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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 269 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we will be looking at mystery versus confusion and how you might have more of the former, with less of the latter. We will also be answering listener questions on flashbacks and capitalizing on festival success. Plus we have three new entries in the Three Page Challenge. It’s going to be a big show.

**Craig:** It does already sound, and I don’t want to jinx us or anything, like the best show we’ve ever done and we’ll ever do.

**John:** You know, I’ve been scrolling through the little outline here, Craig, and you’ve got a lot of really good stuff in here. So, we will see if we can — we’ll see if we can finish as strong as we start. How about we start with a correction because I actually messed up in last’s week’s episode? I know this seems impossible because I don’t make mistakes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I did make a mistake in the very first minute of last week’s episode. I referred to Jane Bennet in Darcy. I was referring to the principal characters of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Bennet is a sister, she’s not the principal character. I really did mean Elizabeth Bennet but I think I was conflating her and confusing her with Jane Austin, the author of Pride and Prejudice. So I just wanted to actually get that out of there and make it clear that I have read Pride and Prejudice. I really do know who’s the main characters in Pride and Prejudice.

**Craig:** It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

**John:** It’s a feature. Also, I wanted to make sure that the other Jane Austin, the one who you actually get when you Google it, she’s a professor of political theory in the US and she’s going to be really confused when her name shows up in the Google news alert later today.

**Craig:** Wait, Jane Bennet is or Jane Austin is?

**John:** Jane Bennet. Did I said Jane Austin then?

**Craig:** Yeah. So again, I have to say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

**John:** Feature. So somehow, I have a form of aphasia that is limited to Jane Austin references.

**Craig:** That is so specific.

**John:** It is but it’s all I can do.

**Craig:** You know what? Should qualify you for Make a Wish.

**John:** Yeah absolutely.

**Craig:** Anything you want and —

**John:** I’m — clearly, I’m a dying child in some way. My inner child is dying.

**Craig:** We’re all dying. I have a little bit of follow-up myself. So I believe it was in our last episode where we talked about writers who had broken in from not Los Angeles, not New York, not London. And one of them was Chris Sparling. And he had mentioned in his comment that one of the things he missed was that sense of camaraderie. And I said, “Well, next time you’re out here, drinks are on me.” Guess who I had a drink with last night?

**John:** How nice.

**Craig:** Last night, it’s — very last night, Chris Morgan and I and Chris Sparling all sat down, had a drink. I didn’t even have to pay because Chris Morgan paid, which is great.

**John:** Well, he’s got that Fast and Furious money, so he should kind of always pay.

**Craig:** Yeah, he paid and it’s his own money, too. I mean, it’s got Vin Diesel’s face on it and everything.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** But it’s legal tender. Anyway, great guy, had a terrific evening with him and he got a little bit of it, a little taste.

**John:** Yeah. So do you think you’re going to get him to move out to Los Angeles? Was there any sense of that he’s going to leave Rhode Island to get out there?

**Craig:** I did broach the topic. It doesn’t seem so. First of all, he’s got a six-year-old daughter and a four-week-old son.

**John:** Yeah, that’s young.

**Craig:** So that’s, generally speaking, you’re not going nowhere and, you know, his whole thing is, look, it’s basically working, you know.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** He said every now and then it’s a little annoying, but he was out here pitching a show. And so he can always jump on a plane and get here. But I think he’s very happy living where he lives. His family is happy living where they are and it’s working for him. So I think, probably, he’s going to stay right where he is.

**John:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Before we get to our big marquee topic, which is mystery versus confusion, we have two questions from listeners. So I thought we might bang those out quickly. So first, we have a question from Matt Nai. Let’s take a listen.

Matt: So I’ve written a horror feature that I’ve submitted to a handful of film festivals and screenwriting contests. It has placed as both a finalist and quarter-finalist in four competitions so far. I’m waiting to hear back from a few others and this got me thinking, can this good news be used as any sort of leverage to pitch to studios or do they have to seek out the material? How can you make the most out of a festival win when you don’t have many contacts in Hollywood? Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.

**John:** So this sort of fits with the pattern of people who are able to get started while they were not living in Los Angeles, New York, or London is sometimes they had something that did well in a festival and it sort of started getting them some attention. The question is, what attention could Matt really expect off of some wins in these festivals?

**Craig:** Well, not much. Depending on what the festivals are. You know, we did hear from Peter Dodd the other week who said essentially that winning the Nicholl gets you at least a read. Not much else going on. Part of the problem with these festivals is that there are too many. So, essentially, none of them mean much. Everyone, it seems, has been a semi-finalist or finalist in a contest somewhere. And a little bit like that for films, too. I mean, there’s gazillions of these little film festivals. So every independent film will have 14 stamps on it with laurel leaves but you don’t know what any of it even means exactly. Is there leverage to be imparted because you’ve finished well in some festival? Not really, I mean, no. I don’t think so.

**John:** I think you’re wrong, Craig, because I think the leverage is not with like getting a studio to read it or getting a studio to consider you for other projects. I think the leverage is finding a horror filmmaker to actually make that script. So, Matt’s winning these festivals, they’re probably horror specific festivals. He needs to go to them. He needs like to see who the good directors are. This is all based on the assumption that Matt is not trying to direct this himself. But if he’s looking for a director to direct this script or one of his scripts, this is your opportunity.

So find who are those good directors, who are the ones you think can actually do something and just reach out to them because a lot of times people who are making horror films at these tiny budgets, they are looking for other good new things. And if you are that good new thing, having that stamp of approval from winning this festival might actually mean something to the people who were at that festival. So that, to me, is an opportunity. You also may have a chance to network with some, you know, other writers who actually are represented, who have managers, who have some other sort of next step and it’s a chance to sort of figure out what those options are.

So while I don’t think winning these things is going to get to you the agent, it’s not going to get you the reads at the studio, it may get you some of those early steps with meeting with a filmmaker, a meeting with a manager, something to get you going. And that’s what you should really concentrate on is how do you get something made. And it sounds like you may have written something that could get made, so try.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I can’t quibble with that. I’m just — it’s one of these things where you kind of have to look at the progressive scale of odds and ask where you are on that scale of odds. And are there other things you could be doing beyond the festivals or are things that are unrelated to the festivals that could improve your chances. And to that end, I think, figuring out how to get your script into the hands of that one person who actually can make a difference for you. That person may or may not be at that festival. If they are, that’s fantastic, and absolutely, yeah, leverage your win at the festival within the festival. Sure. But it’s unlikely that that’s going to be as valuable, I think, as, say, being in Los Angeles and handing the script to somebody who can read it or, you know, I don’t know. It’s tough. I take a little bit of a dim view on this. There’s so many festivals. Everyone is a semi-finalist. Everyone. Everyone’s born a semi-finalist of 14 screenwriting festivals.

**John:** So here’s — if a year from now, Matt has a film in production, here’s what I think would have happened, is I think he would have found a director who did something really good, who was like looking for his next thing. And someone who had done a teeny tiny thing, who is stepping up to do like a Blumhouse movie and read Matt’s script and said like, “Oh, this is great. I want to do this.” I think that is the point of inflection that he might be at, and so I think it’s worth pursuing that. But our standard blanket advice is probably accurate for Matt, as well as everybody else, is it’s going to be easier to do all of those things if you’re in Los Angeles. It’s going to be easier to do these things if you have other stuff to show rather than this one script that’s gotten some awards at festivals.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. All right. Let’s hear about Adam Tourney has to ask.

Adam Tourney: Hey, John and Craig. I wanted to get your opinion on a re-playing audio or video from earlier in a film to clarify a character’s revelation later on. Examples that spring to mind, are Steve Martin realizing that John Candy is homeless in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, or the final Keyser Soze scene in The Usual Suspects. Can this device be used effectively today or is it a clichéd cheat?

**John:** Craig, what do you think? Effective or cliché?

**Craig:** Possibly but, well, certainly cliché, possible effective. I think that all clichés are one slight twisty thing away from being okay. Sometimes, and we’ll talk about this in our main topic today, sometimes when those moments happen, they weren’t intended to happen. It’s not that someone sat down and said, “We hear these things now.”

What happens is they show the movie to an audience and people say, “We don’t get it.” And then they go, “We have to do the cliché thing so that people get it.” And if you are properly stunned in a reveal, you don’t really mind the cliché because you’re stunned. You’re like, “Wow. This is cool,” you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And because you’re actually learning what happened and it’s a big twisty surprise to you. Where it gets really clammy is when you know what it is, then the cliché is brutal. I mean, there is a certain value to that. It does work. It works when the twist works.

**John:** Yeah. And I think it has to be the twist. It has to be like look at the magic trick I just pulled on you. And like then, it’s like, “Oh, I see what that is. I see how I was misinterpreting that.” That’s great. Because then when you’re seeing that scene again, it’s not just reinforcing that idea, it’s actually reversing that idea. It’s actually showing you like things weren’t what you thought they were. And so the things he cited are, I think, great examples of replaying previous scenes to give you a new sense of the moment that you’re in right now. And I say don’t be afraid of cliché if it’s really effectively serving that moment in your story. And I think you’re going to be — you will have set out to write the kind of movie that wants to have that scene. You’re not going accidentally back into writing that kind of scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right. I mean, the value of a great twist is that it re-contextualizes everything that you’ve seen. So part of the fun is to enjoy that re-contextualization and the only way to do that is to replay something and just be happy in knowing that you’re replaying it but seeing it differently now. Don’t worry so much about being cliché or being not cliché. You know, I think sometimes people get caught up in that. If you have a great twist and that’s the best way to reveal it, it’s just when it’s clunky that it’s clunky. I don’t know how else to put it, it’s kind of a goofy thing to say but that’s how I feel.

**John:** Let’s talk about what that looks like on the page. So if you’re writing those moments in, you want the reader to have a sense of like, really, we’re still in that current moment or I’m just flashing away to those previous things. So sometimes you might repeat these scene headers from where that thing came from. So if it’s otherwise unclear. But sometimes you’re just going to repeat the action lines or the dialogue, it may make sense for your script to put all that stuff in italics just to sort of make it stand out, make it feel like this is a different texture that we’re really into a kind of flashback moment.

You’ll know what feels right for your script. You want to give the reader sense of like, “I’m doing something special here. Pay attention and it’s all going to make sense when I’m through with this section.”

**Craig:** Correct. Yeah. Anything to echo the dreamy quality of the dream that you’re doing, I mean, right, because all of these moments are dreamy. You’re being very internal to the character. This is something that’s inside their mind so give us that sense and then you’ll be fine. You know, there are ways to do it that aren’t quite so down the middle cliché, you know. Things that you can do or you can even describe in terms of the visuals. They almost look like they’re a water painting or they’re de-saturated or they’re in black and white. You just do something but, yeah, you know.

**John:** You will do it. So a genre which I see this in a lot are sort of the Agatha Christie mysteries, which at the very end, like Hercule Poirot, like piecing together what actually happened and we get to see like all these little snippets from previous things like, “Oh, that’s when all the stuff was happening.” Which ties very well into Craig’s marquee topic which is mystery versus confusion. So, Craig, get us started why should we care about mystery?

**Craig:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers we’re trying to do something and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything?

Well, because, oh well, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things. And we get maybe a little distracted by the word mystery because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative. The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?” Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character,” or “Why did she say that,” or “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more because we want to see what’s happening. And so often they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human, it’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious, we insist upon knowing certain things. If you walk down the street and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, you want to — there’s no decision to want to know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right? So, let’s as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of like the crowd outside the store and it’s blacked out windows, if our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating and we would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing.

Which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered, or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient, and sort of frustrated, and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much and that’s the thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished in general because people are too busy staring at boobs and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part.

So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs because then it just — it’s like, I’m confused, I’m distracted. So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction — and I know you’re distracted, I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery, it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story.

And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then, it’s not really mystery, then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows. This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it and I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways, I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking. I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening and I don’t know why they’re happening so now I’m getting really worried and distracted. And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** If I’m watching a David Lynch film and [laughs] suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be confused — this is abstract, okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think I’m not supposed to be confused right now and I am so confused.

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie and that can be a real thing, that can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved. And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form what moments were you confused in a bad way? Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that like pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for like this wasn’t just — this wasn’t intriguing, this was annoying. I didn’t know what was actually happening here.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. What — there is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away. And that answers will be revealed and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Everything single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful. And what you said before about you feel like if I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion. And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery and after you’ve seen one of these movies you recognize like, in the third act, they will confront the mystery and they will — there’ll be little tiny mysteries but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour you’re going to know who the killer is and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long, arc stories of an Alias or a Lost where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling, that you had a sense of like are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important I think to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment. And so very kind of broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, okay, who’s her? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do? Very simple, very easy, and, you know, then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” Did you do it? I did it. And? It was hard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s it? Oh, I have to know. [laughs] What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our pick a card, any card. People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s a flashbulb. It’s not even a — it’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that will never solve for you. Just like what does Scarlett Johansson whisper — or Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter because you will never know and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to and the situations where I see it is, you enter into like two characters having a conversation and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or like how the actors actually changed some words but it makes it seem like they’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, wait, is — are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is? So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery but if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people, we — I mean, when you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right? You are now involved and that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved. There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that I’m personally — I love this version when I see it and every now and then I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at any, you know, at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something and the character lies, and we know they’re lying because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here and I’m curious what that is. Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all, it’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just like look at the lines and you’re like, oh, wait, he says this but on this page with this and the other page, if you don’t somehow single out that like this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap. I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will like forget like oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there, that’s a lie there. And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.

So this is a case where the slightly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores like that she’s a terrific liar. Something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, like, remember, this is not actually the truth here.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s later on when you want to think, okay, maybe somebody has forgotten or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie, are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, so if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, okay, you’re a liar, why? [laughs] I need to know, right? So this is a good little mini mystery.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** You can have — similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object like the briefcase–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** –in Pulp Fiction. Or, you know, someone is like — you got a camera looking — here’s a little mystery at the end of Inglourious Basterds. You have — I mean, it’s not much of mystery because you can pretty much see it coming but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak actually. I think it’s a–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak, looking up at them, looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa and they’re talking about it and we are the perspective so we don’t know what it is but they’re talking about it and then we reveal the answer to the mystery.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is just — listen, it may seem inevitable to you because that’s how you saw the movie, it was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do and it’s the what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information.

So in this idea, someone asks someone a question and they get an answer and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us and that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it, creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” and the person goes, “Oh, yeah.” And the person asking the question says thank you, walks outside and starts crying.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What? Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Why does George — what — who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things could get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment — like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectation. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” Like no you’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not-not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do — we should do and must do everything we can, to create that movie and if that means that we are directing on the page — in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

Does that mean — I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle — no. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen.

So the short-term mystery, so there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?”

Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person which is okay or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are for some reason slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Well, okay, I — what’s — why are they doing that? And obviously they’re going to light it up but why are they going to light it on fire and what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries — I kind of think of those as like middle of the movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on and there are some characters with relationships who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t, they know secret motivations, they know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it. This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward.

It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So these are good little middle of the movie things. The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident,” you know, but—

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yeah. But typically they are slightly more interesting than that and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term hang a lantern on things and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice like I’m doing something here — so yes you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here and I’m going to be doing something with it later on.

Like — you are like — you are marking this for follow up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. Like you’ve done the right job there because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful and that’s a great way of like the mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or you — your main character has a scar and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, hmm, and then maybe somebody else asked “Where did you get that?”

If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar — it won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to be — then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing, if I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the kind of character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? Like they are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie like we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about like a plot mystery and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little, meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water which is in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it but there’s a long-term mystery that — which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that like you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it.

Like, yes they’re doing it to get money but there’s — there clearly is a specific reason and there’s a plan but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time — like much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s like it’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on like what their actual plan is, is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, like practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s take a look at our Three Page Challenge because two of these actually have that sort of mystery versus confusion issue as I read them, so let’s see what you guys think.

So the Three Page Challenge, if you’re new to this, every couple of weeks we take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts that they send in. So these are scripts written by listeners. They’re almost always features, sometimes they’re TV pilots. If you’d like to send in your own, you can visit johnaugust.com/threepages and there’s a whole set of rules for like how you submit your pages.

If you’d like to read along with us, the PDFs of these pages are attached to this episode. So you can go to the show notes at johnaugust.com or just scroll your little player and you’ll be able to click the link and like read along with us as we take a look at these.

So most weeks, you and I read aloud these descriptions, and it’s honestly one of my least favorite things to do because it just feels so boring for us to be just reading these descriptions aloud. So I thought it’d be fun to have somebody else do this for us and so I wanted to turn to a familiar voice — a trusted voice — a voice who is beloved by Americans for many, many seasons now, it is Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor. So he offered to read these descriptions aloud, let’s start with On Tic by Gabrielle Mentjox.

**Jeff Probst:** We open on a door. Crystal, a woman in her 20s, opens the door and exchanges cash for two small tinfoil packages. This repeats a few times until one dissatisfied stoner charges inside the apartment claiming he’s been ripped off. Crystal tries to get him to leave but the stoner isn’t budging.

Crystal’s roommate, Chantal, overhears the chaos. She turns on the stereo and joins Crystal in the hallway. She asks what’s going on. And as they argue back and forth, a dog starts growling in the background. Chantal mentions how Bruce is hungry and doesn’t like strangers.

The stoner bolts. Trouble averted, Crystal and Chantal smoke weed from a homemade bong.

Outside, a crappy Nissan drives on the streets of small town New Zealand. Chantal rummages through the kitchen for food while Crystal messes about on Instagram. A car pulls up. An orthopedic shoes steps onto the pavement and we reached the bottom of page three.

**John:** How cool is that?

**Craig:** Well — I mean this is the best version of Survivor there is, right? I mean, it’s better than people on an island. These are — they’re writing things to survive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you and I may take their torch away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ah, Jeff Probst.

**John:** Jeff Probst. Craig, what did you think of On Tic?

**Craig:** Right. So first all, I’m fascinated by Gabrielle Mentjox because I’m trying to figure out like how do you pronounce Mentjox? It can’t just be Ment-jox. It’s got to be — I don’t know — something else.

One thing that was really interesting was that Gabrielle, I believe, is from New Zealand and her story takes place there. And she includes a little mention of the specific slang on the cover page to describe what a Tinnie is. And a Tinnie is 20 dollars’ worth of marijuana wrapped in aluminum foil, which I actually thought was kind of helpful.

And a good example was somebody going like, “Oh, I don’t really care what the orthodox nonsense is. I need people to know what I need them to know.” So generally speaking, I thought this was pretty good. I mean it was — I saw everything. I really enjoyed the description of Crystal. It hit all of my hair, make-up, wardrobe notes.

