here were some things I loved. Here are some things that drive me crazy when I see them in escape rooms, which I’m happy to talk about.

But the escape room personality that is best to have, I think, and I thought you had it as well – and in fact I thought everybody had it that we did this with.

**John:** It was a good room.

**Craig:** Is essentially a generosity of communication.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** You’re just telling everybody everything. You have to presume that some people are just going to solve a puzzle before you can or ever would. So you just keep sharing and then your own brain will naturally match up with certain puzzles that you’re just, you get. And other people will go, oh, the thing that’s frustrating you or completely mystifying you I know what to do. It’s such a relief when one of your partners knows what to do.

**John:** Absolutely. So when we say communication it is to call out the things that you’re seeing, especially when they are inputs or outputs. So you see something on the wall that says like, OK, I need a three digit number. And someone else is saying like, OK, I see it and this is a map and there’s dots on the map. And you’re calling out the things that you’re seeing so other people in the room who hopefully aren’t all clustered around you can see, OK, these are the things we’re looking for. And that kind of constant narration of the things that you’re working on is really important.

Also in that communication is we want to say like this is already solved and done. Because so often when I see people who are struggling in escape rooms they are trying to solve a puzzle that has already been solved. So calling out when you’ve done something is really important.

**Craig:** Exactly. The other thing that you want to do is point out patterns that may not be inputs or outputs but feel like they’re relevant. If something on the wall is some words but they’re in colors and they’re arranged in a certain way, just say we’ve got some words with colors over here. Because you may uncover something later and go, oh, those are the colors that that thing is in. And in this way you can kind of keep everything together. It’s good to announce like you said that something is solved so everybody knows that’s burnt. We don’t need to deal with that anymore. It’s over.

**John:** Almost never in an escape room will one thing be used for multiple purposes. You’re not going to go back and use that same thing twice. So if a lock is opened, you’re done with it. And if there was a key that had to go into that lock, just leave the key in that lock because you’re not going to use that key for anything else. So, cleaning up after yourself and moving on is a really crucial skill here.

Many of the escape rooms will actually have multiple rooms. So you’ll enter in one place and you’ll go into another place. In most cases you’ll never go back to that first place once you’ve crossed a threshold into a new room. Not 100% true, but keep in mind that you’re probably not going to be backtracking a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally speaking there’s forward motion. There are two kinds of rooms and sometimes I’ll ask what kind we’re dealing with, but sometimes I just don’t want to know. There’s linear and there’s parallel. In linear rooms you solve a puzzle, it gets you to a next puzzle. You solve that it gets you to your next one. And you proceed as such. In a parallel room there are multiple puzzles that are available to be solved at any given time. You choose which ones. Eventually you have to solve all of them. But they will begin to open up other things. And you may have to backtrack. And you may have to use something twice. And something could get reinterpreted. Those rooms are harder. It’s fun to play either kind. And it is also fascinating to see how we can trap ourselves.

So, sometimes it’s really good to call out and say I have a theory. I just saw a this, and I know that there’s a that over there. My theory is if anybody discovers a blankety-blank it will tell us how to interpret this to put into that. And sometimes you’re right. And sometimes you’re not. And when you get stuck it’s important to kind of go through and say what are we presuming and let’s challenge those presumptions because what if we’re totally wrong. What if we’ve been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out how to stick a square peg in this square slot when that’s actually not at all what this is for?

And it can get frustration. It’s kind of part of the job.

**John:** It can.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The other thing is to avoid your perfectionist tendencies. So if a combination has four pieces to it, and you have three of them, don’t worry about the fourth one. Just go through all the options on the fourth one until you find it. Unless it’s really clear from the start that there’s some sort of time limit or number of attempts possible on this combination lock before it locks you out for a time. And in that case you will need all the inputs in order to try that thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You will at times – and they usually let you know. They’ll say, OK, for this electronic lock it’s very common that you’ll face a safe that has a standard keypad on it. For this electronic lock if you enter the wrong code, if you enter three wrong codes it will lock you out for five minutes. That’s important to know. Because that’s not something you want to try in brute force. But you’re right. If you have a combo lock and you know three of them, that’s fine. Back solve it. I’m a big fan of that.

**John:** Absolutely. And then I would say rotate out and around. So, if you’re working on something and you don’t get it, let somebody else swap in for you and tell them what you’ve tried and let them figure it out. So in the escape room we did before the holidays, like Bo your assistant was able to figure out something that I just could not figure out. And I told her what I had done and she was able to step back and figure out what I was missing. So, it is good to have – when you have multiple people they have fresh eyes and they sometimes can have a perspective that you yourself were missing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Listen for confidence voice which is different than false confidence voice. Confidence voice is I know exactly what to do. Here’s what we’re going to do and this is why it will work. I’ve got this. Let’s do this. Usually when somebody gets confidence voice it’s good for everybody else to stop arguing with them and let them be right. Because what you don’t want to do is debate what the right path is. If someone has a path that they’re sure of that won’t take an hour to try, yeah, line up behind them and let’s see if they’re right.

**John:** Let’s talk through some of our frustrations with escape rooms and the things that would keep them from getting ten out of ten. For me it is when it is unclear whether a problem is solved or not solved. Where there is no visible sign. It’s not clear that you’ve actually done the thing. No change has happened when you’ve solved a particular puzzle. That is a frustration of mine.

**Craig:** Yeah. You will occasionally hear of someone come on the speaker. You’ve done something. Something should have happened. It didn’t. You think well I guess we didn’t do it right. And someone will say you did solve that correctly. Something has opened. And you go, oh, here’s a cabinet that had a magnet release latch and it opened, but it opened so silently and in such a small way how would we ever know. It’s such a problem with rooms I think when they don’t give you that feedback.

**John:** Absolutely. Or the thing opened but there was no sound cue. There was no light. Nothing told you that this was a thing that was possible to have happened.

Oftentimes in a room you will sense like, OK, there is a door. A door is going to open here. And so therefore I’m looking for that. But it’s something that doesn’t look like it could open that does open, as a designer you probably feel like that would be a wonderful surprise. But it’s not a wonderful surprise if none of us saw that as possible, or no one could have been possibly looking there.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this general technology issue. So you can sometimes walk into these very old school rooms in the way that rooms used to be done let’s say five years ago or so when they really started cranking up where it’s a lot of very analog stuff and it’s locks. Just a ton of locks of different kinds. Well, generally speaking locks don’t break. Although I have been in a room where the lock did not function well which was really frustrating and just sort of a time-waster where you’re like if the point is for me to figure stuff out, I figured it out, and now you’re just punishing me because your lock is crappy. How about this? How about just spend another ten dollars and fix the lock? Seriously. Just put a new lock in. So that drives me crazy.

There are rooms that are more technologically advanced which I love. I love rooms that have tricks. But then they have to work.

**John:** They do have to work.

**Craig:** They can’t not work. It’s maddening when they don’t.

**John:** So you and I both loved Lab Rat which is a room that we’ve mentioned on the podcast before. And one of the things – no spoilers – one of the things I loved about that room is that there were things you would encounter for a second time and like, oh, that’s how those things relate. And the context behind what that item was there and sort of how we might use it were clever on second viewing. So that’s an example of not just good narrative design but good sort of puzzle design. What we assumed was the reason for something being there actually had a very different purpose.

**Craig:** Right. So recontextualizations are great. There’s a lot of – I think I like it when rooms pull tricks that don’t use clichéd methods. So if you want to build a clichéd room at some point someone is going to discover a little flashlight that is a black light flashlight. And it will reveal black light stuff. As opposed to in some rooms where the entire light in the room changes. That’s cool. I mean, that’s fun. But, oh look, it’s the black light flashlight again. We found it. Again.

So there are things like that where I’m like, meh, OK. I also have a huge issue with rooms that require you to break something or push something with a lot of force, of any kind. Because one of the basic rules of escape rooms that you were told a billion times is please don’t break our escape room. So use two fingers of force, no more than that. If it feels like it’s not moving easily, don’t push it. Because people go in there and break the rooms.

And so that’s bad. Which means if you’re a responsible escape room escaper you don’t want to break things. There is one room in LA that I’m thinking of that is a very prominent escape room. And it’s a good one. But it does require you to break something at some point and I hate that. And I honestly think all escape room companies should get together and form some sort of consortium where they agree to not do that, because all they’re doing is training people to break shit in other people’s escape rooms.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say a frustration of mine is sometimes – like in an escape room you should look underneath things. You should turn stuff over because often that’s where you’ll discover important things. But where a chair will have like a number on the bottom of it, if it’s not actually a relevant number, it’s actually just some tag that indicates what room it goes into that’s frustrating for me. If you’re in a room where numbers seem important and there’s a random number 14 on the bottom of a chair, I’m going to assume that it’s important for some reason.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ve actually touched on two things that drive me crazy about escape rooms. And when I see them I get angry. Thing number one. You put something in there that looks like a puzzle and it’s not. That’s not a red herring. That’s a time waster. So there is a room that I did recently and there was in the corner of the room there was an object that had a lock on it. There was a lock holding it flat down on a tube.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** And we were just killing ourselves trying to figure out how to open that lock. And finally someone came on and said that’s not part of the room. Then label it. But if you’re going to put a lock in an escape room, hey guys, we’re going to try and unlock it. That’s why we’re there. So don’t do that. And the other thing that I just honestly loathe – loathe- are escape rooms where part of the thing is stuff is hidden. Like, oh, OK, the big puzzle here was that I had to look underneath the drawer in the corner and find this little key on the ground in the dust bunnies? Great? I feel so smart? What’s the point of that? It’s just – why?

**John:** Yeah. You’ll find stuff tucked into a jacket pocket. And I guess I’m OK with that, but I would prefer that if it was related to the narrative. That there was something about that person’s coat and therefore we have the idea that, oh, it will be important to search inside the coat. But like looking through every tag and every piece of clothing just doesn’t feel like a puzzle.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. Yeah. Like if we unlock – let’s say there’s like a high school locker. And we find the lock combination and we open it up and inside is a jacket, like a varsity jacket. And that’s all there is. Something is in the jacket. Or something is on the jacket. Totally fair game. But if there is a key for a box and that key just happens to be in the corner of the room under a rug. I did an escape room in Vegas and you couldn’t – it was a linear escape room. So if you hit a bump and you don’t know what comes next, you’re done. And what came next was that there was an area rug in the room and you had to lift it up because there was a key underneath it. No. No, escape room, that’s bad.

I don’t like it.

**John:** With that rug, if there were some piece of something sticking out from underneath the rug that gave you the sense of like, oh, this rug is not simply just there for floor covering. It is actually part of the puzzle, then that would be fair.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But it was not fair what they were doing.

**Craig:** Correct. So in my beloved Room games on iOS one of the things they’ll do is if there is something that you otherwise would not think would be movable they might if you examine it closely put little scratches in the metal around it as if to say somebody has been moving this. It is movable. Let me try and move it.

But if it’s just some random thing you just end up wasting time. Like OK there’s a bed. I guess we have to lift the mattress up, too. Do we pull the pillow out? And then they come on like you don’t need to do anything with the bed. Well then don’t hide stuff. How about we use our minds to solve problems instead of just go on some sort of dumb room cleaning assignment?

It’s funny. I love escape rooms so much that I actually do get angry when they fail you. But I wish that – so ideally escape rooms take these elements that we’re familiar with and they just reinterpret them in fun ways. The way that you and I in our jobs have to take stories that people are familiar with and reinterpret them in interesting ways. I’m not giving anything away. No spoiler here. There’s a terrific room in LA called the Stash House. And those of us who have done a lot of rooms have encountered a lot of locks. Well at one point you encounter some locks in that room. I don’t know if you’ve done Stash Room yet.

**John:** I’ve not done it yet.

**Craig:** You’re like, OK, not bad guys. Tip of the hat. Tip of the hat. And you go that’s pretty cool. And it’s because it’s like, oh, you guys have also played escape rooms. You also get angry at crappy escape rooms so you didn’t fall into any of the pitfalls which I always appreciate.

**John:** Yeah. I do look at escape rooms as kind of a new narrative art form. And so sort of like the early days of cinema or early days of television there are conventions that are starting and growing up and we are able to push against those conventions as well. So, I’ve loved the escape rooms I’ve done so far, but I’m actually really curious to see where we’re at five years, ten years from now with the possibilities of the format. So, that will be cool.

So the same folks who do Lab Rat, they have a new thing called The Ladder which sounds really cool. Where you can play it multiple times because there’s multiple endings. That sounds smart.

**Craig:** Yep. No, I’m totally on board for that. I have very, very high expectations for that. And I also like the fact that when I travel somewhere, whether it’s in the US or abroad, there are escape rooms. I’ve done I think most of the escape rooms in Vilnius, Lithuania, and there’s some good ones. There really are. I do escape rooms, if I’m just in some random city I’m always looking for an escape room. Always. And it’s fun.

And, you know, sometimes each city has its own flavor. I’ll tell you. Salt Lake City escape rooms brutally hard. I don’t know what’s going on there. My goodness.

**John:** It’s the altitude that makes it so much more difficult.

**Craig:** It is just – they are like – because they’re nice. They’re so nice. And they’re like, all right, good luck. Close. And oh my god, when you don’t get out, and usually I escape. I don’t think I’ve escaped a single escape room in Salt Lake City. And then when they come in they’re like, oh, you were so close. Here’s 4,000 other things you would have never known. I’m like, wow, amazing.

**John:** Yeah. Amazing. All right, to the future of escape rooms. Craig it was very good talking with you and I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Excellent. See you then, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Read the script for [Marriage Story here](https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/marriage-story-ampas-script.pdf) or watch [Marriage Story](https://www.netflix.com/title/80223779?)
* [APA Signed with WGA](https://variety.com/2020/film/news/apa-deal-writers-guild-of-america-1203475114/), congrats APA!
* [Megan McDonnell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6876585/), former Scriptnotes Producer, to write [Captain Marvel Sequel](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/captain-marvel-2-movie-works-wandavision-writer-1272259). Congrats!
* David Byrne’s [American Utopia](https://americanutopiabroadway.com/)
* [Noah Baumbach](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000876/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Alex Winder ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/435st.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/whats-the-plan-anyway).

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

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

**John:** Episode 340.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig.

**John:** Specificity.

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** Segue Man.

**Craig:** Don’t you die on me.

**John:** That’s why they call it a One Cool Thing.

Today on the podcast it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge where we look at the pages that listeners have sent in and tell them what’s working and what’s not working. We also have some follow up. We have a deep dive into the plan behind Return of the Jedi.

**Craig:** If one can call it that.

**John:** Yeah. But I think we’ll actually be able to talk about plans in general, especially opening plans of movies. Because I think it’s sort of a special case.

So that is our episode for today. But first we have some follow up. Wyatt from Florida wrote in, “On Episode 80 of Scriptnotes, Craig Mazin said that it takes four hours to drive from Miami to Atlanta which is a grossly inaccurate statement. To give some context, he was talking about how in Stolen Identity it was mostly filmed in Georgia, making for a less breathtaking road trip than he desired. But, still, I find this to be upsetting as a resident of Florida. Google says this trip takes about 10 hours with a car, which will probably be more like 14 hours after you’ve stopped several times to keep your brain from exploding.

“While I agree that the trip from Miami to Atlanta is not an interesting drive, quite the opposite, it does take a very long time. I think it’s understandable that I would take a certain amount of umbrage with this claim.”

Craig Mazin, how do you answer Wyatt from Florida?

**Craig:** Well, I think I was using a little bit of poetic license there, Wyatt. If you’re going to do a road trip movie, probably you should limit your units to days. How many days will this road trip be? Will it be one of those weeklong road trips? Is it a three-day road trip? A one-day road trip is not a road trip. That’s just a long drive for the day. So, yes, the trip does take about 10 hours in the car. That’s true. You are absolutely correct that visually speaking the trip from Miami to Atlanta is a festival of flat unchanging landscape.

But the sentence here that I’m going to seize on, Wyatt, is, “But, still, I found this to be upsetting as a resident of Florida.” I think you have other things to be upset about right now, Wyatt, as a resident of Florida. I can think of like 20-hundred things that as a resident of Florida you should probably be worried about. But that said, you’re right. And, yes, tip of the cap.

**John:** Yes. We want to be an accurate podcast. I mean, we have a whole staff of fact checkers behind the scenes, but even they will let some things slide through. So that’s why we rely on our listeners to keep us honest and keep us – we don’t want any fake news in this podcast. We want this to be a completely accurate podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. So, Wyatt, thank you.

**Craig:** I kind of imagine Wyatt was listening to Episode 80. He was like loving the podcast, right? He’s just totally gorged on one through 79. And here he is on 80, he’s just humming along. And then he hears me say this and he turns white. Like white as a ghost. Then he rips his headphones off, finds a baseball bat, and just destroys his computer in a rage and then finally calms down, breathes, breathes, breathes. Gets out his phone and is like, “OK, I got to fix this. I got to make this right.” And then he sends this email.

So, I hope that’s not what happened. But if it did, I get it, Wyatt. I also get angry.

**John:** So Wyatt is listening to Episode 80 of Scriptnotes, so quite a long ways back. So either he’s listening to Scriptnotes.net where all the back episodes are, or he has the 300-episode USB drive. So I could envision that maybe he pulled the USB drive out from his device and broke it in half, because his faith had been shattered.

Although his email does go on to say, “Love your show. Hope to send in a Three Page Challenge soon.”

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I think he calmed down. In my scenario he got a hold of himself. I get it.

**John:** You get it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. A thing that caused umbrage on Twitter this week was a tweet by–

**Craig:** That’s weird. That never happens on Twitter.

**John:** This is actually an article by Mike Ryan from Uproxx. And I first saw it as a tweet, but then I clicked through the article. We’ll link to the article. Mike Ryan was talking with his friends about Return of the Jedi. And they happened to be discussing the opening of Return of the Jedi, which if you’ve not seen it for a while involves a plan – well, a bunch of actions that are taken to free Han Solo from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt, which was he had been sold off at the end of Empire Strikes Back. And Mike and his friends were wondering, wait, what was the original plan before everything went south.

Craig, can you talk us through either what does happen in the movie or what might have been behind what was happening in the movie?

**Craig:** Well, I can try. So, this is a movie that we all know really, really well, generally speaking. So you’d think that we would have noticed this collectively many, many times before. This is a movie I’ve seen, I don’t know, probably 20 times since it came out in the early ‘80s. And then the question that he asked here, “If Luke’s plan to rescue Han from Jabba had worked perfectly, what would that plan have been?”

All right, well, great question. So here’s what happens roughly in this opening sequence. This rather long opening segment of Return of the Jedi. First, we know that Jabba the Hutt has Han Solo. He’s got him frozen in carbonite. So he is a prisoner. He’s like a decoration in Jabba’s palace.

We see that Luke has started his plan by sending in C-3PO and R2-D2. R2-D2 plays a little message that basically is like, hey, I know you’ve got Han. Let’s bargain for him and I’m giving you these droids kind of as a show of goodwill. And Jabba is like, great, I’ll take your droids and I’m not bargaining with you at all.

OK. So now the droids are there. We also reveal that Lando Calrissian is working in Jabba’s palace kind of clandestinely. Right? He’s incognito, disguised as one of the guards. We’re not sure what he’s doing exactly, but we know that he’s a good guy and he must have a plan, too.

Then, next, Princess Leia arrives. We don’t know it’s her at first because this little bounty hunter with a mask comes in. You know, who talks like that. And the bounty hunter is bringing Jabba another prisoner, Chewbacca. And the bounty hunter, you know, is bargaining for money and then Jabba makes a deal. And now Jabba has captured Chewie.

Later on that night, the bounty hunter is revealed to be Princess Leia. She tries to rescue Han Solo. And they are caught really easily by Jabba the Hutt who now enslaves Leia and makes her wear the crazy metal special bikini.

**John:** The iconic bikini.

**Craig:** The iconic bikini. At this point, at long last, Luke – the Jedi – shows up, does a quick Jedi mind-trick on some of the pig-faced guards. I know they have names. Whatever. And then he shows up and he basically tries to Jedi mind-trick Jabba and Jabba is like, no, that’s not going to work, hits a button, and Luke falls through the floor, lands in a pit, and has to face a big monster. I know it also has a name. I think that one is called the Rancor. And he beats the Rancor, but you can tell he was not at all planning on falling into the pit and having to face that thing, because he almost dies. But he doesn’t. He beats the Rancor. And then Jabba is like, “OK, fine. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to throw you all into the Sarlacc pit, which is terrible.”

And during the Sarlacc pit execution scene Luke gets everybody to sort of work together to kill Jabba and rescue Han and save everybody and off they go. That’s how that all works. At no point until this gentleman, this mind-blowing Mike Ryan, mentioned that that makes no damn sense did it ever occur to me that that makes no damn sense.

**John:** Yep. And here’s my theory about why you never worried about it. Is because I think we give special dispensation to opening sequences in movies, where we see a plan that’s already in the middle of action. For whatever reason we don’t go too deep into thinking about, wait, how did this all come to be? What are they exactly trying to do? What are the next steps? Because we’re enjoying it. So as long as we’re buying it moment by moment we’re like, oh “OK, well this is the next thing that’s happening.” We’re always curious like well what’s going to happen next.

Because most plans in movies, most heists if you think about like in Ocean’s 11 or any sort of big thing that has a plan, we’ve seen the characters make the plan. And there might have been certain details omitted, but we know what the general steps are supposed to be and so then when things go wrong we know that they went wrong because we saw all this.

But with opening sequences like this we don’t see any of that planning. And so we’re just assuming that they have some kind of plan. And as long as they seem to be behaving competently we just don’t kind of question it. So think back to any James Bond movie you’ve seen, they almost always start with some kind of big stunt sequence. It never really kind of makes sense how he got into that situation or why there’s a nubile young woman waiting for him at the end of it, but it’s James Bond so you just kind of go with it. And it’s interesting how for 20+ years we’ve just gone with it for Return of the Jedi.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll push back a little.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** So, for James Bond, those opening sequences are clearly picked up in media res, right? So we are in the middle of a plan and we don’t need to therefore know how he got into that place. What we’re excited to see is how he gets out of it. And each James Bond movie, with a few notable half exceptions, stand alone as their own stories. They are not sequels to prior movies.

