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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/making-things-better-by-making-things-worse).

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

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

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

How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** Um, I’m doing spectacularly well.

**John:** Good. You and I are both taking trips to go off and write projects, and so we’re recording this a week ahead of its launch. So, by the time this episode comes out, everything in Hollywood might have changed.

**Craig:** That’s right. But I feel like that’s the case normally. I mean, anytime we do a podcast there’s always at least a day or two.

**John:** Just a flag.

**Craig:** Everything can… — I mean, you know at some point we’re going to do a podcast and the world will end.

**John:** Mm-hmm. But the question is, if the world ends will Stuart still be around to push the little button that makes the podcast go up on the Internet?

**Craig:** Again, this is not scientific, but I’m going to say yes.

**John:** So, if a podcast goes out in the world and there’s no one to hear it, was it ever really podcasted?

**Craig:** Well, somebody will be out there. I do see Stuart covered in radiation burns, slowly crawling over the course of 24 hours, to finally push the button with a finger that is more bone than flesh. And then dying with a smile on his face. “I did my duty!”

**John:** It really is an inspiring moment. It’s sort of like The Postman, that sort of post-apocalyptic Kevin Costner delivering mail.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Except it’s Stuart Friedel, so it’s automatically 10% better.

**Craig:** That’s right. Everything is 10% better with Stuart.

**John:** Well, today on the podcast we’re going to talk about making things worse, and how making things worse for your characters is honestly the best way to get your story working in many cases.

We’re also going to talk about what I call the organization of narrative information, which is sort of how you structure your story so that people know the things they need to know when they need to know them. So, that’s our podcast today.

But first we need to tell people about Austin. So, you and I are both going back to the Austin Film Festival this year.

**Craig:** Going back.

**John:** We had a very fun time last year. We will have a fun time this year. We are going to do a live Scriptnotes show there with an audience and questions and things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We might do a live Three Page Challenge. There will be other fun things. There will be drinking. So, it’ll be a good, fun time.

**Craig:** Will there be a dunking booth?

**John:** I have never seen a dunking booth, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a dunking booth.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll hold out hope.

**John:** Yes. There’s always hope.

So, Austin Film Festival this year is October 23 through the 26. If you register for it and you use the promo code Scriptnotes, all one word — Scriptnotes — they’ll give you $25 off your conference and producer’s badge. So, there’s a limited number of those Scriptnotes little special pass things, so if you know you’re going and you want to use that promo code, absolutely, why not use it? $25 saved.

**Craig:** That’s great. It’s getting a little, I mean, not only do we not ask you people for money. Now we’re just trying to give you money.

**John:** We’re basically just giving things away.

**Craig:** We’re just giving you money now. What is it — what do we got to do?

**John:** I don’t know what we’ve got to do. I think we need a stronger business sense or something.

**Craig:** Something. I mean, we’re not getting it from Stuart, that’s for sure.

**John:** Well, in many ways we are a classic startup though. We’re trying to get big and then we will figure out monetization later on.

**Craig:** Step one, start podcast. Step two, question mark. Step three, profit.

**John:** So, I will say in the monetization front, since we’ve ended this little side bar topic here, we make a little bit of money on the show. And how we make money is some people subscribe to the premium channel through scriptnotes.net. That gets you all the back episodes and occasional bonus content. That’s $2 a month and so once we split that with Libsyn who hosts us, it’s about $1 a month for each person who subscribes to that. And it’s not honestly a lot, but it helps pay for the transcripts, so we do transcripts for every episode. And it pays for Matthew who cuts things.

It doesn’t really pay for Stuart, but Stuart would be part of this enterprise anyway because Stuart is Stuart, he’s my assistant. So, it is useful. So, if you do want to support us in that way, we do really appreciate that, so that’s good.

**Craig:** When you say we make money, you mean we gross money. We have revenue but we don’t we actually profit.

**John:** Exactly. So, there’s money coming in the door to do that. Sometimes it works out enough money to actually pay for things. But, eh.

**Craig:** Cause you know it’s a big point of pride for me that this will always be a money-losing operation.

**John:** It will always be a money-losing podcast. Trust us on that.

**Craig:** Yes. We will never — we promise our shareholders that they will never, ever see a profit.

**John:** But I have asked Craig, like Craig used to have to write a check every once and awhile, because hosting was costing us so much. But we’ve taken care of those things, so we’ve made some smart business choices. But we’re sort of like one of those non-profits, like where you’re just trying to balance the books.

**Craig:** We’re like a church.

**John:** We’re like a church.

**Craig:** We’re like a church. And, John, you’re like our Jesus.

**John:** Thank you! And you are like the angry — are you the St. Augustine? Like are you the, who are you?

**Craig:** Oh, I like that. Yeah, I can see that. Actually, that does make sense. St. Augustine, I just wander off into the desert, super angry and shaking my fist. Although you could also suggest that perhaps I’m John and I’m having just whacked out schizophrenic hallucinations about hell and the beast and all the rest. That’s probably what I am.

Was that John in Revelations? I think it was, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, I think it was. Hmm, I’m not good at remembering Revelations. But I think it’s interesting that you picked both John and Augustine which would both be really good choices for me.

**Craig:** Wait a second. I think we, honestly, we just wrote the sequel to Angels and Demons. What was that — is it Dan Brown?

**John:** Dan Brown. Yeah, Dan Brown is listening to this podcast right now and he’s taking notes.

**Craig:** Somewhere Dan Brown is like that is a story I want to write with a lot of adverbs.

**John:** So, let’s give Dan Brown some helpful thoughts about creating a good movie narrative, because really essentially what he’s writing is books that will become movies starring Tom Hanks. So, let’s give him some help here.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** You’re going off to write your movie, I’m going off to write my movie. And so I’ve been working through some stuff on my movie this week and it was stuff we haven’t really talked about on the show. The movie I’m writing is a two-hander. And I should define a two-hander for people who don’t work in our weird little business.

A two-hander is a story with two important characters, where basically both characters are roughly equally important in the progress of the story. So, romantic comedies are generally two-handers, but really it applies to a lot of other kinds of movies, too. Lethal Weapon is a two-hander. The Sixth Sense is a two-hander. Identity Thief is a two-hander.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ll see two-handers typically in the buddy cop genre, road trips, if you do a story that’s like a father/son kind of story, or you mentioned one that was also very common, like you see it all the time. There are certain genres that lend themselves to being two-handers, and others that don’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is this one of yours? Can you say?

**John:** This is a drama I’ll see. A drama or a thriller. And thriller two-handers sometimes happens. Like The Bourne Identity is a single hero and that’s very common in thrillers, but there’s two-handers in thrillers you see pretty often as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, in a two-hander, generally each of the characters have something that he or she wants. And sometimes they have a shared goal, but they each have their own individual goals. And the work I’ve been doing this week has been each of these characters in my story has his or her own individual goal, and it’s been figuring out sort of which of those goals we sort of publicly state first and we sort of let them get started on achieving their thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I describe it honestly like a fuse. So, basically once a character has explicitly stated the thing they’re going off to try to do, you’re sort of lighting that fuse for that character. And then if you go off and do something else with the other character, or have to use your character to do something else to the other character’s plot line, you’re like, but wait, that fuse is already burning. Why are we doing this — you already said you’re going to do this. I want to see them do their thing.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, what I was juggling, it’s just sort of at the index card stage, or I’m just doing a little outline in WorkFlowy right now. It was figuring out which character’s storyline was really going to get precedence at the beginning of the story so we could basically get one of their things really going before I dealt with the other character explicitly stating what he was after.

**Craig:** Right. And sometimes that comes down to examining what is essential to the plot of your story. That will often give you a clue. One person’s story is more interconnected to the plot. They’re the ones that have to begin the adventure and then perhaps another person joins them.

So, for instance, you mention Sixth Sense. It begins with Bruce Willis. So, his want becomes — it lights the fuse in a sense.

**John:** But take a look at some of our movies. Like let’s take Stolen Identity right there.

**Craig:** Right. Identity Thiefy.

**John:** Identity Thiefy. So, we have to know that Bateman is going after Melissa McCarthy first. And he has to go on the road to get to her and actually has to find her before we should know anything about her agenda. Because if you had stopped and given us all sorts of her deal and her life we’d be like, wait, no, no, no, he’s not even met her yet. So, you had to start the story getting it from his side.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that was something that we ran around and around on. And where we ended up wasn’t exactly what I would have preferred, at least in the beginning, because I knew I wanted to see a hint of her in the beginning. I wanted to essentially show kind of a force of nature out there. And then indicate that she had stolen, she was using somebody else’s identity. And then I wanted to meet that person. And at that point I was happy to just stay with him.

And stay with him all the way through until he goes to find her. You know, in the battles that are fought sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

**John:** But I would say there’s a difference between meeting a character and like knowing who the character is and having them articulate that thing that is that they’re going for. And in Identity Thiefy, you pushed back her real — you pushed back her danger and sort of what’s at stake in her life until they’re actually together.

**Craig:** That’s right. Exactly.

**John:** So, she’s not in danger until they’re together, which I think is a crucial.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** A similar dynamic happens in Romancing the Stone. So, Kathleen Turner is going down to find her sister I believe who’s missing somewhere in South America. And we do not know that much about Michael Douglas until they meet and until they are together, because if we had done a lot of cross cutting between the two of them it would have really hurt her motivation for getting down there. It would have sort spoiled her perspective on getting down there.

**Craig:** And this is something that you’ll see all the time in romantic comedies, even though they are movies about relationships, one person has a crisis that pushes them out of their loveless comfort zone and into some kind of arrangement that they have to navigate with another human being, whether it’s While You Were Sleeping, She sits in the toll booth, or the ticket booth at a train station, somebody gets pushed in front of a train. She has to act.

And in Shrek, you know, the kingdom confiscates his beloved swamp. And he has to act. And then they meet these people and, so you’re right, and that’s why you look at the plot — unless, if you don’t know what the plot is, you just know what a relationship is, then it’s kind of wide open. But typically you’ll have some sense of what the hook of the movie is.

**John:** And so the movies I was talking about are really two-handers where it’s like Character A/Character B and you just have to pick which one you’re going to sort of go with first. But it can also happen in more complicated movies. So, Go, as an example, there’s three basic plotlines, there are three sort of protagonist plotlines. You have Ronna who is trying to make this very tiny drug deal. You have Simon who is trying to get laid in Vegas, and you have Adam and Zack sort of as a group character who are trying to get through their situation with Burke.

And when I wrote that first section with just Ronna and sort of her trying to pull off this tiny drug deal, it was nice and tight and clean because it was very clear like this scene led to this scene led to this scene led to this scene led to this scene. There’s a good sense of consequence of each person’s actions.

When I went back to make the full version of the movie, one of my first decisions was, well, am I going to just try to intercut these scenes between the different plotlines, and I recognized it just wasn’t going to work at all, because once I had started the fuse of Ronna trying to make this drug deal, anything that wasn’t about that was going to not work. And I was going to hurt all of the other storylines by trying to interweave them.

So, being able to keep those storylines separate and let them each be their own chapter let each of those stories actually be the best version of that story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very hard to do a true, I don’t know how you would describe the kind of Altman or Tarantino approach, or Paul Thomas Anderson does it as well, where it’s almost, I guess it’s like an anthology where you’re following different stories that have similar weights to them and you’re moving in between them.

**John:** But I think Tarantino is actually a good counter example, though, because if you look at sort of — Tarantino does tend to clump all of those plotlines together. So, like everything that’s going to be about this one character and what they’re doing here is going to stay together as one chunk, rather than cutting back and forth between a lot of different perspectives on something.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yes. That is true. I mean, they all tend to turn around a story. But I’m thinking of for instance in Kill Bill Volume 1 when you take a break from the narrative of the movie that’s clearly being driven by The Bride and her desire for revenge, and you watch an animated presentation of the history, the origin of O-Ren Ishii.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is fascinating. It doesn’t really impact what happens in the main narrative, but it is its own side narrative that’s amazing. And it’s a tough thing to pull off. It’s a style choice, but in this case I think when you look at Tarantino’s stuff you’ll see, well, all the side stories actually have very high stakes to them. They are often all about violence, and love, and these deep passions.

If you have a story like that in your framework, and the other ones are just not quite as commanding or as urgent, then yes, the audience will get fussy.

**John:** They will get fussy. And, again, I have not watched Kill Bill Volume 1 for years, but my recollection is we stay with Bride’s story for a period of time and obviously her journey of revenge is going to take over two movies to get to, so we don’t have the expectation that we’re going to get through all the way to her revenge before we see any of these other stories. But you have to take her a certain distance.

I’m trying to remember what her first obstacle is. I mean, at times she has to get out of the hospital, or she has to get one thing done. And so as long as we sort of know that she was going after one thing, and she got to that one thing, then we’re sort of fine with like, okay, she was trying to do this one thing, she accomplished that one thing, now we can move on, or at least we got her to a place where we understand where she’s at. It’s when you leave something as dot-dot-dot, as a frustrating dot-dot-dot that it gets to be frustrating for the reader, for the viewer.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you’re going to distract us from a story that you’ve asked us to care about, and that story has elements that demand our concern, if you want to distract us from that, go for it, but you then need to also give us something that will be equally as demanding of our attention and concern. Or we will get fussy.

**John:** Absolutely. So, when we had Aline on the show two weeks ago we talked through tone which I loved that conversation and it was really great that we talked about that topic. And it got me thinking about sort of the questions we ask about a movie. And those sort of fundamental questions are really the same questions that they taught us in journalism class. And I’m sure you know the fundamental questions you’re supposed to have in a news story. Do you remember what those were?

**Craig:** Who? What? Where? When? How? Why?

**John:** Exactly. So, the 5 Ws and 1 H. And those are the thing they teach in every Journalism 1 class and that every news story is supposed to be able to quickly answer those questions so that you could theoretically lop off the news story at any given paragraph and it would still make sense.

I looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out those questions are actually much, much older. And so it was the rhetor Hermagoras of Temnos who came up with Quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis, which is who, what, when, where, why, in what way, and by what means. And so our conversation with Aline about tone I think was really those two halves, the in what way and by what means. It’s not what’s happening but what does it feel like? What is the sense of it?

And I think the conversation we’re having right now is really the when question.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Structure is really about when things happen and when you reveal certain information. And I get frustrated by screenwriting textbooks because they always talk about structure as when in the sense of like on this page you’re supposed to do this, and on this page you’re supposed to do this, and hitting these page counts, when really it’s so much more subtle than that. It’s when are you giving a piece of information to the audience so that they have — it’s how are you dolling out the information to the audience to get the best sense of what your story is.

**Craig:** I agree. The endless frustration with the screenwriting textbooks and the prima facie evidence that the people who write them aren’t really practitioners of the craft is that they typically make the mistake of thinking that plot is just about what, and what goes where when, I guess. As if these positions in linear time were there because they’re supposed to be there, because, it’s just a tautological way of thinking about structure.

Things that happened, the whats and the whens are connected to the why, I think. Everything is a choice. Yes, you can certainly see the patterns. Pulling patterns out of movies and saying, “Well, it does seem like typically the hero experiences a low point at the end of whatever we think of as Act 2.” Absolutely. Well noticed.

Here’s another observation: it does certainly appear that as we progress into the summer months that the day grows younger. Neither of those statements, the first statement about screenplays won’t help you write a screenplay. The second statement about the lengthening of days will not help you create a universe.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** It is just an observation. But why? Why? Why?

**John:** Yeah. When we had the episode about tone, which I thought was a great conversation, there were a couple tweets and a couple of questions that came into the account saying like, “Well how do I get better at tone?” And I was like that’s fundamentally a silly question. But you hear the same thing all the time about how do I get better at structure or how do I get better at character. And people try to answer these questions individually. And I think what I’d like to stress is the answer to all those questions is so deeply interconnected.

So, let’s take a look at those questions. Who. Who are the characters? Well, those characters are the people who are determining the what. They’re determining the plot. They’re determining what is actually going to happen in the course of your story. They’re usually affected by the where, by the locations that you’ve chosen, by the world in which your story is set.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The world in which your story is set, if it’s a revenge story set in Westeros versus a revenge story set on Wall Street, those are very different kinds of stories that affects the how in many ways. It affects whether you’re dealing with swords or some sort of stock selling revenge to get back at somebody, some sort of Trading Places kind of revenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re also defined by the when.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** When do we meet them? What just happened to them? Why are we meeting them now?

**John:** Yes. Why did the movie decide to start right at this moment versus three days ago or 30 years later? And those are fundamental questions that are all interconnected. You can’t be good at one of those. You can’t say like, and you will hear people talk about like, “Oh, she’s really good at character stuff, but plot is not her strong point.”

**Craig:** Uh-huh. [laughs]

**John:** Or you’ll more hear about this about sort of beginning screenwriter people, but like, “I just need somebody who is good at structure. I’m really good at story, I’m just not really good at structure.” Well, that’s fundamentally a deep component of it.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. My favorite is, “He writes great dialogue, but the characters and the story…” Well what is the dialogue, what would be the purpose of that? That’s like a painter just throwing paint into the air. What?

No, this is what we do. No one has ever said to a sculptor, “Well, you know, what you’re really good at is curves. Not so good at the straight lines.” Nobody cares.

**John:** No. Now, is it absolutely — to me it’s absolutely true that you can read a script and say, “These are some aspects that were not working. And they weren’t working because of… I feel like you have the possibility of a good story here. But these are the things that are getting in the way.”

And then you might talk about some of the character issues that are getting in the way. You might talk about, “I think you’re setting this in a really boring location that’s not giving you the best potential.” But you can’t spray on a better location and suddenly everything is going to make — it’s not going to fix all the problems.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And similarly, you can’t wipe off something to reveal something great underneath. I’ve heard some people say, “Listen, it’s a really god script, it’s just that the dialogue isn’t very good.” So, if you just wipe that part off and then put new dialogue on top of this very good thing, but in fact, no, because what dialogue is is an expression of tone, of what the character wants, what the character is thinking. It is an expression of the relationship between two characters or three and how it is progressing.

No, there’s no such thing. Unfortunately, this is where the books that analyze these things analyze them as everyone analyzes everything. The idea is to take something that seems complicated and break it down into constituent pieces. And talk about how those constituent pieces all exist and then must be assembled like Lego bricks into this gestalt. But in fact while that is a useful thing for a beginner to do simply to understand what is roughly going on, it is very quickly useless to you. It is as useless to you writing an actual screenplay as, oh, I don’t know, fundamental arithmetic is useless to somebody who is trying to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. You’re beyond that and that point. Way beyond that.

**John:** Yes. It’s a beginning math textbook talking about like these are the rules of how you add two numbers together, but then ignoring the actual execution of it. Basically, ignoring that you actually have to do that work, as if execution doesn’t matter. As long as you follow these simple steps and simple guideline, here is the net result.

**Craig:** Which is why these people make money. It’s the same, you know, how should I lose weight? Follow these steps. How should I get a boyfriend? Follow these steps. How can I get a better job? How can I win friends? How can I win influence? Follow these simple steps.

Nothing that is worth anything can be achieved through simple steps. It is the children in us that are looking for parents to give us instructions to follow. And we are all children looking for parents everywhere. In the end, however, in order to achieve anything of value you have to be your own parent and you have to be a grown up and you have to confront the messiness of it. And the messiness of screenwriting is this: the plot is the character, is the theme, is the dialogue, is the narrative, is the choices.

**John:** Is the location.

**Craig:** Is the location. The how is the what is the why is the when is the where is the how. Isn’t that awful, but that’s the way it is.

**John:** It’s just the worst.

**Craig:** It’s the worst.

**John:** I can’t believe you have taken something that was so simple and made it so complicated, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m a terrible person.

**John:** You’ve really been a huge disservice to screenwriters everywhere.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Because this is a thing that should be straightforward and you made it completely un-straightforward.

**Craig:** You know my favorite objection whenever I go on about these charlatans who take your money in exchange for nonsense, people will say, “Well, it’s easy for him to say because he works already.” Which is my favorite like, yeah, and how did that happen, through what? What, did I win a lottery or something?

And then the other one is, “He’s trying to keep us out by taking away the things that would give us the secrets that let us…” Oh, okay.

**John:** How dare you take their magic beans, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s secrets. That’s it. It’s really just a secret. That’s like a lot of times when I’m in a restaurant I think, “I could make this food, I just need the secret.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just need the secret.

**John:** Whenever I watch one of those home improvement shows, or especially if I watch the New Yankee Workshop, it’s like I could do what Norm Abram does. I just need that table saw and those spinning spindle things, the lave. God, if I had a lave there’s no end to what I could do.

**Craig:** That’s why my favorite thing to watch when I was a kid was Bob Ross.

**John:** Oh yeah, so good. Happy Little Clouds.

**Craig:** Happy Little Clouds. And I have no ability to illustrate, to draw or paint. None. I can see things in my head, but my brain connecting to my hand is incapable of reproducing anything that is true in terms of painting or drawing or anything like that. I’m just terrible.

So, I watched Bob Ross and what I always was struck by was that for awhile, oh, and there was another guy, even better than Bob Ross. There was a guy named Robbins, I believe. There was a show on PBS, it was a reading show, and while somebody read a children’s story —

**John:** Oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about, Craig.

**Craig:** He would illustrate it, right? You remember that guy?

**John:** Absolutely. Because that’s actually where I learned sort of like forced perspective. Yes.

**Craig:** That guy, what always blew my mind about that guy was I had no idea what he was drawing for awhile. He would start making these lines, and curves, and shades, and shapes and I would think, well, this is just a mess. It’s a mishmash of nonsense. And then suddenly in a moment the image would appear. And it was just remarkable how integrated it all was to the point where — the way he broke it down, and was able to then construct it, what made no sense from a post-analysis way, none. You would have never thought to break it out.

And, by the way, I feel it’s the same thing. Like if people saw how you built something or I built something, they would say, “Well that’s not applicable to a book for other people. And then we would say, yeah, that’s right. It’s not. Go figure your own way out.

**John:** Well, it’s interesting you bring up these drawing examples, because you look at Bob Ross or this other perspective guy, or, you know, that simple like paint-by-numbers kind of thing, where draw from here, to here, to hear, the simple little instructions. You know, on some level it’s good if it’s getting somebody to actually sit down and do the work. I full commend that. And if it gets somebody who may actually have an aptitude for it to get started, and try it, and sort of keep working at it, then that’s not a bad thing necessarily.

But it’s when they’re selling you on the idea that all you have to do is exactly what I’m doing and you will be able to make great art, that’s incredibly unlikely.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I found the guy by the way, just so you know. His name is John Robbins.

**John:** John Robbins. Very good. We’ll have a link —

**Craig:** It was called Cover to Cover and the Wishful Artist. Oh, god, so cool. Anyway.

**John:** Well, I do remember, I think he basically had like a big white board and he would just have a little marker and he would draw little things. And there would be little creatures coming out. It was great. I loved it.

**Craig:** Yeah, awesome.

**John:** This also reminds me of the conversation we were having about the — I think it was a New Yorker critic who was writing about how screenwriting is not really writing.

**Craig:** Eh.

**John:** Eh. Because if you were to try to tell someone like, “You can write a great American novel, just follow these simple steps.” Everyone would say, well that’s crazy. You can’t be Steinbeck. You can’t be Faulkner. There’s not a way you can reduce that to a simple pattern. Yet, we want to be able to do that for screenwriting because it seems like, well, it should be that way because I’ve seen a lot of movies. You can look at a script, it doesn’t seem that complicated. How challenging could it really be?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, this is where unfortunately the reason that these people exist and the reason they push this nonsense is because there is still a Gold Rush mentality about screenwriting.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** You know, people still think that this is — the deal is that you’re going to sell you spec, make $4 million, hobnob with movie stars, marry an actress, and live happily ever after. And, no.

**John:** But I think we’ve also, helping the novelist, or what keeps people from going for that novelist dream so much is we’ve romanticized the idea of writing a novel as suffering.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And people don’t want to suffer. People just want to get it done and then like be a success. And we don’t have the idea that screenwriting is suffering. We have the idea that screenwriting is that lottery, like it was really so easy, I sat down, two weeks later, in 21 days I wrote my script. And then I sold it and now I’m a huge success and I have a pool.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that is the dream but that’s the image that is being put out there in the world for people who aspire to write movies. People who aspire to write novels, we’ve not given them that dream. We’ve given them the dream of misery, and heartache, and at the very best maybe you’re David Foster Wallace, but then you still kill yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s true that there is a certain economic benefit to screenwriting that maybe isn’t there for the vast majority of novels. Individual novels obviously will break through. But people think, well, you know, every year somebody goes and sells a thing and they make a thing. And that’s true, but then saying that you’re five times more likely to make money as a screenwriter than you are as a novelist — so?

They’re both really, really small probabilities. And the only way you’re going to succeed as a novelist or as a screenwriter is if you have some innate talent and you understand how to integrate these various things and that you… — If you start approaching this stuff in a workman like way with these books, you’ll never integrate. You’ll never understand. You won’t be honest. The material just won’t be honest and true. And, by the way, I’ve gone through it. You know, there have been times where I just felt like I’m just plotting through this. I’m painting by numbers. This isn’t honest.

And I’ve really been making an effort over the last few years to be as honest as I can, even at the risk of somebody saying, “Well, but you know, we wanted the fake thing. We didn’t want you…”

**John:** Or, “We expected. We expected what we expected and you didn’t give us what we expected and therefore we’re confused.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like cherry flavor when you’re a kid is red. It’s that red fake cherry flavor. And then occasionally you would run into somebody who is like, “No, no, no, this is made with real cherries.” And you think, ew, it’s so gross. They’re like, “No, this actually costs money and it’s far, far better.” But I wanted the fake thing. I understand that impulse, but I can’t do it anymore, so.

**John:** My mom was telling me that this summer in Colorado they’ve had a lot of hikers killed by lightning strikes, so there are these storms that will pick up in the mountains late in the afternoon and if you don’t get off the mountain by two in the afternoon there’s a really good chance that you’ll encounter a lightning storm. And so they’ve had several hikers killed already this summer.

I could look up the real statistics, but it’s actually entirely possible that you’re more likely to be killed by lighting than sell a spec script.

**Craig:** I would imagine there’s a whole rafter of things, dying of viral meningitis. I know, it just seems like there’s so many things that happen more frequently than selling a screenplay. You should write screenplays because you love writing screenplays. And not for any other reason because, you know, any energy that you slop out in expense of any other thing is wasted energy. You know, caring about breaking in and all the rest of that, you should — you could do that, I guess, when you’ve finished your writing for the day, but better to just concentrate on writing well.

**John:** I agree. The other topic I wanted to talk about today was making things worse. And it occurred to me because I’ve been catching up on other TV shows over the summer and as you watch one-hour dramas especially, but also half-hours, you recognize that while the one-hour form especially has gotten so good lately and so many wonderful things have happened, there’s a fundamental challenge in television is that you have to be able to create stories that can repeat themselves. You have to be able to create something that can duplicate itself, so that you can actually have multiple episodes.

