Search Results for: flashbacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Right. About Halloweenie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Double nothing.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Pretty early on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Okay, go pee.

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

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

Yup.

Just talking.

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

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

**Craig:** I think it’s great.

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

**Craig:** I had to pee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** How lucky are you?

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

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

What was the first script you tried to write?

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. No problem.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** For sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

**Craig:** I agree with that.

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

**Craig:** Another good one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Awful.

**John:** Awful. Awful stuff

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Shoe leather.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Ugh.

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

**John:** Yup.

So, Craig, are you ready for this now?

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Ha-ha-ha. So…

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

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

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

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

**John:** I wasn’t aiming for funny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** I agree.

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

**John:** Yeah, that’s fine.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. Carillon bells.

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** [laugh]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A simulated FLASH FLOOD is unleashed.

‘I mean…water.'”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

**John:** That’s not fair at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I know.

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

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

**John:** Great writers there.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** I love Myst.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Room and Boom.

**John:** Moom.

**Craig:** Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Done. Podcast.

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

**John:** Mic drop. Now.

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

**John:** Thanks, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/gorilla-city-and-the-kingdom-of-toads).

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

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

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

**Craig:** I’m not too bad. Hanging in there. How about yourself, sir?

**John:** I’m doing really well. It’s a beautiful afternoon.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re finally — it looks like we’re starting to peak out of the 100 degree misery.

**John:** This weekend — this last weekend was super hot. I guess by the time you’re hearing this podcast it was two weekends ago, but it was super, super hot. We were down at the San Diego Zoo, and the San Diego Zoo is amazing, but when it’s 102 degrees no zoo is amazing enough to make you really want to stay there.

**Craig:** One day, and maybe it’s today, I’ll talk about how I hate zoos. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Hate. Hate zoos. I’ve hated them since I was a child. We would go to the Bronx Zoo, which is one of the world’s great zoos. Hated it.

**John:** It’s a great zoo. I’ve been there.

**Craig:** Hated it. Hate the LA zoo. Hated the San Diego Zoo. Hate zoos. Don’t get ’em. Mystery to me.

**John:** I like zoos for kids. And, you know, we go to the LA Zoo fairly frequently. And the LA Zoo gets a lot of flack because it’s the hilliest place on earth. Like somehow topographically they managed to put extra hills in places where you wouldn’t think they could actually put a hill.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But once you learn how to manage the LA Zoo and you sort of go deep and then work your way back, it can be a very good zoo. I mean, it gets very hot.

**Craig:** Except for the part where it’s a zoo.

**John:** It is a zoo.

**Craig:** You’re just staring at animals that are staring at you.

**John:** It’s true. You are.

**Craig:** It’s just a zoo.

**John:** The second day in our San Diego trip we got to go to SeaWorld, which was much less educational than I would have gathered — like, it’s not really about the oceans or anything like that. There was no educational outcome. But you get to ride some rides, and my daughter got to feed some dolphins. So, it was a good time.

**Craig:** See, SeaWorld entertains you. They’ve taught dolphins to do things, not just look at you. [laughs] That’s why I don’t like zoos; they’re just looking at you.

**John:** I understand your frustration.

**Craig:** You get it?

**John:** I get it. I totally get it.

Craig, I have actual news. I sold a TV show.

**Craig:** I saw that. Congratulations.

**John:** Thank you. So, after talking about television and the wonderland that is television on this podcast endlessly it’s like, you know what, I’ll just do it.

And so I wasn’t going to do it at all this season, but then I had lunch with Josh Friedman, who is a friend and a neighbor, and he said, “You know, if you ever want to do a show that you would write the show and I could take over the show, that could be great.” And I was like, “Well, you know what? That actually could be great.”

And so by the end of the lunch I sort of knew what that show was, and we went and pitched it. And so I thought I would take just a little second to describe what television is like for that process, because it’s a lot different than what happens in features.

So, for a TV show, Josh and I talked and figured out what the show would be. Josh already had an overall deal with 20th Century Fox Television. And that is considered the studio for a show. And so his deal was there, so if I wanted Josh to be able to take over the show I obviously had to do it with Fox, which was fine because I’d already done a show with Fox once before. They’re good people. They’re smart.

**Craig:** Oh, sorry, I sneezed. I’m not…

**John:** You just totally sneezed in my story.

**Craig:** Well, because I’m allergic to it. [laughs] Something about it. I think because you said Fox and suddenly I went into anaphylactic shock.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I get it. That’s a common reaction among a lot of writers. Although I would say 20th Television, that part of Fox, is kind of generally well liked.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s the movie-studio-Fox people have big aversions to. And that’s changing, too — who knows.

**Craig:** And perhaps fewer issues with ongoing. There was a little news there. But I don’t mean to hijack your story.

**John:** That’s fine. So, we had to go in to talk to Fox. The only place I could do the show with Josh was at Fox. And Fox was the right choice for it anyway. So, we went in, you describe it to one of the executives, who likes it a lot. The other executive was out of town, so we had to go back in two weeks later and describe it to her.

And that pitch is very much like the movie pitch, except that where in a movie pitch you’re just describing, “Well, this is what happens during the course of this arc of this movie,” that starts the conversation. And then there’s like, “That sounds great.” And there’s a little pause. And then you have to describe where the show goes from there.

And that’s the huge difference between TV and movies is that you’re looking at sort of, what is the ongoing week-to-week? What is the engine of the show going to be? Where is it taking us over the course of a season, or five seasons? And that was fantastic and fun. I actually really enjoyed it.

So, once you have a good meeting at a studio, the studio makes a deal and they say, “We would love for you to write this show. And if we can get a network to sign onto the show, hooray, great, and we’ll make the show.” And so they then set up meetings with the networks that they feel are appropriate. So, I went out and we pitched it to Fox, the television network, ABC, and NBC. And so you go in, you sit in those rooms, and you’re going into those rooms not just as you — me and Josh — but also with somebody from 20th, or several people from 20th there to describe their interest in the show and what they see. And so the rooms are just a lot bigger than they usually tend to be in features, because it’s not just you-the-writer talking to the studio executive, or you talking to a director. There are a lot of people involved.

And what’s weird is, everyone — there’s a season for it. And so this is the time of year where you pitch one-hour dramas. And so every place we went for a meeting there were other writers there waiting to have their meetings. And so you’re all sort of — it’s like you’re going in to audition. I mean, you’re very much, like you are lining up. They’re waiting. “Okay, you’ve got the 2:20. Someone else has the 2:40.”

And so you see the same people again and again. So, I saw Liz Brixius at NBC right before she sold her show. There was this group of 10 writers who were doing this — they weren’t all writers — but there was this big giant posse of 10 people who were going in for a meeting for this Bruckheimer military comedy that they ended up selling, so good for them. But it was just so weird to see how much bigger the rooms are when you’re pitching a TV show.

**Craig:** It’s also interesting, I think people don’t get this, and I almost don’t get it in a weird way. So, there’s a big company, a big Fox company that Rupert Murdoch owns. And there’s a part of it that produces television shows. And then there’s a part of it that airs television shows. And you’d think, well, if the 20th Century Fox Television wants to spend the money to produce the television, wouldn’t they just then have Fox Broadcasting air the show?

And the answer is, no. [laughs] They actually sort of look at all the networks equally because they want the network that’s going to give them the best time slot and theoretically pay the highest licensing fee per episode so that they recoup their money faster and then go into profit faster.

**John:** Yeah. I think in the best of all possible worlds, if you had a show that you felt was the right show for you to make and the right show for that network to air, that’s lovely and great and everyone can be sort of in synch on things. But oftentimes that’s not the case. And so a really great new show this next season is The Mindy Project, which is Mindy Kaling from The Office. And so that was an NBC/Universal show, but NBC decided it wasn’t the right kind of show for them, so they took it to Fox. So, it’s NBC making a show for Fox. Fox is making a show for ABC. That’s okay and it’s good.

And I think there have been times where it has contracted a little bit and where studios would only develop for themselves, for like their sister network. But also all those executives end up moving around from network to network and place to place. And so the people that you’re pitching to at one of these networks may have already worked for one of these studios. So, everyone has these relationships anyway. So, it’s less — it’s not that it’s not competitive, but it’s less insular than you think.

**Craig:** Yeah. It used to be we had these rules called the Fin-Syn Rules, or Financial Syndication Rules. And they basically said that if you produced television shows you couldn’t be part of the same company that aired them over the public airways. And they got rid of those rules; people were concerned that they were going to essentially be anti-competitive so that suddenly if you were developing something for Fox Television, that Fox Television really wouldn’t make much of an effort to sell it anywhere else. They would just make a sweetheart deal with the Fox Network.

It turns out that’s not really the case. However, where writers have run into trouble with this arrangement is in syndication, where the company — if the show is a hit — the producing company, there have been a number of cases where it appears that they have made sweetheart deals with their own networks, or their own outlets to put the shows out there. So, a show on 20th Century Fox suddenly sells itself the syndication rights to run on FX.

**John:** The case you’re citing is really X-Files, which was Fox sold the rights to reruns of The X-Files to FX. And there was a question of whether they were selling it for the right price.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And I remember that I think Bochco sort of engaged in the first major lawsuit. I’m not sure which of his series he was litigating on, but basically he was arguing, “Look, you didn’t really take this out and find the proper market price for it. You made a sweetheart deal with another division of this large company. And since my profits are tied directly to what you guys make in syndication, you’ve reduced the amount of money I will be getting off the show.”

And all those things always get settled, but that has been where the elimination of Fin-Syn seems to have hurt the most.

**John:** Now, these are all luxury problems, because this isn’t going to happen unless you have 80 or 100 episodes of your show that you get to sell into syndication. So, where I’m at in the process right now is there is a deal for a pilot script. And if they like the pilot script they will shoot a pilot. And if they like the pilot they can shoot a series. But the number of projects that are at my stage versus the number of projects that become actually series, well, there is a tremendous drop off.

So, I approach this with full optimism, but I’m not counting on my syndication deal kicking in quite yet.

**Craig:** Not yet.

**John:** Not yet.

**Craig:** But you’re partnered with a good guy. Josh definitely knows television, no question. So, I’m looking forward to it.

**John:** Josh did The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I loved. So, he’s been great. Cool.

Craig, I don’t know if you’ve been checking on iTunes, but people keep leaving nice reviews for us on iTunes.

**Craig:** Oh, good. I don’t check it. But are there any bad ones? [laughs]

**John:** Honestly they’ve all been really good. And so one of them I wanted to flag because it was more detailed than some of the reviews.

I should say: Please do leave reviews on iTunes, because it actually does help a lot, because we’d love to move a little bit higher in the iTunes ranking. We’re in the 50s right now, and we could go higher than that.

But here’s one that someone wrote recently — it says: “At first, I found the podcast to be a little annoying. While John tried to make the podcast informative, Craig seemed to be using it as pulpit to express his personal pet peeves.”