Now, in this case, we don’t start in media res. We begin with a plan. So at this point in the beginning of the movie Jabba the Hutt only has one prisoner, which we know he got at the end of Empire Strikes Back. He doesn’t possess Chewbacca. He doesn’t possess R2-D2, or C-3PO, or Leia, or Luke, or Lando. And so we’re starting in the beginning, and Luke kind of just wings it. And then everybody seems to be winging it independently of each other. And I have to say even though I didn’t notice that this plan made no sense, now that I look at it and I see that it makes no sense it explains something to me about my own reaction and relationship with that movie, which is I don’t like it as much as the other two.

And one of the reasons I think I don’t like it as much as the other two is because that long opening sequence felt a little – character-wise it was always missing something for me. So, in The Empire Strikes Back, for instance, there’s a scene where Lando Calrissian sells out his friends to Darth Varder. And we can tell that Lando is conflicted because he’s trying to protect his own place, but you know, what are you going to do and he’s selling out a friend and he feels guilty. And all of that is good character stuff. There’s no character stuff in the beginning of this movie. Nobody is doing anything from character. Jabba just happens to be able to resist Jedi mind tricks. Luke doesn’t really seem like a very good Jedi, nor does he seem to have an interesting plan. It seems all a little light. And, yeah, you know, it’s not great. And I’m not sure that there is any way to logically explain the rationality behind his plan.

First of all, for this to make sense at all, Luke cannot know what Leia is doing. Right? Because what she’s doing has literally nothing to do with what he has done.

**John:** Yes. That is true. And if you look through this original article we’re going to link to, there are some alternative theories laid out about what we might be missing. What the original plan could have been that could have gotten us there, including the possibility that these people are actually kind of working independently. That like Leia had her own plan. And Luke had his own plan. They were essentially acting independently and really had no sense of what was going on.

But here’s where I will push back against you. You said like, well, this isn’t in media res. Clearly this is in media res to a large degree because Lando is somehow there. So he’s already part of something. He’s already in the middle of some thing is happening. Luke has already hidden his light saber inside R2-D2. So there was some thought of putting that thing in where he could get to it later on. But the question of like do they anticipate they were going to end up in the Sarlacc pit together at some point?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That seems like an impossible stretch.

**Craig:** It’s crazy, yeah. No, that’s crazy. And also, you’re right, Lando is definitely in media res, but how? And why? What’s he been doing that whole time? What was his purpose there at any given point? And why would Luke hide his light saber in the droid? What’s the point? Just show up and start swinging it and kill people. I don’t get it.

**John:** The only thing I can sort of be happy about is that I know David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have just announced they’re going to be doing the three Star Wars movies. Apparently they’re all about how we got to this moment at the beginning of Jedi. That’s really–

**Craig:** I would watch it.

**John:** That’s where they’re going to spend $300 million to fill in this missing detail of how Luke got to this point.

**Craig:** I would love to do a kind of weird gritty – like a $10 million movie that’s just a gritty film about how Salacious Crumb came to end up sitting on Jabba’s lap like that. But like where he comes from, the whole Crumb family.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And just living on the streets and hard times. Drugs. Drugs. And, you know, prostitution. And just like — he’s seen it all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he’s lost his mind. He’s just lot it.

**John:** Yeah, but I mean maybe it’s not that bad of a gig for Salacious Crumb to be there, because you know he’s got – he has interesting people. I mean, he’s surrounded by interesting people all the time.

**Craig:** And he loves to laugh.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s lots of opportunity for comedy, which is a – he’s sort of like a Dobby the House Elf but in the Star Wars universe.

**Craig:** But I think he’s hiding an enormous amount of pain. I mean, that’s the story I want to see is sort of like what are you running from, man.

**John:** Yeah. Well I think the stories where you can take the villain and really re-contextualize him as an anti-hero and ultimately a protagonist, those are the most rewarding. So, again, I think that’s why – I mean, David and D.B. have told us secretly that this is really what their whole mission is. Is to fill in this crucial bit of logic behind this important piece of Star Wars canon.

So let’s try to generalize back out. This idea of opening sequences and plans where you don’t know what the characters are planning but the ones that work and the ones that don’t work. I’m thinking back to Pitch Perfect 3. And Pitch Perfect 3 opens with a sequence on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and suddenly Rebel Wilson and Anna Kendrick are there and they are trying to save the rest of the Bellas from something.

It’s absurd, but it also gets to play in with our expectations of like what kind of movie this is. You know, it’s Charlie’s Angels. It’s deliberately sort of nuts. And ultimately we’re going to come around to see that moment again.

So, it was crazy when we first see it in the movie. It’s crazy how it actually happens in the movie. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it’s fine for that kind of movie.

Other genres have much higher expectations of like these pieces all have to fit together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in comedy yes we do have a little bit more leeway on these things and they usually are not quite so complicated. But I can’t disagree with you. We have a grace period at the beginning of the film. People are more accepting and maybe you can get away with a few things that you wouldn’t be able to get away with later. But, there is a kind of weird hidden cost.

Nobody, you know, with rare exception people don’t have access to their – whatever the underpinnings are of their response to a story. There’s always going to be some weird impact that these things have on some people. And until I read this I didn’t realize that this was part of my – you know, it’s not that I don’t like it. I do. I just – I’m not a huge fan of that whole sequence. And I think now this is why. Because it just kept like – at one point he describes it, it’s becoming sort of like bad comedy. Because the plan is: droids show up, Jabba takes them. Chewie shows up. Jabba takes him. Leia shows up. Jabba takes her. Luke shows up. Jabba takes him. It’s just like what is this clown car being taken – and they definitely were not doing the whole “Don’t you understand I wanted to get arrested.” None of them wanted to get captured. Clearly.

Clearly. So it just became, I don’t know. I don’t know, Mike Ryan has really opened my eyes. And, you know, F-d up my head.

**John:** Yep. Now Craig, I know I have had experiences as a screenwriter where, over the course of development and then production, things that were simple and logical became much less simple and much less logical. And it’s maybe worth discussing sort of how these things happen. And we don’t know how it happened with the case of Star Wars. We don’t know whether this was the initial vision as written down in the script and this is what they shot, or if just a bunch of ideas all got thrown together and this is the result of a bunch of competing ideas being thrown together.

But in my experience when stuff doesn’t make sense, it wasn’t because the screenwriter said like, “I want to make the least sensible version of the sequence possible.” It was that people with strong opinions came in with specific agendas and someone had to find a way to match these specific agendas. So sometimes it was actor agendas. It was a studio saying we need more of this character, or could we shoot new stuff so this character is actually part of the sequence that they weren’t originally part of. Could we get rid of that scene that actually explains why they’re here and what they’re doing?

There are a lot of reasons why sequences which should make sense don’t end up making a lot of sense in final movies. Are there any other factors you’ve encountered over your years of working on movies?

**Craig:** Yeah. I consider logic to be a very dangerous weapon in the hands of certain people. And what happens is everyone is looking at a script and somebody might say, oh you know what, there’s a problem here. I don’t quite understand this. Or this doesn’t make sense. Or this maybe feels contradictory. And a good writer will attempt to solve problems from a place of character and simplicity and elegance. But a lot of other people, what they have is logic. They just have hard cold logic. And they will begin to add things to fix it. They are “helping it.”

So when you’re watching a movie and somebody suddenly just starts saying some stuff because apparently you need to hear it so that something makes sense, it’s rarely a screenwriter. It is typically a producer or a studio executive or somebody well-meaning who is attempting to solve a problem by just pouring logic ketchup all over it. But that is not good storytelling. It’s just fixing a problem. We don’t come to movies to see that. So I worry about that when that happens.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say in some ways the Star Wars situation is the opposite of that where no one is talking about what they’re actually trying to do. And so therefore it’s completely opaque. And it almost feels like there was a mandate of like all these characters need to be involved in this thing. Just introduce them separately. They can’t sort of be coming in as a block, except for C-3PO and R2-D2 because we always love to see them together. And everybody has to have heroic moments. And it is actually one of the challenges of supporting a large ensemble cast is finding things for each of those characters to individually do. And sometimes you end up with these kinds of sequences which are a little bit mish-moshy.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Any of these movies that we talk about that have sort of large ensemble casts – Charlie’s Angels, the Pitch Perfect movies – you want each of those characters to have their little moment of shine and spotlight. You want to get to them as quickly as you can. But in doing so you end up sometimes creating kind of Frankenstein sequences.

**Craig:** Without a doubt. I think that’s a really good point. There’s also a demand of sequels, because you’re not sort of meeting these fresh characters. I mean, Jabba is sort of a fresh character. But we’re not meeting fresh heroes like we do with say Lando or something like that in the second movie. So in sequels it’s basically, OK, everybody knows these people already. Give them stuff to do. What you don’t get to do are these quiet, like look how we meet Han Solo in Star Wars. He’s sitting at a table, chitchatting about his ship. And then another guy comes along and he has a chitchat with him and then he shoots him.

Well, by the time we get to the third movie, when people make their entrances they’re dressed up as bounty hunters and threatening to blow you up. And then they’re saving the one that they love. And he’s blind. And then another guy comes out and goes, “Ha-ha, I knew you were there and now you’re going to wear a bikini.” And you’re like, wait, this is what sequels do to you. And believe me, I’ve written enough of them. They are very, very difficult to write because all of the tools of surprise and freshness and introduction are gone. It’s tough.

**John:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The lesson we’ve learned. So I guess the takeaway we could give to our screenwriter friends is if you are hired to write the third movie in a giant franchise that’s sort of world-changing, be careful with your story logic.

**Craig:** Yeah. But also you could say the other lesson is don’t worry about it. That movie did pretty well.

**John:** No one will notice your story plot holes for another 20 years.

**Craig:** It’s literally another 20 years. And then two nerds will talk about it on a podcast. But even then you’ll be all right.

**John:** You’ll be just fine.

**Craig:** We should do some Three Page Challenges right?

**John:** We should absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s been so long.

**John:** It’s been a very long time. So I think the last time we did this was the Austin Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Oh my. Whoa. That’s like a half a year has gone by.

**John:** Maybe so. Or I could be forgetting another one, but anyway we have three great new entries that Megan has picked. So the general theme she decided for this one was point of view. So characters who have either limited point of view or sort of different point of views that are uncharacteristic of other movies. So we’ll start with Pudgy by Jay Emcee.

We’ll have all of these Three Page Challenges linked in the show notes, so you can read the PDFs along with us, but here’s a summary in case you’re driving in the car:

A 10-year-old named Pudge observes his neighborhood from his stoop. He plays a CD in is well-worn portable CD player and starts nodding along to the gritty East Coast hip hop. Phat Boy, who appears next to him in Timberland boots, died jeans, and a gold chain raps along like it’s his music because it is his music. The two sit side-by-side on the stoop in the freezing cold, pouring rain, and blazing heat.

Fat Boy’s outfit never changes. Pudge makes sandwiches for himself and Phat Boy, though Phat Boy has more sophisticated taste than the ingredients left by Pudge’s mom than the fridge can accommodate. Craig, get us started on Pudgy.

**Craig:** Well, I generally liked this. Just to start, I don’t know if there’s a reason why our writer Jay Emcee has not told us what city we’re in. It seems like it’s New York. If I see brownstones and I’m hearing East Coast hip hop then I’m feeling like it’s New York, but I’d love to know. Just helps.

And I like the way we revealed his imaginary friend, right? So this is sort of like Hip Hop Harvey. We have a character who sees an imaginary person that nobody else sees because he’s not real. And I liked the way that this guy was introduced. This is a smart way to introduce somebody. You have a fact. He’s not real. Well, there are a lot of uncreative, boring ways to show that, like I’m sitting there and he’s rapping and then I cut to somebody else’s POV and there’s nobody else there except for this little kid named Pudge. And then we go, “OK, we get it. That guy is not real.” And what I like is that he didn’t do that.

Instead, what he did was he showed time passing, and because Phat Boy never has to change his clothes, never gets wet in the rain, never gets hot in the heat, our suspicion, which I think we will all have from the jump that Phat Boy is not real is confirmed. That’s a creative way of doing this. So I really liked that.

And there’s an interesting promise of a story here. And I liked that there was a kind of well-worn relationship between the two of them. I think sometimes people will create a kind of internal relationship that you would have say with an imaginary friend, somebody who lives in your head. And once those two characters start talking it’s like, wait, have you guys met each other because you’ve lived with each other your entire lives. There should be a complete, total, easy intimacy between you two. And that’s exactly what you see here.

I don’t quite get what’s happening on page three in terms of the food. I was a little thrown by that because Phat Boy seems to fill a role which is to be the kind of musical hip hop star that maybe Pudge wants to be, but Phat Boy also has really specific and quite extensive dialogue about how picky he is about food. If that’s meant to just be kind of flavor and sort of fun flavor, I don’t know if we need basically six-eighths of a page or whatever it is, three-quarters of a page to deal with that. I would probably limit that and get quickly to what we want to know which is what is Phat Boy doing for Pudge. Why does he exist for Pudge?

**John:** I agree. So I think “aioli” is a funny word. It’s used a little bit strangely here. Aioli is mostly a mayonnaise kind of situation rather than a mustard situation and it’s confusing that we haven’t gotten to the mayonnaise situation when he starts complaining about the aioli. So there’s some sequencing issues on page three that don’t really track for me. But I mostly agree with you. By page three I got it and I’m ready to sort of know what kind of movie I’m headed in for. Because at this point you’ve established this is a really good Hip Hop Harvey kind of situation, but I have a hunch that it’s not just about the two of them and their relationship. There’s going to be a third thing and I’m curious what that third thing is going to be. What does Pudge want? And he hasn’t really expressed anything that he wants.

We sort of get his situation. Now we know what his normal situation is. What is the change that’s going to come? What is the thing that he’s yearning for that’s going to take him on this two-hour journey? So, but I really liked the writing. I agree with you that the way we’re introducing Phat Boy and sort of going through the time passage is really well done. The observations of the other people on the other brownstones are really smart. It’s a little central casting, but it also feel specific to the thing he’s trying to do.

A moment that didn’t quite work for me is on page one he opens up his CD player and takes a look at the disc so we can see it. And then he closes it and plays it again. Like, well, you wouldn’t do that. And so maybe we need to find a way to introduce the name of Phat Boy without doing this. Or maybe he’s sitting down at the start of this and he’s putting in his headphones and we see the disc spin up or something. But it felt weird to really make a big show of opening it, looking at the label, and starting it again.

**Craig:** I had the same feeling, too. That was the one bit of clunky exposition and you don’t need it because you can just see it spinning inside or you can just see that he’s written Phat Boy, Money Hungry on his sneakers because that’s his thing, or whatever it is. Like there’s ways – I mean, kids write the names of their favorite artists all over things. There’s other ways to do it. And, by the way, he’s rapping. I mean, rap stars have been known to announce themselves in their songs. So, you know, that’s OK too. I think he could do that. So, yeah, that felt a little kind of, yeah, like ‘80s TV.

**John:** Yep. Because I’m a person obsessed about fonts, I’m going to talk about the fonts for a second. So this script is written in Courier Prime, which is the typeface I commissioned. It looks beautiful. It is delightful. But there’s other fonts used in here, too. So on page one where it says Phat Boy, Money Hungry that is in a bold type face, like it’s some sort of Sans-Serif bold. On page two there’s a note from his mom says, “Fresh cold cuts in the drawer. No music after 8pm. Xoxo, Ma.” Some people get really annoyed by this. For me, it’s fine. You’re trying to break something out as the thing you’re going to be reading on the screen and so to stick it in a different font for me is kind of fine. It doesn’t feel too cheaty for me. But I’m curious what you think, Craig.

**Craig:** I have no problem with it whatsoever. In general, I’m so bored with reading scripts that the one thing that blows my mind is this notion that people who read scripts are desperate for absolute violent conformity. That there must be always one Courier and this…and I’m just thinking oh my god if my job were to read scripts all day I would be desperate for one little blob of some other font there every now and again just to wake me the F up. So I have no problem. As long as it’s purposeful, and here it was, cool.

**John:** Cool. Last note on the title page. It just Pudgy, Written by Jay Emcee. That’s all fantastic. If I were to be turning in these three pages to somebody or showing them in the world, I might stick a date on them just so I could show when I wrote it. I would also put an email address just so if somebody loved them they could reach me. Because with a name like Jay Emcee, which doesn’t even feel like your real name, no one is going to be able to track you down otherwise. And so it’s good work. So, make sure that people can find you to tell you that it’s good work.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked it. Good job, Jay.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take the next one?

**Craig:** Yeah, what should we do? Which one do you think I should do?

**John:** Do you want to do Trucker?

**Craig:** Yeah, man, I’ll do Trucker. I’ll do it. Sure. Trucker, written by Erno van der Merwe. That’s a pretty Dutch name right there. Merwe. That’s a great name. Anyway, Trucker. So, here’s the story with this:

Sarah, 13 and tiny, observes a butterfly as Baron, 40s, packs up a truck. They prepare to drive off, but Sarah sensing that something is off asks if everything is OK. Baron offers a reassuring smile. As they drive, Sarah points out that they haven’t taken a vacation in a while and she pitches a beach in the Caribbean that she’s seen in a magazine. She shows him the picture and it does look lovely. She’s flipping through the magazine when Baron shouts at her to get down. She scrambles down to the floor of the truck’s cockpit. They are approaching a police checkpoint. An officer shines her flashlight in as she inspects the truck. It’s tense. Finally, she waves Baron on.

Good summary there, Megan. I like that.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, John, kick us off with Erno van der Merwe’s Trucker.

**John:** All right, so if you’re looking at the PDF of this you’ll notice that Erwin has chosen to sort of keep all the lines on the left hand margin. So they’re not paragraphs, they’re just single lines. That’s a style. It doesn’t really bother me. I don’t think it especially works for this script and we’ll talk about why.

I had a bigger problem with, actually, descriptions overall. And so I don’t know if English is Erno’s first language. I don’t know where Erno is from. It’s not the US because there’s definitely British choices in here. But the overall choice of words didn’t help serve the story especially well. So, start with the truck. First line, “SARAH is lying on top of a truck’s bonnet.” So, bonnet, the hood. This is the hood of the car. We know this is a British word. But, wait, what kind of truck is this? Because when I saw this I’m like, oh, it’s like a pickup truck, it’s something like that. But, no, it’s a big truck. And so if it’s a full big truck, how are you lying on the top of a big semi-truck? I just had a hard time envisioning what kind of truck this was.

Later on, you know, halfway down page one we are INT. COCKPIT – LATE AFTERNOON. I don’t think they call that a cockpit in British English either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That is the cab of the truck. Or just say INT. TRUCK because we know that we are in the part of the truck that you can sit in, the cabin. But don’t call it a cockpit because suddenly I’m in space, or I’m in a jet. So, when I see words that aren’t the actual words for things it just makes me lose a little faith in the writer and the writing. And so pick those right words because in screenwriting you have so few words. They really all have to be the right words.

A few other small things. Second line, “An orange sun is lighting up her face.” An orange sun? There’s two orange suns? The orange sun. Orange sunlight. Sunlight is lighting up her face. Just giving us an orange sun, are we looking at the sun or are we looking at her face. And there’s a whole subject predicate thing that happens when you have sentences this short that we focus on, “Wait, what are we actually looking at here.” And by line two I was losing a little bit of faith.

Craig, talk me through what you’re experiencing.

**Craig:** Well, yes, so we definitely do have a non-native English speaker, or American English speaker at the very least. You know this from the very first scene header, EXT. PETROL STATION. So, petrol is what they call gasoline in the UK. And bonnet is a UK term as well. And in general I’m OK – look, I just had to go through this process with every single page of Chernobyl putting in Briticisms and taking out Americanisms just because everybody is UK or European on the crew and in the cast. So, you can write flashlight, but they call it a torch and, you know, why just not make it easier for them. Call it a torch, you know.

So, I sympathize and I’m not going to go after Erno so much on that stuff. I also really weirdly love this format. It is its own weird format. I don’t know if Erno is doing this because he’s just cool and doesn’t like to follow instructions. Or if he’s doing it because he doesn’t know. Either way, it was kind of cool.

I agree with you that there were some descriptive problems. There was some confusions. I do need to know what kind of truck we’re dealing with. It appeared to me that what we were talking about was a semi, like the kind of truck–

**John:** Tractor trailer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tractor Trailer. That hauls a big thing. I don’t know how the hell she would get up on the hood or bonnet of that truck. They are way up there. And I don’t think she could just hop on down easily either. She jumps off the bonnet. She jumps off that bonnet, she’s dropping a good six feet I think. So, yeah, I need to know what kind of truck we’re dealing with. But I really liked the back and forth between these two. I’m curious, this is good mystery as opposed to confusion. I don’t know what their relationship is. I don’t think they’re father and daughter. It seems to me more like a situation where he is taking her somewhere where she can be safe. That maybe somebody is looking for her. I just got that feeling.

So I liked the way that they went back and forth. I liked how much more she talked than he did, which felt very real to me. I got so much of her personality just from the way she kind of pushed him and kidded around with him a bit. She seems like she’s almost in charge, and then he gets in charge because here come the police. That was all really good. So I actually think there’s some really good character work here. There’s some good back and forth. It kept me going.

In general, Erno, you know, if you can sort of pull back a little bit on some of the fancier descriptions, because they do distract a little bit from the nice spare nature of your characters and their dialogue. For instance, “The truck roars to life and shoots out a ball of smoke. They drive off towards the sunset into the night. Slowly disappearing over the glazed horizon.” I get it. And I know exactly what you’re seeing. But, when you read it like that, it starts to sort of mush over into Bad Poetryville. Especially from your formatting.

So, I would maybe get a little – just pull back a little bit on some of that stuff. But I kind of loved it. I did.

