Search Results for: flashbacks

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 266 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we will be looking at the Netflix series Stranger Things and the writing choices that made it work so well. The WGA elections are upon us again, so Craig will tell you who to vote for. Finally, we will be tackling four recent articles in the news and asking our favorite question: how would this be a movie?

For the first time, all the stories we’re looking at come from listener suggestions, so thank you.

And, Craig, we’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back. You are currently in Europa.

**John:** I’m in Europe.

**Craig:** We are now separated by how many hours? Nine?

**John:** Nine hours. So it is nine in the morning as you’re recording this. It is 6PM as I’m recording this. I guess that’s our first bit of follow up. At the last episode, I was about to get on a plane to Paris. And I didn’t chicken out. I did it. So I’m now here. I’ve been here 10 days. It’s all going really well.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. And you at 6PM and me at 9AM, we should be roughly the same amount of tired.

**John:** It should be. I’m about ready for some dinner, and then some winding down, and heading into bed. And you’ve got a whole day ahead of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. But also probably ready for wine and a wind me down. I like to wake up and immediately start winding down.

**John:** One of the things I found challenging about being in Paris this time is usually when I’m here it’s vacation, so like, sure, let’s have wine at lunch. Sure, let’s have ice cream every day. And actually living here, that’s not a sustainable lifestyle, at least for me. So, I’m having to learn how to pace myself. And what living in Paris John is like versus vacationing in Paris John.

**Craig:** God, you know, I never thought of that. But it’s true. You’re in a different country and you think, all right, well, it’s the weekend. Let’s go do four things until we’re deadbeat. Eat way too much. And then have somebody clean our room. Nah. That ain’t happening.

**John:** Exactly. There’s none of that. I’ve had to learn how to do very basic Parisian things, like go to IKEA to buy the desk I need that I’m recording this podcast at. I’ll be sure to include a photo in the show notes of the desk setup I got, because I had to buy a children’s desk, because all of the desks are too big. I could only use a child’s desk in this apartment.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Your little, little child’s desk.

**John:** I’m a little child.

**Craig:** Is it the [Sturmfuhrer]? Is it the–? No, what is it called?

**John:** It’s the Pahl desk. It’s the P-A-H-L, but with a circumflex – not a circumflex, the two dots above the A. The Pahl desk is what I have.

**Craig:** Pahl.

**John:** So, you know, I had to go shopping for school supplies. I’ve had to do lots of really normal Parisian things.

**Craig:** And how are you doing language wise? Are you hanging in there?

**John:** I’m getting by. It’s slowly coming back to me. So, I can get by in French, I’m just not a natural French speaker. And so the goal is to be able to sort of answer back more smoothly as people talk to me. But people can speak at me full speed and I can usually understand what they’re saying.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s pretty good. For folks who are kind of familiar with Paris, there are all the Arrondissements, which are sort of confusing. They’re laid out like a snail. The easiest way to think about where I am in the city is you know how you see those tourist photos of people near the Eiffel Tower. There’s like a great big lawn and they’re usually taking a photo where it looks like they’re pinching the Eiffel Tower or plucking the Eiffel Tower through forced perspective. You know all those really annoying photos?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I live right near where all those people take those annoying photos. So, that’s who I see every morning as I cut through the park.

**Craig:** Every morning you see Tower pinchers?

**John:** I see Tower pinchers.

**Craig:** God. You start yelling at them out your window now.

**John:** Tourists!

**Craig:** Go back to your country! Swine!

**John:** Swine!

**Craig:** Because, you know, French people speak English, but with a French accent. I don’t know if you knew that? That’s what French is. It’s accented English. Yeah.

**John:** Very true. Well, actually, you know the British accent is just American English and they just change a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. They make it silly.

**John:** They make it silly. Yeah.

Two episodes ago we had Peter Dodd on, the UTA agent. And he said that agents read the Nicholls finalists, but they don’t necessarily read the semifinalists and quarter-finalists. And he said there are thousands and thousands of semifinalists. Greg Beal from the Academy wrote in and sort of gave us the real numbers. So, here’s the actual numbers of how many semifinalists there are.

So, he said, “In a single year, the most Nicholls semifinalist scripts ever was 140.” Which is a lot of scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “That means in the history of the competition there’s approximately 3,000 screenplays that have been semifinalists but were never finalists.” So, considering that some writers might have had two scripts, that’s at least 2,000, 2,500 people who can say like I was a Nicholls semifinalist. So that’s a lot.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** But he also sent a list of the people who were the semifinalist but not the finalist, and there’s some really good names on that list. So, I thought we would end on an inspiring note and say who some of those people are. Names like Michael Arndt. Ava DuVernay. Mark Fergus. Vince Gilligan. Gavin Hood. David Levine. Damon Lindelof. Josh Marston. Melissa Rosenberg. John Spaihts. Frank Spotnitz. Meredith Stiehm.

So there’s a lot of really great writers who were semifinalists but not finalists. So, that’s encouraging.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the implication – I don’t think Peter’s implication was if you don’t become a Nicholls finalist, and you only are a semifinalist, you’re never getting an agent. I think his implication was you’re probably not getting an agent because of the Nicholls. The script may find its way to him some other way. Or, you may write another script that is more attractive that people find you via. But, you know, our general thesis in that discussion that contests are perhaps overrated and the notion that writers have that contests are their ticket to the big time is probably more of a myth than a reality.

**John:** I think there’s also a correlation versus causation thing here. The fact that those writers who I listed there were finalists, well, that was because they were really good writers. And they were successful because they were really good writers. But, being a semifinalist was not the cause of them becoming successful. It was a correlation because they were already really good writers.

**Craig:** That is the rule that is overarching all of this stuff. Because, in the end, if you’re good enough to be a finalist, you don’t need to be a finalist. You’re good enough to be a finalist. It’s one of those things. Somehow or another the good should be borne out. And the cream should rise. And great scripts will be found. So, I guess the advice to people is to think, you know, everything good that might happen because of this script will happen because of this script. I am not trying to use this script to have something else happen. And that’s the thing that makes the good things happen.

**John:** Yeah. The good writing is the good writing. That is the ticket.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** We had a question from Andrew in Maryland. And so he was good enough to send in some audio. So, let’s take a listen to what he asked about that episode.

Andrew: Hi John and Craig. I’ve been a faithful listener since the early days of Scriptnotes and have always found the podcast entertaining and extremely helpful. However, I was deeply discouraged by two episodes – the One with the Agent, and Sheep Crossing Roads. It seems you’re saying there is really no hope for those of us who love screenwriting but live in other parts of the country and world.

I have a hunch the burning questions on the minds of your listeners not in LA are what does this mean for us. If we can’t move to LA, do we just hang up our spurs and write novels? I have a young family, so it’s not feasible for me to move to LA anytime soon. Should we even bother pressing toward our goals of becoming career screenwriters? I would love to know what you think we should do, if anything. Your faithful listener, Andrew from Maryland.

**Craig:** Well, this is a question we get all the time. And the answer, Andrew, is no. We’re not saying there is really no hope. We’re saying there is little hope. But then again, there’s little hope for people here. [laughs] You know? I mean, the deal is, I think I’ve said this before, if it’s a million-to-one shot in Los Angeles, and it’s five times worse in Maryland, then it’s a five million-to-one shot in Maryland. Those are all terrible odds.

So, you know, the problem of course is you have to think that you’re the one in the X million. And then do what’s best. But, it’s tough. We can’t sugarcoat reality here. It’s tough.

**John:** I wonder though if there’s a reality that we don’t actually appreciate, because we just haven’t found the writers who have actually broken in from outside the system. So, we have so many people who listen to the show, including working professional writers. I’m wondering how many of them actually broke in from some place outside.

So, basically they were Andrew from Maryland, and they wrote a script that somehow got the attention of people here. And now they’re working as a screenwriter or as a TV writer. So, if you’re listening to this and you are a working writer who started someplace else and got it all to work sort of from Andrew’s situation, could you please write us and let us know. Because we’d like to talk to you. I don’t know a lot of writers who have had that situation, but it must happen. So, write in to us. Write into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll try to get your story out there. Because I really feel for Andrew.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do, too. I would say if you are in New York, excuse yourself from this exercise. That doesn’t count. But the only one I know of is Diablo. I don’t know anybody else that kind of just shot in here from a non-New York or California, or Southern California location.

**John:** Yeah. Gary Whitta doesn’t live in Los Angeles, but I think he might have been living in town when he started working.

**Craig:** You know what? Let’s also excuse London. That’s a great point. Because London has its own industry, and they make their own films. So, I would say, because we do get a lot of London writers who come over here because they initially work on London productions.

**John:** Like Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Right. Like Kelly Marcel. Well, there’s a ton of them. I mean, Tess Morris. And Kelly Marcel. And Gary Whitta, I assume, is a London guy, because he sounds Londony to me.

So London doesn’t count. New York doesn’t count. I’m going to accept every other place in the world.

**John:** Great. So we’d love to hear your stories if you have been able to start a writing career in film or television from someplace other than Los Angeles, New York, or London. Write in. Let us know. Because we could be wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re often wrong. We love to be wrong.

**Craig:** I mean, John is often wrong. I don’t recall ever.

**John:** Yeah. We cut something out of this segment just now.

**Craig:** John was literally wrong seconds ago. [laughs]

**John:** One thing I’m not wrong about is Stranger Things, which is a terrific show on Netflix.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Even in France, I am Segue Man. I’m l’homme de Segue.

**Craig:** L’homme de Segue. [laughs] Stranger Things, so, so much fun. Who doesn’t like this show? Nobody doesn’t like Stranger Things.

**John:** I found one person on Twitter who I follow who doesn’t like it. And he could be wrong. Craig, I was just so happy you watched it, because I watched it a couple weeks ago and I thought, well, Craig won’t watch it because Craig watches nothing. And then you surprised me by watching it.

**Craig:** Well, my wife said, “You’re going to watch this show now.” And I said, OK. That usually works. When the boss tells me to watch, I watch. And, frankly, what’s great about my position vis-à-vis watching TV is to me TV is the greatest medium of all time because I only watch the absolute best of shows. That’s it.

I’ve seen Breaking Bad. I’ve seen Stranger Things. And Game of Thrones. That’s what TV is to me. It’s an amazing machine.

**John:** It must be so intimidating when you try to do television yourself, because you assume that everything on TV–

**Craig:** How is that possible?

**John:** –if you turn on any random channel, it’s going to be just a masterpiece.

**Craig:** Actually, I weirdly assume that television is nothing but advertisements and then Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones. How else do they fill their day?

So I was talking to Mike Birbiglia the other day, and I said you’ve got to watch Stranger Things. Because, you know, and I hate telling people watch a show, because I know how I feel when people tell me to watch a show. And that’s basically angry.

But it goes down so smooth. It’s like drinking chocolate milk. It’s just, fooop, it’s in you. It’s so easy to watch. So easy to watch.

**John:** Now, there’s a good chance that some of our listeners have not watched the show yet. So, what we’re going to do is Godwin, when he listens to this episode, he will note the timecode of when we start hitting spoilers and then he will give you a timecode for when we’re done. So you can just read in the show notes about what you should skip to.

Obviously we have chapter breaks, but if you’re listening to this on a player that doesn’t have chapter breaks he’ll also give you the timecode so you can jump to the next segment if you don’t want any spoilers.

But I think on the whole we’re probably not going to go too spoiler heavy. We’re mostly just going to celebrate the things it did really well.

We could talk about the casting. We could talk about the production design. The terrific direction by the Duffer Brothers. And Shawn Levy who also stepped up and did a great job as well. But I really want to focus on the writing, because what I thought was so remarkable about the show is it took this premise, which to me felt like if we could have a Stephen King book, or an early Steven Spielberg movie, and do it as an eight-hour show, what would that feel like. And they pulled it off so geniusly. They were able to take that idea for a story and break it out over eight episodes in a way that didn’t feel tedious or padded. I was just really impressed by how they managed the control of information, the reveals of character details. It just all felt like it was of one piece. And so it was smartly done.

**Craig:** Well, you can see how much planning went into it. And this is a good lesson for anyone writing anything. I do think certainly for people writing films. But when you look at these limited series, an eight run series like this, it’s just a long movie is what it is, right, broken up into bits.

And what they did so wonderfully was carefully ration out information in such a way that you never felt under-informed, nor were you ever over-informed. You just wanted more. And that is a tricky balance to strike.

**John:** One of the other realizations I had is that this show, because it was dumped all as a block, you got to see all the episodes in one sitting if you wanted to. There wasn’t that week-to-week fan engine of curiosity or theories about who this character was or what was really going on. I think they knew from the start, because they were doing this for Netflix, that a person might watch the whole thing all at once. And they built it in a way that was rewarding if you were to watch it all at once, and didn’t feel like it was a show that you had to watch one week at a time.

**Craig:** I actually loved the fact that it didn’t come out one week at a time. Maybe a little counterintuitive, but because you may think from an executive point of view, a Netflix point of view, we have a problem here: if we dump all eight episodes of the show out, and this is a mystery, with multiple reveals throughout, what’s going to happen after day one when people just go online and start saying, “Here’s what happened. Here’s how it ended.”

In fact, in today’s culture, I feel the opposite is true. I feel that people respect that and don’t do that anymore. What they don’t respect, however, is the time in between time-lapsed episodes. So, if you do release an episode once a week in the traditional way, between your Sunday and Sunday, you have a week of people going bananas online attempting to explain things and guess.

So it’s like watching a movie with somebody next to you constantly whispering saying, “I think I know what’s going to happen. I think that that means this. I think that this is going to happen.” And you just want to kill them. And I don’t like that over-analysis, the interstitial over-analysis that goes on. So I love that this thing just went bloop and nobody had a chance to post endlessly long, boring theories about what you were about to see.

**John:** Agreed. So let’s take a look at what might have been on their whiteboard as they were mapping out these eight episodes. We obviously don’t have time to dig into the individual things on each individual episode, but what are the big macro notes as they were figuring out who the characters were, what was going to be revealed about each character in which episode, and sort of how the flow of the eight-episode season was going to work.

So, we start with episode one. The whole thing centers around the disappearance of a boy named Will Byers. And so Will Byers is obviously a key character. His mother is a key character. His brother is a key character. His best friends are key characters. And so we’re going to need to establish all of them.

We need to establish all of them. We need to establish the town. We need to establish the sheriff who is going to investigating his disappearance. That he’s not just a functional investigator, but he’s actually a flawed hero kind of character himself. And then there’s one other family that’s going to be very important. And so it’s his best friend, and his best friend’s sister. The family to some degree we’ll get to see. Am I leaving anybody else out of that initial sort of tableau?

**Craig:** The only other thing that you get early on is they establish a villain. They establish something dangerous and murderous that we can’t see. And they establish a bad guy with very stark white hair.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s also in the first episode that we meet the girl we’ll come to know as Elle. We first meet her on the run. She goes and she sneaks into a diner. She meets the owner, a guy named Benny, who seems like he’s going to be a useful, important, sympathetic character. He gets killed off very gruesomely. Let’s you know this is the kind of show where people will die suddenly. And that her life is in real danger.

By the end of the first episode, we’ve connected Elle with the boys. And we’ve pretty much established what the show is going to be like. That the engine of the show is the girl and the boys, the cops, Joyce, the mother played by Winona Ryder, searching for her son, and the bad guys.

**Craig:** Yeah. And what they’ve done is set up a bunch of questions. These are good burning questions, but we’re not overdosed on them. Question, what is in that laboratory? Question, what is the dangerous thing that kills a scientist in the laboratory? Question, it seems like that’s the thing that came after young Will Byers, but instead of killing him, young Will Byers just vanishes. Where did he go? Why would it do that?

And, lastly, the strange little girl, who we presume probably comes from the same lab, I guess, this girl doesn’t talk, and she seems somewhat traumatized. What’s the deal? All great questions. And not too many. Not not enough.

**John:** Exactly. And I thought it was very important that they show you that, you know what, we’re going to connect threads. This is not going to be one of those shows where people are going to be working in parallel forever. The girl is going to meet the boys by the end of episode one. And it feels, OK, you see what the shape of this is going to be by the end of episode one.

You get a sense of what the series is going to feel like. So, episode two, Barb – who is everyone’s favorite character – she is Nancy’s best friend. I should have explained that this is essentially a John Hughes movie that’s happening kind of in one frame of this. And it’s about her virginity. It’s all very kind of classically ’80s teen stuff, played pretty straight, although I would say some of that stuff goes a little broader in a kind of fun way.

But Barb is just this amazing character who disappears at the end of episode two. Joyce sees something climbing through the walls. This is where the supernatural things have started to intrude into our world. And so it clearly isn’t just the mystery of the disappeared boy. This is something that’s going to keep going on, and people are going to keep being in danger from these supernatural forces.

**Craig:** Right. And, again, for every bit – and this is what these guys are really good at – every time they gave us answer, they would then give us another question.

So, they give us an answer about this girl, Eleven. One answer is that, yes, she is from the hospital, and yes, bad people are chasing her, and no, she’s not a bad person. She’s a good person. But we also learn that she can move things with her mind. How? And yet still more questions. And she gives, I think, the boys the ultimate question at the end of this episode when she attempts to explain to them where Will is.

And she does it by taking – silently, no words – she shows that – they are all on their little Dungeons & Dragons game board. And then she flips the board over, puts Will on the back of the board, and puts him near a monster.

So, that’s a ton of questions. What the hell does that mean, right? But it was great. We learned a lot. And then they’re like, uh-huh, did you enjoy that information? Here comes more questions. Same thing with Barb. Barb vanishes. We get a little bit of information. There is some blood involved. And then she’s gone again. And someone has taken a picture – Will’s brother has taken a picture. So there’s a little bit of evidence now of something. And we also have this wonderful story of a mother who we all believe, and no one else believes, and that’s always just fun, you know. That’s just fun tension for us.

**John:** Absolutely. One of the things so crucial here is as an audience we are basically caught up with the characters. So, Eleven obviously has more information than we do. The bad guys have more information than we do. But everybody else is basically where we’re at. In some cases we have more information because we’ve seen multiple perspectives on things. But we’re never given a lot more information than what the characters themselves have. And I think that’s part of the reason why we can relate so well to the characters because we understand their confusion and frustration because we are confused, too.

We’re really wondering what’s happened. We’re wondering whether Winona Ryder is crazy. We’re wondering what the next best thing is to do.

The boys are great, but they’re also cocky and confident in a way that really helps propel the story. And I feel like other probably older, more rational characters, might have taken a step back and really looked at it more objectively. I love that they just went for it. And because they were kids, they just plowed right ahead.