And, yes, there may be an overall journey over the course of episodes, but you kind of cant burn down the house every week. You can’t make things as bad for the characters as you can in a movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that may be actually one of the fundamental characteristics of a movie is that a movie is something that should theoretically be able to happen to these characters only once in their lives, versus a TV show which is theoretically going to be happening over the course of their lives, or over many years of their lives. So, it’s a very different nature of story.

And as I’ve read some scripts recently, I really approach them from the perspective of are the writers willing to make things as difficult as they can for their heroes, for their protagonists. And in many cases I think they’re sometimes too sympathetic to their characters.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** They don’t want their — they love their characters They don’t want them to suffer. But it’s only through making things awful for them that they’re going to actually be able to overcome the real challenges you want them to overcome.

**Craig:** That’s right. And it’s not necessarily true for real life. You know, it’s quite common that you grow and achieve without suffering. However, that’s not good drama. In good drama we require the suffering. We need the sacrifice. We need blood. Even if it’s all metaphorically done, if the character experiences something early in the movie or in the midpoint of the movie and is surviving and continuing forward then apparently you haven’t hit them hard enough. At some point they need to be disintegrated by you so that they can be reintegrated as something better.

And there are movies that take this to extremes. Mel Gibson tends to do those. He loves to, you know —

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s written in his contract he must be beaten at a certain point in each of his films. Tortured.

**Craig:** He must experience a Christ-like, what is the word, the — not the Passion, is it?

**John:** The passion play aspect of it all.

**Craig:** The bad experience. So, in Braveheart it’s not enough for him to be poor. It’s not enough for him to be oppressed. It’s not enough that his wife is killed. It’s not enough for him to suffer in battle. It’s not enough for him to even be betrayed by a friend. He must be tortured publicly and humiliated publicly. And sometimes, of course, those characters do die and in dying they are transformed and they succeed. But in all cases, it’s not enough to get them into a bunch of trouble and then have them work their way out of trouble. There is always, and Pixar also, masters of this.

Pixar will punch a character repeatedly, and some of them will be jabs, and some will be nice right hooks, but they’re saving the big one for the end. They’re saving it — like how much more of a beating can Rocky take? Oh, watch this. That’s what’s I think at the heart of a lot of their success is that they have no problem really hurting their heroes.

**John:** Well, it’s one thing to have the movie hurt the hero, so some external force hurting the hero, but it’s often much more rewarding that the hero’s own choice is a bad choice. And they’re suffering the consequences of their decisions. And that’s a thing I don’t see happening enough in many scripts is where the character has to make a choice, and that choice either by necessity is going to lead them down a darker path, or they think they have made a choice, an easy choice, that has consequences down the road.

Forcing your characters to take action, even when sometimes those actions are more dangerous or sort of more harmful than the normal thing would be.

Again, in real life, if you gave a character a choice they would probably choose to go home, or call the police, or just get out of the situation, which is a reasonable response. So, your challenge as a writer is to find ways to take away the option of those reasonable responses and force them to take bigger actions.

**Craig:** Right. And Shakespeare, for instance, would typically look to the characters themselves and their tragic flaw as the reason that they make the choice that perhaps you might not. And those choices would get everybody into trouble.

**John:** Yeah. So, in Aliens, Ripley has no desire to go back to that planet, but she reluctantly agrees. She has no desire to actually go down to the planet itself, but she reluctantly agrees. She doesn’t want to have to be in charge of anything, but she ends up having to step up and take charge of something. She ends up having a relationship with Newt. She’s trying to protect Newt and trying to just get the hell off the base.

The movie very cleverly keeps adding new escalations to things. But it’s ultimately Ripley’s choice to go after Newt that makes the end so incredibly dangerous for herself. It’s her finally sort of coming into her maternal rage that powers the last part of that movie.

The movie makes things worse for her, but she’s also making the movie worse for herself, and that’s when movies are working really well, that’s what can happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also think that there’s something wonderful that can happen as the product of a series of bad choices and bad things. Your character may make mistakes and may make bad choices and get themselves deeper and deeper into trouble. But what that sets you up for in the ending is the realization that they now know what the right thing is to do. And that thing is even harder to do than all of the other stuff they’ve been doing. And then they’re really — they’re really, that’s why endings to feel so much more final than the middle parts of things because we understand that they are now asked to do something that is because it is good for them and because it goes against the grain of who they’ve been all along. It is now the hardest and most painful choice.

**John:** Yes. They had the opportunity to get the thing they’ve always wanted and they’re going to have to maybe sometimes surrender that thing for what they know is the right thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And it can be challenging.

**Craig:** In fact, that’s oftentimes very clearly the difference between the protagonist and the antagonist. The antagonist will not change. They refuse to let go. They can’t, and that is their downfall. That in some ways is the purpose of stories is to entice us to be brave enough to change.

**John:** So, I want to take a look at some television shows because my thesis was that it doesn’t often happen in television shows because television shows have to be able to repeat themselves.

So, you look at a show like Homeland, which did you watch Homeland?

**Craig:** No, you know I watch two shows.

**John:** You watch two shows. So, Homeland is a spectacular show and it’s essentially a two-hander. There’s other characters, but the Carrie character is fantastic and the show does a brilliant job of making things as incredibly difficult for her. And in many ways does what I’m saying in terms of like continually escalating and forcing her to make choices that make things much, much worse for herself. And she’s constantly losing allies and things are melting away.

But it ultimately paints that show into a very challenging corner because you can only destroy everything a certain number of times before it just becomes kind of silly.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another counter example is Game of Thrones, which you do watch, and Game of Thrones has the luxury of having so many characters that it can actually sort of make things much, much worse for a character and ultimately kill a character, or kill a lot of characters because there’s room in that world to keep killing characters.

**Craig:** Well, I will say, answer this question for me about Homeland. Do you think in watching Homeland that the people who created it and currently make it, do you think that they conceive of it as something that will go on as long as it can go on? Or is there a story that they have with an absolute ending and when they get to that ending they’re going to say, “We’re not making Homeland anymore, no matter what our ratings are.”

**John:** I assumed that was going to be the end of season two. And I have not watched season three. So, there is a plan to continue into now season four, but they’ve made some fundamental character changes. I don’t know what those are ultimately going to be.

**Craig:** Because I look at Game of Thrones which has an endpoint. It’s moving towards an end. Breaking Bad is an even better example because it’s shorter, so there are five seasons of Breaking Bad, I think, is that correct, five?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they played out as a long movie, a very long movie, and over the course of that long movie Walter White changes dramatically and irrevocably. There’s no kind of backing up the way, you know, in soap opera characters become evil, then they become good, then they become evil, and then they become good. That’s kind of the fun of it.

But in Breaking Bad there is a descent. It is a little bit like Heart of Darkness set in Albuquerque. Marlow goes down the river and is inexorably changed. And we watch those — so maybe that’s why, I mean, look, I love Breaking Bad for so many reasons, but I think as a television show I really appreciated it, but in a way by the way — I love The Sopranos, but The Sopranos was never laid out that way.

The Sopranos kind of just existed and did its stuff and then suddenly said, “Okay, we’ve got to bring this to an end,” so there was almost like a rush of changes that occurred. But not so Breaking Bad. It felt deliberate and like a very long movie.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say that many TV series, and many successful series are kind of all middle. And a given episode could happen anywhere in the order of the show and it basically feels the same. Possibly one of the reasons why a show like Heroes was a little bit frustrating is that a big super hero story doesn’t feel like it should all be middle. It’s meant to have beginnings, middles, and ends, and it just got to be weird that you were suddenly in the middle of this thing for so long.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think our expectations of a super hero story is more a feature kind of expectation. Even in comic books they have those arcs and, yes, Heroes would try to have those little chapters or those little arcs, but it always just sort of felt like you were bound to what TV was supposed to be doing which is giving you the middle.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s why, for instance, I think it’s very smart what Nick Pizzolatto is doing with True Detective or what they do with American Horror Story. Okay, we’re going to do a season and we’ll do as many seasons as you give us, but each season is a story. So, we get to actually change people and have a beginning, middle, and an end.

This is a problem that sitcoms have because they are not designed to deliver story per se, they’re designed to deliver situations and laughs. They are literally defined as, you can call a situation comedy middle comedy. It’s second act comedy. And so what you’ll see in a long-running sitcom, take Friends for example. So, this one likes this one, but this one likes that one, but then they switch, but then they get married, but then they get divorced, but then somebody has a baby, then somebody does not have a baby.

It’s like you could see them just every year they’re like, “Well, let’s just go with this one and this one and make a new middle.” But you never get anywhere until at long last there’s some emotional farewell. But even those emotional farewells aren’t about story. They’re just about saying goodbye to people that we really liked hanging out with.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like you were with them for five years of college and then now you’re done and you’re all doing your separate directions. So, you fell in love with the characters, but it was never about the journey that they had together.

**Craig:** By the way, that’s why I’m going to be an iconoclast here and say that my favorite final episode of a sitcom is Seinfeld’s last episode, which I know at the time was derided, but what I loved about it is it didn’t do — every other sitcom as far as I can tell, most of them, would turn into kind of a maudlin goodbye. And Seinfeld, [laughs], Seinfeld is great because it basically was like we’re now going to judge you. The series was not about hanging out with people that we now have to wistfully say goodbye to. The series was essentially we the audience are god, we’ve watched these people live on earth, and we will now judge them. And we judge them to be lacking.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And they are now to spend the rest of eternity like the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos together. Together. In their own hell. How about that? How about that for fancy?

**John:** That is fancy. I’m trying to think of my favorite last episode of a sitcom. I don’t know that I necessarily have one.

**Craig:** They’re often forgettable.

**John:** They’re often forgettable. They’re often just like, you know, I remember Cheers ending, I remember Frasier ending, I remember liking all those characters but not feeling necessarily like, well, that was a transcendent episode of what they were supposed to be, partly because the nature of a sitcom is they’re designed to deliver laughs. They’re designed to deliver this situation. And then that situation is resolved and then you come back next week and you see the new situation. So, it’s a very different experience.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everybody loves the ending, that famous Newhart ending where it was all a dream and they bring back Suzanne Pleshette, and that was great because it was so clever, but —

**John:** It wasn’t part of the series. It wasn’t —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It didn’t have anything to do with that.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was clever.

**John:** Yeah, it was clever.

**Craig:** Usually those, it’s interesting how sitcoms try and become about story in their end. Suddenly they rush to grow up and become adults at the end of their series because they feel like that’s the only significance that those characters can actually have. And essentially they’re a movie that has been a second act for ten years and then five minutes of third act.

By then we don’t really care.

**John:** We’re done.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re done.

**John:** Cool. All right. Well, let’s wrap this up. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing this week. And my One Cool — well, I guess I have two now, because John Robbins is one of my Cool Things and we’ll find — I’m sure there’s some great videos and you can just watch how this guy makes an illustration out of a bunch of garbled up lines. Ah, what a genius.

**John:** I kind or remember him having like a number seven line. Like did he have names for the different lines he was doing?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I can’t remember that. I just remember that he had that very soft voice and a mustache and he was super ’70s out in a kind of like cool high all the time way. And he was just so talented.

My One Cool Thing this week, I’m taking a class at my son’s school, the headmaster has a summer great books class for adults who wanted to take it. And so I took it and it was great. And I read a short story that I had not read before that I thought was just amazing. And I’m a little embarrassed that I hadn’t read it before, because then when I did a little research, it’s sort of a seminal short story that I suppose I should read at some point. And it truly is short. It’s by an author named Delmore Schwartz who was something of a celebrated literary figure of the ’30s and ’40s. A poet and a short story author and editor. But by his own account never really was able to top his big debut which was this short story that he wrote when he was 23, I believe, called In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

It’s a fantastically written short story about the terror of choice and of our own past, our present, and our future. Beautifully written and done. If you Google it you just might find a copy out there that you could read, although of course as content creators we always urge that you purchase it somehow responsibly. But it will take you ten minutes to read and probably the rest of your life to mull over. It’s really, really good.

**John:** That sounds terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a book I’m reading right now called The Answer to the Riddle is Me by David MacLean and has such a good setup. So, it’s a nonfiction. It’s a true story of this guy David MacLean who suddenly found himself in a train station in India with no idea of who he was. Complete amnesia in a way that is sort of what you think about in movies where someone literally has no sense of who they are at all.

So, he believes that he was a drug addict and that he may have hurt somebody and these people sort f take pity on him. He ends up in a mental institution in India, which doesn’t seem like an ideal place to end up in a mental institution.

**Craig:** No, not a good summer holiday.

**John:** And then ultimately the book sort of follows him trying to figure out who he is and sort of get his brain back together. So, I’m not spoiling anything to say that it’s based on a real thing that does happen, which is an allergic reaction to Lariam, which is a big malaria drug. And on a previous episode when we talked about Datura and like how no one should ever take Datura because it destroys your psyche, this was fascinating to me because where he was lacking most was a sense of inner narrative. He had no idea who he was because he had no story to sort of connect all these little bits and fragments of pieces.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And so when he finally finds his family again he has all these photos that he’s in but he doesn’t know what they really mean, so he’s sort of artificially trying to force the memory, or he’s faking a memory for what these are so that it all makes sense to him. It’s a really well written story, and written in a very fragmented way that seems completely appropriate for the narrative.

**Craig:** That reminds me of that great line from Her. The past is a story we tell ourselves.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Just love that.

**John:** One of the things it brings up is that we have an expectation about memory that’s so strange and specific. So, like we sort of kind of remember what books we read, but you don’t really remember the details about the books we’ve read. There’s like a threshold about what we expect ourselves to remember or not remember. And it’s only when you dip below that threshold that everything just sort of falls apart.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Deep. We both got a little deep there.

**John:** We got a little deep there. So, a reminder for folks, we have a few of those USB drives left that have the first 150 episodes of Scriptnotes on them. So, if you are a newcomer to the podcast and want to catch up, it’s a chance to get all those episodes at once. So, you can go to store.johnaugust.com and you will see them there and you can order those if you want to.

**Craig:** 100 Quatloos on the Newcomer.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Is that right? Is it 100 Quatloos on the Newcomer? Do you know what I’m talking about?

**John:** No, I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** It’s from Star Trek, the good, the original Star Trek. I’m almost said the good Star Trek and then I realized I was going to start a huge fight because I like Star Trek: The Next Generation, too.

**John:** Is it in Mudd’s Tavern? What’s going on there?

**Craig:** No, I think it’s like the thing where they all have to fight each other like —

**John:** Gladiator style?

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Quatloos.

**John:** All the best. And do they have the little neck things around them?

**Craig:** I think, is it 100 Quatloos, or 1,000? I don’t know. [laughs]

**John:** The exchange rates these days, it’s really so hard. To value the quatloo, it’s really tough.

**Craig:** I don’t know how many quatloos, yeah, like the dollar to quatloo exchange rate is probably way out of whack at this point.

**John:** It’s got to be crazy. I started watching the original Star Treks with my daughter on Netflix. And it’s really fascinating because they went back through and they cleaned up the visual effects, which do make the show look a lot better and less cheesy, but the cheesiness is actually an inherent part of how the whole thing works.

So, they can fix the visual effects, but you can still see like, oh wow, you shot this whole thing on just like three sets.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, you can change the visual effects, but you can’t change the fact that sometimes like the set seems to be shaking a little bit. [laughs] Yeah, I mean, come on, don’t clean it up.

**John:** Just leave it.

**Craig:** No, you should leave it as it is. I don’t understand that.

**John:** Well, what they did is when the Enterprise is circling a planet, that looks much better now. So, that was a useful thing to cleanup.

**Craig:** I guess. I guess. I liked it. I think that’s part of the fun.

**John:** Well, if you have an opinion about Star Trek and its cleaned up visual effects, you can tweet at Craig or John. Craig’s Twitter handle is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

If you have a longer question, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com, and we answer some of those questions on the air. If you are on iTunes at this moment and wish to subscribe, you click that subscribe button. That’s always great and handy. You can also leave us a comment.

If you’re listening to us through [Stitch] or one of those other apps, that’s awesome, go ahead and do that. But it’s also great if you subscribe through iTunes just because that way other people can find us, or at least leave us a note there. That’s great. If you would like to listen to all those back episodes, you can go to scriptnotes.net, or you can go to the iOS or Android app for Scriptnotes and you can subscribe to all of those back episodes. Always good and fun.

Our episodes are produced by Stuart Friedel. They’re edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week, and that’s it for our show.

**Craig:** Yeah. How many quatloos is the USB drive?

**John:** It is, I think, well, in American dollars I think it’s $20 or $19.

**Craig:** Okay. I see. In quatloos it’s like 0.0001 quatloos.

**John:** Yeah, I mean you have to use your special quatloo calculator thing because it really changes based on the —

**Craig:** Well, lately, too, god, the dollar is just being crushed. They say that you don’t want the quatloo to go too high.

**John:** Well, actually because then it really hurts your export market.

**Craig:** It does.

**John:** Then no one can actually afford to buy your domestic tribble grains. Sorry, the quatloo lately, it gets way too expensive.

**Craig:** It’s really bad.

**John:** Yeah, it’s really tough.

**Craig:** Quatloos.

**John:** Craig, have a wonderful writing vacation.

**Craig:** Thank you. You, too, John.

**John:** And we’ll talk next week.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Bye.

**John:** Thanks.

Links:

* Badges for the 2014 Austin Film Festival [are available now](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/shop/badges/)
* Scriptnotes archives are available on [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) or at [the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Two-handers](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-two-hander/) on screenwriting.io
* Scriptnotes, Episode 152: [The Rocky Shoals (pages 70-90)](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-rocky-shoals-pages-70-90)
* [The Five Ws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws) on Wikipedia
* [John Robbins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robbins_(illustrator)) on Wikipedia
* Scriptnotes, Episode 150: [Yes, screenwriting is actually writing](http://johnaugust.com/2014/yes-screenwriting-is-actually-writing)
* [In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0811206807/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Delmore Schwartz
* [The Answer to the Riddle is Me](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1907595163/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by David Stuart MacLean
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/secrets-and-lies).

**Disclaimer:** Hey, this is John. Today’s audio was recorded in two separate sessions and Craig’s microphone was terrible during part of it, so just apologies for that. We got it fixed. If you hear the follow up section, Craig sounds much better, and healthier, and fuller of life, and that’s because we got his microphone all fixed up. So, sorry about that. And enjoy today’s episode.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 151 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, completely different environment for me here. I am sitting atop a mountain here at the Sundance Resort. I’m here for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. And so it’s very much like how we normally talk over Skype, but just I’m in a very different place geographically.

**Craig:** Mentally, emotionally. Well, you sound great. You know, I was invited once to go do the Sundance Lab and then I had to cancel it because I was stuck in production. And then they never asked me back. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, that’s sad.

**Craig:** I’m thinking that maybe they just got… — I mean, it wasn’t like I canceled at the last minute. I canceled months in advance, but yeah, I think that that probably was it. That sealed my fate.

**John:** Yeah, you get the one shot.

I’ve been an advisor here since 2000 was my first year up here as an advisor. So, in ’99 I had, my movie Go was playing at the Sundance Film Festival and the next year they asked me up to be an advisor. What I didn’t tell them is that I’d actually applied to come to the labs before with a previous script and they had not even considered. I’d been rejected. So, I was never a fellow. I was only an advisor.

But, this process is great and I’ve talked about this on the show before, but they bring up a bunch of filmmakers who are working on their first or second features and in the summer session they are shooting some scenes just on video to sort of practice what it feels like to shoot scenes out of their movie. But they also have these five days where they’re talking with other screenwriters. And we’re reading their scripts and offering suggestions, but more importantly just an extra set of brains to help figure out how they’re going to tell their story. And it’s a great process.

**Craig:** I saw the picture online. Is that Howard Rodman lurking there in the background?

**John:** Howard Rodman is a fixture at the labs. He came up here the first year that I came up here. And this year he’s actually — he oversees all the advisors for this process.

**Craig:** He’s terrific. I’ve gone and spoken to his graduate class at USC a number of times.

**John:** He’s salt of the earth. A great guy.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Today on the podcast, you suggested some topics, and I suggested some topics, and I think we’ve got a good show here for you. So, we’re going to talk about secrets and lies. We’re going to talk about the things that characters are concealing from each other, sometimes concealing from the reader. We’re going to talk about subjectivity and sort of the experience of how a character within a scene perceives information.

Based on all my reading up here, I have seven suggestions for how to pick character names so that people can understand which character is which. And then a reader had sent in a scene and then also the three pages that became that scene, which we thought were fascinating, so we’re going to talk about his three pages and the scene that he actually shot and what we can learn from seeing those two things. We’ll answer a question about following up after a meeting, so it’s going to be a busy show.

So, on the topic of follow up we have some follow up — on an earlier podcast we talked about Aereo, which was a service in New York City and a few other places that led people record live broadcast TV on these little tiny antennas and then stream that video that they recorded to their devices, their iPhones, their computers, wherever else they were. And this was a Supreme Court case, so the networks were suing Aereo saying that what they were doing was a violation of the Copyright Act. And the Supreme Court decided this week. And come down with a 6-3 decision in favor of the networks, saying that this was, in fact, a copyright violation.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, so it’s an interesting thing. Aereo’s argument was essentially this: that they’re not really doing anything. This is all about broadcast network. So, broadcast networks send their content out over the public airwaves. And anyone in the public can receive it through an antenna, if they so choose, and then watch it in the privacy of their home.

Of course, now almost everybody is on, you know, uses cable to receive broadcast networks which in and of itself is relevant to this case. But, what Aereo essentially said was our service, all our service is really just a whole big bunch of antennas. They had like 10,000 tiny little dime-sized antennas. And the way the product worked is you would pay them a subscription fee and then if you wanted to watch, say, Big Bang Theory you would just say, “I want to watch Big Bang Theory,” you would send that to their servers, their servers would tune one of those individual antennas to Big Bang Theory —

**John:** And specifically your antenna, because essentially you’re renting one specific antenna.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s just yours. Exactly. So, that one specific antenna would pick up the free broadcast signal of Big Bang Theory and then it would take that signal, put it onto a hard drive. It would essentially make a copy. And it would make a specific copy for each person that requested it. And then it would start streaming that copy with a slight lag behind the actual air time of a few seconds.

You could either watch it streaming at that point where you’d be essentially watching the broadcast signal a few seconds behind the actual broadcast signal. Or, you could time shift it and just watch it later as if it were a DVR. So, their argument was essentially we’re not doing anything other than simply allowing people to use one of our fancy antennas and nothing more.

**John:** But, they didn’t win. That argument did not go over. And six of the justices said, well, you know what you’re doing actually feels more like cable TV.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I thought the decision was interesting because they kind of just said that. It’s like it’s sort of irrelevant how you’re doing it. The net result is sort of like cable TV and congress has previously decided that cable companies if they want to carry broadcast channels have to pay the networks and probably I think local people, too, in order to carry those signals.

**Craig:** This is an interesting area where I think a lot of powerful people’s desires intersect.

**John:** And also I think consumer’s desires. Consumer’s desire not just for cheaper access to broadcast television, or sort of better access to broadcast television, but just convenience. And Aereo was genuinely convenient and it was a useful thing for people. And so when you take that away there’s going to be some pushback on that as well.

It doesn’t necessarily by the way mean that Aereo has to go away. Aereo went into this saying that there was no Plan B, but of course their Plan B could essentially just do what cable companies do and negotiate terms for coverage on what they’re doing.

**Craig:** I don’t see what the Plan B is. Their entire business model was essentially built around a gimmick, a trick. And I do think frankly at its heart what they were doing was wrong. And I do think it was more than just ethically wrong. I agree with the court here. I think they were flouting the law. The law may, you know, I don’t know if every specific word was there to cover it. I mean, the law was written in ’76 I believe. Basically they were — I think they were breaking that law.

**John:** A second bit of follow up. We had a great shout-out from the people at the Slate Culture Gabfest, Julia Turner and Dana Stevens endorsed us as one of their cool things, that’s their equivalent of a One Cool Thing on their podcast this week. So, I just want to return the favor and say how much I enjoy the Slate Culture Gabfest which I listen to every week.

Craig, how did you even find out about it because you don’t listen to any podcasts at all?

**Craig:** Yeah, I didn’t realize there were other podcasts other than this one. I thought we were it. But somebody sent me a tweet about it and so I clicked on it because I so very often read anything positive about me in Slate. [laughs] And so I listened to that section of the podcast and they were both very complimentary and it was nice to hear that.

I mean, my favorite thing was when they were both done talking about it, the third person with them, a gentleman, there was like a pause and then he kind of John August-ed them, you know, where sometimes I’ll say something and then there’s a pause and you’re like, “So anyway…” [laughs]

**John:** He segued right out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. He was like I’m bored with your Scriptnotes talk. So, I’m not going to talk about that guy. I like the people that like the podcast.

**John:** I love the people who love the podcast.

**Craig:** So we were talking on Twitter about maybe doing a crossover.

**John:** Which would be so much fun. The Nerdist crossover was fun.

**Craig:** It was.

**John:** It’s good. We’ll make it happen.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** All right. On to today’s topics, so Craig what motivated this talk of liars and liars in scripts?

**Craig:** Well, I’m working on a movie right now that is essentially it’s a whodunit. And when you start to investigate the world of whodunits you — I’ve been reading a ton of Agatha Christie. I mean, I’ve always been a Doyle fan. And I’ve always been a Poe fan. Poe is really the kind of inventor of the modern whodunit detective story.

For this kind of movie I felt that Agatha Christie’s genre was the most appropriate, and so I’ve been just reading a lot of Agatha Christie. And one thing that I’ve noticed is all of the characters, with the exception of the detective, are liars. Part of the fun of a good mystery is that when you ask the question whodunit the answer is any one of these people could have done it.

And we think that they could have done it in part because perhaps they all had motive, they all have opportunity, but more importantly they are all lying. And it’s lying that makes us suspect them.

But as I started to think about this, I realized in fact everyone is a liar to some extent or another. All humans are liars. Lying is part of the human condition. But there are different kinds of liars. And there’s different kinds of lying. And when we talk sometimes about new writers who are writing and the characters — we’ll say, “Oh, everything seems on the nose or there’s not enough subtext,” in a weird way I think sometimes the mistake people are making is that they’re writing people and those people aren’t lying.

They’re writing truth-tellers.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s just less interesting. So I wanted to talk about how useful it is to think of your characters as liars, but also the different grades or categories of lying and lying characters that you’ll find.

**John:** I think it also feeds into our concept of motivation, why a person is saying the things that they want other people to believe is key to understanding who they are in a scene and overall in the film itself.

**Craig:** That’s right. The idea of drama and of experiencing a narrative where humans move through it and transform is that they are not at the end who they were in the beginning. And if they were just truth-tellers in the beginning, naturally they’re simply going to say, “Well, here’s the situation. I’m very scared of this. I’m scared of growing up, and I’m scared of telling you that I love you, but I do love you. And I’m hoping that by behaving better I will in fact grow up and whether I get you or not I will be a better person.”

