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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/taking-notes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 86 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I’ve had a profound revelation that will change the podcast forever. Are you ready?

**Craig:** I assume it’s that I’m fired?

**John:** [laughs] Well, there’s that. But, before we even get to that — so long time listeners of the podcast will know that a thing that annoys Aline Brosh McKenna more than anything else is that I drop out the T of “interesting.” And it’s something that I’m just defective, or that’s what I thought: it was just my problem.

Except that my family was visiting this weekend, including my nephew Ben, and he said, “Oh, that’s just because you’re from Colorado.” And I’m like, no, no, is it really a Colorado thing? And he says, “Talk about what are those hills outside — those giant hills in Colorado?”

I say, “Mountains.” And he said, “Yeah, you know, you don’t say the T in ‘mountains.'” I’m like, I don’t. He’s like, “No one in Colorado says the T in ‘mountains.'” So, dropping that T is an important thing.

So, then I started doing some introspection and figuring out like, well, when do I drop the T and when do I not drop the T?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s actually pretty consistent. So, I would always say “intelligent” because the “tell” has a stress on it. The emphasis on the word is inTell. But, “interesting,” there’s no emphasis on that syllable.

**Craig:** Because the emphasis is on the “in.”

**John:** Exactly. And so “intelligible,” sure. I’m trying to think if there’s other T situations, but it’s pretty consistent. So, as long as there’s not a stress on it.

**Craig:** What about those, like when you’re eating Cuban food and you get those little bananas. What are those?

**John:** Plan-Tains.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Because there’s emphasis.

**Craig:** Right. But if they were Plant-Ains. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, there’s a weird corollary to this that my grandmother had. It’s a very Brooklyn thing. And you can also here, if you watch Goodfellas and you know Martin Scorsese’s mother plays Joe Pesci’s mother in Goodfellas, and you can hear her doing it, too. And I can’t quite do it right. But if you take a word like “bottle,” for instance, go ahead — say bottle.

**John:** Bottle.

**Craig:** Okay. You and I say it the same way. There’s an old school Brooklyn way of saying it that’s “Bot-ul.” Bot-ul. Or Bottle. It’s almost like you’re saying either two Ts or like a word glottal T. It’s the strangest thing.

**John:** I think what I’m doing is essentially a tiny little glottal stop that’s getting rid of the T when I don’t need to. Because when you’re making the “In,” you’re going forward as if you’re making the T, but then you just don’t actually stop and make the T because you can understand the word without it. So, I’m capable of making the T.

**Craig:** This is a remarkable — remarkable — explanation for your…what I will continue to maintain is just a defect.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. It’s defective to explain it.

**Craig:** I’m going to Colorado and I’m going to confirm this. Now I’m flying.

**John:** But it was really profound when I started talking about like “mountains.” Like I have never said “Moun-Tains.” It just seems weird.

**Craig:** I say “Mount-Ains” also. I don’t say “Moun-Tains,” I say “Mount-Ains.” But when you say “interesting there’s almost no T. Like I don’t make a big deal of it. I don’t say “in-Teresting.” I just say, “Interesting. Interesting.”

**John:** I’ve ruined you, Craig. You’re doing exactly what I’m doing now.

**Craig:** You do, “Inneresting.” You know what it is, it’s not that you drop the T, it’s that you jam the R right up against the N. “Inneresting.”

Well, regardless, I love it about you and I don’t think you should change. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it many, many times. The hell with Aline Brosh McKenna. It’s practically my motto.

**John:** [laughs] Thank you. We’ll put it on t-shirts which we’ll sell at the 100th podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah, somebody get to Etsy quickly.

**John:** So, I consider the issue put to bed.

Today, though, I want to talk about other exciting topics. You suggested a very good topic which is so relevant to me right now which is about how you take notes as a writer. So, let’s talk about taking notes. But then there’s also some really good listener questions in the mailbag, so I’d thought we’d get to that, and call it a show.

**Craig:** Great. Well, it sounds good.

So, let’s start with this whole issue of notes. And I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, as long as I’ve been doing it. The first time you get notes in a professional situation, it’s a bad feeling. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care how pleasant the session is. That first time is a slap in the face. And there’s so many ways that we can go wrong in those meetings. And I have done them all, I think, and I kind of got them out of my system early on.

But I continue to watch writers do it to this very day and I would imagine that this extends across any creative pursuit. If you’re a musician and someone is critiquing your music, or you’re a lyricist, or you’re a dancer, whatever it is.

So, I wanted to talk about the pitfalls of all of this. And I’m going to preface it by saying this: don’t think for a second that avoiding some of these things somehow means you’re dealing away your pride. It’s not. If anything, it’s ego which is different than pride. That’s not professional pride; that’s ego — ego that gets in the way.

I’m going to start by asking you a question, John.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** When you go into a notes meeting, what in your mind are you hoping to accomplish, if anything?

**John:** I’m hoping to accomplish a transformation in which they will see that I was correct and that they were wrong…

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** …and that the script is ready to become a movie. If I’m being honest, that’s really what I’m hoping to accomplish in the course of a movie, of a movie notes session. Now, realistically, I’ve been to this rodeo enough times that I recognize that’s not going to happen. So, what I’m hoping for myself is that I will be able to do the kind of judo that accomplishes their goals while accomplishing my goals simultaneously.

**Craig:** And what are your goals in a general sense? Are they always specific goals? Or are they general goals?

**John:** I think my goals are to make the movie better, which is sort of the pinnacle goal. The secondary goal is to make the movie not worse. And often notes can make a movie significantly worse. Related to that is I want the movie to get made. I want the thing to proceed to the next step.

So, getting the movie made is sort of the overall arching goal, but usually those note session you’re talking about are we going to go out to a director; are we going to send it into this person? There’s some next step, and I recognize that only through the successful completion of this meeting and the discussion of these notes will we be able to get to the next step.

**Craig:** Well, those are all good thoughts to have and good goals and I share them all. I think every time we walk in there there’s a part of us that’s hoping that the point of the note session is really, “Look how great this is.” And then practically speaking, as business people, as well as artists, we have a certain list of business goals that we have like let’s get a director attached, let’s get an actor, let’s get going. Let’s make a movie.

And then there’s the hope that somehow they will give you something that you hadn’t considered that will make the script better. And then the most important one of all — let’s not make it worse. And for me, if there’s one goal I have when I walk into a notes session, it’s this: I am there to make sure that I protect my intentions. You know, screenplays are just a big huge bundle of intentions. And I’m okay with doing whatever needs to be done, and I hope that whatever needs to be done is something that I agree with that is going to make things better.

But I want to protect my intentions. And the reason I’m bringing that up is because I think that intentions are protectable. And when you start thinking about your intentions for what a scene is about, what it means, why the character is doing what they’re doing, all the why questions instead of the what questions, we start to get ourselves out of the realm of sounding defensive about what we wrote. And we get instead into a conversation about the why. And I have to say right off the bat that puts us at an advantage because we understand the whys generally better than anybody.

It also makes it seem less like we’re there to somehow create an obstacle to what everyone else considers to be a very necessary process. And if you’ve ever given notes to somebody, you suddenly realize what the other side of it is like. It’s actually quite hard to do. And when somebody is really resistant or does any of the things I’m about to talk about, it’s frustrating for you as the note giver.

So, I wanted to talk about things to not do. [laughs] And along with those, some things to do. And little tips. And join in with any that come to your mind as well. And comment on these as you wish.

A couple of easy ones to start off with — a couple of dos. Try and be as relaxed as possible. If you’re not relaxed you’re starting a fight that doesn’t need to start.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Listen, which is very, very hard for us. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this where you realize that you know exactly what this person is saying, you already have the answer to what they’re saying, and yet what am I supposed to do, sit here and listen for another three minutes of terrible irrelevant monologue when I have the answer? So, you just want to cut them off! [laughs] You know that feeling?

**John:** Yes. I do know that feeling, often on this podcast.

**Craig:** Ah-ha!

**John:** Ha-ha-ha.

**Craig:** Nah!

**John:** I think listening is crucial. Also, listening with — to say a really cheesy term — it’s sort of the active listening, where it’s making it clear to the person that you are listening to them, that you’re hearing them, and oftentimes what’s helpful is just to restate what they just said in slightly different words so that they know that you heard what they just said to you.

**Craig:** That’s right. And another thing that goes along with being an active listener, and I like that term a lot, is taking notes. You may not agree with what they’re saying. Just the physical act of taking notes helps get your mind off of whatever the emotions are of the moment. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen other writers listen to very detailed suggestions, not take notes, and then have the person say, “Are you at all interested in writing any of this down,” because it’s viewed as disrespectful.

I mean, essentially it’s viewed as “I’m not listening to you” [laughs] and I don’t care about what you’re saying. Which may be true, but why give that away?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I am a big believer — this is another “do” — of asking neutral questions about a note. If I sometimes feel that sensation, the “oh my god, oh no” sensation welling up, instead of just repeating the note back I’ll ask a neutral question, in part because I really do feel like when I do that I can kind of maybe get something of value out of it.

Simply put, something like, “Can you explain that for me?” Or, “Can you go deeper into that,” which is a very neutral interrogative. But it does have them talk more. And, frankly, sometimes it also helps them on their own realize that there’s not much ground underneath their feet with that particular note.

**John:** A corollary to that is make them contextualize when they felt that note. And so if they’re saying like, “I didn’t really like this character. I didn’t really like this thing,” you can sometimes ask them, “So when did you start feeling that? Is it at this moment? Is it at this…?”

Ask them to be more specific about sort of what it is that — what isn’t working for them. And if they could place it within the timeline of the script, that can be helpful for you, too.

**Craig:** That’s great. And, again, that expresses legitimate interest in what they have to say, which at times they do deserve. Let’s talk about some don’t dos. And I’ve seen all of these and I’ve probably done them all as well.

I call them the 3Ds. Let’s start with the first D — Defend. It is a natural thing to defend your work. When somebody says something like, “I just read this scene and I just thought it was not funny at all. I read the scene and I thought it was over-the-top. I read the scene and I thought it was boring.” Don’t defend that. You can’t.

You can’t say, “No, it is funny. No, it’s not boring. No, it’s none of this,” because it’s not to you, but it is to them. That’s not going to change. Better to just say, “Okay, let’s talk about why. Let’s talk about what I intended there. And let’s see if we can maybe find a way where that intention can be done in a way that is funny, or thrilling, or tense, or exciting.”

The next D — Deny. Do not deny what they’re saying either. “That’s not true.”

“It just seems like this character doesn’t care that much.”

“That’s not true! Obviously this character cares.” Don’t do that. Again, you may be right, but denying what they say is only going to get you, again, into a fight. And if your goal is to not make the script worse, to not get fired, to protect your dramatic intention, there is no value to deny what they’re saying. Better again to just try and find your way through what they’re saying.

And the last D is Debate. And this is the one I think most writers fall into. And when I say debate I don’t mean to — because there are times when I’ll say, “Well, I’m not sure about that, and here’s why.” Or, “Well, okay, if I do that just be aware of this.”

Debating is essentially when you step outside of the process of trying to make the script better, or trying to protect your intention, and instead engage in war. You’re fighting. That’s what you’re doing. And you’re fighting because you’re hurt and because you’re scared.

And you know, I mean, I assume you’ve felt hurt and scared before in these notes meetings?

**John:** I have indeed. And it’s always like they’re insulting not only you but they’re insulting your child. And so your instinct is to protect your child. So, deny, defend, debate — these are all natural reactions. It’s a posture you’re taking because someone is coming after you, so therefore you are going to assume a posture that could protect yourself and your work.

**Craig:** Exactly right. And by protecting yourself, unfortunately what happens is you’re actually doing a worse job of protecting your work. It’s a weird paradox. You’re better equipped to protect your work if you stop worrying so much about yourself and the pain that they’re causing. But it’s real pain. That’s the hard part.

I’ll tell you the emotional reaction I get when I get a really bad note, because I’ve thought about just like how do I qualify precisely what’s going through my under brain. And it’s this: I’ve just seen in rapid fire progress in my mind what happens to this movie, its reception, and my career, and my ego if this happens. And it’s horrifying to me.

All of that is packed into my reaction to a sentence that they’re saying that they simply don’t realize has that kind of ripple effect. Very hard to not deny, or defend, or debate.

**John:** So, let’s talk about strategies for when you encounter those situations, because the most helpful thing I’ve found over the years is both in your own mind and for the person you’re with is to reframe it in terms of the movie you’re trying to make.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And that way if you stopped talking about the script and started talking about the movie, then you’re sort of on neutral territory because you’re talking about a theoretical thing that’s in the future rather than this thing that’s right in front of you.

So, you can talk about not only what your intentions where with the script — fine, whatever that is — but what your intentions are for the movie. And exactly what you’re saying where like I’ve now quickly fast-forwarded through and saw exactly what the horrible thing that that note would do to the movie, they’re not there yet. And so sometimes what my job is is to help them subtly discover what the repercussions of that note would be without sort of telling them what the repercussions would be, without making it seem like I’m the person who created this horrible scenario. Let them come up to it in their own terms.

And so sort of slowly walk them through sort of what that is that happens there.

**Craig:** And you said a really important thing which is to talk about the movie as opposed to the script. Their nightmare is a writer who doesn’t understand that the point is a movie and not a good script. And their nightmare is a writer who is focused entirely on a document that will be 100% worthless once the movie is made.

And they’re panicked over that. So, I love that you’re saying talk about the movie. That’s exactly right.

**John:** In a general sense, let’s talk about what notes tend to be helpful and what notes tend to be frustrating, because there’s sort of a Goldilocks zone of notes that I find are really useful. And so if note is “too general” then it’s just maddening, because I can’t do anything with that. So, if someone says, “I don’t know that this should take place in space.” Well, like that’s too general. I can’t do anything; that’s the nature of the movie that we’re talking about. So, that’s too general of a note.

There’s also “too specific” of a note. There’s like, “Oh, when he drinks out of the blue glass it should really be like a green glass. I think the green glass more feels like…” That’s way too specific.

What’s usually helpful for me as a writer is that note that falls right in that sort of in-between zone where it’s usually talking about a scene, it’s talking about a character, it’s talking about a moment that’s actually addressable, that is something that I could do and I could work on.

So, I love when somebody comes to me with, “This isn’t working for me. This is the problem I’m coming to. But I’m not going to tell you how to solve it. I’m here to be a sounding board for talking about how we can work through those things.” The best note sessions have been the ones that ask the questions and don’t sort of try to force the answers upon me.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And I think the best note givers are the ones who don’t have ego wrapped up in doing a job that they’re not currently doing. The worst note givers are the ones who aren’t directors, aren’t writers, aren’t actors, but think they are and talk that way. So, they’re trying to do it for you. The best note givers are the ones who respect what you do and also respect themselves, understand that nobody gets it perfectly right the first time or even the 20th time. It can always be made better to some extent. And their job is to get you to figure out how to do that.

Everybody is an audience member. Everybody is born an audience member. Eventually we show these movies to 20 people, well, a room full of people, and then ask questions of 20 to 25 of them. And they have absolutely no qualifications whatsoever except that they have a pulse and they like movies. Well, if they say this is all boring or it’s really slow, it’s boring, and it’s slow, at least for them.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And so good note givers can have an impression and then are able to tease out of you the solution. I think that’s exactly right. There are times when you will get bad notes and it’s very tempting to win points. Sometimes you will get a note like, “I just feel like — why isn’t there a moment where he tells his friend that he actually loves her?” And there is that moment. It’s on page 11.

And every writer has had that experience. You’re like, it’s on page 11! And there’s two ways of saying that. [laughs] There’s the, “It’s on page 11, dummy!” And then there’s the, “Well, there’s this moment on page 11 that I intended to do that. I don’t know if it’s landing that way. Can we just take a look at it?”

And nine times out of ten if presented that way they’ll go, “Okay, you know, I just missed it.”

**John:** Yeah. When doing a TV pilot they often say like, “Yeah. Maybe we kind of need to underline that moment.” And what they literally mean is just, “Could you just underline it because I didn’t see it because I read it too quickly and no one else is going to see it.” So, that’s one of the things I learned this last time through in TV is like sometimes you actually just have to underline it because people are going to read too quickly.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to talk through two frustrating scenarios that have come up in the last couple weeks. And I don’t know that I have solutions for them, but I will point out like a shared frustration I think most people are going to feel. One is when you get really — when someone is really articulate and impassioned and makes a very strong point about something, there’s a tendency to sort of give them more weight and validity than you necessarily should.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Because sometimes really smart people can be wrong. Really smart, articulate people can be wrong, and they can actually steer you in a dangerous direction. And it’s so tempting to listen to them because they seem so smart and articulate. But they may not actually have the same intention for the movie that you do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that is a thing to always keep in mind. And so all the other things we’re talking about in terms of active listening and taking notes and all that stuff, but at the same time you have to ask yourself, “Is this the right person to be giving this note for this movie? And is this steering the movie in a direction that I want to go into?”

I’m often part of the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. And so I’m an advisor there and I will read a bunch of scripts and we’ll give feedback and try to help people find the right things. And we’re coached in sort of how to give notes in a way that’s hopefully asking the “what if” questions rather than trying to give solutions.

The challenge is all the advisors are like really successful screenwriters. And so anything we say people tend to put sort of too much stock in in a weird way. And so I have to sort of sometimes caution people, it’s like, “This is just what I’m feeling right now. Do not take this as gospel and do not try to do exactly what I’m saying, or do not try to do what me and three other screenwriters are saying which is going to steer you in different directions. Just listen to sort of our ideas, but don’t try to do this directly.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The second situation which I run into far too often is sometimes they’re really giving a note about the last draft. So, they had a very strong opinion about the last draft and you did things to address those things. But they still have that residual opinion from the previous draft. And so sometimes they’re not really giving notes on this draft. They’re giving notes about how they kind of feel about the project and not specifically what you put on the page.

And that’s just something you kind of have to live with in a way because you’re not going to be able to convince them that it actually has already all changed in the script, or that you have addressed that. It’s just, you know, it’s the echo of a previous opinion and that’s just going to stay there for awhile.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. There’s nothing you can really do about that. I think you’re absolutely right that there are times when individuals who are persuasive through force, position, articulation, and intelligence will sway a room. Persuasiveness, as you point out correctly, does not equal correctness.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And I think that is something that… — I’ll tell you, I’ve come across that a couple of times. The only strategy I have for that, or I guess tactic is the proper word, is I find that you’re not the only one who is struggling under that yoke. Everyone else is, too. Whoever that bulldozer is, you’re not the only person that’s been bulldozed.

And sometimes what I do in those situations is I circle back with the other people who are sort of cowed into silence or mowed over and I say, “Look, that’s a big personality in there. But can I just talk to you side bar and just say brilliant person, very smart. I don’t think that the movie they’re describing is the one we should be doing. Can you help me out?”

A lot of times they’ll say, “I know. Let’s figure this out.” And you find your allies where you can find them, you know?

