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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/how-do-you-like-your-stakes)

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 402 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program we’re going to be talking about the idea of stakes, what it means for a writer, and what it means for a character. We’ll also talk a little bit about Aladdin, fandom, and of course some agency stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But first we got to hype up our live show again. That’s coming up really soon, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. It’s a Thursday night.

It is a benefit for the amazing charity called Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Alec Berg of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, but also we’ve added Kourtney Kang of Fresh off the Boat and a new show coming up. She is fantastic. I got to work with her on a project. So we’re so excited to have these TV moguls up on stage with us.

And there will be more stuff to do too. We have some prizes. We have giveaways. We have special shirts we’re making just for that night so people buy your tickets if you have not bought your tickets yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. And correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m not wrong so you can’t correct me.

**John:** You’re never wrong.

**Craig:** I’m never wrong. Not about these things. And we have McQuarrie on a loop saying, “I hate to say it but Craig is right.” Hollywood Heart, which is the charity that this benefits, is a legal charity. Meaning if you buy tickets you can deduct them from your taxes.

**John:** I suspect that’s true. Because – and the actual value you’ll receive is just knowledge and joy.

**Craig:** And power.

**John:** Power. Yes.

**Craig:** And love.

**John:** We’re giving away power. Yeah. Love.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I mean why wouldn’t you come to this? It’s a great cause. And you know what? We’re in a bigger place. We got ambitious here. We need to fill a bigger venue so we need you listeners. If you are in the Los Angeles area–

**John:** We need your physical bodies in that space.

**Craig:** Yeah, we need you.

**John:** So that we will feel together.

**Craig:** I mean, look, in all seriousness, you know me. I’m perfectly happy talking to an empty room. In fact, I’m happier talking to an empty room. In fact, no one come. But really here’s the thing: it’s for charity. We’re trying to help kids. So, that’s why you need to show up. It’s not so much for me. Show up for John and the kids.

**John:** Yep. And our guests because our guests are phenomenal.

**Craig:** And our guests.

**John:** And there could be one or two more coming, but we can’t say that yet.

**Craig:** We’re always full of surprises.

**John:** Great. So hyping is done. I had my showing up at a place experience this week. This was the premiere for Aladdin. So Aladdin came out this past weekend in the US and most of the world. So I went to the premiere on Tuesday and it was weird. So I don’t think we’ve really talked about movie premieres so I thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what it’s like to go to a premiere as a writer.

So I guess, let me start how the day begin, because obviously I don’t need hair and makeup because I look just the same no matter what.

**Craig:** Well, makeup. [laughs] You could use a little makeup.

**John:** I get a little blush – no, I do nothing. So basically I get in a car, the studio sends a car, so me, Mike, and my friend Dan, we all went to the premiere together. We hop in a car. We got to Hollywood. This is at the El Capitan. They block off streets around it because they actually have blocked off all of Hollywood Boulevard for this premiere. So it’s actually difficult to get there.

They try – the publicists try to get you there so early. So the premiere started at 6:30. They wanted the car to leave my house at 4:30.

**Craig:** Oh god. Come on.

**John:** I’m like 10 minutes away. And so I said, no, 5:30 at the earliest. So we get in the car there. We get to the place where they’re dropping us off. There’s a greeter there who was fantastic. She took us around and did everything. And I specifically said that I wanted to skip the red carpet, so we’ll get into why I wanted to skip the red carpet, but Craig what’s been your experience when you do a premiere and doing the red carpet? Do you actually answer questions along that red carpet?

**Craig:** I have. It’s only been for certain movies, but I have. It’s weird. Definitely – it was less weird for Chernobyl because they seem to want to ask a writer questions in television. [laughs] When you’re in the movie business, so you walk down this red carpet and all these – you know, people have seen this I suppose in movies. The red carpet and all those people have their cameras and they’re like, “Look over here. Look over here.” And then the writer walks down and it gets real quiet all of a sudden.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s usually a handler beside you saying like, “This is Craig Mazin, the writer of the film.” Or they point to specific people who are already going to be asking you questions. Sometimes there’s little video crews.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes it’s just a person with a microphone there to talk with you. And, hey, can you tell everyone at Cat Fancy Magazine about Frankenweenie? And it’s like, are there any cats in Frankenweenie? I’m like, yes, there is. Let me tell you about Mr. Whiskers.

**Craig:** Yeah. And sometimes you speak to people who are from other countries. And, look, it’s all part of the machine. I mean, the thing to remember about these premieres, which I think a lot of writers don’t quite get early on, is that the purpose of the premiere is not to celebrate you, or the director, or the cast, or the movie. The purpose of the premiere is to sell tickets. It is designed to create stuffing for magazines and websites.

And so the parts that get the most stuffing generated that’s where they care. Meaning typically actors.

**John:** Yeah. Because those are the ones who are going to actually move copies of magazines if there were still magazines, but like clicks on websites.

**Craig:** Correct. Like if Will Smith for some reason was not able to go that day, because he had something else going on, they would move the premiere. [laughs] You know, it’s like he’s the thing that’s going to get all of the attention, right? I mean, he is the biggest name. So, it becomes that.

I mean, I watched it first hand at The Hangover 2 premiere. It was extraordinary. And it was right across the street. So Disney runs its family premieres at El Capitan and across the street you have Mann’s Chinese where a lot of big premieres take place. And they close off the street and it’s madness and people are there to see – they’re there to see Bradley Cooper.

**John:** Yeah. They’re not there to see Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** No! No. No one even in my house is there to see Craig Mazin.

**John:** So, approaching this premiere, this is a movie that I had worked on, very hard. I had stopped working on the movie. I had seen it several times. I had given notes on it. But it was not fundamentally my movie. And I knew I did not want to be answering a lot of press questions along the way because I can smile and sort of like, “I’m so excited to be here,” give those generic answers. But it was just going to be awkward and weird.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I didn’t sort of want to give some honest answers on certain things. And so I said like, OK, I will go but we’re going to skip the whole red carpet thing. And my handler was fantastic. She whisked me through this little back way so I didn’t have to do any of the red carpet stuff.

And then you get into the theater, which the El Capitan Theater is beautiful inside.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Intimate but beautiful. And there’s like two other people inside the theater. And so even after delaying going there so early we had about an hour to kill.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**John:** For everyone who was on the red carpet to start it.

**Craig:** I know. The timing of it all is so weird. At some point they start yelling at everybody to go into the theater, but no one is going in. I’ve got to be honest with you. I do not like these events at all. And if I can avoid them I do. If I don’t have credit on a movie but I’ve worked on the movie and I get an invitation to go–

**John:** I don’t go.

**Craig:** I can’t remember the last time I went. I do not like premieres because they’re actually not fun ways to see a movie. It’s so much of a hassle. And I just care about the movie.

**John:** I’ll take that back. The one time I did go was the first Iron Man. And it was a fun premiere and I was happy for everyone involved. And so I was there to celebrate them, but I just loved that it was not about me at all.

**Craig:** And, you know what? I’ll take it back, too. There was one. I went to Hail Caesar, because I was just really excited. I wanted to see it early. And you know what? I was not disappointed at all. I love that movie.

**John:** That feels like a good movie to see with a big crowd and with a group around you. And that is actually genuinely the fun of seeing these movies is because in the previous incarnations where I’d seen Aladdin I’d seen it in a screening room by myself, or nearly by myself, and so I’m watching this thing that is supposed to be a comedy and it is not funny to me because I’m sitting here scribbling into a notebook about things that I would encourage them to work on.

And then to see it with a crowd it’s like, oh, yeah, those are jokes that I wrote. And those jokes are getting laughs. And you actually get spontaneous applause at moments. Yes, the crowd is sort of extra hyped up because they know the folks involved and they’re applauding people’s credits as they show up. But it’s also a joyous moment because also it’s new for people because none of them have been spoiled by reviews or other bits of spoilers that have come out about what actually happens in the movie. So it was genuinely fun to see it with that group.

I met one of the composers who did the great new song for it, so that was cool. So, I’m glad I went to the premiere of Aladdin is the short summary.

**Craig:** I’m glad you went, too. It’s good. I’m glad. You know what? We’ve got to stay positive.

**John:** We got to stay positive. And it looks like, you know, we’re recording this on a Friday but it looks like the movie is going to do pretty well for the weekend and that’s a good thing, too.

**Craig:** It’s Aladdin from Disney.

**John:** It is Aladdin from Disney. That was kind of built in to the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean not to take anything away from the accomplishment, but we’re talking about degrees of success at that point. There’s no chance that people aren’t going to show up. It’s Aladdin. It’s A Whole New World. For You and Me.

**John:** Basically thank you everyone who went out to see it over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it. I’m happy it actually turned out in sort of the right kind of PG. It’s truly a PG that you can take younger kids to. And I’m happy with a lot of how stuff went in the movie.

**Craig:** How many murders, onscreen murders, do you get before you get bumped into PG-13?

**John:** I don’t know. There is one onscreen murder that I really, really argued to cut. Sidebar here for a moment. It’s a thing that you encountered in so many different cuts of movies you’ve seen before where there’s a scene that is wedged in there to establish a character and it breaks the flow of everything else around it. Just like, oh no, this guy is a bad guy. See how bad he is? And I really, really wanted that scene to go and they didn’t listen to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, this is – it’s what happens. You see, I mean–

**John:** It’s a collaborative medium. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a collaborative medium and maybe – I think what you should do is maneuver yourself into a position where you don’t have to collaborate that much. [laughs] And I’ve said this on the show many times. There is a way of doing something where you are going to do it mostly by yourself. You are going to make mistakes but the mistakes will be consistent with everything else because it all came from one brain.

It’s the mix and match of it all. Somebody may have a great idea. You know what the problem is? That character we’re supposed to be scared of him, but we haven’t seen him do anything bad. We should establish how evil he is. Great idea. Execution-ally there’s no chance of success because that came from somewhere else. It’s like throwing some weird instrument into the middle of another song.

**John:** And that’s a thing that happens in the writing stage all the time, too. Even what I’m writing right now, there’s a scene that I would kind of love to establish a little bit earlier in the script but like there’s no place to put that without breaking everything else around it. So, you know what? I have to do the hard work of figuring out, OK, if it is coming in at this later moment how can I make it work as this later moment beat. Because it’s not the same scene that would be happening earlier in the movie.

**Craig:** This is the life of the writer.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Writing and editing. They’re closely tied together.

We need to talk about the WGA and the ATA. But I would propose Craig, because last week it went on a long time, maybe could I set a three-minute timer and when the timer goes off we’re just done talking about it?

**Craig:** I need ten seconds.

**John:** All right. I’m starting three minutes, but if it goes less than that that’s great. And go.

**Craig:** Well, last week I was praying to the skies that everybody get back to the table. And they’re getting back to the table. Can’t claim causality there. I’m just happy that it happened. I’m optimistic and I’m very hopeful that you guys in leadership and the agency people can find a deal together.

**John:** Craig, you said you prayed to the skies and heaven, so this is a religious conversion for you is what I’m hearing. That you now understand that there is an all-powerful creator behind these things?

**Craig:** Sort of. By the skies and the heavens I’m referring to myself. So I’m the member of a new religion. The religion of–

**John:** Craigism?

**Craig:** It’s Craigism. And our lord’s prayer, “I hate to say it, but Craig is right.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, wouldn’t it be so funny if your first disciple was Chris McQuarrie?

**Craig:** My only disciple.

**John:** We should also briefly mention, because we have two minutes left on this time, which we didn’t even need. So another thing that happened this week was – I saw you single this out on Twitter – a writer who had been represented at Gersh shows up for a meeting at Fox. They say like, “Oh, no, your meeting was canceled.” And Gersh confirmed that they had canceled the meeting after he had fired them. That was not a god look for that agency.

**Craig:** No. That’s just dishonorable behavior. And even worse it is ignorant. This is not – in theory this will have an end. And we will want to return to agencies. And new writers are going to want to go to agencies. And Gersh will be one of those agencies, except now if anybody were to ask me about Gersh I would say they’re not great because as an institution they thought that would be a good idea. That’s a terrible idea.

That implies a poor sense of judgment. And that’s shameful. Shameful and stupid.

**John:** I knew almost nothing about Gersh, but this is the only thing I’m associating with Gersh right now is this incident. And so that ain’t great.

**Craig:** Just a huge error on their part and petty. And revealing. This is the problem. You reveal something about yourselves. Why in god’s name would they have done – what did they think they were going to accomplish? It’s the judgment thing that makes me – so it’s not a question of like, boo, you’re anti-writer. If they want to be anti-writer and somehow manage to be successful at the same time I guess OK. But there’s no successful strategy encased in that move. None.

**John:** Nope. None. And also it speaks to the question of who owns a meeting. And so if a meeting is set up between a writer and the studio, to my thinking is a social contract between the two of them that is not a thing that the agency owns in any meaningful way. I don’t think you can own an intangible thing. That’s the frustration to me, too, is that they felt that they controlled that meeting rather than the writer.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. It’s so arrogant. And you’re Gersh. No offense—

**[Alarm timer sounds off]**

Whoa.

**John:** I literally set a timer. That’s three minutes. We’re done. We can’t talk anything more about it.

**Craig:** That’s good. The people at Gersh are so happy. They literally got saved by the bell. [laughs]

**John:** Literally saved by the iPhone bell. Let’s get to some questions from listeners. We have not answered listener questions for a bit.

**Craig:** Somebody at Gersh was like shorten that timer. All right, listener questions. Are we doing listener questions or we doing stakes? What would you like to do first?

**John:** Well, our first listener question is about stakes so I thought we might start with this. Why don’t you take Vera’s question here?

**Craig:** Sure. Vera from Germany, welcome Vera, asks, “How do I raise the stakes in a true story? I’m involved in writing a feature film based on real events. Our producers are worried there may not be enough personal jeopardy in the story and I worry there may not be enough potential for it. The story is about young researchers who learn something of global consequence. They are ridiculed once published and their lives changed drastically after, but they didn’t know that beforehand.

“Almost all our main characters are alive today and still relatively well-known. We’re even in touch with them and they’re supportive of our project. So we can’t make their past selves look worse than they are and wouldn’t want to. They were good. How can I raise the stakes for the characters beginning early in this story?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** Well, first off, Vera, this is a fantastic question because it’s the kind of thing you’re going to face all the time. You have the extra difficulty of having real life people in there so you can’t manipulate backstories in ways that sort of get to reverse engineer what you want them to have.

But let’s talk about stakes overall, because we’ve talked about stakes in previous episodes but it’s good to have a refresher about what we mean by stakes, what development executives mean by stakes, why you hear this term used so much, particularly in features. You hear it some in TV, but you really hear it in features.

I think there’s two main questions you’re asking when you talk about stakes. First is what is the character risking by taking this action? By making a choice to do a thing what are they putting at risk? The second question is what are the consequences if this character or these characters don’t succeed? So it’s both the action that they’re taking and also the consequences of failure. How bad is the failure if they don’t succeed?

Chernobyl, of course, has remarkable stakes throughout the three episodes I’ve seen so far. Characters are faced with these kind of stakes questions all the time. Craig, anything else about the definition of stakes we want to tackle before we get into it?

**Craig:** No, it’s a very simple concept. What are you risking and what happens if we don’t succeed? It’s as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. So you’re trying to pick the answers to those questions and to me what’s so crucial and so often missing is proportionality. You have to pick stakes that feel right for these characters, this world, this situation. Not everything can literally be life or death. Not everything is the end of the world. And so often I think especially in our blockbusters we try to make everything be the end of the world. Superhero movies especially have to sort of be saving the whole world and they probably shouldn’t be so often.

If you think about the world of the characters, it could be the end of the world to those characters. And so then you have to carefully define, you know, what is their world consisting of. Is it their social grouping? Their standing? Is it their family? Is it their dreams, their hopes, their wishes, their goals? What is at risk for them that isn’t necessarily of global consequence?

**Craig:** Yeah. We are currently in a state of stakesflation in Hollywood where everything gets upped. It’s not enough to destroy a planet, now you must destroy the galaxy. No, now you have to destroy multiple galaxies. Now you have to destroy half of everything that is alive which I assume at some point someone is going to say, “Well, we have to move that up to next time Thanos snaps his fingers it needs to be three-quarters.”

But when you think back to the first blockbuster, generally Jaws is considered to be the first blockbuster film, and the stakes in Jaws are there people on an island that are being eaten by a shark. And our heroes have to stop the shark before it eats another person. That’s it. That’s it. And it captivates to this very day because the stakes there are really not so much about random people getting chewed up, it’s about a man who has a certain sense of self and purpose and that self and purpose is being challenged to the extreme by a creature that seemingly is beyond his ability to handle. That’s stakes. It’s personal. I love it.

**John:** That’s stakes. So obviously when we talk about stakes our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character. But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters and they don’t have to be the same stakes. In the case of Jaws there’s the stakes of if we do this then we could hurt tourism. If we acknowledge this problem there could be issues.

I’m thinking to Chernobyl. So, we have your scientists explaining, no, if we don’t do this thing the next thing is going to blow up and it’s going to be worse. And we have another scientist who is saying if we don’t figure out exactly what happened these other reactors could blow up. But we also have government officials who are saying we can’t let this get out because if we do let this get out then there will be a panic.

Everyone has a different sense of what the stakes are and they’re taking actions that match their own understanding of what are the most important stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. For some characters in the show the stakes are love. I want to be with the person that I love. I don’t want to abandon them, even though it puts my own life at risk. For other people the stakes are I have to keep this government together. And if I fail to then there’s going to be chaos. Right. Everybody had their different competing interests. And in those moments, for instance in Chernobyl there’s a moment in Episode 2 where Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård’s characters are on a helicopter and they’re approaching the power plant. And they both have stakes.

One guy is I have an order from the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. That is somebody with nearly absolute power. And I have to fulfill that because if I don’t I understand that my life and my position and my authority and everything I have is under severe threat. And the other character’s stakes are that’s going to kill us. Don’t go there. We’ll all die.

Competing stakes. Always a good thing to have.

**John:** And ultimately the helicopter pilot has to decide.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who does he need to listen to in this moment? And he actually reverts to sort of a lower [unintelligible] hierarchy of needs to sort of get to, OK, I don’t want to die in the next two minutes and so therefore I’m not going to fly over this thing. I’m going to listen to the other person.

But I think that actually points to really the root of stakes which is needs and wants. I mean, wants are generally sort of the better way of thinking about it. But what is the character going after? And is the thing they’re going after a really primal survival kind of thing? In some movies it absolutely will be. In some movies it is life or death. It’s cliffhanger. It’s those movies where at any given moment you could die.

But for most characters in most movies it’s a little bit higher up the chain. So it’s about comfort, family, stability, self-realization, self-actualization. Their sense of identity is at stake if they don’t succeed in this venture and that’s the risk that they’re taking.

**Craig:** All these levels of things, what it comes down to is what can you make me believe. And when it comes to stakes I don’t really as a writer have to do much to make you believe at home that saving the planet from a space alien is high enough stakes. It’s just sort of baked into the scenario. Strangely, and this is something I wish our friends in the executive suites had a stronger grasp of, that reduces our interest because there isn’t much of a challenge to that question.