[Yawns] Movie over. You know? Everyone has to be concealing something in some way. But then there are characters who are lying for other reasons. Maybe not such understandable or empathetic or sympathetic reasons.

So, let’s talk about some of the different kinds of lying there is. The most useful kind to me is self-deception. I think every protagonist to some level or another is engaging in self-deception. We’ll say the character has an arc. It is a bad character, a dramatically unsatisfying character who has complete access to his or her emotional states, weakness, flaws, and can pinpoint them perfectly and then throughout the course of the movie go about and achieve them.

One of my favorite examples of this, because it was done so cannily, is Jerry Maguire. I honestly think that Cameron Crowe pulled off one of the most brilliant self-delusional movies of all time. You know, we’ll see sometimes in comedies shine a — hang a lantern on it. If you have something that seems a little wonky in your story just go for it and embrace it and people feel like it’s intentional.

**John:** Yeah. Call it out to the audience so the audience knows that you recognize that it’s there.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, what does he do with this character of Jerry Maguire, and the movie begins with a man who in a moment of frustration writes a manifesto about the kind of person that is a good person. But he is still engaged in a very high level of self-delusion. He is in fact not that person. Even the writing of that manifesto is a manifestation of his self-delusion. He’s actually a bad person. The manifesto itself is really more of a temper tantrum, and nothing he actually thinks he should or could do.

As a result of writing that manifesto he loses his job and all of his clients except for two. And actually really what it comes down to is one. And then must struggle over the course of the movie, clinging all the while to his self-delusions, to finally get to the place where he realizes, oh my god, I’m supposed to be the person I wrote about in that manifesto.

That’s how strong self-delusion is, even when you can write down the truth of yourself, you do not believe it.

**John:** Self-delusion is commonly the starting place for a movie where the journey is for the character to come upon emotional honesty, emotional authenticity. And so when we talk about sort of how useful it is for a character to lie, that’s not that the movie should be lying. It’s that the character needs to have progress from this inauthentic state to an authentic state at the end, and Jerry Maguire is a great example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think all protagonists to some level or another have a self-delusion. If they have an arc it means they have a self-delusion.

Going into the world of animation, the character of Marlin in Finding Nemo, he is honest to himself to a point. He honestly believes that he must take care of Nemo at all costs. But he’s deluding himself because somewhere down there is access to a truth, an inherent truth, that this can’t last. The boy will grow up. He must let him go.

**John:** Even in movies that are more action-based or sort of have more classically sort of like here’s the hero protagonist you often see that the hero at the start of the movie is really kind of a series of poses, it’s acting the part of the hero but it doesn’t actually have the stuff inside him because he hasn’t been tested in ways to really show what it is that matters to him.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** What it is that is sort of unique to his own journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, in fact that can start to give you a clue as to what — everybody is afraid of the second act, but this gives you a clue to your second act. What situations should this person go through so that their own delusion can be laid bare to them.

**John:** But they’re normal way of doing things and the normal person they’re presenting out into the world is called out in a way or is ineffective in a way and they’re forced to find a new identity.

**Craig:** Right. And this works in part because it is the function of drama to — why we are attracted to drama is because it illuminates our lives. All of us are delusional.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Everyone on the planet is delusional. We are all walking around either ignoring something in ourselves, willfully or subconsciously, or simply misunderstanding ourselves. No matter how much therapy you go through, there will always be a glitch in the system because we’re made of meat. We are rational to a point, but the part of us that is irrational is not accessible by the rational, so therefore it’s happening out of our control.

**John:** Well, I would also question whether if you got rid of all your self-delusions, if you got rid of all of the lies, would you even have — would there even be a person left underneath there? I think of so many cases are personalities and sort of who we perceive ourselves to be is a narrative that is carefully constructed based on experiences, based on our hopes, based on our dreams. And you are sort of a story. And a story is made up of some fabrications.

**Craig:** That’s right. Just as you can’t step into the same river twice, every new realization you have changes your mind. It changes who you are and gives birth to a new level of potential self-delusion. One hopes that you, you know, you can improve your life and know thyself is a great goal. But you’re right, it’s actually an impossibility. To truly 100% know yourself, I mean, let’s get really heavy for a second. Are you familiar with Gödel’s theorem?

**John:** I don’t know Gödel’s theorem. Tell me.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, a great book. This is my One Cool Thing for everyday. Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s an incredible book. Douglas, I want to say it’s Douglas Hofstadter I believe is the — and he wrote this I believe in the ’80s. This brilliant kind of mindboggling book that goes into mathematics, artificial intelligence, logic in ranges from Alice in Wonderland to the music of Bach, to the drawings of Escher, and then interestingly in to the work of Gödel.

And Gödel had this very famous mathematical theorem. And essentially what it said is for any given system of mathematics, you know, in math I don’t know if you remember, you can prove things.

**John:** Yes. Absolutely. That’s crucial.

**Craig:** Do you remember that? Right. So you have a system of rules and then somebody gives you an assertion. And then you can create a proof of that assertion using the rules and you can proof that it is true and that’s important.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** What his theorem said was there are — for any system of mathematics, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. And that’s kind of mindboggling in and of itself. And it gets to this whole idea of recursion, all the rest.

But what it really comes down to is our brains are closed systems. There will always be things that are true that are brain in its current state simply can’t prove. You’re right; self-deception is inherent to the human condition. So, wonderful thing to think about as you’re creating your character.

**John:** And if you go in further, if you actually were to strip away sort of everything you think about yourself, your entire narrative, I’ll put a link in, too, Datura, I may be pronouncing it wrong.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** But you know that drug?

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** It apparently just lays you completely bare and you sort of see yourself and your wholeness and all of your flaws. And very few people can withstand that sort of spotlight of scrutiny. When you lose yourself, you lose all of your lies.

**Craig:** Precisely. And that’s why the journey for a character that is struggling with their self-deception is difficult. When we talk about — see, bad screenwriting teachers will always talk in terms of bloodless structure, because that’s all they understand. So, they’ll say things like it’s important that your hero face obstacles. Why? Why? Let’s just start with these really fundamental questions.

Like I remember I took a philosophy class in college and the professor asked a question. it’s good to know that things are true, but why? Why is truth better than not truth? [laughs] Then you go, huh, I guess I should probably think about that. Well, why obstacles? Because if there are no obstacles — the obstacles aren’t the point. The obstacles are the symptom of the difficulty of undoing your self-deception. It’s hard.

**John:** All right. So, self-deception is a key thing. What other types of lies do you think are fundamental for storytellers?

**Craig:** So, that’s the first and that’s the most common class. Then there’s this second class that doesn’t apply to every character. And I call this the manipulators. These are people who lie for a purpose. They’re lying for an external purpose. And we can break them out into two subgroups. There is the protective manipulators and there are the manipulators who are lying for gain. So, protective liars are people that lie in order to avoid pain or hurt or to maintain some lifestyle that is their best option.

**John:** So, they’re not trying to deceive themselves. They’re trying to deceive other people to either protect what they have or protect the things they love.

**Craig:** Right. And you and I have both written movies that have this. Big Fish, Edward Bloom. He’s a protective liar. He is lying because it’s helpful to him. He’s certainly lying more than the average person. He’s not lying to get rich.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And he’s not self-delusional. He’s lying purposely, but in order to protect himself on some level.

**John:** Yeah. I would push a little bit back on protect himself, is that he’s attempting to — the only thing he can pass on is his vision of how the world should be, so he’s attempting to use these fabrications in order to create an idealized world, a vision for what he wants for his son.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I actually think that that’s consistent with protecting yourself in the sense that if you don’t do it then you feel inept as a father. You know, that you’ve somehow failed. That this is something he needs to do for his son.

In Identity Thief, the character of Diana lies because she is lonely and unloved and the only way she can survive is by constantly lying. Constantly. It’s become a crutch. And these characters can be very sympathetic actually. They’re frustrating. They’re frustrating, and that’s fun. They create conflict, which we love of course. And they also keep the audience guess, which we love. And then, of course, they have the audience begin to connect with that person. The audience naturally tries to make sense of things. It’s part of what we do as human things.

So, don’t try and make sense of why this person is doing it, and now they’re doing your work for you. They are engaged. And your job when you finally explain why is to explain why in a way that is satisfying to them, that does make sense.

**John:** Absolutely. So, you’re describing the character’s secrets and lies, which is really the same thing. There is something that they’re not showing. There are cards they are holding back. And that’s a way of engaging the audience’s curiosity.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And anything that makes your audience lean in to the story rather than sit back is a very good thing.

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, the second sub-heading under manipulators are the people who lie for gain. And these are typically villains. Sometimes, however, they’re heroes. For instance, Danny Ocean lies constantly for gain. He’s a thief. But, you’ll take a look at a villain like Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Wonderful liar. Wonderful, brilliant liar, and lying for gain. He also, too, is a thief.

These people who lie for gain are oftentimes much better liars than the people who lie to protect themselves or conceal a personal secret. And they’re definitely better liars than people who are simply self-delusional. They’re professional liars. So, you get to write somebody who is not only screwing with the people around them, but screwing with the audience, and this is important.

**John:** When you say they’re lying for gain, it’s not just necessarily monetary gain. If you look at Jeff Bridge’s character in Jagged Edge, that’s a character who is lying with a very specific agenda. He’s trying to protect himself, but he’s also — he gets so much more by establishing and maintaining this lie. It’s his natural way of going through the world is that lie.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And sometimes the reason, the gain is actually quite noble. Flick, the ant, goes and gets these guys to help save the village, but they’re just circus performers. And this lie has to be maintained until finally it’s laid bare.

There are all sorts of ways that people can lie for gain, but when they do so they have to do so with some skill. And therefore as a writer you have to actually think like a manipulative liar here who is trying to get something. The truth is no longer important. What’s far more important is what you have to say. And the audience shouldn’t always know. I mean, one of the great things about Ocean’s Eleven is that they lie to each other. They lie to Matt Damon. Not everybody knows what’s going on. And then the movie lies to us through their perspective, because we think we’re seeing something we’re not, and then they reveal how they’ve lied. So, that gives you so many opportunities.

**John:** I think the challenge for a screenwriter is recognizing when it is good to let the audience in and see the liar doing his work, because that can be really rewarding to see somebody be really good at the thing they’re doing. And when you’re better off holding back and keeping the audience in the same point of view as all the other characters where they’re being manipulated as well.

**Craig:** Yes. And the revelation of their lies should have the punch of some kind of climactic feel, because if you reveal it too soon you’ll simply lose interest. I mean, we understand the basic lie of Hans Gruber fairly early on, but there’s this other lie that he’s hiding from his own guys of what’s going to happen with that last bit of security lock. He hasn’t told them, which is actually kind of great. I mean, because look, realistically if you were leading a gang of henchmen into a building to rob it and you knew that there were seven things you had to get and the last one was an impossible-to-break electromagnetic seal on the vault, you would say, “Don’t worry. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stage a terrorist attack. Eventually they’ll follow the handbook, turn off all the power, and that will open the thing for us. You ask for a miracle, I give you the FBI.”

But he doesn’t tell them.

**John:** You like at Keyser Söze at the end of The Usual Suspects and you know that he is manipulative, you know that you can’t trust him, but you didn’t know that everything you’re experiencing was a lie. And it was the right choice to save that reveal to the very, very end so it is the punch line to the joke is the revelation of this last lie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m sure there decisions and he probably went back and forth about like, well, if we revealed a little bit earlier then we could see, we would have the tension about will he get caught. And this was the decision like, nope, the whole movie has to be set up to this point.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. And that’s a great segue to our next category, because Keyser Söze is a perfect example of somebody that manipulates and lies for gain. He’s also a very bad person. But his badness isn’t his lying. His badness is that he’s a murderer. The lying is done to get him gain for his other badness, which is murdering.

But then there’s the last category of liar, and this is the worst liar, and these are always villains. And these are some of the scariest characters you can create. They are bad, bad people. These are the chaotic, pathological liars.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** These are the people that lie because they love trouble. And they lie to create strife and drama. They can’t control their lying. I don’t think they’re alive unless they’re lying. I don’t think they even know what the truth is.

So, the character that often comes to mind in this case is the latest incarnation of the Joker, the Heath Ledger Joker. One thing that I thought was just remarkable, I think everybody thought it was pretty amazing in Dark Knight was when the character the Joker explains how he got his facial scars. And it was kind of very scary, very revealing confession of a trauma.

**John:** It made you almost sympathetic for a moment.

**Craig:** It did. And then there is another scene later where he explains to somebody else how he got his scars and it is just as compelling, and just as terrifying, and just as true feeling, but it’s a completely different story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s when you realize this man is just a liar.

**John:** Yeah, he’s truly a sociopath. A psychopath. I mean, all he can sort of do is lie. It’s the air he breathes. If he says hello, that’s a lie.

**Craig:** That’s right. And these characters are very difficult to write because for the most part we aren’t them. I mean, occasionally — god help us — we will run into these people.

**John:** I worked for a person — I worked for one of those people.

**Craig:** There you go. And part of the problem is they’re so good that you don’t really know for awhile what’s happening. And then eventually it becomes clear and then part of the struggle is it’s hard to wrap your mind around the fact that another person is actually doing… — You, like the audience, want to make sense of them. But you can’t, because they are operating in a way that, frankly, they don’t even care about their own destruction.

The Joker doesn’t care if he lives or dies. He has no interest in that. He loves chaos. He loves the chaos that lying can bring. And you’ll see these characters sometimes in noir, these characters will skew towards female, because when you put it in a man you immediately start to think, my god, he’s going to just start stabbing, shooting, killing, and all the rest, whereas women can maybe just scramble your brain and make you second guess your own name and all the rest of it. And then finally Bogart sends you up the river.

But, liars, pathological liars are very scary people. And if you’re going to write one, you just have to know that the movie will be deeply infected by them. That they are going to take over.

**John:** It’s a movie that hasn’t come out yet, but Kristen Wiig is terrific in a comedy I saw, I guess you’d call it a comedy, kind of a comedy, kind of a drama called Welcome to Me. It should be out later this year. And she’s not a psychopath, but it’s one of the rare cases where I’ve seen just a chaotic, manipulative person really at the center of a film, where she is supposed to be the protagonist, but she honestly kind of can’t protagonate in a meaningful way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a really challenging task for a writer and for an actress to put that person at the very center of a movie and not have that person be the villain.

**Craig:** Of course, because the protagonist at some basic level is trying to achieve something. We ask simple questions of our heroes. What do you want? What are you willing to do to get it? What scares you? This or that.

Well, what does the pathological, chaotic liar want? Trouble.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** That’s what they want. They want trouble. So, the only person I’ve written like this, and I loved writing him, was Mr. Chow.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Mr. Chow is a chaotic, pathological liar. He does not care if he lives or dies. In fact, he thinks it’s awesome. He just loves trouble. But, because he’s so comic, and also embodied in this kind of very small, physically frail man, it’s funny. I mean —

**John:** But if you tried to have the Mr. Chow movie, good luck. It’s very, very challenging to put that person in the center of a movie and have them do any of the kinds of things you want a person at the center of a movie to be able to do.

**Craig:** Absolutely. In fact, Todd and I talked for a bit about the idea of what a Mr. Chow movie would look like. And it was totally different because it was the darkest thing imaginable. And I remember we had this one idea for a scene that sort of sums it up. Mr. Chow comes home to see his elderly father. And he walks in and his old, old father looks up at him and says something like, “Leslie, you returned to us, you came back.” And Mr. Chow walks over to him, and then cuts his throat. [laughs]

And as his father is dying, his father looks up at him and says, “Good job.” [laughs] Because that’s the only — that’s how Mr. Chow is born. It’s just pure, awful chaos and darkness, willful self-destruction. The only goal there is is to blow up the world, you know?

**John:** Yeah. Those characters are almost un-human, because they don’t work in our normal ways. Crispin Glover and I had a few conversations about taking his Thin Man character from the Charlie’s Angels movie and just doing his own movie. And ultimately nothing will ever come of that probably. But it’s a fascinating character, but such an incredibly challenging character to put at the center of anything because he is chaos. He’s like chaos and death in ways that’s very hard to — he’s challenging. It’s very hard to have insight into that character, because deliberately they’re supposed to be opaque and you just can’t know them.

Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under the Skin is a similar situation, is where she’s just this lioness. There’s not a human — there literally is not a human underneath that. It makes it very challenging.

**Craig:** Right. It essentially doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. There needs to be somebody in opposition to it, or they need to not be human and that’s sort of the point, and then the purpose of the movie is to illuminate the difference between humans and non-humans. But, they will infect your movie and you have to write them carefully. They can kind of get in your head.

And by all means if you run into one of these people —

**John:** Run away.

**Craig:** Go the other way.

**John:** The classic advice, and I’m trying to remember who originally said this, but the advice to young psychiatrists was if in your first meeting your patient talks about how awful their previous therapist was and how all these things — run away, because that person is probably a psychopath. There are people who are just — you’re just going to fall into their deep well and you’re never going to figure a way out of it.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. You know, it’s funny, Dennis Palumbo told me that when he sits down with a client for the first time, the first question he asks is have you had therapy before and can you tell me about that experience. All we’ve done now is we’ve given the chaotic liars a way to wiggle out of that.

**John:** Absolutely. They’ll say about how incredibly helpful it was and the skills they used. And it was really life-changing. They just need a little tune up.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then they crawl inside you and devour you from the inside.

**John:** Oh, yes, that’s never a good thing. So, let’s recap what we talked about with liars, because I think it’s really, really useful. So, liars who are self-deception, which is probably true to every character in your script. There’s going to be some aspect of self-deception.

Manipulative liars — manipulative liars who are lying to protect something, or manipulative liars, what was your second case of manipulative liars?

**Craig:** Or trying to gain something.

**John:** Exactly. So, protection or gain. And then finally the, I mean, what did you call it, the sociopathic liar?

**Craig:** Chaotic, pathological.

**John:** Pathological, yeah, where they can’t stop lying and they will lie for any reason. It’s like kleptomania. They don’t need that pack of gum, but they have to take that pack of gum.

**Craig:** That’s right, lying even to mess themselves up.

**John:** So, I had a boss who, when he got bored, this is pre-internet, when he got bored in the afternoon he would just call someone at Variety or Hollywood Reporter and just make up a lie about another project or another person, just to stir shit up.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow! Blech.

**John:** Yuck. And you just don’t want to be around that for long.

**Craig:** No, that’s, Geez-Louise.

**John:** One of my favorite things to do at dinners here is to tell our terrible Hollywood stories about people who are just completely awful to us. And really you sort of collect them like little badges, like that was an awful thing but I’m so glad that happened because now I have a story about that.

**Craig:** It’s true. At some point the tragedy finally has enough time and then it becomes funny. But, oh gosh, in the middle of this stuff it can really just scramble you up. And that’s why we have to — writing is actually a way to maybe pop the balloon a little bit, because it’s fun. Look, it was fun for me to write Leslie Chow because he just didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything. He loved it. He was so excited to die, or for you to die, or for something to happen. Everything is funny. Everything.

**John:** Yeah. Hilarious.

**Craig:** Yeah, if a lion bit off his arm he would laugh and then he would tell the lion to choke on the arm and then he would laugh as the lion choked on the arm. He wouldn’t care.

**John:** Wouldn’t care.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s nuts.

**John:** So, one of the writers I’ve gotten to meet up here at Sundance is Chris Terrio. Have you ever met him before?

**Craig:** No, I haven’t. But I enjoyed his movie.

**John:** Yeah, so he wrote Argo which is a great film. And so we screened it last night here and he did a Q&A afterwards. And one of the points he brought up which was really fascinating and I hadn’t really considered it in the way that he framed it. So, he was talking about a scene in which Ben Affleck’s character is driving and then it’s going to cut to news footage of talking about the Iranian hostages. And so it’s existing news footage. And in the edit Ben Affleck was driving and then it cuts to the news footage and he was pushing really hard for the way he had it in the script, which was a pre-lap, is that the Walter Cronkite or whoever is talking while Ben Affleck is driving and then we finally go to the news footage.

And that seems like a very small distinction. Like it’s sort of really when does the sound start. But his point was that by starting the sound while you’re with Ben Affleck’s character, you’re creating the experience of subjectivity. And what we’re about to see feels like it’s inside Ben Affleck’s mind. It feels like it’s that character thinking about it. It’s a way to sort of verbalize thoughts. It feels like it’s running around in his head. And then when we actually go to it we still feel like we’re with Ben Affleck’s experience.

Probably that music is also taking us through. It’s a way of letting that clip happen not just as a thing that happens. It’s inside Ben Affleck’s head. And that experience of subjectivity is really interesting and it makes me feel much better about how often I tend to use pre-lap in my scripts to explain that something is start — like a sound is starting, and dialogue is often starting before we get into that next scene. It’s anticipating the cut.

**Craig:** I love that. First of all, we’ve done a long discussion about transitions. I mean, it’s just generally a nicer, smoother transition. But I love that observation because, again, we want to try and have the audience do as much work for us as possible. They appreciate that. The bad feeling is when you feel like the spoon is entering your mouth and you already know what that food is and then, yup, it’s that food.

And so see the news report and then you show him in the car, well that was just a news report scene that feel like “and now a moment in the movie where we have to tell you stuff. And now here’s Ben Affleck driving.” But instead, simply by pre-lapping, showing him in the car and then completing the news report, by simply putting that sound and that image in parallel, the movie stops teaching us something and is now telling us that this is an experience that Ben Affleck has had. Either he heard this news report before. I mean, he’s not hearing it right now.

But the movie is essentially implying he knows this and that changes everything because then it’s about him and as Chris points out his subjectivity and his experience. This, by the way, is a great example of what I call the new screenwriter, who not only thinks like a filmmaker, but is involved.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that he can help the director and the producer towards these things because we actually are pretty freaking good at this. And I love the way that the movie business has opened up to the new screenwriter because the new screenwriter provides moments like that, which are great.

**John:** Sure. What’s also I think crucial about the sense of the pre-lap and the overlap is that it’s taking these things that are two scenes and made them one scene. It’s joined them so that they are fused together as one element. So, you look at like, oh, that’s when he was thinking about this, rather than that was him driving in his car. This is information about the hostage crisis. So, as you look at your own scripts, I think it’s important to really figure out how much information that you’re giving us can you find a way that it’s meaningful to the character who is giving us the information, or that the movie is giving you information. How can you put that in the subjective experience of one of the characters so you’re not just telling us?

And there are many examples of doing that, but it’s really thinking about who is the interesting person to be seeing these events through and how do you experience the movie? How do you find a place holder for who the audience is in this movie?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a good example of how sometimes a problem can lead to a solution. You’re sometimes stuck with something that has to happen but it feel clunky. And oftentimes if you sit back and look at it you realize it’s actually not a problem at all. It’s a benefit.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It is clunky to simply show Walter Cronkite talking about stuff. And then it’s even more clunky to show the shoe leather of Ben Affleck driving in a car.

**John:** One thing, Argo is worth a rewatch. And one of the things you recognize they do really brilliantly is they insert the news footage clips in ways that are very smart. And oftentimes they’re playing on TVs in scenes in ways that are meaningful. Or one of the great examples is a cross-cut between the hostage woman talking about why they’ve taken the hostages and the table-reading of the Argo script. And so you have this really funny moment at this table read of this ridiculous cut intercut with this announcement of the hostages.

And by being able to do both things at once, that’s sort of the key to the tone of the movie is that it’s both a big Hollywood movie about big Hollywood movies and there’s real stakes in terms of these people’s lives.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anytime you can kind of take two things that maybe separately would be a little flat or a little empty or a little thin and layer them together. Yeah, there are times of course where you know that the dramatic focus is such that you don’t want to do that, you don’t want to get noisy, but one thing that I know about screenwriters is that those things are intentional and they’re purposeful. When he says, “No, it should be pre-lap and like this,” that’s not just a random… — I mean, look, for good screenwriters it’s not some random bit of technique. There’s a purpose.

And I like the fact that people are open to hearing what that purpose is, especially when they’re excellent filmmakers, which in this case Ben Affleck is a very, very good director.

**John:** Agreed. So, this last week I’ve had a chance to work with five different filmmakers and read five scripts. And I don’t read as many scripts as I used to. I used to read a ton of scripts, and now I tend to read what I’m writing, or read a few things that friends send through. So, when you look at five scripts over the course of a couple days you notice some patterns, and one of the patterns I noticed is that sometimes people are not making the best choices for naming characters.

And so while we were sitting in a meeting and people were talking about other stuff, I wrote up my seven suggestions for character names. So, I want to sort of share those with you.

My first suggestion we’ve talked about on the podcast before is pick different first letters for character’s names. So, if you have a character named John, you can’t have a Jim, or a James, or a Jackson. There should be one character named with a J. That’s a pretty good basic rule of thumb. Don’t double up. And you’re not likely to have 26 characters who really need names, so you’re going to be fine.

Helpful — pick a different number of characters in names. So, if you have a character named Tom and a character named Ben and they’re both talking a lot, people on the page they sort of skim down and scan and they notice different lengths of names. So, Tom and Ben, they’re going to get confused in people’s heads. So, you’re better off with a Tom and a Benjamin and keeping them straight than a Tom and a Ben.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Not only should names have different first letters, but they should also sound different. Because I think you actually do in some ways sound out those words you’re seeing in your head. So, if you have a character named Gene, G-E-N-E, and a character named John, you’re going to get those confused. They can sort of blur together. So, if you have a soft G sound and a J sound, those can blur together. So, if you can avoid that, that’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Try to avoid names that are semantically similar. So, if you have a character named Rose, don’t have a character named Tulip, because we’re going to get them confused. Because we thought flower and that’s all we’ll remember. Oh, it’s the girl with the name of the flower. Oh shit, which one is it?

**Craig:** Yeah, and the world suddenly seems so weirdly small that there are two people with flower names.

**John:** Absolutely. As much as you can, try to avoid gender ambiguity in names. So, names like Robin, Carrie, Kim, depending on the language, can get really confusing, especially if that’s not a character we see very often. So, if it’s been 20 pages and Carrie shows up again, you’re like, wait, is that a man or a woman, and then you start searching for pronouns to figure out who it is. That’s not your friend.

**Craig:** Unless you need the guy to be named Sandy.

**John:** Sandy. Sandy is perfect.

Use diverse names. And so people are not likely to confuse Bill and Sangeet, but they will confuse Bill and John. So, not only does using diverse help the reader out, but it also makes your world a little bit bigger. And hopefully signals to the casting directors and everybody else involved in the movie, hey, let’s look beyond just the five white guys for this movie. Sangeet is your friend.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And last point, which I think we talked about on the podcast before, often it’s best to not name your day players. So, if a character only appears in one scene and that character’s function is clear, you might be much better off with Hotel Clerk than giving that person a name. Save names for people who actually need names.