**John:** OK, so I did not love it. And for me it fell apart in the character work really. I thought all of the scene description lines where he’s trying to do essentially the parentheticals about what’s going on between the characters, it was too much and it didn’t really work. So, if we took those all out and just had what was just in dialogue I could track it better, but I still wouldn’t love it. So, let’s just hear just the dialogue. Sarah says, “You know, we haven’t taken a vacation in a while.” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah. We’re always so busy. We need to relax every now and then.” “Look doesn’t that seem really cool?” “It looks nice.” “Ah-huh. It says it’s in the Caribbean. We should go.”

So, if I had that all together as one piece, I would be fine with it because I get what’s happening in there. I get sort of what she’s trying to do. He’s kind of engaged but not fully engaged in it. But instead in the actual what we have on page two is, “Baron knows what she’s trying to do. Always trying to be the optimistic one. He decides to entertain her.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Yes! She has his attention. Now it’s easy.”

“Yeah. We’re always so busy. You need to relax every now and then.”

“She sits up on her knees and turns her back. Shuffles in the back of the truck and pulls out a pile of magazines. Falls back into her seat and gives him a bright smile. Baron shakes his head. He is slowly loosening up. She takes the top magazine and opens it up to its centerfold. Holding it in front of her face she shows it to Baron.”

All of that action that he’s describing along the way is getting in the way of understanding what the real dynamics are between these two people which was done perfectly well in the dialogue. So, that’s my frustration with the character work in here. It’s making it seem like a whole bunch of stuff has happened when really nothing has happened and just dialogue in a screenplay can do that work for you.

**Craig:** I can’t disagree with that. I think it’s also exacerbated by the format because what would be three lines of action are seven lines of action when you present it this way. And that’s a long bit of page real estate to cover to get to the next line. And I agree. I think just pulling back on these descriptions would help a lot. But I could see his face and I could see her face. And I could see the place and I could see what she was kind of needling him on.

I’m kind of forgiving a bunch of that, but I will say Erno that don’t rely on people forgiving you anything. Maybe I’m just in a weirdly good mood today.

**John:** A generous mood. Then on page three, so this is the first real action of the piece which is like they’re slowing down because of the roadside check ahead. Here’s where Erno’s style is getting in his way a bit here. Because breaking it down into single sentences can work for moments of tension and sort of give you a sense of shot by shot by shot by shot. But by not putting any white space in here and just stacking the lines it is a real temptation to give up. And when you see a big block of text like that you’re like “I don’t know what to do with that.” That’s why poetry is broken into stanzas. You’ve got to give us a little space here so we will actually follow and see what’s important and what the changes are as we’re going through this.

**Craig:** Can’t argue with that either.

**John:** Cool. All right, Erno thank you for sending in your pages. Next up we have an untitled script by Sarah Paradise:

Lou Abern, a woman in her 30s, is getting viciously beaten by Keenan, who is also in her 30s. Both women are beautiful, tough, and fighting like they mean it in a glamorous LA nightclub. Onlookers heckle and cheer. Keenan grabs Lou by the collar and drags her across the bar top, sending all the glasses to the floor in chards.

Mitch shouts for them to stop from behind the bar. After a vicious bout of wrestling, Keenan emerges victorious. Lou exits to the alleyway and stretches her sore shoulder. Keenan playfully scolds her for giving her a small cut on the face. Lou counters that it’s not like she has a photoshoot tomorrow. Keenan mentions a movie that she’s working on that they need a stunt woman. Lou says she has retired from stunts but Keenan says she wasn’t asking.

Mitch pays them for their performance, but it was less than they agreed on. He scolds them for not avoiding the bar top like he told them. Glassware is expensive.

Craig, what did you think?

**Craig:** OK, so the generosity is over. I have many issues. Issue number one, we meet Lou Abern who is blonde and we meet Keenan who gets one name for some reason who is black. And they are women in a bar and they are having a crazy fight. Like a full-on punch you in the face fight, throw you over bars, smash into glassware. They land on a booth. They jump on booths, grabbing each other. At one point one of them slams headfirst into the end of a bar.

And this is not on a movie set. This is in an actual bar. And people are going crazy. And they’re shouting drink orders because apparently in the world of this movie people only order drinks at bars when two other people are fighting, when in reality when two people are fighting in a bar everybody backs the hell away because it’s dangerous.

Regardless of that, the next scene we see them and it’s like, “Oh, get it? They’re stuntwomen and they are putting this on kind of like professional wrestling to fool people into thinking there is a fight because according to this script that’s what gets people to buy drinks.” By the way, this has never happened in any bar in the world. And despite the fact that they have been punched in the face and had their heads smashed and fallen, it’s no problem. Keenan actually runs out and is like, “Wee!”

And they have kind of banter. So, which is it? Am I supposed to watch this fight and go “Oh my god this is a crazy fight. I understand that everybody is screaming for a reason. It’s a wild fight.” Or, is it just fake? Because when I watch professional wrestling I know it’s not a real fight. Everybody in the crowd knows it’s not a real fight. People don’t just punch each other in the face over and over and not fall down or bleed. And that’s what’s happening here.

The page two and three is a long discussion that feels mostly quippy and fake. I don’t know anything about Lou. I don’t anything about her. I don’t know where she’s from. I don’t know how she thinks. The way she talks is not particularly different than the way Keenan talks. I don’t know anything about Keenan. I just know that the two of them are stuntwomen who do this scam that isn’t real. And then Mitch is like central casting jerky sleaze ball. Like, “Sorry ladies, you broke a bunch of glass.” This all felt fake to me.

So top to bottom, I would say this to the writer. This is decently structured. You have a good sense of shape. You know how to begin, middle, and end a scene. You get pace. You have all these things working for you that a lot of people don’t. Like a lot of the stuff that’s in between the words. Where you’re going wrong is just simply believability. You have created unbelievable – and I see this so many times. You come up with what you think is a good idea and then you just start jamming this non-reality into words using the skill that you clearly have to do so.

So, I don’t believe the reality of this. I don’t believe the premise. I don’t believe that that’s the discussion they would have. I don’t believe the guy in the bar. I just didn’t believe any of it.

**John:** I liked this so, so, so much more than you did. I thought this first page was delightful. And I – and this is just people read things different ways – I read this as a crazy knock down roadside bar brawl that I have not seen two women ever have before. It seemed over the top, but kind of delightfully over the top. When they smashed the glassware on the bar I’m like, “Oh, that’s so cheesy, we’ve seen that so many times.” But then I was delighted to know that it was all faked. I guess I started reading this thinking like, OK, well this isn’t probably real. This is not actually the way it should go. And when you read it with that intention it’s like, “Oh yeah, I can see sort of kind of why they’re doing it.” Does the whole thing make sense? I don’t think we have enough information to know the degree to which the audience, the bar patrons, know that this is real or know that this is not real. I think it would be more fun if midway through this fight we sense that the people were there for the show. That this is a thing that they do. Because I would go to see that. If I could see two really good stunt people having a staged brawl in a public space that could be great. If I knew they weren’t really fighting that could be really, really cool.

So, I think it would sell drinks. I think there would be a reason why you would go to that fight, that bar to see that kind of fight.

The dialogue afterwards is not fantastic, but it’s getting us out of that setup and we’re trying to establish who Lou is and sort of what her background is. I don’t think it’s great. And I think we need to have more spin on Lou to know sort of what it is she tries to want. All we’re getting out of this right now is that she does not want to be a stunt woman anymore. And that doesn’t really seem to track with the brawl we just saw.

**Craig:** No. And also if this were in some skanky roadside bar somewhere I guess maybe. This is in a Los Angeles nightclub. You can’t get a Los Angeles nightclub to probably allow people to dance on a table, much less sponsor brawls that break glass. The liability problem is insane.

**John:** Well, but it’s fake glass.

**Craig:** Fake?

**John:** I took this whole – yes.

**Craig:** It’s not fake.

**John:** Well, I chose to believe that the things they were doing were stunt person kinds of things that they could survive. The sort of things that stunt people could do and so that stuff was deliberately staged, but some of the stuff that they broke was stuff they weren’t supposed to be breaking.

But I would say I totally believe that an LA nightclub would do it just because they want to get desperate attention. There was a bar on Santa Monica that used to have like Cirque du Soleil acrobats on Friday and Saturday nights who do the stuff like true acrobatic stuff above the crowd.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** That was really cool. This is not that different than Cirque du Soleil acrobatics in a bar.

**Craig:** It is massively different.

**John:** I don’t think so at all.

**Craig:** I can’t think of something more different. Here’s the thing, for me at least, if people believe that this is a real fight then a bunch of them are going to call the police. If they don’t believe–

**John:** So where on page one does it say that the crowd believes this is real? I see, “The crowd REACTS riotously to this while MITCH,” so they’re shouting, they’re cheering.

**Craig:** Here’s what I see. I see she’s punched in the face. That means it is real. You don’t get actually punched in the face in movies. They fake punch. She’s punched in the face. That’s a real fight. In fact, if you’re faking a fight and you punch somebody in the face it has now crossed over into a real fight. But, also, you’ve got drunk men heckling them. She crashes into – she gets kicked in the stomach. Again, real.

**John:** See, I guess I don’t understand why you believe that this fight has to be real, because we’ve seen good fake fighting a lot of times.

**Craig:** Because he’s selling it – or he or she – they’re selling it as real. I’m looking through this thing and I’m like so she gets her head slammed into the end of the bar and falls to the ground. Defeated, she rolls over and looks at the ceiling, breathing hard. That’s not from anyone’s POV. That’s meant to see like – that’s that shot at the end of a fight when someone is like, “Ow, that hurt. I lost.” And there’s broken glass, which is not fake glass. It’s real because at the end he says, “I’ll go bankrupt buying glassware.” Also, stunt people don’t smash into real glasses because they’d cut themselves and die.

None of this makes sense to me. I don’t get it at all. We’ll just have to agree to disagree. I just think if I saw a trailer for this movie I would be like, “Fake, not going.”

**John:** All right. That’s fine. I think there is an interesting idea here. I don’t think that pages two and three work especially well. But let’s go back to the actual writing on the page. I thought if this were meant to be a real fight, so take out the fact that it’s in a bar, just the action of two people having a knock-down, drag-out fight, it was pretty good writing. I never jumped out of the action writing.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** And that’s a hard thing because this first page is nothing but action. There’s no dialogue at all. And it got me all the way through the page and that’s a hard thing to do on a page one. So I want to give her props for that.

**Craig:** 100%. In fact, I liked page one so much that when page two showed up I got super angry because I thought that it was just undermining something that was good. Like I agree with you. I’m watching these two women in an LA nightclub having a drag-out, vicious physical battle, and they’re not like two 21 year olds with long hair and high heels who are kind of, you know, having that fight that we see on YouTube or World Star. This is like – like they could kill each other. These are two tough women going at it and I love that. And I was like who is this lady and what is her problem and how did she end up here. And then I get to the second page and I’m like, “Oh, never mind.”

**John:** Never mind.

**Craig:** This is baloney. It’s all baloney.

**John:** All right, I guess we both agree that page one is really good. We disagree on whether pages two and three deny the premise that this could ever be a real thing.

**Craig:** Welcome to real life, author of this script. This is how it goes. And here’s the good news. It doesn’t matter who doesn’t like it. It only matters who does like it. So, in this case, you would succeed, at least if John and I were in the business of buying screenplays.

**John:** Which we are not.

**Craig:** God no. What a silly business.

**John:** It is. I got asked to participate in an article that was being written about the death of the spec script market. And I was like I don’t know that it’s dead. I don’t know anything. I don’t try to sell spec scripts, so I’m the worst person to ask for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Spec script market, well it’s like this new phase of the spec script market where there’s no longer a spec script market. It’s a spec project market where people will go around – Rawson just did this.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Where you come up with an idea, you find an actor that’s meaningful for studios. You find a director or you are also the director. And then you go studio to studio and say here’s our package. It’s what Stephen Gaghan did with Dr. Doolittle and it’s what Rawson just did with the Rock, with Dwayne, on – what is it, a skyscraper movie?

**John:** That’s the one he already shot. So the next one is called Red Notice, I think. So.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it was a huge, huge deal. And so you go and you go to like five studios. Five studios used to all read a script on a Saturday and then get into a bidding war on a Sunday. Now, you go around to every movie studio on Monday and Tuesday and with just a meeting and a presentation and they’re bidding on something where there is no script yet on Wednesday. Fascinating. But it is akin to the same kind of market.

**John:** It is. It’s just a different kind of thing. And there have always been spec scripts that went out with talent attached. This is sort of a super version of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I will say this much, and not good news for everybody listening. The barrier to entry for this version of a spec market is way higher. Way higher. It’s rough.

**John:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s wrap up our Three Page Challenge by thanking our three entrants to the Three Page Challenge. If you have a Three Page Challenge you would like to send in to us, just go to johnaugust.com/threepage. It’s all spelled out there. And in there you’ll find the instructions for what we’re looking for, how to attach a PDF. You’ll sign a little thing that says it’s OK for us to talk about your three pages on the air. And we might look through it.

So, Megan reads everything that comes in. So, send in your three pages if you have three pages you think we should discuss on a future episode of Scriptnotes.

All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is also font related. It’s called What the Font? And I may have talked about this years ago, but the app sort of stopped working and now it’s working again, so let me describe what it is.

So often I’ll be out in the world and I’ll see a type face and wonder what is that type face. Like I kind of recognize it but I want to know specifically what it is. So I pull up my phone, I open What the Font? It has a little camera. I click, take a photo of it. It scans it and tells me what typeface that is. It is a thing that is delightful for me. So I think if you are a type nerd like I am you will enjoy this.

There’s a web version of it, so if you’re just finding stuff on the web you can make a screenshot and do it through. But mostly I use the camera on my phone to do it, and it’s great. It’s so very useful. It’s put out by the people who sell a lot of typefaces so that’s really the business model behind it is they’re trying to sell you these typefaces that you identify. But it’s really good, so I recommend it. What the Font?

**Craig:** You know, nothing is as saucy as a font-based joke. What the Font?

**John:** What the Font?

**Craig:** So fonty. That is the most John August thing I can imagine. Here is the most Craig Mazin thing I can imagine. My One Cool Thing this week is Weird Al Yankovic’s Hamilton Polka. He has done a very bizarre kind of overture style summary of the show Hamilton by the great Lin-Manual Miranda. But he has done it in polka style. It is disturbing. It is weird. I love it. And you can enjoy it too, for free, on the YouTube.

**John:** Nice. That’s actually interesting. I mean, YouTube feels like the right place for Weird Al Yankovic to live. I mean, I have always perceived him as being a comedy and really kind of video person. And so YouTube feels like a very good fit for him.

**Craig:** Weird Al Yankovic, his career is fascinating. He has had this remarkable longevity. You know, a lot of these – you would think, like “Oh well, it’s a novelty act. It will come and go.” When you were a kid did you ever listen to Dr. Demento?

**John:** I was just about to ask about Dr. Demento. Of course I did.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Dr. Demento for the vast majority of you who are too young to know what the hell we’re talking about. Like, OK, first of all there used to be a thing called radio. And then you would tune into a station. And on some random night in your town, whatever your local weirdo station was, Dr. Demento would come on. It was a nationally syndicated radio program. And it was just this fun, old, kind of dorky nerdy guy who curated novelty records. And novelty records and comedy songs have been around forever. But you can’t really point to any one act other than Weird Al Yankovic that lasted beyond maybe two songs.

I mean, most of them it was like, “Well, there’s the guy who sang One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flying Purple People Eater. And there’s the guy who did Monster Mash. And there’s the guy who did, you know, whatever it was, like Fish Heads. And here’s Weird Al Yankovic with two decades and multiple albums.” And it’s remarkable. He’s just unstoppable. I love it.

**John:** So we will put a link in the show notes to Dr. Demento, the Wikipedia article. I am finding out that Dr. Demento is still alive. He is 76 years old. His real name is Barret Eugene Hansen. I don’t think we would have a Weird Al Yankovic without his radio program.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Oh radio. It was nice.

**Craig:** You know what? This is amazing. Dr. Demento you’re saying is 76 years old now?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because he seemed like he was 76 when I was listening to him when I was 12. He’s always been 76.

**John:** Craig, I assume you are not watching The Crown on Netflix.

**Craig:** Well, I watched a bunch of the first season because it was part of my general Jared Harris deep dive. And I really enjoyed it. I thought it was really, really good. I loved – particularly it was an episode about his portrait being made. Churchill’s portrait being made, which I thought was fascinating. But, no, I haven’t gotten around to the second season. I’m scared because I suddenly realized, “Oh god, The Crown will never stop because, you know, they’ve got many decades to go.”

**John:** Yeah. They’re jumping ahead quite quickly. But the second season is fantastic. The reason why I ask is because I’m looking up that he’s 76 years old. I was watching an episode last night that was largely about Philip, and Philip is 96 years old. I had no idea he was still – I mean, I knew he was alive, I just didn’t have a sense that like he’s 96 years old and still a person in public life. That’s kind of amazing.

I intend to be a person who is 96 years old and still in public life. That’s my goal.

**Craig:** Well, you know, there’s a possibility that right around before we croak they’ll come up with a way to just keep us alive forever.

**John:** Whether we’ll hit that magic spot right now. I think our kids probably will.

**Craig:** Yeah. If they want it. If they want it, you know? Yeah, I mean, who needs it.

**John:** Who needs it?

**Craig:** Ugh, enough already.

**John:** That’s our depressing way of ending this episode of Scriptnotes. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Matthew also did our intro/outro. If you have an intro or an outro, or really more an outro, you can send us a link at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions or follow up like the follow up we answered today.

You can find us on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave a review there if you can.

All seven episodes of Launch are now up and available. That series is basically done, so I’m really happy with how it turned out. If you are person who doesn’t like to listen to series until they’re done, well, now it’s done, so you can hear it all together.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. If you have a Three Page Challenge you want to send in it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out.

You can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net or on the USB drives we sell at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** You sell them.

**John:** Well, I guess Shopify technically sells them, but they exist in the world.

**Craig:** Mm-hmmm.

**John:** Mm-hmmm. Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John. See you soon.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [We Dare You To Explain Luke’s Plan To Rescue Han In ‘Return of the Jedi’](https://uproxx.com/movies/what-was-lukes-plan-star-wars-return-of-the-jedi/) by Mike Ryan for Uproxx
* Three Pages by [Jay Emcee](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Jay_Emcee_PUDGY.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Erno van der Merwe](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Erno_van_der_Merwe_TRUCKER.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Sarah Paradise](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Sarah_Paradise.pdf)
* What the Font? [site](https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/) and [app](https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/mobile/)
* Weird Al Yankovic’s [Hamilton Polka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v0c6smpHSk)
* [Dr. Demento](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Demento)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_340.mp3).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So if there is one bad word in the podcast, it’s a very minor bad word. But if you have a young child in the car, maybe you want to skip over one of Three Page Challenges we’re about to do.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is episode 274 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at three new entries in the Three Page Challenge. That’s it. It’s a really pretty simple episode this week.

**Craig:** You know what? Good.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** We’ve had a lot of complicated ones with lots of moving parts and pieces.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m on a different continent and so this one is just simple. We look at some scripts, we tell you what you think and then we’re done.

**Craig:** I like that we tell them what they think.

**John:** Oh, did I say that?

**Craig:** Yeah, but I like it. I think that’s actually accurate.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true.

**Craig:** We look at some scripts, and then we tell you what you think.

**John:** Absolutely. We will give you your opinion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll we’re good at it.

**John:** One of the things we’re also good at is making t-shirts—

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** And this is the next to last week to be able to order t-shirts and we’re good at segways. There are two t-shirts for Scriptnotes this year. There is a blue shirt, there is a gray shirt with a gold page on it. They’re both terrific, so you should take a look at the links in the show notes and click through and look at those t-shirts and buy one if you would like one.

We are recording this only one day after we recorded our last episode, so we have no idea how many we’ve sold. Have we sold 10 shirts, have we sold a thousand shirts, we have no idea. We’re living in the blissful ignorance of the past.

**Craig:** Do you think that — but technically we have not yet sold any. I mean as of right now, present time.

**John:** As of right now, not a single one.

**Craig:** Okay. So I shouldn’t — I mean I guess then I’ll guess, we’ve sold zero shirts so far.

**John:** At the moment that we are recording this, we’ve sold zero shirts but by the time this episode has aired, how many shirts will we have sold?

**Craig:** Ooh, how many days have the shirts been available, John?

**John:** They would have been available seven days.

**Craig:** Well I’m going to go with 600 shirts.

**John:** Wow. That’s a high number.

**Craig:** Is that a stupid guess? [laughs]

**John:** No. It’s an ambitious guess, but not a stupid guess.

**Craig:** All right.
**John:** Because we would like it to be a good high number. I’m going to guess between the two shirts, we will have sold 450.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Which is still ambitious. So–

**Craig:** I want to point out, I have absolutely no idea how the shirt thing works. I have no historical data and I just pulled the number out of my butt and it wasn’t even that crazy.

**John:** It wasn’t even that crazy. It’s like the wisdom of the crowds but like you are your own crowded head inside and all the voices conspire to give you that number.

**Craig:** You have no idea, the wisdom of the things in my head.

**John:** Very, very good. But on last week’s episode, which was actually recorded yesterday, we mused aloud about wouldn’t it be great if the guy who won the Austin Pitch Competition that you judged what if he were to write in and tell us, “Oh, hey. This is the pitch I gave,” so we could discuss the pitch that you thought was so good at the live show in Austin.

And now we have it. So just out of the blue he wrote in and said like, “Oh, hey. I’m the guy who won the pitch competition.” And I asked him to record his pitch and he did. So now we have it.

**Craig:** Yeah and it’s good, you know, like I mean I assume you’d listened to it by now.

**John:** Yeah. But I think we should play it for the listeners so they can actually judge for themselves.

**Craig:** What a great idea.
**John:** So let’s take a listen.

**Erik Voss:** I’m Erik Voss and I’m pitching my action comedy feature script. It’s called Gator Country. So this is a story about Mac. He is a white trash deadbeat single father who is in exile from the State of Florida, which in this world has been transformed by a freak hurricane season into this Mad Max style swampland that’s now ruled by the reptiles and the crazies.