So I could see people and the scene moved in an interesting way. I was moving around the space in an interesting way. I was feeling and seeing things. Ultimately my issue with the scene is just that I have seen it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ve just seen this. There is something generally dissatisfying I think about overpowered heroes. And this situation where it’s like, “Well, we’ve got a dog. So beat it.” And, “Oh, God. Okay.” It doesn’t feel very dramatic. It just feels kind of, you know.

**John:** So Craig, here’s a mystery versus a confusion question for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The way I read it is that there is no dog and that she was turning on the stereo and have a recording of a dog but there’s no actual dog and that’s why Gabrielle like singles out that the roommate Chantal goes into the next room and turns on that stereo. I think that was what was actually playing is the recording of the dog. Is that not what you read?

**Craig:** I didn’t know that. I didn’t understand that at all. Because dog — maybe it’s – the problem is — I mean, I suppose that’s possible. But she turns on the stereo. What year is this? Maybe that’s part of the problem, like who has a stereo that they turn on and then there’s — that’s the dog recording on the stereo.

I would have to see — I would have to hear the sound of it right then and there for the reader, at least I think to know, “Oh, okay the sound is coming out of that.” Especially because the dog sound gets louder as they’re talking. So–

**John:** Yeah. So my belief was that Chantal as she was coming into the room, she turned that on and it’s basically they have a plan. They basically have this dog recording that gets louder and louder that they can use to freak out people who are like thinking about breaking in to the house.

So I read these pages with that in my mind and like, “Oh, well, that’s kind of clever. Like these girls are smarter than, you know, your average young drug dealers.” Maybe. Or at least they have a plan. But if you didn’t catch that, and you just thought like was there a dog there somewhere — meh — it’s lost its spark.

**Craig:** Yeah. To be honest with you, now that I’m reading it this way where that’s what’s going on, I’m also a little bit meh about it because it feels frankly like a very thin plan. What it does is it makes their foe, angry stoner, not quite formidable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If now I live in a world where people are easily faked out by stuff like that. And I don’t know. You know, here’s the thing — I liked all of the writing, you know.

**John:** Yeah, so do I.

**Craig:** So I think that the good news is, Gabrielle writes characters well. They were — they were distinct. It moved around. It was visual. It’s really what it is that I think the scene is missing like plus the concept now. You just want to plus that concept.

So if the idea is how can I show that these two women are really good at dealing with problems, even problem they cause, like ripping people-off, I want them to be smarter than this. This just isn’t that smart. So I need more clever, you know?

**John:** Cool. I do want to single out some of her good writing. So, this is on Page three, and this is a description of the residential strait.

“A hypnotic doof doof base blasts from the stereo. We’re in a beat-up Nissan, cruising up a typical street in small-town New Zealand. We pass paint-chipped state houses sitting atop bare quarter-acre sections.” Great, I got a visual there, I got a sense of what this feels like. I like the doof. This felt good, this felt competent. I do think Gabrielle can write. I’m just curious to see what would happen next, and where is this all going? It reminds me a bit of Go, my first movie, in a way that I really like. I love sort of young plucky dealers. It’s sort of my thing.

**Craig:** Young, plucky drug dealers are great, New Zealand is great. By the way, I started watching Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Yeah, Kate & Kate, one of the Kates’ One Cool Thing.

**John:** I do want to single out some things on page one, which needs a re-look. So first paragraph, a “young woman’s face peers out, eyebrows raised. This is CRYSTAL (20s, skinny, eyebrows plucked super thin.” Just repeating eyebrows twice, didn’t feel like the best choice. Like we’re only three lines in and we repeated a body part.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The same thing happens about midway through the page. Angry stoner’s parenthetical says, “Arms folded, staunch,” and then like Crystal stands up, staunched trying to block this guy. Staunch is sort of weird word anyway. So to use it twice in such close proximity, find some different adjectives there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. And even if staunch weren’t a weird word, you kind of have to do put separation between these things. No big deal. There are a lot of arms folded, and standing tall.

So the angry stoner has his arms folded, staunch. And then, Chantal has arms folded standing tall. So there’s quite a bit of that. And I don’t think that’s probably that necessary. There are ways to do these things sometimes, for instance — and sometimes, you I think about how the lines are falling. On the bottom of this first page, the action says, “Chantal strides down the hallway towards Crystal and angry stoner.”

Now the word stoner has spilled over to the second line. Wonderful, we now have the rest of that line to do stuff for free. [Laughs] So Chantal strides down the hallway towards Crystal and angry stoner. She gets big in the doorway, as big as she can in the doorway, you know, stares him down. And then, we can get rid of that parenthetical and just have what seems to be the problem here.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That sort of thing. So yeah. You should be on duplicate patrol as you’re going through. You know, just again, take a look at this dialogue in the middle of page two, and if you’re going to stick with the dog, when they’re talking about the dog, maybe it would be better here if they weren’t so on the nose about their own rouse, or by the way, not rouse if it’s not a rouse. I think Bruce is ready for his walk, or was it his feed. Oh, oh god, the dog is going to eat me. Isn’t it more of a con artist-y thing, if one them was like, what is wrong with the dog? And like — I don’t know. Well —

**John:** Did you feed him?

**Craig:** Exactly. No I didn’t feed him. Did you fed him yesterday? Oh my god, I didn’t feed him yesterday either. Oh, oh, sorry. We got a very hungry, very big dog in there. I’m sorry what were you asking about? You know, like there’s got to be a more — they just got to be smarter I think. If they’re going to be pulling one over on this dude because then I’m more impressed. Because right now, really, instead of being impressed with them, I’m just unimpressed with the angry stoner.

**John:** The last thing I’ll say is if I’m reading this correctly and the dog is just on the stereo, let us know that’s actually the case, because right now there is nothing to indicate that. So I would say, she turns on the stereo, oddly, there’s no music, like you can say like oddly there because it gives us a sense of we’re going to hang back a bit and it’s weird like that there’s no actual music playing, or at some point there’s a cut away to the stereo and we see like the little bars going up and down. That the dog is just on a stereo.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Otherwise, there’s no pay-off to something that, I think, your setup that could be quite clever.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s go back to our favorite host of a reality TV program. Jeff Probst who’s going to talk us through The Beast with 1,000 Faces by Jesse Gouldsbury and Brendan Steere.

**Jeff Probst:** 17-year-old North Stewart is confused why his parent are sending him away to space camp. His mom explains that North needs some time away. His dad says they need a break, too, especially from North‘s 19-year-old sister, Triss. Triss teases North for getting sent to space camp until she finds out, she’s going too. She’s pissed but she knows there’s no way out of it.

After a bus ride, we find North and Triss in a space shuttle. They’re in space, yet it all looks quite ordinary, much like a standard airplane, passengers sleep with their windows down. At the bottom of page three, we arrive at a common room in the dormitory.

**John:** Great. So Craig, this to me had some real confusion issues. Not mystery, but confusion. I didn’t know where I was at as the story ended. I didn’t know if I was in space or on a bus and that’s really a problem on page three.

**Craig:** I got that I was in space. And, well, first, I was on a bus and then I was in space.

**John:** I don’t think you’re in space at the end there, Craig.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** So we’re going to skip to the end here. So let me talk you through – I’ll actually read aloud what happens on page three. So North and sister are being sent away to camp. So then we’re exterior, road — day. North rides along, looking out the window of a school bus. Match cut. Interior, the shuttle — day. North is looking out the window of a space shuttle, in space. He’s sitting near his sister in what looks like a run down, but very commercialized space shuttle. Things look no more extreme than people flying in an airplane. Most people are sleeping, windows are down, etc.

North listens to his headphones, our camera rotates 360 degrees around his face as we hear J-pop beats.

Title card: “The Beast With 1,000 Faces”

We push back into North’s face. Match cut to INT. COMMON ROOM — DAY. The middle point of the ships with four walls, each side with a door. Looks like a dormitory common room designed by that RA who loves Star Trek.

So I read this as the match cut to the shuttle was his sort of fantasy version of like being on the bus, and then we’re in the common room of the ship’s four walls. Then like, this is all like a set basically. This isn’t real. That was my confusion three pages in, partly because I didn’t believe we’re in a world where they could be in space, because the first paragraphs felt so real world grounded.

**Craig:** Okay, you may be right. Now, I read it as he’s going to space and that going to space is a very mundane thing like taking a plane to study abroad in Madrid. And so, now, I would have made a bigger deal out of the reveal of space because — I mean, I think it’s okay to show that the characters themselves don’t give a damn. But we need to make clear like, just throwing on “in space” at the end of a sentence is probably not great also. I don’t like it when people talk about day and night in space, because it is very confusing to everybody. Really. If I start a slug line with INT. THE SHUTTLE – DAY, I think, okay, they’re on a launching pad. They’re going to be launching.

So I think that that’s what going on. I think that the idea here is we live in a time in the future when going to space is no big deal, it’s like going to camp.

**John:** But see, I’ve got no evidence that we are in the future whatsoever at the start. I think that’s my frustration is that if we are truly in space, there was nothing to tip me off to the fact that we could be going into space in the first two pages. Because what we’re given is INT. NORTH’S LIVING ROOM — NIGHT. Close on his face basically. We have his mom and his dad, but we have no information that this could be something other than present day. The most that we have is that, the room around them looks like it was decorated by someone raised in 2005. Okay, I guess that could be a person — I guess, we could be in the future– maybe that’s how they they’re trying to tip me off that like, we are in the future, but there’s nothing else that’s telling me that I’m in the future. So then when I’m suddenly in space, I’m not loving it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you are definitely dealing with confusion there. So mystery is why are these people talking about sending their child into space? And the child is reacting like petulantly as opposed to with shock and fear. Okay, this is going to pay-off certainly. They are in the future and people go into space in the future. What is confusing is when you decide that it would be funny if your future people had retro-style because now it’s just — now, you know what a room that looks like it was designed by people raised in 2005 looks like? It looks like right now. Because we don’t know what the hell that means. It just means now.

**John:** Yeah. So the writers could totally choose to do that, but at some point between leaving that room and getting on the bus, at some point you got to show me something. We’re like, we’re driving by like, you know, in the first Star Trek movie, the first of the new series of Star Trek movies, like the motorcycle goes by this giant like quarry kind of thing where they’re building a spaceship. Like, that tells me like — oh, okay we’re in the future. But nothing here was telling me the future until I’m suddenly in space, and I don’t believe that I’m in space.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also there’s this thing that happens I think where Jesse and Brendan are trying to get this across again, on page two, when North’s sister Triss says, “You listen to classic rock, North. You like that turn-of-the-century crap, you weirdo.” But, you know, classic rock wasn’t turn-of-the-century. It was like ‘60s and ‘70s, so did they mean, turn of the century, the next century? But then, that wouldn’t be — is that what the classic rock is? Because then she says, Wheatus and I don’t know Wheatus. So maybe it’s a hundred but that’s a lot of math you’re asking me to do, and I don’t want to do math. I just want to absorb and engage as I can.

**John:** Don’t make me do math.

**Craig:** Don’t make me — here’s another thing that happens on page two. Again, these are the choices about how to indicate to us what’s going on. So they’re trying, right? It’s just not quite landing. Triss is complaining about the camp, the space camp that they’re being sent to. And by the way, space camp can’t possibly be what people will call space camp in the future. Space camp is what people that don’t have space camp talk about space camp. So she’s going to —

**John:** It’s like a tautology. It’s actually completely true and brilliant, but like you know, space camp is only for people who don’t have space camp.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. Once you have space camp, it has a name, that’s a more interesting name than space camp. Because presumably, there’s more than one space camp. Even they say, there’s more than one space camp. So how could you possibly call it space camp? It’s like going to shopping mall. But she’s complaining about the space camp that they’re sending her to. And North says, she’s kind of right, though. It has the lowest FLERP score out of the orbital camps. Okay, so I get it, we’re in the future now. There’s orbital camps, but —

**John:** Craig, Craig. By the way, Craig is right. I’m reading this now, clearly, we are supposed to be in the future.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re in the future, but FLERP score is not good. Because it’s not funny, but it’s definitely not serious.

**John:** Yeah. It has a joke-oid problem where it kind of feels like a joke, but it’s not actually funny. So therefore, it feels like a joke that didn’t work.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it also has a tone problem and these are — remember, we always say that these are the pages where you’re instructing the audience how to watch your movie. And what you’re telling them here is, this is a silly movie. The reality is silly. It’s so silly that they call space camp “space camp.” And there’s a score called the FLERP score. Nothing matters here.

**John:** So let’s talk about stuff on page one and this runner about things. And so mom says, “Well, we thought it would be fun for you and your sister to have some time away from things. And for us to have some time away from things, too. Mostly your sister.” So from this point forward, things is referring to the sister, but I think we’re going to need to stick in some quotes for a moment there, because otherwise it’s too easy to miss what they’re actually trying to say. So when dad’s line says, “Well, you’re a responsible young man, and when you’re both up there, we’d like you to keep an eye on things.” You have to break that word things out, it could be like with dot dot dot. It could be with some quotes, but you have to indicate that we’re not saying things as a throwaway place holder, it really is meant to refer to the sister who’s sitting right there.

**Craig:** Yes. Part of the struggle that I think you were having and I had, too, in terms of placing this in a sense of time is that this discussion that they’re having is so mundane and weirdly 1950s. That you’re so confused about the time of it all. They are talking like 1950s parents. Weirdly, there are these little subliminal problems that are occurring. His mom and dad (50s — Janeane Garofalo and John C. Reilly). So already the word 50s is in my head, which is a bad thing for a movie that’s set — I got 50s then I’ve got 2005. Also, you keep telling me who these actors are.

Now in general, I’m not going to freak out about this when people say think this person, think that person. But if you’re setting a movie in the future and you’re trying to play a little bit of a confusing mystery game about what year this is with people, this will not help you.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Because when you get to Triss and you say think Anna Kendrick in Pitch Perfect, I’m now thinking it’s 2015, that’s who I’m seeing in my head. Plus she has headphones on. Do they have headphones in the future? I mean we don’t even have headphones now, right?

**John:** Yeah, yeah. Here’s the issues, like the writers are trying to have it both ways. So like you say Janeane Garofalo and John C. Reilly like, oh, okay, those are maybe people you would actually cast in this movie, but you can’t cast Anna Kendrick as 19 years old because she’s not 19 years old. So are you sort of giving us the casting suggestion? Or are you showing us a type? And you kind of can’t do both. You’ve got to make one choice here and like this is not a realistic choice. So like Triss, 19, like the world’s worst Disney princess. Like give us something like that that give us an overall type for her. But I would not like try to give her an actress call out because it’s just not going to make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. So we got some problems here.

**John:** We got some big problems here, but guys, thank you for sending it in.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s go to our final Three Page Challenge this week and hear what Jeff Probst has to say about this untitled script by Mitchell LeBlanc.

**Jeff Probst:** In the vastness of space, we encounter a large derelict starship. The quarters are empty, as are the crew quarters, and the social area. The only sign of life is Atom, a humanoid robot. Atom tinkers with a disassembled computer, ripping out fried parts and using a replicator to produce new ones. He puts it all together and it works. Sad music plays throughout the ship. Atom moves on to the upper quarter, where he cleans the observation deck, then back to the social area where he makes a meal he can’t eat.

Later Atom plays ping-pong by himself, and chess. He paints a perfect copy of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. His battery runs low, time for sleep. He turns off the music, hours pass, then another day begins.

**John:** So Craig, I kind of loved this. I’m hoping that you liked it as much as I did. My biggest concern which I suspect will be everyone’s biggest concern is that I saw the movie WALL-E.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it kind of feels like Mitchell also saw the movie WALL-E. And so that is a reasonable concern that you have a robot who’s just going about the business of trying to live a normal life. And yet, I really enjoyed these three pages. And I was curious to read what was going to happen next. And I liked Mitchell’s overall writing style. It was a very spare kind of thing. It felt kind of like animation, but in a way that I kind of dug. What did you think of these pages?

**Craig:** Listen, I’m with you. If I had not seen WALL-E, I would be dancing a jig right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And listen, it’s not like there isn’t value here, but so much of the value does feel borrowed. I’m struggling to give as much credit as I would here, because it just feels the pace, the moments, the tone, it all feels borrowed. It feels like I’m watching a copy of another thing.

Now, I love how much white space there is, I love it. I love this kind of writing, I love the way that Mitchell uses bold to best effect and puts little dashes in, and onomatopoeia, and italics, and lot and lots of hitting the return key, I love that. I love, love, love. These were a joy – actually, these three pages read so easily and breezily. But, I’ve seen this movie.

**John:** But the thing is we may not have seen this movie because like at the bottom of page three, we’re just setting up the basic world of this character. And so like Sam Rockwell in Moon is sort of like in a WALL-E type of situation. There’s other movies where like, you know, we’re in a spaceship and things are kind of this way. I mean the start of Passengers, I haven’t read the script, but it might feel similar kind of way. So we’re only seeing through page three, so I think my good news for Mitchell is I really want to see pages four through 10 to see if your movie is WALL-E or if it’s actually very, very different. And it could be delightfully different, it could be a romance, it could be something I’m totally not anticipating. And I’m very curious to read those next pages because I really liked what I have read so far.

**Craig:** Well, sure. And I agree with you on that. I mean, look the WALL-E problem isn’t — you’re right, there are a lot of movies about someone alone in isolation, sadly whiling away the time. What set WALL-E apart was that it was a robot. That was the thing, right? So it’s — that’s this. Even if it’s not WALL-E after this, it’s a problem that it’s WALL-E now, pages one through three. Because anyone in the world reading this script is going to go, oh, it’s WALL-E. That’s not what you want, you know, when you’re starting to read a script. You just don’t want that.

**John:** You don’t want that. So if you’re concerned about the WALL-E, which I think you should be aware that it’s going to be a concern, I would look at sort of like removing like the sad music playing. Pick certain threads and like, you know, look at sort of how WALL-E sets things up and like just go a different direction. And so like take out that sad music, take out a little of the art, take out a little of something. Make us curious about this character more than just sort of like marveling at this person’s beautiful loneliness.

**Craig:** Yeah. Precisely. It just felt so, so WALL-E. I will say this is a great example of what I think of as good mystery, that we’ll call is a good short term mystery.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The vastness of space –first of all, in the black, the vastness of space, not space — day. So thank you. In the black, the vastness of space and then clink. Then interior, bios II, echoing through the large derelict starship, which by the way is clever in itself. You interior something, what the hell is that for the reader. And then, you answer, large derelict starship. The corridor is empty. Clank. Nobody in the crew quarters. Clink. Or in the medical bay. Clink.

