Search Results for: hero main character protagonist

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

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 143 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Claire, why Claire? What is the reason behind Claire Schaeffer?

**Craig:** Claire Schaeffer is a senior, a 12th grader, at Flintridge Prep here in La Cañada and she is a devoted fan of our show apparently. My son, I believe did a musical with her and she’s a fan of the show and so I promised Jack that I would give her a little shout-out.

**John:** Well, that’s very, very nice. I worried that there had been news in your life that I had missed out on. Huge life decisions had happened in between our weeks of normal recording the show.

**Craig:** You know that if I wanted to be a women, I would have just simply hurdled into surgery. I don’t…

**John:** Craig Mazin doesn’t stop and think. He just goes right for it. He finds the best surgeon and if that’s too expensive then he finds the second best surgeon and that’s the one he uses.

**Craig:** Sometimes the second best is the worst one. You know that whole theory of the most overpriced bottle of wine on a menu is the second most expensive one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because nobody wants to buy the most expensive one so they buy the second most expensive one. Everyone knows that so they jack the price of that one up.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Many restaurants will actually deliberately stick an incredibly overpriced bottle on there so they can keep moving the second most expensive one.

**Craig:** It’s a real-estate agent trick. They’ll take you to a house that they know is wildly overpriced just to completely throw you off so that when you see one that’s normally priced you think you’re getting a deal.

**John:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** It’s a world of lies out there basically. [laughs] It’s just lies. We’re surrounded.

**John:** [laughs] The screenwriting advice here is that if your script is a little bit long, make sure that people are reading really, really long scripts right in front of yours and then your 130-page script will seem like, oh, that’s reasonable.

**Craig:** Breath of fresh air.

**John:** Yes. It’s benchmark setting.

This is going to be one of those shows, Craig, that is almost completely random. You and I both have many tabs opened in our browser because there are so many little thing to talk about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we’re going to try to get through all of them today. We’re going to talk about the first screenwriting book ever from 1912. We will talk about tropes and archetypes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We will talk about Barry Levinson and his unhappy credit arbitration situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’ll answer a question about managers. We’ll talk about film critics who are watching screeners rather than a big movie on a big screen. They’re watching a little movie on a little screen. We’re going to talk about keeping secrets from your readers, how you keep something on the page that’s different than what people might see on the screen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll talk about what happens to a Broadway show after it leaves Broadway which is the situation we’re in now with Big Fish which is really interesting and so different from anything in film or television. And, finally, we will do some more One Cool Things from the archives. We will look at which One Cool Things are still cool and which ones we’ve completely forgotten about.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is that show, that show with so much. And in all those things that didn’t even include the things we’re doing follow up on. So there’s still more.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s hydrate here. This is going to be rough.

**John:** While Craig is hydrating I will say that voting is open now for the Live Three Page Challenge. If you’re listening to this on Tuesday when the episode comes out, you can vote on Tuesday or Wednesday until noon for your favorite of the 57 entries for the Three Page Challenge, so they’re all at johnaguust.com/threepagelive, all spelled out, all one word. And you can see all those entries from different people. You can read them all and you can vote for up to three of your favorites. And one, two, or three of those will be discussed on the live show Thursday along with our special guest panelist judge, Susannah Grant.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Are there still tickets available for this event?

**John:** You know, it’s completely unclear. I watched the website this morning. We’re recording this on a Friday and it still showed the ability to purchase tickets, so if you’re listening to this on Tuesday and you’ve not otherwise seen me tweet that it is sold out, I’d say come, because they’ll be able — we’ll find a seat for you. So come to the show. It’s at the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yay. One of the interesting things about having all of these 57 samples all showing up at once is that they were just sitting in a folder on my desktop. And I thought, you know what, I wonder what screenwriting software people are using to write these different entries. And so I looked at all the metadata and figured it out. So, Craig, what percentage of these entrants would you guess were written in a Final Draft?

**Craig:** I have to say a number that’s going to bum me out, but I’m going to say 90%.

**John:** Ooh, it’s quite a bit lower than that.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** It’s about 54%.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s spectacular news.

**John:** So that 54% is when you add together Final Draft 8, Final Draft 9, and Final Draft 7. And so I kept them separated in little charts. There’s going to be a link to the chart in the show notes.

Essentially, Final Draft 8 was by far the most common thing; 18 out of the 57 entries were written in Final Draft 8. But a wide range of other software showed up there. So Fade In showed up there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Strong. Slugline was there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Screenwriter, Celtx, Highland, even some ones were written like TextEdit or Word were there too.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it was interesting that people were trying different things.

**Craig:** Well, that is. I have to say that number is exciting to me. I want to see that. I mean, listen, I’m sure the people at Final Draft are like, “Oh, my god, is this guy really doing this again to us.” But, you know, there’s no reason that Final Draft should have even 50%. Final Draft should have 5%. It is simply not the best available option out there. I don’t believe it is the best available option. But it is the most expensive available option. So that to me that should intersect around 5% of people that just bought it once a long time ago and don’t feel giving up.

**John:** I would say that, you know, 58 scripts is a very small sample size but it was an interesting sample size because I feel like the people who are going to be applying or answering in to the Three Page Challenge are going to be aspiring screenwriters. And aspiring screenwriters are people who probably bought screenwriting software recently or services in the case of things like WriterDuet or Celtx. So they’re honestly sort of in that next wave and if that next wave is not fully embracing Final Draft, that’s a change for that application.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I can also say in sort of anecdotally because I sell one of the apps that actually is there, we do keep track of the rankings of the different apps in the App Store. So all the screenwriting apps that are sold through the Mac App Store we can look and see where they’re ranked in the productivity category. And actually we have applications that chart sort of how we do. And the last couple of weeks things have actually changed and so for the first time Highland is sometimes surpassing Final Draft in number of units sold.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Which is great. We are priced a lot less than Final Draft, so our actual total gross is a lot less but it’s nice that people are using it.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. I am happy to see competition doing what it’s supposed to do.

**John:** Yes, creating an ecosystem is a lovely thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We have a follow up from Matt Selman who is a writer who is an executive producer of The Simpsons.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he wrote in to say, “Hi, guys, Scriptnotes’ listener Matt Selman here. I was enjoying your bit on Alloy and fan fiction and vampires. It’s a couple episodes back. And I just had to chime in about a Simpsons episode we did on just that topic, sort of. I produced a show called The Book Job in which Lisa is disillusioned again to find that her favorite Tween kids books are just product pumped out by an Alloy-like publishing house. Then a lot of crazy Oceans 11-type stuff happens. It’s actually a show about the challenges of authorial creation, business versus originality, the perils of procrastination, and an attempt at justifying/invalidating the joys of group writing which is the majority of what I do when I’m not writing emails to you instead or finishing a script.

“Maybe your listeners would get a kick out of watching it or at least it merits a link in the show notes. Sorry, it’s only on iTunes for The Simpsons Season 23 or they can pirate it.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] He wrote that and I didn’t add the whole, “Or you can pirate it” thing.

**Craig:** Oh Matt. First of all, Matt I believe is the showrunner of The Simpsons. He’s a spectacularly good guy. He’s a smart guy. And he is — I’ve come to know some Simpsons writers over the years, Jay Kogen who’s sort of all the way back from the beginning but guys along the way like Daniel Gould and so on and so forth and Matt is, he just fits that, the guys who work on The Simpsons are just smart guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not funny and great writers who also happen to be smart. It’s all connected, you know. There is a culture of intelligence there and Matt is a terrific dude. He really is, just picture a nervous man. That’s Matt. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** What does a nervous man look like? Sort of thin, like kind of kooky hair, looks nervous.

**John:** So I first met Matt Selman because we were shopping for a new house and we were going to open houses on a Sunday which is usually when open houses are happening. And we were in one of these and there’s a guy who sort of recognized me and you could sort of tell when someone recognizes you because they make an eye contact and they make an eye contact again. And it’s like they’re like trying to make sure/confirm if they really did recognize you.

And so he came over and introduced himself and he said, “Oh, hey, I’m the guy who wrote that Simpsons episode that was based on Go or not based on Go but that sort of like used Go in it.” And it’s the episode called Trilogy of Error and it’s an episode where time keeps repeating on itself and sort of like how Pulp Fiction works and how Go works, and there’s actually one whole plot line which is very much taken from Go. And that was my first introduction to him was that he had written the episode that was sort of inspired by Go.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s just a good guy. I’m not sure where, I think I might have met him at a roundtable or something somewhere along the way, but I’ve just always loved him and he was very nice to invite me to a table reading that they did of an episode a couple of years ago. And that was just really fun to watch the cast do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was just fascinating. It’s just very cool. What an amazing institution to be a part of and a good guy, Matt Selman. So thanks for writing in, Matt. We’ll put a link in there. We don’t want people to pirate your show.

**John:** No. They should buy it for real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you said about roundtables is actually very applicable because my next bit of follow up was at the live show we did at Nerdmelt where we did the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Panel, I talked a little bit about that I was going to go in on this panel. I was actually leading this sort of roundtable on a rewrite for a script and I was excited but also a little bit nervous about sort of how it was going to go and it was this week.

And it went really well, I think. And so I just wanted to talk through a little bit what that process was like because it was the first time I had ever kind of done one of these things.

I’d been in sessions that were much more like a little punch up where it’s just like what’s the new funny joke we can do here. This was after our first draft, and the writer was in the room, thank god, because I wouldn’t have really wanted to do it if the original writer weren’t there to keep going on to the next thing.

But the discussion, there’s a total of five writers in the room, was really about what are the possibilities of the next things we could do and really looking at what sort of what are the functions of each of the characters, how can this all work together. And so the day it was structured where I suggested that we actually just read the whole script allowed to begin with. And that’s sort of tedious. That burns like two hours. But I thought it was really important because otherwise there’s this chance that you’re all kind of reading a different script.

You’re all sort of reading the scripts you read a week ago or three drafts ago. It’s hard to focus on what specifically the movie is in front of you unless you actually sort of like read the movie that’s in front of you. So we all divvied up parts. We read the whole thing aloud, including all the scene description which is the worst part of the table read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I was really glad we did it because for one thing it gave that writer a chance to really hear his work all together out there like and sort of celebrate like this is what was there and like the stuff that was really good was really, really good. And in some ways, I think, that can help us sort of move past it and sort of look at it like that was that and what are the opportunities we have sort of kept on going here.

The stuff that felt long reading was probably needed to be addressed and the stuff that was really, really good, well, what was special about what was really, really good and how can we use those characters, those situations to best effect. So it ended up being a pretty good situation.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve never done that in, I mean, I’ve been to roundtables where there was a cast read through prior to it but in a lot of times if it’s early in the process there is no cast. And I’ve never done that. I’ve never done a reading. Usually we just start talking about the script and reactions and things, but, you know, I always feel like the — in the end those are difficult days for a writer to go through because you have everybody kind of coming out at it with all of their different opinions and feelings and you have to figure out how to parse out what makes sense and speaks to you truly and what just may be somebody’s opinion.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And that’s tough sometimes.

**John:** What I think is interesting about a roundtable that’s really driven by writers is that everyone who’s been at that table has had to implement these kind of changes. And so every time we talk about a possibility, we’re talking about it in a way of like figuring out like how do you actually write that, how do you actually get that thing to manifest; rather than sort of pie in the sky dreams, it’s like, what’s actually doable.

It’s like talking about building a building with people who build buildings. And so you really understand what is possible there. The challenge for me as like the leader of this group was to make sure that it didn’t all become like a volleying back and forth with the original writer who was there because there’s a natural instinct of trying to address your suggestion to the person who’s going to write next. And I try to make sure to try to stay a conversation among all of us, not just the guy who is going to go off and do the next pass.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is one thing about those roundtables that I don’t like and I try and guard against. And that is this strange thing where writers have almost, some writers have internalized a kind of very bland note style.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where suddenly they’re talking to a fellow writer like the world’s worst producer giving them these very obvious notes and pushing it towards formula. And I’m always careful when I’m in these things to never talk about things that I think are going to grind the edges off of a piece or to take away that which is unique.

If anything sticks out in a fascinating way but it seems like it’s not integrated, then maybe I’ll just say that. I’ll just say, how do we, this is a moment. This is the kind of thing that’s special about this movie. Don’t round that edge off, but let’s talk about maybe how to have it not feel like it’s unmoored from the rest of the movie. But I sometimes get dismayed listening to my fellow writers because it just feels like they’ve suddenly become the world’s worst director of development.

**John:** Yeah. It was interesting, I was happy to see this studio in this case, the writer I think initiated the idea of doing this panel. I was glad that the studio stepped up and did it because had they done another draft or two more drafts, I think there would have been some burn in and some burn out honestly on what was happening in the script.

And rather by doing it now, when it was still, it was formed but it was still fresh, it was, I think, much easier to look at the different ways we could go and to sort of chart a course because we hadn’t spent so much time trying to implement notes that were maybe the wrong notes. So I’m hopeful that it’s going to be a cool movie and it was a really good process, so I just wanted to — I’ll never actually say what the movie was or who the writers were, but they were actually fantastic. And so I was, I really enjoyed that process.

**Craig:** Awesome. Yeah, I love doing those things. I think they’re fun days.

**John:** Cool. So let’s move to our new stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the first thing is, and I can’t find a link of who sent this to me but thank you whoever sent it to me, I think tweeted this link to perhaps the first screenwriting book ever written. It is a 1912 book by Herbert Case Hoagland called How To Write A Photo Play. And I thought it was just great. And so there’s a blog post on it, so we’ll link to both the original text which is on archive.org but also my blog post about it. It was just so cool. I’ll read a little snippet from it. “To write a photo play requires no skill as a writer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “But it does require a quote constructionist. It requires the ability to grasp an idea and graft, please using the botanical sense, a series of causes on the front of it and a series of consequences on the other end. An idea so graft it will surely bear fruit; and to learn the art of this mental horticulture is necessary. First, to understand in a general way how motion pictures are made and what is done in the studio, in the field, and in the factory. Let us learn something of these things and begin at the beginning, in the office of the scenario editor.”

What I loved about this paragraph was that it just, first off, it’s just like, “You don’t have to have any skill as a writer” is just fantastic. And also the term scenario editor. What’s so great about Hoagland’s book is that, so he was a scenario editor I’m gathering based on certain introductory pages of the book. They were just in a completely different system. And so when they’re talking about a scenario, they’re not really quite talking about a screenplay. It’s really just a series of shots that is going to tell a story. And because they don’t have dialogue, because they don’t have a lot of normal film conventions, it’s just different.

And, you know, so they say, like, you could write a scenario in 10 minutes but more likely you’ll spend a week thinking about it. And so it really is just a very different world and yet so many of the same kinds of things apply about simple things like screen geography or a sequence of events.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I just thought it was great.

**Craig:** Well, Herbert Case Hoagland reminds me of, I’m trying to remember the name, I think it was something Pritchard, the man who’s written the poetry textbook in Dead Poets Society. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Who, you know, has his chart of how to evaluate poetry. You can see here at the very beginning of Hollywood moviemaking the very well-intentioned desire to help creative people work in a very structured format. We’ve said it many times, screenwriting stands apart from all other artistic pursuits as something that requires artistic skill and creativity and yet is not meant to be actually appreciated by anyone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not meant to be read. It’s meant to be transformed into a movie. It’s a very specific thing. And so naturally everybody is trying to come up with ways to help you do that. However, we also see here the birth of a terrible, [laughs], and apparently long-standing tradition of reductionist thinking when it comes to screenwriting and the overabundance of rules and caveats and “it’s really simple, press A, pull tab B.”

This is the thing that screenwriters have struggled with forever and god knows how many questions we get that are of a “should I pull tab A or when,” you know, these questions of ” is the midpoint break that comes before the second and a half act pinch point necessary for the downward motion of the reversal?” And you just sit there going, oh, my god, just tell a story. Tell a story.

**John:** There’s a moment in the book where it talks about sort of scene geography and it all has to do with hats. And so, basically, like, if a man puts on his hat and takes his coat, the next shot needs to be of him like arriving in a different house, because otherwise if he puts on his hat and coat and he’s still walking in the house, we’re like, well, why is he walking in a house. He should have left the house.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s absurd and yet at that time you have to think about sort of what these movies were like at this point, that probably was actually good advice to some degree because we just weren’t sophisticated enough to sort of understand how these things could work. It was all just shot by shot by shot by shot.

I also love that in the sense of like things never change. Here’s his warning about submitting your work to different places. He says, “Don’t send biblical stories to a manufacturer who makes the specialty of Western stuff. Study the needs of the firms producing pictures and direct your scenarios accordingly. On another page, the class of a story might be sought by the different studios it has touched up. And ambitious writers cannot do better than to subscribe to the Moving Picture World or some other trade paper and carefully study the comments on the films that appear week by week.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, so there is the beginning of chase the market. [laughs]

**John:** Basically it’s like, read the trades, chase the market, but he’s also saying, know your buyer which is absolutely true.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, sure. No, of course, and at that time, in an era where there was even less information than was available to us when we were pre-Internet, it’s true.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There were companies that just concentrated on one kind of picture and to send them a screenplay for a different kind would be pointless. But even so, you know, it’s just classic. It’s just because every stupid thing that people are currently trying to charge you money for,[laughs], it turns out that Herbert Case Hoagland wrote those stupid things already in 1912.

**John:** Yeah, and 1912 was really fascinating because like that’s really genuinely the very, very beginning of anything we want to consider a motion picture industry. I think Birth of a Nation is 1914 if I’m right. So it’s really, things are just beginning here. You’re moving out of the sort of the Nickelodeon time into the kind of full-length movie and that there was already this kind of book I think is just fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah, like right there in the beginning there was somebody telling screenwriters what to do. [laughs] It’s just genius.

**John:** And it strikes me that a lot of times when you’re at the beginning of something, you know, you’re still kind of figuring out the rules of things, you’re figuring out sort of what stuff is like. And so, I could imagine like the early like how to make a webpage books would have almost exactly the same kind of things that seem really obvious or weird about like, you know —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t use blinking text and it’s like, well, you should never say that but of course you had to say that at that time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this, Hoagland had no idea what movies were going to become, and yet weirdly he sort of anticipated what aspiring screenwriters would be like and the questions they would ask.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the truth is what he did here is actually very impressive considering that it is 1912. What is sort of sad to me is that there are people in 2014 who are basically saying this stuff, the same stuff that is 102 years old.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But pretending that it’s interesting or insightful or worth spending money on. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just sad, sad.

**John:** As we close out here, I also want to, you know, point people towards archive.org because — so archive.org is the Internet archive. And basically, they take snapshots of websites over a period of time, so a lot of times if you go to a website and you can’t find, and you’re curious like what that website was like four years ago you can enter that same URL in archive.org and find what that was like. But they also have these other great sort of treasure trove of just old materials and things that have fallen out of copyright. And so I bless them for putting stuff like this up online where people can dig at it because it’s just great.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Next up is a less happy topic, Barry Levinson and his arbitration with the Writers Guild of America. We don’t know of course all the details on this but we know that this is about the Philip Roth novel The Humbling. And Barry Levinson wanted to share screenwriting credit with Buck Henry and Michal Zebede or Michael Zebede. I don’t know how he pronounces it. And there was an arbitration. Barry Levinson did not like the outcome of that arbitration and left the guild or went fi-core in the guild. But just basically, Craig, how do you define fi-core?

**Craig:** Well, financial core is a state of what you would call a financial core non-member. You are no longer technically a member of the union. You can’t vote on collective bargaining agreements. You can’t vote in elections. However, if you’re working in a close shop state like California, you’re still subject to the collective bargaining agreement, which is why “quitting the union,” and going fi-core kind of isn’t worth it because in the end here’s what happens: you still have to pay dues. Your dues are reduced by the amount of expense that the guild puts out towards things that are unrelated to collective bargaining which isn’t much. So instead of paying what you and I pay, you’d maybe pay 93% of that rate.

**John:** But, Craig, then you wouldn’t get Written By magazine.

**Craig:** Ah, you don’t get Written By magazine which is a huge, yeah, that would be a huge bummer obviously, [laughs], for those of you wondering with what you should line your cat box.

**John:** I guess you could still buy it at the newsstand. So there’s some…

**Craig:** Yes, you could buy it at the newsstand. And there’s a big call for that. But the really ironic part of this is that if you go financial core you are still subject to credit arbitrations.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This doesn’t get you out of credit arbitrations. It’s kind of crazy. I’m not really sure how — I understand if you are incredibly frustrated that you would want to take action or do something. The problem is when it comes to this there is in fact nothing you can do.

**John:** Yeah. So George Clooney I believe on Leathernecks left the guild or went fi-core in the same way.

**Craig:** That’s the rumor.

**John:** Out of frustration.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the frustration, but I don’t if that’s, I wouldn’t know the details in that situation either. And I bring, I sort of mention this because people asked me on Twitter about the whole situation and the arbitration. The only thing I would add to it is that having been through arbitrations and sat on arbitration panels basically been one of the people who’s deciding credit, I can almost guarantee that Levinson himself has never served as an arbiter because I think if he had he would have been really, really frustrated but he wouldn’t have gone fi-core.

Because having been an arbiter I can tell you it’s really, really hard and yet everyone I’ve ever encountered in an arbitration has worked really hard to do a great fair job. The arbiters don’t know the names of the people involved in the thing. You’re only reading writer A, writer B, writer C, writer D and things that might appear incredibly obvious to Levinson are not obvious to the arbiter because the arbiter is just looking at the words on the page. And that is a real difference.

I’ve been through arbitrations where I’ve sought credit and lost and been really, really frustrated and wished I could convince other people of the logic of like why the decision was wrong. And yet, having been an arbiter myself, I recognize that that’s just the way it goes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, when you look at the situation here, it’s important to understand that we’re hearing one side of the story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if you do arbitrations, one thing that becomes very evident is that writers are delusional about their — not always delusional but frequently delusional about the nature of their contribution to a script. Because as an arbiter you get the scripts but you also get the writer’s statements. And many times I’ve done an arbitration where I’ve had three different writers, each of whom are stating very clearly that they deserve sole credit and it’s obvious. And you just shake your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you read the scripts and realize, wow, two of these people are nuts. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of them is correct. So we’re hearing one side of this. And here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying that he didn’t get credit and what he’s angry about is that he asked to see the arbiter’s statements which is our right if you’re contemplating a policy review board. You can see the arbiter’s statements. And when he looked at those arbiter statements, he didn’t like what he saw particularly in one of them that denied him credit.