**John:** I mean, the high class problems that we often run into is sometimes there are multiple people in that room who all have big personalities who all have authority just because of their position. So, you have a giant actor, you have a powerful director, you have a studio head, and they’re all saying slightly different things. And our function, and hopefully the reason why we’re getting paid a weekly, is because we are supposed to be somehow able to synthesize all these ideas and get everyone onto the same page, which doesn’t always happen.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so it’s recognizing that that’s the Psych 101, or actually the Psych 401 of our jobs is to somehow get these people to feel enough confidence in your ability to tell the story that they’re going to say yes and actually shoot the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you have managed to not be antipathetic and antagonistic, and you have been pleasant and yet also defended your intentions and made them feel not stupid, made them feel welcomed and comfortable and listened to.

It is absolutely true that when the inevitable time comes where there is a Game of Thrones like clash over the “Who gets to sit on the Iron Throne?” everyone will come to you. You have a choice. You can in the process of receiving notes you can hue towards the childish or you can hue towards the adult. And the adult is far less emotionally satisfying in the short term; far more emotionally satisfying in the long term.

And, frankly, it helps you get what you want. You are suddenly listened to and needed in a way that you might not have been otherwise. And that, I guess my final general concluding and guiding advice is this: When you’re in these meetings, if you are positive about something, whether it’s a suggestion or something that we should be doing, or something we all like, be as passionate as you can be.

If there is any negativity — if you are disagreeing with a note, if you’re disagreeing with a suggestion, a thought, or a direction — be as dispassionate as you can be. And you will find that you will be appreciated and you will be given more room to do your job and you will actually, I think, be hung up less on the hook of bad notes than you would have been otherwise.

**John:** I would agree. Craig, thank you for a good talk about notes.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** Woo! Let’s get to some questions.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our first question comes from Matthias from Taastrup, Denmark. He writes, “I read Paul Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver and several times he’s cheating the action scene description, or at least it feels that way. An example: ‘Travis’s cold, piercing eyes stare out from his cab parked across the street from the Palatine headquarters. He is like a lone wolf watching the warm campfires of civilization from a distance. A thin red dot glows from his cigarette.'”

So, the “lone wolf watching from the campfires for civilization” is his question about that line.

“A second example: ‘It is the same look that crossed his face in the Harlem deli. We are reminded with a jolt that the killer lies just beneath Travis’s surface.'”

And so the question is, is this cheating? Is it an exception? What do we think?

**Craig:** Both. It is cheating. [laughs] There’s — I mean, it certainly evokes something a director can go for. At least the director in reading that script says, “Okay, the intention here is that there is a specific look, a kind of hunger, an animalistic predatory hunger here that I want to kind of tie back and mirror in these two moments.”

But here’s the truth: of course it’s an exception, because Paul Schrader wrote an amazing screenplay. And in the end I don’t care what you do. I don’t care if you write it in crayon, and I don’t care if you write it backwards. If it’s really, really good no one cares, you know?

The only reason I say to people don’t cheat on that stuff as a matter of principle is because usually they’re cheating on it because they’re not doing what the non-cheated version should have done, which is reveal those things. But I think that through the actions, the actual filmable actions of that screenplay, obviously Schrader did do that. And so he gets to cheat because he wrote an awesome script.

**John:** I’m going to split my decision on this. I think “he is like a lone wolf watching the warm campfires of a civilization from a distance,” yes, it’s poetic, but that’s actually a filmable moment. That tells you what it feels like to be watching that scene. And you can sense how you might do that. And so I think that’s a filmable moment.

The second one I have a little bit more of a problem with. “We are reminded with a jolt that the killer lies just beneath Travis’s surface.” That pushes a little too far for me. And that starts with the “we are reminded,” it’s like, well, that’s just a lot of presumption on the behalf of the audience in this moment.

So, I think if you can give us a sense of what the visual description is that reminds us. You already say, like, “It’s the same look that crossed his face in the Harlem deli. The look of a killer, or the look of a killer right beneath the surface.” That feels a little bit less like cheating because you’re not going to the “we are reminded that.” The only thing that took me out of the prose there was those four words.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, those aren’t filmable, but apparently not also necessary to be a movie itself, I guess, you know.

**John:** And in a general sense I think you have to remember that what we’re putting on the page is things that you can see and things that you can hear, but the experience of watching a movie, there are things that echo from before. So, if it’s important that a look be a certain kind of look, you can describe that kind of look because that’s a thing that a lens can show you.

Or, sometimes there are sounds and if you can describe those sounds and give us things — if we’re going to recognize somebody that we saw before, that’s a thing that’s really easy to do in movies, but sometimes a little bit awkward to do on the page. But just do it on the page if it’s important. Don’t worry about that’s cheating. If we’re going to remember something that we saw before, that’s really simple to do with a camera. So, it’s absolutely fine to do it on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just don’t do anything cheaty that you need the audience to know, because they won’t. If you’re doing it intentionally cheaty to evoke something in the reader or to clue the director in onto what he ought to go for with the actor, that’s fine.

And I will say that this is a good example of how so many of these gurus and ding-a-lings are incorrect when they say, “Never tell the actors how to act in your script. That’s the director’s job.” Well, uh, no.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Not true at all. I think the screenplay is designed to be read and performed by actors. I think it’s perfectly fine for the screenwriter who came up with the whole thing to express their intention to the actors reading the script. It’s perfectly fine.

No, you don’t want to overdose the thing. You can’t read it that way. But, you know, we can’t… — These ding-a-lings out there who say, “Oh, well, directors hate that.” You know what? They don’t seem to hate it that much when you’ve written a great script that attracts great stars and a budget. Then they’re okay with it.

**John:** Somehow they are.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our next question is also about the words on the page. Gordon asks, “My question is about the TV treatments on your site and their informal tone.”

So, he’s talking about at johnaugust.com in the library I have the treatments that I’ve written for some TV stuff that I’ve done.

“Do they reflect a standard approach, or would they only be accepted from an established writer with a good track record? I was pleasantly surprised by the loose conversational style.”

And so this is what we talk about a lot, is what your voice is. And usually we’re talking about voice in terms of what it sounds like in a screenplay, but a treatment is a much less structured document in many ways. And it often does have a much chattier tone. And it’s a lot like if I was telling you what happens in this story. That’s kind of how I write treatments. They’re much talkier. They don’t necessarily refer to you, or they don’t refer to you or to me, but they feel like you’re in a conversation with somebody.

And, Craig, you don’t submit — you don’t have those kinds of documents very often, do you?

**Craig:** I do. I write treatments all the time?

**John:** Things that you share with people?

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely.

I don’t do it always. It depends on the project. But sometimes I want to do it because there are so many people involved that… — I mean, look, I always do it for myself anyway. But that’s really a collection of notes. And I put the notes in order so that I have all the ideas and things I’ve thought of for the movie. As I’m writing I can say, okay, I don’t forget, it’s a big catch-all bin.

But, like for instance on Identity Thief there was Scott Stuber and Pam Abdy who were the producers, along with Jason Bateman who was a producer. And there was Melissa McCarthy, and there was Donna Langley, and there was Peter Cramer, Scott Bernstein, and there was, and there was, and there was. There were a lot of people.

And when there’s a lot of people like that there’s a natural tendency in any environment for people to kind of pick off the writer here and there to get their thoughts in. And not everybody is aware of what you’re doing at any given point. And suddenly you turn the script in and two people are like, “Well what is this?” And three other people are like, “Well, that’s what we wanted,” and, “No, we didn’t.”

So, if there are a lot of people involved I will write a treatment and basically give it to everybody and say, “Yes we agree, or no we don’t agree” before I start writing.

I do write those very conversationally. I think that those treatments should evoke the feeling of a friend walking out of a movie and saying, “I’m going to tell you what just happened. The most amazing movie. Okay. All right, so it opens on…” You know? Because, why not?

**John:** Exactly. It goes back to the general principle of all kind of professional writing is you want to write something that people want to read. And if it’s loose and conversational they’re more likely to actually read it and not stop reading it and drop it and sit it down on the table at some point. So, if it’s easy for them to read, they’re more likely to go through it.

**Craig:** Yup. Totally.

**John:** Next question is super important. It comes from Chris Ford. He says, “I decided to try Final Draft’s competitor, Fade In, and I was surprised when it loaded up with a ‘1.’ at the top of the otherwise blank first page. They claim they consulted with industry pros. I think I remember Craig saying he was involved with the software or used it. Obviously it’s super easy to change, but I wanted to know where you both stood on this hugely controversial and super exciting issue of having a page number on the first page?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. I’m now opening up a draft of something to see if — I couldn’t even tell you if I have a number on the first page. While I’m doing that you will tell me what your position is.

**John:** I believe the first page should not have a page number on it.

**Craig:** That’s normal for like regular things, like Microsoft Word documents usually don’t do that.

**John:** If it’s the first page you know it’s the first page so why would you put a page number there, and it gets in the way. I also love to put just a little blank space at the top of the first page. It’s just my thing.

**Craig:** Well, I just checked. The Hangover Part III does not have a 1 on the first page.

**John:** So, industry pros tell you do not put a number on the first page.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, what I’ll do is I will tweet the fine author of that software and say, no, get rid of it. The script I’m about to write, I think I’m going to write it in Fade In.

**John:** Eh.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to give it a shot, see how it goes. Why not?

**John:** Absolutely. The second question here, then we can sidebar for a second. Martins in Latvia — I just love that we have listeners in Denmark and Latvia. “Here’s a plea on behalf of those who want to use Final Draft in languages other than the ones currently available. I trust there would be a lot out there. It’s time for Final Draft to switch to UTF-8 fonts.”

And a sidebar about UTF-8. Roman alphabets, there are various character collections you can use. And UTF-8 is a large character set that can include all the different sort of characters and marks for most sort of western languages.

“Since I used to be to get Final Draft to write in Latvian, my native tongue, under Windows XP and less so under Windows 7, but switching to the latest Mac has made it impossible. Now, I can only use it for English language writing and that’s a bummer.”

So, first I want to say, yes, you should be able to write in your own language and it’s frustrating when things don’t allow you to do that. I have found in general Macs to be really pretty good at sort of being able to let you write in whatever character set you need to write in. For Highland we were able to do that and people seemed to have very good luck writing in different western languages in Highland without great problems.

It’s sort of natural to the Mac to be able to do that. Final Draft right now is in this weird state where it’s kind of old and it’s kind of new and it’s not very Macintosh like.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I’m not surprised that you’re having this problem with it.

**Craig:** I don’t have anywhere near your expertise on fonts and so forth. I’ve used Apples, in all their variations, since 1983. And it always seemed to me that the company just was more friendly to alternative alphabets than Windows. So, I’ve never noticed an issue, but then again I don’t use Cyrillic, I don’t use Swedish, or anything like that.

What I do know is that Latvia is cool. And I’m glad that people… — You know, for a long time I thought Doctor Doom was from Latvia. But he’s…

**John:** Where is he actually from?

**Craig:** Latveria.

**John:** Oh, yeah. It’s a crucial distinction. You add that extra syllable, it changes everything.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, it changes it to a country that doesn’t exist, [laughs], most importantly. But I feel like people of Latvia probably do get the “Oh, yeah, Doctor Doom is from Latvia.” And then they go, “No, he’s from Latveria.” Latveria is no more related to Latvia than Argentina.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a totally different country.

**John:** So, there are people who are protesting the Czech Embassy because the bombers were Chechen. And it just makes me so angry and sad for America.

**Craig:** Ugh. You know, god. I’m just.. — People are getting dumber, and dumber. I don’t know if people are getting dumber, or it’s just that there are so many more avenues for them to express their stupidity.

**John:** I think there are more avenues for them to express their stupidity and it’s more easy to report on how stupid they are.

**Craig:** Yeah. Self report. [laughs]. Well, they self report and then we cover it.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, Twitter is like self-reporting stupidity central.

**Craig:** It’s true. Actually now after ever controversial or tragic event there is this thing that happens now that I just call idiot roundup where they’ll then roundup the 40 people who tweeted horrible, horrible things, who are then exposed to everybody. Like after Obama was reelected there was like here’s 40 incredibly racist tweets. And after Boston, here’s 40 incredibly stupid comments.

Now, it’s like the game is the day after — look who’s stupid on Twitter. I hate people.

**John:** I hate people, too.

Going back to screenwriting software for a second, one thing that came out this last week which we should talk about briefly is Slugline which is a plain text Fountain-based screenwriting app that I got to use when I was writing the ABC pilot. So, that was the unannounced software that I was using that I wrote in Fountain. And I love it. I think it’s actually a terrific little app.

And so it’s now in the Mac App Store. I think there’s some confusion. I didn’t make it. I was one of the people who helped make Fountain. I make the Highland app. Slugline is a completely different app that is sort of friends with Slugline but is a different thing.

You got to try it out this week, didn’t you?

**Craig:** I did. And for the life of me, I can’t remember. I liked it. There was something that was bugging me.

— Oh, yeah, I like it when a character speaks dialogue, then there’s a break for an action line, and then the character says “continues,” I like the “Joe (CON’T),” and I like that to be automatic. And this program doesn’t do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I would imagine it’s essentially useless for revisions and things like that as well. But, for a casual user it’s even more simple to use than most of them. It doesn’t use the return tab system. It’s smart enough to know, okay, you just start typing a character name in all caps, you must mean character.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the thing I appreciate most about Slugline is that you just start typing into it. And you never have to sort of like tab over and figure out which element you’re in, because in Fountain Syntax you’re always in one kind of element. And it’s smart enough to know that if you started with an uppercase line, and the next line doesn’t start uppercase, that must be a character name, that must be dialogue.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It just sort of magically does it. So, Highland is more like a plain text editor where everything stays over in the left hand margin and that’s just how it is. Slugline interprets in real time sort of what it thinks the elements are and does a really good job of sort of matching stuff up.

So, if it’s your style I would definitely recommend using Slugline.

**Craig:** Yeah. The other limitation of it, it’s just essentially baked into the way it does it. You know, I prefer a method where I tab and then I can type the first letter without doing a shift, you know?

But then, okay, the tab is a keystroke and so that’s sort of, okay, what’s more annoying: tab and then C, or Shift-C? Mm, you know, I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m just used to it.

**John:** You’re used to a certain way. And I will say that after having written the whole script in Slugline, then when I had to go through to do revisions in Final Draft I found it maddening to have to sort of figure out what element I was in as I started typing. Because there are times where you think, “Oh, I’m tabbed over, I’m in character.” But, no, I’m actually in a parenthetical or I’m in some other weird thing. And then I have to reformat to get back to the right thing.

**Craig:** You know, Final Draft man. It’s just, god, they bum me out because they have such an opportunity to improve that software and make it better for all the people who use it and they just default to, “Eh.”

**John:** Well, they did announce a roadmap and a plan. And so I don’t want to sort of dig too deep into it right now, but they announced Final Draft 9 and sort of where they’re moving. And so the new format will be FDX V9, or whatever. And they said, in the press release, I kind of was flattered because they said like they’re going to start having approved partners for the FDX format. I really kind of think that Highland was the official unapproved format that they got really frustrated that we were using their format without having official approval.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But when you’re based on XML you’re open format. Anyone should be able to do it.

**Craig:** Well, yeah.

**John:** It does sound like Final Draft is going to move — in their press release it says they’re moving to an online service so your script is in the cloud. There are wonderful things about being in the cloud. There are potentially really terrifying things about being in the cloud, about being in Final Draft’s cloud. So, it’s going to be interesting to see sort of how that all works.

**Craig:** I’m not into it. And, you know, look — here’s the killer app part of this that none of these guys have been able to figure out, because it involves network security issues, and that is allowing two people in two different places to work on the same Final Draft document at the same time.

Obviously by putting it in the cloud that becomes simple; it’s essentially a Google Docs. And so that part, I guess, is cool. I like that concept of it. It’s just, god, I wish they were better, you know?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s move onto other topics. Mike from Walnut Creek, California asked, “A, what would be a realistic annual earnings target for someone who ‘makes it’ as a feature screenwriter? Assuming the writer gets a healthy amount of work in a given year and perhaps at one of the top echelons of WGA feature writers who stay employed in any given year.” So, that’s the first one.

And I tried to just like, oh, I’ll just look up what the median —

[horn blares] What was that, Craig, on your side?

**Craig:** It sounds like it was like a truck.

**John:** That was nuts.

**Craig:** Yeah. We should leave it in. That’s what’s going on here all day long.

**John:** Leave it in.

So, I tried to look up what is the median feature screenwriter salary and I couldn’t actually find a useful number. And I kept going back to like 2007 and it was all related to the strike when they put up that average screenwriter’s salary which was, of course, really misleading.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know what the median is. I don’t think they’ve ever reported it. It’s a good question.

**John:** So, of course, the average salary would be to take how much the total earnings are of feature writers and divide it by the number of feature writers, or the number of employed feature writers, but that really kind of misrepresents what the experience is of being a feature screenwriter because some years you’re making a lot, and some years you’re making not very much at all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is a sort of feast or famine kind of thing. And so you have to anticipate that some years you’re going to make a lot and some years you’re going to make much, much less. Like this year I made much, much less because I was busy doing the musical so I just wasn’t working as much.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there are general tiers of things. The typically new screenwriters are going to work on one, maybe two things a year. Typically they’re making between $100,000 and $250,000 for a feature project. And, again, you have to take all these numbers, and I think we’ve walked through this before — reduce it by 15% to 25%, depending on whether or not you have a manager, because you have an agent, and you have a lawyer. And, of course, then taxes, and if you have a partner you can then lop it in half again. So, these numbers sounds a little sexier than they are.

The middle class of feature film writer, they generally define as between $250,000 to $550,000 for — and I think that’s a decent amount for a year’s work for somebody like that. Then you have writers with credits, you know, call them B+ list, I don’t care about the list names. And those are writers who are then, okay, you’re in the upper echelon. You’ve got a good quote. Your quote is maybe $400,000 against $800,000, or $500,000. And so they’re making between $500,000 and $1 million a year.

And then A-list screenwriters make on the low end $1 million a year, all the way up to David Koepp-ville or god only knows. [laughs] I mean, you know, there are writers who have made between $5 million and $10 million in a year.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It happens. So, millions. You know, A-list writers make millions of dollars.

**John:** Yeah. But I would say it’s important to keep in mind that there are fewer A-list writers than there are big NBA basketball players. I mean, there is a very small number of people who actually are making that much.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, you shouldn’t kind of like, “I’m going to be one of those people.” It’s great if that is a goal of yours, but if your goal is to be a working writer the actual money you’re making as a working writer is considerably less. And you should be just delighted to be a working writer because the number of people who tend to be screenwriters who have sold something, or were working writers but are not currently working writers, that’s a large percentage of the population as well.

**Craig:** For sure. I mean, when you say fewer than the NBA, it’s fewer than maybe four NBA teams. Maybe there are 40 screenwriters who made over $1 million last year working in feature films.

**John:** I don’t think there are that many. I bet if we went off the podcast and sort of actually just made a list, we’d recognize it’s a very, very small number.

**Craig:** It’s small. And it is more like being an All Star baseball player, you know. It’s so tiny. But, you can… — Look, you can make a lot of money being a screenwriter if you happen to be one of those. But, I personally think that anybody who goes into screenwriting should think that in success they are going to earn a comfortable living, a very comfortable living. They will be wealthy by many, many standards if they are able to do it over, and over, and over, and over. And that is where you see, because for a lot of people I know, a lot of writers I know, because there are writers I know that were there when I started. So, I’ve been able to watch different people in their different paths.