John, a space alien, is threatening to blow up the world, and we need you to solve it. OK. I mean, I’m on the world. What am I supposed to do otherwise? I don’t really have a huge choice there. But if I say to you, John, you have a dream of something that means a lot to you but to pursue it will put your relationship with your own family at risk. That is stakes that now I’m leaning forward in my seat and thinking, ooh.

**John:** So Craig let’s talk about another recent movie that did a great job with stakes and obviously this is a movie that had huge end of the universe kind of stakes but also had very personal stakes which was Avengers: Endgame, which I thought did a really brilliant job of blending the two. Because obviously it’s going to have these big superhero stakes. Half of civilization, half of all living things have been eliminated with a snap. And yet there were very clear personal stories that they focused on. The choices of – we see Hawkeye losing his family and sort of wanted to get his family back and so that was so important. But I thought what they did with Tony Stark and Tony Stark being reluctant to even pursue going after this solution because he didn’t want to risk this family that he’d been able to have in this intervening time. It was really smartly done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Markus and McFeely are experts at working what I would call understandable, empathizable, if that’s a term, stakes into movies where the apparent stakes are ka-boom and blech and pow, right. What they say is even something as dramatic and huge circumstantially as half of every living person dying in the universe they narrow it in. It’s like they kind of force you to tunnel into a relationship to that event through individuals.

What does this mean for me and the man I love? What does this mean for me and my brother? What does this mean for me and the sacrifices I’ve made in my own life to get to this point? All of it is – they just tunnel you into that so that the two things are enmeshed. And that is super important. I just think these broader stakes of something is going to blow up is ultimately irrelevant. There’s no Die Hard unless there is a man trying to win his wife back. It just doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

**John:** It doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I don’t care about who is in the Nakatomi Building. I want John McClane to kind of earn some redemption and get his life back. That’s, you know, what I’m hoping for.

**John:** Yeah. And even movies that have similar kinds of plot devices the nature of the stakes is so key in why they work differently. So think about comparing the first Charlie’s Angels to a Mission: Impossible movie. They both have some of the same beats and sort of plot mechanics and sort of set pieces, but the Charlie’s Angels fundamentally like will this family be torn apart. Will they be able to save their father figure character? That’s a very different dynamic than what you see in a Mission: Impossible movie.

It gets down to those really granular details about what is the relationship between these characters. What do they really want beyond just the plot wants?

**Craig:** Yeah. And this kind of fine-tuning and understanding, this is where unfortunately we do drift out of the area of craft and into the area of instinct which isn’t really teachable. But what I would say to Vera is, in just garnering what I can from your question, Vera, it seems to me that you’re wondering if you have to make them look bad to create stakes and I’m not sure that that’s ever necessary. Those two things aren’t really connected. I think if they were good people but you understood watching it, and you may have to adjust, that they were risking something really important to them to put their research out into the world. And really important it can’t just be my job. Nobody cares. You can get another job.

It has to be how someone they love or admire looks at them. Or how it might disrupt their pursuit of somebody that they love. Or how it might affect who they think they are as a human being and what their value is. It’s got to be something I can feel in my stomach, you know? Then there are stakes. And, by the way, perfectly fine to create a movie with stakes and have a character “bet it all” and lose. That sometimes is the most interesting story at all.

**John:** Yeah. I think back to Erin Brockovich which this is based on a true life story. This character intervenes in these water poisoning situations. But it was the specificity of like what was in turmoil in her life that made it such a compelling story. And Susannah Grant had to look at all the possible stories to tell and pick the one that had real stakes for that central Erin Brockovich character. And her stakes were not the stakes of the people who were drinking the contaminated water. Her stakes are personal. They’re about her relationships. They involve her kid, her boyfriend, sort of the dynamics of her life.

So I would say look at the characters, the real life people you have in this situation. Try to mine for some interesting ways that they either fit together or that in taking the actions they are doing they’re not just disrupting their own lives or risking their own – I say lives, not their physical lives but their own status or place – but is going to have repercussions on those around them. And the degree to which they understand that, those are stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. 100%. I think that that’s kind of what we’re dancing around here as we talk through all this. We’re really talking about character. I think sometimes this notion of stakes gets separated out by people who are analytic or – and by analytic I mean producers and executives who are trying to come up with something easy for us like, “Well what are the stakes?” And the truth is if the character is working, you’ll know what the stakes are. The character and the stakes should be embedded with each other. It should just be one in the same.

In the same way that the character and the story should be embedded with each other and be one in the same. And the dialogue and the character should be – character is the hub. Character is the hub of the wheel my friends. And stakes is just one more spoke emanating out of it. It’s all baked into character.

In the case of adapting real life, Vera, it’s OK to make changes in order to create some stakes. Sometimes you have to alter that but do it within the spirit of what you know really happened. And if in the spirit of what really happened there are no stakes at all, maybe it’s not a thing. But I suspect that there are some there.

**John:** I think there are. The last little bit I want to add on stakes is there’s a second kind of stakes which is not this overall story/character arch-y kind of stakes, but is very specific to a scene or sequence. And so an action sequence is the easiest way to think about that where if the character doesn’t succeed in this moment these are the consequences or the possible consequences. In those cases it is a little bit more craft, where you actually have to understand that the audience needs to be able to see what could go wrong or what the downfalls are of a mistake or a less than perfect performance in that moment.

When we had Chris McQuarrie on to talk about – on Episode 300 – to talk about the Mission: Impossible movies, he gets a lot into that. Which is basically how can this possibly end well. And to get the audience asking that question you have to make it clear what the jeopardy is. And sometimes as I’ve rewritten my own stuff or rewritten other people’s stuff it’s because it wasn’t clear in that moment, in that scene, what was the thing that could tip one way or the other.

So making sure that in those moments that is really clear to an audience.

**Craig:** Every scene is its own movie. And that means every scene has its own stakes. And all of that is connected back to a simple question: what is it you want? What do you want? Even if the scene is if that fiery gasoline trail hits that fuel tank then all those people are going to die, well, I want to stop that. It still has to come back to somebody wanting something. And ideally there’s somebody else saying, “No, I want it to explode.” And now we’ve got ourselves a scene. But even if the scene is I’m sitting down to tell someone that the nature of our relationship is changing there are stakes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s always there.

**John:** All right. Let’s move onto another question. This is from Daniel in Israel who writes, “I’ve been offered to write a TV pilot episode for a local production company. The thing I’m supposed to write the pilot around is essentially only a main plot point. Something someone might call an inciting incident. What I am lacking is the protagonist. Not his identity, but what he wants and what he needs in his life. What I’m trying to figure out is how to create this protagonist in light of this ‘inciting incident.” How would you construct a screenplay and its protagonist when all that you have to work with is this main plot point?”

So, a related question here really. Here Daniel is facing a situation where the plot of it, or at least the start of the plot is really clear. He’s trying to figure out who is the character to drive through this doorway into a story.

**Craig:** Great question, Daniel. And first of all, if we’re in a situation where somebody was just sitting around the house and thinking, “Oh my gosh, I have a great idea for a plot, but how do I come up with a character?” I would say you don’t have a great idea for a plot. Start with character.

But this kind of thing where somebody comes to you and here are your own stakes – there’s money. You’re trying to earn money as a writer.

**John:** There’s money, yes.

**Craig:** And they’re giving you an assignment. You have to figure it out. This happens all the time. I cannot tell you how many times I get a call where someone says, “We’ve got a script. It needs a little bit of work. Story works great. We just need characters. We need character work.” And I just think the story can’t be that great. If the characters aren’t good how is the story good?

So, Daniel, here is I guess the only practical advice I have for you is take your main plot point and ask this question: to whom would it be most interesting for this to apply? Because any random person can go into a situation and be confronted by a problem. But there are certain people who the nature of their lives and the position that they’re in and their past and what they want – they’re the best people to do this to. And typically it’s because this is the thing that will torture them the most. So, think of who that is and you may be off and running.

**John:** I agree. I think back to the How Would This Be a Movie segments we’ve done and they fall into two camps. There’s ones that have a really fascinating character and then you have to figure out like how would you actually build a story around that character. The other ones are the sort of plot machines. Oh, that is a really crazy thing that happened in the real world and you have to then approach it with like, OK, who is the character that should really be driving that story. So, it might be a real life event and there’s myriad characters around it, but you have to figure out whose point of view is actually the interesting point of view.

And I think Craig nailed it. It’s the character for whom the story is especially suited. Either because they are perfect for it, like they are the one person who could be the expert in the situation, or more often and more interestingly the person who is the least well-equipped to be doing this and is out of their element. And that is going to give you more conflict, more comedy if you’re going for comedy. It’s going to be the person who is relatable to the audience because they’re probably a good proxy for the audience in that they don’t have the information or the expertise to be grappling with this situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s call it the A side of things. In movies we talk about the A side and the B side. It’s sort of like an editorial term. Like the stuff that happens before, the stuff that happens after. So that’s the A side of it. And then the B side of it is for whom would the resolution of this plot point be the most interesting and satisfying? Think about it from forward and backward and you just might have yourself a solution there.

All right, let’s move along to Alex from New York, shall we?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** All right. Alice writes, “I’m in a script writing class and I’m trying to pitch a story where there is no three-act structure. My professor responded by saying that for this class we can only make something that follows the structure. She then pulled out a book with the title How to Write a Great Screenplay.” [laughs]

“And said our script had to contain the six key moments. Of course there are many great movies that follow the three-act structure, but I also know that many of my favorite movies don’t – Boyhood, Nashville, A Serious Man come to mind. I guess my question is do you need a three-act structure to write a great movie or is this a sign that I should drop out of this overpriced school?” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I love people who answer their own questions. Obviously the answer Alice is you’re not in a very good screenwriting program. But I want to sort of move past that moment to talk about this idea of how you teach writing. Because it occurred to me this last week, my daughter for her English class has to write these five-paragraph essays. And Craig you remember these five-paragraph essays.

**Craig:** I sure do.

**John:** They have to have–

**Craig:** Thesis.

**John:** The thesis and then you have to–

**Craig:** The examples.

**John:** Exactly. Each paragraph has to be about a different thing of those things and has to summarize and have the evidence within them and then a conclusion. And I find it just a torturous form. And I want to push back against it, and yet I do feel like it’s important that she learn how to write this ridiculous form now so that she understands what it is and will hopefully never have to write it quite the same way again.

A thesis is important. A thesis, you know, a central idea behind which all of your essay hangs together – that’s important. And for screenplays an understanding of a three-act structure I think is important. That sense that movies do have beginnings, middles, and ends. And there is a natural flow through which you move through story.

But I don’t want to be as an adult be forced to pay money to take a class where someone holds up a terrible screenwriting book and says that you have to follow this template.

**Craig:** Someone has written a book How to Write a Great Screenplay. I’m going to go out on a limb here. Because I have not heard of this book. Therefore my conclusion, this is just supposition, is that the individual who has written the book How to Write a Great Screenplay has not written a great screenplay. What else do you need to know?

Now, when it comes to surviving classes and things like that, you can take any movie and slap a three-act structure on it. If you put a gun in my mouth and say, A Serious Man, divvy that up into three acts. I’ll do it for you. No problem.

**John:** Totally. Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s also a sign that it’s useless. It is a very fundamental thing. It’s a little bit like in math class when you were moving ahead and your teacher said, “No, sorry. You need to show all your work. You need to show me the 15 plus 24 equals, carry, the whole thing.” Can’t I just do it in my head? “No.” OK, fine. So that’s what it is. It’s a little remedial.

Our script had to contain the six key moments. Hey, Alice from New York, I don’t know what those are. John, do you know what those are?

**John:** I don’t know what they are.

**Craig:** Well, we’re doing all right. [laughs] You got Aladdin out. I got Chernobyl running. Things are going OK. Somehow we made it without not only reading How to Write a Great Screenplay. We’ve never even heard of it.

**John:** So, here’s what I will try to defend about this idea about teaching people this template-y thing. if the teacher were requiring you to just do an outline, like a one or two-page outline that talked about your story in those beats or like come up with a new story and make it fit those beats, that I could see being a valuable exercise because it might get you to think about whatever these elements are I suspect they are, you know, what is that transition between the first act and second act, which real life screenwriters do talk about. Where you’re really – you’re not in Kansas anymore moment. Where a character has crossed a threshold into a new part of the story. That does tend to happen in most places.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** One of these other elements could be kind of a reversal where the thing that looks like it was close is now actually much further away. That things have gotten much worse. That is probably a meaningful beat. And so if it was an outline thing, but to make you write and entire 100-page screenplay following this template I don’t think is a fair thing to ask.

**Craig:** No. Perfectly fine to suggest that this is how beginners can learn. This is an intro to screenwriting. But if somebody like you says, “Listen, as a paying customer of this institution I would like to attempt to do it this way.” Why in god’s name would they tell you no? Listen, do it that way. And if it stinks, and by the way, higher probability it will stink, because you’re trying something – you’re doing like a degree of difficulty dive here that’s different than the other dives – then people will tell you it stunk and you’ll learn something and you’ll move on. It doesn’t mean that three acts are going to save you from stinking, nor does it mean that not three acts condemns you to stinking. It’s just part of the learning process.

But I would say to your professor stop that. Just cut it out. That’s just bizarrely pedantic.

**John:** I agree. Chris writes, “I recently swapped scripts with a writer friend. Instead of offering me story notes he called out formatting ‘errors’ in my first couple pages such as how I bold slug lines, reference a song, italicize dialogue for emphasis instead of underlining, etc. I explained how I was under the impression that all these things were stylistic choices rather than hard and fast rules. That a writer should use anything to better paint a movie in the reader’s mind.

“As an underwriter he argued that script formatting must be much tighter so as not to give anyone reading it a reason to throw it away. Is this true or is my friend simply being overly nitpicky on things that are really a writer’s choice? I’ve read dozens of screenplays at this point and feel no two really format exactly the same way.”

Craig, where are you at?

**Craig:** This is guy is swapping with his friend. You know who likes that?

**John:** That guy, yes. That guy.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig. So we’re talking about swapping, huh Chris? You going to swap?

**John:** Apparently they’re talking.

**Craig:** Get out of here, Sexy Craig. You can’t answer this question. Angry Craig can answer this question. Umbrage Craig is here. How many times do we have to kill this? This zombie won’t – we shoot it in the brain. We cut off its head. We light its heart on fire. What do we need to do to stop this from happening, John? I’m at my wit’s end. What do we do?

**John:** I don’t know. So I feel like a lot of people do listen to the show, but I’m also aware when people like Chris writes in that not everyone listens to the show.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** There are a few people who don’t listen to the show, although I’ll say that I had some meetings this past week and I was just surprised like folks who aren’t writers who listen to the show. So shout out to those folks who are not writers who listen to the show.

But, yeah, I don’t know how we’re going to win them over. I think all we can hope to do is to our listeners remind them that, listen, the standard screenplay formatting is helpful. It’s helpful because it creates an expectation about how stuff is supposed to look and if you go wildly off of it we are going to wonder does this person really know what they’re doing. Even as we do the Three Page Challenges when we see things that are like that’s not how it’s done we will comment on that because it is useful because it can slow a reader. It gives a reader an excuse for putting it aside.

I don’t think that’s what you were doing, Chris. The things you were singling out are reasonable choices. Some bold slug lines. I like to bold slug lines. I didn’t always, but now I do. So I use italics fairly liberally. It’s OK.

I think we just need to always remind folks that the standards are there because they’re helpful and they’re sort of standard but they’re not hard fast rules. And anyone who tells you otherwise probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just stop giving your friends scripts. They’re useless. Sorry. Your friend is useless. I don’t know how else to put it. I mean–

**John:** Also, your friend is useless because your friend did not give you constructive notes about the actual story.

**Craig:** Exactly. Correct. All they did was demand that you conform to a system that they insist is real but I can assure you is utter nonsense. Nonsense. That’s what they did. You were looking for advice on the story, the characters, the theme, the dialogue, and they came back and said here are a bunch of things you’re doing that are incorrect factually.

And the only person that was doing something factually incorrect is your friend, who maybe shouldn’t be your friend anymore. Because, I’m sorry, I bold slug lines. And like you, John, used to not bold slug lines. I reference songs all the time. I italicize dialogue for emphasis all the time. I also underline. I use We See. I do all these stupid things.

And your friend, I guarantee you, is going to say, “By the way I heard on Scriptnotes that they were bagging on me, but you know what? They only say that because they’re successful. But if you’re not them then…” this is how he sounds by the way. “And then you’re going to send your script to readers. They’re going to throw it out. If they see that you italicize dialogue they’re going to throw it out.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. And all I can say is no. No, I’ve been doing it this way since I began when I was nobody. Nobody cared. You know what they cared about? Oh my god, I like a script finally. This month of just sifting through one desperate, soul-crushing failure of a screenplay after another and finally something showed up that was, I don’t know, at least mediocre. It made their day. [laughs] That’s all they care about it. That’s it. They don’t care about the rest of this. For the love of god.

**John:** So I’ll say if people don’t trust my authority as a screenwriter on this, let me go back to 20 years to when I was a professional reader. My job was to read screenplays. And I would read two a day and I would write up coverage on them. So I read 200 screenplays. And it was my job to be that reader who passed things up or said no to things. And not once – not once in 200 scripts – did I ever single out for formatting. Oh, it’s a really good story but warning executives it’s not formatted exactly the way you’d want.

No one cares about that. If you’ve never seen coverage – it’s only pedants who say this.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, you know what? John, that – the guy that I was just listening to there, I’m going to call that, that’s Victory John.

**John:** Victory John.

**Craig:** Victory John. He knows when he walks into a room victory is assured. Victory John was great there. Nice work Victory John.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Chris, get rid of your friend.

**John:** Craig, let’s take one last question. Can you read Garrett for us?

**Craig:** Absolutely. Garrett asks, oh god, do we have to do this one?

**John:** I think we can – it actually goes into an interesting place.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Fine. Garrett asks, “So many fans are furious about the conclusion of Game of Thrones. I am nowhere near dealing with this problem personally, but how do writers surprise insatiate rabid fans who spend all their time figuring out where a series or movie will go? It seems as though super fans will be disappointed whether the ending is too predictable or completely out of left field.”

All right, John, dig in.

**John:** Garrett, I think you are correct. Again, I like people who ask a question and then answer the question within their question. There was no way to land that plane that would keep everybody happy. Some people were really upset by how it ended. Some people signed a petition to redo the whole season. That ain’t helpful. That’s not going to happen.

We’re in this weird time where a fan’s ownership of a piece of material and sort of their sense that the culture belongs to them is really challenging and somewhat problematic. As a person who loves the show I was excited to see the show do what the show wanted to do. And I was excited that the creators got to do what they wanted to do. But that’s not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Craig, how do you resolve Garrett’s question?

**Craig:** I think that the shocking part of it all is that it is impossible to get that angry about an episode of television unless you love that episode or that series. You love it. And the only way you can love it is if the people who made that episode made what you love.