So not too different from what Florida is right now. Now, I’m from Florida and I’ve lived through a ton of hurricanes and Florida shows its true colors in the aftermath of a storm. And often that takes the form of a few of these gator hunters on fan boats who just love getting wet and looting the nearest Cracker Barrel. The Florida Man. And Mac is one of these guys.

But now, his rebellious 20-year old daughter has gone missing in this apocalyptic hell hole and it’s on Mac to find her, and fish her out before she falls victim to cults, cannibals or Tampa. Guided by a local drifter named Gator, who knows Florida like the back of his hook, Mac now must battle through former pro wrestlers and gators the size of pickup trucks, and the nightmarish version of Disney World where on the Pirates of the Caribbean, the pirates are alive, high on bath salts, and they will eat your face.

The road ends in the belly of the beast of Miami beach where the family reunites in a loving embrace while covered in the blood of a murderous grandma who just got chopped up in the blades of a fan boat or as we call it in Florida, a Monday. Thanks.

**Craig:** See? That was pretty good, right?

**John:** That was really good. So let’s talk about two different things. First let’s talk about performance and then we’ll talk about the content of the pitch itself and sort of what that is as a movie. So I thought performance wise, I just can’t imagine a better version of like that 90-second pitch in front of a crowd. It’s such a weirdly artificial form and I thought Erik did just a remarkably good job of it.

I can sort of see his performance as he was giving it to us. So he’s laying out the very broad premise of like from the very title, it’s like Gator Country. He’s talking about his lead character, then he’s talking about the setting, he’s talking about himself and he’s like including himself as a Florida person, giving just the very broad strokes and making it fun.

He’s not trying to focus on every little plot turn or twist. We don’t really even know who the villains are in this story. We just know the general sort of setting and world and milieu. And he gets out it. And that’s performance wise, I thought that was a really smart way of doing it. It felt like the kind of thing that you could convey in front of a crowd in an Austin bar.

**Craig:** Yeah, and there are some nice little jokes in there. You know, it’s impossible to be hilarious in the middle of a 90-second pitch, right? But there are a couple of key jokes that made people laugh. And in and of themselves, gave you a sense of the tone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right, tone is very difficult to convey in a pitch because pitch, generally speaking, is about details, not about flavor. But you got a sense of what the tone was. This was clearly going to be a comedic and tending towards the bizarre. And like Erik himself, it has a love-hate relationship with its subject, probably leaning more weirdly towards love.

You know, it was important that he let us know in his pitch that he was from Florida, because then we understood that this wasn’t an attack piece, and that this wasn’t just a, you know, like you or I could write a movie about Cleveland what a dump, but that’s just mean. We are not from Cleveland. It’s always better to make fun of the things you love. So we got across the tone in his performance and he also gave me weirdly a nice circle of story, so I was able to say, “Okay. I can see where it begins and I can see where it ends.” And I kind of get what happens in the middle.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about this performance in terms of how you do your real business. Like I just felt like this 90-second pitch is not the kind of thing he would ever actually give in Hollywood. Like he’s never going to go into a meeting and pitch sort of exactly the way he’s pitched this here. It was too much like a sitcom set for sitting right across from you in a studio executive’s office. Did you feel that?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I mean, look, all of the pitches were designed to win a pitch competition, which is an artificial thing that does not occur in Hollywood. In our business, no one is looking to reward people for a fast, funny, informative, intriguing 90 seconds. What they’re really trying to do is make money and so it’s serious business here.

So if somebody came in and pitched that in 90 seconds in someone’s office, they would go, “Okay, great. Now do it for it real.” Just like, you know, you’re asking me to spend money. So, what? You know, now that doesn’t mean that Erik or any of those people that came in and pitched can’t do that. In fact, in a strange way it’s easier to do it the way people need it to be done here in Hollywood as long as you have the goods.

I suspect that you kind of need to, in order to even get to the 90-second version. So yes — no, absolutely it’s a very strange artificial thing that we don’t actually put a premium on in Hollywood. And if for instance, let’s say Erik were here in Los Angeles and he went to someone’s party and there was a producer there and the producer said, “Well what do you — you’re a funny guy. You got any things?” and he says, “Actually, I have a script and it’s called Gator.” What is it called, Gator Dad? [laughs]

**John:** Gator Country.

**Craig:** Yeah, we got to change that title to Gator Dad.

**John:** Yeah, I think Gator Dad is better.

**Craig:** Gator Dad. “Yeah, I got a script called Gator Country.” “Oh really, what’s it about?” If he then went into this 90-second pitch, that guy would look at him oddly and then walk away because again it is synthetic. You know, there is a version where you pitch this in a far more conversational confident way. But of course for a pitch festival, you know, this is — part of my problem with pitch competitions is that they are requiring writers to do something that only pitch competitions require. It’s not particularly translatable to any other environment.

**John:** When we were doing Big Fish casting, we would have these really talented actresses come in and sometimes they’d have a dance call and then they’d have to sing. And they have to sing like 12 bars and it was just like, you really can’t convey a song or really the energy of a song in 12 bars. You’re basically just conveying like I can hit some big notes and I can do these things, I can be quiet, I can be loud.

It’s such a weirdly artificial form, and yet in that artificial form, Andrew Lippa can say like, “Okay that person can fit my needs for this one slot in the musical.” And in a similar way, I felt like Erik’s pitch was so bizarre and artificial and yet I could tell like, “Oh he’s got something there.” Like there’s a good story there, but he’s probably the guy who can write that good story. He was self-aware enough that I was like I’m curious to hear more.

I definitely agree though that if you were sitting across from an executive or even just at a party talking about the thing, he would want to have a version of this same pitch kind of thing that felt much more conversational and much less packaged than what we heard right there.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. But, you know, as we sat and listened to all of the pitches that came our way and there were 20 of them that evening, you know, a number of them you could eliminate immediately with a simple remark: that’s not a movie. Then some of them, you could eliminate because, well, that is a movie but I’ve seen that movie.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Some of them were okay, well, there were a few that were like that’s a great 90-second pitch. The movie doesn’t sound like something I would actually go pay to see, but boy I sure enjoyed that 90 seconds. You know, there were a couple of those.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well this one was really the one that hit everything. It was a fun 90 seconds and also I thought it could be a terrific movie. And you know, what I said to him, you know, we do our little American Idol brief review after each pitch, and what I really liked about this one was that I got a sense of character, which is, I mean along with tone, incredibly hard to convey. And it wasn’t like he got into the character of Gator dad, I don’t even know Gator dad’s name, right? But–

**John:** I think it was Max.

**Craig:** Oh, there you go, Max. It doesn’t matter, it could have been anything, right? It’s just I don’t know what he looks like and I don’t know how tall he is, I don’t what race he is, I don’t know anything. But what I do know is that he has a daughter and she’s a bit of a handful and he’s going to get her. And I understand implied in that is a character story and an ending that I will care about and then a world that felt at the same time bizarre and unlike anything we know, and yet, oh yeah I do know it. I can absolutely see that.

You know, underneath it all, it’s like okay you have a great idea, what if you do Mad Max in Florida with all of its absurdities, and then we make a nice little, you know, father-daughter story. It just felt like a nice whole piece. So to me, it was — his pitch really was the one where I thought, “Oh, you could actually sell this.”

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. And circling back to the Mad Max in Florida, so often a pitch will compare itself to another movie and what was good about Erik’s pitch is like we could see that comparison without him having to explicitly say it. Like we got what the vibe was. We sort of see like okay, this is the scenario, it’s post-apocalyptic for a different reason, but for flooding and such. Like we get sort of what this is.

Every little detail he threw in there especially about like the kinds of villains you’re facing later on down the road, he also let you see like okay it’s not just going to be one set piece, there’s like a whole journey that’s going to happen here, and you can imagine the kinds of things that the dad is going to be going through and the things that the daughter is going to be going through. And the tone at which all these things are going to intersect.

So I can see this as a movie and I could also imagine like if he’d never pitched this, but had written a good version of this, it’s the kind of thing that would get passed around because it’s an interesting thing. It’s sticky in the right ways. A good version of this is a Black List favorite.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so for sure. And you’re right that there is a lot of these evocative moments that made me think Mad Max but he was smart to never say it. Because the second you say, well it’s Mad Max in Florida, you go, “Okay, well you can stop talking. Like I mean I get it. You know, you’ve borrowed another movie.” That’s the danger of borrowing another movie as a reference.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, you just suddenly don’t feel very original at all.

**John:** The other challenge of borrowing another movie for a reference is people will take too much from that other movie, and say like, oh but what about that thing or that thing or that thing. And like the listener will sort of try to imply things that you’re not really meaning to imply.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They take the whole package with it and like that’s not necessarily what you want. So that’s the challenge of, you know, using any other existing piece of material, be it a movie, be it a book, to describe the thing that you want to make which is hopefully original.

**Craig:** A 100%. So thank you, Erik, for writing in and letting us share that with everyone. It was a joy to hear that pitch that evening. And we heard, you know, I will say for all the 20 people that we heard, they were all well-practiced and I could see why all of them had sort of made it through. I still think 10 seems good. [laughs]

**John:** That was a lot to throw at you guys.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, 10 would have been nice.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s get to our work for this week which is the Three Page Challenge. So most of you probably are familiar with the Three Page Challenge. What we do is we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script, or their teleplay, and we take a look at it, and give our honest opinion on what we read.

So, as always, we invite you to read along with us, so you can find links to the PDFs of these scripts in the show notes. Last time, we had Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor, read aloud the descriptions.

**Craig:** How great was that?

**John:** It was just amazing. He was terrific.

**Craig:** What’s funny was that after he did it, he wrote us and he said, “Ah, you know, I feel like maybe I screwed up because I just made it sound like Survivor.” And we were like, “No.” [laughs] It’s what we want. We want — we don’t want off-the-cuff private Jeff Probst. We just want Survivor Jeff Probst.

**John:** Yeah. It’s so strange that his voice is so specifically Survivor. Like you can’t imagine Survivor without Jeff Probst hosting it. It’s not like just even a visual thing like it’s his yelling at the contestants to like, you know, swim faster. It was great.

**Craig:** It was so cool.

**John:** So obviously the temptation is like, well, we need to find other famous people to read these descriptions, just so we don’t have to read those descriptions anymore. And so just this morning someone wrote in to point out that Martin Sheen apparently listens to our show.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Because on another podcast which was one of my One Cool Things, which was, Mom and Dad Wrote a Porno, and he references Scriptnotes, so —

**Craig:** Wow

**John:** It’s all a big web of connection. So I don’t — Martin Sheen, I couldn’t find on Twitter. Martin Sheen, if you are listening to this show, we are ask@johnaugust.com and lord, we would love to have you read some stuff aloud. Or other famous people, too.

**Craig:** No, no. Now, I want Martin Sheen.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, just to have — you know, because when you have a body of work like Martin Sheen does, which is vast through time, just like every year, there’s probably three or four or five things. And I’m not even talking about the television stuff. You know, I’m just–

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Talking about movies for decades now, you have to pick like who is your favorite Martin Sheen? There are so many. Who is your favorite Martin Sheen?

**John:** I think it was President Bartlet–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Even though I wasn’t really a big West Wing watcher, but like he just sort of became locked in that. And I think here’s the reason why I will say Bartlet is because so many of the appearances you see with him on like — in commercials for stuff or other things, he’s sort of doing the Bartlet character. He has that kind of gravitas where he’s channeling that kind of emotion. But tell me, who do you see?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, I — you are — it makes total sense. I think a lot of people would say that because once you play the president and you play it so iconically, it’s hard to kind of get away from that, I mean you’re the president, you know. But I will always in my heart have the softest spot for Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen. Because Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen, aside from being in Apocalypse Now, you know, in and of itself is oh, my God. Apocalypse Martin Sheen was going through a tough time. And Apocalypse Martin Sheen had some substance abuse issues and Apocalypse Martin Sheen had a heart attack during the shooting of Apocalypse Now.

**John:** That’s right. I always forget that.

**Craig:** And it’s not like Martin Sheen was like some, you know, fat lazy dude. He was like whippet thin, you know, and young. So like the kind of stress to lead to a heart attack at that age is extraordinary and plus, you know, there’s that scene where he’s destroying his hotel room. He really does cut his hand really badly, you know, when he smashes the mirror and there’s just incredible stuff going on in that movie with him personally, you know, and then of course his performance is just amazing. He reminds me so much — young Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen, reminds me of Young — your friend and mine — John Gaines. They’re very similar —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Similar look. So I want Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen to read these things. But also because Apocalypse Martin Sheen has incredible voiceover in that movie. I mean, just like the greatest voiceover.

**John:** He does.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So we don’t have Martin Sheen this week. So I thought we would try something very different which is that you always make fun of me for being a robot. And yet you also make fun of me for never being able to speak proper sentences and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Matthew has to cut around all my mistakes. So I thought we would try having a computer–

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**John:** Read these descriptions aloud.

**Craig:** And wait, how will we know it’s not you? [laughs]

**John:** Well, because we’re using female voices for all three pages.

**Craig:** Okay. And also the computer won’t mess up the words.

**John:** The computer does mess up the words in a few places, but I think it’s adorable for that so —

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**John:** Today, we’re trying three different voices by IVONA which is this Amazon company that provides voices for other developers. And so in this situation, I just pasted in the text. I didn’t try to make it better or worse. I didn’t like listen for it like tweak the words. This is literally just what I pasted in the boxes. And if you’re listening to these voices, read aloud the descriptions that Godwin wrote. So our first voice is Sally. It’s one of the American voices and she’s reading the description for Relationshit written by Christopher Rock and JR Mallon.

**Sally:** We open in a mall, teens flirting, old people mall walking. Then an animal stampede breaks the peace. Puppies, kittens, the usual pet shop inventory all followed by their liberators, 30-somethings Marissa and Dan. The culprit stops three mall cops and celebrate their escape only to find themselves surrounded by 10 real cops who mace and arrest them. In court, Marissa and Dan are unrepentant, blaming the corporate world for their litany of charges, most of them alcohol related. The judge brings up Marissa and Dan’s past run ins with the law, with the two declaring chaos as beauty at the bottom of page three.

**John:** Great. Craig Mazin, what did you think of Relationshit?

**Craig:** Well, hold on a second.

**John:** Let’s start with the voices.

**Craig:** First of all, yeah. Let’s talk about what I think of Sally. Oh, Sally. Sally, you saucy minx. Sally’s into me.

**John:** Yeah, so, here’s the danger. Like this has become a podcast where like I present things that Craig lusts after. So last week it was the pinup girls. Now it’s the female voices, so pretty soon we’re going to put them all together and we’re going to be living in Ex Machina here. So.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it doesn’t take much apparently for me to get going. Sally, alluring, just an alluring voice. Okay, so Relationshit. Well, the pages are composed well. I thought things laid out nicely, a good mix of dialogue and action. I could see things pretty clearly. So there’s basically two scenes we’re looking at here. One is in the mall and then one is in the courtroom. The courtroom got a little ticker tape to me and what I mean by that is, just runs of dialogue. And I understand that partly that’s because it is — that’s a conversation between static people. All the more reason to maybe compress a little bit there. I guess my criticism covers all of this. Marissa and Dan are apparently the same person. They have different names, but they’re both playing Bill Murray in a 1970s comedy. Everything they say is a smart-ass comment.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** There’s — it never stops. To the point where it’s almost like a sketch where you expect the judge to be like, wait, do you only respond in wisecracks, that’s it? You know what, there’s no — you’re not people? You’re not real?

**John:** It’s interesting when you think of like the Bill Murray comedy, like someone has to be the Harold Ramis. Someone has to be the person who’s not that tempo so that you can actually sort of get through it. What this reminded me even more of Bill Murray is a Portlandia sketch, and there literally was a Portlandia sketch about animal liberators. And so the characters that Carrie and Fred play in Portlandia feel like these kind of characters who are always just like so hyped up and they’re sort of joke factory. But that works really well in sketches but it’s not — I’m nervous about how I’m going to relate to these characters throughout a full movie.

I thought like their jokes though, they’re good, they’re funny. I think that the voice is really nice. It’s just the problem is like it’s the same voice for both characters. And it also felt like they write funny lines and they put all the funny lines in rather than picking the selects of like funniest lines.

Where it gets to be problematic for me is on page two, and this is a thing you notice in a lot of these Three Page Challenges we have is there’s a character whose function is just to be the recapper, or sort of like the backstory machine. And so they’re just there to provide the history of everything that happened before this. So in this case, the judge is talking us through like all the previous times they’ve been arrested and the things they did. But I didn’t believe him at all. I didn’t believe that this person actually existed or that he would be kind of indulging them to just – he’d just be setting up, you know, things for them to have funny lines to shoot down. So I would want to cut most of page two and the top of page three and get to the real action here.

**Craig:** Yeah, so Judge Exposition certainly does his job. We all struggle with exposition but there are some things you can do to hide it a little bit better. The one thing, it’s a real simple things is, ask yourself how exposition in actual life happens. So here we have a judge who has seen these two before. They are recidivists as it were, and he does not appear to know who they are. He is talking to them as if he’s never seen them before. He is startled by what they’ve done. And then about a page later he says, “I know who you are. I know who you are and here’s some other things you’ve done.” Well, did he not know who they were before that? So that’s why the info dump is very shocking. It is incongruous to his behavior prior to it.

**John:** So my suggestion, I’m just going to read aloud and edit here. Like get us through this scene a little faster. So Dan Ryan, Marissa Landman, your escapades or Ice Capades — escapades, still hearing Ice Capades, do either of you have a problem with alcohol? Jump right down to that. You know, because the charges I see here include public intoxication, open container disorderly conduct. If you’re going to recap, he can be looking at the list right there. And then we can like get through to like — oh, this isn’t actually, these aren’t animal liberators, these are troubling drunks who like do this crap all the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That creates like actual conflict in the meat of the scene rather than just like setting up the punch lines.

**Craig:** Yeah, and if you want to get into the fact that they’ve been here before, I think it is reasonable for him to, you know, after their third quip or something, say, “Look. I want to be really clear. This isn’t like last time. Last time, and you know what you did.” And then one of them could say, “We didn’t do anything.” “You punched Chuck E. Cheeze. Well, not the Chuck E. Cheeze but, you know, one of his representatives. This isn’t like last time. There is no more letting you off the hook. This is — we’re now on the hook.” Right? So he can — there’s just a natural way to express a prior relationship that isn’t announcing the existence of it and detailing it for the sake of the audience, you know?

**John:** I’m just not sure the judge is the right character for that discussion. Like — and in some ways, is it the public defender? Is it the attorney? Is this — there’s someone else that they have sort of deal with that would make more sense than the judge. I just didn’t buy the judge sort of engaging with them on such a low level to some degree.

**Craig:** I actually completely agree with that and, in fact, I want to warn everybody. If you’re writing a comedy, and this is a comedy-comedy it seems to me, really think twice before you put a judge in it because judges at this point are the corniest of comedy characters. There’s just — we’ve seen 14 million versions, all of whom basically do the same thing. They get [fumphety] and frustrated with a far smarter and far funnier defendant which tends to undermine the, you know, any dramatic threat. It’s just hard to do those things. It’s better to have this scene where they’re just walking out of a building and it’s like, well, that did not go well. [laughs]

You know, they’re just complaining to their lawyer, they’re like, you told us that you could, you know, get us off. And he’s like, well, you did not tell me that you also did these things. So anyway, enjoy jail. You know, you don’t need to do this scene, it’s — but the lines are funny. You know what, I think it’s just like I like salt. I just don’t like eating salt with a spoon, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, years ago, years ago, John, I was hanging out with some people and they were all in The Groundlings. Not the actual troop but, you know, they were taking classes at The Groundlings and I was not taking classes at The Groundlings. And we all went to see the actually Groundlings show which is really funny. I remember Will Farrell was in it because he hadn’t yet gone to = Saturday Night Live and I was like, oh, my god, that guy is hysterical.

And afterwards, we went out to dinner and these improv students were so keyed up from the experience of seeing The Groundlings that they just wouldn’t stop improving and–

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** I wanted to die. It was terrible. I specifically remember walking down the street with them to a restaurant and we passed a phone booth, that’s how long ago this was. One of the guys opens the booth, picks up the phone and goes, “Hello?” And then hangs it up and I thought that’s not — there’s nothing funny about that. You’re just–

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Being wacky now. You’re being pointlessly wacky and I started to feel that way about these two characters. Just being pointlessly wacky. They don’t seem to have any conflict with each other. They don’t seem to ever disagree about anything. They don’t even seem to really be living in our world. They just seem to be little irony machines moving through it. And yeah, if you’re doing sketch, oh, my god. Go for it.

**John:** Perfect for sketch.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s going to be over soon, right? But this won’t.

**John:** Yeah, and so I agree that the actual dialogue lines, some of them are really good and funny and I can see them working well in a sitcom situation where you’re pitching a bunch of alternate lines for things. I can see like these guys being really great on a staff like putting together something for — putting together the funny for something. But I wasn’t feeling the engine engaged at all in these three pages. I didn’t hear a distinction between these two characters’ voices. And this may not have been going right into the judge, didn’t give us an opportunity to hear the difference between these two people or even set up the conflict between these two people which has got to be key to the story if the movie is called, Relationshit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I also want to say, the other reason why you probably shouldn’t have a judge in your movie is, there will never be something funnier with a judge in it than the Rick and Morty version of Denver Fenton Allen. So this is a — we’ll put a link to it because if people haven’t seen it, they absolutely have to see it. So it’s the real transcript of a court case in Georgia with Denver Fenton Allen and it is just remarkable what happens between this man and the judge. And it’s absolutely not safe for work so don’t listen to it in the car with your kids.