I know what you’re doing here, I can see the movie, I see these big like Kubrick-style wide shots of just empty rooms with a little electrical hum. But then, there’s this noise, what is that noise? Who’s doing the noise? And then we find Atom. It even sounds like – like Atom, Eva, WALL-E, clank. A humanoid robot tinkers. His casing resembles a white spacesuit. Cute. A digital panel for a face, but it’s powered off. I wasn’t quite able to see what that meant, a digital panel for a face.

**John:** I think it basically has an iPad for a face, but there’s not – it’s just a black glass.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. WALL-E. WALL-E

**John:** WALL-E. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if I have any of like word objections, it’s literally the second line of clink. The minute I hear clink — what do you think of a –what clinks?

**Craig:** Ice cubes.

**John:** Glasses, ice cubes, it’s all about like a drink. And so if it started with a clank rather than a clink, I know this seems like so petty and minor, but if it went clank, clink, like starting with a clink makes me think like someone is toasting with Champagne. And so it pulled me out of the next couple of lines, because I thought like, oh, wait, is it glass? No, it’s something else. So I know that’s so tiny and unimportant, but literally starting with a clank would have helped me out here a little bit on page one.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I like a nice clunk.

**John:** Yeah. Clunks are good too. The other places where I wanted a little bit more — and so all of this is so spare on the page. If you are not reading this, you know, because you’re driving your car, it’s worth pulling this up as a PDF because almost everything we’re seeing here are single lines. On page two, the daily routine. Atom, gardens in the oxygen garden, cleans glass in the observation deck, analyzes readouts on the bridge. These were the only places where I felt like I was being shortchanged a little bit. What does an oxygen garden look like? Throw us a line about the oxygen garden, throw us a line about the observation deck, throw us a line about the bridge.

We need to have a little bit more painting of our world here because at this point you’re just like, you know, what? Are we supposed to look at the storyboards? Like, gives us a little bit better sense like what is specific about your ship versus the sort of Kubrick ship that I’m picturing in my head.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. Also, if you can avoid the — on top of page three, passing an old photo of Atom with the crew. Where are they? If you can avoid the photo, if there’s another way, even if it’s just a wall that shows captain, dadada, like you know, employee of the month kind of wall, something. There’s something about the old photo that is very cliché. So if there’s another way around it.

**John:** I would love to see like a burnt section of the wall like even if he just goes pass that. Like something to say like, oh, something really terrible happened here. I’m not trying to write his story for him, but like something that indicates like, oh, there’s something really bad that we could go to.

**Craig:** Atom, drifts through a blood soaked room.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Finds his way to a ping-pong table. Very good.

**John:** I really hope — I hope Atom killed everybody on the ship. That’s my secret hope.

**Craig:** Well, listen. Clink.

**John:** Then it’s not WALL-E.

**Craig:** Clink.

**John:** I heard the first cut of WALL-E was much darker, a lot murder.

**Craig:** There’s just blood everywhere.

**John:** All right. So those are our Three Page Challenges for this week. Thank you to all the writers who wrote in. And thank you for the people who have written in with samples that we have not gotten to on the air. You’re all fantastic. Godwin does read all of them, so he picked these three, but he might pick yours next time through. Extra special thanks to Jeff Probst for reading aloud these descriptions. That was so much fun. And again, if you have your own Three Page Challenge that you want to send in, it’s johnaugust.com/three page. And if you want to read what we just talked about, those are in the show notes for this next week.

It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing this week is a book that I’ve been reading for forever. And I kind of put it down, I pick it up, and I’m like, oh, I could still keep reading this book. It is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s already a bestseller, you know, Obama recommended it. And people compared it a lot to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Did you read that, Craig?

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** Yes. Did you like it?

**Craig:** Nope. [laughs]

**John:** Everyone likes it except Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I found it weirdly — I didn’t like it. I won’t even go into why. I was unimpressed with its lack of self-critique.

**John:** I suspect you would like parts of this book and disagree with parts of this book. But the parts I liked so much about it were really getting into the origins of humankind. So a hundred thousand years ago, there are a lot of competing strains of humans running around the world. So like we know about the Neanderthals but there are other kind of humans that could have come to the foreground and they didn’t. And so he’s really looking at sort of why our little branch of this big tree became so dominant. And it wasn’t just our hands and our brains and our language. But he makes a compelling case that it’s our ability to hold metaphor is a crucial aspect to sort of why we were able to organize into such large societies.

So if you have a small group, a tribe, like it can only get to a certain size because there could be a leader, and if that leader is not there, it sort of all falls apart. But with our ability to have metaphors, we can think of a king who we’ve never met. And that we can be in service to a person we’ve never ever seen before. We can have these bigger structures.

And he makes the case that our ability to have metaphor is something really unique of all animals, and that’s probably the reason why we’re able to do so many things we’ve done in such a very short period of time. So as I was reading it, I kept thinking about sort of the acceleration of culture and how as screenwriters and storytellers, we are so responsible for pushing things forward and pushing things faster, especially in our science fiction. We keep describing these things that don’t quite exist and I think because we describe them, we sort of pressure them into existence even faster. So I really dug that section of it. So if you have it on your Kindle and you’ve not read it yet, I would say, open it up and take a look at it. So Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

**Craig:** Excellent. Sounds good. I’ll check it out.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Jeff Probst.

**John:** Jeff Probst, all right.

**Craig:** Jeff Probst. [laughs]

**John:** Are you watching the new season? I just started last night. So he sent me like a code for like an all access thing, but we already bought the season on iTunes, so we’re watching it here in Paris.

**Craig:** No, but I believe my wife — I don’t watch TV, John. I think we’ve established that. [laughs]

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

**Craig:** Or listen to podcasts. [laughs]

**John:** This season is Millennials vs. Gen X. And I will say that after the first episode, I found it strange that like it’s as if Gen X is like the greatest generation. Like it’s as if like we fought a war or something. Like we’re the ones who work hard and do all that stuff. It’s like, no, we were kind of lazy and entitled in our own time, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just compared to Millennials, we’re the greatest generation. [laughs]

**John:** Ahhh.

**Craig:** Millennials.

**John:** Our show is produced and edited by two Millennials, Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And our outro this week comes from Matthew Chilelli, our editor.

If you have an idea for an outro — not an idea for an outro — if you have actual music as an outro, you can send it in to ask@johnaugust.com. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. I’m on Instagram, also @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this and all episodes at johnaugust.com, just search for the episode title. It’s also where you’ll find our transcripts. I think we are going to get the transcripts back on schedule in a week or two. So if they’re not there, hold tight, they will be coming. You can find all the back episodes on scriptnotes.net, which is $2 a month for all the back episodes and all the special episodes, and the dirty episodes, everything we’ve ever done is basically at scriptnotes.net. You will find it there. There’s also a USB drive, which are now back in stock. There’s a link in the show notes, but it’s just store.johnaugust.com. And we’ll send you a USB drive that has all that stuff on it as well.

And Craig, I think that’s our show.

**Craig:** Fantastic show.

**John:** Fantastic. Craig, may your torch not be extinguished in the spirit of Jeff Probst.

**Craig:** I know what that means. [laughs]

**John:** Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Three Pages by [Gabrielle Mentjox](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/OnTick.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Jesse Gouldsbury & Brendan Steere](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BeastWith1000Faces.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Mitchell LeBlanc](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/UntitledLeBlanc.pdf)
* Send us your [Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind](http://amzn.to/2d3iavK)
* [Jeff Probst](http://www.jeffprobst.com/)
* [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)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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_269.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/dig-two-graves).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 267 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today is going to be a very good episode, because Craig you know how sometimes it feels like we’re crushing people’s dreams and hopes?

**Craig:** I know. It’s so much fun.

**John:** I know. But today is all about possibilities. Today is about saying yes. Are you ready to say yes?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, we’re going to be looking at four stories in the news and asking How Would this be a Movie. We’ll also be answering two listener questions about structure and adverbs, but first we got some answers from listeners.

Last week we asked you guys if any of you had managed to build a writing career while living outside of Los Angeles, New York, or London. And quite a few of you responded.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so it was good.

**Craig:** It’s encouraging, actually. Perhaps these are the outliers, but then again as I like to say, we’re all outliers if we’re actually working as writers, right?

**John:** Exactly. On last week’s episode you said, you know, you don’t want to have a business plan where your plan is to be the exception to the rule. And we couldn’t think of a lot of writers who had started outside of Los Angeles. Who had like really gotten their careers going while they weren’t living in Los Angeles, or New York, or London.

Although the minute we wrapped the episode I thought back Ryan Knighton, who actually came in and met with us, and we had a whole episode about building a career while you’re not living in Los Angeles. He is a Vancouver writer. So, there certainly are cases where people have done that, and they do feel exceptional, but now we have I think four more people who have written in to say like how they got started outside of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. Ryan Knighton is from Vancouver. Diablo Cody, who we mentioned in that episode, is I want to say Pacific North-westerner. Yeah? Is that right?

**John:** That sounds right. Sounds right.

**Craig:** So, at least they’re in the time zone, right. But here we have some people writing in who are not at all in our time zone.

**John:** Absolutely. So, let’s start with Angela Harvey from Atlanta. She wrote in and let’s hear what she had to say.

Angela Harvey: I heard you guys this week asking about people who became screenwriters from cities other than New York, London, or LA. And I got staffed as a TV writer out of Atlanta, so I thought I’d give you guys my story.

I was assisting a film producer in Atlanta and he ended up becoming the UPM on Season One of MTV’s Teen Wolf. So working the long hours on set in Atlanta, I got to know the showrunner pretty well. And my boss knew I wanted to be a writer, so he told the showrunner and slipped him a sample of my work. Then during Season Two, I came out to LA to be the writer’s assistant. And then later that year, the network wanted to do this online game where fans could log in and chat with the show characters. And that was a lot of non-union work, and none of the show writers wanted to take it on, so I did.

I spend my hiatus cranking out about 30 pages a week, mostly dialogue, but still was a lot of pages. Then, starting the next season, Season Three, I got staffed staff writer on that show. And now we’re writing 6V, which is going to be Teen Wolf’s last season. Now I’m co-producer level.

I got to LA in 2012 to start writing and signed with my agent and manager here about a year after that. And that’s my story. I think it was a perfect storm of being in the right place at the right time and working with the right people. And then also just working my ass off. And it was a long shot by all measures, but it happened for me in Atlanta. Thanks guys. Bye.

**John:** Well, congratulations, Angela. I am glad you are staffed as a writer and that you got started, but when I listened to her story I heard so many things that sounded so familiar to me. Which was that she was able to get a writer’s assistant job, and then move up to a staff writer. That she sort of made that one contact and sort of impressed the hell of them with how hard she worked in a slightly different job. And they said like you seem great, I’ll happily read something that you wrote.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s an interesting thing that she’s from Atlanta, because I suppose at this point we could almost put Atlanta in that boat with Vancouver for instance, where there’s a ton of production, because Georgia is one of the states that offers a top-notch tax rebate for film production. Film and television production. I think it’s pretty much the best deal in the Union at this point. Although, I know that some Georgians don’t like to consider themselves part of the Union. But, tough. North won the war.

Anyway, there is a ton of production in Georgia. And a lot of people down there are working quite regularly. Frankly, more regularly than below the line folks here in Los Angeles. So, that’s not surprising to me. And I agree with you that this story is often the same. People like someone. They like their work ethic. They like their attitude. They just like them. And they start to think, okay, well, what is it that you want to do? How can we make more out of you? Instead of you twisting their arm, they start pulling you because, frankly, good help is hard to find, as they say.

**John:** So, a couple months ago I interviewed Drew Goddard for the Writers Guild. And so you can find the bonus episode in the bonus feed. And talked about how he got started. And it was very much the same story as Angela. He was living in New Mexico. There was a production in New Mexico for like a TV movie. He got on the TV movie to just be a runner, a PA. And he just worked his ass off and impressed the people enough that they remembered him and they were able to get him more work down in the future.

So, his path was a lot longer than Angela’s in terms of getting paid to write, but it was really the same path.

And what Angela describes here could have easily happened in Los Angeles. She could have come out here, been a PA on a TV show or a movie, and just worked really hard. And someone said like, “Oh, I think you’re probably a smart, talented person. Yes, I’ll read your script.” And that could have been her first start.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the benefit of a place like Atlanta is that it is a smaller pond, so there are fewer people to choose from. So, there’s a larger chance that you’re going to stand out. I mean, working for a line producer, you know, people may not know that a line producer isn’t really a creative producer, per se. A line producer is more of the physical production manager. They’re the person that’s handling budget, scheduling, payments. So, it’s not necessarily the way in for creative work, but what line producers can do is recognize that someone is creative and valuable and like the case here with Angela, help promote them.

So, excellent job, Angela. We’re glad to have you from Atlanta. We win. We take from Atlanta, yet again. Victory.

**John:** Yeah. So while Angela was happy to sort of leave Atlanta and come to Los Angeles where she wanted to work, our next caller did not do that. So this is Kirby Atkins. Right now he’s living in New Zealand. But this is what he had to say.

Kirby Atkins: Hi guys. I’ve had a strange screenwriting career and I’ve never lived in Los Angeles. I began as an animator at Lyca and moved on to a studio in Dallas. I directed the Jimmy Neutron show for Nickelodeon for a while. And during this time I sold a few specs to 20th Century Fox and Miramax, back when specs were still selling in the early 2000s.

After that, I had a pretty good career living in small town in Tennessee, in a house I bought for about $130,000. And writing. And I actually pulled that off for a few years. I even sold a thing to Robert De Niro’s production company. I did have to travel every now and then for meetings, but it was no big deal.

That career did run out after a bit, as the spec market dried up. And now I’m directing something I wrote, an animated feature with the Weinsteins being produced in New Zealand. So, we did sell the house in that little town in Tennessee and now we’re currently living in New Zealand making this movie.

But, I have never lived in Los Angeles. But I love the show. And thanks for getting in contact with me. Bye-bye.

**John:** Great. So that’s Kirby’s situation. Kirby is now shooting a movie in New Zealand. It feels like he has a specialty. Like he’s in the animation world, and a lot of animation is done outside of Los Angeles, New York, or London. There are places that specialize in doing a certain kind of animation, like Lyca, and that’s where he got started. And it seems like he’s not had to come to Los Angeles to do the stuff that he’s doing.

**Craig:** Well, it is true that there’s a ton of animation production overseas in Eastern Europe and in India and in China. And in Korea. But, when it comes to the writing of English language animation, that’s actually not that common overseas. It typically does start here in the United States. The big animation companies are here. Or sometimes a production company here in the United States will develop a screenplay and then go overseas to have it produced in France, or Canada, or India, or China.

But, this is interesting. I mean, oh, he’s working with the Weinsteins, so that’s cool. [laughs] good luck there in New Zealand.

**John:** Yeah, so Kirby’s start with Lyca reminds me of people who start at Pixar. And there are people who just start working as a tech at Pixar. They start working in a very specific area within Pixar and sometimes they have a good enough story sense that they are elevated to being writers or to being on the creative team. So that’s certainly a place you could start. But, you’re already at Pixar, so it’s not quite a fair comparison as starting from nothing. You’re starting at Pixar which is a very high place to begin.

We also got a letter from Jamie Nash in Maryland. He writes, “I’m a fulltime WGA APA-repped screenwriter who lives in Maryland and has never lived in LA. My credits aren’t exactly August/Mazin level, but I’ve been produced and able to make a living since 2008. I made my first dollars around 2005. I currently have a film about to be greenlit by Blumhouse and do a lot of work for Nickelodeon.”

So, here’s a guy who’s gotten some movies made. He’s working. He lives in Maryland. What we haven’t heard from Jamie is how often he’s coming to Los Angeles, how important are those in-person meetings. My hunch is he’s been out here a bunch to do that specific kind of work.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is rare. This is very specifically the rare circumstance. So you had Angela who was somewhere else and moved here. You have Kirby who is working in animation, which is scattered across the world. But this is traditional screenwriting. And this is rare.

And I’m thrilled that he’s making a living. And been doing so for quite some time now. Eight years at it, which is – for us in screenwriting years, that’s like 100 years. So, that’s terrific. And Blumhouse is a real company. They do big horror movies. Well, they’re small horror movies, but they make lots of money.

**John:** Very profitable horror movies.

**Craig:** Incredibly profitable. And he says that he does a bit of work for Nickelodeon, which is obviously a legitimate channel. Now, with Nickelodeon, that’s kind of a curious one, because it’s all television, and Nickelodeon jobs I think are exclusively episodic television gigs. So, I’m kind of curious how that works. And I’m also curious why he’s still there.

**John:** Yeah. We want more information from Jamie.

**Craig:** He doesn’t say. Yeah. I mean, it may be that Jamie has a family and they don’t want to leave, and he doesn’t want to leave, and I get that. I can’t help but feel that if you are working steadily for eight years, you could be working more steadily here. Just a gut feeling.

**John:** That may be true. Why don’t you read this next one? This is from Chris Sparling who now lives in Rhode Island.

**Craig:** Chris Sparling. That’s from Rhode Island. So, Chris Sparling writes, “Though I did live in Los Angeles for two years, it was way back while I was making a go as an actor. I had left college to do so, and ended up moving back to my home state of Rhode Island to finish school. It was also around this time that I started focusing more on writing than acting.

“Long story short, I stayed in Rhode Island, continued writing scripts, made a few no-budget projects, and then years later I finally found success with the script I wrote for Buried. Now, about eight years later, maintaining a career outside of LA has proven to be far easier than breaking in, thankfully. But it’s admittedly not without its drawbacks. For one, many of my pitches are done by phone or Skype, which makes for a lesser experience than physically being in the room.

“Secondly, there are very few if any people here who do what I do for a living, or work in the film/TV industry in any capacity for that matter, so I don’t have that watercooler coworker experience that LA-based writers and filmmakers have. The latter might seem somewhat trivial, but believe me when I say it does matter.”

**John:** Great. So, here’s Chris. He’s working pretty steadily. He’s living on the East Coast, so it’s definitely possible. I loved Buried. I thought it was a great movie. And he has a new movie that’s out right now called The Sea of Trees with Gus Van Sant, so this is a guy who is maintaining a career.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** It feels that he’s honest about the challenges that it presents. He’s having to come out to do some stuff. He’s having to do Skype things. I’ve been on panels with him, so he is coming out here sometimes to do that kind of panel stuff, or maybe it was coincidental to when he’s out here. But that’s also part of the job of being a screenwriter is just being there in person sometimes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, so here’s a very legitimate screenwriter, not working in television, which I think is a help, obviously, because you and I are primarily feature writers. We may live in LA – well, you’re in France now – but normally we’re both living in LA. But 90% of the time we’re living in LA we’re alone. We could be anywhere. We could be on the moon, right.

