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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/lotteries-lightning-strikes-and-twist-endings).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Before we start the show today, I want to let you know about the live show happening on December 11th in Hollywood. It’s Scriptnotes with me and Craig and Aline and special guests Jane Espenson, Derek Haas and B.J. Novak. So we did this last year. It was a tremendously fun time. You should come.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow, November 12th. So if you would like to come, please go buy a ticket. There’s a link in the show notes but you can also go to the Writers Guild Foundation site. That’s wgfoundation.org. As always, it benefits the Writers Guild Foundation which is an awesome charity. And we had a fun time last year. We’re going to have a fun time this year. So come join us if you’d like and we’ll get on with the show. Thanks.

[intro tone]

Hello and Welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 170 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So Craig, last Sunday I had a really strange experience.

**Craig:** Tell me all about it.

**John:** I went to Long Beach where I saw the West Coast premiere of Big Fish: The Musical.

**Craig:** Oh, that must have been both disorienting and pleasing at the same time.

**John:** It was. It was surreal in the best possible ways. So this is the production that actually bought all of our stuff when we closed on Broadway. So they bought our sets, our props, our costumes, our wigs. And so it’s that weird experience of seeing something that is incredibly familiar yet incredibly different at the same time. So it’s the same production in terms of the script and the music but it’s just different because it’s different people doing it. It’s a different stage. It’s at this really quite big house, the Carpenter Theatre in Long Beach. And I kind of loved it, at the same time it was sort of an out-of-body experience.

**Craig:** I know that it’s hard for a lot of people to have seen the Broadway show because it’s in New York only but it was my pleasure to see it. And one of the big show-stopping elements were these big elephant butts, which sounds kind of crazy when I say it like that, but they were. It was very impressive production design. Did they have the elephant butts?

**John:** They have the elephant butts.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So here’s what was so fascinating is because this production is original theatre, it didn’t have automation of the stage. So they had a lot of our set pieces but they didn’t have all the magic under the stage things to make stuff move around. So they have to like push things around. And they did a remarkable job sort of accommodating what they needed to do for that. And they were able to do a lot of the choreography with the Broadway production but not all of the choreography.

So it was actually just genuinely fascinating. It’s an experience that, as a screenwriter, you and I would never have.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** To see the same text but with completely different people and being done without any of your sort of direct involvement. And so in many cases, people are making similar choices to the Broadway production because it’s just that’s the text. I mean like you’re going to play things a certain way because that just is what makes sense. But then sometimes a person will do something that is just different than intention. And sometimes that was kind of fascinating.

So Amos Calloway who, in the movie, is Danny DeVito, in the Broadway stage production it was Brad Oscar who was fantastic. The Amos that I saw in this version was sort of like I would say like a drunken cowardly lion, which is just a very different choice but it kind of worked. And so it was cool to see something very different.

So I would recommend anyone who makes a Broadway musical [laughs] to go visit a regional production of their own show because you’ll find it fascinating and surreal.

**Craig:** That’s spectacular. I’m glad it’s enjoying a second life and hopefully many more lives to come. I can see the show being done in schools.

**John:** We will be doing it in schools. So we have 60 productions this year of Big Fish across the country. Abilene Christian University did it in Texas. There’s a lot of university productions. Eventually there will be a Big Fish junior version like a school version —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which will probably be different because I think a fifth grade musical about death is probably not the most ideal subject matter. So I will do some book changes to accommodate those needs.

**Craig:** There is actually some very interesting junior versions out there. My son was Jean Valjean in the Junior Les Mis in which some people actually were allowed to die.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Éponine was allowed to die but Fantine was sent to a hospital [laughs] but then returns later as a ghost. So you just sort of understood that maybe the hospital wasn’t that great. But various changes were made. No one ever referred to prostitution or things like that. But your show, I think, wouldn’t require much.

**John:** No. I mean, our show is incredibly wholesome and family-friendly. The challenge is just how do you , you know, the idea of a father dying is quite a bit to put on the backs of a grade school cast. And also the split between the past and the present, that’s kind of sophisticated. And then to be able to show that and really act that when you have maybe a 12-year-old doing that could be challenging.

So I think we will find a way to simplify aspects of the storytelling so that it can best be the story of a son wanting to learn the truth about his father’s tales within the framework of what Big Fish should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think you’ll find also that a huge part of the job of juniorizing the musical is making it much, much shorter and taking out — choosing which songs should just go because they can’t sing all of them.

**John:** Absolutely. And which songs can move from being a solo number to a group number because —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have so many kids.

**Craig:** Right. That’s right.

**John:** So today on the program, let us answer some questions from listeners. We have a whole bunch that have been stacking up, so we’ll dig into that mail bag. We’re also going to talk about The Five Types of Twist Endings, this great blog post by Alec Worley. And I want to talk about lightning strikes and lotteries and sort of that sense of whether something becomes popular or successful because of its inherent awesomeness or just because magic happens.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s get to it, but first a tiny bit of follow- up. Last week I announced Writer Emergency, this pack of ideas and prompts that we’re starting on Kickstarter. And Craig, you had to venture to the Kickstarter site.

**Craig:** Here’s the sick part is that I gave you money —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because you’re my friend.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** And then today, I gave our editor, Matthew Chilelli, some money because he does a really good job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s killing me.

**John:** It’s killing you. I really just want to dig into what it felt like to press that green Back This Project button. How did it feel when you clicked that and knew that you were supporting the Kickstarter economy?

**Craig:** It felt like I was betraying everything that I believe in. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s basically I felt like I had turned my back on my values and had contributed to the weakening of civilization.

**John:** Craig, I want to thank you for that because you’ve helped and I want to thank, we’ve had so many backers. We had more than 2,000 backers and we —

**Craig:** Yeah, you guys did great out there.

**John:** We did great out there. So we were trying to raise $9,000. As we’re recording this, we’ve crossed $57,000 which is just nuts. So that’s fantastic. So now it’s pushing through the rest of the Kickstarter and putting these out in the world and then getting them to the hands of kids in creative writing programs across the country and around the world who could hopefully benefit from these. So I want to thank you, Craig, personally —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I know this was not an easy thing for you. But you broke through that seal, that barrier just for this one and then you supported Matthew Chilelli and now you’re just not going to be able to stop supporting Kickstarter projects.

**Craig:** No, no, no, it’s very easy for me to stop. In fact, what I really want is for Stuart to have a Kickstarter that I don’t support [laughs] just as a matter of principle. I don’t care what it is. He’s getting nothing. By the way, do you think you’re going to make money on these things? Do you think you’ll profit at all?

**John:** We might profit a little bit. So here’s the deal. It’s like as I described on the first podcast when we talked about this, is printing playing cards scales pretty well. So they’re really expensive to make those first batch of decks, but the more you can make, the cheaper per unit it is. The challenge is we’re actually doubling that because we have to, we’re sending them out to kids. And then there’s some things that don’t scale like postage and like sending stuff out to backers around the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we’re not going to make a lot out of it but I think we’re going to sort of do what I wanted to do out of the project which is sort of bend the universe in a slightly better direction. So it’s been exciting to do that and sort of engage with that community which has its own sort of esoteric rules and customs and try to both be a part of that world of Kickstarter and also introduce that Kickstarter kind of world to people who are backing their very first projects like Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, now that I hear that you are going to make some money on this, I’m full of regret because I would have just given you the $9,000.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would just have bought you out, given you the $9,000.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is like Shark Tank for —

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** For 100 percent equity in your company, it’s just, but now I’ve given money and —

**John:** But you’re going to be getting a deck of cards. And you said you actually wanted to donate —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The extra cards. So I think you did like the 12-pack.

**Craig:** Yeah. I want all the cards to go to the less fortunate budding screenwriters out there.

**John:** Great. And that’s a thing that backers can always do. So when you get your survey at the end of this asking for your mailing address, there’s this little field saying Special Instructions. You’re can just say I’m Craig Mazin and I want to give all my cards to the kids.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. You can just say I want to Mazin this.

**John:** I want to Mazin this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s really the term that we’re going to use for this. And so when Stuart sees that on the instruction sheet, he’ll know, okay, this is the Craig Mazin special.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Awesome. Let’s get to our things today.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So first up is this Five Types of Twist Endings, which is a blog post by Alec Worley, and whoever sent this to me, thank you because it was great. It’s been sitting in our show notes for a while. But it was really cool.

So this blog post talks through twist endings and it defines twist endings as “the moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s not hard for us to think about twist endings in movies because some of my favorite movies have twist endings.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I thought that this was a pretty good summary of how these things work. We can go through them one by one. I’ll take the first one, reversal —

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Reversal of Identity in which someone turns out to be someone else. So your parent is actually not your parent but your grandparent. Your best friend is actually a shape-shifting monster so —

**John:** Yeah. The Crying Game where the woman you love is not —

**Craig:** Is not a woman.

**John:** Ta-da.

**Craig:** Ta-da. Or in Fight Club, Brad Pitt is not actually a person. He is your alter ego.

**John:** That would also maybe play into the third version which is the Reversal of Perception. And Reversal of Perception is the way you thought the universe was built is not the way the universe is actually built. And so there’s a fundamental thing that is not the way you thought it was. My movie, The Nines, has that aspect where quite early on in the film you realize something bigger is going on. And so it’s not a twist in the sense of like, oh my gosh, I didn’t expect that at all. But you know that there is a revelation coming, that the universe is bent in a way that you were not expecting.

**Craig:** Yeah, the universe is a bent in a way or time is being bent in a way. So Alec cites An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge which is an amazing short story by the great Ambrose Bierce and was clearly the inspiration for Jacob’s Ladder in which it turns out the entire movie is the fantasy of someone as they are dying.

**John:** Yeah. And short stories are actually a perfect place for twist endings to happen because in some ways, a novel, a twist at the end of a novel could feel like a bit of a betrayal. But a short story, you have just the right amount of investment in the reality of the short story that the twist ending feels great and rewarding. Where I would wonder in a novel sometimes you spent eight hours on this thing and like then to say like, oh, I’m going to pull the rug out from under you, it might feel like a betrayal.

**Craig:** No question. Twist endings have always been the stock and trade of science fiction and fantasy short story authors. In part, it works so well for short stories because a good twist makes sense of some confusing facts. And we can only bear to be confused for so long before we just give up. So short stories work beautifully for that.

One of the other twist endings he identifies is the Reversal of Motive.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I thought he was after this but he’s really after that. So he cites Seven where we realize in the end the serial killer isn’t actually helping them. He’s setting up Brad Pitt to become, Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s wife to become his final two victims.

**John:** Obviously reversal of motive is often found in comedies also where you have a misunderstanding of what a character is trying to do and that’s sort of driving things. So in Go, in the third section of Go, Burke and his wife, they seemed to be trying to seduce Adam and Zack like some weird kinky sex thing is about to happen and it’s revealed that they’re actually trying to sell them confederated products.

So their motive was very different and that was the surprise. That’s the jolt that you weren’t expecting. And part of what was fun about that is it was a good misdirect. So like, oh, that’s the twist and then the next scene, you’re going to see that they’re actually, Adam and Zack were a gay couple this whole time and they’ve been fighting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So sometimes you can misdirect twice or like you can lead the audience into one misdirection and then surprise them with a second misdirection.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And some of these things overlap. You know what just popped into my mind is that great character from Monsters, Inc. I can’t remember her name but she’s the one who talks —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And she is both the reversal of identity and the reversal of motive. It turns out that she’s actually there under cover and she’s not a file clerk. “You forgot to file your paperwork.” But she’s the head of some sort of internal investigation and that was her motive. So those things always, you’re right, they work well in comedies.

And here he also has Reversal of Fortune in which, this one was a little, I guess it’s kind of a twist ending. It’s really more of the kind of Monkey’s Paw theory — what you thought you were going to get you’re not quite getting.

**John:** Exactly. So it’s pulling defeat out of victory or that thing that at the very end you realize like, oh, you actually didn’t get what you wanted. He cites someone we talked about before on the podcast, Emma Coats from Pixar who writes, “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating”. And so this is basically there’s a coincidence often at the end that ends up pulling the rug out from underneath that character. And that can be rewarding in the right kind of movie. I think of noir movies sometimes having this or certainly like that Twilight Zone kind of fiction —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** May have that like suddenly at the end the great and short version where he finally has time to read and then he breaks his glasses.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the hallmark of the ironic ending.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of my favorite Simpsons jokes was a Halloween episode. Homer eats the forbidden donut. He sells his soul for a donut, doesn’t finish it. [laughs] So he doesn’t have to go to hell but then he does finish it and he ends up in hell and he’s sent to the Department of Ironic Punishment —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Where he’s put on a conveyor belt and —

**John:** And force fed doughnuts.

**Craig:** Force fed doughnuts except that he never stops eating the doughnuts. He’s perfectly happy to eat as many doughnuts as they give him. And the demon says, “I don’t understand. James Coco broke in 15 minutes!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Anyway, this would be the Department of Ironic Punishment.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then we have Reversal of Fulfillment.

**John:** Which I found the most challenging of the ones he describes and how you differentiate that from reversal of fortune.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so what he’s saying is, somebody is going to achieve is kind of subverted by what somebody else achieves. And I think the best example he gives is the gifts, O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi where two people individually sell their most beloved possession to sacrifice for the other and then find out that they’ve done this.

**John:** Well, it’s not only that they’ve done this, but like one of them has bought a comb, but she’s sold all her hair.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The gifts are now useless for each other. So that was, yeah, that works. Again, it’s a little bit of an ironic. That sort of kind of is also —

**John:** It’s ironic too.

**Craig:** It’s a reversal of fortune in a sense too.

**John:** Yeah. What I think is important about all these discussions about the twist ending is it’s really looking at what does the reader know? What does the reader know at every moment in the course of the story? Because in order to create one of these twist endings to make sense, the entire narrative has to make sense without the twist. And so that the journey you’re going on seems to make sense. And then when you provide the twist ending the reader needs to be able to go back and say, “Oh, it still completely makes sense with this new information.”

So you’re withholding a crucial piece of information and then at the end providing it and that changes the perception of everything that came before it. And that could be a rewarding experience for the reader. It can also be a very frustrating experience for a reader. And if that’s kind of the only thing you’re story has going for it, it’s unlikely I think to be completely satisfying.

**Craig:** That’s right. You don’t want to start and I think you can see the problem in the progression of the career of M. Night Shyamalan. You don’t want to start with this edict that the twist rules all.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** It does not. The script that I’m writing now is essentially a neo-Agatha Christie Who Dun It? All Agatha Christie stories had a twist ending, all of them, because the person that you thought did it wasn’t the one who did it and you never could figure out who did it and then you find out. And she used these reversals of identity and motive all the time.

Interestingly, never a reversal of perception, a reversal of fortune or fulfillment. It was always the motive and the identity were the things that were constantly shifting with her. And what’s so interesting about her success as a writer was that she understood that her audience knew it was coming. And that’s quite a high wire act to do when you, it’s not like — we all went and saw The Sixth Sense. I did not- I wasn’t sitting there thinking I wonder what the twist is. I just watched the movie and enjoyed the twist. But no one sits down to an Agatha Christie book and thinks, well… [laughs]

**John:** Well, this is going to be straightforward. I am going to know who did it.

**Craig:** Just like, yeah, it’s like a true crime story or something.

**John:** And so it’s sort of there’s a meta level of expectation is that she has to write the story knowing that everybody is expecting there to be a twist ending.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So therefore, everyone is going to be reading everything she writes into it with the expectation of like, oh, but that’s not really true. And so she has to both honor that expectation and then surpass it in ways that continue to be rewarding and surprising. And so that’s a challenging thing.

What the frustration would be is if Agatha Christie ever tried to write just like a straight story, something that didn’t have that at all, everyone would be a little bit weirded out by it. I could imagine her writing under pen names because anything with the Agatha Christie brand on it is going to feel like, well, that has to be that situation. M. Night Shyamalan has a similar kind of jinx to him because three times is certainly a pattern.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. No, for sure. I mean, and frankly it started to feel a little desperate. I mean we don’t want to feel like our filmmakers are sweating to cook us the meal that they think we want. We want them to be expressing something competently and then we can enjoy it along with them.

By the way, Agatha Christie’s first big hit novel was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I think it was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And at that time, she was a new member of this Mystery Writers of England organization. That’s not the real name, but it was essentially that. And this caused a huge uproar with the mystery writers organization because they felt she had violated the rules of the craft.

Because the twist in the, and so The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first person account. A guy is living in this little town and Hercule Poirot is renting the house next to him and he describes how a man is murdered and Poirot goes about attempting to solve the crime. And at the end, spoiler alert, it turns out the murderer is the narrator.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And everyone just lost their crap over this. But boy, it really works in the novel. It’s great.

**John:** Yeah, we like that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In many ways, I think that kind of reversal of expectation, that’s a reversal of the form in a certain way. Like you thought this was going to play by the rules and it’s not playing by the rules at all. And I certainly love that when that happens.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

**John:** It reminds me of Too Many Cooks. I don’t know if you’ve seen Too Many Cooks yet.

**Craig:** Well, it’s my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Oh my god. And so Too Many Cooks is fantastic. And so I will let it remain your One Cool Thing. But I think that also reverses the form. You have an expectation of like, oh, I know what this is, I know what it’s parodying.

**Craig:** Repeatedly. [laughs]

**John:** Repeatedly. And then it just through its length and its form and just how nuts it goes, it becomes something really transcendent.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right. I want to talk about two other little Internet things that came up this week. First is Alex from Target. Do you know this whole meme, this thing that happened?

**Craig:** I do. And I have to say, this is where the Internet just occasionally pukes something out. It just randomly decides you — I’m going to make you a star.

**John:** So Alex from Target for people who weren’t aware of it or who are listening to this six months later and wonder what the hell was that? So this is what happened with Alex from Target. There was a teenage checkout boy at Target, someone took a picture of him bagging groceries and another girl on Twitter wrote, “Yo, like so hot.” And that became like a viral meme sensation and then it got remixed and it just became this whole big blowup of a thing.

But then another company, a marketing company, claimed credit for having started it, but it looks like they really didn’t, which is juts nuts also.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If someone can try to jump on and claim credit for something they didn’t do at all. But it’s just so obvious we check that they didn’t really do it. So it was just a fascinating moment of kind of these Internet lightning strikes where this is not a person who, this Alex from Target, he didn’t do anything.

**Craig:** He did nothing.

**John:** He was just, he did nothing. He was just suddenly in a place and his photo went crazy and by all accounts, at the time that we’re taping this, he seems to be handling it remarkably well in the way that I think young people now who’ve always grown up with the Internet are sort of just kind of ready to be famous in a way that we never were. [laughs]

There’s that expectation like you could be famous tomorrow.

**Craig:** Well, also, I mean Alex understands inherently that he didn’t do anything. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** I mean, there are people that want to be famous and start doing things to be famous and then they become famous either because what they do is legitimately good or it’s legitimately terrible.

**John:** Or it’s ambiguous in a way that’s, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or it’s just bizarre or amusing, whatever it is. Alex literally did nothing. [laughs] He did absolutely nothing. This is one of those, this is like when there’s a glitch in the matrix and this happens.

And I think for him I can only assume that he’s like, yeah, this is just the Internet being Internet. I don’t have anything to do with this. It could have been me, it could have been anybody.

**John:** Basically, all he did was reflect light. And that was the extent of it.

**Craig:** Literally, all he did, it’s not even a well-framed photo.

**John:** No, I think that’s partly what makes it so incredibly great and charming. So I wanted to just take a minute or two to talk through what the Alex from Target movie would be, because I guarantee you that at least a thousand screenwriters go like, oh, that’s an idea for a movie. Like what if you suddenly became famous and like for no good reason. And I wanted to think about sort of what that movie would be because we’ve made other movies, good movies, about sort of the rise of Internet culture. I mean, Social Network, one of the best of them.

And I guess in Social Network of course, he’s creating Facebook, he’s actually doing something. But that sense of being plucked from obscurity and put up on this great stage and suddenly weirdly having a platform when you kind of shouldn’t have a platform is fascinating. And there’s potential there’s something to be made there but there’s also so many pitfalls in a character who has and wants nothing and suddenly gets everything.

**Craig:** Well, one of my favorite movies of all time is the old school version of this and it’s Being There.

**John:** Oh, certainly.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I think that I could easily see an Alex from Target’s version of Being There. If you were to make Being There now, that’s probably how it would go. Somebody is bagging, I mean, I don’t mean to suggest that Alex from Target is mentally challenged in any way [laughs] the way that Chauncey Gardiner was.

But somebody who’s unremarkable and perhaps even sub-remarkable becomes famous because the Internet has a weird burp and they end up being the president.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, it could totally happen.