**Craig:** That’s the gift here. And it’s a great writing lesson. When you have something that’s a problem, you can easily convert into an asset. It’s a problem like to say, well, a policeman or a 30-year-old will look at this in a certain way and just grab this girl by the shoulders and say I’m going to have you now explain to me carefully.

But they don’t want that, so they use 12-year-old boys, who are Labrador puppies. And that’s so much more fun. Similarly, you have a moment in this episode where we see a flashback from Elle where she is remembering her past life with this white-haired villain character played by Matthew Modine. And he’s having her thrown into a little solitary confinement cell. We don’t know why. We don’t know why she’s having just that little scrap of a memory. We don’t know why she won’t speak.

But you know what we do know? She’s clearly been traumatized. And so they’ve taken this problem – why isn’t this person telling us everything she knows – and made it an asset. She’s traumatized. She can’t. It’s very smart.

**John:** Plowing episode, episode three, we see Joyce communicating with Will, but also Will’s body is found, which was a big shocker. That was sort of a – if this were a week-to-week episode kind of series, you would be stunned by that having happened. At the end of the episode, his body is pulled from the lake. After watching that episode, we took a break. We didn’t watch it anymore until the next night. And I thought for a while like, oh, so I guess he really is dead and maybe it’s a ghost. I mean, it really does change your perspective on the things you’ve seen up to that point, because you’re expecting like, oh, well, they’re going to find him somehow because he is somewhere. His spirit is somewhere. They’ll find him. His body will somehow come back.

And the answer is no.

**Craig:** This was the only thing where I stumbled a little bit because at this point in the show they have setup Elle as a kind of moral and informational authority. She’s right always. And she has superpowers and she’s been there. And she’s already told them he’s not dead.

So, the part of the show I liked the least was the character of the three boys, it was the skeptic character, because there was no damn reason for him to be skeptical. Once she closed a door with her mind, yeah, I’m in. I’m in. You clearly know what you’re talking about. And the fact that she literally got them to hear Will’s voice very briefly through a walkie-talkie and similarly Will’s mother is experiencing a kind of communication with Will through lights, which is really beautiful and interesting. So, I never believe for a second that that was actually Will’s body.

And I was shocked that even one of the boys believed for a second that that was Will’s body. Regardless, we have certainly more questions. Even if you don’t believe that that’s Will’s body, and I never did, why is there a fake Will’s body in the lake? [laughs] That, to me, is a really good question. And if the obvious answer is because people want to fool you into thinking he’s dead, the question is but why. So then they know where he is. We also – we get an answer to Elle. That this man put her in – that flashback – he put her in solitary confinement because she refused to use her powers to hurt a cat.

But what comes out of that, which is so – then this other question is why is he making her hurt a cat? And why does she call him Papa? And what is going on? You know, you want to know. And what is the extent of her power?

That’s the other thing that’s so interesting, you know.

And then, lastly, the creature who has made little hints that maybe he could come into our world, now very clearly is showing that it can come into our world. And so there is now the question of the threat will this happen again.

**John:** Yep. I was a huge fan of both Alias and Lost. They were great shows. I watched every episode of both. But one of the challenges those shows had is because they were longer series, and because they had to go on for multiple seasons and the creators didn’t even know how long they were going to be going on in some cases, the mysteries, the little things they would seed, you weren’t sure when they would pay off or if they would pay off.

Going into this series that was eight episodes long, I could see things like Will’s body, is that really a fake body. What’s going on here? And I knew like, you know what, it’s eight episodes. I have a strong hunch that it’s going to pay off. And I think I gave the creators a little extra pass on some things because I knew that they only had eight episodes and that there was a plan for it.

I always felt confident that they knew both where the whole series was going, but also how they were going to structure the information within the episodes. And that’s a very tough thing is how do you make this one hour really enjoyable, but also be a great puzzle piece for the whole eight episodes.

**Craig:** 100%. And, you know, look, I like the genre of serialized mystery. I really do. But when it isn’t closed ended, it inevitably turns bad. I loved Twin Peaks. I loved it. But at some point it became clear that they were in a space where they were not writing backwards from an ending. And that’s a dangerous thing, because theoretically you’ve lost all sense of unity. And a mystery, unlike other serialized shows, like action shows, cop shows, procedurals, a mystery has an ending. And so it is a dangerous thing to write an open-ended mystery.

You eventually will run afoul of setups that don’t pay off. It’s inevitable. And so, yes, I would not have started watching this if I didn’t know that it had an end. Wouldn’t have done it.

**John:** Once you know who killed Laura Palmer, there’s no reason to keep watching Twin Peaks. It’s not entirely true, but you can’t frame Twin Peaks as who killed Laura Palmer and expect us to watch after you’ve revealed the answer to who killed Laura Palmer, or sort of a murky half-answer to who killed Laura Palmer.

**Craig:** It’s like listening to a song, and the song has this interesting build, and there’s going to be a reveal. I’m listening to the Pina Colada song. And what’s going on? He’s taking out a personal ad. He’s going to cheat on his wife. He’s going to meet her in a bar. And she walks in and IT’S HIS WIFE. But, what if it weren’t? What if it’s like, well, and she didn’t show up, so I’m going to try a different thing. And now I’m going to try to meet another lady. And this song is never going to end.

No! End. [laughs] End. You know? And that’s the problem. Twin Peaks, once Laura Palmer’s murder is revealed, you begin to realize they’re vamping. This show has now turned into vamping. And nobody wants to watch vamping. Nobody. Unless you’re going to like an improv show, and then give me a three-minute sketch and get off the stage.

**John:** Yeah. Challenging. There will be a new series of Twin Peaks coming on Netflix soon. So, we’ll see if they’ve learned that lesson.

**Craig:** I hope they have.

**John:** All right. Quickly powering through, episode four, the boys really contact Will, so that’s the radio episode. We connect Nancy with the monster through Jonathan. And that’s the first time you feel like, oh, these different characters who aren’t really interacting about the monster, everyone is starting to have the same kind of information about things.

It’s also where we reveal that the body was fake. And so you can sort of feel like, OK, all of these threads are coming together in the way that a Stephen King novel, like those threads would start to come together, like in The Stand, or these things where you’ve been following these separate people doing their separate things. Now everyone is starting to understand that they have a common enemy, and they’re coming together.

That continues in episode five. That’s where Hopper sees what’s going on. We establish the geography of our world and the other world and how one is the shadow of the other.

We see Nancy cross over. And we also see Elle in the depravation tank in the flashback. And you see like, oh, that’s how she does her thing and establishing that’s probably how the monster got in.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you start to see an acceleration of answers here. Episode four isn’t really giving us too much new information, other than that Will is definitely alive, and that body is definitely a fake. So episode four was a little bit of a holding pattern, although it did have some fun character stuff with Elle and the boys. Because, remember also, while they’re telling the story of information and mystery, they’re telling a love story between Elle and Mike.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And it’s an adorable love story. They also in episode four, they begin to relieve you of some of the burden of frustration. It’s a small town. There are six or seven characters. All of them know things that would help the other one, and they’re not talking, which is normal to create tension. But at some point you can’t keep it up. And in this episode they say no more of that; let’s start connecting our dots together. That really happens in episode five where everyone is sort of now becoming one big team.

But what’s great about episode five is it also gives you a huge answer. And that answer is what the hell is this other place? We don’t quite know until they very clearly show Nancy actually entering it, and then coming out. And then we go, oh, I get it. It is like upside-down our world. I get it now. I get exactly what’s going on.

And all the way back in episode two when she flipped that board over and stuck his little figure on the back of the board, that was actually incredibly accurate.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So, you’ve gotten all of these really interesting bits of news, and you also now can position Elle’s origin story. We know that she has these powers. We know that she started by being used by the military to listen to spies. Now she’s going to be helping to kill spies. But while she’s in that zone, right, she was never meant to contact this creature. She was just traveling this other dimension to help spy, but while she’s in there she discovers this bad, bad thing.

**John:** Yeah. And that bad, bad thing follows her out. So, in episode six we learn more backstory on Elle. We learn about how she came to be. We learn why she calls the man because Papa, because her real mother was part of this secret government program. They did acid and tried to do sort of psychic experiments. She was pregnant with Elle during that time. So, this man who she calls Papa probably raised her. And that is all very, very troubling.

So, it’s not just a name she’s given him. She actually sort of does see him as a father figure. If I have a qualm with sort of how some stuff played out, there was opportunity to see some real affection between the father and the daughter figure, and it was never there. And I don’t know if they just sort of ran out of time, or they decided it was not a thing they wanted to see. But I didn’t have a sense of Frankenstein’s love for his monster, or any of that really manifested through the end of the show. Do you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** I totally agree. And part of it is that Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Elle, is such an extraordinary actor that she was frankly more convincing than everybody else at any given time. When she’s crying out to Matthew Modine, our villain, and crying for his saying Papa, like please don’t hurt me and put me in, you know, don’t punish me, I believed that it was the anguish of a child not to someone that she was scared of, but somebody that she loved.

And I needed – I’m so with you – I would have loved to have seen that he had some of that for her. And instead you mostly just get that he’s kind of a stock government sociopath. And I would love if he’s – the implication is he’s no longer with us, but if he does return in season two, that’s something I would love to see explored.

**John:** I agree with you. If I have any other fantasy wishes for a scene that wasn’t able to fit in here, Winona Ryder I think is terrific in the show, but she has to play sort of one emotion, and she gets to dial it between nine and 11, which is sort of the panic/anguish of a mother who has lost her kid. If she had a flashback, had some other moment to give us some other flavor of who she was. If they’d given us a little bit of whatever her and Hops relationship was back in the past, that would have been fantastic. Because I missed seeing another flavor of Joyce, who in this show only gets to be panicked mother.

**Craig:** True. But I will give Winona Ryder all the credit in the world. What a difficult task. You have to be basically completely strung out and realistic as a woman whose son is gone and who everyone is telling you is dead, and yet you believe he’s not dead. You deny the fact you’re going crazy. You’re talking to him through your lights. You’re crying all the time. And I believed her. And that was amazing.

I could easily see that in the second season she kind of goes through a Sarah Connor transformation. Like Sarah Connor in Terminator was basically damsel in distress. Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 is transformed by the experience of Terminator 1 into this ultimate hard-ass warrior, which I love.

**John:** Yeah. I think I just wanted Winona Ryder to have her Emmy reel. And I wanted one more scene for her Emmy reel there, which would have been great.

**Craig:** Well, she’s got some good ones. I’ll tell you the one that I would put in, which I loved. It’s such a little scene, but she goes to the store where she works. We’ve never seen her actually working her job. She just goes there, confronts her boss–

**John:** And takes stuff. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. She needs two weeks advanced pay. And she needs a telephone. And she needs a pack of Camels. I mean, that was great. So well done.

**John:** All right. So episode six, we got our backstory. Episode seven is where everybody comes together. So essentially all these characters who have been in different spaces, they’re now all under literally one roof. We’re in the gym. They’re building this giant bathtub thing so that Elle can float and find where the missing boy is. It was nice.

It was a thing that you sensed needed to happen at some point. Like everybody had to get together and be working together to do things. And there was still conflict between the different characters. Each of them had some slightly different agendas, but they were all generally on the same page.

We also could really feel the ticking clock that the bad guys were out there and they were going to find them sooner or later. So, everything was coming to a head.

**Craig:** Yeah. And good writing lesson here. When you need to create obstacles for your characters, try and create them out of elements of the world that you have organically put in there that nobody would expect would then become an obstacle.

So for instance, we have these flashbacks where we’re seeing how Elle first contacts this other dimension and a monster. And to do that, they’re putting her in this isolation tank. And we don’t really understand why, although it seems pretty quickly like, OK, it helps her concentrate and it helps her access her full power. How smart then for them later to say, oh, if we’re going to win the day, we need to reproduce that with her as good people so that it becomes this fascinating obstacle that no other show would have ever had.

We need to fill a bathtub up with water and salt. And how do we do it. How much salt do we need? And where are we going to do this? Very, very smart. It’s a really good lesson, I think, to take the things that you have, that only you have, and turn them to your advantage.

**John:** Yeah. Being specific rather than being generic. And then finally we get to our eighth episode. And the series has basically promised this from the start. We will go in and we will save the boy. And so Hopper and Joyce go in to save Will Byers. And it’s all cool. It’s all actually really well done. And so we have the tension of them being in this other world, whether they’ll get to the son in time. We have all the bad guys in the real world. We have the monster crossing over to face the boys. You knew that had to happen, but you weren’t quite sure how it would look, or where it would take place.

I mean, the boys at the very first episode, they’re fighting this monster. And now they’re fighting the monster for real. So it was nice to see it all coming together.

**Craig:** Here’s where all of our big spoilers are. It was not at all surprising to me that she sacrificed herself to destroy the monster and save Mike and the boys. That seemed inevitable from the start. I love my Christ figures so much, so when I see one walk into a movie I think, well, you’ll be dead. And that’s fine. Although, of course, in Stranger Things fashion, you get all of these answers. And the day is done, and then more questions are raised at the end to tease you ahead for the second season.

Maybe she’s not dead. And maybe Will Byers isn’t exactly OK. And the good questions to keep us posted for it.

Now, it’s interesting, when I watched it, it didn’t seem to me like a series that needed to continue with those characters, by the way. I could easily see a second season where it’s an entirely different story with different people.

**John:** And they haven’t promised one thing or the other, have they? So, there’s no guarantee they’re coming back.

**Craig:** They have implied, actually, so let’s talk about Barb for a second. So, Barb, the perfectly pitched friend character, the Jiminy Cricket character for Nancy, who’s saying don’t sleep with the boy just because he’s cool – and accurate. She disappears. She’s discovered to be dead on the other side, so that’s sort of the stakes for Will. That helps us know that Will is in legitimate jeopardy on the other side.

That’s really all that ever happened with her. Her mom answers the phone at one point. We never see the mom again. People on the Internet were a little upset. I mean, hold on to your hats everyone: the Internet got upset. Because they felt that she had gotten a short shrift.

Some of the anger came from the corner of gender/queer politics. That she was probably gay and another gay character died. Although, I don’t see why they thought that, just because of her haircut? I mean, I didn’t get that jump. I mean, look, from a writing point of view, Barb existed so that we understood that Will Byers could die. That’s why she existed as a character. But they did say that they heard some of the criticisms about Barb and that Barb would get some kind of justice in season two, which implies a continuity here, yes?

**John:** Not necessarily. It could be a more metaphorical justice. Like basically the bad things that were done to her will be avenged. Or that maybe Nancy will go out there and take down the bad guys. So we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** I leave it to them. But let’s talk about what’s next for them, because I don’t know the development process on Stranger Things, the first season, but I suspect they pitched the pilot. At some point they wrote up a document that was sort of what we were describing. It’s basically the talk through what happens episode by episode. And I’ve had to do those kind of outlines. Craig, you probably had to do the same kind of thing for the HBO show you’re doing, right?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so the kinds of things we’re talking about today, really the broad strokes about what’s happening in a given episode, after you sell a series you’re going to be writing up that document. And that’s the kind of thing you’re going to be talking about with the people who are writing the checks for your show about what’s going to happen in given episodes. And sometimes there’s negotiation. I don’t know sort of what degree they had to wrestle over what things were going to be happening in which given episodes.

But those documents exist before there are ever scripts. And so they’re very important places for planning the big broad strokes of the story. And I thought in those broad strokes documents, I don’t know if they’ll ever be published, they were really good.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I would love to see their show bible. We call it a show bible. Because inevitably things change. I mean, it’s funny. I’m in the process right now of conforming my – so I’ve written two episodes of the HBO thing. And they’ve asked me to kind of go back now and make changes to the bible to reflect how things changed in those first two episodes, because as they’re talking to other broadcasting partners, they just want all the materials to match up. And things do change. And I’d be fascinated to see where they kind of deviated from their plan, their initial plan.

But I suspect that the big points, in concrete. Have to be, or else I’m not sure how you survive writing a show like this.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. So if you skipped over our discussion of Stranger Things, please go back and listen to it when you’ve had a chance to watch the show, because we thought it was great. But now let’s get to the WGA election. And Craig will tell you who you should vote for.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll do my best here. This is what we call an off-year election, so no officer candidates this year. It’s just board members. We’re losing a bunch of incumbents, a bunch of good incumbents. I’m sorry to say we’re losing some feature writers. We may soon find ourselves with a board of directors that has no feature writers on it. It’s just horrifying to me.

Regardless, here’s who is running. Matthew Weiner of Mad Men fame. Glen Mazzara of Walking Dead fame. Zoanne Clack, who is medical doctor and a big TV writer. Jonathan Fernandez, who is an incumbent. Chip Johannessen, who is incumbent. Marjorie David is an incumbent. Courtney Ellinger, I’m not familiar with. Ligiah – I think it’s Ligiah Villalobos who interviewed me and Chris Morgan one evening at the Writers Guild. I can’t remember what it was about. Ali LeRoi, who is a big television writer. And Patric Verrone, evergreen Patric Verrone.

Look, some of these people I don’t know. But I figure probably the better thing is to say who I do know and who I definitely support. I definitely support Glen Mazzara. Glen is fantastic. I can’t believe he hasn’t been on the board yet. He’s hugely active in the Guild. He’s incredibly active in the showrunner’s training program, which is of vital importance. He is a great guy. He is super active in diversity efforts at the Guild. And he’s a practical, smart dude who listens. I love Glen. I love, love Glen. He’s terrific. So, please do vote for Glen.

I don’t know Zoanne Clack, but she’s a medical doctor and I just feel like people that – unless they are–

**John:** You know who else is a medical doctor?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Dr. Ben Carson is a medical doctor.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I get it. But, see, she’s never said anything cuckoo like Ben Carson. And I’ve got a good feeling about her. Medical doctor. Also, it just seems like she does seem to have approval from a wide swath of people in the Guild. So, I am supporting Zoanne Clack.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Jonathan Fernandez, incumbent, terrific guy. Very, very pragmatic, again. Good and moderate and smart. We should absolutely get Jonathan Fernandez back on the board.

**John:** So I know Jonathan Fernandez from the picketing group. Back at the last strike, he was part of my picketing group. We picketed in front of Paramount Pictures. Every morning at like 5:30 in the morning. And so it was a small group of us and he was one of them. And since that strike he’s been sort of my go to person to ask questions about like, hey, what’s really going on here with these issues in the Guild. He’s very smart about younger writers and sort of the struggle of actually bringing home enough money that you can afford to be a writer. And so he has TV experience, feature experience. He seems like a great choice to get back on that board.