**Craig:** True.

**John:** “I’ve since grown to like Craig. And while sometimes his judgment is too quick, he is mostly good-hearted and has a lot to offer. Even his opinions I disagree with I still find educational. So, my suggestion is if you feel put off at first, stick with it, Craig will grow on you. He’s a good-hearted guy, even though he may not seem it at first.”

**Craig:** That’s absolutely right. My wife can confirm that. Everybody in my life can confirm that. So, I know I’m an acquired taste. And I know that sometimes I come off abrasive, grumpy, cranky pants, because I am. I am actually an abrasive, grump, cranky pants guy. That’s who I am. Can’t help it. But it is really from a good, decent place. I do very much want to help.

More than anything I get frustrated watching people make mistakes I’ve made when, you know, it’s like you walk into a restaurant and you slip on a wet, soapy floor and you land on your ass. And you sit down at your table in pain and you see somebody else walking in and you just want to say, “Oh, watch out for the wet, soapy floor there, buddy.” And Hollywood is a big, wet, soapy floor.

**John:** You’re basically that plastic triangle sign that they stick down there when they mop the floors.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. I am Cuidado Piso Mojado.

**John:** What I love most about those triangle signs is the way they use them to fan the floor afterwards. Have you ever seen that where they mop it up and they use that as a fan to air dry it faster.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Probably actually works. God bless it.

This segues really nicely into our first question today which comes from Dan in Calgary. He writes: “I’ve been a regular listener and fan of your podcast since its inception and am curious about how you and Craig met and how you came to agreement on the podcast. To the best of my knowledge the two of you haven’t collaborated on any projects prior to the podcast. But, really, what do I know?”

So, going back to our history, I think I first met you in reference to really the website, clearly. You were going to launch your website. But we didn’t really work together on anything until the Fox writers deal. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. We had the same agent at the time. And I called you up just for website advice. That was 11 years ago, roughly. And, oh no, 7 years ago, sorry; because it was my daughter was about to be born, that’s what it was. It was about 7 years ago.

And we just sort of — we’re screenwriters. We run vaguely in the same circles. And then when John Wells did his Warner Bros. deal I got the idea that maybe we could do the same thing and you were my first call.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig and I partnered together. We Shanghaied a bunch of other screenwriters into this little pack and we went around and pitched this concept of this batch of 10 screenwriters writing spec scripts for a studio, and Fox was the one who bit. And after much, much detailed hand-wringing and negotiation we made that Fox deal happen.

And maybe one of those movies will get made some day.

**Craig:** Maybe one of them will get made someday. I have no problem looking at it as a marathon. Hopefully they don’t have a problem looking at it as a marathon. But that’s how we got to know each other. And then I kind of let my blog drift off because I had essentially run out of things to type. And you just called me up one day and said, “Hey, do you want to do a podcast?” [laughs] That was pretty much it. And I said, “Sure.”

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And that was a year ago.

**John:** A year ago.

**Craig:** A year of podcasting.

**John:** Good stuff. Our second question of the day, before we get to the meat of our show, is from Kevin in New York City. He writes: “You mentioned a lot last podcast a ‘weekly rate’ for writing work. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what a writer is expected to do or not do if coming in only for a week or two.”

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** So, this is a definition of “what is a weekly.” And a weekly is when you are brought into a screenwriting job, it’s a thing that I think only really happens in feature screenwriting, to do a specific bit of work, usually for a movie that’s going to go into production really soon or is already in production.

Weeklies only really happen for screenwriters who, I think, are produced, who a studio or producers and directors have some faith in that they can do the work that needs to be done and won’t break anything. And will make things better and make life happier and smoother for everyone else involved.

So, my first weekly was — God, I don’t know. It was many, many years ago, and I’m trying to think what it even was on. When did you start doing weeklies, or start doing that kind of work?

**Craig:** I can’t remember. I can’t remember the first one. All I know is they pop up occasionally, you know, a couple times a year, maybe three times a year. And typically — I mean, when we talk about weeklies, typically what we are talking about are production weeklies. Usually the movie has been green lit and so there’s quite a bit of pressure to suddenly fix some things.

And the studio will call you and say, “Listen, we need some work. We need some character help here. We need the first act to make a little bit more sense. Or we need to fix this ending. Take a look. Would you be willing to come on for a week or two and handle this?”

And generally you are paid quite well for those one or two weeks because it is high pressure writing. The movie is getting made. There is a lot of money that’s on the line. And you are asked to write very efficiently, very quickly, and very surgically. Again, these are, sort of the typical weeklies I think of, you’re talking not just to the studio or to an executive, you’re talking with the producer of the movie and you’re talking to the director.

And you are not only kind of cutting in between the things that are good to just get the stuff out that’s bad and put new things in that are good, but you’re also serving as a clearinghouse, frankly, half the time for disputes between the various parties, and sort of saying as a neutral third party observer, “Here, I think this is the way to go,” or “That’s the way to go.”

And you don’t have a tremendous amount of emotion invested. It actually can be a very good thing for a movie to have somebody come in and do a couple of weeks like that. They used to be far more common because they used to make far more movies.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But they still happen. I do them every now and again.

**John:** Yeah. I always say the job of a screenwriter in a weekly is you’re carrying the football for awhile and you are making sure that everything is sort of safely moving on to where it needs to go to next. And so an example is I worked on the movie Hancock, back when it was called Tonight, He Comes. And at that point you had Will Smith attached. You had Sony eager to make the movie. You had Pete Berg attached to direct it. You had Michael Mann producing it. Akiva Goldsman. You had — there were tremendous number of smart and powerful people involved in the movie.

And so I was going to come in to do just a very surgical bit of work on the third act. And one of the first things I had to go in and tell them is, like, “I think the script is fantastic. I think it’s great. I think there’s this little tiny thing that’s not working right, but please don’t think that the rest of the movie isn’t working because you’ve read it 1,000 times. But I’ve just read it once and I love it. And I really want you to make this movie. And this is how I think you can make this one section that I know is bumbling for you make sense in the way the rest of the movie works.”

Part of the reason they would give me that job versus another writer who might be able to write as well as me but didn’t have the experience is I had to go in and meet at Will Smith’s house with Michael Mann, and Pete Berg, and Akiva Goldsman. And usually there is one 800-pound gorilla, but this was just Gorilla City. And so they needed somebody who could sort of survive Gorilla City. And that’s a large part of your job in weekly is doing that. So that was a job where…

**Craig:** Well, you see, again, I hate zoos.

**John:** Oh, so that’s why you…

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is part — like I said — part of it is you have to figure out how to navigate between very important people, each of whom seems to have a vote or a veto. And it can be difficult at times. And sometimes they send you to the movie. And you know also in the back of your head that you are not to be seen afterwards, that this is very much hit man work. There’s no credit involved. It’s extremely rare that you would get credit for the work you do on a weekly.

You don’t go into it thinking about credit. You just go into it thinking, “I go in, I take care what I need to take care of, and I’m out.”

**John:** And I take these jobs — when I take them — because it’s great to get paid, but it’s also great to be able to work with filmmakers you want to work with, even if just for a short time, and also that sense of, like, make things a little bit better. Like, you recognize that this is a problem, I know how to solve this problem. I can solve this problem for you. And that movie, I think, will be a little bit better for my having been involved with it.

So, I just want nice things in the world. And so if I can help this movie get over its hurdle, that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s funny. Weekly work is often where you get the most gratitude back. And it shouldn’t be that way, but I understand why it’s that way. To me gratitude should be basically commensurate with effort and quality. And the hardest thing to do is to write a screenplay from scratch. A page one rewrite is also very, very hard. And sometimes you come in on a weekly and it is pretty clear to you what to do. And it is not writing an entire script. It’s fixing this, this, this, and this. And you can do it rather quickly.

And it’s like a magic trick. [laughs] Everybody gives you a lot of love over it. I like that part.

**John:** I do too. And rarely, but sometimes, you’ll break down a weekly down to just a daily, where like I did three days of work on The Rundown. And it was just to take care of some very specific little beats. But I took that job because it was a chance to write dialogue for Christopher Walken. And, like, who does not secretly fanaticize about writing dialogue for Christopher Walken in his sort of strange inflection patterns. And it was great, and it was fun.

And because that was for Pete Berg, and Pete Berg liked what I did, I was on his short list for coming in to do this work on Hancock.

**Craig:** That’s actually a good question. When I do weeklies — I’m just kind of curious what your business practice is. The fee you get for weeklies is quite high. If you were to take eight weeks — like say you typically write a script in eight weeks — you get a fee for that script. If you were to write on a weekly rate for eight weeks, it would be much, much more than that.

**John:** Much, much more than that.

**Craig:** So, you’re getting paid a lot per week. My business practice is to write for seven days per week. I give them seven days per week. And if I don’t use all the week, I prorate it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that what you do?

**John:** Usually it’s more that at the start of each week I’ll tell them, like, “This is what I can do in these days. And these are the days I can hand you these things.” And so I just sort of promise them delivery of this material in this amount of time. So, I’m not sort of not billing them for the days I didn’t work. I’m just saying this is what I can do in this week.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if that’s enough work for you for this week, let’s go ahead and do that. So, you bring up a really good point is that sometimes you are delivering stuff much more quickly than you would in a normal situation. So, like on Iron Man, I was helping out on that. And I was delivering pages every day, because everything was very much in flux and they needed to know that stuff was going to be able to add back up. So, I would happily turn in pages every day in a way that I wouldn’t have been delighted to be doing that if I’d been the principal writer on the movie from the start.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just feel like if you’re on a weekly and you are an A-list writer getting paid an A-list weekly quote, I just feel like you should be respectful. Because I do hear stories sometimes. I always get uncomfortable when I hear a story about a screenwriter that misbehaved because, you know, naturally I just think you’re making us look bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** 99% of the time the studio is misbehaving. I don’t want to engage in moral equivalence, but there are screenwriters that blow it. I mean, they miss their deadlines. They take a weekly rate and they turn in what would probably be two days of work.

**John:** Like they only touch the first ten pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I get so uncomfortable when I hear that stuff.

**John:** That’s not good at all. It doesn’t help anybody. This last year was the first year I ever did, like, it broke down to essentially an hourly, because it was just rewriting the introductory voice over for this one movie. And I knew, like, this is not going to — this is going to take me two hours to do. And so I was like, “Oh, let’s figure that out.”

And, again, at that point it’s essentially just a favor, because I want the movie to be better. I want the movie to have a little bit better shot. And so I did it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never done that. I guess a day is my minimum, but I guess if it picked up. I mean, well, you know, we do things like roundtables.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** I mean, frankly, like you and I did a roundtable together. And you spend what amounts to a day of work on something like that. But you get paid, whatever, $2,500 or something. And that’s really just a friend-of-the-court kind of gesture.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Gesture. Not a “friend of the court jester.”