**Craig:** It could happen.

**John:** Yeah. So I think there will likely be competing Alex from Target movies in development. And I suspect none of them will happen. But I suspect we will see this idea in general explored not because of Alex from Target but just because it’s an idea that sort of needs to be talked about in the universe is this sense of suddenly out of nowhere you can just have this giant spotlight on you and you have no way of anticipating it, controlling it, making it start, making it stop.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s a weird time that we’re living in.

**Craig:** Yeah, and somebody out there is pitching Jimmy from Taco Hut.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And probably selling it.

**John:** Yeah, probably.

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably.

**John:** Low six figures, yeah.

**Craig:** Low six.

**John:** Low six. The management company is involved as a producer, they shopped it around.

**Craig:** Right. The studio is, even though they haven’t gotten the script yet, they’re already thinking about who’s going to come and rewrite it.

**John:** Yeah, they are. And they’re probably going after like some of the Teen Wolf cast like Dylan O’Brien or somebody like kind of person for that role.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Totally. So in a related thing, this was already on my show notes to talk about, is this great talk that Darius Kazemi did at XOXO, this sort of, I’ll summarize and say it’s a sort of TED Talk like, but his speech was actually really fascinating because it was like the most brilliant parody of a TED Talk speech. And so I’ll link to it in the show notes, but essentially he talks about how he made it. And we’ve heard a lot of speeches about how people made it and sort of how they became successful and how they built a community.

So what he did was he played the lottery. And he would, every day he would play the lottery and really think about what numbers and he started a community and he started like a blog where like he talked about his favorite numbers and like he’d mix it up and like played numbers in different combinations or sometimes like on his mom’s birthday he’d actually play his dad’s birthday to really throw things off. And eventually like he hit it and he became like super rich.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s this brilliant parody of like how I made it but what’s so great about his speech is he actually segues into this idea of lotteries and this idea of lighting striking. And he’s a person who, this guy in real life, he makes sort of little Internet memes. And so he makes this little Twitter bots that combine random things. And so he gave a demonstration of like 50 of these different things that he’s made and combined.

And some of them are incredibly successful and some of them aren’t incredibly successful. And he can’t predict what goes viral. And his suspicion is that there is no reason. That it genuinely is just random, like Alex from Target, and that you cannot funnily predict it and shouldn’t therefore beat yourself up if something doesn’t work and you shouldn’t praise yourself when something does work because it kind of is random.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, look, there are way, there is good work and bad work. There are ways to do better and there are ways to do worse. But the magic that occurs when something takes off is unpredictable and does incorporate an enormous amount of random factors.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that fascinates me. I talked a while ago, one of my Cool Things was Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a great book, which I think is —

**John:** Which I bought, which I —

**Craig:** Wait, I sent it to you.

**John:** No, you sent it to me.

**Craig:** I sent it you.

**John:** You sent it to me. You sent me the physical thing. It’s like 1,000 pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a massively long book. But Gödel was a mathematician and his — and I always worry that I’m not quite getting his theorem correct, but I believe this is essentially what he said was for any system of math with rules, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. There must be things that you can’t — that are true regardless of the fact that you can’t prove that they’re true which is fascinating to me. And I feel like entertainment is the same way. There will always be things that are good and there’s no way to prove why. And you could have never gotten to them intentionally. They just happen.

**John:** Yeah. I think that absolutely is true. What is interesting about this idea of lightning strikes or lottery tickets is that in a weird way you’re more likely to win the more things you do. And so I would say for people who are looking at a writing career or like trying to get into the movie business, the more times you’re at bat, the more likely you are to hit a home run.

And so you’re much less likely to sell a spec script if you’ve written exactly one script and you’ve shown it to one person. So that exposure to many opportunities and taking many chances is much more likely to get you into a situation where you can suddenly find yourself lucky.

**Craig:** Yeah, you have to strike the balance of course because there are people that shotgun a lot of things out there. One of them happens to click, but that’s the end of them because really their success was a product of nothing more than the shot-gunning.

When they talk about animal behavior, they talk about two reproductive strategies. I can’t remember, they’re defined by letters. But regardless, one of them essentially is a low quantity, high quality reproductive strategy which is a very human way of approaching it. Elephants do it this way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It takes a lot to have a child, so therefore you’re going to have fewer of them, but really put a lot of resources into protecting them and raising them. And then there’s the other way which is, screw it, I’m going to have as many kids as possible and then a bunch of them are going to die but maybe a bunch won’t. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what you find, actually, even in humans, is that when humans are in situations where there is plenty, they will go for the low-quantity, high-quality reproductive strategy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And vice versa.

**John:** The other thing which I think the lightning strikes theorem kind of misses is, especially in creative work, is iteration, in that sense of like, you know what, that first thing may not be the right idea, but by going back and tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it, that’s sort of how you find what is the thing that takes hold. And, you know, with all the sort of Twitterbots this guy did, that’s not really iteration, it’s a bunch of like things moving in parallel versus sort of serially going back through and seeing like, what, how can I make this thing better? How can I take the system and tweak it and make it better, and how can I make that experience better.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, in rewriting a script, that’s iteration. That’s taking feedback and looking at the script again and saying like, okay, this is the better version of this. And you’re honestly iterating on your own ability to write because I’m certainly a better writer than I was 10 years ago because I’ve had the experience of looking at my work and saying, okay, these are strengths, these are things that are not strengths, and I can actually do things better through all that iteration process.

**Craig:** And for those of us who are making movies, our goal is to make something that is permanent. We don’t always succeed, but we try. Whereas when you’re doing pursuits like the kind that Darius is doing, there is no expectation of permanency.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you’re hoping for really is a combustion, you know.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** But everybody knows that when the combustion consumes the fuel it’s gone. I mean, there’s no chance that a meme will last forever. You know, Grumpy Cat will not be popular 10 years from now.

**John:** Yes. And so, we can love Grumpy Cat now, we can celebrate its impermanence.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But we can’t try to emulate its impermanence. We can’t try to like, to make the next Grumpy Cat. That’s probably not the right idea. We should try to make the next amazing thing. And the next amazing thing could end up blowing up like Grumpy Cat or could be a long slow burn that is remembered 10 years from now.

**Craig:** Yes, yes. But when you’re trying to make things that are permanent the high-quantity approach often will bite you in the butt.

**John:** I would agree. Let’s take a look at some questions.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the first one I have here is Jason from White Rock, British Columbia who has a location question. “How specific can you place action in the real world? Can you really place a scene on a specific street in a specific town with perhaps even a specific address? I’m a suburban Vancouver-based filmmaker, and we Vancouverites don’t have a lot of experience watching movies that are actually set in Vancouver. Mostly our city serves as a stand-in for other American towns. I probably know as much about the way addresses work in New York as I do about Vancouver itself. So when addresses are needed in your script, how specific can you make them?”

**Craig:** Well, yes, you can make the address as specific as you want. Generally speaking, it should be as specific as it needs to be.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no point in saying that the building is 35 West 56th Street if you can say, well, it’s a building, you know, Midtown, you could say, or corner of 56th and 5th. But, you know, if you’re telling the story where the address becomes a matter of importance, for instance it’s a crime story and someone has lied about where they live, sure. Well then, that makes sense, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Put the specific address in.

**John:** Yeah, I think Craig and I are generally always pushing for specificity. And specificity doesn’t necessarily mean the street address, but it’s describing things in the kind of detail that makes it this house versus that house and lets us know the kinds of people who live in this house versus the kinds of people who live in that house. And so really think about what information will help your reader understand what is unique and special about these characters and their world.

And if that means really nailing down to what that street is like, great, tell us the street, but also make sure you’re giving us words that describe what that street feels like so, because we’re not going to know this. Don’t just put in a link to Google Street View, like really describe the street.

**Craig:** Yeah. What we want to know really is about people more than anything. So places exist for people to be in and we need to know what that place says about the people that are there. So, yeah, be specific, but don’t be over-specific. If the detail adds nothing for the reader it’s probably dispensable.

**John:** It is. So anything that provides feelings, sentiment, emotional detail, that’s what you want.

**Craig:** Right. Okay, well, next question is Matt from LA. And he asks, “After a long time toiling in the entertainment industry, I’ve been lucky enough to make the leap into fulltime writing and directing. As a freelancer I’ve been very busy and I’ve taken every single job that’s been offered. Now, they may not be the best projects but I’ve learned a ton and I’ve always felt good about the decision to take the job. But I foresee a near future where the various companies that have been offering me jobs will present something I don’t think is worth my time or the paycheck. As two very successful writers — ”

**John:** Ah…

**Craig:** “Very successful writers, I’m sure you’re offered projects that you feel compelled to turn down by reputable studios.” I think he means I’m sure you’re offered projects by reputable studios that you feel compelled to turn down. “How do you turn down opportunities without souring relationships? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.”

**John:** That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that happens a fair amount, I’m sure, I mean, to both of us. And so someone will send us something and say like, hey, we’d love you to do this thing. And I will read it, and I’ll say I don’t want to do this. And so how do you answer back in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a jerk saying like that’s a stupid movie, I don’t want to make it, but also doesn’t leave you on the hook for trying to write this movie for these people?

**Craig:** Yeah. There are a couple of reasons why you’re not going to want to do something. You either think it’s dumb or just not your thing, or you think this isn’t, it’s just not something that I want to do or that I think I could add something great to or that I could succeed with. What you want to do is always turn down things with that second reason, [laughs] even if they’re not always that second reason.

**John:** [laughs] Exactly.

**Craig:** Nobody minds if you say, listen, this is very cool, it’s not quite — I’m not quite sure what I could bring to it or it’s not quite what I’m looking for right now. John Lee Hancock has a great phrase, “This isn’t a pitch I can hit.”

**John:** Ah, nice.

**Craig:** You know, like so I’m putting it on me. I will often say, you know, it’s probably not something that I think I could succeed with, but I look forward to being embarrassed when this thing wins an Oscar for somebody else.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So, you know, I try and be humble about it. I mean, people are offering you things, you should be polite. But, you know, they’re not unaccustomed to this.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Just as we are not unaccustomed to hearing no.

**John:** And that’s absolutely true. And so, often what I will say is truthfully I am too busy, so like, maybe I’m just not actually available to do it, and that could be a completely valid way to get out of something. The danger is sometimes they can come back to you with that same thing when it becomes clear that you are more available. Or they’ll say, we’ll wait. I’m like oh god, now I actually have to explain why I really don’t want to do it.

The other thing that I will say, which is often true, is that someone will come to me with a project and I’ll say, you know what, this is actually kind of like something I already planned to do myself. And so I sort of have my own version of what this kind of thing is, and yours is going to be great, but I sort of want to do mine at a certain point.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s another way to approach it. So from you, as a writer-director, Matt, I would say, always say thank you. Make it clear that you really did really look at it, that you’re not just dismissing it out of hand, that you don’t want to work for those people. Just say like I didn’t spark to it. It didn’t feel like it was my thing, but I’m excited to work with you in the future. And if you mean that, then they will come back to you with more stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. By the way, something that I will often do is I’ll say, after I’ve said no, I’ll say by the way, I really like this. For this part, think about this. I’m just saying like here’s just some thoughts in general. It doesn’t cost me anything and it shows that I wasn’t just being a jerk.

**John:** Exactly. And you may actually have a suggestion of like a person who is the right person for it. And so that’s always a good thing, too, if you can get someone else who would be fantastic for it involved.

**Craig:** Great point, great point.

**John:** Jay writes, “Can you go over the correct format for writing different scenes in the same room? For example, a bar where protagonists split up and do battle separately but in the same room. Do I still separate each scene with slug lines? If so, how should it look since they’re in the same master scene location? If not, can you give an example to how you would phrase this?”

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I personally wouldn’t do separate slug lines here. The slug line ultimately is a tool for the production to know where they’re shooting this thing. And if it’s all in one room, they’re shooting it all in one room.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you can do is, say something like OVER BY THE BAR, you know, in all caps, and then write some of that and then say OVER BY THE ENTRANCE and then some of that, you know, so that people will understand that the camera is picking off two different areas of the same room.

**John:** Yeah. So what Craig is describing is often called the intermediary slug line. So it’s not an EXT/INT. And you’re not changing going from a new, it’s not a new scene, it’s just like a new part of where you are at in a scene.

And you’ll see that a lot. And as you read more scripts, especially action things, you’ll see that happens a lot, when you’re in sort of the same general space but there’s sort of scene-lets happening. There’s moments happening over here, and there’s moments happening over here, and sometimes characters — you need to make it clear that characters are not in the same space and can’t interact, because they’re in different parts of an environment. That’s totally fine.

I would say, in general, as I read scripts from newer screenwriters, they tend to throw in too many slug lines and make things seem like there’s too many scenes. And a lot of like “same, continuous” they get so freaked out by the format, and sort of like moving through a house takes like three pages because there’s so many slug line.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s not how it really works in the real world. If you’re in a house and the character is moving through space, let them move through space and don’t worry about each little new location.

**Craig:** Well, it’s just in part it’s the toxic impact of all these know nothing scripted advisers and so forth who fetishize the rules and put the fear of god into these poor people that their script is going to be thrown out if a slug line is misused. It’s absolute nonsense. The screenplay is there to inspire a movie in the reader’s mind and that’s what you should be aiming for. Don’t panic over things like “this is the way the slug line has to be!”

**John:** Yeah. Or that it should say “same” rather than “continuous.” It’s like no, it doesn’t need to be either of that. You probably don’t even need the slug line.

**Craig:** It’s just crazy.

**John:** In general I’d say like save those scene headers. Let’s really call them scene headers because it’s a header for a scene. The movie has moved to a new place and time in general and if you really haven’t moved to a new place and time but you’ve just like moved to a slightly different part of the room, just keep going and just let us be in that place.

**Craig:** I mean, there are times when you need a different slug because it’s the same time but you have two people in the bar and then at the same time behind the bar outside two guys are climbing in through the rear window.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, people need to know, okay, it’s a cheat to not kind of call out that you’ve made a big location change, because again, it’s really, it’s for the production. I mean, that’s what it’s there for. Frankly, readers tend to glide through these scene headers. It’s not the stuff that our eyeballs snag on, so.

**John:** I think, honestly, I doubt, most times as a reader I’m not really reading those, I’m just aware that there was and INT and EXT and it was all upper case and so therefore, okay, I’m in a new scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s a sort of piece of visual punctuation that lets me know that, okay, I’m in someplace new, and I’m going to figure it out once I start reading it.

**Craig:** Precisely. All right. Well, we’ve got a question here from Jim from Durham, North Carolina. And he writes, “My question concerns use of paragraph breaks in a block of dialogue.” All right, we’re in the format session of our Q&A?

**John:** We are.

**Craig:** “Admittedly, in most scenes, there’s a lot of back and forth, so it’s not common that a character goes on for half a page, but it can happen. My natural instinct when writing a long speech like that is to use normal paragraph breaks, a blank line. However, I was chastised for doing this. In fact, I was told by a person who seems to know all the rules that I had to put, in parentheses, beat, between each paragraph. I didn’t really intend for a pause any longer than the normal speaking pace, I was just trying to make it more readable and less run-on. ”

Well, there wasn’t a specific question there but I think that the implied question is who’s right? [laughs]

**John:** Who’s right? Can you put that blank line in a long speech?

**Craig:** Yeah. What do you say?

**John:** I think you can. But I would agree with whoever said that it’s not standard and that it does sort of throw you because we’re not used to seeing it. And if I were to encounter that in a script I might wonder is this a mistake, did something get dropped out, is there something wrong, because I’m used to seeing a continuous block of dialogue being a continuous block. And if it’s broken up by anything, it’s broken up by beat or something else.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, the problem isn’t that you’re putting the break in there, the problem is that the reader might presume that something went wrong and obviously that’s not what you intend. Beat is a perfectly good way to break these things up. Most people don’t read beat as long pause. If I want a long pause I’ll write in “long pause.”

However, I have to also say, if you don’t intend for any pauses or anything and it’s a half a page of a speech, try it without the pauses. I mean, just write the half a page. I’ll tell you this much, if it’s a half a page speech, better be a damn good speech. But if it’s a damn good speech, I’ll read it.

**John:** And you have other options rather than just beat and for that parenthetical. And there may be some good reason why there’s sort of a special moment of action or emphasis that it makes sense, like sort of like in the parenthetical, you might say like, you know, (to Jim) or like (straight down the barrel), or like some kind of a color line that you’re putting in that parenthetical that actually helps make the speech make more sense, and it’s also visually breaking it up. I think Jim’s overall instincts, like oh my god, this is going to be a very long block of dialogue if I don’t break it up, that’s the right instinct.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** I would just that overall a use of a parenthetical or honestly just breaking out in speech to put it in a line of scene description and then going back into the dialogue is generally a better approach.

**Craig:** I agree, I agree. It’s a good instinct to break it up unless you’ve got something that really works best as a kind of spat-out run-on deal.

**John:** Yeah. So Clarence, from Canada, asks a marathon question.

**Craig:** [laughs] This needed to be broken up by beats.

**John:** Yes. So it’s in little bullet points in WorkFlowy here. So I’m going to read this and it’s going to be kind of long, but I think it’s interesting, so I’m going to get into this here.

“Two years ago, I wrote, directed, produced my second feature film with a meager budget of $7,000. It was solely financed by me and my own production company. I had screened it at a film festival in Los Angeles and was fortunate enough to be able to attend. Before arriving in Los Angeles, I got in touch with a handful of sales agents that the festival announced would be in attendance.

“I met with those three who were interested in representing the movie for international and domestic distribution. Two wanted to make changes to the cut, so I went with the one that didn’t.”

**Craig:** Act one.

**John:** “The deal was this. The company would own the distribution rights for my movie forever and ever. And they would work hard to sell the movie to territories worldwide because otherwise they wouldn’t make any money either. They had a number of other movies under their belt that range in size from no budget like mine, to about the $1 million range.”

**Craig:** Midpoint.

**John:** “Since its initial release on VOD and DVD in North America last year, it has also been released in 30 countries. But here’s the thing, I haven’t made that much money. It’s not necessarily the number that bothers me, it’s still a huge return on a $7,000 investment. What bothers me is that my sales agent has made much more than I have, about a 60/40 split. They take a 22% commission right off the top of each sale, and they recoup $20,000 they invested into marketing, like poster design, travel to film markets, et cetera. What’s left is mine. Unless the film reaches $100,000 in sales, then they recoup $15,000 additional marketing expenses. The movie has pushed past the $100,000 mark, and most markets have now been sold, giving a little room for much more income to trickle my way.”

**Craig:** Denouement.

**John:** “So finally, my question, is it normal for a sales agent or potentially distributor to make more money than the production company that actually made the movie? Not to mention put up the cash in the first place? Is this just the cost of doing business?”

**Craig:** Okay, so let’s summarize this Cecil B. DeMille production of a question. So he’s made a micro budget movie for $7,000. He has some sales agents that have sold it on VOD and DVD, and basically he’s not getting as much money back from the sales as they are.

The movie has grossed, I think is what he means, pushed past gross $100,000. There’s not much more that he thinks is coming towards him. So while he’s made some money here, it’s not what he was hoping.

Yes, this is normal. And here’s the problem. When you’re in this micro budget business, and you’re having an independent sales agent going out there and slinging this thing around, you are essentially, it’s like the pink sheets in the stock market. You’re penny-stocking it, you know?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And so there’s this enormous built-in risk to these things. Some of these deals, the fact that the movie cost you $7,000 doesn’t mean anything to them. What they’re worried about is that they have to spend in this case, $20,000 to actually market and distribute this thing.

That $20,000 is at enormous risk. So the only way for them to make money is to build in the failures into the successes. And unfortunately, you’re not just paying them for what they did for your movie, you’re paying them for what they did for other movies that lost everything.

**John:** Yes. They’re sort of building a slate after the fact. They’re gathering up a bunch of movies. And in some ways it reminds me of sort of like the housing crisis where they packaged up a bunch of mortgages, and like put them into different bins and sort of like, you know, marketed them as one thing.

They probably were able to cut deals with VOD places and other stuff for like a whole big bundle of things. And yours was one of those bundle of things. And I think it’s unlikely that you’re going to see a huge windfall from that sort of situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Here’s the good news for Clarence though, like he made a $7,000 movie which got released on VOD and DVD. That is full of win.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think you have to take that as a victory. And the fact that your movie exists in the universe, is a really good thing especially if you like your movie. That’s a really good thing. Many, many filmmakers, Lena Dunham’s first films never had that kind of release, so you’re ahead of her from that perspective.