Television, not so simple. So, Chris, at least the angle that Chris is taking on – and has taken so far with great success in the movie business allows him to be on his own in Rhode Island. But, I really took notice of his point and felt for him when he talked about that lack of the watercooler coworker experience. The funny thing is, years ago when you and I were starting out, even if we were all in the same town, there still wasn’t that much of coworker/watercooler experience. Because, again, we would just go back to our corners and write as feature writers.

But, as the Internet came about, we became far more connected as a group. And I’m happy to say I have dozens of friends who do the job that you and I do. And it matters. It does matter. It matters to be able to show them work and to ask them for advice. And to just go and have a drink with them. Or play Dungeons & Dragons. And feel like you are part of a community, even though you do spend most of your time alone. So, I feel for him. And open invitation to Chris Sparling, whenever he’s in from Rhode Island – Providence, or wherever – to come hang with us. Have a glass of wine and chill out.

**John:** And, Craig, I think you deserve some credit for how many screenwriters I know and how many screenwriters other screenwriters know, because you’ve been very good at sort of connecting us together. I had my site, you had your site, but we also just sort of got together a lot more. And I remember during the strike, the 2008 strike, that was the first time I really put faces with names for a lot of these people.

Like the strike overall I thought was a pretty big boondoggle, but one of the things I really got out of it was the chance to meet a bunch of writers. Like Jane Espenson, who I saw her name, I saw her on Twitter, but I never actually met her. Then you meet her and like, well, she’s delightful. And every day out on the picket lines I was meeting all these people and really getting a chance to connect with them. So when I would see them later on, or I’d see them at the grocery story, or I’d see them on panels, I really knew who they were.

The other thing which has been so helpful for me was the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab, is that as an adviser there I’m getting to meet some of these other really great writers. And a chance to talk with them about the actual craft. And that’s what Chris is missing right now in Rhode Island.

**Craig:** Rhode Island.

**John:** All right. Let’s do one from not the US. This is Pete Bridges who wrote in from Brisbane, Australia. And here’s what he had to say.

Pete Bridges: I wanted to let you know that it is possible to work for Hollywood without living in Hollywood. Late last year, I optioned my first spec script to Broken Road Productions which landed me a great manager at Madhouse and two great agents at Verve, as well as a spot on the 2015 Black List with a video introduction by the great John August himself. And this past July we have also just sold and set up another spec at DreamWorks, so so far it hasn’t impacted job opportunities and I get sent a lot of materials and invitations to pitch on different projects.

To make it all work, I fly over to LA every few months to do a week of meetings and the in-between periods are all handled over email and phone. I do the occasional general meeting over the phone if it’s important, but most people seem happy to wait until I’m in town to sit down and talk properly.

If I’m pitching on an assignment, I will usually submit my take by email and then we setup a call and discuss it later. The time difference is the biggest hassle and I sometimes have to set an alarm for 3AM to take a call. But mostly the assistants are pretty great about lining up a time that suits everybody.

Ultimately, I’m looking to move my family to LA as soon as possible, but it is a lot more difficult for us than loading up a truck and driving across a few states to California. My advice for others in my situation: you do not need to live in LA to break into the business, but you need to work much harder to do it and at least have the willingness to move there once you do.

If you’re going to cold query, don’t mention where you live. Setup your email program to send out your queries during LA business hours. Let you work stand on its own until they like it and then break the bad news to them. Be prepared to fly to LA every two or three months to do general meetings and build up your relationships. Calls and emails are great, but nothing beats sitting down with the people who may be looking to hire you on something. In between trips, always be generating spec material that your reps can send out to keep your name and work in people’s minds when you’re not there.

And if you can move to LA, move to LA. Until then, be prepared to work much harder, sleep way less, and travel further than everyone else.

**John:** Great. So, here’s a situation where he is thinking like he’s happy to be working, but he’s also thinking I need to move to Los Angeles. That’s what his next step is for him.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s no doubt. Look, it’s hard to fly from Australia to Los Angeles and vice versa. Having done a similar flight from LA to Bangkok a couple of times, four times, it’s no good. It’s no good. It’s not something you want to do frequently. He’s doing this every three or four months. Three to four times a year. Not only do you have the stress and expense of flying, and all the jetlag and the rest of it, but then you’ve got to do this thing where you jam everything in. And so everything is high stakes.

It’s just a mess. And I love that he was able to get started from Australia, which does have its own very significant film and television base. But, yeah, I mean, look, he sold a spec recently to Amblin. He’s gotten a spot on the Black List. He – it’s time. It’s time.

**John:** Yeah. It’s time.

**Craig:** Listen, here’s the thing. Pete, the hard words, you know, when I listened to what you’re saying, the hard words are relocate my family. And I think we all get how difficult that is. You and I are friends with Chris Miller and Phil Lord. And Chris has a wife and kids and Phil and Chris are off in England now making the Han Solo movie. And that’s a relocate, you know, just like you’ve done it. And I’m sure you can say as well as anybody it’s tough to relocate your family.

**John:** One way to think about it though is what if you got picked to be a NASA astronaut? Well, you’d move to Florida and you’d just do that. And that would be like of course you would do that. And I think if you have the opportunity to pursue screenwriting, and that’s your ambition, and you have the chance to move to Los Angeles, there’s probably good reasons to do that.

And it’s sort of the career you sign on for. So I can see why a lot of people would want to do it. But I can also see why it’s challenging to be thinking about that at the very start of your career.

On Twitter this last week, a couple people wrote in sort of challenging us on what do you really mean by establish a writing career. Do you mean getting your first sale? Do you mean working continuously? What do we mean?

And I think you and I both came to the point of like being able to make a living as screenwriter or television writer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Previous episodes we’ve talked about the myth of breaking in, as if there’s this giant wall and once you scale over the wall, then you’re inside the inner circle. That’s not really true. It’s the ability to work continuously is sort of the goal of a screenwriting career. And that’s a much more challenging thing to do outside of Los Angeles than inside Los Angeles. And I think the people who wrote in so far have really said that to be true. That there’s additional challenges that you wouldn’t think of when you’re trying to get all this happening while you’re not living in town.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a rough one. I mean, part of being a steadily working writer is not only being able to support yourself, or the people that rely on you, but having a reasonable expectation that you will be able to continue to do so for at least quite some time. And I love your NASA analogy in the sense that the odds are similar, right, of becoming an astronaut or becoming a screenwriter.

The big difference I suppose, other than the fact that astronauts are cooler and go into space, is that it’s rare for an astronaut to be accepted into the astronaut program, move to Florida, go through the training, and then have someone say, “Oh, you know what? Yeah, we’re actually not going to space. But thank you.” Which happens all the time in writing.

**John:** Yeah. We decided not to build that rocket, which is basically a screenwriter’s career.

**Craig:** Oh, sorry. You know what? We went with a more experienced astronaut this time. Yeah. Sorry.

**John:** So, if you are a listener to this program and you have your own story of how you got your career started, and are hopefully maintaining a career in writing film or television outside of Los Angeles, keep writing in. So, keep writing in to ask@johnaugust.com. And if there’s some interesting stories to share, I’ll just post them on johnaugust.com. So, we can see your text there and we won’t have everyone read aloud. But thank you everyone who wrote in. And thank you for continuing to write in and telling us how you are doing it.

So, let’s get to some questions. People can ask us stuff. And so we have two questions today. Both of them have audio. The first one is from Nicholas Salazar who wrote in with a question about adverbs. Let’s take a listen.

Nicholas Salazar: In the last episode, Episode 265, Craig used, “Oddly, John doesn’t react,” in giving an example of an action line. It’s been drilled into my head by both English professors and screenwriting professors that adverbs are lazy writing and the work of the devil and must be eliminated from anything I write. How do you guys feel about adverbs? Thanks?

**John:** Craig, how do you feel about adverbs?

**Craig:** Well, you might think that I would rear up in high dungeon and extreme umbrage at this, but I don’t. Look, it’s unfortunate that some pedants take this too far and say things like, “Adverbs are lazy writing and the work of the devil and must be eliminated from anything you write.” That is not true. However, adverbs should be used with restraint. So, in a case like, “Oddly, John doesn’t react,” I’m okay with that. I like a nice introductory adverbial clause. That’s fine.

It’s when you start throwing them in junkily, when they could easily be removed. If I remove the word oddly from that sentence, it’s no good. It doesn’t work. The whole point is that it’s odd that you’re not reacting. But, yeah, it’s not a bad idea to go on adverb patrol, particularly L-Y adverbs. Because generally speaking they are a little junky.

**John:** Yeah. I’m on your side here. I think the reason why professors and screenwriting teachers tell you to avoid adverbs is that they’ve seen so many bad uses of adverbs. The high school English teacher probably read a bunch of essays where it was just jam-packed with adverbs to sort of pad it out. Or, adverbs are used as a lazy way of modifying an adjective around it, rather than just actually picking a better adjective. So, you know, “He felt very bad.” Like you know, there’s so many more specific choices you could have instead of just modifying bad with a very.

So, I get where it’s coming from, but I think a blanket prohibition on adverbs is really taking it too far. If you’re using an adverb, I would say take a look at it and see if this is really the best choice of how I should be expressing this idea, how I should be emphasizing this idea. And see if you can find a better one. But sometimes, I think in the case of “Oddly, John doesn’t react,” that’s just the right way to do it. And anymore words you try to throw at that are not going to be helpful to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s a really easy test, too, to just say, okay, if I take the adverb out, does this still work? The typical junky adverb use you’ll see is someone saying, “Jim ran quickly to the bus stop. Panting heavily, he got on the bus.” We don’t need quickly and we don’t need heavily. “He ran to the bus stop. Panting, he got on the bus.” That tells us everything.

So, a lot of times it’s just a repetitive or redundant sense of things. And especially when you have L-Ys directly modifying action verbs, like right next them. That’s where it feels sort of middle school. You know? I don’t how else to put it.

Of course, the other problem with these people is that they’ll say things like, “Don’t use adverbs,” but there are all sorts of words that we don’t know are adverbs.

**John:** Completely.

**Craig:** You know. Like how. So I don’t know if–

**John:** Or, like the well in well done. So many things are sort of invisible. We only think of the L-Y adverbs and there are so many more that are important.

**Craig:** Yeah. So the blanket prohibition on adverbs completely does not work. I mean, journalism would stop. But, yeah, I get it, Nicholas. Don’t go crazy with this. But, yeah, reasonable concern.

**John:** Great. Our last question is from Daniel Lewis who is writing in about structure. Let’s take a listen.

Daniel Lewis: Hi guys. I really love Craig’s explanation of screenwriting guru books. I think it’s in the vein of these are demolition experts telling you how to build a house. But I can never seem to shake the tendency of following prescribed beats when mapping out a story. For instance, X happens on page 20. Y happens on page 45, etc.

In the beginning of a screenplay and eventual movie, how much time do I have to grab the audience’s attention? The knock on the door beat that supposedly happens around page five, how accurate is that benchmark?

If my writing is strong and engaging, can I push it until page 10 or 15 for the first sign of a big plot catalyst? I assume the answer is yes, but wanted to get your opinions on audience attention span in general. Thanks.

**John:** So, Craig, I think I’ve heard this term “knock on the door,” but it feels so screenwriter bookie to me.

**Craig:** I know. And, look, it’s not like these things are wrong, right? It’s not like heroes aren’t called to action. It’s not like there aren’t knocks on the door occasionally. They are using the most reductive forms of these things. And I think what Daniel is getting at is the issue underneath them, which is a great thing, by the way, Daniel. I mean, you’re asking the right question, which isn’t should I be doing these paint-by-numbers things, rather why is everyone saying that? Okay, if they’re demolition experts, at least they’ve noticed that this is how buildings were built why they were building them up. Why is that way? And how much time do I have to grab the audience’s attention?

And my response to you, Daniel, is I don’t know. Because I think you never have any time to grab the audience’s attention. You should be always grabbing their attention. They will begin to squirm at some point if they feel like things aren’t going anywhere, but along the way until that thing happens, whatever that thing is, you should be engaging them and interesting them.

I don’t know when the door knock comes in The Godfather in terms of elapsed time, but I doubt it’s five minutes in. I know that movie pretty well. That’s a long wedding.

**John:** So, I would say my frustration sometimes about this like, oh, we have to get stuff started faster is it’s absolutely true that you want to get the audience engaged. The audience needs to be leaning forward, really looking forward to seeing what’s happening next. You need to get them like hooked on sort of what the world of your movie is. But that’s not necessarily the same thing as like starting all the engines of your plot.

And so often I’ll see in the development process there’s this pressure to like, “Oh, we got to get the story started faster,” by people who know where the story is going. They’re saying like, oh, well let’s get rid of this first stuff and get the actual A-plot going faster. And that’s often a mistake.

The most crucial thing is that we are onboard with your characters and the world that they’re in. And so if they don’t know the specific thing about the actual A-plot yet, that can be fine. So, going to your Godfather, you know, the actual A-plot of that story may not be kicking in right at the very start, but we’re completely fascinated and intrigued by all of the world and the characters we’re meeting in those first 10 minutes. And that’s what’s really crucial.

We know the kind of movie that we’re getting in that first 10 minutes, even if we don’t know the specific plot that we’re going to be seeing.

**Craig:** For sure. That is the joy of a movie that is operating on its own terms, with confidence. And if you don’t like it, and it’s boring to you, beat it. But The Godfather, the door knocking is Sollozzo showing up to ask about getting the Corleone family to help him sell drugs. That doesn’t happen until after the whole wedding sequence and after the bit where what’s his face, Tom, has to go out to Los Angeles to meet with Waltz and try and get Johnny Fontaine the movie, and the horse head. All of that stuff happens before the “door knocks.”

So, I’m with you. Look, I have said this so many times and it doesn’t matter, because it’s not changing anything. But I’ll keep saying it. They’ve got it – they meaning the people that make you speed up in the beginning – they’ve got it totally backwards.

When I go to see a movie, and I believe most people are like this, we are open and engaged and full of faith in the start. Okay, I’m going to go on a ride with you. I’m here, hoping it’s good. So I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt for a while. I’m with you now. I’m patient. It’s the beginning.

Where I think things tend to go on and on, and I wish they would speed up, is in the end. When the modern studio method often is speed up in the beginning, get it going so we barely know who people are, and then drag the third out to be 14 set pieces all piled on top of each other. It’s so boring.

So, maybe I’m the wrong person to ask this, but I think take your time, don’t worry about hitting some number. If you’re in it, and you’re engaged, and you’re fascinated, some movies have legitimate prologues to them. They do. And it’s totally fine. Totally.

**John:** I agree. Cool. All right, let’s get to our main feature for today, which is How Would this be a Movie. So this is the segment which we were supposed to do last week, but we ran out of time. So, we’ve had more time to look at these four stories that were in the news. All of these were submitted by listeners. And so I think actually one of them is by Craig, but Craig sometimes listens to the podcast.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** Let’s start out with Florence Nightingale and the Woman in Disguise. So this is the true story of Dr. James Barry, pioneering Army doctor who made many crucial reforms. Told off Florence Nightingale. Performed the first successful Cesarean Section. And was secretly a woman in disguise.

**Craig:** Great. So great.

**John:** Craig, what kind of movie would this be?

**Craig:** Well, this feels like it has to be the mood, right. There’s no way to do some side movie about this. You want to just go at it and do it as the movie. You want to do it as an examination of what it’s like to be a woman in the 19th Century, working in a field that is barely – barely civilized at this point. I mean, we’re talking like they had just figured out to wash before chopping legs off. And she is better than everyone and isn’t allowed to practice. And so she becomes a man.

And obviously there’s – it’s a modern story because we are only now really wrapping our minds around the fluidity of gender. And there’s this also like a really interesting twist to this story where Dr. Barry, whose real name was Margaret Ann Bulkley, Dr. Barry spent almost all of his life living with a black man who was her – I guess her assistant, her servant. Not her slave. Man-servant. Wasn’t a slave.

And this guy lived with her for 50 years and there’s this beautiful detail where every morning he would lay out six small towels which she would use to hide her curves and broaden her shoulders. So he was part of her thing completely. And there’s this wonderful combination of two characters who are living lives that are repressed and tightened down by the outside world, helping each other in the strangest way. But she had no – it did not appear to be a romantic relationship. In fact, Dr. Barry had a reputation as a ladies man. Not sure if she was gay, or if this was just a cover. It’s hard to tell. But, I think overall what I found so fascinating about this beyond the – I guess you’d call it the more prurient aspects – is that Dr. James Barry seemed like a real hard-ass.

Like, you know, I love – I think this is the greatest bit in a weird way, is that Florence Nightingale, the symbol of women in medicine, he was just disgusted by her. [laughs] Told her to beat it. Just like everything we know about grouchy jerk doctors. Yeah, you know what? Margaret Ann Bulkley, AKA Dr. James Barry, she got to be as jerky as she wanted. She did the first Cesarean ever. So, I would just tell this one straight up. And I would probably concentrate on her relationship with her servant, John.

**John:** The other relationship I thought was fascinating was her mother. And so her mother was around during at least the starting part of this, her going to medical school, and was clearly complicit in this whole act about this was not her daughter, but the son. That is a fascinating dynamic, too. So, what is going through the mom’s head as her daughter is doing all this stuff?

You’re also right to point out that even though this is a biopic set in a specific time, it’s a modern movie. And you cannot make this movie without addressing the modern dynamics of what we think about what she’s doing in this time.

So, if you made this movie 20 years ago, it could be sort of a crossdressing thing. But I think you couldn’t do this movie now without looking at like what are the real gender identity issues here. And we have to sort of put a modern label on whatever she’s doing. And you’re going to have to make the decision as a screenwriter how you’re going to portray that. Because you can’t just be ambiguous. You have to really make a decision about like does she perceive herself as a woman or as a man.

Does she perceive herself as something else? What is really driving her? And we have all these fascinating details, but it’s going to be the writer’s job to figure out why are those details there. Like what is actually going on inside her head that is making her make these choices?

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And I think that there’s something – hopefully you find, okay, the circumstances that connect you to now, to audiences now, and I think in this case it’s pretty clear what those are. But then there are the other things you’re looking for, which are the circumstances that connect you to a general human condition that has always been true. Something universal over all times, for all people.

And in this case, the thing that I read in this article that I thought might have been a hint to that, and I sort of touched on it earlier, is Florence Nightingale’s description of Dr. Barry as “the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the Army.” And there is something about the cost of hardening yourself so that you are not revealed.

And that is really interesting to me. And I would love to see what that cost might have been for Dr. Barry. And why she got so hard. And I think that’s an interesting – you know, there are people who refuse to let the world beat them. She certainly seemed like that person. I’m not going to let the world beat me. I’m going to become Dr. James Barry. I am a male doctor and I will not be pushed around. And no one is going to get in my way.