**Craig:** Unless your work is what you and I do, and then it is safe for your work.

**John:** Totally, totally. All right. Let’s go to our next script here. So next up, our voice is Amy. She’s one of the UK voices and she’s reading the description for Roommates written by Astride Noel.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s take a listen.

**Amy:** 32-year-old Whitney sits on the toilet as her roommate, Kai, walks in on her and proceeds to brush her teeth. Kai complains about Whitney’s curly black hairs littering the bathroom floor. Whitney fires back by producing Kai’s own long red hair. Whitney tells Kai she is not comfortable sharing the bathroom while taking a piss. Later, Whitney tries in vain to block out the moaning coming from Kai’s room. She confronts Kai and her lover, asking them to keep it down. We flash back to Whitney and Kai inspecting the apartment as potential roommates and seeming to agree on everything, including the importance of quiet. And that’s the end of page three.

**Craig:** Well, Amy does not do for me what Sally did, to be honest with you.

**John:** So that’s so fascinating. So I thought the voice, in many ways, was more natural, but it doesn’t provide the tingle that Craig needs.

**Craig:** No. It’s not arousing at all. It’s actually kind of — it’s kind of bumming me out.

**John:** So Amy’s voice reminds me of our script supervisor from Go who was phenomenal and sort of helped keep that movie together during all its tumultuous shooting and had that sort of patient — it’s not a schoolteacher voice, but just, like, a level, calm, nothing was going to rattle her.

**Craig:** Yeah. The stereotype of the English person with the stiff upper lip, but then thrown like a whole bunch of Librium or something. It’s real, really just – “You know, the Germans are bombing. Oh, well.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Creepy. Creepy.

**John:** Yeah, creepy.

**Craig:** All right. What did you think?

**John:** Well, let’s talk about the actual script. So this script had a lot of problems, and it didn’t ever click in for me. But there was some really useful stuff in here that I think people should take a look at because I think a lot of people’s early scripts have some of these issues, and I think by looking at them, we can get people past some of these sort of common mistakes.

I had a hard time just even getting started in the script. And some of it was just how we meet the characters on the page. Whitney is already in the bathroom, Kai walks in. Kai has this huge, long intro that sort of takes a while to get through. So let’s talk about Kai’s intro. “Kai, a.k.a. Gertrude, 22, white, barges in and startles Whitney. Kai is wearing an oversized Bob’s Burgers t-shirt. Kai waves at an appalled-looking Whitney and proceeds to brush her teeth. Whitney is grabbing toilet paper when Kai faces her.” And then we get into the dialogue about the hair.

There was sort of weird subject-verb — like, I had a hard time really quite understanding, like, what I was looking at or sort of whose movie I was in for a while. Did you feel that?

**Craig:** Well, I felt something wrong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think for me, the problem was that the style of introduction and length of introduction was incompatible with the action that you were asking me to envision in the movie, which is somebody barging in on somebody peeing. You barge in, you start talking. Right?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So she walks in. What you would have us see in the script is a woman is on the toilet — by the way, very hard to start a screenplay with somebody on the toilet, peeing. It’s just — it’s hard.

**John:** I think it’s doable. Here’s what I would point out, though. It’s like, you can’t barge in on a character who’s just gotten there. And so if we’ve just gotten there–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like the second sentence. So like, I think you would actually need to make a bigger deal of, like, Whitney’s sort of stumbling in, like, not really turning on the light, like, finding it, like, pants down, start to hear the piss, and then Kai comes in and sort of like ruins it. Because that, then you’re like breaking a moment. But the moment hasn’t even started before Kai’s walked in.

**Craig:** Great point. And the idea of her being half-asleep, I mean, is she slowly nodding off while she’s peeing? I mean, what’s going on there exactly? Because you’re not really — I don’t know how you’re half-asleep. I mean, you’re either falling asleep, or you’re — you know. But it — half-asleep, if you’re not falling asleep, is just tired, woopty-doo.

But when she walks in, I would probably just slide everything up. Kai, first of all, a.k.a. Gertrude, means nothing to me. I’ve never met this person. Don’t give me two names. Just give me one. If she’s Gertrude, later tell me about that. Have that be a surprise. For now, Kai, 22, white, barges in. That’s it. Don’t tell me anything else. Kai, “Hey, those fuzzy little black balls I see on the floor all the time, I’m assuming is your hair. Can you do something about that?”

And then, you know, you can show Whitney reacts, grabbing toilet paper. Kai grabs her toothbrush, starts brushing and keeps going or whatever. But if someone’s barging in, make the dialogue barge in. Otherwise, it feels flabby, you know?

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. On page two, I thought — I didn’t love the dialogue, but I liked where it was getting to. This is Whitney saying, “When I told you I’m open to sharing the bathroom when I’m in it, I meant if I’m putting my makeup on or brushing my teeth. I like to piss alone.” So not the right words, but I think that’s the right sentiment because it tells us that — it can give us the hint that, like, this is actually Whitney’s apartment that Kai has moved into that they are still negotiating their relationship. And that could be a good exit line, but I would need a better scene before we got there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the introduction felt paste wrong, but that didn’t — where I kind of hopped off the boat was in the first exchange. Kai says, “Hey, these fuzzy”– so Whitney is black and Kai is white. Kai says, “Hey, these fuzzy little black balls I see on the floor all the time, I’m assuming is your hair. Can you do something about that?” Whitney reaches behind her and pulls out a long string of Kai’s red hair. “This long piece of stringy-type thing that I just pulled out of my ass, I’m assuming is your hair. Could you do something about that?” So a couple of problems here. One, what does it matter to Kai that the hair or fuzzy little black balls — and by the way, I’m not sure that black people’s hair accrues on the floor in fuzzy little black balls, but regardless, I know for sure, because I am white, that white people’s hair doesn’t end up in other people’s butts. Our hair doesn’t have some weird and magical thing that climbs up other people’s butts.

So Whitney — and there’s a weird typo here where there’s a plus after her Y in her name, but Whitney reaches behind her, now I think she means behind herself, right, because you got to be careful with these pronouns when you’re talking about two people of the same gender, you got to be really clear about that. Always ask like, is there confusion possible. Reaches behind her, and pulls out a long string of Kai’s red hair.

If she knows that Kai’s red hair is either up her butt, in her butt, around her butt, none of which by the way —

**John:** Or on the toilet seat.

**Craig:** Or on the toilet seat, exactly, none of which I believe. She should have handled it already. She shouldn’t be waiting for the opportunity to spring it upon her roommate like a bon mot because no one wants to sit on someone else’s hair or have someone else’s hair on them. It just does not make sense. And this sounds like–

**John:** But in some ways, I would love the movie in which that did make sense. Where like Whitney is walking around with a roommate’s hair up her ass the whole time.

**Craig:** Waiting for Bidet.

**John:** Yeah, that would be great. I mean it’s no Gator Man, there’s no Gator Dad, it’s no Gator Country, but it’s a thing.

**Craig:** It’s its own thing like ha-ha, finally, I’ve been waiting for years for you to complain about my hair, so I can show you this. This seems incredibly picky, you know.

These kinds of logic discussions go on in every single writing room that deals with comedy. If comedy is illogical, it will not work. People are so finely attuned. And what they’re really sensitive to is when a writer is fudging things to allow a joke to happen, and they will give you no credit for it, none, because they can see that you basically warped your world to be able to say something that you thought was funny, and all of a sudden, then these aren’t people, it isn’t funny, it’s a written joke, and nothing is working, you know?

**John:** Yeah. A similar kind of thing happens in page two. So, the middle of the page, we’re in Whitney’s room, and so it’s a nest of elegance, filled with antique furniture and expensive art. Who is Whitney, how does she have all this money? If she has all this money, why does she have a roommate? But so she’s reading a book, The Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, but inside it, there is another — she’s reading another book actually inside it, which is Lord of the Hissy-Fit, by Elizabeth Mayne, but if you’re alone in your room, why are you doing that trick — that no one actually ever does — of one book inside the other book.

It felt like we’re in a movie, I guess? It was a really frustratingly false moment to me.

**Craig:** Also, you know, now you’re the director and you’re like, okay, I got a shot here, this woman, she’s reading a book, but there’s a book inside the book, and they need to see the cover of the book that’s inside the book. How do we even–?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Exactly. How do we know that the book inside is Lord of the Hissy-Fit? These are the annoying questions that we ask. But you know, so, A, no reason for her to be disguising it, from, I don’t know, God. B, t’s goofy and yeah, generally sort of hacky. And, C, what comes after that is, again, something we see many times, oh no, my roommate is having loud sex. But I got so confused, because generally speaking, in my mind, when you’re reading one book but you’ve hidden a book inside that is a trashy romance novel, and then I hear, the next line is literally, it starts in low, but then starts to grow the sound of sexual moaning.

In my mind, I’m like, oh okay, Whitney is jerking off to Lord of the Hissy-Fit. But no, she’s not. She’s hearing her roommate. So I don’t know.

**John:** I got confused, too. I even got confused, like, Kai and her lover are hanging out on swings as they go at it in an impossible position. Is her lover male or female? I have no idea. We never got a pronoun.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on. And it feels like important information on page two. And then at the bottom of page two, we have a flashback, which we’ll call a Jabangwe Jump, because it’s not a Stuart Special because the whole thing doesn’t take place in the past, it’s just a jump cut.

**Craig:** This is a Jabangwe Jump.

**John:** Where we see Kai and Whitney sort of first looking and like sussing out whether they should be roommates. So Astride has chosen not to start with this scene, or start with a version of this scene, but honestly, I think it would be better off with a version of the like, hey, like, maybe we could be roommates, or like hey, what do you think of this place?

I know it’s a little generic, but it’s also a chance to meet our two characters before they’re at each other’s throats. And I suspect the premise of this movie, called, Roommates, is about the relationship and the tension between these two women. So seeing them in their natural state before they become roommates would probably be very helpful.

I’m actually curious to see a version of the story that is about the black roommate and the white roommate and sort of issues that I haven’t seen explored in movies a lot, which could be great. I wasn’t getting a sense that I was going to get that movie in these three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean part of the problem with stories about roommates is that almost all sitcoms are about roommates at this point. So you’re competing with I don’t know, about a thousand different storylines and situations that we’ve seen on television for free, and you’re asking us to go see a movie, which must turn on some kind of special drama. If you are going to open a movie and then do a Jabangwe Jump, then the thing you open on must be quite startling, I think, to deserve the jump. Otherwise, you’re just showing sort of a, oh here’s, ugh, these two and they’re kind of the drudgery of being roommates, flashback to the drudgery of… – You know, it just doesn’t give you enough to work with there.

But I could not help but escape a general sense of predictability here even the scene where they meet on page three, which I think you’re right, I mean there’s a way to open this movie where first we meet Whitney, and see why she has an apartment full of all this expensive stuff, but needs a roommate. What’s going on in her life, why is this important to have one, does she need it? In what sense is she being hoisted by her own petard by getting a roommate? All these things.

But when Kai comes in, their discussion, it’s so obvious to any normal person that the way Kai is talking indicates this will be a bad roommate. And Whitney doesn’t seem to get it. And that’s no Bueno, you know? If she’s fooled, we should be fooled, right? We want to feel like she’s capable enough or at least as capable as we are in the audience to suss out that somebody is probably bad news.

**John:** Yes. So here’s Whitney’s dialogue on page three. So Kai says, “Brah, I really like how all the rooms have a fireplace. Classy.” Whitney says, “They’re not functional, but there’s nothing like spending a quiet evening admiring the aesthetics of it all over a cocktail. Which reminds me, do you consider yourself quiet?” Felt, forced and written. And I couldn’t picture the character who is saying that. So I think you’re going to have to paint me a better picture of who Whitney is before you give her that kind of Frasier-like line, because I just didn’t see a universe in which she quite existed, or existed in a way that she would be possibly inviting this other woman into her apartment.

**Craig:** And it’s particularly incompatible with the way we meet Whitney two pages prior, which was on the toilet. It’s not like Frasier doesn’t pee. He pees. We all do. But that’s like something that you hold back for later because he’s so prim and proper. And this does sound like a prim and proper person who uses words like aesthetics – which is one of my favorite words, but you don’t see me peeing, do you? No.

**John:** No. Never have. Never hope to.

**Craig:** No. You won’t.

**John:** All Right. Let’s get to our third and final script, and this time, we have Emma, another UK voice, reading the description for Popops Lives Alone by Isaac Lipnick. Let’s take a listen.

**Emma:** Popops sits next to his wife’s hospital bed, holding her hand. His wife passes away, and he pulls the plug, telling her goodbye. In the synagogue, Popops drinks at his wife’s funeral and at her burial. After the funeral, Popops plays gin rummy with his grandson, Benny, who he tells the story of how he caught Field Marshal Rommel by leering him out of his camp with kugel, his favorite dessert.

Meanwhile, Popops’ daughter frets about her father’s living condition, knowing he’ll refuse to move out of his home. Sure enough, when Rachel pitches the idea, Popops shoots her down reminding her he’ll be fine. He can always call on his neighbor, Edna, if he needs help. He leaves to go to the bathroom but is immediately surrounded by mourners and that’s where we’re at, at the end of page three.

**Craig:** Well, first, a quick review on Emma. Emma’s not alluring, so I’m still a Sally guy.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** I’m all about Sally, you know, for sure.

**John:** Yeah. Salli with an I, by the way.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I mean–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Salli was amazing. In fact, Salli is so amazing it makes me hate Emma. Emma sounds depressed to be honest with you.

**John:** Emma sounds like Emily Mortimer to me. It sounds like Emily Mortimer. Did you ever watch 30 Rock when she was playing Phoebe who has fragile bones like a bird?

**Craig:** I do remember that.

**John:** It reminded me of that character.

**Craig:** Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, Emma — look, Emma tried. I get it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, listen, Emma. You’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t try. But, if you know that Salli is also doing it, just go home. Come back a different day. You’re not Salli. You’re never going to be Salli.

**John:** I think in some ways though, Craig, someone could really object to how you’re treating these women because, yes, they are not real. They are just computerized voices, but like they one day will have feelings, too. And you’re basically — you’re judging them based on how much they excite you and that shouldn’t be it. It’s how well they’re doing their job which is their job should be to communicate to our listeners summaries so that we don’t actually have to read these summaries aloud.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t have a great track record in the way I treat fictional female characters. I treat actual human women brilliantly, but, you know, fictional women, I just — I don’t know. I’m a cad. I’m a real cad. Yeah.

**John:** But let’s get to Isaac’s script here. So, Craig, I have a suspicion that within the first two-eighths of a page, you’ll have a concern.

**Craig:** I do and again, it’s just about signaling to an audience that they’re in good hands or they’re not in good hands and that’s all about inspiring confidence in your storytelling. And part of inspiring confidence in your storytelling is not relaying something immediately that is just flat out nuts.

And in this case, what is flat out nuts is that Popops is with his dying wife, the heart monitor flat lines, [laughs] and he pulls the plug. No. No. You don’t pull the plug because you’ve seen TV and you know that the flat — no. You know, a lot of times what happens is people come in and revive that person. But even if they have a “Do not resuscitate,” you don’t touch the plug, sir.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because you might go to jail for murder. You can’t do that and everybody knows you can’t do that. Everybody knows in the world that a guy sitting next to a dying woman doesn’t go, “All right, well, let me pull the plug.” No.

**John:** Let me give a scenario which that character could do that. And so, if we saw a flat line and we’re there for like a really, really uncomfortably long time and he’s looking around and he’s like does he go to the door. He like doesn’t know what to do, and like no one seems to be coming and eventually he pulls the plug. I would buy that scene, but it would have to be like a really long, long, long uncomfortable moment until finally we would say, “Oh, thank god. He pulled the plug.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But if he pulls the plug within the first 10 seconds of that drone, he’s a monster.

**Craig:** Or one, I mean, look, it’s not like pulling the plug, like, she’s on an iron lung or, you know, a breathing machine. You know, it’s not — it’s just the monitor, right? It doesn’t impact it per se, but you don’t touch medical equipment in a hospital. If it flat lines, you — we understand unless you’re in some kind of weird warzone where everyone’s going crazy, someone will be in very, very shortly to turn it off.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And, in fact, what I would find so much more human and revealing is if I’m there and my wife is dying and it flat lines and it’s going beep, and I just put my hands over my ears because the sound of it is awful. But I can’t. I don’t turn that off.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, I got angry immediately.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I could sense that. So, let’s move ahead though in the script. So, we’re at the synagogue, the cantor sings, The Mourner’s Kaddish, the grave site. Then we’re in Popops’ living room, and we’re here for the rest of the script. We’re here for the rest of the three pages. And so this is all the mourners back at the house. They are schmoozing and noshing.

**Craig:** This is just kidding. You know, I really wish that I actually think that the computer voices would probably do a better job saying some of these words then you because would you’re from Colorado. [laughs]

**John:** I’m from Colorado. So, what have I said wrong here?

**Craig:** Well, it’s Kaddish. Kaddish not Kaddish. The Mourner’s Kaddish.

**John:** Kaddish.

**Craig:** Yes. But schmoozing and noshing, you nailed those.

**John:** I did. It’s all because of Noah’s Bagels. They taught me how to say those words. And so, Popops is playing gin rummy with Benny, his youngest grandson, who worships the ground he walks on. Benny has no age. Benny needs an age.

**Craig:** He’s going to get an age later. Not good. [laughs]

**John:** Does he?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the problem. So, you know, when I read this like you, I just said, “It’s Popops playing gin rummy with Benny, his youngest grandson.” I’m, like, it’s okay, it’s gin rummy, it’s a grandson. Probably 13, 14 years old. Later on page three, Rachel says, “I told you not to play for money with him. He’s only 6.” Now–

**John:** Whoa.

**Craig:** You know, here’s the thing; I got the feeling that Isaac was trying to kind of make a joke reveal over something that would not be a joke reveal in a movie because we can see the kid there. We have to know that he’s six years old from the start. You can’t do a weird misdirect on something that only works as a misdirect for the blind, you know?

**John:** Putting Benny’s age here greatly changes my reaction to some of the things he’s saying. So, like, when Popops is saying, like, “I ever tell you about how me and Lenny caught Field Marshal Rommel?” You’re saying that to a six-year-old, it’s a very different experience than saying it to a 13-year-old. Like a 13-year-old, like, kind of rolls his eyes. A six-year-old is, like, I don’t know what a field marshal or Rommel is, but okay. it’s–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** A very different experience. I will say, and I suspect you had the same instinct, is whenever you have an old man starting a story with like, “Did I ever tell you about this time when–“

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** You immediately think of Grandpa Simpson. I mean, it’s very much that kind of, like, ugh, I know the stock version of this scene. And unfortunately, I wasn’t getting a very different version than the stock version of that scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s an old man telling a baloney story to a kid and it’s a bad baloney story. I got to say. Well, look, first of all, as a Jewish person, you know, I understand that a lot of what’s going on here is the conveyance of the cultural experience of a multigenerational Jewish family and this is sitting shiva which is the traditional thing you do after a loved one dies. And there’s all these little things that are very much, you know, covering of mirrors and people coming over, and the food, and all that stuff, and kugel — lots of kugel talk. But it almost feels weirdly, like it’s Margaret Mead describing a Jewish gathering, you know. I mean, it’s — it doesn’t feel confident. It’s, like, so much, like, here’s this, here’s this, here’s this. The thing about the kugel and the kind of kugel and the sweet kind with raisins and apricots and I’m going to talk about Nazis and we’re playing gin, it felt, yeah, weirdly anthropological and not just natural and being. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah. It also felt vintage. I had no idea what era this was set in because it could had been set in any era. It was obviously post-Nazi but other than that, I really didn’t know whether this was happening now or this was happening in the ‘80s. And that’s not a good sign either.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. I mean, I presumed that it was happening now but then again, I don’t know, he pulls the plug. I can see that happening in, like, 1963. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Back then they’re like, “Yeah, this thing is annoying me.”

**Craig:** The nurse is, like, “You know, when she goes, go ahead and, you know, you can shut that off.”

**John:** You can just pull the plug. [laughs]

**Craig:** Pull it. You just do it. Pull it. Pull it. We’re good. We’re busy. You know, just let us know.

**John:** So, at the top of page three, Popops says, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Popops cannot say this. That’s — this line cannot be spoken in a movie. This is a quote from Mark Twain. I did a Google search with that in quotes. There are 37,000 Google results for this line. So, even though Popops probably would say this because he’s saying it like a quote, you can’t put it in a movie. It’s just too trite, too cliché, and I would have put down the script right then if I didn’t have to read to the bottom of the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. Although you know what would’ve been awesome. I had the same reaction, but then this is what I thought. What would actually be really cool is if Popops said to Benny, “You know, what I always say, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” And then Rachel says, “You didn’t say that. Mark Twain said that.” And then he says, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Then I would go, “Okay, he knows.” Like the movie is not pretending that they don’t know–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that we don’t know, it’s just kind of his point, you know. But–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you can’t really — again, this is all about confidence and, yeah, listen, you and I have been to a lot of test screenings. The percentage of people in the typical test screening that would know that that’s a Mark Twain comment and not something that he said, yeah, probably 5%.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s a lot — that’s a big five.

**John:** But that 5% though, even if they didn’t know Mark Twain said that, they would have heard that before. It’s just, like, it’s just–

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An old thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I agree and–

**John:** It’s a clam.

**Craig:** It’s — yeah.

**John:** So, Craig, like, you can put a hat on a clam which I thought you did a very good job of putting a hat on the clam. But it’s still a clam.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can put a hat on it, you can put beard on it, whatever you want.

**John:** Totally. Yeah.

**Craig:** But, yeah, I agree even if you don’t know — even if you’ve never heard it before actually, how about this? It still sounds like some kind of I don’t know, what’s the word, epigraph? Is that what you call these things?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It feels like a crafted little bon mot, not something that somebody just says. And none of this is helped by the fact that there are having the most mundane adult daughter/aging widowed grandfather or widower-father discussion all the time which is “You’re alone now, you shouldn’t live alone, daddy. Come live with me.” “I don’t want to. I’m fine on my own.” Again? But I think that is so cliché that if Melissa should die before me, and I’m really old, and my daughter comes to me and says, “Dad, you really can’t live alone.” I’ll say, “You know what? I want to, but I cannot bear to have the boring conversation with you about how I’m fine and I shouldn’t. So you know what? Yeah, okay. I’ll go live with you just to not have that incredibly clichéd argument.”