I wouldn’t stress out about this. I would kind of forget about this movie, this distributor. Work on your next thing, and then if you have a thing that has multiple people who want to distribute it, take a stronger look at sort of what those terms are and if there’s a possibility for better terms with a better person, maybe that will be the case.

**Craig:** Yes. Michael Eisner once famously said of negotiating for deals, “You can get what you can get.” And this is what you’re able to get.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So when you roll with these kinds of guys that are doing these high risk investments, yes, this is the way it works. There’s just no way around it. But John is absolutely right, the victory here is that you made the movie, people saw it, now it’s time to trade up and see if you can get into business with some people that aren’t necessarily in the, what my grandmother would call the schmatta business. John, that’s Yiddish for low quality clothing.

**John:** Ah-ha, I learned something today.

**Craig:** You learned something. Patrick in good old Blighty writes, “If I’m a British writer, writing a US-based script, most likely targeting a US production company or agent, should I be taking measures to alter my language and spelling accordingly? Hopefully, the dialogue should read as authentic to the setting. But should I be writing mom and not mum even if it’s against my nature? Would this freak an American reader out? Or would be people be able to accept the British-isms if it’s not affecting the story?

“I want to be able to write the script the way I feel comfortable. And I would feel as if I’m being inauthentic or misrepresenting myself as a writer by trying to remove or hide part of my identity from it, but I’m also worried at the same time it will be jarring, or take people out of the script. So what do you think I should do?”

**John:** You should absolutely not write mum instead of mom particularly in dialogue. Anything a character says needs to be written in the way that the character would actually say it. I mean, not going crazy into sort of like regionalisms or colloquialisms or trying to describe specific dialects accurately, but you don’t say mum instead of mom if it’s an American kid. That’s just not going to be natural. I wouldn’t worry about sort of every last little spelling. That’s fine. If it’s spelling in scene description, that’s going to be fine, but the big words, the words that are actually going to be said, those have to be American words if this is going to be a US production.

**Craig:** 100%. This is a slam dunk answer here. It’s not you, you’re not saying these things. You’re writing a screenplay with American characters, they have to speak as American people would speak. I’m on my second script in a row that is primarily populated by British characters. They speak like British people. What I don’t do is, for instance, if it’s a word that has a different spelling but the same pronunciation, I don’t go that far.

**John:** So honor, color, valor.

**Craig:** Precisely. If someone is going to say color, I just write it C-O-L-O-R. But I certainly, I take very careful, pay very careful attention to not use words that they simply don’t use over there. I mean, specifically if it’s in dialogue. For instance, in Britain, dumpsters aren’t called dumpsters. So I’m not going to have a character say dumpster. I’m not going to have an English character say dumpster.

This is an easy one, Patrick. Go ahead and write them however you want when people aren’t talking, but when the characters are talking, they have to talk like the people that they are.

**John:** Yes. John in Orlando writes, “I’m an attorney and screenwriter who is in Florida. I have a good friend who happens to be childhood best friends with a major showrunner you both surely know.

Oh, now I have to think of who this could be.

“We have hung out in social situations, but I’ve never revealed that I write scripts. I really hate to be ‘that guy,'” in quotes, “lest it change the social dynamic between the three of us, but I would like to at least pick his brain about some things. My dream would be to have a project gain traction first, and then mention it, but I feel this guy probably knows a ton that could help me at this point. Any advice for broaching this subject? This must happen to you with friends of friends who want advice.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it does happen with friends of friends who want advice. I think what nobody wants to hear is read my script because they already have scripts they have to read. There’s legal issues with reading a script, and so on and so forth, and of course, what’s hanging over it more than anything, is that they don’t want to be in that terrible position of having to tell you that your script is atrocious.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** However, I don’t think it’s a problem if you’ve hung out with this guy in social situations and you live near him to say, “Hey, can I just buy you a drink or a cup of coffee, an hour of your time, no more, no less? I just want to ask you some questions.”

That’s an easy one for somebody to say yes to. Frankly, it’s also an easy one for somebody to say no to. If they say no, then you just let them off the hook and that’s the end of that. But if they say yes, at least then you get them there. And if your concept comes up in the discussion and they get really excited by it, then they’ll ask you if they want to read it.

**John:** Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think broaching it in a way that is sort of both direct but also not sort of confrontational, so like putting it in the context of like coffee or a drink is going to make things probably feel a little bit better. I’d be leery about having like someone else sort of broach the topic like having the wife call the wife or any of that stuff. That’s going to just be a mess. If there’s a friend of a friend and you are friends with this person, and it hasn’t come up yet, but it could come up, let that come up.

If it’s a situation which like you’re going to the Austin Film Festival and that comes up naturally in conversation, then clearly you are a screenwriter and they will know that you’re a screenwriter and that’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah, easy. All right. Here’s our last question, I think. Jawaad from Fort Lauderdale writes, “My question is about a recent fear I’ve been having about being trapped underground in a box.”

**John:** That’s not true.

**Craig:** No, I misread that, “About being trapped in one genre.” Sorry. I misread that word. [laughs]

“So my question is about a recent fear I’ve been having about being trapped in one genre. So far, I’ve been a comedy writer, I’m the head writer of my university’s sketch comedy show, done quite a bit of improv. However, lately I’m starting to realize that I may not love comedy as much as I initially thought. I realize with comedic features,” and he says here, “I just finished my first feature, a kids’ comedy and it’s definitely not as funny as it should be.”

All right. “There is a high expectation of laughs per minute and I’m not sure that’s the type of writing I ultimately want to be doing. Do you think there is an easy crossover for somebody who’s only done comedy to start writing dramas? I feel like sprinkling a little comedy into dramas would be an asset that would make my writing stand out.” John, what do you think?

**John:** So Jawaad is in college. He’s written one script and he’s worried about being pigeonholed.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.

**John:** That’s actually crazy. And so, I put this question on here because I love it because it’s that sense of like I worry I’m going to be trapped in a genre having written one thing and being in a comedy troupe in college. That’s not how it works. If you had like a hit sitcom that ran for five years, then yes, you might be pigeonholed as a comedy person.

But you are at the start of your life. You can literally do anything. And so you should go off and write the drama if you think you’re a drama person. You are not trapped at all. The sense of being trapped is completely an illusion.

**Craig:** Yes. If a tree is pigeonholed in the forest and no one’s there to read it. Yeah, no, Jawaad, you are pre-pigeonhole, my friend. Nobody knows what you’ve written here, and it doesn’t matter. Your gut is telling you something, however, that is important and that’s you don’t want to write a certain kind of movie. You don’t want to write broad comedy, and you may not want to write comedy at all.

The fact that you maybe identify as a funny person or that you like writing sketch comedy, so you like writing comedy in sketch format as opposed to feature format, that doesn’t mean that that’s all you can be or all you should be. You should write the kind of movie you want to write. That’s really the only sort of movie that you are ever going to have success with anyway.

Sprinkling a little comedy into dramas is a good thing if that’s what the movie wants to have. I would not think in terms of assets. There’s a lot of calculation inherent to this question that I would advise you abandon.

**John:** Exactly. It’s always like, it’s trying to figure out like, well, what if I build this mansion and I don’t like the bathroom in this mansion that I build. It’s like, well, you don’t have a mansion yet, so like, stop building your mansion and actually like, you know, go to work. It’s one of those sort of like, what if I don’t —

**Craig:** It’s a Steve Martin joke. You know, how to not pay taxes on $1 million, step one, get $1 million. You’re not there. This is not something you should be worrying about. You have all the ability and time to write precisely what you want in the manner you want to write it.

**John:** I agree. Craig, it is time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** One Cool Things.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is so short. It’s Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns. It’s a documentary by Joe Callander. It is 1 minute and 47 seconds long. So I shouldn’t say too much about it because I could actually talk longer than the actual documentary is. But it’s just a perfect little gem that I just love. And it reminds me of like an Errol Morris film, but it’s 1:47. I loved it.

**Craig:** You had me at 1:47. I’ll be watching it as soon as we’re done recording. My One Cool Thing is the aforementioned too many Too Many Cooks by Chris “Casper” Kelly. So Chris Kelly, who goes by Casper Kelly because there are four billion Chris Kellys out there, he’s done a lot of shows on Adult Swim which is the Cartoon Network, I believe. And he did this thing that may be the greatest thing actually that anyone has ever done in an Internety way. This is the best of the Internet. If Alex from Target is the sort of most pointless of the Internet, this is the greatest.

Adult Swim has this thing where they do these infomercials which aren’t infomercials at all, but they fill in an 11 minute gap at 4am.

And so he floated this thing out there and lo and behold, a few days later, it is a sensation. And it truly is a sensation. We talked about subversion. The concept is a simple comic concept. We’re watching the opening credit sequence of what is sort of like a Full House sitcom. And the gag is that the song is super cheesy and everybody in it turns and looks at the camera and smiles when their name appears underneath them.

And you think, okay. And then the joke becomes, oh, there’s actually way more characters than there should be on the show like there’s like way too many characters and you think, okay, that’s a joke. But every 40 seconds, Chris Kelly says, “No, that’s not the joke. This is the joke.” And then, about seven minutes in, it’s not a joke anymore at all.

It’s actually something brilliant, and subversive and kind of existentially gorgeous. And where it ends is quite beautiful actually. Smarf, that’s all I say is Smarf.

**John:** Smarf. I’m going to watch it again because I’m not sure I got to the moment of existential beauty. I got to a moment of just tremendous appreciation for sort of just the ongoing genius of it. And to me, where it crossed over is there’s a moment where a young woman is hiding in the closet, and it’s one of the most sort of bizarrely brilliant little ideas. So I just loved it.

**Craig:** I think my mind went into a Nirvana space when the names rearranged themselves as people, and the people appeared as the names. That’s when I just thought Chris “Casper” Kelly, and really, I’ll just say this, why I love it so much is that this is truly a marriage of chaos and discipline.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We typically just get chaos on the Internet. It’s easy to be weird on the Internet. Super easy, and there’s lots of it. But this was absolute madness within a structure that was so good. So anyway, it’s out there, by the time this airs it’ll probably be, everybody will be like, oh, we all know about Too Many Cooks, but if you don’t, my god, Too Many Cooks.

**John:** Check it out. So we will have a link to that in the show notes, and also there’s a piece I read in Entertainment Weekly this morning about an interview with him talking about sort of why he did what he did and how he did it. It was just remarkable.

You’ll find links to that in the show notes in addition to other things we talked about. You can find those at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. If you want to subscribe to Scriptnotes, you can join us on iTunes, and click subscribe there, you can also leave us a comment which is always lovely and helps us out.

If you want to listen to the back episodes, and also the special bonus episodes, we’ll have special things with the Three Page Challenge from Austin. We’ll have Simon Kinberg. Those are found at scriptnotes.net and you could subscribe there. It’s $1.99 a month, it gives you access to the whole back catalogue.

**Craig:** $1.99.

**John:** $1.99. Craig, we are super, super close to the 1,000 full-time premium subscribers, so we’re going to have to do that dirty episode and I’m so excited to do it.

**Craig:** You said you had a great idea. Do you want to say what it is?

**John:** I don’t because I’ve not reached out to that person yet.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Yes, but it’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I trust you.

**John:** Well, I told you who the person was, right?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I did. Craig, your memory is failing. It’s a person who, I’ll tell you again after the show. But you said, I told you after the last show, you said oh my god, that’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** Yes. Wow, Craig. I’m sorry, maybe you should like have a medical professional because last week you asked about the whole Retina iMac and the display —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You said like you wanted to get the Retina display but without the iMac and I explained why. And I explained that I’d done it before.

**Craig:** Let me put your mind at ease. I have a 13-year old son. He’s destroying my mind. [laughs] It’s just him. It’s not medical. It’s just my son.

**John:** It’s not medical.

**Craig:** No, he’s just consuming me. He’s consuming my mind because I have to remember all of my stuff and all of his stuff.

**John:** Yes, it’s a burden.

**Craig:** Yes, huge burden.

**John:** If you would like to jog Craig’s memory, you can reach him @clmazin on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. If you have a long question like the ones we answered today, you can write it to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you want to get a Writer Emergency Pack, you can just go to writeremergency.com, that’s a link to the Kickstarter. There will also be a link in the show notes. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week, who also has a Kickstarter project, so back that.

Stuart Friedel is out sick today. He will be back next week.

**Craig:** Good, good. [laughs]

**John:** How do you dare say that?

**Craig:** I hope it’s fatal. [laughs]

**John:** Craig gets very mean late in the episode. This is the one where everyone turns again Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Exactly, I don’t know why. I think this is my new theme is that Stuart is bad.

**John:** Stuart is all things good.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, Stuart. But it’s, what if he’s dying?

**John:** Well, it could be Ebola.

**Craig:** Oh, sweet.

**John:** All my staff went and got their flu shots because the flu sucks and it’s much more likely that you’re going to have the flu than to get Ebola.

**Craig:** Slightly more likely, yes.

**John:** Just a little —

**Craig:** Just a touch.

**John:** Just a tiny bit, but I learned that everyone who works for me is afraid of needles.

**Craig:** Oh, what a bunch of babies.

**John:** I know. [laughs] Like it’s very rare that I run around with a needle and stab them.

**Craig:** Like what a bunch of, first of all, the flu shot, you don’t even feel that needle. It’s the tiniest, skinniest needle.

**John:** I know. And it’s so rare that I stab them. And for them to have this sort of, you know, instinctive reaction just because I’m running around with a needle is weird. [laughs]

**Craig:** Honestly, it’s so bizarre. Wait, you gave them flu shots?

**John:** Well yes. It kind of saves them money.

**Craig:** I like that you sit them down and just start injecting. No wonder Stuart is sick. It’s your latest concoction over there at Quote-Unquote.

**John:** I told them it was the flu serum.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s not Stuart.

**John:** You’ll never know.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s not.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Craig, thank you for another fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Tickets to the Scriptnotes Holiday show are on sale tomorrow at the [Writers Guild Foundation website](https://www.wgfoundation.org)
* Big Fish: The Musical is now playing [at Musical Theatre West in Long Beach](http://www.musical.org/MusicalTheatreWest/bigfish2014.html)
* [Writer Emergency Pack](http://writeremergency.com) is going strong [on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck)
* [The Five Types of Twist Endings](http://alecworley.weebly.com/blog/the-five-types-of-twist-ending) by Alec Worley
* [Alex from Target](http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/11/alex-from-target-fame.html)
* [Darius Kazemi’s XOXO talk](http://boingboing.net/2014/10/28/every-artists-how-i-made-i.html)
* [Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Douglas R. Hofstadter
* Screenwriting.io on [intermediary slugs](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-slug/)
* [Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgrjhtbQlOQ) by Joe Callander
* [Too Many Cooks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8) by Casper Kelly, and [his interview in Entertainment Weekly](http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/11/07/adult-swim-too-many-cooks/)
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/procrastination-and-pageorexia).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 131 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are ya?

**Craig:** You know, I’m — do you ever get this thing, John, I’ll bet you you don’t. I bet you you don’t. But every now and again, and sometimes for stretches of days at a time, I’ll get that butterflies in the stomach anxiety thing.

**John:** For no good reason?

**Craig:** For no good reason. And I just sit and I wake up in the morning and there it is. And it kind of lingers all day. It’s really uncomfortable and I feel anxious and I don’t know why. I believe this is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry to hear it.

**Craig:** Do you ever get that?

**John:** I do get that sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, you do?

**John:** And, in fact, I will talk about a little section of my life. These last two weeks have been really busy with the contract negotiations. And then we were supposed to take a trip this weekend. And then the next week was going to be chaotic for different reasons. And I finally just had to say I cannot possibly take a trip this weekend. It just was going to be impossible.

So, we ended up staying home and it’s a lovely weekend in Los Angeles and it’s so much better and more fun.

But, yes, I sympathize with your Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I don’t know, is it technically some sort of like fight or flight instinct that has no basis? Do you know what it is?

**Craig:** It seems like it. I mean, every now and then I get that. It’s the feeling that you get when, I don’t know, you’re nervous or scared, except that there’s nothing to be nervous or scared about. So, you just get that fluttery — and I guess physiologically what’s going on is that adrenaline tends to divert blood flow and oxygen from your gut to your muscles and that what you’re feeling is the result of that. But it’s unpleasant and I’m not really sure what’s going on. And I just want it to stop.

And the problem with anxiety is that you — then what happens is you feel okay but then you get a little twinge of it again and then you suddenly worry, oh god, it’s happening, and then that’s why it’s happening. You know, it perpetuates itself.

**John:** Yeah. With me it’s usually I have convinced myself that I’m having a heart attack.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a panic attack. That’s a whole other…

**John:** Well, that’s true. That’s a whole extra discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah. I never had that. But people who get checked into emergency rooms all the time, with every symptom of a heart attack except cardiac damage.

**John:** Yeah. Well that’s me twice. I’ve twice had to go to the emergency room with all those symptoms.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And they said like, “Yeah, it was good that you came in. But, no, you’re not having a heart attack.”

**Craig:** Right. You’re just panicking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. The two of us are so panicky!

**John:** We’re so panicky.

Well, this week let’s talk about some psychological issues. Specifically I want to talk about procrastination and pageorexia based on partly a great article you sent through that we’ll talk about.

But we have a lot of other sort of follow up and bits and news and things. I want to talk about sort of all the changes in the industry with the Aereo lawsuit and the Comcast merger. So, let’s just get to it, okay?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, as long as I don’t freak out.

**John:** All right. Don’t freak out. I’m here to keep you company.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

First off, we can freak out just a little bit because we have a live show coming up. We have a live crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. And I’m so excited because we’ve talked about doing this for a long time. The Nerdist Writers Podcast is potentially the other great screenwriting podcast or writing podcast you should be listening to and we’re going to have a joint show. We’re going to have a joint live show — they do all their shows live — April [13th] at 5pm. It’s at Meltdown Comics. And tickets are available right now. So, you can go get them.

We have a link in our show notes, but if you’re listening to this on Tuesday I would really recommend you get tickets now because they’re $15. They will sell out. And then you’ll be sad that you weren’t there in the audience for us.

**Craig:** Once again you and are the Jon Bon Jovi of live screenwriting podcasting events. So, yeah, you got to get these tickets.

**John:** I guess we are the Jon Bon Jovi. I don’t even know what the Jon Bon Jovi means though.

**Craig:** Well, Jon Bon Jovi keeps selling out — he sells out everything. You, Jon Bon Jovi is a huge — people love Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** See, I’m learning things on this podcast even right now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I should say that this podcast, like all the stuff we do, we’re not making any money off of this. The proceeds from this benefit 826LA, the non-profit organization that sponsors writing programs in Los Angeles. So, it’s another good cause to support.

**Craig:** I mean, you’re familiar with Jon Bon Jovi in general?

**John:** Oh, in general I am. But I’m familiar with him as being a thing from the past.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, for us to be like the current things, that makes me feel really weird like, oh my god, we’re like some ’80s relic. And I don’t feel like a relic whatsoever. I feel vital and young.

**Craig:** So does Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** [sings] Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.

**John:** We also have some follow up. Last week on the podcast we talked about —

**Craig:** Just the best.

**John:** [laughs] I said, “Oh, there used to be this place called The Office where people would go and write.” And I spoke of it in the past tense and that was completely incorrect because it still exists. And so they sent a nice tweet, which I retweeted, saying like, “We still exist, we’re out there.” And I recommend people check it out.

There’s another place called Writer’s Junction which does the same function. So, I did mean for those to rhyme. But, if you are looking for a place to go that is not actually a coffee shop but is more like an office that you can go to and write, those are two options for you there.

Also, last week, Craig said The New Girl instead of New Girl for the TV show on Fox.

**Craig:** Sorry!

**John:** And I get it. I mean, it’s so easy to say The New Girl. But, it’s actually called New Girl.

**Craig:** And, by the way, my current television obsession — I shared this with millions of people — is True Detective. And about, I don’t know, 80% of the time I’ll say True Detectives with an S at the end.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s two of them.

**Craig:** There’s two of them and I’m basically a yokel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t get this stuff right.

**John:** You’re the Cletus of the show. You’re the Cletus and Jon Bon Jovi of the show.

**Craig:** Cletus. Cletus is the greatest character.

**John:** He’s so good. Because clearly he was meant to be just a one-time throwaway and they just loved him so much that they brought him back.

**Craig:** Did you ever see the one where Marge is trying to find a designer dress at a discount price because she has to go to this fancy party?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they offer her, [laughs], they tell her that they don’t have anything right now, but in her price range there is a shipment expected of partially burnt Sears sportswear coming in. And she’s not interested. And Cletus walks up and he goes, “What time and how burnt?” [laughs]

Perfect line. Ah! He’s slightly discriminating.