But then there is a cost. And so that’s fascinating to me. So, this actually is a movie. I think somebody should and could do this. There is a new biography of her called, or him, depending, Dr. James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time, written by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield. And it is available for £18.99. And I would be surprised if somebody didn’t – if somebody hasn’t already optioned the rights to this.

**John:** Yeah. There’s an actress chopping at the bit to play that part.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** So, we’ll have a link to this in the show notes. This article we read was by Joseph Curtis who is writing for Mail Online.

Our next story is called The Perfect Mom. It was submitted by Brett Thomas in Sacramento. It tells the story of Gypsy, a girl with a litany of debilitating diseases, who grows up loved and cared for by her devoted mother, Dee Dee. Their relationship is admired by all their neighbors until one night a mysterious Facebook post unravels a tale of murder and deceit. The mother and daughter faked the girl’s illnesses for 20 years. The mother seemed to be imposing symptoms of muscular dystrophy and other diseases on the child.

Gypsy’s only escape was to contact her online boyfriend and convince him to help her murder her mother and disappear into rural Wisconsin. The two are eventually captured and tried for murder in the first degree. And, man, this story has everything.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s got everything. Yeah. It’s got everything except the thing that I kind of want the most, where I was struggling to find the right way in here. I was struggling to find that thing that would illuminate something else.

This is a real thing, obviously Munchausen by proxy. And it’s a tragic thing. And the woman who was doing this to her daughter was a bad person. She didn’t deserve to be murdered, but she was bad. She was doing a terrible thing. Her daughter clearly was abused mentally and emotionally and perhaps her mental health was significantly impaired. She hooks up with this guy. He seems like a real winner, too. He commits this murder.

And that’s how it ends. And no one is really – who do I root for here? And what do I want to happen? I don’t even feel a sense of justice, frankly, that they’re caught and go to jail. I feel nothing except a general nihilistic – this is a true crime and it could be a great episode of a series in that sense, but as a movie it feels too nihilistic, I guess.

**John:** I agree with you. So, the challenge of a movie is that you want to have a main character you can follow. And so would either one of these be the main character you follow? Oh, that’s tough. Because if you follow it from Gypsy’s point of view, then you’re in on the ruse, so you sort of know that she’s not actually as sick as she thinks. Unless you were really changing things and she really believes she’s as sick as her mother makes her sort of state. And maybe over the course of the story you’re discovering with her that she’s actually not so sick.

You could do it from Dee Dee’s point of view, but that’s sort of an odd thing, too. Like, when you have your central character being this very dark force, it’s a challenging thing. Talented Mr. Ripley does that. And it’s great. So, maybe it’s the maternal Talented Mr. Ripley, in a way. But it’s a very challenging way into a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Ripley, there’s a reason that that first Ripley novel has been made twice now, and I think they’re contemplating making it a third time, whereas many of the subsequent Ripley novels haven’t because there is something about a sociopath discovering his sociopathy and beginning on a journey that ends in tears and drama that’s interesting. This is not that.

This is basically the deal. This has been going on forever. There’s no other way to do it. You can’t start with a little kid. And just, yeah, I feel like it is a cool side show episode for something, but…

**John:** Yeah. So I think there is a Lifetime movie to be made about this. And I think the way you get into the Lifetime movie is like it’s one of the neighbors who starts to suspect something and sort of starts to unravel this. And so it’s Dee Dee versus this neighbor who is starting to pull the threads and have everything come apart. That’s a way in. But that’s not really a feature movie. That very much feels like a seven-act Lifetime made-for-television movie.

And there’s nothing wrong with those, but that’s not sort of the big marquee movie we’re dealing with here.

**Craig:** Yeah. And even in the Lifetime version, the neighbor would be the hero, you know.

**John:** Completely. And so the other option you have is if it is just an episode of a standard TV show, then it’s a little bit more straightforward because then you have – your heroes are already established. They are the heroes of every episode. And they’re coming in to investigate this thing. So, if it is the equivalent of a Law & Order or a Chicago P.D., they’re coming into this thing with one set of assumptions and there are new things being revealed each time that you go through it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s much more straightforward.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s fun. Because – I mean, fun in a sick way. You begin to suspect, you know, around right before the second commercial break, or however they divide these things up, that wait a second, she’s not sick at all. Dum, dum, dum, commercials. And so that works, because you know you’re going to be able to wrap it up, send the bad person to jail, or figure out that she was the one that murdered her own mother. And you wrap it up and then two lawyers sit in a room going, “Wow. Life’s crazy, right?” [laughs] And that’s kind of how those shows work, right? Basically, right?

That’s how those shows work. So, yes, good fodder for a procedural, not a feature.

**John:** So, we’ll put a link to think story. It’s written by Michelle Dean for BuzzFeed.

All right, our next one comes from Rachael Speal, who wrote in with a story of an amateur sleuth. Craig, why don’t you talk us through this?

**Craig:** So, like a real life Nancy Drew case here. It’s kind of great. There’s this 12-year-old girl named Jessica Maple, which I must say is a great movie name. Jessica Maple.

**John:** It’s a great movie name.

**Craig:** So Jessica Maple, also a denizen of Atlanta, she went to a camp called Junior District Attorney Camp, sponsored by the Fulton County DA Office. And at that camp she learned how to be a detective. You know, and you can imagine how cute that is. You know, it’s like a camp for middle schoolers to learn basic detective stuff.

And then lo and behold, someone broke in and ransacked her great-grandmother’s home. And the police, you know, did a little swing by and said, “Well, whoever robbed the home must have entered with a key because large items were stolen and there’s no sign of forced entry.”

But, our junior sleuth, Jessica Maple, 12 years old, knew something wasn’t right, because the only people that had keys were her parents, and they wouldn’t rip off her great-grandmother. So, she investigated the scene and found in fact that on the side of the house of the garage the windows were broken, fingerprints by the glass. And lo and behold she went to the pawn shop down the street, as she had learned to do at camp, and found all of her grandmother’s stuff at the pawn shop.

And that’s how they actually found the guys that did it. So, Jessica Maple, Sleuth.

**John:** She is a preteen sleuth. You got about ten pages of movie there. You got like a premise. So, here’s the thing: she’s an interesting character, and an interesting sort of setup in a world, but there’s nothing else around that. That can’t sustain a movie just by itself. There’s not a through line there. There’s not a big thing to have happen.

So, if she is a center piece character in this, it feels that this is a thing that’s happening by page 15, or through all this, and then she’s on to some sort of like really grizzly murder. Or something goes way beyond, because you have to be able to sort of push beyond the like, oh, she found her grandmother’s stuff. That’s not enough.

**Craig:** [laughs] High stakes. Because, you know, great-grandmother needs her TV for the remaining four months of her life. You know, the biggest problem I think here is that we have seen the teen sleuth or the child sleuth in every permutation possible, once a month, for the last 40 years, minimum. It’s just a standard. Take a kid and turn them into a cop or a detective. It’s been done a billion times.

And usually they’ll throw some other twist on to it, just to make it a little more interesting. You know, oh, now he’s a spy or whatever. There’s no oil left in this ground. It is a dry well, I’m afraid.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, at any point did you pitch on Encyclopedia Brown? Did that ever enter your world?

**Craig:** It did. And I’ll tell you how. And it was the coolest and yet worst thing. It’s actually a great and sad story about my life.

So, one day Scott Frank calls me up and he says, and this is many years ago, Harold Ramis was still alive. And he said, “I was talking to Harold Ramis about you and he got very excited because he has something that he thinks you would be great for and he wants to talk to you about it.” And I just levitated. I mean, Harold Ramis, for god’s sakes. You know, I mean, just the greatest thing.

And Harold Ramis called me. And I spoke with him on the phone. And he said, “How would you like to write Encyclopedia Brown?” And I didn’t.

**John:** You didn’t?

**Craig:** I didn’t. I did not want to write it. And the thing is if he had said, “I’m going to be directing Encyclopedia Brown,” I would have said I’m in. But he’s like, “Yeah, I’m producing it. But we’re going to find a director somehow.” And I could tell it was like, oh yeah, I got this thing in my pile of stuff. Encyclopedia Brown. And I just thought, no.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I was an Encyclopedia Brown fan and everything, but it’s just, you know, well, you know, obviously, I mean, look at the last thing I just wrote with these sheep. I’m an Agatha Christie kind of a guy. I’m less of a Hardy Boys/ Encyclopedia Brown guy.

**John:** So, what is Encyclopedia Brown’s real first name?

**Craig:** Leroy?

**John:** It is Leroy. And so that was always my premise for the pitch is that he’s Detective Leroy Brown. Detective Leroy Brown does not sound like a 12-year-old white kid in Florida. It sounds like Sam Jackson. And so my pitch for it was always that it was a sort of mistaken identity thing where they thought they were hiring Sam Jackson detective, but they got the little boy detective. And so like the Sam Jackson character and he have to team up to solve this thing. Which I thought would have been fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would have been – but, I’d like to note, you are running away as fast as you can from what Encyclopedia Brown actually is.

**John:** I think you have to do all the normal stuff with Bugs Meany, and Sally, and all that stuff. That has to be playing in one thing, but also it gets incredibly Michael Mann level of car chases and violence simultaneously.

**Craig:** But then like inevitably Bugs Meany goes to prison because, you know, he said that he was in the treehouse eating cherries all afternoon.

**John:** Yes. But where were the pits?

**Craig:** Where were the pits? Bugs Meany needed a lawyer desperately, because any time he got busted all he would have to say is, “You know, I talked to my attorney. I don’t really think the Where Are the Pits is going to hold up in court, Pal.”

**John:** Yeah. Probably not. But then again, like, Encyclopedia Brown was being paid a quarter, so the dollar stakes were not especially high.

**Craig:** [laughs] And how embarrassing for his dad. Embarrassing bordering on humiliating. His father was the Chief of Police.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Routinely could not solve even the simplest of crimes, but Encyclopedia Brown would always solve it before dessert.

**John:** Is there an equivalent term for like cuckolding there? Which is basically like humiliating your father? [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s kid-culking. Cuck-kilding. Cuck-kidding. It’s Cuck-kidding.

**John:** All right. So, back to Jessica Maple. We’ll have a link in the show notes for this story. This was from ABC News. It’s really just the slightest little whiff. So, there’s an idea about a character here, but there’s nothing to buy. There’s nothing to make obviously.

**Craig:** I mean, but good for the real Jessica Maple, though.

**John:** Great name. You can take the name Jessica Maple. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Our last one, oh, is a doozy.

**Craig:** Now, I have to say, the little preface here. I was talking to my television agent today. She mentioned this thing. She didn’t know that we were doing this. I believe that she is one of the agents at CAA that is representing this currently. So, they’re going out to the town with this one. And she actually said, you know, would you—

And I’m like, no. But, it’s tempting. [laughs] It’s tempting.

**John:** So, what we’re talking about which is so good is by Christopher Goffard. It’s a six-part series in the LA Times spaced out over the course of a couple weeks of this story. But it very much felt like to me like a big Vanity Fair piece, because it very much had that sort of like peeling back layers.

It’s the story of this Kelli Peters, a mom in Irvine, California. She’s the PTA president. She gets arrested for drug possession. She denies the charge, claimed she got framed. But who could have done this to her? It turns out it was Kent and Jill Easter. They blamed Peters for an incident involving their son at school. And the couple continued to connive. They tried to get her fired. They planted the drugs. They covered things up. And it was just kind of amazing.

So, the story tracks the trial basically and the investigation onto why the Easters did this and sort of how they did this. And, Craig, how would this be a movie?

**Craig:** Oh, boy. I mean, so, it’s not a movie. It’s a television show, I think. I think it has to be a series, just like this article is a series. Because the unfolding is where the deliciousness is. The resolution itself is forgone. So, the only – you know, once you realize, once the police realize this lady is the first lady in history who is actually telling the truth when she says people planted – those aren’t my drugs – she’s the first one who told the truth in history. And once they realize that, you have to know already that these other two are involved.

In fact, you want to know. You want the audience to see them squirming and conniving. You want to be part of their squirming and conniving, because that’s where the fun is. For instance, the Mrs. Easter – god, what great names, by the way. They’re just like giving us great names. Mrs. Easter is having an affair, so I want to see that, too. Not only is she getting her husband to plant drugs in this woman’s car and fake calls to 911 using like a weird Indian accent, kind of, but she’s also berating her side piece for not being supportive enough of her when the police come after her. She’s incredible.

So, you want to be involved in all of that. You can’t wait for it to just all fall apart in the third act. It’s got to be like a six-parter, right?

**John:** I think so. One of the things I enjoyed so much about this piece as presented on the Times website is they have the actual audio of a lot of stuff, so they have like the police interviewing him and other little small calls. And so you actually – it’s one thing to see the transcript, but to actually hear it in their voices. Like, oh man, these people are just not making good choices. Bad choices all around.

So, I agree with you that we have to be able to see sort of behind the curtain and see what the Easters are doing. And they are the fascinating characters. You’re like, Kelli Peters, she’s great. I have nothing bad to say about Kelli Peters, but the fascinating thing is Kent and Jill and sort of what their real dynamic is.

And even at the end of this six-part series we don’t really know what was kind of happening in those conversations about when they were deciding to plant the drugs. We don’t know why he stayed. We don’t know if he was really behind things. If she was behind the things. The most fascinating dynamic to me, though, is that they’re both lawyers and the investigation was so hampered by their both being lawyers, because they had attorney-client privilege, which made it very hard to go through all their emails to find stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They had spousal privilege about testifying against each other. So, it became this whole game about sort of how you get them to testify. So, there were a lot of really great things, but I feel like they are series things, rather than movie things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. There is a difficult thing at the center here that would have to really be thought through carefully. And it’s not evident in this article yet. And maybe it’s the most fascinating thing, I suppose, that Jill Easter – and it seems like it was her problem initially – Jill Easter, the thing that makes her so upset, and it wasn’t like there was a history of a problem with this other woman, Kelly. It’s just one day her kid wasn’t out in front from the tennis court where he was getting a tennis afterschool lesson or something. And then the Kelli lady went and got the kid. Oh, yeah, like for three minutes he was kind of unattended on the tennis court. Which is just not that big of a deal.

And just so people understand, this whole story takes place in Irvine. So, when my son was playing–

**John:** The setting is so crucial.

**Craig:** It’s crucial. So, my son was playing tournament baseball for a while, and every Memorial Day we’d have to go to Irvine for this massive baseball tournament. Irvine is the most – I don’t know how you describe. It’s like a computer made a nice city. You know? Right?

I mean, the streets are impossibly wide in Irvine. It’s like every street is 12 lanes wide, and there’s no dirt anywhere. So, your kid being alone for three minutes on a tennis court is not the end of the world, and even if it were like you’d talk it out and she’d apologize and that’s that.

But this little thing sends this woman and then by extension her husband into a mania that is just unwarranted even by the merits of crazy people. And that’s the part that really concerns me about the adaptation of this story. I don’t mind villains doing crazy things as long as I understand the little sane kernel behind it. Like, you know, Holly Hunter did that wonderful movie about the true story of the murderous Texas cheerleading mom.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But I get it. It’s like, okay, the hyper-competitiveness and the need to promote your child. I get that there’s a kernel of sanity that spirals out of control. There’s not even that here. It actually doesn’t make sense.

**John:** I think it does make sense. And here’s where I think the – this is the universal truth that’s underneath all of this. I think it’s equivalent of like the hygiene hypothesis. You know how like because we are so obsessed with keeping our hands clean and stuff like that we have horrible allergies now that we didn’t use to have.

I think in some ways Irvine and sort of our modern culture, everything is – there’s so little crime, there’s so little danger anywhere that we keep looking for it. And we sort of overreact to things that shouldn’t be things that we react to at all.

And so in her overreaction to this not really big deal, she goes like cavewoman crazy about how to defend her kid. And that, I think, it’s all about overreactions. And I think that is the universal thing you can get to underneath all of this. And that’s why I think the setup for this is also brilliant, because the author does a great job of really just describing how pristine this place is, but also how remarkably competent the police are.

As you were reading through this, weren’t you just struck by like, wait, they can actually trace all of those calls down to a specific payphone and actually find the video surveillance. Compared to like Serial where we couldn’t, like did [unintelligible] even have a payphone? We don’t know. Here they know everything. They know exactly where the cellphones worked for times. They have all these special pinging things. They knew everything kind of from the start. It was remarkable to me sort of how competent the police were.

They have like 20 detectives on this tiny little case. And, again, that feels like an overreaction to something that shouldn’t kind of be that big of a deal. No one got killed. So, it’s strange. The other thing I will say is I felt some sympathy for the Easter’s kids who are very carefully kind of left out of the story, but in a movie you’re going to see them there and you’re going to think like, oh man, something bad is going to happen to those kids because their parents are going to be in jail.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they are ruined. I mean, at the end of this, what was a very comfortable seems like upper-class lifestyle has been dashed to bits. The marriage is broken. All because of this insane thing. In a weird way, I wasn’t surprised by the Irvine police force’s ability to do this, because I don’t know what else they do. I mean, I’m not denigrating them. I know there is crime in Irvine, but my guess is that they have the time and resources to dedicate to this because it is a pretty safe city.

And I loved the conversation that is recorded, the real conversation you can hear in this article between the cop when he’s interviewing Kent. Because Kent is a lawyer and this guy is just asking him questions like where were you and what did you do and did you hear about this, and blah, blah, blah. And at some point he goes, “You know, I’ve been asking you questions now for a while. I think you know that there’s something probably going on here, right? I mean, you’re a lawyer. You know that cops just don’t chat you up for a while just ‘cause. So why don’t we just get to the point here, right?”

And then Kent was like, “Yeah, yeah.” It’s great. It’s great. That character was terrific. That conversation was terrific. It could be a terrific – yeah, it feels like a series to me, like a mini.

**John:** I think there probably is – there’s a way we’re not thinking about it that you could do as a movie. Because people say Gone Girl and it’s like Gone Girl could have totally been a series, too, but Gillian Flynn was so smart at sort of finding the way to tell that is a two-hour movie.

And I think there’s something about breaking it half where you actually crossover into the Easter’s point of view on things and really see what they’re doing. And that becomes fascinating. So, you’re going to see it. The universal truth behind all of this as well is like never go for revenge. Like the classic saying is when you seek revenge, first dig two graves. One for your enemy and one for you. And it’s so fascinating to watch how it boomerangs back at the Easters. They’re trying to destroy this woman’s life and in the course of maybe, I don’t know, 20 minutes of stupidity they destroy their own lives and their families. It’s remarkable how completely they’re able to ruin everything around them.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you get to listen to the actual call that Kent made where he posed as a man with an Indian last name but who did not have an accent until he sort of did. It is a – they should teach it in lying school, because it’s so clearly not valid. You can just smell it. You can smell that it’s a lie. It’s remarkable. There’s a lot of good stuff here.