**John:** Craig, let’s move into our main topic this time, which is Three Page Challenges. So, last week we announced that officially we are going to open it up to people writing in with new entries. And so far 70 new people wrote in with Three Page Challenge entries.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, you’re welcome to, if you feel like sending in your three pages for us to look at on the air, you can go to the show notes for this episode at johnaugust.com/podcast. And so we’re going to be going back to this, not every episode, but a couple times a month we’ll be looking at some of these new entries. And, let’s get right to it. So, we have four that we’re going to take a look at today.

**Craig:** Four!

**John:** Four! And I thought we would start with the Untitled Art Heist Movie by Henry Fosdike & Lloyd Morgan.

**Craig:** Yes, got it.

**John:** All right. So, here’s the synopsis on this movie. We start on black with a voice over by a character named Montana who says, “People still ask how I never get caught. The answer’s simple. Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

Then were in the Met, the museum. A ceiling panel falls, glow sticks drop. A lissome woman named Gem drops in. She’s our thief. In a control van nearby we meet a nerd named Fuse. Then a man named Santos parachutes onto the roof of the Met. Gem uses an aerosol can to reveal infrared beams. Santos cuts the alarm. Gem sprints to make it across the room. And that’s the end of our page three.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Shall I start?

**John:** You shall start.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I got excited when I read the first line because I thought it was very good. There is this interesting voice over that you just cited there. But then I started to get unexcited.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The first problem I had was that the voice over continued. And I’m not a voice over Nazi. I’m okay with voice over — I have no problem with it. However, the voice over is disconnected. The first thing she says is sort of a thesis statement. “Art is not what you see but what you make others see.” That’s very interesting. The next line is, “There have always been rules. We live by rules. We play by rules.” Well that would be a different essay. And I feel like if you’re going to start off with sort of a declarative theme, stick with it, explain it, transition from it, do something. But there is a real grinding of the gears there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We have an art heist of the kind we have seen many, many, many times before. There is almost nothing unique to this one. You have — first of all, you have a nerd named Fuse. I really have a problem with this. I just don’t understand. I was watching The Italian Job, the remake the other night, and when you meet the mechanic his name is Wrench.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** And I just feel like, why do that? Why? What’s the point? Give them names that aren’t what their job is, like an index card thing. So, I’m not a big fan of things like Fuse as the guy that deals with wires and such. I like that Santos is parachuting down to land on a rooftop, except of course it doesn’t make any sense. If you’re trying to steal from the Met, and you’re parachuting down over Manhattan, I think someone might notice. [laughs] Just guessing.

So, there’s a huge logic problem there. then we go inside where Gem is dealing with the standard trope of the invisible laser beams, although they’re not laser beams. They’re actually infrared beams, which will not illuminate from aerosol cans. They are invisible to the human eye. So, it’s a little bit of a technological glitch there. But, regardless, we get the point. But the real point is we’ve seen that.

We have dialogue like, “I’m in. Backup generator is live in 30 seconds. Move your ass, girl.” Uh…that’s sort of clammy.

**John:** Yeah. Clammy. We also have a countdown…10, 9, 8…5, 4….

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ve got a countdown, and guess what? She’s running towards the thing and sliding under the laser beams. So, you know, it’s not that it’s poorly written. Everything moved. There was good pace to it. It’s just that it was cliché.

**John:** Yeah. This is — actually, I need to preface this by saying I’m not a heist person. I will never write a heist movie. I don’t seek them out. So, it’s not my genre by nature. And part of the reason why I think it’s not my genre is that I always see this scene. I always see some variation of this scene.

To me, my test for like why these were maybe not the first three pages to start your movie is: if we started at the bottom of page 3, I would have filled in everything that happened beforehand. Just, we know what a heist movie is. And so we could start with her cutting the painting out, or whatever she’s going to do next, because I would fill all that stuff in.

You could have showed me the discarded aerosol can and I know everything that happened up to that moment. You could have shown me him cutting his parachute and I would have known that he parachuted onto the roof. Like all that stuff I felt like we were starting too early. And if we started in the middle of the action I might have been more with you.

The other problem I have is the voice over is from the point of view of a character named Montana. But we don’t meet Montana in the course of these pages. And so we don’t know if Montana is a man or a woman. We know nothing about her. I’m guessing it’s a woman, but I don’t know.

So, it felt really weird to have this disembodied, disconnected voice over that wasn’t helpful to me. And also this voice over is happening over black. And that’s one of — it feels kind of fine in a screenplay, but if you actually see that in a movie, that’s really not all that good or interesting just to have a black screen and have a person talking.

I would much rather see something interesting, even in a close up, and here that voice over than just a black screen.

**Craig:** I agree with all of that. I agree with all of that. I actually love heist movies. I think that the fun of heist movies, and this is why I like that first line so much, really is about the beautiful con artistry of it. Heist movies have a way of subverting our expectations. We are watching magicians do a trick. And it’s fun when I don’t know how they did the trick. Ocean’s 11, which is a fantastic screenplay by the great Ted Griffin, has a ton of surprises in it. I had no idea that the video those guys were watching was not the guys actually in the vault. I did not understand until he wanted me to understand that the video that the guards were watching was actually the thieves stealing from a fake vault that they had built on a stage and filmed hours and hours earlier. So smart.

And this has nothing like that. This is really just parachuting and, frankly, I feel like anybody with an aerosol can and a pretty good sprint time could have done what this person did.

**John:** Yeah. So not a huge success for us. I would also challenge, like, Untitled Art Heist Movie. Nothing makes me want to read a script less than something that’s called Untitled Art Heist Movie. Because you’re already setting it up for like, “Well, this is going to be a generic art heist movie,” and the first three pages feel like a generic art heist movie. So, giving us a title might have set our expectations a little bit differently.

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Because we’re talking about expectations let’s skip to the script by Jeffrey Stoltzfus, the one with Dennis Rudibaker in it.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. What was that name again?

**John:** Stoltzfus.

**Craig:** Stoltzfus.

**John:** I think?

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** I’m just pronouncing it the way I see it. I’m like the Siri that way. I’ll just plow ahead and say it the way I see it.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Here’s a summary of the script. So we open on Denis Rudibaker; he’s brushing his teeth. He’s described as having Ken doll looks. He lives in a nice house. He drives a BMW. Wears a Canali suit. He’s really polite at the bakery. He goes to work at an ad agency called Ad Think where he hands out coffee to his co-workers who love him.

In his office he pulls out a 357 magnum from his desk drawer and jams it in his mouth. That starts a series of flashbacks to a therapist asking him questions about his parents who abandoned him as a child. As a boy he is sent to live with his uncle, a science teacher who didn’t even pull down 30 grand a year. And that’s the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** What did you think?

**John:** Here’s why I wanted to talk about this second is: where our first movie was “this is the standard cliché of what a heist movie is,” this one starts as the standard clichés of like what a Jim Carrey big concept comedy is going to be. It felt like a high concept Jim Carrey comedy. Like, “Well he he’s a really nice guy, but then something crazy happens.” And so I liked subverting all of that happy bounciness but suddenly he jams a gun in his mouth and is going to kill himself.

That I really dug. And it felt — there was a feeling of confidence to it. And there was also smart, I don’t know, there were smart choices about what the writer is revealing about who this guy is. The Ken doll looks. Specifics on the car. His house. His suit. I would love more specifics, but I felt like this guy knew what the world was he was describing and what he wanted to sort of show us.

Then when he gets into the flashbacks, they were pretty well-handled. And our Dennis guy has voice over power, but the writer held off on giving us voice over power until the gun is revealed. So, I kind of dug it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I did like the — obviously there’s a big buy in here when this guy shows up and puts the gun in his mouth, and then we sort of freeze on this moment of potential suicide. And I did like the juxtaposition of it. I have a couple of issues though that I want to point out. And they are these:

Once you put that gun in your mouth, you are asking the audience to recontextualize what came before that, and that’s the point. It’s hard, frankly, to understand what is going on with this guy before that point. So, you’re right, it is a subversion of a kind of thing, of an expectation we have. But in retrospect, once we get the new information, we have to also be able to make sense of what we just saw, and that’s tough.

I’m not quite sure why he’s so cheerfully holding open a door for an old lady other than that the writer is misdirecting us. Similarly, he brings all this coffee to everybody, which I kind of though, okay, yes, in retrospect bringing people gifts is the last thing he does before he kills himself. Sure. His cheery, “Love that tie. Looking good. Have you lost weight?” is the kind of smarmy insincere talk that frankly is incompatible with what he’s about to do.

So, I would just say take a look and make sure that everything plays backwards as well as it does forward.

**John:** I would agree. I do feel like pages 4, 5, 6 would likely help us here and that we might get more clues about sort of what that — the recontextualization of those first three pages might be coming pretty quickly thereafter, but I do share your concern. Because some of the stuff feels so deliberately generic that it may not really make sense with more information that we’re going to get.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the only other issue on the flashbacks is that there’s a glib tone to them that is clashing, frankly, with the fact that he has a gun in his mouth. Either I’m meant to take that seriously or not. So, I like the content of what he’s saying which is, “I was the children of inattentive salespeople who abandoned me.” That is interesting content — “and who I ended up with” is interesting content. The glib tone is confusing me. I don’t know if this guy is really killing himself now. Am I supposed to care that he’s killing himself? Because he seems to be making time to be clever.

So, I wasn’t quite sure about that. And, lastly, he writes when his parents abandoned him, “One day they never came home. Didn’t even leave the door unlocked. I spent two days on that porch before somebody noticed.” I don’t believe that.

**John:** Yeah. It feels very, very arch. But I think this may be the kind of movie where that actually does happen. Where it is that sort of, you know, Coen brothers comedy of a possibility.

**Craig:** It’s possible. And if that’s the case then this tone bears out and is rewarding. So, I’m only flagging these things if it doesn’t quite feel right, because those were the things that hiccupped for me as I read this. But I did want to call out something I really did like, which was the way the writer was defining Dennis as, well, he wasn’t really defining Dennis this way, but the writer himself was saying, “Here is what his house is worth. Here is what his car is worth. Here is what his suit is worth.” So the writer is doing that.

And then at the end Dennis remarks of his Uncle Bert, who he’s sent to live with. “He didn’t even pull down thirty grand a year,” implying that Dennis has been infected with this kind of world view even if he doesn’t realize it.

**John:** Agreed. A few small things to point out, or just one small thing here. Bottom of page 2 is when Dennis starts, so he put the gun in his mouth, cocks the hammer, closes his eyes. Dennis, voice over, “Monday started like any other day. The gun garbles Dennis’s screaming.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** and then it starts going. Like, that — “The gun garbles Dennis’s screaming” I had to reread a couple times. Is he screaming this aloud? Basically like, “Closes his eyes. He makes a primal scream of pain,” or whatever. That description of the screaming didn’t work the way it was placed there.

