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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/austin-2018-three-page-challenge).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode is the live Three Page Challenge we recorded at the Austin Film Festival a few weeks ago. There is some swearing, so keep that in mind if you’re listening in the car with your kids. If you’d like to see another live show with me and Craig and a bunch of other great guests we just started selling tickets to the December live show, December 12th at 8pm in Hollywood. So if you want a ticket for that you can go to the link in the show notes or to wgafoundation.org. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is the Three Page Challenge of Scriptnotes. And so what we do on a Three Page Challenge is we invite folks to send in the first three pages of their script. It can be a feature, it can be a TV pilot. It’s not always the first three pages, but it’s usually the first three pages. It’s confusing if it’s not the first three pages. And we talk about what we’ve read.

And so a crucial thing we should all note is that these are not necessarily the best things we’ve read. They’re the things that have the most interesting stuff to talk about. So, people were brave enough to send them in, so we always commend the folks who are brave to send their work out so we can all discuss it in this room and on the air. So let’s applaud for all these folks.

**Craig:** And we should thank our producer, Megan, who is the one that makes these selections. In a sense, the people here are slightly less brave than the usual people because we’re nicer in person. It’s just sort of a–

**John:** Well, except that they’re also brave because they’re going to come up. That’s the difference between the live thing. They’re actually going to come up and talk to us about the things they wrote which–

**Craig:** It’s a wash. They’re about as brave as everybody else.

**John:** They’re just about as brave as any normal people. And they’re braving a hot day, a very cold air-conditioned room for us to talk about this.

**Craig:** It’s freezing up here. But we do have another thing going for us on this kind of Three Page Challenge which is we have help.

**John:** We do have help. So with help in the form of guest analyzers of scripts. First off let’s welcome up Lindsay Doran. The legendary Lindsay Doran. Lindsay is a producer whose credits include Stranger than Fiction, Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, Dead Again. Executive producer on The Firm, Sabrina. She’s the former President and CEO of United Artists. She is right now the script whisperer. She is the person that people go to help solve script problems. So we are very lucky to have her with us today.

Do you have a microphone Lindsay Doran?

**Lindsay Doran:** Got it.

**John:** We are so excited to have you.

**Lindsay:** Thank you.

**John:** Our other guest is Jewerl Ross. Jewerl Ross is a manager and the founder of Silent R Management. His clients include such names as Barry Jenkins, Matthew Aldrich, Jack Stanley, Our Lady J, Evan Endicott, and Hannah Schneider.

**Craig:** That’s where the real bravery is. A manager shows up at the Austin Screenwriting Film Festival. That’s impressive.

**Jewerl Ross:** Glad to be here.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Before we get started talking about these three page samples, I want to talk about reading scripts overall because the two of you must read an enormous quantity of scripts and you’re probably reading them for different reasons. So I’m guessing Lindsay you’re often reading scripts for things that are in development and things that are going hopefully into production. And you have an eye for what are the challenges, what are the problems, how can we make this script better. But you’re not doing the basic filtering at this point. Like you’re not reading terrible things. You’re reading maybe pretty good things that need to become great. Is that fair for what you’re doing right now?

**Lindsay:** Yeah.

**John:** Microphones are so helpful for a recorded podcast.

**Lindsay:** Here I thought you and I were just talking.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Lindsay:** So when I nod it doesn’t really do you any good? Yeah. So that’s true.

**John:** That’s true. And are most of your conversations these days with the writers, or with studios and producers who are coming to you for guidance on scripts?

**Lindsay:** Both. Both absolutely. I mean, I’m usually hired by studios but then I end up in the rooms with the writers. Once and a while things are in such bad shape that it’s about how do we get this in the kind of shape that we could even give it to a writer to do something with. Craig knows what I’m talking about there.

**Craig:** I didn’t write that one.

**Lindsay:** [laughs] But, no, a lot of the time I’m working directly with the writers.

**John:** And Jewerl, are you still filtering, because I feel like early on in your career you probably were just reading a ton of stuff and having to just triage like is this even a person I should consider as a client.

**Jewerl:** True.

**John:** Are you still doing that now, or you have so many people that you–

**Jewerl:** No. I’m lucky that I have enough people to filter things and so hopefully the things – I’m only reading client stuff, current clients, and things that my people think are great. And occasionally, you know, if something comes well recommended. Like if Lindsay sends me a script but I give it to my people and my people are like Jewerl don’t read it, I will occasionally say, “Well, I like Lindsay a lot. She has great taste.” So I’ll dip into their pile every so often.

**John:** So, how far into a script do you need to read before you see that this is a person who has a talent, has a voice, has an interesting thing. How long does it take you to get into a script before you get that sense?

**Jewerl:** You know, I can get that in two pages.

**John:** We gave you a third.

**Jewerl:** I mean, you can certainly see a bad script on page one. You know, but there was a script that was on the Black List that one of my clients was attached to direct at one point. I’ll remember the name in a minute. That the writing was so magical. The world was so interesting. I mean, it was like – I think about that script often because that’s what I want to feel right away. Like I’m in the hands of someone special.

You know, like craft is interesting and figuring out how to – act breaks is interesting. But what’s more interesting is someone who is doing something so differently. That has a perspective on the world that’s so different. And I did get that this year. I signed this 23-year-old kid out of Penn. His professor called me and said, “This guy is a genius and I’ve heard about you.” And so she sent me the script and it was the weirdest thing. It broke every screenwriting rule.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**Jewerl:** It took me five hours to read it.

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**Jewerl:** And I think he’s a genius.

**Craig:** It broke every screenwriting rule. It broke every screenwriting rule. Remember that. Love it.

**Lindsay:** It started at the end.

**Craig:** We’ve already seen that. That was already a movie.

**John:** It was white letters on black paper.

**Craig:** Ooh. I would read that.

**John:** Lindsay, how quickly – he says he can do it in two pages. When do you get a sense of when a writer has a voice?

**Lindsay:** I try to be more generous than that, even though I do completely understand why the first page tells you an awful lot. The second page tells you an awful lot. I do a thing that I did yesterday morning called The First Ten Pages based on the situation I had with Dead Again where I found out later on that Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson were reading a ton of scripts at the same time. He had just made Henry V and he was getting sent a million things and he was touring the world with King Lear and Midsummer Night’s Dream and they were carrying around dozens, and dozens, and dozens of scripts.

So they just said we’re just going to read the first ten pages of everything and if we don’t like it we’re going to throw it away. And they had a huge trash can in their dressing room at the theaters. And when they read the first ten pages of Dead Again they missed their cue. Because they were so excited and they couldn’t wait to get off stage so they could keep reading.

So that is in my mind. And I do remember the first time I ever read Scott Frank. The first time I read Little Man Tate I called the agent on page 11 and said I don’t have to read anymore. I just want to meet this guy. And I know when Emma Thompson was reading Stranger than Fiction she called me on page 11 and said I don’t have to read anymore. So, I do know that it can make an impression on you that quickly.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would seem it’s a lot harder to determine how far to read to decide that somebody is great. But it should be fairly easy to determine that somebody is absolutely never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to qualify as a screenwriter. That you can sometimes see in four words.

**John:** Craig, I want to push back a little on that.

**Craig:** Go for it. You think you can get it down to two words?

**John:** Some of what we’re talking about is voice and vision. But some of what we’re talking about is purely craft. And sometimes you read stuff where the writer clearly has not read a lot of screenplays and doesn’t have a sense of what the form is. So they’re really struggling with the form and having a hard time understanding–

**Craig:** I would never turn something aside because the form was incorrect. It’s just sometimes you can read a few things and you realize just the mind is not a particularly strong mind. I mean, you guys have read things, right, where you’re like–

**Jewerl:** You guys are harsher than I am. Geez.

**Craig:** Oh, you have no idea.

**Jewerl:** Geez, I’m going to like you.

**John:** I mean, some of the things that knock it out quickly for me is when it’s halfway through the first page and I’m already on a cliché. And there’s no spin on the cliché. You’re just in this really rote moment. And it’s like, OK, if you’re doing that so early I don’t have good faith that it’s going to be worth my time to do it. And really what we’re talking about, reading a screenplay is an act of faith. If I’m going to give you an hour, two hours, five hours of my time, and the writer says I’m going to make it worth your while to do that. And there’s trust and faith. And if you break that trust, that sort of social contract between the writer and the reader, that’s a problem. And that contract starts on page one.

**Lindsay:** When I was doing my First Ten Pages workshop yesterday morning two of the scripts, the worst writing in the scripts were in the first page and a half. They were both things where they were putting the bomb under the table. You know, they were setting up the thriller underneath the other stuff. And once I got to the other stuff the writing was really sound and really good. They just didn’t know how to do that whole other thing.

So, and yet I was trying to convey that a lot of people will just put it down after a page and a half. If you’re not on the top of your game on page one. At that workshop I talk a lot about how everybody who reads your script has too much to read. Would rather be doing something else. They’re exhausted and distracted. So that’s what you’re up against. And that’s what we’re up against with the audience really. They may have paid the ticket, but they’re still thinking about a lot of other things before the lights go down.

So we have to grab people who would rather be thinking about something else or doing something else. That’s the job.

**Jewerl:** You know, I never stop reading at page two. I always give someone ten, 20, 30 pages. You know, I’ve been developing a TV pilot with Howard Gordon who produced 24 and some other big television shows.

**Craig:** X-Files. I think he was on X-Files.

**Jewerl:** Yeah, all these big television shows. And I stopped feeling bad because he has this thing where if there’s a logic problem on page 12 he can’t go to page 13. He’s like we have to fix the logic problem here before I can get to the – it’s an OCD thing with him. And I’ve appreciated that because it’s like when there are too many logic problems for me they’ve lost me. I can’t – I’m not longer in fantasy. I’m in why do you suck.

**Lindsay:** You think he’s meaner than you. Wow.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s hope he doesn’t repeat those words.

**Craig:** I can outdo that. I can absolutely go – that was positively Amadeusian. That was the greatest laugh I’ve ever heard. That was amazing.

**Jewerl:** I still want to figure out the name of that script. The three pages. I’ve been looking at my phone and I can’t figure it out.

**Craig:** The one that you loved, loved, loved?

**Jewerl:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well we should probably deal with these three pages.

**John:** We should. So I’m going to look at my phone and I’m going to read the summary for this first script. So as a reminder if you are in this audience and want to read along the pages with us, or if you’re at home listening to this podcast you can go to johnaugust.com/aff2018. Or if you’re listening to the podcast you can just click the links there. This is Night Trauma by Athena Frost.

We open in a boy’s bedroom in Chicago where 50-year-old Raimond Fanon is performing a ritual with incense. The young boy clings to his mother. Aimee Fanon, a woman in her mid-20s says the boy needs to stay in order to draw it out.

Raimond says that Connor Leidenfrost should remain outside, but Connor says my monster, my fight. Raimond begins chanting. The room begins to shake violently. Something bursts out of the closet, moving so fast we can’t finally see it until it ends up atop Connor. The monster is six-feet tall and thin as a broomstick, with sharp claws that cut down to Connor’s body armor. Raimond magically holds the creature and shouts to cut off its head.

Aimee dispatches it with Connor’s knife.

We cut to a hospital in Seattle where an Asian man in his 20s pushes his way into a critical care room. There, doctors Foster and Goralczyk are working on a gunshot victim. And that’s where we’re at on the bottom of the first three pages.

Lindsay, do you want to start us off? Talk about your first impressions going through these three pages.

**Lindsay:** Well, Craig knows that I have this thing about where is everybody standing. It drives him crazy. He thinks it drives other writers I work with crazy.

**Craig:** Only because they told me so.

**Lindsay:** Oh well, OK. If you’re going to go with that. So, I have to say my first impression was I couldn’t tell where anybody was standing. You start in the room. It’s boy’s room. But then the character comes into the room. I couldn’t tell whether those other people were in the room. So I was just confused and there’s – I work a lot with Phil Lord and Chris Miller on their movies and they always refer to me as Captain Clarity because if I can’t get past the clarity of the situation I have a really hard time getting engaged.

So, for example, I thought Connor was the father for a while because he talked about my monster, and so I thought that’s why he was there. But then he seemed to already know those other people and he was the one with the knife. So I guess he must work with them, but they don’t seem to like him. I was having such a hard time. Because I love the situation. I love being in a situation where it’s so scary and you need the boy to draw it out. Aye-aye-aye. What the heck? All of that seemed really, really good to me, but I was so troubled by the clarity of the situation that it was getting in the way of the suspense of the situation for me.

**Jewerl:** I totally agree. The geography of the room–

**Lindsay:** See?

**Jewerl:** Is impossible to know. Like for example, paragraph three, “He pulls out a small gray puck,” and I highlight the word puck. I don’t know what a puck is. “From his bag and lights it on top of an incense burner.”

OK, so he has a bag. He can light something while holding the bag and put it on an incense burner. I’m trying to imagine him doing that and I can’t imagine him doing it because I would need a third arm to do all of those things and hold those things.

And then you say he edges slowly into the room. Well, you’ve already told me that I’m in the interior of the room. And so how can he come into the room that he’s already in? And then when you introduce, mother has dialogue next, and mother says, “What is he doing?” Well, you’ve only described Raimond and you’ve described Raimond already in the room. You never told me that mother even existed. And so now I’m thinking she’s off-screen. She’s like – she’s saying something and you just didn’t write OS or something.

Like I don’t know – and so then I read more and there are more characters there and I’m like I was scared. I thought we were doing something where people were magically maybe appearing. Maybe he’s having a fantasy sequence. That they’re not really alive. I didn’t know if there were real characters in the room at that moment.

**John:** So geography was the first thing I underlined on the page because I got confused where we were. But I felt like if you’re introducing characters in the middle of the scene that totally works, but you need to tell us that we’re not supposed to see that they’re there until they start speaking. So like the word reveal is useful. So like we reveal a young boy clinging to the mother’s waist. Then it’s that sense of like OK now we’re seeing this kid for the first time.

If you set up the mother but we hadn’t seen the boy, and then you used reveal to show that the boy was clinging to his mother, that’s great. Then you’re adding to the scene versus just piling more stuff on.

The challenge with so many characters in a scene, I got really confused who was driving the scene. Who was in charge of the scene?

**Lindsay:** Right.

**John:** Because my assumption would be that it would be Raimond because he’s the first character who spoke. He’s the first character we meet. He’s not the first character who speaks. So I assumed that he was going to be driving the scene. But it seems like Connor is. And ultimately Aimee is. And we don’t know enough about any of them to sort of really have a sense of who has the storytelling power in the scene and through whose eyes were supposed to be watching this thing unfurl.

**Craig:** These people are terribly mean. Let me be very, very nice to you for a second.

**Lindsay:** Living up to his reputation.

**Craig:** Exactly. No, everything they’ve said is true and we’ll get around to it, and then I’ll be worse. But what I like a lot is that there is a situation. I’m not – it’s sort of reminded me a little bit of Constantine. It had a little bit of a Constantine kind of vibe to it, but it was different. I loved the description of the monster and so I’ll just do a quick little thing here.

I loved the way you did this. This monster appears through sound, which was wonderful. And then we couldn’t find him. It says, “The sound is continuously getting louder. It is in the room somewhere but we can’t see it directly. A flash here. In the corner of the eye there.” I can imagine that and I’m feeling it which is great. “Raimond motions for everyone to stop moving. No one can hear anything anymore.” That’s cool. I can see that. I can feel that. “He stands calmly in the middle of the room and pushes the incense away from him, talking quietly.” Then it says, “All sound stops,” which means that you’ve done that twice, right? You know that because nobody could hear anything else. But that’s a side.

What I loved was I’m learning about him and how he responds to things around him. I’m learning about his character through this action and his choices, which is great. And then the description of the monster is wonderful. “Over six feet tall but as thin as a broomstick, it glares at the three of them through shiny black eyes. Tufts of lint hang on to its glistening body. Its skin looks like it’s wet with syrupy tar. It spews out its previous meal of skin and hair and cloth.” I mean, I don’t know exactly what it looks like but that’s so cool. And so I kind of imagine this creepy, gross, like oily laundry monster. So amazing.