And, yeah, I think you’re right. There’s a way to do it as a feature, but if you’re going to do it as a feature I think you are going to need license to stray. Quite a bit actually. To get to something at the end that feels like an end. That matters, you know.

**John:** I agree. So, we’ll have a link to all of these articles in the show notes so you can click through and see how you would make them into a movie, or not into a movie. But that’s it for that.

So, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is potentially depressing, but also really well done, so worth reading for that. It’s an article in the New York Times by Naomi Rosenberg, a Philadelphia ER doctor, called How to Tell a Mother Her Child is Dead.

**Craig:** Oh god. I’m sure this could be potentially depressing.

**John:** But I think it’s actually fascinating for screenwriters, because I’m always obsessed with procedure. Like what is the actual procedure when you have to do this thing. When there’s a certain kind of investigation. Well, this is the procedure you go through if you have to go into the room and tell a parent that their child has been killed.

And Rosenberg is incredibly thoughtful about what the experience is going to be like for the physician, what the experience is going to be like for the parent, and how you bridge the two of them. So, I’ll give you a taste here.

“When you get inside the room you will know who the mother is. Yes, I’m very sure. Shake her hand and tell her who you are. If there is time you shake everyone’s hand. Yes, you will know if there is time. You never stand. If there are no seats left, the couches have arms on them.”

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** So, it’s incredibly well-written. It’s just really thoughtful and smart about what that process is like. Even getting into the you’re not allowed to say that they were murdered. You’re not allowed to say they were killed. You say very specific things. They’re not allowed to see the body because there could be an investigation. It does everything just right. So, I really recommend all screenwriters take a look at it.

**Craig:** You know what would be a cool scene is if somebody knew this, they knew that when the doctor comes in and sits, even on the edge of the couch, it means the kid is dead. And then they have to go in. And the doctor comes in and site. Ugh. Blech. This is the problem with being a writer. You just think about bad things all day long.

Well, here’s a good thing. Maybe. This is a potentially cool thing, because I haven’t played it yet, and I’ll explain why. Obduction. Not Abduction. Obduction. O-B-duction is a new mistype game from Cyan. The Miller Brothers, who were the creators of Mist. So, it looks like kind of a Mist for 2016. And I’m sure you played Mist.

**John:** I loved Mist.

**Craig:** Right. It’s the greatest. So, I am super excited to play it. Ah, but I can’t. And why? Well, it is available for PC and Mac. Apparently the Mac version is having a little bit of problems. But my problem is that the only way to play it is to download it from Steam. And I maybe somewhat imprudently decided to just jump on the Sierra beta bandwagon. So, I’m running Sierra and I think the problem is Steam is like, oh no no, this game isn’t supported on your platform because they don’t recognize my OS version number. So, it’s like a weird thing like you need to hit a number, and if you’re too low you’re no good. And if you’re above the highest number that they recognize, you’re also no good.

So, hopefully that’s what the problem is. And when the official Sierra release happens, maybe Steam updates and then I can play this damn thing. Because I paid for it.

**John:** That’s good. I should say, Sierra is a challenge on a lot of different levels. So, both Highland and Bronson Watermarker, two apps that we make, they are going to have updates for Sierra because of like one specific thing that changed in Sierra, which we went back and forth with Apple a bunch of times on and they did not get fixed in the build master.

So, if you are using Highland or Bronson Watermarker on Sierra, there will be a new version out in the App Store hopefully by the time it ships on the 20th so that you will be able to keep using those apps.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But it’s challenging. I agree.

All right. That is our show for this week. As always, we are produced by Godwin Jabangwe. Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link for that. Also a place for the longer questions like the ones we answered.

On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. I’m also on Instagram. I use Instagram stories a lot for sort of all my time in Paris. And so if you want to see a bunch of photos of like kids carrying baguettes and little dogs in restaurants–

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t.

**John:** That’s where you can find all of those photos.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. Godwin usually has them up about four days after the episode airs.

All the back episodes of the show are at Scriptnotes.net. And on the Scriptnotes USB drives which are I think now just back in the store. We sold out of them, but we had a couple hundred more made. So, if you’d like to buy one of those, you can buy those.

We’re on iTunes, of course, so if you could leave us a review that helps. It helps people find our show. And that’s it for this week. Craig, thank you again.

**Craig:** Thank you. And adieu.

**John:** Adieu. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Writing for Hollywood Without Living There](http://johnaugust.com/2015/writing-for-hollywood-without-living-there)
* [Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3750328/Top-army-doctor-told-Florence-Nightingale-performed-successful-caesarian-hiding-amazing-secret-WOMAN-disguise.html#ixzz4ISGE4GUd)
* [The Perfect Mom](https://www.buzzfeed.com/michelledean/dee-dee-wanted-her-daughter-to-be-sick-gypsy-wanted-her-mom?utm_term=.taGexxnz2n#.hsy0PPR1WR)
* [Amateur Sleuth](http://abcnews.go.com/US/jessica-maple-atlanta-girl-12-solves-robbery-police/story?id=14341277)
* [Revenge in Irvine](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/)
* [How to Tell a Mother Her Child is Dead](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/sunday/how-to-tell-a-mother-her-child-is-dead.html)
* [Obduction](http://obduction.com/)
* [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)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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/Episode_267.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/outlines-and-treatments).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 245 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program, we’re going to look at the non-screenplay kinds of things screenwriters end up writing, most notably outlines and treatments. We’ll be looking at some of the ones we’ve written for ourselves and hopefully giving you helpful advice on how to write your own.

We’ll also be answering a question we hope you’ll get to ask one day — how do you deal with sudden success?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, Happy Birthday.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** I did not know it was your birthday until moments before we started recording. But what are your plans for your birthday celebration?

**Craig:** Well, my daughter is making me some kind of cake.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** She’s been watching The Great British Bake Off. She’s obsessed with the show. So she’s all about the baking now. So she’s going to bake me a cake. She said, “And daddy, daddy, the icing, I’m making it green because green is your favorite color.”

**John:** Is that true?

**Craig:** And I guess on my face, I sort of — my face indicated that green is not my favorite color. [laughs] So then she went, “Green is your favorite color, right?” And I said, “Well, no, I love all colors.” And then she’s like, “But green?” And I said, “Yes, green is my favorite color.” [laughs]

**John:** I think the challenge with green frosting is it sets an expectation that it should be mint and if it’s not mint, something is very wrong.

**Craig:** Or lime. I don’t know.

**John:** I guess lime, a key lime icing frosting could be nice.

**Craig:** I mean, she’s just winging it. She likes the color. It’s her favorite color. So that’s something. And then my wife and I are going out for a nice little dinner and that’s it. I’m not a big birthday guy.

**John:** Yeah, after you cross a certain age, birthdays stop becoming fun. It’s just one year closer to your death.

**Craig:** Actually, it did occur to me that, because I just turned 45 today, that if it works out, you know, well, I think 90 is great.

**John:** I think 90 is pretty great.

**Craig:** For a man. So halfway.

**John:** Yeah. I actually had a heart appointment this week because there was a concern that I had a — it’s actually kind of a thing we can talk about. At our last D&D session, not the one at my house, but the one at your house, I left your house at midnight, and like, wow, my chest feels really strange. And so it’s the question of like should I go to the emergency room or am I just freaking out over nothing? And so I decided I was freaking out over nothing. But then ultimately on Sunday, I ended up going to the emergency room, that Sunday months ago. They’re like, no, you probably don’t have a heart attack. So I’ve actually been through like a month of sort of like tests and things to see if that was a heart problem. And the answer I can definitively say, it was not a heart problem at all.

**Craig:** No, it was just a panic attack or anxiety or —

**John:** It was not a panic attack. I’ve had those before. This was actually my ribs got stuck together in a strange way. And so like it’s chiropractic stuff adjustments have helped and I no longer feel that.

**Craig:** Well, great.

**John:** But because I actually had all these tests, I now know that my heart is just dandy. So for the next 10 years, I will not have a heart attack. And if I do have a heart attack I want listeners to sue my doctor.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll get right on that. [laughs]

**John:** It’s everyone’s priority.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it will be class action lawsuit at this point.

**John:** Yes. We should do some follow up. First off, our Lawrence Kasdan interview which was originally supposed to be a live show, and it was not possible to do it as a live show, we are now doing kind of as a live show. We’re doing the Writers Guild Foundation event on April 16 in Beverly Hills at the Writers Guild Theater. And so it’s part of an all day craft thing. So it’s not just Scriptnotes. There’s a bunch of writers talking about writing, so including Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom are going to be talking about their great show. Jane Espenson is going to be there talking about stuff. There’s going to be Greg Berlanti and a bunch of superhero folks. So it’s going to be big deal day and afternoon. But part of it is going to be you and me talking to Lawrence Kasdan.

**Craig:** Right. So we finally get to sit with Larry in front of an audience and grill him about his remarkable career which spans all the way back to the late ’70s and early ’80s when he was making movies like Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then through things like The Big Chill and The Bodyguard. And I mean, it’s unbelievable with this guy.

And then now, still doing it with The Force Awakens. So after all these years, Larry now has the biggest movie of all time. So we’re going to ask him all sorts of questions. And if you have specific questions, I know we collected a bunch from our live show last time, but you can always send them into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll, you know —

**John:** We’ll field it. You know, part of the promise we made at the live show is that the only questions we’re going to ask from the audience are going to be the ones people wrote on little cards on the back. So that will be true for us. But if people grab a microphone and ask a question, we can’t stop them. I guess we could stop them. I mean, Craig, you’re physically intimidating. You could shut them down.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I’m looking forward to this conversation. And there’s still a few tickets left. So that’s why we’re talking about it because they had like less than 20 left time I checked. So come to it, so it’s Writers Guild Foundation, wgfouncation.org is where you’ll find that. There will also be a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Our second thing is actually something you put in the outline here. This is an article in BuzzFeed about Karyn Kusama, the director of The Invitation. And that was a great article, I thought.

**Craig:** I thought so as well. By the way, I should just add as a side note, because it’s my birthday, so I get to do side notes. I feel like I came off as somewhat disappointed that you didn’t have a heart problem. So I just want to be really clear, I’m happy that you don’t have a heart problem. I don’t know, if you die, I don’t know how to do this show. I just don’t know what to do.

**John:** It’s going to be very challenging.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s the only thing that concerns me about your death. [laughs] Like what do I do? How do I hook it up, you know?

**John:** I think you were more surprised by my admission that I do have a heart and that they did intensive scans with me and found that there was a heart beating inside me.

**Craig:** I presume that when you said heart, I just thought you were talking about some sort of pump.

**John:** Yeah, it’s essentially a pump.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a pump.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Karyn Kusama who directed The Invitation has had a really interesting career. And one thing that she talks about in this article is what it was like when she won Sundance with Girlfight, her first feature film that she wrote and directed, and was the belle of the ball and then didn’t really know how to deal with it. And it occurred to me that this is something that all of us go through when we first “break in.”

And we’ve talked about how people don’t really break in as much as like something happens. And then there’s this attention on you because you’re new and something has happened. And obviously all the people listening to us, I think they would — most of them would like something to happen. Well, what do you do when it happens?

So I thought this would be a good topic for you and I to discuss.

**John:** Well, let’s go for it. So this could apply to somebody who directed a film that was the talk of Sundance. It can be somebody who wrote an amazing spec script and had a great sale off that or that got a lot of attention or, you know, won the Nicholl Fellowship or, you know, placed in The Black List in a very high place. Or just became famous for some other reason. And we live in an age of sort of viral stars who for whatever reason, they started a Twitter feed that became a huge sensation and what do you do next.

**Craig:** So I was actually talking about this with Karina Longworth because her podcast, You Must Remember This, has become a sensation and people are calling. And there’s this attention that comes. So I’m going to break down what I sort of remember and what I have continued to perceive, when people get the wave, right, there’s this wave that comes at you, it’s a little bit like a hundredth monkey syndrome like no one’s paying attention to you, no one’s paying attention, and suddenly everyone is.

So the first thing that happen is, everybody starts telling you that you’re great. Now, it’s I think fair to say that some of those people who are telling you that you’re great really do think you’re great. Most of them are telling you you’re great because it doesn’t cost anything to say it and maybe it’s true. I think people are, in our business, they’re always looking for a magic bullet, something that is going to solve all their problems. And oftentimes, that means a filmmaker, a writer. And then they’re thinking, maybe it’s you. Because if other people like you, maybe I should like you, but of course, you’re not a magic bullet.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** The other thing that happens is that because it’s — this is no shock, in Hollywood, a lot of people are superficial. Superficial people tend to want what other people want, not what they actually want. They don’t really have any kind of self-directed principled wants. They’re just watching everyone else and following. So a lot of the people that are telling you that you’re great, they’re following. So how do you think you deal or how would you deal with the wave of questionable praise?

**John:** So I got this off of Go. So before Go was a movie, it was a script that I sold to a little small company but a bunch of people read it and bunch of people liked it. And people would tell me like how much they loved it. And so I was always mindful of the same people who are telling me that they loved it and the people who are calling me for meetings are also the people who didn’t buy the script. So that was a helpful sort of reality check is that they could say they really loved what they wrote, but they didn’t feel like they could make that movie or they didn’t feel like taking the risk to try to make that movie.

And so I was always mindful that these are people who seem to like and appreciate my writing, but they’re not necessarily people who I can trust to make the kinds of movies that I want to make. So I was always listening. I was always happy to get that praise, but I always eager to sort of segue to the next bit of conversation which is what are you working on, what is it that we should be thinking about working on together?

**Craig:** Precisely. So you carve this middle path where you accept the nice things that people are saying, but you have — I wouldn’t call it paranoia as much as a healthy skepticism because it happens all the time, right? Not everyone can be great. But everybody that has this moment is suddenly “great.” So you’re probably not. You’re just having a moment, right? So in that moment, I think where you want to hopefully get to is figuring out which of the people that are praising you are praising you out of some sense of substance, an actual independent evaluation of you, people that might truly appreciate you and start talking with them.

Did you ever see the movie Overnight?

**John:** Of course. And so if you have not seen the movie, Overnight, I would recommend when you finish this podcast, put everything else aside and watch the movie, Overnight. It’s usually on Netflix. You’ll find it someplace. It’s a terrific study of one guy who suddenly has all the heat of Hollywood on him and the bad choices he makes.

**Craig:** Almost exclusively bad choices. He literally does everything wrong. And it’s a great instructive course on what to not do when this happens. I think one thing that this business is really good at is humbling you if you don’t decide to be humble first.

**John:** Yeah. What I think is interesting comparing — so this guy’s experience making The Boondock Saints and Karyn Kusama’s experience with Girlfight, she had made something really fantastic and everyone could sort of see that she made something really fantastic. But in a strange way, I felt like she didn’t have the confidence in herself that she had done this thing. There was maybe, I don’t want to say impostor syndrome, but there was some degree to which she didn’t step up and say, yes, I deserve this and here are the next things. Whereas this guy who did Boondock Saints overdid that a lot.

**Craig:** He certainly did. And I think that sometimes with some people — and I think Karyn is one of these people because I know her fairly well. And I appreciate her personality which is quiet and then incredible, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I think some people, it’s not so much that they don’t think that they belong there or think that they deserve the praise as much as it is that they just don’t like that. They’re not really designed to be gregarious and in the center of a party.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I think this is an area — and she touches on this in the interview and I think she’s dead right. She refers to a kind of an autism that there are certain kinds of autism that directors have. And when males have it, they’re sort of considered artists or kind of unique, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For instance Doug Liman who, you know from Go.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Who’s sort of the poster child of, “Well, he’s very, very odd. But, you know, look at all these movies.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas a woman can’t — isn’t allowed to be odd.

**John:** Yeah. A woman with the same traits would be perceived as standoffish.

**Craig:** Standoffish or weak.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you have to kind of have to recognize that you may have some of these things in you and that’s fine. In a way, I think it’s probably better to err on the side of less receptive to waves of praise than overly accepting of fake praise. I strongly advice everybody to set their expectations low which is annoying because you’ve worked so hard and everyone told you you couldn’t do it and now you’ve done it. And here I am saying, uh-huh, now calm down and lower your expectations. Because in truth, Hollywood will defy expectations and will undo so-called sure things 99 times out of 100.

**John:** Yeah. Most things will fall apart. And that’s the strange reality. And so if you’ve successfully made a movie, you know how hard it was to make that movie. And your natural instinct should be, well, the second movie will be easier to make. But I was talking to Kimberly Peirce at an event a couple of months ago, a Black List event. And she said that there should really be a workshop, a club, sort of for like your second movie club because that’s actually the hardest one to get made because you don’t have the sort of like beginner’s sort of like anything is possible, everything is impossible, kind of just zeal in a way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You sort of now know how to make it and it’s actually kind of harder to make your second movie than your first movie a lot of times because there’s this weird dance of expectations and realities.

**Craig:** Well, you know, there is a kind of a clock that starts when this happens. And the clock is ticking and it will last for a certain amount of time. But it is finite, it’s a window. And in that window, you’re new. And you’re exciting. And you represent a world of possibilities. That window closes fairly rapidly. By the time you’re trying to make your second movie, you’re no longer new and emergent, you’re now on a list of people that make movies. And all the sexiness suddenly is gone. So you have to be aware when your moment comes that there is a window. And it’s the one time in your career you get to actually take advantage of everybody else and their psychological weakness because the rest of your career, they’re going to be hammering you and manipulating you.

So I think it’s probably a good idea to make hay while the sun shines and see if you can’t get something going quickly while you have that window but, you know, not at the cost of sacrificing who you are as a filmmaker.

**John:** So the Karyn Kusama article does a great job sort of listing the choices she made and sort of why they ended up being really challenging situations. And sometimes it was situation like Aeon Flux and a change of studio regimes and other times it was Jennifer’s Body and sort of the production, the marketing, the everything else sort of around it.

It’s also useful to look at sort of positive examples. Like Rawson Thurber, who’s been on the show several times; here is a guy who was working as my assistant. He went off and did Terry Tate: Office Linebacker, a series of commercials, he just did on spec. And he followed it up with — and so that got him heat, to be followed up with a spec sale of Dodgeball which he was able to direct. And he very smartly sort of played in that lane for a while.

Where he got off track is he made Mysteries of Pittsburgh which was sort of not as well received and it took him a while to sort of get back on that same track that he was at before. But, you know, those first two choices he made were very smart about capitalizing on the heat that he had and seeing like, this is what people want me to do. This is of the things people want to me do that I want to do and let me give them that.