**Craig:** I agree. It stopped me in the exact same way. And then once I figured out what was going on, I didn’t want it to be happening anyway. I wanted him to put that gun in his mouth and then freeze frame and start hearing voice over. Because the longer he has the gun in his mouth in live action and isn’t pulling the trigger, the less I believe that this is a real suicide. I want the tension of thinking, “Is he going to pull this trigger or not?”

**John:** I would also say, we don’t need the line, “Monday started like any other day.” I’d love to lose it because that feels clammy.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a tip. You don’t need it. I totally agree.

**John:** So, if the first line of voice over is, “I know what you’re thinking, but I’ve already tried the best shrinks and the best pharmaceuticals money can buy,” then we cut to the shrink, then I think we’re in a better place.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree.

**John:** Cool.

From here let’s move onto The Toad Princess by Virginia Lee.

**Craig:** I’m glad you picked that one next.

**John:** Aw. Yeah. So let me give you a quick description of the Toad Princess. So, we open in the courtyard of the Toad Kingdom which is paved with butterscotch discs and peppermint candies; lollipop trees and candy-bar benches line the path to the Queen’s candy-covered throne. It’s a kingdom full of anthropomorphic toads.

We meet a plump wingless fairy named Memory Lane. On her shoulder is the Toad Prince Mortimer. The Queen arrives, announces it is a special night for the presenting The Chosen One. By the light of a magical snow globe they await the arrival of Princess Makenzie, but she never comes. And that’s the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** So, this was — I presume this is meant to be animated. I think?

**John:** It might be? I don’t know. I could see a couple things — it could be like Alice in Wonderland where it’s sort of half and half.

**Craig:** Sort of a hybrid. It was written by Virginia Lee, who I presume is a woman. I will now just go ahead and stomp on third rail. [laughs] This was adorable. It was cute and adorable. And it’s not because Virginia is a woman. It’s because it’s cute and adorable. It’s full of candies, and peppermints, and talking toads, and little 8-year old fairies. Although I didn’t quite understand — she’s 8-years old but she sounds like an adult?

**John:** Yeah. I had issues with the fairy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not quite sure what that’s about. You know, it was — I love the world that was setup. I was really intrigued by the world. A little bit overwritten in the description. You know, “Servant Toads stand at attention, golden eyes twitching with nervous anticipation.” I think you could get away with “golden eyes twitching.” There’s a lot of stuff like that where “her honey colored skin shimmers in the moonlight.” A lot of moonlight and a lot of shimmering.

**John:** Yeah, a little too much poetry.

**Craig:** But you could tell that there’s an interesting and somewhat economical setup here, that we’re dealing with some version of the princess/frog and the princess story. And they need a princess to come and kiss the frog for something important to happen. So, I was interested in that. And I liked the idea that the fairy that they all rely on as their guardian is of questionable ability.

So, you know, and there were good visual things. She holds up a globe to the moonlight and let the kissing begin. It was all nice. I didn’t have any major issues here.

**John:** Yeah. I thought the visual ideas were really nice.

**Craig:** I just want to point out that this actually is cute. And I don’t want to get blamed for it.

**John:** Yeah. Quentin Tarantino could have written these pages and we would still have said they were cute.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So to the degree I understand the concept, I’m intrigued, I like it. It feels like, okay, it’s a retelling of the Princess and the Frog from a new perspective and that feels interesting.

I got really confused with the fairy. Is she a human-looking fairy and not a toad? If she’s the one thing who’s not a toad, then you really need to single that out. You have her listed as being 8-years-old, which is fine if she’s actually 8-years-old, but she’s not acting like she’s 8-years-old, so there’s a mismatch there. It’s just not as clear as it could be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Where I had some issues is how we first get into it. And let me read you the first paragraph and I’ll explain sort of what I’m facing. So:

“EXT. TOAD KINGDOM – COURTYARD – NIGHT
The desert moon shimmers across a beautiful courtyard paved with butterscotch discs and peppermint candies. Lollipop trees and candy-bar benches line the path to The Queen’s candy-covered throne. The courtyard is abuzz with activity. As we swoop down, we notice that we are in a kingdom of TOADS. A grand feast is in the works, and there is not an idle flipper in the place.”

I felt like we were having some camera problems in that — are we going really wide? Where is the helicopter shot here? Is the helicopter shot really wide and then we’re pushing in and getting into the details? It just felt like we were wide, we were close, we were wide, we were close. Give us the bigger picture first and then maybe setup the world a little bit. Are we at a castle? Because right now it’s just “EXT. TOAD KINGDOM – COURTYARD .” It’s like, what is that? Are we at a — there’s a throne, so it’s probably some sort of castle. I want a little bit more world, and then I want those details, and then I want to meet our Memory Lane, our fairy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought just a little bit more finesse could have sort of landed me as the viewer a little more securely in our world.

**Craig:** That’s a good point. And also I was a little confused by “desert moon,” because it doesn’t seem like it’s a desert. It seems like you don’t build castles in the middle of the desert. It seems actually quite lush. So, I was confused by that. And also I was confused by the fact that there is not an “idle flipper” in the place, since toads don’t have flippers; they have legs.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think it’s worth being specific enough, like how anthropomorphic are these frogs? And do they stand on their back legs? Do they hop around? He’s evidently small enough that he can sit on the fairy’s shoulder. So, I just had some scale and size problems.

You can’t answer all these questions, but I just need to have a sense that there’s a consistent visual idea for how this stuff is going to fit together.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that one.

**John:** Cool. Great job, Virginia. I was excited to see that. I would want to see that movie.

Last one is a script by Sandy McDougall. And here is our description:

So, we open in a dressing room where Jimmy Alexander, a man in his mid 50s is trying to take a dump into a woman’s purse.

**Craig:** [laughs] God!

**John:** This is Burbank, California, 1983. This is all part of a television studio where we meet Diane Dorronin, in her 20s, who is presumably his assistant. We also meet Brant Collier, 58, who is some sort of executive.

We then move to the soundstage, which is actually for a game show, and Jimmy is the host. Sunset Sutherland is the special celebrity guest. She is a cerebral palsy comedian. Jimmy makes lecherous remarks as the curtain opens, and that’s the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** Okay. [laughs] Uh…

**John:** I dug it. Obviously my first thought very quickly went to Anchorman in that it felt like we had that sort of ’80s setting. It was heightened. People were behaving really terribly towards each other. I kind of dug a lot of it.

I had issues on some stuff on the page, but I was intrigued and I would definitely be reading the next ten pages.

**Craig:** I unfortunately am on the other side of this one.

**John:** That’s great. I love debate.

**Craig:** I just didn’t think it was funny.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I thought it was in the shape of a funny thing, but the things inside of the shape of the funny thing just actually weren’t funny. Pooping in a handbag could be funny, I suppose, but to be the first thing I see from somebody, I’m so disoriented, so deeply disoriented. I feel like in broad comedy when people do insane things it has to be in juxtaposition to our expectation, you know. And this was not. So, I don’t understand — I’m lost in the tone from the very start.

I get further confused when it appears that, based on the discussion between Diane and Brant, this has happened before and they actually know what’s going on. So, now the world around the crazy guy is crazy, because that is insane.

Jimmy’s line when he finally poops in the bag and walks out is, “The missile codes were good, Mr. President. Target destroyed.” So, now he’s making sort of a clunky poop joke about the poop, which I guess is supposed to be a bad joke, but now it’s just a bad — I just didn’t get it.

And then they’re all waiting for him, but for some reason they haven’t done anything until he shows up on stage. So, when he shows up that’s when they start moving props into place, which was weird to me. And now as if this guy weren’t weird enough, his special guest start is kind of a movie version of Geri Jewell. I don’t know if you guys remember her, who was a standup comedian who had cerebral palsy.

And he’s into her. And I feel like, again, that’s a little bit of a tonal problem. If he’s the wacky one, I kind of want to see him juxtaposed against a normal person who would be on the show. And then you could bring in, once you’ve established his juxtaposition to the world, then go ahead and go for the Geri Jewell bit later or in a different context. Maybe Geri Jewell is hot for him.

But right now I just had nothing, there was no ground beneath my feet. And when they say “try and ground comedy,” in a weird way it’s the most important thing to ground comedy when the comedy is super broad like this is. And I like super broad comedy. But then I really need to know where the ground is beneath my feet or else I just can’t go on the ride.

So, that’s kind of where I was.

**John:** All right. I totally understand your concerns. I just disagree. I felt like I understood where the ground was on this and I was sort of with him, even though we don’t know a lot of information about him, I was with him. And I liked that as an opening first beat.

And I took the conversation in the hallway where they’re hearing him do this as like him trying to take a dump in general, not that he’s trying to take a dump into a woman’s purse. So, they were assuming that he was making bathroom noises because he was using the toilet. But I understand your confusion there.

And I like the Sunset Sutherland stuff. Where I did have some concerns about setup and sort of first page stuff, the title for “Burbank, California, 1983.” Let’s put that bold; let’s put that middle of the page. Let’s center that a little bit. It’s so easy to skip past that, and it so helps to sort of set the heightened nature of the story.

And the first time I read it I skipped over that. And I’m like, “Wait, where are we, when are we?” And then, “Oh, I saw it there.” So make that a little more clear and obvious. Also, right from the second paragraph here — “The walls hold decades worth of memories. Photos, posters, blown up covers of TV Guide.” Of whom? Of what? Like, whose dressing room is this?

And so if you’re going to tell us that these props exist, tell us what these props actually are, because otherwise, why are we staring at them? So, they need to be the posters and the photos of our hero, of Jimmy Alexander, if we’re in his dressing room. It might be more interesting that we’re not in his dressing room, that we’re in someone else’s dressing room. I needed specifics there.

**Craig:** When you read these, did you laugh?

**John:** I didn’t laugh but I smiled.

**Craig:** Well, that’s a problem. And I’m not trying to invalidate your opinion. I’m just saying that for broad comedy like this that goes for big, big swings, I think getting some kind of laugh is huge, when you’re making big swings like this. If you’re going to do poop, I feel like you got to do it. You’ve got to get a big laugh from it. Smiles aren’t going to be enough to carry you through, I think.

I actually don’t think that — I mean, this is not a writer where I would say, “Oh, you’re not funny; don’t write comedy.” I just think that there’s some comedy science that just needs to be addressed. But I think a lot of the pieces were there. I think it’s very inventive. Like the Geri Jewell thing is really smart, I just think it’s in the wrong place. You know, stuff like that.

**John:** Cool. Craig, that was four of these. That was fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like we whipped through them. I love it.

**John:** We did. I think we’ve being much more efficient and speedy in our experience.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, I should have asked you before we started the podcast. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week? Because sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t.

**Craig:** This week I actually do.

**John:** Oh great. Why don’t you do yours first.

**Craig:** Well, this week I did my first of what will be four sessions mentoring a new screenwriter. And the program, it’s a mentoring program that’s run by the Writers Guild of America East. And I was asked to participate in this by Richie LaGravenese, who is a spectacular screenwriter, those of you who’ve seen Fisher King or The Ref, one of my favorite movies, among others.