There’s all this really cool shit going on. But now here’s what’s going on. Why they’re confused I think in part is you’ve left them too much room to fill in. The human mind is expert at filling in gaps. That’s how we move through the world because we don’t see everything happening. We fill in gaps. So he starts to fill in gaps. I didn’t see her in the room. I’m hearing her voice. She must be outside of the room. Two or three of those mistakes in a row and everyone is completely lost.

So, I will absolutely be Captain Clarity with you as well. You can’t go into a room if you’re already in the room. There’s a point here where the mom says to her son, “Don’t worry. I won’t let it past this door.” What door? They’re already in the room. So are they just outside of the room? Are they in the hallway? Are they looking through the room? This is where I’m totally like you because what I think you need to do is set your stage. Just think about how to set this stage. John is absolutely right that there’s no real strong perspective in the scene.

So, when we talk about perspective we mean to say, for instance, “RAIMOND FANON (50s) looks a bit Rastafarian at first glance with his dreads and dark skin, but he carries himself…” Great description there. Black Dumbledore. Amazing. And then mother. I would do that off screen. What is he doing? Raimond turns to see an old woman standing there with a younger woman and a son. She’s scared. The young – you know? Put it in his perspective. Let that motivation. See what I mean?

When we’re shooting scenes that’s how we break down how to do it. Someone’s head turns to see something. And it’s his perspective because I think you’re right. It feels like it’s his scene.

The only other thing I would mention to you is the – I don’t know who Connor Leidenfrost is. I don’t know how he fits into this. Here’s what my mind did. My mind saw that Connor Leidenfrost – just from his name I went sounds white. Then nods to Aimee as he follows Raimond into the room. Nods to Aimee. Friend? Husband? Boyfriend? Not sure.

“He’s a handsome, corn-fed Midwesterner,” nailed the white, and then it says, “Accent and all the backward thought that comes with it.” And I went, oh, racist. Wait, hold on. What’s this racist doing with all these black people? Just reasonable.

**Lindsay:** That’s why I thought he was the father.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**Lindsay:** There’s a mother and a son. I thought he was the father of that child.

**Craig:** The racist father?

**Lindsay:** Well I didn’t know where else he could fit into this thing. Eventually I realized–

**Craig:** OK. So I wasn’t really sure. You can see where we’re all really, really puzzled. And when he says, “My monster, my fight,” then I thought, OK, he seems to work with Raimond, so maybe they’re like a team. But he’s a racist? So I’m trying to figure out, OK, then what’s Raimond’s feeling about him and how does that work? And also all you’ve really told me is you’ve told me he’s a racist. But nothing he’s doing here is racist. So don’t tell me he’s a racist now. Reveal it later when it’s going to shock us and we’re going to go, oh, that explains why – really it’s just more like he seems like this perfectly fine person except that his partner is like, eh. You know what I mean? It’s all about that perspective.

So, anyway, oh, final, final thing. When all the clothes get torn away it says, “Clothes rip away to body armor.” Body armor underneath regular clothes for a guy like this is a bit surprising. This is one area where you might want to think about all-capping that, or underlining, or something. Just so that the reader doesn’t just go right past it. Because that’s actually really interesting.

**John:** It’s a really cool detail. Because it shows that he was prepared. It’s a surprise that you’re giving us, which is awesome. So, give yourself some weight on the page so we can see that and know that it’s a really cool moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there’s a really good thing going on here. Like I actually want to keep – I want to see what happens. I just think – take this all in. This is all kind of the best possible sort of mistake in that it’s super-duper fixable.

**John:** Yeah. You know what the great thing is. She’s just not a voice on the other end listening to us. She’s actually here. Athena Frost, can you come up and take a chair here?

**Craig:** And you know I’m so happy that Megan picked Athena’s work because Athena has been to many of our shows.

**John:** I recognized her name. I was curious whether she’d actually been on a Three Page Challenge before.

**Craig:** She’s a physicist.

**John:** I like physicists.

**Athena:** Astrophysicist.

**Craig:** Astro. She’s an astrophysicist.

**Lindsay:** Oh my god. So you’re a rocket scientist.

**Athena:** No, no, no, no. I’m not an engineer.

**Craig:** No, no, no, no. Those were the applied people here. She’s more theoretical. All right.

**John:** So, Athena, so what we’ve talked through here, you obviously have a geography in your head, and so what we were thinking about with like they’re mostly in the hall but some of them are going into the room. Were we right there?

**Athena:** Yeah. That’s what’s going on.

**John:** Are the three characters, so are Connor and Raimond and Aimee, are they the three main characters we’re going to follow in the course of this story?

**Athena:** Yes, they are.

**John:** And this kind of monster we saw in the first one is the first of many monsters we’re going to see in the course of the story?

**Athena:** Three for three. Yes.

**John:** All right. So what I think is good about this is I was able to make the right assumptions about what kind of script this was and what kind of movie I was going into based on these first three pages which is awesome. Because there’s nothing worse than like you’ve read something and you’re like this feels like a thriller and then you come up and tell us, “No, no, it’s a goofy romantic comedy.” And then it’s like, ah.

**Craig:** Tonally it was consistent. I think we all kind of probably saw the same thing happening, so that was great.

**John:** What world is this happening in? I had a hard time figuring out what kind of universe this was. What city are we in? What does this feel like?

**Craig:** And what time period?

**John:** Is it present day?

**Athena:** Yeah. So this is present day. It takes place in Chicago on the south side, which is where I’m from. And so the idea is that it’s a supernatural TV show that takes place in a hospital. So later you’re going to find out that Aimee is the head nurse of the ER. And that Connor Leidenfrost is a doctor.

**John:** It feels like you changed some stuff there or you’re not quite sure.

**Athena:** No, no, no. I mean, he’s a doctor to most people, but he essentially took over this other guy who died. Like weird backstory.

**John:** So where are you at in the process of writing this? This is whole thing done? Is this something you’re working on right now?

**Athena:** Yeah. The whole thing is done. I know that I need another rewrite and essentially very related to you all’s notes which is that I need to make some things more clear. A lot of times people are like left with questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, it’s always that game we play of mystery versus confusion. Keep the mystery. Avoid the confusion. One thing to think about on a page one sort of thing now that we know where this is set is the very first thing people see will be – it will kind of help them understand what you’re going for and what’s special about your show.

So, for instance, in this case you’re in the south side of Chicago, but I would never know it. This could be any year. He’s pulling out incense and he seems a little old-fashioned in a way. So, if I heard or saw through a window South Side of Chicago and then just moved away from that to this weird situation that doesn’t feel like the typical South Side Chicago story that would be kind of cool.

Just something to get us into your world.

**John:** Or to the establishing shot that sort of begins this thing where you can paint a picture of what neighborhood we’re in would really help anchor us and sort of know that we’re in a specific place and time that’s going to carry through.

But this sounds cool. In your head is this more Buffy or is this more Grimm? Is this Grey’s Anatomy with monsters? What is this in your head?

**Athena:** The comps I usually do is Grey’s Anatomy meets Supernatural. More recent ones that people like to do is I think they like to say Gray and Constantine.

**Craig:** Yeah. I definitely had a Constantine vibe. One more thing for you to think about. When you get to the hospital scene at the end, your first scene there has an annoyed nurse, a woman, a child, and an Asian man. That’s four no-named people. So, I’m OK with one no-named person. Maybe two at the most. But I kind of want to know that I don’t have a scene with four day players kind of moving around. Just something to think about there. Cool.

**John:** Athena Frost, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Athena. Which one should we do next?

**John:** Let’s do The Conch Republic.

**Craig:** Is it Conch or Conch?

**John:** It could be either one.

**Craig:** Conch.

**John:** Conch, sorry. Got the author here.

**Craig:** I have the conch.

**John:** Do you want to read it?

**Craig:** I’ll read the summary, yes. The Conch Republic by Elden Rhoads. We’re on a commercial fishing boat off Key West, Florida. It’s June 1975. Kittens sniff a chum bucket. The fishermen speak a mix of English and Spanish. Eduardo and Hector talk about the kittens and then use them as bait to catch sharks.

Oh, get over it. Felix, 30, is a burly fisherman. Fisherman? Fisherman. Drags Ramon Sanchez, 20s, up from below deck. Sanchez swears he doesn’t know who called the cops. Felix says Sanchez was going to testify against Artie. The men throw Sanchez to the sharks. Notice no one cared that a man was fed to sharks. It’s a human being, but fine.

Cut to one month earlier. In Miami police officer Carmen Soto, 20s, rides in a squad car with partner Cal Lakewood, 40s. Lakewood tells the story of finding a missing woman in a smelly apartment. Soto is unimpressed and keeps eating her sandwich.

And that is our summary for The Conch Republic by Elden Rhoads. So–?

**John:** So, before we get started here we have to – who can raise a hand and tell me what trait we saw in this script? What specific Three Page Challenge phenomenon we witnessed in this script?

**Craig:** Stuart Special.

**John:** It’s a Stuart Special! A Stuart Special is when you go through some time and then you jump back in time to sort of set things up. So, I just want to acknowledge the Stuart Special.

**Craig:** Lives on.

**John:** It lives on even after Stuart Friedel has left us. Jewerl, can you start us off with your first read on Conch Republic and what saw as you were reading through it.

**Jewerl:** I was just looking on my notes and I have a lot of little, little things about language. A lot of little, little things about why you used this language here. But I think overall I really liked these pages.

**John:** What was it that you made you spark to them?

**Jewerl:** It’s vivid. When I was looking at the geography of the boat and the fishing line and the chum in the water and what these guys were doing. And it was clearly gritty. And then we pan and we see these kittens. And at first I wrote why have you introduced kittens on a boat with fishing gear, like you’ve changed the tone of the movie. That was my note right then.

**John:** Yeah. Right then.

**Jewerl:** But then when he puts the kittens on the fishing line and they go into the water and the sharks eat them I’m like, OK. And then when they bring out the man and they throw the man overboard so the shark can eat him, I’m like this is a lot of work to kill someone, but it’s F-ing cool.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** It’s an amazing laugh. Lindsay, what did you read as you were going through this?

**Lindsay:** I don’t disagree with anything you said. But you kill in a kitten in a script and I’m out. I’m out. I’m a proud owner of a brand new kitten. I cannot read about kittens being thrown overboard. Craig will be glad to know I also felt really bad about the guy. I felt really terrible about that.

**Jewerl:** And I happen to be a dog person.

**Lindsay:** See? Good person. Bad person. Can read about kittens/can’t read about kittens. But I think it’s important to say that certain people are going to read this and just say that’s it. I wish I could unread these pages.

**John:** Yeah. Because we’re talking the first three pages. And so as a person who can’t read about – the kittens freaked me out. And so I had a hard time going back and reading it a second time. The second time I was like, OK, you get desensitized to the kitten death. But, here’s what I’ll say on the second read through is that the first read through I was so shocked by the kittens and then the guy gets thrown overboard that I wasn’t paying attention to the dialogue and sort of to what the guy was saying, what Sanchez and Felix, what their dialogue was about. And so I wasn’t really paying attention. There’s something going on between them. Someone is betraying somebody else.

The second time through when the shock wasn’t there so much I was looking at the dialogue and I wasn’t believing the Sanchez/Felix moment. Here’s the reason why. This guy was beaten up down below decks and then is brought up deck. And he’s saying the things I think he probably would have said down below. I didn’t feel like it was his final pleading. I felt like he was saying those things for me and the audience and not for himself in those moments. It didn’t feel real like what he would be saying in those moments.

So, if he’d been blindfolded and then blindfold was off and he realized where he was then I might be able to buy sort of what he’s doing there right now. But I feel like he already knows he’s on a boat. He already knows he’s really screwed. So I need to have a different way in. I always think about how would you direct that actor. What would you be talking to that actor about? I feel like I wouldn’t have the note for him given the lines that are there right now.

**Craig:** We have a typo on the very first line. June has an E at the end of it.

**Elden:** Oh, that’s throughout the script. I just used (inaudible).

**Craig:** Why? I guess later on when I saw Aug or Sep I would know, but here it just looked like Jun. Regardless, I think the best thing about this are the kittens. Here’s the deal. She’s right. You will lose people on the kitten thing. But, the name of the game is not to get the most people to sort of like something. The name of the game is to get one person to fall in love with something. So I thought it was shocking and remarkable. I’ve never seen it before. That alone gets a huge checkmark.

I think in a weird way you didn’t do it enough in a sense, because it’s so shocking you have to kind of build the moment around it. So for instance the first line – well first it says, “On board, KITTENS sniff the chum bucket. Looking closely at the litter, we see they all have six toes.” No we don’t.

**John:** No one will see that.

**Craig:** No one is going to see that. Ever. We’re not looking that close. And you want us to look at all those paws all at the same time? That’s not the way cameras work. And more important, that’s not important right now. There are kittens on a ship. What’s that about?

The first line is Eduardo, “Why all the gatos?” No. No, no, no, no. Everybody should know what the cats are for. The cats are the last thing on their mind. They know what the cats are for. The cats don’t know what the cats are for. But I want to think, right, lull me into a sense of security. Like that these guys are on a fishing trip and they just have cats. They like the cats. Maybe they’re feeding them some of the fish. They’re pets. They’re lovely. It’s fun.

And then when they casually grab one and stick it on a thing we go oh my god. It will come out of nowhere. It will be terrifying. So, that I think is important.

I want to read–

**Lindsay:** Yeah, make it worse.

**Craig:** Yes! Yes. If you’re going to do it, do it is my point. Right? Aim for me. You’re never going to get her. But you can get me, right?

**Lindsay:** Bargain.

**Craig:** This is the second line. I just want to read this. “FISHERMEN, leathery skin burned rusty brown by the tropical sun, monitor their thousand pound test fishing lines plunged 300 feet below the sapphire blue waters.” Do you sense a certain monotony to the rhythm there? So when you have a three-line sentence and it’s da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da without much punctuation or breaking it’s going to start to – you know, people want to skip past that stuff anyway. So, make it a little bit more fun or a little more breaky-choppy.

John is 100% right. This deal with Felix does not work because it’s not real. So we talk about emotional math. We are doing the emotional calculations here and we are immediately coming up with a wrong answer. For instance, they drag him up. “I swear man, you got to believe me. Please. It wasn’t me.”

These are not the most original lines in the world. However, that’s probably what somebody would say there. I believe the math.

He gets hit on the face. He falls to the side of the boat. And then a yellow pool forms between his legs and Felix says, “Damn, he pissed himself.” Felix has seen people piss themselves a thousand times. Felix doesn’t even notice anymore. Felix feeds cats to sharks. This is all in a day’s work for Felix. Let us go – in fact, we learn something when somebody sees a man pee and goes, uh-huh, we learn about them. OK. This ain’t your first man peeing.

**Lindsay:** He’s one of those.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s one of those guys.

**Jewerl:** I’m having so much fun.

**Lindsay:** There’s more challenges here than just the three pages.

**Craig:** And so I think John is right that this feels like an info dump and it’s coming from somebody under emotional distress who is the worst possible choice for an info dump. Because when people are under emotional distress they don’t speak in complete thoughts. They are not concerned with the information anybody else needs. Sometimes they can barely get words out at all. And so you can be interesting and creative about that.

If you need an info dump, he can try to say something and they can say, “Yes, we know. Blah-blah-blah. You said it a thousand times. It’s still not true.” Kick. You know what I mean? Find ways where the emotional math works.

I love this little bit at the end where he’s like, “Whew, not this cat. This is my daughter’s cat.” I thought that was great.

The only issue is I would think maybe to pull it earlier because if you’re going to do a Stuart Special you kind of have to cut on a moment of shock. And this is sort of – the moment of shock is they feed Sanchez to the sharks. Maybe the cat can meow and then cut. But there can’t be probably too much chitchat and then cut. This conversation between Soto and Lakewood, I’m having some emotional math problems here too. I feel like it’s trying very hard to make me feel something about Lakewood. Lakewood is talking to Soto like he’s never been in a car with her before. I mean, are they new partners?