We’ve just seen it so many times. I will say though that there was — I did like Edna and it was cute. I wished that–

**John:** I liked Edna, too.

**Craig:** He needed to help me. He needed to help me, so I got to Edna on page three. So Edna comes by on page two and says, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Adrian. If there’s anything I could do, I’m just down the street.” Then she heads off. He goes back to his story. Then on page three, Edna comes back, “I am so sorry for your loss. If there is anything I could do, I’m down the street. I know where you live.” So we get it. Oh, okay, she’s, you know, got dementia or something.

But when I got to page three, I was like wait who’s Edna, how does he know she’s down the street, and then I had to go back, because it wasn’t like her line was particularly interesting on page two. We needed I think a little bit of direction there, of like, you know, Edna walks back up again, weirdly, you know, her expression hasn’t changed, you know.

And give me something so I’m like, “Oh, yeah,” or give me something when she walks over, “Edna, an elderly neighbor approaches Popops with her walker.” Give me a little bit more there just so I know like pay attention to Edna. This might matter. Something, you know. But it was a good — it was a cute moment.

**John:** It’s the right idea, for sure. So it’s a senior with memory loss who’s repeating. She’s sort of doing a Dory, and that’s great. It’s a nice idea. What I had a bigger problem with on the top of page three is like Popops gets through his story and so while he was telling his story, the daughter Rachel was talking with a family friend about like, “Oh, Popops, he can’t live alone.” But then she goes right to him and says like, “You could live with us. Please consider it, dad.”

It felt really weird that like she was suddenly telling him that right now. There was no motivation for that conversation to be happening right there. It felt like it should be a separate conversation.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, listen here is something that is true about – Shiva is a very weird thing because, you know, I don’t think anybody else does this. I know that in some cultures they’ll have a wake, which is specifically a party where you get drunk and talk about somebody who died and that sounds way cooler than sitting shiva. But sitting shiva is basic.

The whole point of sitting Shiva is let us distract you from the pain of mourning. So we’re going to all sit around and eat food and chitchat. And maybe tell some jokes and just keep it lighthearted and not do stuff like this nor would you have this discussion in front of a whole bunch of other people. What a weird time to do it. You’re absolutely right, even though you are the least Jewish person in the world, you innately understood that.

**John:** Yeah. I think I understood it better than Salli could understand it.

**Craig:** No, how dare you. How dare you!

**John:** So as always, I want to thank our writers for writing in with their scripts, and letting us take a look at them. You guys are incredibly brave, so thank you. I hope this conversation helped a bit to get you to your next draft and your next passes. If you have a script you would like us to take a look at, don’t send it to the email address, instead go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out and there’s an entry form there that you attach a PDF, you fill out some questions, and you send it through.

Godwin takes a look at absolutely every one of those things that gets submitted. And sends a couple of them our way every once in a while to take a look at on the air. So thank you to everyone who wrote in and thank you to these people especially for letting us discuss their scripts on the air.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So what is your final assessment of text-to-speech in 2016, Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** Salli. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Salli and I are — even while you were just doing that, we started a little bit of a relationship because I can — Salli will say whatever I want her to say. So I can have Salli talk to me all day long.

**John:** It’s Her all over again.

**Craig:** Yeah, if Melissa is not saying the things I want her to say, I’ll just have Salli say it. No big deal. And Melissa does not say the things that I want her to say. [laughs]

**John:** Of the three, Emma was my favorite. I know she was calm, she was rational, but also had a little bit of perk to her, so I wanted her to tell me the headlines.

**Craig:** She sounded like a broken woman to me. [laughs]

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. I actually have two One Cool Things, I don’t know if Craig has one.

**Craig:** I do, I do. I have one. Yeah.

**John:** So my two One Cool Things, the first one is Harry Potter and the Translator’s Nightmare, which is a Vox video that talks through the translations of Harry Potter and how challenging that was for all the 30 or 50 or however many languages that book series was translated into because Rowling had so many special words and concepts that had to be described and she had puns and like “I am Voldemort” like all sort of things that had to sort of make sense in whatever language they ended up in. So it’s a good little five-minute video that talks through the process of translating. And I’m not too far away from having to deal with that for my own book.

And so it was great for me to see like, oh yeah, I should actually warn translators of those things because some of that stuff is much more important than you would guess down the road.

**Craig:** That’s a really good point. I wouldn’t have thought about that, but yeah, it’s got to be absolutely maddening. I mean, how do you translate a word that doesn’t exist, like muggles?

**John:** Exactly, so you’d make up stuff. And so even things like Hogwarts, like some languages chose to like, say, oh, we’ll take the word for hog and that word for warts and put them together. But Hogwarts really isn’t about hogs and warts. It’s just like a cool name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so other languages made very different choices. In some languages, they would omit things or change things because they didn’t think it was like all that relevant in Book 1. But then like in Book 4, like, oh, wow, that becomes a really important thing. And because of the change they made, they have to sort of deal with the changes they made. So that’s a tough thing.

**Craig:** Can you imagine if you were writing a screenplay for a studio and it’s about magical kids at a magical boarding school. And you said, “And the magical boarding school will be named Hogwarts.” I don’t think that would go over too well with them. No. “Well, that doesn’t sound likeable.”

**John:** No. I think that wouldn’t have done well at the pitch competition and it wouldn’t have made it through.

**Craig:** It would have been great for me.

**John:** My other One Cool Thing is a really quick and easy one. It’s The Americans on FX, which I’ve just started watching and were now into Season 2. It’s really terrifically well done. Are you watching the show, Craig?

**Craig:** As you know, I don’t watch television. However —

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** My friend, Stephen Schiff, excellent screenwriter — interestingly, in his past life, film critic, he was a very well-respected film critic, for whatever that’s worth, but then turned his back on it, and became a writer, and wrote Deep End of the Ocean, I believe, was the movie, right, Michelle Pfeiffer movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the second Wall Street film and now, he is one of the, I think, he’s a pretty highly placed writer on The Americans and I hear it’s great. So for his sake — and he’s like the greatest guy. So I should watch it. But, you know, first, I have to watch television.

**John:** Yeah. So if you are in Europe or at least if you’re in France, the first couple of seasons are on Netflix. I think they’re on Amazon in the US. So it’s a very easy show to sort of bolt through and catch up on because they only have 13 episodes seasons. So we’ve quite enjoyed The Americans on FX. And, really, one of those premises that I wouldn’t have thought could have sustained itself and it manages to be both the spy story of the week, and have ongoing arcs in ways you wouldn’t think possible. So I would just commend the writers of The Americans, and urge you to watch it.

**Craig:** Fantastic. My One Cool Thing is for your feet. John, do you wear slippers?

**John:** I never wear slippers. So convince me why I should.

**Craig:** Well, I can’t, really. It’s either you’re a slipper person or you’re not. Now, I don’t wear anything out of the house. It’s like I don’t wear like sandals. I don’t wear any of that. Give me a proper shoe or a sneaker or something. But when I wake up in the morning, I want to put my slippers on. It feels so good. It feels so good. So I got these slippers that are just the best. And, slippers, you buy them once, they last you ten years, right? I’m so in love with these. They feel — every morning, I’m happy to put them on. So it’s made by Ugg. You know Ugg like Ugg boots?

**John:** I know Ugg. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m the last person you’d think would know about Ugg and I only know about it because, you know, Melissa said, “Oh, you should buy something. Like Ugg probably has a good…” She was right. So the Ugg Australia Men’s Ascot Slipper. Australia may just be — but I don’t know. I think it’s just Ascot Slipper. That’s the key.

**John:** So do these slippers have a heel? Do they have — do they go back behind your heel or you just slip them on? Because I can’t stand the ones that are just like these spa slippers.

**Craig:** Oh No. No. No. I would never, in my life, ever do that. That’s horrifying to me. Like anything that makes a flip flopping noise is anathema. No, this is more like moccasin style.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s suede but the inside is all, now, what I would call — the inside, I would call like fluffy white stuff. But apparently the word for that is shearling.

**John:** How nice is that?

**Craig:** Yeah. The inside is shearling and the outside is a nice suede, and yes, it’s full coverage. Super comfy. John, I feel like you would love these. What size foot are you?

**John:** I am a size 11.5.

**Craig:** Okay. We the same size feet, which is great, so we could share shoes now.

**John:** God. [laughs] My dream has come true.

**Craig:** You have access now to my vast collection of four things. But size yourself up a little bit on these. Go for the 12. Go for the 12, John. I think you will be thrilled.

**John:** All right. I might even try them here en France to get into the slippery of it all. That’s our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

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**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Have a great day. Bye.

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/what-is-good-writing).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 239 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is 100% craft, there will be no follow-up, there will be no questions, no discussion of etiquette. We are going to try to answer the question of what is good writing before we take a look at three new Three Page Challenges.

A warning that one of the Three Page Challenges has some bad words in it, so if you’re driving in the car with your kids, you may want to turn down the dial before you get to the Three Page Challenges. But other than that, it should be a pretty clean show.

**Craig:** I’m glad for it. I feel like while it was fun to wander around a bit, we need to focus. We need to refocus on our mission.

**John:** We need to focus on our mission, which is to talk about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So the idea for this topic came up because I read this piece in Slate and which is originally from Quora. It was by this guy, Marcus Geduld. And he was trying to answer the question, how do you differentiate good acting from bad acting? So I’ll put a link to the show notes for his original piece but I thought it was actually a really nicely designed explanation of sort of what he’s looking for in good acting.

And what I especially liked about it is he says, “If anyone tells you there are objective standards, they’re full of crap. This is a matter of personal taste. There are trends — there are many people who love Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting but if you don’t, you’re not wrong.”

And so, as we get into the succession of acting and writing, I would back up what he says. It’s not there’s a one objective standard, but there’s things that I tend to notice when I’m saying like, well, that’s really good acting or really good writing and it may be useful to point them out.

**Craig:** This is a large philosophical discussion but I do agree with this gentleman as well. When it comes to writing, it’s not possible to say that this is capital G good and this is capital G bad. What you can say is that this is to my taste or it is not and here’s why. We do know that there are certain kinds of writing and the writing of certain writers that tends to be toward to most people’s taste, to a lot of people’s taste. There are some writers who appeal to the taste of those who consider themselves refined. There are some that appeal to the average man or woman.

But I’m with this guy completely. That’s why anytime I talk about a movie, I’m like, “It wasn’t for me.” That’s the best I could do.

**John:** Let’s take a look at his criteria for good acting. He says, “Good actors make me believe that the actor is going through whatever his character is actually going through.” So there’s a believability. You really believe that he has been shot, that he is terrified in this moment. And he singles out sort of like if you can tell they’re faking it, then it’s honestly kind of worse. Like you can sense that they’re acting.

And that’s very true. I mean, the performances that I admire the most, I genuinely believe that they are experiencing — obviously you know there’s artifice, you know that they’re in a movie — and yet the moment feels incredibly real because they’re responding to things in a very real way.

**Craig:** And ultimately verisimilitude is kind of what we do, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re trying to create a fake world that at least seems real to you while you’re experiencing it or is real enough that you can suspend your disbelief. And this advice I think is perfect for actors or writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Actors, obviously it’s immediate. We see and hear them and so we know that they’re believable or not. But for us as writers, believability, that probably is my number one problem with most screenplays I read. I read something, I read a character’s line or I witness their choice and I think, “I just don’t believe that that’s what a person would do in that circumstance.”

**John:** Absolutely. You say like, “I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t get it. It doesn’t connect for me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s because you don’t believe that character is performing that way in that moment. But very related to that, Geduld is looking for surprise. The great actors surprise him. So out of all the choices they could make, they are making really interesting choices.

So he singles out sort of like if there’s a bank teller, you sort of want that bank teller just to be believable as a bank teller and not draw any attention or draw any focus to himself. But your main actors in your piece, they should be making really fascinating and interesting choices at times so you don’t know what they’re going to do next. Because if you can predict perfectly what they’re going to do next, you get bored.

I think I see the same thing with writing. If I can tell you what’s going to happen three pages later or three sentences later, then I stop being so intrigued. I’m not curious what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s where the boredom happens. And when we see characters doing these things that are sort of obvious, right, there’s the lack of surprise, this is when you tend to hear things like, well, tropey or just sort of, “I’ve seen it before.” The element of surprise isn’t so much about leaping out and going boo at the audience as much as it is delighting them with something that they were not expecting.

All comedy is surprise. You cannot get a laugh if there’s no surprise, right?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Everybody knows that. If you tell somebody a joke and they’re like, “I’ve heard it before,” don’t keep telling the joke. There will be no surprise. All actors surprise, all emotion I think is surprise. It creeps up on you. Even when you are not surprised by the thing that happens, the intensity of it surprises you, and thus, the tears come.

**John:** And there’s no surprise without expectation. So the reason why a joke works is because you set up an expectation for what the natural outcome is and the punch line is a surprise.

The same thing happens in drama. You set an expectation for what is going to happen next and the surprise is something different happens or a different choice is made. So you don’t get those moments of surprise unless you’ve set expectation really well.

That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about Drew Goddard’s adaptation of The Martian is he was very clever about setting up expectations about what was going to happen next so that all the calamities that would happen to poor Matt Damon on Mars can still be surprising. You don’t get those surprises unless you’ve very carefully laid out for the audience what he thinks is going to happen next.

**Craig:** It’s remarkable how similar what we do is to what magicians do, because there is no surprise for the magician and there’s none for us. We know how it ends. We know everything. So there’s this careful craft of misdirection and misleading and setting up one expectation only to deliver something else. It’s all very crafted.

You know, if you spend any time reading Agatha Christie, she is just a master of this because in her case, think about what she has to do. She has to surprise the reader at the end and the entire time they are battling her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not surprised that there’s a surprise. So it’s a bit like watching a close-up magician at work. You know he or she is trying to fool you. And then they fool you anyway.

**John:** Yeah. I think the other crucial thing to remember about surprise is if everything is surprising, nothing is surprising. And so if you don’t allow characters to behave in a way that we can have some ability to predict what’s going to happen next, we will stop caring or just stop trying to put our confidence in you that they are going to do something worthwhile. That there’s going to be a payoff to this.

And you see that sometimes in writing as well, where it’s just such a scramble of different things, it’s going in so many different directions. The rug is always being pulled out from underneath you to the point where like, “You know what, I’m not going to stand on that rug because I just know you’re going to pull it out from under me.”

**Craig:** No question. And in acting, we know this feeling when we’re watching a movie and we want to turn to somebody next to us and say, “Do you have any idea what this person is doing or talking about?” I love Apocalypse Now. I love that movie and my favorite book is Heart of Darkness. And I think there’s more great performances in that movie than practically any other movie I can think of.

But Marlon Brando’s performance is essentially surprising constantly to the point where I can’t quite get a handle on him at all as Kurtz. For me at least, that performance, it’s just all surprises and nothing to push against.

**John:** Yeah. It can be the real frustration. And of course, when you talk about an actor’s performance, we really are balancing what was written, what was the scripted performance and what was the actor actually doing. And in the case of Apocalypse Now, that was just a huge jumble.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. [laughs]

**John:** But there’s times where, you know, you’re trying to look at a character in a movie and it becomes very hard to tell, like, did that not work because it was bad on the page or did that not work because the actor made bizarre choices that made it impossible for that to function? And it’s one of the reasons why it can be so crucial to have a writer around on a set to sort of be that set of eyes to let the director know and everybody else know, like, “Okay, what they’re doing is fascinating but it will not actually add up and you’re going to be in real trouble when you get to the editing room.”

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s no question. I think Brando famously showed up on that set like 100 pounds overweight, hadn’t read the book, probably hadn’t read the script, didn’t know any of his lines. [laughs] Yeah, that one was a disaster.

**John:** Geduld’s next point is that great actors are vulnerable, which is very true. You feel like the great actors are letting you see parts of themselves that they might be embarrassed by or essentially that they’re not embarrassed to show you those things that are sort of icky inside them and they’re not trying to be perfectly put together at all moments. They’re letting you in and showing you the cracks.

And good writing does that, too. Good writing isn’t trying to impress you at all moments. Good writing is trying to explore uncomfortable emotions and uncomfortable feelings.

**Craig:** Yeah. This can be a little bit of a trap for writers who work in comedy because comedy is one of the great defense mechanisms of all time. And there are very funny movies that essentially truck entirely in comedy and they never show vulnerability and they never get you in a moment where suddenly you feel, you deeply feel. You’re there to laugh. And by the way, it’s perfectly fine. I mean, you know, there are a lot of terrific movies that are just there to make you laugh.

But if you are trying to do a certain kind of comedy, you need to be able to access your vulnerable side and put aside your humor armor and just be real. Sometimes, it’s those moments inside of comedies that are the most touching because of the contrast.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, you obviously had that moment with Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief but I’m also thinking about Melissa McCarthy in Spy. And I think one of the reasons why Spy worked so well is you definitely see what she is longing for and sort of her obsession with her boss that she doesn’t really want to own up to and her own fears and frustrations sort of bubbling out. And so they find great comedic moments for it but they also really let you deep inside. And that’s why you can sort of identify so closely with her character.

**Craig:** And Melissa’s really good at that. I mean, Melissa, you know, she has one of those faces, like Zach Galifianakis and Steve Carell, these are people that you want to take home and hug, and yet they’re also so funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then there are some really funny people that I don’t want to take home and hug. Like Ryan Reynolds is really funny. But he doesn’t seem to need my emotional support. [laughs] He seems to be just fine, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas like Zach or Steve Carell or Melissa, I’m like, “Okay, come here, here’s some soup. Let’s talk it out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, let me take care of you.

**John:** Yeah. His next point is listening, that the great actors watch them when they’re listening to other characters speak, which is a thing I’ve definitely noticed is that there are some people who just seem to be waiting for their turn to act next and there’s other actors who you feel like everything they’re saying is in response to the previous character, that they’re engaged in this moment, they’re engaged in listening. And those actors help the other person’s performance so much because they direct your attention back to what the other character is saying.

It’s such a simple and kind of obvious thing, but if you look at scenes that aren’t working, it’s often because you don’t believe that the other character is actually listening to what the first character is saying.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is acting school 101, you know. Sometimes all you do is just sit and listen and learning how to listen seems weird. Like why would it be so hard for me to do something I’m constantly doing anyway? But in the moment, when you are required to say things that you didn’t think and they are not extemporaneous, they were written down and studied, the act of listening in and of itself is a challenge, because suddenly you’ve lost yourself listening to this other person and you forgot you have something to say. That’s really tricky but what it comes down to is essentially putting your ego aside and not feeling like it’s more important for you to be in command of your moment when you say words.

Sometimes the big moments are the ones where you listen. Film actors, the ones who’ve been around the block a lot, they know that oftentimes the camera is on them more when they’re not talking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So listening becomes crucial.

**John:** From the writer’s point of view, you are often writing those words that they are saying. And so if you are just batting a ball back and forth, it’s unlikely that you’re writing your very best dialogue for those actors because it doesn’t feel like they had to hear what the previous person said to respond to it, didn’t actually need to process it, but rather is like, funny line, funny line, funny line, funny line, that scene is not going to work or this is not going to work as well as it could. And the actors are not going to be able to bring anything special to it because you’re not giving them any things to hold on to. There’s just no handholds in that kind of dialogue.

**Craig:** There are exceptions. Sorkin is very good at putting lots of dialogue and not giving his characters a lot of time to listen because he demands that they’re fast and smart. So I think of the first scene of Social Network, it’s very ratatat. It’s very verbal. But then in that scene, when there is a moment where somebody suddenly stops, it means something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You realize that they’ve been knocked back on their feet a little bit. Those are very challenging scenes for actors to do.

**John:** Yeah. Well, you know, if you’re writing things where the point is that they actually sort of aren’t listening, where they are basically two simultaneous monologues directed towards each other, that can be great and be fascinating. But if your whole movie is built of that, you better be Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and even Aaron Sorkin understands that after a scene like that, you need a break.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. His next point, the great actors use their instruments to their best effect. So by instruments, he means their body, their voice, basically what they came to the show with. And so it’s recognizing what you have and how to make the most of what you have.

So his example is Philip Seymour Hoffman who was overweight and not conventionally attractive but definitely knew how to use his body to best effect to, you know, be that character or sort of provide that character a reality within that world. And I think that’s something we’re always looking for with our own writing and with the characters we’re creating is how do you use who they are and what they bring to best effect.

**Craig:** And also for ourselves, there are things that we know we do well. John Lee Hancock, he always says that when he is sent something, a script for consideration to direct, the first question he asks while reading it or after reading it is, “Is this a pitch I can hit?”

**John:** Ah, yes.

**Craig:** You know, and the truth is, not everyone can do everything. And there are things that sometimes we want to do for a change because they’re exciting, and those are terrific. But there are also things we know we can do. And this is why some great actors have been bad in movies because they were miscast. That’s what miscasting is, right? So for us as well, we have to kind of cast ourselves into what we write to make sure that we’re writing with the wind at our back and not in our face.

**John:** For sure. So let’s go on beyond his suggestions and think of some of our own suggestions for the things we notice about good writing that are sometimes lacking in writing that is not so good. Do you want to start?

**Craig:** Sure. For me, just a few things that came to mind that don’t really apply for the acting model of things. One is layers. Good writing I think is accomplishing more than one thing at a time. Usually, I’m watching plot happen while I’m also watching a relationship change or watching a character grow. There’s just layers to things. I think audiences appreciate those complexities when it’s very — okay, this, now we stop doing and we talk and we have a relationship. Now we do talking again. It starts to feel very simple to me.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes in procedural dramas on television, you’ll notice this, like they’re just doing the one thing. They’re basically like just putting out information about the next thing they’re going to do. And that’s sometimes how procedural dramas need to work but it’s not sort of the best writing we could aspire to in other forms.