And there are writers who sell — they have a big script sale for $1 million and that feeds them for six years. You know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** it is not… — Don’t become a screenwriter to make money. That’s not going to be…

**John:** Yeah. Become a screenwriter to make movies. That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** Yup. Big time.

**John:** Become a stockbroker to make money.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Dan writes, “I thought you and Craig might want to start a Cut it Out list for clichés that come up in screenwriting like the ‘staring into the mirror’ example mentioned in the recent podcast. It might be fun to compile a list, get reader participation. It would also be a helpful tool for screenwriters to avoid all of these clams.”

I think that’s a terrific idea. So, if you have a suggestion for me and Craig of something that we just need to stop doing in scripts, tweet it to us and we’ll keep a list. If it’s longer than what can fit into a tweet, you can just mail it to ask@johnaugust.com. But, if it’s a short little thing, tweet it and we’ll make a list. We’ll maybe even retweet the really good ones, because that’s a great idea.

**Craig:** This is kind of like the action description version of the dialogue clam list we did. Love it.

**John:** Yes. So, on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And tweet us your suggestions for things that we should just stop doing in movies, things we need to Cut it Out.

**Craig:** But don’t put things that are in the movies I’ve done, [laughs], because you know, there are people out there who would be like, “Cut it Out, Craig Mazin writing screenplays. Cut it out.”

**John:** If you want to hash-tag it, just #CutItOut.

**Craig:** Yeah, oh nice. Well done. I keep forgetting about those hash-tags.

**John:** I’m very viral that way.

Drew in Taiwan writes, “Whereas box office gross is extremely accessible,” box office gross numbers he means, “probably owing to history and tradition it’s been difficult for me to find the numbers behind the profits of on-demand services or iTunes rentals and streaming sites like Netflix. A friend in the industry told me that studios don’t want to release this information because it gives them more bargaining power with talent or whoever else. What do you think about that theory? And where could I find these statistics?”

**Craig:** That’s a perfectly good theory. In general, business wants to release the least amount of information possible because it tends to muck their stuff up. I mean, information is power. The movie business is challenged in that regard because the theater collects tickets. And the studios make their money by finding out how many tickets the theater sold. The theater then takes a chunk of that and the studios take the other chunk. So, there needs to be independent, verifiable sourced information, hence Rentrack and I assume there’s other companies that do this as well.

It’s not like, for instance, Big Fish the musical, the production collects the tickets, right? I mean, you pay rent to the theater, but the money for the tickets goes to the production. Isn’t that right?

**John:** That’s not actually true.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Actually I would say theater box office, the actual box office is actually very similar to what film box office is.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** And so you can actually go to sites like BroadwayWorld and they will have the weekly to show exactly how many tickets were sold and what percentage of seats were sold. That’s actually all very public information.

**Craig:** Because the theaters do take a — is it a numerical cut based on the tickets you sell?

**John:** Yes. It’s because there’s house nuts. And so some of that stuff works very much like how it works in the film industry. And that was a surprise to me. So, I’m only just learning that it is such public information. But that’s why we can know what shows are struggling because it’s really public information.

**Craig:** It has to be because any time two different businesses are relying on a number, that number has to be shared.

**John:** Absolutely. And so if you are a participant in a show, like with Big Fish when we open on Broadway I will get a percentage of that box office, that’s just sort of the deal a writer has in that. And so that has to be a public figure. Granted, there are all sorts of things that get taken away from that. But there is some sort of public figure that can back up there.

Where I’ve often found, just studying the industry, trying to figure out video numbers in general, even before we get into online and streaming stuff, is very, very difficult and is much more fungible. So, you’ll find out video rental information or you’ll find out video sales through retailers, but it’s all much murkier than it is with true box office.

**Craig:** Yes, it is. They do publish DVD sales lists. They generally aren’t as accessible because just aren’t as interested. So, for instance, most news sources won’t subscribe to those sources because they just don’t care. But, they exist. The problem — the reason that they’re murkier is because these kinds of sales take place in a very diffuse manner. It’s true that the first week a DVD is available for sale — and we’re talking in 2006 terms now — you’ll sell a lot of DVDs.

But, DVDs are constantly being sold. They’re constantly being sold — it’s library stuff. And sometimes there is suddenly a spike in interest in a DVD because, you know, something happens, or people are interested in the movie.

For Netflix and for downloads and all the rest of it, I guess the basic rule is if they don’t need to publicly share admissions, actual people going through turnstile, then they’re probably not going to tell you much about it.

**John:** Absolutely. And the retailers, the equivalence of that, have good reasons for not disclosing those figures if they don’t have to. So, Amazon doesn’t want to tell you how much they paid for the streaming rights to that movie, or how many DVDs they sold of that movie because they want that information for themselves, because that’s power for them.

So, I agree that it’s frustrating and I don’t have good answers.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s the case, if it does poorly it’s embarrassing to them, so they don’t want you to know. And if it does really well then they don’t want you to know how much sick amount of cash they just made off of someone else’s product.

**John:** Absolutely. So, they’ll show you charts, but I think they show you the charts because they know that charts can sometimes generate sales in itself. So, they want to show you the top 20 selling DVDs because maybe you’ll be one of those top 20 selling DVDs. But it’s just one of those self-fulfilling prophecies many times.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Our last question of the day is a long one. So, I’m going to take a deep breath as I read into this. Emma in Rochester, New York, and I’m actually changing Emma’s name for reasons that you’re going to understand why, she writes:

“In December 2010 I began writing a screenplay about and for somebody. It was about a man I barely knew but I thought might have been in love with. We were never ‘together,’ in fact we were barely even friends. I told him how I felt, he rejected me, and then I went on and wrote this screenplay mapping out in detail how much I wanted him.

“I’m a woman with no experience. No experience — read between the lines — so in reality I guess it makes sense that I would do something idiotic that others might even presume is something psychotic. Michel Gondry once said, ‘Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.’

“My idea of writing a screenplay for someone that didn’t want to, but doing so in trying to make the screenplay hilarious, funny, heartwarming, innovative, and endearing to the point of possibly making that person want to take a second look at you as a woman to me was just that, ‘A great idea on the verge of being stupid.’

“It’s now been 2.5 years since I wrote the first page of the screenplay. In those 2.5 years I’ve only seen this man three times in brief passing at social events. We’re no longer in contact, but he does not know about the screenplay. I went to therapy last year because of major depression and other things, not just him, and am now in a better place. I have stopped editing the screenplay.

“The script is done but in need of a heavy rewrite and edit. Now that I am in this better place I feel odd going back to it. But in the past two years it has always been my goal. People tell me not to ever show this to him in case it ever goes somewhere professionally and that I shouldn’t care what he thinks, but in all honestly I don’t ever think I could not care what he thinks. After all, if anything, he was my muse and to me I care most about what he thinks and I still want to show this to him despite I have more or less moved on.”

I’m going to skip three paragraphs here.

**Craig:** [laughs] Okay.

**John:** “I worry that writing this screenplay is no longer ‘good for the psyche.’ And in the same breath I feel like the longer it sits there I’ll wonder what if I had tried doing something with the script. My question is how do I write about someone who has become a distant memory to you and how do you infuse that passion needed to make a good story out of this when this person is someone you’re not even sure as to whether you have feelings for them anymore?”

I muddled that sentence, but you get where we’re at in this situation, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, I kept waiting for that moment when Emma from Rochester would say, “I’ve gotten over this unhealthy obsession with this guy who is, as they say, just not that into you. And now I’m looking at the screenplay as a standalone work of art but I want to adjust it so that it’s not specifically about the things that are irrelevant, like my former obsession with him, and rather could just be something that would be universally interesting to an audience. How do I do that?”

That’s a question I can answer. The problem is she never got there. She’s still…

**John:** And I don’t think it was even in the paragraphs I cut out.

**Craig:** [laughs] No. So, she’s still hung up on this guy. And I have to tell you, Emma, that from everything you’ve described here, when you say, “I’ve more or less moved on,” it seems less than more. And you should move on. If you want to write screenplays to entertain audiences in a theater, then do so and write another one. No one has just one screenplay.

And I would suggest, I’m not saying throw this one out, I’m not saying burn it, but put it in a drawer and wait for the day where it is not an instrument to achieve a romantic goal, because that ain’t happening.

**John:** Yeah. I chose to read this letter because I completely relate to her. And I completely relate to her situation. And I think a lot of writing is sort of obsession. And, you know, it’s exploring those feelings that you sort of dare not actually explore otherwise. And so I’ve been in her situation where you sort of fall in love with people that are never going to love you back. And some of the early writing I did in college was that sort of situation.

And that’s not necessarily healthy or good, but it’s really normal. And so I want to make sure that I underline that what she’s sort of experiencing and going through is totally normal.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** At the same time I think your suggestion in general is absolutely correct. She does need to set this one aside and work on something completely different that intrigues her and interests her because her interests as a person and her interests as a writer will often overlap but they can’t be exactly the same thing.

She can create a work of fiction and that’s wonderful, but she’s not going to be able to make that work of fiction transform her reality. That’s just not a healthy expectation about what her writing can do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Screenplays are not particularly good at persuading individuals to fall in love with you. Screenplays are, I think, a great avenue as is much art — a great avenue to exercise any demons you have, to examine your own behavior.

Let me tell you, Emma, that if you wrote a screenplay about this, that would be interesting. If you wrote a screenplay about somebody who is obsessed with somebody who didn’t care about them and really put themselves out there through work of art and was rejected and then found a way to move on, that’s empowering and that’s terrific.

Slightly related, did you ever see The Boys in the Band, John August?

**John:** Yeah, I’ve seen it. Yeah, of course.

**Craig:** So, I’d never even heard of this movie and our friend, Ted Griffin, fine screenwriter, he’s reading the William Friedkin autobiography. And he gets to this chapter where he’s talking about The Boys in the Band. And The Boys in the Band is one of these movies that you can watch on YouTube, like somebody separated it into 12 chapters. And, frankly, it is a movie that you absolutely could watch on YouTube because it takes place in essentially a room. It was a stage play that was very successful and then they shot it almost true to being — it was very stage like in its production.

Fascinating movie. I mean, it’s ridiculous at times. It’s dated and somewhat over the top. But, I kind of loved it.

**John:** I think you need to explain the sort of context. It was one of the very first…

**Craig:** It’s the first.

**John:** …movie depictions of gay men as not monsters.

**Craig:** Well, kind of. Yeah. It was the first filmed depiction of gay men being men, just people, and not tragic figures that end up killing themselves, or objects of ridicule, or side characters.

And it was the first movie that treated gay romance as just romance and problems of gay men as just human problems. And the guy who wrote the play, I think his name is Mart Crowley, was gay at a time when that was almost completely wrapped up in a kind of self-loathing and outsider-ness. And he wrote this play to kind of exercise a lot of demons.

And the main character of the play is a terrible person. And that is, he’s like, “That’s kind of me. I was kind of that guy and this was part of the exercising of that.” And he’s just a cruel, mean person who is wrapped up in hating himself and hating his — both celebrating and hating his homosexuality.

And I thought just as an exercise in cleansing yourself, this was a remarkable act of courage. And so for Emma I would say, okay, cleansing yourself of something is a great muse. It’s a great impetus to write a screenplay. But, feeding something that is unhealthy is not.

**John:** Yeah. Right now she’s sort of kindling her obsession.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And she’s able to revisit all the feelings she has about this guy by working on this script. And that is not going to be a healthy choice for her life or for her writing career.

So, I agree that it may be fascinating for her to pursue sort of the introspection of what is this character who is obsessed with this thing, and what is the funny version of that who like puts on the play. That could be a great story. But, what might also be a better choice is just something that’s completely not that, something else that is actually interesting; something bright that she can move towards rather than this dark sort of tumbling thing that is never going to resolve well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But, if there’s a last bit of encouragement I can put on you here, some of the greatest works of art, of literature, have come out of this kind of obsession over people.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so if you look at Jane Austen’s work it’s kind of about girls obsessed with guys in a way that’s, you know, I don’t know if it was specifically Jane Austen’s situation, but it kind of feels like it was — like that inaccessible guy who finally loves her, that’s a great story and that’s a great thing to pursue. So, you shouldn’t feel afraid about feeling things too deeply. Just don’t keep recycling that feeling to get stuck in this loop with this script about this guy who’s never going to love you back.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And also I would say just in a general sense, you need to — in getting over this guy you need to recognize — this is the sort of self help portion of the podcast — you just need to find somebody else who recognizes that you’re awesome and who isn’t this guy. And recognize that they’re awesome for recognizing that you’re awesome and start living a happy, healthy life.

**Craig:** Yeah. Big time. Absolutely.

**John:** And that’s our self help section for the show today.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing which I worry could be your One Cool Thing, but I’m going to say it first so that I get credit for it.

**Craig:** Not a chance. Not a chance.

**John:** Okay. So, my One Cool Thing is a website that Craig knows. It’s called the Internet K-Hole and it’s just amazing. And so it’s a photo blog, and when I say a blog I mean it’s literally in Blogger. And so it already feel vintage just because it’s in Blogger.

So, you go through the site and you feel like you’re looking through some stranger’s photo album, like there is this weird, sort of bizarre druggy nostalgia that’s just super compelling. It kind of feels like — it’s like rock-and-roll and skateboard culture, but there’s also a lot of nudity and there are kittens.

It is not at all safe for work. It’s not safe for children. It’s not safe for…it’s just not safe.

**Craig:** No. But it’s not gory and it’s not particularly explicit.

**John:** No, no, it’s not violent. But if you don’t want to randomly come across female genitalia, don’t go to this, because you will come across female genitalia.

**Craig:** You will. Yes.

**John:** So, don’t look at this at work. Don’t look at it with your work computers.

What I found so amazing about it, it was this woman Babs, she took some of the photos but mostly she just curated and she created sort of this alternate universe where this thing is happening. And so it’s photos from the ’70s, ’80s, probably early ’90s, and every once and awhile you’ll come across like, oh, there’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers before they were the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Or, there’s Siouxsie & the Banshees.

But what it reminded me most of was there’s this great performance thing in New York called Sleep No More…

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s funny. I was talking about that with Ted Griffin as well.

**John:** …which is sort of vaguely inspired by Macbeth. It’s like this site-specific sort of thing you wander through that has narrative but weirdly kind of loops in on itself. And it reminded of that which is you felt like you just tumbled into somebody’s strange dream and you were sort of smothered under too many blankets in a way that’s fantastic.

So, I didn’t go through all of the site. I know people who have gone through everything and sort of experienced the very depths of it, but it’s worth a visit if you are not afraid of genitalia and kittens.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And rock-and-roll lifestyle, and are not on a work computer. I would recommend you take a look into the Internet K-Hole.

**Craig:** It’s so cool. I mean, there’s something about it that manages to recall my memories better than my memories because it’s so mundane. I guess if I were to say one thing that unites all the photos she’s selected here is they’re just total mundanity. They are tacky, but the point isn’t look how tacky. It’s not like People of Walmart which is like, oh my god.

Sometimes the pictures are nothing more than two kids, one drinking from a hose and the other one laughing. But it’s the clothing, it’s the quality of the photographs. It’s all — it truly is a celebration of the most mundane aspects of growing up in the ’70s, and ’80s, and ’90s. And so much of it reminded me of what Staten Island was like in 1979. Just boring and off, but not off in a…

**John:** But kind of awesome in a way of, like you now, of drinking beer on a porch kind of way.

**Craig:** Right. It’s funny, when you go through you remember. Like for instance, I’d forgotten the shape of beer bottles. And then everyone is holding those Michelob bottled and I remember my dad holding that Michelob bottle. And I’d forgotten that shape. I’d forgotten so much. It is a cool — it’s cool. It’s bizarre. Totally.

And I guess that’s the thing. It’s bizarre without trying to be bizarre. It’s not bizarre enough to even qualify as bizarre, that’s what’s so bizarre about it.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. It’s honest in a way that’s just sort of kind of fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. Very cool. That is a very cool thing. Enjoy tripping through that.

My Cool Thing this week is something called Slacker Radio. Are you familiar with Slacker Radio?

**John:** I don’t know what it is. Tell me.

**Craig:** Slacker Radio is, I mean, this is just another nail in the coffin of FM radio. It’s internet-based radio. And I know that you can access it through their website, but I just access it in my car. I think a lot of cars now are coming equipped for it the way that they now become equipped for satellite radio.

And so if your car has essentially a 3G connection or you buy a unit for your car that has a 3G connection, as the Tesla does, then you have access to Slacker. And here’s the beautiful part about Slacker.

So, first of all, it sounds awesome. I don’t know how they made a 3G streaming signal sound better through a really nice car stereo system than either HDFM radio or satellite radio, but they do, so that’s pretty remarkable right there.

And the best part is there are channels, sort of, but not really. Really what there is — I can imagine it’s basically a database of tagged songs. So, for instance, let’s say I want to listen to Les Mis. So I type in Les Mis into their little search thing and, okay, there’s the album Les Mis. I tap on that. That instantly creates a channel called Les Mis. That channel doesn’t just play songs from Les Mis. It plays songs from Les Mis, but it also plays songs that apparently other people who like Les Mis like.

So, it makes an instant radio station for you. And you can customize it and so forth. But the coolest part of it is you can pause. [laughs] And this is like — remember when TiVo happened and you were like, “Oh my god, I’m pausing TV!”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s so great to pause a song. So, when you’re listening to a song in your car, you pull up to where you’re going, and you turn your car off. When you get back in your car it picks it up from where it was.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** That’s great. And, also, if you don’t like the song that’s playing you just hit next.

**John:** I like it. Craig, what is the model that’s sustaining this?

**Craig:** It’s a subscription-based model. I think that the subscription is bundled with the Tesla. So, it’s essentially the satellite radio model I believe. So, check out Slacker Radio. I don’t know honestly how you get it in your car if it’s not built in already, but I would imagine there’s little thingies the way there used to be for satellite radio, remember when everybody had that little stupid thing. It’s awesome.

Just the fact that, oh, a song comes on, I don’t like it? Next. Wow.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** That is cool.

**John:** Great. Craig, thank you for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** So, standard boilerplate here. If you like our podcast, subscribe to us in iTunes so that we know how many people are listening. And if you are there and you want to leave a rating, that helps other people find us and that’s awesome.

On Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

Notes for this episode, and all episodes of the show, can be found at johnaugust.com/podcast.

If you have a question for us you can write ask@johnaugust.com. There’s some suggestions on the site for about how to phrase those questions so that we’re more likely to answer them.

We do a Three Page Challenge every once and awhile, so if you want to submit the first three pages of your script to us go to johnaugust.com/threepage. That’s spelled out “threepage.” And there are instructions there for how to send those in.

And, that’s it for tonight. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [Slugline](http://slugline.co/)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [Fade In](http://www.fadeinpro.com/)
* [Final Draft](http://www.finaldraft.com/)
* Screenwriting.io on [page numbering and other basic formatting](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-standard-screenplay-format/)
* Tweet your clams to [@johnaugust](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) and [@clmazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) with #CutItOut
* [Scriptnotes, episode 52](http://johnaugust.com/2012/grammar-guns-butter) featuring Go Into The Story’s list of dialogue clams
* [Rentrack](http://www.rentrak.com/) and [BroadwayWorld](http://broadwayworld.com/)
* [The Boys in the Band](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001CQONPE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Internet K-Hole](http://internetkhole.blogspot.com/2013/01/dead.html?zx=87aad0c98be70c6c) (Warning: NSFW!)
* [Sleep No More](http://sleepnomorenyc.com/) NYC
* [Slacker Radio](http://www.slacker.com/)
* How to [submit your question](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question)
* OUTRO: [Obsession](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4wM9w79_YI) cover by TERMINATRYX

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-your-very-first-screenplay).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 58 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, you may be familiar with the sort of classic technique in dramatic writing where you create tension by letting the audience know something that the characters on screen don’t know.