**Elden:** He’s a rookie.

**Craig:** OK, have they been together for more than a day?

**Elden:** It’s very, very early.

**Craig:** Then I need to know that. Even the way he’s telling the story feels so casual, like two partners, and she’s like, “I’m eating my sandwich. You’re so boring with your stories.” So it was a mismatch. If he’s like let me tell you, you’re new, so let me tell you something. Whatever it has to be so we know that they don’t know each very well, then he would tell this story differently.

Also, why this story? Why is he telling it to her? Just to gross her. She’s a cop. You know what I mean? You’ve got to do a lot of that emotional math. And constantly ask is this true. I know I want to do it, but is it true?

**Jewerl:** By the way, for me the most important thing about these three pages, I wanted to read more.

**John:** That’s crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Elden, you’re here. Can you come up and talk to us about so we can know more about.

**Elden:** If there’s anybody from PETA please don’t kill me.

**Craig:** They’re just words. Just words.

**John:** So on the title page it says inspired by actual events. So can you tell us the shortest version of what are the actual events and were kittens harmed?

**Elden:** This is literally a story I heard around the dinner table as a child. Growing up in Key West, very shortly in the ‘70s it was a very big drug trade going on. And it was dark. So, this story just came out of – I thought if I ever told the story about Key West and the Conch Republic this was always the opening scene. Cats were used as bait on commercial fishing boats. And I heard this story many, many times growing up.

And to what you’re saying about the shock value of it, the Ramon character I really had to build it out because I had him just coming up with a blindfold on and being thrown overboard and the first people who read it literally didn’t even notice that a person went overboard and was killed because they were so freaked out–

**Jewerl:** Cat people.

**Elden:** About the cats.

**Craig:** Terrible.

**Elden:** And I’m not like deliberately doing it to be shocking. I’m doing it because this is literally the stories that I heard.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s cool. Don’t apologize for this. It’s awesome.

**Lindsay:** You’re horrible.

**Craig:** I know.

**Elden:** And so I had to expand. They’re like give him some lines. I didn’t even notice that he went overboard. Give him some lines. And what would he say?

So, when you’re saying that I’m like going back and the history of the rewrites and saying, OK, I was little clumsy here because I’m just trying to force this dialogue in here so people are paying attention.

**Craig:** I have an idea. Do you want an idea? I don’t know if it’s right or not, but what you could do is while these guys are talking and catching sharks with cats, you could just show that there’s a guy sitting there who is all beaten up and gagged watching. You know, so we’re like who is that, but he’s also – now the cats are contextualized in oh my fucking – these people do that to cats, I’m so fucked.

**John:** So, I mean, I think the other thing Craig might be suggesting is that is there a piece of information you want to get out of them. Are you just there to dispose of the body? Because you could kill him in advance and it wouldn’t really matter. Or are you trying to get some information out of him? That makes the scene alive.

**Elden:** Well, I’m trying to – I mean, the thing about Artie, this guy is a snitch. He snitched on Artie. Artie is a big kingpin/drug dealer/gun runner who is one of the main characters in the rest of the story. And he’s a snitch who is getting what’s coming to him.

**Craig:** Stitches.

**Elden:** Yeah.

**John:** Fishes.

**Elden:** So, I put the Artie line in there to tie him back to Artie so we know who this person is snitching on.

**John:** I have a question. So you’ve done I’m sure a lot of research figuring all this out. It’s 1975 and we have Carmen Soto, early 20s. She’s a spark plug of a Cuban-American chica. She’s a police officer riding with this guy. Does she exist? Is there going to be an early 20s in Miami female police officer riding in that car with that guy?

**Elden:** In this era there were women who were serving in the police force as well as military but they weren’t treated very well. And one of the things, again, about the dialogue that’s going on – he’s testing her. He’s trying to push her buttons and gross her out. And so right now she’s resisting him by eating the sandwich saying you’re not grossing me out.

**Craig:** I think we got that. I think the problem with that exchange is that he’s bad at it. He’s too bad at what he’s trying to do and she’s too good at ignoring it. It needs to be better. For me to feel that she – to give her credit for resisting I need to feel that she actually has to resist. Because the story he’s telling is too goofy I think ultimately for me to feel like, oh god, I’m in her shoes and this is – if that makes sense.

**Elden:** I will tell my criminology professor you thought his story was too goofy.

**Craig:** I’ve done it before.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** You know the thing about real life is it’s often boring.

**Elden:** Yeah. That was a story literally out of–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, there’s all sorts of them. But it’s not, you know.

**John:** Elden, thank you so much for coming up here.

**Craig:** Thank you. We’re kind of wondering if–

**John:** Hey, Joseph Valezquez, are you here?

**Joseph:** I am.

**John:** He’s here. All right. We weren’t sure if you were here.

**Craig:** Good, good, good.

**John:** Good thing, because we were about to talk about your script. And we would talk totally differently if you weren’t here.

**Craig:** I would not.

**John:** All right. This is Cameraman by Joseph Velazquez. Here is a summary. In a production office Australian animal show host Jimmy Cool Waller, 40s, tells cameraman Jason Rodger, early 30s, that he loves his name because that name, Rodger, means fuck. Waller tells Jason he’s hired, but Jason says he’s never worked with animals before.

When staffer Rachel Hawkins, her late 20s, enters with a snake Jason jumps up on his chair and screams. He falls, curling into the fetal position against the wall. He says a snake ate his Billy goat when he was a child. Waller says Jason is the missing ingredient this show needs. And that’s where we’re at after three pages of Cameraman.

Craig, why don’t you start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. This is my sort of thing. I do love these sorts of movies. And I was enjoying at least the sense of understanding who this guy was. This was sort of a pushed version of what’s his face.

**John:** Steve Irwin?

**Craig:** Steve Irwin. I thought it was – I loved the posted that he’s on open water behind a boat using two crocodiles as water skis, shocked yet delighted to have just noticed the rope he’s holding onto is actually a snake. And I love shocked yet delighted because I can see that idiot poster like, so that was great. Water skis does not take an apostrophe S. But fine.

Waller’s voice is unique and true. I believed it. It felt like he was this kind of like over-eager, over-happy, weirdly dim Australian adventurer. And Rodger literally means “to fuck.” “Your name’s a verb, mate,” is very funny.

All right, so, here’s what’s happening for me. Where things go a bit off the rails. The premise of these three pages is that Jason is being hired to be a cameraman because Waller loves his camera work, but you show us through a quint split screen, a five-way split screen, that everyone has fired him before. So I guess this scene is now from his perspective, even though you’ve put it from Waller’s perspective, so that has shifted.

The premise here is that he’s not very good at his job, therefore I’m wondering where’s the mistake in the comedy of errors where Waller thinks he’s great. I don’t understand why Waller is excited about him. So, the comedy starts to fall apart. Even though what you’re showing me is that he’s scared of snakes and all the rest of it, because I’m missing information I start to just drift away from the comic premise of everything that’s coming after.

So that’s sort of where I landed.

**Lindsay:** I was assuming, again, that what you want was they’re hiring him not because he’s a good cameraman but because he’s scared and he thinks having a scaredy-cat on this part of the show is good for the show. I just don’t understand how having a scared cameraman is good for the show? I would understand having a sidekick who was scared who would be funny and we would laugh at him running away from all of the things that he loves to do, but the guy behind the camera running away I couldn’t figure that out. So, I agree. There were a lot of things about these pages that I thought were really fun, but the basic situation I just couldn’t understand.

**John:** Could you understand there Jewerl?

**Lindsay:** He’s so far ahead of us.

**Jewerl:** For me, a comedy can make a lot of mistakes. It can make geography mistakes. It can make, you know, a lot of the mistakes that we talked about in the other scripts I forgive a comedy. The only thing I want from a comedy is to laugh. You know? This line, five people in five different Australian film sets fire Jason simultaneously I thought was the funniest joke of the three pages. But you know, I misread the joke. Like I thought that five different camera people had been set ablaze. I mean, that’s what I thought the joke was and I was like, god, this is the best joke in these three pages. I loved it. I might have even laughed out loud at the joke you didn’t write.

So, and I had the same problem that he did which is five different people are set ablaze and you tell me that in one line. I’m like they’re going to have to film that for – that’s a two-page thing. That’s a half a page joke. You know? And so yeah.

**Lindsay:** We also don’t care about killing cameramen as much as we care about killing kittens apparently.

**Craig:** Nobody cares about killing cameramen.

**John:** I want to talk a little bit about Jason in this scene, because it’s a question of like is this scene from Jason’s point of view? He sees this larger than life character. Or is it from Waller’s point of view trying to convince this kid to sign on and be the cameraman? And when Jason freaks out and climbs onto the chair and falls back he’s so big, we got to be so big and so cartoonish that I stopped believing it. Or I stopped believing the dynamic.

And so Waller is this big giant bulldozer character. He’s a Craig. And Jason in that moment was doing a big giant thing and you can’t have two Craigs. You can have one Craig. One Craig is enough. Two Craigs, it doesn’t really work.

**Craig:** It’s gilding the lily.

**John:** So, the idea that Jason is going to be hired on because he is terrified of stuff is a really good idea, but I think you need to find a smaller way to get into that that’s a less of a big, yelping, screaming kind of thing, but just we see how terrified he is and let that be the joke and set that up as the dynamic.

Because I suspect when we bring you up here their dynamic is going to be the heart of this. And I’m excited to see that. And even like your minor character who comes in, Waller.

**Craig:** Rachel.

**John:** Rachel, I’m sorry, Rachel. She has very few lines but, “He’s a fuckwit.” Great. That’s the perfect line. I see who this woman is in her very minimal things. And so that gave me confidence. We talked at the start about, you know, you have to have faith and trust that this writer is going to take you on something that’s rewarding. On every page I saw some stuff that I really loved and that was what was going to keep me reading along further into the script.

**Craig:** I still, you know, what I still cannot answer is whether Jason wants this job or not. Or does he need the job? Because when Rachel says, “What the hell is wrong with you,” because he’s scared of a snake, he says, “A snake like that killed my kid.” And they gasp. And then he says, “Kid Billy goat. A snake like that killed my goat.” He’s lying, but he wants the job so he’s trying to explain why he got scared because he needs this job. But if he needs this job then why one page earlier is he saying, “I’m a little concerned.” It’s like, are you or are you not? Do you need it or do you not need it? There’s something very funny about somebody who is deathly afraid of animals and absolutely must get this job working for deadly animals. Right?

And so then I understand the fakery and why and all the rest of it. And, frankly “A snake like that killed my kid” is a great excuse. He shouldn’t have – I don’t even understand the logic of why he left that. Why is the goat better than that? That’s a great one. That worked for him. You know what I mean? So there’s a lot of these picky little logic things, but they’re poking holes in the side of your comic Titanic and there aren’t enough lifeboats.

**Lindsay:** May I just say though if anybody has heard the big talk that I give here, it’s all about relationships. And what I felt very happy about was that I felt grounded in the central relationship right away and it felt like it could be something like My Favorite Year or The Producers where you have the sort of bigger than life character and this little scared guy. And they’re going to be on this journey together. And I love that right away on page one I felt grounded in that.

And I had a feeling that Rachel might turn out to be the love interest. Ta-da. So now I’ve got two different relationships going at the same time. And I just thought, man, you did that really fast in three pages. You told me that this was going to be a fun movie about this particular triangle, father-daughter-wimpy guy. And I thought that was good.

**John:** Cool. Joseph, come on up. Let’s talk more about your project.

**Joseph:** Hello.

**John:** Joseph, is this a movie or a pilot? What is this?

**Joseph:** So it’s actually a short but it was – I wrote it as an outline for a feature and then I wrote the short. And not I’m taking the short and I’m putting it back out to a feature.

**Craig:** Well that sounded good.

**Joseph:** I don’t know why I did that, but I think just to find the structure of it.

**Craig:** Sure. Whatever works.

**John:** What did you have first? Did you have Waller as the host and then you’re trying find someone opposite him? What is the genesis of the idea?

**Joseph:** I mean, it comes from watching Steve Irwin and like watching these situations where the snakes are biting him or this animal is terrifying. I was like, man, what is the cameraman thinking? I’m scared for the host. The cameraman is not a nature guy. He’s just a person. He just knows about video.

**John:** So, let’s go to what Lindsay said, because in some ways the cameraman is the worst person because the cameraman wouldn’t show up. I think she’s maybe pitching that it’s the sound guy or somebody else who has to be there and has to be really close who is the guy. How are you feeling?

**Joseph:** Well, I mean, I’m open to that. The reason it’s the cameraman is that he is actually good at his job and what makes him good is anticipating what people are going to do. So a lot of this movie is him learning to – that, and he only does it there. He doesn’t have that connection with people one on one, or the connection with nature, the thing that binds us all, right? So that’s kind of what he’s going to learn on this journey.

So he’s actually a good cameraman. The reason that Waller likes him–

**Craig:** Why has he been fired so many times?

**Joseph:** Well, that was a bad way to try to show that he needed the job. And it’s illogical, and you’re right.

**Craig:** It’s not illogical. We definitely know that he sucks. That’s what that means.

**Joseph:** Yeah, so that is an error.

**John:** So you’re saying, so he says there “my visa is going to expire.” So basically he needs this job or he gets kicked out of the country as well. Is that another aspect of this?

**Joseph:** Yes. Exactly.

**John:** And how soon do we find out why he wants to stay in Australia in the first place?

**Joseph:** Pretty much so the next scene is a quick like kind of Jerry Maguire/LA Confidential rundown of Australia opening where the animals and how terrifying and how ridiculous they are. And then the very next scene is where he goes back to his apartment in Sydney. He’s like I’ve got the job with his friend that’s there. And then he goes off to the northern territory right after that.

**Jewerl:** I mean, I personally don’t want him to be terrible. What I was imagining was a scenario where just a normal guy wants his job and he has the boss from hell. This guy is going to put him in danger with the alligators. Put him in danger with the snakes. And he needs the job but he doesn’t realize he’s signing up for the job from hell. And I thought that was such a clear idea, you know. I think making him terrible at it or making him super afraid of animals just muddles this very clear idea.

**Joseph:** OK.

**John:** In some ways the cameraman is the voice of reason. No, no, what you’re doing is crazy. So that sense that we can identify with him. So, you may want to push and heighten to some degree so we can be, because it’s a comedy, but like he is probably our way into, no, no, it’s nuts what you’re doing. You shouldn’t be doing these things.

**Craig:** And why is Waller so excited about hiring him?

**Joseph:** Well, so the excuse, and I guess maybe it’s not in those early pages, is that he loves his reality/crappy reality television show that he’s been shooting in LA before that. Whatever show it is. So he’s a fan of that show. So he knows he works on it. But I think there’s more.

**Craig:** Nobody gets that excited about cameramen.

**Joseph:** He sees something inside of him.

**Craig:** I mean, look, there is a version of this where – because John just said these magic words “the way in,” and I think Jewerl is talking about it, too. The way in is really important with comedy. If you have a cameraman who is quite competent and quite good but he’s been screwed over by something that’s realistic and, you know, we can identify with it. You know, like the company folded and you don’t get paid. And his visa is running out and he needs a job. And then lo and behold is looking through the – this is all page one stuff – looking through the ads and there’s a cameraman job that pays four times as much as any other one he’s ever seen. He’s like, I’ll go there, but there’s going to be like 20 people. And he gets there and there’s no one.

It’s just him. And then this guy is like, oh my god, great. First I’m going to interview you, then you get the job. No, I didn’t say that. Let me interview you. Maybe you’ll get the job. Right? Point being nobody wants to work for this guy because people die. That’s interesting. And you are – that’s where desperation meets need and situation. Now he can’t leave it. But you definitely want the last cameraman to be dead. Like behind Waller is like a think of In Loving Memory of.