And it’s really great because they take students whose professors have sort of singled them out and said, “Okay, I have a class of a lot of kids. This one, I think, actually has a shot.” So, you read their script and then you do four 90-minute sessions via Skype, and you just get into it. And you just start to do the work of talking about the screenplay, and their intentions, and what they want to do.

And my, what’s the word? Mentee? Mentoree?

**John:** Yeah, mentee.

**Craig:** Mentee. My Mentee is really great. I think she’s got a spectacular attitude and she’s got a terrifically sharp and unique voice. And so I’m really — it was very good. It was a good thing. I felt good about it in a way I sometimes don’t feel when I’m talking to people, because I feel like I’m wasting my time sometimes with people.

But, she — I think she’s going places. So, it was a really good thing. And I have in the past given the Writers Guild of America East a lot of crap because as a union they’re a bit of a squib. But this program is a very smart thing that they’re doing and, frankly, I wish the Writers Guild of America West would do something similar.

**John:** And these are writers who are not necessarily members of the Writers Guild East, but they are good up-and-coming screenwriters who have been singled out by professors?

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re students. They’re all students. They’re in school. I think she’s probably — I’m just going to guess she’s 20. She seems young. So, they’re not yet professional. They’re not close to professional. That’s not where their mindset is. They’re just trying to learn the craft. And I also like the fact that the screenwriting professors are open to this sort of thing, because it’s an important partnership, I think, between the people who instruct and the people who do.

**John:** Definitely. That sounds great. And so if someone is interested in being part of this program, they would essentially — it’s not like you can apply to it, it’s just that you get nominated for it by East Coast writing professors?

**Craig:** It seems like that, yes. To be fair I don’t exactly know the details, but since this was — I mean, for instance, I had to talk to her professor before I spoke to her. So, yes, it would seem like that’s the way it goes.

**John:** Cool.

My One Cool Thing all relates to I finally installed Mountain Lion on my main machine. Because people who have been following me on the blog know that I had issues with I couldn’t install Mountain Lion on my big Mac Tower because it was seven years old. And even though I really like the computer, it wasn’t able to be upgraded, so a lot of drama.

And so I ended up taking Ryan’s MacBook, and he got the Retina MacBook. And everything was working fine. I just wanted to make sure everything was working fine before I upgraded to Mountain Lion. But in the process of doing that I had to do another backup of my hard drive.

And I may have talked about this before on the podcast, but I just want to sing an extra bit of praise for sort of the bare hard drives you can buy now. Because people think of hard drives and they tend to think of, “Oh, you buy that hard drive that you plug into the back of your machine and then you have a stacked thing, and you use one and then you get rid of it.”

The best and most efficient way to use hard drives these days is just to buy the bare hard drive. And so this is the kind of hard drive that you would actually plug into a machine and never really see. They are just these metal boxes — metal and plastic boxes. What makes them so useful is that they’re super cheap and you can buy these external docks for them that you just pop the drive in. So, it sort of looks like a toaster.

So, I’m using one by NewerTech, which is like $79. But essentially you can just jam a hard drive in there, use it as a hard drive for backing up, for whatever else you need to do, and then you’ve not wasted money on all the other stuff that you would usually buy when you buy a hard drive, like the power supply, and the cables, and everything else. It’s just there and it’s handy.

So, with this backup, I can keep one backup here at the house. We have another backup that we store offsite. It makes it just super simple to create a backup and keep it there for when you need it. So, this is not my time machine backup, which is sort of the constantly churning thing which is always doing stuff. This is sort of all my files. This is an exact snapshot of my hard drive at a certain time and place.

And because I have been doing this for two years now, I can go back and I can reboot my machine in Snow Leopard or older operating systems, because I have a bootable backup on one of these drives.

So, my one cool thing is bare hard drives, which are incredibly cheap these days.

**Craig:** And welcome to Mountain Lion, sir.

**John:** Yeah. It’s pretty good. I had no huge issues. So, I wanted to wait a little bit to make sure that no one was going to have fundamental problems with apps I needed and, nope, everything has upgraded really nicely.

**Craig:** Whereas I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 6 yesterday because I could.

**John:** Yeah. And I upgraded my iPhone as well. And I mostly enjoy it. Maps is kind of a mess, but it will get better. It’s kind of a mess right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, it will be fine.

**John:** It will be fine. But yeah, I was happy and good.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you so much, John. We’ve done it again.

**John:** All right. Talk to you next week.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/setting-perspective-and-terrible-numbers).

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

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

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

So, Craig, my working theory is that most of our listeners are not actual screenwriters, or they’re people who are interested in screenwriting but they’re actively pursuing a career in screenwriting. Is that consistent with your perspective?

**Craig:** Given the numbers that you’ve been reporting, it has to be true.

**John:** Because there are no 65,000 aspiring screenwriters I would assume.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So just people who are interested in screenwriting. And so I really thought this was great news that came out this week is that — it was a study released by the WGA. They released the earnings and clearly there’s never been a better time to not be a screenwriter.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s exactly right. If that’s your interest, if you are actively pursuing not being a screenwriter the trends are definitely in your favor.

**John:** Definitely. Really pretty much any other career you might want to pick other than screenwriting, it’s looking great. Or if you were thinking, “Maybe screenwriting? Or maybe dog grooming?” Well, the numbers are pretty clear that dog grooming is really your future.

**Craig:** It couldn’t be worse than the screenwriting numbers. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] So the numbers we’re talking about, and it’s really hard to talk about numbers and charts on a podcast so I’ll include links to them at johnaugust.com. The Writers Guild every year, I think, has to report earnings for its members.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so essentially everyone who works as a screenwriter or TV writer in Hollywood is a member of the WGA, the Writers Guild, and the WGA has access to all their payment information, so they know how much these people are bringing in. And so what’s helpful is you can look historically to see how much did people make last year, or the year before, or ten years ago and see whether the trends are positive or negative.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the trends are not positive if you are a person who wishes to be employed in the Hollywood system.

**Craig:** Certainly not for theatrical. For television maybe it’s a little bit better. But for screenwriting right now it’s horrendous.

**John:** Yes. So the number that you actually, the chart you sent me which is Earnings and Employment in Screen, was that for features or was that for TV and…

**Craig:** That’s just for features.

**John:** That’s just for features.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Screen is what they call movie screens.

**John:** So, for this last year, for 2011, which is the last year that they have numbers, there are 1,562 writers reporting earnings for Screen, for the big screen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which was down 8.1%.

**Craig:** From the year before.

**John:** From the year before. And down significantly more from prior years. And the total amount of earnings of all those writers writing for feature films was down 12.6%, which is a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a lot. And at some point you can’t quite…you have to get off of the thing of blaming just the economy. If you look at the sort of year-on-year trends you realize that even though we sort of hit rock bottom with the economy in 2008, somehow there are still so many fewer of us who are reporting any earnings. Reporting earnings means that you made a dollar. There are so many fewer of us reporting earnings now than in 2008. And we are making much less as an aggregate because so many fewer of us are reporting earnings.

And if you go back to the last number that the Guild reports historically, in 2006, to give you perspective on it, 1,993 writers earned money in screenwriting for movies. That’s down to 1,562. So that’s 431 jobs, or 431 writers that earn money, gone.

**John:** Yeah. So someone might be thinking, “Well, there’s less competition, so that’s a good thing.” But that’s not really the case at all. It’s probably the same number of writers pursuing fewer jobs, and in pursuing fewer jobs fewer of them actually end up landing jobs.

The other sort of dangerous statistic which is a temptation but I would urge you to really step back away from the precipice there is to take the total amount of earnings and divide it by the number of writers employed. Because that would give you a number that is like $200,000 which makes it sound like, “Wow, everyone’s making $200,000,” which is not a very useful metric by anything because you’re making up an imaginary average writer who doesn’t actually exist.

**Craig:** That’s right. There is a distribution of income across writers. And this is a… — I’ve actually asked one of our Guild board members to see if they can’t put a chart like this together for us because this is what I’m most interested in.

Typically you will see bell curves for income distribution in any field. So, the fewest people earn sort of the bottom end of the thing. Another small amount of people are in the top end, but most people working in the business tend to earn the sort of middle average salary for that business.

For us, I suspect we’re looking at something like an inverted bell curve, a U-curve where the bulk of people are either earning at the lower end or at the very high end. And it’s the middle class of writing that has been decimated as the amount of jobs that are available go down, and as the amount of writers who are employed go down, and as the amount of writers who are employed go down, and as the total earnings go down.

**John:** And that’s what we’ve talked about many times on the podcast is that screenwriting is essentially the research and development of the film industry. You are designing the movies that may or may not get made, but that’s what they’re bringing you in to do.

And it feels to me like the biggest crisis in the film industry right now, especially as it affects screenwriters, is the decision not to even do the research and development. We’re basically just deciding, “We’re going to make this movie and we’ll spend however much money we have to make this movie, but we’re not going to try to figure out other stuff. We’re not going to experiment along the way. And so we’re only writing big checks and we’re not writing any small checks.”

**Craig:** Yeah. And unfortunately what’s happening, I think, is sort of akin to what the New York Yankees went through under Steinbrenner in the last ’70s. And I know you know what I’m going to say, John.

**John:** Absolutely. 100%. A sports reference, a sports metaphor, I’ll totally be with you.

**Craig:** [laughs] George Steinbrenner in his zeal to win World Series would routinely trade away all his young farm system players, all of his prospects, for middle aged or aging superstars who could give you that one great season and push you over the line. And in doing so kind of mortgaging the future.

And I think right now studios are kidding themselves if they think they’re not hurting the movies ten years from now, because if they can’t figure out a way to make screenwriting an attractive occupation for smart people, smart people won’t do it. They just won’t do it. It’s too hard of a job. It’s too unpredictable of a job to throw your lot in and hope that maybe you can make $100,000 a year when you could go into finance, or law, or medicine or something that frankly is more satisfying on some kind of a human level. Whether your interests are financial or just quality of life, it’s too easy to go do something else.

So, who’s going to be writing these movies ten years from now if they can’t figure out how to make this a reasonable occupation? I don’t know the answer to that question.

**John:** No. But let’s not dwell on the glumness of that. It’s not something we’re going to solve here today. And sometimes our podcast does get a little negative, so I want to make sure that we’re not driving people to the bridge that they want to jump off.

**Craig:** I know. And we do do this and I apologize. The truth is it would be… — It is unfair, in a sense, to go on and on about this stuff in a discouraging way to the person out there who is going to end up making $1 million because they going to make $1 million, no matter what we say, no matter how bad things are. But it would be equally unfair, I think, to hide the truth for people which is that it’s looking not good.