**Craig:** That’s right. The only exception I would say to that is if you know that you want to actually get somebody really good in for the day. So, when we say day player we don’t just mean somebody that’s there for one day. We just mean basically a glorified extra and I’m sorry to insult people that are day players, but typically when I think of day player I think of the waitress who comes over and says, “What’ll it be?” As opposed to a cameo, because that’s somebody you do want to name.

**John:** Absolutely. A cameo is totally worth it, because the cameo is probably going to be a character who actually has some weight and substance and is really chancing the scene, is going to have a character — it’s meant to pull focus.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And if the character isn’t meant to take focus, don’t give them a name.

**Craig:** Precisely. And you’re going to have a hard time getting a good actor to do your cameo when their role is Cop. A name would be helpful. The one area — I love these. These are all correct. And I follow these all the time and I think about names all the time. The one thing I would say though is there are occasionally points where you can play around with names and break these rules if there’s a point.

And the example I always think of is Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood is a man named William Money. And the Sherriff that he goes up against played by Gene Hackman is Little Bill. So, there’s a William, and a Bill, and a Little Bill at that, and there’s a point to that.

**John:** But I’m trying to remember the Unforgiven script, because it’s been a long time since I read it, but when characters have dialogue, isn’t William Money called Money in his —

**Craig:** No, he’s called Will all the time by Morgan Freeman.

**John:** So, Will all the time. Okay. Is Hackman’s character called Bill?

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s called Little Bill or Bill. Yeah, Will and Bill. They are meant to be two sides of a coin. It’s clearly a thing going on there.

**John:** All right. Part of the reason why I think this actually matters is to remember that when people are seeing the movie, they don’t see character’s names, they don’t see how things are spelled. So, there are things which watching movie people aren’t going to get confused. It’s just that on the page we don’t have faces, and so all we have are those names. Let’s try to keep those names clear.

When you’re casting the movie, you’re going to try not to cast people who look too much like each other so people don’t get confused. So, don’t cast names in a script that are too confusing, too similar.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** All right. Our next thing, a reader wrote in and it’s actually a writer who I think comes from the videogame world and it turns out actually is represented by, has an agent who is a friend of mine, so he’s actually a working legit writer. But he sent through these three pages and said like, “Oh, and I actually shot this as a scene.” And I was like that’s really cool.

So, I thought it was a good example of so often we take a look at these three pages and we always think about what the movie could be like. Here this guy shot the scene and I think it’s really interesting. So, the guy’s name is Rob Yescombe. I hope I pronounced that right, Rob. The scene is called A Gun, so if you want to read along with us there will be a PDF attached in the show notes.

So, our scene starts in the marshlands of rural England. It’s 1352 AD in Birmingham, England. Marshy wet grass. There’s three people riding. There’s Tilton, who is 35 in a Friar’s robe, Roland who is stocky and drunk, and Durwin, who is unkempt and slack-jawed. They’re all in their thirties. Durwin says like, “There it is. It’s just what I said it was,” and it’s this tree that’s been burnt in the middle of this marshland and it’s sort of unusual for a tree, what caught on fire, and the Friar says, “Did you light it on fire? Tell me, honestly if you set it on fire.”

“No, no, God did it.” And as they’re investigating the tree, the drunk guy falls down in the water. He comes up and he’s found something and it is a 2013 Colt M45 Close Quarters Combat Pistol, with a silencer screwed tight onto the barrel. And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I actually watched — I did it wrong, I did it backwards.

**John:** That’s fine. We’ll forgive you this once.

**Craig:** I watched the video, then I read the pages. But the thing, it’s funny, basically the things that I liked about the little movie were exactly the things I liked about these pages. And the one thing that bothered me about half the movie was exactly what bothers me on the page. So, in that sense everything went according to plan.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And but in terms of the pages I think these are very well written. And there’s the one interesting difference that I would say between the pages and the movie other than like they’re not riding on horses because it’s hard to get horses, is that on page three when there’s the reveal of the gun, it’s a half page of careful sort of drawn out reveal of the gun, which is appropriate I think. When you’re reading you want to make a big deal of something and he made a big deal of it here.

Obviously in the movie it happens, but that’s the difference between audio visual and text. So, it’s okay to play a little bit of a trick with the text here to get that and then not go super — like for instance, here’s a mistake that gets made all the time in a screenplay and it’s made here. He pulls a large brown lump, something caked in soggy grass roots and soaking clay. And then I’ll just skip ahead. Tilton watches. Something shimmers.

They’re not going to shimmer. It can’t shimmer. It’s all covered in mud and it’s a gray day. But that’s okay. Because it’s happening ping — we’re getting the vibe of it, you know. We don’t care that when we actually see it it’s not shimmering. What we like right is that it’s a gun.

So, I thought it was very —

**John:** I thought that they were good pages. And it very much to me felt like in a weird way like the setup for — like the teaser for like an X-Files, like a medieval X-Files.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s a possible thing and then you cut to opening credits and then you get back into the investigation and what’s actually really happened here. I like almost everything on the page. His use of semi-colons drove me a little bit crazy. Semi-colons are really useful in the rare cases where you really need them. And in the first case, in none of these cases where he was really using them in a way that semi-colons are best for which is where you have to join two independent — two thoughts that could be their own sentence but they’re much better joined together.

And in these cases they weren’t independent clauses. They were just things. Commas would have done the job.

**Craig:** Commas or dashes.

**John:** Yeah. Or periods.

**Craig:** Or periods.

**John:** But I really enjoyed it. So, the joy and the sort of special bonus we have is that there’s actually — he’s filmed this. And I suspect this was a filmed version just to show as a demo, to sort of show what it might feel like. And so there’s a link in the show notes also for his YouTube clip on it.

And so some of the changes you will notice is here in the script there are horses, in the movie they’re just walking. Walking is honestly kind of great.

He picked a really great location. It’s really just marshy, and muddy, and gross, and terrible.

**Craig:** And that one great tree, I mean, the focus of this thing is this tree that supposedly was burning impossibly. And there’s just one tree in the middle nowhere. It’s kind of great.

**John:** Which is great. Some of the challenges, I found — the tree is really great in wide shots. And then when we’re getting close I had a harder time understanding that it was burned. Some of the stuff about that the tree was on fire didn’t play as well in the video as I got it on the script. I think some of it was just shooting. Like we spent too long talking about the tree before we saw the burnt tree, to me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another thing which was a challenge is no one says anything about the footprint. And when I first watched the video I didn’t see the footprint at all.

**Craig:** Oh, I saw it. I saw the footprint.

**John:** You saw it clear?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**John:** All right. I didn’t see it. But on the whole I thought it was just really a terrifically well done thing. And it’s the kind of thing we talk about our listeners doing is don’t just write pages. Try shooting some things. And you learn a lot by trying to film something.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, you learn a lot and you also impress people. I mean, I watched it and I thought well this guy can do this.

**John:** He can do this.

**Craig:** Which is great. He had a sense of composition.

**John:** He had a good sense of music. He had a good sense of tone.

**Craig:** Yeah, a good sense of music and tone. The three pages already told me he could do it because he understood how to create a mystery with dialogue. We don’t need to know what they’re talking about until we know what they’re talking about. And even then we don’t need to know what the hell is going on. The point is that they’re confused.

We get that Tilton, who is the —

**John:** Friar.

**Craig:** I’ll call him Friar. He already has knowledge these other two don’t. Clearly he knows — he may not know exactly what this means, but he knows something, because he’s just looking at it differently than they are. And that’s something that you can pull out of this and then pull out of the movie, which is great.

The one thing that I think the movie didn’t do as well as the pages was pacing. The pages moved at a certain pace. And the short film I think was a bit too languid. I think it could be paced up just a little bit. It got a little draggedy.

**John:** The one thing I was missing was, so Durwin is the person who apparently saw this tree burning, but if this is really the first introduction to any of this I wanted Durwin to say what he saw. And so if he describes like, you know, I was coming back from this and I saw it, bright as day, burning. That would actually paint in my mind what this looked like before it went out.

When you see a tree that’s been burned, we don’t know the context of how this guy saw it, what it looked like. That would actually be really helpful to me.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah, I mean, he’s saying, “See? Just as I said.” But it’s not just as he said.

**John:** Yes. So, if that conversation happened beforehand, better to just put that in the scene here itself.

**Craig:** I think that’s right. The other thing that I want to point out is that the drunk is just too drunk. He’s goofy drunk. He was goofy drunk on the page. And he’s goofy drunk in the short. And I’m not criticizing the actor. I think the actor did what was here on the page. I think it’s a page problem.

I always have a problem with unrealistic drinking on screen. I just struggle with people that can just drink what appears to be the equivalent of six glasses of wine in the course of a minute and a half. Frankly, then their talking is either way too slurry to be useful or interesting, or far too articulate for their mental state. I’m not sure why they’re that drunk. I don’t know why they need to be. This didn’t seem to call for that much constant drinking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, maybe one purposeful swig? But it’s funny, even when I brought up Unforgiven, there’s this wonderful scene in Unforgiven where William Money has returned with the Schofield Kid, from killing the guys that there was the bounty on. And he doesn’t know exactly where Ned is at this point because they’ve split up. And one of the prostitutes from the town is riding up slowly with their money. And while she’s riding this kid is talking about how it’s the first time he ever killed somebody. And he’s obviously just distraught.

And the whole time he’s drinking from this bottle of whiskey. [laughs] And he drinks what would probably kill you, I think, you know? I mean, it’s so much drinking. I’m just like, oh my god, slow down. How are you even talking?

**John:** Yes. It’s because he was drinking iced tea and not —

**Craig:** Well, yes. But then in my mind I think, well, maybe in the Old West they just watered that stuff down. I don’t know. You know, because it’s so corny and old fashioned. Like men in movies used to be able to drink, like even Raiders of the Lost Ark which is an homage to all those serials, I mean, that drinking contest with Marion and that guy, they each had like 14 shots or something. [laughs] They would be in the hospital.

I know, I’m Jewish, so I think any amount of drinking is like, “Oh my god, how did they drink that much?”

**John:** Yeah, somehow up here at Sundance, the second year that I was up here, Tiger Williams who is another advisor up here, wrote Menace II Society, he and I got into a drinking contest. And we drank so much tequila. And he says that we had like 27 shots, which is of course actually impossible.

**Craig:** Impossible.

**John:** Like we would be dead.

**Craig:** Dead. Yeah.

**John:** We would be dead. And yet he maintains this to be true. I just know it was far, far, far, far, far too much tequila. And it was both a wonderful evening and a tremendous mistake. So, it [crosstalk] heavy drinking.

**Craig:** How bad was the aftermath?

**John:** So I never threw up. I have not thrown up sixth grade. I don’t know that my body can actually physically throw up. I tried to throw up. It was like that bad that I was trying to get it out of my system.

So, I got back to my room after that and I packed up. So, it was like two in the morning and the vans were going to take us to the airport at like seven in the morning.

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** It’s like I cannot go to sleep because I might not wake up. And so I just had to stay up all night and just ride it through. It was bad.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s terrible. Listen, you’re German, so I think that there’s a certain ethnic capacity for drinking. I’m not saying all Germans can drink, but they’re more likely to be able to drink than a Jew. If I have, honestly, more than four drinks, I’m in a bad place. I do. I puke. And I have a terrible headache. And I’m just in bed the next day and I’m miserable. I just can’t do it.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** It’s probably a good thing.

**John:** That’s probably a good thing. It keeps you from —

**Craig:** But, boy, I’ll tell you what, man. I could eat cake. Ah!

**John:** Mm, cake is good. So, maybe you have built in genetic Antabuse. So, like drinking past a certain point kicks you into your sick mode.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I’m on that thing that they give you. Isn’t there a pill that they can give you?

**John:** That’s what I said. Antabuse.

**Craig:** That’s what it’s called? I didn’t know that’s what it was. Yeah. That’s the thing that killed Keith Moon.

**John:** I didn’t know that.

**Craig:** Yeah, he was on that, and then he decided to go crazy and drink anyway. Keith Moon.

**John:** Oh, it’s like the people who get their stomach stapled and then figure out ways to manipulate the gastric band and stuff so that they can still eat all the stuff they want to eat.

**Craig:** That’s kind of awesome. How do they do that? Just milkshakes?

**John:** No, what you do is, I was talking with a woman who did that. And she was like, “Yeah, so if I try to eat a bunch of potato chips I couldn’t. But if I just let them dissolve in my mouth, then I can swallow them.” It’s like, oh my god.

**Craig:** That’s not the point!

**John:** That’s not the point.

We have one question we wanted to get to. So, this is Jonathan who wrote in. He said, “I just graduated from film school at the AFI where at the end of the program we go through a pitch fest. I sent out some scripts to interested parties, a few of whom were interested but passed for a wide range of reasons. My question is this. After someone passed on your script, is there a good way to keep in touch with those managers and agents to submit future scripts without feeling like I’m nagging them to death? Keep in mind that some of the agents and managers I’ve had meetings with and some of them I have not.”

So, if someone has expressed interest but then passes, do you think there is a way to sort of keep that relationship alive?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I don’t know that there is either.

**Craig:** No. There is no relationship. Let’s just be honest about that. There is no relationship. There are many grades of no. So, there’s pass, or “I love it, it’s not right for us, but I’d love to see something else from you.”

**John:** Yeah, if they say that — let’s say that happens, because that’s actually the right case where you do need to figure out a way to follow up.

**Craig:** Right. They’re asking you to. They’ll let you know if they want to hear from you again.

**John:** So, what is a way that Jonathan could follow up with that person who said like, “But we’d love to see something else.” How often should he reach out? What should he do? What is your advice, Craig?

**Craig:** I mean, if somebody says I’d like to keep in touch with you and see what else you have. Send them what else you have. If you don’t have anything else say, “Great. I’m working on something like this. I will send it to you when I’m done.” And then just reference, make sure when you do, reference your prior conversation.

**John:** Yeah, so they remember.

**Craig:** So that they’ll remember, because they won’t. But if somebody says, “I’m sorry, I listened to your pitch or your material and it’s not for me,” there is no fire to rekindle.

**John:** Agree.

**Craig:** This is the girl at the bar has said, “No thank you. I have a boyfriend.” Return to your seat, like a gentleman.

**John:** So, in those situations where follow up is invited, I would say that the threshold of time for me is probably eight weeks, or two months. If more time than that has passed, I may just kind of forget about you and may forget that I ever liked you.

So, if there’s not something immediate to show them right after that, at least lob in an email — thank god email exists, because we had to do some of this before there was email. Lob an email saying like, “Hey, it was fantastic meeting you. Like you said, I’ll certainly send you this next thing when I’m ready to show it to people. Thank you so much.” That email to sort of like put that pin in there is great. But that doesn’t buy you a year. That buys you kind of like two months.

**Craig:** Right. And just understand that any email that doesn’t include some sort of actionable content is garbage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s just garbage emails. Nobody wants to get emails like, “Hey, just checking in. How are you doing? Just letting you know I’m still working on it.” Nobody cares.

**John:** No one cares.

**Craig:** Nobody cares. Send me a script, or shut up.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s basically the deal.

**John:** So, that first email though can be a thank you.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That’s the only thing I will say. A thank you email can just sort of like — it’s that one time you can put a pin in it.

**Craig:** And don’t vamp. You know, everybody out there vamps. You and I get emails from people where they’ve decided this email is their shot to prove to us how smart or clever or funny or what a wonderful grasp of vocabulary they have. Don’t vamp.

**John:** Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Just the facts, ma’am.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Be polite. Be a gentleman. Be a gentle woman. Be a professional. Professional-professional. Act like you’ve been there. All the usual.

**John:** All the usuals.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** What is yours?

**Craig:** I got this from someone on Twitter. Love this. I like, just about everybody, really, really hate the click-bait stuff out there. You know, this video shows something and what happens next will blow your mind. All this stuff.

Or even the things that are like, you know, news used to like — the headline used to tell you the story and then you would go further. Now like a particular — like for instance, here is a news headline at ABC, “Police: Burglars signed into victim’s Facebook. It’s what he forgot to do that got him caught.”

**John:** Oh man.

**Craig:** That’s a headline. Right? That’s a click-bait headline. You’re like, “What did he forget to do?” So, there’s a Twitter account called @SavedYouAClick. And all this guy or woman does is read this nonsense and then even their format is great. The answer to the click-bait question, and then what the headline is. So, for instance, the one I just read you, @SavedYouAClick writes, “Forgot to log out.” Retweet @ABC: Police: Burglar signed into victim’s Facebook. But it’s what he forgot to do that got him caught.

So, every single one of these things leads with the answer. He spoils every — and some of them are really funny. I like this one. And I’ll read the answer second just because it’s more fun that way over the air. Retweet @PostPolitics: What Google Trends tells you about who will win an election. And the answer is “Nothing.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] That’s awesome.

**Craig:** “Is America better at treating cancer than Europe? Statistically yes.” It’s the greatest thing. You never have to deal with stupid headlines again. So, I love this. I’m following @SavedYouAClick. I love @SavedYouAClick.

Oh, and you know, it says on their page that the tweets are by a gentleman named Jake Beckman.

**John:** Oh, now we know.

**Craig:** So, Jake Beckman, thank you for this most excellent service.

**John:** If you enjoy that Twitter feed then you should also probably The Onion’s new spinoff site called the Clickhole where they create stories for just those , really just parodies of those kinds of stories.

**Craig:** Is that a Twitter account or a website?

**John:** It’s a website. So, Clickhole, we’ll have a link to it in the show notes. It has those kind of hyperbolic headlines but also slide shows. And so it’s like, you know, “Reasons I’m glad I’m an American.”

**Craig:** I know! [laughs]

**John:** And so you’re clicking through, you’re clicking through, and then like slide number five is Gary Sinise. It keeps going. And like slide number 9 is Gary Sinise.

**Craig:** I mean, these are, it’s just — god, I hate the media so much. Like “Dr. Nancy, NBC News, on what makes the horrifying Ebola outbreak so deadline.” And @SavedYouAClick, “Very contagious.” [laughs] This guy is the best. I’m sorry, Jake Beckman, you’re the best. I love it.

**John:** So, my One Cool Thing is actually kind of related. It’s this book called How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, by Jordan Ellenberg. And it’s a great book on sort of popular mathematics and really a lot of what he talks about is these kind of stories where there’s these really misleading facts or sort of misleading charts or graphs or numbers that maybe not even deliberately but sort of play into our misassumptions about how math works and how the world works.

And so there’s not formulas in it. It’s really about what it’s like, the simple but fascinating things that happen in math and sort of how they affect us in our daily life.

A good example in the chapter I read last night, he talks about there was like this obesity study that was published that says like, you now, by 2048 all Americans will be obese. And it’s like, well, that’s very, very unlikely. But what makes it especially unlikely in the same report they talk about how African American men, their obesity is increasing at a slower rate, so they won’t all be obese until 2072.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** Of course, the inherent flaw here is that African American men are also all Americans, so which is it? Are all —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If the African American men aren’t going to be fat by then, but all Americans are going to be fat by then, it’s actually an impossible thing. So, that was his example to talk about limits and sort of like how things approach boundaries. But it’s really just a terrific book and so I think many of our readers would — listeners would really enjoy reading it.

**Craig:** That sounds great.

**John:** So, if you’d like to have more information about the things we talked about on the show today, you can click through the show notes. They’re at either johnaugust.com where you may be listening to this, or at scriptnotes.net, which is where we have all the stuff. So, we have links to many of the things we talked about, including Craig’s Twitter feed, and Datura, and all these other —

**Craig:** Oh, god, Datura. Never, please — please understand this for anybody listening to this who is some sort of pharmacological adventurist.

**John:** Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Never do it. I mean, there’s a website where they basically collect first person accounts of taking drugs of all kinds, legal and illegal, and so on and so forth. And that section is one of the most horrifying things you’ll ever read. Never, ever, ever, ever do that. Ever. Please.

**John:** Ever. No, don’t. Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Never do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** But what you should do is if you have something to say to Craig or me, you can send to us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We also love comments on iTunes. So, if you find Scriptnotes in iTunes and click and leave us a comment, that helps other people find our show as well. And we sometimes read those and it’s really nice. You could leave us a rating, too. That’s also great. And subscribe while you’re there, because you may be listening to this on the website or something, but also if you subscribe then that helps us go up the charts and more people find our show.

The last 20 episodes of Scriptnotes are always available on iTunes. The back catalog is available through scriptnotes.net and on our apps. We have an app for iOS and an app for Android. If you’d like to subscribe to those premium back episodes and some bonus content as well, that’s $1.99 a month. A bargain.

**Craig:** $1.99 a month!

**John:** A bargain!

**Craig:** Two dollars a month. It’s a bargain. And to reiterate to people, we do not profit from this show.

**John:** We are a money-losing venture.

**Craig:** We are a money-losing venture.

**John:** Through and through.

**Craig:** We are proud of being a money-losing venture. If you could help us lose a little less money, that would be awesome.

**John:** That would just be terrific.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t that be great?

**John:** It would be great.

**Craig:** But, hey, you know what, if you don’t, it’s also okay. [laughs]

**John:** It’s all good. If you have a longer question like the one that Jonathan asked today you can write ask@johnaugust.com and we will try to read some of those on the air. And thanks. And thanks Robert Yescombe for sending through that clip and the pages. That was really cool.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m going to get you a gift. I’m going to send you Gödel, Escher, Bach. I think you’re going to love it.

**John:** I’m sure I’ll love it.

**Craig:** I would love for people to… — God, that’s a gift. If you haven’t read that book and if you’re a left-brainy kind of person and you love artificial intelligence, and math, and art, and recursion, and brain-scrambly stuff —

**John:** Oh, is the Escher in there like MC Escher?

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** Okay. So, it’s all fitting together. I thought it was one person named Gödel Escher Bach.

**Craig:** No, no, no. It’s Gödel, Escher, and Bach.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** The Eternal Golden Braid. By the way, that’s what it’s called Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. And notice that that’s EGB, also for Escher, Gödel, Bach. It’s going to scramble your mind. Great book.

**John:** Love it. Craig, thank you so much. Talk to you next week. Bye.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Bye.

Links:

* [Sundance Screenwriters Lab](https://www.sundance.org/programs/screenwriters-lab/)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 131: [Procrastination and Pageorexia](http://johnaugust.com/2014/procrastination-and-pageorexia)
* The [Aereo lawsuit](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2014/02/14/aereo-vs-the-broadcasters-six.html?page=all) on Upstart
* The Supreme Court’s [Aereo decision](http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf)
* Wikipedia on [cable television](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television)
* [Slate Culture Gabfest “Summer Strut 2014” Edition](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest/2014/06/slate_s_culture_gabfest_on_the_fosters_brooklyn_s_industrial_signs_and_the.html)
* [Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Douglas R. Hofstadter
* [Pre-lap](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-pre-lap/) on Screenwriting.io
* [Three Pages by Rob Yescombe](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AGunSCENEEXTRACT.pdf), and [the scene on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOgHNw0AbhU)
* [Datura](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura_stramonium) on Wikipedia
* [@SavedYouAClick](https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick) on Twitter
* [Clickhole](http://www.clickhole.com/) by The Onion
* [How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594205221/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Jordan Ellenberg
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Regis Duffy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/yes-screenwriting-is-actually-writing).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 150 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I’m back from vacation. I’m ready, I’m rested. I feel like I’m ready to do a big show because we’ve got a lot of stuff to get through today.

**Craig:** Normally when people say they’re ready and rested, you also expect them to say, I’m ready, tanned, and rested, but there was no chance you were going to be tanned.

**John:** I’m paler than I began.

**Craig:** Wow. How does that even work?

**John:** It’s difficult but it’s a process of heavy sunscreen application. So we went down to visit Southern Colorado. We went to the Great Sand Dunes. We went to Mesa Verde. We went to Four Corners which is probably the most useless sort of monument you could possibly imagine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An arbitrary place where four states come together.

**Craig:** Yeah, the four states with the — yeah, because they’re drawn on longitude and latitude, those borders.

**John:** Those borders.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yes. But arbitrary really.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course, but you did the thing where you’re like I’m in one state, I’m in another state, I’m in —

**John:** Yeah. My daughter did a backbend, so she was in all four states at once.

**Craig:** That was featured in a Breaking Bad episode.

**John:** Oh, how nice.

Speaking of Breaking Bad, a friend of ours who directed two of the best episodes of Breaking Bad apparently is going to direct these movies. So he finally got some work. I think it’s really good news.

**Craig:** Yeah. He is — there’s a… — God, I cannot remember the name of it. It’s a science fiction thing like a trilogy or something and then there was another trilogy. There are just too many of them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But for whatever reason, you know how it is, they just can’t stop making derivative sequels, crappy derivative sequels, so they’re making more of them. And he’s —

**John:** And they had to go to a foreign director to do it now. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** Right. They had to go to a Swedish guy as well. He’s not even doing the first of the next bunch of them.

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** He’s only doing the second of the next bunch.

**John:** Yeah, he’s doing the sequels to the knock offs.

**Craig:** I mean, god, his name is Rian Johnson.

**John:** He was a guest on the show. I remember him. He was really nice.

**Craig:** And this franchise that he’s doing is Star Wars. Star Wars.

**John:** With an S at the end, right?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Star Wars, not Star War, Star Wars.

**Craig:** Well, maybe a Z, I don’t know.

**John:** Oh, I like that a lot.

**Craig:** Star Warz.

**John:** But I’m sure there’ll be all sorts of toys and things like that.

**Craig:** Oh, garbage. Hollywood garbage.

**John:** Yeah. But, you know, all the same, I’m just really delighted for Rian because this is a kid who he’s put in the hours. He’s made some television, he’s made some short films. He did some videos.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s great that they’re taking a chance on this newbie —

**Craig:** Give him a shot. And you know what, look, everybody has to start somewhere. So if you start doing the second of a series of Star Wars films, ideally you’ll learn and, you know, I’d love to see what comes next. I guess that’s what you can take —

**John:** Absolutely. I think in a few years he may be ready to make some real movies. So congratulations, Rian Johnson. And I think it’s going to be — I’m looking forward to seeing what you make.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That actually segues really well to our first bit of follow up, which is Rob Norman wrote in about remakes and reboots which we talked about two episodes ago. And Rob writes, “I wonder if a remake uses the same laws of storytelling, whereas a reboot changes how the story is told drastically. For example, 21 Jump Street not only changed formats, it also changed genres from police procedural to meta-comedy.

“At the core of Star Trek, there were always this chin-scratching philosophical quandaries, lots of standing around debating issues. J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek feels a lot more like Indiana Jones than anything Gene Roddenberry every built. But from Robocop to Robocop, what changed? A few details in the narrative were updated. The actors are different but the tone is the same. Spider-Man to Amazing Spider-Man seems very familiar. It wasn’t really rebooted. A few what’s are different, but the how is the same.

“A remake might be the story and the world stays the same, details change, an old movie is updated. A reboot is going back to the original premise and doing a page one rewrite of the franchise. The story mechanisms are replaced with something completely different.”

That’s Rob’s description of remake versus reboot.