**John:** [laughs] He is. Yeah, so it’s a character that you couldn’t get away with — if he had like a race associated with him you couldn’t possibly do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But because he’s just white trash it’s still safe.

**Craig:** Oh, 100 percent. I talk about this with Malcolm Spellman all the time. We try and track what races are now safe to do. Like what racism is okay. I mean, poor white trash racism, thumbs up. Huge thumbs up. Irish people. Yeah. Green light. Green light.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Asians, I think, are successful now enough where it’s starting to get to be a green light. Bad news for Asians.

**John:** Yeah. But then you’re generalizing a whole giant category of people rather than being specific.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, but that’s the point of racism. [laughs]

**John:** That’s the point of racism. It should not be precise enough in your description.

**Craig:** That’s it. The whole point is it’s a very clumsy, ham-fisted way of getting a laugh, a cheap laugh out of an entire billions of people. But, yeah. I think that they are successful enough, powerful enough that it’s happening. It’s happening.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I feel it.

**John:** Craig, so we recorded — the last show came out on Tuesday and Tuesday afternoon we put out this new app and I sort of didn’t want to talk about it ahead of time, I just wanted it to be a surprise upon the world, but it wasn’t actually a surprise to you because you’d seen the build of this app quite early on. This is called Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s an app for reading screenplays on your iPhone. And can you summarize what your reaction to the app was when you saw it?

**Craig:** [laughs] Look, you don’t have to set a trap for me. I’m perfectly happy to just jump into your spikes and poison. I have no idea.

**John:** And told-you-sos?

**Craig:** And, by the way still — and told-you-sos. I still have no idea why anyone would want to read a screenplay on their phone. On their iPad, sure, I get it. On their phone, it’s just tiny, and I frankly don’t want anyone reading my screenplays on their phone.

So, you sent it and I’m like, “Why would anybody?” It’s perfectly — you did exactly what you set out to do and you did it well, but why would anybody want this. Well, apparently, I’m just, once again, totally marginalized by existence. Everybody wants it. I think it’s your biggest seller, right?

**John:** Which has really been remarkable. So, Weekend Read is a reader for your iPhone. It basically takes a screenplay and melts it down so you can make it look good on an iPhone, so basically you can take a PDF of a screenplay, sort of like what Highland does, it melts it down and just gives you the text so you can change the size and make it actually readable on your iPhone.

You and I both — well, you said you’ve never ever had to read a script on your iPhone, but I’ve had to. And you basically end up squinting and pinching and it’s terrible. That’s why you would never want to read a script on your iPhone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now you suddenly can. So, we launched the app on Tuesday and within like four hours we’d sold — we’d shipped more copies of Weekend Read than we did of FDX Reader, our first app, which has been out for two years. So, that was remarkable.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It seems to be quite popular among people. I just feel like many listeners of the show probably do read screenplays and many of them probably do have iPhones, so if you would like to try it out it’s free in the App Store right now. So, you just download it.

**Craig:** Look, congratulations. That’s spectacular. One thing that occurred to me when you were talking about how successful the launch had been is that you had — the app is a great name.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** It’s a really good name, you know. And it’s one of those names that manages to both say what the thing is but also sound interesting. It sounds like an actual name and not just a description.

**John:** Yes. So Weekend Reading in Hollywood lingo is classically the scripts that a development executive would read over the weekend. And so essentially a bunch of stuff will come in over the week and then they will sort of assign out the weekend read which is basically everyone on the team is supposed to read these scripts over the weekend. And so it felt like a very natural thing to call a script reader Weekend Read.

**Craig:** And now they’re going to read them on their phones. “Oh, good for you!” That’s my Christian Bale yelling at Shane Hurlbut. “Good for you!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** It’ll be nice.

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** Oh, yeah, that great audio of Christian Bale ranting at people?

**Craig:** That’s my favorite part. “Good for you!” [laughs]

**John:** Good for all of us. What Kelly Marcel pointed out, which I think will be interesting to see if it actually kicks in, is that a lot of times actors going out for auditions get sides. And those sides are just a PDF. And so it’s fantastic for them just like, well, it’s now on their phone and that’s kind of all they need. So, we’ll see if that works as well.

**Craig:** Oh, good, now the actors will just be reading their parts. “Good for you! Oh, good for you!” We got to throw a little clip of that in at the end of this.

**John:** It’s going to become a meme.

**Craig:** Did we ever talk about which side of that you come down on?

**John:** Both of them came out horribly in it I would say.

**Craig:** Interesting. I disagree.

**John:** You think Christian Bale came out — ?

**Craig:** I back Bale 100 percent on that one.

**John:** Okay. Here is my perception of what actually happened, being the person who was in Shane Hurlbut, the DP’s perspective. For people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, this was on the set of Terminator Salvation which was — Christian Bale played John Connor in a Terminator version. And he had a complete flip out on the set against the DP who was Shane Hurlbut I think is his name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recorded because people were already wearing mics. So, Christian Bale initially came off really badly in this and sort of had to do some penance to dig himself out of this hole.

My gut feeling is that Christian Bale was incredibly frustrated by the situation and he couldn’t flip out on the director, McG, and so he flipped out on the nearest person who he actually could kind of flip out on, which was probably Shane Hurlbut. That’s my perception.

**Craig:** My perception is that Shane Hurlbut was doing something that I’ve never seen any DP do which is go and tweak lights in the middle of a take. And I guess the deal was it’s coverage, so the camera is aiming at Christian Bale over someone else’s shoulders. Which means all the lights are behind the camera pointing out at Christian Bale.

And you try and clear the eye line for actors so they’re not being distracted. They can perform in the moment. And then while he’s talking here comes this guy that just starts wandering in behind the person he’s talking to and starts moving stuff around.

And I guess he had asked him a bunch of times, “Please don’t do that,” and then the guy just kept doing it and he flipped out. “Good for you!” I’m sorry. This is the weirdest tangent. Like a weird old tangent.

**John:** It’s a fine tangent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s get to the meat of today’s podcast.

So, you had sent this great article by Megan McArdle which is from The Atlantic on procrastination. And I loved a little piece of it, but it’s worth reading the whole thing because I thought it was a really smart piece and it’s actually part of I guess a bigger book about sort of the importance of failure.

But, tell me why you sent it and sort of what you got out of it.

**Craig:** Well, first I got excited because I thought that the child star of Annie had written this, but that’s Andrea McArdle. Megan McArdle — boy, I’m in the craziest mood today.

**John:** That’s all right.

**Craig:** I promise you I’m totally sober.

Megan McArdle wrote about procrastination which in and of itself is nearly impossible to do, because it’s been written about 1,000 times, but what I liked about this was that she zeroed in on why writers — I mean, this is the title — Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators. And she has a theory.

Look, I’m not sure if her theory is correct. But at least it’s a theory of why it seems to be so much harder for writers than for other people. And essentially her theory is that writers were likely the kids who found writing easy. That is to say writing relative to their peers. So, you’re in English class, you’re doing creative writing, you’re discussing a book, you’re doing a book report — you have to write anything. And everybody pats you on the back because being able to write instinctively and write cohesively and interestingly turns out to be fairly rare. I mean, just walk around. Go into any business and read what people are writing. It’s just hard for most people.

It’s a little bit like singing. Most people can’t sing, but a lot of people can. And people who can sing it comes easily to them, that’s great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And her point is that this unfortunately starts to — this creates a bad lesson for this kid, because they associate writing with something that is innate and fixed. That is to say this isn’t something I’m going to develop, it’s something that I was given. You have a gift as they say.

It turns out, of course, in the real world, no. You do have to develop your skills. Just because you have natural ability or a “gift” doesn’t mean that you are now ready for primetime or that there are other people that aren’t doing a lot better than you are. You have much to learn, much to learn. And you always will. You always will.

So, what happens for a lot of writers is that procrastination becomes the psychological extension of the fear that they don’t have anything more than what they have.

**John:** Yeah. I described it on the blog as the best scene is the scene you haven’t written yet. Or like you can’t fail at a scene you haven’t written yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s every chance — every time you sit down at the typewriter it’s a chance that you’re going to write something terrible. And so therefore maybe I just won’t sit down at the keyboard and I will do something else instead.

What I think is interesting about writing is you compare this to really kind of anything, like athletics, and so let’s say you’re a kid who is like really naturally athletic and great. And so you are very good at basketball or whatever. At a certain point it’s going to become objectively clear whether you are great at basketball or you were just good compared to your peers. Because you can actually see how good somebody is at basketball.

Writing is actually so much more amorphous. It’s really hard to say who’s a good writer, who’s not a good writer, who is a fantastic writer, who’s an okay writer. But weirdly the writer, him or herself, at a certain point develops a sense of like what is good and what’s bad. And they can recognize sometimes when they’re not writing their best. And there’s always that fear like, well, I might write something just awful. And everyone may — this is, again, the imposter syndrome — everyone may realize that I’m actually not that good of a writer at all.

And so by procrastinating, by putting off that writing you are delaying, you’re protecting yourself. It’s really self-preservation through procrastination.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because if you’re one of these people that falls into this category that there’s — Ms. McArdle sites Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck who is doing some research on this, and so professor Dweck has this idea that there are people who have the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset people, basically when they do something they look at it as an indication of essentially what my ability is. Period. The end. That’s it. if you have a fixed mindset and you sit down, and you start writing, and either you don’t like what you wrote, or other people don’t like what you wrote, this is going to shatter some fixed part of your identity. People might as well be looking at you and saying you have an ugly face, you know, you’re far too tall, and I don’t like your eyes. You can’t change it.

Whereas the other kinds of writers, the growth mindset writers, don’t look at their writing ability as some sort of fixed capacity tank. Do you feel like you have both of these or just one, or — ?

**John:** I think I do have both of them. But I think I definitely am guilty of sometimes picking the easier — that sounds wrong — but in her article she talks about self-sabotage. I’ve definitely witnessed myself self-sabotaging by creating a situation where it was impossible for me to sort of succeed. And so therefore I have an excuse for why that thing wasn’t the best thing I could possibly do.

So it’s like, well, it’s the best I could do in that circumstance. Well, I put myself in that circumstance so therefore is it really my best work?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or, not doing that thing that is so incredibly risky because I wasn’t sure if I could write it.

I would say over the last ten years though I’ve been much more aggressive about picking the thing that I’m both sure I can write and also not sure I can write. The thing that’s sort of outside of my comfort zone.

And even I guess sometimes at the start of my career, definitely going from Go to Big Fish, which are not sort of natural progressions, I really tried to push myself to do both of those things.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s very —

**John:** Are you a growth or a fixed? I perceive you — I’ll diagnose you first, but I think I’ll be wrong. I perceive you as a person who is fixed in the sense that you perceive yourself as a comedy writer and yet you very much also want to stretch beyond those boundaries of just a pure comedy writer.

**Craig:** I, yeah, well the thing is the genre that you pick is probably — it’s probably a symptom of your desire to stay safe and to succeed.

I don’t feel that I’m a fixed person. I do feel like I am always trying to get better and challenge myself, which indicates that I don’t have a philosophical belief that I’m just capped at a certain level. But certainly like you, I’ve made choices to protect myself and like you, lately and particularly lately, I’ve been making choices that do the opposite, that essentially put me out there in an area — I think you said it perfectly. I can do this and I can’t do this. That’s a good place to be. That means you’re not trying to fly, but you’re definitely taking careful steps somewhere. And that’s a good thing.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say beyond just my pure writing stuff, I think in public speaking and sort of my moderating of panels and my doing stuff at the Academy has been also an expansion beyond what I’m comfortable and safe doing, because it’s just so much easier for me to stay at home and just write on blog. And to go out and have to be in front of a big crowd of people was not natural for me. And yet I’ve gotten much more comfortable about doing it.

I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I’ll summarize it here because it actually fits really well with this sort of fixed versus growth mindset. I was on set and I was watching Spielberg direct this scene. And I was looking at sort of how he was doing stuff and how stuff was going. And I had this momentary flash where I realized like, oh, he’s just working really hard.

You associate these great directors as being these visionary talents who are born with these gifts. And while clearly he has gifts, he’s also just worked really hard. And I could see him — he’s Steven Spielberg, but he’s figuring out all these shots and he’s telling all these people what to do. And he’s really good at doing that, but he’s also just really focusing on it and he’s really working.

And it was one of those moments that was both sort of sobering in the sense that, oh, it’s not magic. But it was also like, oh, it’s not magic. Like I can work really hard, too. And that was actually greatly encouraging for me to see like, you know, it’s really, really hard work but I know I can work really, really hard.

And I think it gets back to Megan McArdle’s point is that oftentimes the people who succeed are the ones who just kind of aren’t afraid of failing. The ones who sort of can benefit from failure or benefit from struggles and learn how to sort of struggle.

**Craig:** That’s right. It puts you in a tough spot because most people on the planet don’t do jobs where failure is likely. They don’t. I’m not sure — most jobs are fairly safe things. This one isn’t one.

**John:** You can’t fail at a spreadsheet.

**Craig:** No, you can’t. I mean, you can, but it’s a different kind of failure. It’s not a failure of you. You can make mistakes but it’s not a failure of the expression of your point of view, your taste. Our brothers and sisters in the film review community, how do you fail? How do you fail?

If you can give Her a terrible review and still be at work the next week, how do you — there’s not failing there. But what we do, there’s failure every day. In fact, it’s built in. When we are hired, the contract is built around the notion that we’re going to keep failing. That’s why there is more than one draft even if it’s just optional. The entire editorial process is built around that. The reason you shoot more than you’re going to keep in the movies, because directors make mistakes all the time.

Why do actors get more than one take? Failure. Failure. Failure. The whole thing is a parade of it. And you have to make your peace with it, or it will absolutely destroy you.

**John:** It occurs to me that this kind of procrastination that a writer faces sitting down at the keyboard is really just a form of stage fright. It’s that fear that I’m going to get there at the keyboard and I’m not going to be good. And everyone is going to see that I’m not good and it’s going to be awful.

And so therefore I just won’t sit down at the keyboard.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the difference with stage fright is that eventually you have to get on. They’re going to call your name and you’re going to have to get up on stage and you’re going to have to start singing. And that’s, I think, ultimately what you have to face is a writer is that I have to sit there and I have to type this thing. And even if it’s terrible, I have to get through it because that’s my job. That’s what I’m here to do.

So, let’s just talk a little bit about sort of how you get past those humps and sort of what you find.

**Craig:** Well, I try and remember, and this is something that McArdle points out. I try and remember that there is no percentage for me to compare what I’m about to do or what I’m doing with finished products, which I think is the demon that plagues us constantly. I’m going to sit down. What should I write? Well, if I write this, that’s been done before. If I write this, somebody else already did that better. If I write this is it too much like that?

Constantly comparing the process, the messy process of cooking, to already completed perfect meals. You have to get ultimately to the place where it’s done. And, of course, we’re all trained to watch and appreciate the best of all those completions. So, I try and remind myself that there is nothing permanent about what I’m about to write. I can always hit delete.

It’s not like I’m expending resources, you know, rare resources to generate three or four pages, only to throw them out. I’m not building a wall, you know, where it’s going to cost me money to build it again. So, I give myself a break in that regard.

**John:** I think what you’re saying is exactly right in terms of recognizing that the finished product is not what you’re working on right now. You’re working on the process and in McArdle’s piece she points out that we always read, when we read like the great authors, we’re reading their final drafts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’re not reading everything they did along the way. We’re not seeing all their mistakes. We’re not seeing everything they threw out. We’re seeing the finished product. And it would actually be very helpful, I think, sometimes if we saw all the drafts that led up to it so we could see this.

Shakespeare actually weirdly, we do get to see all the different versions of things, and that’s kind of useful. You can sort of see how things grew and how things changed.

When I find myself procrastinating I, you know, the classic rule is you sort of set a timer. And it’s like for the next 20 minutes I’m going to write and I’m not going to do anything else. I’m just going to write. Jane Espenson calls this a Writing Sprint, which is basically no matter what, the next 20 minutes, the next 40 minutes, I’m going to write and I’m not going to stop writing until the timer goes off. That’s a great trick.

Freedom for Mac, the utility that we’ve talked about before on the show, which basically turns off your internet connection for a period of time, also really helpful. So, if you’re sitting there and you can’t get on the internet you’re more likely to be able to focus on the work you’re doing.

Anything else for you?

**Craig:** Yeah. The other little trick I do is to think about the scene that I’m supposed to be writing and then say, okay, maybe I’m scared to start writing this because I just don’t love it yet. There’s nothing in it that’s getting me super excited. And so I just try and think about it in different ways. Or just let myself think.

If it takes all day I’ll just think all day. If I have to take a walk, or you know me, a long shower is always great. But, when you find that thing that suddenly gets you excited then it’s a lot easier to sit down because it doesn’t feel quite so grindy.

And, by the way, interestingly enough, a lot of the times those things that got us motivated, they come out. It was something that we just needed to do it to not feel bad about moving our fingers over the keys. And there are days when you can take a walk and you feel like you can walk from one end of the earth to the other. And there are days when taking five steps just feels tough.

You have to actually honor that and not punish yourself for having one of those days. It’s totally normal.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

I want to sidestep to another sort of psychological thing which I actually witnessed this week in the negotiating room.

So, basically during the negotiations there is a lot of time where we as the screenwriters are just sitting there waiting for the next thing to happen. And so people are writing, which is great. So, you’re shoulder to shoulder with all these writers writing, which is fantastic.

But one writer who was sitting close to me was struggling to — his script was 116 pages and he really wanted to get down to 114, or 112. And he called it Pageorexia, which I thought was just the best term. And this wasn’t like a newbie writer. This was like a guy with multiple awards and nominated this year for awards. And I just thought it was hilarious that this is this guy who is getting paid a tremendous amount of money to do whatever he wants to do. And he still sweats all of these little details to try to get it down one more page.

He described it as, “Well, if they love it at 116 they’ll love it even more at 114,” which is such a classic anorexia kind of comment. It’s like he’s looking in the mirror and he’s not seeing what the script truly is.

**Craig:** Right. He’s got script dysmorphia.

**John:** Yes. But I would argue that in some ways that’s related to the procrastination thing that we’re talking about. It’s a perfectionism as a way of fearing failure. Rather than fear stopping him from writing, fear was getting him gripped into this sort of OCD must make everything perfect.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are constantly deluding ourselves that we have control over the response to our screenplay when we don’t. We write what we write. And we then give it to entirely different sentient organisms with completely different tastes, experiences, moods. And either they like it or they don’t. But that stuff is about trying to control that which we cannot control.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It does not — they will not like a 114 page script more than that script at 116, ever. [laughs] It’s never going to happen.

**John:** Yeah. What it’s doing is it’s crossing the line between like sort of professionalism, which is basically like making that look as good as it can. And perfectionism, or sort of needless perfectionism where you’re just moving commas around so that it breaks a little bit differently.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is a very smart man. So, I can tell him, and he knows that the 114 page script and the 116 page script will shoot exactly the same. You’re not changing the movie whatsoever. You’re just changing the words around on the page.

And yet sometimes we get obsessed about the words on 8.5 x 11 paper, not remembering like, oh that’s right, it’s actually just a plan for making a movie.

I heard a story, which may be apocryphal but it sounds absolutely true, because I feel I like I may have seen this in one of his scripts, that James Cameron when he got to — this is back in the time where you actually would type scripts or they were sort of printed out of things, so they weren’t PDFs. So, he would number it from 70 to 79 and when he got to 80 he would start it again at 70 to 79 again, so he could squeeze an extra 10 pages in. And no one would sort of notice that like it was doubled up there. Isn’t that a great idea?

**Craig:** [laughs] I totally believe it. I mean, the “it’s too long” is the traditional problem of the screenwriter. I’ve really never had a problem of a script that was much too long. The current script that I am doing is more of an action movie, and so I’ve given myself more length than a typical comedy. And it’s in at 119. And that’s 119 with proper margins and double spaces before the slug lines. And I feel good about that.

I called up Scott Frank in a little bit of a panic —

**John:** Scott Frank will tell you to turn in a 180 page script. Scott Frank writes long…

**Craig:** Scott laughed at me and then slapped me around and said, “No one gives a damn. I’ve never turned in a first draft that was shorter than…” Yeah. Exactly. “If it’s under 150 it’s a hallelujah for me.”