So, an example: you’d have like a spy who places a bomb underneath the table, and then when the hero is eating dinner at that table, some of that dinner is filled with tension, because you as the audience know there’s a bomb under the table and the hero does not know there’s a bomb under the table.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** A good, classic technique. And that’s sort of what I’m feeling right now, because the audience, our listeners, have information that I don’t have.

**Craig:** Right. About Halloweenie.

**John:** Yes. It’s called Frankenweenie, but thank you so much.

**Craig:** I know. [laughs] I’ve been calling it Halloweenie lately. I just like that; I don’t know why.

**John:** I like it, too. So, we’re recording this on a Friday, a Friday afternoon, which is the day that Frankenweenie comes out. But most of our audience will be listening to this on Tuesday at the earliest.

— Maybe we should have, like, people could pay money to hear it early. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, like a Scriptnotes Premium?

**John:** Premium. Yeah, like — we would charge extra money rather than nothing.

**Craig:** Double nothing.

**John:** Double nothing. Yes, exactly. You could pay zero dollars rather than free.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, anyway, our audience is hearing this on Tuesday. So, they are knowing how well the movie did. So, we got great reviews, and that’s all great, but in terms of how we did at the box office, they have information that I don’t have.

They are living in one of three possible futures: the future where we did outstandingly well, the future where we did fine, and the future in which we didn’t do as well as we might have hoped.

And I would love to know which future our audience is living in, but I really have no good sense of that, because the tracking on the movie has been just bizarre. And so, like, the people who you usually go to ask, “How much do you think the movie will make?” they have said like, “Oh, it will make between $10 million and $30 million this weekend.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very, very difficult to track children’s movies. I mean, first of all congratulations; the reviews were outstanding, so it’s always good to see.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** The way tracking works is they call people up at home and they say, “What race are you? What gender are you? How old are you? Here are a bunch of movies. First of all, what are movies you’ve heard of — we’re not going to say any names.” That’s called unaided awareness. “Now, here’s a bunch of movies, have you heard of those?” That’s called aided awareness.

Then, “Which of these movies would you definitely recommend to friends,” or, I’m sorry, “which of these movies are you definitely interested in seeing?” And then, “Can you tell us which of these movies would be your first choice to see?” And then, “Which of the movies that are actually available for you to see — which one of these would be your first choice to see?”

The problem with kids’ movies is that kids’ movie-viewing is driven by moms, mostly, and kids. And a lot of times moms aren’t aware of what their kids want to see until it’s Saturday at noon, so very difficult to get a sense ahead of time what kids’ movies are going to do. They often surprise people. Typically they surprise you in a good way. Sometimes they Oogielove all over you, and then you’re just crying.

**John:** I don’t think anyone was surprised by Oogielove. That was not a surprise to anyone. But, like, the surprise last weekend was the Hotel Transylvania which did much better than people were expecting. And so the second weekend of whatever that movie will be, even if it drops a tremendous amount of money, will be a lot of money. So, people will go see that movie because it’s out there in theaters as well.

Anyway, it shouldn’t really matter that much. I’m delighted the movie did so well. It’s not going to help me or hurt sort of how much it does, but you want people to come see the movie. You want it to be successful.

So, I’ve been trying not to… — I know that the reviews are good because I sort of the scan the page of Rotten Tomatoes. This time I’m trying not to actually read the reviews because I find I can just sort of get sucked into a K-hole of reading all the reviews, which is just not helpful or productive to anyone.

But, my new time suck has been going on Twitter and just doing a Twitter search for Frankenweenie.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** And so you see all the people who are just seeing the movie right then. And so at midnight on the east coast, or two in the morning on the east coast before I went to bed, I could see all the people who were just coming out of Frankenweenie and crying and talking about how much they liked it, which was really nice.

**Craig:** That is terrific. I totally know where you’re coming from. I used to be obsessed with reviews, and obsessed with this, and obsessed with that. But Twitter has not only supplanted the importance of all that in my mind, I think frankly it’s just eliminating the actual practical value of critics. I’m not talking about their theoretical value, or their intellectual value, or cultural value, just their practical value of “Should I go see a movie or not? Let me check a particular critic. Let me check Metacritic. Let me check Rotten Tomatoes.”

It seems entirely driven by Twitter. So, even when the Identity Thief teaser hit, I went and searched and was getting — just kind of rolling through the reactions. And people are super honest, which is great. And it was a good reaction, so it’s always good to see.

But, you should be — eyes glued to Twitter, all weekend. But, you also know — I don’t know if people know this — but I mean, I guess most people by now know by Saturday morning or even frankly by tonight you’ll have a pretty decent idea of what the movie is going to do.

**John:** Absolutely. By tonight we’ll know whether sort of grownups, how many grownups went to see it. And based off of that they can do their little metrics and figure out with this kind of movie what they could expect for a Saturday, which would be a much bigger day for families, and Sunday, which is also a big day for a family movie.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, exactly. So, they just sort of compare it to a similar film and use the same multiplier and you should… — But, I would be shocked if it were on the low end of that. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were on the high end. So, good luck.

**John:** Yeah. Fingers crossed. But, I thought we might escape from this stress by reverting to a simpler time in the podcast today and really think back to what it was like when we were writing our very first scripts. Because before you have a movie that you have to worry about NRG tracking, you have this first screenplay that you’re trying to write. And so I thought today would be a walk down the hallways of history back to the time when we were not screenwriters yet, and we had not finished a script, and we were just getting started.

And so I don’t think I know — what was the first screenplay you ever read?

**Craig:** Screenplay I ever read? It was probably, oh, that’s a really good question.

**John:** As a related question, when were you aware that there was such a thing as screenwriting?

**Craig:** Pretty early on.

**John:** You grew up in a neighborhood with writers.

**Craig:** I knew in high school that there were screenwriters. I don’t know if I knew in middle school.

**John:** So, what do you think was the first time you started thinking about the script behind a movie? Because to me, I’ll give you my example first, is my brother and I had rented War of the Roses on VHS. And so we watched it and I was like, “I love this movie.” And then we rewound it and my brother went upstairs and I, like, I started just playing the movie again and started writing down everything people said.

And, I realized, “Oh, you know what? Someone must have written the things they’re saying. Like, there’s a whole plan for this.” Which sounds incredibly naïve, but I guess I just didn’t really realize that movies were sort of like plays. I’d read plays, but I didn’t realize that movies must have worked the same way. And so, just on a sheet of legal paper I was like trying to figure out what scenes were and what — I was trying to reverse engineer War of the Roses.

**Craig:** Huh. I actually remember before ever reading anything, I actually remember writing a script in — I wrote a script in eighth grade. So, I must have been aware of it. I didn’t write a script with proper FADE IN, and INT./EXT., or anything like that, but we were supposed to do a skit in our drama class and I wrote the whole thing.

**John:** Yeah, but that was a play, though. Because you’d experienced plays before. So was it more like a play, or was it really meant to be a script for filming something?

**Craig:** No, it was definitely more like a play, because we could not film anything.

— Hold on, I have to pee. If I don’t pee now it’s going to be a disaster.

**John:** Okay, go pee.

**Craig:** I can feel it. I’ll be right back.

**John:** So, Craig thinks we’re going to cut this part out of the podcast, but no; I’m actually going to just leave it in. So, this is a chance for us to talk about Craig while he’s not around.

Yup.

Just talking.

**Craig:** Uh! So much better.

**John:** Good. I talked a lot while you were gone. So, Stuart may leave that in, or may cut it out.

**Craig:** I think it’s great.

**John:** Yeah. Honesty in the podcast at this point.

**Craig:** I had to pee.

**John:** Yeah. We’re at episode 58. We’re not going to hide anything here.

**Craig:** No. Because if I try to pee in a bottle or something like that — I mean, if they can hear an electronic cigarette, they’re going to hear pee.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true. You shouldn’t try to pee in a bottle.

So, you were saying that you wrote this little skit, or sketchy kind of thing. So you had a sense of what a play was like. But to me it was a weird change, because I had a read a lot of plays. I’d read Shakespeare and I read sort of The Importance of Being Earnest, but I just hadn’t associated that movies were written the same way.

So, the first script I was able to find — this is Boulder, Colorado; this is early ’90s — the only script I could find was Steven Soderbergh’s script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, because that was published in a book. It was his production diary and his script. And so I bought that, I read it, and then I read it like while the movie was playing. And I was like, “Oh my god, everything they’re saying is in there, and this is what a scene is. And this EXT must be exterior and INT must be interior,” which sounds so hopelessly naïve now, but this was a time before the internet was everywhere, and before you could sort of find that information.

I had maybe, like, Premiere Magazine as my only source of film information. And that was just a revelation. So, first off, thank you Steven Soderbergh for making that movie and publishing your script. But it actually was one of the reasons why on my own website I do publish as many of the scripts as I can, because I feel like I want people to be able to see what the scripts were like behind the movies.

**Craig:** I think probably the first screenplay-type material I ever read — I guess it was more teleplay material — was in 1991, the summer of 1991, I had gotten an internship through the Television Academy. And I came out to LA that summer between my junior and senior year, and I worked in the current programming department. And that was the first time I was exposed to teleplays. So, I was reading scripts for The Simpsons.

**John:** How lucky are you?

**Craig:** — And I was reading scripts for their other sitcoms and their not-sitcoms. And I distinctly remember being surprised at how dead it all seemed on the page. That was interesting to me. Learning how to fill that in, just from text to images in your mind. It’s weird; you almost have to learn how to read before you can learn how to write, because screenplays are such a strange animal. That was probably the beginning, yeah.

**John:** It was also a strange situation reading Simpsons scripts because the scripts for an established TV series tend to be much less detailed in terms of scene description, because you don’t have to introduce who Homer Simpson is. And so you were reading a very dry version of what a script would be.

What was the first script you tried to write?

**Craig:** Well, I started — the very first things I tried to write were television scripts. I thought I would break into sitcoms. So, the very first script I ever wrote was a spec script for Frasier I believe. And I did that with my partner at the time.

**John:** The very first thing I tried to write was, well, I sort of transcribed an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So, literally, I recorded it and then I wrote it all down. And then I tried to sort of reverse engineer what the script was like. And, so, all the dialogue I used from the dialogue that I saw in the show, but I tried to make the scene description feel like what the actual scene description probably was for it. It was a good exercise. I would recommend it to any high school student who’s listening who wants to sort of figure it out.

So, I was obsessed with, like, “Oh, I’m going to write a spec episode of Star Trek and…” you know, because sometimes Star Trek at that era would take a spec episode and actually produce it. That was my first obsession. And then I decided I was going to adapt Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s not at all ambitious.

**John:** No, not at all. And so I got through about two and a half pages of that, because it’s a simple little story of the American south when told with multiple narrators and many flashbacks. Easy.

**Craig:** Yeah. No problem.

**John:** No problems. But, when I finally came out to Los Angeles I had the opportunity to read a ton of screenplays and realize sort of all the things I didn’t know. And one of the great luxuries of the Stark Program that I was in is that we had at USC a great film library. So, you could check out all these scripts, you know, James Cameron’s Aliens, but like everything you could possibly ever want.

And Laura Ziskin, who taught our very first development class, she had her own library, so everybody could check out two scripts from her. I learned how to write up coverage. You could even go and compare two different drafts. So, you could see, like, an early draft of Hero and the shooting draft. You’d see sort of all the changes that happened along the way. And that was fascinating. And that got me over some of my fear of it. Because when you first encounter the screenplay form, it’s just alien. It’s not like any other kind of writing you’re going to experience.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So in addition to these great scripts we had to read at USC, I also started interning. And so I wan interning at a little production company called Prelude Pictures that was based at Paramount. So I would read scripts for them and write up coverage. And at first it was free, and then I got a different job where I got paid for it. But I was reading a bunch of honestly terrible screenplays. And that was really useful to me, too, because I was reading these great screenplays in class of these like produced movies, and I was reading these bad screenplays. And to be able to compare and contrast the two of those was fantastic.

And at the same time, I was starting to write my own screenplays. And it taught me a lot of what I didn’t want to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly. You know, the thing about comedy — and I remember at the time, this is when I started thinking about writing comedy screenplays. It was 1994/1995, in that zone, and PG comedy was sort of ruling the day. Family comedy was ruling the day at the time; at least it seemed that way to me.

And I just sort of thought, “Well, you know, I’ll try my hand at that.” And so many of those scripts were bad. And, so, in a weird way I had the kind of opposite instruction. I was reading scripts that I thought were goofy but they were successful. And I kind of [laughs] wandered down a weird path there for awhile because I thought, “You know, in that kind middle class-ish, sort of 24-year old way I should probably just write what they’re buying, shouldn’t I?” I didn’t know any better.

**John:** Yeah. Very much the high concept PG comedy was the sweet spot at that time, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** So, I want to talk about some of the common characteristics I’ve noticed in people’s first screenplays. Over the years I’ve read a lot of people’s first scripts. And they’re often like, you know, friends of colleagues. Classically sort of like your gardener’s sister wrote a script and would you read it? And I try not to read those, but I do sometimes need to read them. Or, just other people who I think are smart overall, but they’re just new to the format.

So, some characteristics I’ve noticed of first screenplays, and in listing these hopefully people will recognize them and try to move past them. And you can add to these as you hear.

If I see a scene that’s three pages long, it’s probably a first script, or a very early script. Produced screenplays tend to have short scenes. They don’t tend to go on for a very long time. Three pages of, you know, a speech. If a speech goes on for more than a page, that’s unusual.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have a general rhythm where scenes should — the typical scene, not big ones, but typical scenes should fit in a day of work. And a day of work on a major motion picture film is 2.5 pages. And any time I get past 2.5 pages I start getting a little itchy.

**John:** Well, and the experience of watching a movie, if you actually were to pull out your stop watch and as you were clocking a movie, you would recognize that very few scenes are more than three minutes long. There will occasionally be some scenes that are more than three minutes long, but three minutes in one place and one time with two people talking feels like an eternity in most movies.

**Craig:** For sure. And I just want to point out that there’s a distinction between scenes and sequences. So, when you’re thinking about the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s one big sequence that begins with a shot of a mountain and ends with Indy flying away on a plane. But there are a lot of little scenes within it.

**John:** Yes.

Another characteristic of first screenplays: shot-gunning characters. So, if I see, if you introduce eight characters in the first page or two pages, that’s not going to be a happy outcome most likely. If you’re trying to overload us with a bunch of people all at once and tell us everything about them we’re not going to be able to keep them straight. More sophisticated screenplays tend to sort of understand the readers and recognize, “I’m going to highlight these people who are important and save other people for later on in the story.”

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Same token: when you over-describe a minor character. So, that doesn’t mean everybody needs to be Security Guard #2, but if you’re giving a lot of description to a minor character who’s never going to appear again, that’s not a good idea. Because we as the audience and the reader are going to think, “Well, this person must be really important so I’m going to ascribe a lot of mental energy to remembering this person,” when they’re never going to come back again.

**Craig:** Another good one.

**John:** Weird formatting is always a standout for me, because people tend to freak out about formatting, but if it is wrong it feels wrong.

When did you feel like you understood the formatting of scripts?

**Craig:** Well, I think I started basically by just mimicking the formatting that I saw in actual screenplays. I picked up a copy of Syd Field’s…it wasn’t the Syd Field book that people normally read. It was a book called Syd Field’s Workbook, or something like that. And it was very technical and really just about where-do-you-put-the-margins and interior and exterior. And so I just sort of copied that faithfully. So, I don’t think I ever went down a weird formatting hole.

**John:** What were you writing in originally?

**Craig:** Believe it or not, Final Draft.

**John:** Oh, you started on Final Draft?

**Craig:** I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing all the work of writing in Microsoft Word like that, and it was — I want to say it was 1993. And I was working at an ad agency and a guy who was working there was friends with this dude named Mark Madnick who had invented this really cool program called Final Draft. And it was on floppy disks. And I drove to Santa Monica and they had a little bungalow there. And I bought it right from them. I bought it from Mark Madnick. [laughs] I wrote him a check and he gave me two floppies for Final Draft 2.0.

**John:** That’s fantastic. How much was the check?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Was it like $200?

**Craig:** I mean, my guess would be something like $40. I’m just guessing.

**John:** All right. Because it’s now up to like $199.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was nowhere near that. I couldn’t have afforded it.

**John:** I started in Microsoft Word. And so in preparation for this podcast I was looking at early script and it is in like an ancient version of Microsoft Word. It’s very easy to sort of slam on Final Draft for some of the things that have gotten frustrating over the years, but if you try to write a screenplay in just Microsoft Word and do all the formatting yourself it is really maddening. Like when you have to do a page break, that becomes just a brutal, brutal exercise. So, it was a good innovation.

But my first, up through Go, I never had Final Draft. And so that was all Microsoft Word.

**Craig:** Awful.

**John:** Awful. Awful stuff

A common feature of many first scripts is what I call D&D descriptions: “There are,” “there is.” You’re talking about a room as if you were the dungeon master describing the room in which the player characters have come into. And so it’s very much like, you know, “15 feet to the left there is this,” as if characters need to figure out how to avoid traps on the floor. They’re not sort of painting the scene the way a screenwriter does.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another thing I sometimes see is a weird over-appreciation for one’s own dialogue. The characters get very florid and a little too over-literate as they speak. And you get these long — I think first time screenwriters love speeches. They all think that the movie is going to be chock full of those great monologue moments. And, if you have one monologue in a movie that’s a lot. Most movies have none.

**John:** I also notice first time screenwriters have a hard time getting a character into a scene. There is a lot of like walking through doors.

**Craig:** Yeah. Shoe leather.

**John:** Yeah, they’re shoe leather. Characters will say hello and goodbye and do all of this stuff that people do in the real world, but there’s ways you find how to do in screenplays where you don’t need those intros and outros and you can just, you know, get to the meat of the scene much quicker.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** By the same token, a lot of times these movies will spend 20 pages setting stuff up, and you will have no sense of where this is going. And in most movies, quite early on you get a sense at least that you’re on a path to some place. You don’t need to know all the details, but if you’re just spinning your wheels, you have no idea what the next, what the characters are trying to do after 20 pages, there’s a real issue.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also a thing I’ll see a lot in first scripts or relatively early scripts in someone’s path is an abundance of plot and almost no character at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the movie becomes about exciting sequences, and I couldn’t care less about any of the people involved.

**John:** Sometimes you will often see the flip, where it’s just exceedingly low ambition for a script, where it’s just a bunch of characters hanging out, talking about marital problems…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …but not in a fascinating or interesting way. So it’s like: put a little more story in there, like actually have your characters do something rather than just sit around and kind of complain.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the whole idea is that the story should be matched to the character, and the character should be matched to the story in an interesting oppositional way. A lot of times you just get, like you said, people talking, or frankly what’s even worse to me, people acting but not actually being people.