The only thing I will say… Here, I will end on an optimistic note. So if you are driving to the bridge, pull over. This business is remarkably cyclical. Almost fetishistically cyclical. I think Hollywood is built on the notion that new is good. And that permeates everything, even business, I think. So, it seems like what’s going to happen is in a year or two, I’m hoping, they just get sick of the current way of doing it and try something new.

**John:** Great. And I want to believe, Craig. You know I want to believe. What I worry about is that the next stage isn’t going to be actually a better stage. It’s going to be a riskier stage that’s not going to actually be helpful to people.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I was trying to be helpful. [laughs]

**John:** Where I do think your thesis is correct is that this is a business that is built on the new, and so if you’re a person who is now entering the film and television industry, there may be opportunities that weren’t there before, and there’s new stuff that will come up and new opportunities and new ways to do things. That doesn’t necessarily help the person who reached the middle of the career and it’s just sort of going away now.

**Craig:** I was really struggling to say something hopeful and you killed it.

**John:** I did. I’m so sorry. We won’t try to spin gold out of this anymore. We’ll just go on to something new and happy.

Let’s talk about craft. Let’s talk about a question from Kyle, a reader who says, “It would be great to hear from you and Craig to discuss setting and its impact on character, conflict, and story. I’ve been reading a lot of scripts lately and the kitchen, the car, and the sidewalk are due for an upgrade.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good observation. A lot of times you will see just sort of generic settings used in movies. And movies don’t have to take place in normal areas and necessarily probably shouldn’t. So settings should be one of those early things you’re thinking about in the conception of your movie. And, you know, think about it… — Remember, you’re not just writing a script, you’re writing a movie, so where will be the interesting place to stage those scenes of your movie that have the visual and emotional impact that they could have?

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. It’s, to me, eventually somebody is gonna have to go scout, and how do you scout “Park?” How do you scout “Parking Lot?” How do you scout “Super Market?” There has to be something, I think, when you sit down and write a scene that connects the setting to what’s going on. And even if the nature of what’s going on is sort of setting independent, find a way to at least place it so it feels real. Interact with the world around you. Who is moving in and out of the space? What can the space tell us about the people who are employed there or the people who are visiting there, the people who are robbing from it?

Whatever it is, figure out how to make it integral. Otherwise, frankly, you’re just doing a sitcom, you know. It’s boring. Sets are boring.

**John:** The reason why you see the same settings again, and again, and again on TV is because TV is trying to shoot on a 7 or 8 day schedule. And so if you see parking garages a lot in TV that’s because they could get to the parking garage and it’s a location they can control. They don’t need to worry about day or night. Parking garages are common in TV because they’re easy to shoot. They’re sort of terrible for sound but they’re easy to shoot.

But if you’re writing a feature, well, I would say no matter what you’re writing, don’t be limited by what you tend to see on one-hour dramas. Think bigger. Classically a sort of like at this point clichéd-ly — is that the right way to say it? “Clichéd-ly?”

**Craig:** I’ll take it. Yeah.

**John:** Almost every Bruckheimer movie will have some scene that takes place in a boxing ring. And it will usually be some sort of exposition scene where somebody has to go to talk to somebody about something, and for whatever reason they’re going to be in a boxing ring. They just do that. Because it’s more visual.

And that’s a choice, but find your own boxing ring to stage that scene where two characters are talking.

**Craig:** By the way, the boxing ring is what happens when the screenwriter doesn’t come up with something better.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because the director is like, “Look, I’m not having two people talk about this over a sandwich. So, oh, here’s a great space. And here’s light shining through. And here’s something with aesthetic value that’s gonna look cinematic.”

Now the truth is those things seem ridiculous because they seem superimposed onto the drama of what matters. But to me that goes back to, okay, at least… — If that happens to you it’s because they just didn’t like your idea, but at least have an idea. Have a better, more interesting setting.

Your point about television is a great one. Remember: hour-long dramas are on budgets. They are shot for a small screen. And they are confined by time. The show must be certain length. Movies don’t have to be a certain length at all and they’re very, very big. So that means when somebody drives to a spot the camera can linger on it. It can rise up. It can reveal. It can really make a meal out of it if it’s interesting, you know.

So, if you are effectively seeing the scene in your head before you write it, that doesn’t mean just the people and their mouths. It means the world around the them, for sure. And think about…I always like to think about the things that you can’t see immediately but then you can see on people, like heat, wind, dust, smells. Really work with the world.

And, you know, you will find sometimes that you get comedy or interesting surprises out of characters who are desperately focused on the thing that is the story and yet distracted by the world around them. And that creates a verisimilitude that I think is very satisfying.

**John:** Definitely. If that scene is now walking through a meat packing plant it’s going to have a very different feel and texture and you’re giving the actor something to respond to as they’re going through things.

And I’ve kind of forked this answer into two parts. There’s the setting that come to, “This is the world in which this movie takes place.” And so quite early on in the process you’re figuring out, “What is the setting of this movie?” “What part of the world does this take place in?” “What kind of things are in this movie?”

There are two projects I’m working on right now where setting, those big setting questions are really key and crucial. One of them, the initial version of the project was taking place in sort of Park Slope, Brooklyn. And I like Park Slope, Brooklyn, but I have weird sort of sympathy issues with Park Slope, Brooklyn and our expectations that come bundled with people who live in that neighborhood. So, is that the right place to tell this story next, or should we tell it in a different neighborhood? So we’re looking at sort of what are the alternatives that gives a lot of what Park Slope has but doesn’t have all the pressures of what Park Slope would give you.

Another thing I’m thinking about, it’s a dark movie, but could we take this dark movie and do it in San Diego? And you don’t think about San Diego being dark, but if we were going to do it in San Diego, what are the dark parts of San Diego? And that could be really interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, that is how directors approach the stuff and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do that as well. For a lot of the complaining that we do as screenwriters about directors “screwing up” our screenplays, sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re filling in gaps we just didn’t get across.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the more you can put into a script that conveys your intentions as an author, the more the director will tend to absorb that and use it directly or be influenced by it.

**John:** Look at The Hangover II. You had to make a choice very early on where you were going to set that movie. And picking, was it Thailand? Bangkok?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Once you picked that place that was a fundamental decision about everything else that was going to radiate out from there. And so if for whatever reason you couldn’t have shot there, you could have moved the movie somewhere else but it would have been a very different movie and you would have had to go through probably every scene and look at sort of, “What is this? If we’re now in Tokyo rather than Bangkok, what is different about our movie?” And kind of everything is different about your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it would have just been a complete rewrite.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can’t, particularly in a movie in which the location is such an enormous part of the plot itself, it needs to be tied in integrally, which means if you pull it out that’s not a simple stitch up. And frankly with that movie, Todd and I did a scout in Bangkok and in Malaysia and wrote — I probably rewrote 20% of the script just based on the locations that were there to be the locations we had wanted. So it was even, “Okay, we want to do something in a marketplace.” And we looked online and we studied and researched and found pictures.

So we wrote the scene crafted towards a marketplace. But then you get there and you walk around and you go back and you rewrite it again because you have to use what’s around you. It’s sort of fundamental to the gig. Which, by the way, another reason I feel like directors who sort of as a rule of thumb don’t like to have writers around during preproduction are hurting themselves.

**John:** Because they may have found an amazing location, but they’re going to try to shoehorn that location onto a scene that already exists. And if they’d actually brought the writer to that location and talked with them about like these are the opportunities at this place, “What do you think? What can we do? How could this affect the scene?” The writer might have great ideas for how it actually impacts things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, frankly, I’m okay with the director saying, “I want to shoot the scene here. I love the way this looks. I think it’s going to be exciting. And it’s going to put the audience in the mood I want. Please help me fit the scene as well for this space as you fit it for your theoretical space.”

**John:** Exactly. So, this is really staking to the other fork of the conversation is you’ve made the big setting choice in terms of this is the location, this is the world this is taking place in, and now it’s getting very specific. And so as you’re just the screenwriter working by yourself, you are approaching the scene and you’re sort of doing that looping in your head. You’re figuring out what’s in the scene. One of the first questions you should ask is, “Am I really setting this scene in the right place? Is this moment taking place in the most interesting place?”

A director I’m working with, one of her cardinal rules is she never wants to see the same set twice, which seems really, really hardcore but it’s actually a wonderful challenge. So you look at if you saw that character’s house before, she never wants to see that house again. She never wants to see that living room again. And so you’re constantly having to move on.

Her point, which I think is an interesting point, is that visually if we’ve been in a place before and we come back to that space it’s going to feel like, “Well, we’re just back to where we began.” Like we haven’t really moved forward.

So, you can go back to a space but only if you basically fundamentally destroyed something or completely changed what’s happened when you’ve gotten there.

**Craig:** It’s a good rule of thumb. It really is. In fact, I remember you were telling me about this and I looked back and it’s something that I naturally do anyway. I don’t adhere to it slavishly. There are a couple of times where you might see the same set twice for good reason. And certainly movies that are about journeys always require a return. But in general, yeah, that’s right.

**John:** You’ve got to burn the bridges behind the characters. And sometimes that literally means burning their house down. Always a good choice.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So as you’re looking at that individual scene that you’re writing, and you’re looping it in your head, “Where is the best place for that to happen?” And your first instinct will probably be something kind of pedestrian. And it’s like, “Oh, it’s a normal real world kind of thing, but it doesn’t have to be that at all.” And so look for what it is.

And that’s not an invitation to go nuts on your scene description and sort of do that, again, that D&D description where you’re talking about the tapestries on the walls, but just give us someplace interesting that’s going to have not just hopefully something visually interesting to see but will create interesting opportunities with the people or the characters who would be in that spot.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s no reason to over-describe the space if the slug line does all the work for you. Like you said, “Meatpacking Plant. Two people are having a discussion. He walks in.” “It’s an interior Meatpacking Plant. Day. It is a fully-functioning meatpacking plant full of cows, and blood, and workers wearing chain mail, wielding knives. Chunks of meat hit the floor. So and so moves to…”

That’s it. And by the way, here’s the thing, and think about this as a reader, anybody reading a script is going to remember that. It’s instantly specific. And people complain sometimes about writers skimming, we’ll naturally skim over the generic every time. It’s just sort of a neurological glitch.

**John:** Yeah. So, specific, interesting. Try to sort of pick the least boring place possible to set that individual scene. And, as you’re approaching the big idea of your movie, where’s the best place for it to happen? Where’s going to be the most visually interesting and create the most challenges for your character as you’re going through it?

**Craig:** Yeah. And when you’re sitting around sort of thinking, “Okay, now how do I make this interesting because they’re going to have a fight and they’re going to have a chase?” Well how will it be interesting? Stop and go, space. The space will make it interesting. But then think about how the space makes it interesting. It’s your friend.

**John:** Next topic I want to switch to is something that came up with something that you and I both interacted with this last week, but also a project that I’m trying to set up. There’s a book that may be made into a movie that I’m sort of taking around town and pitching. And as people read the book they like the book a lot, but the book is complicated in that it has multiple narrators and there’s overlapping narrations, and the story is told from different points of view, and some of those points of view overlap so you see the same events from multiple places.