**Craig:** For sure. I can’t really speak to any of the other ones. That doesn’t mean they would be good or bad. Except for Patric Verrone. And Patric Verrone actually finished in ninth place in the last election. So, theoretically he should have been not elected. But one of the people who won an office position was Aaron Mendelsohn who was a board member. So there was a board member vacancy which meant they took and filled that position with the ninth vote getter, which was Patric Verrone.

I want to point out how extraordinary this is. Patric Verrone was the two-term president of the Writers Guild and he is so un-liked that he couldn’t finish in the top eight of board member elections last year. There’s a reason for that. He is a very, very smart guy. He is completely misguided on Guild politics. He has always been completely misguided on Guild politics.

He has one gear. And that gear is in moderation as a virtue. And Patric Verrone’s time is over. It should stay over. And he should find something else to do. So don’t vote for Patric Verrone.

**John:** Craig, I will guarantee you that I will not vote for Patric Verrone. So, if you are a WGA member, you got an email this last week that invited you to cast your ballots. So, do cast your ballot. It is important.

What Craig was saying is that this is an off-cycle election, so this is not the election where we also elect the president and do all of those other things. But these are quite important decisions you’re going to be making, because these are the people who are going to be taking us into this next negotiating cycle. So they’re not the negotiating committee, but they’ll be setting some of the agenda for going into that, so it’s important because it’s always important. And let’s pick some good people this year.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s important, too, that we have voices on the board who are actual voices. My experience on the board and my experience since in dealing with board members is that nine times out of ten board members do what they’re told to do. They’re told to do by the officers and they’re told to do by the executive director. And they have unanimous votes. And what they quickly become is large, boisterous discussion group that spends an hour or two yammering about stuff and then voting as they’re told. And we don’t want that.

We actually want a group that probably doesn’t spend as much time yammering to hear themselves speak, but also doesn’t rubber stamp things. We want thoughtful, independent, specific voices who are setting policy for our union.

**John:** I would agree with you. So, Craig, I’m looking at our recording time and it’s clear that we are not going to be able to get through these How Would this be a Movie. So what I propose to do is there are four different things we were going to talk through. And since we know what they are, let’s do that for our next episode. And we can actually put the links to these things in this week’s episode so people will see what they are, and they can read ahead.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And actually know what they are. So the four things we want to talk about, first is Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise. It’s a story by Joseph Curtis writing for Male Online. It’s about Dr. James Barry. And, no spoilers, but Dr. James Barry had a very interesting life. And that was a submission by listener Craig Mazin, who occasionally listens to the episodes.

**Craig:** Rarely.

**John:** The second one is The Perfect Mom, submitted by Brett Thomas in Sacramento. It tells the story of Gypsy, this girl with a litany of debilitating diseases. An incredibly inspirational story of a mother and a daughter who really struggled against a million possible odds. And the community that supported them. And, wow, things go dark. Things go very, very dark.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, the story we’re going to have you read is by Michelle Dean writing for BuzzFeed. Our third one was submitted by Rachael Speal. It’s about an amateur sleuth. This is 12-year-old Jessica Maple. Her home was burglarized, but this pre-teen took it upon herself to find the scoundrels and bring them to justice. So, we’ll give you an article that is from ABC News that you could look at for that.

The final one, and it’s maybe kind of good that we’re pushing this back, because new pieces are still coming out and I haven’t read all of it, was submitted by Phil Hay who is a screenwriter friend of ours. One of the writers of The Invitation who was on a previous episode. This is called Revenge in Irvine. It’s a series of stories in The Los Angeles Times about a PTA mom and drugs and accusations. And it seems just great. It seems like a Desperate Housewives kind of story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s wild. Yeah, this guy, Christopher Goffard, is the writer. And I think he’s done four segments so far, and maybe two more coming out. I’m not sure.

**John:** So by the time we’re recording our next episode, maybe everything will be out and we can discuss the whole thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** I thought it was just fantastic. So, we’ll have those up for next week we’ll discuss them. So if you want to read ahead, go read ahead.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is oddly related to something we discussed. It is Angelo Badalamenti explaining how he wrote the Laura Palmer’s Theme for Twin Peaks. It’s so great. The music for Twin Peaks is so incredibly important for Twin Peaks. So it’s Angelo Badalamenti sitting at his piano with David Lynch as David Lynch is basically trying to evoke this feeling in him and Angelo Badalamenti is creating the music that matches that feeling.

It’s just a great description of the process for trying to create any piece of art, especially a piece of collaborative art. So, I really loved it. How he worked with composers. It’s one of those really strange things where you’re trying to describe something that you can’t really describe, so you end up using a lot of poetry, a lot of just imagery to try to evoke something. And yet it’s the responsibility of the composer to make that be music. And it worked out so brilliantly here.

So, I recommend everybody watch this.

**Craig:** Such a great theme. I mean, that theme song does so much to help you watch the episode that comes after it. The Game of Thrones theme song has a similar thing. It just puts you in a certain place, in a certain mood. There aren’t a lot of themes that do that for me for television shows. But, I mean, look Twin Peaks came out when you and I were in college and I can still, you know, I can hear it.

So, awesome. That’s excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing, how could it not be HD 164595? Now, HD 164595 is a star. And it is kind of flipping people out a little bit, because it may be the first time that we’ve actually picked up a signal from space that may not be natural, but rather alien-made.

So, this is our Contact movie story here. And so what they’ve done is they’ve found these particular kinds of spikes of signals that seem like they could be artificial. And it happens to be the case that this star is very much like our sun. It’s really close to the size of our sun, so it seems like maybe it’s in that Goldilocks zone for a nearby planet.

And so they’re now pointing all their stuff at it. Pointing all their stuff at this thing.

Now, to put some – to put a little damper on it. There is one possibility that this is not at all extraterrestrial. One of the things that’s concerning is that the frequency matches military frequencies. So, what we may be picking up is ourselves and we may be picking up some classified military signals from some satellites bouncing back that we just didn’t know were there. And, of course, no one is going to tell them.

But, I don’t know, because the thing is the Russians picked this up first, and now we are looking at it. If it’s not the Russians, and it’s not us, maybe it’s an alien.

**John:** It could be. Now, in the past when they found these strange signals, sometimes it became part of a revelation of other things out there in the universe. My understanding is like pulsars or quasars, one of those, like we thought at first that signal is too regular, too perfect, that must be the alien contact. But it turns out like, oh no, there’s actually these rotating stars that do cool things.

So, if nothing else it’s worthwhile to explore interesting things to see what’s there. Same situation with that star where it looks like there’s stuff circling it that could be something that people built.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tabby’s Star.

**John:** It may be nothing, but it shows us that there’s something we don’t understand about how stuff around stars can form. And so that’s useful to pointing out telescopes out as well.

**Craig:** They did say that if it is artificial, that it is of such a nature that this would be a very, very advanced civilization, because of the strength and the type of signal that it is. So, I’m always reminded of this thing that Neil deGrasse Tyson once said. He said that on our planet we have, I think, 99% genetic overlap with chimpanzees. And so it’s that 1% that make us so much smarter than chimpanzees and account for everything that we’ve done to our planet and all of our technology that chimpanzees don’t do. And if we meet an alien species and they’re just 1% different than us, which is really close, but their 1% is to us that we are to the chimpanzees, we have a problem. [laughs]

So, you know, hopefully they’re nice, if they are real.

**John:** Well, I think the encouraging thing is as a world we function very well together, because we have very sensible leaders who really think through about all the possible repercussions of every action. And so I’m sure we would be completely reasonable and act in a very unified manner about these kind of situations.

**Craig:** What we’re going to do is we’re going to build a wall. And these people from HD 164595, they’re sending rapists. They’re sending murderers. We’re going to build a wall, folks. It’s going to be the greatest wall. And they’re going to pay for it. [laughs]

**John:** Totally going to pay for it. With their advanced technologies, they can pay for it.

**Craig:** That’s right. From 94 light years away, they’re going to Venmo us a payment for the wall.

**John:** Yep. It’s going to be nice.

So that’s our show this week. Hey, it worked.

**Craig:** It worked!

**John:** All the way across the ocean and the whole US, we recorded the episode. The show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from John Venable, and oh, it’s a good one.

So, if you have an outro you can send it to us at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the great place to send your experiences if you are a working writer in film or television who started someplace else and actually was able to start a career not living in LA, New York, or London. We’d love to hear from you.

But we’d also like to answer your questions like the question we answered at the head of the show. So, send those to ask@johnaugust.com.

Short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find the show notes for this episode, including how to skip over the Stranger Things information at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about three or four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. You can also find them on the Scriptnotes USB drive and on the Scriptnotes app which is in the App Store. So, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And I’ll see you next week.

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

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [John’s desk in Paris](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/JohnsDesk.jpg)
* [The Nicholl Fellowships](http://www.oscars.org/nicholl)
* [Stranger Things Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWxyRG_tckY)
* [WGA Election](http://www.wga.org/news-events/news/press/2016/2016-final-board-candidates-announced)
* [Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise – suggested by Craig Mazin](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3750328/Top-army-doctor-told-Florence-Nightingale-performed-successful-caesarian-hiding-amazing-secret-WOMAN-disguise.html#ixzz4ISGE4GUd)
* [The Perfect Mom – suggested by Brett Thomas in Sacramento](https://www.buzzfeed.com/michelledean/dee-dee-wanted-her-daughter-to-be-sick-gypsy-wanted-her-mom?utm_term=.taGexxnz2n#.hsy0PPR1WR)
* [Amateur Sleuth – suggested by Rachael Speal](http://abcnews.go.com/US/jessica-maple-atlanta-girl-12-solves-robbery-police/story?id=14341277)
* [Revenge in Irvine – suggested by Phil Hay](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/)
* [Angelo Badalamenti on writing “Laura Palmer’s Theme”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgXLEM8MhJo&app=desktop)
* [HD 164595](http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/30/health/seti-signal-hd-164595-alien-civilization/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by John Venable ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Episode_266.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-rules-or-the-paradox-of-the-outlier).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 186 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we will talk about the Oscars and the folks who won the screenplay awards. We will follow up on Tess Gerritsen’s Gravity lawsuit. But for our main course, Craig will talk us through the rules of screenwriting —

**Craig:** At last.

**John:** And once and for all settle all of the discussion and debate about the rules of screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yes, we will come up with a full and complete set of rules that you must follow. And also, just minor follow up, really, just from last week’s podcast.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I think we witnessed a star being born.

**John:** Malcolm Spellman was our guest on last week’s show and he was kind of amazing. He was terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Twittersphere?

**John:** They seem to like it.

**Craig:** The Tweetopolis went bananas.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They went bananas.

**John:** Yeah. So if you’ve not listened to the Malcolm episode you should listen to the Malcolm episode because he spoke a lot of truth.

**Craig:** Yeah, and for people saying, “Hey, can we have Malcolm on every week?” No, of course not. That would be crazy.

**John:** Absolutely not. It’s like, “Oh, can we have candy for breakfast every morning?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Oh, can we have no homework and ice cream for lunch. No. But Malcolm will be back for sure.

**John:** Yeah, I think if listeners are really good, then they get that as a treat.

**Craig:** That’s right. Malcolm is a treat.

**John:** Craig, when you were in elementary school, at the end of the year, did you have like movie day where like you didn’t have to do any work they just would show you movies?

**Craig:** No. I don’t believe we did.

**John:** Yeah. In Boulder, Colorado we would have that and it was quite fun. So you’d bring all your chairs to the all-purpose room and you would sit there and they would project a movie and we would watch a movie, so something like Freaky Friday would be projected for everyone to watch.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s pretty cool. Now, we would have field day —

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Where, you know, you throw water balloons at each other. And my favorite was if it was raining, then instead of going outside, obviously, because we couldn’t, and there wasn’t time to show a full movie, so we would watch these Disney safety movies. Did you see these when you were a kid?

**John:** This sounds really familiar, yeah.

**Craig:** So Jiminy Cricket would walk through, basically Disney made like workplace safety movies, I guess for, I don’t know, factory workers. So like, for whatever reason, there we are, we’re in third grade watching movies about how it’s important to not use heavy machinery while you’re tired and Jiminy Cricket was the guy who would sort of say, “Here is a guy who’s doing it right and here’s a guy who’s doing it wrong,” and he had this great song — I’m no fool, no siree. I’m going to live to be 103.

**John:** Oh, I’m going to live to be 103. Oh, my gosh, I remember this so well right now.

**Craig:** [sings] I play safe for you and me, because I’m no fool.

**John:** Really, all you need is a jingle and it will be stuck in a person’s head forever.

**Craig:** Well, there is a link we’ll have to throw up in the show notes.

**John:** So will people remember the winners of the Academy Awards 20 years from now, of this year’s Academy Awards? I’m not sure they necessary will.

**Craig:** You ask me, ask me if I remember them next week. I mean, I forget the award winners like immediately.

**John:** So, you know, we’re recording this about five days after the awards so it’s more than full week for our listeners after the awards. And I did honestly forget who had won original screenplay.

**Craig:** It happened that fast.

**John:** It happened that fast. Just like slipped right out of my head there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s talk about the two films that won. You had some thoughts and some follow up on Birdman which won for Best Original Screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, and so Birdman which I really enjoyed did win Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. And someone tweeted at me Scriptshadow’s review of the Birdman screenplay from some years ago. And it’s a spectacularly awesome review because it’s so incredibly wrong.

**John:** So, for people who are joining this podcast late and may not know sort of the history and sort of back story here. Scriptshadow is a site, it is a person who reads scripts and reviews scripts and writes up his critique of movies that have not yet been made. And this is something that has stuck in your craw for many years?

**Craig:** Well, the thing about Scriptshadow that has always driven me crazy is that he will review screenplays that are currently in development which I find horrifying, because aside from putting out spoilers and things like that, the scripts aren’t done. I believe you had written something critical about it as well —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Back in the day. So I’m not a big fan of the guy. I’m sure the feeling is mutual. But this was just delicious. I guess I’ll read a little bit of his review of Birdman. And this is what he said of the movie that just won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay.

**John:** And we should say that this is his review of the screenplay before it had gone in production.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Okay, I’m just going to come out and say it, this was terrible. I mean, it’s pretty much a failure on every level. This is a comedy without any laughs. The tone is all over the place — dead serious one moment, overly goofy the next. And I’m wondering if the script’s shortcomings are an ESL issue.” That is English as a second language. “Because very little made sense. I know I couldn’t write a comedy in another language so there’s no shame in it. The shame is in trying to do something you shouldn’t have done in the first place.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, that’s just a line that will come back and bite you. You don’t write that line without knowing like, hmm, could this ever boomerang against me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Not good.

**Craig:** It’s just confidence masquerading as knowledge here. It’s remarkable. I mean, even to take swipe at the fact that the screenwriters weren’t native English speakers. It’s just a terribly, poorly thought out, low-quality review or something. And then, this is great, he writes, “In conclusion,” because it’s not enough to bury the screenplay and explain with haughty confidence why it’s absolutely no good. He has to use it as an example of how the system is broken.

And he says the following, “I think there needs to be a system in place where production companies and studios send their scripts out to a neutral party, someone who has zero skin in the game. Because a lot of money is about to be spent, don’t you want someone telling you if your script is terrible? Don’t you want that chance to avoid a colossal mistake or to fix what’s broken? I get the feeling this script was written in a vacuum and these guys didn’t have anyone telling them how off it was.”

**John:** One might wonder if what the things that made Birdman distinct was because it was written in a bit of a vacuum and it wasn’t a bunch of people telling you, “Oh, no, it’s not what we expect it to be.” And certainly, you know, in terms of a neutral person with no skin on the game, Scriptshadow has sort of no skin in the game. But he also is just wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah, he has no skin in the game because he doesn’t deserve to have skin in the game because he says ridiculous things like this. Obviously, he has poor taste. I mean, let’s just get that right out there. It’s funny, I was talking about this with somebody at lunch today, if you don’t make things in Hollywood, all you have to offer is your taste. So here we have an example of just dreadful taste, but this remarkable idea that maybe people like Scriptshadow could save the studios from disasters like the multiple Academy Award winning Birdman is just — this is a movie that not only won a passel of awards but has completely revitalized Michael Keaton’s career. And on top of it, it’s really good. I mean, it’s just a really good movie. It’s actually quite —

**John:** Yeah, and even people who don’t love Birdman acknowledge that like it’s really well made and that it’s trying to do really interesting things. So like, you know, I’m sorry in reading the script you didn’t get that and it didn’t work for you. And there’s other places in the review which he does sort of cop to maybe this just isn’t working for me at all. And like maybe it’s me. But, if you’re saying, “Maybe it’s me,” you can’t then be so adamant in your opinion that it’s not me and that someone should come to you and tell you how to fix this.

**Craig:** I agree. Yeah, maybe it’s me sort of precludes you from saying things, like, “This was terrible. It’s a failure on every level.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just far too declarative. I mean, all critics wrestle with that declarative voice but, yeah, I get the feeling that Scriptshadow thought that maybe he could help. It turns out we don’t need your help buddy.

**John:** All right. The second movie that won an award at the Academy Awards this year was, for screenplay, was The Imitation Game written by Graham Moore. And so Graham Moore gave, honestly, it was my favorite speech of the night and so I want to play a little clip from the speech in case you forgotten it or in case you are listening to this a year later.

**Graham Moore:** And so in this brief time here, what I want you to use it to do is to say this. When I was 16 years old, I tried to kill myself because I felt weird and I felt different and I felt like I did not belong. And now I’m standing here and so I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere, yes you do. I promise you do. You do. Stay weird, stay different, and then when it’s your turn and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along. Thank you so much. I love you all.

**John:** So, classically, I’ve been of the mind that the best acceptance speech is really thank you and then you take your award and you leave. But if you’re going to say something, to me, it was a template for like what you should say. Use that podium, that one moment of spotlight you have, to sort of pass along a positive message that sort of conveys an acknowledgement of how special this moment is for you but that, you know, other people should be able to share in this kind of special moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, what was your take on his speech?

**Craig:** I’ve been always been in the Paddy Chayefsky camp. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that clip of Paddy Chayefsky coming out to talk about the screenwriting awards. This is, you know, back in the day of course. And, I guess, earlier in the night was it Vanessa Redgrave had gone on some political rant while accepting her award.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he basically said can’t you just say thanks and not use this for that. And everybody applauded. And that’s not what this was. But I am more in the Paddy Chayefsky camp of just say thanks and move along. I actually liked Patricia Arquette’s comment more because frankly that room needed to hear that. And that was great to see.