**Craig:** Precisely. And there is a certain perspective on that moment that comes when it’s long in your rearview mirror.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You and I have not been the new guy now for 20 years. [laughs] And so, you know, we’re the old guys. And so it’s hard to even remember that. But you can put it in great perspective when you see it happening to other people, which is another thing. I think if you do have somebody that is older and more experienced and has been through the wars a few times, gravitate toward them in this moment of heat but also cling to the people that have nothing to do with Hollywood.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You are still the same person. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that success means you’re different now. You’re not. Trust me. And you can see it in the documentary, Overnight, how poisonous that becomes when somebody decides that they are a different human being now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Remain grounded. And try not to mistake the “Wee” of Hollywood with actual Hollywood which is work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When you have your moment, they will fill your day. They will fill your day with phone calls and lunches and meetings and parties. And you might think, this is what I do as a screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah. It’s sort of like a press junket for yourself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where you’re just out there sort of promoting yourself and everything is theoretical. The challenge is you got to this place by doing really hard work and if you are not finding ways to do that really hard work and show your best stuff and actually improve, then you’re just spinning your wheels.

**Craig:** They will love to see you and they will love to see you and see you and see you. And then one day, they’re like, “Uh, is that guy doing anything? Has she written anything since so and so? Don’t invite her. Oh, oh. Yeah, no, no, I can’t take her call.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you realize, oh, that was all just celebrating the work part. And you don’t need to celebrate that much. [laughs] Get to work, you know. Keep going because my recent success is not — that doesn’t count as a career.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s what happened. And it’s just the start of something.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about what projects you should be focusing on. And my advice would be you probably came into the success with some idea of what you wanted to do next. And whatever it is you wanted to do next, that should be a thing that is not necessarily front burner but is still always in consideration. And if there’s somebody who would love to do your next movie, that is, you know, that’s already cooking there, that is fantastic.

But you’ll also be hopefully offered other movies or other projects to work on and be smart about which ones of those you pursue. And you want to be able to show that you can write your own stuff but also that you can write other people’s stuff in the case of a writer. Or if you’re looking at directing assignments which, you know, Karyn Kusama now is. She said she had eight that she to read over the weekend. Be mindful of like, which are the things that are out there are things that I could actually knock out of the park? And if there are some of those and if you like the people who are — it’s hard to say like. If you respect and trust the people who are involved with those projects, you should consider one or two of those. Not 10, one or two of those.

**Craig:** It’s also a good guide to choosing a representative.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A lot of times when you have your moment, you don’t have one. And then they come.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they almost invariably will present you with these remarkable visions of the future.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because again, it costs them nothing. And they don’t really have to even deliver on those things because, you know, sooner or later it’s like, well, you were working on this and then you were working on this, you know. [laughs] So yeah, no, you haven’t won the Oscar yet, but, you know, we’re getting there.

**John:** Yeah. Just this last month, I had to get a new agent for this new project and those initial conversations were really important. And one of the things I’ve always said as friends in my life have gotten agents is pick the person who you will never dread getting their phone call because I know some people who don’t like talking to their agent on the phone. And that’s never a good sign. If you’re not looking forward to speaking to them on the phone, that is the wrong representative for you. And that comes in success and that comes in failure, too.

**Craig:** I completely agree. And similarly, if you’re agent has a vision of who they want to make you and it is not compatible with the vision of who you want to be, that’s also not the representative for you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s really simple. I think sometimes of Rian Johnson as a good example of somebody who’s simply stayed the same. He had a moment when he made his film, Brick. It was kind of very similar to a Girlfight moment. And suddenly he was a filmmaker and people were really interested and I think people started calling him and he just thought, no, I know what I want to do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I want to write this script and I want it to be this and he made The Brothers Bloom. And, you know, the world wasn’t lit on fire by it. And he didn’t panic. He just said, “All right. Well, I’m going to keep doing what I did before.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he made Looper and the world was set on fire. And they loved it and now he’s directing Star Wars.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Slow and steady. Never changed. Still hasn’t changed, by the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Never really got caught — he’s was the most nerdy, wonderfully nerdy nerd.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ever. Who’s just unassuming, doesn’t get caught up. Kind of my hero in that regard.

**John:** I want to say that’s not advocating only going indie. You have to be an auteur, indie person who only does your own things. It’s being true to what you are. And if what you are is a person who does like sort of mid-budget comedies, then go after those mid-budget comedies and make those mid-budget comedies. You know, just don’t try to change into something that you’re not because you feel like you should or that you should be fancy. And don’t try to please other folks. Really look at like what are you going to be happy writing and/or directing for the next two years?

**Craig:** I’m certainly with you on that. I mean from the start of my career, I was always interested in making movies that a lot of people would go see. Those were the kind of movies I liked. And I moved toward what I liked.

**John:** Exactly. So we are going to put a link into the show notes for this BuzzFeed article by Adam Vary. Just a really good write up. And a lot of photos of Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, our guests from last week. A lot are sort of awkwardly staged photos.

**Craig:** Oh my god. [laughs] So the first one, I’ve already written them. And so the first one Matt Manfredi is staring at the back of Karyn’s head like he hates her guts. Phil is looking at some weird point that’s neither here nor there and seems almost embalmed.

**John:** Yeah, he does.

**Craig:** And then Karyn is looking directly at the lens with this like, can you believe I’m saddled with these two idiots look? [laughs] I want to frame it, it’s a great photo.

**John:** Yeah. It’s really a great photo for like an episode of a podcast about a murder.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** And like some sort of like, you know, none of them — for the first time, they agreed to be in the room together. [laughs]

**Craig:** I know, exactly. [laughs] Or this is the last time they’ll be in a room together.

**John:** Yeah, maybe so.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s another one too that’s equally bizarre where they’re sitting at a table with plates and there’s no food and, again, Phil is looking — it’s like it’s actually difficult to look nowhere.

**John:** Yeah. He manages.

**Craig:** Yeah, he does it. He’s looking at a spot no one else would look.

**John:** Yeah. He’s looking slightly — he’s looking behind the lens in an uncomfortable distance.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like the weirdest place. [laughs]

**John:** I also noticed that his wine glass is fuller than the other two and maybe that’s why he’s staring off at a strange place.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs] And Matt’s face in that photo is like, well, where is the food?

**John:** Yeah, where’s the food? And there’s two bottles of wine that are both apparently open. But like, so one of them refused to drink from the yellow bottle. I just don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah, these pictures deserve their own show. [laughs] They’re the weirdest photos. I love them.

**John:** So please look through and look at those. I’d like to jump out of order because our discussion of suggestions for directors who suddenly have heat applies very well to something that came up just this afternoon. So the Writers Guild, when you join the Writers Guild, they assign you a mentor.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I had a group of five mentees who were assigned to me a couple of years ago. And they’re all phenomenal. But one of them emailed this morning to ask a question about something that’s going on in his life. So he wrote, “I wrote a micro budget script to direct. My reps attached producers who gave it to a big name actress who has raised her hand to star. Next week, I’m set to have a Skype call with her. She’s out of town shooting her giant budget sequel. I’ve never done this sort of Skype before. I’m wondering what on Earth I should say to convince her I’m competent to direct this little movie?”

**Craig:** Well, we’re probably not the most qualified people to answer this, but you and I have certainly both had to convince actors to be in movies.

**John:** Yeah. And I had to do this with like Ryan Reynolds for The Nines. Like he was this complete stranger and I had to convince him to do this. Also with Hope Davis, a few other people for projects along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I find myself doing this often times actually. [laughs] I had to convince Jason and Melissa to do Identity Thief before we even hired a director. I sent a letter to Jessica Chastain regarding Huntsman. And I had to talk to Chris because he wasn’t necessarily going to do it. This happens all the time.

I think, frankly, there’s a certain amount that they’re going to discern just from you, from who you are as a person. You know, if you are warm and friendly and positive, they will note. And if you are introspective and thoughtful and quiet, they will note. These things aren’t necessarily good or bad. I think mostly they want to hear some passion. They want to hear what your plan is for the movie and they really want to hear about their character and why you want them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s really important. Why me? Because they know, they’re not stupid. They know there are a list of names that are required to release money into a machine. And they know, for sure, that they get calls from people who are like, we want you to be in this, only you. And that’s not true at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they want to hear “why me.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that I think you need a really good answer for.

**John:** I think the other thing you need to be able to talk about is sort of your vision for the project, not just sort of what the finished film is. And like in talking about the finished film, I think it’s absolutely fine to bring up sort of your references, like the other films it sort of feels like, other films you love, things that can be a part of a conversation. But also, your plans for making in terms of who your collaborators are. Particularly if you’re a first time filmmaker, people talk about like these are the kind of DPs I’m looking at, this is the sort of the look, the color, this is the world I’m looking at for this. If there’s other important elements like production design or locations or that kind of stuff.

It’s fine to talk in a general sense of like how you see yourself making this movie because it helps them visualize what is the experience going to be like of me being on set to have this movie be made. Because a big name actress who’s going to be in your tiny movie, she’s basically giving up all her money and all her freedom to be in a little tiny trailer to make this film. And so is the experience going to be worth her time?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that doesn’t mean it has to be like the happiest, shiniest, most comfortable set ever. But she has to believe that you are a person who can make a really great movie, that the experience of making the movie is not going to be torture, and that she’s going to feel like, you know, when it’s all done, that she made the right choice to devote the time to this. And so that’s really what the conversation is about. It’s like making sure that she feels that like her instinct — because the only reason she’s talking to you is because she liked the script, that her instinct that this is a good project and that you might be the right filmmakers are correct.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean you make a great point. The only reason a big movie star does a tiny movie is to strengthen people’s understanding of how good they actually are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s hard to be your best sometimes when you’re in a movie that’s more machine than man.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But small movies give us insight into actors. It reminds us of their humanity. It helps feed into when they do the big movies. And the big movies help feed into the little movies. They need to know that the little movie is going to do something for them. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** They’re not just doing it for fun. I would also suggest that you don’t — while, I would never suggest sounding aloof, you also want to sound like a partner.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You don’t want to sound like someone who’s just staring up at this huge movie star going golly and everything they say, you’re like, oh yeah, oh my god, yes, yeah. They don’t need that. They’re looking for somebody that can really help steer them through this.

**John:** I’d also say, you’re going to want to flatter them, or at least sort of in acknowledging that you’re so excited to be talking with them, I think if you can be specific about what it is that they bring that is exciting to you, that’s helpful. So for Ryan Reynolds, the parts that he was going to be playing in The Nines were not like anything he played before. But I could say, “Look, I saw what you did in Amityville Horror. And I didn’t love that movie, but it’s clear that you fully, fully, fully committed to that role. And that’s what is exciting to me as I’m sitting across the table from you is that this is a role that’s going to take a similar level of commitment. And I’ve seen that you can do that. And that kind of specificity is really helpful when you’re talking to a stranger about joining this movie.

**Craig:** I kind of feel like you negged him.

**John:** Maybe I did neg him a little bit. Yes, like, yeah, in that crappy movie, you were actually pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s like you’re a pickup artist.

**John:** That’s really what I do.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** The other thing I would say is you talked about sort of like, you know, making sure they feel like it’s about a partnership. You’re not just sort of kind of fully offering them and saying like, oh, no matter what, you’re my star, you’re my whatever. Talk a little bit about sort of not even like schedule, but sort of like what is your life like and like is this actually a realistic thing that could fit into your life to be able to make this movie because what I don’t want my mentee to be doing is to spend six months chasing this actress or hoping that she’s actually going to be onboard and then find out she just goes off and does something else.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because that’s the challenge with big name movie stars is they get a lot of offers. And they get a lot of offers for a lot of money. And so I don’t want him to structure the conversation in a way like, well, she’s the star and it’s all decided and it’s all done. She should feel in the conversation that he really wants her in the movie and he would love to have her on the movie but he’s going to make this movie with her or without her.

**Craig:** Right, absolutely. And I would — I guess the only other thing I have to offer is that sometimes the overarching intent that I have when I meet anyone new, whether it’s over the phone or in a room or anything, is to communicate quickly and convincingly that I am a safe, decent person who’s not going to hurt them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, because — and I don’t mean physically. But this business is full of monsters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Full of them. And so I’m not suggesting that I’m weak. I don’t think that makes you weak at all. But rather you’re going to be okay with me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they’re trusting the director. I mean what they know is after they go, the director is going to edit the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let’s see what happens, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The director is going to, you know, be dressing them in clothes. It’s like they need trust. They need to know that they can trust you. And saying you can trust me is useless. They need to feel it.

**John:** A fun exercise to do when you’re really bored is to go through IMDb and like pick up a big name movie star and go through and find what movies he or she has made that like I’ve never heard of this movie. And most of those movies will be sort of exactly like this situation where it’s like they took a chance on this thing which seemed like a good guy was making the movie, and it just did not turn out well or did not turn out well enough that it got a big release. And that happens. And, you know, there’s probably a corollary conversation to be had with actors who are considering like, “Should I take this tiny little indie for no money?” And the answer should be sometimes yes, sometimes no, but like that phone call or Skype that we’re describing is very important on their side, too. And they should trust their instincts and advice of their trusted people about whether to take those jobs or not.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. All right, let’s get to our main topic today which is Outlines and Treatments. So this came up because twice in the last six months or so, I found myself I needed to write up a treatment for a project that I was working on. And I realized that, you know, I hadn’t really talked about this on the air and sort of what treatments are and the difference between outlines and treatments, to the degree that there really are. So I thought we’d just dig in.

And in the show notes, you’re going to find links to a bunch of things that Craig and I have written. So as we talk about different things, if you’re curious what they actually look like, just click on the link and there’ll be PDFs that show what we wrote up for those projects.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. So I guess we can start with just what’s the difference, right?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** I don’t know if there is technically like a hard difference but I know that I think of them differently.

**John:** I do think of them differently, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I think of an outline as being a document that I’m writing for myself mostly. And it’s essentially a plan. It’s like a roadmap for sort of how I’m going to get through this script and sort of what the beats are. And so it’s really written for my own purposes. It tends to be very short. It can sometimes have little just bullet points for what the things are. And it’s basically so I remember what sequence of events happens to get me through this script.

Is that what you call an outline, too?

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, absolutely the same. Whereas a treatment is designed to be read by others and usually it is designed to help convince others, either convince them or put them at ease.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I wouldn’t say it’s not called for in your deal but I do it a lot, not because they’re asking me but because I want everybody to kind of agree before you go.

**John:** Yeah. It gets everyone literally on the same page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because they’ve all read the same documents, they’re like, “Oh, yes, that’s the movie that you described in the room. And now that we’re paying you money, it’s good for us to see this thing so that four or five months from now when you hand us a script, we’re going to say, ‘Oh, that’s right. This is the script I was largely expecting.'”

**Craig:** And because of that, I tend to be very detailed in my treatments. I just did a treatment, I can’t put it up because, you know, it’s in development. But I did a treatment for Disney and it was 40 pages. So I wrote the movie in the treatment.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, including chunks of dialogue and all of this stuff. Now, when I go and write the screenplay, if I do, then things will change of course and things will expand and contract. But the purpose of this was to say, “Here’s a movie.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Similarly with my HBO mini-series, the bible was I think 60 pages, and it was every episode reads like an episode of TV.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s the show.

**John:** Yeah. And so, what we’re describing for treatments tend to be in prose form, it’s paragraphs rather than sort of, you know, little short blocks of things. It’s really giving you a flavor for — in some ways, the same way that a screenplay should be the experience of watching the movie, a treatment is sort of the summarized down experience of reading the screenplay. It’s a compressed version. It’s honestly, it’s like a very good version of what would be written up if there was a synopsis written for your script, like it got sent in for coverage. It’s like the really good version of that.

It’s more persuasive, though. And I think that persuasive thing is a key quality because your audience is people who either do already know what the project is or don’t know what the project is and you’re trying to get them onboard your vision of what it is you’re trying to do. And so, some things that feel like they should be really quick and easy to write, I’ve had to spend days writing out these treatments because I want to make sure that the treatment reads really well and really captures the flavor of what it is I’m trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. The treatment affords you an opportunity to show other people these moments. More than anything, treatments are good at this. Moments, big turns, character changes, events.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And get them onboard with these things that are the iron girders of the building you’re about to make. And you should be excited about this, I think.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I know some people are like, “Oh, god, I’ve got to write a treatment.” Well, you’re a writer. Yeah. And I have found — I don’t know, I’m sure you’re going to answer this yes but I’ll let you. When you’re writing the treatment, you learn, you discover new things about your movie just because you’re sitting and writing it.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just, it’s inevitable. It’s a good thing to do. I don’t always do it but when I do, I never regret it.

**John:** Yeah. It’s absolutely true. I think there are times where the process of having to write out this thing is just really daunting and exhausting and it’s like, just let me write the script instead. And the times where I’ve actually had to go through and do that work, I’ve always discovered some new things or I discovered a way to communicate an idea that wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise.

So they can be very valuable. Before we get into specific examples of things we’ve written, let’s talk about the money behind this and sort of like what it is in terms of your deal or not your deal to write this.

So weirdly, I’d never been paid to write a treatment until I wrote one for Disney. And I think you also wrote one for Disney which was just a treatment, is that right?

**Craig:** Yeah. I wanted to do it that way, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I was like, “Look, either we all want to make the same movie or we don’t. So let’s make a deal where you or I can say no after I do this treatment.” [laughs]

**John:** And that was a similar situation for a project at Disney. Usually though, a treatment is not an individual step. In the Writers Guild, you know, basic minimum agreement, there is some sort of flat fee for a treatment. And sometimes if you’re being paid scale, then you really should be paid I think that treatment thing as a separate thing. If you’re being paid over scale, sometimes you just write the treatment because it is a useful way to keep everyone on the same page. They probably can’t require the treatment, but it’s actually a very useful thing for just getting everybody seated and centered on what the idea is before you go off and write it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is an official MBA step.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they can break it out. But usually no, I don’t think of this as something to be finicky about. Frankly, when it comes time after I’ve turned it — let’s say I have a one-step deal and I’ve turned in a script and it comes on the heels of a very detailed treatment that everybody signed off on —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When they say, “Well, can we do like the five-week, you know, thing before we turn to the studio,” my answer is, “No. No, no, see, I did this before I wrote the script and that was our moment before. That was the free work. That’s the free work I want to do and I need to do but now I’m not going to do — no.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It strengthens your hand, I think, in that circumstance.

**John:** So mostly what Craig and I write are features and so most of what we’re talking about is features. But some of the examples we’re going to bring up are from TV things I wrote. And TV is its own separate beast and its own separate world. And in TV, you are very often writing documents that are not the teleplay. They are other things to get approval to write the teleplay.