The one thing that I do spend time on, and I know Scott does — a lot of writers do — is page breaks at important moments.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I do look and see, okay, look, if there’s a big reveal or a moment, I don’t want that to be split up by a page break. If there’s an interesting speech. In fact, I don’t want any dialogue split over page breaks. I hate it. So, I try and — I mess around with stuff like that. But, you know, that’s when the script is done. And that’s just a fun hour or two.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s segue to our next topic which is a bunch of stuff happened this last week and it’s going to be happening in the next few months which could make everything quite a bit different in the next couple of years. So, I just want to give a little sense of what’s gone on and forecast — a very murky forecast — of what could happen in the weeks ahead.

So, this last week it was announced that Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable, which will create the largest cable company in the universe, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it was the number one cable company, Comcast, buying the number two cable company, Time Warner. It raises just a lot of questions about sort of how powerful can one company be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Also, happening soon we have Aereo, the company that’s being sued by the broadcast networks. Aereo essentially retransmits over the air broadcast via the internet. And it’s a whole question about sort of what is possible there. What’s going to be legal there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we also have, you know, this is the new season of House of Cards starting. A real question about Netflix and Amazon and now companies are making things that are like television but are not classically television. And how are we going to write for those and how are we going to get paid for those? And that’s a big thing.

**Craig:** It’s a mess out there. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess out there. And they’re actually all kind of related because — so, let’s go back to the Aereo lawsuit.

So, essentially Aereo’s lawsuit is — the broadcast networks are suing this company, Aereo, which provides television, a local channel television, but what they do which is very clever, they have these tiny little antennas and essentially as a subscriber you are renting this tiny little antenna which is often hooked to a tiny little hard drive which allows you to record the over-the-air broadcast in your market and so that you can look at it on your iPhone, your iPad, your computer.

It’s a way of getting your broadcast television to your computer or your other device. And it has this sort of geofencing on it and stuff so you’re not supposed to be able to get it outside of your region. Classically that would be called retransmission.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when cable companies come into a market, or cable companies are in a market, they have to pay the broadcast channels for the right to retransmit their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they have to pay, the classically New York, CBS, and I guess it was Comcast had the fight over basically how much Comcast would have to pay CBS in order to rebroadcast.

**Craig:** It happens all the time. Yeah.

**John:** And so if you lose a channel, like basically for awhile CBS wasn’t on Comcast, and that was because they were fighting over the price. And the broadcasters make about $4 billion a year in those retransmission fees. So, if Aereo were to succeed the broadcasters would feel like, well, we’re going to lose all that money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand how this is legal at all. Anyone that watches a baseball game has heard, or any sports event, “This telecast cannot be rebroadcast or retransmitted without the expressed given permission, blah, blah, blah.”

Yeah, how do they do this? It doesn’t seem…

**John:** I’ll tell you exactly how they get away with it. It’s because of Comcast itself. So, Comcast won an earlier Supreme Court decision with their basically personal DVRs. So, what Comcast was letting it do, and I remember blogging about this a zillion years ago and actually coming down on kind of maybe the wrong side of it. But, so Comcast, the DVR decision, was essentially Comcast wanted to say like, “Okay, so we have this cable subscriber. And rather than having a DVR in their house, they can have their DVR at the cable company.”

**Craig:** Right. A cloud-based DVR. Right.

**John:** Exactly the same thing. But it’s one DVR per household, so it really is an individual’s DVR. And so the retransmission is public retransmission, not private retransmission. So, that is the very fine line that Aereo is trying to go for. And apparently the reason why they introduced service in New York City is because it was already in the second court, the second district court when it had that ruling for Comcast that was beneficial. So, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens.

This case, and now I think it’s supposed to be heard by the Supreme Court in April, so we’ll have a ruling there.

The question is, from a writer’s perspective, and an industry’s perspective, what happens if the Supreme Court says you can do this sort of private rebroadcasting? Well, I think if you’re a cable provider you’re going to say like, well, I’m not going to pay this local channel all this money for this. I’m going to do this thing with the antennas and it will be cheaper for me just to do this thing with the antennas.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m always fascinated by these businesses that operate like fatal viruses. There’s the classic question in epidemiology. Why didn’t say small pox just kill everyone? What stopped it? And the answer what stops it is it’s too good at killing people. And it just kills at its hosts in an area too quickly and can’t transmit itself.

I’m fascinated by these companies that their business model is to feast on the corpse of the thing that’s giving them life until there’s nothing left.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing though. I think from what Aereo would argue back, and I’ll just play devil’s advocate for Aereo here, is that it’s essentially the same thing as what the Cablevision decision was. The subscriber is still getting exactly the broadcast that they would have gotten with their own rabbit ears.

And so they’re still getting all of the commercials. They’re still getting — Nielsen still measures those people. So, technically it’s not that they’re stripping out commercials. It’s not that they’re taking the content away. They’re just giving it to them in the way that they want. And so Les Moonves of CBS said, “Well, if this lawsuit happens maybe we’ll just become a cable channel.”

Well, maybe they’ll just become a cable channel. Or maybe they’ll just start offering on CBS.com all of your shows for a subscription.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which then raised the question of like, well, does that mean that five years from now, CBS, NBC, everything we associate as being broadcast television could ultimately become a subscription service?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, it could. I mean, the fact that anything is broadcast over the air anymore is, obviously, it’s archaic. But it is so much part and parcel with the way that networks work. And there are still a bunch of places in the country where people use antennas and pick signals out off the air.

**John:** Yeah. And complicating these things even more, when we switched over to the digital channels — there’s piggyback digital channels. There are basically secondary channels that can go along with this. And so you’ve seen like My Network TV in certain markets or there’s another thing with like Axion or something, that’s considered a piggyback. It’s a secondary digital channel. And the rules for how we treat those are still kind of amorphous. Are they broadcast? Are they not broadcast? Do they fall under those rules? Do they fall under some sort of digital distribution rules?

That’s all strange and complicated.

**Craig:** Mess. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess.

So, but let’s talk about Comcast because what’s so weird about Comcast is if the merger happens, it’s already the nation’s largest internet service provider. It’s the nation’s largest video provider. It’s one of the biggest home phone providers. It controls a movie studio, because Comcast owns NBC Universal, so it controls a movie studio, a broadcast network, and a whole bunch of cable channels. That’s a big company.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where do you stand on big companies?

**Craig:** Well, my feeling is that as a professional writer who makes a living from these big companies, that I want them to survive but only to a point. I want them to survive with robust competition.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem. I know the Writers Guild immediately freaks out every time this happens. They absolutely lose their minds over vertical integration and multi-national corporations consolidating the business. My feeling is, good, I’m okay with that. As long as there’s not one or two of them, you know.

We currently have Sony and we have Comcast Universal. And we have Warner Bros. which will exist with its networks and its movie studios and its television production regardless of the cable situation. We have Disney and we have Fox and we have Viacom. There’s big companies out there all fighting with each other. Those companies have the resources to not only make large scale entertainment but they also have the resources to pay us and to negotiate pretty good — pretty good deals with our union, as you’re in the middle of right now.

I think the Writers Guild, this is an area where I’ve never understood the Writers Guild’s full blown paranoia. Paranoia, yes. Hysteria, no. They’re constantly looking at Amazon and Google as some sort of rescuers. I keep screaming to everybody they’re the opposite. They’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Non-union shops that are used to bullying everybody out of everything.

I mean, we have five major movie studios, right? Five?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How many major search engines are there on the planet? One. That’s the way Google works.

How many major e-tailers compete with Amazon? I’m going to go with none.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem with these companies doing what they need to do to survive as long as I have options. Frankly, in my house I don’t get my internet from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my phones from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my television from Time Warner or Comcast. You know what I get from Comcast?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** I get paid because I’m working for Universal. [laughs] That’s what I get. I get paid.

**John:** Ha-ha! You get checks.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m still living — I get checks. So, I’m still living in a world where these companies have vital, large scale competition and I support their — I back their survival as long as there’s enough of them to keep each other honest. How about you?

**John:** All right. I’m concerned about this merger because it’s literally like, it’s just like number one and two, it’s like 75% of cable in the country would be controlled by this one giant company which doesn’t feel like a lot. And cable is also one of those weird things.

So, broadcasters are subject to these regulations because the broadcast spectrum is there are limited resources, therefore we have a lot of controls over sort of what you can do there and how many players you can have because it’s a limited resource.

But cable is actually a limited resource in the sense that every community had to make deals with the companies who are bringing in this wire. And basically because, so you’re not ripping up the streets a thousand times, they’re sort of near-monopolies in a lot of these markets.

And I do worry that because they are the fastest pipe into the house and it’s essentially only end up having one or now maybe two choices, a duopoly situation where AT&T is the other way you can get the stuff. It could just become really problematic.

And I’ve sympathized on both sides of the net neutrality debate, but I think it becomes a little bit more pressing when you have this giant company that controls the access to households, to so many households, and is making its own content and can therefore in the world of no net neutrality prioritize its content over anyone else’s content. And that is challenging to me.

**Craig:** In my mind, I don’t see that the company would do that. I don’t think that Comcast/Time Warner would — their merged cable system — if they were to tier stuff would say, hey, it’s going to cost you more to watch these other channels. It’s going to cost you less to watch the ones that we control.

**John:** But that’s exactly what they’ve done in cable. Cable is tiered. I mean, it already is tiered right now. You can get these channels with this. You can get this, a higher tier, you get these channels.

**Craig:** But in the way its tiered, they don’t — in other words, Time Warner never gave you a break on HBO. They charge you more for HBO because it’s worth more. My point being that they never — they know the consumers — the demand from consumers is what drives the market price. And if they try and use monopoly pressure. Well, first of all, they’re going to run into anti-trust problems if they start bundling, because that’s basically bundling. You’re not allowed to do it.

But also they’re just going to run into marketplace problems because people are not going to want that. Where I kind of see benefit for professional writers on these non-net neutrality side is if these companies said things like, “Well, we’re going to start charging a premium for super fast delivery of movies. All movies. Not Universal movies. All movies.” And then we would get better residuals. So, that — I could see that as a benefit for writers. But, I don’t, I mean, look, I personally suspect that cable has got another 10 or 15 years left. Physical cable. Because I think ultimately —

**John:** Before there is some sort of pervasive Wi-Fi?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So, I mean, this merger I don’t think is a cause for us to twist our underwear up.

**John:** All right. We’ll see.

We have some questions. Let’s go to some questions. So, Mark in Portland asks, “If pagination isn’t that important,” I think he’s talking about last week’s episode where I ranted on pagination. “If pagination isn’t that important, why use Courier or Courier Prime font?”

I would say that use Courier because Courier is what is expected in screenplays. It’s not that it’s better, or that it’s perfect, or that will exactly match the one page per minute guideline. It’s just what we’re expecting in a screenplay. And anything that’s not that will be met with an “Uh-huh? That’s not what a screenplay should look like.”

**Craig:** Yup. It’s basically tradition. Simple as that. It’s the tradition that comes from an old school way of thinking about stuff as being a page a minute and all that. And really it was way to try and — all of these things were really ways to foil writers who were trying to cheat either by not writing enough, or by jamming too much into a space. The studios got wise to all of our tricks.

It’s an easy way for them to go, “Oh, okay, well at least we’ve eliminated one variable. They can’t use the super tiny font. They can’t write everything in Times 12, you know.” But, yeah, it’s tradition.

**John:** I think we use Courier and Courier Prime, even though we have better fonts now, or different fonts that you could use, simply for the same reason why when you’re turning in those papers in college or in high school they wanted you to use a certain font so you wouldn’t cheat.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s style sheets. I mean, Warner Bros. I think still includes all that stuff in the contracts. Margins and all that.

**John:** Scotty Shumaker writes, “I’m a 22 year old recent college graduate working as a night shift janitor at McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.”

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** “I came here to find some adventure and pay off student loans. Because I work alone in a deserted science lab for 60 hours a week I’m able to pass the tedious hours mopping and scrubbing urinals by listening to you guys. I have probably listened to over 100 hours of Scriptnotes in the past few months as well as all seven Harry Potter books, all three Lord of the Rings, and about 100 episodes of a podcast called Inside Acting. I just wanted to say thank you and let you know that your wisdom and umbrage has made its way down to the seventh continent.”

**Craig:** That is amazing. I mean, first of all, there’s something — doesn’t that sound like the first five pages of a movie? You’re the guy —

**John:** Oh, come on, it’s a great setup.

**Craig:** You’re there at the science base on the south pole, but you’re not a scientist. You’re a janitor. You’re just the janitor.

**John:** You’re the janitor.

**Craig:** And you’re just scrubbing stuff. And then one day you come out of the bathrooms and everyone is dead.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And there’s something — yeah, I mean, it’s great. Anyway, my former college roommate, Eric Leech, I believe worked down at that very station. He’s an astrophysicist. And I think he was there for a year. It’s dangerous down there. When they have their winter, and our summer, you get like 15 seconds or 30 seconds to walk around before they make you come back in. It’s brutal.

**John:** It’s bad.

So, Craig, I’m hoping that over our many, many episodes of the podcast I’ll get to know all of your college roommates who have all gone on to become famous people.

**Craig:** Well, Eric and I share a common opinion of the junior senator from Texas.

**John:** A third roommate.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz. Yeah.

**John:** A question from Khrob in San Francisco.

**Craig:** Khrob?

**John:** Khrob. K-H-R-O-B .

**Craig:** Oh, Khrob.

**John:** Khrob. “Where’s the line for things in your script that are very clearly referencing the specifics of another project? If the Tae Bo movie had a shot — ” So, last week we talked about the Tae Bo movie, or the theoretical Tae Bo movie. I guess it was a real Tae Bo movie.

**Craig:** It was an actual Tae Bo movie.

**John:** “If the Tae Bo movie had a shot of the protagonist clearly doing Daniel-san’s Crane Kick practice, but was otherwise its own film, at what point would that cross from reference to homage to plagiarism? If a show like Futurama or The Simpsons builds a whole episode around a known property, the Futurama episode of Titanic, for example, do they pay for that or are they allowed to use specifics given their status as satirical shows?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, you can reference any movie you want.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine. It’s fine to reference the movie. And I would say like that whole thing about doing the shot, the Crane Kick position, that’s obviously a reference, we get the reference, you’re not stealing anything.

But I will tell you in a very real sense it does happen sometimes where people get uncomfortable, even not a legal standpoint, but sort of like, “I’m not sure we’re in a parody spot here. I just feels like too much the same movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It does happen. That’s a conversation that happens all the time.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, if you’re trying to parody something, parody is generally protected under the copyright law and fair use. But, let’s say you’re just making a reference so that the reader understands the kind of thing you’re going for, you know, you say something like, “The two of them begin fighting in the elevator. It’s like From Russia with Love,” but you know, something, something.

**John:** Over peanut butter.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just so that people understand what you’re going for. That’s okay. I mean, don’t do it lot. You know, it starts to get a little weird. But it’s fine if you feel like it’s going to help convey your intention. You’re not copying something, but you’re saying it’s a little bit like this, but imagine that in this new circumstance. Just, you know, underline the film title and keep going.

**John:** Keep going.

Hope writes, “I’ve heard you and Craig mention several times on the podcast that now more than ever people should try to shoot their own small projects, like a short film. This helps them learn about filmmaking, see their words on a screen, and has a slim but real possibility of getting them attention either online or at festivals.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would this advice still apply if you have no intention of becoming a writer-director? Is an award-winning short that you wrote a useful calling card as an aspiring screenwriter? Have there been any screenwriters, not counting writer-directors, who have gotten their first success in the industry through a short?”

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sure.

**John:** I’m sure there are. But I would say my general advice about like shooting your own stuff is not just as the calling card for yourself, while it can be really great as the calling card, it’s just so you actually understand what it is like to make something as a finished product rather than just a screenplay. And so that’s why — I think that’s why we talk about the importance of going out and actually shooting some stuff, just so you have a sense of what that is, because that is incredibly useful.

But if you wrote a really great short film, and even if you didn’t direct it, I think that is good for you. I think it is great exposure.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, the whole point of making your own thing is to be a better writer. And if you say, “Well, I actually don’t want to direct, I just want to write,” which is completely noble and that’s pretty much what I do, then just do it anyway because it will make you a better writer for the person that is going to be directing it.

**John:** Yeah. A question from Oscar. “A script of mine was optioned by a producer over a year ago. It was a one-year free option. Nothing came of it, even though the producer pushed it and still wants to try to get it made. I don’t want to pull the rug out from under him, but several other producers have asked me to send them the script if nothing was done with it at the end of the option period. How do I handle this? What are my ethical options?

“I realize that legally I can do with my script whatever I wish because the option has expired, and wasn’t formally renewed. But I’d like to do what is right by the initial producer.”

So, what’s your advice for Oscar in this situation?

**Craig:** In this situation I don’t think the ethics are — there’s no shadowy ethics here. the ethics are that you made a business arrangement and the term of the business arrangement is up and it is now your choice. And you are able to ethically, guilt-free, do whatever you want with it.

The only question I think you need to ask is do you want to give this producer more time? Do you think that this producer actually can get it done, that their passion sets them apart from these other people? And that if they have another three or four months something terrific is going to happen and that’s the person you want producing the movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I would say — it’s not clear entirely whether this producer has had the option and no one else has been reading your script, because you need other people to read your script. I mean, you want people to read your script. And so no matter what, make sure it gets out in the world so people can see it.

If these other producers are asking about it because they have some plan for how they’re going to do it, I think honestly at this point you listen to their plans and if they sound like interesting plans you let them pursue it.

Now, it could come to a situation where they start to get some stuff moving and this initial producer gets upset and just the whole awkward terrible conversations, but those are awkward, terrible conversations that are happening because there’s movement and because there’s things that are going on with your script. So, that’s only a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s an interesting — I was talking about this the other day with a fellow writer. There is an interesting psychological phenomenon in our business as it relates to the relationship between writers and executives or producers. We writers are expected to be rejected constantly. And either rejected off the bat or hired and then replaced and fired.

We are meant to expect this and to absorb it politely and without fuss. They are not at all expected to handle rejection politely or without fuss. And very often are nasty about it. And I think you just have to remind yourself they — while the day that they’re complaining to you that you somehow have rejected them, they rejected five people before they got on the phone with you.

**John:** Yup. It’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** Part of life. Circle of life. Lions and gazelles.

**John:** And as a circle of the podcast, because it’s now time for One Cool Things.

Craig, do you want to start, or should I?

**Craig:** Oh, you should totally start.

**John:** Okay. I actually have two Cool Things, so I’m going to give both of them here.

First one is The Fog Horn, which I thought we had talked about on the podcast, but maybe we haven’t. Many episodes ago, god, 90 episodes ago we probably talked about Popcorn Fiction which is Derek Haas’s short fiction website.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The Fog Horn is an app. It’s a thing that you can find in the iPhone App Store, the iOS App Store, which is sort of like Popcorn Fiction, but it’s just short stories that every month they put out a new batch of short stories. It’s one of those sort of online magazines. And some of the short stories are terrific, so I would recommend you check out The Fog Horn online. It is a very good experience both as an app and some really good writing in there.

My second Cool Thing was something that, we’re recording this on Saturday, so this happened Friday, was Ellen Page’s coming out speech. So, Ellen Page, star of Juno, came out this week. And if you just saw the headline, like Ellen Page comes out. It’s like, oh, fine, good for her. But I actually — I really strongly recommend you watch the video. We’ll include a link to it if you haven’t watched it yet. Because it’s really just terrifically well written and terrifically well presented in terms of why she feels — why she hasn’t come out publicly before now, why she thinks it’s important to come out.

And last week we talked about sort of a hero sort of needs to be in charge of his or her own story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s really very much about that. It’s basically until you can claim your own sort of self-identity you can’t actually control anything else in your life. And so it’s a really smartly done thing and I just sort of — I want to vote for her for something, because it was just an incredibly well presented, incredibly articulate and heartfelt description of both what was keeping her from being public. It was basically the lie of omission. And why she was excited to not be lying anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I strongly recommend you check that out.

**Craig:** It’s great. Chris Nee, the creator of Doc McStuffins —

**John:** We love Chris Nee so much.

**Craig:** We love Chris Nee. And Chris made a really good point that one of the great things about the way that she came out in this video was that it was about a minute of “I’m gay” and really seven minutes of her acknowledging that all the people in the room didn’t need her to come out. They were already doing great work. They were already doing great stuff.

She said at some point, “So you guys are doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, and the truth is you didn’t need me to tell you any of it. That’s the weird part of this.”

And I love that she didn’t — it’s so easy for celebrities to turn everything into me, me, me, and frankly coming out of the closet is a me, me, me, and somehow she made it into a you, you, you, which was awesome.