**Joseph:** Croc got him, mate.

**Craig:** And a guy with a camera. Right? That’s what you want.

**Jewerl:** I mean, basically the joke that I misread, you need to change it to what I thought it was going to be.

**Joseph:** It’s way better.

**Craig:** Right. Like your last cameraman seemed to have died. He goes, “No, no, the last cameraman was terribly maimed. Oh, no, this is the cameraman before the last cameraman. This one died.” There’s a million ways. But it’s the way in. Also, we want to know who someone is before the – in comedy, I believe – we want to know who somebody is before the meteor smashes into their life. We need a little bit of, just a little brief sense of who I am as a normal person and then madness. So like for instance wonderful movie that you mentioned My Favorite Year. It’s a great movie to watch if you haven’t seen it. And it’s about a guy who works on a television show in the golden age of television. He’s a very junior comedy writer. And his hero, who is basically Errol Flynn, played by Peter O’Toole, comes to be a guest on the show. And he, our hero, our little guy, is put in charge of him. And the problem is this man is a terrible, terrible drunk. And a disaster of a human being. And probably won’t show up and it will mean his job and everything.

And, of course, a relationship is formed. We must know what it’s like for this writer and this girl that he is in love with but doesn’t seem to quite know how to, you know, can’t really get. And the situation vis-à-vis him and these older men. We need to see it first, just to know. And then in comes a wrecking ball that will smash his life apart and then somehow put it back together better. That’s this kind of movie I think.

So definitely watch that kind of movie.

**Lindsay:** I think of this as a bringer of chaos movie. And the surprise of the bringer of chaos movies, you know, Cable Guy and all these various things, is you start out thinking, god, if only that character would go away and by the time it’s over the person who has had to change is the sweet guy.

**Craig:** What About Bob?

**Lindsay:** Who has to realize, or Planes, Trains is a good one.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s another one.

**Lindsay:** You essentially welcome him into your house when at the beginning it’s like how fast can I get away from this person.

**Craig:** They’re reverse Christ stories basically. It’s like what if Jesus were really freaking annoying, but has also been sent to save you. That is what What About Bob is. That’s what that movie is.

**Joseph:** Definitely spot on.

**Craig:** And then you can see in like Rain Man and Midnight Run, it’s like people that make us a little nuts, sometimes that’s what we need. So, watch those movies. See how they do it.

**John:** Thank you, Joseph. Thank you so much for coming up.

**Joseph:** Thank you guys.

**John:** All right, we have time for some audience questions. We have no microphones, so raise your hand. I’ll call on you and we will repeat your question back. Second row.

**Audience Member:** I was wondering if you could clarify the term emotional math. I kind of understood from the context, but I want to be sure what you meant by that.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, I’ve invented it, so you don’t really need to – I mean, it’s not super-duper important. There will be no test on that. But to me when we are reading characters, and so we’re reading a representation of what a human being is. But on every bit of these lines what they say and what they’re doing, what the writer is doing is asking the reader or ultimately the person watching the movie or television show to believe it. The whole point is that we give ourselves even to a show. Even shows that are doing bizarre things that we know aren’t real. There’s no Chewbacca. But I want to believe that when Chewbacca sees Han Solo for the first time in a prison cell that he’s going be, “Ooh!” Right?

So it’s all about that. The words and the decisions and what is said and what is said and what is not said add up to, as I do it, yep, that equals real. None of those things seem to violate what I understand about how humans work.

And that means asking questions sometimes of your work that are pesky and annoying because you thought something that is funny to you, or you had a line that you thought would be really cool, and then everybody else goes, yeah, but that’s your problem. Our problem is it’s violating the real of what you have created.

**Audience Member:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Question back there. So I’m going to repeat the question back just so we can have it on the podcast. So, Jewerl, when you’re reading a five-hour script that sort of breaks all the rules, do you think there’s a value to a writer deliberately breaking rules so they will get your attention?

**Jewerl:** That’s a really hard question. Generally the only thing that matters on a screenplay, to me, have I had a feeling response. And so people who are good craftspeople can produce that result with all of the rules. People who are just intrinsically talented who are channeling a story that is beyond them can do that. You know, people who have had an authentic experience in their own life and they are replicating that experience on the page can do that.

So whatever your means to get me to feel and be invested in your journey, that’s what you should do. If that means doing the Robert McKee method, fine. If that means telling a story that no one would actually film, you know, but you’ve written it so well that suddenly it’s the filmable thing. So that’s all that really matters.

**Lindsay:** One of the First Ten Pages things that I did yesterday, it was one of the things that I was really tired. I didn’t want to read anymore, but I thought, oh, I’ll just look at the very beginning. And I opened it and the first two lines of the script were in the past tense. And I went I’ve never seen this before. And it really got my attention. But eventually it felt like a gimmick and I became a little bit resentful. The writing got a little bit overblown and it felt like they were deliberately trying to get my attention with something that wasn’t organic.

I think breaking the rules is the only way to tell your story as opposed to here’s a way to get somebody’s attention and then you begin to say, oh, they’re just trying to get my attention.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t calculate. Don’t calculate.

**John:** Great. Oh, another question. Right here?

**Audience Member:** Thank you. I’m really interested to know kind over time from the beginning of your careers and reading scripts to now, how have you seen script writing change? Do you prefer scripts that are in the style of now? Do you still like scripts that were maybe 10, 20, 50 years ago in the style? What are you thinking about? How has it changed and what do you like to see now?

**John:** Lindsay, you probably have the longest track record of reading scripts.

**Lindsay:** Yes, 50 years ago when I was reading screenplays. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s actually talk about sort of the evolution of–

**Craig:** When sound came in…

**Lindsay:** Yes, exactly. [laughs]

**John:** We can do a very quick look at sort of—

**Lindsay:** When DW and I were talking about this very thing. You know, the first thing that comes to mind is the people who would fuck in the stage directions. That – you know, Shane Black.

**Craig:** Did you say people would fuck in the stage directions?

**Lindsay:** They put the word fuck in the stage directions. People start cursing in the stage directions. They became very informal and the language began to become informal. And I really did think that – for me, I just remember reading a Shane Black screenplay and I was, oh my god, I didn’t know you could do this. And it really did get people’s attention in a huge way. Now I feel like it happens so often that I don’t pay that much attention to it anymore.

But I do feel as though that format used to be much stricter. Now I think for better people feel a lot more free with stage directions to get a mood across, to get a tone across, to get a type of humor across. And it just makes the whole thing more of a whole. That’s the thing that comes to my mind first.

**John:** If you look back at the original screenplays, the women who were writing those were basically doing – it was kind of a list of shots. It was a plan for this is our shooting sequence and it very much feels like you’re shooting it this way. With Casablanca you start to see things that more resemble our modern screenplays.

And what we write now is basically you’re trying to capture the feeling of being in an audience watching that thing up on the screen and we’re kind of allowed to do anything it takes to get that experience across. And so I think it’s good that some of the harder restrictions of like that it’s only what the camera can shoot, some of that has melted away in a good way I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. As the actual format of what we’re writing for changes, so to can the format. It used to be that there was either a 30 or 60-minute television program, or a 120-minute movie, and so you go forth young person. And now you can write anything, in any length. It can also be a three-part thing, or a two-part thing, or a nine-part thing, or one thing.

And so you are allowed, I think, to write in such a way as to get across what is unique and wonderful about you and your story. Ultimately there is so much going on now in Hollywood that it’s the new, it’s the exciting. You know, we always say like if you’ve written something that seems like it’s something like they make, they’ll just hire one of us to do it, because it’s sort of something like they make.

What happens is it’s the new. They want to find somebody that just has some sort of undeniable thing that is of its own. And that’s where breaking the rule – it’s not even breaking the rules, it’s really making your own rules, right? Because breaking the rules is just an act of sort of petulant rejection. But it must be this way is an act of creation. So that’s more interesting to me.

**John:** I remember reading Natural Born Killers, Quentin Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers, and it was such a groundbreaking script for me to read early in my career because it would just morph into a completely different movie at times. And suddenly it became a sitcom. It just felt vital and alive. It was the first script I remember getting to the last page and just flipping back and reading through the whole thing again because it felt like the form had changed a bit. And that I think we see a lot more now.

What Lindsay was describing about with Shane Black’s scene description is he had voice in scene description. I don’t think that was a thing we were really focusing on then. Like the whole movie should feel like one person wrote it, like no one else could have written this scene description that way. That you’re in capable hands. That goes back to that trust and like if you give me your trust I will make this worth your while.

**Lindsay:** You know, a lot of times I feel like when directors write screenplays they already know how they’re going to make the movie so they leave out the stuff that makes them readable because they don’t think they have to fill them in. They already know.

But I remember before I was ever in the movie business I read the screenplay for I think it was The Apartment. And Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond wrote it together. And one of the things in The Apartment, I hope I’m thinking about the right movie, is that there’s all this slang that goes around the office about that’s the way it crumbles cookie wise. That’s the way everybody is talking. And the last line of the screenplay is “That’s the way it ends screenplay wise.” And I thought they’re just writing for themselves. They’re awake and alive and doing it for you. And I just love that.

**John:** I think we can fit one more question in.

**Craig:** Can we fit one more? We can fit one more.

**John:** One more question. Who has got the question? A gentleman with a hat back there and a pink shirt. Yes.

**Craig:** So, the question was are there things that we see repeatedly in screenplays that seem as if the writer was intending to be clever or interesting or provocative but in fact it’s sort of old hat and producers find it a bit annoying and obnoxious.

**John:** Jewerl, I bet you have insight there.

**Jewerl:** You know, I have a really big vocabulary. When people use words that I don’t know I’m like, wow, they’re trying to be smart and interesting and I just have to stop, figure out what the word is before I can move on. I find that people who can convey feeling with very short sentences and very simple words are the most exciting.

You know, the first book on writing I ever read when I was 16 years old was called On Writing Well, and it’s a famous, famous, famous book that’s been around for 40 years. And it’s about nonfiction writing, but the rules apply to simple language, simple sentences, clarity. Over the last year I’ve sent 40 copies of that to friends when they talk about – they’re at a hump. They don’t know if the thing is readable. I’m like these simple rules work everywhere.

You know, like simple way that we can convey – simple ways to convey what you’re talking about. You know, when someone gives me a run-on sentence, a three-line sentence, a three-line sentence, I say can we just do each of these sentences be three words. And it’s like magic.

**Lindsay:** I remember reading – I talked about this yesterday for some reason. A Steve Soderbergh screenplay 20 years ago. And the first line was, after it said interior bedroom day or whatever, it said, “The football just won’t fit.” And it was a scene about a guy packing. But I’ve never forgotten the rhythm of that and the simplicity of that and how it told me the emotion of it weirdly and everything else right away.

But in one of the scripts I read this week there was something where literally the villain was referred to as like the magnificent maestro of malice or something, like if you’re talking about what gets people annoyed is that kind of stuff. Where you just feel like people are showing off or it just takes you out of the scene in that kind of way.

**Craig:** Well, separating what your intention is from what you want it to be. Your intention is to move or create an emotional response, high, low, or something, fear. All these things that we want to do in the reader. And when people employ material like that their other intention which is love me, like me, be impressed by me is taking over. Well that’s ego. And no one is interested in anyone’s ego. They just want to read a good story. Your ego will be so well fed if you write a good script.

**John:** The last thing I would point out is that we talk about sometimes you need to underline, bold face, call something out so we can actually see it on the page. Sometimes I read scripts where it’s almost all bold face and there’s like double asterisk and things like that. Especially action movies.

**Craig:** It looks like the side of that guy’s van.

**John:** Exactly. [laughs] It’s bomber van text. Just be aware of that.

**Craig:** Like cats and van. We just want to find where the points are where we use them.

**John:** Be aware that the more you shout the less we hear. And so you got to really be careful with where you’re putting your emphasis so we actually are paying attention. Craig and I are big fans of white space and making it feel really natural to fall down a page. Anytime you’re doing stuff to stop us from reading it’s got to be worth what you’re doing to stop us.

Cool. This was so much fun. I want to thank Lindsay and Jewerl for this. I need to thank our three very brave Three Page Challenge entrants. Thank you again.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** We need to thank Paul and Olivia, Hannah, Travis, and Jonas from the Austin Film Festival. Thank you for having us again. We need to thank Megan McDonnell for producing our show and picking out our things. And Matthew Chilelli for editing. Thank you all very much.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

Links:

* [Tickets](https://go.wgfoundation.org/campaigns/8810-the-scriptnotes-holiday-live-show) are on sale for the Holiday Live Show!
* Thank you for joining us, [Lindsay Doran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsay_Doran) and [Jewerl Ross](http://www.silentrlit.com/)!
* [Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=752INSLlyf0) is also great.
* The [Three Pages](https://johnaugust.com/aff2018)
* [On Writing Well](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060891548/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by William Zinsser
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_375.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 298 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at how characters move and how screenwriters can use character movement to their benefit. Then it’s another round of Three Page Challenge where we take a look at reader’s submissions and diagnosis what’s working and what could be improved. So, this is usually the spot where we have follow up, but there’s not really a lot of follow up. I mean, we’re in this weird place because we’re recording this on a Thursday, so all of our listeners are way ahead of us. They’re living in the future and we are far back in the past. So, by the time people are listening to this, we’ll have more insight into what’s happening with the WGA negotiation. The live show at the ArcLight will have already happened.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So whatever Craig said about me I don’t know yet, but you as listeners might possibly know if you were one of the 400 people in that theater.

**Craig:** Right. Like they may know as they’re listening to us have this discussion that you and I aren’t talking anymore. Like that’s it. They heard it. This is the last camaraderie we’ll ever have. By the way, the last time we had this whole you all are living in the future discussion, it was because of the presidential election.

**John:** Yeah, oh great. That turned out really well. So, that’s a good omen.

**Craig:** How do we get back to the past somehow?

**John:** Yeah. Some time travel would be good. I actually did a post about time travel today for the blog. I rarely write on the blog, but I did a post about time travel because I was working on a project a couple years ago for a studio and it never happened. I never actually fully wrote the whole thing. It fell apart for other reasons. But, in that time travel movie, it was – you’re traveling back and forth in time, but you’re always physically in the same place. And so you’d be in Los Angeles but it would be, you know, 20,000 years ago. But, that’s as much of a cheat as anything is. And so my sort of thing that keeps me up at night sometimes is if I were to travel back in time, and the time machine broke, or I was sort of set back in time like how Kyle Reese would be in the Terminator and landed someplace in the past, how would I know where I was and when I was if I didn’t have any of my stuff to tell me that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I speculated a little bit in the blog post, but I really asked people to contribute their own thoughts for the best ways to figure out where and when you are if your time machine breaks down. And people have already had some good suggestions. That was just this morning and people had some good thoughts.

But, Craig, you’re a smart person. What would you do? How would you figure out when and where you are?

**Craig:** I suppose I would just follow what movies and television have told me to do, which is to either grab the nearest newspaper or ask somebody, “What year is it?”

**John:** Yeah. You seem like a crazy person then. In my head, I was always thinking back to there’s no one else around, or if there are people around, it is like a primitive civilization.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So like I can’t just go up to a person. I could go up to a person, but they wouldn’t speak my language most likely. So how would I–

**Craig:** You don’t.

**John:** Figure that stuff out?

**Craig:** No idea. None.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, stars? I wouldn’t know.

**John:** So, apparently stars are useful because I don’t know if it’s the Big Dipper or Little Dipper, but you can actually chart to see where you are at in periods of tens of thousands of years based on what the Dipper looks like.

**Craig:** If you knew that–

**John:** If you knew that. Yeah. You got to know a lot. So, in my post I said like a biologist would be able to look around and see what was nearby. And then Nima, my friend, who is a biologist actually said like, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Because biologists don’t necessarily know what the ecology is of a place.” So it’s an ecologist rather than a biologist I needed.

**Craig:** Yeah. And even then, ecological periods are incredibly long. So, you might be able to say, “Well, I’m clearly between 8000 and 4000 BC. Well that’s not very useful.

**John:** Yeah. If there were trilobites running around then I would know that I’m back in a time, but I wouldn’t know where I am in that time.

**Craig:** You’d know you’re screwed. That’s the deal. You’re screwed.

**John:** You know who are really smart people? Are our listeners. So, if you have a good suggestion for me on how I can figure out when and where I am if my time machine breaks, I would welcome that.

**Craig:** You know what I’m going to do, what I always do in these hypothetical situations when I’m faced with very difficult odds and a challenging circumstance like arriving back in time at some unknown time and place, I just immediately give up. I curl up into a ball and I pray for death. Pray for the sweet release of death.