**John:** Ideally you want to match the character to a story in a way that is answering both questions. Who is the most appropriate character for this story? And who is the sort of least appropriate character for this story? Who would this story impact the most? Who would this idea have the biggest impact on and thus, you know, that character would be a fascinating person to see in this world and in this universe. And too often they’re kind of matched too perfectly.

Like, “He’s a schlub who wants to impress his wife.” It’s like, eh, I don’t care.

Another, sort of like the walking through doors problem, is when one character tells another character something we as the audience already know.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, I see that. “As you know, to review…” I was just going through these the other day with somebody. There’s “As you know, to review,” and then there’s one of my favorites: “Wait, wait, wait. Tell me that again?”

**John:** Oh my, yeah. So, those are all things, like, trying to summarize stuff. It’s easy to understand the instinct. The screenwriter needs the audience to know that the other characters are also aware of this fact or information, but the actual scene in which you’re doing it is terrible, and you will try to find a way to cut it out when you actually make the movie. So, don’t write this scene. And find some way that we’re running up and we’re getting ahead of that, because those things are deathly.

And weirdly I find I don’t encounter that nearly as much now as I used to. I think subconsciously I’m already avoiding those scenes way ahead of time. I’m doing the judo so that those scenes can never have to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, to me it’s just a sign that your story is all wrong anyway. I mean, if you find yourself in a spot where suddenly one character has to explain a bunch of stuff to another one, something is just in your story. If it’s important for one character to know it’s important for me to watch it happen or see it. So, figure out a way to illustrate it dramatically to me, whether it’s a flashback… There are always creative ways to get this information across.

**John:** Agreed. Although you say flashback; unnecessary flashbacks are also pretty much the pinnacle of first screenplay-ness. It’s just like, you know, “Here’s a big flashback to tell you about how bad my dad was.” It’s like, that’s not important.

**Craig:** Well, unnecessary flashback, unnecessary narration.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** These are the crutches we use when we’re not quite sure how to tell the story that we have, because maybe it’s not the right story to be telling.

**John:** Yup.

So, Craig, are you ready for this now?

**Craig:** Dude, I was born ready!

**John:** Ah! So the reason why we’re talking about this: it’s been so nice that so many of our listeners, more than 200 of our listeners have written in with their three page samples. And so Craig and I are actually going to give you three page samples from our very first screenplays.

**Craig:** Very, very first. And so, you know, I had such a… — When you suggested this I thought, “That’s a great idea/that’s a terrible idea.” [laughs] Because it’s so embarrassing and it’s so awful.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. It is. It is so awful. So, it was my idea, so I’ll start first just to rip the Band-Aid off.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, my sample is from my very first script. I wrote it while I was in grad school. And I’ll give some back story on when I wrote this. Between my first and second years of grad school I was interning at Universal. And I had a job for the head of physical production. And I was the intern below three assistants. Like, there was nothing that they actually needed me to do. It was very nice of them to give me a little job, but there was nothing for me to do. So, I would file a couple of papers a day.

So, I would come home from work and I had not used any brain cells, and so I would just write at night. And so I hand wrote at night, and then during my lunch break I would type up the pages. And actually wrote most of the screenplay during that summer at Universal.

The script I wrote is called Here and Now. It was originally called Now and Then, but then there was a movie with Demi Moore that was called Now and Then while I was writing this, so I had to change it to Here and Now. So, these are the three pages from Here and Now which you will find on the website, along with all the other three page samples.

A summary of what happens in these three pages: We open in a crowded parking lot of a shopping mall. It’s snowy, Christmastime. Two passing women talk about someone’s sudden death. We meat Karen Miller, a young woman. She’s in her car. She’s trying to back out. Another car slams into her. Her airbag blows. She’s not badly hurt, but as she looks into the window’s reflection she sees someone behind her, someone who is not actually there.

We cut to one year earlier, and we’re at the University of Colorado. We see some background action describing the student body. And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a pretty good summary, and if you had written that summary I think you’d be in good shape. [laughs]

**John:** Ha-ha-ha. So…

**Craig:** Do you want me to go after you because you get to… — I mean, I want to go after myself, too. So, maybe you want to go after yourself first?

**John:** Yeah, I’ll go after myself first. So, a lot of the stuff I talked about in the criteria of like first scripts, you see some of that here. There’s a lot of over-description of things. And our protagonist, our Karen Miller, first off we say her name but we don’t’ actually give her any description whatsoever. So, there’s nothing to sort of signal that she’s actually who she is as a person. She’s just a young woman in a car. And so we don’t know anything special about her. She’s not driving this introductory scene. She’s not doing anything interesting. She’s just a passenger in the scene.

And she’s a passenger who gets hit in the scene. And that’s not a terrible opening, but it’s not a great opening. It’s setting up that there’s some mystery there. And it may be a bit of a misdirect in terms of sort of what the tone of this is going to be. It feels just sort of wintery and snowy. And then by the end we get to the University of Colorado a year earlier and it’s just, you know, a picture postcard. It’s just painting, “this is what a campus looks like.” And it’s like, “Oh, but that is probably what a campus looks like.” But we haven’t really gotten any story started and we’re three pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look: the truth is I like your pages better, your first pages better, than I like my first pages. That’s the awful thing about comedy is when they’re not funny, that’s just — that’s the headline…

**John:** I wasn’t aiming for funny.

**Craig:** You don’t have that sort of objecting, “ugh.” However, there’s just nothing really happening here. I mean, she gets hit by another woman, and there’s a lot of description of what’s happening with the cars and the geography of the space and how she actually gets hit, although it’s really just a fender bender so the car crash itself isn’t that interesting.

There is one interesting thing buried in there, which is that she sees somebody that isn’t there. So, you sort of like made a real meal out of all these mundane things that frankly just aren’t that interesting and then kind of, like, da-da-da, passed the one thing that really is interesting. And so the scene has this lack of focus. And I always like to say — and this is a classic new writer thing: You are not directing my attention to where it’s supposed to be. You’re directing my attention to where it’s not.

So, there is a paragraph, or descriptions of what the engine sounds like as the car stops. [laughs] But, then, you know, very little thing — I mean, you underline “Someone is standing directly behind her.” There’s no one there. But then we’re back and then there’s just more discussion of the woman. And then, yeah, some of the description is awesome. I mean, I got to hand it you. “Brown mutant icicles hunched behind the wheels,” is spectacular.

**John:** But it’s novelistic. I mean, I think you can get away with some of it. And I think “brown mutant icicles” could last if there wasn’t so much other stuff around it.

I don’t like these five sentence blocks of scene description. They’re intimidating to read, and so people skip them.

**Craig:** Thank god I didn’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Thank god you didn’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s the worst. But we’re getting there.

**John:** On page two, midway, actually near the bottom of page two, I actually finally do give a description of Karen. So, “She’s really very pretty, a page torn from a J. Crew catalog, fresh-faced and a little delicate.” That’s actually not bad description. But that should have come when we first met Karen Miller, and not, you know, two pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also feel like we have this — we’re concentrating on what these two women that we will never see again — I presume, because they’re Woman 1 and Woman 2 — are saying, when really what I wanted desperately is a moment before Karen Miller gets in her car and starts to pull out and gets hit. I just want to be contextualized with my protagonist, not with weather and extras.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** But, here’s what’s good. I want to sort of say, “Okay, but here’s the sign that the guy who wrote this would one day write Halloweenie.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I just love saying Halloweenie.

**John:** Yeah, that’s fine.

**Craig:** There is a specificity to the way you’re writing this. And, more importantly, it is visual. It’s not always interesting in terms of what you’re visualizing, but you’re being visual. And you’re also being very sparse with the dialogue. The dialogue felt real to me.

And, you know, these are things like pitch that you can’t teach. Either you can or can’t sing. Either you can or can’t feel rhythm. And so I see that there is somebody writing this who has an ear, and somebody who has a rhythm. And, you know, this was — can I say what year this was?

**John:** Oh yeah. This is 1994.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this was February of 1994. And that’s 18 years ago, actually. And you can see there is something going on here. There is an intelligence behind this. And there is a voice. And also little things, like for instance, just to show that you understand the language of cinema — as the sequence ends, Karen looks up at the Donna Karan woman, gives a half a laugh, smiles a little to herself, which I like the sense of mystery. “In the distance, CARILLON BELLS ring, continuing as we cut to:
TITLE OVER BLACK
One year earlier.”

And there are the Carillon bells. That’s how I pronounce it, right? Carol-on?

**John:** Yeah. Carillon bells.

**Craig:** And so you got already that there was a language where sound could sort of play oppositional to time stream. And these are things that are precise.

**John:** It was my very first pre-lap. And lord knows I pre-lap the hell out of things these days.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I’m not embarrassed by these three pages. It’s just that they’re not the way I would have written them right now.

So, reading these three pages, what kind of story do you think this is?

**Craig:** I would suspect it’s some kind of supernatural — what I got was a supernatural love story.

**John:** It is a love story, but it’s actually not supernatural. It is a weepy. And it was my first weepy. So, it’s actually good that it’s on a Frankenweenie release date. Because it was the first time that I made people cry. And that was actually the thing about this script is I could kind of consistently make people cry. And that got me an agent. It got me sort of started, because people weren’t used to actually reading a script and crying.

So, it’s a tiny romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado, which is my hometown. Again, a very sort of first script thing where it’s like you write things that you know so well that they might not be interesting to other people. And it suffered from another first script problem, which is that I tried to cram everything I knew about everything into it. Because, like, “Well maybe I’ll never write another script, so I should shove everything I know about everything into it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. A lot of speeches.

Well, great. Thank you for looking at that. I’m not horrifically embarrassed. Let’s take a look at Craig’s script. The Stunt Family.

**Craig:** Yes. The Stunt Family. Just a year later, February of 1995. And the background on this is I was working at Disney in the marketing department. And my boss was Oren Aviv, who would later go on to actually run Disney and now is the head of marketing at Fox.

And Oren took a shine to me and suggested that I try my hand at writing a movie and then he could produce it. And he had an idea for a movie. And his idea was called The Stunt Family. And it was going to be a big, broad, physical comedy for kids about a family of stunt men who live their lives as if every day and every moment were a stunt. And they would go on a grand adventure and kind of use their fearlessness. But one of the family members, of course, just didn’t really feel like he fit in.

And so I wrote it with my then partner, Greg Erb, and it was the first screenplay I’d ever written. These were the first screen pages I’d ever written. And so, I mean…God.

**John:** [laughs] Well, for people who are just listening who aren’t on the page in front of them, do you want to give the summary?

**Craig:** Sure. So the summary is: We are on a backlot of Maxwell Studios, which is essentially like Universal Studios if any of you have visited Universal Studios where you take the tour of the actual backlot of the studio in the little tram. And they’ve kind of combined the actual working backlot with attractions. Like at Universal there’s a fake earthquake and then Jaws comes out of the lake and stuff like that.

And so you’re sort of on a tour with a tour guide who apparently is on his first day and isn’t very well prepared. And they pass by the stunt house and we start meeting members of the Stunt Family who are waking up to their morning routine. And their morning routine is sort of a very Addams Family combination of living in the middle of a working attraction. And it seems like they are living in a rather dangerous life, and yet they seem kind of curiously okay with it.

**John:** Yeah. And we get to the bottom of page three, we’ve met — have we met all the family by that point?

**Craig:** No. You meet sort of the [laughs], this is probably not a great idea. But you meet the protagonist on page 4 who is the one who doesn’t feel like he fits in.

**John:** Okay, cool. So, Craig, do you want to pull the Band-Aid first? I mean, how are you feeling?

**Craig:** Well, I feel pretty bad.

**John:** [laugh]

**Craig:** And this is when I talk to some of the people who send pages in who are writing comedy, and I say, “Listen, I’ve been there. I’ve done these mistakes.” I really have. And you can see it here, even though this was 17 years ago, it hurts to read. First of all, you have these huge chunks of description. And even though they’re not particularly prosy, it’s just a ton of unimportant detail.

We have a run, a page and a half run of back and forth dialogue between the tour guide and some people on the tour that is really broad, poorly written, not at all funny, illogical. Just bad. Really forced and awful.

**John:** And I would assume, just as the movie starts, that Zeke is actually our hero because he’s the guy who’s given a name and give, you know, he seems to be the center of the story but he’s not.

**Craig:** No. You sure would think that. And he’s not. And nothing is grounded. Not even the name of the studio and their mascot is grounded. It’s Zeke’s first day and yet apparently they don’t train people there, so he’s overly stupid and doesn’t know what anything is and makes ridiculous mistakes in order to set up bad punch lines.

So, the first page and a half is an unmitigated disaster. It gets a little bit more interesting when we actually get inside the stunt house, because you do have this kind, I guess I would describe, as sort of Addams Family setting. And even though, again, way too much description, there’s some interesting things happening.

This old man wakes up, and as the clock goes from 7:59 to 8:00 his eyes open up and this huge rot iron spiky chandelier plummets from the ceiling, puncturing the bed, and he rolls out the way and looks at his wristwatch and says, “I’m getting slower.” So, that’s kind of interesting, like, okay, they’ve rigged the house like Cato and Inspector Clouseau. A kind of constant test for them.

And on the third page you can see that their house is actually — and this is of course unfilmable; I mean, this comedy would have cost $400 million to do — the house literally is besieged by a fake flash flood. The people inside kind of amusingly know how to work with it. They’re using the flood waters to clean dishes. More terrible lines. It’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah. I do like, at the start of page three, the idea of the bus tram tour and the inept tour guide is funny. And there’s reason why, like, Kenneth the page works on 30 Rock. There’s a way that can work; where things go a little bit wrong, he’s saying the wrong stuff.

So, I did like at the top of page three it’s like, “‘Rumor has it that Wilford and his family still live in the old house, but I sure hope not, because I smell SMOKE!’

A simulated FLASH FLOOD is unleashed.

‘I mean…water.'”

That’s a good joke. The scene description line didn’t really help us there. But it is a nice idea. You set the wrong expectation and suddenly a flood comes by. You get a joke for that, the unexpected.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wouldn’t call that a joke. [laughs] I just think it’s awful. I mean, I hate it. And I think it’s really just juvenile and even more juvenile than for me. It’s really juvenile.

I mean, I don’t know. The only thing I look at this, I mean, I would have said had I read these pages, “This guy is never going to make it,” personally.

**John:** I see competence in there. I see, you know, I see you setting up sort of — trying to setup a world, trying to get into something. I see the instinct behind t”his is how we would set up a studio by giving a studio tour.” So, you had a sense of what the Universal thing would be. And once you get to Wilford’s room, and since you said Addams Family, I get that more now. I just didn’t get it on the page. But I can see where that would be.

But partly why I want to talk about first scripts is you kind of have to get one out of your system. You kind of have to get through it, just so you can get familiar with the format and just finish a document that’s 120 pages long, which is going to be the longest thing that most human beings will ever write. So, it’s just that process is an important part of getting started.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. I think doing this script, one of the things it drove home for me, if I can remember that accurately that far back, is that there was a lot — it was really important to take care of the fundamentals that weren’t related to comedy. To make sure that the story was well told and the characters were real and relatable and that the plot moved in an interesting way.

And even though the next script I wrote with Greg was also very ridiculous, and broad, and family-oriented, it was a movie. And they made it. And that was the second thing I ever wrote. So, I surely needed to do this.

**John:** Yeah. And I couldn’t have written Go as my first script. Go was too complicated. I needed to be confident with the format. Although I will say I wrote the first section of Go at about the same time I wrote Here and Now. The first section of Go was X, which was a short film which became the whole movie, but it’s really just that first act of Go. And if people are thinking about trying the format, writing something short might be a really good idea, because at least it will get you familiar with the format and you’re not juggling all of the complexities of how-do-you-tell-a-story-over-two-hours. You’re just trying to tell a story over a shorter period of time.

That’s a small bit of advice. But, eventually you do have to write a full lengthy script and there are going to be all of the challenges that come with writing a full length script. And it won’t be perfect, so don’t expect it to be perfect.

**Craig:** No. It will likely be absolute garbage.

**John:** Yeah. But people don’t remember the first time they wrote a school report. People don’t remember the first time they wrote a paragraph. This is such a bigger step that it’s hard to expect that it’s going to be great the first time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think I want to actually wrap it up today because this was actually sort of meaningful and touching. And we’ll save other Three Page Challenges for a future time.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. I’m glad you find it meaningful and touching. I just find it awful and depressing.

**John:** Well, see, we’ve come full circle then. Because I started the podcast sort of stressed out because of Halloweenie, and now I feel actually kind of better about myself, because in a slightly Schadenfreude way my pages were better than yours. So…

**Craig:** Well, I mean, honestly, you could have wiped your butt with three pages and roughly assembled the fecal smears into Courier shape and they would have been better than that. I mean, that’s just the worst. When I look at that stuff and I just think, “Good lord, what was I thinking?”

**John:** Yeah. Clearly your co-writer is the problem.

**Craig:** No. I can’t really blame him at all. [laughs] I can’t.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** No. I mean, the one thing when we talked about doing this, I did think, “Well, you know, it might not be fair because I did write it with somebody, and maybe the better way of approaching this would be for me to submit the first three pages of the first thing I wrote on my own.”

**John:** That’s not fair at all.

**Craig:** But that was kind of a cheat, because frankly that was a really good script. And, even though it didn’t get made, it’s probably why it didn’t get made because it was good. And I really love those first three pages of that thing. And I thought, “Well, this is just cheating. I’ve got to actually go back and just pull up The Stunt Family, for the love of god.”

But, I was 24 and foolish. You apparently were 24 and wise.

**John:** Yeah. Wise beyond my years. I decided to write, like while everyone was writing the high concept comedy I was writing the weepy, which didn’t get made either, but it got me started. So, god bless those first scripts.

**Craig:** I guess that’s the way you’ve got to look at it. This one got me going, too.

**John:** Every once and awhile a producer will ask for, or a development executive, will call my agent and say, “Hey, do we have any of John’s old scripts? Can we read some of his early things?” Or they will ask for the script specifically. And I had to say no. I don’t want that out anymore because it’s just not me anymore. There’s a reason why it’s not part of my active file.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I would say that the one script I just brought up that was sort of the first one that I wrote on my own I would love to see made. I think it still is an interesting one that works. Scott Frank is prepping a movie right now to direct that he wrote called The Walk Among the Tombstones, which he adapted from a Larry Block novel. I think. And he actually wrote that in ’97, I think, or ’98. And sort of it’s always been there and he’s kind of dusted it off and polished it up and gotten it ready to go.

**John:** That can work. Often there are bad examples, but there are also good examples. Unforgiven was an old script that sat around for a long time and someone said, “Hey, let’s make that script.”

**Craig:** Well, actually, Clint Eastwood bought when — David Peoples wrote that script. Clint Eastwood bought it, I think it was in the late ’70s or early ’80s I want to say. And put it in a drawer on purpose because he knew he wasn’t old enough to play the part. So, he bought it and just aged it like wine until he was ready.

**John:** I’m sure David Peoples was delighted.

**Craig:** You know what? He should be, because it’s one of the greatest movies ever made.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. But at the time, I mean, do you think for those 30 years David Peoples was like, “I’m so lucky that Clint Eastwood hasn’t made my movie.”