I thought that his comments were moving in one regard; they are comments that people have made before and there’s, you know, the it-gets-better campaign. I get a little uncomfortable when people use a moment like that to leverage their personal experience for something like that. But that’s really more about me. I never had a problem, like for instance when Ellen Page came out during a speech. That speech, it was like, there was context to it. That felt so quick and bullety and I don’t know, I was glad that he did it on the one hand. On the other, I would have much preferred that he had written something that was a little more argumentative, not aggressively argumentative, but rhetorically argumentative, prior to the awards or after the awards to really make that case.

**John:** Yeah, I think in the press for The Imitation Game, he has talked in a general sense about sort of like how he related to the Alan Turing story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so the clip I’m playing doesn’t sort of give a set up which is basically that Alan Turing sort of never got to stand in front of an audience and be celebrated for his work. And so, therefore, you know, it feels weird for him to be accepting this award and really he’s accepting it on behalf of this man’s legacy.

What I really did like about what Moore said is that he made screenwriters look good. And so, so often you never know who the screenwriter was or it’s this random person who takes an award and walks off stage. So for that one moment, the reason why it got I think the applause it got and got the ovation it got was this is a person who’s saying something that everyone in that crowd and everyone at home can sort of understand and relate to. We’ve all sort of had, you know, those crappy teenage years.

What was really fascinating to me is having, you know, watching that moment happen live and putting it in context of The Imitation Game and sort of everything, I assumed like, “Oh, it is life. It gets better.” And sort of like the Dan Savage, our former guest’s, campaign to try to convince gay and lesbian queer youth that, you know what, get through this, everything does get better. And so I assumed like, oh, here’s this gay screenwriter saying it’s all going to be fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that was the initial take on the moment. And then, so, something that Graham said in the thing is like, you know, “stay weird, ” and then like immediately gay press goes like, “Well, is he really say that gay people are weird and all this stuff?” The irony of course is that Graham Moore isn’t gay at all and one of the most awkward retractions in the LA Times was the day after, “In the February 23 Oscars special section, a review of the Oscars telecast said that in the acceptance speech for Adapted Screenplay Graham Moore spoke of the isolation he felt as a gay teen. Moore spoke about his isolation, but after the ceremony he stated that he is not gay.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, oh, that’s just so awkward when you make the wrong assumption.

**Craig:** You know, I mean, look, the worst assumption that you can make, I believe in the category of awkward assumptions is, “When are you due?” That would be the worst, right?

**John:** That would be the worst.

**Craig:** That’s the worst.

**John:** And I don’t know Graham personally. He’s friends of friends. And he truly is straight from, you know, mutual friends will back me up on this. But it struck me and it reminded me of something that happened just a few weeks before and that was with Rashida Jones. And so, this is a moment on the red carpet for the SAG awards and an interviewer — this interviewer stopped and talked to her about her dress. And then they made this comment.

(Audio clip begins)

**Male:** Rashida Jones, one of the funniest women in Hollywood.

**Female:** Come on up, Rashida.

**Male:** Come on up. Hello.

**Female:** You look amazing.

**Male:** Hello, wow!

**Female:** Gorgeous.

**Rashida Jones:** Thank you so much.

**Female:** What are you wearing?

**Rashida Jones:** Emanuel Ungaro.

**Male:** Well, that’s beautiful.

**Rashida Jones:** Thanks.

**Female:** You look like you’ve just come off like an Island or something. You’re very tan, very tropical.

**Rashida Jones:** I mean, you know, I’m ethnic.

**Male:** Me too. [laughs]

**Female:** [laughs] It’s just being ethnic. That’s what it is.

(Audio Clip Ends)

**John:** So, the Rashida Jones, you know, Rashida Jones is black or mixed race.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And her dad is Quincy Jones and her mother, I think, is Peggy Lipton. Is that right?

**John:** Peggy Lipton, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The actress. And so, I wonder if we’re at a moment in our culture where sort of perceived sexuality is also kind of like of like the same thing as perceived race. Where it’s just like you’re not quite sure what to do with it and so you make these assumptions and they’re often just the wrong assumptions.

**Craig:** Well, what’s crazy is that these are two — it almost seems like these are the opposite sort of situations. You have one, the Rashida Jones case where someone makes this assumption that you are a member of the culturally dominant race.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then in the other, in the Graham Moore, people make the opposite assumption that, in fact, you are a member of a minority sexual orientation. In both cases, ultimately, everybody just looks clumsy.

**John:** And, what I thought, Rashida Jones actually handled it really well, because she could have made a bigger deal of it. She could have said, like, you know, “You’re an idiot.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You know, you should actually know my father is Quincy Jones. She just played it off as, “I’m ethnic,” and I would urge us all to sort of take a step back and sort of not get outraged when things happen whether it’s certainly — it’s your choice when it happens to you. But just like, not allow it to be sort of a moment of outrage when someone just makes — when it’s clear why they made the mistake and there was no —

**Craig:** They just didn’t know.

**John:** They just didn’t know.

**Craig:** They didn’t know. I mean, I love — and I loved the way she’s saying, “I’m ethnic,” which is kind of adorable, you know. I mean, we’re all ethnic, I guess.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, you know. I mean, she was — look, there are people, I’ve always been the kind of person when someone says something to me and it is going to be embarrassing for them, I try and let them off the hook as fast as I can because I feel bad that they feel bad and —

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And as long as they’re not, you know, doing it on purpose. But you’re right, some people kind of go, “Oh, good. I get to collect an injustice. And I’m going to hang you for this, hard.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, I think, the pregnant thing, it’s so awkward when you mistakenly do that. And so that’s why you end up like sort of not acknowledging that a women is pregnant for like a really long time.

**Craig:** I swear to god, I only say something if there is like, if they’re more than eight months pregnant and they’re small to begin with, that’s it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t want to go down that road because I’ve never made that mistake, but oh my god, if I did, oh.

**John:** Yeah. What it is, is generally like you have a general classification of things, so like a woman is either pregnant or not pregnant, and there’s a temptation to think like, oh, a person is either this race or is not of this race or this person is either straight or this person is gay. And sometimes the obvious things you’re seeing are not the actual truth underlying it or at least not their identify. And I think as we have more people who are transgendered or, you know, things that are just not quite so obvious, we’re going to have to just be a little, you know, careful but also really forgiving is what I would —

**Craig:** We have to be forgiving especially as we, I think, a lot of people, their hearts are in the right place. And they are learning new vocabularies. They are coming from a place of wanting to be sensitive and kind and yet there will be clumsy moments. And, look, Patricia Arquette, there was an interesting article I read where she got called out by some elements of, I don’t know if they were progressives, feminists, both, possibly women of color. I’m not sure what was going on. But basically, they were yelling at her for not saying it right.

**John:** Yeah, or something that she said backstage undercut what she said front stage, and just like stop expecting people to be perfect and stop expecting people to say exactly what you want them to say.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Acknowledge the intention and acknowledge sort of where they’re trying to go. A moment from my own life that was good and awkward. So I’m in the dentist chair and this new dental hygienist is cleaning my teeth. And so she sees that my spouse is listed as a guy. And so, like, I think she had originally said something about my wife while my mouth of full. And she’s like, “Oh, oh, Michael.” And it’s like, “Do you call him your wife?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I’m like, “What a horrible question is that?” And like she has like these tools in my mouth. I’m like, “Well, of course, I don’t call him that.” Like that’s a ridiculous thing.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s awesome.

**John:** But it was just —

**Craig:** She’s trying.

**John:** She’s trying. There was no malice there at all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, I think, it’s just important to acknowledge there was no malice in those reporters who asked the stupid question about looking very tan, you know. Don’t mistake idiocy for malice.

**Craig:** I know. Basically, give everybody the benefit of the doubt that you’d give to like your grandma.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because actually your grandma isn’t that much different. Everybody is trying to figure out the new vocabulary. But I will say that even though I get a little nervous sometimes when people do sort of use something like the Oscars and the occasion of winning an award to announce that they attempted suicide, it feels — you know what it is more than anything is that I suddenly feel that discomfort of too much intimacy too quickly with somebody I don’t know. But I will say that you’re absolutely right that Graham Moore did a great service for screenwriters by being eloquent, looking into the camera when he needed to, looking at the audience when he needed to, not being boring or weird. He seemed quite normal and frankly owned the stage and that’s a nice thing I think. Props.

**John:** Absolutely. And I’d also point out that he thanked all of his collaborators and not everyone who won awards thanked their screenwriter.

**Craig:** Why would they?

**John:** Why would they?

**Craig:** Why would they?

**John:** Because they just made the whole thing up by themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, anyway, that’s the wrap on the Oscars.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So our next bit of follow up. On episode 183 we talked about the lawsuit about Gravity. So this author Tess Gerritsen wrote a book called Gravity. She was suing Warner Brothers claiming that Gravity was based upon her book. There’s a complicated number of issues involved that ended up taking the entire episode. So if you’re interested in those kind of things I would advise you to go back and listen to episode 183 where we walk you through all the complicated things involved.

But at the end of that episode and sort of the outcome was that her complaint was denied but the judge gave her lawyer the opportunity to re-file with some corrections to take care of some certain things that were at issue. And so that happened. So that new complaint is dated June 19. And it is all about whether Warner owned or controlled New Line and its subsidiary Katja which is what, exactly what the judge had asked about. So I think it’s really interesting to look through there. I would say, for me, at least it was more clear and sort of the case that they’re trying to layout.

Did you look through the amended complaint, the PDF?

**Craig:** Yeah, I took a little scan through. Yeah.

**John:** We will have a link to this is in the show notes. And so, it’s again a good thing to look through sort of what the issues are. I think if I had an overall concern with it is that they’re trying to make a lot of cases that New Line is just kind of a shell corporation for Warners now. And so they go through a lot of like, you know, this is the current structure.

**Craig:** Right. This is on the website.

**John:** The website. If you call this number. But 2015 isn’t when this is actually all happening.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s 2009. And so, there’s even some very specific language in there where they talk about a quote from the press release when Time Warner announced that New Line was going to be sort folded in and did some very selective editing.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, today it was announced that New Line Cinema will be operated as a unit of Warner Bros Entertainment dot, dot, dot. “We want to take our time to make sure that we understand New Line’s business and properly align the valuable asset that’s now affiliated with the studio.” So that sounds like, oh, yeah, they totally — they’re taking it all in. But I went back and found the actual press release from that day when it came out.

**Craig:** Good sleuthing.

**John:** Just, you know, simple Googling, you put stuff in quotes and you find the exact quote. Here’s the real quote says, “As part of the consolidation, New Line will be operated as a unit of Warner Bros,” no dot, dot, dot. “New Line will maintain separate development production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operation but will closely integrate and coordinate those functions with Warner Bros to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings and improved margins.”

So reading that it sounds like the intention was at that time to sort of operate them as whole separate units and that is certainly not the impression you would get from the dot, dot, dot.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think they’re going to lose. And I think they’re going to lose because I think their argument is actually incorrect. And in particular, when you see that even when New Line was, “Folded into Warner Bros,” they still had separate business affairs, separate distribution, separate development. Yeah, it’s hard to see from there how you could say, “But we’re also going to collide all chains of title together,” so I think they’re going to lose. But, you know, lets’ see how it goes. There’s obviously stuff that we don’t have available to us. I will say that every time you say Tess Gerritsen, I think to myself, “That’s a great name for a Western movie star.”

**John:** Oh, my god. I think she’d also be like a great like it’s set in the Old West but she’s actually a detective.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So Tess Gerritsen like frontier detective.

**Craig:** Tess Gerritsen frontier detective. Like she works for the Pinkertons.

**John:** Completely.

**Craig:** Yeah, I would love —

**John:** Oh, my god, she wears the britches.

**Craig:** Yeah, I want to see The Tess Gerritsen show. I’m not sure I want to see anymore of the Tess Gerritsen lawsuit. But let’s see how it goes. I’ll say this much. If I’m right, this will end quickly.

**John:** Yes. Now, if you’re wrong and this moves on to the next stage, one possibility is that there’s discovery and if Tess Gerritsen and her lawyers win discovery then they can sort of start going through and looking at, you know, just start digging through documents about Warners and New Line and sort of how all that worked. And that could be fascinating. It could be troubling. It could take a lot of time and legal expense.

I think I am with you. I don’t think this moves to the next stage. And I think the general complaint I would have about sort of the nature of this is it’s kind of — it’s arguing from conclusions.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s starting, it basically says like, “I conclude this is based on my book. And I’ve already decided that and now I need to go back and sort of layout the ways in which I’m allowed to make that complaint.”

**Craig:** It sure feels like that.

**John:** It does feel like that to me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we’ll keep following it.

**Craig:** All right, well, we’ll keep it on our radar.

**John:** Craig, it has come time for this. And this is the most you’ve ever typed into our outline.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** This is just, in sheer number of words, it’s an impressive list of things you’ve laid out here.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So tell us your goals in this next section.

**Craig:** Well, and I appreciate you, I can see you’ve helped me organize it. So, obviously, there are a lot of people out there who are spreading around the gospel of the rules. Rules of screenwriting, things you must not do and things you must do. And if you fail to adhere to the rules, your script will be thrown out. And I see a lot of these. But most of the time when I see them, I think, that’s completely wrong. And so, I leaned upon the good people at the Screenwriting Reddit, it’s a subreddit. I’ve learned this.

**John:** Yeah, get your lingo there.

**Craig:** And I asked them, I said, “Hey, fellas and ladies, please supply me with the various rules that you’ve been exhorted to follow.” And so, what I’d like to do is I’m going to read these rules, John, and let’s just say after each rule, no that’s not right. That’s mostly right. Or, yes that is a rule. And let’s see how many actual rules we come up with.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** All right, so. First, rules of the page. Your script must be 120 pages or fewer.

**John:** Not true.

**Craig:** Agreed. Not true. Wrong. Next, the inciting incident must happen by page 15.

**John:** I think not universally true.

**Craig:** Not universally true. Agreed. Not. Wrong. The first act break must be on page 30.

**John:** Not.

**Craig:** Not true. [laughs] A trend is emerging. And by the way, I should say, when we say this, we’re only saying it as two guys that have worked in this business as professional screenwriters for a couple of decades, four decades between us. We aren’t, for instance, somebody that charges, you know, $50 to read your script and tell you if it’s any good. So, take it with a grain of salt.

Next rule. The midpoint is really important.

**John:** Not any more important than almost any other moment in your script.

**Craig:** Agreed. So, not true.

**John:** Not true.

**Craig:** The second act break must be on page 90.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Not true [laughs]. No scene can be longer than three pages.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. Use only day and night unless you absolutely must say morning or evening.

**John:** Over-applied, no.

**Craig:** No. Never use Cut to.

**John:** Absolutely not.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I absolutely disagree. You can use Cut to.

**Craig:** Yes. So far, none of these rules are correct at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Next, no camera directions unless you’re also the director.

**John:** Untrue.

**Craig:** Untrue. No using “we see.”

**John:** Untrue.

**Craig:** Untrue.

**John:** Not a rule.

**Craig:** No all caps in action lines. No bold, no italics or asterisks.

**John:** Absolutely not true.

**Craig:** All untrue. [laughs] This is great stuff. We’re on a roll. I hope you’re all listening. Don’t use beat or ellipses for more than one character because that makes them all sound the same.

**John:** Not a rule.

**Craig:** Not true. Don’t use actual song titles.

**John:** Not true.

**Craig:** Not true. Don’t make asides to the reader in your action descriptions.

**John:** Not true.

**Craig:** Not true. Avoid voice-over. [laughs]

**John:** I’ll say not true.

**Craig:** It’s not true. Just avoid bad voice-over.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is my favorite. Don’t use the word “is.” [laughs]

**John:** Not true and impossible.

**Craig:** [laughs] How awesome is that? Don’t use the word “walks.”

**John:** Not true and impossible.

**Craig:** And impossible.

**John:** Well, yeah, possible but inadvisable.

**Craig:** Yeah, inadvisable. Ambles. No adverbs ending in LY. [laughs]

**John:** Not true.

**Craig:** Not true. No ING verbs.

**John:** Absolutely not true. And that merits further discussion but not true.

**Craig:** Yes. I think we’ve actually even gotten into why occasionally you want to use that because it indicates continuing action. Nothing in your script can be longer than four lines and you’re [laughs] allowed to break this rule five times.

**John:** Not true.

**Craig:** That’s not true. No monologues.

**John:** Not true. You can do monologues.

**Craig:** No brand names.

**John:** Not true.

**Craig:** Not true. Readers are draconian. If you violate a rule, they will throw your script out immediately. [laughs]

**John:** It’s not true.

**Craig:** Not true. All right, those were the rules of the page. And so far, zero of these rules are true. But let’s see. Maybe we’ll do —

**John:** Should we talk sort of why — should we talk about those rules of the page first before we go on, because we’re going to say a lot more not trues if we just keep going.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So in all these cases, I said not true. And in all those cases, there’s a reason why people think they’re a rule because in most of these cases that thing we’re saying is not a rule, it’s generally a good idea. And so it’s a conflation of, you know, these are things to aim for in usual or things to think about. But they’re not, by any means, iron clad rules. Rules are things like this is an absolute versus here are some suggestions that you should tend to think about when you are writing your script.
And so, an example being, you know, use only day or night unless you absolutely need to say morning or evening. You know what, that’s how I tend to write. I tend to just stick with day and night and then not try to get too fancy because when you get too fancy, sometimes it’s more confusing. But that’s, in no way a prohibition on morning or evening.

**Craig:** That’s right. I mean, these rules are a little bit like saying to a cook, “Don’t use salt.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Don’t use pepper,” because bad cooks often over-salt and over-pepper. But as we’ll see there’s a larger issue here that we’ll get to once we finish our rules, and that’s what I call the Paradox of the Outlier.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, yes, absolutely, you can say that there are kernels of good advice in these things or at least the versions of these rules that are “Don’t overuse these things” or “Don’t go far, far afield of the norms that they kind of gravitate towards,” yeah, sure. But rules that are going to have you punished —

**John:** Uh-uh.

**Craig:** No, not at all. Well, let’s —

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Let’s see if we can find one. Maybe we’ll find one.