**John:** Yeah. You protect your internal organs from the predators coming after you.

**Craig:** Or just let them take me.

**John:** Or just let them take you. Yeah. Just jump off the cliff. Find a cliff that you can fall off of it.

**Craig:** Find a cliff. Leap. That’s it. Not realizing that five minutes later they would have picked me up. They would have found me. Or that I didn’t even go back in time.

**John:** They were looking for you the whole time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I didn’t go back in time at all. I was just having a mild stroke.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like the ending of The Mist where you think everything is at its absolute worst and then if you’d waited another 30 seconds everything would have been fine.

**Craig:** Oh, you wait – that by the way is a theory I’ve heard from people regarding our prior strikes. [laughs] We just needed to strike one more day and we would have gotten everything.

**John:** Everything you want.

**Craig:** Everything. I don’t know about that. Oh, dear.

**John:** I’m realizing at this moment we actually do have one piece of follow-up. In last week’s episode, we talked about – we did a bunch of follow up. And at the very end I said that if we were a podcast that had music, this would be the place where we played the music to close out the follow up. And so Jonathan Mann, a very talented composer, created a piece of music just for wrapping up follow up.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, let’s take a listen.

**Craig:** [music plays] Well that sounds exciting. I think that will be fun. I’ve had enough of follow up. I think follow up is done. Follow up is done. [music ends]

**John:** Follow up is done. And now let’s get to our first topic. So, this is something Craig proposed. So, kick it off.

**Craig:** Well, I was thinking about this because I was watching something and there was a character who was so physical and was doing so much physically. And it occurred to me that one of the things that you and I like to do when we talk about crafty issues is pull out little things that maybe writers don’t think about as tools in their toolbox. We’re so textual and I think for a lot of people we tend to focus down on action and dialogue. And you and I have talked about the importance of place. And we’ve talked about the importance of sound. And we’ve talked about the importance of transitions. And nonverbal communication.

**John:** And hair styles. And wardrobe.

**Craig:** And hair and wardrobe. All these things are part of our palate. But when I don’t think we’ve talked about is physicality itself. Have you ever taken an acting class?

**John:** I’ve taken no acting classes.

**Craig:** I took an acting class when I was in college. And it was really instructive. And I took it because I was trying to write and I thought if I want to write things for actors I should probably have some sense of what the hell they go through. And the thing that surprised me the most about class number one was the fact that we spent the first ten minutes stretching, breathing. These are things that every actor is like, yeah, dumb-dumb, that’s what we do. Our bodies are an enormous part of our instrument.

And the first acting assignment we had, and I will never forget this, because it was mean and it was cruel. And it was exactly the kind of lesson you don’t forget. Our teacher said, “OK, first acting assignment, each of you, you’re going to sit in the chair and what I’d like you to do is perform sitting in a chair. And you have one minute to do whatever you’d like to perform sitting in a chair.” And each person, including myself, performed some sort of remarkable little mini drama while sitting in the chair.

Waiting nervously for somebody. Shooting up drugs. Crying. Remembering something terrible. Yeah. And then when we were done she goes, “OK, now it’s my turn.” And she sat in the chair and she sat there, believably, for a minute. And we were all like, gulp, because that’s a huge part of what you do.

And I never forgot that. So, I thought today we would talk about how we as writers can employ this and think about this while we’re writing. Whether it’s something we’re calling out specifically as we’re writing, or whether it’s something that we’re using to inform what we’re having our characters say as opposed to not say and so forth.

Do you do a lot of thinking about this sort of thing when you write?

**John:** I would say in general as I’m sort of looping through the scene, sort of in the pre-writing process where I’m seeing what the scene is like, that’s where I’m sort of doing the blocking for characters and figuring out where they are and sort of what they’re generally doing in the scene. And so some characters are not – they’re not running around. They’re standing there. They’re sitting there. I’m placing them within the mental set I’ve built for them. And because of where I’ve placed them, that will inform their choices definitely.

But I would say in general I don’t think a lot about this consciously. And so when you proposed the topic, I went back and sort of retroactively looked at the choices I have made in different movies and some of those were really helpful choices. So, I’m eager to sort of have the discussion about thinking through what character movements could be and when it’s helpful to call them out. Because I think a lot of time I’ve seen them in my head, but I haven’t bothered to describe them on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s normal, because the truth is it’s not always something that is necessary. I will always be necessary for each individual actor to make a choice about their own physicality. And I’m talking about everything – how they stand, how they sit, how they walk, how they move through a space, all of that. But in key moments, it’s important for us to think about it. And you can kind of break these things down into two large categories. One is situational and one is I’ll say constitutional.

So, you think about a character like – you watched Breaking Bad, I presume.

**John:** I did not watch Breaking Bad. I’ve seen episodes, but I did not watch it as a whole series.

**Craig:** All right. Have you ever seen Giancarlo Esposito’s character, Gus Fring? Have you ever seen any of those?

**John:** Absolutely. And I perceive him to be a very active and physical character, even when he – if he’s listening to you, I think it’s a very active listening.

**Craig:** Right. So, he – that character – that actor, and the writers together have made a choice that this person is going to exercise total control over his physical self. He stands rigid. His posture when he sits is always perfect, to the point where it’s almost unnatural. When he talks to you, he tends to put his hands flat on the surface, palms down, evenly spaced. It’s a remarkable series of choices but it says so much about who he is, which is an intense control freak to the nth degree.

That is a kind of constitutional decision. This is who this guy is. But then there are these moments characters can respond to something and then how they respond physically can sometimes tell you so much. So, I guess, first we could about just motion. How actors are moving through a space and what it means for us as writers. These are simple things like how fast are they going, or how deliberate are they. Are they in control of their physical self at that moment? Are they clumsy or are they graceful?

They can also indicate things to us, I mean, the physicality of a character can indicate things. For instance, like I mentioned, posture. But there are also things like strength, general strength and weakness. You can tell when, and these are questions that actors will ask. And if they ask a writer, it’s good for you to know. Is this person weak? Are they physically weak? What does that mean for them? Do they have a disability? Sometimes a slight limp does this remarkable thing.

We know, for instance, watching No Country for Old Men, and you see Anton Chigurh, and that–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Odd limp. It’s the strangest thing. And it’s so important. So important to his character. 99% of writers will not really go there. But they should. It doesn’t mean you always want to do something like that, because it can quickly tilt into affectation. But when you’re creating a monster and then giving him a slight imperfection like that that almost harkens back to Frankenstein or something, it can be really interesting.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think if you’re calling this kind of detail out on each character, it loses its unique quality for the characters it’s actually important for.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it can also feel like you’re setting something up that you don’t mean to be setting up. So you have to be really mindful of it, but for I think Anton Chigurh is a great example of a character whose menace is amplified by this perceived weakness.

**Craig:** Precisely. And there are also little behavioral ticks that all people have. If you – you know, we sometimes say if you want to learn dialogue, I mean, I do think there’s a certain innate talent for that. It’s a little musical. But we’ll say, listen to people right? And sometimes we’ll suggest record two people having a conversation, with their knowledge, of course. And then just listen to the rhythms and see how that works.

Similarly, just watch people with the sound off in your head. Watch their bodies. Watch what they do. Watch how they fidget. Do they bite their fingernails? Do they chew gum? Do they pull on their pants? What are those things that they do? Those little things sometimes tell us so much and the audience tends to enjoy learning these things, like little detectives who are spying on somebody. Because we’re watching a character on screen and while they’re talking they’re nervously fiddling with their shirttail. They feel – the audience feels a satisfaction. It’s a voyeuristic satisfaction. They know that that character isn’t really aware of it. Right? That’s what kind of an unconscious habit is.

So, we’re kind of titillated by the fact that we’re learning something about them that they don’t necessarily want us to know.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, I think what you’re talking about is you’re giving them a specific differentiation from all the other characters in the world. We often talk about that first moment where you introduce a character. So, they get their uppercase because it’s the first time they’re showing up in the script. And you can sometimes cheat a little bit and like give an extra line of description that isn’t really necessarily filmable, but it helps sort of anchor for the reader who that character is.

But sometimes a movement is a fantastic way, really what one of these constitutional movements, is a great way to sort of anchor that for the reader. Because you’re giving them something specific about, you know, in the case of the Breaking Bad character, how precise and measured he is. And sort of how he sits so ramrod straight.

That’s useful. And it’s a thing that actually can help inform the actor. Help the director understand the character’s role in the thing. But it helps the reader see that character in his or her head.

**Craig:** It also starts to help you as the writer cast. Even if that’s not the cast that you end up with, in your mind you’re saying this character has this kind of physicality. Who fits that? You know, I remember in that acting class I told you about in college, at the end of the semester we had to partner up with one other person in the class and perform a scene. And she assigned the scenes and the characters. And I got True West, which this other guy, and I was the hard ass brother. I was the tough brother.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Because she said, and you know, it’s so funny, she said, and she’s right, and this is why I’m not a good actor and why I can’t do it well, because I’m in my own head too much. She said, “You have this physicality you will not access, and I want you to access your own body. I want you to get in this guy’s face. I want you to intimidate him. I want you to be scary.” Which I don’t feel, in my head, but I have the kind of physicality – it’s not like I’m a super heavy built guy, but if I were a bad person I have the kind of body that helps that out. You know? Got some broad shoulders and sort of barrel-chesty.

And so as you’re thinking about the physicality of these characters, you also then start to think well who could play this and who does this physicality match up to? And a lot of times where that takes you, and this to me is maybe the most important aspect that I think about routinely is this kind of relational physicality. Two people are in a space, how is their physical presence impacting each other?

**John:** Classically, if you ever take a class in negotiations or sort of like interpersonal communication where you’re trying to convince somebody of something, there’s that process of mirroring where you sort of do back what they’re doing to you and then like you can sort of change the dynamic. Even like those sort of gross things about how to pick up women, they’re all about the interplay of space between you and the other person. And so how you put those two characters in the scene and how you sort of suggest that they’re going to be moving in the scene really will influence the dynamic.

If a character is approaching the other character, that can be read as they’re entering their space for a positive reason or they’re trying to control that person. And you have to make those decisions.

And just even that line of dialogue or the parenthetical honestly, like approaching, changes the read of that next line of dialogue.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And similarly you have a choice of how to respond. In this way you can have a fight without ever throwing a punch. Someone can lean in – you know, sometimes instead of saying he gets it – like I will read in scripts, “He gets in his face, or he gets in his comfort zone.” But to me that’s not very specific. I mean, if somebody, you know, juts his head in, these are things that people do to get into your space without just weirdly walking close to you and specific. And then how does the other person respond? Because if they don’t flinch, that tells me a lot, too. And then the other person maybe starts their – their performance starts to fall apart. Their performance of being strong.

And there are all these body language things that people just do traditionally and I think it’s good to think of about those things as well, even if you don’t spell them out. If in your mind your character is arms crossed and eyes down, it will affect how you have them say things.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, in that sense it’s not always necessary to spell it out, but you should be thinking about it.

**John:** Well, the general rule for sort of everything we’re talking about in scene description for the scenes that we’re writing is you have to know what all the things are and be very judicious about the things you’re actually saying because screenwriting is an art of economy. So, you’re not saying 90% of what you know about the scene. You’re only saying that 10% that’s actually crucial for the understanding of the intention behind the dialogue and the intention behind the actions, the crucial actions that they’re taking in the scene.

So, you know, the scene may really not be about sort of where those two characters are or sort of like how they are physically interacting, but if it’s helpful for the reader to understand the intention and for the actors to understand the intention, you’ll make the choice about like, OK, I’m going to be very specific here. And, again, there’s always that worry like, oh, I’m directing from the page. Well, sometimes you’re actually just directing the reader’s attention to what’s important in the scene. Moments that might be lost if you hadn’t actually called them out.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And if you think about the comparison to dialogue as music, that there’s that rhythm and melody and the rests and the notes, then the equivalent comparison for physical motion is dancing. And I do think about these things like little dances at times. And that doesn’t mean to say that they have to be arch. But how people are leaning and moving back and coming together, whether it’s out of intimacy, or threat, or fear, frightened people are the most wonderful dancers in movies. It’s so much fun to watch them.

I remember another Coen Brothers example, Miller’s Crossing. What’s his name, The Schmatta, that’s what the character’s name is? When he’s begging for his life. “Look into your heart.” He’s so folded over and pathetic. It’s like they took his bones out or something. It’s really amazing to watch what servility looks like, and fear, and it’s similarly I’m always impressed by truly scary people in movies. Not fake, fighter, corny ones, but those live wires that are dangerous like Begbie in Trainspotting. I mean, Begbie, the character, what, he weighs like 120 pounds maybe. And he’s, what, 5’8”? And he’s absolutely terrifying because it looks like electricity is in him. And he leads from his, in surprising ways, like explosively from his neck. You know? And that’s amazing to me. It’s such a wonderful dance to watch.

**John:** Well, that idea of dance, I think, is a crucial reason why – and I’m curious what your take is on this, because I almost never have characters sitting down. I think it’s because of the dance aspect of that. So, even in situations where in the real world they might be sitting down, I’ll almost always put them up on their feet. And so now that I’ve said that, people will watch movies and TV shows and they’ll recognize like, oh, you know what, it’s really kind of weird how rarely people sit in movies and TV shows. But it’s because you want people on their feet. People pay more attention to people who are standing up. And it’s a strange thing. But if people are standing up then anything can happen. If people are sitting down, less can happen.

And the transition from being seated to standing up is a big change. And so you can do that, but you’re also sort of taking up time to do that.

Conversely, I think one of the reasons why people are often standing is then when you have somebody sit down, it really does change the dynamic. And sitting down can be a major power move to sort of say like, no, no, we’re not going to hurry. I’m going to sit down.

Or, like Hannibal Lecter, you have a character who is mostly sitting down and he’s eerily calm, which is, again, a powerful position.

**Craig:** Actually, I was thinking of him as standing. That’s interesting.

**John:** Well, sometimes he’s standing, leaning against the wall, but I think in a lot of those conversations he’s seated in the chair opposite Clarice.

**Craig:** Oh, is that right? Well, yeah, because the first time we meet him, not only is he standing in a Gus Fring ramrod way, but he’s floating in the middle of the space. By the way, as good of a time as any way to say rest in peace, Jonathan Demme. It’s very sad that he passed away.

**John:** 100%. Yeah.

**Craig:** But also an amazing example of what body control and defining a character by body movement is. But I agree with you, sitting is a fascinating choice. And this is where you know you’re talking to screenwriters, because anybody else would just say, what, they’re sitting, who cares. So to me sitting is always about negotiation, or intimacy. Or exhaustion, literally exhaustion. But when people are sitting across from each other, I think that there’s either a negotiation going on, which I think is very typical. We think of that as across the table, or an intimacy where two people are kind of together and sharing something quietly that is in a so-called safe space I guess is how I would put it.

But when one person is sitting and one person is standing, that’s always fascinating to me, too. Because then there are times when the seated person is the one in charge. Then there are times where the seated person is the one in trouble. And you’ll see that dynamic quite a bit.

**John:** I think back to Star Trek, and you look at the bridge of Star Trek and its different incarnations, and obviously the caption has his seat and in the Next Generation there were seats next to him, but it always – you could tell the actors never really wanted to sit there. They always wanted to be up. And even from the initial Star Trek, they found a reason for why Spock had to be standing to look into that little monitor thing. There’s no reason why that monitor thing couldn’t be like seat accessible, but I think they wanted him standing up because if he was sitting down he was sitting down. And the characters who were sitting down were kind of less important.

There’s a reason why Spock was standing, because he was the second most important person on the bridge and Chekov, Sulu, and Uhura, they were sitting down. And while we love them, they were not the driving force in the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. When people are standing, there is a chance that one of them will attack the other one. Physically. Or there is a chance that one of them is going to kiss the other one, physically. And so that is exciting. There is – you’re absolutely right about that. And it is good advice I think to ask yourself, because I fall, and we all fall into this trap, ask yourself do they need to be sitting here? And if they don’t, what would be going on if they were standing? Because you also don’t want them to just stand dead, you know. And then this leads you down the path of what other kind of discussion could occur.