He thought that this person had written a “muddled critique that made no sense. It was just way too messy and inaccurate and I asked the board to have this person read the stuff again because I couldn’t see how this was a qualified judgment and they said no.” Well, you know, Barry Levinson’s opinion of the quality of that statement is not necessarily something upon which one can turn a system of jurisprudence.

I will say this, here are some things I don’t know. I don’t know, first of all, I don’t which guild administered this. The Writers Guild West tends to administer most of these things but in cases where a number of the writers are Writers Guild East members, the East may run it. I know that the West staff is really good about reviewing the arbiter statements and making sure that they comport with our rules.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We don’t have a guarantee that an individual arbiter is going to be a genius.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** The staff does try and not call writers who they think are just bad at it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t want that either because they don’t want this. They don’t want a story like this. There were some comments on Deadline that were predictably way, way wrong, just factually incorrect. Some people seem to think that directors faced some sort of 75% threshold in order to get credit. Now, directors are essentially treated like everyone else, especially now, we did change a few rules, so there’s no — they would be looked at the same way everybody would be looked at in the situation like this. It’s an adaptation. Everybody has to hit 33%. 33% was Barry Levinson’s threshold which obviously is a guideline because there’s no such thing as a percentage like you’d actually figure out.

And two of three arbiters thought that he didn’t. Some people thought that the arbiters should be allowed to talk with each other and that it’s not fair that they don’t. They do talk to each other —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In a case like this, again, that was a change that we instituted. So if it’s not a unanimous decision, they talk. They have a teleconference in which anonymity is maintained and they discuss it. And if they can’t — if at that point they are still not unanimous but two of the three agree on something then that’s that.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He doesn’t like this decision. I get it. He thinks one of these arbiters was a knucklehead. He might be right. I don’t know. All I do know is that he’s gone financial core and that changes truly nothing, not even for him. I wish that he had thought to do what I did when I got a credit decision that I thought was terrible. I decided to run for the board. I decided to form a committee. I decided to change the rules. I did change the rules. I decided to do it again. I did do it again.

I actually did the work. Oh, and I served as an arbiter. And Barry Levinson apparently has decided that in his union, if he doesn’t immediately get what he wants or what he perceives as fair, the only recourse is to quit. And, frankly, I just find that to be babyish.

If you’re on a boat and you see a leak in the boat and everyone is telling you it’s not leaking, fix the leak anyway. Convince them. Don’t just jump off the boat and swim away. It’s stupid. It just doesn’t do anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I get frustrated sometimes with this attitude of like, “Oh, my union did this to me.” There is no union. There is just a bunch of people. That’s it. We’re all in this together or we’re not, you know.

**John:** Yeah. People do bring up the idea of like a director has different qualifications for it. And so, what I want to stress is that this is an adaptation, this is the rules are set up in a way that the director only has to hit 33% just like any other writer. What is different about a director in an arbitration situation is the director, correct me if I’m wrong, Craig, it’s an automatic arbitration situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** So, because he is a director or a producer on the film, it has to go to arbitration. There’s no sort of just like everyone just shakes hands and agrees on it. It has to be arbitrated.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was another thing a few people got wrong on the Deadline comments. There is no situation here where the writers could have all agreed amongst themselves. And that rule has been there since the very beginning and it’s a good rule and no one has ever really convincingly challenged its value. And the idea being if you have one writer who has the ability to hire and fire other writers, then it makes sense that you would want to just essentially require an arbitration to avoid situations where a powerful director who holds somebody’s economic life in their hands saying, “I think we should all agree that I should be credited here.”

**John:** Yeah, you don’t want that at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But in other cases where no one is production executive or a director on the project, you can actually all as writers talk and there’ve been many cases where I have talked with the other writers and we’ve figured it out ourselves and has not had to go to arbitration. And in many ways, that’s the best scenario where you actually just figure it out and people end up feeling happier about it because of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s exactly right. And even in situations where there is no automatic arbitration or there is an arbitration where there are five writers and four of them agree and one doesn’t, you can also write joint statements.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or statements in support of each other. There is no reason that this is necessarily as combative as people think. What ends up happening in these situations is everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts screaming about how this system is imperfect and they are absolutely correct. It is imperfect. The thing that I hear most from people who have gone through this and with which I completely agree is that we would be better off if we weren’t serving as arbiters for each other or at least or at least solely comprising the arbiters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We would be better off if there were some independent voices in there who were the kind of people that are routinely called as dramaturgical and literary experts in plagiarism cases or infringement cases in courts of law to help make these decisions because, frankly, knowing how to write a script is not the same Venn oval as knowing how to analyze components of literary contributions. It’s just a totally different skill. And, frankly, the other problem with our system is we’re busy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And with fewer and fewer screenwriters working, the idea that, you know, you’d want your jury pool to mostly be made up of people that are writing screenplays and active screenwriters and we’re busy and sometimes these arbitrations come in and they’re asking you to read eight drafts and a novel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s just — it’s a burden. They’re desperate, constantly searching for people to do these things. It’s rough.

**John:** I got two calls this last week about arbitrations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I couldn’t. I’m too busy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s also partly because it’s TV time. And so because the TV shows are being picked up and announced, those credits are having to be figured out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not a fun thing to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right, to our next thing. Several people wrote in with this kind of cool animated chart called the Periodic Table of Storytelling, or at least I thought it was cool. So basically it takes a bunch of tropes and ideas that exist in storytelling, various forms, largely cinema but also sort of general storytelling and kind of rearrange them into a chart that looks like a periodic table.

And the general categories which would be sort of the, you know, the columns on this chart are things about structure, settings, story modifiers, plot devices, heroes, character modifiers, archetypes, villains, meta tropes, production and fandom and audience reactions. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes because it’s a fun timewaster for awhile.

Two of the things I really enjoyed on this chart were Flanderization, and Flanderization is defined as, this is obviously Ned Flanders, but it’s when you take characters that are kind of normal and then over time you exaggerate qualities in him so much that he doesn’t resemble a normal person at all anymore. So in the case of Flanders, he was just like sort of the nice neighbor next door. And then they made him a little Christian, then a lot Christian, and then he ended up being sort of super-crazy Christian. And that’s just the arc that that character sort of took over time.

The other thing I liked was what they call the anthropic principle which in general the anthropic principle is that we are perfectly suited for the earth because if we weren’t perfectly suited for the earth we wouldn’t be here. Story-wise, the story equivalent of that is what we really call the “buy” is that like if it weren’t for this thing there wouldn’t even be a movie. So you’re willing to take as a given one or two things about the nature of this world because if it weren’t for these one or two things there wouldn’t be a story.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a cool chart. I mean, it’s very thorough.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s got a ton of stuff in it. I, from the point of view of somebody that tries to write things, I never really — these things I just find more amusing. It’s really, they are what they seem to be more than anything is a fan’s compendium of stuff they’ve noticed. But I don’t, I wouldn’t see any value here to somebody that was actually trying to write something.

It’s just more of a — it just feels like a very, [laughs,] I say Aspergers all the time. And I don’t want people to think like Aspergers is bad. Aspergers is awesome actually. I mean, people with Aspergers basically save our lives and, you know, figure out every bit of technology in our lives. But this is a little Aspergersy to me in a way that’s maybe not that useful.

**John:** Well, what I find useful is there are certain things on here that I will throw out in sort of casual conversation and then I will recognize that people don’t actually know what I’m talking about. So Chekhov’s Gun is an example of that and there’s a good entry on Chekhov’s Gun. And actually I should say that all the entries actually link back to TV Tropes which is a great way to waste about six hours of time just going through TV Tropes. Like Chekhov’s Gun which is a classic example of like if you establish a gun on the wall early in the story that gun has to go off or else everyone is going to be frustrated.

I think those are important things for writers to know and having a shorthand like Chekhov’s Gun is a good way of talking about like why something isn’t working right or why setting an expectation that is not fully met.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure. Yeah, look, Chekhov’s Gun was described by Chekhov.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there are things that are literary notions that have been given to us by great writers and I always think those are useful and we should know those things. But here, I think it may be a little bit lost in some other stuff. I mean, I got a little suspicious when the, you know, now they start combining these periodic story elements into molecules that are, you know, movies or episodes of things and the examples are Star Wars, Mass Effect, Dilbert, Avatar: The Last Airbender, My Little Pony, Here Come the Bronies, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann which I assume is something anime, Firefly, Death Note, Wall-E and Ghostbusters. That’s some hardcore cheese doodle stain nerdism there. And I love almost all of those things. Not the Bronies stuff, but I love almost all that stuff. I just feel like this is a bit too , it’s a bit too dorky for me I have to say. And I love chemistry. I love the actual periodic table. I love writing. This actually drifted into just too dorky for me. I apologize.

**John:** Well, let’s step away from that chart to another chart because I was up in Seattle this last weekend. And Seattle by the way is awesome. So if you live in Seattle, congratulations. You live in an awesome town. So at the Experience Music Project, EMP, the big museum, they have great music exhibits but they also have like a lot of other really cool stuff there and two of the ones we went through were archetypes of fantasy and then there’s also a sci-fi, horror section. These are all sort of down in the basement and they are fantastic.

In the archetypes of fantasy, they had very nice, both animated on screen but also sort of as you walk through displays set up talking about the different sort of archetypes of fantasy you see in everything from Game of Thrones to Harry Potter to The Wizard of Oz, like sort of all these kind of things.

And I’ll include a link to a photo I took sort of that shows a chart of how many, 20 different archetypes they have, from the night to the shadow, to the unlikely hero, to the hero’s muse. And when you look at it just as little charts it’s like, well, yes, okay, that’s a thing. But what’s so smart about the exhibit is they actually then took a look at like who are those kind of characters in actual stories.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it makes it real for people when they see like, oh, okay, that character is — like Robin Hood is that type, but also Han Solo is that type. And the sense of the commonalities we see across our sort of mythic stories. In some ways it may be a little bit more useful for the person who is writing a movie to really think about these characters and the kinds of roles they could play.

Again, not in a prescriptive way, like you have to have the barbarian face off with the trickster, but a way of thinking about what functions are your characters serving in your story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there’s lots of good stuff there out in the world that delves into this topic of commonalities between stories and narrative. I mean, narrative is just a — all narrative is is a symptom of being human. So, naturally there should be these archetypal things because there’s stuff in all of us that’s archetypal. You have fear, and bravery, and honor, and justice, and all these things that then emerge in the forms of people, flat characters, or complicated characters.

You should read those things. Look, everyone will tell you you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, and I always think, well, yeah, that’s great. You should. I mean, watch The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but — the thing he did with Moyer. But, read the myths. You know, when I was a kid I went through a phase where I just did nothing but read Greek myth.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was awesome. You read those myths and you start getting pure undiluted narrative because that’s what that stuff is.

**John:** Yeah. I went through a very hardcore mythology phase, actually probably a couple of phases. There was one in sort of early elementary school. It hit again later, and then sort of got into my Bulfinch’s Mythology in sort of late junior high/high school. And what’s fascinating about when you actually go back and really look at the myths is like there’s so much overlap and so many, like, you know, it’s almost like fandom or sort of like competing versions of how things fit together, like Demeter, and Ceres, and Persephone, and the underworld. It’s different kind of every time. And so there’s so many versions of what that story is. There’s no one completely archetypal true version of like what that thing is.

And in some ways seeing the multiple telling of it and how they different they all were sort of gives you permission as a storyteller to really think about what are the other ways I can tell this kind of story. And what is common between all of these versions of what is so different between all of these versions.

**Craig:** The New Testament is —

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Is basically that. It’s Rashomon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just that everybody agrees that Jesus was awesome. But Bulfinch’s Mythology is — that’s a book that should be on every writer’s bookshelf. Every writer should read Bulfinch’s Mythology.

**John:** At Barnes & Noble a couple weeks ago I bought myself, they have these really nicely bound special bound versions of The Great Tales of Mythology. It’s not a Bulfinch’s, but it’s a good mythology reader. And then the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I’d never actually read through Grimm’s Fairy Tales and basically never fall in love because you’re going to die is essentially what you sort of learn.

**Craig:** They’re grim.

**John:** They are in fact grim. What’s also so fascinating about Grimm’s Fairy Tales I discovered is that almost, at least half of them in the first few sentences there will be like some throwaway random thing about his father was a bull, blah, blah, blah. And it just keeps going on. Or like there will be a curse that’s set up that’s never actually paid off. It’s really weird to sort of notice which of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales have sort of survived into modern culture and which ones are just like, “I’ve never heard of that one before and I can see why.”

**Craig:** [laughs] It didn’t work out. The Brothers Grimm collected these stories, basically German peasant stories. And I had a roommate in college, not Ted Cruz, but my friend Eric Leech whose mother was German and she had given him at one point a book, a German book of those old stories and along with these illustrations. And children were constantly being injured on purpose or as a result of their misbehavior.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** They would lose their fingers and blood would spurt out. The stores, I mean, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were in a race to harm as many children as possible. [laughs] It’s horrible.

**John:** What I also found so fascinating about the Grimm’s Tales is that so rarely do you actually see — in Grimm’s Tales it’s actually kind of rare for its protagonist to take an action that saves him or herself.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** More likely it’s that somebody takes pity on them and then marries them. Or someone else basically rescues them in so many of the stories in a way that’s a little disappointing.

**Craig:** Well, they are there to serve a social construction that was, I guess, important at the time, or necessary to survival. But how many of those old stories involved stepmothers? Stepmothers were this enormous problem apparent, [laughs], that just asshole stepmothers.

**John:** I was looking in the introductory pages of this book, whatever the scholar was who was setting stuff up. He explains that stepmothers are actually sort of a bad translation of what the real concept is here. So, sometimes it was really just bad mothers, or second mothers, or stepmothers, or just other women who were around. But because in English we just have the word “stepmother,” we always take it to mean the woman who came in after mom died. And that’s not necessarily always what it was supposed to be in the Grimm’s stories.

**Craig:** Ah-ha!

**John:** Ah-ha! The same way that I think French has different words for like a cousin on your mom’s side and a cousin on your dad’s side. I may be making that up, but like different cultures describe relationships differently. And so we have the word stepmother, but there’s actually more subtle ways to talk about some of these things in other languages.

**Craig:** Well, look, as long as some kid gets his nose chopped off by a woodsman’s ax then I’m satisfied.

**John:** I am satisfied as well.

So, this last week, maybe it was two weeks ago, there was a New York Times piece called Memos to Hollywood. And the conceit behind it, which is not actually at all true, but the conceit behind it would be that A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis and other critics at the New York Times were writing emails to different people and they were just going to print what the emails were.

Well, one of them I found really fascinating because it actually touched on something that I never really considered. Or, I guess I considered it in the back of my head but never thought this could be real problem. So, I’m going to read one from Manohla Dargis. It’s directed to two directors. She writes:

“Do you know that, increasingly, your labor of love — the movie you spent months and probably years of your life on — is being reviewed by critics who are watching it on their computers? For years, the cost of striking and shipping film prints as well as renting theaters for press screenings led cash-strapped companies to simply supply DVDs to reviewers. Some reviewers have been happy to comply, and of course, the blurring between the big- and small-screen viewing, and the closing of theatrical windows, hasn’t helped. After all, if a movie is being released in theaters and on demand the same day, why bother watching it on the big screen ó or so the bottom-line thinking goes.

“These days, though, some companies don’t even bother to send critics DVDs: They’re only supplying Internet links that often have the reviewer’s name watermarked on the crummy-looking image, and even come with distracting time codes. So that moody shot that you and your director of photography anguished over for hours and hours? It may look beautiful, but there are critics who will never know, which certainly encourages them to pay more attention to the plot than the visuals. Viewers who bypass the theatrical experience and prefer watching movies on their televisions and tablets may not mind. Some directors, especially those whose talking heads and two shots look better on small screens, also won’t care; others just want their work seen however, wherever. But I bet there are directors who would freak if they knew how some critics were watching their movies.”

And, yeah, I think they really would. I’ve seen some of those sites, like I remember for Star Trek when we did — I did a panel at the Academy and we had a clip from the second Star Trek movie. And so they sent me a link that had like my name burned into it so I could just watch it ahead of time. If I had watched the whole movie that way I would not have liked it the same way I liked it when I saw it in the theater.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you are trying — if you care enough to send a movie to film critic I guess you care enough about their review, then you should send them a nice looking thing. That said, no one actually cares what they think. [laughs] The directors do, but the studios don’t.

When she says “cash-strapped companies are simply supplying DVDs to reviewers,” they’re not cash-strapped. They don’t care Manohla, they don’t care what you think. They don’t care what A.O. Scott thinks. They don’t care what any reviewer thinks whatsoever. They know perfectly well that when they have a movie that they think critics need to discover and love in order to get people to go, trust me, you’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice copy of it somehow or another. They’ll care.

But if it’s Star Trek, I mean, they couldn’t give a damn what you think. And, you know, these memos John —

**John:** Oh, I’m going to disagree with you strongly there. I guarantee you J.J. Abrams would not —

**Craig:** No, J.J. Abrams does. I’m not talking about J.J. Abrams. I agree, the directors would freak out. I’m talking about the people that are actually sending them, which is the studio, the bean counters, and the distribution and marketing and publicity departments. They don’t care. They don’t care.

**John:** I think that’s why this memo is directed towards directors. I think the fact is that a director might not even know that this is happening —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And this is pointing out that you really, in many cases you really don’t want that to happen. Now, I think there’s also some logic to some cases it doesn’t really matter. And there are movies that are coming out on TV at the same time and for those people maybe it’s fine to just provide the link because it may be the difference between getting your review and not getting your review at all. You probably want a review for a small indie film, something like, you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Short Term 12. That’s the movie that you want to make sure it gets reviewed. You send a link, you’ll do whatever just to get them to watch the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and look, she points out — it’s a bit dismissive about movies that are talking heads, so apparently talking heads are bad unless I suppose it’s My Dinner with Andre in which it’s great. Look, you know, I read this — I read the whole thing. I read this whole thing. And I just kept laughing the whole time. It’s like two people that truly have no idea that nobody gave a damn what they think, going at length in America’s “paper of record” about how people should be listening to them. And they’re writing these memos to people that just don’t care.

We don’t care. I mean, listen, directors should want anyone, not just critics, anyone to see a nice version of their movie. Of course. And, you know, I don’t know — I know that these people go on these junkets. I’d rather frankly have a reviewer, if it were up to me, watch the movie on their own than watch it in a room with all of these other critics and their weird herd-like junkets as they convince each other that something is good or bad.

But nobody really cares. I mean, these people are writing these memos about superhero movies like anyone cares. [laughs] And then they’re writing letters to their fellow movie critics complaining about them. This is such a critic’s thing. Let’s just talk about stuff we don’t understand and complain about it. They literally don’t know what they’re talking about, John.

**John:** I was surprised you took so much umbrage here. Really. Genuinely. Because I was going to save that thing they read about the superhero movies for our superhero show. But, obviously now we can’t do that, so I’ll have to find another way to make you angry.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s just…these people…they write:

To: Television

Cc: Movies

Subject: Get over yourselves

And then this nonsense about movie and television and how one, oh, “Current conventional wisdom holds that television has entered a golden age while movies are in a period of decline. Those are dubious notions…”

Nobody cares. Shut up. Just watch the television you like. And watch the movies you like. And stop talking about this nonsense. Nobody cares. These people, my god, is there any naval too small for them to not gaze at?

Thank you.

**John:** [laughs] Next, a question from Twitter. Bobby Bearly wrote in, and I don’t have his actual tweet so I’m just going to summarize what his tweet asked, which is, “How do you keep secrets from your readers in a script,” which is a question we haven’t really talked about on the show.

And so I think what Bobby’s referring to is there will be sometimes where there’s going to be a reveal in a movie, but the reveal in the movie isn’t going to make the same kind of sense on the page. And sometimes it will be about who a character really is, what somebody looks like, and that it’s really the same person the whole time through.

And so how do you do that in terms of what are the words on the page to show that you’re keeping a secret there. And are you in some way violating the trust of the reader by not being upfront about what was happening there?

**Craig:** Well, we’re supposed to violate trust to some extent. The existence of a movie is already the violation of a trust because you are portraying events to somebody as if they are happening in real time, or happening linearly, when in fact you who are presenting these things know exactly how this ends.

The entire thing is a betrayal of trust.

When it comes to secrets, tricks, gimmicks, twists, reveals, there are two things to keep in mind. The first is you cannot get away with the following statement: I know my movie seems really boring for 50 pages, but then when the big secret happens it will all make sense and be cool.

No. We were just bored for 50 minutes. You cannot use twist or revelation as an excuse for everything prior to that twist or revelation being boring. In fact, the reason that good twists and good reveals are so exciting is because they shock an audience who has been enjoying what they’ve been watching without it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club, very famous and somewhat recent examples of movies that have big twists, are remarkably enjoyable on their own terms prior to that twist.

**John:** Exactly. So, I think both Fight Club and Sixth Sense though bring up interesting issues about what you actually put on the page, because in both those cases — especially Sixth Sense — you want to make it clear that Bruce Willis is not actually touching anybody else.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And portraying that on the page can be really crucial and yet you don’t want to tip it too far. And so it’s one of those things where like with a camera you would do it a certain way. With just words on the page it’s sort of harder to show what the nature of that —

**Craig:** It’s tricky.

**John:** That physical geography is. The other case which comes up quite often is — and I guess this is Fight Club to some degree — but where you’re going to see like a shadowy figure and then ultimately down the road you’re going to reveal who that person really is. It’s the degree to which a screenplay is a plan for shooting a movie. Well, that character was in these scenes all this time and we shouldn’t see him. And so usually you develop some sort of terminology for what that thing is, what that character is, like the man with the gray coat. And then eventually you will reveal the man in the gray coat is actually this person, this other character who we’ve been seeing the whole time through. Like, Susan is the man in the gray coat. There’s going to be that reveal later on.

On screen we’re going to see that. On the page, sometimes that’s actually a little harder to catch. And so that’s one of those cases where if you’ve been conservative and not bolded or underlined things, this is the time to break out and actually bold or underline something so the reader is caught up with where a viewer would be, so they really can sense like, “Oh my god, they’re actually the same person.”

**Craig:** Yeah. You want to, as you’re going through we’ll call your — there’s the pre-twist and then there’s the moment of the twist. Your pre-twist stuff you have to make sure that when the reader goes backwards, and they often will — they’ll get to the twist and they’ll go, “What? Hold on a second.” Then they’ll go back because they think they’ve caught you in a mistake.