So, the first question that people ask me when they read the book and want to know how I’m going to do this movie is like, “Well, so who’s story are we telling? How are we seeing it?” And they assume that because I was the guy who wrote Go and The Nines that I had this really complicated plan for how I’m going to do it. And I say, “No, no, I’m actually doing it very simple and very straightforward and I’m telling it with a camera and we’re moving forward in time,” and people feel much more confident when I sort of talk them off that edge.

But that idea of point of view and perspective is something I want to talk into right now. Because every movie is going to be told from some character’s point of view. And as I read screenplays from newer writers, sometimes that point of view is really murky and unclear. And so I want to talk about some of the deliberate choices you make as a screenwriter for who’s point of view you’re telling a story from.

I thought I might start with Bridesmaids.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So at the very start of Bridesmaids we’re seeing Kristen Wiig, we’re seeing Jon Hamm, and other important characters come through. There’s the other Bridesmaids. There’s Chris O’Dowd. Let’s just talk about Chris O’Dowd who plays the policeman, the unrealistically Irishman Irish police policeman. But he’s one of the main characters.

So, what if early on in the story we cut to a scene with Chris O’Dowd before we had met him with Kristen Wiig and we saw him going about his daily life, or we saw him like making an arrest? And a screenwriter might put that scene in saying like, “Oh, well this is going to be an important character. I want to know who he is. I want to know a little bit about him before we he and Kristen Wiig’s characters meet.”

That would change the script fundamentally if we had a scene with him that did not involve her. That’s my thesis.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Certainly, because it would start to feel much more like a romantic comedy centered around the two of them and less about the story of a woman growing up. Yeah, for sure. There are certain conventions that we use in the first act to cue the audience about what sort of story they are to expect and what kind of weight to apply to characters. And you’ll get this note constantly from studios to, “We need to see this person on their own. We need to get who they are, and where they live, and all the rest.” And that makes sense for some kinds of movies.

But like you say, for other kinds, no. No it does not.

**John:** So I would argue that in most movies your protagonist is going to be driving scenes, and by driving scenes I mean they are going to be the main engine behind a scene. And it would be very unusual to have a scene that does not involve your protagonist or some other characters providing some crucial service to your protagonist which could by your villain.

I mean, with something like Bridesmaids, though, let’s take for example what would happen if we did catch Chris O’Dowd. Our audience’s expectation would be this is going to be a two-hander. This is going to be a movie about how the two of these people meet and fall in love. And the only thing that would change is just that one extra scene with Chris O’Dowd would set that expectation.

If you have a movie that’s like a thriller and we’re following our hero and then suddenly this minor character who we’re cutting away to who is doing something, our expectation is going to be that that person is going to be very, very important. And so we’re going to watch and be waiting for that person. If that person doesn’t’ come back and do something interesting in the next 20 minutes we’re going to be frustrated.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a difficult thing to instruct. This is kind of one of those things you have to have a sense for. You have to have an ear for it. Because there are times where you could sort of feel like you might be able to go either way, or does this person deserve a little bit extra? You just kind of have to feel it. Yeah.

It’s funny that you mention because there is I know in Identity Thief, the first 10, 15 pages is kind of split perspective between Jason Bateman’s character and Melissa McCarthy’s character even though their nowhere near each other geographically, nor do they know each other. But that sets up the expectation that in fact the movie is about their relationship, which it is.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. So, it has a romantic comedy setup even though it’s not a classic romantic comedy.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** But if you did have that split setup and they were not going to overlap you have an audience revolt. If those two characters did not meet pretty quickly into the second act, your audience would get very, very impatient with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’re essentially… — The only people you introduce in the beginning, and from their perspective, are the key players of the key relationship. In an action movie you would obviously know your hero and you could split perspective to the villain, which they do all the time, because that’s the key relationship of the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But beyond that, if it’s a story about one person growing up, the story about one person, I mean, because what is the central relationship in Bridesmaids? Well, you could argue it’s between her and the cop, you could argue it’s between her and Maya Rudolf, you could argue it’s between her and her friends, her and her mom, her and the world. It’s her. It’s her and herself. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. The primary relationship is Kristen Wiig and herself.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s the same thing with 40-Year-Old Virgin. We don’t spend time meeting other people on their own because everything is through the lens of the person who has to grow up. So, it is an important thing to figure out. Are you telling a story about one person kind of blossoming, or are you telling the story of one person locked in battle with one other person? Or are you telling the story of one person falling in love with one other person? And that should help you figure this out.

**John:** So, an alternative if you are faced with a situation where you do need to introduce this character but you’re having a hard time finding out about this person without, you know, basically your instinct is to give the cutaway scene where you can figure everything out about the Chris O’Dowd character or whoever, and you don’t know quite how to do it. You probably need to find a way that your protagonist can come to wherever that other character is and see them there in their setting.

If you need to find that character in a setting, somehow you’re going to need to take your protagonist and bring them there to see that, because otherwise we’re under the expectation that we can cut to that character at all times and that person is going to have equal weight in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can’t leave the character. The character doesn’t get their own introduction. You can’t leave them flat and sort of uninteresting without a life, but one of the things that brings us and the audience closer to the protagonist which is precisely what you want.

It is for the protagonist to ask the questions we’re asking. So we’re going, “Well what’s the deal, why is that guy Irish? And what is the deal with him being a cop? And why does he live here?” And then she asks him, and that’s comforting to me because I think, “Oh, she’s like me.” And we want that. We want that.

**John:** She is your window into the movie. And so you’re seeing things from her point of view and you have the same questions that she would have in the scenes.

Now, a related issue which often comes up is voiceover. And voiceover is like POV but sort of like a super power POV. And that’s the ability of a character to talk directly to the audience. There’s probably two or three different flavors of voiceover. There’s the voiceover that’s not attached to anything, so that’s literally just the character is talking to you directly as the audience. And you see that in some movies that sort of set up the “once upon a time”, or the…

**Craig:** American Beauty.

**John:** Exactly. And so the person is talking directly to you. There’s the attached voiceover which is a character starts talking and then it transitions into something else and that character is talking kind of continuous over that. So, Forrest Gump does that where Forrest will start talking to somebody on a bench and then we’ll transition into that. At a certain point they kind of blur together because if it’s been so long since we went back to the attached scene we’re going to sort of forget that it’s attached to anything.

But Big Fish actually has examples of both kind of voiceover, where most of the voiceover in the story is something that Albert Finney or Ewan McGregor started talking about a story and then we transition to what that was. But Billy Crudup’s character does have sort of direct voiceover power to the audience. And that was a choice we had to make along the way: “How are we going to get inside their perspective on what this story is about to them?”

**Craig:** Voiceover is sort of unfairly maligned because so many bad screenwriters use it as a crutch. They pour it like ketchup all over something because they don’t know how else to convey the information in an interesting way. But that’s unfortunate because in the hands of masters voiceover is amazing. And it can also evoke a certain tone, a wonderful tone.

I mean, you know, Blade Runner is the great — the great debate over the voiceover in Blade Runner. I kind of love it. I just feel like, okay, it’s film noir, that’s the point. And that’s what film noir has. It has voiceover. I love it. And the voiceover is good.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So I enjoy it.

One of the most fascinating uses of voiceover, perhaps misuses, is in Dune, the David Lynch film.

**John:** Absolutely. I love David Lynch, too.

**Craig:** I mean, I’m obsessed with this movie. I’ve watched it a billion times. It’s not a good movie, but it’s a wonderful movie anyway. It’s amazing. Parts of it are just stunningly incredibly great. Overall, I could see why, really the problem with the movie is I think you do have to watch it 12 times before you start to like it. [laughs] So that’s not really what you want out of a movie, but I love it.

But it has one of the.. — I don’t think any other movie has ever done this, where multiple characters will do voiceover of what they’re thinking. Sometimes in the same scene. One person will say something and then will hear what they are thinking.

Then you will cut to the other person they are talking to who will answer back and then will hear what they’re thinking. It’s bizarre. I just love that he did it.

**John:** Yeah. It feels very Lynchian, so there you go.

**Craig:** It does. It’s wild, man. But, you know, be careful with VO. A little goes a long way. And if you’re going to use it, just understand it has a big impact on the way the story is unfolding.

**John:** And the other related sort of super power tool that some characters are allowed to drive and some characters aren’t is flashbacks. And flashbacks are one of those controversial things because it’s like, “Oh, I need to find out more information about that character. I need to understand why they are saying this thing they are doing in the present.”

And that can be fine. There’s lots of movies that do flashbacks extraordinarily well, or that are built in a way that works them in really well. The big point of caution I would have with any sort of flashback situation is whenever you’re in a flashback that means that nothing bad can happen to your protagonist in the present. So, any time you are cutting away from the present tense storyline, you’re basically letting your character off the hook.

We know that nothing terrible is going to happen to them in the present which could be a bad thing if you’re in a thriller or some sort of action movie. But it’s also bad in a comedy because we were supposed to be caring about what was happening in the present tense of the comedy, and if you’re cutting away from the present tense of the comedy for a long period of time we have no idea what’s going on.

**Craig:** Yeah, comedies will sometimes use flashbacks just as goofs, you know, almost to make fun of the trope of flashbacks. The thing about flashbacks is that they are cheesy. So, if you’re going to do them, figure out how to do them in an un-cheesy way. Make them shocking, or confusing, or surprising. But, uh, you know…

**John:** I would also argue that anytime you’re going to a flashback, our having seen that flashback has to fundamentally change our experience of watching the present right at that moment. So you can’t just like — a character can’t just be sitting there on the lawn and then have a flashback to think about their life when they were a child, and then come back to them on the lawn and not have anything changed. It needs to be a crucial bit of revelation for us as an audience that changes what this character is doing next for us.

**Craig:** The only exception I can think of to that is if part of what is going on is that it’s not so much a flashback as a memory that is unconstructed or not completely realized. So a person is trying to remember something and they can remember all the way up to a point and then it collapses. And then that’s creating a mystery. But that’s really more about a memory and not a flashback.

I always feel like a flashback is the movie sending you somewhere, which I don’t like.

**John:** Yeah, it can be tough. Again, any of these techniques done masterfully are great, and they’re wonderful, and they’re awesome. And there are movies that do strange things with point of view and perspective that kind of shouldn’t work but because they do work they are kind of extra brilliant.

I love a movie that in the third act suddenly a character who shouldn’t really be able to drive a scene by him or herself does and it’s surprising and exciting. And that feels… — You notice that because it’s almost always a mistake. But then when it’s not a mistake it’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. And can sort of recontextualize everything that came before it. And there are movies that sort of make a meal of being split perspective, and that’s a stylistic thing. The key is, of course, if you’re going to go for something, go for it and do it. So, Pulp Fiction fragments its perspective across a number of characters and just goes for it completely. It commits.