**Craig:** I’ll buy that too. I mean the last definition was a pretty good one. This definition is a pretty good one. I’m not sure there’s that much value in determining what these nonsense words mean anyway. They’re mostly for bloggers and entertainment journalists to bandy about as they attempt to draw clicks to their website. But, yeah, that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. I think rebooting, basically you’re going in a new direction. This is like, all that stuff existed and that’s over there. And this is a new way that we are forging forward. I thought 21 Jump Street was actually an interesting example to bring up because I saw 22 Jump Street over the weekend. I really enjoyed it. Have you seen it yet, Craig?

**Craig:** I haven’t.

**John:** Oh, you should see it.

**Craig:** I know. It’s on my list.

**John:** Yeah, it’s quite good and quite interesting in the way that they, he describes it as a meta-comedy. They go really meta in it in ways that you think are going to be dangerous. Because usually when a movie tries to be too self-aware that it’s a movie, you’re sort of like navel-gazing and yet it does it just geniusly.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’m looking forward to that.

**John:** Cool. A second bit of follow-up. We talked about something like this on the show before, but Charles Forman is a developer who’s been working with stuff in the Fountain. And he came up with this new product for Mac called Storyboard Fountain. And it’s a lot like kind of what Craig had always wanted or described, which is the ability to sort of shift back and forth between your script and the storyboards for your script. And his, in fact, is a drawing tool. So you work on it with a tablet and you’re drawing with the script, you know, right there in the same frame.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It seems really, really cool. So that was a great product demo. So I’m going to steer people there —

**Craig:** I wish, I wish, like I’m so bad at drawing that I can’t even draw stick figures properly. I remember I would work with storyboard artists and I would say, well, this is kind of what I’m thinking about and they would get it. You know, they’d understand, okay, I see. You want behind him, you want over his shoulder with him sort of blown out in frame and then this stuff is in the deep background. But when they looked at my stick figure drawings, they honestly looked at me like I was sick. There was something wrong with me.

**John:** So the last couple of weeks, I’ve been storyboarding this really complicated project. And so I’ve had a guy, Simone, who’s been in the office a lot doing this stuff. And so we’ve been talking through things. It’s always interesting talking with somebody who’s so much better at something than you are. And so you shouldn’t even try to — I just don’t pick up a pencil when I talk to him about it anymore.

But what I found is really useful is to use real things around me to sort of describe what the shot is and sort of use my fingers as the camera. So like, we’re here, we’re here, we’re here. And he can draw that beautifully. But if I try to do it, it’s just, it’s disastrous.

**Craig:** It’s funny, John, that your instinct when talking to somebody who is better at something than you is to defer to some extent to them. Whereas, if say the thing that you were really good at was screenwriting, the people that talk to us so frequently fail —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** — to defer. In fact, they don’t see any mystery in what we do at all.

**John:** Uh-uh. A monkey could do that.

**Craig:** A monkey could do it. Anyway, the only reason they don’t do it is just because they’re tired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just too hard to — it’s so much typing. But I know what to say.

**John:** Oh, you do, absolutely. It’s just a matter of putting particular words down on the page and sort of like, you know, making it all work right there. Basically, it’s how to use Final Draft is really 90% of screenwriting.

**Craig:** 90% of it. My favorite phrase that idiots use is it just needs to be put into writing. [laughs] I love that. Like I have the story, I know what it is, it just, somebody just needs to put it into writing. What does that mean? It just needs to be put into writing. It’s like a doctor. Like, listen, I know that you’re sick. I just need to put you into health and you’ll be fine. That’s all. I don’t have to do it. Somebody could do it. Anybody can be a doctor. You just have to put somebody into health. I know what the problem is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Could you just put me into health? You —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** D’oh! Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy. Well, you may want to hold on to some of that anger because you have an important Halloween task which is that you need to play Steve Ballmer for Halloween.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And one of our listeners, Cynthia Closkey sent me a link to a comedian impressionist named Jim Meskimen who I had seen on other shows before but I’ve never seen this YouTube video where he talks through like how to do an impression and basically how he breaks things down.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And this is very important to me because I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to do my Tim Cook so I can be Tim Cook to your Steve Ballmer. And it’s a very clever video because it was not about sort of the technical details, it’s about sort of looking at the world from their perspective and figuring out how they sort of move their mouths and sort of how they project things much more so than trying to match that sound with that sound.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a very clever —

**Craig:** It was. I mean, when you listen to Tim Cook, I mean the first thing you’ll notice probably is the drawl because he has a Southern drawl. But he drags his words. It’s really amazing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It really looks beautiful in your hand. He’s got that long thing on certain vowels, you know. Like those things… — But I really liked what this guy said about the forceful nature, the plosives, as it were, of speech. And, you know, a good — being able to be an impressionist is a helpful thing I would think as a screenwriter because we are doing impressions of other human beings when we’re writing. We’re doing impressions of multiple other human beings talking to each other.

It’s kind of high level mimicry. And so where does the specificity come from? And I think a lot of new screenwriters will go to things that are very textual: long words, complete sentences as opposed to short words, and slang or whatever have you. But even thinking about the forcefulness of the way a sentence emerges will bleed into the dialogue in a way that people will pick up on. They just will. And it’s not so heavy-handed.

**John:** Yeah. Your example of plosiveness, like the example he gives is like if you have popcorn in your mouth, how far would the popcorn fly when you do it. And he distinguishes between Kevin Spacey, who keeps everything very close to himself, versus a Paul Giamatti who we think of as being this bursting, bursting, bursting out.

That’s why as you’re writing characters, you know, you shouldn’t get stuck on one actor for a role. But if you have an actor in your head as you’re writing a role, it can be very helpful to see like, would this actually make sense coming out of his lips? Like can I believe an actor, one actor would say all these things this way and that can be really helpful to get the voice consistent even if it’s not the actor you end up casting in the end.

**Craig:** I don’t really know what the point is in writing a character if you don’t have an actor in mind. I really don’t, because you’re just cheating yourself. Have somebody. It doesn’t have to be anybody that you would ever even cast. Maybe it’s an actor that wouldn’t attract a single ticket buyer. But the specificity, I think, is just so critical.

**John:** Yeah. If we say specificity three more times in this podcast we’ll get some sort of special prize.

**Craig:** Specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity.

**John:** All right, nicely done. I will say that one of my great joys in my writing career is I got to do three days’ work on a movie that starred Christopher Walken. And so I got to write dialogue that Christopher Walken would say.

**Craig:** Walken dialogue.

**John:** And it’s just such a unique joy to have somebody whose voice you can already hear in your head so clearly and specifically as you’re putting those words down. You pick words that you would never pick for any other actor because it’ll just be so amazing when he says them.

**Craig:** And Walken’s thing also is there’s either , you know, it’s not that there’s no punctuation. It’s that the punctuation is random. So commas and periods will appear randomly in a brick of dialogue without any actual relation to syntax.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which I think is —

**John:** Well, he’ll put them in. He will take the dialogue and he will pencil them in where he’s going to do them. It’s planned.

**Craig:** It’s planned but it just , you know, he’ll —

**John:** It’s amazing.

**Craig:** [Walken impersonation] He’ll pencil them in where he’s planning to do them. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s so weird.

**John:** Yeah. But it’s wonderful.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful. And like question marks instead of periods and it just… — But, look, at some point, it’s, I don’t know. I don’t want to, it’s just so weird like he’s — Christopher Walken has almost become like Al Pacino, a guy that seems to be doing impressions of people that do impressions of him.

**John:** Yeah. And so I know there are movies that he doesn’t do the Christopher Walken of it all and I just haven’t seen them because people want him to do Christopher Walken I guess.

**Craig:** The early ones. If you go way back —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** — to the early days you’ll see —

**John:** Totally different person.

**Craig:** You’ll see , yeah, smooth Christopher Walken. Yeah.

**John:** A final bit of follow-up. Giovanni wrote in. Giovanni from Turin, Italy writes, “In episode 146, you talked about Hopscotch and how it would be awesome to have something similar that works with Minecraft. I’m just writing in to say there actually is. It’s called Kano. And it’s basically a computer that kids can build and they program in it with code blocks for a number of applications and games. Minecraft is one of them. Craig would be happy to know it was funded mainly through Kickstarter.”

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** “Since I’m writing in, I will also say that as an aspiring videogame writer, I find it very interesting when you talk about games and their narratives. Would you ever consider having a videogame screenwriter or somebody who worked in videogames like Gary Whitta or such on the show?”

No. Absolutely no. Gary Whitta? Never.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, not Whitta.

**John:** Oh yeah, anybody but Whitta.

**Craig:** Anybody but Whitta. That’s actually a great name for the podcast. I mean if we ever want to change it, it could just be called anybody but Whitta.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a guy I met recently. I believe his name is Jesse Stern and he’s written a number of the Call of Duty games. Goyer has worked on some of those as well. But Jesse Stern I think is primarily a videogame writer. And I actually think that it would be great to speak to somebody like that. And we love Gary Whitta, but Gary’s a screenwriter who also writes some videogames. But this guy is like way deeper and more about that world and it would be — I would love to talk to them. I mean, it’s a fascinating area.

The Writers Guild, you know, continues to make fluttering whimpery noises about trying to organize videogame writers. I don’t see any coherent strategy.

**John:** So you actually, if you’re a WGA member, you could actually get a WGA contract writing on a videogame.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re not eager to give it to you but you can possibly get it. And it establishes some things, some minimums, some benefits that you would not otherwise get if you were not doing that, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you were being paid, you know, enough you could qualify for pension and health. The problem is that the payment for many of the positions is very low. So many of the large companies are either located overseas where we have no jurisdiction or they are Walmart-ian in their anti —

I mean, look, the whole, we’ve discussed this before, the entire Silicon Valley world is just brutally anti-union. And, or I’ll call it the technology world because I know that some of these places aren’t just, you know, but yeah, it’s a massive uphill climb.

**John:** Yeah, it is. But, Gary, what I should say is actually a very, very nice person. So, I’m slagging on him just because we adore him. And Gary Whitta’s actually writing one of the Star Wars movies. That’s one of the things that’s actually announced, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s doing one of those spinoff movies. So there’s going to be the three, I guess you’d call them canonical sequels. J. J. Abrams is doing the first of them, then Rian and then an unknown third director. And Gary is doing one of these standalone movies. I think there’s going to be another one as well. There may even be two. You know, it’s funny —

**John:** It’s an exciting time.

**Craig:** I was talking to a producer today about it and he’s like, “Is there, how many Star Wars movies are going to come out?” And I said, you know what man, they can’t make enough. I honestly believe that Disney can’t lose money on them. It doesn’t matter because if the third prequel, by that point we’d had enough evidence. [laughs] If the third prequel made a ton of money and it did —

**John:** It did.

**Craig:** Every single one of these things is going to be massive and of course there’s the dragon’s tail of merchandising and theme parks and all the rest. We are going to find out just how big a movie can be when this first Star Wars comes out.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Exciting.

**Craig:** It’s going to redefine big.

**John:** All right. Topics for today. Three big topics that we have marked out. First is Trinity Syndrome. Second is sitcoms at conflict. And the third is the question of is screenwriting actually writing. So let’s spin the big wheel and start with Trinity Syndrome.

**Craig:** [Mimics the Price is Right wheel spin]

**John:** Oh, you went over a dollar.

Tasha Robinson writing for The Dissolve is writing about what she calls Trinity Syndrome which is that your strong female characters in many of these movies, it’s like, great you have this “strong female character” who actually doesn’t do anything significant in the plot and she points out How To Train Your Dragon 2 as an example of this, Lego Movie as an example of this, and the most recent Lord Of The Rings movies as an example of that. Where you have a woman who is incredibly competent and can do a lot of great things, and then she doesn’t do anything.

Craig, what did you think of Tasha’s article and her points?

**Craig:** I thought, I was almost all the way there with her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that she’s pointing out something that’s absolutely true that making a female character “strong” oftentimes is a weak-sauce substitute for making them actually human and fleshed out. Of her examples, the one that I thought was probably the weakest was The Lego Movie because she was basically, she was parodying the strong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, the hero of that movie is called The One. You know, The Chosen One. And so obviously they’re kind of parodying The Matrix there as they were parodying a billion things.

But the only thing I wanted to point out I guess to nuance really is that when you ask the question, why is this happening, to some extent I think you can say it’s because the people that are making these movies are sort of casually sexist. But I also want to point out that many times in these sorts of movies the male characters who aren’t The One or The Hero are also just as thin and pointless.

**John:** I think that’s a really good point because essentially the way movies tend to work, the way sort of action movies tend to work is you have your hero protagonist and then you have everybody else. And in that everybody else, those are hopefully good entertaining funny characters or dramatic characters, but none of them are going to be as integral as the hero is or if there’s a villain, the villain is going to be. So any person, any character in the movie who’s not the hero or the principal villain is going to feel a little bit secondary and can feel a little bit sort of weak-sauce. If they’re just there to sort of give advice or to help the hero out for a bit but don’t have an integral story function in their own right.

**Craig:** Right. So there are movies that have relationships. And Lindsay Doran has a really good talk that she does about this. There are movies where characters have a task to do: save the world, blow up a building, become the one, whatever. And they do it. And along the way they experience a relationship with another person. And in the end they get that relationship together almost as a reward for having done the task of the movie.

Then there are other movies where really the relationship is the reward, rather the relationship is the purpose. It’s the journey, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you have movies that kind of hybridize it where you can feel that there’s equal weight to these things. So for instance, Tasha mentions Edge of Tomorrow where the goal, which is to save the world, seems basically on par with this other goal which is to figure out this relationship with this woman that is the key to understanding how to save the world. In a lot of the movies that she talks about, for instance The Matrix, which I think is brilliant and I actually want, I think that The Matrix is a movie that we should do an episode on.

**John:** Oh, we absolutely should.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s just gorgeously structured. What is the — where’s the dimension to Morpheus? He might as well have a flowy beard and be sitting on a mountain. He is just the wise old man. And absolutely Trinity is the trinity. [laughs] And the villain’s the villain. He’s the rat. The rat’s the rat. The only character in The Matrix that is an actual human who has anything interesting to say that isn’t the one is the oracle —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Who is a woman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I agree that strong female character syndrome isn’t ideal in one sense, but I would argue that really what we’re kind of talking about is broad weak character syndrome.

**John:** Yeah. Tasha offers a couple of points and basically a checklist of things to ask yourself when you’re looking at the characters in a movie. So some of them include: “After being introduced to your strong female character, they fail to do anything fundamentally significant to the outcome of the plot or anything at all.” And that’s a thing you do see where this woman is established as being incredibly competent. I think back to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and I think it’s Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, she’s like in disguise at the start she says she’s a great sword fighter and then she never does sword fighting —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Is that right?

**Craig:** She mostly just gets threatened to be raped which is number two.

**John:** Exactly. “If she does something to significantly affect the plot, is it mostly getting raped, beaten, or killed to motivate the male hero, or deciding to have sex or not have sex with, agreeing to date, deciding to break up with the male hero, or nagging the male hero into growing up, or nagging him to stop being so heroic. Basically, does she only exist to service the male hero’s needs, development or motivations?”

But this gets into what we’ve just talked about is that if in a lot of these movies there’s one main person and if that main person is the dude and she is the female character, you have to look for what else it is that she can do, what other functions she can have.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** If it’s a movie that has like essentially one person driving the story, it doesn’t matter if that secondary character is male or female. It’s going to feel extra.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, because the protagonist is the protagonist. Therefore, every other character exists to service their needs, development and motivation, all of them. I mean, listen, I think that I did a good job in Identity Thief of having a female character who was not a typical female character and who didn’t fall into any of the pitfalls that I think are listed here. And yet she does help the protagonist’s needs, development, and motivation like any other character must in a movie because that’s what the non-protagonists must do or else they don’t belong in a movie.

**John:** Well, but fundamentally Identity Thief is a dual protagonist movie where they’re causing each other to change.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s true. I always felt that he was the primary protagonist because I think he had the most — I think he had the most central problem.

**John:** Yeah, and she was the obstacle to overcome.

**Craig:** In many ways, yes. In many ways, yeah.

**John:** And I would say back to my movies, you know, Go certainly doesn’t have a strong female character problem. You have, you know, Ronna is incredibly competent but she’s the protagonist also. Things are changing because of her. But Charlie’s Angels, we had a luxury of, we have the three women, so there’s not — they’re driving the story. They’re doing those kinds of things themselves.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think I want to go back to your defense of Lego Movie and sort of the parody of Trinity Syndrome in that because my recollection of The Lego Movie is the Wyldstyle character, the Elizabeth Banks character, she really wants to be the one and she’s really frustrated that she’s not the one.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so I think she vocalizes the frustration that I think Tasha Robinson is describing. It’s like, why am I the secondary person? Look how competent I am. Why am I not the person being put in charge here?

**Craig:** That’s how, you know, it’s a natural thing to want to spoof when you see The Matrix because The Matrix begins with Trinity. The story begins with Trinity doing things that we cannot believe. I mean we know that she’s in a building somewhere and the cops show up and an agent says, you know, what’s going on and they say, oh we sent our cops in there. They probably already arrested her. And the agent turns around and says, they’re already dead. And then we watch her just be awesome.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So a natural thing you want to spoof is why is that guy the one? He is just a guy, like why? And that’s a great thing to — I guess my point of being that I thought it was unfair for Tasha to pick on that character because that character is kind of on her side, I think, is the point.

**John:** So what solutions can we offer or what sort of recommendations can we offer someone who is worried that they have a character who is just basically strong female character syndrome? What hope do we offer them?

**Craig:** Well, I think that there’s a list here of some trope-y things that people do with women that are starting to become really annoying because, you know, what happens… — When we look at characters, there are certain things that we see immediately and then there’s all the stuff on the inside. But if you look at race, gender, and sexuality, I can come up with a whole bunch of trope-y things for race and sexuality that just don’t work anymore because they’re kind of insulting. They’re getting in the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it’s time to start doing that for, it’s long past time to start doing that for gender. So for instance, Tasha points out some very good tropes that you don’t want to do. “Could your strong female character be seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it to help a male hero?” Is — I love this one — “Is a fundamental point of your plot that your strong female character is the strongest, smartest, meanest, toughest or most experienced character in the story until the protagonist arrives?” And that, by the way, is something you see in Raiders of the Lost Ark which we both love.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** But Marion is like awesome. She owns a bar. She out-drinks some huge, you know, Himalayan man and then immediately she’s into screamy-me-me, you know, damsel in distress, but just like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because Indy’s there. “Does the male character enter the story as a bumbling screw-up but then spend the whole movie rapidly evolving past her while she stays entirely static and even cheers him on. We’ll call that Rene Russo in Tin Cup. It’s nice if she’s hyper cool but does she only start off that way so a male hero will look even cooler by comparison when he rescues or surpasses her?”

We see that all the time. I mean, she’s making real — these are really good tropes you just want to avoid because we’ve seen them forever and they’re frankly starting to accumulate into a morass of fairly insulting points of view on women. We can just calm down about the gender roles quite a bit, you know.

**John:** The challenge though is like this is a list of don’t do’s. And so what are some proactive steps you can take to make sure that the female characters in your story are going to have, I don’t know, that they’re not going to fall into this syndrome? And I would say that it’s making sure that, track the story from that character’s point of view, the female character’s point of view, and what would the story be like if the hero hadn’t shown up there.

And so ask yourself the question I think they ask in The Lego Movie which is, well, why isn’t she the hero, and find interesting answers for that. Find interesting things for her to do that don’t fall into these tropes, like find interesting reasons for her to make the plot move forward. Have her take assertive actions that change the nature of the plot. And create conflict with the protagonist that’s not just sort of bumbling romantic tension or whatever you want to do or just like, you know, I’m more competent than you are. Have some real stakes there.

One of my frustrations is that women in movies never seem to make ethical choices. They sort of seem beyond it and —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So have that be a fact and have some flaws, have some real issues there so that it’s a three-dimensional character regardless. It can also be really helpful to just look the character irrespective of gender and what is that character’s motivation and how would you write this character if you were writing it as a man and look at all the choices and decisions that the male characters would make and then ask yourself, are you making those same of kinds of choices with the character as a woman.

**Craig:** Yeah. For me from a practical positive standpoint, I think that when you write a character who is a woman, you need to consider that she is a woman. You have to understand women as you understand men. I don’t think, by the way, that men have any better understanding of men than they do of women. I think people have understandings of themselves and barely at that. We misunderstand members of our own gender aplenty.

But you want to write a woman and you want to consider that gender as part of her identity. But the thing that I would suggest avoiding at least in the beginning, unless it’s integral to the story, is an immediate dose of sexual politics, sexual interplay, romance. Hold off. Hold off. Make this character alive and full and complete without that. Because what happens all too often is the romance substitutes for substance. And in The Matrix, you see it. In the end, Trinity’s character is a soldier who is defined by her blind faith love in Keanu Reeves —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who does not deserve it until the very end.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that I think is where things — I mean, by the way, in that movie, it works. But that movie’s already —

**John:** In a lot of movies it works. I mean —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the reason why these tropes are there is because it’s been successful and —

**Craig:** That’s right. But I think that we’ve moved on is the point. And we’re starting to see different kinds of relationships occurring. You know, thinking about a brother… — It’s funny, Aline McKenna when she saw Identity Thief, she said, “One thing I really enjoyed about the movie was that it was a man and woman together and it wasn’t about romance or sex, and it was just watching a man and a woman become friends and you never get to see that in a movie.” And it’s true. You never get to see that in a movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s why it’s funny. In Edge of Tomorrow, I didn’t want them to — have you seen it?

**John:** I haven’t seen it yet. Sorry.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I was going to do a spoiler.

**John:** Right. Don’t spoil it for me. I do want to see it.

**Craig:** I’m not going to spoil it.

**John:** Doug Liman directed it.

**Craig:** Doug Liman did direct it, absolutely, the director of Go. I’ll just say that for much of it, for most of it, for the great bulk of it I was watching two people become friends. And I really enjoyed that.

**John:** It’s a nice thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** All right, speaking of friends, we’re going to talk about an article by Todd VanDerWerff in the AV Club where he says that friendship is killing sitcoms.

**Craig:** God, you are on fire with the segues today, by the way.

**John:** Thank you very much. Sometimes I’m just in a segue mode. I hop on my little two-wheeled scooter and I just go.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** On top of the segue, I may have brought this up on the show before, it’s a word that I was using and never really knew how it was written. It’s the most disturbingly written word. S-E-G-U-E.

**Craig:** That’s right. Seg. It looks like “Seague.”

**John:** Yeah, I assumed that that word was a short version of the longer word that actually was segue. I thought it was just supposed to be segue, but it’s really segue.

**Craig:** Segue. Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** Todd’s point is that modern sitcoms, and by sitcoms he doesn’t mean just three cameras, but basically half hour comedies on television, have been hurt by the nature of just people hanging out. And so the kinds of shows he’s talking about include Happy Endings, Cougar Town, How I Met Your Mother, even Modern Family. I think Modern Family is a bit of a stretch. New Girl, recent seasons of New Girl, in that essentially the show can be sometimes paralyzed by the characters getting along too well, by the characters hanging out. And when they just hang out the tension in the scenes naturally just sort of dissipates and your motivation for staying engaged and for really watching falls apart.

Craig, what did you think of the article?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s a pretty good observation. I generally agree with his assessment that comedy requires conflict and that the best sitcoms were built around conflict. Although the one that I kind of picked out was Cheers, because while Sam and Diane had a will they/won’t they, that conflict was kind of confined to them. That sitcom to me sort of defined the hang out.

In fact, I’ll go one step backwards. Taxi really for me was the first great hang out show. Yes, Louie is in conflict with them, but really they’re not all in conflict with each other. The point of that show was that they were all in the same boat and desperate to help each other through their misery. And so now that I’m thinking about it, [laughs], I’m not really sure I agree with what he’s saying.

**John:** I will say that you look at Cheers, and so even after Sam and Diane, when Diane left, they brought in the Kirstie Alley to basically be that central conflict again. Fundamentally these two characters will not get along. And she wouldn’t get along with Carla. She wouldn’t get along with sort of everyone else in the show. To a large degree Frasier I think was brought in to — when Frasier Crane was on Cheers, he was brought in to be sort of a force to be angry against or to be frustrated with.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Then when we segue that off to Frasier, that whole show is built on conflict, about basically the one-upmanship between Frasier and his brother, the dad looking to have both of them.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** So, that’s a great show, and it’s a great show partly because of its conflict.

The reason why I didn’t find Modern Family to be the best example of that is I feel like they do find clever conflicts in there sort of constantly. So, most of the plots are conflicts between two of that extended family members.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, he kind of lays this all at the feet of Friends. But, Friends has all the same kind of conflict that he’s talking about. Rachel and Ross, and who loves who, and the love kept switching around and there was a baby, and people were going to get married, and then they weren’t going to get married. There was lots of conflict there. Tons of it.

**John:** One of my favorite episodes of Friends is the one where Ross — it’s a bottle episode where Ross is trying to get everyone to come to this event and basically like the clock is ticking and he’s trying to get everyone actually dressed so they will actually leave so they can leave the apartment on time. And everyone just sort of like gangs up against him in fun ways.

And that’s the nature of what conflict is. And so often if you’re looking at why a scene doesn’t work it’s because the central conflict of the scene is not clear. It’s not clear — you may understand what the two characters want, but they’re not being put against each other in ways that are going to create some sparks.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, every sitcom, I mean the “sit” part is conflict.

**John:** Yes. Situational.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, every episode will have conflict. In terms of the DNA of the show, the idea of baking conflict in between the characters is a good one. And I think, for instance, Friends did that. I mean, we knew from the start that Ross was pining away for Rachel and she wasn’t into him. The will they/won’t they just went on, and on, and on.

And, I don’t know, it says “the show ran Ross and Rachel into the ground.” I guess, yeah, I don’t know.

**John:** [Crosstalk]

**Craig:** I don’t know. I’m not really sure. I’ve got to be honest with you. I think Todd VanDerWerff wrote a very — he wrote this well, it’s well thought out. I’m not sure if this topic, frankly, deserves this much thought. It doesn’t seem —

**John:** I think it’s worth pointing out that sitcoms, comedy thrives on conflict. And that when conflict dissipates it can be more challenging to actually find the conflict. So, two of the shows he singles out are New Girl and — I took of the “The” this time. I said New Girl the way the show actually is.

**Craig:** That’s right. New Girl.

**John:** New Girl. And Parks and Rec. And I think you can make valid cases for both of these shows in that New Girl I think the writing is terrific, I love the actors, but this last season there’s not been a lot of conflict between the individual characters. You know, Schmidt is — do you watch New Girl?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. So, the Schmidt character can be horrible, and yet you still like him. But with the central couple actually becoming a couple and then falling apart, it has had less inherent conflict then it could otherwise be. And so they do just tend to hang out a lot.