You want to have covered your tracks well. So, in Fight Club there’s a scene where the main character is acting as an interloper in an argument between Tyler Durden and Tyler Durden’s girlfriend. And then Tyler Durden is at the bottom of the stairs in a basement and she’s in the kitchen and, in fact, if you go back and look at how that scene plays out and how it would be written you would go, “Oh my god, oh, my god, it actually works with that.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you want to be careful about all of that stuff. The moment of the twist when you write the twist and you make the reveal you use the page. Give yourself page space. Let it really sink in. Make a deal of it. Use white space.

If you feel like putting nothing on that page except the reveal, do that. The page will show the emphasis. And use that space creatively, otherwise it’ll just be another action description. People will just literally go, “Oh, well I guess it’s as important as the fact that somebody walked into the room with his hat.”

**John:** Ah-ha! All right. We have a question from David Dunne who writes, “Part one, I don’t currently have an agent but my so-so manager of a few years has given me notes on a few different scripts and they sucked.” I assume the notes sucked, not the script sucks.

“He offered vague generalities, better this, bigger that, not feeling this/that, and virtually nothing constructive. I like this but take it further. Dig deeper here. This character is interesting but flat.

“So how much of his inability to give useful notes weigh in my decision to drop or keep him? If he were an all-star maybe I would overlook the shortcoming. We’re talking just so-so here.

“A related part of the question. A good friend sold a cable network show that’s going and he wants me on his staff. Should I drop the manager before joining, or if I keep him should he get a fee? How do you handle this in the most professional way?”

**Craig:** [sighs] Well, let’s run down the facts. Your manager is, as you call him or her, so-so.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All we have to judge is the behavior you’ve given us which is that his notes are bad, at which point my argument would be they’re not so-so, they’re bad. But either way it doesn’t sound like you’re getting anything out of this relationship. How important is it to have a manager who gives you good notes? It’s as important to you as it is. If you want a manager to get you work and you don’t care what they think about your script then it doesn’t matter. If you’re looking for somebody to help you grow and get better, then it does. And it sounds like that’s what you’re looking for.

You have somebody that’s offering you a job. And you don’t like your manager and you think they give you bad notes and this manager didn’t get you this job. My advice would of course be to fire the manager. [laughs] He’s done nothing.

**John:** When Craig Mazin wakes up in the morning he sits up, he says, “Fire your manager.” It’s your first instinct for everything, right?

**Craig:** I mean, normally, yeah. A lot of times people ask a question, like the prior question was about how to handle a secret in a screenplay. And my answer, my instinctive answer is, “Fire your manager.” But I control that.

**John:** [laughs] You do. But your second answer I thought was better in that case.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I want to go back and stick up for the manager just a tiny bit, but then ultimately I’m with you. Managers can serve two functions. There can be managers who are really good at helping you get your writing to the best state and they can sort of serve as a proxy for like what a producer might think. They could be reading every draft. They can sort of help you get your stuff in the best shape.

And there are some managers who do that who are really good. Not a lot of them, but there are some of them, and that can be useful.

A manager can also help you get work. And that sounds more like what you were using this manager for, hopefully, but in this case the manager didn’t get you work. It sounds like you weren’t working. It sounds like this friend is going to hire you on a show independent of what the manager did. So, I would also fire your manager. And then wait a few weeks and then sign on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. No brainer to me. I mean, he even says he’s not a super star. My guess is this is a marginal — there are so many of these people on the margins of Hollywood who, if you think about it, they’re posing as experts in the thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not. So, it’s a bit like you’ walking around with a festering wound and you like in a town where the way you know someone is a doctor is that they call themselves doctor. And these people call themselves managers. That word means nothing. It means that they can afford letterhead.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And we don’t even know if they can afford letterhead. That may just be credit card debt.

**John:** Yeah. It’s all emails now anyway.

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

**John:** So, yes, we think you should fire your manager in the part one of the question. And then in the part two of your question, if you’re going to get this job staffed on a TV show, congratulations. Once you’re on board there that might be a great time to look for an agent because agents love people who work and who get hired to work. And if you are working on a TV show then you are by definition a working writer. And that might be a very good way for you to get started with an actual agent.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** Our next topic in our big, multi-tab episode, I want to talk about Big Fish and sort of what happens to a Broadway after Broadway.

So, Big Fish closed right at the end of the year and in the time since then we’ve had the cast album come out. But we’ve also started to announce that there’s actually a bunch of stagings of Big Fish happening this next year. I think there are 20 announced so far. The biggest one for Southern California, Long Beach actually bought out all of our costumes and props and things like that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And so they’re doing a big production here.

**Craig:** Including the elephant butts?

**John:** I think they bought the elephant butts.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I’m not sure on the elephant butts. Those are pretty big, but they bought stuff. So, I hope they have that, too.

So, that’s going to be kind of more like the Broadway version of the show. So, it’s like what you might have seen on the main stage on Broadway. We’re also going to be doing, the only one that Andrew and I are going to be sort of directly involved in is we’re doing a new staging in Boston at the Speakeasy Theater which is a really stripped down sort of 12 chairs, maybe no sets kind of version. We’re both going in and rewriting stuff designed to bring it down to a much smaller cast, a much smaller orchestra, which is actually really exciting. I get a chance to do that, again.

What’s so odd about this process is that I’ve done film and I’ve done television, and in film and television once something is done it’s just kind of done. You might go to a retrospective screening of Go or you’ll be flipping through channels and you’ll see the Big Fish movie on HBO, which is there a lot, but you’re sort of done. And weirdly here you’re not just done because Andrew and I control copyright on Big Fish and so everyone who wants to do a future version of Big Fish comes to me and Andrew and says, “Hey, I want to put on your show,” and we get to say yes or no.

And we sort of made the decision to just say yes a lot, like a lot a lot. And so we’re licensing it to these bigger places like the Speakeasy and in Long Beach, but also there are high schools that are going to be doing it next fall.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s great.

**John:** There’s religious groups that are doing it. There are churches. And I won’t see most of these productions, but it’s fascinating to think that these things are going to exist sort of independently of me. It’s kind of cool.

**Craig:** That is cool. I really like that you guys are opening it up to high school productions because both of my kids are big — they’re really involved in musical theater and they love it. And you do tend to get the same kind of thing happening in high school productions. And rarely do you get something that’s new, because if it’s new typically the rights holders want to kind of exploit the higher end of it, or they jack up the rates to such that high schools can’t really afford it.

For instance, Jack’s school was going to do Cinderella, which is an old play.

**John:** Yeah, it’s been out so it’s more expensive.

**Craig:** But now suddenly because it was revived they couldn’t afford it. They just couldn’t afford it, so they had to go to Once Upon a Mattress, which is about as overdone a high school production as you can get. I mean, it’s fun. Don’t get me wrong, and they did a great job, but Once Upon a Mattress is right up there with Fiddler on the Roof which my daughter will be in, [laughs], in a couple weeks.

So, it’s nice to see something fresh and new with modern music and interesting themes and storytelling, you know, and hopefully you can get out to some of those churches, John. [laughs]

**John:** I’m very excited. So, Liberty University is actually doing a Big Fish —

**Craig:** Wait, I’m sorry, hold on. You guys, the two of you —

**John:** Us. The two of us.

**Craig:** The two of you licensed your show to Liberty University?

**John:** We did.

**Craig:** I’m against this.

**John:** I didn’t even know that it happened until it happened. But I’m actually kind of excited. I honestly feel like Big Fish is the kind of show like we could probably run in Branson, Missouri for a good long time.

**Craig:** Well, you could. But, I mean, I just have to ask the question — I mean, was there at no point did you guys say, “We’re licensing our production to an institution that is just like off the charts homophobic?”

**John:** Uh, you know, it honestly happened, but like I found out that it was happening after I think the deal had already been signed. So, I’ll give you a little more backstory as to what the actual process is like. So, people can come to me or Andrew but we would ultimately say like, “That’s fantastic that you want to do it. Here’s where you go.” And so it’s a company called TRW who does the licensing for this show and a lot of other shows.

And so they’re ultimately the ones that are doing it. And so in our initial conversations with TRW about the places we were excited to see it, we really strongly — or I, I guess honestly I’ll put this on me — I strongly stressed that I really think the religious community will dig this show and will probably like it a lot. And so I said Utah and the South. And so they took me at my word and we have a staging in Orem, Utah and we have a couple stagings in the South.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, we have like Abilene Christian University and Liberty University. And then here is the thing: I’m not quite convinced it’s actually Liberty University. It’s the center that is next to their campus, but it may not actually be part of the campus itself. The website is not Liberty University.

**Craig:** Oh, well, those people love gay folks. [laughs] Oh, the people next door to Liberty University.

**John:** Oh, they love them. It’s just the best scenario.

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

**John:** But in a weird way I feel — I feel kind of okay with that. It’s hard for me to explain why, but it’s just the show should work for people of , you know, across the board.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s no question about that. It’s a very family friendly show and it’s a very kind of wholesome, I mean, the word wholesome comes to mind. It’s about small town America in the ’50s and ’60s, that kind of idyllic time that a lot of socially conservative people yearn for.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, there’s no question it will work for them. But, you know, hey, look, I guess one way to think about it is that you are quietly putting some gay into Liberty University.

**John:** I think there’s already plenty of gay in Liberty University.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think you’re right!

**John:** So, just to wrap this up, so we’re finished on Broadway and while I would love to still be running on Broadway, it’s also sort of nice to put a little of it behind me on some stuff. We’re not quite done yet. We’re up for some Drama Desk Awards, which is great. I was especially — Kate Baldwin and Norbert Leo Butz who were so fantastic in the show, I was happy to see them get singled out for their great work.

And we’re actually up for best musical on Broadway.com, which is sort of the People’s Choice Awards of Broadway.

**Craig:** Oh, great.

**John:** So, there will be a link in the show notes. If you want to stuff the ballot box for Big Fish I won’t say no. And you can vote for Big Fish as Best Musical if you choose to.

**Craig:** You know, the People’s Choice Awards, that’s the only award I ever get.

**John:** [laughs] You and me, together at last.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** Let’s talk some One Cool Things. So, we’ve been going through, we had two earlier sessions where we talked through old One Cool Things. And we got up to number 80, so should we start?

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do it.

**John:** So, my number 80 was Unfinished Scripts which was a Twitter feed where it was sort of screenshots of terrible screenplays. And there is also Unfinished Screenplays which is the same idea. I’m not sure which one came first. They’re both kind of funny. I don’t really follow them much anymore, but I see them every once and awhile.

**Craig:** Yeah, mine was EyeWire which was a little web-based game that actually helped neurologists map the brain. I think they were rat brains, but still they’re trying to come up with a good map of that stuff. And I did that for awhile. It was fun. Then I stopped. But I think the idea was that you don’t play that every day. So, I had my time with it.

**John:** My number 81 was StageWrite for the iPad which was actually developed by the associate choreographer on Big Fish. And it is a way of keeping track of everyone on stage and sort of where they’re moving from set to set to set, to scene to scene to scene. And it’s great software for that. So, I don’t need to use it, because I’m not choreographing anything, but I see people using it still.

**Craig:** And mine was Kiva, which is a microloan website where you can essentially loan money to indigent people across the world, mostly in third world countries. And I still do that to this day. I basically have an amount that I just roll. And as people pay me back then I just roll it off to somebody else. And it’s a great thing to do. And I urge everybody to check it out at Kiva, I believe it’s Kiva.org. It’s super easy to do. And it’s a good thing.

**John:** My number 80 was Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger & Kenneth Cukier. It was a book I read. I liked it a lot when I read it. I liked it a fair amount when I read it and there’s been a lot more discussion of Big Data in the time since I remember reading that book. And sort of how much you can zero in on the individual person if you combine enough data sets and how that can be great but also troubling.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Motors Forum, along with the username FlasherZ who is an electrician. And I check in there all the time to get little bits of news and blurbs and stuff. Very useful. Very useful forum.

**John:** Hey, Craig, do you like your car?

**Craig:** It’s not really car, John. It’s everything. [laughs] It’s everything to me. Everything.

**John:** From your helpful forum I needed to point to my helpful forum, this is number 83, this Lifehacker post on using multiple audio inputs and outputs in OSX. And this came up because we had Derek Haas as a guest on the show and needed to be able to connect two microphones to my laptop and it was really confusing to figure out how to do that And god bless the internet that there was a little thing on how to do that.

**Craig:** Someone has thought of everything. Mine was the Animal Specialty Group which is an animal hospital in Glendale that saved the life of my dog who is currently prancing about in the yard as I speak. They are wonderful people. I hope to never have to see them again, but if I do they will be there for me.

**John:** My 84 was tips for singing the National Anthem which if you take nothing else is the lowest note you possibly can sing it should be the third note of the National Anthem. [sings] “Oh, say”…that say should be the lowest note you can possibly sing.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That way you have the range to be able to go to the top, hopefully.

**Craig:** The word that you should be afraid of is “glare.” And “the rockets’ red glare.” Glare will be the highest. If you don’t start low enough you will never get to glare.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Mine was BioShock Infinite. What a great game. I really enjoyed it. That — it’s funny, it ties back to our little twist conversation. There’s a huge reveal in it and frankly it was very complicated and I didn’t quite understand it at first. I needed to play through the game again really to appreciate it, which actually to me says they didn’t do that great of a job on that. It was almost too rich. You know, whereas the first BioShock when the twist happens everything suddenly kaboom in your head.

And yet also I have to say that the depth that Ken Levine provided through the game is — it’s essentially the most creatively and philosophically ambitious video game I’ve ever played on a console. It was really well done.

**John:** Mine for 85 was Ulysses III. It’s a Macintosh text editor. I like it but it’s not my go-to text editor. I use By Word most days.

**Craig:** Mine was That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC. Those guys are awesome. I still will occasionally amuse myself by just watching clips of those guys. They’re very, very funny.

**John:** My number 86 was the Internet K-Hole, which was a collection of photographs that this photographer woman has assembled on a website. And you cannot just not look at it. It’s just great. And it’s photos from sort of a punk rock lifestyle over 40 years maybe. It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Pretty cool. Mine is Slacker Radio. I use it every day in my car, also known as the Everything.

**John:** My 87 was Stag’s Leap, a book of poems by Sharon Olds. I still think about it. It’s actually a great collection of poems mostly about the disintegration of her marriage and just really brilliantly done.

**Craig:** Mine was ITER which is I think a French consortium coming up with a way to provide us with unlimited pollution-free energy. I’m pretty sure they’re still working on it. I’d love to see that happen.

**John:** Yeah, has that happened? That’s great. That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. I think they are still working on getting some bugs out.

**John:** My number 88 was FilmCraft Screenwriting by Tim Grierson. Tim Grierson did a series of books on screenwriting, on cinematography, and other things. And I’m actually in the book on screenwriting and it was a well put together book. It still sits on my coffee table. I think I’ve read the whole thing. But, I read my little part, so that counts.

**Craig:** That’s good. I had nothing that week.

**John:** [laughs] My number 89 was Scandal Revealed episode 221 from Matt Byrne.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you had so many.

**John:** There were so many. It was a weird episode. I don’t know why — basically all my old assistants are linked to different things.

**Craig:** And I had just a fact really that the LA Times reported that studios donated film set materials to Habitat for Humanity which is very cool. And also this was the first time that Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang did their American Heart Association thing where they offered to read your script to raise money for research into heart disease.

**John:** Great. Let’s stop there. Man, we got a lot of these.

**Craig:** What do you say —

**John:** We bang out ten a week we’ll get through them all.

**Craig:** This is like — this podcast had everything.

**John:** Lord.

**Craig:** I got upset. We covered like 100 topics. I don’t know if we should continue. [laughs]

**John:** I think we’re basically done. Although I have a One Cool Thing for this week.

**Craig:** Me too. What’s yours?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is, oh, you’re going to love this, Craig. You’re salivating.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** You’re going to love this so much.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** It is the WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand.

**Craig:** I mean, oh god.

**John:** So, it’s not for me, it’s for Stuart. Because Stuart who works downstairs, he works on a laptop and I see him slouching in his chair. I’m like, Stuart, that’s not good. He’s like, “I know it’s not good.” And so I said Stuart if I get you a stand for your laptop so you can stand up when you want to stand up, would you like that? He’s like, “Sure.”

And so I got it and I bought this one off Amazon. It was really good. He uses it right now.

**Craig:** He’s just shutting you up.

**John:** Well, he’s standing up while he’s shutting me up, so that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** I think you get more work out of Stuart if he’s in pain.

**John:** Ha! Crippled over in agony.

**Craig:** Yes. My, by the way, I’ve been playing Monument Valley a lot. It’s really, really good.

**John:** Isn’t that beautifully done?

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** Actually you can’t kind of play a lot because it’s really short.

**Craig:** Well, so I play a chapter and then I just put it down. So, I’ve spreading it out. But my One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS, as often is the case, called Sometimes You Die.

**John:** I’ve played Sometimes You Die. I thought it was great.

**Craig:** Really cool. It is very minimalist. The game play is — basically it’s a platform of sort, except sometimes you die. Sometimes you have to die. And when you die your little body, which is just a cursor, it’s just a carrot —

**John:** A square block.

**Craig:** A little square block. Your body is left behind and you can use your past dead bodies to get to where you need to go. But where the game is really kind of fascinating is in the sound of it and the look of it and the text on screen. It’s essentially saying what are you doing, why are you playing this?

And so in that regard it’s very, very cool. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

**John:** It reminded me a bit of portal, and not in the sense of like the fancy mechanics, but just the sense of kind of it’s talking back to you and it’s sort of — there’s a quality of existential doom to it that was actually quite fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think I played to the end but I’m not even sure if I’ve gotten to the end.

**Craig:** You haven’t because I did a little reading. I played to the end, too, but every time you play thought it you get a little thing. And the idea is that at some point you will have collected a couple of little super powers that allow you to play through the game without dying.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** So, I don’t know if I noticed when you played all the way through, now you’re allowed to turn your phone and your little carrot will — gravity will work on your carrot.

**John:** Ah, okay. So, now —

**Craig:** And then there’s another one later when you play through again where you get a pause button. So, there’s all these things that happen and the idea is eventually you can complete the game without dying.

**John:** That is genius. You’ve basically made a new game for me by telling me these secrets.

**Craig:** Voila.

**John:** And that’s our show. So, you can find links to things we talked about in the show notes which are at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. It’s also there where you can find transcripts for previous episodes. Just by the way, Craig, I had a listener who wrote into me on Twitter today who was thanking me for the transcripts because he’s deaf. And because he’s deaf the only way he can experience the podcast is through the transcripts. So, that was just really great that he took the time to write in.

You can listen to all of the back episodes, both on the site, the most recent 20, or the older ones you can find on scriptnotes.net. The ones that are on scriptnotes.net you can also find in the app, both for iOS and for Android. You search your applicable app store for those.

We have occasional bonus content things, so those show up if you’re subscriber to all the back episodes. Subscribing also gives you all back to episode number one when we didn’t know what we were doing.

We have a few of the USB drives left. They are at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Sam Worseldine.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** And if you have an outro that you’d like for us to play on the show, send it to us. Send us a link. Put it on SoundCloud and send us a link. We’d love to hear it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** If you have a question for Craig, you can find him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions like the one we answered today you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you are on iTunes just randomly and you want to leave us a comment or leave us a rating, go for it. Knock yourself out. It helps other people find the show. And that’s it.

Craig, next time I see you it will be the live show. I can’t wait.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Hey, hey John.

**John:** What’s up?

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Next time is going to be live.

**John:** It’s going to be amazing. You can see Craig Mazin do that voice live on stage.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Yeah. This is Craig. Yeah.

**John:** And he promises to dress the part, too.

**Craig:** [laughs] Always.

**John:** You don’t want to miss that experience.

**Craig:** Nothing is sexier than a 43-year-old man in J. Crew.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right. See you there.

**John:** Great. Thanks Craig. Bye.

Links:

* [Voting for the Live Three Page Challenge is open](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive) until May 14 at noon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* John’s blog post on [which apps screenwriters are using](http://johnaugust.com/2014/which-apps-are-screenwriters-using)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 141: [Uncomfortable Ambiguity, or Nobody Wants Me at their Orgy](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy)
* Matt Selman [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Selman)
* The Simpsons, Episode 492: The Book Job, on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job) and [Amazon Instant Video](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006B318N8/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* The Simpsons, Episode 266: The Trilogy of Error [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_of_Error)
* John’s blog post on [How to Write a Photoplay](http://johnaugust.com/2014/how-to-write-a-photoplay) and [the book on archive.org](https://archive.org/details/howtowritephotop00hoag)
* Deadline on [Barry Levinson leaving the WGA](http://www.deadline.com/2014/05/barry-levinson-quits-wga-over-sloppy-credit-arbitration-on-screen-version-of-philip-roths-the-humbling/)
* [The Periodic Table of Storytelling](http://designthroughstorytelling.net/periodic/)
* Seattle’s [Experience Music Project Museum](http://www.empmuseum.org/), and [John’s photo of the Archetypes of Fantasy chart](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/archetypes.jpg)
* Joseph Campbell’s [The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Collected Works](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1577315936/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), and his and Bill Moyers’ video series, [The Power of Myth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A4E8E1O/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Bulfinch’s Mythology](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1440426309/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Memos to Hollywood](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/movies/critics-weigh-in-on-patriarchy-and-the-vanished-film-print.html) from The New York Times
* Big Fish’s [upcoming shows](http://www.theatricalrights.com/big-fish)
* Vote now (for Big Fish!) for the [Broadway.com Audience Choice Awards](http://awards.broadway.com/buzz/2014/5/5/votebway-vote-now-for-the-winners-of-the-2014-broadwaycom-audience-choice-awards)
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* [WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand](http://www.uncagedergonomics.com/workez-executive/) and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B9HGHPU/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Sometimes You Die](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sometimes-you-die/id822701037?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Sam Worseldine ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

**Franklin Leonard:** Hello. My name is Franklin Leonard.

**Rawson Thurber:** Hi, my name is Rawson Thurber.

**Lindsay Doran:** My name is Lindsay Doran.

**Kelly Marcel:** Hey, I’m Kelly Marcel.

**Richard Kelly:** Hey, my name is Richard Kelly.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Hi. My name is Aline Brosh McKenna. And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

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

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

**John:** And this is the Holiday Edition of Scriptnotes. And I am so happy to have six of our favorite guests here with us tonight to talk about things that are —

**Craig:** They are, in fact, our six favorite guests.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** Not “of our.” These are our favorite guests.

**John:** Wow. Right now people are doing the calculations like, oh god, who got left off of this list.

**Craig:** Everybody that’s not here.

**John:** Wow. People are going to feel really bad about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we actually have, obviously you can tell, a lot of guests. We have three topics — that’s common for Scriptnotes. We have a microphone back there so we’re going to do a Q&A at the end of this. So, we have a lot to do tonight.