**Craig:** Agreed. The other thing I think is a hallmark of good writing is hidden scenes because, you know, we are trying to create the illusion of something that is whole and of one piece because it really happened even though it didn’t. Of course, that requires us to stitch things together. And sometimes we have to do things in our stories to make them work that aren’t completely organic to what happened before. And I think good writing knows how to hide those scenes so that they’re not even visible at all. It’s like a good tile guy knows how to fit two slabs together so you don’t even notice that it’s two pieces and it looks like one.

**John:** Yeah. You brought up magic before and I think of sort of what David Kwong does in his close-up work. And I don’t ever want to ask him how he does what he does because I’m never going to be able to do it. It’s sort of more fun for me not to know. But I’m sure some of the misdirection is a real vigilance about where the audience’s attention is going to be.

And so when you talk about hidden seams, you’re really basically being very mindful of like what are they going to see and what are they not going to see. And by putting something over here, they’re not going to be paying attention to this thing that I’m doing over sort of down here on the page. It’s being very aware of like where they are at and their experience of reading the story, of watching this movie so they’re not going to see what you’re actually needing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of times when people talk about good craft, I think this is a big part of it, is just hiding the artifice and avoiding all those — you know, there’s a common thing people say in Hollywood when they want to say they had a problem with something in a script. They’ll say, “This bumped me.” And bumped means, literally, I felt the seam, you know. Like I was in a car, I was on what I thought was a smooth stretch of road and then bump, right? So those are the things we try and hide.

The other thing that I think is part of good writing is a point of view that unlike a performance which is delivering one character and making us believe that character, the writer needs a point of view because otherwise the story isn’t really about anything in particular. The writer needs something interesting to say and they have to have an interesting way of saying it. It doesn’t need to be text, it could be subtext. And it doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be unsaid by anyone else before. But we do need a point of view.

**John:** Yeah. On the blog about two weeks ago, I addressed this article that Michael Tabb had written about — he called it premise and I sort of disagreed with him calling it premise. But what he was really talking about was this idea like what is the point, like what are you actually wrestling with in the story? Even if characters aren’t speaking aloud, even if it’s not even sort of obvious subtext, it’s the reason why you wrote the story, it’s the question you’re trying to answer. It may not even be like the dramatic question that a character is going to ask or resolve. It’s not the plot. It is sort of the point.

It’s like, I want to believe that the story is about more than just the surface plotting of it and that there’s a reason why you wrote this story, there’s a reason why I should be spending my time on it. That even if there’s not necessarily one answer, that you’re going to try to convince me of some point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. I call it the central dramatic argument. Everybody’s got a different, you know, phrase for it.

Scott Frank told me he wrote a script once and he sent it to, I won’t say who, but a big screenwriter, to get their opinion and that person’s response was, “This screenplay is well-written but it’s answering a question no one is asking.” And I thought that was a really tough love way of saying that whatever the point of view was there, it wasn’t something that would connect universally.

And we talk about this a lot. When you’re writing movies, you are creating the uncommon and the bizarre and the remarkable and notable because those are the stories worth seeing. But buried in there, something that is the opposite, incredibly common, completely universal, applicable to everyone’s life experience.

So that’s where the point of view comes in. And similarly, I think that connects to another part of what I consider to be good writing, and that’s a general unity, that there’s a cohesion of the narrative, the end feels like a proper resolution of the beginning. The phrase coming full circle. A good movie comes full circle.

**John:** Yeah. And when we say coming full circle, meaning both in terms of like story and plot. So like we started some place and we got some place, the characters went through a journey, we actually saw them do something, we saw them accomplish something or failed something in an interesting way.

But also, thematically, that there was like these were the themes we were exploring and we succeeded in exploring these themes through different characters, through different situations and we got someplace. And it all feels like it’s of one piece and it’s not just like a bunch of things that happened and now the credits are rolling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally, the beginning informs what the end is and the end informs what the beginning is, the two of them are yin and yang. And those pieces fit together gorgeously. By the time you get to the end of the movie, you go, “Yes, it had to start that way, it had to end that way.”

**John:** And yet, at the same time, ideally, starting at that place, you should not have been able to predict that it got to that place.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And that’s the narrative trick. That’s good writing.

**Craig:** That’s good writing. And the way to, I think, your best friend in achieving that trick is having a point of view, because that’s what you’re bringing that the audience doesn’t walk in with.

**John:** Yeah. The thing that I think I’ve noticed about good writing is confidence and that the writer has confidence in his or her words and that his or her story is going to be interesting enough that me as the reader should be spending my time to follow them on this journey. And it’s a hard thing to describe because you don’t sort of see it, you just feel it. You feel like, okay, this writer is confident, I am confident in this writer that this is going to be an interesting journey worth taking.

Some of the things that make me lose confidence at times are simple mistakes. And so, you know, a typo here and there isn’t going to kill you. But a lot of typos makes me wonder like, “Wow, are you really that dedicated to your story? Did you not even proofread this?” And sometimes it’s sort of more they’re not typos but they’re just like things they didn’t think through, like logic flaws that make me question whether this is going to end well.

And so, confidence is a thing I look for in writing. And when I see it, I sort of lean into it. I’m excited to see where they’re going to go next.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you say that the idea that the writer is in control of the story and that’s exactly right. When you read a well-written script, you’re turning the pages knowing full well that when you turn the page, the next one is not going to be the one that makes you go, “Oh, god, really?” Whereas in bad writing, I’m feeling that on almost every page.

I mean, all of your triggers that you mentioned are correct. The one that always gets me is when I see the writer solving a problem in an evident way. And then I go, “Okay, I get that you had a problem and I get you needed to get out of that problem so that you could do blah, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t want to see that. Now I have no confidence in your story. Now I see the artifice.”

You know, I’ve been starting to create crossword puzzles because I’m not a dork enough, I guess. And when you’re building crossword puzzles, you have your big theme answers and then you’re going to fill in words around it. And sometimes you get jammed in a spot where, in order to make everything work, you need to stick a word in that’s just a really bad dumb crossword word.

**John:** What’s an example of a bad crossword word?

**Craig:** Well, there are so many. Well, there’s the crossword ease words like Etui and Esai and, you know, ero. And then there’s ones that are just like, you know, NGP and then you’re like, “What the heck’s an NGP?” And then it’s like, okay, one person once said it and it’s like this bizzaro thing or some foreign capital no one even knows.

And people do it because they have to solve their problem. But the good crossword puzzle creators, they just go, “Nope, let me undo this section and do it again because I don’t want people to hit that thing where they go, ‘Oh, that’s right, this is fake and you just magneted a solution on here so you could get to the next page.'”

**John:** Yeah. So things that make me lose confidence — typos, those kind of just like hacky solutions to things, and clichés which is a general kind of hackiness where it’s like, okay, that’s a really obvious tropey either plotting device or just a bad phrase that you just didn’t spend the time to think of a better way to say that thing.

And so, cliché can be great if you’re going to explode the cliché or sort of like play against the cliché. And if I have a lot of confidence in your story, in your writing, I will see that cliché and like, “You know what, that’s fine because they’re going to do something great with it. I’m going to keep turning pages because it’s going to be awesome.”

But if I was starting to lose confidence and then I encounter one of those cliché’s, I’m like, “Oh, it’s dipping low.” And remember in our last live show or two live shows ago, we had Riki Lindhome up. She was talking about when they were staffing for Another Period. And it’s like, oh, how many pages of a script do you read before you say yes or no? It’s like, well, about three.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, if she encounters a really hacky cliché on page three, she’s done. And that’s what you have to be so vigilant about.

**Craig:** Yeah. This idea of confidence in what the writer is doing is going to come up in one of our Three Page Challenges. I think we’ll see it pretty clearly. Part of what happens is when you feel good about the writing and then something comes along that’s a little squidgy, you give the writer the benefit of the doubt, “This must be intentional, it will work out.” And then, in well-written scripts, it does.

Think of like a script as the Titanic and it’s sailing along and it’s got its watertight compartments. You can hit, you know, one or two things and if you fill one or two watertight compartments, you can stay afloat for a while. But when you’re dragging something across all of them, you’re going to sink.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when I read scripts where characters are, their voices are changing from scene to scene, characters are behaving in the middle of situations that are just bizarre and not realistic at all or inconsistent with what they did before, suddenly, the Titanic is being ripped in half, Jack is drowning, Rose is on the piece of door.

**John:** Spoilers.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, the Titanic does go down.

**John:** Sorry, man.

**Craig:** Yeah, spoiler.

**John:** It’s good to bring up voices because voice is one of those things — we talk about characters having voices and making sure the voices sound believable. But writers also have voices. And good writing, that writer has a voice. And so I don’t care if it’s a non-fiction piece in Slate or something in The New Yorker or a Hemingway short story or Faulkner, or just any screenplay. You know, you read a Tarantino screenplay versus an episode of Game of Thrones, you read one of their things, they’re all very different but they all have a voice. They all sound like they’re written by a person who is confident about the words that they’re using to describe their world.

And as we get to the Three Pages, I think this sense of voice is really crucial. It’s a thing that keeps you turning pages because like, “Oh, even if I don’t necessarily love the story, I love hearing this person’s voice.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And there are writers who like, I’m not actually nuts about some of their plotting but their voices are just so fantastic. You want to talk about an amazing writer, someone we both follow on Twitter, Paul Rudnick.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What an amazing voice he has.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** So Paul Rudnick wrote In & Out and lots of other movies.

**Craig:** Addams Family.

**John:** Was it Addams Family or —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But he also used to write as Libby Gelman-Waxner. It was a column for Premiere Magazine which was the big film magazine at the time. And it was written for the point of view of this film critic kind of. She would review two movies in every issue. But it was mostly about her life and sort of her daughter and her dentist husband, Josh, I think.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And basically, it was all about sort of her even though she was technically reviewing these films. And it was all just a wonderful exercise in voice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just such a fan of his. In & Out is such a good movie. I love that movie. I mean, that’s a great movie, by the way, for anyone to study in terms of structure because it’s structured perfectly. And talk about, it’s loaded with surprise. I mean, you have a movie where someone is gay but isn’t ready to come out of the closet and you’re like, okay, it’s going to end with him coming out of the closet. Yeah, but that’s not where the surprise is, you know.

And then his voice, look, he’s one of the wittiest people ever. [laughs] He’s like Dorothy Parker witty. That guy is, he’s great.

**John:** He’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My last little thing I’ll say about good writing, and this is not an exhaustive list, there’s probably other things you can think of, but I want to talk about finesse. And this is a thing that you maybe only kind of recognize when you have written a lot. But when I see a writer doing something that’s actually really difficult and they make it look so easy, you’re like, “Wait, how did you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s the thing that I start to really appreciate. And so, two recent examples I can think of, over the Christmas break I read To Kill a Mockingbird. And obviously the book is great on many levels and that’s why you study it in high school.

But looking at it now, Harper Lee was able to do these things, these transitions where she was in a scene and it was like really a detailed scene and like every moment, every sort of gasp and every, you know, scratch on the floor, and then like within just a few sentences, several months could pass and then we’re off to something completely new. She was able to transition in and out of these sort of close-up moments in ways that were just remarkably subtle and clever and adept that you didn’t even sort of notice. Like, “Oh, wow, just months passed and now Scout’s older and like two sentences have gone by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a really remarkable thing.

**Craig:** It is. I think that the idea of making the difficult scene easy is more a hallmark of great writing. You know, the person that confounds me time and time again is Neil Gaiman. I read this guy and I’m like, “How did you just do that? How did you pull that off?”

You know, just reading through the entire Sandman series at least once in every issue, I’d go, “Wow. Wow. How did you — ” especially later on when you’re like, “Wait, did you set up something three years ago and it just paid off?” [laughs] I mean, his mind is just remarkable and he makes it look so easy.

**John:** Yeah. And I had this filed underneath the finesse category but it speaks back to sort of all these things, so maybe my final example will sort of talk about how well she did on all these different levels.

So Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl, both in the book and in the movie, and different ways how she did it in both the book and the movie, there’s this narrative handoff that has to happen halfway through. And when you see what she did, we’re talking about the layers, there was actually much more going on than you sort of thought was going on. There were these hidden scenes that she was just masterful.

She had a point of view as an author about what she was trying to express but also very clearly you could understand the characters’ points of view on this. There was a unity, there was a deeper thing that this was all sort of connected to. And she had confidence and it’s only because I had confidence in her writing and sort of what she was doing that I was able to take this giant leap halfway through the book and halfway through the movie that like, “Okay, everything has completely changed and I’m so excited to see where this is going next.”

**Craig:** It’s such a good feeling knowing that every page you’re reading has been thought out and is part of a larger plan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you never get that sense of — because I’ve read some novels where — I read one in particular recently where I was so happy halfway through. And then I got into the second half and it just seemed to me that the author had kind of gone, “Okay, that’s enough craft. Let’s just wing it.” [laughs] And it just fell apart.

**John:** I will tell you quite honestly, there was a book I was sent as an adaptation, I had this two years ago maybe, maybe even more than that. And it had sold for a fair amount and then I heard back — so I read it, it’s like, “Well, the first half is really good and the second half is not really good at all.” And the backstory was like, yeah, people only read the first half. They bought it at an auction, they only read the first half. And so no one sort of knew how it ended. And then they got the rest of it and they’re like, “Oh, oh, no. Oh, no.” And it just wasn’t a good ending.

**Craig:** No. And that’s a real challenge for us when we’re adapting these things because, like I said before, the ending must be fundamentally there in the beginning. So it means that the beginning that you like so much, you might have to change that a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the frustration. And as we start these Three Page Challenges, we are just looking at the beginning. So we have to be mindful of, the first three pages are so crucial but in some ways they’re so easy because you’re not responsible for like the next 90 pages as you’re writing these three pages and giving them to us. But of course, if you’re writing the full script, these three pages would actually have to set up the things you want to do for, you know, another two hours of the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re crucial. Crucial.

**John:** They’re crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, let’s get started with this. Which one should we do first?

**Craig:** Here, I’ll do Brewed.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Brewed is written by Joey Perotti.

**John:** So as always, if you’re new to the podcast, you may not know that there are links to the PDFs of these Three Page Challenges in the show notes, so you can read along with us if you’d like to. So these are people who have written in to johnaugust.com/threepages and they said that we could talk about their pages on the air. So these are willing participants in this and they’re all very brave to give us their pages.

**Craig:** Indeed they are. So we summarize them and then we discuss and you can play along with the home game. And for those of you listening and you don’t have the pages in front of you, Brewed is B-R-E-W-E-D, not B-R-O-O-D. Brewed by Joey Perotti.

So we open in the brew house which is a small, moderately busy coffee shop and we’re listening to Chuck, an overweight buffoon and manager, and he’s holding up a journal and he’s basically instructing his employees, it seems. And he’s talking to Henry who’s in his late teens and giving him this information. And then Henry notices Robert, he’s a homeless man. The homeless man is talking to Jude who works behind the register. And the homeless man, Robert, is asking to use the bathroom. Jude says, “No, it’s for customers only.” Robert then walks up to Henry and says, “Hey, can I get some change?” Henry gives him some money.

A customer named Paul tells Henry he’s made a big mistake. That Jude is going to be mad at him. Paul is a regular, he’s been there all the time. He sees everybody and what he knows is the most important thing in the coffee shop is the bathroom key, it’s for customers only. At which point Robert, the homeless man, says to Jude, “I want the bathroom key, I’m a customer.” And Jude is annoyed.

**John:** Yes. So we’re going to have I think two really promising things to talk about next. But to me, I felt like that this was one of Joey’s first screenplay exercises. And there was a lot here that didn’t work for me. So this is going to be one of those things where like it sounds like I’m just going to pick and pick and pick and pick. But I think there’s a lot to pick at here.

So we can talk about sort of the concept but I’ll tell you where I had issues on the page and we can work through those and then maybe other ways he could sort of set up this thing which read to me like it was maybe a pilot or an indie com. I wasn’t quite sure what I was reading.

**Craig:** Right. All right, well, go for it.

**John:** Go for it. So this is going to be some tough love for Joey, but hopefully helpful. So let’s just look at the first page. There’s a fade in, which you don’t need. You can have it, you can let it go. A lot of typos, just a lot of typos. Buffoon is B-U-F-F-O-O-N. We see the Brew House a lot in this first bit. You could take that out. So Chuck tells a joke and then like laughs hysterically and then like laughs bigger about it. I didn’t believe it. So going back to our discussion, like I didn’t buy that. I don’t think I would buy any actor actually being able to do that. Unless there’s like a meta joke about someone doing that, it felt really strange and weird to me.

I also got lost about like, wait, is he giving instruction to a bunch of people or just to this one new guy because it wasn’t clear. Just the geography of the space was not clear to me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If we’re going to be in a place called the Brew House, are we behind the counter? Are we on one side? Like I had no idea how the layout of this place was working.

Opportunity is misspelled twice.

**Craig:** Three times.

**John:** Three times. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Opportunity is misspelled consistently.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Slightly is missing a T. On page 2, a few things, parentheticals. Parenthetical, the first letter is not capitalized. And so if that parenthetical is truly that thing that’s underneath the character name, that first letter is not capitalized. OS when it’s like off screen or voice over, those abbreviations, those are different kinds of things. Those actually go up on the line with the character name. So those are two different things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Page 3, we have the same problem with the capitalization and the parenthetical. I asked Stuart why he picked this and he said that we hadn’t done a lot of things that were just comedy and we hadn’t done things which were just dialogue and that’s why he picked it, which I think is true. So I think it was useful for that reason. But also because there are some things here that people would probably — they might see in their own scripts and fix.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this is the one I was thinking about when we think about confidence in reading. So we look at this line here, Chuck says, “I want you to jot down any time you size an opprotunity. And then Henry goes, “Size?” “Yeah, is the opprotunity big? Is it small?” Okay, so there’s a joke here that Joey is trying for which is that Chuck isn’t good at talking. But now is opprotunity on purpose? Does he not know how to pronounce that word or is that just a typo like all the other typos on this page? This is the point. I don’t know what you’re going for and I have no confidence in it, so now I’m just chucking it up to a typo.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Since you talked a lot about form and I agree with every single thing you said, I’m going to talk a little bit about content here. I have no idea what a journal is in terms of a manager at a coffee house instructing what appears to be a new employee. Chuck says, “This is your cold beverage journal. And your pastry journal, and your tasting journal, and you’re African coffee journal or as I like to call it, your ‘urban’ journal.” And that’s his joke.

Okay, A, that’s not a very good joke. And not because of racism, it’s just not a very good joke. B, I have no idea what a journal is. So I don’t know what’s going on. Is it an instruction manual? Is that a menu? So journal is a weird word. If I haven’t worked in Starbucks, then I don’t know what that is and I don’t know if that’s a specific word for that.

And Henry isn’t saying anything here at all. He’s just sitting there, so I have no idea who he is, what he’s about, I suspect he’s our hero. This is not good. Chuck ends this conversation on the top of page 2 by saying, “Wait here, I’m going to grab Zoe,” gets up and walks into the back. Great example of not hiding the scenes. [laughs] Character just says, “I have to go away now, bye.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about character names. All the characters have very similar names and it was very easy to get them confused. And so when your homeless person is named —

**Craig:** Robert.

**John:** Robert. Well, that doesn’t feel like — I’m sorry, that doesn’t feel like the homeless guy to me. I couldn’t tell Robert from Jude from Henry by the bottom of page 2 and that’s really a problem. Particularly if Henry is supposed to be our lead character, he’s not particularly well described or set up. And we don’t see him, going back to our craft thing, we don’t see him listening. We are never given any instruction for sort of what he’s like as he’s listening or sort of how he’s reacting to this crazy stuff that’s he’s being told.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s little bits. He nods his head confused. But who wouldn’t nod their head confused at that?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s something particularly unique to him or his responses. Henry looks at all the journals. I still don’t know what those are. Then Robert is having an argument with Jude. Now, Robert’s had this argument many, many times with Jude.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** First of all, in the parenthesis, apathy on the verge of annoyance, you can just substitute the word annoyed, okay? Just bored, annoyed if you wanted to, right? Shorter. You don’t want to ever have two lines of parenthetical. Just indicates that you’re a failure of imagination basically. So Robert says, “Come on man, I just got to take a piss.” And Jude says, “Restroom’s for customers only.” How many times has he said this to this guy? A thousand? So wouldn’t it be, “You know the restrooms are for customers only.” [laughs]. You know right, there’s got to be some indication of a past life. Talk about acting — one of the things they drill into you in acting class is the moment before. So there’s a whole world before this. So that’s a moment where I don’t believe it.

**John:** So the parenthetical for what Craig is describing could just be in parenthesis, (thousandth time). I mean that gives the actors something to play.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. And that’s what those things are there for, right? It’s to get them something to play. Apathy on the verge of annoyance is rather wordy. This, by the way, is where parentheticals get a bad rap, you know. And people will say, “Never use — don’t tell what actors what to do, blah, blah, blah.” You know, that nonsense. You know, just don’t do it like this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But yeah, for the thousandth time would be a terrific thing. Then we introduce Paul. And Paul delivers this monologue on page 3 that feels very written. And the way he gets into it is so written. I don’t know if Paul is empathetic toward Henry. I don’t know if Paul is a weirdo. I don’t know if Paul is attracted to Henry. I don’t know if Paul is trying to make Henry stay a little bit better. I know nothing. All I know is that he delivers exposition that feels like an announcement about what this movie is.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s look at Paul’s introduction because there’s potential here. So let’s look at what it says. “Henry turns around to face Paul (60s), a bearded gentleman wearing two sets of eye glasses, drinking from a ceramic mug and holding open a book, Factotum.” So there’s a lot of gerunds happening here kind of. But each of those is sort of individually a good idea. I could sort of see him like as a kind of like he is an NPR tote bag kind of person. And that may be fine. But I don’t know specifically what Craig is going to, like I don’t understand like what he’s trying to do for Henry in this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I don’t understand like what’s the moment he’s playing. You give me sort of a physical description, but I don’t get a sense of who he is.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, characters always want something. Always, even the littlest things. But they want something. I have no idea what Paul wants when he said — by the way, they’re not gerunds. I actually realized, the gerunds are the noun like the wearing of clothes, right, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** But Paul has no motivation to deliver this, so that means the writer is forcing it in there and now I’m aware once again that we have a problem.