This isn’t a case where some other showrunner came along and took it over and everybody goes, nah, they don’t have the magic. That’s fine. I get that. But in this case Dan and Dave who made this thing you loved, not for one episode or one season, but for years, and who gave up years, a decade of their life, while their children were being born and raised, moving back and forth between Los Angeles and Ireland over and over and over. Doing all of these things and throwing their heart and soul into all of this and keeping a massive cast together and a storyline that involved god knows how many characters. I wish I could impress upon people how many decisions are required to make one episode of television. It is insane.

And they did it into the 70s of episodes of television and they did it in the highest level. And the very same creative ambition and bravery that led them to this material in the first place and allowed them to do it in such a remarkable way in the first place is the very same creative bravery and ambition that led them to deliver an ending that they thought was right.

And if you don’t like it, that’s OK.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But why – the part that blows my mind, and this is where I agree with you Garrett, it’s a huge problem – is why people would suddenly say things like they’re bad writers. How dare you. How dare you. Not on the level of being insulting to Dan to Dave. They’re geniuses and they’re doing just fine. How dare you insult logic in such a crass and outrageous manner. To say that they are bad writers because they didn’t write a good episode of a show we love because they’re good writers.

I mean, get help. Listen, I get it. You can be super angry in an episode. I’ve seen episodes of things of shows that I love where I watch the episode and said I don’t like this. I don’t like the choices they made. But what I would never do is say because they’re bad writers.

I’m sorry, no one is going to bat 1,000. How about be happy for the good times and the joy they brought you, which is a decade of joy. Can’t we celebrate that? It just bums me out.

**John:** I don’t know who proposed this, but someone was pitching that HBO should film a reality show, sort of like a Project Greenlight, where they bring together eight of the biggest petition signers about wanting to do a new season and get them all together to write a new final season. And just film the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** And what that process is like. Because that would be–

**Craig:** What a cruel, cruel joke to play.

**John:** That would be pretty amazing.

**Craig:** And I do. I see things where people say, “I figured it out. Here’s what they should have done.” And they’ll stick it somewhere and then people go like, “Yeah, amazing.” And I’m reading and I’m like that would have been the stupidest, lamest, who cares episode of nonsense in history.

Remember, again, they are somewhat victims of their own success. This is a show where people would spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince each other that Bran was really the Night King. And that level of engagement is amazing. You don’t get to it if the people making the show haven’t done an incredible job. And they did for so long. And to turn your back on them because you didn’t like the last – well, they betrayed us. No. No, you betrayed them. You betrayed them. You bought into that show. You loved it. You cared about it. You told them how great they were. Because they were. And then the minute they do something that’s slightly a – I mean, oh my god, people lost their minds because Jon Snow didn’t hug his dog, sorry, direwolf. Well, guess what? He does later.

And then I hope people go, oh, oh, if he had hugged him there then this hug wouldn’t have meant as much. Yes. Have a little faith.

**John:** That’s probably true.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’d probably [cut] myself – I’m going to get petitions now to have my head chopped off. I don’t care.

**John:** Back in Episode 296 I sat down with Damon Lindelof. So we talked through Lost.

**Craig:** Lost. Sure.

**John:** We also talked through The Leftovers. And interesting to compare the response to those two endings because they’re both kind of big puzzle box shows and people were incredibly frustrated by the ending of Lost. People seemed to generally love the ending of The Leftovers. And I do wonder if some of it was expectation management. I felt like on The Leftovers Damon did a very good job from season one saying do not expect that you are going to have one answer that will completely resolve everything about what happened and why it happened. That will not come. And I think that softened the – conditioned things a little bit better. And so that may be one of the things that showrunners unfortunately now have to think about is not only how do I get this plane up in the air but how do I land this plane in a way that is going to – basically how do I tell everybody right while the plane is going up where I expect to land the plane and condition them for what they’re going to be getting into.

**Craig:** It’s hard to stop, especially when the joy of something is in the process of it. I mean, I’m a Game of Thrones fan. I’ve seen every minute of every episode of Game of Thrones. Including every minute of an episode that no one else has ever seen. And I’ve loved the journey. And to me the joy was the process. It was the unfolding of this story over time and the collision of characters and things.

Ending is essentially counter to the purpose of the entire venture. So, of course people are going to be a bit confused or put off by some aspects of it because it goes against the DNA of what that show is. That show, the joy of it, is in that it doesn’t end. The world gets bigger and crazier and wilder as things smash together and the stakes grow higher. That’s the joy.

So, I mean, guys, it’s almost as if you would have preferred that, I don’t know, a piano had fallen on them and there was no final season. Is that what you really want? I shouldn’t have asked that question. Now there’s going to be a petition to drop a piano on them.

**John:** So, I would say if you are considering writing into me and Craig and telling us why we’re wrong, I would urge you to first listen to Episode 235. That is the one where Benioff and Weiss came on our show at our benefit for Hollywood Heart. They were gracious to fill in for Lawrence Kasdan when he could not make it. And they talked about the making of Game of Thrones and Craig’s involvement in that early pilot process. And how this is mostly Craig’s fault.

**Craig:** Like most things.

**John:** Actually, you’re somewhat to blame, Craig. Because if you had not intervened when you had intervened maybe Game of Thrones wouldn’t have become a thing and then we wouldn’t have been frustrated by the events of the end of the last season.

**Craig:** That’s such a – you know what, John? There you go. You want to save yourself disappointment folks, stop watching things. Stop falling in love with things. Stop opening your heart to things because it’s much better to have never loved than to have loved and lost. Is that what you are saying? I’m sorry. No one can deliver it perfectly. And if you point me to something and say, “Well they did it perfectly,” I’m going to say to you no they didn’t. Because they didn’t. There’s no way to do it perfectly. You just do it.

And years later people will come – I swear to you people will come back to this years later and say, “Well actually, here’s a think piece about why it’s brilliant.” That’s just how our culture works. Inevitably.

**John:** Yep. Those are the stakes of making a high stakes show.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Segue Man, that’s beautiful.

**John:** Got to bring it all back around. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book I read this last week which I really enjoyed. It’s by Ryan North. It’s called How to Invent Everything. And the premise of the book is that you are a time traveler, whose rental time travel machine, has broken and this is the manual that comes in the little machine. And so, OK, you’re stranded in the past. Here’s how you have to invent all the things that get you back up to modern civilization.

So it goes down from basics of agriculture to metalsmithing to inventing logic. It’s just a very comprehensive guide to how you would get back up to as close as you can do modern day civilization if you were to be stranded in prehistoric times.

**Craig:** Before being eaten.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That is a very smart idea for a book. I like that. My One Cool Thing is also some reading material, but as you know big puzzle buy over here. So there’s a magazine. It’s an online magazine called PANDA Magazine which is short for P and A which is short for Puzzles and Answers. It is published by a gentleman named Foggy Brume. That is his real name.

**John:** I would not buy that as a character’s name. No–

**Craig:** It’s his real name.

**John:** I reject the premise of Foggy Brume.

**Craig:** Foggy Brume. Very nice guy. I’ve had the joy of puzzling with him myself a few times. And he puts out a monthly edition. And I think this is true frequently he does these big puzzle boats once a year where it’s like a big mega puzzle to do. And then each issue has a little sort of mini mega puzzle where you solve, in this case in this month’s issue there are 12 puzzles that are difficult and each one gives you an answer that you plug into one big puzzle to get a big answer. PANDAMagazine.com is where you can find this if you’re big into that sort of thing. It’s a good challenge.

Each magazine comes with a whole bunch of puzzles where he provides the answers so you’re not miserable. And then there are some that are more of like a contest where he will eventually publish the answers once the submission date comes and goes. So, PANDA Magazine. Foggy Brume. A good subscription for the puzzler in your life.

**John:** I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli who also wrote our outro this week in the style of Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Who did your Chernobyl music? It’s a woman with a hard to pronounce name.

**Craig:** So her name is Hildur, well I’m going to pronounce it like an American. She is Icelandic. So the cheap pronunciation is Hildur Gudnadottir. In fact it is like Gudnadottir. I can’t do it because I’m not Icelandic and I think Icelandic is the hardest language in the world to learn and speak or something. It’s hard.

She is brilliant. You’re also going to be able to hear her work in Todd Phillips upcoming movie Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So she’s amazing. And, good news, I believe that – so HBO has confirmed they are releasing her original soundtrack for Chernobyl for download and other versions of it. And I think it’s coming May 31. I think that’s when it will be available. I believe given the quality of the work she did on Chernobyl that that original soundtrack, that original score, is going to become a staple in editing bays.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s going to be one of those temp scores that’s going to confound other composers for years to come I hope. Because it’s unique.

**John:** Nice. If you have an outro you’d like us to play you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. They go up about a week after the episode has aired.

Some folks have started to do recaps and discussion on Reddit so you can head over there and see what people are talking about for this episode.

You can find the back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons in the store at johnaugust.com.

You may also want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to see which episodes listeners recommend most.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

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

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John August: Hey this is John. Today’s episode has some strong language – barely strong language, but if you’re in the car with your kids this is that warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Hey baseball fans, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 394 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be talking about how to create a hero the audience is rooting for even while establishing that character must change. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about conflicting notes, meet and greets, and true life stories. To help us sort through all of this we welcome back Mari Heller. She joined us all the way back in Episode 212 when she had just written and directed Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Since then she has directed the Oscar-nominated Can You Ever Forgive Me? and the upcoming Mr. Rogers feature starring Tom Hanks. Welcome back Marielle Heller.

Marielle Heller: Yay. Thank you. Back to my favorite podcast.

Craig: Back to your favorite, the one and only, the greatest.

Marielle: But unlike you I listen to podcasts, so it actually means something that I said that.

Craig: It actually does mean something. I know that you listen to this and it actually makes me feel very warm and fuzzy. And it’s been so much fun to have you be part of our little podcast family because we get to watch you do these incredible things. And now they’re like throwing Oscar nominations around and people are winning Oscars. I mean, you won a guy an Oscar. That’s how I like to think of it.

Marielle: I don’t think we won any though.

Craig: Richard Grant didn’t win an Oscar?

Marielle: No. He did win an Indie Spirit.

Craig: He won an Indie Spirit!

John: That is an Oscar.

Marielle: And they got nominated for BAFTAs, Oscars, Indie Spirits, I mean, everything. Yeah.

Craig: I don’t watch the Oscars.

Marielle: Do you really not? That’s kind of great.

John: We were playing D&D during the Oscars.

Marielle: Good for you.

Craig: I don’t really understand anything about awards, but I did know that a lot of people got nominated, obviously our beloved Melissa McCarthy.

Marielle: And Melissa, I know.

Craig: The greatest.

John: We’ve all made movies with Melissa McCarthy.

Marielle: That’s so weird. Maybe we should change the title of this episode to be something about Melissa McCarthy.

Craig: We love you Melissa McCarthy.

Marielle: One degree of Melissa McCarthy.

John: Something about Melissa McCarthy is now the title of this episode.

Marielle: Great.

Craig: There’s something about Melissa McCarthy. Well, anyway, it’s just been amazing to watch how you’ve kind of grown. And now you’re making movies with Tom Hanks.

Marielle: Crazy.

John: And you often direct commercials. That’s good.

Marielle: I do sometimes. Yeah. I know.

Craig: No, you’re big time. Basically what we’re saying is you’re big time.

Marielle: How did that happen? I don’t know. I guess. It doesn’t feel like it though, right.

John: Here’s how I think it happened.

Craig: You never know, right? Because actually you are not big time. The world perceives you as big time. But you’re still a seven-year-old girl.

Marielle: Exactly. It doesn’t make any sense in your own brain when that’s happening.

Craig: Never. Yeah.

Marielle: I’ll always feel like an outcast. It’s just part of–

Craig: You are.

Marielle: Part of my DNA. I’ll never feel like I am part of Hollywood in any way.

John: Then you’re truly a writer-director.

Marielle: Exactly. [laughs]

Craig: Well it’s so good to have her back.

John: Before we get started on your topic, which you actually suggested this topic which is a great topic, there’s a little bit of news to get through. So by the time you’re hearing this we’ll already know the results of the vote on the code of conduct.

Craig: Ooh, can I throw out a prediction?

John: Throw out your prediction.

Craig: It’s going to pass.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m going to say it is going to be a 93% yes.

John: All right. So the people who are listening to this podcast will know whether you’re correct or not. I have no idea what the percentage is going to be.

Marielle: I voted on the plane yesterday.

John: Congratulations. Thank you for doing that.

Craig: Thank you for voting. That’s the most important thing. Please, oh, I would exhort people to vote. But that’s in the past.

John: It’s already in the past.

Craig: Oh my god.

John: So, what happens this week as you’re listening to this, well, we are negotiating and we’re going to try to reach a settlement. But what happens the week after that is really an open question. But it’s something we’ll talk about on the show if we get to that point.

Craig: I’m sure we will.

Marielle: You guys are so helpful the way you talk about it on the show though. I think a lot of us look to the show to help us understand some of these issues, especially when our lives are so busy and it’s hard to follow everything.

Craig: That’s good to hear. And, you know, you tweeted the link to the WGA, but it may be the first WGA video that I’ve ever thought was well done. Literally the first. I have to presume you had something to do with it.

John: I had nothing to do with that video whatsoever.

Craig: I don’t believe you.

John: It’s a fantastic video. There’s a video about conflict of interest. We’ll put that in the show notes so you can see it.

Craig: It works. It reminded me of those videos that explain why vaccinations are important.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Helpful. I was at a couple of the big WGA meetings this past week and in one of the meetings a young writer stood up and asked a question. And the point of it was really how much is she allowed to do by herself, like without an agent. And I just wanted to talk about that for a second because I don’t we’ve necessarily talked about the entrepreneurial aspect of your career. You know, obviously at the very start before you have an agent that becomes important, but it doesn’t stop. And so what I urged her to do is to – basic things like write down the names of everyone you’re meeting with, all the people you’re going to talk to. You can call those people directly. You can email those people directly. You don’t have to do everything through your agent.

Craig, what other advice would you have for writers thinking about themselves entrepreneurially especially if they find themselves without an agent in the next few weeks?

Craig: Well the first thing to recognize is that there’s absolutely nothing that an agent is allowed to do that you’re not allowed to do. There’s no legal thing there. It’s the other way around. Agents are limited in what they can do. But on your own behalf you can do whatever you want.

Ideally, if you have an agent you almost certainly have an attorney. At a minimum. If you have a manager then that’s a different sort of thing and they will keep doing what they do. But if you don’t, don’t necessarily feel the need to run out and get one. If you have an attorney who can at least say, all right, I can kind of field or at least handle the negotiation part of things so you don’t have to worry about that. And just sit down right now, make a list of all the people that you would wish your agent would contact and lobby on your behalf. And if something should come to pass where you don’t have that agent, I would agree that you will probably be better served by yourself in that regard than the agent will serve you, partly because of the very problem that we are tackling right now.

John: Yeah. Mari, how much are informal networks helpful to you? As you’re putting together a movie, obviously you’re dealing with agents, you’re dealing with managers and stuff, but how much is it you reaching out to folks?

Marielle: Huge. Hugely. I mean, Alexander Skarsgård was in my first movie because I actually – I had been trying to get him the script through the normal channels. I had been getting nowhere, because nobody wants to give their client a script for a movie that has no money. And then I saw in an US Weekly that he was friends with Jack McBrayer who I am friends with. And I called Jack and said I’ve been trying to get this script to Alex, can you help me get it to him. And the next day I got a call from Alex.

Like it all happened because of, you know, little circles and connections. And it continues to be like that. Always. I mean, it helps to be able to get to people through their agents as well. But often I find myself trying to go rogue.

Craig: Yeah. Well because the agency method is an institutionalized thing. They represent a thousand people. They have to handle outcomes in that context. So they call, they get an official no, it is over. The no has been received. Moving on.

But we don’t do that for ourselves. We’re like, OK, who said no. Why did they say no? Let me go around that person.

Marielle: And the number of times I’ve talked to actors and I’ve said did you ever get that script and they say, oh no.

Craig: By the way, I don’t get theirs.

Marielle: I don’t either. As a director I don’t either.

Craig: They’ll say to me, oh you know, we were hoping that you write this thing but we heard you were busy. What thing? What?

John: Ha.

Marielle: Me too.

Craig: And then when I hear about it I’m like oh yeah, no, I was busy. [laughs]

Marielle: Yeah. My agents were protecting me.

Craig: Pretty much.

John: I was reminded about all of this this last week because we were gathering names, we gathered like 770 names of showrunners and high profile screenwriters, Marielle Heller.

Marielle: And Jorma Taccone both signed.

John: And Craig Mazin.

Craig: The Jorma.

John: And as we were doing that it was interesting because we couldn’t go to agents to say like, hey, we’re trying to get to this person. We had to figure it out ourselves. And so you recognize like, oh, the informal networks you have are really important. And so we’re emailing like who has Aaron Sorkin’s email address? Who knows Aaron Sorkin? And you eventually find the person who knows Aaron Sorkin and Aaron Sorkin signs the list.

Marielle: I got an email from Jorma from you, but he passed it on to me saying we should all sign this thing. It was just going around.

Craig: It’s just going around like a bad penny.

John: Yep.

Craig: Keeps turning up. But a lot of people did sign it. A lot of people are going to vote yes.

Marielle: Do you want to tell Aaron Sorkin’s email address on the air right now? Sure.

John: What if it was aaron.sorkin@gmail.com? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Craig: It probably is.

Marielle: It probably is.

Craig: I think you might have just done it. It’s actually probably like Imamazing@hotmail.com.

Marielle: Also, you know, all the Gmail addresses it doesn’t matter if there’s a dot or a dash, it’s all the same. So it’s aaron.sorkin or aaron-sorkin. Oh, you didn’t know that?

Craig: What?

John: In Gmail addresses the periods don’t matter at all.

Craig: My mind is blown.

Marielle: The periods don’t matter. Yeah.

Craig: They just strip them out.

Marielle: Which is so smart.

Craig: It is. Because then you don’t get confused between mariheller and mari.heller.

Marielle: Exactly.

Craig: Whoa. I’m freaking out.

Marielle: It’s weird.

John: Strange.

Craig: John, I have an amazing idea.

John: Tell me.

Craig: OK. The Writers Guild should create a list or some sort of system where if a writer wants to be staffed and the agents are out of the picture they can contact the guild through some kind of system and then there would be showrunners on the other end of that system who would then be able to see and get submissions. Wouldn’t that be an amazing idea?

John: That would be an amazing idea that is called the Staffing Submission System.

Craig: Wait, it’s happened?

John: It’s actually happening. So it’s rolling out. It’s a limited thing. I don’t want to sort of oversell it, but it’s a thing that’s out there for WGA members East and West to submit on shows.

Craig: All right. That’s exciting.

Marielle: That’s a really good idea.

Craig: It is. If it works.

John: If it works.

Craig: Like I always remain my, I have to be guild skeptic. And this is exactly the kind of thing that I could see them just fumbling. But lately, I got to say, just from that video alone, something is going on over there. I feel like it’s a John August influence.

Marielle: But I do think we’re at a time right where the gatekeeper thing is being broken down. And that is one more step toward the gatekeeper kind of being dissolved and it being direct-direct, artist-to-artist contact, which is great.

John: Julie Plec, a former guest who came to our live show, for staffing for her new show she went on Twitter saying like, “Listen, I need to find new writers. And so send me the writers you think are fantastic.” And so she went out to Twitter and she found some people off that. So it happens.