**John:** It was really smart. So, the context of this was HRC’s Time to Thrive conference which is this sort of youth and teachers conference they were doing. And it was exactly what you described. It was five minutes of you, you, you, this is the nature of the struggle, and it’s because of what you’re doing that I’m able to come out. And so it was just a thank you.

And it was just perfectly done. Perfectly delivered.

**Craig:** It was. Well, you know, my One Cool Thing is also a person and it’s, I’m sad, I’m sad John because we found out this week that this coming baseball season will be Derek Jeter’s final season.

**John:** I can’t tell you how incredibly heartbroken I am to hear this.

**Craig:** Well, you should be, and I’ll tell you why.

**John:** I did know that Derek Jeter was a baseball player, so I get some points for that. [laughs]

**Craig:** Allow me to extend what his value is. Are you a Simon & Garfunkel fan?

**John:** I’m aware of who they are. That’s the best…

**Craig:** They are not baseball players. The famous folk singing songwriting duo of Simon & Garfunkel.

So, in their song Mrs. Robinson there is a lyric that says, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”

And apparently this drove Joe DiMaggio nuts because he was a notorious grump. But Joe DiMaggio is in that song because he exemplified a kind of purity of a time. He was a class act playing America’s game. He was remarkably talented. And he just managed to do it all right. And we love that in our heroes. I mean, he had his stumbles and his falls, and he had his injuries and his mishaps, but he was classy. He was the Yankee Clipper.

And baseball has had lots of heroes and lots of great guys and lots of goats. God knows, so many goats. And in a time when America’s pastime has just been about the most tarnished it has been since the Black Sox scandal of the early part of the century, Derek Jeter has exemplified what it means to just be a classy, great baseball player. He’s done it right the whole time. He’s enormously respected.

And more importantly, now I feel old because Derek Jeter isn’t going to be out there anymore manning shortstop for the New York Yankees. This is going to be a tough season. He’s a shoe-in first ballot Hall of Famer. Never one iota of concern that he was on steroids. He wasn’t that kind of player. But, he has hit some magic benchmarks, well over 3,000 hits and a career average of slightly over 300 which I know is something that you always look for.

**John:** It’s really my first criteria, career average.

**Craig:** It’s sad because one of the greats is riding off into the sunset. One of the truly great, great players of a great, great game celebrated by a great, great country. So, Derek Jeter, today and for many months to come you will be my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Now. Craig, is it possible we’ve pinpointed the source of your anxiety. Was it his retirement that is causing your anxiety?

**Craig:** No. No. I’m not quite that, [laughs], I don’t like Derek Jeter at all, actually.

**John:** Not that much. You appreciate it more from a distance. And that’s our show. So, if you would like to know more about the things we talked about today, the show notes are always at johnaugust.com/podcast. You can see the things we’ve talked about. You can see some sort of article that Stuart will find about Derek Jeter. You will also find Ellen Page’s coming out stuff. Many of the articles we talked about today on the show.

If you are on iTunes looking through the App Store you can find the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to our most recent episodes, but actually our entire back catalog as well. You’ll also find Weekend Read there while you’re there.

If you have iTunes open and you want to leave us a comment or a rating, that’s awesome as well. You can subscribe to us there in iTunes.

And so, Nerdmelt, so we should say the live show at Nerdmelt, the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. Tickets are available now, so don’t wait too long for that because that will sell out. There will also be other live shows coming later on in the spring, but we’ll have those details when they come.

**Craig:** “Good for you! Good for you!”

**John:** Craig, have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You too, man.

Links:

* [Generalized anxiety disorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_anxiety_disorder) on Wikipedia
* Get your tickets now for the [Nerdist/Scriptnotes Live Crossover episode](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/tickets2/index.php?event_id=791/) on April 13th at Nerdmelt, with proceeds benefiting [826LA](https://826la.org/)
* [The Office](http://www.theofficeonline.com/intro.htm) and [the writers junction](http://www.writersjunction.com/) are both open
* Weekend Read in the [App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-podcast)
* Christian Bale [gets upset on set](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0auwpvAU2YA) (very NSFW language)
* Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators by Megan McArdle in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/)
* [Freedom for Mac](http://macfreedom.com)
* Comcast/Time Warner deal will [face antitrust hurdles](http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/13/technology/comcast-time-warner-antitrust/)
* The [Aereo lawsuit](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2014/02/14/aereo-vs-the-broadcasters-six.html?page=all) on Upstart
* [McMurdo Research Station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station) in Antarctica
* [The Fog Horn](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fog-horn/id778971478?mt=8)
* Ellen Page’s [coming out speech](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hlCEIUATzg) at HRC’s Time to Thrive conference
* Wallace Matthews on [Derek Jeter announcing 2014 will be his final season](http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/68961/for-once-jeter-can-savor-the-moment), and Jeter’s career on [Baseball-Reference.com](http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/j/jeterde01.shtml)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kim Atle

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/plot-holes-and-the-myth-of-perseveraversity).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, episode 59, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m doing fine, John. How are you after Halloweenie?

**John:** I’m doing pretty well. I actually wrote a little blog post about my feelings on it, because as we talked during the last podcast I didn’t know which of three futures we were living in — whether we were living in future where Frankenweenie did extraordinarily well, did just fine, or did less than hoped. And we are in the “less than hoped” alternate universe.

And yet I wanted to make sure that… — I was blogging about I want to make sure that I wasn’t letting that disappointment over how much money we made sour my experience of the whole movie, which has been my experience on other things where something you really love a lot, a bad thing happens, and suddenly you feel like, “Well I can’t love it anymore; I can’t even think about it anymore,” because you only remember the bad stuff.

So, it was a very therapeutic blog post.

**Craig:** I think that’s exactly right. And the truth is that these movies get discovered, and sometimes they get discovered in their own time. Didn’t Nightmare Before Christmas kind of go through a — it wasn’t a big box office hit, and then it just exploded later?

**John:** Absolutely. It became a phenomenon quite later. So, I think, that’s one of the things I cite in the blog post, but also Go, which did not come out roaring in the box office and ended up being a very useful thing for my career. So, yeah.

I’d rather have a good movie that doesn’t make a lot of money than a bad movie that makes a lot of money.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you the worst situation is when you have a bad movie that also doesn’t make a lot of money. [laughs] Because, you know, I mean one day we should do a podcast on Superhero, or what was absurdly retitled Superhero Movie, and what an awful experience it was for me to work on it, and make it, and then also to watch it crash and burn.

It was just sort of… — That might be therapeutic for me.

**John:** [laughs] Talking through it. The second Charlie’s Angels is a bit of that for me, because the first Charlie’s Angels was, you know, an adrenaline high of a really hard to make movie, but we ended up doing it right, and people liked it a lot, and it became sort of — we were an underdog. And then coming in with the expectations of the second movie, which was just a nightmare to shoot, and it not performing well, it was frustrating on a lot of levels.

**Craig:** Yeah. You never want to… — We are taught, there’s a narrative that if you persevere in the face of terrible adversity you will come out on the other end successful. And yet there are times when you persevere through terrible adversity and you still die. [laughs] You know, you battle cancer and they give you a clean bill of health and you walk out of the hospital and a bus mows you down. And those are rough moments, and frankly hard to derive very positive lessons from them beyond “sometimes you lose,” you know?

But that’s not what happened here, I don’t think, at all. I think you have a great attitude about it. Because I suspect that this movie will — good movies, especially good movies for kids, and especially good movies for kids that are tied to holidays, they have a way of living forever.

**John:** Yeah. Plus movies about kids and dogs.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. That’s exactly right.

**John:** Done. You have kids, dogs, Halloween, you’ve got animation of the dead.

**Craig:** And you have a great title, Halloweenie.

**John:** Exactly. If only we had chosen the Craig Mazin title rather than the actual title that we used.

**Craig:** I may be onto something.

**John:** So, last week was our very special episode in that we looked at the very first screenplays that we had ever written, and so we did our Three Page Challenge on ourselves, and looked at those three pages.

And one of our listeners wrote in a very smart follow up question. Kevin in Sydney, Australia wrote, “If you could each give your first screenplay writing selves one piece of advice that would help you learn the craft a little quicker, what would it be? Or, conversely, what thing were you stressed out about that turned out to be really unimportant?”

**Craig:** Well, I think I kind of said it in our last horrifying podcast. For me it would be to not overlook good, basic, non-comedy oriented storytelling. Make really good characters. Write really good interesting scenes. Don’t let the comedy lead everything, because you’re not doing a sitcom; you’re doing a movie.

And what was the second part of that question?

**John:** “Conversely, was there anything that you were stressed out about when you were writing that first screenplay that ended up being really unimportant?”

**Craig:** Oh, just, like, “there has to be five jokes on every page?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No. One really, really good one is much better.

**John:** I would agree with you there. My two pieces of advice to young John August would be to make things worse for my hero. I think I had this sense, and a lot of new writers have, is that you love your characters and don’t want bad things to happen to them. But, no, you’re a screenwriter and you should make terrible things happen to your [characters], and so you should embarrass them in comedies and kill their loved ones in dramas. You need to make things as difficult as possible for your heroes, and that’s a hard lesson to learn, because you love these characters and you don’t want anything bad to happen to them.

But you have to make bad things happen to them, because you’re god. And god has to make disasters and floods.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. And specifically you, as god, you look at a character and you decide, “I must put them through the most miserable thing for them, or else they will not come out the other end improved.”

**John:** Yeah. And I think my converse advice is that early on in my career I was so worried about pleasing everybody that I would sort of take notes and really try to work notes that were just not the right notes. And I would take notes from people who just really didn’t understand what I was trying to do and try to implement them. And that is just a recipe for disaster.

**Craig:** It is. That is a burden that we carry our entire careers. And there is always a time, in every movie, no matter how well it’s going, where you suddenly have a moment of clarity and realize: “I’m actually now just writing towards people, specific people. I’m no longer writing towards the audience.” And that’s when you need to stop.

And I have to tell you, in general, when you say to people, “Look, I feel like this is what’s happening,” they, too, suddenly become scared. They don’t want to be responsible for something bad. You can’t obviously say it every day, but when you have that feeling, you got to put your hand up. You have to put the movie before your own feelings, your need to be accepted, your fears, etc.

**John:** Yeah. It’s hard as screenwriters because I think we are by nature good boys, and we want to please people. And you are not always going to be able to please people. And it took me years to learn that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, today I thought we’d talk about three things. First, I want to answer some listener questions, because it’s been awhile and they’re sort of stacking up. Second, you had suggested we talk about plot holes, so let’s talk about plot holes. And third, we have two Three Page samples that we meant to get to last week, we didn’t get to last week, so I thought we’d do those this week.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** It’s going to be a full show. Let’s get started.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** First question comes from Ricardo in Italy. He writes, “I haven’t seen Frankenweenie yet, because the movie will come out here only in January, but I would like to ask you something. What is the exact meaning of all the names? I think I get all the references to classic monster movies, but why Persephone, Colossus, Toshiaki, Rzykruski? And Weird Girl has no real name?”

So, I’ve answered some questions on the blog people have written about Frankenweenie, but this was a good general purpose question, because I think how you name your characters is really important, so I can talk about sort of why I named these characters these names.

The hero of the story is Victor Frankenstein, because it’s always as Victor Frankenstein, but the rest of the characters are essentially new to the story. So, Mr. Burgermeister is the next door neighbor. “Burgermeister” actually means “mayor,” and so it’s like this fake Dutch town, and so Burgermeister is just the mayor of this town.

Persephone is the dog next door. Persephone is the queen of the undead in Greek mythology, and so it’s sort of nice to have a reference there. I think we had a different P name for the dog originally, the poodle, and Persephone just felt right.

Colossus is a joke. So, one of the boys, Nassor, resurrects his beloved pet and has this massive tomb, and he says, “Rise, Colossus,” and of course a little hamster comes out. So, it’s just the joke of Colossus.

Toshiaki, I needed a Japanese name, and it sounded like a good Japanese name. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t using the same first letter as any of the other characters in the story.

Rzykruski was the instinct to have the most difficult to pronounce name you could find so that all the characters in the movie would sort of avoid saying it if they could. And so when he wrote it on the board it was funny.

So, they’re all there to be sort of specific, and I didn’t want any Joneses or Smiths. There’s one Bob, but he actually just looks like a Bob. He’s sort of a big, chubby boy. And the rest of the parents, like the mom and the dad don’t have specific names. Bob’s mom is just Bob’s Mom. It’s really a story about the kids.

**Craig:** Should I give my answer now? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, what’s your answer?

**Craig:** I actually think that that’s really interesting. I obsess over the names. Obsess.

**John:** I do too.

**Craig:** And it’s funny because sometimes when you’re writing a movie where it’s not fantastic and it’s just regular people you think, “Well, why obsess over a name like Phil?” But it’s either right or it’s wrong, and you will type that name over, and over, and over. Don’t be afraid to change it if it feels wrong.

**John:** So, the pilot that I’m writing right now for ABC, there’s a family of four, and I knew one of the girl’s names right from the very start. It was an interesting name that was believable enough but obscure enough — that’s just right. I knew the dad’s name. The boy, found a good name for him. And then the mom, the wife, she was the hardest character because I had this image in my head of who she was, and she’s sort of an Amanda Peet kind of character. And so what do you name Amanda Peet in this role?

**Craig:** Well, I just did it. So, what did you name her?

**John:** I ended up naming her Lisa.

**Craig:** I went for Trish.

**John:** Trish? Trish is a great name. But Trish feels more like the snarky Amanda Peet, and this is sort of the little bit more serious Amanda Peet.

**Craig:** Yeah, my Amanda Peet was, yeah, she was kind of a slightly sassy but understanding wife. And I know a Trish who is a slightly sassy understanding wife, so maybe that’s — really, sometimes that’s all it is.

**John:** Yeah. Lisa feels like she could be an accountant. And so I had to violate one of my principal rules in that I have Lisa and Logan — Logan is the son. And usually I would not have two L names in a script, but they’re such different names, and one is a boy and one is a mom. I just felt like no one is going to get them confused.

**Craig:** A general piece of advice: If your character reminds you of or is inspired by somebody that you know in real life, take the name. Because just using the name sometimes helps, just helps you kind of connect with the person that you’re writing.

**John:** I agree.

Our next question is from Jack in Massachusetts who writes, “I heard on your latest podcast that Craig wrote the script Identity Thief. I wrote a much different script called Fake ID about two guys who steal the identity of a newly married man and woman and go on their honeymoon. So, although the premise of stealing an identity is the same, my script was obviously very different. Should I give up on the dream of having my script sold, or do you think because they’re so different I shouldn’t worry about another ID movie being made?”

**Craig:** Oh, I mean, if — Here’s the problem. There are two possibilities. Identity Thief is a hit or Identity Thief is not a hit. If it is a hit, you should know that that space has been occupied by a hit movie and it’s going to be tough for you to not look like a copycat. If it’s a bomb everyone’s going to say, “Oh, we don’t make movies about people stealing IDs. Remember Identity Thief? What a bomb.” So, it definitely impacts the salability of your script.

What Identity Thief nor any movie can impact is the quality of your script. So, while I and Universal Studios may have negatively impacted your fortune here, if you’ve written a really good script you will be noticed as a writer and you will work. So, I can’t say it’s all good news, but it’s not the worst possible situation.

**John:** I would reframe how he thinks of his movie. Because I think part of the problem is his title. Fake ID, the ID sounds like Identity Thief; it puts people in the same mind frame as that. But this is the logline or pitch for his movie: These two con artists take another couple’s honeymoon and hilarity ensues. Essentially if you frame it as these people and not sort of the identify theft of it all you have a valid premise there. So, I wouldn’t try to put a giant spotlight on the stuff that’s obviously similar, like the word “identity” or “ID.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there you have a premise. Because people impersonating other people, that’s a standard premise. That goes back to Greek drama or comedy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe just re-title it Stolen Honeymoon.

**John:** Yeah. Done.

**Craig:** Or something like that. And then — great point — then you sort of avoid the stink of it and you don’t have to worry so much about it. And, frankly, I don’t even think, just from what he described as his premise, the actual theft of the ID is probably something that you could change or alter anyway so that it’s not ID based.

**John:** Yeah, completely. I wanted to throw that question in because a lot of times I’ll be flipping through the trades or something and see a premise for something and it’s like, “Oh my god, that’s so totally my movie.” But that’s because I’m reading like a sentence of a log line. I’m seeing a title that seems similar to something that I’m working on. But, if I actually really dug into it, they are not related at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s only because in my head everything is about this one movie that I’m working on. And that’s not at all the reality on the ground.

A question from Joseph, who I don’t have a city for: “With the Austin Festival approaching I was wondering what type of experience an aspiring writer/director could have attending alone. Is it easy to network on your own? Or does everyone attend in groups?”

**Craig:** Well, my experience is that people do tend to show up with a friend or as part of a group, but networking — you know, I have been…that word has made me cringe for 20 years now. Because any social circumstance where you are trying to meet people or talk to people is akin to dating, and networking is very similar to going to a bar and working pickup lines, you know?

You will likely find other people with similar interests to you if you go to certain panels and you just strike up conversations. And don’t worry so much about networking, because the truth of the matter is most of the people you’re going to talk to at Austin Film Festival aren’t professionals. They’re not in the business. They’re just like you — they’re learning.

And so it’s less about networking and more about just making friends with similar interests. And if you go with that in mind, I think you’ll find that after basically once 8 o’clock comes around everybody starts drinking and having a great old time in the bar. And if you can meet some friends, you know, make some plans with them and get to know people and don’t be quite so calculating about it. I think you’ll have a good time.

**John:** I would agree. There is an opening night party. There’s the barbeque, which I assume is happening this year as well, which are sort of big open events where you’re sort of wandering around and it’s very easy to sort of strike up conversations with people.

I went to my first Austin Film Festival and it was really before I knew you and sort of the other screenwriters, and so I just wandered out there by myself and it’s fine. And everyone is friendly. And everyone is in the same boat, so you’re unlikely to have a bad outcome from just saying hello to a random person and talking. So, I would go for it.

**Craig:** Unless you’re a weirdo and then it’s just going to go as poorly for you as all other social interactions do.

**John:** Yeah. But, I mean, I would say you’re at least in good company. There could be plenty of other weirdos who are just as socially awkward as you are.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. There are a lot of weirdos there. I mean, they’re all good weirdos. I like — I mean screenwriting weirdos are a lovely group of people actually. I much prefer screenwriting weirdos to like Comic-Con weirdos…

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** …or even general movie weirdos that tend to obsess over source material and directors and actors. Screenwriting weirdos are actually pretty nice.

**John:** Yeah. So, people in Austin at the festival are good sorts overall, so I wouldn’t be too nervous about attending by yourself. And in a weird way going by yourself rather than going with some other friend, you may actually talk to more people, because if you’re just there with one friend you’re most likely going to just stare and talk at your one friend.

**Craig:** Correct. True.

**John:** James in Antioch, California writes, “I’m currently working on an outline for a drama that is heavily infused with Argentine Tango dance sequences. While there is a good portion of drama to fill the page, I have zero idea how to write the dance numbers that will appear throughout the script. Do I list specific dance moves? It sounds like it would be tedious, but then again writing ‘and they dance’ seems incredibly boring and shallow.”

So, this is really sort of a special case of how you write action. So, writing a car chase or a gun fight, you know, you’re going to have to write these things, or writing a sports movie — you’re going to have to write what you’re seeing on screen. And you want to write it in a way that’s interesting so the reader doesn’t just completely tune out of it. Dance isn’t one of the easier things to write. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I would think that every time your characters dance there is a dramatic purpose to that dance, something is going to change because of that dance. Someone is going to fail. Someone is going to fall in love. Someone is going to be inspired. Someone is going to realize that they’re better than they thought. Someone is going to realize that the competition is harder than they thought. So, that’s where you concentrate.

It’s less about the steps themselves, because frankly the steps are irrelevant. What matters is the drama and the characters and the change of state. So, that’s what you need to zero in on as they dance, and then as you describe the dance only describe the parts that really service that.

**John:** I agree. I would also point to looking at a scene; it’s not just the people who are dancing but everyone reacting to how they dance. And a lot of scene writing is just sort of painting with words what it kind of feels like. So, give some description for that. A good exercise for you honestly would be to look at some dance sequences in other movies, watch them a few times, and then just write what the scene would be that goes with that.

And if can sort of describe what’s happening in those great dance numbers in an interesting way, there is a good chance you’re going to be able to write a good dance number.

**Craig:** And I would do a quick search on the internet and see if you can find a screenplay for Strictly Ballroom, which is my favorite dance movie, and I think you could — if you find it, hopefully that would give you a great model for what you’re going for.