So I thought we wouldn’t dilly dally too much, Craig, unless you have some holiday topics you want to talk about.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wanted to talk about the eggnog situation.

**John:** Okay, let’s talk about some eggnog.

**Craig:** And how disgusting it is.

**John:** Yeah. I didn’t see you drinking any eggnog.

**Craig:** No. But I noticed people were nogging it up. Noggy mouths.

**John:** Okay, a show of hands. Who out there actually tasted the eggnog?

Oh my god, that was a lot. And so by applause who liked the eggnog?

Yeah. That’s only about half the audience who liked the eggnog. So, a lot of people tasted the eggnog and did not enjoy it.

**Craig:** Gross. It’s drinking mayonnaise. It’s disgusting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. I’m done with dilly dallying. Let’s go.

**John:** Craig has done his contribution to the weekly podcast. So, Craig…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pick on you.

**Craig:** No. That was accurate.

**John:** Yeah, I sort of nag on Craig and I shouldn’t. Actually that can be a resolution for the New Year is I won’t nag on you so much.

**Craig:** Don’t patronize me, August.

**John:** Because it is. Actually when I say I’m going to do nice things, it actually comes across as patronizing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because it is.

**John:** That’s how it is.

So, Craig, this will be our 123rd episode of Scriptnotes once this goes live on Tuesday, which is a lot. So, thank you all for listening.

And I realize while we talked about a lot of topics on the show, one of the things we never actually spoke about is what happens when people say yes. What happens when people say like, “Oh yeah, I really like your script. I want to buy your script.” We haven’t really talked about that process.

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems like all you do is hear no, no, no, no, no, no, and then one day you hear yes and it’s not the fake yes, it’s the real yes. And go out to dinner and you tell all your friends and you get drunk. And then the next morning you wake up and, oh no, here comes trouble.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff that happens when someone says yes. It’s a luxury problem, but let’s talk about some luxury problems. And who would be better to talk about luxury problems than Franklin Leonard. Come on back up here.

**Craig:** Impresario of the Black List.

**Franklin:** Hello. Hopefully I can get this part right since I screwed up the introduction.

**John:** No, don’t worry about it. We’ll do a take two and it will all be fine.

**Franklin:** Excellent. [Crosstalk]

**John:** Franklin Leonard, creator of the Black List, a person who deals with a lot of writers who are suddenly hot.

**Craig:** Suddenly hearing yes.

**Franklin:** That’s the hope, yes.

**John:** Our other guests for this segment would be Rawson Marshall Thurber.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Rawson Marshall Thurber who last time you were on the show you had this little indie film called We’re the Millers that ended up doing pretty well.

**Rawson:** Yeah. It did okay.

**John:** Yeah, you can set your wine anywhere. Don’t worry about that.

**Rawson:** Thank you. Sorry. Hi everybody.

**John:** Hi Rawson! So, Franklin let’s start with you because this year’s Black List just came out.

**Franklin:** It did. On Monday.

**John:** So, the Black List is an annual assessment of the scripts that development people liked the most. Is that —

**Franklin:** That is a perfectly accurate description. Yes.

**John:** And so talk to us about this year’s Black List. Were there any changes you noticed? What was the tenor of this year’s list?

**Franklin:** It was an odd list this year. I mean, I think fascinating subject matter. I’ll run through some numbers. There were two scripts about the making of Jaws. There were two scripts about Mr. Rogers. Two scripts written by identical twins, which I think is the first time that’s happened.

**Rawson:** That’s just cheating.

**Franklin:** I suppose it is. Right? It’s like two of the same brain generating one piece of material.

If there was a big trend I think it was bio pics. We saw a ton of adapted stories of a moment in a person’s life, with whom a lot of people are familiar.

**Craig:** We call that the Marcel.

**Franklin:** Ah, yes. Lots of Marcels. Are they as good as the original? Certainly not.

**Craig:** No. No. Maybe.

**Franklin:** I don’t know. I haven’t read them yet. There’s one about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing, which I’m particularly interested to read.

I think that was the big trend. But I think what’s really exciting as we’ve seen every year is that when you ask Hollywood development executives the scripts that they love, not the scripts that their boss loves, or the scripts that they think will make tons of money, it is a really eclectic list of really ambitious storytelling that very often succeeds in the execution of that ambition. And it’s not big four quadrant movies that don’t have a soul. It’s an attempt to do something that reminds us —

**Craig:** So there is a place for those.

**Franklin:** There is. No, there absolutely is. I’m a fan of those movies.

**Craig:** And everybody has a soul. But they still want to be entertained.

**John:** Now, how many of the scripts on the list this year are already set up someplace, like someone is trying to make this movie?

**Franklin:** A third of the scripts that were on the list this year already have a financier attached. About two-thirds have a producer attached. Leaving one-third having neither a producer or a financier.

**Craig:** Well, you know, when we think about the questions that we ask when we do a live show I’m always thinking about the folks that are here and coming up with questions that relate to where they are right now in time. And one thing I have to say, you know, I started out with the Black List where my position on it was “do not attack.”

**Franklin:** Which was still the greatest praise we’ve received so far.

**Craig:** But I really now am in favor of it. I am positively in favor of it.

**Franklin:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s a great service that’s getting results and I like to think that there are people here, there’s somebody here, if not one, two, maybe even ten, who are going to write a script that will get on the Black List, will get them noticed, and then someone is going to say yes.

**Franklin:** Yes.

**Craig:** When you see this happening and I think you are in an interesting position to see it happening to people that may not know what the hell is going on.

**Franklin:** Yes.

**Craig:** What happens? Tell them what they’re in for.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, look, I think it’s a case by case basis. But the way that the Black List website is set up, you know, someone downloads your script and reads it. And we sort of step aside at that point. We sort of joke about the website being eHarmony for people who make movies and people who write movies. And just like you won’t see that guy from the commercials at your wedding night being like, “Where’s my 10 percent?” you won’t see us after we make the connection.

So, a lot of times it can be an email out of the blue like, “Hi, I’m a producer at this company. I’m interested in talking more.” Or, “I’m an agent, I’d like to talk to you.”

And I think at that point, you know, get on the phone with them initially, and then I think trust-but-verify is probably a good rule of thumb. And then the other thing is we — our membership are all legitimate Hollywood people. Like if you’re getting an email from someone who says they read your script on the Black List, again, still trust-but-verify, but in all probability they are a legitimate person who can do something significant with your career, otherwise we wouldn’t have approved them for membership.

But, that’s actually a good time, especially if you develop relationships with other people in Hollywood, to then triangulate that information with them and say, “Hey, I just got a phone call from so-and-so. What do you know about this person? Would you like to read my script now that other people are interested?” I think taking advantage of that is always a good idea.

But I’m loathe to give blanket advice generally.

**Craig:** Yeah, but think specific now.

**Franklin:** But specifically in this case, I actually am loathe to, because I think it really does depend on each individual’s sort of circumstances and who it is that’s contacting them. But trust-but-verify is a good rule of thumb.

**John:** I want to just zoom in on that moment of someone says yes and they say we are going to make an offer on your script, because that’s a moment that sort of gets every writer’s heart pitter pattering. But what does an offer really mean and what is it that you would actually do when that situation happens?

So, Rawson, I remember you were working for me when Dodgeball sold. That was your first script sale —

**Craig:** You were like, “I’m out of here, August. Oh, up this.”

**Rawson:** “I never liked you!”

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait for my turn.

**Rawson:** What did you say?

**Craig:** I said I can’t wait to also tell him I don’t like him at all.

**John:** Ah-ha!

**Rawson:** “I quit this podcast!”

**John:** Indeed. You need to direct like two big successful movies and then you’re totally free to do that, Craig.

**Craig:** Wow. Beat me down.

**Rawson:** Instead of write like half a dozen successful movies.

**John:** So, Rawson, what were those last — the last week, the last day, the last hours. Tell me what that feels like.

**Rawson:** I don’t know. I guess I’d always hoped it was going to be that. Like, you know, the balloons would fall from the ceiling and you’d get hit in the face with confetti. And then someone would hand you a big novelty check and you give everybody the middle finger and you’re gone.

But never, at least for me and for most people that I’ve talked to about this, it doesn’t really — it doesn’t usually happen that way.

**John:** So, Dodgeball, this was Ben Stiller’s company became attached to do it. And they made a deal at Fox because their deal was at Fox. There was like a competitive situation for that.

**Rawson:** Right, well it’s significantly worse than that. [laughs] Lots of stuff happened beforehand. Everybody sort of passed on it. And then we sent it to Ben’s company, Red Hour, and the receptionist there, Will, read it and liked it, who gave it to the junior executive, who read it and liked it, who gave it to Stuart Cornfeld, Ben Stiller’s producing partner, who read it and liked it, who gave it to Ben, who read it and liked it, who met me and liked me.

And then they — well Red Hour, his company, had just left 20th Century Fox and had just made a deal with DreamWorks. And DreamWorks said, “Look, we don’t really get it, but we just made this deal with you. And we want to start off on the right foot. So, here you go, here’s…”

I mean, I think it was whatever is like minimum and then a little less than minimum, [laughs], or as low as they could go.

**John:** So, not scale plus ten, but just scale.

**Rawson:** Yeah, scale. And then please wash our cars, you know, also. And I said, “Yeah, great. Whatever!” So, it was not — and then it was — so then it wasn’t even a sale, it was like a really low option. Like I don’t think you could buy a Kia for like the option price.

**Franklin:** I think the Kia Option is a car.

**Rawson:** Is that right? [laughs]

**Franklin:** I’m not sure, but it should be.

**Rawson:** At any rate. And the check, and then you get to the part where like you’ve got to actually do it.

**Craig:** Kia Option! [laughs] Sorry, he’s funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** And then that’s the weird part where you actually like go from prospect to employee and then you kind of have to — you got to step up and do the work. And I rewrote Dodgeball with Ben and Stuart for a year and a half. And we kept turning in drafts to DreamWorks. And Adam Goodman at the time was the executive and John Fox was the junior. And they were kind of saying like, “Wow, this is getting better.” And we’re like, yeah, it’s not like a homework assignment, like we’re trying to make a movie.

And then they said, yeah, we’re not going to make it. And then the very quick summation is we took it to Fox and we took it there because there was a fantastic executive named Debbie Liebling who was there. And she found — she had just come over from Comedy Central. She had found Matt and Trey. And she read the script and loved it and got it and sort of stood up in like the Darth Vader room at Fox and like the long black table. And at the time told Tom Rothman like, “This is the kind of dumb movie we need to make.” And so then they took it from DreamWorks.

**John:** So, let’s talk about this last week you set up another pitch which was a very different experience.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Completely different. Well, for me, a couple reasons. One is I was attached as the director, not the writer. Simon Rich was and is the writer, a very talented guy from New York, wrote for SNL for a few years, New Yorker, et cetera.

And so we went around town and pitched everywhere in town. He had this idea based on underlying material written by Steve Breen, a sort of comic — a collection of single panel comics. It didn’t really have a narrative to it. Simon came up with one and we went around town and pitched.

And the town was split in half with two different producers, which was really awkward for us, for everybody really. And then we pitched and people really liked it. And it was the first time that I had ever been involved in I guess what amounts to a bidding war. There was like, I think, five different studios wanting the same thing.

I’d always heard of this sort of thing, but I’d never actually been a part of it. And it was really cool. And also awful at the same time, because what I didn’t think about for whatever reason is that you can only say yes to one person. And at this point, you know, I know a lot of the people at the studios and they’re friends and we’ve done other things together and both producing entities are fantastic. And, yeah, it was great. It was bittersweet, I guess.

**John:** It’s like The Bachelor. You can only give the rose to one girl.

**Rawson:** We had the final rose ceremony. And it was —

**Craig:** It’s just like The Bachelor.

**John:** It’s just like The Bachelor.

**Rawson:** It is. It is.

**John:** Craig, have you had bidding war situations? Have you had like a thing where you went out on the town and had to meet with multiple people?

**Craig:** Yeah, early on in my career all I did was go and pitch. And that was all the movies that I was doing were based on pitches. And there was one that an executive that I’m very close with to this very day didn’t talk to me for three years because I didn’t pick him. And, you know, and when he was yelling at me I remember I said, “But you have passed on stuff I’ve offered to you before and I don’t yell at you.”

**Rawson:** That’s exactly right.

**Craig:** And they don’t care. They don’t care.

**Rawson:** I mean, that was part of the fun. The shoe was on the other foot this time, for once.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing and this is why it’s touch. We are actually just nicer people. I’m so sorry. We’re nicer people.

**Franklin:** By the way, I agree with you. I mean, it’s like you could have said —

**Craig:** Oh, don’t jump on our [crosstalk].

**Franklin:** You could have also said, “But they’re paying more money,” and I’ll bet he still would have yelled at you.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, probably. I mean, but it’s hard to make those choices. One thing that’s interesting about the first time you hear yes, and I get it from your story about the scale or the near scale, don’t — I don’t want anyone to think that there’s any such thing as breaking in. I know everybody thinks that there’s a rolling in. There is an endless dribbling in. [laughs]

The first movie that I pitched and sold was with a writing partner and our deal was for $100,000. So, I got $50,000, which means I got $45,000, but really means I got $42,500, I think. And then after taxes and it took like a year and a half. And they took eight months to pay me.

**Rawson:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** So by the end I think I got $20,000.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Gold Lobster. Let’s go. Awesome.

**Craig:** You know, and so I don’t want anyone to think that that first time is going to be some amazing thing. The angels don’t sing, usually.

**John:** The thing I’ve learned over the course of a lot of pitches being set up and stuff, and not really competitive situations usually, is that when you hear the words “business affairs,” that means like, oh, something is actually really happening. So, that’s just not like idle executives talking about stuff, like, “Oh, we’ll call business affairs.” It’s like, Ooh, they’re going to actually bring real people who make money deals into our situation.

**Craig:** Which is great, but then you find out that the business affairs people are awful.

**John:** They’re awful. [laughs]

**Craig:** All the passion, and the love, and the excitement about what you said and you did, that’s real for the people that really want to make a great movie. But then there is this other place that’s cold. And those people, their job is to pay you the least amount possible. And so somebody in a room — And it’s so schizophrenic, because you’ve seen it on your side.

**Franklin:** Oh, absolutely.

**Craig:** Somebody in a room will say to a writer, “You’re amazing. I’ve always wanted to work with you. I need to make this movie with you. We want this movie. Please, please, please. You’re amazing.” And then your agent will get a call from business affairs guys like, “We don’t think that they’re really worth that much. At all.”

**John:** Yeah. “We see this as a one-step deal for about half their quote.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. That’s literally what —

**Craig:** “Oh, did someone tell you that they liked them? We don’t.” Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And so the challenge of a writer — if it’s your first day you’re going to end up kind of taking whatever you can take, which is sort of the nature of it. But the challenge of it is that you felt all that enthusiasm in that room. You felt like, oh, this is going to be a thing. I sold a movie. And then it ends up being three weeks of drudgery while that thing gets figured out. And that can be a very long time.

**Rawson:** Three weeks if you’re lucky. Sometimes it’s longer.

**Franklin:** Yeah. I was going to say. Three weeks, you’re very lucky.

**Rawson:** That’s fast.

**Craig:** It can be a year.

**Franklin:** But I think the other thing that’s important to remember, and I say this as someone who is on the other end of the table —

**John:** You were an executive at Overbrook before.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, I was an executive at Overbrook, which is Will Smith’s production company. I was an executive at Universal. I worked for Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company. I worked for Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella.

And on the other side of that table I think it’s important for writers to remember that the moment when someone is interested in your material but you still own it is sort of the apex of your power.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** And once the studio owns it, you have virtually no power. And so essentially make sure that what you are getting for your work, whatever it is, is something that you are okay with seeding the power that you have over the work that you’ve toiled endlessly over to someone who then really won’t feel as though they owe you anything.

And that’s sort of the price that every writer, every person, whether you work as an accountant for a big corporation, or whether you work as a writer, has to determine for themselves. At what price your soul or in this case your writing?

**Craig:** And that is the moment when they will work the hardest to convince you that you have the least leverage.

**Franklin:** That’s absolutely right.

**Craig:** Because they’re smart. They are. Don’t underestimate these people. They’re not smart about story a lot of the times. But they’re smart about this stuff though.

**Franklin:** I would even argue that they’re not so much smart as that they have almost all of the power, because they have the purse strings.

**Craig:** And a total lack of scruples.

**Franklin:** Right. But like I would love to see, for example, an environment where if you had a spec script you could put it onto the market with a timeline and people would have to buy your script like eBay. Because there’s nothing that sort of throws me off more than this idea that the studio is blocking —

**Craig:** Buy it now.

**Franklin:** Exactly. Buy it now, at this price, and if the price goes up the price goes up. And you are as a writer able to see…

**Craig:** ScriptBay.

**Franklin:** …every single offer.

**Craig:** You should do that.

**John:** Well, no, what he’s really bringing up though is the idea of a deadline. And so we see the giant sales that happen, it’s usually because there’s been enough interest in the town that an artificial deadline has been set. Where the agents have called around and said, “We are taking offers until 5pm. And then we’re done.” And that’s crazy.

**Craig:** Is that what happened to you?

**Rawson:** Well it was almost the reverse or the inverse, I guess. So, the first studio N said here’s our offer and it expires at 6:30.

**Craig:** They love doing that.

**Rawson:** And Simon Rich and I share the same agent. And I got to — at the end of the day, we pitched Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Thursday night we went to CAA and we like sat in his office and watched as emails came in and he was on the phone. It was really kind of fascinating to watch. But I mean he’s done this before. So, he said, “Look, I can’t honor that. Don’t tell me that time because I can’t get to all the parties and get you an answer by that time, so that won’t work.”

He deflected it in such, I thought, a really elegant and sophisticated way. But it’s interesting when they put the other — and then they came back in after that. So —

**John:** Was it the first party who came in who ended up getting the script ultimately?

**Rawson:** No. No, no, it wasn’t. Yeah. That was tough.

**Craig:** Oh, good. I like it when that happens.

**John:** They have to squirm and sweat.

**Franklin:** But here’s the interesting question is that who cares who came in first at the end of the day? At the end of the day it’s like who are you willing to work with who is going to pay you the most money to do it? And I don’t — yes, I respect somebody who says I love this, here’s an offer. But if they’re going to explode the offer at a certain time, that’s a negotiating tactic. They’re trying to limit how much money you make.

**Rawson:** But I also made, oh sorry, I also made a mistake with that. There was another project that was like based on a graphic novel and I set it up and I had two different studios that wanted it. And I went with the one that was going to pay me more. They’re both great studios, great people, et cetera, and I went with the one that paid me more versus the one that said we really are going to make this thing.

**Craig:** Ah!

**Rawson:** And I regretted it. I regret it now. I completely made the wrong choice. And sometimes it’s hard to see that at the time where you feel like, oh, well these people say they want to make it, too.

**Craig:** It’s a mistake everybody makes.

**Rawson:** Yeah, it’s just, you never know I guess is all I can say on that.

**Franklin:** I think that’s true.

**Craig:** Nobody knows. So, that’s bleak.

**John:** A sobering thought of nobody knowing anything.

**Craig:** And we’re talking about success!

**John:** I want to thank our first panelists, Franklin Leonard. I’m sorry, you have a last thought?

**Franklin:** Oh, one thing.

**Craig:** Franklin has a little Christmas gift for everybody.

**Franklin:** I have a little Christmas gift for everybody.

**John:** A holiday present. I’m sorry.

**Franklin:** Craig mentioned that maybe one, or two, or ten people in the audience may have a script on the Black List and end up sort of oozing their way into Hollywood.

**Craig:** Dribbling.

**John:** Here’s a question for our audience right now.

**Craig:** Painful, burning dribble.

**John:** First off, is anyone in this audience on the Black List that was just published this last week. Do we have any people who got that award?

**Craig:** Oh, those people are way too busy to show up to this.

**John:** Yeah, they’re too busy. They’re fielding all the calls that Rawson’s agent was taking. Is anyone here currently on blcklst.com?

**Franklin:** Does anyone have a script on the Black List?

**John:** Oh yeah. Very nice. Very good. So, for people who don’t…

**Franklin:** For people who don’t, and everyone who does I’ll be standing outside afterwards with the coupon for a free month of hosting for a script on the Black List.

**Craig:** Woo!

**Franklin:** You get a script! You get a script! It’s my Oprah moment.

**John:** Franklin, you are our Oprah.

**Craig:** It’s like t-shirt gun kind of…

**Franklin:** I asked for a confetti cannon to shoot them out of and I got a response that I can let Craig clarify.

**Craig:** I talked about my confetti gun.

**John:** [laughs] And Craig made it pornographic is really the answer to that email chain. Franklin, Rawson, thank you so much.

**Craig:** It’s colorful.

**John:** Yay!

**Craig:** Who is next?

**John:** We’re going to talk a bit. So, Craig, I’m writing now. I’m actually writing a screenplay, which is such an unusual experience for me.

**Craig:** What’s that about?

**John:** It’s really fun to write a screenplay, but really hard because you have to have all these characters, and you have to like do stuff.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, not at all? Oh, you write comedies, I forget. You basically make a little outline and then Zach Galifianakis says something funny.

**Craig:** That’s not entirely inaccurate.

**John:** All right. So, I’m writing this screenplay and it’s going good.

**Craig:** Oh, look. Look who is angry at you. My little pit bull.

**John:** Oh, Kelly Marcel is angry with me.

**Craig:** Well, Marcel will deal with you later.

**John:** She’ll have her moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I’m going to be totally honest. I’m having some challenges where I know I want to be able to articulate what the two main characters sort of want at any moment. Both what they would publicly say they want and what they sort of ultimately kind of inherently want. And I’ve been wrestling with it. And there’s stuff in the second act that I’m like leery about getting into because I don’t kind of know the answers to these things. I don’t want to write stuff that I don’t have the answers for.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But, we have two panelists here who will tell us the answer and they’re going to come up and it’s going to be awesome because they’re going to be helping a lot. Lindsay Doran, the amazing Lindsay Doran.

**Craig:** Lindsay Doran!

**John:** And our inaugural guest, our Joan Rivers —

**Craig:** The Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes. Aline Brosh McKenna. And I should say that for all of the stick I give our brothers and sisters in the studio suites that Lindsay really is —

**John:** Lindsay is kind of amazing.

**Aline:** Let me talk about Lindsay.

**Craig:** She’s pretty amazing. I mean, she is — she is the exception that proves the rule, frankly, that people like you are terrible, but you’re not.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah, thank you.