And this is the challenge of the screenwriting. I always feel like writing a script is a little bit like those old school printers that had to run through a color, then come back and do another color on top to get to the final colors, you know. So they’d do one color at a time. And oftentimes I feel like there’s only so many layers we can do at once. But, it’s a good exercise to go back through on a rewrite and ask yourself why are they sitting, should they be sitting, and how are they sitting, and if they’re not sitting and they’re standing, what can I do with their bodies? What can I think about with their bodies?

The more you give your actors to do physically, the more they will be able to be real. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. All right, I think that’s a great discussion on some movement. Some physicality. So, if you have suggestions about physicality or movement, write in with those ideas.

Before we go, one last actually really concrete example I can think of, from The Crown, so the Netflix series, The Crown, a big sort of plot point is that Churchill doesn’t want to sit down. Churchill always wants to be standing to give his information to the Queen. And she makes him sit down at one point. And it is a very clear sort of power move. When I’m telling you what you have to do, and making you sit down, I’m taking away your agency. And it’s a really interesting moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, we go through this – I mean, you and I, we’re getting older. Every now and then you tweak a little muscle or something. Even just being aware, body conscious, we are conscious of our own bodies. Ow. You know, if you have a scene where someone sits down and they just wince a little bit, that’s interesting. I’m already interested. They seem real.

**John:** Even as we’re recording this, I think you are sitting in your chair in Los Angeles. I am standing at my desk in Paris. It’s the difference between us.

**Craig:** That’s right. I am incredibly lazy. [laughs] So lazy. Slouched over. Basically I’m Charlie Kaufman’s character in Adaptation. I am. I’m just like – my posture – I’m the opposite of Gus Fring. I’m basically a comma.

**John:** I am some other Nicolas Cage character in some other movie.

**Craig:** Let’s go with The Bad Lieutenant. And…? Three Page Challenge time.

**John:** Perfect. So I just reached back and picked up my iPad to talk through our Three Page Challenges. So, as always, when we do a Three Page Challenge, we’ve invited listeners to write in with the first three pages of their script. So they have gone to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, they have read a little form. They have attached a PDF and said that it’s OK for us to talk about these on the air. And, in fact, if you would like to read along with us, we strongly recommend it. So, in the show notes for this show, or just go to johnaugust.com, you can download the PDFs and see what we are seeing, what we actually have in front of us.

So, if you feel like pausing the episode and downloading them, it really is good because we’re going to talk specifically this week about very specific things on the page that could be looked at for a rewrite.

And we also love to have a wonderful not us person to read aloud the descriptions. So, if you’re listening to this in your car you have a sense of what we’re talking about. So, we’ve had Jeff Probst, we’ve had Elizabeth Banks. This week–

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** We went international. And so it is Rebel Wilson who is going to be reading our summaries.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Rebel.

**John:** Rebel. So, she was so generous. We tweeted at her last night and she did it right away. And she’s just the best. So, if you would like to hear more Rebel Wilson, she was on a previous episode. We’ll have a link in the show notes. She was actually on two episodes. So we had a normal clean episode, then we did a special dirty episode which is in the premium feed for subscribers. And the premium episode, if I recall correctly, involves a hat and diarrhea.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of course it does. Of course it does. By the way, now, so we’ve had Elizabeth Banks, Banksy, and we have Rebel, I feel like we should just keep rolling through the Pitch Perfect cast, you know?

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** I think that’s the only people that we should have doing these, other than Jeff Probst. We should just have Pitch – we should get Anna Kendrick. And we should roll through.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right, let’s do our very first of these. And Rebel Wilson, if you will please introduce our first script so we can discuss it.

Rebel Wilson: OK. Hey guys, it’s Rebel Wilson here. OK, first up we have Alice by Ted Wilkes. Oh, I feel like the person at the table read that reads out all the stage directions. We open in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant where a toad and a cat are hard at work. We are in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland reimagined as a sprawling metropolis with a Victorian twist. A perp races through the kitchen, chased by Rabbit White, aka, the white rabbit, now a hard-nosed bail bondsman.

In voiceover, Rabbit tells us why the perps always run, even though they know it’s pointless. Then, in the alley, Rabbit catches the perp as he’s about to climb over a fence. He cuffs him. As Rabbit muses on how things have changed in Wonderland, the perp reveals that he knows where she is, the one Rabbit is hung up on. Enraged, Rabbit knocks the perp out. At the WPD, Harry Mad Hatter Harrington, balding and fat, watches Rabbit. He confronts Rabbit about smoking inside the station and warns him about beating up suspects. And with that, that’s the bottom of page three.

**John:** And thank you Rebel Wilson. Craig, do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. So, this was a little challenging for me. There’s a choice that’s made here. And I understand it. There are times when you want to – your action description wants to be a character in and of itself. And there are times when you want to impart things to the reader quickly and efficiently so they kind of get it.

So, here we start in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, and then we’re already a little meta because Ted Wilkes says, “Because that’s where chases always take place.” I haven’t seen a chase yet, but I guess I’m going to, which I don’t really love. Let the chase unfold. Let me actually watch the movie. But he says, “However, there’s something different about this one. We’re in Wonderland. The place where Lewis Carroll’s novella was set. However, it’s years after the hallucinations of Alice Liddell which gave birth to that narrative. Turns out that the place is actually a sprawling noir metropolis (with a Victorian twist) when you put the book down.”

Now you’re just pitching me the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s not what screenplays do. So much of what we want when we read a screenplay is to discover. And I understand at some point you may need to clarify. First, just lay it on me. And then let me discover it. And I think that choice is kind of infecting even the way the scene is working, because we have a film noir voiceover from the Rabbit who is clearly basically a film noir detective. Or in this case bail bondsman, which we know because he tells us in the action. “The white rabbit from the stories became a hard-nosed bail bondsman.” Again, before he’s even said a word. So we’re pitching. He has some voiceover and then they start to run.

And understand what’s going on here. And we see a lot of these in Hollywood. I mean, Travis Beecham wrote a spec called Killing on Carnival Row which was sort of like fairy creature world, you know, noir gumshoe. So this is Alice in Wonderland noir gumshoe. It’s a very similar sort of thing. But it seems to me that I kind of need to get one thing at once, like maybe just give me the white rabbit. And I think it’s Alice in Wonderland and he’s checking his thing, because he’s going to be late. And then he looks up and he sees somebody running by. And then he runs out after them, chases them down, catches them, and knocks their teeth out, which is a very similar thing to what’s happening here.

And then I discover, oh my god, Wonderland is not the way I remember it. But it seemed like I was getting too much before it happened. So, by the time I was done, and this is sort of just a global problem with these three pages, by the time I got to the end of the third page, I thought to myself I don’t need to see this movie. I think I get it.

**John:** Yeah, I felt like I got it, too. And I had a lot of the same objections you did in terms of it didn’t feel like it was presenting itself fairly. It didn’t feel like it was actually a screenplay. It felt more like a pitch document for the idea rather than the thing itself.

The idea of like combining two different genres together to make your own unique thing, that’s great. I have no issues with it. And, you know, an Alice in Wonderland noir drama, I’m fine with that. I think my concern is that it didn’t seem particularly interested in being a noir genre. I didn’t sense that this actually cared about the chase. It was just – the chase was just there to set up stuff. And I didn’t feel invested in the action, partly because let’s see, so we’re talking, you know, in the kitchen there’s a toad washing pots by the sink, and a cat is cutting onions in the corner.

But then we have this Perp, 40s, races through the kitchen. We never get any description of what the perp is. Is he human? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it wasn’t – yeah, I don’t think – if Ted had an answer for it, he wasn’t giving me the answer because it didn’t seem like it was important to him. And so I didn’t know whether to invest my attention on any one detail of all this.

So, the voiceover from the Rabbit, it feels like gumshoe voiceover, but it didn’t feel like specific to this world of a gumshoe voiceover. It felt like it could have been in a different movie and it could have been in a different movie. And that’s where the gears started to not fit very well for me. Is that we visually see that he is the White Rabbit, but nothing he’s actually saying or doing feels like Lewis Carroll’s world at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, if you want to start with that classic noir vibe, and again, this is my theory of do one thing at once, so show me some dirty streets and some fog and the camera is moving through. And a dog is barking and there’s sounds of clatter and garbage cans. And we hear a voiceover. And the voiceover, I’m just reading from Ted’s pages here. The voiceover, we don’t see anyone. We just hear someone say, “They always run. They know that it’s pointless… I always get them. It’s just something to do with the nervous system. You see a threat coming your way and your feet start turning in the direction of the nearest exit…”

And now we move through a window and we arrive at an ashtray and a glass of scotch. And we hear, “… It’s the amygdala. The place where our brain gets all its emotional signals from. Once it kicks in, it just takes over and no matter what you were just thinking about, you’re not in control anymore.” And then a hand reaches in, takes a cigarette. And then you hear, “And that’s where I come in,” or something.

And then we reveal it’s a rabbit. You see, somehow or another we need one thing at a time. I’m also thinking about, I love Men in Black. Boy, that’s another movie we should deep dive into. And Men in Black, one of the things that I love the most, when I knew I was going to have a great time in that movie more than anything was after the chase scene where Will Smith chases down this purse snatcher. And the guy–

**John:** They race up through the Guggenheim and–

**Craig:** Right. And then that guy is doing things that you couldn’t really do. And then his eyelids do this weird blinking thing, like there’s eyelids inside of his eyelids. And then he jumps. And later Will Smith is saying, “Yeah, his eyelids were doing this weird thing.” And the cops are like, “You’re out of your mind.” And then in comes Tommy Lee Jones and he says, “They weren’t eyelids. They were gills. He was out of breath.”

And you go, whoa. This is cool. Right? Like he knows stuff. And they’re taking it seriously. They live in this world. It’s not cute. It’s not meta. It’s real to them.

This all felt like it was – it had that glaze of a pitch. There was like a weird meta thing sitting on it, so that I wasn’t really in a movie. I was just more getting hit with a lot of flash.

**John:** Yep. I agree with you. Let’s take a look at the words on the page and see if there’s things that screenwriters in general can look at here and learn from. So, a thing which bugs me a lot and I suspect bugs you, too, is when scene headers go more than one line. And so here we see, this is bottom of page one, EXT. DARK ALLEY, BEHIND THE CHINESE RESTAURANT, WONDERLAND – NIGHT, and the night breaks over to the next line. Don’t do that. I’ve never had a good outcome with multiline scene headers. Find a way to shrink that down. EXT. DARK ALLEY – NIGHT. Done.

Like I know we’re in Wonderland. You don’t have to keep calling it out every time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you’re going to keep the same Chinese restaurant kitchen opening, I would have gotten rid of the first scene header all together, because he’s repeating it in the second line. So, it just says, “It’s the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant because that’s where chases always take place.” That line bugs me less if I didn’t just see it in the scene header.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** A general thing, but in screenplays, two dashes are the sort of punctuation dash. So one dash by itself just looks like a minus. This was inconsistent. So that would be helpful.

He’s got a voice like gravel in a mixing bowl. Sure. That worked for me. I could hear what that sounds like.

**Craig:** And it’s a little cheesy, but true to noir. That’s kind of how they talk.

**John:** That’s why I liked it. Bottom of page one, “Chiaroscuro light fills the alley as two shadows run up the wall, just about visible through the thick fog circling around the place.” Really close, just a little too long. So, you can get the Chiaroscuro and the fog, great, and the shadows running up the wall, but then it just went on too long.

But in general, I felt the noir vibe there. Great. Just little less would have helped me there.

Page two, there’s a semicolon that’s not really a semicolon. “The Perp CLATTERS against it; then tries to climb as fast as he can.”

**Craig:** Right. That should be a comma. Or take out the then.

**John:** And I share you concern with we are told that he’s a bail bondsman, but nothing we actually see him do really sells that idea. And so it looks like he’s just a cop arresting him. And even when we got to the station, I was really confused sort of what his relationship was with everybody there. It took me three times on the third page to really understand like, oh no, he doesn’t work there. He’s just returning this guy who ran away. So that was confusing to me as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. There is a disconcerting spelling error on the bottom of page two. “A rye smile from the Perp.” You want to say W-R-Y there. Not rye as in the drink. And the reason it’s a little disconcerting is because, look, mistakes happen, but I like it when my writers read. And it just – you don’t want to shake anyone’s confidence. You never want somebody to look at that and go, oh, this guy is just not well-read. Because I’m sure Ted is well-read. This is probably just a think-o instead of a typo. But you got to check these things. It’s really important. And that’s something a spell checker is not going to catch, obviously.

**John:** Top of page three, “Rabbit tees off on the Perp’s face.” I didn’t know what that meant. Did it mean slug him?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What does tees off mean?

**Craig:** Tees off means take a big swing at basically. Like a golf club. I was a little more confused by, “I’ll have a vowel please.” I didn’t quite get the joke there. Because the perp–

**John:** He’s got a vowel.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, the perp, the rabbit has caught him and the perp says, “I know where she is.” And the rabbit says, “What did you say?” And the perp says, “You’re the one they keep talking about. Hung up on that girl. What’s her name?” Now, that’s just not real. It’s forced exposition. It’s forced drama. That’s not the sort of thing that you would just calmly toss out. What is he trying to achieve exactly in this moment? He’s trying to get away from a guy? What is he doing? It seemed ill-motivated.

Then the perp says, “…A…”

And then the action says, “I’ll have a vowel please,” in italics. “Rabbit tees off on the perp’s face. Goodnight, Scumbag.”

I mean I understand the vowel, like I guess it’s a Wheel of Fortune thing. But what? I didn’t quite – I was confused.

**John:** Yeah. It didn’t work for me either. Let’s talk about this as a concept in general, because I got confused about the tone and sort of who the target audience was for this. Because it felt like a – I think there’s some F-words in there. I didn’t know who this movie was aimed at. And it could be OK to not necessarily have a perfect audience, but if this landed at my desk and I was a studio executive, I wouldn’t know what I was supposed to be doing with this. Because I wouldn’t know is this to our children’s division, or is this to – it felt expensive, but adult.

I didn’t know sort of who this was aimed at.

**Craig:** Yeah. This would really function best as a sample. Once you have a talking rabbit, any producer or reader or executive is immediately going to think, well, this is going to be expensive. And it will be. Well, if it’s going to be expensive then that means a lot of people have to come see it. This doesn’t seem – I mean, the whole gimmick here is we’re going to take something with an enormously wide appeal, the classic Alice in Wonderland story, and narrow it down, which is fine to be niche and cool. Just no one is going to spend the money to make it.

But, you know, OK, so maybe it’s mostly just for the writing, but then the writing has really got to be just wonderful.

**John:** Got to be great.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s got to be great. And let’s take a look at the very last bit here between the Hatter and the Rabbit. And I get a little confused here because the Mad Hatter is a police officer. And I thought, OK, the Rabbit chasing somebody has a general connection to the traditional role of the Rabbit, because I assume partly here what we want to do is see, oh, there’s a dotted line – even if it’s thin – between the character we know and the character that’s being presented to us.

So the Rabbit runs a lot in Alice in Wonderland. And here he is running again. OK. It’s just a different kind of running. Interesting. But the Mad Hatter is not a cop in Alice in Wonderland. There’s nothing he does that’s cop like. And yet here he is. So, I start to wonder what exactly is the connection to Alice in Wonderland other than the names and maybe some of the clothing. Makes me a little worried.

**John:** It makes me worried, too. Have I ever talked about this on the podcast, that Go was originally an Alice in Wonderland story.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting. No.

**John:** Yeah, so Go was originally conceived to be an Alice in Wonderland story. And so the yellow Miata which hits Ronna was supposed to be a white Volkswagen Rabbit. And so there was a bunch of things that if you kind of squint you can see that like, oh, this is a thing I was trying to do. But along the writing of it I was like, you know what, I’m trying to force people into these roles and they don’t naturally want to be in these roles. And so I gave up on that as a concept and the movie is much better for that.