Marielle: That seems dangerous, but.

Craig: Well, exactly.

Marielle: For murderers and stuff like that.

Craig: Murderers–

Marielle: On Twitter that’s what I think of.

Craig: Always dangerous.

Marielle: I’m scared of Twitter.

Craig: Yeah, if you’re a showrunner the threat is that you will be, you know, just subsumed by a tidal wave of scripts. And I understand that. Even if you were to limit it just to people in the WGA my guess is there’s a good 4,000 people with scripts that would like to be on, and then name a show.

John: So the system limits people to apply into three shows, submitting to three shows.

Marielle: Oh that’s actually really good.

Craig: OK, cool.

John: Pick the shows that you think you’re actually appropriate for.

Craig: God, I hope they all pick the same show.

John: That would be amazing. [laughs]

Craig: I really want them to. What do you think that show would be?

John: Chicago Fire.

Craig: Chicago Fire.

John: 100% Chicago Fire.

Craig: No question. Oh, let’s do it to Derek. Let’s see if we can. It would be lovely.

John: Oh, it would be so good.

Craig: Just truckfuls of scripts showing up. Beep. Beep. Beep.

John: My favorite ideas for episodes are ones where the guest has an idea for an episode and says why don’t you do an episode about this and we can bring in a guest to do the episode.

Craig: Such a smart idea, too.

John: Such a smart idea. Mari, tell us about what you emailed us and what we can talk about today.

Marielle: Well, I feel like we talk a lot about how you begin a script. You guys obviously do your Three Page Challenges. What are the first five pages of a script? How do you set up a world? How do you set up what type of movie you’re going to tell? What are the rules? All of those things. And I’ve noticed in particularly the edit process of making movies that there is a script issue that can come up which is not how you set up your world but how do you introduce your main character who is going to be your hero who has a major journey that they have to go on, so you can’t meet them at a point in their life where everything is going great and they’re perfectly mentally healthy or whatever it is.

And how do you set them up as a person with problems but a person you can engage with emotionally, that you feel connected to, and that you’re rooting for? And it’s different than the likeable question that comes up a lot.

Craig: Correct.

Marielle: Which is the note we tend to get about the beginning of a movie or the beginning of an introduction of a character is how do we make this person likeable. And I think that that note has come around because of this actual bigger question which is how do we set up a new character that the audience has never met before in a way that is engaging and makes you root for them and makes you connected to them in your gut and in your heart?

And I dealt with it in different ways with Diary and with Can You Ever Forgive Me? And it was such a struggle with Can You Ever Forgive Me? that figuring that out. It finally dawned on me like this is a script problem and it was a problem that I handled in the script phase for Diary and it wasn’t a problem therefore in the edit. And I didn’t handle it in the script phase with Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Craig: Ah-ha.

Marielle: So then I had to solve it in the edit, which is much harder.

Craig: Way harder.

Marielle: Yeah. So I just thought it was a good idea to talk about because it’s something I keep thinking about recently.

John: It’s a fantastic idea. It’s an Oscar-winning idea in terms of–

Craig: At least a nomination.

Marielle: All my ideas are.

John: At least a BAFTA. An Indie Spirit. It’s an Indie Spirit–

Craig: Full on BAFTA.

Marielle: Indie Spirit winner, Oscar-nominated idea.

Craig: Correct.

John: Scriptnotes episode idea. So, a couple things that you’re talking about here is what is the author’s intent, like what does the movie need to do with this character and what is the audience’s first interaction with this character? And how do you line them up in a way that the audience’s first encounter with this character is positive. That they are curious and engaged. They understand the character well enough that they’re willing to go along with them, but also they want to know more. How do you set it up so that you have the runway that you need to get them through to the end of the story?

Marielle: Right. Because I think the tendency with notes around this is people tend to say, “I just want her to be more likeable in the beginning and I want her to be easier to stomach,” which I don’t think actually is the answer.

Craig: It is not.

Marielle: Because there’s a wonderful way that you can show somebody with a lot of problems but that you have to find a way to engage.

Craig: Yeah. If you mess up this little balance in the beginning the character will be alienating. It’s a turn-off, right? So it’s not a question about likeability. I agree with you. It’s really more of a question of the ability to inspire some kind of empathy in the audience.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: So that’s the one side of the misbalance is that. The other side of the misbalance is they’re boring, because they’re just good. And this entire movie is maybe predicated on the fact that they’re difficult people.

Marielle: Right. With Can You Ever Forgive Me? that was definitely the case.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: Right. So I believe that there is a theory of behavior that people bring with them into a movie theater. And the theory of behavior is if somebody is behaving monstrously, not in a criminal way but more in a way that violates social norms that underneath that surely there is some kind of understandable, empathizable with pain. And if you can show me, even if you don’t explain what it is, if you just show me that you know it’s there and you give me a tiny little glimmer of it, just a tiny peep, then I will be OK.

But if you don’t, I mean, we had the same thing with Identity Thief with Melissa’s character, too. It was the same thing. Show me one little peep and then I’ll be OK.

Marielle: With Diary I kind of had this chance to work this out because I did it as a play. And I got to realize when the audience connected to the character and when they didn’t. And the book started with her immediately, her first confession of I had sex with this guy and it’s my mother’s boyfriend, it goes right into it. And what I realized was in order for the audience to engage and go on this journey they first had to meet her and her philosophy of the world without knowing that little piece of information.

So, I wrote this scene where she’s walking through the park in San Francisco and we literally get to see the world through her eyes. She says, “I had sex today. Holy shit.” And you don’t know who it is with, but you see she’s really excited about it. And then you watch her looking around at kids smoking weed, and there’s like smoke wafting up around a cute boy, and a woman jogs by with big boobs and she imagines animated stars on her boobs and she kind of giggles to herself. And you get to see this creative mind at work. And you get to see this character who the way she sees the world is sort of infectious. You’re like she’s raging with hormones. She’s seeing the world through a sexual lens, but innocently sexual also. And she’s got something going on inside of her that’s bubbling out. And you fall in love with her before she tells you, oh by the way, the person I had sex with was my mother’s boyfriend.

Craig: Well, that’s so smart because I remember watching that and having a feeling – and I don’t know if this is what you intended or not – but when I watched it the feeling I had was worry for how vulnerable she was.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: Because that is actually – she was “irrationally exuberant,” to quote Alan Greenspan. That is not the way you should be feeling of those things. But we have all felt it.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: Particularly the first time after you have sex, you’re like this is it. I’ve stared into the eye of god.

Marielle: Right. She’s like walking around wide open.

Craig: Wide open.

Marielle: Her whole self has been opened up and she’s walking around totally vulnerable.

Craig: And then when she tells you what she did, you already know that her heart is going to get stomped on. And so somebody that’s done something, yeah, if you start with just like meh, whatever.

Marielle: Right. And I didn’t really realize at the time, but it developed over years of realizing what the audience needed in order to be engaged in the story. And I didn’t realize how hard that is to do until I was in the edit room with Can You Ever Forgive Me? and I realized – I did a lot of work on the script of Can You Ever Forgive Me? but I actually barely touched the first act. I kind of felt like I’d never done anything crime related before and I sort of trusted that I didn’t know how to set that up. And this must be setting it up right because I don’t really know to set it up, not realizing from a character point of view we’re actually not quite setting up what we need to set up to engage with this character. We’re pushing the audience away a little bit. And how can we get on her side? Because I actually do love this character. I think she’s wonderful and amazing. So how can we give the audience enough?

John: Well let’s talk some techniques because you describe it in Teenage Girl about you literally are showing her POV. So you are showing her POV on things and letting the audience know that this is from her POV and this is how she sees the world. And so once we are seeing what she’s seeing then we’re kind of in her shoes and that’s a very helpful technique. So by literally setting her up as the focus of the universe and the lens through which we’re going to experience the entire story.

Marielle: Yeah. And I think if you can set up what makes that person special. The way they see the world and how that is something unique and special, which Lee Israel, the Melissa McCarthy character in Can You Ever Forgive Me? also had a very special lens through which to see the world, which is really jaded, and funny, and dry, and self-involved, but enjoyable. And so we had to open it up enough so that you can see the way she was experiencing the world and be able to laugh with her, not just at her.

It’s also a matter of giving I think that character enough power that you’re not terrified for them the whole time. Like it’s this balance, right? Because you want to show – often you want to show your protagonist in a position where their life is going badly. You know, I think about Breaking Bad. You want to see the ways in which the world is not treating them well. But how do you do that in way but you also see where their power does lie when they had it, or you see their struggle for power, or whatever it is, but you don’t see them so deflated that you can’t feel like there’s any fight left or something.

Craig: Right. Well, I think sometimes people that – we’ll call these people challenging people, challenging characters. A lot of this stuff is they don like armor. This is their armor against the world. And one of the techniques you can use to create empathy is essentially show them nude. Not literally, but in As Good as it Gets which is, you know, Jack Nicholson is playing an incredibly challenging character. He’s a racist. He’s a homophobe. He’s just viciously cruel to everybody, including children and waiters. And then he gets into his apartment and we just see him go through the motions of having to do the locks a certain way, and having to move his things around a certain way. And because in here he’s naked. And it’s not that he’s pathetic. He’s not depressed. He’s not crying himself to sleep. But now we see what he looks like without the shell.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: And then we go, oh OK, there’s somebody to love in here.

Marielle: Totally.

Craig: And the one thing we know for sure about almost all of these characters is that they are alone. And showing loneliness is a huge—

Marielle: That was the key for us with Can You Ever Forgive Me? was the scene we could feel the audience connect to Lee is when she’s at home watching an old black and white movie. She’s speaking along to the movie with her cat, eating shrimp out of a napkin that she stole from a party. But she’s enjoying herself. You’re seeing what she loves. She’s lonely. But it’s funny. Like it had all of these elements that made you connect because you get to see her vulnerable. And there is something about seeing people in their place that they live when they’re alone and giving them that one little moment to let their guard down, especially if you’re established them as somebody with a thick armor before that. Seeing them drop their armor is really effective.

Craig: Seeing what makes this person smile. What makes them laugh? What makes them happy? And understanding how they’ve built their state of acceptable imperfection around themselves to protect from the world outside. And then you start to go, OK, oh yeah, you know, when you go outside put your armor back on because you are not equipped for out there. And now you’re with them.

There’s a question of timing as well. When do you do this? Because if you start this way you kind of let air out of the balloon. You kind of need to start with Bah and then go, but OK.

Marielle: Right. But it can’t be too late.

Craig: Precisely. You’ve got to measure it out just right.

John: Well how long do you think you have before an audience decides, OK, I’m onboard with this movie or I’m not onboard with this movie?

Marielle: Ten minutes?

John: Is it ten minutes? Do you think you can get all ten minutes? I don’t know if–

Craig: I mean, I think about it in terms of scenes. I think once you have delivered the scene that shows that they are a challenging person, I don’t want to see another one. If it isn’t within that scene I need the next one to be–

Marielle: That was the exact issue we had with the first act of Can You Ever Forgive Me? was it was scene after scene after scene of showing the same armor and the same pain and the same being shit on by society. And it was taking too long to get to the moment of vulnerability. To get to the moment of the soft underbelly where you get to see somebody naked a little bit. And yet we knew we needed to set up these circumstances to show why she was going to go to this life of crime. So we had to show her dire straits. We had to show all of these things of how bad it was. Because when we stripped them out and we only showed one or two things you went, “She didn’t try hard enough.”

Craig: Correct.

Marielle: And so it was this fine balance. But what we ended up doing, our editing trick we ended up doing, is we tried to turn all of the pieces that were separate scenes, that were written as very, very separate scenes into a sequence.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Yes.

Marielle: And we did it with music.

Craig: That’s the way to go.

Marielle: We had recurring music that came back between each piece. And we tried to make it not feel like and we’re going to start again, and then this one is going to have a beginning, middle, and end, and then we’re going to start again. Because that felt way too repetitive.

Craig: There’s an enormous amount of pressure on any scene that starts from a dead spot and then builds, right?

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: Those have to be pretty good scenes. And if there is a sense of repetition in them, right, then all that pressure just begins to crush you. So what you effectively did was kind of follow the do a scene and then give me the vulnerable scene. You just took a bunch – it’s a very smart solution.

John: Sequence.

Marielle: We took a lot of scenes and smooshed them together. And it was tricky to figure out and I don’t think it’s perfect by any means. It’s one of those things that I’ll – I mean, I don’t think you ever feel like any movie you make is perfect, but it’s one of those things I’ll go down feeling a little bit frustrated about because we worked so hard on it and I think it works, but it could have been better, and it could have been better in the writing phase and then we wouldn’t have had that problem.

John: A lot of filmmakers in your situation would have tried to do a voiceover or some way to get us inside of her head so we understand that the character that we see on screen is not the full character. There’s another way to do it. And voiceover that’s not planned, voiceover that’s glued on at the end it just doesn’t work. It’s disastrous.

Marielle: I did voiceover in Diary that was so baked in because she is writing a diary and when I made it into a movie I thought, OK, I don’t want to see her just sitting down and writing and hearing her voice. I want to see her physically recording herself on a tape recorder because that’s something I did as a kid. So that became part of the DNA of the movie.

John: It was natural. You can feel when it’s just been spackled on to try to fix those things.

Marielle: Totally.

John: But that instinct for voiceover is good to hear. Sometimes if you’re looking at a first act, a first ten pages that isn’t working, it might be good to think of what that voiceover would be. If you did have the insight into what the character was really thinking write that voiceover, set it aside, and then figure out how do I get the effect of that voiceover with actual scenes.

Marielle: Totally.

John: What are the actual scenes you could write that would give you that information?

Marielle: What would the action that I could see, the physical action, the visualization of that voiceover. Because I do think it’s also a lot about what you see, what your visuals of that person are. Whether it’s them in their space, how do they move in their space, what are their actions that they’re doing? Are they active? Are they passive? You know, what speed do they move through the world? Is it that you’re doing a slow-mo shot of a person with their head down walking through a crowd? Everyone else is moving fast, they’re moving slow. What does that tell you, that visual, about that character and where they are in their head? Are they depressed or whatever it is?

But if you can try to figure out what the visual way to tell that story of their internal dialogue it’s all the better.

John: For sure. Now, we’re talking about difficult characters, but some of these lessons apply to any character. Because every movie is theoretically a character’s one-time journey, one-time adventure. So what are some lessons we can take for more traditional heroes who are not – I mean, obviously all heroes need to have some flaw, something that they can overcome, some journey that they can go on, but what are the lessons we can take from these really difficult characters and apply them to characters who may not be so challenging?

Craig: Well, it’s a craft thing for me. It’s giving the audience a glimpse at some truth that that character is not willing to even acknowledge themselves. So they may look happy, right, because this is what we do as people. We create a situation to cover up some sort of pain and go, good, good, I’m happy now. No you’re not. And I need to see that. But you don’t get to see it yet as a character. I get to see it and I get to see that you don’t get to see.

I may be dreaming this, because I haven’t seen Groundhog Day in a long, long time, but I believe at the very beginning when Andie MacDowell first comes in he looks over and he sees her kind of goofing around with the green screen and there’s this little weird moment where he’s a human being. And he’s just sort of taken by this person and how kind of free and happy she is. And then he returns quickly into being an absolute wretch, as she calls him. And it’s so important because we see him go, you know, nah. Let me just go back to being a wretch and a letch and all that. That’s my speed. That’s what I do. I don’t actually have the equipment to, I don’t know, appreciate someone as a human.

Marielle: Right. And we were just talking about Groundhog Day for this exact reason which is even though Bill Murray is obviously so troubled and he’s somebody who can’t be happy and he’s a miserable person by all accounts, but he’s so enjoyable to be around as an audience member.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: You wouldn’t want to be his friend. But watching him is just a joy because watching somebody have terrible thoughts and say them out loud, or do the things you’re not supposed to do in life, or say no I don’t actually want to talk to the guy I just ran into from high school. Sorry. There’s something actually really relatable about that, even though you know it’s bad.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Right. And he’s so good at it. I mean—

Marielle: He’s so charming.

Craig: That’s another lesson I think for heroes in general is give them their flaw but then make them smart. Or make them powerful. Make them do something–

Marielle: Make them specific.

John: Yeah.

Marielle: Make them specific and make their – whatever their problem is, whatever their flaw is, it should be baked into the thing that makes them interesting.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: Like it should be – with him, part of what’s interesting about him is that he’s kind of a jerk and he moves through the world and you feel like that’s why he’s successful. You feel like that’s why he’s gotten where he has gotten in life. It’s not like he’s somebody who is living in a ditch and can’t make a living. He’s actually a successful kind of celebrity guy who everybody wants to talk to.

John: The superficial charm is partly what gets him where he is.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: And therefore you understand that it’s actually hard to remove that person from this path. In fact, it takes a metaphysical, cataclysmic event of time looping to force him to stop doing this because he can. And I think that’s for all characters in the beginning of a movie whatever their flaws, whatever their dire strait is, it should be something that theoretically they could keep doing forever if not for you as the writer just changing one little thing. Moving one toothpick.

Marielle: Knocking them off balance.

Craig: That makes it no longer possible. Which is the worst feeling for them. And really all they want to do then is just try and get back to where they were at the beginning of the movie for the longest time.

Marielle: And I think, something I thought about a lot when I writing Diary was that often when that protagonist is a young woman particularly they end up becoming less than an active participant within their world. They’re more like a blank slate that we tend to see things happen to and we project ourselves onto that character more. And I was so aware of the fact that I wanted her to be active within her life. I mean, she was within the book, so I’m not making up who this character was. But what I loved about her was that she was so active and she was such an active participant in all of her problems. And that made it so that – but I realized that that’s a major problem we have, particularly with female protagonists, is that things tend to happen to that person.

John: Yes.

Marielle: Rather than their inherent philosophy about their world or their inherent problems within themselves are the thing that’s driving something.

Craig: That drives it. The passive hero is bad in all shapes and flavors. But you’re right, there is a certain brand of plot where something crashes through the window and I fall off a boat or I get hit by a thing or a wizard turns me into a something and you’re just dealing with it, you know.

Marielle: Right. You’re sort of perfect to begin with and then something bad happens and something.

Craig: I know. And you know there is this thing, I’ve become really, really weary lately of beautiful people and their problems.

Marielle: I’ve always been weary of that.

Craig: Yeah, I just like, you know, I get it, it’s hard whatever the circumstance is in this movie, but you are objectively beautiful in a world that prizes that above everything.

Marielle: No, it’s really actually a major challenge to get an audience to totally sympathize with somebody who is super beautiful, super rich.

Craig: Good.

Marielle: It’s just really hard.

Craig: Yeah, maybe we should stop. Maybe we should not do that anymore because it’s–

John: Or if we’re going to do it we should look at the examples of movies that do it really, really well. I go back to Clueless where you have a beautiful rich girl who is the center of the movie and what Amy Heckerling does so genius-ly is set her up as this very flawed character even within her very skewed world and let her – she’s making the decisions that are leading her down these paths to discovery.

Marielle: And she’s not just flawed. She has a really funny way of seeing the world. Her mind is really interesting. And she’s not smart in a book smart way, but she’s smart in this other kind of way.