**Aline:** I wanted to say two things before we started this topic. The first is this is a holiday party and I’m really glad you guys dressed up. And you can tell they’re dressed up because Craig is not wearing a hoodie.

**Craig:** No, my wife has it over there.

**Aline:** And John is wearing a hoodie.

**John:** I’m wearing a hoodie.

**Aline:** And that’s how you can tell that they’re all dressed up.

**Craig:** You really are the Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes.

**John:** We basically invite you on to insult us is basically…

**Aline:** Yes. The other thing I want to say to insult everyone is you’re very lucky to have Lindsay here, because she is the closest, one of the closest that Hollywood gets to having a guru.

**Craig:** She is.

**Aline:** And she is a guru.

**Craig:** She is.

**John:** Hooray.

**Aline:** So enjoy.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, guru, help me out. This is literally the problem I’m having right now. So, I have two characters who are sort of a key relationship. They’re not a love interest relationship but a key relationship. Each of them has different things they need to do. And in trying to articulate what it is, it’s like what would Sandra Bullock in Speed say her — what is she trying to do? If you’re carried along on a ride in a story, what does she say she’s trying to do? And how do I get that out? Does that make sense at all?

**Aline:** How does she articulate her wants.

**John:** How does she articulate her wants?

**Craig:** Isn’t she trying to just go faster?

**Lindsay:** “I don’t want to crash.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “I have to go faster than 55mph.”

**Lindsay:** Is that so hard?

**John:** Sandra Bullock was a terrible example.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let me step back.

**Craig:** I’m feeling better about myself right now I have to say.

**John:** What does Demi Moore in Ghost want to do?

**Lindsay:** She wants to, wow, that’s hard, isn’t it?

**Aline:** Is she the main want though? Is Patrick Dempsey, oh Patrick Dempsey. Patrick Swayze.

**John:** Wouldn’t it be amazing if Patrick Dempsey was in that. Patrick Swayze has an easier —

**Craig:** Swayze wants to save her.

**Aline:** Yes, he wants to —

**Lindsay:** The good news is that it changes, right?

**John:** It does, yes.

**Lindsay:** At the beginning she wants this Whoopi Goldberg woman to go away and leave her alone to her grief. She wants her husband back. She can’t get that. She wants this woman to leave her alone. And then at a certain point she wants to believe. And that’s when we can break her heart and show that Whoopi Goldberg is just some fake con artist and then we have to win her back again. So, it’s a long bunch of stuff.

**John:** Does she want to believe? Does she ever consciously realize she wants to believe? Or is it an inner thing that sort of comes out? That’s a want/need question.

**Lindsay:** There’s a remarkable moment, something that we used in the trailer to great effect, where Whoopi Goldberg is trying to persuade her that she’s sitting there having a conversation with Sam and she gets up to leave. And Patrick Swayze says to her, “Tell her that I love her.” And he says it, “Tell her he loves you.” And she turns around and she says, “Sam would never say that.” And it’s so viscous and real when she says that. And in the trailer —

**Craig:** Because he didn’t in the beginning. He couldn’t say.

**Lindsay:** That was the whole thing. He would always say, “Ditto.” And it was in the trailer. It was like, oh god, this is a real movie about real people with real relationships. And then eventually, yeah, you do track points at which she really wants to believe. There’s the thing with the penny coming up into the air. And that’s the moment when she finally does believe.

But, yes, it is difficult. She’s not the protagonist. It’s really easy what Sam wants. But if it’s interesting to anybody, we had a really interesting thing with Ghost because in the pitch, which was very, very long, I had to as the executive in charge get that down to about a 30 second pitch for the head of production. And in trying to reduce it I realized we had a problem.

And I went back to the writer and said Sam wants to be alive, of course. He wants to tell his wife that he loves her, of course. But it’s not concrete. We need something that drives the story. And so it became he has to save her life.

**Craig:** The crime angle.

**Aline:** Right.

**Lindsay:** We have to do something with the guy sneaking into her apartment so it looks as though he has to save her life. So, that was the thing. He comes back from the dead to save his wife. And it’s in the trailer. [laughs] It was in the pitch. It’s barely in the movie. Barely. It was so scrunched in there. But it became, it was so concrete and important as opposed to something as misty as he wants to tell her that he loves her.

**Craig:** That was pretty misty.

**Lindsay:** And it made a good thriller premise as opposed to just a romantic —

**Aline:** It kind of hardened the wants.

**Lindsay:** Yes. It hardened the… — Ooh, that’s good. Harden the wants.

**John:** Oh my god. Aline Brosh McKenna. She nails phrases that become like iconic. Things about squirrels and robots. That’s why we have her on the show.

**Craig:** I mean she really is —

**Lindsay:** But I don’t know if any of that helps you.

**John:** It helps me tremendously in the sense of I always wrestle with the degree to which characters are aware of what they need, what they want and what they need, and the ability to have characters to articulate what it is they’re actually trying to do.

**Craig:** Well, I always feel like what they want and what they need should be in complete opposition in the beginning of any movie, of any story, because what they want is for the movie to not happen. And you’re going to force it on them. That’s why the movie is interesting. Something is forced on them.

And what they need is to go through this very painful thing. Nobody wants to get a splinter pulled out of their finger. Nobody. They want to just not be in pain. But what they need is for the splinter to be pulled out of their finger. So, I like to think of those things in opposition. I like to think of a movie as a progression where want and need slowly finally become the same thing. You know?

**John:** I like it. I like it.

**Lindsay:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Thanks. Yeah, I believe you.

**Lindsay:** I’m a guru.

**John:** Aline, talk to me about characters in films you’ve written. Devil Wears Prada, or as you have a protagonist, are they able to articulate what they’re going for at the start of the film? And is it true to what the actual story is or just what the character is feeling at that moment?

**Aline:** Well, I agree with Craig that the thing, the stated goal, is often not the actual goal. But one thing I’ve been thinking about lately that I think is helpful for this, and might be helpful for the people in this room, is when you first write a script you’re just trying to have it make some sense. You’re just trying to have the goals be really super clear so that, you know, there’s that — what was that song? Things That Make You Go Hmmm, or something.

You want your script to not be things that make you go, huh, and a lot of your first scripts are really that. Where you don’t really know what people want. That’s usually the issue. And then when you get some skill going you can sort of depict like what people want, but it’s a little flat. It’s a little bit direct, so people say, “I want to get the briefcase there by noon on Thursday.” And then you’re watching everyone do that. And it’s very flat. And one thing that I’ve sort of realized in my own writing is — I’m sorry, are we boring you, Craig?

**Craig:** No, no, no, just you.

**Aline:** One thing I’ve noticed is you want to have an evolution in what the want is and you want to have some sort of epiphany moment for the character but also for the audience. And I think a great example of this is in Frozen. In Frozen you kind of think you know what she wants. How many people have seen Frozen? A lot of people have seen Frozen.

**John:** Yeah, good.

**Aline:** I just loved it. And you think you know what she wants and I’m not going to spoil it for anyone, but you think you know what she wants and you see the guy going towards her.

**John:** Who?

**Aline:** The main character. The younger sister. And you see the guy coming towards her. And you’re sort of okay with that want. And you sort of have signed off on that want. And it would work perfectly well and it would track perfectly well and it’s in keeping with what her expressed goal was. And then the movie does this amazing thing where she has an epiphany, we have an epiphany, and it does something which I think is miraculous where it takes the theme and the character to another level that you hadn’t imagined. And I really think that’s what separates a good script from a great script.

And in that moment you have this incredible insight into her, but also this incredible insight into the world that she’s created thematically. And that’s the other level to get to. I think the first level to get to is just to make sure that the audience is not confused about what people want. And then the great thing you can get to is if there is an evolution, an epiphany for the character and for the audience. And if you can do that you’re really well ahead of it.

**Lindsay:** You have to think a lot about what does the audience want. That’s what I — it’s like what do you want the audience to want? Because in Frozen you want them to think they’re invested in that relationship, but you don’t want them so invested in that relationship when you turn the tables on them that they go, wait, what happened to that relationship? And I’ve certainly been in previews where you go, oops, they wanted — I bring up Pretty In Pink all the time. Oops, we wanted them to make the transition for her to be in love with Duckie and guess what, they never got there.

**Aline:** Right.

**Lindsay:** They wanted her to be in love with Andrew McCarthy and we had to change the ending. So, you have to be really, really clear. And a lot of decision making has to go into making sure that you’re tracking what they want and how you’re going to pull the rug out from under them and they’ll go with you.

**Aline:** And there needs to be an evolution in, as Craig said, the difference between the want and the need. There needs to be this evolution between what they think they want and the thing that they really need. And so that is often that little twist where the character makes a shift. It goes past what we think their actual goal is.

And that happens to Sandra Bullock in Speed. I mean, she thinks she wants a certain thing. She just wants to live. She just wants to make it through this day. And then she starts to really want to save this guy and want to save these people and it evolves. And your wants and needs should evolve. If they don’t, you’re going end up with something… — What happens I found once you clear the first barrier of trying to have clear goals is they become flat. And you’ll have these scripts which feel a little flat.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want a movie where you’re just waiting for somebody to do the thing they said they were going to do on page five.

**Aline:** Exactly.

**Craig:** People don’t actually want to do what they’re supposed to do. Nobody wants to exercise. Nobody wants to eat better. Nobody wants to, you know, address the things that were uncomfortable or painful in their lives.

What we do want to do is take pills, and sleep, and do things that are generally papering over the problems that we have. We are really good at just taking the path of least resistance.

**John:** And so the challenge, the screenwriter needs to find ways that the characters are not going to be able to take those paths of least resistance, to continually escalate the stakes to burn those bridges behind them so they can’t go back to those safe [crosstalk].

**Craig:** That’s the fun of it. And Pixar does it so much better than everybody. It’s so simple to see what Marlin wants. Marlin wants to keep the one surviving member of his family alive. The one that’s the hardest to keep alive because of his bad fin. That’s what he wants. It makes total sense. To the point where he will refuse to let anything happen to that kid. But look where he is at the end. What he wants is to let him go and do these things, even at the risk of dying.

That’s, to me, that’s the fun of movies. That’s the fun of storytelling is watching somebody finally realize that what I want isn’t what I need.

**Aline:** And it’s fascinating to me that animated movies, lately, are the ones who really have dug into this storytelling thing in a way that’s really fascinating. I mean, they really kind of take it to the wire in terms of having these stories which are really interesting and complicated, where the characters change their wants.

In some ways I feel like they have a rigor. And it may be because they can do so many iterations.

**John:** That’s what I think it is. Because an animated film goes through scratch reel, so you’re seeing it being built up again and again. So, you get to watch the movie, it’s like, “Well that doesn’t work.” And so then you’re able to change a story and do it again and again.

Even Frozen changed tremendously over the course of their shooting. I remember the stories of new songs go in, new things come out. Suddenly the reindeer could talk, the reindeer can’t talk. You figure out what the movie really wants to be because you get to see the movie in front of you which is a luxury that we rarely have in live action.

Although you can reshoot also. You can —

**Craig:** Yeah, but much, much easier to do in animation. Plus, also, I mean, you have a lot of experience with animation. I mean, I would imagine one gift of animation in terms of making stories is when we make a live action movie the actor has an enormous amount of power on the day. Either I’m saying it or I’m not. You know?

And we, this is it, we’re here once, you know? And in animation we can just try. We can just try. Try it this way, try it that way.

**Lindsay:** Yeah, it’s true. And because I come from live action I’m always saying, “But why couldn’t somebody just write Toy Story and then make it? I don’t understand why it’s been four years getting to that screenplay. I don’t understand it.”

And the argument that came back to me originally from Chris Miller and Phil Lord was, yeah, but look at the number of great animated movies compared to the number of animated movies. And at first I bought that argument. But then I thought, wait a minute, when I’m working in animation, these are the goals: It has to be funny — laugh out loud funny; it has to make you cry; it has to be universal — it has to be so universal that kids all over the world will understand; it has to appeal to children and adults; and it has to have a theme that you want the whole world to understand.

Well, if that’s where you start, of course you’re going to make a better movie. Of course you’re going to have a better — because your goals are so high. They’re so high. On every single one I’ve worked on, and I’ve worked on about twenty now, that’s where you start. And you’re always articulate.

**Aline:** But I always think of that thing that Michael Arndt said in the New Yorker which is we work on our — he says, “We work on the Pixar movies for five years and they suck for four of them.”

**Lindsay:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It’s true. But I keep thinking, why can’t —

**Aline:** There’s so many times in the live action movie —

**Craig:** Just get it right the first time.

**Aline:** There are so many times in a live action movie where you’re thinking, oh, if we only had this line covered this way. If we only could reinterpret this. If we could only get him coming from this side saying this. And you just don’t have it and it’s so hard to get. So, the fact that they have this ability to make those changes is really such an advantage. But I don’t know that that accounts totally for — I think what you said, which is the goals that they set out with are so concrete and so specific and so really what storytelling is.

**Lindsay:** Well, I know when I was at Austin this year I was on a panel about theme. And somebody said, “Does every movie you work on have a theme when you’re starting out?” And I went, “Every animated movie does.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Lindsay:** It’s not particularly true of every live action movie, but when you sit down that first day on an animated movie, theme is foremost in everybody’s mind. Who does that?

**Craig:** I do it.

**John:** Craig does it.

**Craig:** I do it and everybody makes fun of me.

**John:** [laughs] I never make fun of you, Craig.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** Nah. Never.

**Craig:** I know.

**Lindsay:** Does that help you, John?

**John:** That helps me a lot. I guess my last question for you and writers up here as well is to what degree before you started writing the script do you have answers to all those questions about what the character would say he or she wants at this moment? Because this is one of the first times I’m really challenging myself to do it before I write those scenes. And do you have an outline that would really articulate that? Or are you just going by gut feeling that like, “Yeah, she knows what she wants.”

**Aline:** For me an interesting thing was in writing Devil Wears Prada was what she wanted was just to survive that year so that she could do something else.

**John:** And does she articulate that?

**Aline:** And survive that year is not an incredibly propulsive narrative goal. And so it was very difficult to always get to her through the thing where she’s just trying to get through this, trying to get through that. But that is a movie where she takes the thing that is the most important thing and she throws it in the fountain. She literally takes the thing which is her stated goal and just kind of forgets about it and moves on from it.

And that was a good sort of object lesson for me in exactly that thing which is the thing she needed was to see that the world was different from the way she understood it. And that was different from what she wanted which was to have everyone tell her she was a genius.

And so what I think is really interesting about the theme is you can start out thinking something in particular, but I always find that as I write it I think, oh, I thought it was about this, but it’s actually about this. That always happens after the first draft that you really kind of find your theme. And I have found that countless times.

It’s very interesting — that is one of the many weird intangibles about writing is, and it’s not that the characters say it, or they teach you or whatever, but there’s sort of an emerging message that comes out of the script and it’s sort of the script knows that that’s what it wants and the characters start to tell you that.

And it’s almost impossible to know that when you go into it.

**John:** It’s like you know what happens and then finally you realize why it happens. It is just like I know this thing is this way and then ultimately like, oh, this is the reason why it’s happening this way. This is why this character is in this moment.

**Aline:** One thing I would say though which is maybe a helpful crafty thing is if you find yourself, I was just watching a movie where they had a character that was there just so that the lead character could say this is what I want and this is what the movie is about. If you find yourself doing that, try and cut that person out completely. Because it should be completely visible in the action.

And if you find yourself wanting a character who is going to show up and explain, you know, the best friend character, or the kindly train conductor, or the super helpful telemarketer, or somebody who is going to try and draw out those thematic goal things, something is wrong with your storytelling often. And you have to try and get those… — You know, you can get so much about what a character wants from action and that’s really what you want to do.

And I think when you find yourself having people say, “This is all I want is…” there might be something a little hanky in the way you’ve set it up.

**Craig:** I got to tell you I do think about this from the start. I organize my story around this very thing. I really do think about the story as a hero who is not always heroic wants simply to maintain their life of acceptable imperfection. And then the movie happens to them and they slowly start to become aware that there’s something wrong with their organizing philosophy of life, the way that they have — what they have decided their life is about, and that there may be another way to live.

And they get glimpses of it and they get hurt by sort of moving towards it. And eventually must act in accordance with faith in that thing.

**Aline:** But does that change when you’re writing it ever?

**Craig:** It can. But what that — but at least to start with and I know this: my story is connected to my character fundamentally. And if it changes I will change it so that both change together. But there is not character end of story. That story is for that character.

And, by the way, I haven’t always done this, but I’m doing it now. It’s something that I’ve come to and I believe in. So, I would say to you if you’re thinking about that, think about how the only difference between your character in the first scene where we meet her or him and the final scene is that they’ve changed their mind about this most fundamental philosophical question.

**Aline:** And here’s a question I ask maybe Lindsay at what point in the writing process did they write, “I was a better man as a woman than I ever was as a man.” You know? I don’t think they wrote that on day one.

**Lindsay:** Well, when I was working for Sydney Pollack, but not when he was making Tootsie, after that, but he said, you know, when he was asked to do it, because it was supposed to be Hal Ashby or something, and pretty close to production Hal Ashby dropped out and suddenly Sydney was dropped in. And he said that was thing about being a better man by being a woman, that theme was when he sort of decided to do the movie.

He said, “Once I knew that, I knew what to do with everything. I knew there had to be a baby over here so we have a baby over there.”

**Craig:** It tells you what the story is.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. It was like I knew exactly how to —

**Craig:** It tells you what the challenges are. It tells you how it should end.

**Lindsay:** How to organize it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** But can I tell you a really interesting thing? Sometimes you go to make the movie and the director has a different idea of what the theme was.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** And I was just talking to somebody who wrote a movie which is a great movie and is up for Oscar buzz and stuff and he was saying that his idea of what the movie was about was different from what the director’s movie was about. And he said to me, “I think my movie is still in there.” But it really is this thing where because that is the intangible, you can always say to someone, well, they need to get the briefcase to Moscow by noon, but if you say to them this movie to me is about someone who understands that love is more important than money, you maybe be giving it to a filmmaker who thinks something completely differently.

**Craig:** Yup.

**Aline:** And what’s really interesting to me is I have made movies where I thought, oh, they’re still going to see what I wanted to do. They’re still going to see what I wanted to do. I know it’s in there. And it wasn’t in there. And it can be the same similar scenes and similar characters and similar dialogue and the thing that made you want to write the movie and the thing you were trying to say can disappear down the bathtub drain. And that’s one of the very strange things about being a screenwriter.

**Lindsay:** One of the things I’ve learned as a script whisperer, because I do all this consulting on things, when I come in on high level, high priority development, is I have everybody in the room, the producer, the writer, the studio executive, the director, whoever is there take a piece of paper without showing it to anybody else, say what is the most important relationship in this movie.

**Craig:** Oof.

**Lindsay:** And frequently I get four different answers.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Lindsay:** And that conversation is where you discover what everybody thinks the movie is about, what the last scene should be. You know, somebody said, your Devil Wears Prada, it’s about her and the boyfriend. You go, wow, that’s a different movie than if it’s her and Miranda, and that’s a different, you know what I mean? Or it’s Stanley Tucci. It’s like all of those are interesting movies, but everybody has to know who that last scene is about.

**Aline:** And I would actually say in some respects you know you’re in a good process when everyone is saying the same thing. If you actually looked at someone’s piece of paper and went like, “Ooh!”

**Lindsay:** And when that happens they don’t need me, because it means they are all on the same page. And it’s like only when —

**Craig:** What a bummer for you when they know and they’re like, “Get out!”

**Lindsay:** But usually the reason I’m there, the reason that everybody is having problems is that they haven’t quite all figured out that they’re making different movies. And then it’s about everybody figuring out what movie they want to make.

**John:** Well I know that we need you both very much. So, thank you very much for this discussion.

**Craig:** Thanks guys. Thank you.

**Aline:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Now it gets weird.

**John:** Now it gets weird.

**Craig:** Now it gets weird.

**John:** Because we know the history on these things.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, here we go.

**John:** You’re going to set this up because I don’t even know what to say. You like it when I’m drunk and you saw me drunk.

**Craig:** I love it when you’re drunk. Austin John August is the best John August. We just had the best time with these two. I would love for them to get married.

**John:** Oh my god!

**Craig:** Because then Kelly Marcel would become Kelly Kelly, which is so exciting.

So, we have — I’d like to welcome up here for a discussion of good and bad habits, mostly probably bad, but maybe a few good. Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame and Kelly Marcel of Saving Mr. Banks.

And normally, I mean, this is just working out great because I’m sure you haven’t been busy or anything.

**Kelly:** No.

**Craig:** Kelly’s film opens wide tomorrow.

**John:** Tomorrow! Woo!

**Craig:** And it’s really good. Really good.

**John:** Yeah, so Kelly when you were on our last live show in Austin I had not seen your film yet, and so I got to see it right after Austin. It was fantastic.

**Kelly:** You were my date.

**John:** I was your date. What was so wild is you’ve been basically promoting this film that entire time since we last spoke.

**Kelly:** And the month prior to Austin as well. Three months.

**John:** So, that’s a thing we have not really talked about on the show is what the writer’s function is in promoting a film, an award-caliber film that you’ve written.

**Kelly:** I had no idea that you had to do this much stuff to open a movie. I don’t know if it’s the same for every writer. And I think it’s been like this — I think it’s been this crazy because it’s a film that’s got a lot of award buzz. But, we worked out, John Lee and I worked out the other night that we’d had five days off including weekends in three months.

So, I’m a little bit tired. This is the last night of anything I have to do.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** It’s Kelly’s last night everyone!

**Kelly:** I’m going to get so drunk…

**Craig:** Well, this means that we could probably get her to say anything tonight. I feel like this is the night.

**Kelly:** This is the night.

**Craig:** Where she calls Walt Disney a Nazi.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Kelly:** [Gasps]

**Craig:** Tonight!

**Kelly:** Melissa! Beat him up.

**Craig:** Oh, no, she’s not going to help. No, no, she loves this chaos. She loves chaos. That’s my wife, Melissa, she’s over there. It’s my wife. I’m married!

**John:** She’s a real person.

**Craig:** Just wave so they know you’re real.

**Kelly:** She just said no. [laughs] No.

**Craig:** That’s it? We’re done?

**John:** She’s gotten embarrassed of this podcast.

**Craig:** We’re done? Yeah. All right. Well…

**John:** And Richard Kelly, we got to hang out some more in Austin, too, and I had known you before Austin but I didn’t kind of really know you until Austin.