**Craig:** It wasn’t 30. It was like 12.

**John:** Everything feels like more time.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, Craig, our last piece of housekeeping. Scriptnotes Live in Austin, at the Austin Film Festival, is October 20 at 9am. So, people have written on Twitter to ask, “Hey, can I just get a ticket for that one event?” And I don’t think you can. I think it’s actually part of the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Austin Film Festival would be silly if they started to do things like that. I mean, the whole point is that they break even. And I don’t think it’s a profit organization, so they do need people to buy their passes to actually put on these things and support these events. So, no, you can’t just go see it. You have to buy a pass to the event. They are still available online. And there are a lot of other wonderful things to go see there.

**John:** Great writers there.

**Craig:** I mean, we will be, spectacular, no question. But…

**John:** And we have Aline Brosh McKenna is really our secret weapon.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think I’m our secret weapon.

**John:** Well, yeah, you’re right. That too. And if you want to talk to our secret weapon, Craig Mazin, on Twitter, you are @clmazin?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I am @johnaugust. That’s a good way if you have like small questions for us. If you have bigger questions, or if things you need to send in or ask us about, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a whole form on the website, johnaugust.com, about how to write stuff in.

And, thank you very much for listening to our podcast. Subscribe in iTunes if you don’t.

**Craig:** Wait! I have a Cool Thing, finally, and you’re just blowing right through it.

**John:** Oh, I blew right past it. Tell us your Cool Thing, Craig.

**Craig:** I’ll be really fast. It’s an App. It’s a game. It’s called The Room. The Room. It is for the iPad. It’s spectacular. I like these puzzle games. I like games that are sort of Myst-like if you remember that one.

**John:** I love Myst.

**Craig:** This one is gorgeously done. It’s beautiful. It’s in the perfect space of not too hard, not too easy. A really good hint system if you need it. Incredibly simple. You don’t know who you are. You’re in an attic and there is a box in front of you. And you proceed to examine the box, and open the box up, and then open the box inside the box, and a house inside the box, inside the house. It is spectacular. It’s so well-done. Download it.

**John:** Hooray. If you’re doing yours, I’m going to do mine. Mine rhymes with yours. Mine is called Moom. And it is an app for the Macintosh. And what Moom does is a very simple thing. It resizes windows in a very specific grid-like way. And so if you’re trying to have multiple windows open, like I am right now while we’re recording this podcast, that little green dot in the title bar of every window, which is mostly kind of useless, now when you hover over that with Moom it pops up a little gird and you can sort of draw how big you want that window to be.

And it just stacks your windows really nicely. So, it’s very helpful on a big monitor, but it’s also really helpful on smaller monitors as well, when you need to have two windows side by side. So, Moom for the Macintosh. It’s in the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** Room and Boom.

**John:** Moom.

**Craig:** Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Done. Podcast.

**Craig:** Podcast. Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Mic drop. Now.

**Craig:** Good luck, John, with Halloweenie and I’ll talk to you next week.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/mistakes-development-executives-make).

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Hooray, we did it right!

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** This is actually our second attempt to start the show.

**Craig:** You know, you could of course just record… — I mean, we have 50 versions of you doing that. They really should just put that on for us.

**John:** You know what? I think it should just be a simple copy and paste.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For now on Stuart will just copy and paste it and start because it’s the same every week.

**Craig:** And you’re really consistent with the way you do it.

**John:** I really am.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today we’re going to talk about two different topics that have nothing to do with Comic-Con. First we’re going to talk about the mistakes that development executives often make with writers and see if we can offer some suggestion for improving those mistakes, or not making those mistakes. And second we’re going to do the first couple of scripts that came in for the script challenge.

So, this Three Page Challenge that we talked about at the end of last week’s podcast, we asked readers to send in three pages of their screenplay and we would look at it and talk about it on the air. And a bunch of people did, and so many people did. And so Stuart dutifully read all of them and suggested a couple that we could look at, and we’re going to look at three of them today.

**Craig:** Fantastic. And just because I know people are going to ask: are we going to do it again?

**John:** Yes. I think we will do it again if it’s fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you have to listen through to the end of the podcast to see if we had a good time. And then if we had a good time, we’ll do it again.

**Craig:** We’ll do it again. Great.

**John:** A bit of housekeeping. On the last podcast you were going to play your guitar, but then you didn’t play your guitar because you offered your own kind of challenge, which to recap: If we were to cross over to 100,000 listeners you would play a guitar solo as our outro music. And weirdly this last week the numbers showed that we crossed over to 100,000, but I don’t think it was really an accurate number. And here’s why I think it was an inaccurate number.

This last week was the week that Apple released the podcast app for the iPhone. And the podcast app is controversial because its user interface is kind of terrible. Also, it tends to want to download a bunch of things that you’ve already downloaded before. So, people who are already subscribers to our show might suddenly find themselves with like 20 episodes of our show being downloaded to their phone. And so I think a lot of these greatly inflated numbers are because people who are already fans and subscribers to the show and have downloaded that file again even though they already listened to it. So, we’ll give it a few weeks and see how it sorts itself out.

**Craig:** And because I wasn’t ready anyway. And just to be clear, I’m actually a terrible guitarist, but it’s really more about singing a song. I mean, I can play guitar along with myself, but guitar solo sounds Eddie Van Halen-ish.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s a good point.

**Craig:** I can’t do that.

**John:** So you’re going to give us an acoustic session.

**Craig:** There you go. It will be unplugged. Yeah.

**John:** Yes, there you go. Craig Mazin Unplugged.

**Craig:** Unplugged.

**John:** And weirdly my Cool Thing for the end of the show is also about music. So, it’s all going to kind of fit together. Even though we don’t get the Craig Mazin singing experience.

**Craig:** Not yet. But if you get… — Friends can start listening to this thing, then finally the world will be rewarded with the thing it’s been waiting for the most.

**John:** That you never knew you wanted but now you can’t live without.

Also, in a bit of follow up, which is really kind of blog follow up so I’m not sure to what degree I’m allowed to talk about it on the podcast, but really it’s our rules.

**Craig:** Do it. There’s no rules here.

**John:** There’s no rules. So, AMC Theaters, which is one of the big theater chains in the nation, but Los Angeles and California has a lot of AMC Theaters, there is a lawsuit happening where some of the employees are suing AMC theaters saying they should be allowed to sit on the job if they’re selling tickets or ripping tickets and doing that kind of stuff.

And so it’s a class action lawsuit that we’ll see how it proceeds. And so I wrote about that on the blog and it got me… I sort of offhandedly mentioned that sitting is terrible for you and that I work at a standing desk. And so a lot of people wrote in to ask, “Oh, so what is your standing desk situation?” And so I thought I would talk a little bit about that if that’s okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. Go ahead. I mean, is there much to say other than that you’re standing at a desk?

**John:** I’m standing at a desk. And actually I do all the podcasts standing up and I’ve been doing that for a couple months, and it’s just better I think. Sitting is actually really bad for your body. It sort of… — Not only is it kind of bad for your back and you’re compressing your spine and stuff, someone how it slows down certain processes and your cholesterol gets weird. People should stand up more if they have the opportunity to stand up.

So my desk situation… — And I don’t want you to feel like they should do what I do, but it’s working well for me. I use this thing called an Anthro Cart. Anthro is a furniture company and they make a bunch of different kinds of desks. The one I have is I think the older version; it’s called the Adjusta. And I originally bought this desk because I’ve had horrible carpal tunnel problems. And I use a special weird keyboard that I’ve linked to before that has sort of vertical keys on it. And I need to set the typing surface really low so that it fits nice, so that my wrists are in the right position for typing on it.

The nice thing about the Adjusta desk is it can go really low but it can also go nice and high. And so when I’m standing up at the desk I can just literally raise the whole level of the front of the table up fairly high and just tilt my monitor up and it’s quite a comfortable service for working at, for typing at.

**Craig:** My working method is to curl up in a ball, as tightly as I can. And then I cry.

**John:** If they can just make a waterproof laptop and I can just work in the shower, that would be awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Be nice and clean.

**Craig:** Clean.

**John:** Clean things.

**Craig:** You know what’s so great is that all the people that sent in pages are like, “Get to my pages!”

**John:** We’re going to just keep stalling.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s get on to our first question, which was submitted to you by a friend or colleague I think. And he said he was talking to executives and they had a question for us which is this: What mistakes do development execs constantly make with writers?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s quite a few, I think. You want to start? I’ve got a litany.

**John:** I’ve got a litany, too. But I have actually kind of a list whereas you’re going to have to think of them.

**Craig:** True. Well why don’t you do your list and then I’ll fill in.

**John:** Yeah. That’s pretty much how this podcast works.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because I don’t really prepare.

**John:** Here’s the first mistake I’ve noticed: not giving immediate feedback and acknowledgement. So, when a writer turns in a script to you, sends you his script, you should immediately say, “Thank you. I got your script and I will read it in this period of time and get right back to you.” So that first email just to say, “It actually came in and I got it and I’m printing it out or I’m putting it on my Kindle,” is so crucial because for the writer we’ve been working on this for days, weeks, months. We just need to know that you actually have it, that the email went through.

Because I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve sent something through on like a Thursday and then on Friday I haven’t heard anything back and I’m like, “Do they actually have it for the weekend to read? Did they really get it? Do I need to call? Do I need to resend?” And I’m going through the weekend with this question. So, email back and say, “Great. I’m so excited. And I will get back to you on Monday.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Then, when you say you’re going to get back on Monday, actually call back on Monday or email back on Monday. Or if you can’t get back with feedback on Monday, send an email that says, “I’m so sorry I can’t get back to you but I enjoyed it and I will get back to you with feedback really, really soon.”

Nothing is worse for a writer than uncertainty. We’d kind of rather hear that you didn’t like some things than to just be wondering, because we are our own worst enemies.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just simple courtesy. I mean, it’s not going to ruin anything if you act like a jerk, but if you don’t have to act like a jerk, why?

**John:** Yeah. Here’s a magnifying factor: If you have pushed, and pushed, and pushed, and pushed for the writer to turn in the script…don’t badger them for three weeks to turn in the script and then not get back to them for a week.

**Craig:** That is really annoying. And, again, this is sort of in the category of stuff that doesn’t ruin the development process because eventually they call you and then the development process begins. But I have…there’s one producer I will not mention in particular where they would do that check-in call constantly and then it would take sometimes three months for them to read the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, guys, leave me alone then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** By the way, I’m not one of those writers that blows through deadlines. I’m really good about it. I say this plane’s landing at 6:30pm, it lands at 6:30pm. Sometimes it lands at 6:25. I am really, really good. So it’s just annoying to me, frankly, to get those constant calls. And I know why they’re doing it because not all writers are good and they’re paranoid and freaked out and their boss is saying, “Don’t let people turn stuff in late,” and I get that. But then come on, [laughs] you know? I mean, at least hold up your end of the charade.

**John:** Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with a check-in call, particularly just so both sides are sort of synchronized in terms of when we think this is going to come in. There’s nothing wrong with a check-in call as long as it’s helpful and positive and doesn’t feel like I’m setting this big timer to go off.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But, come on, you can’t push a writer to turn something in and then not respond when they turn something in. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s silly.

**John:** Then when you actually have the script and you’re ready to give feedback on the script, praise first. And I can’t tell you how often I’ll go into a meeting or go into something and they won’t tell me what they liked and what they loved. And like, yeah, I’m a grown up. I think I have a fairly thick skin as a writer, but come on, tell me what you liked first. Tell me what worked for you. Even if that’s just two minutes and then the next 90 minutes are going to be a lot of “this didn’t work,” give me some love first.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then when you start to point out things that aren’t working, avoid speaking so broadly that I want to kill myself. Sometimes the first things out of your mouth will sound like you’re just talking about a completely different movie, like, “Well what if we did this, and this, and this, and this?” And in my head I’m just shutting down because I’m like, “You want to take this thing that I wrote which was set in the Middle Ages and move it to the future.” And I’m just like, and I’m all I’m doing is just seeing how much work that is going to be to do that and how everything I’ve done has been completely undone.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So even if that is sort of your agenda, why don’t you start on something smaller. Start on something that’s kind of achievable and move us to this bigger idea.

**Craig:** Or, look, sometimes you read a script and you think it’s all wrong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, look, I’m a little less requiring of praise maybe than you are. I mean, I’m okay with it. I like it. It actually makes me a little uncomfortable sometimes, too many compliments, because I’m like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Get to the stuff we have to fix here.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it is annoying to me…when you talk about mistakes development executives make when they talk in a big sense about the things they don’t like without acknowledging it. Because sometimes I have had the experience with development executives where they’re saying, “Look, I think what we’d like to see out of this next draft is A, B, and C.” And they’re sort of saying casually, like, “You know, we’d love it if instead if he was a plumber, wouldn’t it be better if he were an electrician?” Except that they’re saying it like that, except what they’re saying is, “We think instead of a comedy it should be a drama.”

And you’re like, wait, don’t marry huge notes with casual tone. Go ahead and acknowledge it. Just say, “Listen, the truth is we actually think this script is far afield of where we want to be.” Just set the tone so at least then when we have the discussion I’m not deciphering that while you talk. I’m not on my own thinking, “Oh wait a second, um, they hate everything.” But I have to say that myself, in my head, putting it together from what they’re saying casually like, “La di da, di da.”

Don’t do that. If you really hate everything or if you — well, not hate. I mean, if you really think the script is just not where it should be story wise or character wise or tone, just be honest about it so at least you can contextualize what’s about to come next.

**John:** I would also stress that if this is something that you you’ve worked and developed with the writer and you think you’re so far afield, you’re going to have to at least take some of the blame for it being so far afield. If you come back and say, “Oh, I think you completely missed the mark, blah, blah, blah,” and this writer was actually doing what you guys agreed he was going to do, then you’re going to have to acknowledge that, “Okay, I think we took a wrong turn here.” And include yourself in that decision process.

**Craig:** Great point. Yes. That is very annoying when development executives divorce themselves from the very things that they input into the process, or that they ask for, or that they agreed to.

You know, I always make sure that we’re all on the same page before I start writing. I like to write outlines and I like to share the outlines with everybody specifically to avoid this. And it is very annoying. And look, to the development executives listening, here’s the upshot: you’re in control anyway. You want to fire us, you fire us; hire us, you hire us. Whatever.

The only thing that really I’m saying to you is I guess the most important step for you for your job is: you want us to do well right? Because you want the script to be good; that reflects well on you. That’s your gig. If you want the script to be good then you do have to acknowledge the partnership because if you don’t we start to hate you.

And it’s fair for us to start to hate you because you’re being a jerk about it. You know, if I come in and I turn a script in and people are like, “Well, you tried this thing here, and we don’t like it.” Okay, you’re right. But, if you ask me to do something and I do it and you’re like, “Why is this here?” Oh my god, now I hate you so much. [laughs] Because I didn’t want to do it in the first place, probably. I might have even warned you.

**John:** Next point I will get to is: criticize the work and don’t criticize the writer. And only twice I think in my career have I gotten the note back saying like, “We think you rushed through this,” or, “We think you did a bad job,” and basically said, like, “We thought you were unprofessional in this.”

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** And when I hear that, I can never work with this person again. And there is a development executive who is quite well respected throughout the industry, but somehow for some reason she said that. And because of that I never want to work with her again, because I think it was very inaccurate but it was also: who are you to say what my process was or what this is?

If you’re unhappy with the script, say you’re not happy with the script. But don’t say that I didn’t do my job.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Don’t say that, like, I shouldn’t get paid. That’s a pretty crazy thing to go to.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, ultimately it’s not the development person’s job to make that call anyway. If somebody really blows it they blow it. But you’re right. I guess my point would be this to the development executive saying things like that: It might make you feel good and you might believe that that’s true, and it might even be true in some cases, but it’s not going to actually get things to be better. So just… — Just like I tell screenwriters, getting notes is hard, and it’s emotional. Keep your eye on the job.

I would say the same thing to you guys who are development executives. Getting scripts back that you don’t like is emotional and painful. Keep your eye on the job.

**John:** Next thing I’ll point to is credit where the notes are coming from. So, if you as a development executive have this opinion, but you don’t even know what the next level up’s opinion is going to be, or there is just some disagreement there, use your best judgment about how you’re going to share that information.

So I think it’s perfectly fine for a development executive to say, “Listen. I get what you’re going for here, and I really do like this. Here’s the reason why my boss doesn’t like this and that’s going to be a problem. So let’s together figure out how we’re going to get this to a stage where he’s going to respond positively to this thing.”

I will always take uncomfortable honesty over sort of a mystery.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s hard sometimes for them to do that I think though. Because look, ultimately who’s signing their check?

**John:** But the thing is we can always tell when somebody’s giving us a note that they themselves don’t believe at all.

**Craig:** Yeah, we can.

**John:** Because we’re going to be able to say…like, we will ask you three questions and you won’t be able to answer in a meaningful way. The illogic of what you’re saying will come through. And so as you’re giving notes, please before you sit down in the notes session with a writer, look through what your notes are and make sure they’re actually internally consistent, because it’s so tough to be the writer sitting on the couch giving these notes, recognizing these two things are at cross-purposes. And I’m going to point this out in the room and make everyone feel foolish, or I’m going to have to make the awkward call two days later for “classification” to point out you can’t do both of these two things you’re saying.

You can’t say, like, “We want the first act to be much funnier but we really want to feel the drama…” A lot of times you will get those things that are cross-purposes and it’s just not possible to implement them all.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you know, sometimes with those things I just sort of go, “Okay…” and I ignore one of them, you know? Because I feel like half the time really they’re struggling to figure out how to fix something and in the end it’s on our shoulders. Which leads me to one of my sort of pet peeves with development executives, and that’s when they try and fix it for you.

I do not want any development executive telling me how to fix it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I want them to tell me what’s wrong. They are an audience. That’s the best version of…they are an audience proxy. And they should be, hopefully, very good at explaining why it’s wrong and a general direction of what they would prefer to see.

But I don’t want them telling me what to write because in the end they’re doing themselves a disservice. If they could write it, they should go ahead and write it. But they can’t. And that requires a little bit of humility, frankly, on the part of the development executive to say, “Look. I don’t like this way. We think a better way would be something like this. Please write something like that or do you have a better idea? Let us help you fix the problem.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When you dictate to us it makes me insane because all you’re really doing is wasting your money and your time. No writer — no writer — can write something they don’t believe in well. So don’t make us do it.

**John:** To summarize that: Tell us what’s not working for you and why. But do not try to provide the “hows.” Don’t try to provide the “whens” and the “wheres.” Don’t tell us what the solution is. Tell us what’s not working for you. Because if you tell us the problem then we can ask questions that could help root out what’s really the problem.

Because very often the thing that’s happening in the second act or like, “I don’t feel like I’m connected to this character,” the problem isn’t right there. The problem was something earlier and we’re going to have to do some detective work to figure out why you’re not getting this thing that we think is so obvious to you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to get to sort of specific pet peeves, because this is a thing that came out a lot in the Charlie’s Angels movies is that sometimes you’ll get a note and it’s like, “Why am I getting this note?” And if it’s just because it’s your personal pet peeve, or someone’s personal pet peeve, that’s okay to label it as that.