**John:** So let me go through rules of story. You can tell me what these are.

**Craig:** Yeah, great.

**John:** So these are some rules about story. Now, Craig, your idea has to fit into a one-sentence log line.

**Craig:** Absolutely not.

**John:** Okay. There can be no flashbacks and certainly no flashforwards.

**Craig:** Absolutely not true.

**John:** Okay. Don’t word build too much.

**Craig:** That one is not only not true, it’s aggressively not true. [laughs]

**John:** You’re hero must be likable.

**Craig:** That’s just been proven time and time again to not be true.

**John:** Characters must change by the end of the movie.

**Craig:** Not true.

**John:** Not true, so again —

**Craig:** They typically do, but they don’t have to.

**John:** Yes. So zero for five on those rules of story.

**Craig:** Zero for five. You know what comes to mind is Young Adult. She doesn’t really change.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, I love that movie.

**John:** I love it, too.

**Craig:** Okay, all right. I’ll try you now with some rules of the industry.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** No one’s buying screenplays about such and such topic.

**John:** That’s actually just not ever the case.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** There’s always the weird Western that sells when no one’s buying Westerns.

**Craig:** That’s right. You’re no Tarantino, you’re no so-and-so, so don’t bother writing those kinds of movies.

**John:** Absolutely not true.

**Craig:** Not true.

**John:** Reductionist.

**Craig:** Correct. Your instincts aren’t as good as these rules. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I don’t know quite how to process this, but I would say trusting your instincts is generally good, so no, I don’t believe that.

**Craig:** They’re all you have. Write what you know.

**John:** Not if you only know boring stuff.

**Craig:** Correct. Or if you want to write movies about space.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You must read this particular book on screenwriting.

**John:** That is not true.

**Craig:** Not true. Screenwriters should know their place, meaning such and such kind of thing is either the director’s job, the costumer’s job, the production designer’s job, the actor’s job.

**John:** That’s not true.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And in fact, the screenwriter’s place is, you know, often intercepts all of those rules because you were the first filmmaker.

**Craig:** Correct. So those are the rules, and thank you to all the Redittors over there at the screenwriting subreddit for helping me out. As you can see, John and I are in complete agreement that none of these are actually rules. So let’s talk about why they exist.

Because I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And here’s my theory. Screenwriting rules are designed to create standards so that screenwriters don’t keep making the, “same old mistakes.” And I think that that is a natural thing that occurs when people who are paid to read screenplays read a thousand of them and continually see certain things that bother them or are associated with bad screenplays.

And so they then extrapolate and say, “Stop doing those things. Here’s a rule. Just stop saying ‘we see’ because I read all sorts of scripts that use we see way too much and those scripts are bad, so stop doing it.” Here’s the problem. There’s something called the triangular non-relationship in logic where something is correlated with something else but one is not causing the other, they are both caused by the same thing.

And in this case, a bad screenplay correlating with rule-breaking doesn’t mean rule-breaking causes bad screenplay writing, it just means that oftentimes, people who are bad writers will also tend to not do these things. But it doesn’t go in the other direction. It doesn’t necessarily mean that people who write good screenplays also don’t break these rules. In fact, most professional screenplays I read break almost every single one of these rules, sometimes within the same script.

**John:** Absolutely agree. So let me see if I understand what you’re saying here. So you think that there is kind of a pattern-matching that’s happening here. The people are reading bad screenplays and they’re recognizing these “rules being broken” and therefore they’re assuming that it’s because these rules are broken that the screenplay is bad. When the fact is, it’s a badly written screenplay and the same cause of the badly written screenplay is a person who is a bad writer who also isn’t following some of these guidelines that is resulting in this terrible piece of work.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of these things will seem irksome in a bad screenplay because everything is irksome in a bad screenplay. But let’s say you read a good screenplay and that good screenplay is 129 pages. The inciting incident happens on page 26. The first act break is on page 40. There’s plenty of caps in the action lines and it says morning and evening and there’s monologues and the word is and flashbacks, but it’s a wonderful script.

Well then, the rule-breaking is completely irrelevant. And this gets me to the paradox here. Screenwriting rules are based on people who are reading lots and lots of scripts and basically saying, “Look, here are all these things that occur in the big middle of this screenplay pile, right. I’m ranking these things up from zero to ten and the big fat middle are from four to six. All of these things are going wrong.” But this isn’t a business where you’re trying to get to the middle.

In fact, this is a business where only the outliers succeed. In fact, your averages are worthless and things that would help the middle are worthless. The only things that matter are the things that stick out completely from the rest. And so in a sense, when readers and screenplay so-called screenwriting consultants give you the advice on these rules, what they’re really saying is, “If you follow these rules, your mediocre screenwriting will seem slightly less obviously mediocre. But it won’t make your script good.”

**John:** I 100% agree with this assessment. So when you talk about, you know, it’s the outliers that are successful, it’s not just like, you know, a great screenplay can be forgiven for its faults. In many cases, it’s those sort of weird things that the screenplay did that made it so transcendent and so spectacular. And so it is that weird way that the first act took, you know, was especially long or especially short, that way of how the action was described on the page that let you sort of see how the movie was going to be even though it didn’t, you know, sort of match up with the expectations of rules.

**Craig:** No question. And this is why the rule-giving and the rule-following is seductive. It is implying that there is something non-mystical and non-unique that you can do to improve.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, it’s not true. Unfortunately, the only thing that people respond to in screenplays is that intangible quality. Nobody responds to orthodoxy. They only respond to that which is unique and inspiring in your work. It has nothing to do with any of this stuff. This stuff is wonderful to follow if you don’t have inspiring, exciting talent. Unfortunately, if you don’t have inspiring, exciting talent, following the rules ain’t going to save you, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you’ll hear a lot of times from people, they’ll say, “Well, you guys can break the rules [laughs] but we’re not allowed to.” And I don’t how to put a bullet in the head of that, except to say, no. No. I mean, listen, Quentin Tarantino, his first screenplay didn’t avoid what we now think of as Tarantinoisms. He broke every rule you can. It was exciting. It was invigorating.

There is absolutely no world in which people in our business who are desperately craving screenplay material that they can produce and profit from will look down on a really good screenplay because somehow it broke the rules.

**John:** I 100% agree. So let’s bring this back to us because that’s my favorite topic is myself.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** So as we do the Three Page Challenges, we look at a lot of these pages and I hear us saying things like, you know, I love how the action lines are kept short, they’re kept, you know, three lines or less. I love that we very quickly establish who this person is and that we are interested in this person. I want to defend our ability to say that while still talking about the rules.

And so some of these samples have come through and haven’t done that and they’ve still been fantastic. Other ones had really good formatting on the page and we’ve commented on that. There’s this balance that you would want to try to find, which is you want to make the experience in reading the screenplay as delightful as possible for the reader. In some of these cases, it’s going to be doing things like, you know, how you’re using the white space on the page in an interesting way. Sometimes that means short lines.

You’re going to want to lay out your story in a way that makes sense for the reader. And some cases, that really will follow the kind of normal movie patterns and that movies are about two hours long and you have sort of natural rises and falls of action. I mean, these should be great signposts, things to aim for, things to think about. But they certainly should never be shackles that your script has to be bound to.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, you know, I cop to expressing preferences like as you put it. When we do those Three Page Challenges and we do have preferences, but I also know that if I read a five-line action paragraph block that I felt was just wonderful, it wouldn’t matter to me that there wasn’t, you know, a character turn in the middle of it. It just doesn’t work that way.

The truth is that if 999 times out of 1,000, if you’re not a professional screenwriter, you’re an aspiring screenwriter, you’re going to fail. Well, fail on your own terms then, you know. Don’t fail chasing orthodoxy.

**John:** Yeah. I think the differentiation between orthodoxy and preference is really important. So you say you have expressed a preference for certain way things can look on a page. Basically, that’s how I would have written it. I would have done this differently. But how I would have done it is what it would like, you know, through my fingers and my keyboard. It’s not necessarily the way it’s going to work best for you.

And I think sometimes you try to achieve some, it’s like minimalist vanilla styles and something — you’re trying to make your movie look like a movie that anyone else could’ve written. And that’s never a success. It’s never going to be the way you break out. You break out by taking bold chances and choices. And that’s not what these rules are going to let you do.

**Craig:** No. The rules are designed to do the opposite. They’re designed to push you into the middle and make you not stick out in any way. And we’ve said this before. It’s an outlier business on both sides. You have to be that one screenplay that sticks out. And all you need is the one buyer that sticks out. You don’t need everyone to love you. Most great success stories in this business start with someone who writes something that everybody says blech to, except one person who sees the same thing you saw.

And that union goes on to create things that then everybody else tries to copy, that everybody else mints new rules off of. The world of rules is the world of following, chasing, mimicking, conforming. It is not the world of innovating and it’s certainly not going to help you sell a screenplay.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about innovating because I don’t want to sort of push people towards like, “Well, you know what, my script is going to all be in Helvetica. And it’s going to use 14 different font colors to represent the different moods and emotions and tones.” That’s not what I’m sort of urging you to do. It’s to look at sort of what, again, remember, you’re writing a screenplay but you’re also writing a movie. And writing that movie should be really your focus.

And so you’re using your words to evoke the experience of watching that movie just through the words on the page. So I’m not telling you to just go nuts. I’m telling you to, you know, go nuts in really appropriate ways and just find the right way — basically, don’t limit how you’re writing your script because you’re trying to follow some rules. Use these, you know, suggestions to help you write the best possible movie you can write.

**Craig:** Yeah, because here’s the deal. If you’re good and you’re meant to make it, breaking the rules won’t stop you. Nothing will stop you. Similarly, if you, like most people, are not meant to make it, sorry to say, following the rules will not help you. So I agree with John. There’s a general heading of what we call the Koppelman Rule: calculate less, right.

So new screenwriters are always calculating. They’re doing things like this, like if I have a certain page count or if I have, you know, my action happens on page da da da, right. They’re trying to game the system to creating the illusion of control over their work and their fate. And part of calculation also comes down to “I’m going to break the rules on purpose and be crazy.” Well, that’s also calculation.

Don’t calculate. Just write honestly. Express yourself honestly. And most importantly, to all of you out there, if anybody who is advertising their services, they’re charging you money, says, “This is a rule, don’t do it or your script is going to get thrown out.” This is my new thing, you look at them and you say, “No.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “No, no, no. No.” And if they say, “Oh, well because Craig and John said so, well, they can get away with it,” you look at them and you say, “No.” Just like that. Like you would to a bad dog.

**John:** Yeah, basically what you teach young kids about like strangers who, you know, approach them and make them feel uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Stranger danger. [laughs]

**John:** Stranger danger basically. Screenwriting guru danger. And when someone tells you absolutely this is what you must do, there’s a good reason to just stand there and say no and then run if you need to.

**Craig:** Yeah, the other thing you could do when they [laughs], this is the meaner version, when somebody is selling you their services says, “You have to do it this way,” you look at them and you go, “How is that working out for you?”

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean that’s the mean version. I would not. [laughs]

**John:** Craig would never do that.

**Craig:** I mean —

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** Sheesh.

**John:** I think it comes down to there’s this desire to, because the screenplay format looks strange, there’s this desire to boil it all down to an algorithm. And I think there’s a lot of people who are attracted to screenwriting who are also attracted to things like computer coding. And the great thing about writing a computer program is you write it and there’s more than one way you could write it. But like either it works or it doesn’t work. It either gives you the result you want or it doesn’t give you the result you want or it crashes.

And so people want the rules so they know how their screenplay won’t crash. But it’s not like that at all. It’s actually much more just like writing. And writing is just a weird esoteric thing where you’re trying to evoke these emotions and these feelings and make these characters feel alive. And it just doesn’t want to be reduced to that.

**Craig:** Do you ever see these debates online where someone will say, “This is a rule.” And then someone else will go, “Well, what about this movie?” And then there’ll be this debate where they try and fit the movie to their rules.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** And you just think, what are you people doing?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That debate, I have to say to anybody that engages in it, is the furthest away you can get from proper behaviors of a [laughs] screenwriter. That is a waste of your time. If you get caught in that debate, you got to stop, you got to look at yourself and say no and just go back to your screenplay because that ain’t helping anybody.

**John:** So back when I was in film school I had a screenwriting class, the only screenwriting class I ever took. And the professor, I will fully credit her, like she was very provocative and part of what I really learned about screenwriting was sort of in reaction to her. So in that way that like, she wasn’t my J.K. Simmons throwing a cymbal at me, but it was that kind of contentious relationship.

But I remember, she had very strong ideas about like, you know, what movies need to do and how they need to work and sort of how the beats need to function. And so somebody brought up in class, I’m trying to remember what movie it was. I think it could have been like Goodfellas or something and pointing out like it did not follow this template, and she’s like, “Well, that’s why it’s a failed film.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** [laughs] And so I may be misremembering Goodfellas, but I do remember like that’s why it’s a failed film. And that was just like a real like moment of insight in that, “Oh, these people are going to try to reduce everything to these fundamental things and some stuff is just irreducible.”

And so the same reason why Scriptshadow looks at Birdman and sees a disaster. Well, that’s because it was an outlier.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It was this weirdo thing that didn’t make sense on the page to him, but did make sense in the mind of the director and the actors and everyone else who had to make that movie.

**Craig:** No question. There was a thing that I did early on in my career really when I started where I had read one of these books. I can’t remember which one. When you start your career as a screenwriter, one thing that you do a lot of is go around and pitch for jobs.

So one thing that’s good about that is you get practice coming up with stories kind of quickly because you have to.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what I would do is I would sit down and I would make a little line graph. And so the line graph would have a little point in the middle and a point for the first act and a point for the second act break. And then I would think, “Okay, let’s come up with the points here on this so we have our goal post of the story and we’ll do it like this. Then we can in the space in between, we’ll make a lot of other little lines and how to get from here to here.” Very methodical.

And I did it that way I think because I was so scared. I mean what do I write is the scariest feeling. And you want to dispel that fear and here’s this handy-dandy system. It’s a building system. It’s an algorithm.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s very comforting. Unfortunately, it’s also dumb because that’s not how good writing happens. It’s just how some writing happens. It’s writing. But it’s not inspired. You haven’t let yourself kind of wander and explore and come up with something beautiful. You’re just trying to get, it’s like you’re eating your food as fast as you can because you’re afraid of being hungry. And that’s what a lot of these rules do. And they are, no surprise, generated by people who have never experienced, generally speaking, the opposite of the fear of not making it. And so they are peddling this snake oil to other people who are afraid because they haven’t made it. And it’s a vicious cycle. But it should stop.

**John:** It should stop. Now Craig, hearing you talk through that, I think a future episode of the show needs to be about pitching on jobs and sort of that process of — because I went through exactly the same thing where I would have to pitch on like two or three movies in the course of a week.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so you have to really quickly come up with like, how would I write this movie? And that was honestly, it was exhausting but it was so incredibly useful to me because it got me thinking about like, you know, I have a folder and maybe I’ll break out some of these examples of like 40 movies I never wrote.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I was like pitching on those jobs. And some of those jobs [laughs] are still in like open writing assignments.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It’s like I got called about one literally six months ago. I was like, “You know what, I pitched on this like 15 years ago.”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** And so like I found the file. I had written it for myself. I had never handed this is in. But like a 15-page treatment about like how I would this movie.

**Craig:** Was it Stretch Armstrong?

**John:** It was not Stretch Armstrong. It was Raised by Ghosts which was a Sony property and still is a Sony property.

**Craig:** Oh, they’re still at it.

**John:** They’re still at it. But, you know, I pitched on like, you know, Adam Sandler-Kevin James movies. I pitched on Highlander. I pitched on so many of these things that were never actual things. But that process of like how you quickly — they want you to come in tomorrow. It’s like “oh my god, I have to pitch a movie tomorrow” was just the best. It’s very much like, you know, an actor auditioning, you have to figure out like, how would I do this? And that’s a great process.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just looking in my folder, my old pitches folder, and I’m just like I forgot how many of these Green Acres —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Did you ever pitch on that one?

**John:** Oh no, I never pitched in Green Acres. It would be fun to figure out which ones we’ve both pitched on.

**Craig:** Scooby-Doo?

**John:** I worked on Scooby-Doo

**Craig:** I didn’t even know that you worked on Scooby-Doo. I pitched on that at some point. I’m not sure when. God, so many, The Ump. I don’t even know what The Ump is.

**John:** An umpire I’m guessing.

**Craig:** Here’s a good one. There Goes the Hood. Great title.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was a rewrite of some sort. Wow.

**John:** Yeah. Oh memories.

**Craig:** Oh memories.

**John:** Yeah, that would be a fun episode. We could go through and sort of talk about that. We’ll bring in somebody else. We need to have like one more writer in here who can do it to —

**Craig:** We need another old hand.

**John:** An old hand, somebody who’s done a lot of this. But that process of figuring out how you’re going to tell a story, how you’re going to pitch a story but like what would the movie be? You have to like literally spend, you know, you have like an hour to think about like, “Okay, what could that movie be? Like who will the characters be? What would it be?”

And in most cases, it’s based on some existing properties, some underlying things, so either they sent you an article, they sent you a book. You know, Scooby-Doo is like, what is the Scooby-Doo movie? And you end up going in and pitching that.

Battlestar Galactica, I through quite a few rounds on a feature version of Battlestar Galactica before it was it was rebooted as a TV show. And I have a Battlestar Galactica movie I’d love to make. But I’ll never make that.

**Craig:** Here’s one called The Move. I don’t know what that is. I honestly don’t remember it and I can’t even open the file because it’s from 1996 and Word doesn’t even — it’s like, what is this? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, that’s part of the reason why we made Fountain, is because, you know, when you write up stuff in plain text like Fountain you can always open that file. I had some things written in like Write Now.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Which was a great Mac app. And nope, doesn’t exist anymore.

**Craig:** I’ve got things written in Bank Street Writer. No, I don’t [laughs], I don’t. Not anymore. But I did have that when I was a kid.

**John:** So to wrap up our conversation about the rules, all the things we talked about with like these are not rules, I think actually every one of them, there’s a reason to think about it, but there’s certainly no reason to limit yourself by that expectation. Never think of these as rules. We should only think of them as like, these are some general areas you should be considering as you’re writing a script. But you should certainly move past them and write the best possible script that you can.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just keep in mind that you’re going to make it if you’re special. And if you’re special, generally speaking, rules don’t apply. So keep that in mind. Take that to heart. And remember, “No. No.”

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. Actually, I have two One Cool Things. I had one and then over at lunch I thought of a second one.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So my first One Cool Thing is an article I read this morning by Adam Clark Estes. It’s actually from last year and sort of I randomly stumbled across it. He’s a writer at Gizmodo and other places. And he just writes about having ear surgery because he was like largely deaf and had a series of ear infections as a child and that basically broken up all the bones in his ear. And so he was largely sort of profoundly deaf, but not to the point where like he’d gotten the hearing aids.