**Craig:** And I still don’t know him really. Can you know Richard Kelly?

**Richard:** Yeah, it takes some time. Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So, since we had a great conversation about Donnie Darko, but you like Kelly are sort of strongly identified with the films you’ve made. And so does it become exhausting at a certain point to be the ongoing representative of the Donnie Darko franchise, of this thing you made?

At what point are you allowed to sort of say like, “You know what? I made that movie, that’s awesome, and now I’m going to go be Richard Kelly over here by myself.”

**Richard:** Yeah, well I mean, listen, it’s a blessing to have a film that stays with people and it continues to haunt you and be tattooed somewhere on your body, or on other people’s bodies usually.

**Craig:** He’s so weird. So weird. I love it.

**Richard:** I’ll take it. I’ll take it. But, listen, it’s all about constantly just evolving and trying to reinvent yourself. And not write the same movie over and over again, or not direct the same movie over and over again. And I think that’s tricky in this business because they always want to, like I said, put you in a category or a box, so to speak.

And for me in sort of trying to evolve as a writer I’ve been trying to just venture out into different kinds of stories. And change things up. You know, it’s like when you work out at the gym you’re supposed to change your weight lifting habit every few weeks.

**Craig:** We do that.

**John:** Yeah, that’s us. That’s us totally.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You can tell here that this…

**Richard:** But it’s constantly just like changing the way you’re exercising your muscles or your brain. And I don’t know, it’s just switching up the process I’ve found.

**John:** Well, and we’re approaching 2014, so are there any things you want to change up for 2014, or any things that you see in yourself that you want to do differently for 2014, especially in terms of you’re writing, your craft, your filmmaking. Is there anything?

**Richard:** Well, I’ve been writing for myself for probably three years. I’ve written probably three or four scripts over the past three to four years of all different kinds of genres. And I’ve been pushing into new territory. But I think for me it’s about getting back behind the camera, obviously, but in terms of writing, I think venturing into a place where I’m doing like two to three hours a day of really essentially work and that’s it.

I used to try to think I needed to write all day.

**Craig:** Not possible.

**Richard:** That I needed to. And it was just a mistake. I was writing too much. I was over-thinking things. I was creating too many characters that were extraneous. And it was actually an unhealthy process. So, I think I’ve learned now it’s like you just need to make sure when your brain is the most functional, what time of day is that, what environment do you need to be in. It’s a very almost — it’s like a dietary exercise thing in a lot of ways. Not to be too physiological.

**Craig:** No, no, totally applies to us as well.

**John:** Not at all.

Kelly, how about you? Your 2014. Do you have any things you are looking at doing now or in this new year that are different?

**Kelly:** Having a little sleep.

**John:** Sleep is so good.

**Craig:** Sleep.

**Kelly:** Really just want to do that mainly. No, I think I’m going to do some television next year.

**John:** That would be great.

**Kelly:** There was a TV… — When I sold Terra Nova, that brilliant show, [laughs] I also sold another show, I told you tonight’s the night I can just say anything.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Kelly:** I sold another show called West Bridge to Showtime which went into development but never got made and now because of Banks it’s been picked up. And so we’re going to do it as like a closed end series. So, that will be exciting.

**John:** So, talk about your writing though during this time, because you’ve been so busy doing —

**Kelly:** There is no writing.

**John:** There’s no writing at all?

**Kelly:** There’s no writing.

**Craig:** Very disappointed to hear.

**John:** But I’ve not done as much writing during the whole Big Fish thing as I wanted to, so it’s been exciting to get back into it. But are you on the Richard Kelly plan of a couple hours a day, or what’s your thing?

**Kelly:** I’m trying to do what you told me to do, [laughs], in Austin which is just do three hours a day. And it doesn’t matter which three hours that is. Just do three hours. But, you know, really the way my life works at the moment is I wake up, the phone starts ringing, I do press, I do phone interviews, all that —

**Craig:** Don’t forget the hair and makeup people.

**Kelly:** The fucking hair and makeup people. Swear to god if someone comes near me with another makeup brush! Um, yeah.

**Craig:** We also have a lot.

**John:** Yeah, you can tell. You can tell.

**Kelly:** They call it “grooming,” like I’m a dog.

**Craig:** Yes!

**Kelly:** You need to be groomed.

So, phone interviews happen all day and then I don’t think there’s been a night this week that I haven’t done a Q — I was on this stage last night doing a Q&A. It’s every single night.

**Craig:** And that is, I mean, I have to just say, one of the worst things about Q&As, when you’re doing Q&As for a movie is that you will be asked the same question over and over and over and you start to lose your mind. It’s a weird form of mental torture to be asked the same question over and over and over.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I started to make things up.

**Craig:** Out of curiosity, what’s the one? What’s the one that is driving you the most crazy so that I can now ask it.

**Kelly:** Ha! Normally the Banks questions are kind of what they are, but obviously everybody wants to know about Fifty Shades of Grey. So, I’ve started to tell everyone I’m a virgin and that I don’t really know —

**Craig:** You’re not? I bought that.

**Kelly:** No, that’s true. Yeah. And that a really good friend of mine had told me that, you know, when you have sex like what you have to do is sit on a rabbit or a duck and then you rub a bald man’s head. And then you either get pregnant or flowers. And that doesn’t seem to going down too well with the studio funnily enough.

**Craig:** Walt Disney is not impressed.

**Kelly:** No. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, are you a two or three hour, you’re a two or three hour work person. And what are your two or three hours, because I’ve started to try to make it the morning so that I can get stuff done. The first thing I do when I get in the office, I don’t do anything until I’ve written stuff.

**Craig:** I’m not that way. But what I will do is my plan is as I’m going to bed I’ve actually found a pattern. I didn’t realize I had one, but I found one. As I’m going to bed I start thinking about the next day’s work. And then I fall asleep. And I don’t worry about writing anything down because we all know when your dreams are nonsense.

But then when I wake up and I take a shower, I take a very long shower and in the shower I start to think about the scene. Once I’m out of the shower I should — I usually have a sense of what it is I’m going to write. If I don’t, I know it ain’t happening that day. But if I do, then I know I have all day to pick the three hours. And it’s just waiting for the moment. And then I do it.

**John:** So, Melissa, how long are the showers?

**Craig:** [laughs] She’s not in there with me when this is happening.

**John:** What’s a long Craig Mazin shower?

**Melissa Mazin:** Oh, I don’t know.

**Craig:** That’s my wife. There you go. 15? No.

**John:** Only 15? No.

**Craig:** No, no.

**Melissa:** 20 minutes. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Do you live with me? [laughs] It’s never when she’s there by the way. Here’s the other thing: She wakes up at 6:30 in the morning. I’m going to bed sometimes at 6:30 in the morning. So, she wakes up, she’s gone. So, now I’m talking like 9:30 or 10 I go into the shower. Easily sometimes I’ll go for a half an hour. Easily.

**Kelly:** Why does she get up at 6:30 and you get up at 9:30?

**Richard:** Uh, because he’s a writer.

**Kelly:** This is bullshit.

**Craig:** I got to go. [laughs]

**John:** Because she’s the parent who gets the kids off to school I bet.

**Craig:** She’s the responsible one.

**Kelly:** So you don’t help taking the kids to school or anything like that?

**Craig:** This is neither the time nor place, [laughs], to discuss this matter. We’ll talk about it later.

**Kelly:** I’ve got your back, Melissa.

**Craig:** I regret everything. Everything! This is kind of where it was eventually going to go.

**John:** You still have like the benefits of a bachelor writer life.

**Craig:** I do. Actually she’s great about that. Actually, I will say that if you have somebody that you share your life with who understands what you do and gives you the flexibility and space to do, that’s wonderful.

Now, if six years go by and you haven’t sold anything, that person is going to get super grumpy…

Yeah, she’s like, “Yeah!” She’s like, “I am super grumpy.”

**John:** What is the difference between like an aspiring screenwriter and a freeloader? It’s a really fine line.

**Craig:** It’s so…it’s right there. But, you know, assuming that you are actually earning a living then it’s nice to know that you’re living with somebody who kind of gives you the space you need to do the crazy job that we do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Kelly:** Like sleeping in?

**Craig:** I am so uncomfortable.

**Richard:** Well, the thing is if you’re only really required to work three hours a day, sleeping in is not that big a deal.

**Kelly:** Right.

**Craig:** Thank you, Richard Kelly!

**Richard:** And you need the sleep to rest your brain so you can make those three hours count.

**Craig:** Great point, Richard Kelly!

**Kelly:** No, but my argument is if it’s only three hours a day then there’s all the other hours in the day to help out, right?

**Craig:** That makes no sense.

**Richard:** There’s things like Angry Birds.

**Kelly:** And that’s how you make films.

**John:** And the gym. Don’t forget to go to the gym. That’s another crucial thing here.

**Craig:** Right. Although I’m also forgetting to go to the gym.

**Richard:** It takes a good hour and a half to go [crosstalk].

**John:** Yeah.

**Kelly:** Look at those guns.

**Craig:** I actually think I could fill enormous wads of my day with nothing. I don’t even know what happens. I don’t know what happens. But I do say, look, if you are writing a screenplay I will say this: I’ve never missed a deadline in my career. Not once. I am really responsible. I don’t know how. I just know that by this day it’s happening. And I’ve always gotten there, so I am very responsible. I’m very routinized in certain ways. In other ways, maybe not so much. What the hell! [laughs]

I mean, ugh…

**John:** Well, we’ll be able to ask more questions about Craig and his life during the Q&A.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But, Kelly, congratulations on your movie. Congratulations on all you’ve done with this part of it.

**Kelly:** Thank you.

**John:** Kelly Marcel, you don’t naively think that you’re done doing press?

**Craig:** Oh no.

**Kelly:** What?!

**John:** No, there will be more.

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** But for now you’re movie is coming out and congratulations, that’s awesome. Richard Kelly, thank you again for being here.

**Craig:** Richard Kelly. The great Richard Kelly.

**Richard:** Well, thanks for having me.

**John:** You guys can get up because we’re going to start our wrap here.

**Craig:** Get off. [laughs]

**John:** We have so many people to thank.

**Craig:** You especially. [laughs]

**Kelly:** Ha!

**John:** We need to thank the Writers Guild Foundation, the giant logo behind us. So, thank you very much for hosting us again. LA Film School for this venue, which was great, and so helpful —

**Craig:** Thank you LA Film School.

**John:** I need to thank Matthew Chilelli. Matthew, are you here? I never actually — he’s right there. He wrote a lot of the best outros you’ve heard. He also wrote the Christmas —

**Craig:** This guy is cool.

**John:** He’s pretty great. He also wrote the opening music that you heard tonight, sort of the holiday remix of the [hums Scriptnotes theme].

**Craig:** It’s amazing what you’ve done with such a mundane tune. Thank you so much.

**John:** Yes. It’s really remarkable what you’ve been able to do. So, thank you again for writing these for us. Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you. Wait, what about, are you going to get to them?

**John:** I’ll get to them eventually. We’ll thank Stuart Friedel. Stuart Friedel —

**Craig:** Stuart! Stand up, Stuart!

**John:** Tonight the role of Stuart Friedel will be played by this —

**Craig:** Stuart is played by this actor, Brett Goldfarb.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, he’s fantastic.

So, the Writers Guild Foundation who is this giant slide behind me, every year they have this holiday sale of Extraordinary Experiences, which you can find on their website, so wgfoundation.com.

**Craig:** This is the charitable. They are not part of the union. They are a 501c3 not-for-profit charitable organization. Great organization.

**John:** They do great work with veterans groups, with other aspiring writers, schools, all sorts of special programs. Once a year they do the sale of Extraordinary Experiences where you can have lunch with a certain given writer, or coffee, or someone will read your script.

So, if you go to the website you will see the Extraordinary Experiences that they have up for sale. This year some of our panelists will be also offering new special things after tonight, because we will strong arm them. So, I would encourage you to go there because it’s a great organization and it’s a great way for them to raise some money to pay for the eggnog you had here tonight.

**Craig:** Argh!

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** It coats your mouth.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good if you have like hot spicy food though. Insulation.

**Craig:** No, because you’re putting heat next to milk. It’s disgusting.

**John:** Well, at least we’ve bookended the show with the talk of eggnog.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, Craig, thank you, and have a very happy holidays.

**Craig:** I thought you actually meant that.

**John:** See! I can feign sincerity when I need to.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas to you, John.

**John:** Aw, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** I always mean it.

**John:** And thank you all very much for being here.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

Links:

* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show) and [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing)
* [Franklin Leonard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Leonard) on episode [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes)
* [Kelly Marcel](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2813876/) on episode [115](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-back-to-austin-with-rian-johnson-and-kelly-marcel)
* [Lindsay Doran](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/movies/lindsay-doran-examines-what-makes-films-satisfying.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) on episode [68](http://johnaugust.com/2012/talking-austen-in-austin)
* [Rawson Marshall Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/) on episodes [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode) and [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show)
* [Richard Kelly](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446819/) on episode [118](http://johnaugust.com/2013/time-travel-with-richard-kelly)
* The [2013 Black List](http://list.blcklst.com/story/7887) and [blcklst.com](http://blcklst.com/)
* The New Yorker on [live action versus animation](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_friend?currentPage=all)
* [Saving Mr. Banks](http://movies.disney.com/saving-mr-banks) is in theaters now
* Thank you to the [Writers Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) and the [LA Film School](http://www.lafilm.edu/) for hosting
* Support the Writers Guild Foundation and get something awesome from their [Holiday Sale of Extraordinary Experiences](https://www.wgfoundation.org/holiday-fundraiser/)
* [Intro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Fred Tepper

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/lets-talk-about-coverage).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 120, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, are you high right now?

**Craig:** No, I’m not at all high right now. Not right now.

**John:** And that’s something we’ll be talking about on today’s episode is writers who get high a lot, or somehow use some other substance in order to allow themselves to write.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And the pros and cons of doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today we will also talk about the upcoming WGA negotiations. There may have been a template set by the DGA negotiations, so we will talk about that. But first, we wanted to talk about this infographic that probably everyone on Twitter sent to us this last week.

**Craig:** I mean, there’s got to be some service, someone would make millions, if they could create a service that let people know don’t send this to someone because the rest of the world has already sent it to them.

**John:** Well, let’s think about that. because it wouldn’t be that hard for Twitter to actually build that in. So, essentially if you were trying to @-message somebody this link, when you send it to them Twitter could come back saying they already got that. Are you sure you want to pester them again?

**Craig:** That is a great idea. Twitter, please! Just because you and I have a very specific kind of podcast. Probably more specific than 99% of the podcasts out there. And what that means is when something hits our specific topic, everyone sends it. Everyone.

**John:** I like that Craig knows that our podcast is more specific than every other podcast…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Considering he listens to exactly one podcast, this podcast.

**Craig:** I’m using the process of — I’m using induction.

**John:** [laughs] Induction.

**Craig:** Induction. I’m inducing this. Because how could you be more specific than what we talk about?

**John:** Oh, there are whole podcasts about grandfather clocks.

**Craig:** What?! That’s crazy. [laughs]

**John:** Well, if you think back to the prototype for our show, something like Car Talk, where they’re just two brothers talking about cars. And that’s a very — seems like a very specific topic. Granted, it’s more general than screenwriting, although we’re talking about screenwriting in movies overall, so movies are not more specific than cars, are they?

**Craig:** Well, screenwriting is. But you’re right. I’ll notch it back. We’re not more specific than 99% of podcasts. We’re more specific than 9% of podcasts.

**John:** We are fairly specific. And so the bigger point being that people do send us things like this infographic a lot. Probably because they like the show. They think this graphic is interesting. And we would probably want to talk about it on the show. And you know what? Let’s do it right now.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** So, this was an infographic that was put up on Reddit but a guy named profound_whatever. I think that’s his handle. If his actual name was profound_whatever…

**Craig:** Coolest guy.

**John:** He’d be kind of cool. Also, you wonder about his parents. It just tells you a lot about who the parents could be if they named their child profound_whatever. This person wrote, “I’ve covered 300 spec scripts for five different companies and assembled findings into a snazzy infographic,” which is linked. And it’s a huge infographic.

So, before we get into this I thought we could talk about what coverage is, because for people who are new to our podcast or to screenwriting, they may not be familiar with coverage.

So, Craig, describe coverage for us.

**Craig:** Great question. In fact, there was somebody on Twitter recently who was asking this very question and they seemed a little, they just seemed a little at sea about the notion of it.

Coverage is simply the process by which people who are interested in whether or not they should pursue a script ask somebody else to do the work for them. And the work meaning reading the script, summarizing the plot of the script, offering opinion about the quality of the script — relative quality of the script — and then giving it some sort of grade.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It sounds a bit awful to say that people whose job is to evaluate screenplays don’t do the reading, they essentially farm out the reading of these scripts. But they have to. They just don’t have a choice. There are so many more screenplays than decision makers. And so the decision makers need some sort of filtering system. And that’s how Hollywood has evolved. There have been readers forever. And they get paid, you know, sometimes they get paid okay. Sometimes they don’t get paid much at all. It’s a classic job for somebody that’s starting out.

You yourself did it.

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** And you kind of — you just hope that you get good coverage. And everyone has it. Agencies have readers, and studios have readers, and producers have readers. They’re everywhere.

**John:** Great. So, let’s define some terms. A reader is somebody who works for a producer, a studio, an agency, and someone plops a script down in front of this person and says, “Please read this and write coverage on it.” Coverage is both the process of covering a script, basically like to write out this report on a script, and it’s also the report itself. So, it’s the object and it’s the process.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, coverage can best be thought of as sort of like a book report about a script. And so it has a summary page and it sort of lists the very basic things about it like who wrote it, how many pages long it is, so the quantifiable data. Some grades in different categories, like characterization, or setting, or different things.

**Craig:** Plot.

**John:** Plot. Which would be scaled from like poor to excellent. And then usually three possibilities: “consider” or “recommend” are sort of interchangeable terms; “pass with reservations” or “consider with reservations,” sort of like that maybe grade; and then “pass,” which would just be no — you should not consider making this as a film or pursuing this any further.

**Craig:** Right. Recommend, consider, and pass are like green light, yellow light, red light.

**John:** Exactly. So, this person wrote coverage on 300 different scripts. When I was reading at TriStar, by the time I left TriStar, I had read 110 scripts and books and written coverage on them. And it’s very common to sort of keep at least your title pages of this in like some sort of database. And so it’s actually easy-ish to generate some kind of report and that’s what this guy apparently did.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, out of 300 total scripts, he recommended eight.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** 89 scripts received a consider. And 203 scripts received a pass. I found the 89 considers really, really high. Did that strike you as high, too?

**Craig:** No, because consider is — you have to put yourself in the shoes of the reader. I’m not sure who he was reading for, but you usually know for whom you’re reading. You will find screenplays sometimes that either have a high quality to them, but you don’t think are something that your employer, the person asking you for coverage, is looking to make.

And sometimes you have the opposite problem where, okay, well this is exactly the kind of move they want to make, it’s just not very well written. So, you kind of have to give it to them and let them know, at least, because it may be something that they want to be rewritten, or maybe a writer that they love that they want to put on something else.

So, that didn’t shock me.

**John:** That’s actually — those are very good points. And consider may also be, depending on the studio or what the venue is that you’re reading for, consider might be consider this is a writing sample. Basically like I don’t think this movie is something you’re going to want to make, but this writer is good, so therefore you should take a look at it.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the number that should give everybody a little pause is eight scripts out of 300. So, we’re talking about roughly, what, 2.5% success rate there.

**John:** I will tell you that when I was a reader for TriStar, I recommended — by the time I was done with 110 scripts I had recommended four.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I can tell you on each of the four scripts I recommended I got called to the mat for recommending them. They’d say like, “Why are you wasting our time recommending this script?” And so it’s one of those things where as a reader a lot of times you’re more rewarded for not recommending something, which is a sad thing but a true thing that people should keep in mind.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because the thing is when you recommend something you’re saying, “You are going to spend three hours on your weekend reading this.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if they hate it, you wasted their precious time.

**John:** Exactly. You took time away from them and their families and their second wife.

**Craig:** [laughs] Second wives!

**John:** Let’s take a look at page count, because I thought you would be very excited by this page count graph. Basically he’s charted from the very shortest script to the very longest script.

**Craig:** I was excited, yeah.

**John:** The average script length was 107 pages. But Craig recognized a very familiar pattern from his psychology days.

**Craig:** The pattern of like the double hump.

**John:** The double hump. At first glance it is a bell curve, but then as you dig in a little deeper, there’s sort of two places where it also pumps up.

**Craig:** Yes. This is not a clean bell curve by any stretch. And the average script length here, I think, is less interesting probably — he’s using the mean. I’m kind of more interested in mode or median perhaps. But, yes, there’s this cluster of, I mean, it’s really small on my screen on this particular — oh, there we go.

So, there’s this cluster that occurs kind of around 95 to 100 pages. There’s a cluster that occur around 106 to 112. Then there’s a cluster that’s 117 to 122. A weird little spike, like in the mid 120s. But I was interested, and I was actually pleased to see this, there’s kind of no real average here. When you look at it you realize that there’s pretty remarkable diversity of page length in the range of 95 to 126 pages.

**John:** Yeah. The highest number of scripts he read had 106 pages rather than 107 pages. Also, I recognize now on the very right end of the chart, it goes up to 147, but it doesn’t fill in all the little steps in between. So, it’s misleading out there on the edges of the chart.

**Craig:** Yeah, he didn’t do the little squiggle to show that the graph was breaking numerically, which makes sense, because the 147 would have just skewed the graph and made it look stupid.

I mean, let’s give — what’s his name, proper_whatever?

**John:** profound_whatever.

**Craig:** profound_whatever has done a quite beautiful job graphically here. I just wanted to give him or her credit for their visual sense. I like the color choices and the fonts and everything.

**John:** Here’s what I would say, a useful thing to take from this. Anywhere between, you know, I’d say 98 pages and 120 pages, you’re going to be in a pretty safe zone. Most of the scripts you’re going to read are going to be in that zone. And so if you’re outside of that zone, you should really think twice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you still see, I mean one of the more popular page counts in his infographic is 95 pages, which surprised me that there were that many. You know, I’ve never turned in a script that was fewer than 100 pages. I don’t think I’ve ever turned in a script that was more than 120. I’ve always landed somewhere in that 20 page zone depending on what the story called for.

But, I could see, okay, if it was a great 95 pages, no one is going to throw tantrum. If it’s a great 128 pages, no one is going to throw a tantrum. But, you will start to stress people out as you drift away from. I mean, however many standard deviations away from whatever they say — I would just say 110 is a nice number to call middle zone.