Parks and Rec is another great show with a fantastic cast, but Ron Swanson who was sort of the Alec Baldwin 30 Rock character who was always like the stern person you couldn’t convince to get onto your side has become more lovable and because of that it’s harder to find the real conflict between the different characters. They brought on Billy Eichner who is just sort of a firecracker who sort of sets everybody off, but it’s more loud than actual conflict.

**Craig:** You know what I think is missing from sitcoms?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** And if I were to write a sitcom today, which I’m not gonna —

**John:** What would you do?

**Craig:** I am a huge fan of Laverne and Shirley. I love Laverne and Shirley. And one thing that Laverne and Shirley did so well was physical comedy. They managed to do incredible physical comedy within the confining format of a sitcom. And it’s really hard to do because, I mean, physical comedy can be dangerous. And being funny doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re physically capable of doing a lot of these things. Plus, you can’t use stunt people. Plus, you’re doing it on a locked down set like a living room. And they managed to do the most incredible — and I just love how physical they were. And you never see that on sitcoms anymore.

I would love to see a sitcom with adults being physical. I love physical comedy. I’ve always loved physical comedy.

**John:** I would say Modern Family does that some. I mean, granted it’s not a three-camera.

**Craig:** It’s single-camera. Right.

**John:** It’s single-camera, so they can do more sophisticated things sometimes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But there have been some really good physical comedy moments where they’ve —

**Craig:** I’ll give you that one. I’ll give you that one. That’s true.

**John:** Modern Family is a great show. So, I think we’re going to leave it at good to point out that conflict is central to shows. I don’t know that we agree with some of his specific examples or points, but yay conflict. And I think it’s a useful thing as people are writing — if you’re writing a comedy pilot, your fundamental question should be what is the conflict. What is the conflict of these scenes? And not only are my characters saying funny things, but are they saying funny things that is exploring the conflict within those scenes.

**Craig:** Correctamundo. Silicon Valley does it very well, by the way.

**John:** It does it very, very well. You have great empathy almost all the characters, and yet they are pretty much always in conflict with each other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This will be a quick one, I’m sure. This was Richard Brody writing for The New Yorker. The headline wasn’t provocative at all. It says Screenwriting Isn’t Writing.

**Craig:** Eh. Meh.

**John:** Yeah, nothing hyperbolic about that at all. So, the article is talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner to some degree and their Hollywood careers. And it’s based on an article that Ken LaZebnik did in Written By, which is an excerpt from his longer book, where they’re talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s frustrations writing for Hollywood and that he was really trying to write as if screenwriting was an art form and Brody’s point is that it isn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, where to begin with this? First of all, let’s just — I just love — the article falls under the heading “The Front Row: Notes on the Cinema,” by Richard Brody. And then there is his bearded, bespectacled cartoon face and above it, of course, the sneering, [laughs] 1800s monocle hoisting New Yorker icon. They both seem so similar to me.

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read, which is saying something. Because it’s obvious that Richard Brody is very intelligent. He knows how to put sentences together. I think that he strikes me as one of these people that’s been raised in a pod inside of an academy and has never actually seen the world or tasted or touched things. He’s just read about it in The New Yorker.

This is dumb. Where to begin with how dumb it is? First of all, if you’re going to discuss whether or not screenwriting is writing, let’s not maybe limit it to F. Scott Fitzgerald, [laughs], which is just like — so, yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a brilliant novelist. He was a brilliant novelist of a time that was 80 or so years ago. And he attempted because he was unfortunately not great with money and not great with alcohol and not great with lots of things attempted to make some money in Hollywood writing screenplays the way that many great authors like Clifford Odets did.

And he just didn’t get it. And it wasn’t that screenwriting wasn’t writing, it was that he just wasn’t giving these people what they wanted. And I think of Barton Fink. “It’s a Wallace Beery picture. Write a Wallace Beery picture.”That doesn’t mean that writing a Wallace Beery picture isn’t writing, nor does it mean that everything is a Wallace Beery picture.

Interestingly, in his article about how screenwriting isn’t writing and F. Scott Fitzgerald is proof of it, he has this quote from a book about how Fitzgerald embraced screenwriting as a new art form.

**John:** This is the quote. “Instead of rejecting screenwriting as a necessary evil, Fitzgerald went the other way and embraced it as a new art form, even while recognizing that it was an art frequently embarrassed by the ‘merchants’ more comfortable with mediocrity in their efforts to satisfy the widest possible audience.”

**Craig:** Right. So, there it is. That’s my point. I agree with Fitzgerald one hundred percent. And I don’t agree with Richard Brody. And I have to say, and again, Faulkner — this guy apparently has, I don’t know, maybe he was hermetically sealed in some sort of cryogenic crypt back in 1958 because it seems like the most recent reference he has is Faulkner’s 1955 film Land of the Pharaohs, because it’s more easy to then go backwards to discuss popular touchstones like Tiger Shark from 1933, ’32.

This is my real problem with this. It is absurd prima facie, forget — putting aside the fact that somebody who doesn’t do a thing is deciding whether or not it’s another thing. I don’t — I don’t like reading How To sex guides from eunuchs. But really I think what upsets me about this is that it’s dishonest. This entire essay is dishonest. It’s a lie. Richard Brody knows it’s a lie. He came up with a title that he thought would get a lot of clicks because he was feeling lonely or something. There is no way this man is dumb enough to believe the argument he’s put here.

**John:** So, I’m not going to stand up for a huge defense of him, but when I clicked through that headline I was like well that’s just absurd, that’s ridiculous. And then I remembered the fact that often the writer of an article does not choose his headline. And so it’s very possible that someone else put that headline on.

And so I’m trying to push past the headline to look at this as what was the point of the essay. And I think if you look at the point of the essay as Fitzgerald, he was really trying to be a screenwriter. He was really trying to do art in screenwriting, and failed at it. Brody’s point seems to be like, well, it was a foolish game anyway because you can’t look at screenwriting as being real writing.

**Craig:** I’ve got to push back here because in his essay, not the headline, in his essay he writes, “In short, Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting is writing mistake.”

**John:** Yes. I think I said that. I think I got to the point that the headline may seem much more categorical than that one sentence does. He’s, yes, saying that Fitzgerald, this was this one situation. Without that Fitzgerald framing he has no point whatsoever. I’m stating this badly.

But where I think this still falls apart is that I think there’s an implicit idea that there is real writing, sort of like “real writing,” and the question is what is real writing. Obviously this article from The New Yorker isn’t real writing. Is a short story real writing? What is real writing.

And I think his definition of what writing is basically a novel of a certain size. And that’s absurd.

**Craig:** I guess. I can’t even tell. I mean, this is so sloppily done. If you’re going to drop a bomb like screenwriting isn’t writing, you’d better sit down and do your homework here. And you better be able to explain to me why Paddy Chayefsky didn’t write Network, and you better explain to me why The Godfather wasn’t written, and Groundhog Day wasn’t written. And, I don’t know, I mean, it’s just insane.

**John:** Well, later in the article he talks about the collaboration. And collaboration in a sense of like a sort of pejorative sense. Like, well, you were working with a director on the project, so you can’t really say that you wrote it, basically saying there is no sense of authorship.

And if collaboration is his definition of what makes something not writing, then the theater can’t be writing either. Shakespeare can’t be writing because he was writing for people. He was writing with people, with theater troupes in mind to try to make this thing happen.

**Craig:** And editors — book editors are omnipresent.

**John:** Absolutely. So, it makes it — basically if screenwriting isn’t writing, then almost nothing really could be writing.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I mean, look, it is true that screenwriting is unique in the world of writing in that it is not meant to be read by the audience. It is rather meant to be translated into another art form. However —

**John:** Well, playwriting is the same thing, too.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s right. Playwriting is the same thing. You’re right. I’ve always said that doesn’t mean it’s not writing. It’s absolute — in fact, when you think about what is required to make a movie and you realize how much is leaning on the screenplay, it becomes almost super writing. It becomes über writing. And I’m not talking about quality here, because listen, if writing a novel of a certain length is writing to Richard Brody, there are good novels and bad novels, there are good movies and bad movies, good scripts, bad scripts. But, of course it’s writing.

I can’t even believe we’re talking about it. It’s dishonest, John. This is dishonest. He can’t believe this. It’s such a poorly written article that cites a bunch of things cherry picked from the first half of the 20th Century. It makes no sense. It’s sloppy. It’s sloppy. Richard Brody, you are sloppy.

**John:** If we were Richard Brody’s editor and we needed to rewrite this piece, I think I would start with a different headline, “Movies aren’t novels.”

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** And I would focus on the fact that Fitzgerald had frustrations trying to adapt, you know, he had frustrations moving from a career as a novelist to a career as a screenwriter, a transition which would seem kind of natural, but it’s not natural because not only is the form different, but the profession which we talk about on the show, the profession is vastly different.

The profession is about pitching and meeting with people and incorporating ideas and notes and getting along with folks in ways that is so different from what a novelist has to do.

**Craig:** Yes. And maybe Richard Brody loves F. Scott Fitzgerald so much that he has to rationalize his failure, Fitzgerald’s failure, by blaming it on screenwriting itself. I love F. Scott Fitzgerald, too. But listen, there are amazing novelists who can’t write screenplays at all. That’s why so many great novelists don’t adapt their own pieces into screenplays. And there’s so many incredible screenwriters who couldn’t write a novel to save their lives.

They are two different things. It is possible that one of the great novelists in history simply wasn’t very good at writing screenplays.

**John:** Yeah. It’s entirely possible.

**Craig:** But that doesn’t mean that screenwriting therefore needs to be indicted as non-writing. Oh my god, he cannot believe this.

**John:** Shakespeare, by the way, was a terrible novelist. I don’t know if you’ve read any of Shakespeare’s novels, but they’re awful. They’re so awful that they’ve been buried and no one has ever read them.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** Ah-ha! We have some questions in the mail bag, so let’s get to them. Michael writes in. “Now that I’ve been working for a few years on about a half dozen projects,” first off, Michael, congratulations. You’ve been working on a half dozen projects.

**Craig:** Yes, well done.

**John:** “I’ve experienced something strange about the process of making deals and starting to work on a project. Here is what happens. I sell a pitch or get hired for an open writing assignment and my lawyer negotiates with the studio’s business affairs about the headline deal points, how many steps, how much per step, etc. Everyone agrees, and then the studios and producers start moving forward. We have the commencement meeting and I’m expected to start writing. All good, except I don’t have a signed contract as my lawyer and studio’s business affairs will probably be working on the nitty gritty details for about three or four months.

“Multiple times I’ve finished a first draft before receiving a contract. Now, this has never really been a big problem because it all works out in the end, but is this normal? Despite my team’s assurances that everything is good, it’s hard not to have fears about everything falling apart. What do you guys do? Do you start writing when the deal is ‘closed,’ or when you actually sign a contract?”

**Craig:** Great question.

**John:** It’s a great question.

**Craig:** Excellent question.

**John:** Craig, what do you actually do in practice, because I’m curious.

**Craig:** In practice, I start — assuming that I have all the information I need, that there isn’t a particular meeting that I need to have to sort of figure out what we’re all going to do, when the deal is closed and my availability is —

**John:** That’s a phone call that says it’s closed.

**Craig:** Yeah. A phone call says it’s closed and my availability is appropriate, so I’m not finishing up another thing, I start working. There are two levels to contracts. The first is a deal memo, which often goes along with a certificate of authorship. And that is a way, if the lawyers feel like it’s going to take quite some time to work up a long form contract with all the little annoying details like how much you get paid per week if you’re in a medium sized city on location, they’ll come up with this certificate of authorship that basically says this is what you’re going to get paid.

And you’re basically saying, yes, I’m going to write this and, yes, you guys will have the copyright on what I write, because it’s a work for hire, yada yada.

And that oftentimes is enough to release commencement payment. However, there have been times where the contract has taken forever. Now, you should be paid, by the way. You don’t want to not be paid.

**John:** That’s a fundamental aspect.

**Craig:** Yes. The very first movie that I ever was hired to do, this is exactly what happened. So, we were told to start writing. We had a deal. The deal closed. And then — it was Disney at the time took months and months to get the paperwork done. And we called up our lawyer, my writing partner and I, and we said we’re done, what do we do? We haven’t been paid, and they haven’t finished this contract. And he said do not turn it in. That’s the most important thing. The day you turn it in you’ve lost your leverage to get the contract done.

So, he called them and said, they’re done, so, A, how embarrassing for you. B, they’re not turning it in until this is signed. And I think two days later it was done.

**John:** Yeah, so that standard advice is how I’ve worked through most of my situations. Really honesty, and I think the official WGA policy is that you’re not supposed to start writing until you have papers signed. But in practice that rarely happens.

**Craig:** That’s right. And papers signed — or you’ve been paid.

**John:** And that’s the thing. Being paid tends to be the proxy for having the contracts done because being paid means that the person employing you believes that the contracts will get done and believes that there will actually — the deal will close. And so there’s the danger, I guess, the possibility that you’re paid to start writing, you start writing, and the contract never closes and you’re in this weird limbo about do you have to get the money back, do you give them the script, sort of what is all that stuff. But, you still have the leverage of having the script and they still hopefully want the script.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never heard of a situation where the long form wasn’t worked out.

**John:** Yeah. I have heard of some things, and occasionally if you’re adapting anything you need to be very specific and very pointed about the underlying rights. Because I have been in situations where, oh, this is great, this is swell, and we’re going to do stuff. And then it became clear that the underlying rights were actually much more complicated.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, even if I started writing, there’s a possibility that they weren’t going to really close those underlying rights and that’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** They should have been paying me, but they did pay me, and then it became clear like I’m writing this thing that we may never be able to make.

**Craig:** Be able to make. And so the one area of the big document that you’re looking at, one important one to concentrate on is what they call conditions precedent. So, there are certain conditions that have to be met in order for the contract to be valid. Some of them are obvious like you have to be who you say you are and a citizen and a Writers Guild member and la-da-da.

Some of them are things specific to your deal. We have to have the rights to this project and there has to be creative approval before commencement from this particular person. And you need to know what those terms are so that you know where you stand.

**John:** Yeah. At some point we should really go through a whole contract, but the frustrating thing I often find — and this is worse when I started and it’s become a little bit better, at least for me, but they’ll ask you to have things notarized or have some sort of like certification that you are a US citizen, all this stuff, and it just feels like stalling.

I don’t believe they actually really need it. I think they’re basically just, you know, burning some time so they can not finish closing the deal.

**Craig:** There’s some quote somewhere that says something like never ascribe malice to that which can be explained by incompetence.

**John:** Yes. I get that.

**Craig:** I think that a lot of times it’s simply by the time it gets down to that stuff there’s a person in a cubicle who has a stack of these things and a job. And the job is get W2, I-9, C forms from these employees and they go and dutifully execute those orders.

**John:** Yeah. But that same person or the person in the cubicle next to them also has the checks that are going out, and some reason like those checks won’t go out until pointed phone calls are made and suddenly those checks start flowing.

**Craig:** I find that the departments of all corporations that involve incoming and out-coming checks are just the worst. [laughs] And you could say, yeah, because they don’t want to spend money. But they don’t even seem to want to take money either. That whole world, you know, as bad as screenwriting can be sometimes, I’m glad I don’t work in the incoming/out-going check business. I’m not cut out for it.

**John:** So, my very first job, How to Eat Fried Worms, was over at Universal. And for a time I was dating a guy who was an assistant at Universal. I’m not even sure who he worked for. But he said like, “Oh, your check crossed my desk today.” I’m like, oh, that is just really, really awkward that you know that I have a check for X thousand dollars crossing your desk.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It just feels kind of odd. And I guess I had to buy dinner that night.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes, I mean, your check crossed… — What does that even mean, by the way?

**John:** Well, it basically means that like his boss had to sign the check or something and so —

**Craig:** Oh, I see, I see. So, it’s on his desk, he sees it. Listen, people know everything. That’s the truth. Everything. They know everything.

**John:** Everything.

**Craig:** There’s no secrets.

**John:** There are no secrets. Thomas in London writes —

**Craig:** [British accent] Hello!

**John:** [British accent] Hello! “I’m an aspiring writer and I’ve been given a little bit of attention for a script on the Black List, the paid site, the year-end hit list. I received this email from someone a few days ago. The email is, ‘My name is blank, and I’ve been an executive producer in feature films in Los Angeles for the last eight years or so working at this studio and this production company. Anyway, I read your script, the title of the script, and I was curious if you had an agent in the states. To be totally transparent, I’m always looking for unrepresented talent to recommend to high level agents so they keep me at the top of their callback lists. Please let me know.'”

So, Thomas writes —

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god.

**John:** “As a total newbie to Hollywood dealings, I don’t know if this is normal. Do producers recommend un-repped writers to agents purely as a back-scratching tactic? I don’t see anything dodgy in what he’s offering and it’s very kind of him to want to help me, even if he does get something out of it. Craig, what do you think of this situation?”

**Craig:** I don’t think that is normal. I’m kind of stumped by this. I mean, first of all, it’s such a Willy Loman thing to say, you know. Like, “Listen, I’ve done a lot of things, I’m not doing anything now. But, oh golly gee, I’d love to take your script to somebody so that he might call me back one day about something else.” What?

I mean, yeah, I guess, look Thomas, I don’t see how it would hurt.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t see how it would hurt, either. I guess I’m trying to look at it from this producer’s point of view is that he’s trying to establish some sort of relationship with you vaguely, kind of establish with you. He doesn’t feel like he can get your movie made, but he thinks you’re a good writer, so this is a way of him saying that I think you’re a really good writer. He could say that and say like, hey, we should have a meeting next time you’re in town. That might be a good way to do it.

I guess he’s genuinely asking whether you have an agent because he doesn’t want to recommend the script to a certain agent unless that person is already represented because then he looks kind of foolish.

But I’ll say it’s weird that this guy is an executive producer because this kind of reaching out would happen much more at like a very junior level. And so basically says like, “Hey, I read your script. I want to give it to my boss. Do you have — tell me what the deal is with the script. Do you have an agent? Is there a manager? I want to know that it’s actually available.”

That kind of thing I think would happen all the time.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look. Everything is in past tense here, so I’m not sure if this individual still is working anywhere, but what I just found surprising was the transparency was completely unnecessary. I mean, you just say, “Listen, I really liked your script. I’m not really in the marketplace to buy or produce things, but I do know a ton of agents. If you don’t have an agent I’d be happy to pass this along to some of the ones that I know.”

**John:** Yeah. That would be a better way to phrase what he was doing right there.

**Craig:** “To keep me at the top of their callback lists?” What?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** What?! That’s cray. That’s cray.

**John:** That’s cray.

**Craig:** Thomas, that means crazy.

**John:** Yeah. That may not have crossed the pond.

**Craig:** It hasn’t.

**John:** I will say in general that sense of like recommending a script to somebody else to prove that you have good taste is a thing that happens a lot and so you want to sort of establish like, listen, I found this person, this person has good — this is a good writer. I’m the person who brought them to you, therefore I have good taste. The reason that I got my first agent was because a friend had read my script, gave it to his boss who liked it, who recommended me to his agent.

So, that happens a lot. So, that can be a good thing. You should accept those offers when they come. It just — the nature of his email was a little bit weird.

**Craig:** Yeah, but you know, I don’t see anything terribly awful about it. No.

**John:** And it’s why Franklin has the Black List site so that random people who can be helpful to you can read your script. So, I guess it’s a success in that way.

**Craig:** I think maybe just if you write back just be clear that you have no problem with this person forwarding your script to any agent that you think would be good. As long as you guys are clear that there is not — this doesn’t imply anything, any relationship, any professional relationship between you and this person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s all. You just don’t want to suddenly have this guy on your movie.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Julie writes,”There is a YA novel that I would like to adapt. I am an acquaintance of the author and contacted her to see if her book has been optioned. She expressed interest in my idea of writing a TV pilot, however, she contacted her literary agent and was told that the film rep has been pitching the book for TV the last two years. From that information it doesn’t seem the book has been optioned or has a screenwriter attached.

“How do I continue to express interest in the project to her and the film agent and convince them to give me a shot in writing the pilot to accompany the pitch?”

So, in this situation it’s a little bit weird, like you’re saying it doesn’t appear that it’s been options. Like, either — it’s a binary condition. Either it’s been optioned or it hasn’t been optioned. It sounds like it hasn’t been optioned. It sounds like no one has bit on this property yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, if you have a good take on it and you want to basically spec the TV pilot, that’s a thing you and your friend can figure out. It doesn’t have to be especially complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, listen. You say how do I continue to express interest in the project to her and her film agent and convince them to give me a shot in writing the pilot to accompany their pitch — you just do it. You just say, “I’m interested in writing the pilot to accompany this pitch and you should option it to me.” And option it for a buck or whatever and give me a shot here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then they can decide if they want to do that or not. But it doesn’t — I mean, I don’t know why they wouldn’t because nobody wants this thing as just in the form that they’ve been offering it.

**John:** Totally true.

All right, let’s get to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, my One Cool Thing is a movie that is out this weekend and this past weekend it debuted in Los Angeles and New York. It’s called Coherence. It’s written and directed by — I don’t even remember his name now — James Ward Byrkit, with a story by Byrkit and Alex Manugian, who is an actor in the movie as well. Another actor in the movie is our friend Lorene Scafaria who is awesome. She’s the writer and director of cool movies. And she’s an actress in this movie. She was also an actress in my movie The Nines.

And if you liked my movie, The Nines, you will probably like Coherence because it’s one of those mind trip movies like The Nines or like Primer where everything is not quite what it seems. And it gets very paranoid because of what’s really going on. So, I really enjoyed. I saw it at a screening about three weeks ago and highly recommend it to people who like that kind of movie.

**Craig:** Excellent. Is it available in theatres only, or…?

**John:** Right now it’s only in theaters. I’m sure that it will have a Video On Demand soon, so I think the rest of the world will see it soon, so I’ll give a follow up when it’s available for everyone else in the world.

**Craig:** I’ve been hearing a lot about it actually. A lot of buzz.

**John:** A lot of buzz.

**Craig:** A lot of buzz. My One Cool Thing is a website that I go to all the time to check on things and it’s called Quackwatch.

**John:** Ooh, I’m excited about Quackwatch. I hope I know what it is.

**Craig:** “Quackwatch.com, your guide to quackery, health fraud, and intelligent decisions operated by Stephen Barrett, M.D.”

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** They are also associated with the National Council Against Health Fraud and with Bioethics Watch. And they are spectacular. They — listen, you know me, I am a scientist. I am a medical scientist in my mind. And I really, really, really get crazy about the nonsense that’s put out there. Anti-intellectual nonsense. And Quackwatch is just incredible.

They’re kind of the Snopes for terrible —

**John:** I was going to bring up Snopes. That sounds right.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re the Snopes of bad health advice and they also — they will chase down individuals, they are fearless. They chase down websites. Laboratories that are notorious for fraudulent results that are telling you what you want to hear. Obviously they’ve always been on the forefront of the nonsense anti-vaccination.

Can I just say, if you’re anti-vaccine, just stop listening to the podcast.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We don’t want you. I don’t want you. I don’t know about John. I don’t want you. Unsubscribe. Get out of here. There’s now a Pertussis epidemic in California —

**John:** I know. I know. It’s ridiculous. A disease that should have been completely wiped out.

**Craig:** Wiped out. Wiped out. Well, because Pertussis is unique. See, there is no true herd immunity for Pertussis because we actually all carry it around. What the vaccine does is prevent us from getting symptoms. But we carry it around. And you can’t vaccinate newborn infants until they’re a certain age. So, in that time we’re just getting babies sick. And you know who’s getting them sick? Their parents.

**John:** Parents.

**Craig:** Their parents. Because they haven’t been vaccinated!

**John:** Or they were vaccinated as kids and the vaccine wears off and —

**Craig:** And it wears off and you need to get booster shots. Or they haven’t vaccinated their other children in the house. The whole idea is since there’s no herd immunity, the key with Pertussis is what they call cocooning because the baby mostly stays in the house for the first six months. That’s why they tell you, hey, don’t really take the baby to Chuck-E-Cheese when he’s three months old.

So, you’re in the house with people who have been vaccinated and therefore have much less viral load. And particularly aren’t coughing and spewing it out at you. But if your five-year-old snot-nosed unvaccinated kid is sneezing Pertussis at your three-month-old baby, oh, that is. The umbrage level right now. I got red alert. [laughs] I’m at red alert.

**John:** So, but it’s not just babies. That’s the thing. It’s clearly incredibly dangerous for babies, but like I have an adult friend, you know, a friend in his late forties who got Pertussis. I was like, well, he — who gets whooping cough these days?

He got it because the vaccine wears off and it’s out there in the world now. It’s becoming more common in the ways that should never have been more common. And he was knocked on his ass for weeks.

**Craig:** That’s right. And by the way, he gets knocked on his ass for weeks and that’s bad. But I’m angry at him for not getting a booster. And, on top of that, if he comes in contact with anybody who is immune-compromised, like somebody who has AIDS symptoms, or if he comes in contact with the elderly who have compromised immunity. He’s going to get them sick. And they could die. Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah, it’s maddening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ugh.

**John:** That’s maddening, but the things like measles which really were supposed to be done.

**Craig:** Ugh, measles.

**John:** That’s just, ugh.

**Craig:** It’s mindboggling. And, really, I want somebody to tweet angrily to me about this one. This ain’t She-Hulk. I will come out, [laughs], I will come out guns blazing. I will go monkey. I will go insane.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** God, this was a good show.

**John:** It was a good show. We got through a lot of stuff today.

**Craig:** I umbraged out. It’s been a long time, and I went crazy I think three times. [laughs]

**John:** Totally reasonable choices every time.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** If you would like to leave a comment for me or for Craig, you can reach us on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. He is @clmazin. You can also leave a comment on iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. That’s a perfect place to subscribe to Scriptnotes, but you can also leave a comment there. And when you leave a comment or subscribe it actually boosts us up in the ratings there and more people can find us, so that’s always lovely when that happens.

The most recent 20 episodes of Scriptnotes you will always find on iTunes. The back episodes, the whole back catalog the first 130 episodes you can find at Scriptnotes.net. You can also find them on the iPhone at the iOS app and the Android app. Just search for Scriptnotes in the App Store and you will find that there. And through there you can get the back episodes, it’s called the premium subscription, that gives you all the back episodes, and every once and awhile we’ll have like a bonus episode that is sort of like Scriptnotes but not really Scriptnotes, things like interviews with people or stuff like that.

So, if you want to support us that way, you’re welcome to do that. It’s only $1.99 a month, so it’s not like vaccine money or anything like that.

**Craig:** No, no! And it doesn’t have Thimerosal in it. “Oh god! Ooh, I don’t understand science or chemistry. Argh! I believe in ghosts.”

**John:** If you have a longer question like some of the ones we read today, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and we try to get through as many questions as we can. It’s also a good place to write if you have follow up on things we talked about that is bigger than what we can talk about in a tweet, but tweets are sort of preferred because we can get to them right away.

And I think that is our show this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the end of what I think is the number one podcast for the non-writing art form of screenwriting.