Craig: And she’s not evil.

John: No.

Marielle: She’s good.

John: She has very good intentions.

Craig: She’s a good person. Which I think is partly what saves that there.

Marielle: She’s also young. Like if she were a character who were 40 you’d kind of be like, you know, I don’t know if I care anymore.

Craig: Yeah.

Marielle: But there’s a vulnerability to being young that is almost similarly to a vulnerability of not being beautiful or something.

Craig: Yes.

John: But also because she’s young, we’re talking so much about the very start of this and how you set up this character, but we set up these characters so we can give ourselves the runway to have a full arc. And so in seeing Cher at the start of this movie we can see what her problem is and she needs to grow into. And we sense that she could grow into this thing if she could make the right choices.

Marielle: Do you have a memory of what the first thing we see of Cher is? I can’t pull it out of my head.

John: What is the very first moment of this? You know, we’ve always talked about doing, we should do a Clueless deep dive on it, because it’s one of my favorite movies.

Marielle: You should.

John: I’m trying to remember what the very first–

Craig: We should also have Amy on.

John: We should have Amy Heckerling on.

Craig: She’s the best.

John: Resolved.

Marielle: Can I sit in the corner while you do it?

Craig: Yeah. You don’t even have to sit in the corner.

Marielle: I’ll just listen though.

Craig: Yeah. You can sit in her lap. She’s very tiny though. She’s a very tiny person.

John: Maybe she can sit in your lap. Nice. So what basic lessons do we want to take from our flawed but improving characters discussion? So, it’s about how we first meet this character, the situation, what insight we’re getting that they may not want us to see perhaps. Sometimes it’s seeing them along. Sometimes it’s seeing their point of view. Giving us a sense of what is specific and interesting about this character and this situation. What else?

Marielle: There was like a moment in Homeland that I remember my writing partner Katelyn pointed out, because it was such a great character moment where Mandy Patinkin’s character is alone. They’d been working late. He’s at his desk and he pulls out a box of crackers and some peanut butter and he doesn’t have a knife. And then he takes a metal ruler and he scrapes the peanut butter and puts it on his cracker. It’s the saddest thing you’ve ever seen.

Craig: I feel like I’ve done that.

Marielle: Like 1am at your desk.

Craig: I may have done that this morning.

Marielle: Yeah. But there’s something – it was specific, it was character related. It was so defeated. Like something about it was like, ugh.

Craig: Well you see how deprecated someone’s – whatever the part of our life we reserve for us it has withered away for this man. It’s just the job now. Everything else, like the comfort of a meal or anything, it’s all gone.

Marielle: And it wasn’t the introduction of his character, but it was something that let you connect to him in a real way.

Craig: Which in television as you go on and on you get opportunities to flip the script on people. So this person is just an absolute awful villain, and then we get the episode where we go, oh god, you’re a person, too. But in a movie we’re on the clock. And so one lesson definitely is once you show us – introduce to us a challenging character, you have pulled a pin on a grenade. You are running out of time.

Marielle: It’s so true.

Craig: So make sure we get to see them as a vulnerable person we can empathize with before the grenade blows up or else you’ll never get a chance. Because they won’t believe it later. It will contrived.

Marielle: It will. It’s true. You have to see something that is innate to who they are. And you have to see it early enough that you go, oh, OK, now I’m connected to that person. They’re my person. I’m on their side. I’m with them. I’m going to see this story through their eyes. Which it actually really matters. I mean, it’s so tricky, but if you’re not on the side of your character you’re screwed.

Craig: Jack Nicholson does something in As Good as it Gets that always blows my mind. It’s early on when he’s delivering one of his horrendous rants that are so shocking you laugh because you’re shocked. And once he’s done, and he does it with pure conviction. There’s no hesitation. He just does it. And then the person just sort of reacts and then he reacts like them, like he didn’t get it until that moment that he could hurt someone with this. And then we see inside of him is guilt. And that’s also – it doesn’t excuse it, but you start to say there’s more going on here than just a jerk.

Marielle: Totally.

John: It’s a relatable moment. Because we’ve all done that thing where we overstepped where we didn’t mean to and then you’ve embarrassed ourselves and yes.

Marielle: It’s a naked moment.

Craig: Yeah. It’s a naked moment.

Marielle: In that small way.

Craig: It’s a revealing vulnerable moment.

John: Cool. We have a bunch of questions that are stacked up because we’ve not answered like crafty questions in a long time. Craig, do you want to take the first one here?

Craig: Yeah I do. All right. So Connor in Koreatown asks, “Lately I’ve been getting notes in meetings from two different executives that seem to tug in vastly different directions. Sometimes the people involved realize and remark upon this. ‘Ha-ha-ha isn’t this funny?’ And sometimes it seems to not even occur to them that they have just shoved an idea down the opposite path that the previous note did. What’s the best way to handle this? Is it our job to make the execs aware of this conflict and attempt to work it out with them there in the room? Is this something that we should just keep to ourselves and work out later on our own?”

Well this has never happened to me, or to you, or to you. So how could we possibly answer this question?

John: First time ever happened in Hollywood.

Marielle: But I do think that it’s always the best thing when you get two conflicting notes because it makes you get in touch with what you actually want. Because you feel in your gut somewhere one note making you go, oh, and one note making you go no, no, no, no. And sometimes only getting one set of notes – dealing with the exec is a totally different question. But in terms of what it does for you in your writing process, and it’s what happens at the Sundance Labs which is so helpful, is when you get conflicting feedback it puts you in clearer touch with what you really want.

John: Yeah. So, as a practical matter when you get those conflicting notes, I think it’s fine in the room to sort of let’s talk through this. And you don’t need to necessarily need to bring up that they’re conflicting notes, but I always like to bring it back to your work and your next step or like what you want to do. That you want to be the person who can give them what they want. And so you say like, OK, so is the goal to do more of this or to do more of that, because I can see that it’s going to be hard for me to do both things simultaneously. And so that way you can bring it back to the fact that you are going to be doing work on an actual script, an actual draft that they’re going to read next and talk about that as the future work rather than what an idiotic thing that just happened in front of you.

Marielle: You know, you guys talk about this all the time, but when people are giving notes I think there’s often very little thought about what that actually means for the work that you’re going to have to do after those notes come. It’s often that people want to feel engaged in the project. They want to feel like they got to give the smart note. They want to feel like they said the thing in the meeting that made a change. They want to feel like they’ve been involved in the creative process.

But they’re not necessarily thinking through the fact that one of their notes could take you down one path and the others could take you down another path. So clarifying and being like let’s unpack that a little bit, where does this lead us, where does that lead us, or, oh, that makes me think of this can kind of be a helpful way to make both notes feel heard yet do what is right for the story. Because I don’t know, I just also don’t think it’s our job to always do every single note. Our job is to filter those notes through our brain, take those notes, and say OK the reason that that’s not going to work is this. Or I totally understand why you think this note makes sense. I went there, too. And when I went there here’s what happened. You know, when I tried that in a different draft then this is what went down.

And explaining the process then they feel heard. Their note has been addressed essentially, even though it’s not making it in the script.

Craig: I mean, from a practical point of view Connor I think it’s perfectly fine to say – if you have a lot of conflicting opinions it’s fine to say, listen, it’s probably going to work best if you have a pre-discussion and come up with one unified set of notes here that you can discuss with me and advocate for. I’m happy to have the conversation with everybody here, but for the sake of clarity what I can’t do is do both of those at once. So let’s try and figure out where we’re going. And also let’s have – because sometimes the conflict between notes is not about notes. It’s a conflict between how two people see the movie.

John: Totally.

Craig: Or see the script or the show. It’s very fundamental. I try and have a conversation. And I try to ask questions. I think Connor one thing you can do is get out of the mode of receiving notes and get into the mode of having a conversation with them about notes as if you didn’t write the script. Put yourself in the shoes, you are also a creative executive on this project. So start having a conversation and ask questions. Ask them – go into that more. OK, well happens if this? Or why do you think that that would be better this way? Just ask questions.

Marielle: Dig.

Craig: The more they talk the more of a chance that they will either finally figure out what they’re really trying to say or also finally realize that what they’re saying is stupid, which happens all the time. I do it. I’ll say something and someone will ask me a question and I’ll go oh my gosh I just realized that’s stupid. Never mind.

Marielle: We all do that.

Craig: Yeah. That’s human. So give them a chance. Or rope. Whatever analogy we’d like to use.

John: The last bit, that spelunking you’re doing to try to ask questions about the questions might also reveal what’s really behind the note, which sometimes isn’t really about the script in front of you. It’s about the executive who’s above them or something else that’s going on. And so it’s good to know that.

Marielle: Or it might be revealing a problem with the script that’s different than the problem they’re identifying in the note.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: It may be that those two executives both are having – if they’re having conflicting notes about the same scene or the same moment or the same character or whatever, OK, so they have two philosophies about how that should be solved. But they’re identifying a problem. There’s a common problem there. There’s something wrong with the way that’s being developed.

Craig: It’s snagging. Something is snagging.

Marielle: That’s a good thing to identify and you can dig to find out what the deeper problem is.

Craig: You as a writer will always have more permission to propose a radical change than they will.

John: Oh yeah.

Marielle: Yeah. That’s a good point.

Craig: So what they’ll do is they’ll nibble at something and they’ll say, “I think in this scene she shouldn’t come in until the end.” And they’ll say, “No, no, I think she should come in sooner.” And you can go, “I think I know what you’re both reacting to. That scene shouldn’t be there at all. In fact, that character should be this character.”

Marielle: And people are blown away when you’re able to do that.

Craig: Yes.

Marielle: When you’re able to go, “You know what? It’s actually bigger than anything we’re talking about. This whole thing needs to go. Or that character is just not working.” And they go, “I didn’t want to say that, but that’s clearly the problem.”

Craig: And by the way I’m glad they didn’t want to say it, because the truth is—

Marielle: You do.

Craig: If somebody says that to you before you—

Marielle: Then you’re like, “No.”

Craig: It sounds horrifying.

Marielle: Absolutely.

Craig: It sounds like you’ve just suggested 14 years of hard labor in a gulag. But if I come up with it it’s like, oh no, but I know what to do, so it’ll be a joy.

Marielle: And let me tell you that that’s how it feels the whole way through that. Feels the same way in edit. If somebody else suggests that a scene needs to get cut out that I spent two days filming it makes my heart race. But if I come to the conclusion that I need to cut that scene out and I go to them and they go, “Wow that was really bold.” I feel great.

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Like look at me.

Marielle: Look at me. I killed my darlings. I did that really hard filmmaking thing where I cut something out and it made the whole better. But also I think with writing as the exact same thing as with editing. Sometimes it takes a while to get to those points. Sometimes getting to a point where you’re ready to make some big change, because often it’s something that you felt – it might be the first thing you wrote in a script. It might be that scene that you’ve had in there the whole time that made you love the character. And then you realize it has to go. You have to come to that on your own in some way.

Craig: You do.

Marielle: And you can get nudged, but if someone tries too hard to get you to lop that arm off it’s just really—

Craig: Your muscles tighten up. Dennis Palumbo talks all the time about how there are lines that we write that we are so resistant to cutting not because the line is good but because its creation meant something to us.

John: Of course.

Craig: It was a signifier test that we had changed as a person or as a writer or something.

Marielle: Oh, that’s so sweet.

Craig: You know? But then you have to cut it. [laughs] You just have to take the lesson of I can do something like this, but also it should not be in this. It’s hard.

Marielle: Right. It is, really.

Craig: So, good question Connor. Hopefully we helped you out there.

John: Jordan asks, “I’m a youngish writer trying to make it my day job. I have a lawyer and I’m in the WGA so I’m starting to meet with managers. It’s not going great. In one meeting I asked the manager if she was going to represent me after 45 minutes of chatting about work and personal life. She seemed uncomfortable and said she needed to read more but that we would be in touch. I understand now that maybe it isn’t very cool to ask, but I was under impression that that was why we were meeting. How do you ask that question? Or is that the manager/agent’s job? Is there a way to know if a meeting is going to be a general meet and great before I slog through traffic to get to general advice like apply to Sundance Labs?”

So, Mari, you’re of the Sundance Labs. So Jordan is asking this really kind of natural—

Marielle: Oh, it makes my stomach hurt.

John: Yeah. Because it’s like dating.

Marielle: It is.

John: Is this going well? Is this not going well?

Marielle: And it’s so kind of wonderfully bald – like I would put that in a script the person just being like, “So are you going to represent me?” Because that’s the naked moment that you’re not supposed to do. I mean, not that you’re not supposed to, because I don’t think there’s a supposed to, but yeah, it’s uncomfortable because there is this – I mean, there’s such a thing in this town particularly of having a million meetings and never knowing where that meeting is leading or if it actually means anything. And we’re supposed to just be OK with that. Like what was that meeting about? Why did we meet and talk? It’s just part of – and everyone will say, “Well you’re building relationships. You’re building relationships.”

Craig: No you’re not. What you are is a piece of sand in a sieve that somebody has gathered up and they’re shaking the sieve to find what they think is gold. But they have to tell you, “Oh no, no, you’re an important piece of sand to me, therefore let’s have this 45-minute meeting.” But in their mind you either are that gold that they were not expecting to find, or you’re just another piece of sand.

Marielle: Or they’re not even really judging you in that moment on whether you are that gold. They’re waiting to see what you’re going to do without them so that then they can say, “Remember, we know each other. Now I do want to represent you because you’re already working.” So in so many ways having that meeting, you just should be spending that time writing the script because whatever you make is what matters. Those meetings matter once you’ve made the thing, once you have the thing, once you have some value to them that they could then help you with. And then they can be incredibly valuable. But until that thing exists, whether it’s a short film or a script, or whatever, those meetings are just to lay the first ground work and–

John: Yeah. I think those meetings are important because they teach you how to have those meetings and they’re practice for important meetings that are going to come later on. So you have to take them. I think Jordan’s awkward overreach of like, “So are you going to be my manager?” in the room, that’s a lesson learned.

Marielle: Totally.

John: And so it’s good that you learned that lesson in something that didn’t matter so much.

Craig: Let’s give him just the practicals here. It seems like the best practice would be to let them tell you that they are or are not going to represent you. So you have your meeting, you say well this was lovely, and then they say, “Yes, I really enjoyed our meeting.” Great, well let’s keep in touch. Or follow up if there’s interest. Whatever you want to do. Meaning I don’t need you.

Marielle: Yes. I think that’s actually the most important thing is to give off the air of like–

Craig: Non-desperation.

Marielle: Non-desperation.

Craig: But we’re all so desperate.

Marielle: And that they would be missing out if they don’t take you on.

Craig: Right. By the way, everyone is doing that. Everyone is desperate.

Marielle: Absolutely.

Craig: Everyone is doing this to each other. Yeah, I’m cool.

John: I’ll tell you about an early meeting I had. So my attorney is Ken Richmond. And so my agent had apparently set up several meetings with different attorneys. This is when I was selling Go. And so I went in and met with Ken Richmond. And we talked for about 20 minutes and I said like, “You’re fantastic. I want you to be my attorney.” And he’s like, oh, OK, OK, this is good. And there were other attorney meetings already set up that I was going to be blowing off for this. But he was the right person and sometimes you know. It’s dating. Sometimes you know.

Craig: Sometimes you know.

Marielle: That was the question I was going to ask, too. Did you want this person to be your manager? Is this the person who when you were sitting there you went, “I want you to be my manager?”

Craig: Or is it that you just want a manager?

Marielle: A manager.

Craig: Which sometimes people can pick up on. And then it’s like, right, well I just don’t want a client. I mean, you have to find somebody that you care about.

You know what? Listen, Jordan, totally understandable. And we’ve all done stuff like that.

Marielle: Oh gosh yes.

Craig: And it’s annoying to have to game anything, play any kind of game.

Marielle: It’s the part of the business I hate the most.

Craig: I agree. And you know what? You do it a little bit here or there. Or, by the way, maybe Jordan you sit down with somebody at one of these meetings and you just be yourself. And you just say, listen, this is how I am. I’m not good at playing the game. So, just let me know if you’re interested or not. And they might go, “Oh no, I’m totally interested.” And then you’ve found your person.

Marielle: Right. And I actually think the way to not play the game is to make it that you’re doing enough that you actually aren’t playing the game. That you actually don’t care.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: Like you want to pretend you don’t care if that person signs you, but actually if you have enough going on on your own you actually won’t care that much.

Craig: Correct.

Marielle: So, do the things that make it that you don’t care for real. Then you’re not playing a game. You’re not pretending.

John: Great. Chris from Brooklyn writes with a question I think you’ll be especially good to answer. “I started sketching out a screenplay based on a true-life murder case from the 19th Century which about only three historical nonfiction books have been written, as well as many articles. Although I’m using them all as sources, one book in particular encapsulates the story best. Mostly looking at it from the same angle and shares the title I want to use. But that title was also used in several Penny Dreadful dramatizations of the story way back when.

“However I’ve been reluctant to reach out to the historian who wrote this book because he is known and well-regarded and if asked I’m not in a financial position to afford the option I imagine he would want. But I’m not sure an option is necessary because the true story involves no living persons. Based on what I found online it seems as if the book in question was either optioned or purchased nearly a decade ago with a name actor attached but nothing appears to have happened with the project since then.

“So, given all that, and given that the book is my primary source but not an exclusive one, should I reach out to its author to avoid any potential legal challenges down the road? Or just stop worrying and write the darn thing?”

So you guys have both written things based on true-life things. What’s your first instinct for Chris here?

Marielle: I would do both. I would keep working on the thing. I wouldn’t hold everything up. But I would reach out to the person who wrote it. I would first of all if you have an agent or you have a lawyer they can look up the option and who owns the option, or if there still is an option. If it was 10 years ago and no movie has been made about it.

Craig: That would be a lapsed option.

Marielle: And also you’re probably fine. Like most books after the first few years they’re coming out if they haven’t been optioned and no one is holding onto that option they’re not going to be some crazy hot commodity that’s impossible to get the option for. And you can actually get a very affordable option, especially if – in my limited experience – if that author feels like you’re the person with the most passion who has a reason behind it and you can connect to them in a real way and you appreciate their artistry and they can appreciate your artistry. Then actually it’s more about that relationship then about how much money you’re bringing to the table. They may not have anybody else who is even considering doing this weird historical thing that they wrote 10 years ago and it lapsed. You know?

So you might be getting it at the perfect moment.

John: Yeah. Craig, what do you think?

Craig: I’m in slight disagreement. I think no question you should keep writing it. I actually wouldn’t reach out just yet because you don’t need to. The facts are the facts. This is a nonfiction thing. The title is a question mark and I would strongly consider a different title at this point. But there’s nothing in – if it’s facts there’s absolutely nothing in any of those books that the authors own in terms of fact. They own the expression of those facts. They own their sentences. They own the way that they lay it out. And even then in a very specific way.

So it’s just research. They’re research sources for you. If as you get closer to selling this or setting it up, in that moment you should say these are the sources I used. These are the books I used. This one has an amazing title and it inspired me the most. We might want to consider reaching out. If you reach out now and they say no, now you’ve got a problem. Because merely by reaching out—

Marielle: You’re right.