**John:** Dennis in New York City writes, “A lot of the movie I’m writing takes place on a computer interface which requires some Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I can’t use Google, can I, or CNN, or Twitter? For example, there are scenes where someone is using someone else’s Facebook account to look at their lives. How do you show these real interfaces in film without being lame, like renaming Facebook to something stupid like Social Net, etc?”

**Craig:** You don’t. I mean, you, the screenwriter, write anything you want. I’m putting aside the issue that so much of your movie takes place on a computer screen, which I think has the potential for great disaster for you, but presuming that you’re spectacular and the story is great, write Facebook, write CNN, write whatever you want.

Down the line it will be other people’s issues to get the licensing and figure it out.

**John:** I would agree with you on both topics. Looking at computer screens in movies is not generally a great idea. The Social Network did it as well as any movie I’ve ever seen, but still you’re not doing coding or Facebook for very much of that movie. Use the real stuff until they tell you that you can’t use the real stuff. And even when they tell you that you can’t use the real stuff fight them on it because you probably can.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There are certain instances where you simply can’t use a product, or you can’t use a name. They are hard and fast, depending on the circumstances and the context. Then there is a certain class that you can always use, and then there’s this big old gray area and a negotiation ensues between the filmmakers, the creative side of the studio, the production side of the studio, and then the business affairs department who will always, of course, default to protecting themselves.

And I have found over my career that there is an always an overturn, one or two overturns of a decision when it really matters.

**John:** A question from Anna in Australia who writes: “I’m a 24 year old Australian aspiring writer and will soon be visiting LA. I have a year-long working holiday visa, some savings, scripts, and a handful of contacts. I hope to spend to spend the year dipping my toe in the water to gauge my prospects and see if I even like it in LA. My question: Should I take care to use Americanisms such as ‘trash’ instead of ‘rubbish,’ fahrenheit instead of celsius, and ‘color’ instead of ‘colour’ in the scripts I send out?”

I have sort of two opinions on that. If she’s representing herself as an Australian writer and the script that she’s writing is set in Australia, then she should use Australian words for things in dialogue and in scene description. If she’s writing a script that takes place in America and there is nothing about it that says “isn’t it so interesting it’s an Australian writer,” I would Americanize it and use the American words for things and don’t put anything in there that can stop the reader.

And, honestly, just throwing in that extra “u” every once in a while, or that different word for some things we describe, could stop somebody, so don’t risk stopping somebody.

**Craig:** I’m halfway there with you. I think you definitely don’t want to use terms that some readers simply might not get. You know, we get “rubbish,” but it would probably stop you. It just seems a little odd. I mean, for us. “Rubbish” is commonly used for garbage in the UK and in Australia; here, “rubbish” is an old fashioned word. It’s something almost comical to us.

So, things like that I wouldn’t use. I would not use celsius simply because a lot of people don’t know how to do the math on it, and frankly, why do you want to stop them for doing the math?

The only thing I would say though is different spellings, alternative spellings, like for example “colour,” might actually give you a little bit of, “Oh, there’s a slight foreign glamour.” If you’re, for instance, writing a prestige piece, an awards-drama kind of movie, it might not be such a bad thing to cloak yourself in the — because, you know Americans do think that UK and Australian spellings are somehow more erudite than ours. So, that, you know, that’s the only thing where I might say, “Okay, well I suppose that’s okay as long as it doesn’t stop anybody.”

**John:** Yeah. I had lunch last week with Jonah Nolan who is a screenwriter and writer on the most recent Batman movies and also does Person of Interest. And so Jonah Nolan, if you’ve met him, it’s like, “Oh, he’s an American.” But his brother Christopher Nolan, if you met him you’d say, “Oh, he’s British.” And it’s because while they are brothers, Christopher was raised more in the UK and Jonah was raised more in America.

And so it was interesting talking with him because every once in awhile there is a word that will slip out, I think it was “pro-cess” (process) he said. And so like everything else, his entire accent is completely American except for a few special words. And so, don’t change who you are necessarily. I would just say look for reasons why somebody might stop reading your script and don’t give them those reasons.

**Craig:** Canadians say “pro-cess” also. The Canadian thing is really interesting to me because everybody there is basically like Nolan. There is no clear accent. I mean, there is a little bit of an accent, but there is no clear accent. And yet you will hear “pro-cess.” They will say “past-a” instead of “pasta,” which his fascinating to me.

**John:** And, of course, “a-boot.”

**Craig:** And “a-boot.” Yeah, I mean, that’s sort of a general accent. But the complete alternate pronunciation on certain words. And “shed-ule” — I think a lot of them do say “shed-ule”. And I’m fascinated by cases like Chris and his brother because there are people that are really good accents. I mean, everybody remembers sitting in foreign language class in high school and some kids would just ace every test, but had the most atrocious accents. And other kids actually had great accents; they just couldn’t remember any of the grammar or vocabulary.

Accent is very musical. It’s just a different part of the brain than the actual linguistic part that processes grammar and words. And so I’m just fascinated by — for instance, my sister and grew up on Staten Island. And we have audio tapes of each other when we were kids with the most outrageous New York accents. And my parents have really strong New York accents. And my accent is gone. It just went away.

We moved to New Jersey and I’ve always, I don’t know, I have good accent ability. Don’t have great foreign language ability, but I have good accent ability. So, it just went away, and Karen’s stayed. It diminished, but it stayed. It’s an interesting skill that some people have. They just — it falls away.

**John:** Friends of mine moved to Australia with their daughter who is my daughter’s age. And so she was 6 when they moved to Australia. And so it was interesting, they came back after four months and the girl’s accent had started to drift to somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. And now you hear her and you go, “Oh, she’s completely Australian.” Things hit at a certain time and they’re not aware that they’ve changed these things, and they’re not aware that they’re doing it.

A question from Natesh in India. He says, “I live in India and my financial conditions aren’t so good, so I cannot come to LA to sell screenplays or search for agents in these conditions. What should I do? Do I need to be in LA if I want to sell my screenplay? I really want to break into Hollywood but I know I cannot come to LA now. So, how do I handle all of this from my place?”

“What should I do,” essentially, asked many more times.

Oh, Natesh.

**Craig:** Well, if he had asked this question 15 years ago I would have said nothing. But, we live in a time now where the Korean rapper Psy has 400 and something million hits for Gangnam Style. The internet is the world’s greatest megaphone. I think you should put your script on the internet. And I think you should put it on — obviously you speak English which is essentially the lingua franca of media.

**John:** Yes, big Hollywood media, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, you should put it on the internet. And you should try and see if you can attract attention that way because, frankly, I’m not quite sure — I mean, it sounds like you’re not interested in Bollywood or the very large industry there, so that’s what I would do. I’m not sure what else I could think that you would do.

**John:** If he has a hope, it is the internet. I would also write things that you can specifically make in your current situation that are smaller and shorter that you can actually put up online. So, if you have any interest in directing I would write yourself things you can direct locally and put up online so people can see them, and develop your skills as much as you can there since you can’t move someplace else.

And sometimes magic happens. I forget all the details about the South American visual effects filmmaker guy who did this sort of alien invasion movie that was a little short that was terrific. And he did it all sort of himself. And you could be that guy and find the way that it breaks out to the next step.

I would also look for every — sort of the Sundance model of script development and sort of like screenwriting labs. Almost all the other countries have their own equivalent of that now. So, I would look for what is the equivalent of Sundance in India and try to get involved with that and see if there are ways you can sort of reach out beyond your little smaller place to the bigger India. And eventually get to either the UK or America.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the last piece of advice I’ll give is that Hollywood tends to not notice things unless they accrue enormous attention prior to their attention. The good news is you don’t live in a small country. You live in an enormous country with a billion people. And if you put something up there, part of what you should be thinking about is how to show evidence of attention. A counter of how many times downloaded or viewed.

If millions of people are suddenly liking and enjoying what you have done, someone will notice at that point.

**John:** Last question comes from Joe in Rancho Cucamonga. “I wrote a script a few years ago that I gave to my mentor at the time to read. He’s a professional screenwriter with a few credits and I’ve always valued his opinion. He happened to like the script very much and had some notes and suggested I did a little rewriting and he could show it to people. I was thrilled and got to work right away. I incorporated his notes and worked with him closely to craft the script into a sellable or at least readable asset.

“He read the read the new draft and congratulated me on a much improved draft. However, then he laid a bombshell on me that I still have trouble understanding: My protagonist happens to be a screenwriter and the bulk of the second act involves the making of this fictional movie. My mentor told me that regardless of how good he thinks the script is screenplays about moviemaking get thrown into the trash.

“Rather than completely reconstruct my script I moved onto the next one. But, I still really like that script. Is that a real thing, or was that just his way of telling me that it wasn’t good enough and wanted to spare my feeling?”

**Craig:** Uh…go ahead.

**John:** I would say he’s — there’s an aspect of truth to what he’s saying. Movies about moviemaking are a hard sell. Movies about screenwriters are a hard sell. There are not a lot of big successful examples to point to. There are little successful ones to point to, which seems surprising considering screenwriters know screenwriters and could write about that craft very well.

So, I think there is some aspect of truth to what he’s saying. If you have really good writing in your script, that’s fantastic, and that’s great and good. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that Hollywood is not knocking down your door to make that movie because it’s just about a screenwriter. And, kind of who cares about a screenwriter?

**Craig:** Yeah. The thing about movies about Hollywood is that the point of a movie is to escape into a story, and no matter how good of a job you do writing about the making of movies, you are reminding people that they’re not watching a real story; they’re inside of a movie because you’re inside of a movie. The whole point of the movie is that the movies are fake and somebody is writing it, so that becomes a barrier between them and the experience of watching the movie.

It’s not impossible. The Player is a wonderful movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Didn’t really find an audience in theaters maybe because of this, but it’s about as good as you can do.

**John:** Sunset Boulevard.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sunset Boulevard. Yeah, you’re right, an absolute classic. But I’m a little annoyed that he didn’t just tell that right off the bat. It’s kind of lame — I mean, why tell you after you did all that work? But, that said, look, it could be both.

He’s right: Movies like this are a difficult sell. And also he may just be letting you down easy because he doesn’t like it. That might be true, too. But as we say over, and over, and over on here, a well-written script is its own reward and also will lead to other rewards.

**John:** Agreed. I would say there may be very good reasons why he said this thing about your script, partly because of what he read on the page and partly because of the genre and sort of the nature of trying to make a movie about Hollywood, or a movie about screenwriters.

If you’re picking your next thing to write, just a general audience thing, writing about screenwriters is not usually the best choice for a subject matter.

**Craig:** It does imply that you have a poverty of experience or insight into the world, because you’re writing about the thing that you’re literally doing in that moment. That’s sort of my gut feeling. You know, they always say, “Write what you know.” Well if you’re writing about being a screenwriter, I’m presuming that you don’t know anything else.

So, that’s a little bit of a ding on you. But, listen, if it’s a really good script, you know, I wouldn’t sweat it.

**John:** I agree. So, Craig, let’s talk plot holes, because you brought this up as a topic for something that we should discuss on the podcast. And when you brought it up I said, “Oh yeah, absolutely, sure.” But then I was like, “What are we going to mean by plot holes?” Because it could mean a couple different things. And so I wanted to give the Wikipedia definition of plot holes first and see if we agree with that.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “A plot hole is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot, or constitutes a blatant omission of relevant information regarding the plot. These include such things as unlikely behavior or actions of characters, illogical or impossible events, events happening for no apparent reason, or statements or events that contradict earlier events in the storyline.”

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a bad definition. I tend to use plot hole to mean an omission, rather than an inconsistency or illogic. Although, I guess that’s a plot problem or just a mistake. [laughs] But to me, plot holes are things where it appears that you’ve left stuff out of a story because it would have made the scene you wanted to write impossible. And people stop and go, “But wait a second, how did he get there?”

**John:** Yeah. There’s a question of refrigerator logic, which is like, as you’re watching it, “Oh, okay,” and then as you’re going to get a soda out of the refrigerator you’re like, “Wait, that doesn’t actually make sense.”

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. If you really look at the logic of it, the movie is impossible as constructed. There are movies that naturally invite this sort of thing, like time travel movies, because time travel is inherently impossible. It is inherently paradoxical. Therefore, every time travel movie will have some sort of plot hole or inconsistency.

But the areas where we have to really be careful about it is when we’re writing movies that don’t involve the supernatural or things that should invite plot holes. And what happens is, I think, a lot of times screenwriters come up with something they want to do in the story. It solves a lot of problems for them. It is interesting to them. It is dramatically compelling.

The problem is it’s just inconsistent with what’s come before it, and yet what’s come before it is what’s making the scene interesting. And so you suddenly have this cognitive dissonance between what you want to do and what you can do.

And, so, a lot of times people just go, “Yeah, screw it. No one will notice.” But they always do. [laughs]

**John:** They always do. And one of the sites that does, there’s actually a site called movieplotholes.com. And so I looked there and they defined, they have like different categories of plot holes which I thought was interesting. They have what they call “minor plot holes,” which is something that affects the logic of an individual scene. So, an example of that would be in Speed when Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock’s characters have an early conversation they know each other’s first names even though they’ve never introduced themselves to each other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a minor thing. It only affects that scene and the world is not going to come crashing to an end.

A major plot hole affects the logic of main characters. An example would be what they called “induced omissions or stupidity.” So, like, you have a character doing something that either they know way too much information or they are doing something dumb for the sake of necessary plot advancement.

An example they cite is in The Avengers, Loki, the evil Norse god, he does mind control over Hawkeye and he’s controlling him for a lot of that movie. But why Hawkeye? Why doesn’t he control somebody more useful or powerful like Nick Fury, who is, like, running S.H.I.E.L.D. and running the whole operation?

**Craig:** Yeah. That to me is less of a plot hole and more of just bad logic, you know. The plot hole to me is, for instance, the name thing. A lot these plot holes happen because of editing.

What happens is, if you run a movie site called movieplotholes.com, well, you’re going to go ahead and chase down those plot holes the way that the Gaffes Squad chases down the discontinuities in movies, like, “The liquid in the glass keeps going up and down.”

But when you screen movies for people, what happens is you start to realize that some of the information that you felt was necessary is not. And that, in fact, a two minute scene designed to actually strengthen and support something isn’t enjoyable for anybody and they don’t need it. There is actually a certain amount of plot hole that is required. Movies are discontinuous; we’re doing it all the time. I mean, people get in a car and suddenly they are somewhere else.

And so the intermittent motion of the film itself kind of metaphorically spills over into the story itself. So, in cases like, I guarantee that there is a scene that was cut out of Speed in which they learned each other’s name. But, everybody will presume that it was never shot or thought of by the screenwriter and will say, “It’s full of plot holes.”

I mean, The Hangover for instance, there is a big deal about “let’s not mess up my dad’s car.” And when they get home it is trashed. Well, the dad never says a word about it. It’s a deleted shot. Just, you know, they shot it. It’s just people didn’t care at that point. They were onto other things, didn’t matter to them, their attention was elsewhere.

My feeling is you actually don’t know what those things are going to be until you screen the movie, so as screenwriters we have to write the scene where the car is explained.

**John:** Yes. I think it’s very crucial just to point out that the ones the screenwriters are responsible for, and sometimes those are the questions of motivation. Like, suddenly a character is acting in a very different way for no clear reason, or has information that they couldn’t possibly have. And that is often a screenwriting problem. You needed them to do that and that’s why you’re having them do that, but it doesn’t actually make sense. And then a lot of what we call plot holes are really just deleted scenes.

And, in Frankenweenie, suddenly Weird Girl shows up along with this group of boys to go reanimate the dead. Well, where does she come from? We hadn’t seen her for awhile and suddenly she’s with this group of boys. Well, there is a small deleted scene where she joins in with them, but it wasn’t crucial enough in the story to get that little bit in there.

**Craig:** Exactly. I think for the audience — I think people who get outraged over certain plot holes need to understand that it likely… — And people who get enraged but also are surprised that other people aren’t enraged need to understand that it’s because other people aren’t enraged that the plot hole exists. That the idea of the movie isn’t to satisfy the most demanding logician; it’s to satisfy the broadest audience.

**John:** And so this website also defines what they call a “Super Plot Hole,” which is a plot hole that makes you question the entire logic of the story. And this is, I think, a meaningful one for us to talk about screenwriting. An example would be like a villain has a weapon that can destroy a whole city but he’s using it to rob a bank. Or things like Signs or War of the Worlds where the aliens are invading but they seem to have no basic idea of how earth works, that water can kill them.

**Craig:** Right. Signs was sort of rife with them. I mean, there’s this whole thing where they just didn’t know how to turn a door knob but they had mastered intergalactic travel. And at that point what happens is you just get angry, because you understand that Shyamalan had come up with this really cool scary scene with this thing in a closet, and a knife under the door, and it was tense, and it was Hitchcockian and cool. The problem is it just didn’t make sense with what had come before it. And so it’s just not legal. And it angers people.

**John:** There are two last categories I want to talk through because I thought they were good ways to distinguish two ideas. A “plot contrivance” is an unlikely event or coincidence. And I’ve talked a lot about sort of the perils of coincidence on the blog, and I’ll link back to my post on that, but I feel like a movie gets one, maybe two coincidences that can happen.

A premise coincidence is absolutely fine and good. Like in Identity Thief, the coincidence is that these two people have the same name. That’s the premise of the movie so you can’t say that’s really coincidence. That’s the premise. Or in a romantic comedy, like these two people happen to meet and they wouldn’t have otherwise met. They could have met anyone else, that’s great.

It’s when you have a bunch of things, like they just happened to be there at the right moment to see this thing in the third act. That feels frustrating.

**Craig:** Actually even in Identity Thief they don’t have the same name. She basically just looks for people whose names she can pretend to be.

**John:** Even better.

**Craig:** But every movie needs a contrivance or coincidence to get things going, because the whole point is the story of a movie is exceptional. So, therefore, one exceptional thing should happen. In the case of Identity Thief, she makes an appointment at a salon under his name and they call to confirm Jason Bateman. And when he realizes that someone has stolen his identity he also knows I know where she’s going to be at a certain day and time. And so that’s the contrivance or coincidence.

And you not only get one, you need one. But once you get into two, or three, then you realize that the screenwriter simply isn’t in control of a good story.

**John:** One thing I will say about coincidences: a good way to sort of take the curse off them is to give the coincidence to the villain every once and awhile. So, if the villain can have a happy lucky thing happen to them every once and awhile, then you can sort of take the sting off a little bit.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. And also if there is a coincidence that gets a laugh then I think it’s good. I mean, there’s that moment in Pulp Fiction where Butch pulls up to the light and there’s Marsellus just happening across the street in front of him. They look at each other and it’s just funny. [laughs] It’s just funny, and so it’s okay.

**John:** The last thing they separate out is an “unaddressed issue,” which is like a natural question that comes up about the plot or the universe of the world that the movie doesn’t really address. And that’s fair, and I think it’s nice to sort of separate that out from plot holes. Yes, in this elaborate science fiction universe we’ve created of Star Wars there is stuff that you don’t really know how that all works, but every movie isn’t responsible for answering all of those questions, because if they did you would have no movie. You would just be — a bunch of people giving exposition to the screen.

You can’t answer all of those questions that could come up because of the nature of your movie or your universe.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it gets a little uncomfortable at times when you’re in the test screening process and you realize that there’s been some information left out that does make you uncomfortable that it’s not there. You feel like, “Okay, people are going to think I did a bad job here.” But the audience just doesn’t seem to care. I mean, there’s like three people that are grumbling about it, but everybody else is like, “Ah, shut up.”

Because the truth is as screenwriters we are that guy. We’re always the guy who is like, “But, but, but.” And so sometimes it’s a little uncomfortable. It’s one of those things, I always talk about the illusion of intentionality, that when an audience or critics view a movie the presumption is that every single thing was intentional and that nothing else was shot. “There was not one other foot of film shot other than what I saw, and no mistakes were made.”

**John:** And if it’s a legendary director like Kubrick that intentionality means that, well, that chair that’s there in one shot and not there in the next shot, that was a deliberate choice.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Where if it’s a comedy then these people are hacks who don’t know what they’re doing.

**Craig:** Pretty much. “They didn’t even bother to explain why A and B happened.” Mm, they probably did and the audience was squirming in their seats at that point and didn’t seem to care. And so what do you do at times like that? It’s a tough one.

**John:** So, as a screenwriter what we’re talking about with plot holes and trying to anticipate what could be perceived as plot holes is you’re really trying to make sure that people are going to be able to suspend their disbelief throughout the entire read and then through the entire movie that they’re watching. There is nothing that’s going to come up that’s going to make them say, “Hey, wait a second. That doesn’t actually make sense.”