So Nancy Juvonen — who I love — who is a producer on the Charlie’s Angels movies, there was this scene in one of the, I think it was the first movie, where the girls are eating and it was important for the girls to be eating because we wanted to show that girls — that the Angels actually did eat. And ketchup drips on this one file and we wipe it off. And I think I had it in there because it helped, “drops on a photo,” and it was just an easy way for me to show the villain’s face. Just a way to sort of connect who it is that we’re talking about.

And she was sort of talking through, like, “Oh, do we really need to do that?” And I’m like, “Nancy, what’s the problem?” She was like, “I hate that moment where characters are messy and stuff spills on things.” She hates the Carl’s Jr. aspect of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s just…

**John:** Well I said, “That’s fine.” I mean, she’s the producer of the movie. She gets one or two of those where it’s just like, she doesn’t like that, I’ll find another way to do it. And so rather than doing the big long dance over what it is and sort of how it all… — It’s like, you don’t like it. That’s okay. Especially if you’re the director. The director is always allowed to say, “I don’t like that. I don’t get it.”

**Craig:** The director is allowed to say it. That’s exactly what I was going to say. I don’t care if a producer has some weird hang up about the color blue, or people being messy, or singing, or anything. I don’t care. The director is going to make the movie.

So my point is if you have some weird fetish, you should do what we do which is shove it aside because you’re a big boy or a big girl, and you’re making a movie. You’re not exercising your own OCD. And it’s just not cool.

If the director doesn’t like it, they get a pass on it because they have to shoot it just like we get a pass when we have to write things. You can’t tell me that I have to write a certain way because I can’t. There’s some ways I just can’t write. I don’t like certain kinds of writing and I can’t do it, so I won’t. Hire somebody else to do that. But producers and development executives don’t get that pass. Sorry.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree on development executives. A producer, especially on something like Charlie’s Angels which was such a delicate balance of personalities and everything else, I felt like she totally got that right to do that one thing. If that’s the one thing she’s standing up for, awesome.

**Craig:** I guess. Give her the one.

**John:** Every movie’s going to be a little bit different. And there are movies that are really made by the producers and sort of aren’t made by the directors. And as a writer you recognize when those situations are happening and you…

**Craig:** Well, that’s true. That’s true. I mean, if you’re doing a Jerry Bruckheimer movie and Jerry has a real bug up his butt about a thing, Jerry is kind of a director of a lot of those movies in a weird way. But my sort of corollary for that for comedy is when a producer or development executive says, “I don’t think this line is very funny.” Well, are you funny?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Because so many people that I meet in Hollywood actually are funny. They’re not funny in the sense of “I can write a funny script” or “I can write a great line here” or “come up with a great idea or situation,” but they’re just generally funny people. They laugh at things that I find funny; they don’t laugh at things I don’t find funny. And they have an innate sense of rhythm, which is what comedy is all about.

But then I meet a lot of people who don’t, you know. And when those people start telling me what is and isn’t funny, and I think to myself: “You? You’re as funny as a toothache.” Well here’s the deal: No. Absolutely not. If I say, “You know what? It’s a marginal line,” or, “Oh, yeah, you’re right,” that’s my judgment. But if I say, “Nope, I believe in this.” And then the director says, “I believe in this.” Back off.

Because, listen, nobody bats 1.000 when it comes to comedy, but I cannot — you know, Bob Weinstein comes to mind — I can’t tell you how many times he and I would fight over something that would absolutely kill in the theater, I mean, just lay people out. And I would turn to him and he would be so angry, [laughs] because he was wrong, you know. But I’m like, “But the point is you’re not funny. That’s not a shameful thing, it’s just you’re not funny. I’m sorry. What can I tell you?”

You know, know your strengths. And if you’re not a funny person and you’re dealing with a comedy script, stick to the stuff that you think you’re strong at. And then let the funny people deal with the funny stuff.

**John:** Indeed.

Television makes it a little bit easier because they split their comedy development from the drama development as two separate groups. Movies are just one big pile. And so you get a person who should never be working on a comedy working on a comedy and there you are.

**Craig:** One last thing I wanted to mention that is annoying is sometimes development people will zero in on… — Let me put it this way: We who write screenplays understand that there are some levers you push that have huge ripple effects, and others that have none at all. That’s the way screenplays are constructed. But a lot of development executives don’t understand that.

They will zero in and obsess over this little thing that we all understand is minutia, essentially, in the web of the screenplay. And they will just go over it, and over it, and over it. And all you can think in your head is, “What is this person talking about? This is something that I could just change in a minute. It’s something that could change in the day. It’s something that editorially could go away, or if it works or it doesn’t work.” Don’t get caught up on some little bugaboo that makes you nuts.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Especially if it’s not pushing on the concept, the main character, the theme, the essence of the narrative. Just don’t go crazy. Lodge your complaint and move on.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. Far too often the whole meeting ends up being about this one little thing, and like that’s not the important thing at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then you walk out of there going, “That?! We just talked for an hour about that? Did this person see anything else, you know? I’ve built this whole thing…”

And sometimes… Here’s the most amazing thing about development executives — sorry guys. In success sometimes these things are even more annoying. I write a screenplay and everybody goes, “Wow, great job. You know what? You nailed it. We’re green-lighting the movie. And this actor is in. And this director is on. And you did it. You built a whole world for us and we’re gonna throw money into it and make it come to life. But, now let’s talk for an hour about how annoyed we are about the fact that in this one scene this one person says this stupid thing.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Really?! And the rest of it just sort of blew by in a blur and we’re just gonna talk for an hour about that? Cut it out. That’s what I say. Cut it out.

**John:** So, some advice for development executives.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this is now a podcast for screenwriters and development executives.

**Craig:** Development executives. And things that are interesting to development executives.

**John:** Sure. And one thing that might be interesting to development executives is the first three pages of a screenplay, because very rarely will they read past it unless they’re really, really intrigued.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So we had invited listeners to send in the first three pages, really any three pages of their screenplay. The ones we’re looking at today are the first three pages for the three samples.

And we got a lot of people wrote in, send in their scripts. And weirdly, like, right away, like within 20 minutes of the podcast going up we had like seven people had written in with their things. So, thank you everyone who sent them in. We have a bunch. We probably have plenty, but if people are still going to send some in, okay, send them in. We may get to it in a future podcast episode.

And I thought we’d start with one by — I may pronounce his name wrong — Ajay Bhai.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s the one that begins with “Fade In.”

**John:** So this one we don’t know the name of it because there wasn’t a title page, which is fine, we don’t need to know the name. But I wrote a little summary so people don’t have to — we’re not going to read his whole thing aloud because that would be awful to read it aloud. But I’ll give you a summary of what his script is about.

So, we open with a 6’5″ guy and he wakes up handcuffed naked to a railing outside a New York apartment. We don’t learn his name. The movie then cuts to 40 hours earlier just establishing NYC. We see some kids playing basketball. Both the kids say that they’re “Kevin Hayes,” and so evidently Kevin Hayes is an important basketball player, or like, a superstar.

We have a montage of short scenes with everyone talking about Kevin Hayes and a big game coming up. The last scene in this montage on page three is longer and it is set in an office, and there are two characters named Vijay and Ian. They’re talking about Kevin Hayes but they’re also talking about work. And that’s how much we get in the first three pages.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Craig, how did these three pages work for you?

**Craig:** Not well. Not well.

**John:** Yeah, not well for me either.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ll just sort of run through my issues. I thought the opening was nice. I mean, it was very visual, and it was a little bit of a mystery. So there’s a man. He’s handcuffed outside. I was a little confused because I’m not quite sure how you can be handcuffed outside in New York and not have anybody notice, so that was a little odd. And perhaps I was a little confused. But, it says, it looks like he’s on the concrete outside a NYC apartment. So right away I was a little annoyed.

And by the way, if sometimes you’re doing things like putting people handcuffed outside the middle of New York, okay, but then explain it for me so I don’t stop and go, “What?”

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure there’s a way geographically that could work where he’s sort of hidden behind trash cans or something so people aren’t wandering by seeing him. But otherwise I’m thinking, “Why isn’t someone seeing him?”

**Craig:** It says he’s lying under a pile of garbage. But if he’s lying under a pile of garbage, his face is still exposed. We know his face is exposed. Generally speaking it’s very hard to be handcuffed outside with your face exposed in New York and not have somebody notice. Just an aside.

**John:** That’s a personal experience — the times that you woken up naked handcuffed in New York, everyone seeing you.

**Craig:** Yeah. They wake me up. I don’t just happen to wake up. 40 hours earlier is nice. You probably want to put a title on that so we know it’s 40 hours earlier and not just people reading the script. And then here’s the problem: The next page and a half is what I just call fake dialogue. The purpose of the next page and a half is to tell us, the audience, that Kevin Hayes, who I presume is the man that’s handcuffed, is super duper popular in New York.

The problem is, it belabors it. There are kids who are practicing and talking about being Kevin Hayes and arguing about being Kevin Hayes, which is a little annoying. Then we see the only shot you need which is Madison Square Garden and all these people walking around with Hayes. Then we go to a pizzeria where this guy is saying, “Limited time Kevin Hayes specials. Knicks win tomorrow get a free championship slice all week long.”

**John:** Impossible. No one has ever said that in the history of time.

**Craig:** No one has ever — no one talks like that. Certainly no one in New York talks like that. There are no such specials that exist in New York where literally using the bathroom costs you money. [laughs] Also just as a general thing: very popular athletes are not referred to by their first and last name over and over by everybody. Usually it’s just the last name. If you’re a Jordan fan, you’re a “Jordan fan.” If you’re a Pujols fan, you’re a “Pujols fan.” Everybody doesn’t keep repeating the name, first and last, over and over and over.

We get to, I thought Middle Eastern men cooking up falafels and then occasionally if they dropped Kevin and just said, “Hayes,” that might be nice.

**John:** Yeah. That would be nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, so okay, I get it. Everybody gets it. Even people that aren’t American or have just recently immigrated. Then we have an old lady — ugh, this just gets so broad — an old lady asks for two balls of yarn, one orange, one blue. Clerk says, “Another sweater for your grandson?” So I don’t know where we are. Now we’re in middle America and not New York. And she says, “My own Kevin Hayes jersey. They’re sold out everywhere.”

“She holds the balls in her hand, as if they were a balls of golden treasure.” So first of all, typos. Second of all, no — they’re just yarn. I mean, again, people have to be normal. And also she’s not going to knit herself her own Kevin Hayes jersey. And, no, they’re not sold out everywhere. There is not a single sports jersey that has ever been sold out. Ever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then this final scene where I presume we’re meeting our two main characters, Vijay and Ian, who work in an office. And there is a lot of very juvenile play acting pretending to be Kevin Hayes, which again, adults or even twenty-somethings simply don’t do. It’s the kind of thing you see the kids on Suite Life on Deck doing. But you don’t see young people, twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings in an office ever doing.

And, once again, every single person who mentions Kevin Hayes must say Kevin Hayes. [laughs] So, I didn’t like it.

**John:** I have a few additional points to yours.

I thought the opening was interesting. It was visual. And the way he’s revealing like you’re not quite sure what the situation is or what the tone is going to be. But like we leave the scene without any idea of what the tone is. And so like, well, what kind of movie are we in? There’s no dialogue being done in that. And so if this is a comedy, then that guy who presumably is Kevin Hayes needs to say something. Or he needs to respond to his situation somehow other than just like panic.

Because I don’t know what panic — is it a funny panic? It is an “Oh no, they’ve captured my wife” panic? I don’t know what kind of movie this is.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. Yeah. It felt almost like it started like Saw.

**John:** I agree with you on if you’re going to cut to an earlier time you have to show us that it’s an earlier time. You can’t just tell the reader that; it has to be shown to the audience.

I got really confused by the kids playing basketball. I had to reread it a couple of times because I thought, like, “Are they saying that their name is Kevin Hayes? Oh, no, they’re pretending that they’re Kevin Hayes but there was no setup for who that was.” If that scene came later in the montage I might get it a little better.

I also — some characters were named and some characters weren’t named. So, the old woman is Vespasian. Is she a character we’re going to see again? If she’s not a character we’re going to see again, don’t give her a name. Because every time I see a character with a name I assume it’s a person we’re going to see.

And then we finally get to the office, which like you, I guess that those characters are important people that we’re actually going to follow in the course of the story. But this is something that we talked about in the last podcast. It’s just “INT. OFFICE.” That tells me nothing. I have no idea what kind of workplace this is. And so if it’s meant to be a generic office, then just say “Generic Office” and give us, like, “The most pedestrian, ordinary cubicle farm you’ve ever seen.” Give us some sort of color so we know what kind of place this is, because “Office” doesn’t mean anything.

**Craig:** You would probably want to also do an exterior so that we understand are they working at a large corporate building, are they working in a loft, are they working in a small place, are they working in Brooklyn, are they Manhattan? Something so we know what’s going on.

But that’s a great point on tone. Because honestly the beginning I thought, “Oh, this is like Saw,” you know, a guy chained to a thing.

**John:** And, again, the writer doesn’t need to direct from the page, but give us sense of what’s important and what’s the montage. And so even if you put the “Cut To” in after his waking up and probably giving some sort of reaction line, “Cut To,” okay, now we’re going through a couple of short scenes. And then give us another “Cut To” before we get to the office. That will at least give us a sense of what the flow of this movie is and where we should put our relative weight of attention.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. And know you’re world because when you’re writing a movie about a very specific thing that isn’t maybe something people are familiar with, like the way Special Forces teams move through the jungle, you’re allowed to kind of build your own world. Everybody knows how sports figures are discussed. Everybody. And I don’t care who you are.

**John:** Even I know that, and I can’t stand sports.

**Craig:** You know that. Exactly. LeBron James, probably the best player in the NBA. Now people will tweet back at me, but LeBron James gets ripped to shreds every day on ESPN by Stephen Smith and Skip Bayless and ding-a-lings like that.

Nobody, nobody is talked about the way this guy is. And it just seems so unreal that I’m already out. I’m out on page 3. The buy-in isn’t there.

**John:** By the way, if you’re going to talk about a sports figure, why haven’t we seen a TV talking about that? I mean, it feels like that’s the natural sort of cut, part of that montage to set up who this guy is. And I guess they’re trying to avoid showing you his face so you will be surprised that that was the guy who woke up buck naked. But it’s not a surprise.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not going to work.

**John:** Because you know what? We’ve seen movies before.

**Craig:** Exactly. We know it’s that guy. He’s six foot tall.

**John:** I don’t want to be completely negative. First off, Ajay, thank you for sending in the script. And I assume based on these first three pages that it’s some sort of sports comedy and that it’s going to be telling the story of that guy’s night and maybe it’s a Hangover kind of situation. It’s a promising enough idea, a major professional athlete going through some sort of spiral. I just think the scene work in setting up those first three pages can be a lot stronger.

**Craig:** Yeah. The tone of this comes off too juvenile for what the subject matter is.

**John:** Yeah. Even though like the Hangover movies, they’re kind of juvenile. I don’t mean to offend you at all. But they’re smarter and more specific than this.

**Craig:** I don’t think they’re juvenile. What I mean by juvenile is targeted towards an audience. In the Hangover movies, people behave, characters behave in juvenile ways, but the tone of the movie and the things that happen are pitched to people who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** And this movie feels like it’s pitched towards 10-year-olds, but it’s not supposed to be, I can tell.

**John:** Yeah. So pitch higher. If you’re going to have somebody waking up naked, it should feel like a grown up movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s go on to the next script. This one actually has a name. It’s called Exposure. And it’s by J. Nicholas Smith.

**Craig:** No, no. It’s called “Exposusre.” Did you notice this? How do you have a typo of your title?

**John:** Where is that? On the first page?

**Craig:** On the front page. On the cover page. Do you see that?

**John:** Oh wow. I didn’t. Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, look, I’m not a typo Nazi. But for the love of god, if you can’t get your title page right it shows a lack of regard for the reader that is astonishing to me. Just astonishing. Please, I mean look, I saw typos on all these things. Please, at the very least, spell your name right and spell your title right.

**John:** That’s the minimum we could ask.

**Craig:** Minimum.

**John:** I would say though, despite that typo which I completely ignored on the first page, I kind of quite enjoyed this. I’ll give a summary for readers so they can know what we’re talking about.

So the scene starts with blood on the snow. We crane up and we find a 17-year-old girl named Molly. She’s half-naked in a tree. She’s bleeding out. And she’s using the flash on her camera. It’s not clear if she’s trying to attract attention to herself or take photos, but we just see the flashing.

The next scene is one month earlier. There’s a super that tells us that, so thank you for giving us the super. We see Molly spying on her neighbor, Warren, and she’s using her same camera and she’s smoking a joint. They establish a bit about her neighborhood and her dog. The last scene of the three pages is Warren, the guys she’s spying on, a guy named John, and Molly’s father, Sam. They’re sitting by a fire, drinking beers, and smoking.

So, things to note: There’s no dialogue in these first three pages. It’s one of those just done visually sequences. I thought actually fairly nicely done. I enjoyed reading through every bit of it. J. Nicholas Smith does a good job of keeping scene description tight and short and like no line of action is more than three lines which is very helpful, because readers tend to skip anything that’s more than three lines. And if you see a paragraph you’re like, “Yeah, maybe I won’t read that paragraph,” but it’s two or three lines, “Yeah, sure, we’ll read that.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There was good specificity. I like that. But some stuff got so specific that it was a little bit annoying. There’s a sequence on page two where she’s dealing with this red scarf and its red is way too important. It was a bit giant like underscore when she’s touching her red scarf.

But I like that he’s setting up a world, and I’d keep reading it. If I read to page three I would have read to page four.

**Craig:** I agree. I think the good news is that J. Nicholas Smith can write. So I like the way — I think there was good craft here. Certainly it’s not an easy thing to write the first three pages without dialogue. You’re forcing yourself to tell the story visually and I thought he did a pretty good job.

My issues: I was a little confused on the first page about where she was versus the camera and whether she was triggering the camera or whether the camera was on some sort of auto flash thing. I think part of it was that the Canon is nestled in the crook of a thick maple branch. “Its body, marked with bloody handprints…” And so just the word “Body” kind of through me off even though when you read it — it’s just one of those things where you have to read it twice which you don’t want.

**John:** No. You never want to read something twice.

**Craig:** Right. And then she’s bleeding out and the camera flashes, and that’s really good. I like that a lot. So the first page was exciting and had a tone. And what was nice is the second page maintained that tone even though, once again, we get a nice super of one month ago. And we see also that she’s on the roof, which I love. And I liked the way that it started with the leaves in the gutter, and then you find the legs, and you realize this girl is on the roof. I know so much about her already.

And I love the specificity of where she puts the joint and how she puts it away. And now I get she’s a voyeur. She sees this guy. And then, good lessons for screenwriters, this guy Warren Shaw, so our writer makes a choice here to demonstrate this character’s sensibility through a simple thing — not being able to leave the mailbox flag alone until it’s straight up and down. So it’s all these nice little things.

I kind of had the same issue that you had in the bedroom. I got a little confused about what was going on with the dog. I assume the red scarf is important, that’s why it’s in — that later on this red scarf will be a big deal. But the dog stuff got me a little confused. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, why she was checking the time and rolling around.