**John:** Let’s take a look at heroes and villains. Here he’s charting whether the hero and the villain were male, female, and how it all works. So, by far the bulk of scripts were a male hero and a male villain. That’s not surprising to me at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Male hero/indistinct villain is the second highest number. An indistinct villain is a forest fire, zombies, himself/herself, a haunted house, the Nazis, society, etc.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that man versus something that’s not another man.

Female villain, there’s only 16 scripts. Male versus female villain, 16 scripts. Female villains altogether only accounted for 33 of the —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That’s a not very high number.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Female heroes were 33 out of these scripts. Sorry, total of 50 if you count the male and female villains. Not that huge a number.

**Craig:** No, this may be a function of the fact that more men are writing these screenplays than women. It may be a function of society or god knows what. You know, I always hesitate to draw conclusions from these things. But one thing is clear. This is a very statistically significant finding.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the 300 scripts is actually a pretty decent population upon which to draw statistical analysis. That stories about men opposing men are wildly more popular than any other kind of story.

**John:** Nearly half of the scripts that he covered was a man versus a man.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the writers. So, of these 300 scripts —

**Craig:** Oh, well there you go. [laughs]

**John:** 270 were male writers.

**Craig:** There we go! That probably has is a big part of it. Yeah.

**John:** 22 were female writers. Eight were a male/female duo. Solo writers accounted for more than two-thirds, 223. Writer duos or trios accounted for the rest of them. Only four trios.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I know very few writing trios. So, if you have three names on a script, that’s usually someone has come in to rewrite it. It’s not that you were a writing team of three people. Do you know any writing teams of three people?

**Craig:** I do. The most famous and longest lasting writing trio probably in Hollywood is Berg, Schaffer, Mandel.

**John:** You’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** But they are an anomaly. No question.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the miscellaneous section. Heroes/villains with macho action movie names, 25.

**Craig:** “Stacker Pentecost.”

**John:** Scripts based on a true story. 18 of those.

Pun titles…

**Craig:** [sighs]

**John:** Yeah. Oh, he didn’t count how many were like a bad word in a title, because that’s always like one of those icebreaker things where you have filthy words in the title.

**Craig:** Where is that?

**John:** It’s not there.

**Craig:** Oh, he didn’t count that.

**John:** It feels like there would be more of those than pun titles.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that’s a thing that people do. They throw some word you could never actually use in the movie title —

**Craig:** But so many pun titles. I mean, Last Vegas is out in theaters right now. People love pun titles. I don’t know why.

**John:** They do. Found footage scripts, 11. Zombie scripts, 10. Attempts at the next Sherlock Holmes, like historical revision.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Manic pixie dream girls, only four.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice to see.

**John:** But three uses of the scorpion and the frog analogy.

**Craig:** Well, it’s everyone’s favorite analogy.

**John:** It’s the best little analogy.

**Craig:** And look, I like that he puts here, “We get it, some people are born bad.” I know, but you know, like what if it’s in a good script?

**John:** I would take exception to that. I don’t think you can use that anymore. I think it can be a fantastic script, it would only hurt a fantastic script to actually call it out. Even Drive, with his scorpion jacket, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I get it.”

**Craig:** Well, what if it’s in the script in action and it’s not meant to be seen or heard? Like what if somebody says something like, “Jim shoots Dan. Dan looks at him. Of course, the scorpion and the frog,” but not like dialogue. Is that okay?

**John:** Yeah. It wouldn’t bug me nearly as much. I think it’s still absolutely a valid idea that a character cannot change his basic nature. That’s an absolutely valid idea, thematically resonate now, for the next 100 years.

**Craig:** But you can’t say it.

**John:** You can’t say it aloud.

**Craig:** I totally agree with that. That would be ridiculous at this point.

**John:** So, of the 300 scripts that he covered, he or she, I’m just assuming it’s a he, but that’s not necessarily true, 49 were horror/slasher.

**Craig:** That’s so crazy to me that there’s that many.

**John:** So many.

**Craig:** And you know, interestingly, so that was the most popular genre. And perhaps specs lend themselves to horror/slasher genre. Or perhaps a sort of cottage industry of amateurs love horror. But, horror movies are actually not that — they don’t get made a lot actually.

**John:** See, I think people will see that those scripts are selling. And we’re making at least ten of those a year. So, I think if you’re a first-time writer who is trying to sell a script, it might be the thing you write though.

**Craig:** Sure. But, I mean, look at this —

**John:** It’s not a bad —

**Craig:** There’s comedy, I mean, every month there’s two comedies, no matter what, without fail. And there are only 31 out of 300. 10% of the scripts were comedies.

**John:** That seems crazy to me.

**Craig:** It just seems crazy, right? Whereas almost 50 were horror movies. That was very, I mean, listen, great. Less competition. Please, more horror movies.

**John:** But here’s a thing I’ll say. If you are a funny person why are you not writing a comedy script? Well, maybe you’re writing a comedy TV half-hour. Maybe that’s where they’re actually spending their time. But if you’re a funny person, you have so much less competition on the spec level for those reads.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, maybe there just aren’t that many funny people.

**John:** Now, it could be a reporting bias. Like maybe this guy is known as like not having a sense of humor whatsoever, so he doesn’t get sent those scripts. That’s possible. When I was at TriStar I got sent certain scripts and not other kinds of scripts and I will never know why, but that’s possible.

**Craig:** Oh, all right.

**John:** The other genres are less represented. Drama, only 23. Drama that’s not a thriller or crime and gangster. So, that is sort of an eccentric way of breaking that up. Coming of age is broken out separately, so you never quite know what that —

**Craig:** Right. I mean, 13 science fiction post-apocalyptic. 12 mysteries. I liked “extraordinary romance,” 12 scripts. I’m not sure what that means. I guess, does that mean like — ?

**John:** I think it’s Twilight.

**Craig:** Oh, that means almost like supernatural romance?

**John:** Supernatural romance.

**Craig:** Oh, okay, I thought extraordinary romance meant like, wow, they really love each other. As opposed to those other movies where they kind of love each other.

**John:** I will point out that later on in this chart which I didn’t recognize, action-adventure comedy is listed separately as a category as six scripts, so there’s some of your comedy people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Black comedy is listed as four. But black comedy is really it’s own thing. Like black comedy is not joke-joke funny-funny usually.

**Craig:** Yeah, black comedy is truly its own thing.

**John:** And there’s seven scripts listed as family, and family is a little bit more likely to be comedy.

**Craig:** You never know. It could be, or it could be sort of mopey.

**John:** Time period, story set in the past, 55 scripts. Story set in the future, 12 scripts. The vast majority of stories were set in the present. That makes sense. As it should be, unless there’s a reason to be somewhere else.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** The endings. Good triumphed over evil in 229 of the scripts. Evil triumphed over good in 32 of the scripts. And there were a lot of horror/slasher movies —

**Craig:** Right, setting up the sequel.

**John:** Yes. Open-ended or even-handed. A little of both but not enough of either. 39 scripts.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, I was thinking of my own movies applying to this and it’s like, well, good triumphs over evil. Well, like Go didn’t really have evil to some degree. I guess it’s a happy ending because no one that you cared about died, so —

**Craig:** Yeah, maybe yours would have been “even-handed.”

**John:** Yes. All right. Settings. How many scripts were set in each of these different locations. Totals will not add up due to scripts with multiple locations.

So, he has a very nice little map here that shows the locations where a lot of things are set. Obviously things tended to be set more on the edges of the country. So, west coast, east coast, some Texas, some New Orleans, very little in — well, there were four scripts in Denver, Colorado, which has been a weird thing I’ve noticed recently. Because both of your last two movies had a Denver connection, didn’t they? Or, no, your movie and Rawson’s movie? Identity Thief did, but also Rawson’s movie had.

**Craig:** The reason why is because studios, particularly when you’re dealing with the, we’ll call it mid-budget studio comedy that’s around $30 million or so, which is where We’re the Millers and Identity Thief both landed, they almost inevitably shoot in Atlanta. And you can’t make every movie actually set in Atlanta. Denver, as it turns out, is a kind of — for the rest of America, it’s considered a generic city. Nobody really knows what it looks like. You can kind of get away with it.

And so I have a — that’s why they did Denver, at least for us, and I suspect it was the same for Rawson because he was shooting in Atlanta, also.

**John:** So, considering that so many movies are shooting in Atlanta right now, not one script was set in Atlanta.

**Craig:** I know. Which is really interesting.

**John:** I would say the south overall is hugely underrepresented in this sample. So, Houston, there’s only two. New Orleans, there’s five. Miami, you really can’t count Miami as the south. Nowhere else in the south.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is odd. When I look at, for instance the original setting for Identity Thief was a road trip from Boston to Portland. So, in this case I would have been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three scripts, which I assume were Harvard stories, and Portland, Oregon, two scripts. But, when you look at the way people basically write, New York — 43 New York. 32 in LA. 12 in Chicago. And then everybody else is just running behind.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** People love writing movies in New York and LA.

**John:** They do.

This next category, the undisclosed locations, some of our south is made up here. So, there were 11 scripts set in the deep American south. But, not specifically one southern place or another southern place, which as someone who has made Big Fish, I will tell you that you’re going to find great differences between Alabama, and Kentucky, and Tennessee.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it strikes me it might be a lack of specificity to use our commonly used term here.

**Craig:** Or to be fair to these writers, he may have not — when it says “Undisclosed — the deep American South,” there may have been some indication that it was in a state or something like that. But he’s done these by city, so.

**John:** Yeah. We also don’t know — he presumably didn’t go into this planning to do exactly this infographic chart. And so usually in coverage you would not necessarily list every little detail that could help build this kind of chart.

**Craig:** Right. I didn’t like seeing though that 46 scripts were in some anonymous small town and then 40 were in some anonymous big city. That’s unacceptable. And I have read many, many scripts where you are in “a town.” What town? How town? [laughs] Please, give me more than “town.”

**John:** A town in Montana and a town in Arizona are going to be very different towns.

**Craig:** I mean, this is not a stage play. You know what I mean?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You can get away with Our Town on stage, but not on film.

**John:** So, this next section is recurring problems. And this is where it’s really his judgment, and so you should take it with a grain of salt. Like this is his opinion. But, the reader is basically giving his opinion in writing this coverage report anyway.

Usually coverage will have a title page which will list all the sort of quantifiable facts. And also give you the pass/recommend/consider. The second page or couple pages of the coverage will be a synopsis which will basically — just like a book report, like summarizing what actually happens in the plot. The last page of coverage is usually comments, which his basically this is what I actually genuinely think of the script. And this is really the meat of it. And this is where you’re pulling these recurring problems. So, these are the problems that he found in scripts and we’ll go from the most common to the least common problem.

The story begins too late in the script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. You see that a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I don’t know what to — this is a little hard for me because I’m not sure how to evaluate this exactly. Maybe I disagree with him, and you and I have talked about how —

**John:** Because you like long first acts.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you — we both like long first acts. This guy may just be like, “Start,” you know.

**John:** Well, here’s what I will say based on what he’s putting in his little sub heading here. If it’s not even clear what kind of movie it is until like midway through the script, then you really have a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, even in these long first acts we’re talking about, they’re setting you up for, like, this is what the world of the movie is. This is what we’re going to follow and see. So, even if the fuse hasn’t been lit so quickly, we know that there’s a bomb.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We know sort of what the world is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have a feeling that if we were to talk to the person that did this, he or she would be able to look us in the eye and say, “No, no, no, trust me. This story began way too late.” And so I’m going to say, okay, yeah, I get that.

**John:** Scenes are void of meaningful conflict.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Yeah. We know this. So, far too often you have scenes where characters are either doing the next thing the story needs them to do, and they’re just doing it, or they’re telling another character something that happened that we already saw happen. Like, you have to look at like what is the conflict within every scene. And if there’s more than one character in the scene, there’s probably some conflict. Hell, if there’s one character in the scene, there’s got to be something that she needs to do that is a source of why there’s an engine in this scene.

**Craig:** You will also see this a lot in screenplays written by people who are attempting to dramatize their own lives, or things that have happened to them that they think are interesting or funny, but they’re not. All they read like is lunch with three people jabbering.

**John:** Yup.

The script has a by-the-numbers execution, 53 scripts. Yeah, so if you can predict exactly what’s going happen the next ten scenes from now, that’s a problem.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The story is too thin. That’s a little bit generic. But he says 20 pages of story spread over 100 script, stuffed with tone but light on plot. Well, yeah, with bad execution, certainly.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** There’s lots of movies I love that are actually kind of light on story, but that’s part of their charm that there’s not that much that happens. The French film with the old couple and she has the stroke.

**Craig:** Amour.

**John:** Amour. Great. That has 20 pages of plot over a two-hour movie. But you would not want more in there.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, there are movies where the joy is the journey. And I have a feeling, again, that perfidious_whatever…

**John:** profound_whatever.

**Craig:** profound_whatever would say to us, “Uh-huh, no, totally. Trust me. None of these were Amour. None of these came close to that. I, in fact, wanted to kill myself with a pillow after reading a number of them.”

**John:** The villains are cartoonish/evil for the sake of evil. Yeah, that’s really tough. We talked about villains in a previous episode. You have to have — every villain is a hero. You have to look at the whole story from the villain’s point of view. And it has to actually really make sense.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They can’t just be doing it “just because.”

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, there are times when you write a villain and part of their charm is that they are kind of — they’re kind of monologue-y and a little pretentious because that’s who they are. I mean, he writes, “The best villains are those who think they’re the hero of their own story, i.e.,” I think he means e.g., “the Joker, Hans Landa, Anton Chigurh.” Well, the Joker and Hans Landa, in particular, are incredibly snarky, and smirking, and sinister, and have affected dialogue, and pretentious monologues.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, you can’t have it both ways, Whatever. You got to pick one. So, I think the answer is if you’re going to go for a villain like that, make them interesting. And make them actual human beings who are understandable.

**John:** Also, let’s look at, you know, so many of the things he covered were horror/slasher things, which is going to be much more likely to have this as a problem.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’ve come to accept in certain kinds of genre, slasher movies, that the villain is just a psychopathic villain. And there’s something really terrifying about that, but that is sort of evil for the sake of evil.

**Craig:** And he’s calling out hit men, serial killers, and gangsters. And those three areas are rife with awfulness. No question. The too-cool-for-school hit man. The Hannibal Lector rip-off serial killer. And then gangsters. There’s just, you know, we’ve been doing gangsters since they figured out how to shine light through celluloid.

**John:** Yeah. Character logic is muddy. Yeah. Often lack of character consistency or a logically unsound villain plot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Every character actually needs a reason. Why is he doing this?

**Craig:** Yes. Your characters don’t behave like human beings.

**John:** That’s where I describe where we should be able to freeze the movie and point at every character in the scene and say, “What are they trying to do? What is their goal? What’s happening here?’

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if you can’t answer that question you need to stop and actually rewrite your scene.

**Craig:** And do they pass the human test. Would a human react this way to this?

**John:** Absolutely.

The female part is underwritten.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** A common complaint.

The narrative falls into a repetitive pattern.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Yup. The conflict is inconsequential/flash in the pan.

**Craig:** Right, low stakes.

**John:** And sometimes it’s really just that you can feel the conflict is just being spread on. it’s not inherent to the actual situation. It’s just like people are shouting at each other just because you need them shouting at each other.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there’s a problem and it just gets done. There are no obstacles. It’s not interesting. You don’t feel like anybody had to struggle or sweat. There is no significance to what the heroes are tasked to do.

**John:** The protagonist is a standard issue hero. So, basically based on the genre or the kind of movie it is, it’s exactly the kind of hero you have in this kind of movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a fair criticism. If it feel generic because it just sort of comes with the territory, that’s not going to be a helpful thing for you.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** The script favors style over substance. Well, yeah. I don’t know, there’s scripts I really enjoy reading that are written very stylishly and have a lot of flourish to them. That can be great. But if it’s not great, it’s not going to be great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m not quite sure I understood the little sub-header here. “The rule of cool for action movies. The rule of funny for comedies. The rule of scary for horror. No depth, just breath and flash.” What are these rules? That they should be those things?

**John:** Yeah. The rule of cool I kind of get, which I think is going back to that sort of Shane Black action style is what I think they’re trying to get to.

**Craig:** Hmm, okay.

**John:** But I don’t know what the rule of funny is. What’s the rule of funny?

**Craig:** That it’s supposed to be funny? I don’t know what this meant. [laughs] I got confused by that one.

**John:** The ending is completely anticlimactic.

**Craig:** Ooh, that’s bad.

**John:** That’s a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Think of your ending before you start writing, folks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Characters are all stereotypes. Sure, that’s not going to work well.

Arbitrary complexity. “Cluttered and complex aren’t synonyms.” Well —

**Craig:** I know what that means. Sometimes I read scripts and I think the person who wrote this, you know, like Richard Kelly was talking about scope creep. And sometimes you read a script and you think this script has all the invention that only an autistic writer could have put in there, but then also a level of complexity that is bordering on autistic as well. I’m being asked to work too hard to enjoy it.

And now that obviously changes depending on who’s reading it and who’s watching it. And, listen, people went to go see Primer and were like, a lot of people thought it was amazing and some people were like, “Oh, my head.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, most of these rules I think all have to fall under the biggest rule of all which is unless it’s good. [laughs]

**John:** Unless it’s good, yeah.

**Craig:** And then it’s Primer and it’s cool.

**John:** The script goes off the rail in the third act. Yes. That happens probably most of the time where you start to read it and it’s like, wow, that’s not just where I wanted to end up with this story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes writers who have not planned their story in such a way that the ending has relevance for the beginning and vice versa, they just replace — they substitute noise.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, everyone is going to run around, stuff is going to blow up, I’m going to flash lasers in your eyes, and then roll credits.

**John:** I honestly believe that most of the problems with scripts’ third acts is because it’s the last thing you wrote. You were just desperate to get it done. And you just didn’t write it with the care that you could have. So, yes, some of it may be plotting. You may not have actually had good ideas for how you were going to wrap stuff up. But, honestly, just the words on the page are much worse than they were in the first 15 pages because you haven’t rewritten it as much as you’ve rewritten those first 15 pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was sort of the last in, last out. And you kind of were rushing and you were tired.

**John:** Yeah.

Script’s questions were left unanswered. Sure.

The story is a string of unrelated vignettes. Well, that’s a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s bad.

**John:** The plot unravels through convenience or contrivance.

**Craig:** Yes. You get one coincidence per movie.

**John:** Agreed. And so Peter Parker can be bitten by a radioactive spider, but that needs to be it. You can’t have a lot more coincidences there. You can have the one that’s sort of without this coincidence the plot wouldn’t have happened. That’s great. That’s starting you off. That’s like why you’re watching this movie, with this character today. But it can’t be happening again and again throughout the course of your story.

**Craig:** I would actually say that Peter Parker getting bitten by the spider isn’t a coincidence. That’s a random act. The coincidence that they got in that movie was that Peter Parker’s best friend is the son of a guy who is going to become a super villain. That’s convenient. That is a coincidence. And I think you get one of those kinds of things.

Then, you know, if it happens again and again, like I just happen to be here, and I happen to be going through here, then people start getting really angry because our feeling as an audience is you’re not doing the work that’s required to entertain us. You’re just cheating.

**John:** Well, we start to disbelieve the world.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because we know that the real world is not that coincidental. Things don’t happen that way so often.

I would say you can sometimes get an extra coincidence if it’s something that helps the villain. And so if it’s the kind of thing where it’s like out of the blue the villain gets something that actually sort of really helps his side, that’s kind of great, too.

**Craig:** Right. Agreed.

**John:** Luck. Yeah, if it feels like just luck that helps them get there.

**Craig:** If luck hurts your character I think it’s okay. [laughs] It just can’t help them.

**John:** How are you making things worse for your characters? One of those fundamental questions you should be asking with every scene.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The script is tonally confused. Okay.

**Craig:** Sure. See it all the time.

**John:** The script is stoic to a fault. Let’s see what he says by that. “Nothing rattles the characters or the script. Characters don’t react to moments of drama. The script can’t deliver emotional/dramatic beats successfully. Dramatic beats fall flat, even when characters are dying.”

**Craig:** See this all the time. That’s a great one.

**John:** That’s actually a really good observation. It’s not something I’ve ever singled out, but I think it is a real problem where it’s another way of saying the character is not responding in a way to these events as real human beings would.

**Craig:** That’s why when I say to somebody, “How would a human being respond?” We had that Three Page Challenge a few weeks ago, the really good well written three pages, but there was a moment where somebody after murdering somebody kind of quips. And that was a stoic moment that shouldn’t have been there. It was too stoic for what had just occurred.

**John:** That was the western.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly.

**John:** The protagonist is not as strong as need to be. Ooh, that’s a bad sentence.

**Craig:** The protagonist is not as strong as need be.

**John:** As need be, oh yeah, sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s still not a good sentence. The protagonist is not strong enough is the proper way to write that. We’re now doing coverage of the coverage of the coverage.

**John:** [laughs] It got very meta here for a second.

The premise is a transparent excuse for action. Well, yes, but that’s not all together bad. There’s a whole genre of movies that are a transparent cause for action. And it’s really the same way we have musicals which are just an excuse for musical production numbers. There can be something lovely and delightful about that in the right kind of movie.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So, yes.

Character back stories are irrelevant or useless.

**Craig:** Well, irrelevant and useless is bad in all circumstances. [laughs]

**John:** So, a thing is where it’s just like the obligatory “here’s my character backstory” but it doesn’t actually matter at all, don’t do that.

**Craig:** Yes. That would be bad.

**John:** Supernatural element is too undefined.

**Craig:** Uh….well. I don’t know. I mean, sometimes I kind of like it when the supernatural element is appropriately undefined because it’s supernatural, you know. Like when it’s like a very clear, well drawn ghost that explains what his problem is. That’s the one way of doing things. But the idea of some cloud, some evil, some presence, some thing actually matches a child’s understanding of what the dark is, so I kind of like that.

**John:** I do like that, too. I go back to The Ring, and it’s never really quite clear what’s going on with The Ring, but you are freaked out. And I love that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Totally.

**John:** The plot is dragged down by disruptive lulls.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Breaks in story where nothing happens. Momentum is lost. Well, momentum is lost is really the key thing here. How are you going from one scene to the next scene and really propelling your story forward? And if you have this little chunk where nothing is happening, that’s going to hurt you.