And there are two techniques which I sort of commonly go to when faced with these issues. The first is to take away the questions, which is to anticipate when they’re going to start asking those questions and answer them before they can ask them. And sometimes you can collapse a lot of questions together.

I worked on — we talked about time travel movies — Minority Report is essentially a time travel movie, that you have these people who can see the future. And it creates a host of story and logic problems, because if they can see the future how can they know what the future is? One of the ways I tried to address that is a scene where Tom Cruise’s character rolls a ball down a table and Cog girl’s character catches it before it drops off the end. He’s like, “Why did you catch that? It was going to fall.” “How did you know it was going to fall?” And the fact that Cog girl stopped it didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to fall.

I’m explaining this poorly. This is explained better in the dialogue in the actual movie. But it was a way to sort of — there were going to be all these questions about causality and how if you’re stopping the crimes these things can come up. And so very early on I needed to have a scene that sort of took all those questions off the table, like, “We understand, this is what we’re saying in this movie, and let’s not keep asking that question again and again.”

**Craig:** Precisely. I mean, there’s a scene in Identity Thief where he kind of comes up with this plan and Jason Bateman and I spent days and days just sort of going back and forth about the need to know that when this guy goes to get this woman it makes sense, it is the only option, there is nothing else that’s going to help him. It must be this.

Because if people are going, “Well, but why is he — why don’t they just call the police,” then you don’t have a movie. So, you have to make those as interesting as you can. You have to make them as compelling as you can without turning into homework. And it’s a real challenge.

**John:** It is. The second technique is something that Jane Espenson’s blog referred to as “Hanging a Lantern,” which is if there is something that sort of sticks out, you hang a lantern on it so that people say, like, “Oh, yeah, I’m aware that this thing is here and it’s addressed and we know it’s there and we’re going to keep moving on.” And so you’re in a space environment and you need to talk about the lack of gravity — gravity being there/not being there is important. You sort of hang a lantern on it by having the gravity generators fail at a certain point so you can say like, “Yes, we do know that there is gravity, or people are referring to it.” So, you’re acknowledging that this is part of the rules of the universe of your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, what’s that line from Casablanca? “Of all the gin joints in the world she had to walk into mine.”

**John:** Classic example.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, yeah, that is pretty insane. And yet it needed to happen for the movie and he acknowledges that it’s a wild coincidence, but here we are.

**John:** So, that is some plot hole talk. Let’s go to our samples now.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Which one first?

**John:** Well, last week I had said that we’d gotten 200 samples. I was wrong. Stuart says we’ve actually gotten more than 500 samples.

**Craig:** Good god almighty.

**John:** So, Stuart as read all of them, except for the ones that didn’t have like the proper header stuff which he deletes immediately.

**Craig:** Stuart has read 500 of these things? [laughs]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Stuart…

**John:** Yeah, Stuart, god bless him.

**Craig:** I’ve got to get him some flowers.

**John:** Our first script that we’re going to look at today is from Greg in Lichtenstein. And here is a summary — we don’t have a title for it, so here is Greg in Lichtenstein’s script in summary.

**Craig:** [Thunder rolls] Did you hear that?

**John:** That was great thunder. I like it a lot. Now is there actual rain with your thunder or not?

**Craig:** Is it rainy thunder did you say?

**John:** Yeah, is it rain or just thunder?

**Craig:** Oh, no, no. It’s raining here. It’s coming, buddy.

**John:** Oh, it’s sunshine here.

**Craig:** As goes Pasadena goes Hancock Park.

**John:** I don’t think that’s how it works, but that’s okay.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** We open in Central Park where a bird, a harrier, catches a worm and swoops up to its nest, which is high atop the Empire State Building, which is still being built. It’s 1929. A rope snaps, a beam falls, and the nest is knocked down. As it falls a single egg in the nest remarkably survives by falling into a truck full of pillows, then it hatches revealing a little chick named Dave. He gets washed into the sewers, emerging later as an adolescent harrier.

We seem him chase a squirrel named Skip, but he’s not trying to eat him, they are friends. And that’s the three pages of Greg’s script.

**Craig:** Yes it is. And it appears to be an animated movie.

**John:** Yeah, and I wasn’t sure it was animated at the start, because I thought, “Oh, maybe this bird is actually setting up the world of New York City.” And then by the time you get to the animals are talking, it’s probably animation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really liked when I saw the Empire State Building being constructed. I thought, “What a great way of establishing our place and our time.” It was very cool.

However, I didn’t like the fact that I was delayed, because here’s the thing: This bird is flying along Fifth Avenue and getting dangerously close to the ground in the middle of rush hour traffic. Well, those cars would be cars from the ’20s, ’30s. Whenever the Empire State Building was built. Oh, it’s…

**John:** 1929.

**Craig:** Oh, it was on the edge. So, we would already, the surprise is ruined. The Empire State Building being constructed is such a great surprise, and since New York is such a relatively old city, I would have just hit that first.

We then have an impossible sequence. I mean, this is a real problem. The idea of the movie clearly is that this harrier eagle, this harrier eagle egg, is dropped and separated from his family, although, then later it seems like his father is still around, and goes through this traumatic thing, and yet the baby survives. And that’s fine if it’s possible.

And so our writer does a pretty good job of showing how the egg is falling through some shades and things, and there’s a gag I’ve seen a lot where there’s a pillow truck. You know, it’s the old feather truck gag they’ve done on the Simpsons. And then you miss the feather truck, and you land in the glass shards truck. So, I’ve seen that joke too many times.

But the point is the egg hits the street. It hits the street after falling from the top of the Empire State Building. It says, “The egg hits the street — missing the pillow truck — the shell breaks in half — a miracle — the very cute, helpless BABY HARRIER is still alive. This is DAVE.” No, he’s not. He’s dead.

Sorry. [laughs] ‘Cause I don’t know — if you want me to believe that bird is alive, there are no stakes left in the movie anymore, because I can’t think of anything more dangerous that you could do to unhatched egg than drop it from the Empire State Building and have it hit the street. So, that’s a huge mistake.

**John:** I agree. I feel like it could land in somebody’s drink or something like that. I would buy that there’s some way it could land, but just not on the street.

**Craig:** Right. Not on the street. And then we sort of jump ahead to the modern day. It appears that, I guess Dave has been adopted by other creatures and he is — we now do a little bit of a misdirect. He is flying but then it turns out he’s not flying, he’s running, which I liked. So, I like the idea of a bird that never learned to fly. I can see where this movie is going already. I can already tell you in the end he has to fly, and that’s great. I’m all for that.

He is with his buddy, Skip, who is I assume like an adopted brother. He’s a squirrel. And the squirrel is beating him in the race, which is cute. And then he stops, turns around, and starts his victory dance. “Ha, ha! I win again? I am a winner, You are a looser. I am a winner, You are a looser.” But, Greg from Lichtenstein has spelled loser “looser” not loser. And you and I had a little pre-conversation about this — people misspell loser on the internet constantly. It’s one of those words that, I don’t know why it’s hard for people to spell it L-O-S-E-R as in I lose, loser, as opposed to looser.

So, I don’t know if Greg is making the internet mistake or making an English mistake. Or, as you thought, maybe he was trying to say “Looooser” mocking, in which case he needs a couple extra Os.

**John:** You need at least four Os to make it clear that it’s not a typo. “I’m deliberately spelling it wrong to draw something out.”

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And then the last line of dialogue is a bit too — it’s one of those lines where someone is saying exactly what they’re thinking.

**John:** Yeah. The last line of dialogue is, “It was only three times and we really have to get going now. I don’t want a sermon from dad again for being late.”

**Craig:** Right. Better maybe if the dad just delivers the sermon when they get back.

So, I think there is the bones of a good animated film idea here about an eagle that’s been adopted by squirrels and doesn’t know how to fly. I can see a grand adventure and I love the setting of art deco 1930s New York. We just need to work a little bit on some of the mistakes.

**John:** I agree. My issues were, from the very start, what is a harrier? He doesn’t say it’s a bird, and so I’m reading this and I’m like, “Is it a jet? What is it?” It took me awhile. I had to keep reading the first couple sentences again. I was like, “Oh, a harrier is a bird.” I just wasn’t clear. And even once I knew it was a bird, I didn’t know what kind of bird that is. Is it like a dove? Looks like it’s more like an eagle, I guess.

But assume your reader has no idea of what a harrier is. So, I would start with that.

I thought the opening gave us a lot of scale, and once I understood it was animation I was less frightened by sort of the unproduceability of it. In animation, unproduceable stuff is fantastic because you’re doing things you couldn’t do in real world stuff. But I wasn’t getting a lot of sense of character or comedy or what kind of movie this was.

And once we actually started getting into dialogue it wasn’t funny, so that is an issue. Because I feel like this wants to be a comedy — the premise is a comedy premise. So, those first lines need to be funny, and it didn’t feel like we were going to get there.

**Craig:** Yeah. The scenario, the concept that he’s running and not flying, it was a good way to introduce that important fact right off the bat, but it didn’t actually — the scenario itself, the character of his friend, it was playing very young.

You know, Pixar does such a good job of pitching their comedy to adults, and yet also being acceptable and enjoyable by kids. And this just felt very kind of Nickelodeon sitcom.

**John:** Yeah. And I should have said right from the very start that if you want to read along with us on any of these Three Page Samples, there are links along with this podcast. you can look at johnaugust.com/podcast and find all of the links to the samples that we’re talking about today.

Our second script sample is by Vance Kotrla. I asked Stuart to pick the most difficult names possible.

**Craig:** He’s doing a great job of that.

**John:** It’s good stuff. It’s a script called State Champs. So, here is the summary: We start in 1987 at the Houston Astrodome, Texas, at the Texas 5A High School Football Championship. With a minute left in the game Quarterback Martin Peavey, 17, gets sacked. His finger is dislocated but he doesn’t want to get off the field, so tailback Dave Enstein yanks it back into place. In the final seconds Martin throws a shaky pass that nevertheless results in a game-winning touchdown.

We dissolve to today where 42 year old Martin throws a football in the back yard with his 10 year old daughter, Rachel, who doesn’t even like sports. Meanwhile, Martin’s son, Sebastian, is at a high school football practice. And as we come to the bottom of page three he has closed his eyes preparing to get hit.

**Craig:** Right. Would you like to begin?

**John:** I will begin. Oh, so we start in a football game, and football games are not my forte. It was an okay description of a football game. There was nothing kind of unique or magical about this one football game. It felt like a Texas football game.

My concern was that we’re being introduced to a lot of characters along the way, so Dave Enstein, some of these people may come back, some of these people may not come back, but I was having a hard time following what was going to be unique about this thing, because I’ve seen that last minute left to play a lot. And I’ve seen it as an opening a lot, and it wasn’t particularly wonderful or special. I wasn’t even sure kind of how to feel about sort of the shaky pass that he wins. I was concerned that we were getting into cliché territory really, really fast with this opening.

Then we jump forward to the present. We see the 42 year old guy. I didn’t get a lot of sense of who he was now, and then why it was important that I saw the young version, sort of how he grew into it.

We meet the daughter, but there’s barely any time to sort of know who the daughter is. And then it’s not fair to criticize Sebastian because he was just barely getting started there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I would say by the bottom of page three I wasn’t sure what kind of movie this was. And is this a family comedy? Is it a comedy? It felt like it was trying to be funny. I just didn’t know where we were aiming as we got to the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** Well, Vance is lucky because he comes a week after my disastrous debut as a screenwriter in 1995. So, please Vance, take all of this in the context of I too once fumbled badly. This is a comedy. It is a comedy for sure. It wants to be a comedy. And I understand why we’re opening where we are. This is going to be a redemption story where the father whose life was defined by one moment of glory in high school, and who I suspect probably no longer has any glory like that wants to relive it again through his children. And yet comedically it is the daughter that has all the talent and the son doesn’t, and he’s going to have to figure out how to connect with both of them and accept them for who they are.

That’s okay. I don’t mind predictable. [laughs] Here’s what I mind. The opening sequence, I agree with you by the way, I get a little confused, especially when I have Claire and Coach Stapp and they both begin with C. These little things, believe it or not. And Clear Lake.

We have Clear Lake. Claire. Coach Stapp.

**John:** Conroe. The other team is Conroe.

**Craig:** Exactly. So we have a ton of Cs. I’m confused between Clear Lake and Conroe. I had to go backwards when I saw that he was playing, that Sebastian was playing with Clear Lake High School. I had to go backwards to make sure they hadn’t left town and gone somewhere new.

But, look, those are minor things. Here’s the biggest issue: We have a dramatic situation here where this young quarterback, who is pretty great, and who has a girlfriend that perhaps he’s now married to, Claire, is worried because it looks like he’s been hurt, and he’s hiding this pretty severe injury. I do not think that the way to go about this is to be broad. The injury itself is rather severe. He’s dislocated his finger and he doesn’t want to come out.

I need two things. One, I need to understand why that’s not a selfish, bad thing to do. Or, is it a selfish bad thing to do? When you’re hurt, and the game is on the line, and you’ve dislocated your finger and you’re job is to throw a ball, you need to tell me either, A, the backup quarterback is a disaster and you guys know as well as I do if I don’t throw this it’s not happening. Or, B, someone needs to say, “Look, we’ve got a good backup over there.” “No, I’m doing this. Pull it back into position.”

So, I just need a character moment there to explain. Because the truth is, staying in a game when you’re hurt like that is meaningful, and I need to know which way it’s meaning about this guy.

**John:** It’s being selfish or selfless?

**Craig:** Exactly. So, that’s question one. Then the second thing is when they snap the finger back in place, don’t do, “I need someone to pull my finger,” ha, ha, ha. You’re just killing the drama of the situation. The whole point is the movie is going to rest on this dramatic thing. And if it’s not dramatic and stupid, or goofy, then we just don’t care. Why am I supposed to cheer for a bunch of guys laughing about pulling fingers? And I say that as someone who has written far too many fart jokes in his life.

And, similarly, “You gonna pass out? I think I am,” and then “without warning Dave gives Lucky a NIPPLE TWISTER.” Now we’re doing gags between secondary characters and I would argue that if the point of all this is to setup people that we’re going to see later, don’t. We need the big ones. We need Dave, we need his wife, or his future wife Claire, or maybe she’s the one that got away. Either way, I’m sure she’s important. And maybe Coach Stapp who’s still the coach. And maybe even if you needed his buddy Dave, I understand, I’m sorry, Martin. But then to add on Lucky and to have them interrupting everything with a nipple twister is just off tone. It’s just a bad idea — don’t do it.

**John:** I would agree. If you look at page two, most of the dialogue comes from these minor characters. Dave and Lucky have the bulk of page two, and who wants that? That’s not your story. That’s not what you should be focusing on.

I would probably call Dave “Enstein” rather than calling him Dave. Using somebody’s last name helps distinguish that first names could be your primary characters and secondary characters have their last names, so that’s a thought there.

Just fewer people talking, less C words and I’d be able to follow the sequence more clearly. And really know what the stakes are. Putting a joke on something so early kills all the tension. I think you’re much better to cut that out.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then on page three we’ve got bad dialogue here. Martin throws a pass to his daughter, who catches it, and I like that. And I like that she doesn’t like the fact that he’s working her so hard. And then she says, “Maybe if you went slower…” And he says, “We’ve got a winning tradition in this family. I’m counting on you to keep it going.”

No. No, no. Humans don’t say stuff like that. That is entirely subtext. And no one should announce. And then she says, “But I don’t like sports.”

**John:** “Why can’t Sebastian do it.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like, come on. We’ve got to do better than that for sure. For sure.

**John:** Cool. I want to thank our two writers this week, Greg and Vance, for sending in their scripts, because that was hugely brave of you, and useful, and helpful, and I got something out of it. I hope people did who are listening. And I hoped we helped some.

**Craig:** As do I.

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

**Craig:** Ugh, you know, last week I had one and you weren’t going to do it. And then I wasted it last week.

**John:** Yeah, that’s fine. I’ll talk about mine, and maybe you’ll think about yours in the meantime.

**Craig:** Okay, yeah, sometimes that happens.

**John:** Sometimes it happens. My Cool Thing is I got the new Kindle. And I really liked my old Kindle. I had the $79 cheap Kindle that I liked a lot. And I use it, especially if I got to New York. I can stick it in my pocket and read at restaurants. Or, if I’m not home with my family I tend to read myself to sleep and it was great for that.

But what wasn’t great is because it was an e-ink Kindle, you had to have a light turned on in order to read it. And so it was tough for reading in bed. The new Kindle, the $119 version that has a side lit screen, so it’s not really backlit, it’s lit from the sides. But it’s really well lit. And it’s actually quite great. I’m enjoying it a lot.

The way the side lighting works is that during daylight hours the light is actually on quite bright, so it makes the screen look much whiter than a normal Kindle screen does, because Kindle screens have always been kind of gray. And so this one actually looks white, and it looks really, really nice. And then at nighttime you can bump the brightness way, way down and you can read in bed or in the dark with it, and it’s actually quite pleasing. And it’s not as hard on your eyes as trying to read on a iPad which is like glowing at you full time.

So, I really quite like it. It’s a tiny bit thicker than the cheap $79 Kindle that I had. And I wish it were not thicker, but I’m happy to have the light. And I’m sure that’s the battery that’s mostly doing that. The touch screen works pretty well. The interface is a lot better than the other Kindle was. So, I enjoy.

I would recommend it. If you’re considering a Kindle for reading books, I think it’s great. Some people always ask, “Oh, can you read scripts on it?” And the answer is yes, sort of. You can email yourself a PDF and it will do a reasonably good job of trying to convert that to read on the screen, but it’s not ideal. And I think if you want to read scripts you’re probably better off with an iPad.

**Craig:** I have heard good things about the new Kindle, so I’m going to check that. And while you were talking a Cool Thing did emerge for me.

**John:** See, I thought it might.

**Craig:** And you know what? It’s a Cool Place. I spent the last three, four days in Nogales, Arizona, where we were shooting The Hangover Part 3. And Nogales is a border town. We were literally feet from the actual border. It was kind of bizarre to be somewhere that close to the border where you can see folks on the other side watching you, looking at you. Border guards everywhere on bikes. Guns. It’s an interesting environment.

But, when you come to a small town, and Nogales is a small town, which a large movie production it is disruptive. You’re disrupting traffic. And you’re also recruiting, in this case, because we were shooting outside and we were shooting both day and night scenes, we were on splits which is, for those of you don’t know, a split schedule is when you’re in a location and you need to do both daytime and nighttime work. So, you start shooting at say two in the afternoon and you finish at two in the morning. It’s sort of the most dreaded of production schedules for crews.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But we needed people, we needed a lot of extras, so we needed a lot of local people to come out. And I have to say the people of Nogales were spectacular. They were — they kind of reminded me that this is actually fun. That as hard of a job as it is, it’s fun. And to the point where there was a crowd that came, the first night we were there the crew was really just sitting up and rigging lights. And they stayed with us until two in the morning, just a crowd of people, just watching us rig lights.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I mean, I wasn’t rigging lights. [laughs] But, they really were — they just loved it. And all the extras who came out, and extras — so, extras are people that are walking through the scene, but a lot of people don’t realize a lot of times extras are people just driving their cars through a scene.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so they just drive in a loop. And they drive on a loop all night until two in the morning. And when you come back the next night, because you’re shooting a different part of the same scene, you think to yourself, “Oh, they’re not going to come back. I mean, they’re just going to say, ‘Well the hell with this. I’m not driving in a circle.'” They did. They all came back. And they came back again.

And the crowds of people, you know, cheering for the actors and the actors were great, and talked to them and held up signs and things. And also for all the people that were standing out there and who could have disrupted shooting by being noisy or honking horns or being disruptive, incredibly quite, and respectful.

It was a wonderful place to shoot and I just want to thank the people of Nogales and the mayor for just coming out and being the perfect town for us to be in and visit and they were great hosts. So, thank you, Nogales.

**John:** That’s wonderful. It’s great when production shooting goes well on location. Because there are horror stories, so it’s nice to hear the happy stories.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Hooray. Well, Craig, thank you for another fun podcast. if you have comments about this podcast you can Twitter to Craig, @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. You can also leave a comment for us in iTunes, which we love, which is helpful and helps other people find the show.

And that’s our week.

**Craig:** And are we going to record again before our big live podcast in Austin? Or is that the next one we do?

**John:** I think that may be the next one we do. We’ll check our schedules. So, our next one, it could be you and me in the studio, or it could be a live festival in Austin, so we’ll see.

**Craig:** We’re getting close. I love it.

**John:** Getting close. All right, Craig, thanks so much. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John. Bye-bye.