It’s a fine line between keeping me interested by building a mystery and then confusing me. And that’s where it started to tip into confusing. The only last thing I would say was I was kind of thrown off by these Djarum Black Clove cigarettes, because John Hastings, who’s the character that pulls them out, pulls up in a truck with a six-pack of Bud Light, grubby jeans, and a sweatshirt flecked with paint, which to me — so his character introduction says blue color guy, but he’s pulling out the most effete cigarettes possible.

**John:** It feels like hipster cigarettes.

**Craig:** Right. Now, by the way, that may be a point. That may be something that’s interesting about him. But then I think the author needs to acknowledge that to me so that I don’t feel like, “What?” So if he says, “John improbably pulls out a pack of Djarum Black Clove cigarettes, the last thing you’d imagine him smoking.”

And then, finally, this is a big thing that I’ve been talking about a little bit on DoneDealPro. “Sam Gray, 48, wants to be a better father to Molly but doesn’t know how.” Don’t do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Please let me discover that Sam Gray wants to be a better father to Molly but doesn’t know how. Don’t tell me in this. You’re cheating.

**John:** Yeah. It’s cheating. So, it’s okay to give us something that’s not quite filmable, but don’t give us something that’s unfilmable that’s also about another character who’s not in the scene. Like, you can give us an action for him to play, but you can’t just talk about how he fits into the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you wanted to give us something that says, like, “he’s a man that’s been kicked around his whole life,” or something like that is to me fine. But don’t establish important things about your entire relationship in your movie on one line of scene description.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t sum up what is obviously going to be an important central relationship in the screenplay with a line of action that the audience will never have access to, in no small part because by doing that you let yourself off the hook of having to do the work later through the scene work itself. And if you’re going to do the work through the scene work then it really isn’t important there. In fact, you’re just ruining the fun of us discovering that relationship. And if you’re not doing it, well then you’re blowing it. So either way it doesn’t work.

**John:** One thing I’m nervous about in this script is what the first line of dialogue is going to be, because you have two choices. Is the dialogue going to be really important because it’s the first thing that some character says? Or, maybe the better choice is that it’s something that is sort of thrown away and we don’t make a big deal of the fact that no one has spoken for three minutes.

**Craig:** That’s a really good point. I find that when you go two or three pages without dialogue because you’re being impressionistic or very visual, it’s a nice thing to ease the audience into dialogue. It’s a very jarring thing to go from this sort of silent, poetic way of revealing story to somebody blabbing. A one-word response might be a nice thing. You know? [laughs] Just something to slowly ease us back into the world of talking. Good point.

**John:** Or it could be the character of Molly might walk in on a conversation that’s already happening in the background and she actually gets something from the refrigerator, or just ease us into that world because otherwise it’s going to be too much of a big deal.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Too big of a spotlight.

Let’s go to our third and final one for this week. This is a script by Bryan DeGuire. Three pages by Bryan DeGuire, called Wasteland Vacation. And I did not look at the title of the script when I first read the pages and it would have been very helpful because it would have helped set the right expectation. But let me give you a summary of what happens in these three pages.

So we start in a post-apocalyptic Hellscape. We meet Dr. Robert Fleming, who’s a scientist, and Jeremiah, who’s 27. We don’t know much more about Jeremiah. Jeremiah drives off in a 2012 minivan. So this post-apocalyptic thing is sometimes way in the future. I think we are have a super that says 2068.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so then Jeremiah drives off in this 2012 minivan and he honks the horn three times and travels back through time to present day suburbia which is very banal, but he thinks it’s beautiful.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And then we meet, the movie cuts to introduce us to Bob, in his forties, and he’s a life insurance salesman. And the script tells us that he will be our hero. We see him at work and then we see him at home with his bickering kids, Lucy and Max.

**Craig:** So I’m glad you brought up the point on the first set of pages about the basketball player about aligning the tone. Because in comedy there’s a non-comedy plot against which the comedy plays. And in this case it appears from the way that the first page was written, and I enjoyed the first page until Dr. Fleming started talking — but we’ll get to that — but the first half of the first page was evocative and it was certainly not funny.

It was quite serious. It felt like Book of Eli or Mad Max or something like that. And I just want to tie that in. When Jeremiah arrives in our time, he does so as a joke. There’s a mom… — So the minivan goes racing across the desert and Back to the Future style disappears with a honking, which I did not like, and then emerges in our time. But before it emerges there is a mom saying, “What do we always do before we cross? We do we always do? Look both ways.” It’s all clear. They take a walk. And then, zoom, this minivan appears out of nowhere, almost missing them, which is now sort of a slapsticky introduction.

And my issue is, look, when you’re doing these comedies with big science fiction conceits, that stuff has to be grounded. Keep that stuff grounded. Don’t be goofy-funny with that. You can be goofy-funny, you know, have him zip off into the future and have him emerge into our present and look around, like, “Oh my god,” and it’s kind of awesome. Then when we go to Bob, that’s okay, that’s a new jump, because Bob’s a funny guy so we can now be funny with him. And we’ll know that when he runs into Jeremiah and that plot there’s something to play against that’s real. Because if everything is funny, nothing matters. You got to keep that stuff grounded.

**John:** Yeah. I didn’t like the start as much as you did. And partly because I didn’t know that it was supposed to be a comedy to start, that I was reading it as if it was — I was trying to read it as real, like it was a real Hellscape. And it felt sloppy to me. It didn’t feel like it was doing a particularly good job of setting up what this world was like. Because it’s not really giving us — it says, “Flying over a desert hellscape. Scorched earth and human skulls.” But I’m not really feeling what that world is like, and apparently it’s important, but I’m not really noticing or caring.

And then when we get to the doctor, and once it becomes clear that this is going to be a Back to the Future kind of minivan, then I just sort of checked out for awhile.

**Craig:** Yeah. I understand what you mean. I kind of just read the first half and, okay, I get it. At least I understood what was going on. Then I felt that when the minivan showed up in our time I felt the kind of torque of tone fight going on. I was not helped by Dr. Fleming’s dialogue. “There will be many distractions but you must stay focused on the mission. This is our only chance to stop the apocalypse.”

There’s no subtext whatsoever. This man literally says exactly what he thinks. And he says it to somebody that already knows the information. So, this is not good craft. There’s a way… — We will fill in all sorts of gaps. He’s older. This guy’s younger. This guy’s deferential to him. We get that Fleming’s the boss. We get that Jeremiah is doing this. He says, “It’s time,” which is movie code for something important and dangerous is going to happen. They load this minivan up and then I think it sort of, you know, “It all comes down to you. You cannot fail.” Something like that. We’ll just get it.

It’s like, okay, they’re in the middle of an apocalypse. He’s going back in time. We’ll put it together. But this kind of over-expository radio play stuff is never good.

**John:** Yeah. And we don’t anything about the relationship between them. All we know is that it’s like a boss and employee, but if Jeremiah is the more important character because we’re going to see him in the present day, we should really come to it from his perspective rather than from the doctor’s perspective.

**Craig:** I think that’s a fair point.

**John:** So if the first person we see in future time is Jeremiah, and he carries us to the doctor, that helps establish the weight between the two of them better.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s a great point.

**John:** My other issue is with Bob and his introduction at the end.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I like the idea that the arrival into present day, either it should not be funny, it shouldn’t go for the joke, or if it does go for the joke then I feel like then you cut to the pre-title sequence or you do something else to make a clear divider so that when we get to Bob, the first thing that Bob has right now, he’s selling insurance, and the guy he’s sort of selling insurance to is talking about his mistress. It’s fine, but I’d rather Bob who’s our lead and our hero, get the first laugh.

It would be much better if our hero was the guy who owned the first joke rather than the guy who has to react to the first joke.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yes. For sure. Look, Bob is going to be Steve Carell, probably.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what I read.

**Craig:** I see these a lot. If Steve Carell is in a comedy about saving the world from Armageddon, set up the Armageddon reel and then cut to the silly mundanity of Steve Carell’s life in juxtaposition. But it has to be juxtaposed.

And, yes, he has to be the funny one. Once again we have an “INT. OFFICE.”

**John:** Yes. A generic interior office.

**Craig:** Yeah, so that’s helpful. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know what kind of office. How big? I don’t even know whose office it is, because Bob Miller, who is an insurance salesman, is selling insurance to a corporate executive. Are we in the corporate executive’s office? Are we in Bob’s office? Why is the corporate executive in Bob’s office? Why is he in the corporate executive’s office? No idea where they are or what’s going on until he looks down at the insurance brochure on his desk.

But, you know, you have to think always about how where people sit and what they look like, and how they’re dressed, and where they are. Setting, from our last podcast, can tell us so much about our characters And for comedy can add so much.

You know, when you have two people talking about a brochure, I would love for something else in that scene to be going on to just give it a little bit of life.

**John:** So, again, you don’t know what Bryan has in store for this movie, although I can kind of guess, and I think it’s going to be that these two guys are going to have to come together and stop the apocalypse. I would suggest to Bryan that he might want to do what I think we were just implying there, is set up the apocalypse, set up there’s a plan that you must do, smash cut to — have some line that takes us to, “You must go to the glorious past,” and then we see Bob who’s in the present day which is not glorious at all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So as an audience we’ll know that these three things are going to be related, and then we’re going to go to the future time and see the minivan or whatever mechanism it is that sends him back in time. That would probably be more rewarding for the moviegoer.

**Craig:** Yes. Without question. And it would be nice if when we see Bob we connect Bob to the activity that is ultimately going to lead to the Armageddon, if it’s some sort of petty thing like littering or whatever.

And then we see Bob return home. He’s in an upscale Kansas neighborhood. I don’t know how I know it’s Kansas. And if it’s important that it’s Kansas, show me it’s Kansas. If it’s more important that it’s just middle America, clue me into middle America but give me a sense of it. Just give me a sense of geography in one way or another.

“When he walks into his house his kids are fighting.” And this is just simple dialogue stuff. His daughter says, “I told you not to delete 30 Rock from the DVR.” Max, her brother says, “Just watch it on Hulu.” Lucy says, “It’s the principle.” Bob says, “Cool it guys. It’s not the end of the world.” Okay, so we get what that line’s about. But “I told you not to delete 30 Rock from the DVR” is not really a line that one child says to another.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** They would be more like, “Idiot, watch it on Hulu!” You know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We don’t need to know the details of their fight. She could just hit him and he could say, “Just watch it on Hulu. Who cares? It’s the principle. Don’t touch the remote.”

**John:** And it’s better if they’re actually beating the crap out of each other rather than just arguing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Give the scene; we don’t need details that we don’t need. It’s more fun, frankly, to get an evocation of life in that house than the specifics of the DVR fight.

**John:** If two kids are — like — wrestling and he has to come in and break them up, it’s like, “Whoa, what happened, what happened?” It’s like, “He deleted my show. Just watch it on Hulu.”

**Craig:** “Oh my god.” And then he just walks out.

**John:** Has a reaction.

**Craig:** And he literally walks out of the room and let’s them go back to fighting because he’s given up; he doesn’t care — let them beat each other up. But that sort of thing is about building a scene that informs us. And these — listen, it’s great that people send in the first three pages because the first three pages should be beautifully crafted. They should be just jam-packed with stuff. All sorts of really good stuff about the characters, the tone, the world that the characters live in.

I want to get things from their clothes, their environment, their setting. I want to know — even the pace. Even the pacing. Everything gets set in these first three pages so you can’t be flabby or loose with it

**John:** So I want to thank, I should highlight, but I also want to end on saying Ajay, and Bryan, and J. Nicholas Smith, thank you so much for sending in your three pages. And if we were harsh at any points it’s because we love you and because we’re so very thankful that you were willing to share your three pages of script.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. You know what? I have to say, guys, John and I have both written pages worse than those. Guarantee you.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And it’s part of the deal. And the fact that you’re willing to be brave enough to go and do it speaks well to your chances. And hopefully we didn’t make too many of the same mistakes that we were telling the development executives to not make. [laughs].

**John:** Do you have a Cool Thing this week? Because I have a Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I do have a Cool Thing this week, but you go ahead and do your Cool Thing first.

**John:** So my Cool Thing this week is a book I just read this week, it’s for the iPad, so it’s through the iBook store, and it’s Hooktheory. And it’s one of the new iPad books that has built-in stuff. So it has little video clips built-in and little quizzes built-in.

And so the idea of the book is to talk through music theory in terms of how pop music is built. And a part of me bristles at the thought of me because I always rip on screenwriting theory books, because I find those frustrating, but with music I’m giving it a pass because music theory, there is actual logic behind music. There’s a reason why certain chord progressions are easy and certain chord progressions are really tough to make work. And there are reasons why you find stuff in between.

And since I’ve been working on the musical, I’ll often look over at the music department and they’re figuring out how to move from this key to this key. And they have a grammar and a way of talking about it that’s actually useful in daily life.

So what Hooktheory does is take a look at pop songs, mostly things of the last 10 or 20 years, and they’ll give you these little short 15 second snippets that will break down what the chords are and then how the melody fits into those chords. And by chords they’re not talking C, F, G, but they’re talking relative chords. So they’re teaching you sort of how relative chords work which is 1 through 7, and how you can compare sort of — and the natural ways that you can move from one chord to the next chord, and why certain things fit together really easily and certain things are harder. And it’s very good and proscriptive is saying, like, “Well, you can’t ever do this.” It’s saying these are choices that make it easier. And this is why if you go to this cadence chord you’re going to find it much easier to start your next phrase.

So it’s very, very smart. A really good use of the iPad because it’s the kind of thing that would be almost impossible to talk about in a meaningful way with a normal conventionally printed book. If you didn’t have those little examples right in front of you that you could play back through and see, it really wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

So I read through this and I found myself very intellectual satisfied because it answered a lot of those questions that I’ve always had about how music works. And also frustrated because I felt like this is stuff that I should have been taught in high school. This isn’t Music 101 stuff, but like once I knew how to play an instrument, once I knew how to play piano past a certain point, someone should have taught me how this stuff works, because a lot of things just make much more sense now.

And I’ve ranted before on music education and everyone always accuses me of hating trombones, and that’s not the case at all, but I just felt like this would be a great resource for anybody who is curious about how music works and wants to sort of see the inner workings of harmony.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is absolutely different than screenwriting books. Screenplays are of not fixed length and wildly variable length whereas most pop music songs are between three and five minutes long. And most pop music songs have verse/verse/chorus, verse/bridge/chorus, out. I mean, there’s a real rigid structure to those things and it’s beautiful.

There are some wonderful videos on YouTube where some guy on keyboards, and I think in one case a band, was just going through a very common core progression. One example is the U2 song With or Without You. [hums melody] Okay, now those are all notes, but there’s chords there. [hums again] And it keeps coming back to that same, I think it’s the diatonic or the tonic. But the point is I think it’s a four-chord progression. And that four-chord progression is used by, in these videos you will see, 80, 90 really familiar songs in different ways.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s astonishing. I mean, you would never think that I’m Going Down by Bruce Springsteen is the same as With or Without You, is the same as Glycerine by Bush, is the same as Don’t Stop Believing. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** Yeah. Where I come out on this is that it’s not, the book isn’t trying to teach you “here’s how you write a pop song.” It’s basically saying, “These are the components.” And it’s like teaching “these are nouns, these are verbs, these are adjectives. There’s reasons why these fit together in a certain way. And it doesn’t mean you have to absolutely do them in these ways, but if you are trying to do them in different ways you are going to find some things are really natural and some things are really, really hard to do.” So it was a good introduction.

Now, I do want to stress it’s not a 101; it’s like a 201. Because if you were to approach this book and you couldn’t visualize a scale and know what are sharps and what are flats in different scales, it would be a hard book to sort of embrace. And there were times where I had to either go to the piano or pull up a little piano keyboard on the iPad to figure out what stuff was.

But, it also makes good use of sort of the quiz function of the iBooks, is that it will give you an example and you have to figure out what chords could actually fit in these blanks.

**Craig:** I like that. Yeah, put the link up to that. I’m gonna get that. That sounds great.

**John:** It’s good. And so it’s called Hooktheory and they also have a website that it’s based on and so if you don’t have an iPad go to Hooktheory.com. You can see sort of the way they built it out. And it’s very, very smart. It uses a little flash player that you can drag in notes and see sort of how things fit together.

**Craig:** Well interestingly enough my Cool Thing of the week is also music-oriented mostly. It is an app called Audio Essentials. And the internet has been sort of littered with these so-called sound enhancers for laptops.

Laptops have really tiny speakers, obviously, and the smaller that laptops get the smaller the speaker gets. Speaker science is actually pretty amazing, the way that they create speakers and the way that they can… — Because, you know, initially speakers were all about size. When we were kids in the ’70s and ’80s the bigger the speaker the better it was because the woofer was huge and the tweeter could be really big. And then you had a mid-range guy in between the tweeter and the woofer, so you’re EQ, the whole spectral band was represented beautifully, and separated, and gorgeous, and great. But, of course, you know, people don’t really listen to these massive cabinet speakers anymore so much as listen to through headphones and these tiny laptop speakers.

This company Audio Essentials put this app out that what they propose, what they allege, is that it would make your laptop speakers sound super, super better. So, I downloaded it. And, guess what? It makes everything sound super, super better.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I don’t know how their doing it just through software manipulation alone. All I can say is that there is a separation of the stereo feel that you don’t get. They’re probably doing some version of “exciting.” Exciting is basically where the human ear responds to certain frequencies — frankly, we are excited by certain frequencies more than others which is why literally cymbals are exiting to us, you know. And poor drummers start to experience deafness at certain frequencies because of the cymbals.

But they’re probably pulling out certain frequencies and exciting them. I’m not sure exactly how they’re getting that stereo spread the way that they are, but it really sounds great. And for, I don’t know, whatever it is, $30, I feel like it honestly transformed the sound that’s coming out of my laptop to something that I actually like listening to now.

**John:** That’s great. Just this last week I had people over that needed to play some songs off the laptop. And I ended up running it through separate Bluetooth speakers because it sounds so bad on a laptop. So this might have been a good solution.

**Craig:** Give it a shot. See what you think.

**John:** Cool. Well, Craig, thank you so much. And I would say, and I hope you agree, that it was actually really quite fun going through these three pages, so I would be inclined to do that again in the future.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was great. And I will say this: For those of you who listened to that and went, “Oh no, oh no,” I’ve been doing a very similar thing like this on DoneDealPro. I do it when I can. It’s occasional because we’re busy.

But I read three pages about a half a year ago or a year ago I would say, and I loved them. And I hooked that writer up. I asked him to send me the entire script. I read it. I thought it was really, really good. I gave him suggestions on what to do for a next draft. He finished that draft. I hooked him up with a manager, he has a manager now. And he has an actor attached to another script that he’s writing.

And he’s a screenwriter now. He’s actually getting paid.

**John:** Hooray!

**Craig:** So it’s not all just being smashed in your kneecaps.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** But mostly it is. [laughs]

**John:** I hope we weren’t smashing in kneecaps. We were pointing out what worked and giving opportunities for improvement.

**Craig:** But I will say, honestly, please, please spell check and watch the typos. When I write I check. I really proofread. I just don’t like sending in things — it just feels unprofessional to me frankly.

**John:** Don’t do that.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, that was great.

**John:** All right, have a fun time, and I will see you next week.

**Craig:** See you next week.