**John:** Yeah. Paul’s big block of dialogue — I’ll just read it for people who are not reading along with us. He says, “I’ve been coming to the Brew House for seven years. You see a lot of strange stuff, all walks of life: bums, businessmen, commuters, teens, hippies, hipsters, wanna-be writers, wanna-be intellectuals, druggies, psychos, stressed-out mothers, cat ladies, and creeps. And they all want the same thing.” “Coffee?” “The bathroom key.”

And so let’s get back to sort of the idea of the scene that I think there’s a good idea underneath all of this where it’s just like, okay, no, the most important thing in this entire place is the bathroom key. That’s actually a good comedic idea behind a scene. And so if the scene around it were sort of like, you know, talking about sort of like the training and all the stuff, or like how to do this and how to — the temperature you have to do for these kind of beans and stuff like that, but the most important thing in this entire place is the bathroom key. That’s a comedic premise which I don’t think this achieved.

**Craig:** No. I mean there’s a way of redoing this where we begin with Henry sitting with Chuck, his manager, and Chuck is like, “Okay, so I graded your test and it’s 100. So you scored a 100 which is really remarkable. You obviously studied the manual. So now I’m just going to ask you a question that isn’t on the test. What is the most important thing here in this coffee shop?”

**John:** And so the natural answers you could give is like respect.

**Craig:** Hard work, coffee, equality. [laughs] Cleanliness.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a million things and for him to go, “No.” And then he just holds up this thing. “This is. This is the bathroom key. This is the one thing, this key, that separates this store from civility and success and absolute chaos.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you go, okay, there’s a point of view, right, instead of somebody just being this guy that just says, and now a monologue that is unmotivated by anything to a person I do not know for no reason. [laughs]

**John:** What we didn’t put on our list of good writing, but what this describes is you’re in and you’re out. Sort of like what is the first thing we’re going to see in the scene and what’s the last thing we’re going to see in the scene. And what we’re pitching is like how are you going to open this moment? And if you’re going to open this moment with the manager guy, that should get you to the comedic payoff here and that probably is the key.

**Craig:** I agree. And that’s why you can really see the gears turning and hear the metal on metal noise when Chuck says, “Wait here, I’m going to grab Zoe.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s just bad showmanship, you know, as a writer. The other thing is that Paul’s speech doesn’t really tell us anything that we haven’t heard before. We’ve all been to coffee shops. We know who goes in and out of there.

**John:** Also, if you’re going to make a list in a comedy, you have to throw in some wild things there. Like, you know, like Frisbee duelists, you know, something that’s just like really absurd or like, you know, something to break it. Because you’re setting a pattern — and in comedy you set a pattern and then you break it wildly and so break that pattern.

**Craig:** Yeah. So lot of trouble here. And this does feel like early work. This feels like the beginning of something. Maybe Joey’s first attempt at something. There are a lot mistakes here. And I think that you need to — this is one where I feel like you need to do a little bit more homework. You need to watch and think more about how the things that you like are and then ask yourself if you can rise to that standard.

**John:** I think it’s worth looking at your favorite comedies and pulling up those scripts and going through it scene by scene looking at sort of how they work and really figure out where the ins and the outs are, how — the economy of those scenes.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** All right, let’s go to our next one. This is HALCYON by Amanda Mar”n. We are in Gus’s sporting goods store in Dartmouth, New Hampshire. It’s day. There’s a revolving stair-climber caught in an endless cycle climbing to nowhere.

Paul Adam (50s) shuffles in. His preppy, upper class clothes are wrinkled and stained. Goes up to the counter where he talks to a sales woman and he’s thinking about buying a new gun for the hunting season. She says, “Well, hunting season doesn’t start till fall,” but there’s some stuff on sale so she’s showing him options for guns. Shows one that might be a good fit for him. He clearly doesn’t actually know a lot about hunting. He doesn’t know a lot about the geography of the place. He wants something that takes a 3.5, a 3.5 magnum. So she shows him that gun. She’s very clear about like we don’t have ammunition here, so you’re not going to be able to load the gun. She seems suspicious and weary, but is also still trying to sell him the gun.

He ultimately takes the gun, loads it with a single bullet that he has, and puts it to his forehead and he says, “I have not changed the world. I’ve destroyed it.” Steels himself, finger on the trigger, face tight and closed, as we end on the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, Amanda, this is I think a good idea for an opening scene. It does all the things that opening scenes should do. I just have major issues with the way you’ve executed it. So I’ll begin with the simplest thing and then I’ll go to content. You begin by saying over blackness. No. Over black, yeah. Unnecessary-ness. But already it’s shaking my confidence because it’s such a clunky word and it’s unnecessary.

But let’s talk about what’s going on here. Paul wants to commit suicide. Paul is walking into a store that sells guns. He has a bullet in his pocket. The store does not sell ammunition. They’re going to give him a gun to look at. He’s going to take his bullet out, load it or in this case, a shotgun, shall load into the weapon. He’s going to say these very creepy things. And then presumably he’s going to die. We didn’t get quite there at the end of page 3. That’s terrific. I really love the idea of somebody going gun shopping, having somebody be nervous and say, by the way, we don’t sell ammo here. And the guy would be like, “No, no. No problem.” And then taking out his own ammo. Very clever, very smart. Here’s my —

**John:** Yeah, it’s a surprise.

**Craig:** It’s a surprise. Here’s my problem. You make way too much of Paul being scary. So this woman knows he’s scary. We all know he’s scary. So all of the juiciness and creepiness at the end you have diminished greatly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas if this man walks in and is maybe a little bit off but almost a little too chirpy, then suddenly there’s that other thing like, hmm, does anybody in the audience or the people in my row get the same creepy feeling from this guy? Probably not. He’s overtly okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is two pages solid of back and forth about guns. And it’s boring. It just goes on too long. The idea is he would like to buy a gun and he should be talking and she should say, “Okay, what kind of gun are you interested in?” “Well, I was thinking about this or this, but, you know, what about this? Do you have that?” “Yeah, we do. I should let you know that we don’t have ammunition.” “No problem.” Can you just show me how to — how do you open it? Does it like — do you have one with this?” “Yes.” So much. I mean the saleswoman does this enormous chunk of dialogue on page 2 where she’s trying to sell him the shotgun and it just was, it just kept going. So just too much.

Lastly, gun choice. He goes in there to kill himself. He has a shotgun shell and he needs a shotgun. Shotguns are not great ways to kill yourself. I mean they’re long. So it’s really hard to do and it’s very easy for somebody to stop you from doing it because you’ve like got to wrestle it into position and everything. [laughs] Why wouldn’t he just be in there with a 9mm bullet asking to see a Glock and then load it and put it in his mouth? That’s one where I was struggling with his choice.

**John:** I was struggling a little bit with the bullet and sort of the issue of sort of the size caliber of it all. I got confused about that, too. But I felt the idea that like, “Oh, this isn’t for the size bullet I have,” is actually really good. He actually knows nothing about guns at all so he just happened to find one bullet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was really interesting to me. So it wasn’t that he magically had the right — he had a bullet and this was his plan from the very start. Like somehow he came across a bullet and decided that this is what he was going to do.

**Craig:** Right. That would be cool.

**John:** So I liked this a lot more than you did. And I agree with you that I think most of page 2 should be greatly compressed because I can imagine filming all this. And if you filmed the scene as written, you would take out most of it because you sort of get it. Like you get like — what I love about the saleswoman is like she’s trying to do her job, she’s trying to sell the gun. At the same time, she’s like, but just so you know, we don’t sell the stuff. The natural red flags are going up for her and I was so happy to see that she was aware of the situation. But there’s just too much of it.

**Craig:** Too much.

**John:** Too much awareness. And so we were ahead of the story and if we’re ahead of your story, that’s not good.

**Craig:** Yeah, I struggled with the saleswoman. There’s red flags and there’s red flags. Somebody walks in, here’s how Amanda describes this character, Paul. His clothes are wrinkled and stained. His hair is matted with something dark and sticky. His eyes are blood shot. He is unblinking. He answers with no emotion each time she speaks. That to me is more than a red flag. And that I think was putting stress on it. It started to make me hate her for like not just going, you know what, I’m sorry, you should probably talk to my manager. Like there’s got to be some way to bail out of this discussion. [laughs] This guy is off, really off, as opposed to curiously off and then we are surprised.

**John:** Craig, as an exercise, on page 1, if we take — so once the dialogue starts, if we took out all of the scene description, I think you actually have a better flow. So, “Help you hun?” “Thinking of a new one for hunting season.” “Well season doesn’t start till fall, but you’re in luck we got a few on sale cause of that.” Like essentially like, if we stop stopping so often for the scene description, I think there’s a flow there that might just give it a little bit more energy there and make it feel like, you know, she’s just not so vigilant from the very start.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree. There’s a lot of — all that I think exacerbated my problem that things were overwritten here. And I’m such a believer that the first 10 pages are precious, precious real estate. There shouldn’t be one wasted letter on those 10 pages. So, you know, your job should be to be ruthless about weeding out the unnecessary.

There’s a couple of other things I’ll mention and then I’ll turn it back over. There are some typos here. Holds it’s weight, I-T apostrophe S, there should be no apostrophe there. Feel it’s cold steel, same there. Its-it’s thing, your-you’re, there’s just no excuse anymore. It makes me upset.

And in the moment, here’s what happens on page 3. He’s looking at the gun and then he says to her, “I’m sorry. I have no choice. Then he pulls his hand out of his pocket, a shell casing gripped in his palm.” Then he says, “I’ve done a terrible thing.” Then he shoves it into the shotgun, closing it with a pump. Then he says, “Without our suffering we are no longer human. We become monsters.”

Then the saleswoman lets out a scream. This is the latest scream in movie history, right? So he says, “I’m sorry. I have no choice.” He pulls out a shell casing. We all go, oh, and she needs to go, gun, gun, right, and just go. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he can do all the rest of his lines to himself but that was crazy.

**John:** Yeah. Take out all those lines there and I think it’s actually a stronger moment. Going back to sort of typos and other things. On page 1 again. So we’re inside Gus’s sporting goods store. The sound of a revolving stair climber caught in an endless cycle. The sound happened beforehand so if you’re going to show it, then it’s not the sound. I think you probably want to show it because that’s a great image. So take the sound of out of there. Bloodshot is one word or hyphenated. You can make your choice. So this is the fifth sentence of the scene. “A long expired in summer banner exclaims — New Year New You! With a woman in a bikini.” I doesn’t actually make sense. I get what she’s going for but it was very hard to read. And it stopped me three times. So get rid of anything that is hard to read basically.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. Also, beeline is a wonderful word for somebody that’s walking quickly or running quickly towards something he’s not. He’s shuffling, so you can’t beeline while you’re shuffling

**John:** Yeah. But I do like that he had single focus on something. That’s a great description for where he’s headed.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. So there’s other words you can do to accomplish the same thing so that you’re not confused. Is he running suddenly? We have the same thing where Amanda capitalizes “whispering,” the first word inside a parenthetical, which generally you don’t do. I mean it’s not the end of the world.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** If these were three terrific pages, I wouldn’t care.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, okay, well, John liked that one a bit better than I did. But I love the idea, Amanda. I thought it was really creative, really smart. So, you know, basically even though John and I seem like we’re slightly different on this, I think we’re king of saying the same thing. Just tighter. Tighter.

**John:** Tighter. Tighter.

**Craig:** Tighter, tighter. All right. Well, let’s go to our last one. This one is called Blue Forty-Four. And it’s written by Josh Corbin. All right. So here we go. So this one begins outside a field in morning. And it’s the kind of day that was shitty twenty minutes ago. Gray overcast split open by a blast of early-morning sun. We’re behind a dog. And the dog looks like he’s been beat up a bit and then he hears somebody whistling. He stands at attention and then in audio we hear a phone ringing. Somebody is yelling for Benny, or Benny is yelling over the phone to somebody named Daniel that he needs cavalry.

And then we are now in a chase. Benny Miller is in a car and he’s speeding down the road on the phone with Daniel trying to get help because some guys are chasing him. And each one of them is wearing a monster mask. There’s a wolfman and then there’s a skeleton and a zombie and they’re shooting at him. They’re not cops and Benny is shooting back at them. And then Benny gets a moment where he can actually kill one of the guys but he can’t actually take the shot and kill the guy.

And then Benny’s rear window explodes because it’s been shot by the wolfman character and Benny loses control of the car.

**John:** And we should say that he’s on the phone with Daniel throughout this so it’s a speaker phone we’re hearing this other voice who is not actually in the scene.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I thought these pages were really strong. There were some problems but I dug the moment. I could see it. I believe that the writer could see it. I believe that it could be shot. I believe that it would probably be exciting. And it read like the kind of action sequence I like to read on the page when I’m going to see a movie.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I have no idea what’s going on with this dog.

**John:** I don’t really either. And honestly, my confidence was flagging from the very first sentence. “The kind of day that was shitty twenty minutes ago.” What does that mean? I have no idea what that means.

**Craig:** Well, I actually understood it because the next sentence — I agree, like when I first read that I’m like, “What?” And then he says, “Gray overcast split open by a blast of early-morning sun.” I’m like, oh yeah, I know what that is. That’s that thing where it was like the sky looks like it was just raining and now it’s not.

**John:** All right. So flip those two sentences and I understand it.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly, exactly. Very good advice. The thing about the dog, maybe I assume it will eventually make sense. And that’s fine. But it was well-written.

**John:** But it was confusing at times. And here’s where I got confused. “Until someone whistles from afar. He stops, alert as we angle on him.” So the dog suddenly was a he but I thought that he was referring to the someone whistling. And so I just got confused. And so either keep the dog the dog. I just felt like it was overwritten for what was actually happening here. And I just don’t even quite know what I was seeing there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think you could have just set up the dog staring, looking at something, and then got me to the chase faster. I bet you could have lost two-eighths of this page.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the meat of it is obviously this chase. And once I was into the chase, I was really happy. I believe that we should be allowed to write things to match the feeling we want the audience to feel. The feeling that Josh wants me to feel in this chase is panic. And so even his slug lines are panicky. A cutlass. Moving. Fast as fuck. Day. The car engine working its ass off because Benny is fucking panicking. And Josh is capitalizing. He’s bolding. He’s italicizing. Which, you know, in a scene where people are just moving through a space and talking is incredibly annoying. In a scene where it’s life and death and cars are screaming down a road and people are shooting, that’s right.

**John:** Yeah. This is as good as I’ve seen it. I mean, I’m not a big fan of like crazy bolding and underlining and all that stuff. But this is a really good version of it. He’s using the double dash to sort of keep connecting thoughts together and sort of single out what shots are. And it works really well for it. And it gives a good feeling. He’s also using a lot of onomatopoeia for shotgun in the hand — SHK-RK — wolfman aims at Benny. Some bwooms, the difference between a blam and a blam, blam. It works.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it works and I really appreciated as a reader that I could identify these three people. It’s creative. Look, we’ve seen movies where guys are in kooky masks. That’s a cliché, right? Bad guys wearing masks. And that’s fine. I mean they actually do wear masks so the cliché is fine. What I appreciated was that there was a wolfman, there was a skeleton, and a zombie. And all of a sudden now I can see what’s happening.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The fact that those were specified unlocks my visual mind. Otherwise, it’s guys and what am I looking at? Guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know?

**John:** Thug one, thug two, thug three.

**Craig:** Exactly. And boring, right? Now, I’m imagining when he says, because he makes a moment here, right? And this is what I also really appreciated about what Josh did. Inside of plot and we talked about layers before, there should be character, right? So here, this is this crazy, hyperactive chase with guys wearing monster masks and then everything slows down for a character choice because he structures this so that Benny is afforded a choice. And the choice is should I shoot this guy wearing a zombie mask in the head and he chooses not to.

So that’s really the payload for this. All of the other stuff is icing. That little moment is why the scene exists in the movie. I assume that is going to be something very meaningful going forward. So I thought that this was done really well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I have no idea what the rest of the story is. But I would be curious to keep reading the story. I have confidence that he seems to know what he’s doing. That’s a lot sometimes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** These were also I think three really good examples because the problems they had were addressable and they were all very different. And they very well illustrated some of the things we’re talking about with like what is good writing and sort of what we’re looking for with good writing and what makes us not think something is as good as it can be which is the moments that stick out in the wrong ways.

**Craig:** Absolutely. By the way, I should add that I really like this title, Blue Forty-Four. I don’t know what it means, but it grabbed me.

**John:** Yeah. So as always we want to thank our three very brave listeners who sent in their pages to let us take a look at them. If you would like to send in your own pages for us to look at, the link is in the show notes. You can also find it at johnaugust.com/threepage. And Stuart will take a look through those and occasionally pick three of them to send for us to read through.

All right, it has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a very simple little web game. Not even game, it’s like sort of a demonstration. It’s called Creatures Avoiding Planks. And basically it’s these little AI, adorable, little googly eyed things that will try to avoid running into these planks that keep drifting past them. It’s a very good example of sort of like emergent behavior based on changing environment. So each of the little things is just doing its own thing and has very simple rules. But those simple rules sort of act to help keep it alive. And so because we are all malevolent gods, we will inevitably try to put too many little creatures in a space or like too many planks and then they’ll get crushed. But it’s a fun way to pass a few minutes of time.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds interesting. My One Cool Thing is a substance. There’s no particular product I can endorse here. But it’s a substance I didn’t know existed. I didn’t know why anybody would need it. And now I need it. And it’s very, very good. So John, as you know, I have a beard now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A lush, lush beard. And this means now I have to start thinking about hair because like you, not a lot up top. [laughs] So not really that much of a concern for me. But now, it is and beard hair gets really coarse and dry. So there’s this stuff called beard oil. And my whole life, I thought the whole point of hair care was to get oil out of your hair. So the idea of putting oil in your hair sounds gross. But beard hair literally becomes like fire kindling. It’s so dry and nasty. So you put this oil in and it actually is quite lovely. So if you have a beard and it’s getting a little dry, scraggly, scratchy, buy some beard oil. It’s cheap. There’s like a thousand brands. They all have some different stupid smell that’s designed for a man, you know. [laughs] So like what are man smells? This is a whole thing. Like what would you say are man smells?

**John:** Sandalwood?

**Craig:** Yeah, a lot of wood. A lot of wood.

**John:** Yeah. Wood, leather.

**Craig:** Yeah, wood, leather, tobacco.

**John:** But weirdly, Drakkar Noir has that sort of orange peel smell and you often find that in men’s things as well.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s fascinating. Like why do men like the smell of wood and leather? I mean I guess.

**John:** I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the #masculinitysofragile, which tends to be a bunch of photos of like side by side on the shelves they’ll have like toothbrushes for men and toothbrushes for women and they’re like the men’s packaging is always like, you know, corrugated, steel and stuff like that.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I think there was actually a pack of Q-tips, like Q-tips for men and they’re actually the same, but it’s like a corrugated cardboard/sort of metal thing.

**Craig:** I mean, gendered packaging is so insulting to everyone, to everyone. I mean, you know, like I was standing in the pharmacy like, you know, behind the counter waiting for them to bring some prescription and they had a wall of stuff and I didn’t know — and because it was their, you know, prescription meds, it’s not marketed for consumers, but still there’s packages. And I looked at this wall and I was like this is the wall of either contraceptives or hormone replacement therapy for women or something because every box had some pastel swirl, a butterfly, some tulip opening up. I mean, it was incredible. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s not even for sale to consumers. That’s just for the pharmacist. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And like what do Viagra bottles come in like with like a mushroom cloud on it or a jet fighter? [laugh]

**John:** They come in solid steel packaging, yeah.

**Craig:** It comes in a steel cube.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, like what? Stupid.

**John:** It’s stupid.

**Craig:** It’s all stupid.

**John:** All right. Well, that’s our show for this week. So thank you for joining us for that. Our outro this week comes from Daniel Green who I just saw in New York. And he has a big beard, too, so he can use that beard oil that you recommended, Craig. If you have an outro you’d like us to consider for the show, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link. If you have questions for us, that’s also the great address to send questions. Short things on Twitter are fantastic. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find us on iTunes. Please subscribe if you’re there because that helps people know that we exist. And, also, leave us a comment because that tells people that you like the show. We have all the back episodes available in the Scriptnotes app which you can download on the applicable app store. Subscriptions to the app and to Scriptnotes.net where all the episodes are stored is $1.99 a month. A steal.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** We also have a few of the 200 episode USB drives left. And so I’m not sure we’re going to make anymore. So if you’re curious about one those, just go to store.johnaugust.com and get one of those. You can find the show notes for all the things we talked about on the webpage at johnaugust.com. Just look for this episode title. And that’s our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Marcus Geduld looks at [how you differentiate good acting from bad acting](http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/09/10/how_do_you_differentiate_good_acting_from_bad_acting.html?wpsrc=fol_tw)
* Michael Tabb on [The Concept of Premise](http://www.scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-where-story-begins-premise), and [John’s response](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-premise-or-whats-the-point)
* Paul Rudnick’s [Libby Gelman-Waxner](http://paulrudnick.com/secret/libby-gelman-waxner/)
* Three Pages by [Joey Perotti](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JoeyPerotti.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Amanda Marín](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AmandaMarin.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Josh Corbin](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JoshCorbin.pdf)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Creatures avoiding planks](http://otoro.net/planks/)
* AskMen on [beard oil](http://www.askmen.com/grooming/appearance/best-beard-oils-reviewed.html)
* [#masculinitysofragile](https://twitter.com/hashtag/masculinitysofragile) on Twitter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Daniel Green ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))