You know, there’s a fine line between mistake and on purpose, but it’s a line. So, if you’re going to do it, do it.

**John:** Quite early on in Go, I had to make the deliberate choice of every scene is from — as the movie starts — is from Ronna’s perspective. But then we’re able to cut back to Claire and Gaines at the apartment by themselves, and that was an important choice because that let the audience know that we were going to be jumping around between people and it’s going to be okay. And suddenly as the second act starts we’re going to be jumping to a whole new group of people who you kind of barely know and they’re going to have storytelling power for the next thirty minutes.

**Craig:** It’s funny, one of the most common words used in criticisms of big Hollywood movies is “Lazy.” They’ll say, “Well, it’s just a lazy movie.” But, frankly, I think there’s nothing lazier than a movie that doesn’t feel any obligation to make sense. I mean, god, give me two hours I write one of those.

**John:** Yeah, easy.

**Craig:** Easy!

**John:** Yeah, basically just write a bunch of scenes and then scramble them up and done.

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs] Exactly. It’s why… — I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Shaggs.

**John:** I don’t know what The Shaggs are.

**Craig:** So The Shaggs were a…I hesitate to say a musical group. It was the 1960s and this guy in New Hampshire, I think, was looking at all these bands and a lot of the bands were family bands. And they were making money. And so he had three daughters and he bought each of them an instrument — a guitar, a bass guitar, and a drum set. And basically sent them to the barn because he was a farmer and said, “Learn how to play this and then I’ll write songs and then I’ll take you into Boston and well record an album.”

And the problem is they had absolutely no musical talent whatsoever. Nor music songwriting talent. In fact, they’re aggressively untalented. And he didn’t quite get that. And he took them to Boston and they recorded an album. And it’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever heard. And it’s freely available online. And Frank Zappa sort of famously said, “If any musician had done this on purpose they would be the greatest musician of all time.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Because the time signatures were incredibly complicated. The patterns were… — You really have to hear it; it’s remarkable.

**John:** It’s like outsider art.

**Craig:** It really is. It was just remarkable. And sometimes I feel like when I see really, really bad things that are just jumbled together and make no sense in and of itself, I think I couldn’t have done this if I tried. And no musician could do what The Shaggs did if they tried.

**John:** So maybe they shouldn’t try it.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t try.

**John:** Don’t try.

**Craig:** Don’t try it.

**John:** I’m ready for Cool Things. Do you have a Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do. I do. I have a really cool thing this week. This is like the coolest thing to me. It’s so stupid but I love it. [laughs] So, I love peanut butter. And I’ve always loved peanut butter. And peanut butter is one of those foods that depending on who you talk to it’s either good for you or bad for you because it’s lots of protein, it’s a legume, and the kind of fat that is has is very good fat, but there’s also a lot of fat, there’s a lot of oil in it, and it’s very caloric. So, you get differing opinions on this.

But there is this new thing called PB2 and basically this company took peanut butter and smashed out all the oil and then dehydrated it basically into a powder. And then you just mix it with water and you get what is essentially peanut butter with almost no fat in it at all.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And so the caloric difference is like basically it goes from 200 calories to like 50 calories. It’s crazy. So I’ve been eating this stuff literally by the boatload. It’s spectacular. And so they have regular and they have chocolate flavored, so almost like a Nutella. And, okay, so the question is: Does it taste just like peanut butter? Almost! Yeah. And it’s not like “almost” like the way that Diet Coke “almost” tastes like Coke except it’s got that weird chemical thing going on. It’s totally natural. They haven’t put anything into it. They’ve just taken one thing out. And, oddly, you miss it less than you would think. So, you can get it on Amazon. I am not a paid endorser of this company, even though I sound like it. I just love it. I think it’s so cool.

**John:** We will put a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yeah, PB2.

**John:** I’m not a peanut butter eater. I’m an almond butter eater. I eat way too much almond butter. Like some days I think maybe 30% or 40% of my calories come from almonds in some form.

**Craig:** It’s good.

**John:** But, yeah, peanuts are good. Now, is the peanut butter fine enough that you could maybe distribute it in the ventilator system of a building and kill all the people with peanut allergies?

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Ah, see, we made a plot right here.

**Craig:** No question. No question. If you wanted to kill somebody with a peanut allergy it’s done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool.

My Cool Thing is a simple little thing that you can buy at most office supply stores now. Now we talked in the podcast previously about how I tend to write by hand. So when I go off to do a first draft I will write by hand. I usually use sort of stiff-backed legal pad and white legal pad is my preferable legal pad. And it’s worked fine. The challenges of a legal pad is you’re always flipping the pages back over themselves and it gets to be a little bit unwieldy. So, I said, “Well maybe there might be a wirebound notebook that I would like.” And it turns out there’s one that’s amazing.

So, it’s the Cambridge Ivory Wirebound Notebook. And it looks just like kind of the notebook you remember from high school with like the little spiral wire thing, but it’s wider so that the pages are actually full size and have perfect perforations so you can rip out pages and they’re nice and neat and clean.

It’s slightly off-white which seems weird when you first look at it but it’s actually really comfortable for your eyes. It’s just the right heaviness and thickness.

So, I try not to be one of those people who’s obsessive about having to have one specific thing, or one specific pencil, or one specific anything, but I really love these notebooks. So, if you’re writing by hand I would urge you to pick up a three-pack of these because they’re really good.

**Craig:** I don’t understand. Because you said you don’t like flipping back and forth with the legal pad but don’t you have to flip back and forth with this, too.

**John:** No, here’s what I’m saying. As you’re writing on a legal pad you’re always bending those top pages back over.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** Bending over the top of the sheet.

**Craig:** And then by the time you get to like the 80th page…

**John:** And it gets messy and those pages get sort of bent.

**Craig:** So this lays flat like a proper spiral.

**John:** It lays flat like a proper spiral. And it’s good. And it’s easier to sort of carry around because a lot times when I’m doing writing someplace, I’ll be in Vegas, or Boston, or whatever, I’m taking this pad around and it always sort of gets dinged up and this actually has a cover on it so you can do it properly.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. If I ever use paper for anything I would probably get that.

**John:** Yeah. But you don’t use paper because you’re a digital boy.

**Craig:** I’m digital. But I will tell you what, I do use that PB2 for everything.

**John:** If you could write just on a sheet made of PB2. And then if you don’t like you could just eat your words.

**Craig:** Just eat it. I’d just eat it. Yeah. Yeah, it’s delicious.

**John:** What if you get sick of it? What if like three weeks from now you’re like, “God, I never want to see that stuff again?”

**Craig:** Well, you know, they send it to you in a regular peanut butter sized jar which I blow through really quickly. Like, you know, my wife was out of town. And I don’t know if it’s the same thing with you and Mike, but when my wife is out of town I don’t go to the grocery store.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what happens is I just start going down layers of old food, [laughs] because at some point I’m like I haven’t eaten in eight hours, because I’m lazy, but I don’t want to leave the house. So now I’m going to eat graham crackers for dinner. Which is what I did last night.

So the PB2 has been a huge thing because Amazon shipped it over. But it doesn’t come in massive sizes. So you’ll get through it pretty quickly, and if you don’t like it just chuck it. Send it to me.

**John:** I’ll send it Craig. Craig will eat it.

**Craig:** And for those one or two of you who are thinking, “Oh, why isn’t he playing his guitar?” I was thinking about it and then I realized it’s a little dumb to pointlessly play guitar and sing on a podcast about screenwriting.

But then I thought, you know, what if we get to 100,000 people…

**John:** [gasps]

**Craig:** …Then I would do it.

**John:** Okay, so if people get their friends to listen to the podcast then…

**Craig:** Yeah. If we can get, I mean, 100,000 people, at that point I am playing for a venue that’s bigger than Dodger’s Stadium or the old Meadowlands. Then I’ll do it.

**John:** That feels like a lot of pressure, but it’s certainly a good opportunity.

**Craig:** No, I have…I’m fearless because I’m a sociopath.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s one challenge. And then we talked before we got on the air today, a second challenge that we’re going to do for next week. Basically we’ll be taking submissions this next week, and it may not be the next podcast we record, but a subsequent podcast. Let’s do a first Three Page Challenge. So this is a thing where you send us the first three pages of your screenplay and we’ll sort of randomly pick through and grab some of these screenplays that are sent to us.

Only send the first three pages. If you send more than three pages we will not open it. We will just delete the email. So, only three pages of your script. And we will read the screenplay and we will probably talk about it on air. And we will tell you what was awesome and what was not so awesome.

And we’ll also include links to…so that other people who are wanting to read those first three pages can read it, too. So, first three pages, it could be any genre, it could be any kind of thing.

**Craig:** Does it have to be the first three. What if they do like…

**John:** It could be a disaster, honestly, as I’m talking about it. It could be a horrible thing but it could be a lot of fun.

**Craig:** What if they do three pages from the middle of the script?

**John:** Oh, that’s an interesting choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why don’t we just say any three pages.

**John:** Any three pages.

**Craig:** As long as they’re consecutive.

**John:** First three pages make a lot of sense. But if the middle three pages are more appealing, that’s great, too. First three pages we would probably talk more about how you’re setting up your story. Middle three pages we might talk a little bit more about the words you’re choosing and sort of what you’re doing on the page. So, your choice. Please only submit once.

Other disclaimers: Don’t see us for stealing your idea or something because we’ll just mock you endlessly.

**Craig:** You should actually probably, if you’re going to do this online, make them sign a thing.

**John:** Yeah. Signing stuff online is really weird, though.

**Craig:** Oh it is?

**John:** I’m not sure that it actually holds up. Because how is somebody to say that it was really their script and not somebody else’s script? Yeah, when I first considered the idea I thought maybe we’ll do, like we’ll assign them a topic so that they would have to write on a certain topic so therefore they wouldn’t feel like there’s the…we’re stealing someone’s idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, we’re not going to steal your idea.

**John:** Maybe we should have talked all about this before we actually got on the air and started recording it.

**Craig:** [laughs] Maybe we should quickly go to law school.

**John:** I am willing to try the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it will be fun. The only other thing I would say to people is don’t send us your three pages if you’re not willing to get punched in the face super hard if we don’t like it.

**John:** Absolutely. So if you want to use a fake, a handle, a pen name, pseudonym, go for it. But, we might talk about your thing on the air and we might love it, or we might not love it. So, do be aware of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. But otherwise, let’s do it.

**John:** So final bits of business here. Anything we talked about on the show today, including Craig’s weird peanut butter, and my notebook obsession, and…

**Craig:** The Shaggs.

**John:** Bridesmaids, and The Shaggs, of course. Bridesmaids, if you’ve never heard of that incredibly successful movie. And, of course, the WGA earnings stuff, all those links will be at johnaugust.com which is a website that I run.

**Craig:** [laughs] They know. They better know what dot com means.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. On Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that’s it. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Take care. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.