And I can’t speak knowledgeably about sort of what that’s like on a current series but I’m going to include some examples of things I wrote between selling the pitch of the pilot and actually turning in the script, which were very important documents that I had to sort of get approvals on before I was able to sort of go off and write.

So the things you’re writing in television can have very different names and so I’m not going to try to give you the wrong terminology for things but you’ll hear like one-pagers or outlines or sometimes we’ll hear treatments. And it’s all very specific to the kind of thing you’re writing. Sometimes approving a story idea or a story area and it’s always going to depend on the nature of the show and the nature of the network and studio relationship.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s funny, I’m looking through my files here and I realize how many of these I’ve written. Like I sent you one but I’m going to send you so many more because I’ve written so many of these. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And a lot of times, the ones that I probably will send along are from movies that just never happened because, you know, the ones that have happened, a lot of times I just — I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’d just rather have the movie be the movie, you know, like even with Identity Thief. It’s interesting actually. You can see the difference. There are some differences for sure.

**John:** Let’s go through some of these examples. So I’m going to start with the Big Fish outline. So this is literally a one-page document and this was just really kind of for my own purposes to figure out what the basic scenes were and sort of how it would all fit together.

So it says Act One, Act Two, Act Three. There’s individual lines for each thing and it shows in parentheses which characters are in that scene or that sequence. And so it goes from like “On the day he was born….” “Opening titles: Will grows, Edward annoys” “France: Will gets the call” “Airplane: Fly to Alabama” “The Snowstorm” “Arrive at house: Meet the mother, Dr. Bennett”.

So that actually is sort of the movie I wrote but this is just the, you know, single line version of what the structure of this would be.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a classic example of what’s for you. And another thing that I can send along are note cards. So, you know, I’ll break everything down to note cards so you can see what that looks like. That’s my tool for me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For this, for instance, I’m looking at your Act One here, then it says “First Will/Edward talk”. Well, obliviously you knew what that was. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** So this is absolutely just something that helps you organize your thoughts, which, by the way, I think everybody should do. It’s just my personal opinion. I don’t understand the kind of “I’m just going to wander and discover as I go,” you know. At least this. At least know how it ends, you know. [laughs] So this was a great example of private me-only document.

**John:** So here’s a bigger document. This is the Big Fish sequence outline based on the 3/31/2000 Draft. And so this is the thing I wrote up for myself but I also shared it with the studio executive to talk through like these are the things that are happening in the script. And specifically, people wanted to see what was real and what was fantasy. And so I sort of did differentiation with boxes about like what was real and what was fantasy.

So in this case, I’m taking an existing script and I just break it into sequences. So I’m referring to both the pages and sort of what’s happening in them. So it’s more detailed because I actually knew the details about what was happening in these different things. So this ends up being a four-page document that sort of talks through what the whole thing is. And it’s just useful to have a compressed shorter version of the thing to look at so if we were making big structural changes, “Okay, if we got rid of this whole thing, what would take its place, how can we compress or move stuff around?”

Big Fish was, looking at it sort of structurally in that level was important for Big Fish because we were always shifting back and forth between those two worlds and figuring out what made the most sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like the fact that you made this document to help people understand something. It can be frustrating at times when people don’t understand something that you know they will understand if they just see the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know it, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this is an example. You knew, right? [laughs]

**John:** I knew.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If I could have gone through the script and just like made all the fantasy sequences in like colored font rather than black and white —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Maybe that would have done it, too. But people had a hard time sort of visualizing how we were moving back and forth between reality and fantasy.

**Craig:** Right. And so sometimes you do make a service document. You know, I made one when I came back on The Huntsman and we had not a lot of time to try and do a lot of work. I had to make a document that was basically kind of saying, “Here’s what we’re keeping and here’s what we’re changing and here’s what it’s going to be. And here’s the sets that it’s going to use,” because it was all about like, “Okay, we need you to rewrite this script considerably but we have these locations.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “And we can’t not use them, nor can we get other ones to do different ones.” So you do create service documents a lot. And all of that work is designed to get you to the part of your job that you thought was the only part, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is the writing part. But it’s not. What are you going to do?

**John:** So I’d love to look at your Identity Theft treatment. I took this to be that there was an existing script and you were doing huge work on it and so before you went off to do this huge work, you wrote up this document to say like, “This is what the thing I’m going to write is going to be like.” Is that correct?

**Craig:** That’s right. So there were two prior scripts and this was essentially going to be as close to a page one as it gets. And so I wrote this up to help get everybody on the same page because they had struggled —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, prior to this.

**John:** So let’s take a look at what you’re actually writing here because this is very much how I write up especially like TV pitches, but you start out by talking about your characters. You describe Sandy Patterson. You say Jason Bateman in parenthesis. You’re talking about who he is and sort of how we’re going to see him, how we’re going to meet him, what his journey is. You talk about Diana, Melissa McCarthy, you say. For Trish Patterson, you already called it as Amanda Peet.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And you have other suggestions in here for other folks.

**Craig:** Yeah, like you can see like Jim Cornish, I thought I was writing for Ricky Gervais originally and then it became Jon Favreau. You know, so those things happen. I had Sam Jackson in here. [laughs] And then I had some Israelis which sadly, you know, didn’t make it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I really loved those Israelis.

**John:** So you talk through all that stuff about like this is what’s going to be happening character-wise because in the rest of your treatment, you’re not going to really have the opportunity to get the feeling of who those characters are because the treatment is very compressed and it’s just talking through sort of more plot. It’s not getting into the intricacies of character and sort of what the characters feel like.

So you have to sort of start with all that so we know who these people are because we’re getting a very quick hit of them as we read through the treatment.

**Craig:** Yeah. And as I’m looking through this, it’s funny, sometimes I do it a little differently. I guess I do it a little differently each time. But in this one, part of what I was doing was splitting each — it wasn’t like it was a scene or a sequence. It was just like, “Okay, here’s a story chunk that makes sense to lump under one paragraph, you know, or one subsection.” I would write what happened. And then after, in italics, I would write about what the point of it was.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because a lot of what they had been struggling with was getting out of the episodic nature of what a roadtrip is. Like you go here, you go here, you have those hijinks, you have that, but what’s the point, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So a lot of this document was it was not only about me working it through but it was about comforting everybody that, okay, there will be some substance to this.

**John:** Yeah. I find I use italics in treatments often to reflect dialogue. So within a block of text, a paragraph that’s describing sort of the action, I’ll use italics to sort of indicate what a character would be saying at this moment and sort of those exchanges back and forth. And if I need to do that work where I’m sort of like, you know, kind of underlining like what a character has experienced or sort of why this is here, then I’ll literally go for underlining or bold face to make sure that people are clear like, this is the point of this section.

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And again, you know, you and I both know that if they saw it, they would get it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s part of our job because, you know, it’s actually, the fact that we know that is part of what makes us writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be frustrating to us. It should actually be very comforting that there are some things that we can do the mental math on instantaneously that other people can’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s part of this is helping them.

**John:** And I’ll point out this. This treatment you’ve provided for us is 29 pages long, so this is a lengthy document —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** To sort of describe a movie that’s, you know, just a normal length movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s, you know, you really going through the whole process of making sure that we understand the whole movie before it’s made.

**Craig:** It also in painstakingly making sure that, you know, all the annoying bits and bobs are at least theoretically solvable, you know. The how do they get from here to here and how does she know this and how does he know that, you force yourself to do some of this annoying work sooner rather than later.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At least you know you’ve got like, okay, I’ve got my treatment method as a fallback. Maybe I can come up with something better as I’m writing the screenplay. [laughs] But there is an answer.

**John:** The thing I’m writing right now, I wrote a treatment for it first. And part of the reason for writing the treatment was to make — there’s potentially a competing project. There’s always going to be competing projects, so we wanted to have something that we could sort of prove like this story was all figured out at this point.

But now that I’m writing the real screenplay, I was like, “Okay, at some point I’ll figure out like how I can get between these two characters and get both of them in.” And so I just had to write that part yesterday for like how am I going to actually intercut these two things. And I was angry at the treatment writer who hadn’t figured it out for me.

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs] Exactly. And, you know, sometimes you can kind of embrace the treatmentness of it, you know, and just sort of brush it over.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And sometimes, you know, you want to show that it actually works.

**John:** Yeah. It would have been too much detail to honestly put in the treatment. I was glad I didn’t put it in the treatment, but like as the actual screenwriter I still had to figure out how I was going to do that. And that’s the job of screenwriting.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny, so I’m writing the first episode of this mini-series and as I did the bible, each episode summary got longer and longer. So by the time I got to the last one, it was, you know, the second to last one was like 10 pages and it was dialogue and everything, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The first one wasn’t quite that detailed and I’m having to do it now, I’m annoyed. [laughs] I wish I had done it then. But I mean, the nature of this first one is such that it kind of defied treatmentizing, you know. You had to kind of just plunge in because it’s about chaos, essentially. So you can’t organize chaos too carefully.

And it’s a new thing for me because it’s television, so I understand like, “Oh, I’m not making something that must be orderly by the end.” In fact, I’m just taking five eggs and smashing them against the wall. And smashing them in an exciting way and then letting the yoke drip down and then cutting to black. [laughs] I love that. That’s fun.

**John:** Yeah. You’re writing it for premium cable. Most of the things I’ve been writing for have been for broadcast and so one of the next documents we’ll take a look at is for D.C. And it’s the outline I did for the pilot. And this was an outline I had to get approved.

And what was new to me at this point, which I’m so grateful that I had to do this outline, is act breaks. And so I had to be able to show like this is act one and these are the scenes that are going to be in act one. And there’s an act break and then there’s act two and these are the scenes and then there’s an act break. Because in television that still has act breaks for the commercials, it’s so crucial that you’re going out of the story at a place with rising action and an unresolved question so that you have that urge to come back and see what’s next. And so you can enter into that next scene with the question resolved or at least a new burst of energy.

And so, this outline for D.C. is eight pages long and pretty common I think to what a pilot outline would be like. It’s really showing you, “These are the locations we’re going to be, these are the characters, this is how we’re getting through the story of the pilot.”

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a very good example. And you can also, if folks at home want to follow Tom Schnauz on Twitter, he does this occasionally. So he wrote on Breaking Bad and now he’s maybe like the head writer, I guess, of Better Call Saul and he’s been directing a bunch of episodes, too. And he will post pictures of their card outlines, act one, act two, act three, act four, you know, and the teaser and all the rest of it. And you can blow it up and read them, you know, and you can see it.

And it’s very much like this, you know. You see how much detail goes into the storytelling part. I mean, I think a lot of screenwriters out there, they gravitate towards what they see in a screenplay that they read. And what they see is dialogue. What they don’t see is story, right? The narrative is kind of weirdly invisible underneath the expression of the narrative. But it’s the narrative minus the expression that makes the expression work.

So one thing that these things, outlines and treatments, do is they force you to confront the narrative without the window dressing of the action of a scene and dialogue and all that. You’re forced to just make a story.

**John:** Exactly. The last thing I want to show here is this was a write-up I did for Alaska, which was a pilot I did for ABC. At the time, it was called The Circle. And I call it a write-up because it’s the kind of thing where once you pitched a show, you end up writing this document which is basically an encapsulation of your pitch that you can say like, “This is what I pitched to you,” and they can actually show this to other folks or they can use it to pitch themselves internally so they just know sort of what it is. And they will give you notes on this. They will give it back to you because they want to be able to communicate to everybody else who’s in the process, this is the show we are trying to make.

So for The Circle, it starts with one page which is very much kind of what the pitch was like. Basically like sort of, “This is what’s cool about the world.” Then we’re going into talking about the characters and who the principal characters are we’re following. And then we’re getting into details about the pilot and finally getting into further episodes, like things that happen after this pilot episode.

This becomes really important because sort of like what you’re describing with, you know, not having the dialogue and therefore being able to see the story of the episode or the story of the movie, this is like without even an episode of the show kind of, this is what the series feels like. This is the broad picture document of this is why this is a show that is airing on your network.

And so this was a really crucial, really sales document. Even though it’s theoretically designed for my own purposes and for us to have a conversation, it’s really to convince them that like, “Oh, this is going to be a show that you will want to have on your network, you know, next fall.”

**Craig:** This is a great sales document. And let’s remind ourselves that oftentimes the sale between you and them is completed. They’ve bought something.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The document is for them to sell it to each other.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And if you don’t give them something to read, like for instance, in this Circle outline, it says, “From the description, it sounds like Law & Order without the suits and skyscrapers. Which it is.” Right? Ah-ha. [laughs] So you can help them — you know what this is, it’s Law & Order but in the Alaskan wild. I can see them saying this to each other. It’s like you gave them their little buzzy handle. If you don’t do this for them, they’re going to do it on their own.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And you don’t want that.

**John:** If you also look at this document, you’ll see that I bold-faced things that are incredibly important or sort of like strange. If people end up skimming, they’re at least picking up these crucial things. So “First off, the state only has about 500,000 people. That’s the population of Long Beach, except that they’re spread over a state the size of California, Texas and Montana combined.”

That’s interesting. That’s fascinating. That shows you like what is different about this crime procedural than any other crime procedural that they’ve seen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I talk about they have this weird system of boroughs and magistrates. They don’t have police the way we think of them. So there were interesting things that are bold faced there so that people will say like, “Oh, that’s right. This is what’s different about this show than the other five procedurals that we’re developing this year.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Alaska is awesome, by the way.

**John:** Alaska is great.

**Craig:** It’s really cool.

**John:** And so that’s outlines and treatments. So again, we’ll have links to the ones we discussed today on the show notes for this episode, so just scroll through and find those and pull them up. They’re all PDFs and none of them — well, I guess Big Fish and Identity Thief got made but most of these are like —

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I’m going to send some —

**John:** Dead files.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m going to send some dead file ones that I like that just never happened.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that Craig will absolutely love. This is MCC’s Miscast. So every year, MCC Theater does this big, I guess it’s a fundraiser, but it’s a big event where they have Broadway stars come and they basically gender-reverse the people who are singing the songs. So if it’s a song traditionally sung by a woman, a guy sings it and vice versa.

And so there have been fantastic ones. Jonathan Groff did Sutton Foster’s Anything Goes, did the full tap of it. He was great in the previous one. So this year they had a bunch of great people as always. The two that I’m going to put a link into the show notes for are Tituss Burgess and Tina Fey did a duet that’s great. Tina Fey is singing. She did a great job.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** And also, Craig, you will love this. So they did a song from Hamilton. They did The Schuyler Sisters, but they used like three young boys who are on Broadway shows right now —

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** And they were fantastic.

**Craig:** Angelica, Eliza and Peggy. The Schuyler sisters.

**John:** I always feel like I’m the “And Peggy.”

**Craig:** [laughs] And Peggy. You know, a lot of people think that “And Peggy” gets short shrift in that show, but And Peggy is also Maria Reynolds who plays a huge part in the second act.

**John:** Yeah, which is great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Do you realize that there were 12 Schuyler siblings in real life?

**Craig:** You mean at that time?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There were 12?

**John:** There were 12.

**Craig:** Who —

**John:** It just focuses on three of them. Apparently —

**Craig:** Who were the other ones? [laughs]

**John:** They were not important enough to be in there. Maybe it was the rest of the ensemble who was like sliding around the stage all the time. Maybe they’re the other siblings.

**Craig:** They should do one show where they just keep going.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And Oliver. And Gina. And Dwayne. [laughs]

**John:** It’s very, very good.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So what’s yours?

**Craig:** How could mine not be the Tesla Model 3?

**John:** I cannot wait to get mine. We ordered one.

**Craig:** Fantastic. So did I.

**John:** So did Stuart.

**Craig:** Yes, he did. I had a talk with Stuart and I said, “You’re doing it, buddy.”

So this is the long-awaited and we will still be awaiting affordable car from Tesla and Elon Musk. And their plan is to provide the base model at $35,000, which is definitely in the realm of affordable for most American families. I don’t know what the average amount people spend on a car, but it probably is something like in the mid to high 20s, I would guess. You know, in America, it’s an interesting fact. So it’s not far off the mark there.

It has all the range of the big car, the model S. Not quite as ridiculously zippy, but who cares? The point is, zero emissions, no gasoline, it’s beautifully made. And they got over a million pre-orders, like some insane number.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like an insane amount. And I did it because it occurred to me that my son will be driving in two years, my daughter will be driving in five years, so yeah, just, you know, an incredibly safe car also.

**John:** Yeah. So I’m looking forward to it coming or for whatever comes next. We have the Leaf. I love the Leaf. I’m delighted with it. But I think it’s always great to have, you know, new choices, new things out there. Apple will have a car at some point. I’m curious what that car is going to be like.

I’m also curious sort of how much driving will be important in the future. Like my daughter is 10. I’m not convinced driving will be nearly as important for her as it was for me or even a kid right now. Like a lot of kids these days are not nearly as quick to get their driver’s licenses because they have alternatives. And I think alternatives are great. So, will self-driving cars replace this? Probably, at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But —

**Craig:** At some point.

**John:** For now, this is a great car.

**Craig:** Yup, yup, yup, yup.

**John:** Excited. That is our show this week. So a reminder that if you would like to come to see us on April 16th and join us for the Craft Day at the Writers Guild Foundation, you need to go to wgfoundation.org and sign up for that. It should be a great fun event.

Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth who wrote a great 8-bit theme. So thank you, Rajesh. If you have an outro you would like to share with us for the show, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link. It’s also where you can write questions like the ones we answered today. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel, as always, and edited by Matthew Chilelli. And thank you all very much. We’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** See you.

Links:

* [Get tickets now for the 2016 WGFestival, featuring John and Craig’s interview with Lawrence Kasdan, and more](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/wgfestival-2016-craft/)
* [BuzzFeed talks to Karyn Kusama](https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/karyn-kusama-the-invitation-girlfight#.xdpX87R768)
* Overnight on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overnight), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390336/) and [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000929VTU/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [ID Theft treatment](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/id_thief_treatment.pdf)
* [Original Big Fish outline](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/bf-original-outline.pdf)
* [Big Fish sequence outline](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/bf-outline.pdf)
* [Short Circuit treatment](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ShortCircuitTreatment.pdf)
* [D.C. pitch](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/dc-what-it-is.pdf)
* [D.C. pilot outline](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/dc-pilot-outline.pdf)
* [Alaska write-up](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/alaska_writeup.pdf)
* [Ops write-up](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/ops_writeup.pdf)
* [Ops Iraq outline](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/ops_iraq_outline.pdf)
* [@TomSchnauz](https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz) on Twitter
* [Watch the performances from MCC’s Miscast 2016](http://www.playbill.com/article/video-recap-watch-the-performances-from-miscast-2016)
* [Tesla Model 3](https://www.teslamotors.com/model3)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))