And it’s one of those things where like people say like, “Oh, there’s really nothing you can do,” and so for like most of his life he just — I assumed there’s nothing I could do and he had a hard time understanding things, and had to turn the subtitles on.

And so this article, he talks through the surgery he had and sort of what they do. And it’s just one of those great little things. And I think it’s inspiring that a lot of times people will sort of just live with something that’s kind of broken, you know, broken in their bodies or broken in their house or broken in their lives.

And it’s a great example of just like, you know what, it’s worth looking at like, can you actually just fix it? Because then your life will actually be better because you fixed it.

**Craig:** We truly do live in the best time.

**John:** We live in a great time. Second thing I have to strongly recommend is the Mike Tyson Mysteries because the Mike Tyson Mysteries are great. I don’t hear enough people talking about how great they are. So it’s a series on Adult Swim. They’re 15-minute episodes. This the Wikipedia description of the Mike Tyson Mysteries, “The show follows Mike Tyson, the ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry, Tyson’s adopted daughter, and a pigeon as they solve mysteries. The style of the show borrows heavily from 1960s cartoons, most notably Hanna-Barbera productions such as Scooby Doo and The Funky Phantom.”

It’s really great. And just the first episode didn’t wow me. And then the cumulative effect of it is really just terrific. So there’s only 10 episodes. If you’re only going to dip your toes into it, the order in which I watched them is episodes called Is Magic Real, then Kidnapped, and finally House Haunters, which I think is the funniest of the season but won’t make sense unless you sort of got the general pattern of the show.

**Craig:** All right. All right. I’ll check that out.

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

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, kind of. It’s not that cool. But it’s One Thing.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I started riding a bike again.

**John:** How nice is that?

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I’ve been thinking lately like, “You know, everybody hates exercise.” But really, to be clear, we hate the exercise we hate because boring exercise is boring. Like boring jobs are boring. And boring people are boring. But if you find something you actually like, it’s okay, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I started riding a bike again and I kind of love it. So I’m working my way up to being able to ride into work because I live about seven miles away from my office.

**John:** That’s great. Now you also live up, way up a hill.

**Craig:** There is that.

**John:** That last section is —

**Craig:** My guess is I’ll be walking that one. [laughs]And that’s the other thing, it’s really hard for me basically as a beginner — not a beginner, I mean, look I know how to ride a bike, but it’s like getting back into it in my 40s and have not having ridden a bike for decades. You know, they suggest to really start out and acclimate on flat grade. And where I live it’s just nothing but steep ups and downs. And it’s like San Francisco.

So I’ve been like, so like yesterday I found one cross street and just went back and forth up and down it for a while. There’s a track that I’m going to go around. So I have to figure out sneaky ways of doing it. But, you know, I’ll work my way up and truthfully, if I can get to a place where I’m able to go up that hill, that would be something. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go up that hill. It’s pretty steep.

**John:** What I will say is like so we got bikes a couple years ago when my daughter started riding her bike. And the gearing now in bikes is just so much more sophisticated than when we were kids.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so you may find that these lowest gears are able to do things that you wouldn’t think possible. So you’ve been to my house and you know that like our driveway is just crazy steep. But I can ride up my driveway.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I can. I did a little test run on the hill. I went up, you know, from my house continuing up that hill. And definitely on the easiest, they call it the granny gear, so you’ve got your three gears by your pedals and then lots and lots of gears in the back. And the tiny, tiny gear by your pedal is the easiest one, they call the granny gear. So I was on the easiest gearing. And it was still really hard because it’s not hard on your legs because your legs are moving freely. It’s just hard on your heart because you’re pumping like crazy and you’re going like, you know —

**John:** Inch at a time.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I do like it a lot. Yeah. Bikes.

**John:** Bicycle. Bikes. I have one more announcement. We have a new app that’s actually in the App Store today.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** What? It’s called Assembler and it’s actually one of those apps we built for me but other people will find it very useful as well. I write scenes separately in Fountain. Just so I’m not looking at the same document the whole time, I’ll just write up scenes individually so they’re each in their own file. And then I would have to go through and like copy and paste them into a big document. And that was sort of error-prone and sort of annoying.

Assembler just lets you throw a bunch of text files at it and you can drag what order and then click a button and it saves them as one giant text file.

**Craig:** It concatenates.

**John:** It does. And so it’s the kind of thing you could actually do as terminal command, but not nearly as gracefully in terms of putting them in the right order. It’s also really useful for any sort of text file. But I found it really useful for Kickstarter files because when you have a Kickstarter campaign, it generates all these CSVs , comma separated values files. And you need to put them all together in a certain way. And it’s also great for that.

So it’s called Assembler. It’s in the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** How much does that cost? Like 40 bucks?

**John:** It costs $9.99.

**Craig:** $9.99? I’m not going to buy it but I’ll tell you why. Not because of the price. I don’t assemble anything. I just do —

**John:** You break stuff apart.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m a disassembler. You get me an app that destroys something.

**John:** Oh yeah, we can do that. We’ll work on it. It has a great icon. So if nothing else, you should just click through and it look at the great —

**Craig:** What does it look like?

**John:** It looks like big roll of tape —

**Craig:** Oh, I like that. I’m your dumb friend. Oh that sounds good. Oh, I like that.

**John:** [laughs] Oh, I’m not so challenging.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** No, you’re quite smart.

**Craig:** In my own — in my way. [laughs]

**John:** In your way, you are quite smart. That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Jeff Harms.

**Craig:** Oh, Harms.

**John:** Harms. If you are listening to this podcast, you’re probably subscribing to it. But double check, so over to iTunes and check Scriptnotes. We are in the iTunes Store and we’re also on Stitcher and other places as well. But leave us a comment while you’re there and you tell us how much you like Malcolm Spellman or suggest other rules that you should follow as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes, enrage me, please.

**John:** Yes. And use the comment section to poke Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Give us five stars but then poke Craig. It’s really what we’re asking.

**Craig:** It’s not hard.

**John:** Not hard. While you’re on iTunes, you can download the Scriptnotes app which allows you to listen to all the premium episodes and the back catalog, all the way back to episode 1. Subscription to Scriptnotes, the premium feed is $1.99. You can get those at Scriptinotes.net.

**Craig:** Did you say $199?

**John:** No, it’s $1.99 per month.

**Craig:** Oh, I mean that, everybody should do that.

**John:** Everyone should do that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So a bit of follow up we didn’t get to this week is we still are talking about 200th episode. People have written in with some good suggestions. Craig nixed my brilliant suggestion, but maybe my second most brilliant suggestion, he’ll say yes to.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m a nixer.

**John:** He’s a nixer. He’s not an assembler. He’s a disassembler. He disassembles my 200th episode idea.

**Craig:** I disassembled it. Really just because I’m a broken person.

**John:** No, it’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s fine. And thank you very much for listening. Craig, have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You too, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes, 185: Malcolm Spellman, a Study in Heat](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [Jiminy Cricket educational serials](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jiminy_Cricket_educational_serials) on Wikipedia
* [87th Academy Awards](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/87th_Academy_Awards) on Wikipedia
* [Scriptshadow’s review of Birdman](http://scriptshadow.net/screenplay-review-birdman/)
* [Graham Moore’s speech after winning Best Adapted Screenplay](http://oscar.go.com/video/2015-awards-ceremony-highlights/_m_VDKA0_4756q5vd)
* [Paddy Chayefsky at the 1978 Oscars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JupkXrn1ahU)
* [LA Times retracts an incorrect assumption about Graham Moore’s sexuality](http://www.latimes.com/local/corrections/la-a4-correx-20150225-story.html)
* [Rashida Jones on the red carpet at the 2015 SAG awards](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtj57Vg80SQ)
* [Scriptnotes, 183: The Deal with the Gravity Lawsuit](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-deal-with-the-gravity-lawsuit)
* [Tess Gerritsen’s amended complaint](https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gravity-lawsuit-amended-complaint.pdf)
* [My Cyborg Ear: How a Surgeon and Titanium Cured My Lifelong Deafness](http://gizmodo.com/my-cyborg-ear-how-a-surgeon-and-titanium-cured-my-life-1601254003) by Adam Clark Estes
* [Mike Tyson Mysteries](http://www.adultswim.com/videos/mike-tyson-mysteries/) on adult swim
* [I’m no fool with a bicycle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LmORiZfEJU)
* [Assembler](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/assembler/) is in the Mac App Store now
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jeff Harms ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/first-sale-and-funny-on-the-page).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Mmm…my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 84 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Oh, recovering. I got sick again.

**John:** Oh no, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, enough already with this. But much better now. Feeling good. I think I’ll be less phlegmy in this podcast. And recuperating from, you know, traveling with… — You ever have that thing where you’re descending on a plane but your ears are all stuffed up?

**John:** It’s the absolute worst.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. And you feel like something inside of you is dying.

**John:** Yeah. It reminds me of the classic scene in Star Trek II where they’re putting the little bugs inside, is it Chekov’s ears?

**Craig:** It is. It goes inside Chekov’s ear. And it is a scene that I have tortured my sister with for… — I mean, when did that movie come out? 1981?

**John:** Sounds right.

**Craig:** So, I’ve been torturing her with that for 32 years.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just so awesome. What a weird Jungian nightmare that they just sort of uncovered.

**John:** Yeah. I think anything going into your eyes, or honestly, the knife going across somebody’s eye is the thing that I just can’t possibly stand.

**Craig:** You know, but the knife going across somebody’s eye, like, Un Chien Adalou did that very famous thing, it’s so ridiculous that I don’t even like, eh. Because there’s a lot of stuff that they do in movies where you’re like, “Oh god, that would really, really hurt.” But there’s something about a thing crawling into your ear. It’s an opening you already have, so they’re not cutting you. And then it’s going in you and staying in there.

**John:** We’ve already lost half of our listeners by disturbing imagery.

**Craig:** But we may have picked up some new ones.

**John:** Ah! Maybe so. Well, hopefully they’ll enjoy listening to our topics for today which include the First-Sale Doctrine, which is a big copyright concept that has important ramifications for people who make movies and people who like to watch movies.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Second, I want to talk about what’s funny on the page versus what’s funny on screen.

**Craig:** Hmm, like I know?

**John:** Yeah, I think you can answer a couple of those questions.

**Craig:** I have no clue.

**John:** And a couple of other just random listener questions that have been in the mail bag that I think we can tackle today.

**Craig:** Great. Before we do that, real quickly, how’s everything going over there?

**John:** Things are going really well. So, I’m in Chicago right now. This was our first week of previews for Big Fish. And it was terrifying but really, really good. Everything kind of came together. And our Tuesday night went terrific. And our Wednesday night really well. And Thursday night was even better. So, it’s really been amazing.

The strange thing is we go through this tech rehearsal where you’re trying to put all the pieces together and you’re never quite sure what the whole show looks like. And it was literally not until we started on Tuesday night that it was like I thought we could get through the whole show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And people cheered at the right things, and laughed at the right things, and it was great. That said, you still keep doing work. And so we are performing every night but we have rehearsals starting at noon. So, basically 11am we meet with the creators and talk about sort of what we want to try to fix. And then you’re scrambling from noon to five to make changes, to make cuts, to change lines, to move stuff around.

And then everyone has to go have dinner and come back and put on the show with those changes in it.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, it’s been amazing. But, I’ve said before, it’s like production and post-production at the same time. This is like being at the Avid but the people are actually in front of you and you’re trying to make this thing happen. And every night there’s — you don’t know what’s going to happen because it’s actually live in front of you. So, the second or third night one of the lack scrims didn’t come up in time. Last night we had one of our actresses get sick during the show.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** Like she got food poisoning during the show. A swing had to go in. And our swings are brilliant, so Cynthia stepped up and did the job. So, that’s remarkable and that’s been fun to watch and experience.

**Craig:** Wow. Yeah, it’s funny, I have a friend who has been in musical theater for a long time, and while I don’t think she ever quite made it to Broadway she did a lot of Off-Broadway stuff and a lot of theater out here, like Santa Barbara and stuff like that. And we went to go see her in Peter Pan and she told us that the night before she had food poisoning and actually puked, I think puked on stage, [laughs], which I think is amazing.

And the great part about it is that it’s Peter Pan, so there’s all these kids in the audience. And they’re just like, “Why is Peter Pan throwing up?”

**John:** Yeah. Hopefully she wasn’t like in the aerial sequence of Peter Pan when the vomit happened.

**Craig:** God, you know, if she had been. “Unforgettable,” says the Santa Barbara News.

**John:** And one of the most remarkable things about Big Fish here in Chicago is a bunch of people from our podcast and from the blog have come to see the show. And so I had an open invitation, like if you’re coming to see the show send me your dates, and your times, and your seat numbers and I’ll try to come visit you. So, I’ve sort of done that Where’s Waldo thing of trying to find people in the balcony. And that’s worked only okay.

It’s actually much more difficult to find people up there than I thought it would be. I really needed Nima and Ryan to like make me an app to find people, but it’s been challenging.

**Craig:** Well, why don’t you just tell them when they see you to hold up something?

**John:** Yes. I’ve asked them just to grab me if they see me because I’m pretty identifiable. And so many people have grabbed me and said hello and they’ve enjoyed the show. And it’s been remarkable for them to come. So, I look forward to shaking more hands as we go through our five weeks here in Chicago.

**Craig:** Great. Awesome.

**John:** Let’s get started. First off, the First-Sale Doctrine, which is this legal concept that exists in US Copyright Law, but I think probably other countries’ copyright laws as well. What First-Sale Doctrine means is that if you make something that is subject to copyright, so let’s say you make a movie or a song, or a book is a good easy example.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s say you created a book. You have the exclusive right to distribute that book. That’s one of your rights in copyright. What First-Sale Doctrine holds is that once you’ve sold that book to somebody, they can go off and resell that book again. And that’s why we have used book stores. That’s why we have libraries to some degree. It’s an important thing that’s one of the important tenets of US Copyright Law.

So, these last couple weeks, two big cases came up that challenged our conceptions of First-Sale Doctrine. And I thought they were important to talk about because they have big implications, not only if you are making movies, but if you are watching movies.

**Craig:** Right. I think one of them definitely has implications for the movie business. Maybe more so than the other.

**John:** Great. I’ll be curious which one you think is more important.

So, the first one that came up, the ruling came back, it was a Supreme Court Case called Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons. And so here’s the situation that happened in that, and this was actually a book situation. It was a textbook situation, like literally it was about textbooks.

Somebody from Thailand came to the US to study and found that the textbooks were incredibly expensive. But they found that, “Oh, wow, if I actually bought those same textbooks back in Thailand, they’re much, much, much cheaper.” So, not only did he buy the books in Thailand for himself, he started bringing in those books from Thailand and selling them in the United States to help pay for his college education.

John Wiley & Sons, which was the publisher, said, “No, no, no. You can’t do that.” And they sued him. They won at a lower court, but the Supreme Court overruled that 6-3 and overturned that decision, and ruled that First-Sale Doctrine holds true even if the books were purchased in Thailand or outside the US, that concept still holds true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that’s a fascinating issue because a lot of times we want to discriminate on price based on different markets. And so from a movie perspective, a lot of times we may say like, “Okay, we’re going to price this movie at this price in Asia, but it’s a higher price in the United States.”

**Craig:** Yes. And if we were still living in DVD culture I would say this would be definitely — this is an issue. Because first, I think the notion is that the First-Sale Doctrine is kind of a US thing. I mean, our copyright laws are different from other countries in a number of ways.

So, okay, First-Sale says you’re the copyright holder and the reason that the word “copyright” is copyright is because that’s the biggest right of all, to make copies. You’re the only person that can make copies of your work. You’re the only person that can distribute your work.

However, you get the right of the first sale. You don’t get the right of the second, third, and fourth sale. Once you sell it to somebody they can sell that discrete copy to someone else — as you said, used book store. The same goes for textbooks.

What this case seemed to be about was basically, look, Thailand maybe doesn’t have the doctrine of first-sale, or even if it did it’s a different doctrine of first-sale because it’s a different country. So, if you go and you sell intellectual property in somebody else’s jurisdiction, with somebody else’s copyright laws, and they take that and they come back to the United States, does the Doctrine of First Sale somehow magically appear all of a sudden, even if it wasn’t purchased originally in a place where Doctrine of First-Sale exists?

And the Supreme Court said: Yeah, it does. If were still living in a world of DVDs, and the studios were selling DVDs here for $20, and overseas for $5, then it would make total sense to just start buying your DVDs overseas and then selling them here. The whole point, this guy didn’t just buy a textbook in Thailand, bring it over, and then sell it to somebody. Nobody bothers with that. He was running a business. He was basically arbitraging the difference between the textbook prices of the same textbooks, reselling them and keeping the profit.

So, you could say, “All right, I’m going to buy 100,000 copies of Transformers in India where it costs $2.00 and sell them over here for $8.00, which is still cheaper than the US price and make a lot of money.” True, that there’s this whole DVD region thing that makes it a little more difficult to do, but really that’s not as big of a deal for us right now in the movie business because we are increasingly out of the physical object business, which is why this next case was so, so important.

**John:** Yes. So, the second case is Capitol Records vs. ReDigi. I think they call it ReDigi. And what ReDigi does is it says, “Okay, you have bought these mp3 files on iTunes or through some other store. We will let you resell that mp3 to somebody else who might want it. And in selling it we will delete it off your computer and put it on their computer.”

And ReDigi was the company that was serving as this broker. It was doing this work of moving your mp3 to the other person’s computer, the buyer’s computer.

This is much more sort of obviously troubling for people who are making digital goods, such as digital movies or songs that are mp3 files. The studios really did not want this to happen. It was Capitol Records in this case who came in.

So, it was a lower court decision, but this lower court said that ReDigi’s business model, their plan of doing this, was not realistic. Was a violation of the First-Sale Doctrine. Wasn’t covered by First-Sale Doctrine.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** And I do like that the judge in the case actually cited Star Trek’s Transporters and Willy Wonka’s Wonkavision. And so as a writer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I love that he cited Wonkavision.

**Craig:** He did cite Wonkavision.

There’s a lot going on in this case and it’s not final obviously. I have a feeling that this one will be appealed and maybe make its way to the Supremes as well. But, it was an encouraging decision for us.