I did feel like, you know, in this case the writer is trying to force these people into these zones. Granted, it’s only three pages, so maybe it does make more sense later on, but I share your concern that Hatter doesn’t feel like he any relationship to the Hatter I know from the stories.

**Craig:** Yeah. And like I said, you feel like, well, at some point he’s going to be talking to the caterpillar. And then there’s going to be the Queen. And, you know, Alice in Wonderland is not really something that hasn’t been imagined or reimagined I should say thoroughly many times before. It has. Many times before. So, that makes me just think, hmm, the gimmick may be a little played out here. This may feel a little, well, you just don’t want to feel like it’s homework to go through it.

So, I think that there’s some conceptual issues here and some character issues. But the most important thing I would say, Ted, is let’s just give you the benefit of the doubt. This works out great from here on. You really have to think about how you’re introducing us to the world. And how you’re introducing the audience. It can’t feel like a pitch. It will just never, ever work that way.

**John:** I agree. But you know who knows something about pitches? That would be Rebel Wilson. So let’s turn back to Rebel to talk us into our next Three Page Challenge.

Rebel: The second Three Page Challenge is called Black Leather Jackets by Gerald Decker. Nighttime in Arkansas. A man who looks like fat Elvis jumps off a semi and goes inside an Astro Burger. A character called Rambling Man, the only other customer in the restaurant, pops some pills and downs them with coffee. Elvis orders a Fatty Fat, a chocolate shake, and some fries. Rambling Man approaches Elvis and offers him a lift.

In the truck, Rambling Man asks Elvis on why he chose to be fat Elvis rather than one of the other incarnations. Before Elvis can answer, though, a ball of light shoots past and disappears over the horizon. The truck suddenly stalls and rolls to a stop. The two men exit.

The ball of light reappears and now lands in the middle of the road. It’s a saucer-shaped craft. Rambling Man laments how no one is going to believe him and how no one will believe Elvis either. The craft then opens up and three Nwabalans are, again, I don’t know whether I’m saying that correctly. Nwabalans. OK. I’m guessing kind of like alien creatures exit on Harley Davidsons. The lead alien reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small silver object. He tells Elvis he’s a sight for sore eyes. Elvis then says, “Why, thank you. Thank you very much.”

That was not a bad Elvis impersonation when I’ve never done one before. All right, OK, and then that’s the end of page three.

**John:** All right. So, this is by Gerald Decker and this is written in a way that’s different than a lot of the Three Page Challenges we look at, so I’m excited to see this.

So, most screenplays you read are going to have INT/EXT as scene headers, but you will come across some scripts that are sort of written in a continuous voice. Basically it’s just one continuous flow. And the slug lines or sort of scene header thing is just, you know, a general indication of when we’re inside and when we’re outside. Ultimately, if these movies go into production they get scene headers like everything else and it works out fine. But this one is written sort of like just one continuous flow.

And so it’s an interesting thing to look at if you are curious what that looks like on the page.

**Craig:** And it works for me. You know.

**John:** It works for me. Yeah. So, this one starts, “ONE NIGHT OUTSIDE THE ASTRO BURGER ON ROUTE 64 IN ARKANSAS,” which is essentially the scene header. “A semi drives away, leaving a man who looks suspiciously like ELVIS at the restaurant. This first paragraph brings up one of my biggest frustrations with how this was written is that there were just a lot of run-on sentences that I think hurt the read. It was actually harder to sort of get through and figure out what was really going on the sentences kept going on a lot.

But the flow of getting in from place to place, that actually worked kind of fine for me, despite the sort of strange style.

My overall general take on this is that I was certainly surprised by the things that were happening in the first three pages, but I didn’t have a tremendous amount of confidence that this was going to be a movie that I was excited to keep seeing. Because it was going through a lot of tropes really quickly. And I wasn’t convinced that I was going to be taken on a better journey than things I’ve seen before.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, what we’re talking about here is three pages in which Fat Elvis, who we presume is Fake Fat Elvis, turns out to be – it seems – real Fat Elvis. And real Fat Elvis does in fact have awareness and knowledge of aliens. And we’re meeting the aliens now. So, sort of a National Enquirer pastiche into a movie. And that can work. I feel like we’ve seen similar kinds of things. The territory of all of the crazy stories about Elvis are really true is something that has been mined. But I will say that Gerald has written something that is consistent.

The tone feels consistent. Which that is an indication that you can write. And something like this, the tone is very specific. And I felt at home with it the whole way through. It’s odd. But it’s odd in its own way. And it stays odd in its own way. And I could see it. I could see every single thing that happened, which I really liked.

When that happens, it’s so much easier to forgive things like, OK, you’ve capitalized the word Chewing in chewing gum in a parenthetical when you don’t start those things with capitalizations. You know, stuff like that. There were little mistakes like when they’re in the truck Ramblin, who is the name of the truck driver, Rambling Man, who is giving Elvis a ride says, “As Ramblin sings along, Elvis eats his Fatty Fat Burger and his skinny fries. RAMBLIN (Shouting over the music) So tell me.” Well, is he singing or is he shouting?

So, there are these things like this. And, you know, that’s fine. But I could see all of it, which I really enjoyed. When you look at page three, you’ll see that there’s actually an overdose of something that I generally love. I like to use white space on a page and I really like to break up my action lines. Sometimes the best way to get across a vibe, a feeling, a mood is to not write paragraphs of action, but single lines.

However, if you do it too much, then you start to get a little bored visually. I think you could probably combine lines like, “The three lights stop in a line, one next to the other. Behind the lights are three Harley-Davidson motorcycles. On top of the motorcycles are three dark FIGURES.” That could be one paragraph, right?

But, you know, I mean, the last line put a smile on my face. And I thought to myself, well, I don’t know where this goes, I think there’s a possibility that this script becomes something like a Buckaroo Banzai which is amazing and specific and bizarre. And it’s the kind of movie that doesn’t give a damn whether you like it or not, or understand it or not, because it understands itself. I love things like that.

Or maybe this sort of never gets there. But, there is real promise here and there’s an interesting love of – and an evident love of language. Elvis is drinking a shake that’s called a Fatty Fat while he eats Skinny Fries. It’s just fun. I mean, I feel like Gerald is in control of his pages here.

So, by and large I thought there was a lot of promising – there was promising execution if maybe the topic itself wasn’t the freshest thing.

**John:** I agree with you. A few moments of dialogue did not click for me. So I wanted to call them out. So, I’ll start at the end. On page three, Ramblin says, “You ready for this?” “I was born ready.” I did not understand this at all. I didn’t understand why Ramblin wasn’t freaking out more. This is where I think the character underwriting was hurting it. Because I just had no sense of who Ramblin was in this moment.

On page two, Ramblin says, “You see that?” Ramblin’s voice fades away as the ball light reappears. The line was too short to fade away. So, I think it called for a longer line. There’s more stuff happening. So, give us that longer line. Give us something that can actually fade away. Give us a dot-dot-dot to come out of it.

This is personal choice, but on page one Elvis looks over the menu selections. Yeah, give me a Fatty Fat. One of the chocolate shakes and some home fries. Waitress says, “We just have Skinny Fries.” It always kind of annoys me when a character speaks who hasn’t been called out yet. And so there was, you know, if he’s looking over the menu selection as the waitress sort of leans on the counter or taps on her pad, you know, let us see her first. Because then I think stuff is going to work out better. We understand sort of the scene around him as he’s talking to her.

I didn’t understand why Ramblin was giving him a lift. That seems like an obvious thing, but the timing of it all felt really weird. Like, did his fries come? Did they not come? Why is Ramblin giving him a lift?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** So, all these things are helpful. The last thing I want to single out, and this is because a copy editing thing that Arlo Finch made me think of it. So bottom of page three, it says, “It is not human. This is a NWABALAN. His skin is deep blue, his eyes are huge.” And so it an “its” or is it a “his?” And so once you give even a non-human character a gender, stick with it, and don’t be switching back and forth.

**Craig:** Right. I think those are all very, very valid observations and Gerald would be wise to take all of those suggestions. Check also, you know, little things. Put periods at the end of sentences. The sound of the Allman Brothers’ Rambling Man plays, period. You know, if you don’t want to – I don’t care if you underline or italicize song names. All that stuff. None of that stuff matters.

**John:** An example of the Allman Brothers’ Rambling Man plays, that’s his running on sentence. So the Allman Brothers’ Rambling Man plays inside the cab at a deafening volume. So, that’s his style. And so, you know, his scene header is still a part of the same sentence.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. So, it’s inside the cab, at a deafening volume. OK. Yeah, so in cases like that, I like to do a dash-dash to let me know.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** And then a dash-dash back in. So, plays, dash-dash, then inside the cab, then dash-dash, at a deafening volume. Just to help connect people.

But that’s again, that’s not going to sink you one way or the other. Like I didn’t care that you were capitalizing the parenthetical. None of that stuff really matters. I mean, you know. I mean, fistful is not two words. It’s one word. Stuff like that. I don’t know. Whatever.

But I will say that when I meant it’s consistent at least to itself that this style of no INT/EXT and a kind of flowing, informal moving around felt quirky in the same way as the characters and the dialogue. It all felt very quirky.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** So, you know, in that sense there’s an intelligence behind this which I think is important. I don’t know how it turns out. I hope it turns out well for Gerald’s sake. There is a mind at work here.

**John:** All right. Let’s go back one last time to Rebel Wilson to set up our third and final Three Page Challenge.

Rebel: Now the third Three Page Challenge here is called Thicker than Blood by Phillip Rogers. As a ’69 Mustang drives through the desert, Vince Sutter voiceovers complaining about how heroes in movies are always running off into the sunset without an explanation what happens to them afterwards. Vince we see is in rough shape, missing a finger. His passenger, a sharply dressed man named Kim is spooning a duffel bag in the backseat.

Banging comes from the trunk. At the side of the road, Vince opens the trunk to reveal a pissed-off and bound Nick. Nick was scared someone would kill him. After making him promise not to freak out, Vince tells Nick they stole $5 million from Cheung. Nick freaks out. Vince shuts Nick back into the trunk, declaring he’s not ready to come out just yet. They’re headed for the border. Vince says there is no plan B.

Kim suggests they stop and work on plan B, but Vince is worried that Nick’s girlfriend will soon realize he’s missing. Kim then tells Vince to not worry about the girlfriend. He took care of it. And that’s the end of the third page. All right, thanks guys. Thanks for letting me read this. It was fun. OK, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Oh, bye.

**Craig:** Bye. God, she’s the best.

**John:** The best. Craig, start us off with Thicker than Blood.

**Craig:** Well, we have another voiceover beginner here. Now, I must admit that when I started it, every orifice puckered as I sensed the arrival of a Stuart Special, or perhaps a Jabangwe Jump. Is that what we call them?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The Jabangwe Jump?

**John:** I don’t think that is the situation.

**Craig:** It didn’t happen, so I was really thrilled about that. But then also kind of wondering why the hell I needed the voiceover at all. I’m not sure what it was giving us here.

Here’s the thing about these voiceovers. When you start with a voiceover. Voiceover is pompous. Now, sometimes pomposity is exactly called for, because you’re telling some sort of serious tale. So Lord of the Rings has this wonderful, I mean, Galadriel deserves pomposity. She’s the Queen of the Elves and she’s telling you a tale.

That’s not really what’s going on here. And the tone of it doesn’t have the kind of zippy devil-may-care feeling of say Ray Liotta’s voiceover in Goodfellas which is ping-ponging against lots of fun things and these wonderful images. Instead, it’s very ponderous. Very serious. Very philosophical. And then we get what is essentially a scene we’ve seen many times before. There’s a guy in a trunk. There was nothing particularly special about any of this. It all felt very generic to me. We have two characters in the car, Vince and Kim. Kim is a man. And Kim is asleep while Vince does his voiceover.

And they’re driving. And then there’s a banging from the trunk, which again, Goodfellas, and many, many other movies.

**John:** And Go.

**Craig:** And Go. And circa 1990-something. We’re now in 2017. Says, “BANGING comes from the trunk. Vince’s eyes dart to the rear view mirror. Kim shifts awake.” Kim: Sleeping beauty must have finally woke up.

No. That’s not what you do when you wake up. You don’t wake up and immediately speak a scripted line like that. That’s not human. That should be something either Vince says after Kim wakes himself up, but then I would be confused about who he is talking about. Or, Kim should wake up and just go, “Ahh,” right, because he’s hearing the banging and realizes why he’s just been woken up.

That’s such an alarm bell to me, because it means you’re not really writing people, you’re writing lines.

**John:** You know, I think I took this in a very different way, because I enjoyed this much more than you did. And I took the voiceover as sort of hanging a lantern on that this sort of a very classic scene. This is the moment we’ve seen in a lot of these stories before. And the Vince character was sort of aware that we’ve seen this scene in things before.

And so, you know, this is generally the kind of moment that happens later in the story, but we’re sort of starting here. And we’re going to be filling in sort of what got us to this point. I thought there was a kind of meta quality to it that didn’t come through for you. And I think we’re just seeing different movies here kind of.

**Craig:** Well, I understand. Here’s my problem. What he’s saying is in his voiceover, I don’t like it when movies end off with the good guys just riding off into the sunset. Essentially what happens to them next? We’re just supposed to assume everyone lives happily ever after.

Then the banging from the trunk. And the scene is there’s somebody in the trunk who is screaming and we know that Vince is hurt and the guy in the trunk is screaming. The guy is Nick. Nick had been taped. His mouth is taped. He’s freaking out. They’ve killed somebody. And they put the tape back on.

This doesn’t feel victorious at all. It doesn’t feel like the scene he just told us he doesn’t like to see. So, it doesn’t seem like they’re taking off on that at all. There was a clash there, so I just – I didn’t feel it.

**John:** I get that. The three pages end on a discussion between Kim and Vince. And right now it’s all done OS, sort of like as the car is driving away. I had real questions about whether it can sustain that long of an OS.

**Craig:** It can’t. The answer is it cannot. No. Nothing can.

**John:** You would shoot this on camera and then make a decision down the road where it juts out the car. But I actually liked the play between Kim and Vince here. So let’s just read this last couple lines here. I’ll be Kim. Kim says, “I really think there should be a plan B. What if we stop for a drink and come up with a plan B? Or– just– stop for a drink anyway?”

**Craig:** Can’t. The girlfriend’s gonna realize he’s gone soon.

**John:** Don’t worry about the girlfriend. I took care of it.

**Craig:** What d’you mean you took care of it?

**John:** I took care of it.

**Craig:** KIM! WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!

**John:** So, that was at least intriguing enough to me to make it clear that I had assumed that Vince was the person in control of the whole scene, because he was the person who had all the information. He was the person who was missing a finger, who was driving the car. So that got me curious enough that I’m going to read another ten pages of this script.

Now, am I going to love it? Is it going to set my world on fire? I don’t know. But all this felt confident and competent enough that I was really curious to read what was going to happen next.

**Craig:** Interesting. Yeah, you see, to me everything that I’ve seen and heard tells me we’re in the middle of a story, not at the end, which is why I was struggling with the voiceover.

And probably why you really can’t do what he says you’re going to do, because it’s not the end of their – the good guys aren’t just riding off into the sunset because they haven’t won because they’re still in the middle of something. Someone has been killed. Someone is in their trunk. One guy has been hurt. They need to come up with a plan B. They have a goal which is to cross the border, but they don’t know if they can do it or not. That just does not feel reflective.

But here’s the thing that I would love to see. If Kim is in control, I don’t actually know who is in control. It seems to me like this is more of a kind of Hangover vibe where it’s just buddies. But if they’ve killed someone, maybe one of them is a little more dangerous sounding than the other. They both just have that kind of bro patter going on here, which is fine. But one you have one guy basically implying I killed her, then that’s not a bro. That’s a killer.

So, am I supposed to be rooting for this guy? I have so many questions and I wanted it to be more specific and I wanted the characters to be drawn better. It’s well laid out. Believe me, it’s well laid out. Phillip did a good job of that. I think this VO should be tweaked, personally, or eliminated. And I think just whatever you can do to avoid what I would just call generic “we’re in trouble, bro” patter.