**John:** Perfect. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Bye.

Links:

* Vulture with [Everything You Need to Know About Episode VIII Director, Rian Johnson](http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/who-is-new-star-wars-viii-director-rian-johnson.html)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 115: [Back to Austin with Rian Johnson and Kelly Marcel](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-back-to-austin-with-rian-johnson-and-kelly-marcel)
* [Storyboard Fountain](http://storyboardfountain.com/) from Charles Forman and Chris Smoak
* The [first](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoJggcl3M7M), [second](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8EVGl2KEgk), [third](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAqbZCOIK0) and [fourth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snoDfhUObhA) videos in Jim Meskimen’s How To Do Impressions series
* This is [Kano](http://kano.me/)
* [We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome](http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/) by Tasha Robinson
* [Sitcoms are being strangled by a lack of conflict](http://www.avclub.com/article/sitcoms-are-being-strangled-lack-conflict-204453) by Todd VanDerWerff
* [Screenwriting isn’t writing](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/06/screenwriting-isnt-writing.html) by Richard Brody
* Ken LaZebnik’s [The Red Light at the End of the Dock](http://www.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=211039#{“page”:20,”issue_id”:211039}) from WrittenBy
* James Ward Byrkit’s [Coherence](http://coherencethemovie.com/) is in theaters now
* [Quackwatch](http://www.quackwatch.com/) is your guide to quackery, health fraud, and intelligent decisions
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-lost-lost-austin-three-page-challenge).

**John August:** Hello, this is John. Craig Mazin is not here, but he was there back in 2013 when we sat down with some people at the Austin Film Festival and did a live Three Page Challenge. Now, this episode has actually been sitting in the vault for a long time. We’ve been holding on to it for a certain emergency like rip cord, like pull the rip cord, there’s no episode this week, we got to put up a new episode.

Well, we haven’t had any of those emergencies, so this episode has been sitting around for a really long time. And we feel bad for the people who are waiting for this episode to come out, specifically Krista Westervelt, Melody Cooper and David Elver, who were so generous to submit their pages and have us talk to them. And they kept waiting for this episode to come out and it’s finally coming out. So, sorry it took so long, it’s been like eight months I think. But it’s a good episode.

So next week we’ll be back live with a normal episode, but this is a good Three Page Challenge and I hope you enjoy. Thanks.

[Intro tone]

Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is the Three Page Challenge, and we are here in Austin to talk about writing pages and specifically three pages. This is a thing that Craig and I do on our podcast not every week but every couple of weeks. It’s really Craig’s suggestion, so what Craig loves to do is to read the first couple pages of a person’s script and tell them whether they should stay as a writer or should give up the business completely.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I said three pages. I could’ve gotten away with one. I actually do believe one page is probably enough. But we’ve been beneficiaries to some great Three Pages. A lot of the people who send them in, a lot, really do a good job. I think we’ve got some good ones today. But it’s a nice way also for us to not have to worry about whether you have a good idea for a movie or where it’s going or how it’s developing, but we just talk about the craft of how you’re actually putting the scenes on the page.

**John:** Yes. So Craig and I host a podcast called Scriptnotes and every week we’re talking about the business and craft of screenwriting. And it’s very hard to talk about the craft portion of it without having words in front of you. And so people have been really generous to send in the first three pages of their scripts and letting us talk about them on the air and hopefully give some constructive feedback.

At the Writers Guild Foundation about six months ago we were able to do the first time where we not only read through these pages but actually met the people who wrote these pages and then talked to them more about what was on the page and the rest of their script. And we’re so excited that here in Austin we get to do that again.

And so many of you in the audience have in your hands this little handout, this packet of these first three pages, which is awesome. If you didn’t get one of these or if you’re listening to this after the fact, you can also just go to my website johnaugust.com/austin and I have these three pages up here, so you can follow along with us if you don’t have those physically in hand.

So we have three very brave people who’ve shared with us their scripts.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And let’s just get into it.

**Craig:** No. Before we do that we should just say congratulations. Everybody in here is at least a second rounder of this competition.

**John:** Which is great. So these are people who submitted to the Austin Film Festival and their scripts were considered awesome and made it through to the second round of the competition, which is great.

**Craig:** You’ve earned this. You and everyone who listens to a free podcast has earned this.

**John:**[laughs] For this chance.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** The first script we’re going to take a look at, first three pages we’re going to take a look at, is a script called Graceless and it’s by Krista Westervelt. Krista, where are you here in the audience?

Hi, Krista.

**Craig:** Hey Krista.

**John:** Thank you for coming to Austin. Hello. And so for people who are at home or like are driving in their car and therefore shouldn’t stop and try to read the pages, we’re going to give a little summary of what happened in the first three pages before we get going. I’ll do this first summary.

So we’re starting in Angela’s bedroom. So Angela Reeves, who is her early 20s, she’s sort of half-dressed, she’s getting dressed and she’s listening to voicemails. And the voicemails are from her mom saying where are you, the service starts in 20 minutes, are you hung over. Her dad also has a voicemail saying, “For the love of god, please show up.”

Angela arrives at this mega church parking lot. It’s the First Savior and Living Lord Church which is filled towards capacity. It’s there where we meet her father for the first time. Henry Reeves is 47. She sits down with him. The choir church is singing. Doug Richards, the pastor, scans the crowd from the pulpit. We meet Melinda Reeves, Angela’s mother, who we heard in the voicemail. She’s 47. A little description of her. She says, “Would it have troubled you to wear a skirt?” That’s sort of their first interaction.

Afterwards, we’re in the church sanctuary and we’re being introduced to Dottie who’s in her 50s, attractive woman with just a bit of menopausal softness and who’s greeting people as they’re exiting the church. We also see Dottie’s daughter Jamie who’s in her 20s. We end up with a conversation between Dottie and Jamie. Ultimately the conversation finishes up with just Jamie and Angela. They’re dialogue is bumping over each other. Jamie runs the singles, how long have you been, that sort of overlapping dialogue conversation.

And we exit the three pages on midway through their first conversation. And that is what’s happening in three pages. And Craig Mazin, start us out.

**Craig:** Well, are we going to be joined up here by —

**John:** I think we should talk a little bit about what we’ve experienced first.

**Craig:** Okay. And then we will — and then if they run out and then we can, they’ll come up here and…

Well, I enjoyed these pages. I started to get a little lost here and there but there’s a lot of good things. I like the use — I generally like the use, any time you can introduce a character without introducing the character is interesting. And I like that I was learning a little bit about the relationship between Melinda and her mom through the voicemail in theory. In practice, I’ve seen this a gazillion times. I’ve seen the voicemail and nobody has this voicemail anymore, by the way. That’s the other problem. Nobody has the beep, next message. You know, we all have our phones now, and so it’s a little cliché to hear the carping mom over the phone.

Also, I loved that, well, I liked that she sniffed her laundry because I do that. And that was interesting. And it was a nice touch that the dad also calls and has a different — already has a different voice from the mom. This is good, that’s good that you’re establishing those things. Mega churches are awesome in the sense that they are designed to make you feel like, whoa, I mean either you’re horrified or in love with them. Either way, they leave an impression.

And the name is spot on. But you didn’t give me the mega church feeling. I wanted a mega church feeling. If you walk me into a mega church, you say it’s a mega church but you write it like it’s a one-room chapel, you know? It seems very — even though there’s a stage and everything, everything seems short and down. There’s no spectacle. I want more spectacle. I want a feeling — I want to know what my main character is feeling walking into this mall of Jesus.

Her mom’s first line, would it have troubled you to wear a skirt, right idea. A lot of words to say that when I think my wife, if she sees my daughter doing that would have just said, “No skirt?” You know what I mean? There’s the — tailor the length of dialogue to the relationship because mothers and daughters have shorthand, obviously.

Where we’re going to get to is what, I mean, I don’t know, either this does or doesn’t turn into a lesbian church movie but it’s starting to feel like a lesbian church movie which I’m totally in favor of. But the way that Jamie and Angela meet feels un-cinematic. We’re just, you know, Dottie is the mom and we get that the mom is clueless and there’s just chitchat. There’s just chitchat going on. And when people are interested in each other I want to watch the spark happen. I don’t want to hear it. I want to watch it. It happens before words are ever said.

So I was — that’s what I would suggest to you is to really think about how you can create a moment before you get to the dialogue which has raced immediately to an almost 1930s-style screwball comedy, you know, repartee. It’s like two Jean Arthurs. So I would think about creating a moment before you have the moment. But by and large, it was — the characters felt really interesting and certainly there’s the promise of a very interesting story here, particularly if that mega church gets mega churchy.

**John:** Like Craig, I was really excited by where we were ending up on page 3. I was really fascinated just to know what was going to happen next, so congratulations on that because a lot of times we get to three pages like, “Oh, and I’m done with those three pages.” So that was exciting for me to be curious about what was going to happen next.

The issue of, you know, hearing the voicemails and the woman getting dressed, it’s just a thing we’ve seen before and it’s a little bit of a television kind of thing. It feels like a TV pilot kind of first moment. Maybe this is a TV pilot, I don’t know. But that felt a little both familiar and also not quite present day because, like Craig, I would say no one really has that sort of normal — the speaker phone. And that’s absolutely possibly a way to do it is essentially her iPhone is down and it’s going through those and she’s pressing the next one.

But it was the specificity of checking the smell of clothes felt really good and appropriate. Like Craig, I’m so excited about the mega church but I didn’t know where we were. I didn’t know sort of what part of America it was. I didn’t know if this was a southern mega church, if this was a western mega church, what kind of environment we were in. So more specificity and dressing about that would be great.

And I got a little misled in the wrong ways about sort of come to the service because like I was thinking like, well is it a wedding or is it a funeral? I immediately went to one of those two things. And if it’s a normal service then why does she need to go? And so if we’re not going to get those answers before we meet this new character who’s going to clearly be important, that just let me hanging a little bit.

But we should bring you up here because, you know, I’m talking directly to you —

**Craig:** Yeah, come on up.

**John:** Please come on up. And let’s welcome Krista.

Thank you very much.

**Krista Westervelt:** I can breathe now because I got through this.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, you got through the hard part. You got through the hard part.

**John:** So please, Krista tell us what happens on page four.

**Krista:** What happens on page four or just in general you want me to —

**Craig:** Well, four and…

**John:** Four and beyond.

**Krista:** Four and beyond.

Basically, Graceless is kind of dealing with the fallout that happens when this evangelical mega church pastor’s daughter starts dating a woman. So, yes, you were on the right track there —

**Craig:** Yay!

**Krista:** With the lesbian love interest thing.

**Craig:** I’m so good at picking up on lesbian church movies.

**Krista:** There you go.

**Craig:** It’s my thing.

**Krista:** There you go.

**John:** He has a wheelhouse. And so tell us about the impetus behind writing this thing. Is this the first thing you’ve written, have you written a bunch of other stuff? Where are you at?

**Krista:** This is actually the very first thing. I had originally, years back, started kind of playing around with the idea of writing as a novel and it just wasn’t happening. And then the spark that got me to finally sit down and write it because I was kind of seeing it sort of like a movie in my head and I wanted to kind of play around with that. My husband died in 2011 and it’s sort of that spark of, okay, life’s too short, stop putting shit off, you know, so to speak . And so I sat down and gave it a shot and got through it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m glad we didn’t beat you up because this would have been awkward. [laughs]

**John:** So talk to us about Angela Reeves. So she is our protagonist, I’m assuming.

**Krista:** Right.

**John:** She’s the first character we’re meeting.

**Krista:** Exactly.

**John:** Tell us some things that are special about her and let’s think if we can find some ways to learn about them earlier on or set them up.

**Krista:** Sure, sure. I think she’s close with her parents but her mother’s disappointed in her because she’s a lesbian and she’s this member of this church and she’s trying to be good and get her daughter saved. And maybe if I can get my daughter to come to church, maybe I can get her saved. If she can become friends with the pastor’s daughter, everything’s going to be perfect because, you know, who’s a better role model than the pastor’s daughter to get her saved and gay or whatever.

**Craig:** Well, okay, now that’s interesting because here’s an important fact that I want to start gleaning immediately from the beginning of the movie. There’s a difference between Angie’s mother and Jamie’s mother.

**Krista:** Right.

**Craig:** Angie’s mother knows she’s gay.

**Krista:** Right.

**Craig:** Jamie’s mother has no clue. Now, there’s a way that that can kind of come through.

**Krista:** Sure.

**Craig:** There’s a way that that can be indicated. I mean first of all, what John said about the TV-ishness of the voicemail is true. And when we’re writing a screenplay, that’s when we don’t — I mean unless you are, you know, blowing the earth up and we have of those coming soon, you don’t have to worry so much about budget. So think about space and think about ways to be cinematic.

I mean, here’s a woman and she’s waiting in this line to get into the mega church in her car and you’re just like, uh-uh-uh, and she finally gets up and then it’s her turn to go in and she turns around and leaves. And then, no, and then she turns around and gets back at the back of the line to go in. Something so that you start to sell this reluctance. And when she comes in and you’re selling it with a movie, you know?

**Krista:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When she comes in and sits down next to her mother, I could see her mother looking at her, just looking at the pants. And she’s like, “Mom…”

“No, no, it’s better than I thought. It’s better than I expected.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like the weariness of the mom who just is slowly just dealing with it.

**Krista:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting circumstance. So let that inform how these two talk to each other.

**Krista:** Okay.

**Craig:** They’ve had — this is an old fight. But there’s a new fight that’s coming with the other ones, you know, so that makes it fun.

**Krista:** Yes.

**John:** I have a question for you.

**Krista:** Sure.

**John:** The first scene is set in Angela’s bedroom. But we know so little about her. We don’t know if she’s living in an apartment by herself or if she’s living at her family’s house, what is it?

**Krista:** I figure she lived in a studio apartment on her own.

**John:** Okay.

**Krista:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. So that might be a good thing to tell us here in this opening thing. So maybe get us out of that bedroom and see what her real living environment is because when you just give us bedroom we don’t know any bigger context. So if it is a studio apartment, then that is a studio apartment. There’s no such thing as a bedroom.

**Krista:** Right.

**John:** The fact that her bed is also her couch is — everything is really meaningful. And the fact that her dirty clothes are out, not just on the bedroom floor but like they’re out in the apartment. Like everything is together.

**Krista:** Right.

**John:** And so use each of those little things to give us more space. I don’t think you need to tell us that she’s a lesbian right from the get-go, which is great, but I do wonder if over the course of your movie we are going to have these two girls meet too — so early that there’s no surprise. We’re not going to get to know our hero before we meet the love interest. And so as much as you can do to let us know and love this girl before we sort of know who she’s going to love is going to be helpful.

**Krista:** Okay.

**Craig:** Cool. I think that’s right.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** But you can do this.

**John:** Yes, you absolutely can do this.

**Krista:** Thank you.

**John:** And the words on the page felt solid and consistent and you definitely know what the form is and so I have no doubt you’re going to make some awesome scripts.

**Krista:** Wow, thanks.

**Craig:** Good job, good job. Way to go. Nice work.

**Krista:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Next victim.

**John:** Not victim. Next hero is Melody Cooper with Monstrous.

**Craig:** Hero. If you wish. Okay. And it’s Melody or Melanie?

**John:** Melody.

**Craig:** Melody. Is that you?

**Melody Cooper:** It is me.

**Craig:** Well, then I’ll have to trust you on that. Okay. And so Melody’s three pages are from a script called Monstrous. We open up, the sky over the Atlantic Ocean, night, and then along comes a single engine airplane. We’re now inside this small private plane. It’s dark and then we just see the flash of a woman’s face whispering, “Where is he? I can’t see anything.”

Another woman says, “Stay close, we can’t let them…” And then they scream and scream and they’re lost in the darkness. In the last row of the plane, we meet Moira. She’s 20s, red head, freaking out, she is shoving a small digital camera into a Ziploc bag, sealing it. Somebody dies near her. Blood splatters over her. She keeps going. She puts the bag, she attaches the bag to a life vest, says, “Stay bound together,” to herself in Gaelic or I guess, no, to the camera and the life preserver.

And then she gets out from her seat, tries to basically get out of the plane. But as she’s trying to get out of the plane, she’s dragged back by some unseen terrible thing, dismembered arm attached to the door handle, blood spraying everywhere. She kicks the vest out of the door, the life vest sails down towards the ocean, the airplane crashes into the water. But the vest is there along with the Ziploc bag holding the camera, which presumably has some evidence of what we’ve seen. That’s all on Page 1.5.

Now we’re in New York. We’re in Queens on a residential street. And in a building, David Harrison, 20s who’s a bit of a mess, he’s a gamer, he’s playing some sort of shoot them up game, first person shooter, while he’s drinking beer from a straw. He’s pissed off. He’s playing a game with a werewolf and a Griffin that are killing each other. He thinks he’s won until the zombies come. And when he finally pushes back from his TV having lost, we reveal that he’s in a wheelchair. And that were the first three pages of Monstrous.

**John:** Great. So this is a classic example of a cold open where the initial thing we’re seeing isn’t going to — the characters we’re seeing and the characters we’re meeting are setting up things about the story or things about the nature of the movie, but they’re not specifically talking — this is not — the hero of the story isn’t going to continue because she dead.

So it’s establishing what the world of the movie is like and then we’re going to cut to something brand new and ultimately this thing that we’ve established, this camera will end up becoming an important thing when we get to this guy.

So let’s sort of talk about these two things as separate things. We need to talk about this opening image and then what we’re learning about how the real engine and how the new story is going to start.

I really like the idea of the vest with the camera going out and like that’s the thing that is going to continue long after because we have this expectation that the woman will somehow survive and this things will get out. The idea of this vest and this camera are what remains of this seems really, really smart. And I have not seen that before and I’m really excited.

I got lost inside a small plane. And so I think a lot of my questions about this opening is really the geography and specificity of where we’re at in this place and what we as the audience are supposed to be expecting because sometimes as a reader I got confused and I didn’t know whether it was because I just wasn’t smart enough to do it or else it was just described in a way that wasn’t — I didn’t know if I was supposed to get it or not supposed to get it and it got confusing me in a way that was not especially helpful.

Some examples for it would be midway down the first page, “Slicing of flesh, blood sprays against the seat next and window next to Moira, some of it splatters on her face.” Slicing of flesh, I don’t know what that image is. And so it’s given to me as a slug line as an important thing but what’s slicing what? Like what’s doing the action? Is a knife cutting something as opposed to if it just said blood sprays. Well, blood sprays from something, that would be enough for me. Blood spraying as image —

**Craig:** Did you mean it as a sound?

**Melody:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Oh, great. And so when we see that line by itself, we’re going to assume that’s an image. We’re going to assume that the camera is looking at something. And slicing of flesh is not a thing we can sort of see. So if it’s meant to be a sound, I would say —

**Craig:** We hear —

**John:** We hear, either we hear or do the blood sprays as the slicing of flesh, you know, happens. Another thing that confused me would be Moira’s line here, in Gaelic, “Stay down together.” So she’s in Gaelic, but is that subtitled? Like how are we, as an audience, supposed to be processing that? Because as a script reader we know what she’s saying and so if it is supposed to be subtitled, in Gaelic, subtitle would be the thing.

Earlier on and the first lines we hear, “Where is he, I can’t see anything, stay close, we can’t let him,” and then there’s screams. And yet, I’m told that we’re in a private plane, so my internal geography of what a private plane is is that it is so small that how can anything kind of be loose in a private plane. So entirely possible, I just wasn’t seeing how it would work.

I got confused if there’s other people. I assume there’s other people but I’m only experiencing Moira, so that again. So sometimes that confusion is okay. But you sort of need to make it clear to the audience that like you’re kind of supposed to be confused. Like it’s chaotic and you end up using those words, but you’re not really quite sure what we’re seeing. Any more reaction on the first opening?

**Craig:** Well, it is fun. I mean, you know, it’s exciting to be thrown into the middle of a sequence like that and the camera and the life preserver are great. It seems to me like what we’re missing is something to ease us into it. I don’t think, given the circumstances of who’s on this plane and what he or it is doing, you may not be able to show the moment when things start to go bad.

But what I would — first of all, there was a huge question. Who’s flying the plane, right? That’s a big one. But let’s presume the plane is just flying. Now one thing you could do is you could just, you show this plane… — And by the way, I would try and eliminate a little bit — it gets a little too much like “a calm, clear night, high full moon, a single engine airplane across the sky, cabin windows are completely…” we’re not, we’re just seeing, you know what I mean?

**Melody:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then we’re inside of it. So we can get a little tighter on that. I know you want to see what’s on the tail. Then you could sort of say, interior plane, a man is sleeping calmly, you know, as the plane hums along. You know, he nods and then his head flops to the right, blood. You know, okay, so, whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s not a sleeping business man, that’s a dead person.

Now, you could then see cockpit. The cockpit door is open. The pilot is dead, you know, the plane is on autopilot. And then you could see, you know, the lights go out or something. And then you could see a woman, like “Don’t move, don’t…” you know, whatever it is. Somehow you need to let us in slowly and make this, build it up so that we feel like the point is we’re supposed to be completely disoriented. Disorient us while orienting us. [laughs] I don’t know how else to put. You know what I mean?

**Melody:** Yes.

**Craig:** But that’s kind of the —

**John:** He’s saying you can’t be disoriented until you’re oriented in some capacity.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Right now it becomes just spinning wildly and we don’t know sort of where to start focusing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to push back a little bit of what Craig said. It’s like I honestly thought your first sentences started stronger in that they were so short. And maybe there were a few too many —

**Craig:** You like short sentences, yeah.

**John:** And so it starts, “A calm, clear night. High full moon. A single engine airplane crosses the sky.” But then when we get inside the plane, suddenly our sentences get super long in a way that feels weird because the action is really choppy and the sentences got really long. So here’s the first sentence inside the private plane. “Moonlight, punctuated by the pulse of light from the wings, illuminates the darkness of the cabin of the 12-seater.” Those short sentences you started with would be a great thing to continue into this place.

Moonlight. The interior cabin is dark. You know, 12 seats and focus on whatever we’re supposed to be focusing on. That would invite me in a little bit more. Another very long sentence here. “In the last row of the plane sits Moira, 20s, red head, breathless and frantic, she keeps her eyes in front of the shadowy cabin as she shoves a small digital camera into a Ziploc bag. She seals it.”

As a reader, I’m having to store a lot of information in one sentence. I have to remember Moira and she’s a read head and she’s 20s and she has a digital camera and she’s panicked in the shadowy cabin. Breaking that into smaller bits is going to make it easier for me to process what’s happening and really give us a better feel of what the situation feels like to Moira.

So it’s a beautiful autumn afternoon and she’s strolling through the woods. These long sentences give you that sense of sweet. But if it is short and panicky, short and panicky sentences will be your friend.

**Craig:** Totally. And I just had an idea. So, okay, I realize why you keep talking about moon and moonlight. I get it finally. Here’s my suggestion for you. If you want to make a point, make the point, right? Don’t talk about the moon, don’t show the moon. Don’t refer to the moon. But when the plane crashes, “The inflated vest rocks in the rise and fall of the ocean as the water laps against it, the Ziploc bag that holds the camera still attached to its side. We crane up to see the full moon.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? Like end on it, make it a thing, make it a reveal. Otherwise, we’re just going to be getting a lot of — some DP is going to be putting a dumb filter on a light and calling it a moonlight and no one’s going to care, you know?

So let’s talk about the Queens, the Astoria section.

**John:** Before we get to the Astoria section, on page 2 we’re moving from the wreckage of what happened with the plane and this camera. This is the moment where I think you really do need some sort of transitional element. So either transition to or cut to something to let us know that we’re not in a continuous bit of action, that we’re going to something completely new. So on the right margin, something that ends in TO: to let us know we’re at a new place and time.

**Craig:** Maybe the moon is a nice transitional element that could turn into a thing or a thing —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. So we’re in Astoria. Quite a bit of set up just to describe what was going on outside. I’m not sure any of it is relevant or not, perhaps it is. But that’s a third of a page of just, you know, slice of life on a Queens street. What did you think about the David Harrison scene?

**John:** So in the David Harrison scene, again, we have a lot of sounds that are given their own slug line. And so whenever we see a slug line, we think like that is something the camera is aimed at and the camera doesn’t aim at of sound. So that inhuman screech is probably a prelap. That’s probably something that we’re hearing before we make the cut inside the building, which is a great suggestion that something terrible is going to happen inside and it’s normal inside, it’s actually a video game is great.

I felt like once we were inside David Harrison’s apartment, the surprise we’re going to get to is that he’s in a wheelchair and sort of what his nature of stuff is. We spend a lot of time on a video game that was very specific and yet, you know, no one likes to watch people play video games. And so I would say as much as you can do to tighten that action and give us a general sense of the kind of thing he’s doing, but not sort of beat-by-beat what is happening on that screen because it felt like I was watching a guy play a video game for a minute. And that’s not going to be really the best.

**Craig:** Yeah. A couple of things. One, you have a tall, narrow figure staring out of the — standing and staring out of a fifth floor window. I will presume that the next shot I see of somebody inside a building is that guy. But at first I thought, well she just made a mistake here because he’s sitting now while he’s playing. He’s not standing. But it couldn’t have been him because he’s in a wheelchair. He’s not standing. So that’s a confusing juxtaposition.

If you want to show that he’s in the same building, you can see that guy and then camera can come down to find another window where we hear the growl, you know, but help us out there. The issue with the video games in movies is that unless you’re watching somebody play a real video game, they just, oh, they feel like that thing in a movie where somebody picks up a can of beer that says beer on it, you know. It’s always some fake game. And it’s hard to do well. So hearing it and maybe catching quick glimpses and giving us less and just having us fill in the gaps in our head is fine.

What he’s saying to the TV is also not real, you know. I am the guy that plays these games. I don’t do that. We don’t do that. We don’t talk like that. It’s pushed. You know what I mean? I think it’s a business like way of talking to your TV when you’re playing these games.

**John:** If he’s on a headset game playing with other players, then maybe some of that kind of dialogue could happen in a way that’s —

**Craig:** That’s its own kind of taunting thing. But when you just won a game, you’re like, yeah suck it, you know. But you wouldn’t, “You are no match for…” You know, he’s starting to do exposition here while he’s proud of the TV. And, you know, it’s rare that you play a video game and are surprised by the fact that zombies are suddenly on a level. It doesn’t quite work like that, you know.

Also, drinking beer out of a straw generally doesn’t work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean just physically doesn’t work very well, you know. Beer, straw and beer and beer straws.

**John:** Can you come up so we can actually —

**Craig:** Yeah, come on up.

**John:** And talk through questions. So, applause.

**Craig:** There, it’s over.

**John:** There it’s over. So the scary part’s over and so let’s talk beer through a straw. Beer through a straw, is it because he is paraplegic? Is there a physical reason why you need to do that, or is he just really lazy?