So, the crux of it is this: You buy a digital file from the copyright owner. And the question is how does the First-Sale Doctrine apply to you? Okay, they made the first sale to you; how do you then resell this? And really the truth is you can’t. And the reason you can’t is because the First-Sale Doctrine doesn’t say you can make a copy of what you’ve bought and sell the copy. It says you have to sell that thing you bought. So, because copyright is exclusive to the copyright owner — only they can make copies — unless they’ve licensed you some limited ability to make copies for personal use, which they can do.

So, how do you sell a digital file you have purchased without making a copy? So, ReDigi’s argument was, “Easy. We just take it from you and move it over to here. And we make sure that you’ve deleted it.” But, the judge rightly is pointing out, “Well, that’s still a copy.” Once you transmit the file to another space, you’re copying it. The fact that you are copying the book and then burning the other book behind it doesn’t mean you haven’t made a copy.

The truth is there is nothing that discrete about these digital files. The only real way to resell digital files, I think, and still be consistent with the First-Sale Doctrine is to sell them with your hard drive to someone. But barring that, you have made a copy. Furthermore, it’s really impossible for any business to ensure that they’re not making a copy, because the only way I, as ReDigi, can ensure that I’m not making an illegal copy when I accept your file from you is to make sure that you haven’t already duplicated your file on your end.

And that, of course, is where the opportunity for abuse is and it would be abused. Why wouldn’t any starving college student want to sell his entire music library knowing full well it’s copied, [laughs], and it isn’t going anyway? It’s sort of an obvious one.

Now, here’s what I think is interesting about this: When, I would say about two or three years ago, the movie industry got together and was trying to figure out how are we going to sell movies digitally, away from physical objects, and I suspect one of the things they were wrestling with was this very question, even though it hadn’t occurred to a lot of us. If they do sell things that are re-sellable, it’s not good for them.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, what his all points to ultimately, I think, and the way around this mess for the movie business, and the music business, too, is that ultimately we’re never going to own any of these copies ever. We’re never going to have them. We are going to have to own access because if I’m the movie studio, here’s what I know: The person at home wants to watch the movie when they want to watch it. And they’re happy to pay to watch the movie. I do not want them to have a copy of the movie for so many reasons. So, I stream it to them.

I stream it to them and what they’re paying for is access to that stream. And on their end it ought to be no different than popping in a DVD. Now, that’s going to require infrastructure improvements to download speeds and all the rest of it, but that’s ultimately where it has to go.

**John:** I would agree with you. I also feel like this coming generation is sort of used to this “assetlessness.” It’s been interesting even just me living in like two corporate apartments over the last two months, I’ve kind of come to treasure the fact that I don’t actually have anything I need to own. Like I don’t have any printed books here. I don’t have any DVDs here. I don’t even know if I have a DVD player in the room, because if I want to watch Game of Thrones I just pull it up on my iPad and connect it to my Apple TV. I don’t want to have to own those physical things if I don’t have to own those physical things. And not owning those physical things is wonderful.

The problem comes when I don’t have an internet connection. That breaks down. And that is a huge flaw in this.

So, just so we can talk it out better, I’d like to try adopt the opposite point of view so I can see like these are the real problems with what you’re describing and sort of what the issues here.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, I will now be the counter voice here.

**Craig:** You’ll be the “copy-fighter.”

**John:** I’ll be copy-fighter. So, here is the challenge. What you are doing by saying that you cannot transport this material from one person to another person is you’re essentially going back to the dark ages where things were written on scrolls, and like only certain people had access to certain things. Because what you’re saying is like only — you can’t ever own anything, that you can only license something. Then you’re controlling who can have access to anything that you don’t want them to have access to.

So, right now it’s the corporation saying, “Oh, we don’t want to license that movie in certain countries.” But then you’re denying everyone in that country the ability to experience that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or even to import that movie, or to find a physical copy. We’re saying that 100 years from now there may not be a physical copy that somebody could use in a library. You might say that a copyright extension is a whole separate other issue, but it’s sort of meaningless to say, “Oh, it will become in the public domain eventually,” if there’s never an ownable copy up until that point.

**Craig:** My response would be this. I think that there’s a reasonable case to be made that there ought to be full and open access to these things, and I don’t know how you legislate this. Because ultimately, well, maybe not. I mean, look, the copyright owner has the right to distribute, which also includes the right to not distribute. I don’t have to sell my novel in Wisconsin.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No publisher is required to sell a novel in Wisconsin, nor is any publisher required to translate the book, nor is any publisher required to sell it in any particular country. So, I would say that that’s actually not that different than it is now. The only difference is that you can’t — we’ve effectively barred those people from any kind of re-buying of that.

And, all I can say is, again, I tend to side with the rights of the content creators. I also feel like in general the marketplace tends to solve this problem. The whole point of making movies for these companies is to have people watch them and pay for them. So, I have a feeling that they would be all for open access as long as it didn’t feel like they were letting the foxes in the henhouse.

As far as libraries, I think their day is coming to a close. And I love libraries, but they are not going to be — libraries will ultimately not exist. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

**John:** So, let’s go to books, although of course you can apply it to movies as well. If libraries cease to exist, if you are a person who doesn’t have the economic means to get that book, to purchase that book, to purchase whatever the license is to read that book, then you have no access to that book. And that is a potentially huge problem for not only the educational system but sort of our system of culture.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there will ultimately become some sort of virtual library. And I don’t think that we’re going to live in a time 30 years from now where access to the internet will be seen as the privileged outcome of owning a device. I think at some point it’s going to — for instance, telephones.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** — were just given to people, you know, the impoverished got telephones. At some point they were like, “Everybody needs a phone. You’re going to have to have a phone. And they’re so cheap and here’s a phone. And here’s a connection.” And everybody that uses — even to this day — when you pay your bill, part of your bill is a tax for people who are poor and can’t afford a phone.

And I think that’s where it’s going to go. I think ultimately everybody will be connected. I think there will be literally hobos in the street with tablets.

And there will be some sort of access to free material through there in some form or another.

**John:** All right. Let’s go back to our core demographic here of writers and screenwriters. How do these issues affect screenwriters, people who are making movies?

**Craig:** Well, the biggest way is that by shooting down the ReDigi model we’re essentially protecting our residual base. So, we get paid when the studios get paid. Our residuals for reuse, our percentage of their gross for reuse, and in a ReDigi world where people can just sell each other these copies over, and over, and over, there’s just little incentive for them to buy the premium copy from the studio, which means we just don’t see the revenue.

It’s a little bit like eBay. You know, eBay is an enormous underground market. It’s a huge flea market of resale and the manufacturers get nothing of that resale. And that’s fine. I mean, people are selling objects and that’s the deal with objects.

For us, however, it would decimate what is already a wobbly system and what is already a system that has been knocked down so severely since the fall of the DVD. And by extension, continues to put pressure on screenwriting as a viable career.

Forget the average person, since it’s never been a viable career for the average person. It wouldn’t even be a viable career for the average screenwriter today. And that’s the scary part. So, that’s where the rubber hits the road for me.

**John:** Yeah. I would say going back to the Wiley decision, the ability to bring in things from other places, I’m glad it sort of ended up where it ended up. I feel like if we are not able to import things from other places, to see them, to experience them, then all the Japanese anime that you might want to go see could become locked off to you.

So, I think it’s important to be able to have access to — to bring stuff in from other places — or sometimes things that you would want to have a copy of that is just not available in the US market. And so I think it’s generally a helpful thing for people who want to see movies, that you can bring stuff in from other places.

**Craig:** Well, that decision didn’t really say that you could now do that. What it said is you can now do that and then resell it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is a different deal. I mean, any of us can go online right now and buy a textbook from Thailand. It was just that this guy was pretty enterprising about it.

**John:** Yeah. But I respect the business model, and you see it more in big cities, but like the place that just sells the stuff that they brought in from Asia. And that can be kind of great. And I think it’s good that you can actually get some of those physical things from other places, copyrighted works.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I would worry that had this decision done the other way you could see many more barriers put up to being able to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, for the textbook industry and for the — let’s just say the widget industry where people are selling physical objects, sorry, physical manifestations of intellectual property like books, and CDs, and DVDs, and works of art, this is a little bit of a challenge because they do price things for their marketplace.

I mean, yeah, obviously we pay more here in the United States for the same thing than they do in the developing world. And while we could stop and say, “Well, wait a second. That means we’re getting ripped off.” Uh, yeah, I guess we’re getting ripped off, but then again we have a lot more money than those people do and we’re willing to pay for it here. And, so, that’s that.

**John:** A couple reasons I think for the price discrimination. First off, we have more money, so therefore they can just afford to charge more for it. Second off, I mean, the reverse of that is they don’t have the money in those other markets, so if you price certain things, not only can no one buy it but you’re incentivizing piracy. Essentially like you’re trying to compete with free, or nearly free.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, there’s a little part of me that gets annoyed when I see, okay, well, if you can price it for that in Thailand, and still make money, because I know for sure you’re not pricing it below your cost, then you’re just up-charging me a massive amount for the privilege of having enough money to pay for it.

But, then again, I think, okay, but they sort of average it all out. And there’s like a medium price. The thing is, what do they do about — it does make a challenge for them because they can’t… — The only reason they can charge $5.00 in Thailand is because they charge $25.00 here. If the average is, you know, whatever, is $15.00, well, we’ll all buy them for $15.00 merrily, but they can’t in Thailand. So, what happens then? You know?

**John:** I suspect that the real costs are considerably different based on just the market. So, you know, a lot of the costs that we’re associating with our movies is all the — it’s the store, it’s the shipping, and all the other stuff, which might be quite a bit lower in other markets.

**Craig:** Yeah. But like for instance textbook publishing, I mean, look, I don’t know, but I suspect that most of the books that we buy here are actually assembled and published overseas.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, it’s just that, you know, and yeah, maybe we’re spending a little bit extra for the — you know, because they have to ship the books over, but not that much more. We’re getting gouged. We know we are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so I’m kind of… — In a weird way, who this ends up hurting are the people getting the lower prices. Their prices will go up and that hurts them more than our prices coming down, if this becomes like a huge thing. We’ll see if it does.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. Let’s move onto our next topic which his about comedy. So, a completely different thing. This is a question that actually starts with Joe D. who wrote in to ask.

**Craig:** Where is Joe D. from, by the way?

**John:** He didn’t say.

**Craig:** Oh, because that sounds like a New York guy to me.

**John:** Joe D.!

**Craig:** Hey, Joe D.!

**John:** So, yes, if you’re writing in with a question, and I should stop and say that if you have questions that you want me and Craig to talk about, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And so a big list of questions comes in, and I cull them, and Stuart culls them, and eventually we answer the ones we think are interesting.

So, Joe D. wrote in to ask: “When writing a comedy script do you think there is a one-to-one correlation between funny on screen versus funny on paper? Meaning, should a laugh out loud moment seen on the screen be equally laugh out loud moment on paper? In your experience, has this rung true? At what point does a smile on paper become a chuckle or a laugh?”

**Craig:** There is not a one-to-one relationship at all.

**John:** Not at all.

**Craig:** Not even close. You know, there are books that have made me laugh wildly, but if you were to shoot them they wouldn’t work at all. I mean, prose designed to make you laugh is very different than prose designed to be produced and make you laugh. It’s just a different thing.

Similarly, the same goes for situations that you’re describing. Knowing what to write to turn into something that makes people laugh, that’s why there are so few people that write comedy in movies. It’s not easy. And it’s an art. You know, it is an art in and of itself. It’s a strange debased, silly art, but it is an art.

And there are very few times where I’ve… — You know, sometimes I’ll write a line and I think, “That’s gonna work.” And it does work. And I think, “Okay, so there you go. That was a one-to-one moment, you know.”

**John:** But, I mean, that’s not quite what he’s phrasing. Like how often do you actually laugh when you read a script? For me it’s almost never.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** I mean, I’ve read very funny scripts that become very funny movies, but they’re not funny when you’re reading them on the page because they’re funny because you’re visualizing, like, “Oh, this is how it’s going to work.” And you can tell that, “I think that’s going to be funny,” but you have no idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You aren’t laughing as you’re sitting there with the script on your iPad in front of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t remember reading any script that made me laugh through it. And, frankly, if I did I would be suspicious that something was weird, because it was designed to do the wrong thing.

Sometimes producers or executives will say, “I laughed out loud when I read this,” or “I laughed out loud when I read that,” and I’ll think, okay, yeah, you’re probably lying. You know the way people say LOL but they never really LOL?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think it’s that. But, no, there’s not a one-to-one thing. Comedy is about performance. You’ve probably heard the old saying about timing. So much of comedy is about timing. So much of comedy is about staging. So much of comedy is about editing, or more specifically the lack thereof. And you simply can’t get that from the page. So, comedy writers are basically putting down a chemical formula and then you’re mixing the chemicals in front of the camera on the day.

So, no. No one-to-one relationship with there.

**John:** That said, that’s not to give a carte blanche to not try to be funny on the page. And so I’ll definitely notice that as you refine your work you’ll be taking out certain words, or trying to put back certain words so that it will read funnier, and so that you will give the actor a plan for like how that line can actually be funny.

And I’m sure we’ve both had situations where an actor just doesn’t understand how to make that line funny, or they’re trying to change something that is actually cutting into how that thing should be funny.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** A classic example is an actor will change the tense in a sentence. They think, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” but it actually makes it not funny because of how they’ve changed the tense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or, it’s a misdirect. So, one of the lines in Big Fish that every time I watch the show I have like my little scribbly piece of paper and I take notes on what things are. And because I know every line of the show, if a line isn’t delivered right I can make a note and we can give that line reading back.

One of the things that’s happened a couple of times is exactly that. A very specific thing — in this case it was a joke where if you say, “Luckily, years earlier I had been bitten the Chucalabra snake of Tanzania.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** “Luckily, years earlier,” it’s important that it be that way. Because we say “luckily years before I had been bitten by the Chucalabra snake. “The years before, before I had been bitten,” it becomes a separate clause that makes it not funny. So, earlier versus before is actually a very important thing.

**Craig:** You are hitting on something interesting and sometimes I seethe quietly over this, because comedy requires a certain mastery of grammar. There is a reason why things are funny in their order with specific words. You can look at two versions of a joke where it’s slightly different, and one is clearly funnier than the other. And you could spend all day talking about why, but really nobody has the time for that. Either you know or you don’t.

And the people who write comedy routinely tend to know. And the people who don’t, don’t. And it actually requires quite a bit of intelligence. And just instinct. And that’s why… –What’s so great about comedy, too, is that unlike drama, which I think drama is always about representations of tragedy. There can be new comedy invented. Comedy actually can just come out of nowhere — and suddenly there’s a new comedy that didn’t exist before it.

And those people and their instincts are incredible. But it is so instinctive and so scientific. And, frankly, it’s OCD. Comedy is OCD. If you’re not OCD about the language that you’re using, comedy may not be your thing.

**John:** Yeah. One other thing I want to make clear, when I say like it’s not necessarily funny on the page, that’s a different conversation that voice. And I remember when we had Aline on the show we talked about voice. And the successful writers, the ones you can tell like, “Oh, this person is going to succeed,” a lot of times it’s because they have a voice. And many times it’s a funny voice.

And so the good comedy scripts tend to be funny even in the places that aren’t necessarily jokes. It’s just enjoyable to read in the right ways and it has a sense of humor to itself that’s not just scene, scene, scene, line, line, line.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a hard thing to describe. But even not just what the characters are saying but the way that the script actually feels on the page is funny, or it is just the way it should be.

And so even if people aren’t laughing out loud, they’re going to the next page because they’re hearing a voice. And they’re having confidence that this person knows what they’re doing.

**Craig:** And there are writers who are really funny and write really funny stuff. They don’t have necessarily a great mind for structure. They don’t necessarily have a great mind for theme. They don’t necessarily have a great mind for drama. They’re just funny.

A lot of times those writers end up having incredible careers working on hysterically funny television shows, because television shows do rely less on a kind of self-encapsulated structure. I mean, there’s a structure to each show, of course, and there’s a room full of people to kind of help you get there. But a movie is a self-encapsulated structure. It’s its own thing that begins and ends. Permanently.

So, a lot of times they do that. But then there are a lot of writers who also work in movies who really do come on to projects to make them funnier. They’re not there necessarily to write something that is comedically dramatic or dramatically comedic.

**John:** Yeah. And there are cases where like you just literally need a laugh here. And so that’s where a writer who’s good at figuring out what could be funny in that moment can be really valuable.

You and I have both been on comedy panels, roundtables on movies that are about to go into production. And those are not ideal situations for figuring out the big funny of a movie, but they can be useful for figuring out those little surgical moments of like how do we get a laugh here that can propel us into the next moment.

**Craig:** And it’s funny because you’ll have a lot of people in a room — we do this all the time — where we go through a screenplay that’s about to go into production looking for opportunities for jokes. And all of these really funny people, I mean, I’ve done these things with Patton Oswalt, and Dana Gould, and big comedy writers, Lennon and Garant, and we all go around the table and we do this stuff. And at the end of the day on a movie if two jokes come out of that whole thing and end up in the movie, that’s a good day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s really hard to just sort of come in and throw stuff into a movie that would actually work in that moment, in that tone, is doable, consistent with the characters, translates from what was funny in the room to funny on screen. It’s just a whole different thing.

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes those sessions can help get the other writers, or the writers who are working on it longer term, or if it’s a writer-director, can get them in a good spirit to be thinking for other things, thinking of other moments that can help. So, that can be useful.

And, honestly, if those two jokes end up in the movie but they also end up in the trailer, then you’ve just made things…

**Craig:** Big time.

**John:** Big time. It’s been completely worth everyone’s time to go do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. For sure.

**John:** Our next question comes from Michael who asks — again, I don’t have locations on people. Tell us where you’re from. We’d love to know where you’re from. Michael asks: “It seems like you get a lot of things done with screenplays, musicals, the website, podcast, apps, games, etc. Do you have any tips on time management and self-actualization?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, this is all about you, because I really only get one thing done.

**John:** [laughs] What I liked about this question is that the actual question is like time management and self-actualization, and weirdly I think those things have been bundled together in a way in the last couple years that’s not necessarily healthy or productive.

So, time management is basically, you know, getting the stuff done in your day that you can get done and not being so stressed out about it. And that’s good. And so I do have some things to say about that.

Self-actualization is really a different thing. And self-actualization is sort of feeling good about who you are and what you’re doing and sort of how life works. And overtime management is probably bad for your self-actualization. You’re like a machine who gets stuff done, but isn’t anything other than a machine who gets things done.