Craig: You have indicated that you are basing this on this book.

Marielle: I take back everything I said. Craig is right.

Craig: [laughs]

Marielle: No, no, really. I think you’re totally right. Because historic is so different. Like the book that I optioned was about someone’s personal life, written by the person whose life it was. That was very, very different.

Craig: Yes. There’s life rights involved. If somebody writes about their life, everything that they’ve written about now becomes public record. But all the stuff behind it that you would want to have, and also just to avoid – the one thing that you definitely don’t want is to say, OK, I’ve written something. It’s based on someone’s description of their life. They’re alive. I didn’t need their permission, but they hate this, and they are now telling people not to go see it. That’s bad news.

Marielle: No, it’s bad news.

Craig: Right. You don’t want that. So those are considerations that come later down the line. But you know for Chernobyl we kind of in conjunction, they had somebody – HBO had somebody that does this and then I had a researcher that was helping us kind of do our version. But we had to make an annotated script for every single page. Everything had to be sourced. I mean, it was the biggest term paper of my life.

Marielle: Do people even really still do that in college anymore? I mean, is that like a thing you do? Do you cite your sources?

John: Oh you cite your sources in college.

Craig: They’re required to. I mean, there’s probably some app that does it for you now. Sourcy.

Marielle: That’s my – are these things kind of going to the wayside that these things being learned–

Craig: Everything is going to the way. Everything. It’s all collapsing around us.

Marielle: Like the Dewey Decimal System.

John: Irene Turner came on the show to talk about her movie which was historically based, and so we’ll put a link in the show notes to her conversation because she had to do what you did which was basically cite every little thing about it, because it was a well-known public figure but where that information came from was important.

Craig: And I had to defend my thesis at times. The gentleman that HBO used, that was as thorough a prostate exam as I’ve ever had.

Marielle: You should try to submit these scripts to some college, to like Harvard or something, and see if you could get a Ph.D. This could be your dissertation for some degree you didn’t want anyway.

John: Professor Craig.

Marielle: Professor Craig with a Ph.D. in Chernobyl.

Craig: Surely there’s an easier way to get a degree, like bribe them?

Marielle: Ooh.

Craig: There’s got to be some way to bribe them. I’m sure there is.

Marielle: No.

Craig: Not anymore. Not anymore.

John: Craig, do you want to take the last question?

Craig: Last question. Craig from La Canada writes, “Mari, you’re married to Jorma Taccone right? When is MacGruber 2 coming? Thanks.”

Marielle: Oh my gosh. I love it.

Craig: You don’t have to say if you’re not allowed to.

Marielle: No, I think it’s OK. Jorma has been talking about it. I think it’s fine. Jorma and Will and John Solomon, so Jorma Taccone, Will Forte, John Solomon who all created MacGruber together have been pitching it as a miniseries.

Craig: Great.

John: Fantastic.

Marielle: Instead of doing it as a sequel movie. They started to realize it would be better as a very short miniseries.

Craig: But it needs that canvas. Because we’re talking about a work of literature. It needs to occupy the space it demands.

Marielle: Yes. And so they’re in the process of writing it with Hulu.

Craig: Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t wait.

Marielle: I know. The pressure is real.

Craig: I’m the biggest fan.

Marielle: There’s somebody on Instagram who anything Jorma posts just writes, “MacGruber 2 or get the fuck out.”

Craig: That’s me.

Marielle: That’s probably you.

Craig: MacGruber 2 or GTFO at Insta.org.MacGruber.

Marielle: Which I like that the MacGruber fans are so rabid. You know, it’s the thing – I talk to Jorma about it all the time. He has made a lot of projects that are his total passion projects. The things The Lonely Island makes, they’re weird brain child things that they love. But MacGruber was one of those things where he was so happy when they made MacGruber. And they got to make another one.

Craig: Because he made one of the great movies of all time. Of all time.

Marielle: Yeah. And they have to make another one.

Craig: They have to. Oh. I could go on.

John: All right. It has come time for our One Cool Things.

Marielle: Already?

John: My One Cool Thing is these new door locks being installed at my house and my office. They’re by Schlage. They’re good.

Craig: Is that how you pronounce that?

John: I think it’s Schlage or Schlage.

Craig: It’s not Schlage?

John: I don’t think it’s Schlage, but maybe it is. People can write in and correct me if I’m wrong.

Craig: Yeah, thank you. Germans, tell us.

John: What’s cool about it is we already had – we didn’t have to rekey the locks at all. So our normal keys still work, but then this thing works for the deadbolt and it’s cool. So I just don’t have to carry my keys around as much which is just great. I punch in my code and the door opens.

Craig: And you can do it with your phone.

John: You can do it with your phone. You can tell Siri to open your things. I can tell Siri to check if the door is locked. So, it’s nice.

Craig: You talk to Siri?

John: I talk to Siri.

Marielle: Doesn’t that make you feel like you’re – I know I sound paranoid, but couldn’t you be hacked or something and then somebody could just get into your doors that way?

John: Yeah. Probably. Probably so.

Craig: But you can also be physically hacked with a hammer and a screwdriver.

Marielle: And a sledgehammer. Yeah. But I don’t know. There’s something about – maybe this is not true, but in Brooklyn there’s this thing going on where everybody – some of us have cars, which is crazy, but you end up parking blocks away from your house. But if you’re keyless key is within 30 feet somebody has figured out some machine that can just open your car door with that and people are stealing cars that way.

Craig: Sweet. Awesome.

Marielle: So people are like put your keys in the freezer and it won’t work. And I can’t tell if that’s true or not, but there’s something about like all this car theft is happening because of these keyless keys.

Craig: Oh, Brooklyn. Yeah, don’t have a car.

Marielle: I know. That is the solution.

Craig: Just don’t have a car.

Marielle: Or have a car and just don’t care.

John: Not caring is—

Marielle: That’s actually the key in Brooklyn or in New York is if you have a car you can’t care.

Craig: Have a piece of crap car. Just don’t care. Don’t get something nice.

John: Craig?

Craig: What is my One Cool Thing? Ooh, yeah. OK, my One Cool Thing, so every year in Stamford, Connecticut.

Marielle: Jorma’s grandmother lives there.

Craig: That’s my One Cool Thing. No. It would be weird if I started referring to his grandmother as a thing. Yes, you know that thing.

Marielle: She’s, yeah, that would be weird.

Craig: And he’s related to. In Stamford, Connecticut every year there is the Annual Crossword Puzzle Tournament. There are many, but this is the big one. It’s run by Will Shortz who is the editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle which is the gold standard of crossword puzzles. And this is where everybody comes and it’s a lot of people. They all descend upon some Marriot or La Quinta and they do puzzles. And they compete. And then there’s the ultimate prizewinner. This year again Dan, I think, Feyer, who is insanely brilliant at crossword puzzles in a way that is just disturbing.

In any case, you at home can do it. They have the exact same puzzles that they did there available online. And you pay I think it’s like $20 or something like that and you click on puzzle number one. You do seven puzzles. Puzzle number one and it times you just like them and it scores you just like them. Currently I am number 15 out of like a thousand online participants. Meaning, this is a challenge to–

John: To knock Craig down.

Craig: Come on people. Knock me down.

Marielle: It’s going on right now?

Craig: It goes on—

Marielle: Infinitely.

Craig: Well, until the next year, right. So they’re all available for you to purchase and do now. And as people purchase and do them they will change the – but I’ve been number 15 for a bit now. So, you know, if you’re listening and you think you’re a bad ass, come at me bruh. And see if you can knock me down. And if you do, if you’re the one that knocks me down a peg let us know.

John: All right. Write in to ask@johnaugust.com. Let us know. Take a screenshot.

Craig: Oh yeah. Definitely take a screenshot. Well, just write in and tell us what your name is because I can look on the standings. We can, yeah. Don’t cheat.

Marielle: OK. My One Cool Thing is a play that’s opening on Broadway I think this week called What the Constitution Means to Me.

John: Nice.

Marielle: And it’s Heidi Schreck. She’s a writer. And an actor. Comes from theater like I do, but she’s written on a bunch of TV shows and stuff, too. And it’s an incredible play that I got to see in its Off-Broadway form and it’s now coming to Broadway. Very personal. It’s sort of about when she was a teenage girl and part of how she was raising money for college was she was going around and doing these constitutional debates at rotary clubs and things like that.

But what she’s really digging into is how the Constitution treats women and how it has historically treated women and what that means for herself personally within her own family dynamic. It’s so brave. It’s so personal and deep. And it makes you question everything you know about the world. But it’s just an incredible play.

Craig: What the Constitution Means to Me. And so as you’re describing it in my mind I thought, OK, now that title is like the kind of clunky debate thing.

Marielle: It is.

Craig: Oh, that’s great. And then it takes on this whole other meaning.

Marielle: And she starts off the whole play kind of going back in time and acting like this plucky 15-year-old girl who is going off and doing all of these debates about Constitution.

Craig: She sounds like the light reflection of the very dark and evil Ted Cruz who also spent his childhood—

Marielle: Oh, he did?

Craig: Roaming around and memorizing the Constitution and explaining to people what it means to him, which is bad, because he’s bad.

Marielle: I guess that was a thing that people did and you could win scholarships doing that and it was–

Craig: Yes, it was a thing.

Marielle: My sister did debate and was a very accomplished debater in high school, but it wasn’t specifically these sort of competitions where you would win money and go to these sort of rotary clubs. She did the kind of classic debate.

Craig: Who are the people that are like, “Good news, it’s Friday night, which means we go to the club and we hear kids talk to us about the Constitution. Let’s do it.” Kiwanis, Rotary, Knights of Columbus.

John: Elks.

Craig: Elks.

Marielle: Exactly. Elks.

Craig: Let’s go.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And they love it.

Marielle: They do.

Craig: They love it. They’re like—

Marielle: But the play is – even if you have no interest in the Constitution or what that would be, and that type of night sounds like a terrible night, the play is so moving and Heidi – she wrote it and she performs it herself. And the fact that it’s going to Broadway just feels like this wonderful gift to the world. It’s so cool.

John: Oh yeah. Our friend Mike Birbiglia does the same thing. He does those one-man shows.

Marielle: I know.

Craig: I was going to say. Mike Bags has blazed a trail here and it’s happening. Well, we should obviously did up a good link to this show. It sounds amazing. So congratulations to Heidi for getting something like this to Broadway. That’s remarkable.

Marielle: It’s a huge deal. Yeah.

Craig: That’s great.

John: That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond. We have some Sexy Craig, but we’re not going to use those yet.

Craig: No, you keep those bottled up.

John: If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. John is @johnaugust. Mari, are you on Twitter?

Marielle: No.

John: She’s not a Twitter person.

Craig: Your sister is a Twitter person.

Marielle: My sister is and she’s funny.

Craig: I follow her.

Marielle: Oh good.

Craig: I think I do.

John: Is Emily your sister?

Marielle: Emily.

Craig: Accomplished comedian.

Marielle: Accomplished comedian. She has a special out right now. And she also writes for Barry.

John: Oh nice.

Craig: Nice. That’s fantastic.

John: Oh yeah. I think I knew that.

Craig: With our friend Alec Berg.

John: You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net or download seasons of 50 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig: Mari Heller, thank you so much for coming in. This was a delight.

Marielle: Thank you guys for doing my question. It feels so good to suggest a subject and get to talk about it.

Craig: It was a good question, you know. Boom.

John: Boom.

Marielle: Boom.

Links:

• WGA Video Explaining ATA Negotiations
• Can You Ever Forgive Me?
• A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
• Scriptnotes 212, Diary of a First Time Director with Mari Heller
• Schlage Locks
• American Crossword Password Tournament Online–let us know if you unseat Craig!
• What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck
• We’re hiring a coder! If you’re interested please send an email to assistant@johnaugust.com
• Submit entries for The Scriptnotes Pitch Session here.
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by James Llonch and Jim Bond (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/rules-and-plans).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 385 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be talking about the plans your characters make and how to share them with the reader. Plus we’ll discuss rule-breakers, the techniques that absolutely no traditional screenwriting program will teach you but how they could elevate and invigorate your script.

But first, some reminders. Craig, we have a live show coming up.

**Craig:** Yes we do. In Seattle, the great city of Seattle and the great state of Washington. I’m very excited about this one. We’re going to be there February 6th at 7pm. John is going to fill you in on all these extra details. But what I’m really excited about is that we have one special guest, a very dear friend of mine, Emily Zulauf, who is a former development executive at Pixar. You may have heard of Pixar. They’re a small animation company.

**John:** Little upstart thing. They’re trying to use computer animation. We’ll see if it works.

**Craig:** And their deal is they at least claim to be good at story, so I suppose she might know something or another. And it’s going to be good. She’s a wonderful person. So I’m very excited to have Emily there. And you guys should – Seattle people come out and see us. Don’t leave us hanging. We’ve got a link. I guess it will be in the show notes. Is that right?

**John:** Yeah. The link will be in the show notes. So tickets we now know are $20 or $10 if you’re a member of the Northwest Screenwriters Guild, which apparently exists.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Or The Film School. So, $20 or $10, but come see us. It is at the AMC Theater Pacific Place 11, I guess. We’re going to show up there and we’re going to have a great time. I’m going to be way deep into an Arlo Finch book tour. Craig is flying up just for the evening. It will be a really fun time.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’ll be sort of an intersectionality of Arlo Finch and Scriptnotes and Seattle. It should be a good time.

**Craig:** The Film School is the name of a film school.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** TheFilmSchool. All one word.

**John:** All one word.

**Craig:** All right. So, don’t think if you are at a film school–

**John:** Any film school–

**Craig:** You’re paying $20 if you’re at a film school.

**John:** But if you’re at The Film School.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Definite articles. Indefinite articles.

**Craig:** Hugely important.

**John:** Not every language has the distinction between them.

**Craig:** Interesting. Interesting. I love the distinction between those two things. And I will also say having been to Seattle many times, everything costs $20. Everything.

**John:** Oh, totally. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Looking at a fish costs $20. Just standing in that market, looking at a fish, $20.

**John:** Yeah. Pike Place Market, so expensive just to your eyes, everywhere they look.

**Craig:** Everywhere you look. $20. So you guys can afford it. Yeah. I love that place.

**John:** Craig, we need some photos of you catching some fish at the Pike Place Market, because otherwise people won’t believe you’re actually in Seattle.

**Craig:** I don’t think they let you catch the fish. The deal is you buy the fish and then they throw it to each other. Because otherwise, let’s face, there’s going to be fish everywhere. Have you seen the Gum Wall, John?

**John:** Oh, I’ve seen the Gum Wall. I have good photos of the Gum Wall.

**Craig:** I love the Gum Wall. I love it. Anyway, Seattle, one of my favorite places, so please buy some tickets. Come see us. We’re incredibly entertaining in person. You can’t even imagine how much fun we are. Like beyond.

**John:** We have to cut so much out of the episodes just because it would be too much joy.

**Craig:** Too much cheering.

**John:** Yeah. So, that’s February 6, but then on February 9 I will be back in Los Angeles for the Arlo Finch launch party. It’s at Chevalier’s, the bookstore on Larchmont. That’s 12:30 in the afternoon on February 9. So come see me there. I will be signing copies of Arlo Finch. It’s as simple as it can be. You come in, you buy your book, I sign it for you, I talk a little bit, I answer some questions. I think I’m going to have special cool little patches to hand out, so come see me if you want to on February 9.

But if you can’t make it on February 9, preorder the book because, good lord, I would love to hit the charts.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t that be nice?

**John:** That’s sort of how you hit the charts on a second book is by people buying it the first week.

**Craig:** They pre-buy, they load up.

**John:** They load up.

**Craig:** Don’t just do it for the patch, people.

**John:** Do it for – because you know if it does happen to cross over that threshold and show up on the bestsellers list you will know that you were the reason why it did.

**Craig:** You were the straw.

**John:** You were the straw that broke the–

**Craig:** Finch’s back.

**John:** Yeah. Something. We have a brand new feature that we are rolling out, so not in this episode but we have to prepare for it. This is a new idea that we’re going to try out. It’s called the Pitch Session. And way back in Episode 274 we had Eric Voss who I guess he pitched to you like two years ago at the Austin Film Festival. You thought it was great. You had him record the pitch and so we played it and we discussed it. And we’re going to try to do that again, but opening it up to all of our listeners.

What we’re looking for is a 60 to 90 second pitch. It can be for a TV show. It can be for a feature. But it’s 60 to 90 seconds that sort of sells the idea and you are going to send in an audio recording. We’re going to listen to the recording and put a couple of them up and then discuss them afterwards. So it’s a chance to kind of do what we do on the Three Page Challenge but with audio pitches.

**Craig:** Pitches. I love it. I think it’s going to be fun. I do this at Austin. I judge the big finals. I mean, I’m just blown away. People show up to this thing every year. It’s amazing. It’s in this big bar. They pack the place. Pack it.

**John:** Packed.

**Craig:** The thing about it that blows my mind is people are so respectful of the people that are pitching because you know how hard it is to get a roomful of people to just listen. Well, this place will quiet down and listen really well to every single pitch. I think there’s like 20 of them. So, it’s been fun to that and, yeah, I think it’s educational because like it or not sometimes pitches happen.

**John:** Yeah. So, I would say that the pitch form that we’re looking for, the 60 to 90 second pitch, that’s not the kind of thing that you’re usually going into sit down and really pitch to an executive. But it is the kind of casual thing that you would be doing at a party. It’s a little bit longer than an elevator pitch, but it’s that short distillation of the idea.

And so really we’re going to be responding to does this feel like a movie or a TV show idea. And did we get enough out of this that we can actually see what it is you’re describing that you’re going to be trying to write. So, that’s what we’re looking for. So if you have an idea like this that you want to try to pitch at us the URL you want is johnaugust.com/pitch. And there’s a whole little form you fill out. You click buttons that say that you’re submitting this of your own freewill. That you’re not going to try to sue us. And that this is all–

**Craig:** Don’t sue us.

**John:** This is not a contest. This is not a competition. This is just for the learns. So, depending on how it goes we might do it again. If it goes poorly we may deny this ever happened.

**Craig:** Correct. We erase it from the record.

**John:** Yep. Speaking of erasing things from the record–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** We have more follow up. So this is Brooke in Los Angeles and Craig can you read what Brooke wrote to us?

**Craig:** Yes, so we recently had I guess a rerun of our Raiders episode, which is one of my favorites. Here’s what Brooke wrote. “I do have two questions about your episode on Raiders of the Lost Ark. I share your enthusiasm for the movie. It’s one of my favorites. That said, now that I’ve read the screenplay my feelings are decidedly more mixed. I always assumed Marion was being hyperbolic when she angrily accused Indiana Jones of taking advantage of her when she was ‘just a child.’ I hope Karen Allen will forgive me when I say that through my younger eyes I thought she was older than the script reveals she is supposed to be, 26. Doing the math, it turns out Lucas, Kasdan, and Spielberg intended Indy to have sex with her when she was 16 and to be completely blasé about that when confronted with her justified outrage.