**John:** Yeah. I get that. But I’m curious sort of what happened on page four and page five. And where that’s going to go. Because I like that even by page three my assumptions about sort of what the power dynamic was was proven incorrect. So, that was exciting to me. But I will say, I agree with you that of the three of these things we read, this is the most classically put on the page. It looks the most like a normal screenplay.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And reads well. There’s very little here that I could object to. It’s Courier Prime. It looks beautiful. The italics look so nice.

**Craig:** [laughs] You know, take note, people. If you want to butter this guy up, Courier Prime.

Hey, I have a question for you. What do you – I have since abandoned the CONT’D for character lines. Do you still use it?

**John:** I use CONT’D, so we’re describing when a line of action interrupts – the next person speaking is the same character who spoke before. That’s what you’re describing?

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So like Tom, intermediary line, and then Tom again. I still do the CONT’D in most situations. Because I won’t – I hate when Final Draft automatically does it, which is why we don’t do it in Highland. But I only will do it if I’m typing it myself. Because the automatic version is terrible because sometimes you have like three paragraphs in between, but then it’s a CONT’D? That’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I will do it if it’s like a line or two and it’s really one continuous thought and I’m using that intermediary line basically like a parenthetical. The reason why I find the CONT’D helpful is that sometimes literally as an actor is reading it they just won’t connect the dot, like, oh, I’m still talking. It just helps them see that. And I think the actor in the reader’s head, it just makes it clear that it’s the same character talking the whole time through.

So I still do use it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can see that. I’ve basically just chucked it because I just got tired of looking at it. And, I don’t know, it just seemed a little archaic. In here it’s fine that it’s being used here by Phillip. However, when you get into off-screen stuff, for it to then be also attached to the off-screen, that just looks ugly. Kim (OS) (CONT’D). It’s not even continued because he’s not even on camera. I don’t know. That’s a picky thing, but it seems like Phillip is into formatting because he’s done a nice job here, so.

**John:** It is. So, I used to do cont’d as lower case. And I gave up on that. I really liked how lower case looked. It was like sort of less pushy. But I’ve given up on that, too.

I was going to say on Ted’s script, the first one we looked at, had or doesn’t have a CONT’D, and I found it jarring. Because I kept expecting – here’s what it is. Is if there’s two characters in a scene and they’re talking to each other, and the one character talks twice in a row, I will still put the dialogue in the other character’s mouth, because I’m not really looking for who is talking.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** And so that’s where I think it’s really useful to do that.

**Craig:** Well, I’m screwing up there. But you know, I’ve planted my flag and I don’t like change.

**John:** But you are a single spacer now, aren’t you? Or are you a double spacer?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. No, no, I’ve been a single spacer for well over a decade now, sir.

**John:** Very, very nice.

All right. Those are our Three Page Challenges. So, thank you again to all three of our entrants here, people who wrote in with their three pages. And thank you to everybody else who has written in with three pages that we haven’t gotten to yet. Mostly thank you to Godwin Jabangwe, our producer, who has to read through all of them and pick ones that he thinks are going to be interesting for us to look at. So, again, you can read these PDFs. Just go to the links in the show notes, or at johnaugust.com.

If you want to submit your own three pages, it can be a feature script. It can be a pilot. Hell, I’ll probably even take a play if you want to send us three pages of a play. Send it in. You attach a PDF to the little button and send that through to us. And we’ll take a look at those in the future. But mostly thank you to Rebel Wilson. You’re the best.

**Craig:** She is the best.

**John:** I’m imagining hugging her right now.

**Craig:** Bye!

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. My One Cool Thing is a very tiny, tiny thing. And it’s only for people with mustachios, John.

**John:** Never me.

**Craig:** It is the Kent Saw Cut Handmade Mustachio Comb.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I know. I think it’s the 81T model. Yeah. I can’t explain how good it feels to comb your mustache. [laughs] It is the stupidest thing. I feel like – I’m doing it right now. I feel like some, I don’t know, like Poirot. Like look at me, I’m combing my mustache. But it feels really good.

**John:** So, Craig, I haven’t seen you for eight months now. So, you’ve shaved the whole beard and now it’s just a very long handle bar mustache?

**Craig:** No, no, no. I still have the beard. But the mustache is connected to the beard. I mean, the mustache is – you still have the sections of mustache, of beard rather.

**John:** But what happens if you use the comb on the beard part, rather than mustache part? Does it all fall apart?

**Craig:** It gets stuck. Gets stuck. Yeah. Because the mustache hair is very different than the other beard hair.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Have you – you’ve never – can you even grow a beard?

**John:** I can grow stubble, but nothing that you really want to – nothing that anybody wants to see.

**Craig:** No, and Mike doesn’t look like he can grow a beard.

**John:** Oh, he can grow a beard like tomorrow.

**Craig:** No way. Really?

**John:** Yeah. But he hates it.

**Craig:** Oh, well you know what, I get it, because it itches like crazy for a while, but then it stops and then it’s great. So anyway, there you go. For those of you with mustachios or perhaps those of you who aspire to a mustachio, the Handmade Kent.

**John:** Great. So, if we were a podcast that took ads, then that could be a podcast sponsor because it’s always like the razors and things.

**Craig:** I know. By the way, the great thing about this, I made it sound like it’s really expensive, like it’s a $98 mustache comb. I think it costs like five bucks. You can get a 12-pack on Amazon. I think it’s – I don’t know, it’s $0.12.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is actually a research paper that I read a couple weeks ago and loved and I just thought about it again because of stuff that came up in my life. It is titled A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams. It was done by three researchers at Stony Brook University. And it’s interesting because I’ve heard of tech support scams and I’ve read articles about this, but this was actually a scientific research paper where they looked at sort of like how tech support scams worked. And they went to their ethics department to get permission to participate in this study, because they were having to record these conversations without people’s consent. And they just did a deep dive into sort of how tech support scams work.

And generally it’s people visit a website that they shouldn’t visit and it leads them to a page that says like your computer is infected. Contact this number. They call into a “tech support site” that gets these people to download software that then takes over their computer. And then they charge them the money to get free of it.

**Craig:** Ransomware.

**John:** It’s Ransomware basically. I first learned about this because it happened to my mother-in-law.

**Craig:** Of course it did.

**John:** And it was horrible. And it preys on people who are not tech savvy. And so anyway it’s a really good paper, but I also really like the recommendations they make at the end of this, particularly about ways that browsers like Google Chrome or Safari could really help the situation by just giving people a panic switch. Basically like click this button and it will close all the tabs and wipe everything.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That would have saved everyone so much time and hassle. So, I recommend people check this out. It was also just fascinating to see sort of what a modern university paper looks like on a tech topic. So I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** How great would it be if this paper were a scam?

**John:** Oh, wouldn’t that be great? Basically clicking the link in the show notes leads you to one of these devastating pages.

**Craig:** That would be amazing.

**John:** So my mom is – she’s not great with technology, but she can still do some basic things. And so when we had our weekly Facetime call, she’s like, oh, and can you take a look because something is wrong with my switchboard. I’m like, what switchboard. It’s like, oh, it’s what I use to look stuff up. And so switchboard.com was a site that people used to use to look up things a zillion years ago.

And so–

**Craig:** Switchboard?

**John:** Switchboard.com.

**Craig:** I’m going there right now.

**John:** If you go to it right now you will see that it comes in with a very scammy-looking like Click Here for a Survey kind of thing.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s this nonsense. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And so I said, mom, don’t do that. Just Google it. And so I was looking at her browser and right next to the Switchboard, that URL in the bookmarks little bar there was MapQuest. And she still uses MapQuest to like find directions to places.

**Craig:** Aw, that’s so cute.

**John:** I’m like, oh, that’s MapQuest.

**Craig:** Is she, that’s it, like the MapQuest Board of Directors, every day they have a meeting about your mom.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Like how do we retain our customer?

**John:** Absolutely. Nancy is crucial for our ongoing survival.

**Craig:** How is her health? [laughs]

**John:** Indeed. [laughs] They send her flowers every year for her birthday. Because they know all her personal information.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They know exactly where she lives because she’s always getting directions from her house to someplace.

**Craig:** From MapQuest! Oh my god.

**John:** So anyway she wanted to keep MapQuest, but I got Google Maps on the toolbar right next to that, so she has another modern choice. And I showed her how to use it. And I’m like it’s just so much faster and better.

**Craig:** Well…yeah.

**John:** Once again, it’s all time machines. She’s living in a slightly different time period. That’s how I get – if I went back in time, I could check to see, go up to a person and ask, “Hey, how do you get directions to this place?” And if they said like, well, check MapQuest, then I’d know, oh OK, I’m in like–

**Craig:** It’s 2003.

**John:** I’m in like early 2000s.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And they’re like, I don’t know, why don’t you look it up on Excite. [laughs] I remember when Excite was the bomb, dude.

**John:** That was the best. Here, let me load up Netscape Navigator and we’ll take a look at where that stuff is.

**Craig:** Let me crank that sucker up and get on, jump on AltaVista and let you know what I think.

**John:** This last week I’ve been playing quite a fair amount of Star Craft, the original Star Craft, which they just made free. Blizzard made it free. And it’s still a really good game. There’s a few things that are annoying, but the basic dynamics of it still work very, very well.

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve been playing – I’ve been trying to play Zelda, the new one, Breath of the Wild.

**John:** Yeah. It’s beautiful.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing. I don’t like it. I don’t know what to do?

**John:** You don’t like it?

**Craig:** I don’t know what to do.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Like, if there were ever somebody that was supposed to like it, it’s me, because I’ve loved all of the Zelda games. I’ve played them all. And I love big sandbox environments. And I love all of – and I love quest-based adventuring.

**John:** It’s not working for you.

**Craig:** It’s tedious. I find it so tedious.

**John:** But, Craig, you can climb anything.

**Craig:** Slowly.

**John:** So slowly.

**Craig:** And for a short amount of time before your endurance runs out and then you just fall. Also, they have the most insane weapons mechanic in this. Basically every weapon you have, doesn’t matter what it is, doesn’t matter how special it is.

**John:** It breaks. Yeah.

**Craig:** Breaks. Like within, I don’t know, two encounters. So, you’re constantly picking up weapons and putting down weapons. I just – and you run around for days and you find nothing. [laughs] I’m so depressed.

**John:** Except for sadness.

**Craig:** I’m really depressed by it. I don’t know what to do. I’m supposed to like it, and I don’t.

**John:** I don’t have the new Nintendo, but Jordan Mechner came over to visit and he had the new Nintendo. And we were so excited to plug it in and play it on the big screen, but it requires more power than a Macintosh USB-C cable can give it. So, we couldn’t actually power it. So we had to play on the little screen. And so I enjoyed my ten minutes of playing on a little screen, but I could see how it would be frustrating. I think many, many weeks ago I talked about how I really wanted my daughter to play Portal 2 and I was bummed that it wasn’t available on PlayStation 4.

I don’t know why I didn’t think that actually available on Steam. So, she’s been playing on her MacBook.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** And you know what? It’s still a remarkably good game. And the voice acting in that game is just so top-notch.

**Craig:** Cake is a lie.

**John:** The cake is delicious. So, you never made it through the part where you got the cake? Oh, you should play that game again. Because the cake, when it actually comes, it’s the best chocolate cake. We were sitting there and I came to the piece of the best – the best chocolate cake.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, you don’t get chocolate cake in Zelda. But you can make a wide variety of foods which are the only way to restore your health, so you’re cooking a lot. I can’t, I mean–

**John:** Did you cook at all in Skyrim? I never cooked in Skyrim.

**Craig:** Not once. See, that’s the thing. It’s taken all the things that actually annoyed me about Skyrim and it’s only those things. And it doesn’t have all the awesome.

And again, I loved the Zelda games. I loved Twilight Princess. I mean, obviously Ocarina of Time. Everybody loves that. But I don’t – meh. Bummed out. I know everyone is going to tell me I’m wrong.

**John:** All right. That’s our show for this week. As always, it is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Andres Cantor.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send longer questions. But for short questions, we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We’re on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on the iTunes Store, or whatever they’re calling iTunes by the time you’re listening to this. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us your review while you’re there, because at least for right now that helps us out a tremendous amount.

You can find the show notes and all the PDFs we talked about today at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, which I think are now back up to speed. And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net, including the two episodes of Rebel Wilson which are definitely must listens.

**Craig:** Mm. For sure.

**John:** Craig, have a wonderful time in the past with the live show. I hope it will go/did go very well. And I will talk to you again next week.

**Craig:** See you soon, John. Bye.

**John:** See ya. Bye.

Links:

* Three Pages by [Ted Wilkes](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/TedWilkes.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Gerald Decker](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/GeraldDecker.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Phillip Rogers](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/PhillipRogers.pdf)
* [Kent Handmade Moustache Comb](https://www.amazon.com/Kent-Beard-Moustache-Sawcut-Ounce/dp/B004K3J6H6)
* [A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams](https://www.securitee.org/files/tss_ndss2017.pdf)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andres Cantor ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Nothing. [laughs]

**John:** Nothing?

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

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

**John:** This is the point.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** More rules on screenwriting.

**Craig:** Oh.

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

**Craig:** Ah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

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

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

**John:** Yeah. That’s fun to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Oh, good.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yes, literally.

**John:** As an adverb.

**Craig:** Right, literally yeah.

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

**Craig:** Thank god.

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

**Craig:** Great

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

**Craig:** Literally.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s so me.

**John:** That’s so Raven.

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

**John:** Now it’s real.

**Craig:** I’m just going to —

**John:** Now it’s on the App Store.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m an upgrader.

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** $9.99.

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

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

**Craig:** Totally.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

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

**Craig:** Oh.

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

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

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Hmm.

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

**Craig:** It’s literally tier 10.

**John:** God, oh no.

**Craig:** I hope that’s Seth —

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Both.

**John:** They’re clammy.

**Craig:** They’re gone.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, like literally —

**Craig:** Literally.

**John:** Oh, we’ll never stop this.

**Craig:** I know.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** A little font factory.

**John:** Operation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** Yes, yes.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, that’s pain.

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

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

**Craig:** Once.

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

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

**Craig:** Of course.

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

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

**John:** Nope.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Shh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I might be cheating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That’s a Monday.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** That’s absolutely fine.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** You have to, you know —

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

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

**Craig:** Exciting.

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

**Craig:** Follow-up.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

**Craig:** Yay!

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Okay, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**John:** Okay.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

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

**Craig:** Oh.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** 40.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Fascinating.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

**John:** They’re both guys.

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, just odd.

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, huh.

**John:** Huh, wait.

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

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Yup.

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

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So Med writes —

**Craig:** Med.

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

**Craig:** Baffled.

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

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

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

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

John “I’m not sure.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah [laughs].

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

**John:** Absolutely nothing.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**John:** Wow, that’s amazing.

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

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

**John:** Yeah, right.

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

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

**John:** I agree.

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

**John:** Very much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s not the progression.

**John:** [sings].

**Craig:** It’s not the progression.

**John:** [sings]

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

**John:** Right, so —

**Craig:** And it’s a dead rip-off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** He did.

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

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

**Craig:** We’ll never know.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, thank God.

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

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So let’s go through it.

**Craig:** All right.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** That is.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I agree.

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

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Yup.

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

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

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

**John:** It means you’re lazy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Well, let’s —

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

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

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I mean, so —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Or it’s Harry Met Sally.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s not action, per se.

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, well —

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

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

**John:** Oh, yeah.

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

**John:** What? What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah, okay.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Send your script.

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

**John:** You absolutely may say.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Medicine.

**John:** Medicine, absolutely.

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

**John:** Oh yeah, absolutely.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** No.

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

**John:** And we don’t do magic.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s possible.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Which is just crazy.

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

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

**Craig:** Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

**John:** Absolutely.

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** We’re not.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** It is.

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

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

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

**John:** Okay.

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

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

**Craig:** I’m so smart.

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s the 1%.

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

**Craig:** I’m incredible.

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wow.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Neat.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** It’s like, yeah, my rage.

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

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

**John:** Hulk.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** It’s a brilliant medicine.

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

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just the deal.

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

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

**John:** It’s strongly German.

**Craig:** It’s sausage blood.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

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