So, I think it’s just weird that we packed those two ideas together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For time management, when I’m back in my normal Los Angeles I have pretty good stuff and I can actually churn through a lot of things. Since I’ve been doing the show, it’s all gone out the window. So, I’ve barely my OmniFocus which is where I store all that stuff. I’m late for everything. Stuart, god bless him, sort of keeps his master list of who’s coming to what show of Big Fish every night so I can try to find those people. But then I forget to print it out. I forget that people travel cross-country to see the show.

So, I don’t have like a perfect system for this.

**Craig:** You’re a bastard.

**John:** I’m a terrible, terrible person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like literally in the lobby, I just happened to be in the lobby and three people I knew sort of separately came up and said like, “Oh, John, thank you for meeting.” I’m like, “Yes, I planned…” No. I didn’t plan to be here at all. I just happened to see you.

**Craig:** You’re such a bastard because even the lies you successfully told to hide your bastardy have been undone right here.

**John:** Right on the show.

There are general theories on time management. One is that you should focus on whatever the most important thing is and get the most important thing done, to the exclusion of all other stuff. And that’s sort of been how I’ve treated Big Fish this time is that there’s a lot of other stuff in my life, work stuff in my life, that needs some attention that I just can’t give it.

So, I’ve been sort of stalling on phone calls, or just not engaging on stuff because I can’t I have to sort of devote every brain cell to this.

But, in my normal life I will sort of — I’ll look for what the easy things are and just knock out a bunch of easy things. And I think that sometimes people, and I’m definitely one of them, get sort of paralyzed because they know that the big thing is too hard to do. So, the trick is to break it down into smaller steps and just get those little smaller steps done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** In terms of writing, sometimes there’s that scene that I just don’t want to do that. And so, like, well don’t write that scene. Write the other scenes that are around that scene that are simple that you can do right now.

**Craig:** A lot of times when I don’t want to write that scene I have to confront the fact that something’s wrong with the scene. [laughs] That’s usually the big thing. But I have to say that my approach to scheduling stuff, writing, this, you know, I do a lot of charity work in my town, I do work with the WGA, I’ve got a family — that’s a big one. We’ve often talked about our kids are killing us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have come to accept in a self-actualized way, I think, that I have a method that is methodless, and that through various impulses — guilt, desire, whatever they are, shame, happiness, excitement — the things that I want to get done get done. And what I would say to you out there is if you’re having trouble with these things, there’s no problem whatsoever with looking for help. Maybe there’s a system out there that you would find services what you want. Just make it what you want.

Don’t follow some plan, some artificial plan, to your nature. Because that’s not going to work, either. And you’re absolutely right. It is going to get in the way of you just being a happy person. Productivity is not the same thing as happiness.

Productivity in something that makes you happy is the same as happiness. And we can always get better at things. If it excites you, it’s a good thing. If it exhausts you, it’s a bad thing.

**John:** Yes. That’s definitely been my theory with sort of the app stuff I’ve done and sort of Highland has shipped, and Bronson, and the other things. I did it because it was really interesting to me. And so I have no trouble sort of spending a lot of time on things that are actually fascinating to me and exploring how to do that.

And so the musical was a brand new thing, and it was terrifying, and it was fascinating to do it. It’s exhausting right now, but I recognize that I’m sort of through the sloggy/exhaustion part of it. But I also get to see it every night, and that’s a remarkable, amazing thing.

So, I will say that sometimes — here are the two sides of it. The bright shiny things are always going to be bright, and shiny, and attractive. And sometimes you just have to go chase them because they’re what you sort of want to do. And sometimes you’re going to be in the third draft of something that is just a slog. And it’s recognizing that it’s a slog because it’s a slog. But then you’re going to get through it and you will finish it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t be a child. There is delayed gratification. We all have the experience of not wanting to work out, and then working out, and then feeling great that we worked out. So, writing is no different sometimes. Sometimes writing is awesome and it’s fun. Sometimes it’s working out. But then when it’s done you feel great.

**John:** Craig, I think we’ve talked about the marshmallow test on the podcast, because you as a psychology major must be familiar with the marshmallow test. Have you seen this?

**Craig:** Maybe not under that name. Is it the kids who are given the marshmallows and told to wait and they get more marshmallows. Is that the one?

**John:** Exactly. The classic setup is that you have a young kid who is presented with like a marshmallow on a plate. And the tester says, “If you can wait, I’ll be back in a few minutes. And if you can wait, I’ll give you a second marshmallow.” So, basically they time the kid, like how long it takes the kid to not just eat the first marshmallow and delay gratification in order to get two marshmallows.

And I’ve always been the kids who like I could probably wait there a day to get that marshmallow.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it is interesting because they find that some kids are just better at it than others. That there is a kind of innate capacity for delayed gratification.

For some people it seems that gratification is only gratifying if it’s immediate. Those people do tend to become drunks. But, [laughs], or substance abusers, or sex addicts. They are also sometimes the most fascinating people in the world.

Writing, unfortunately, is not for people who find gratification only in the moment. It is not an impulsive person’s task.

**John:** I would say sketch writing might be, writing for like a Jimmy Fallon. That could be that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that might be so. Writing for stuff that’s immediate like that, sure, like a daily variety show where every night it’s a new thing and you just burst it out. Absolutely. Yeah. I can see that. That is fun. That is as close to standup comedy as writing gets probably.

But writing anything long form — writing anything that’s not being shot that day requires a sense of delayed gratification. Screenwriting requires a sense of delayed gratification that is monastic…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** …in its requirements. You need to be willing to not only write for a very long time to reach the gratification of finishing; you need to be aware that you haven’t finished at all and that you may have another six months, another year, another lifetime ahead of you on that movie. Or it may never gratify in the end ultimately which is the movie experience.

So, those of us who screen-write, yeah, we’re waiting for the second marshmallow.

**John:** I have a theory that perhaps the ability to delay gratification is partly the ability to visualize an alternate future. So, it’s the ability to see a future in which you had waited and this is the result of having waited. Because that’s really what you’re talking about is being able to picture yourself as the person who got the two marshmallows because you waited.

And a lot of the projects I’ve been involved with, it’s knowing that, okay, it’s going to go through all these different steps, but this is what it’s going to look like at the end. And both the movies I’ve written and now the show, and even the apps I’ve done, it’s being able to see like, “Okay, this is what it looks like at the end.” And because I can see what it looks like at the end I am willing to go through all of the stuff that gets you to that place.

**Craig:** Well, that’s an expected confluence for somebody who writes because, after all, writing is imagining stuff and being excited about what you imagine. So, it seems like that would go hand in hand.

There’s an interesting experiment that — a little game that they play. And so you at home can play along with us. I want you to take out a piece of paper, or if you’re in your car just imagine this. You’re going to draw three circles on the paper. The first circle represents how important the past is to you. The second one represents how important the present is to you. and the third one represents how important the future is to you.

And by important I mean to say how much of your thoughts and your mind are occupied by these things — the past, the present, and the future. And, you know, for me, when I did it was sort like a very small circle, pinpoint, huge circle. [laughs] Because, you know, I really don’t think about the past that much at all. I just don’t. I’m not one to go roll over things. If anything, it’s all very dream like behind me. The moment to me right now is the moment right now. But it’s hard for me to access. I’m constantly thinking about tomorrow. I’m constantly thinking about the future.

**John:** Yeah. I would wonder whether that’s necessarily the healthiest balance. I agree that the past is maybe not as instructive and people tend to dwell too far in the past. And therefore we have terrible world situations.

But what’s interesting about the future, and if I could improve one thing about myself, and find myself doing it, I would say I clock it that I’m doing it, is I will visualize the future and I will visualize conversations — hypothetical conversations with people that are not productive. I will visualize, like, “I’ll say this, and then they’ll say that, and then I’ll say this, and I’ll do that. And you know what? That’s not going to really work out so well.”

**Craig:** [laughs] No. No, no, it’s true. I have occasionally caught myself in loops like that. I remember when I was on the board of directors of the Writers Guild, after the first few meetings it became clear to me that the nature of those board meetings was endless talking.

And it was frustrating talking because, frankly, so much of it was just wrong. You know, it was just sitting in a room listening to people say things that were wrong. And saying them with conviction. And when you hear people saying wrong things with conviction, something happens inside of you that is — well, maybe something happens inside of me. It was terrifying. [laughs]

And I would find myself sometimes at night playing out conversations in my head in which I attempted to make them see why they were wrong. And it never worked. Ever. It is, in fact, a waste of time.

But, it may also be neural flotsam and jetsam that is unavoidable to those of us who write because that is precisely the mechanism we use when we’re creating characters and writing dialogue.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** So, it’s hard to make that muscle stop being a muscle.

**John:** Yes. But I think it is important to recognize that writing yourself into imaginary fights with people is not maybe necessarily the healthiest thing to be doing.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, I’m recognizing when I do it and hopefully not doing it as long as I’ve done it.

**Craig:** How many fights have we had in your head?

**John:** I don’t know that we’ve had that many fights. Maybe two.

**Craig:** [laughs].

**John:** And I’ll tell you, one of the fights I had in my head was over a script of mine that you read. And in a lovely way you were trying to talk about some aspect of it, but you said it did not hit my ears especially well.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sorry.

**John:** And so therefore I started having the very unproductive conversation with you, the imaginary conversation in my head. How about you? How many fights have you had with me?

**Craig:** None. [laughs] Because, well, and I’m sorry. You know, that’s why I hate reading people’s scripts and talking about it because then I think like, “How can I say something here and not upset them if there’s something that I feel is wrong, or incorrect, or I don’t like.” And I don’t want to be pedantic about it.

But then there’s always the risk that that will happen. And it’s certainly not intentional.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

**John:** Oh, no, it’s fine. And people who are working on Big Fish know that I have about — you can sort of watch me and know sort of like where my meter is at. Because I can start crying at about 15 seconds at any given point. It’s been a very sort of stressful time. But it’s gotten to the point where it’s just like it’s almost kind of funny because it’s like I don’t have — I’m aware of it, and so it’s not so terrible.

**Craig:** I didn’t make you cry?

**John:** Oh, you didn’t make me cry at all. Not at all.

**Craig:** Because I thought that script was good. I really liked it.

**John:** Well thank you. Thank you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, any thoughts I had were just — they were probably, you know, if you heard anything strange in my voice it was probably that I was encountering things that I had done in the past and paid terrible prices for. And maybe there was memories of old mistakes that may not necessarily have translated to your script, but maybe that was what it was.

**John:** I want to thank you for that.

Let us wrap up with our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** But now I’m going to have a fight in my head with you later though.

**John:** Oh, good. See? “How dare he be so sensitive about that thing? And how dare he call me out on a podcast about it?” That’s really what you’re fight is going to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the more, frankly, the more you do that to me the better the podcast gets.

**John:** [laughs] Because it’s really the podcast where I knock Craig Mazin down a little bit.

**Craig:** But the best podcast. I wish every podcast were me defending myself. It’s my natural position.

**John:** Good! Yes. I very much enjoyed our Veronica Mars podcast for that reason, because we genuinely did disagree.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And I didn’t have to just take the opposite point of view.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing this week which is actually courtesy of two members of our cast. Alex Brightman and Cary Tedder. And this is a recurring joke in the dressing rooms. It’s Carl Lewis “sings” The National Anthem at an NBA game. You may have seen this. This is from a long time ago.

**Craig:** Seen it! Seen it!

**John:** It’s really just amazing. So, it’s not a surprise — he does a terrible job. And there’s moments in it that are just brilliant. Because he recognizes, like, oh, this is not going well, so he says, “Uh-oh.” That uh-oh is great.

**Craig:** I know. That’s my favorite.

**John:** And so we’ve had some uh-oh moments in Big Fish. And nothing has gone horribly awry, but there are cats that have fallen out of trees when they weren’t supposed to. So, there have been some uh-oh moments, shot guns that are broken. And so “Uh-oh” has become sort of a recurring thing. So, I will include a link to it in the show notes. It’s only 30 seconds long, so it’s not going to take up a lot of your time.

What I think is fascinating about it is it’s not just to make fun of Carl Lewis, or not even to make fun of him. He’s given us a great illustration of why our National Anthem is so problematic. And I think some guidelines on sort of if you do need to sing The National Anthem, here is my personal piece of advice: You need to recognize that our National Anthem can only be sung if you start at near the very bottom of your singing register.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, National Anthem, the third note is the lowest note in the whole song.

**Craig:** “Say.”

**John:** Yeah. So, [sings] “Oh, say…” You have to figure out — well, that was a terrible one — but you have to figure out where your lowest note is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The lowest note that you can sing well should be the “Say.” And then you have a chance, just a small chance, of being able to get through the song.

**Craig:** Basically you’re going from “Say” to “Glare.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the range of the song. And it’s a long range. And it is very difficult.

**John:** And if you don’t think about it ahead of time you’re going to make a natural assumption for most songs that you sing, which is that the first note is going to be somewhere in the middle of where that song is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that holds true for America the Beautiful. It holds true for Happy Birthday. Through most of the normal songs you sing. It’s just a fluke song. It requires far too much of a range.

So, figuring out this piece of my own, everyone is like, “Well, someone else must have given some good advice on how to sing the national anthem.” So, I’ll also include a link to this ten-point guideline for how to sing The National Anthem without embarrassing yourself. The zero point on that is never sing The National Anthem.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You basically can’t win with The National Anthem, unless you’re Whitney Houston, or Zooey Deschanel did a great job, too.

**Craig:** Lots of people can sing The National Anthem. And I actually like singing The National Anthem. You just have to know — you have to know that you can do it. The only way to sing The National Anthem is to sing it confidently, because the whole point is it’s a song about confidence. It’s a song about victory.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** And you cannot be confident if you, while you’re singing or thinking, “I wonder if I’ll hit the word Glare.” Maybe not. [laughs] You know?

**John:** One piece of advice in this blog post, and then I’ll stop talking about The National Anthem, is don’t look at a printed copy of it. Instead, listen to the song and handwrite out all the words so that they make sense to you. So, you can detect the through line of the story and that will keep you from messing up the “rockets’ red glare” and a couple couplets that always get messed up when people try to sing it.

**Craig:** [sings] “Bunch of bombs in the air.” You gotta put Leslie Nielsen’s version as Enrico Palazzo is the greatest version of The National Anthem ever.

**John:** I’ll have Stuart find that and link to it.

**Craig:** “Bunch of bombs in the air” is the greatest. You want to talk about one-to-one writing funny and being funny — “Bunch of bombs in the air.” That’s just amazing. Yeah.

**John:** Craig, do you have one this week?

**Craig:** I do. Yes. This is a Cool Thing that a lot of people already know is cool, but perhaps you don’t out there, and it’s the video game BioShock Infinite.

**John:** People love it.

**Craig:** People love it. I love video games. I loved the first BioShock a whole big ton. I’ve really enjoyed the second BioShock as well. This one sort of takes it to another level. So, BioShock, the series created and masterminded by a guy name Ken Levine who’s super duper smart. Interestingly, started his career — attempted to start his carrier as a screenwriter, and didn’t happen for him.

So, then he went out east to New York to become a playwright. Didn’t happen for him either. He is, however, I would argue the preeminent video game writer of our generation. No question he is actually. I mean, you could argue maybe that the Houser Brothers who do the Grand Theft Auto games are up there, too. But, frankly, I think Ken Levine is in a class all of his own.

The game is easily the most fascinating world conceived for those of us with a brain in the video game genre. It is remarkable. It is incredibly literate. It is incredibly literate almost to a fault. I will say — so I’ll give a little spoiler alert here — I’m not giving away the ending at all. I’m simply talking about the nature of the ending.

The nature of the ending is presented in such a curious way and is so much about you figuring out. I mean, there’s that metric of how much do I tell you, how much do I let you figure out. So, okay, I need you to know that Bruce Willis is really dead. So, I’m going to let you figure it out by showing the breath and then showing little flashbacks from the movie and then you’ll get it.

I’m not going to just have somebody announce, “He’s dead!” Well, end of BioShock Infinite, I think, errs a little too far in the “you figure it out — here, we’ve told you everything you need to know.” I couldn’t actually quite understand all of the intricacies of it until I went online and had people sort of explain it in depth, which reminded me a bit of the second Matrix film.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which had that scene with the architect, which if you understand, is amazing. What he’s saying is amazing. And what they are presenting there is amazing. It’s just that nobody understood it, so it doesn’t matter. You don’t get credit for it. So, I think that the end of BioShock Infinite got a little too that way for me. But, now that I understand it, it’s pretty awesome. I just wish that it had been presented sort of in the way that Ken Levine presented the big twist inside of BioShock the first, which was done flawlessly and hits you like a ton of bricks.

And not only — that may be the greatest twist in video game history because not only did it create a twist in the story, but it created a twist for you as the player. You realized you hadn’t been playing the way you thought you had been playing, which was wild.

So, anyway, BioShock Infinite is a game worth playing if you are a writer, if you are intellectual, if you are fascinated by the connection between humanity and the crimes of humanity. So, that’s my big Cool Thing of the week.

**John:** Wonderful. I’m looking forward to that when I get back to Los Angeles. I will barricade myself and play some of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun podcast. Our standard boilerplate here at the end. Anything we talked about on the show today you can find at johnaugust.com/podcast, along with back episodes. If you like our show, it helps us if you give us a rating in iTunes so other people can find us. We are just Scriptnotes on iTunes.

If you have a question for us you can write at ask@johnaugust.com. Even better, you can go to johnaugust.com/podcast and there is a little thing, a link, that shows how to send a question in and the things we will talk about and the things we won’t talk about.

For example, we’d love if you’d put your location so we know where you’re writing from.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I am @johnaugust on Twitter. You are @clmazin?

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next week.

**John:** All right. Bye.

LINKS:

* [First-sale doctrine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) on Wikipedia
* [Reselling Digital Goods Is Copyright Infringement, Judge Rules](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/reselling-digital-goods/) from Wired
* [Capitol Records LLC vs ReDigi Inc.](http://www.scribd.com/doc/133451611/Redigi-Capitol)
* New York times on [the ReDigi ruling](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/redigi-loses-suit-over-reselling-of-digital-music.html?\_r=0)
* [Carl Lewis “sings” The Star-Spangled Banner](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLvCM4j2mg)
* Jonas Maxwell’s [tips for singing the national anthem](http://www.jonasmaxwell.com/pages/index.cfm?pg=298)
* [BioShock Infinite](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003O6E6NE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon.com
* How to [ask a question](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question)
* OUTRO: Leslie Nielsen (as Enrico Palazzo) [sings the national anthem](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ZsDdK0sTI)