“Now at first I was inclined to chalk it up to the times were different. But then on your recommendation I listened to the recorded conversations of Lucas, Kasdan, and Spielberg. And I heard Lucas arguing in favor of making Marion younger, as young as 11 when Indy was to have had sex with her. He thought making her 11 would be it ‘more interesting’ than if she were 16 or 17. Frankly, I was shocked and disgusted. And then confused.

“Here are my questions. One, when you’re creating a character that’s supposed to be a hero, albeit flawed, why would you ever want to so far as to make him a pedophile as Lucas was advocating? Can you please help me understand why these renowned creators thought that audiences would accept that kind of character? Two, why didn’t you address this issue in your podcast? You too are so wonderfully outspoken regarding things you support and don’t. Why didn’t this make the cut?”

Oh boy. You know what, John, just answer this with a yes or a no.

**John:** [laughs] Oh yeah. Simple yes/no. I’ll answer question two first because it’s the simplest answer. I didn’t know any of that backstory. And so while I had seen parts of the interview and I’d watched the movie a bunch of times I had no idea that there was this issue of how old Marion was, how old she would have been 10 years ago. It never occurred to me and I hadn’t seen that discussion from the transcripts or from the recording from before.

**Craig:** When I read this question it jogged a memory, like oh yeah, I think I remember reading that. But I had read that thing a long time ago. So, when we did the podcast it was not at all on my internal memory radar.

**John:** Yeah. So, as to the first question there, I think it’s absurd – I’m horrified. I think it’s bizarre and weird to have a conversation in which the protagonist had sex with a person who was 11 years old. That’s just bizarre and horrifying and I can’t even fathom sort of how that happens. So I can’t answer that in any meaningful way.

What I will say is that I can imagine scenarios, this isn’t apparently how this all happened, but I can imagine scenarios in which you sort of accidentally end up at that place where you didn’t do the math right. And so they knew each other this time and you cast somebody who was a certain age which would have meant they knew each other at a certain time. That is a thing you probably could find in a lot of other movies. When you actually do the math you’re like, wait, that means that she was negative four years old. That happens.

But that doesn’t seem like it would happen here. It sounds like they actually had a conversation where it’s like, oh, she could have been 11. And that is just wrong. And there’s other movies where these problematic things happen. Animal House being an example where that is not cool what happens in Animal House. And in looking at the movies you have to acknowledge that this is a thing which is problematic about the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Obviously Brooke is correct to say that the times were different is a thing. It doesn’t mean that we have to accept anything now about it. But things do require some context of course. I think in this case the one thing I would push back on Brooke is when you say, “Can you help me understand why these three renowned creators thought that audiences would accept that kind of character?” From what I’m reading from your question, because I haven’t actually reviewed that transcript again, so I’m just taking it off of your recollection here, it does seem like Kasdan and Spielberg were not at all in favor of Marion being 11 and in fact advocated that she be 16 or 17, which even now we would consider to be too young but not necessarily in the zone of 11 which is horrifying.

So, really the question is what the hell was Lucas thinking. And the answer is I have no idea. The only thing I can guess is that he was such a total dork that he thought in his mind that that maybe was – I have no idea.

**John:** I don’t know either and I don’t want to sort of get into places where I’m speculating on his mindset.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or what he was actually saying or that we’re actually understanding him properly here. The larger conversation I think we can have is when you dig back into how things came to be I think you need to be mindful that there’s the movie that finally was made and then there’s the process that led to the movie. And some of the process that led to the movie will have a bunch of false steps and blind alleys and things that were not reflected in the final work.

And so it’s fair to look at sort of where stuff come from and the history of stuff, but in looking at the history of stuff how much influence should that have on your perception of the final work. And that’s an artistic question that is fair to ask, but I think it’s also fair to – if you choose to not dig back into that history I think you’re allowed to not dig back into the history and look at the finished work as well. And not having seen the script to know that she was supposed to be 26 years old and this time factor, you can forgive a person for not doing that math or sort of exploring that.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re completely right that the important thing is the choices that were made. Not the choices that were not made. I think that Brooke brings up a reasonable point that the suggestion here is so bizarre as to be disconcerting on its own. And this isn’t a comedy where, I mean, you know, when Todd Phillips and I sat in a room together and just riffed on ideas for the Hangover movies it was – terrible things were said. The point is those movies were transgressive. And of course the point being that you then make choices that you think will work, not choices that won’t or that are going to make people disgusted.

In this case that’s not that – I don’t get it and it’s not good at all. [laughs] I don’t like it.

**John:** But, so you think back to you and Todd Phillips had sort of your writers’ room of two people to talk through doing the Hangover movies. Every TV show has a writers’ room where they’re discussing how to make the show. And a lot of what they’re discussing is things that do not become the final show. And so–

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** All those discussions are not – they’re not reflected in what the final thing was, but they probably had some horrible, terrible ideas or plans for like, you know, ultimately it’s going to be revealed that this was the connection and that wasn’t the thing. So that’s not canon. Like the stuff that happens in the writers’ room isn’t canon.

**Craig:** No, it’s not.

**John:** You want to be able to separate those things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And I guess the only difference here is that if he’s saying that it’s cooler – I am – I hope that he was just maybe tripping on acid that day or something, because that’s just a crazy thing to say. So, I can’t explain it, Brooke. I can’t explain it. But, clearly by the time the movie was made all three of those guys were seeing Marion as the person that Karen Allen is.

**John:** Who is more of a peer to Harrison Ford’s character.

**Craig:** She’s a grown woman. And her age difference with Harrison Ford I don’t think was extraordinary at all. So, clearly cooler heads prevailed. Thank god.

**John:** So, while we’re talking about Indiana Jones, last week on the Slate Culture Gabfest David Plotz was talking about watching Raiders of the Lost Ark with his young kids and he said he found it really problematic racially. That there was a lot of sort of – you look at all of the non-white characters in the film and they are portrayed horribly. And that was not a thing I saw at all when I went back and watched it for this episode a couple of years ago. But I can totally see that. I can totally imagine that watching through it with that in your head you would recognize that like, oh, yeah, it is just a bunch of white people doing stuff and everyone who is not the white person in the movie does not fare well in it. And I think that’s a fair criticism to look at the actual finished work because you’re not looking back at the original intent of things.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, at some point I – if we go way far back, every single movie – every single movie – will be problematic because society, it was in our lens of today problematic. Thoroughly. Top to bottom.

**John:** Yeah. Thoroughly.

**Craig:** I mean, so what’s the point of the exercise? Yes, the answer is yes. It’s all problematic.

**John:** Yes. And so I don’t want to sort of go back and remake Raiders of the Lost Ark to take care of that thing. But I think it’s worth noticing that about the movie so that if we’re trying to make a film in that spirit now to be mindful like, oh you know what, we can’t do that thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If we’re making that movie in 2019 you can’t do that thing. And especially as we go into this era where we’re remaking everything there has to be a thought early on in the process is like, OK, just because we love this thing let’s also be aware of the things that just we cannot be doing in 2019 and beyond.

**Craig:** You know, maybe this is naïve but I feel like that conversation now is happening consistently across every single project in Hollywood. Am I naïve? Or do you think that it is?

**John:** You are not naïve. I would say it’s not every single project, but I would say most studio projects at an early stage are being mindful of that. And you and I both worked on some high profile ones where, yes, those conversations happened early on and frequently.

**Craig:** Yes. Which is good. And so the path of this stuff has been a somewhat promising one. Delayed, sure. Too long? Yes. But it is I think maybe a little easy to tee up some of these older movies and go, “Look, it doesn’t match our enlightened view of now.” Because that’s–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Most movies before a certain age are going to have really, really problematic things. What I like about Brooke’s question is she was bringing up a specific thing from the script and from the conversations about stuff and thank you Brooke for writing in about it.

**Craig:** No question. And really specific answer to you Brooke about question number one. No, you would never want to go so far as to do that. I hate saying blanket things. If your character is a pedophile then we’re not going to like him ever. Period. The end.

**John:** Nope. Don’t do it.

That would be breaking a rule, wouldn’t it Craig?

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** This is Craig’s topic. So, Craig, hit us off with these rule-breakers.

**Craig:** So I’m working on this script where because of the tone of what the project is it’s very carefree and wild. And lately it seems to me that culture is starting to get a little more comfortable with acknowledging that culture exists, not necessarily dipping into the meta because not everything needs to be meta. But as we write screenplays there’s a formality that we may not necessarily need all the time. And in fact breaking some of these stuffy rules can kind of help bring your script to life and convey your intentions in fun ways if it’s done well. If it’s done for a purpose.

**John:** So, Craig, are we talking about the stuff that a writer would do physically on the page or things that movies would do or both?

**Craig:** I’m talking really about the page. This is a super writey topic. I’m not really here to talk in a big way about margins and fonts and stuff like that, although we will get into that a little bit. I guess I want to start with freeing yourself however you want, because we know that, OK, you have been taught at home by your school, or a book, or a “guru”, or the Internet, or people on Reddit that there is a format; you must follow the format; if you don’t follow the format you will be ejected into space. And I’m here to tell you that that’s only true if your script is bad.

If your script is good and it starts being free it can actually be exciting to read. If you are a reader, you are reading the same kind of thing over and over and over and over and over. It must be fun, I would imagine, to suddenly get something that’s wild and great. So, for instance, let’s start with the easiest one: breaking the fourth wall. Talking to the reader in description. If it’s cutesy and annoying, it’s bad. But if you want to have some fun, if you want to play around with their expectations, if you want to say you thought it was this didn’t you, no. You can do these things if it’s that kind of tone that allows it.

Similarly, I think, you can use any page as you want. I believe that you could put one single word on a page if it was a great word and if it required that. I think that would be awesome.

**John:** All right. So let’s talk about situations where you might want to do these things. What I like about both of these suggestions is they really are about the writing and they’re about sort of what the experience is of reading the script and how the experience of reading the script is meant to match or mimic at least the experience of watching the scene happen on a big screen in front of you.

So, in breaking the fourth wall if you’re writing Deadpool, which is constantly breaking the fourth wall, having that sort of chit-chattiness in there could be good. The Shane Black scripts are notorious for having a lot of chit-chat in them, or talking to you. That can work and that can be fine. If it works right for the tone that’s fantastic.

The thing about having a single word on a page that might be exactly the right choice if you’re making A Quiet Place. If you’re making something that actually is all about how disorienting the experience is, great. If you’re making a fast-paced thriller, a single word on a page might not be the right choice.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s a little bit of what poets do at times. And sometimes people interestingly that write books for children will be incredibly inventive with the page and the way words are laid out. Sometimes in our scripts we need to depict disorientation or madness or the voice of an all-powerful being. Well, you could just put it in 12-point Courier. Or not. You know? You have some choices. You aren’t locked into this very dry format that was created in the, what, ‘40s?

I mean, we live in a bit of a freer time. Set yourself free a little bit.

**John:** Yeah. So the quick history of screenplays is that they were originally just a shot list basically. They morphed into what we kind of think as the modern screenplay is around the Casablanca time where it’s not just a series of camera shots. It really has a better feel for what the movie actually is like. But they were all typed. And so the reason they were 12-point Courier is because they were all typed at a certain point. No one is typing them anymore.

We still use 12-point Courier because it is – Courier Prime if you’re fancy – we use Courier because – because it’s standard it sort of takes away distraction. And we sort of know what it’s like. We have sense of how much time it’s going to take because we’re used to it. But if you are doing something where you have a voice of god or something that is intruding and bold isn’t getting it there or italics isn’t getting it there, there could be a case to be made for using a different font for certain things.

I remember early on as I was doing lyrics in scripts I would put them in Verdana italic, partly so the lines wouldn’t break, but also so it would feel different because they were singing. In Courier Prime we added the special italics that look really cool and different largely for lyrics so you really can see that like, oh, this is a different feel. It kind of feels like it’s singing.

So, it is fine to mix it up somewhat. I remember reading a Gus Van Sant script maybe for My Own Private Idaho, or something else, where it was in a bunch of different fonts and colors. And it was annoying. I did not find it a joyful experience. But that’s not to say that you couldn’t make something great and joyful that way.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And listen one person’s excitement is another person’s annoyance. But I think that there is something that translates beyond the script if you do this in a way that is effective. By freeing yourself of the rigid formatting rules here and there you’re also allowing your mind to kind of be a little freer about what could possibly happen in this movie.

So, Pulp Fiction works like a regular movie. Yes, it plays around with time and all that, but other movies have played around with time. It’s basically a regular movie. Until at one point when Uma Thurman says, “Don’t be a…” and then she makes, well, weirdly a rectangle, not a square on screen. And a square appears on screen. Which is bizarre. But if I read that in a script and her dialogue said, “Don’t be a…” And then there was just a picture of a square. I’d be like, what the – ooh. This is somebody who is not necessarily bound by limitations. They’re thinking kind of wildly. The other thing that I am really enjoying doing is lying.

Because we have this thing where when we’re writing scripts our action description is telling you what you see on screen. But so much of what we try and do when we’re shooting is misdirect. It’s magic tricks. We are essentially visually lying to you and then revealing something else. There’s this – may I read a short paragraph from my favorite book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad?

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** “The side of his head hit the wheel twice and the end of what appeared to be a long cane clattered round and knocked over a little camp stool. It looked as though after wrenching that thing from somebody assure he had lost his balance in the effort. The thin smoke had blown away and we were clear of the snag and looking ahead I could see that in another 100 yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank, but my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had rolled on his back and stared straight at me. Both his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that either thrown or lunged through the opening had caught him in the side just below the ribs.”

So, we have this wonderful impressionistic lying, because our eyes lie to us, and people lie to us. And in experiences somebody gets stabbed through the chest with a spear and what we see is a guy is holding a cane. And what is in fact a man bleeding to death we just feel warm wet on our feet. That’s wonderful.

You can lie to people in description. You can say this is what happened. And then somebody says something and then you can say in description, oh wait, no, it’s this. And that is an effective rule-breaking way to actually relay what is a very common and completely accepted cinematic technique.

**John:** Absolutely. So what you’re describing though is the case of is a movie supposed reality, like what you see is exactly what it is, or is it a subjective reality. And the nature of your script may lend itself to you don’t quite know. The movie Memento is full of that. You’re not quite sure how much to trust your narrator. And so the kinds of things you’re seeing in the script description would make sense for that, because you just don’t know how much to trust the narrator and therefore the script that you’re reading in terms of what’s really going on here.

So, again, the right kind of script that makes sense. And it’s a question we’ve answered before on the podcast about like should you reveal who somebody is in the script if they’re not going to be able to see who that person is in the movie?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I always think like remember that you are the person in the theater watching this. And so what is your experience watching this? If it is ambiguous to you, you can use that ambiguity on the page as long as it doesn’t feel like you’re cheating in a bad way. If you’re cheating in a good way like this description from Heart of Darkness, go for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Will this help the people making the movie deliver what you want them to deliver? Simple as that.

**John:** So here is a complicated thing I did – this is way back on the first Charlie’s Angels. And so it was a sequence we didn’t end up shooting the way I wanted us to shoot. But here was the idea. So, in the final sort of castle fight Lucy Liu’s character is on one side of a gate and the Thin Man is on the other side of the gate and they are running in opposite directions. And we basically split screen and we see them running in opposite directions trying to get to each other. And so it’s done in sort of real time simultaneous. You’re trying to figure out where they are. And they will punch each other through openings in this castle wall as they’re doing it.

And it was really fun to do. But to try to do that normally on the page really wouldn’t have made sense, because it really wasn’t meant to be split-screened. So what I did is at the bottom page I said, “Now turn your script counterclockwise,” and I had two parallel blocks of text running on the next two pages that were talking through what was happening. And so these are the simultaneous actions.

It was really fun. It was really cool to read. It was really fun to write because just like you have dual dialogue and there can be reasons why dual dialogue is so effective, this was really a cool way to do it. It was torturous for the line producers. And I think they didn’t like it. But it really gave you the experience of why this was going to be a cool moment that you hadn’t seen before. And ultimately when they did get back together and they were both in the same frame it was exciting.

That’s the kind of thing that I think if you were to do that in a spec script people would notice. And if they were digging your script and they got to that it would pop out to them as like this person has an interesting idea and a cinematic eye for what is interesting and possible.

**Craig:** Totally. I love that. And you know what else? It immediately informs me that you care. You cared enough to say, you know what, I have a better way of doing this. And I don’t mind talking to you because I’m confident that my way is awesome. And that confidence is something that I think frankly helps people buy into your work.

**John:** Yeah. So, to wrap this up I would say an important thing to understand about rule-breaking is you can’t break rules if you don’t understand rules to begin with. And so I think having an understanding of what the screenplay format is is essential because otherwise you could just generate chaos that isn’t doing the basic jobs of what a screenplay needs to do.

But once you understand how screenplays basically work then to break the rules or bend the rules or do things that are unexpected can be great. It can be sort of provocative and make people lean in and be excited to see what you’re going to do next. Is that a fair assessment from you, Craig?

**Craig:** It absolutely is. The only caution I would put out there to our listeners: if you are a reader at a company, please do not email us complaining that you already get thousands of screenplays that are poorly formatted or the people that write them think they’re so damn clever and are doing all this crazy stuff. Because I don’t care about those people. They’re bad writers anyway. The format is irrelevant. They’re bad. You weren’t going to buy their script. You’re not not recommending this script because the formatting was weird. You’re not recommending it because it stank. So, just – I don’t care about that complaint. Keep that complaint to yourself. It is boring to me.

**John:** Yeah. And all the rule-breaking in the world will not help you if your writing is not fantastic.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So the writing is still always paramount. We should ask our friend Kevin who is a reader how much of this he sees. How much he sees people doing clever, innovative things on the page.

**Craig:** You know what? We should have Kevin on the show.

**John:** I’ve asked Kevin and he said no.

**Craig:** Oh really? Interesting. Maybe because – well, first of all Kevin is not his real name. [laughs] His real name is–

**John:** Thaddeus.

**Craig:** Thaddeus. Because he is a working reader and perhaps that would violate some sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe it would. So my topic for the week is planning. And I actually had this idea two weeks ago because I had a lunch with Ben Wittes who runs this great blog called Lawfare, which is all about federal policy and state security and does a lot of stuff about the Trump Administration and sort of the Russia stuff.

And I asked him a question and basically I wanted to know of all the people involved in this whole Russia mess who there do you think actually has a plan, actually sort of knows what’s going on and has a plan for what’s going to happen next. And how many of those people are just scrambling and just going one thing to the next thing to the next thing. And he said that he believed that almost everybody was scrambling.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because nobody sort of knows enough to actually make a good plan. And so that same week I was also writing the third Arlo Finch and in the third Arlo Finch it starts with the characters having this plan. And I had to sort of reveal to the reader kind of what the plan was, but it got me thinking well how do you reveal the plan and how much plan does the reader really need to know. And how much can you hold back which is more exciting for the reader. So I thought we’d talk about characters and plans and motivation and how you share them with the reader.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would imagine that the first question you have to ask is is my character a planner or not, because there are some characters that their hallmark is that they move through the day in a kind of bizarre fashion. The Big Lebowski has no plan. Ever. And that’s part of why that character works. But if they do have a plan, then yeah, you need to figure out how much people need to know and specifically if it’s helpful to conceal part of the plan from them.