**Melody:** Well, because his hands are engaged playing and like friends of mine who do the beer hats at games kind of —

**John:** Nice.

**Melody:** Version.

**John:** We’ve learned so much about you that you have friends who have beer hats at games. So I feel like that’s a character detail. So tell us about the script and tell us… — So, Craig’s right: you got a werewolf on a plane, did that just happen?

**Melody:** Yeah.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Werewolf on a plane. I am two for two.

**John:** Yeah. He’s really good at spotting lesbians and werewolves. So.

**Craig:** Super useful at different times. Both things are useful.

**John:** Can you fast-forward us through some of the things that we would experience in the script if we read the whole thing?

**Melody:** Sure. The werewolf that you meet in the beginning is actually a person who’s a serial killer that takes on the guise of other monsters once he kills them and kills people via those powers. And Harrison who we meet in the apartment is someone who ends up trying to track that serial killer with a next-door neighbor, the receding character in the building is the brother of a woman he ends up falling in love with who is half-human/half-monster. And they, the two of them team up to try to track this serial killer down before he kills more people by using the powers of monsters.

**Craig:** And Harrison is going to be tracking these monsters down?

**Melody:** Yes, yes.

**Craig:** In his wheelchair?

**Melody:** He doesn’t stay in a wheelchair because the women who were killed in the beginning are witches. And they figure in later.

**Craig:** Okay. So they cure him of wheelchair issues?

**Melody:** They help him out.

**Craig:** All right.

**Melody:** They give him a way to get out of the chair.

**Craig:** All right. That would be cool.

**John:** That’s great. So you have a real world that is populated heavily with supernatural aspects?

**Melody:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**John:** And so that is compelling in its pitch in a sense of like it’s a story about serial killer who is a werewolf and supernatural forces will have to stop him. So is that the thing that you’re trying to do both things at the same time to be procedural and also be supernatural?

**Melody:** Yes, and he takes on the power. He kills different types of monsters throughout the entire film. So he starts off as we see him in the very beginning, as a werewolf, but he takes on different forms and different monsters throughout the entire film and he has to be stopped. And so it is procedural and it’s also supernatural.

**John:** So it’s Sylar from Heroes. But the movie version of what that character could be.

**Craig:** And the video game isn’t a thing that matters later on, is it?

**Melody:** No, not that. It’s only a way to introduce the character especially that he himself is fascinated and thrilled by monsters. So that’s why it’s specific.

**Craig:** Sometimes it’s better when people who are asked to fight monsters are not fascinated and thrilled by monsters.

**Melody:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But in fact, they’re just like us. Just because it starts — one thing that happens that’s a little tricky is in movies with monsters, if everybody is either a monster or knows a monster or is interested in monsters, the audience starts going, what town is this? You know, how do all these people live in the same place? Is Moira a witch?

**Melody:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay, good. So another suggestion for you because the scene that you have in the beginning on the plane tells me one thing, there is a monster, that’s it. And all these people are scared as they should be because of monsters.

But what if this one woman turns around when she sees the monster and isn’t afraid at all and just starts talking in Gaelic and then starts, “Whoa,” you know, and then the thing goes flying and you see blood and the plane goes down. And we go, okay, it’s not just that there are monsters. There are also people that know about the monsters who can fight with the monsters. It starts to at least give me a little bit more of a grounded sense of the world.

Once you do monsters, that’s your buy-in and if then you add on top of that buy-in that there’s also witches, you start to end up in that thing that happened in, was is it Stephen Sommers who did the movie with the werewolves versus the —

**John:** Van Helsing?

**Craig:** Van Helsing.

**Melody:** Van Helsing, yeah.

**Craig:** Where it just seemed like every 20 minutes are like, wait, here’s something else that is in this world that you did not know about.

**Melody:** Right, right, right.

**Craig:** And it gets exhausting, you know.

**Melody:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** So the more you can give a sense of this is the deal, we’re in a world with da-da-da. And that in a sense Underworld I thought did a good job with that, you know, where they introduced where you’re like, oh okay, cool, you know, there’s two types of monsters. So anyway, things to think about.

**Melody:** Thanks.

**John:** As you start to establish your world where I wonder if it’s going to be a challenge is the rules of the world. And what he’s talking about with Van Helsing really is that. It’s like it feels like every time you’re going to introduce a new thing, it’s going to be like, “And here’s a new bit of exposition to explain this part of the rules.” So as simple as you can some of these things, the better. As you are re-approaching stuff, I wonder if you might want to just take this, think about this first moment.

And what if this first moment were 30 minutes. And what could happen on that plan, because I think you created a really amazing environment. And if that thing could go longer and really detail all that stuff and you can establish what is it like to have a werewolf on plane, that’s kind of awesome. What is it like to be a witch fighting a werewolf on a plane? That’s kind of awesome. That would be a great, that’s a great in and that might be a way to establish some of the rules of your world so that when we cut to our normal guy who’s in a more normal environment we can sort of have a sense of the scale of what kinds of things can happen in this movie.

**Melody:** Great idea.

**John:** So how many scripts have you written? Is this the first full-length thing you’ve done? What’s your —

**Melody:** No. Well, this is the first draft of the script. I’ve written a few others that are in the sci-fi/horror genre and some TV scripts. And they’ve, you know, placed or won in different festivals. But this is a very complex one. And I really wanted to submit it here to just to get this kind of feedback. And as I was, you know, struggling through, I since revised it, you know, quite a bit and actually simplified it because it had a lot going on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Melody:** But those are great comments in the opening scene in particular. I think that I already see ways that I can actually feed into, you know, how I can revise it to make it stronger.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, as you go through these movies that are about science fiction and mysterious societies and secrets and re-presentations of things that we thought we knew, don’t forget that ultimately we’ll only really care about people and that the people part of it is the most important part. If you can, you know, get the people part right, the rest of it you can always massage into place.

**Melody:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the character. And there’s something in the fact that you’ve got a guy in a wheelchair who eventually is going to walk or fly or something is really interesting. That’s a good people part, you know.

**Melody:** He flies.

**Craig:** There you go. See, flies? I am so good. Well great. Thank you so much.

**John:** Awesome. Melody, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you. All right, next item up for bid is a script by David Elver. Elver.

**John:** Hello, David Elver. Thank you for joining us.

I am going to attempt to summarize the script we’ve read. So, in case people have had not the chance to read this all, as they are sitting down here with us. Over black we hear the distant sounds of amplified Arabic voice, a Muslim call to prayer, and also the beep-beep-beep of an EKG. We’re in a hospital triage tent outdoors. We’re near Cairo, it’s daytime. That eye snaps open. Blood red eye. We’re with a pretty young nurse who’s working with a respirator mask on this person who seems to be dying. The beep falls violent. There’s still the call to prayer. All this sequence is happening without real dialogue, just a bunch of sounds and images.

There’s a handful of doctors and nurses. Clearly like a big thing is happening because of this huge triage unit. The woman, the nurse goes back to check on this man, to check for his pulse. The skin of the man’s wrist peels off in her hand, which is nasty.

Pops, pops, explosions in the distance, artillery, a bigger explosion, a huge ball of fire and metal falls from the sky. It’s a city-size starship and envelopes in a halo flame. It’s crashing into central Cairo, destroying the city, the hospital, the pyramids, everything is consumed by fire. So a small contained little drama that we’re talking about here.

Now we’re in interstellar space. We’re black. And we learn some things about this giant ship we’re seeing, this giant cancerous, tumor of a ship. The ship is called Lazarus. We’re in 2349. We have an estimated time to Earth that is 23 hours, 47 minutes, 15 seconds and counting down quickly. We’re in a service quarter. We’re going to see Abel in his thirties. He is racing down the corridor, jumping and ducking over things. He’s a scruffy guy. At a huge power terminal he’s trying to turn something on or off. He’s trying to reset something. His arm gets stuck behind it. And as we get to the end of page 3 he’s trying to get his arm free from where it’s wedge behind this machinery. And that’s the three pages.

Craig?

**Craig:** David, these were good. Really good. I really enjoyed it. There’s a kind of writing for this sort of sequence. We’ll get to the spaceship sequence. But the beginning sequence, it’s essentially impressionistic writing. It’s something that people started doing in the 1800s and then forgot about somewhere in the 1900s.

But it’s great kind of writing where you are confused as you read it and then it’s resolved. It’s smart. It’s a good way of going about things. You have a lot of good imagery here. The beep-beep-beep of the EKG and the boop is something that we’ve seen lots of, but I’m okay with that. I don’t mind feeling like I’m in a normal situation. And then you pull back and you see this bigger situation with all these people and the pyramids in the background which is odd, what’s going on, war in the Middle East or something?

And then some horrifying disease. Little things give you information. When you think about how to get information across, here’s one way. A nurse turns back to the dead man. She checks for a pulse. The skin of the man’s wrist peels off in her hand. She turns to a doctor, “You need to look at this.” That’s one way. Or the other way is, the nurse stares at the smear of dead skin in her fingers, horrified. That’s a better way, you know, because I’m seeing that she wasn’t expecting that. That’s more visceral for me. It’s a little hard sometimes to see those things through glasses and masks, but it’s okay. That’s the director’s problem.

Really great reveal of the spaceship coming down. So we hear it, we’re not sure what it is and then it crashes. And, you know, these little things like the way you did the city, the hospital, the pyramids, I want stuff like that. It makes it interesting. I mean we all read billions and millions of scripts. So just, I don’t know, make it fun.

So everything is consumed by fire. Hard to do better than that as a screenwriting sentence. “Everything is consumed by fire.” I got it. Great. So I really enjoyed all of that.

Then we go into space. Interstellar space. “One by one, stars bleed into the darkness.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant exactly. I don’t know what stars bleeding into darkness means. But I do know what the loud mechanical rumbling is. The Lazarus, a vast ugly, cancerous, tumor of a ship. So I get exactly what you mean. I know what it looks like. And then here’s this title. I don’t know. I suspect that we’ve jumped ahead in time. I suspect, but I’m not sure exactly. So you’ll have to let us know later on in the script.

The interior of the ship is really well-described. I enjoyed all of these descriptions of both the interior of the ship and Abel himself who’s running. And it’s really when he got to the terminal that the — I guess my only suggestion is I’m not sure, is this terminal really important?

**David Elver:** Yeah, what happens to it is on the next page.

**Craig:** Okay, fine. Then it is. Great. Then I understand why I’m wasting time with it. But I don’t know that he’s trying to hit a reset switch. That’s the only thing. If I need to know what he’s doing, right now he may be reaching for, you know, something he dropped back there or not. If it’s a reset switch show me his hand almost near the reset switch.

**John:** With the glowing amber switch right past.

**Craig:** Do you know what I mean? But geez, that’s my big freaking comment. I mean, good job. You hated it?

**John:** I hate it. Hated it. No, I adored it. But what I especially really appreciated was how you’re showing us and how you’re talking us through things and how you’re making the words on the page feel like what the movie would ultimately feel like, because we have to remember is that we’re really not writing scripts. We’re trying to write movies.

And the challenge is we’re only allowed to use 12-point Courier Prime on white paper to show what that movie is going to feel like ultimately. So we have to use those words very smartly to create the feeling of what we’re going to see and what we’re going to hear. You use both sound and visuals really well.

So let’s start at the very start. “Over black we hear the distant sound of an amplified Arabic voice.” I’m fine with we hears. This is a case where I don’t think you needed it, because if you took that out, “The distant sound of an amplified Arabic voice” Great. It’s a sound. We know. We’re hearing it and it’s over black.

This triage unit is really nicely set up and done. And a good example of midway through the page, a pretty young nurse wearing glasses over a respiratory mask. She’s not given a name. It’s awesome that she doesn’t have name because it tells us that she is an important character at this moment, but don’t bother learning her name because it’s not going to be important. And that’s good. And so you’re not causing the reader to have to make a little memory slot for who that person is. We don’t have to stop to remember her name. And you don’t remember her name because we didn’t need to. And it keeps going.

I did have an issue near the bottom of this page. The nurse turns back to the dead man, checks for a pulse. The fact that you said dead man and pulse, it’s looks like, well, she’s an idiot. He’s dead. So maybe that could be a way to —

**Craig:** It’s a good point. The EKG told her that there was no pulse.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** I hate this. It stinks.

**John:** You hate this. I also had a little question of the skin of the man’s wrist peels off in her hand. Is it her gloved hand? Because I would believe that if it is this kind of infectious place and they know this that she’d wear gloves or not. It doesn’t necessarily need to be one or the other, but it stopped me for a second.

**David:** Yeah, she’s got a gloved hand.

**John:** Okay, great.

**David:** A slender gloved hand.

**John:** Great. So maybe remind us of that, because otherwise they’ll think it’s literally on her skin. And I got obsessed with that. But what Craig talks about on page 2 is a good example of some really non-traditional formatting that I think really helps sell what’s going on here. So, “The ship explodes like a sun going nova. A shockwave of fire flies outwards obliterating everything in its path. The city.” Indented, “The hospital.” Intended further, “The pyramids. Everything is consumed by fire.”

And so it feels very poem-y to do that kind of thing, but it’s actually very appropriate because it helps sell the idea of something going down, falling down. And that’s a really usual thing to do.

Where I thought you had an opportunity to further what you were doing, after consumed by fire. From the deafening war, we cut to interstellar space, black, silent. And give us that silent moment to also underscore that contrast because you’re going to have the mechanical sound come in. But that contrast between fire and noise and light to the blackness of space is going to be really rewarding. And let us know as a reader that that’s going to happen because that’s going to be amazing in the actual film.

Like Craig, I was confused in way that it may not have been the best way about where are we and what time are we at now. And I started to unfortunately go, I started to look back at the first statement and be like, oh wait, was that present day or was that the future in a way that was not the best choice on page 2. Where I was like suddenly re-questioning everything that happened the page before. So by giving us this year, 2349, being so specific, that may not necessarily help you in that moment. Just to be considering that. But I love the time is literally counting down as we’re going. That’s exciting too.

One grammar note on page 3. Interior service corridor. “Cramped, cluttered, claustrophobic.” Love those C-words. “Every square inch of the walls and ceiling are covered in battered pipes.” Every square inch IS covered.

**Craig:** IS covered. Every.

**John:** Every square inch is covered. But again, near the bottom page 3, you’re doing something else that’s really smart. “He strains at the effort, wincing. Can’t. Quite. Make it.” Again, it feels, the sentences feel like what the action feels like which is great and the way screenwriting drives.

**Craig:** That’s the point of it all. I mean in other words, the point isn’t to put together the best, most interesting vocabulary, the point is that somebody would read that and go, [makes struggling noises]. They get it. They know what you want them to see. So this is what it means when we talk about, constantly talking about writing a movie as opposed to writing a document. Movie, movie, movie. So very good, very good. And I don’t even like these kinds of movies. So, very good.

**John:** [laughs] David, come up here so we can talk more about some of this. Thank you. So talk to us about page four. What happens next? I assume, did he hit the switch or did not hit the switch?

**David:** In honor of Craig, it becomes a classic lesbian love story.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Classic lesbian love story?

**David:** Traditional.

**Craig:** Did you say classy or classic? I don’t like the classy ones.

**John:** The classy ones, no.

**David:** Abel is about to be murdered. So he’s struggling with this terminal and —

**John:** Please tell me the person who kills him is not named Cane.

**David:** No. [laughs]

**Craig:** My god, I would have been so angry if that —

**John:** He’s about to be killed by a human being?

**David:** By a human being. By a human being who we don’t quite see until quite near the end of the film.

**John:** The opening sequence, is that present day or like present day?

**David:** You’re absolutely right, it’s present day and that was 300 years later.

**John:** So we did jump forward.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** And what is the thrust of the action forward in the story? What is the quest of whoever we’re going to finally meet as our hero?

**David:** Essentially what happened was there was this pandemic that swept the globe, and so all the carriers were loaded up into a huge quarantine ship and sent away for 300 years. And now we start one day away from coming back to Earth. And this man, Abel, who’s murdered, the only law man on the ship is sent into and basically covered up so that there’s no hiccups on their way back to Earth and he finds symptoms that the virus is back. So he has to go through the ship and it’s a kind of tribal fiefdom —

**Craig:** That’s a cool story.

**David:** And he has to go through all these different levels from the bowels to the uppers to find out if the virus is back and, if so, by whom and why and —

**Craig:** Great, great.

**David:** And then —

**Craig:** You know what I like about that story is that I could start talking about what is dramatically interesting to me as an audience member. You know, I could, anybody could hear and say, okay, well, obviously this is dramatic for the people on the ship. But there are some universal things that are sort of implicated in what that story starts to set up. So very smart, very good, very good.

**John:** Well what’s also useful about that description is, we know what kind of movie it is. We know that movie can be made. And we’ve seen not that exact story, but conversions of that . You’ve seen the Neill Blomkamp movies that have done similar kinds of things that other, the more recent Judge Dredd, or Dredd, which have that sort of lockdown environment, futuristic, dystopia and the contrast between those two worlds.

We know that’s a thing that can be made and therefore it’s to read something, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s great to read a script that you’re like, well, this could never shoot. And it’s like this great writing but you can never shoot. It’s more exciting to be, like, I want this movie to get made. I can’t wait to see that film.

**David:** I would hazard to say, not only can be made, but should and must.

**John:** Great. Thank you. Important word substitutions. Now —

**David:** You’d be surprised how poorly that works. Yeah.

**John:** Indeed. You will it into existence. So talk to us about your writing and where does this fall and what you’ve written before and what you’re writing now.

**David:** I’ve been a writer all my life. I started out as an actor. Actually, I worked in TV. I’m from Vancouver. So I worked in TV.

**John:** I was going to ask where in Canada you’re from.

**David:** Vancouver.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**David:** But I worked as a writer my whole life. I was a speech writer for kind of our equivalent of senators and some —

**Craig:** Senator Ted Cruz?

**David:** That’s the man.

**Craig:** Canadian Ted Cruz?

**David:** Yeah. He says hi.

**Craig:** What an asshole.

**David:** And, but no, this is the second script I’ve written. So I just recently started to become passionate about writing for film and television.

**Craig:** Great.

**David:** And just a few weeks before I came down here, I just found out I was hired to write a couple of episodes of an animated show up in Canada.

**Craig:** Excellent. Good.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got the goods.

**John:** Any questions we can answer for you about this next part of the process or where you see this script now. So when you submitted this in, we only see the first three pages. How are you feeling about the rest of this? Is it working?

**David:** I’m in a bit of a conundrum about it because I think it’s working well, but I actually through a friend of a friend of a friend, I had it looked at by an agent at WME and he loved the first 60 pages and then wasn’t as crazy about the last 40 pages.

**Craig:** Okay. That can happen.

**David:** I’m not sure why. He didn’t give me any sort of feedback on what exactly. And I didn’t feel like there was a sudden drop off. But it’s kind of where I am with it right now.

**John:** My hunch is that the way that this movie gets made is the right person reads it and the right person who has the weird financing out of some place and like the one director connection which is crazy, somehow it all fits together. Or there is some role that you have in there that is perfect for that person who should be in the right kind of genre movie to make this a possible thing.

So I’m optimistic based on my naïve reading of three pages that I think you can get a movie made.

**Craig:** Have you thought about maybe putting this on the Black List website?

**David:** I just came from the panel with —

**Craig:** Franklin.

**David:** Franklin.

**Craig:** Yes.

**David:** And exactly the first —

**Craig:** I think that’s a good move. I think you will get a lot of interest and attention. This is very well-written. Awesome.

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

**David:** Thank you.

**John:** Now we have a few minutes before we need to be finished up here. So I’d like to open up to some questions. If you guys have things you’d like to ask us about three pages, words on the page, things we’ve said today or things in general that you — questions you’ve always wanted to ask me or Craig, we are happy to answer them if anyone has a hand —

**Craig:** We also take medical questions.

**John:** Yeah? Does anyone have a bit more to say? We can wrap up early. It’s allowed. There’s no rule you have to go all the way to the bitter end. Cool

**Craig:** Oh look, he thought about it.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** He thought about saying something.

**John:** We have a question about —

**Craig:** Medical questions. Anything.

**John:** Oh, you have a question now?

**Clever:** Yeah, I do.

**Craig:** Was that the question? Does it have to be three pages?

**Clever:** Like three wishes.

**John:** Yeah. All right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Clever:** No, my question is about a script I’ve got in the second round is a horror comedy and it’s very, very self-aware and it’s very convoluted. It’s like Charlie Kaufman writes a slasher film or something. And the structure is extremely complicated. It calls in on itself. It refers to things that the audience is seeing and seeing as part of the movie. Then suddenly is on the script page.

So it’s that kind of thing and it’s the Austin Screenwriting Group that told me this is entirely too clever. Just, you know, how do you feel about just working on weird structure and doing, just that example that I gave you. Is that off-putting to you?

**John:** It’s not off-putting to me. And I think the horror-comedy is one the few genres in which that you can get away with that more easily because we have this expectation like horror-comedy has already just been broken so thoroughly that we can sort of do anything with it after Scream and the after-Screams.

Like we’re used to that in a way that’s very useful. But even the Muppet Movie has the place where they stop and they look at the script itself. And so I wouldn’t rule that out. The challenge I think you’re going to face is that sometimes it just becomes so perplexing on the page that like you just sort of give up, or you stop caring about the characters as real things because it becomes just an intellectual exercise about the genre. And that’s going to be the real challenge you’re going to face is, yeah —

Male Audience Member: I understand and I think my characters are people —

**John:** Yeah. So finding a way to navigate that is challenging.

**Craig:** Good answer.

**John:** Yeah. You had a question.

**Page Count:** Yeah, I had a more general question about the formatting. I’m writing a pilot for a single-camera comedy. And I’m trying to compress it into 32 pages. But I think I’m, or actually 31 pages. But I made this in Final Draft and I eliminated like one of the spaces between the periods. I did a tight formatting —

**John:** Oh, don’t do tight formatting. Tight formatting looks gross.

**Craig:** What are you doing?

**Page Count:** And so I just wanted some basic guidance.

**Craig:** Yeah, here’s some basic guidance. Stop doing, I mean, what are you, you can’t, you’re not — who are you fooling?

**Page Count:** I know.

**Craig:** Who are you fooling?

**John:** And so here’s, let’s talk about what’s valid, valid ways to shrink page count which is so, I see. The space after a period is fine now. I’ve given up on two spaces after a period. Even in Courier, whatever. We’re used to it now. One space. Saves you a little bit of time. But as you’re going through, what Craig will confess to doing too is you’ll look for every place where something is knocking to the next page and wondering like how do I make that not knock to the next page?

And so there’s places where you’re carefully rewriting one sentence so that everything —

**Craig:** Cut words.

**John:** You cut words.

**Craig:** Cut words.

**John:** The other thing I will tell you is that, yes, you want your script to be short so that it doesn’t seem too long. But most of our half-hour comedies are going page-wise longer than that. So you’re not going to be alone in that universe to do that stuff.

I’d also just really take a hard look at it. Is there anything big you can cut. And if you can cut a big thing that saves you two pages, that’s going be much better than just trying to like, you know, move commas around to save it.

Like all this stuff, simplification can be your friend and by eliminating something that is not the best thing in the script, the stuff that is the best in the script will elevate and will seem that much brighter and sharper.

**Page Count:** I will beat them down.

**John:** All right.

**Pitcher:** I thought of a general question. It has to do with pitch fest that’s going on, too. What got me here is basically an ensemble piece. And I’m wondering in your experience is it better around town back there, is it better to try and pitch that as just talk about the main character and then stick in at the end, oh, I’ve got the multiple story lines. I’ve got — there’s depth to it, you know.

I’ve been told that it might be better when you’re doing your log lines with someone in an elevator to just stick to the main character, who the main persons are. But to me, it’s always been about — it’s a college reunion.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, but that’s, just do it.

**John:** No, you have to. You have to describe it that way. And ensemble things —

**Craig:** Just say The Big Chill of something, something, something.

**John:** Exactly. Ensemble things are tougher to summarize in a pitch. Like I could never really pitch Go because it’s just so complicated. And yet, sometimes you do pitch things that do have a larger ensemble. Like, Big Fish, I had to pitch a bunch of times, and so you talk about it from the perspective of the two main characters and what their relationship is and sort of how it’s going to feel.

If you’re talking about this, I mean, The Big Chill or some other good reference is a way into it. But you need to clarify like these are the threads we’re following and this is how they overlap. And you could still do that one-minute pitch version of that, you just have to really practice how you’re going to get through that. It’s possible.

We’ll take two more questions. How’s that? In the back, on the couch?

**First Pages:** Back to the three pages, what was for each of you like the first script that really brings you in or got you an agent, what happened in the first three pages of each of your scripts, and what was good about those three pages?

**John:** The script that got me an agent was this thing called Here and Now, which never sold, never got produced, should never be seen. But I will say that the opening sequence of it was, so there was this young woman like getting into her car, like, you know, post-holiday shopping and it was — I did a really good job in selling what it’s like to be in a wet, muddy, snowy parking lot and then to have an accident there. And like the scene painting was really good. And that was a usual thing for me.

The thing that sort of broke me out was Go. And in Go it has that sort of flash forward. So it’s giving you a sense of like these are the kind of things that are happening in the movie. But it’s all structured around one conversation and then we’re on Ronna as a checkout girl.
So you got a good sense of like this is the world of the movie. Here’s our main person. Go. And those were my first three pages of that that really I think landed attention for me.

**Craig:** Well, this is embarrassing. Of course, you know, your first scripts are tough. The first screenplay that got me noticed, some attention, the first three pages we saw a kid, he was a nine-year-old boy playing. He was pretending to be an astronaut. And he had his Legos and his stuff and he had his little helmet. And it was all very, it was just a very low-tech innocent thing where he would do, “Houston, I’m entering the lunar module. “And he was just sort of walking down the hall and he just toddled into the laundry room in his house and then got in the dryer and turned the dryer. And then closed the door and actually started rotating and started narrating his own terrible space disaster.

Maybe it’s not that embarrassing. Maybe it’s actually kind of good.

**John:** It is quite funny. It’s cute.

**Craig:** It was just not what you would have expected. I have a problem.

**John:** Yeah. Child abuse. Authorities came. If you were like adopting, like going through the adoption process, you should not show them those pages.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, there’s a few other things I can’t show.

**John:** Yeah, probably so. Do we have one more question out there? Yes, hi.

**Notes:** I just wanted to add one more thing to this because, just how great it is to take notes like this that I think are great, and to go through the revisions and to keep working on it. The revision that I’ve done on this script got me my agent. I just signed a few months ago with Abrams Artist. And when I started out with, the lesson was, when something needs work don’t give up on it. This is so very helpful.

**Craig:** Well great.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** That’s the idea. Thank you.

**John:** A wonderful place to close. Guys, thank you very, very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [The Austin Film Festival](https://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* Three Pages by [Krista Westervelt](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KristaWestervelt.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Melody Cooper](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MelodyCooper.pdf)
* Three Pages by [David Elver](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DavidElver.pdf)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 58: [Writing your very first screenplay](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-your-very-first-screenplay)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Betty Spinks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))