**John:** Yep. Absolutely. Sometimes you want to kind of pre-answer some questions that are naturally going to come up like why is this character doing this. What is their aim? What are they actually going after? Sometimes you need to just take away the questions. And so a script I just turned in I didn’t need a big plan for this thing, I just needed to know – the character would say, “No, I can get you in the club because my uncle is the manager.” That’s all I needed to know. I didn’t have to hear the whole plan or how we’re going to get there or what the whole set was going to be. As long as I knew you could get through the door and that everybody would believe they could get through the door that was enough. And the surprises that could come up because people didn’t really know the whole rest of the plan, that was fun.

So, it’s recognizing the minimum that an audience needs to know about the plan going forward. And by plan I don’t necessarily mean like here’s how we’re going to do the heist. It often is just the character says like, “We’ll be in Denver in two hours.” It’s like, OK, as long as I know a destination that’s great. Or, “Finals are next week.” Ok, great, you set a time and so I know that finals are a thing that’s out there. It’s kind of setting a framework for what’s going to happen in the next little bit of your story.

**Craig:** And it’s hopefully telling us a little bit about this character’s method of interacting with the world. Some people are incredibly cautious. Prudent. Methodical. Planning can become an interesting aspect of your personality. Over-planning is an aspect of a certain kind of personality, just as under-planning is. Sometimes your plans frustrate people. What you really want to avoid are situations where your character comes up with a plan. The plan is flawed. People point out the flaws. And the character says, “Don’t worry about it. It will be fine.” And then it kind of is. You think, well, was it just that you needed the character to do that and then you realized it was a flawed plan so you had somebody say it to take the curse off of it but you didn’t actually – it makes that character into an idiot. And we do not like that at all.

**John:** Yeah. The other crucial thing about showing the plan is so that the plan can go wrong. So if we as a reader, we as an audience don’t understand what they were trying to do, or sort of what the steps were they were attempting to do then when things go amiss we won’t know that they’re going amiss. And so if we don’t know the basic requirements of what they have to do to get into this facility then we won’t know that something has gone wrong. We won’t know what they’re waiting for. So by showing the overall plan, the overall goal, we can frustrate them and a lot of plotting is frustrating your hero’s plans.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the best planning sequences ever is in Ocean’s 11, the 1990s version of Ocean’s 11, written by Ted Griffin. And it’s so wonderful because like most heist movies you get a chance to actually just stop and literally say, OK, here is the plan. I will announce the plan. I will take you step by step through the plan. And as Brad Pitt and George Clooney relay this plan step by step part of the way they tell it is to say every single thing we’re telling you we’re going to do there doesn’t seem to be a way to do it. And they keep listing one problem after another that makes this entire thing impossible.

And that is fascinating because everybody still agrees to do it. And when that happens you realize, OK, these people are a little crazy. They’re not like you and me. They kind of like the challenge of the impossible. And also they trust these two guys. They suspect that these two guys already do have the answers, they’re just not letting on yet. And that creates a wonderful expectation in us.

So, Ted managed to set up these beautiful obstacles. He created this lovely magic trick prelude. And then left us sitting in the seats going, well, OK, I know what their plan – how would I do the plan? I don’t see how this plan will ever work. Great. That’s exactly what you want to do with a spelled-out plan.

**John:** Agreed. So Craig, I’m curious about Chernobyl. Because Chernobyl obviously the overall plan would be for things not to go horribly wrong and for nuclear waste not to be spilling out every place. But I suspect throughout your story we are seeing characters like trying to deal with the situation. And we’re hearing what they’re trying to do. And seeing those things not work properly. Is that a fair assessment? Did I spoil too much about Chernobyl?

**Craig:** Well, clearly some things go wrong. That’s not a spoiler. There are levels of plans in a story like Chernobyl. There are the plans of what was supposed to happen on the night of the accident which clearly wasn’t an accident. That was not part of the plan at all. And that’s an interesting plan because you get to explain where a plan went wrong. And you get to show how people made certain assumptions or bad decisions that started to poke holes in this plan and make it fall apart.

But the other thing that happens quite a bit with a story like Chernobyl, and I think this is very common to any kind of telling of a historical disaster, is that no matter what you do to try and fix it after it happens there are unintended consequences. And that’s always fascinating to watch characters be confronted with the truth that there is no perfect plan. That the only way ahead is to create a plan that not very well might but certainly will backfire on you at some point. And then you’re going to have to deal with that problem and there’s no way out of it.

**John:** Yep. I mean, my movie Go was all about plans, simple plans, that go very, very awry. And sort of scrambling to fix the plan that went awry. But if we didn’t understand what the original plan was there would be no movie. So Ronna is going to try to pull off this very tiny drug deal and small things keep going wrong and keep going wrong and she has to scramble to keep ahead of it. And the sort of theme of the movie is that you can’t stop and really think about it. You just have to keep plowing forward. Everyone has to just go and move forward.

Same with the guys in Vegas. It’s just going to be a fun weekend in Vegas until one character just goes too far and the idea of how to get out of Vegas just keeps going wrong.

So, none of those storylines work though if we don’t understand what the characters want, what the characters are trying to achieve, and if they haven’t articulated a basic idea of what they’re going to try to do next. It goes back to sort of trust and confidence. Do we believe that the characters actually have a notion of what they’re going to try to do next? And that the characters around them would sign off on that plan?

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And if you’re working on a story right now and you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, oh no, my characters don’t have a plan, I assure you they do. When there isn’t the presence of a clear identified plan usually the plan is better described as routine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, very typical film noir story is woman shows up at a private detective’s office and says, “I think my husband has been cheating on me. Can you find out?” So the detective engages in his routine. That’s the deal. It’s not a plan. It’s your job. You stake the place out. You take the picture. You go inside. You check the thing. Except, oh, he’s dead.

So, your routine is disrupted. And now you are thrown off of your normal plan and you have to come up with a new plan on the fly. So don’t be afraid. You don’t necessarily need to start off with somebody going, “We’re going to A, B, C, D, and E.” Your story may just be one of a disrupted routine.

**John:** Yeah. So a great example of a disrupted routine would be Roma from this year. So your central character has no big plans. She’s not a classic protagonist who is like I’m going to achieve this thing. She’s just trying to keep normal life together and she can’t. And so she’s having to react to the stuff that’s happening around her. But the degree to which she has a plan is to keep things together. And you see her reacting to try to do that.

Compare that with Can You Ever Forgive Me? And so Melissa McCarthy’s character has to make a plan and so she sort of stumbles into this first bit of forgery, but then she has a plan for how she is going to keep it going and how she’s going to enlist other folks help her do this. It has to deal with the unintended consequences of this going a little too well.

And so characters are always making plans and they’re always – as an audience we’re always looking for what are they trying to do next. And if you don’t have a sense of that at a certain point you stop kind of following the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And one last thing to avoid. There are times when you may think the interesting way to tell a story is to have a character do a whole bunch of things without letting the audience in on it. Because you would think, well, if I tell you what I’m going to do before I do it while I’m doing it you will be bored. So what I’ll do is I’ll have the character do it and then afterwards someone will say, “How did you do that?” And then the character will say, “Well,” and – see not particularly effective unless what they’ve done is really amazing. Because it feels a little bit like, mm, they could have actually told us the plan, they just wouldn’t have had a very good movie if they had.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say as you get notes back from producers, from studio executives, sometimes they’re pushing for people to over-articulate the plan. Sometimes in TV, especially in TV dramas, you see people way over-articulate the plan. It’s about finding that balance. Giving the audience enough information that they are excited to see what happens next and they’re excited to see if things work out well.

Chris McQuarrie had a great piece that I linked to this last week called How Can This Possibly End Well? That in any action sequence you always know that somehow it’s going to resolve, but the question you should be asking is how can this possibly end well. And so there’s always this sense of like given enough information we can see like, OK, I get where this is going but I’m really curious to see if this is all going to fit properly.

**Craig:** And to bring it back to Raiders there’s that amazing scene where Indiana is trying to rescue Marion. She is trapped in a plane. The engines are spinning. The propellers are moving. The plane is moving in a circle. There is gasoline and fire moving toward the plane. And Indiana Jones has to fistfight an enormously muscular prize-fighting bald Nazi while ducking propellers and the gasoline is coming and Marion is stuck. How can that possibly end well?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s good stuff. All right, let’s get to some questions.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** Do you want to take Dan in Sherman Oaks?

**Craig:** I do want to take Dan in Sherman Oaks. Hi Dan. Dan says, “I’ve written a pilot with three other friends of mine and as of right now we have it credited with all of our names on the page as Written by Person 1 and 2 & 3 & 4. We all had room sessions where we broke story and one of us physically wrote the script hence the and/ampersand designations. My question is would an agent or manager or producer balk at a title page with four writers’ names on it? Should we only say it’s written by one of us but created by the four of us?”

John, I see many problems. Layers of problems.

**John:** I see many problems. So the four of you writing together is really challenging. It may be fine. It may all work out great. But that is a challenging place to start things from. But that’s already been done.

But I want to urge people: title pages should be accurate. Title pages should accurately reflect who actually did the work. Because if they don’t then you have a document that is not sort of properly credited and it’s only going to add more heartbreak down the road.

I don’t think the agent is going to feel more scared, I guess, but yes it’s a lot of names on a title page. It’s a lot of names to be looking at. Craig, do you have solutions for Dan here?

**Craig:** I think so. First of all, Dan, you say that you had room sessions where all four of you broke story, but then one of you physically wrote the script. So–

**John:** Which I guess is Person 1.

**Craig:** Right. But then 2, and 3, and 4 actually write the screenplay, or were you just story? Because there’s story. I mean, you can say Story by and then Written by, or Teleplay by. Created by is a continuation credit that the Writers Guild awards to people that are credited with separated rights and the pilot. None of that matters. None of that matters.

If you want to get all four of your names on, sometimes what you can do is come up with a name for your crew. Just say the Blah-blah-blahs. The Duffer Brothers. There could be 20 Duffer Brothers as far as I know. I mean, it turns out there’s two of them and they’re clones. But, you can do that. And somewhere in the end you can say the Duffer Brothers are and then list your four names. And there’s ways around this sort of thing.

You can be creative because it ultimately doesn’t really matter. You’re not determining the credits.

Now, what you say you do here will be important. What you don’t want to end up with is a situation where down the line Person 1 asks for a WGA pre-arb because his point is, or her point is I wrote the screenplay. All they did with me, I mean, it’s not all they did, it’s an important thing, but they worked on the story. But I wrote the screenplay. Why are they saying they wrote the screenplay when they didn’t?

Stuff like that needs to be hammered out now.

**John:** Yeah, it does. I’m guessing that Dan in Sherman Oaks is Person 1. And Dan if you wrote this document and everybody else had story sessions and they talked about stuff, you’re going to be the writer because sitting around in a room chit-chatting isn’t probably going to get up to the stuff of having written something.

**Craig:** Yeah. Story is important. Give people credit for breaking the story. But then the screenplay is whoever wrote it.

**John:** Yep. Garrett writes in, “What do you make of the writing credits on the new High Life trailer,” which I haven’t seen but fortunately he’s listed them with us. “It says written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau with a collaboration of Geoff Cox and additional writing Andrew Litvak.” So this is not a WGA credit.

**Craig:** [laughs] No.

**John:** This is a foreign credit. And this is how credits work in lots of places in the world. It looks weird to us, but it’s not weird other places.

**Craig:** What I make of it is that the French – and I looked it up, too, just to make sure. But this appears to be a French production through and through. And so they don’t follow the Writers Guild of America credit guidelines. I don’t even think they have work-for-hire for instance over there anyway. So theoretically you should be able to put whatever you want on there unless there’s some kind of gentle folks agreement about these things, like a French Writers Guild or something like that.

So, what I think of it, what I make of it, is what I make of writing credits on all foreign films. That’s what they say the credits are. It’s the same thing I make of the credits on animated movies here in the United States.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK. That’s what you say they are. So, you know, cool.

**John:** As we talked about a lot on the show is that the WGA credits system has frustrations absolutely. But in looking at a credit on a WGA movie you have some sense of what those credits mean. I don’t know what “with the collaboration” means. I don’t know what Geoff Cox did on this. Additional writing by Andrew Litvak. OK, well Andrew Litvak I at least know must have written something because it says additional writing. But I don’t know what collaboration means. So, it is a little bit more confusing.

It’s just different. And so what do I make of it? I make of it as it’s a French film and that’s how they sometimes list credits.

**Craig:** You know, here’s the thing, Garrett, it’s France man.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s France.

**John:** It’s France. We call it the Royale with Cheese.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a very, very simple game. It’s called the Domain Name Pricing Game by Martin O’Leary. And it’s a really simple stupid idea, but basically it takes two web domains that are up for sale and lists the two domains and you have to guess which one is more expensive. And it’s surprisingly addictive because who would buy this domain name, but you almost always get it right. You’re always like oh that one, no one would want that. And it’s like, you’re right, that’s $50. But you see the other one and it’s like, oh yeah, I bet somebody would pay $1,700 for that dumb name.

So, it’s just a complete waste of time but also just a fun demonstration of a little web technology.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked it. I liked it. Cool.

**John:** Simple.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is an app that’s been out for quite a while but I’ve been making a lot of use of it lately. It is D&D Beyond. This is the official D&D companion app from Wizards of the Coast. And here’s why I love it so much. It really doesn’t do much beyond duplicate the material that’s in the hardcover books they sell. The Player’s Handbook. The Monster Manual. The Dungeon Master’s Guide. Etc. Etc. Etc.

But, as much as I love those books, the indexes, sorry, indices of those books are tragically awful. I think we’ve said it before. I think we even said it when we were on Greg Tito’s podcast. I’ll say it to anybody. Like whoever is in charge of the index department at Wizards of the Coast should be, again, ejected into space.

So, what’s great about these things is you have this material now on your iPad, your phone, your laptop and you are able to search through and index through yourself. You can create your own bookmarks. It works beautifully. It’s very quick. It has all the art. It’s just really useful, particularly if you’re DMing kind of the way that a lot of people do DM now with a laptop or an iPad.

So, one bummer is I don’t know – I think if you bought the Player Handbook I don’t know if you can just then get the Player Handbook into – because the idea is you download, you pay for the content. So they give you the structure of it and they give you some freebies, but the big stuff you have to pay for that content, so you may end up paying for things twice. But I’ve lived my entire life paying for things four times, because I forget about them. I have like seven copies of a certain book just because I keep forgetting. So, no big deal for me. For you it may be annoying.

But, if you are a DM or a player and you hate that index, and you should, check out D&D Beyond.

**John:** Yeah. So you only recently started using it and I was surprised, a little horrified, to see you sitting back there with your iPad. But it does make sense. And it is just much faster to be able to find that stuff in such a thing. So I don’t actually have it yet. You would think I’d be the first person to have used it and I’m not. But I probably will get there.

I enjoy reading my D&D books at night. And I try not to use screens after a certain hour. So, I may still buy the books and buy the additional copies because why not.

**Craig:** Yeah, why not? There are things where the book is actually a little bit easier, but when someone says, “OK,” this is so nerdy, “Sorry cool people, but some druid says ok I’m wild, I’m taking the wild shape of a grizzly bear,” whatever.

**John:** Get those stats.

**Craig:** What are the bear stats? Well, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip through the Monster Manual, because it turns out they’re in the back. They’re not under bear at all.

**John:** But some of them might actually be in the Player’s Handbook because they’re actually normal animals, they’re not special animals.

**Craig:** So, this way I just go “bear” and it comes up and it shows me. So, it’s much better. There you go. There you go, Dorks. Be like me. D&D Beyond.

**John:** Craig, while we’re talking about bears, something I just blogged about today. What is the difference between bear spray and pepper spray?

**Craig:** I don’t even know what bear spray is.

**John:** Oh, you’ve never heard of bear spray?

**Craig:** No, what’s bear spray?

**John:** Bear spray may be a very Colorado thing, but bear spray is for fending off grizzly bears who are about to attack you.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** It’s like a big can of stuff.

**Craig:** Well bear spray is maybe like mace? And pepper spray is made of peppers?

**John:** So, it turns out they’re the same thing. But which do you think is stronger?

**Craig:** Well, this feels like a trick question. But I’m not meta gaming this. I’m going to say pepper spray and here’s why. Many years ago my wife’s cousin, Joe, he was 14. Joe by the way lives in Seattle. Maybe he’ll come see us at our show.

**John:** So he’s still alive in this story?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. A little troublemaker he was. And we were all in his step-father’s house. It was a Christmas. And there were like all the leftover presents. And I think someone had gotten his stepmom a gift of pepper spray, kind of as a gag gift.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But it was all sitting in a pile. And all the kids were sitting around, you know, the 14 to 28 year olds are sitting around, chatting. And suddenly one of them starts coughing and can’t stop coughing. And I think it’s pretty funny. It’s funny when people start coughing. But then Melissa started coughing. And then I started coughing. And I’m like something is terribly wrong here. And we looked around and there was Joe sitting there with this “ooh, damn” look on his face. And all he had done was one squirt into the air. Not even towards us. He just wanted to put it in the air and see what would happen.

And just a few particles kind of like wafted over. And we were in paroxysms from like the tiniest bit. Joe. So, is that right, is it pepper spray?

**John:** It is pepper spray. But it turns out they are the exact same ingredients. It’s just the dosage in the bear stuff is much, much lower because you use it for a very different purpose. So you spray this big wide cloud that sort of keeps the bear at bay and keeps the bear from charging. Versus pepper spray which you spray directly at somebody as a targeted thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s basically bears are smarter than humans. If you just sort of go, “Look bear, this is going to be slightly uncomfortable,” he’s like, eh, I’m good. I’ll go eat someone else. But humans are terrible. If you don’t incapacitate a bad person they’ll keep coming.

**John:** They will keep coming. That is our show for this week. As always it is produced by Megan McDonnell, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond again. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. If you want to find us on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts, wherever you’re listening to this right now. If you leave us a rating that helps people find the show which is great.

People put us on lists of like best podcasts and–

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** That’s so lovely. Thank you for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ooh.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. I talked to somebody this week who is deaf who reads all the transcripts and so it’s so great that we have a person who gets to experience the podcast that way. So, that’s awesome.

You can find back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net. You subscribe there and you can get all the back episodes, the bonus episodes, as well.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Our next two shows will be live shows, so we’ll have the William Goldman The Princess Bride conversation and the live show in Seattle.

**Craig:** Awesome. I will see you at our next event. Bye.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

Links:

* [The Seattle Live Show](https://nwsg.org/event/scriptnotes-live/?instance_id=523) is on February 6th!
* You can now [preorder Arlo Finch in the Lake of the Moon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/162672816X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) or come to the [launch event](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/john-august-2019) on February 9th.
* Submit entries for The Scriptnotes Pitch Session [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch).
* [Bear spray is not stronger than pepper spray](https://johnaugust.com/2019/bear-spray-is-not-stronger-than-pepper-spray)
* [Domain Name Pricing Game](https://domain-pricing.glitch.me/)
* [D&D Beyond](https://www.dndbeyond.com/)
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* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch and Jim Bond ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_385.mp3).