**Craig:** That’s got to go.

**John:** The ending is a case of deus ex machina. Oh, am I pronouncing that right?

**Craig:** Machina.

**John:** Machina. It’s a hard “Ch.”

**Craig:** Deus ex machina. Yes. People have been complaining about this since Aristotle. No question.

**John:** The gods come in an rescue you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Or something like the gods.

**Craig:** And, by the way, they’re not even right about — Lord of the Flies doesn’t have a deus ex machina because there is no rescuing. They are lost and broken permanently. Forever. [laughs] But, so I don’t even think of that — to me a deus ex machina is, well, we’ve seen them. We know. We know it when we see it.

**John:** Characters are indistinguishable from each other. We’ve talked about this a lot.

**Craig:** Yes we have.

**John:** Simple things, like your character’s names, will help you out a lot, but every character needs to be more than a name. They need to have defining characteristics so that one character’s dialogue couldn’t be said by another character.

**Craig:** Correct. If you give somebody an accent, nobody else gets that accent. If you give somebody a clipped way of speaking, nobody else speaks that way. Everybody must speak very, very differently.

**John:** Yeah. The story is one big shrug.

**Craig:** Well that would be bad.

**John:** That would be bad. I think that’s actually a fair comment. When you get to the end and you’re just like, “Yeah, okay.”

**Craig:** Right like, “Well, that was perfectly well done. I wouldn’t watch it. I don’t feel anything from it. It ticked off all the boxes. It just doesn’t ultimately deserve to be seen.”

**John:** Yeah.

Let’s power through the rest of these. Cheesy dialogue. Potboiler script. I don’t even know what potboiler means.

**Craig:** Me neither.

**John:** Oh, the airport novel of scripts. Yeah, okay, that’s fair. I guess, but it also just means not well done.

**Craig:** Sometimes those are cool, yeah.

**John:** Drama conflict is told but not shown. Yes, show don’t tell. Great setting isn’t utilized. Well, that’s an interesting complaint. Yes. A great setting is worth making the most out of. Emotional element is exaggerated. Well, okay, but maybe sometimes that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Dialogue is stilted and unnecessarily verbose. Sure.

**Craig:** Hurts the flow. Okay. [laughs] I don’t know, unless you’re watching a Tarantino movie, and then it’s amazing. I don’t know.

**John:** Then it’s fantastic. Emotional element is neglected. Well, so, this reader has some perfect little zone of emotion where it’s not too much, not too little. The Goldilocks zone is not achieved.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, and we’re getting angry at this guy. Screw you, man! [laughs]

**John:** The script is a writer ego trip —

**Craig:** Well, this one actually did piss me off: includes excessive camera directions, soundtrack choices, actor suggestions, credit sequences. How dare you writer that has invented an entire world, and narrative, and characters, and place, and theme, and purpose, how dare you have an idea of where the camera should be looking, or what music should be playing, or who should be playing the person. Or what could even go in the credits. How dare you! That’s the job of the director.

No, dude, that’s old school. Listen, when you say excessive, all I hear is “too much for me” and I don’t know what that is. Now, finally, at this point in the podcast I’m getting a bit shirty. All right, listen, here’s the situation. I don’t believe there are any scripts that have excessive camera direction or any of this other stuff, unless it’s so excessive that it’s stopping you from reading the script. But in and of itself, this notion that writers aren’t allowed to touch this stuff needs to die.

**John:** I’m going to stick up for this guy halfway. So, I think “writer ego trip” is a terrible headline for what he’s talking about here. But things like actor suggestions is — actor suggestions don’t belong in a script. That’s breaking the script to say like, “It’s a Will Smith character.” No, don’t do that.

**Craig:** Not in the script.

**John:** But everything else, not in the script. So, he’s talking about a script. So, if that’s in the script, that’s crazy.

**Craig:** Okay, that one, fine.

**John:** And too many music choices. I think you can get away with like one music choice in your thing. More than that and it’s like you’re reading liner notes. Stop doing that.

But camera direction we’ve talked about on the show. When you do camera direction correctly it feels like you are helping — you’re creating the experience of being an audience member watching it. And that can be fantastic.

Credit sequences are fine. They’re good. I think they’re a useful thing to script if they help tell your story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, don’t stop.

**Craig:** And let me just stick up for soundtrack choices for a second. No, you don’t put in soundtrack choices if it’s just background music while a car is driving. But, if you’re building a sequence that is married to music, and there’s a song that you feel will impart what your intention is for this section, then yes, I’m okay with it. And if you need to do it four times, do it four times.

If the music specifically important to what your trying to say, if in fact you’re using the music to say something you would otherwise have to say with words, then it’s okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Anyway, I got a bit shirty. Okay.

**John:** The script makes a reference but not a joke. A pop culture reference still needs a punch line.

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** Uh…I don’t really quite get that. I mean, I’m sure that he was noting situations where that was annoying, but as a general rule I can’t say that I agree with that general rule.

**Craig:** It’s about the characters. I mean, there are characters that speak that way. If the idea is that you’re trying to make people laugh just by citing it, then no, I agree, that’s annoying.

**John:** But I could imagine things where you’re making like a cosmopolitan joke, sort of like very Sex and the City, and so like if someone now orders a cosmo thinking that it’s really cool, I can see you having them do that and that be a pop culture reference, but making the joke about it would just be a hat on a hat. So, in some ways I think there’s times where you make the reference and you don’t try to make a joke out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or you don’t acknowledge the joke.

**Craig:** Exactly. The point is it’s just a reference which gets made.

**John:** Last one is the message overshadows the story. Well, yeah. I can think of movies that are…yeah, earnest, where you are left with a message but you don’t really care about the plot.

**Craig:** Yeah. Some people like those. I mean, if you’re making a message movie and there’s, I don’t know, I don’t write movies like that so I can’t judge.

I did want to say, have you ever seen that thing from Essanay Studios?

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** So Essanay was an old movie studio. I think it was an old movie studio from the silent film days. And someone found this thing on the internet that has been passed around. It is authentic. And it is a rejection slip from Essanay studios for your screenplay. And so we’ve just gone through all of these things written by some man or woman in 2013. Now let me read you, very quickly, this.

So, they list 17 things and they put a check mark next to the ones that apply.

**John:** That’s so wonderful.

**Craig:** So, Essanay: Your manuscript is returned for the reason checked below.
1. Overstocked
2. No strong dramatic situations.
3. Weak plot.
4. Not our style of story.
5. Idea has been done before.
6. Would not pass the censor board.
7. Too difficult to produce.
8. Too conventional.
9. Not interesting.
10. Not humorous.
11. Not original.
12. Not enough action.
13. No adaptations desired.
14. Improbable.
15. No costume plays or story with foreign settings desired. Illegible.

And last but not least:

16. Robbery, kidnapping, murder, suicide, harrowing death-bed, and all scenes of an unpleasant nature should be eliminated.

Yours very truly, Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, Chicago, Illinois.

**John:** That’s pretty fantastic. So, Craig, when I was in grade school, maybe early junior high I, well, it probably was junior high, I wrote a short story which I hoped to have published in Dragon Magazine.

**Craig:** Hmmm.

**John:** Dragon Magazine being the official monthly magazine of Dungeons & Dragons.

**Craig:** I remember it well.

**John:** And so they published some short fiction. Not every month, but every couple months they published some short fiction. So, I wrote this short story which was sort of hopefully, appropriately sort of sorcery-ish. And so I sent it in and I was so hopeful. And I got back that kind of letter. It was a one-page thing with like a checkmark.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** If I remember properly, though, I think it was just like, “Does not meet our needs at this time.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it was at least a useful thing on that since it was like, well, they liked it, it just didn’t meet their needs at this time.

**Craig:** [laughs] I like that you thought that. You were like, “Hey, dad, great news. They loved it. It doesn’t meet their needs at this time, but that’s sort of like saying it will meet their needs at another time.”

**John:** And what’s amazing is I think they actually did send it back to me, because that was a time where I was sending them a physical object and they sent me the physical object back because they did that at that time. Just the idea of somebody mailing something back to you at this point is crazy.

**Craig:** I know. I know. Well, just the idea of departments of people that are getting these things. Although, you know, it still happens. You ask anybody that works somewhere where things are submitted and packages still show up. There are people out there sending cassette tapes out.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s a wild world.

**John:** Even at the Austin Film Festival, some young musician was like, “I want you to hear my demo thing,” so gave me like a CD. I’m like I have nothing to play this in. A CD? I haven’t touched a CD in a long time.

**Craig:** Did you make a cool CD-shaped USB drive? Is that was this is? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Because that would be really useful. Ooh, you say you actually printed a URL on a business card. That would be vastly more useful to me.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I’m not going to listen to this.

**John:** Or like this is my Sound Cloud account. Oh, I know what that is.

**Craig:** Somebody should go make CD-shaped of things that aren’t CDs. I like it.

**John:** [laughs] Done.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** Our next topic is this WGA negotiation that’s coming up. So, essentially this past week the DGA make their deal, or they — so, I don’t want to overstate what they did. The DGA goes into negotiations with the AMPTP which were the people who run all the major studios. And generally the DGA goes in and is the first group to talk with them about the things they would like for the next three-year contract.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And they came back with some decisions and now the membership will vote on the deal that they have reached.

**Craig:** Yeah. Actually historically they haven’t been the first ones to go in. Historically they’ve gone in very early, but the way that the union contracts were staggered the Writers Guild often went first. Sometimes the actors went first. One of the biggest losses that came out of our strike with the companies in 2007/2008 was that we fell out of cycle and the DGA officially did become the first to negotiate.

Technically we are still — we still expire before they do, but it’s so close that, you know, the DGA will literally go in eight or nine months early. So, they are now in the driver’s seat firmly which is where they’ve always wanted to be and that’s where the companies want them to be. The companies know that the DGA is the most likely union to make a deal. They don’t strike.

**John:** So, next up will be the Writers Guild and the actors will have to go in and negotiate their deals. And the whole idea of being on one of these committees that negotiates these deals is horrifying to me, because why would any sane person ever want to be involved in these negotiations. But, of course, this year I actually am on the negotiating committee, so I was asked to be on this.

It’s weird. I can’t talk in any official capacity about these negotiations, but what I can do is listen to Craig Mazin describe what happened in this last deal and what the things are that we in the negotiating committee might be having our ears open to as we go into this next round of negotiations.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, the deal is that when a union arrives at one of these agreements, what they’re basically arriving at is a memorandum of basic deal points. It’s a little bit like when you and I get hired to do something. There’s something called a deal memo. And the deal memo basically says this is how many drafts we’re hiring you to do guaranteed and this is what we’re paying you for each draft.

Then there’s this long form contract that the lawyers have to write up that goes into all the nitty gritty like how much do I get paid a week if I have to travel with the production to Paris and so forth. That will still happen. The DGA still has to do that long form. But the deal memo is the important part.

We’re still kind of picking out the details from this, but here are sort of the big ones. They got some wage increases for one-hour programs on basic cable, what they call “out of pattern.” Basic cable is a big, big issue for the writers because we know that the explosion of employment on basic cable dwarfs what is currently available on network, which is where our bread and butter was back in the day of three channels or four channels.

We have a ton of people that are working in cable. And, frankly, cable is a little bit of the wild west. Some of the cable shows aren’t even union at all, which I don’t understand. I don’t understand how we let WGA writers work on those shows. That’s another topic. But they got some sort of little increase. We’re not exactly sure what.

They are continuing to work on new media in small ways. They’re coming up with residuals for things like shows on Netflix, or shows that run on Amazon. So, they’re starting to get into that business.

**John:** We should clarify, this is original programming for Netflix or for Amazon.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, things like House of Cards or any of those, or Betas, or any of those things.

**Craig:** Correct. And this is one of those areas where no one seems to know how much money there really is. And they’re trying to figure out how to create a formula that doesn’t turn around and bite you in the butt later. The Writers Guild has, in the past, vehemently argued for formulas that then turned around later were not great for us. So, we have to basically get the details on what’s been done there.

Similarly, they’re covering things in ad-supported streaming and cable video on-demand stuff. Set top box streaming. And these things were uncovered before.

**John:** Yeah, can you explain cable set top box streaming in a way that might make sense? Because I think that’s video on-demand. That’s what I think of as video on-demand. Isn’t it? Or is it a special case of video on-demand?

**Craig:** I think it may be that it is that, that it is basically, but it’s not pay-per-view, it’s different. It’s streaming through, you know what I mean?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** So if you’re streaming directly from maybe, I don’t know.

**John:** Here’s what, so once I get into this negation I’ll —

**Craig:** You’ll find out. You’ll tell us.

**John:** I’ll find out what these terms really mean. Here’s what I think it might mean. And there are some movies which are free to watch through cable. Like they’re basically video on-demand, but they’re free.

**Craig:** Oh, they’re ad-supported. That’s what it is.

**John:** Yeah, they’re either ad-supported or it’s part of a subscription. Basically you get that as part of a subscription. So, those things are free to watch because they’re buying a block of movies that you can watch when you want to watch. So, you’re not paying individually for each movie. My guess is that is the kind of thing which needs to be figured out.

**Craig:** Right. That we get some residuals based on the ad revenue. And they also, a lot of this stuff, the company is building these free windows where they’re allowed to show things without paying residuals for a little bit just to get people’s interest up and then — and apparently the window for free streaming there was reduced.

To me, the big, I guess this is the big one. The big one really is that traditionally there would be a 3% increase in our scale pay rate. Most screenwriters aren’t dealing with scale. And the 3% increase there isn’t that much anyway. The reason that was always important is because television residuals are in fact tied to minimums, to scale. So, when we would get a 3% increase over the life of the contract, that meant that residuals in perpetuity we’re going to paying out at a higher rate for television.

In the last negotiation the companies successfully worked that number back down to two. And it looks like the directors have gotten them to now over the course of three years work it back up to three again. It’s sort of like, okay, everybody recognized that the marketplace went crazy but that crisis is over and we need to get back to three again.

So, it looks like that happened. I’ll tell you that all this stuff is done. In other words, when the companies come to the Writers Guild, the terms that they negotiate with the directors will be the terms that you guys get and they will not be altered in any important way. There are some areas where things are unique and can be massaged. And for this next negotiation a lot of that has to do with the relative state of health of the pension and health funds at the different unions.

The actors have a whole bunch of issues over there. And we all have our own issues. The writers traditionally have had very strong health and pension funds. I don’t know how Obamacare is going to affect us. I have suspicion that it’s going to. And so I think part of the negotiation is going to be about protecting health and pension from perhaps an increase in taxation or penalties or something like that.

**John:** Yeah. I think not knowing any specifics about our pension plan and negotiations, the general discussion I’ve heard about Obamacare is that the Writers Guild health plan is considered like one of those luxury plans.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** It covers a whole bunch of things. And because it covers a whole bunch of things it may have different tax ramifications.

**Craig:** There’s no question. And the thing is what you start to find when you go through a negotiation process is that the companies really look at these contracts bottom line as a number. And it all gets divided up in various different ways. But when they say, okay, well we gave the directors this amount. We’re going to give you this amount. And it’s going to come in terms of an increase in residuals and this and that. And also you can move things around for health and pension.

So, I think this is going to be a fairly boring negotiation. I think it’s basically been negotiated with little areas here and there that we can fiddle with. But this is life in the world of the directors going first and I think we are going to have to get used to it.

**John:** Let’s go to our third topic for our show this week which is something you suggested which is something you suggested which is, I think was a conversation you had with a fellow writer?

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I met with a writer, he was a younger writer and he just wanted to get some advice. And obviously no names here. Terrific, terrific person. But he mentioned to me that — he was describing the various struggles that he faced as he was learning his craft and practicing his craft. And a lot of them were very familiar: finding the right amount of time, and self doubt, maybe partnerships that didn’t work out.

And then he brought up this other thing which was getting high. And, you know, you and I, we’re the old guys now. People just get high a lot. [laughs] They get high a lot.

**John:** You’re saying the younger generation gets high a lot, or our generation gets high a lot?

**Craig:** I think twenty-somethings just get way higher than we ever did. They just —

**John:** That may be true.

**Craig:** They just get high all the time. Our generation obviously got high and still gets high. And drinks. And drank and still drinks. But weed in and of itself, when we were in our twenties you could get arrested, you know? [laughs] Like I had to hide it. You really can’t now. There’s not a — and I actually like that. I believe that marijuana should be legalized.

However, I also believe that if you want to be — and this is what I told this person — stop getting high. If you want to write a screenplay, stop it. You want to get high Friday night through Sunday afternoon? Go for it. But this is a job that to me at least requires an enormous amount of sobriety. Even the famous writers who were notoriously drunk —

There was an interesting article recently. A lot of them found that they were most productive when they were writing through hangovers. It was in the aftermath of the drinking and the abuse. But, it’s romantic to think that you can get high and write the best stuff of your life.

I don’t think it works at all.

**John:** Well, in a general sense let’s talk about writers and drugs, because I think it’s actually a fascinating topic. The writers who get high because getting high reduces their inhibitions and makes the words flow or whatever, that was never me, and it’s not the experience I’ve noticed from any of my writer colleagues who sort of of my cohort. So, it’s entirely possible that this next generation that’s rising up to replace us, they are tremendously successful at writing while high and I’m just completely missing it. That same way that like I kind of didn’t understand why anyone would have a manager, then Justin Marks explaining why writers have managers.

So, it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong. But I kind of don’t think I’m wrong. Because my experience of being around people who get high a lot is that either you can do two things. You can use it as a crutch. Basically like, well, I can’t write because I’m not high, and I’m always high when I write. That’s tremendously challenging when you’re in any situation where you can’t get high. Where you’re actually in a room working on something and that becomes your thing. It’s like having this weird thing where you can only write when the sun is streaming through the window one certain way and any other way it won’t work. That’s bad. That’s not going to be useful to you.

The other thing I would say is that most of the people I know who get high a lot, their ambition just sort of dissipates a bit. And without ambition, I don’t think you’re going to be able to generate the quantity and quality of work it’s going to take to really make a screenwriting career.

**Craig:** I agree. I think that it’s important for me to point out that my experience of my cohorts is exactly the same as yours. I don’t know one single successful writer who has maintained a career who continues to abuse drugs or alcohol. I know some that have, and gotten over it, but I don’t know any that continue to do it as a matter of practice and can still function through it. I also think that the problem with writing while you’re high is that you’re not writing. The whole point of getting high is to alter your consciousness, which is fun.

It’s totally fun. Drinking is fun. And getting high is fun. I get it. But it’s about expanding your consciousness, and letting go of who you are for awhile, and when you come back from it, perhaps you can come back with something that you’ve learned about yourself. But then you’re not writing. There’s a you and it’s the sober you. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** I would agree with you. Writing is really hard. And so I think some of the instinct behind using something like pot or people who are using Provigil or Ritalin or other sort of stimulant things, helps them sort of focus in on what they’re doing, it’s an attempt to make something that’s inherently hard feel easier. But in making it feel easier, it’s unlikely that you’re going to find great success in that solution.

If you’re on one of these, if you take Ritalin or whatever, you may pile through more pages. The odds that they’re going to be awesome pages are very, very small.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** And I would also say the same with pot. You may write a few good sentences, but it’s unlikely you’re going to get the work done that needs to get done.

**Craig:** No, screenwriting is rigorous. It requires enormous attention. To me, writing while altered is right up there with directing while altered. Or driving. And I’m taking away even the aspect of how dangerous that would be for other people, yourself physically. I mean to say your just not very good at it.

It’s something that requires focus, and attention, and intention, and thought. And the whole point of getting high is to make some of that stuff go away. You know, beyond caffeine and, you know, cigarette, you know, if you feel like hurting your lungs.

But, yeah, just no. Don’t. I think culturally speaking I was a little taken aback, not in a judgmental way, but more in a, huh, I think this is probably going on more than you and I realize.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** So, advice here is stop. I don’t think it’s going to help you.

**John:** Yeah. And so I want to phrase it as this is not a moral judgment about sort of whatever substances you want to consume. Just in my experience looking at sort of historical record of people I know who have succeeded and got stuff done, none of the people I know who have succeeded and really gotten a lot of stuff done have been using stuff frequently to do it.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Beyond the exact examples that you list, which are caffeine, which is getting you up and getting your focused through that next bit. And some people do smoke. But not that many people smoke now. Even Craig Mazin doesn’t smoke now.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s an occasional, you know. The guy that needs to smoke a cigar every day while you’re writing. Great. Worked for Mark Twain. And really caffeine and nicotine or sort of two peas in a pod. But, you know, totally agree with you. This is not judgmental. I believe all drugs should be legal. I’m very libertarian about that. And I don’t care what you do when you you’re not writing. But, I do want you to be writing, not high or drunk you.

**John:** Yeah. That’s very important. And I will also say that I’m not discounting the fact that some people have special challenges and their brains are not working right, and so this is really talking about an otherwise healthy person who is trying to write a screenplay.

If you are a person who is sort of not overall healthy in life and needs some other antidepressant or whatever else, go do that and take care of yourself first. So, that’s not like a blanket statement against all drugs or any medication that could help a person.

But specifically taking something in order to get yourself to start writing is not my advice to you.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Craig, I have a One Cool Thing. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Great. You go first.

**Craig:** This flows out of this last discussion. When I was thinking about it I realized that it would probably be a good idea if people who were out there who maybe were struggling with this as writers, is there something for writers who are struggling with substance abuse. And I found this. I can’t necessarily vouch for it, because I don’t have a substance abuse problem. And so I don’t have any personal experience. But there is an organization called Writers in Treatment. And they even have scholarships and things. And they’re an independent California non-profit company that basically was started by writers, for writers, here in Los Angeles, to help people recover from alcohol, or drug, or substance abuse, or self-harming probably, or any of these other things that writers get stuck in.

So, I don’t know if you are somebody out there who is struggling and you feel like, well, I would like to recover but I’d like to do it with people that are doing the same thing I’m doing. Then there are some resources for you. This is one. But like I said, I can’t vouch for them. Look around.

I guess the point is they’re out there.

**John:** Agreed. So, we’ll have a link to that.

My One Cool Thing is called Screenflow. And this last week I’ve been recording some different screencasts on Fountain and Highland and why I like to write in Fountain mostly. And Screenflow is the app I use to record my screen for doing those screencasts. And it’s actually just a terrific application.

In the way that we’re all probably used to taking screenshots of things so we can show like what’s going on on our screen, this is recording the video of your screen and the app is very smart at being able to let you zoom in on parts of the screen. And it very much works like Final Cut Pro in the sense that you’re able to cut between different scenes to get your point across. But it’s a terrifically well designed app that has been a pleasure to use. I’ve probably spent 25 hours in it this last week. And it’s great. So, I highly recommend Screenflow. It’s on the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, Craig, if people wanted to tweet to you or to me, I am @johnaugust. You are @clmazin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you want to subscribe to us, go to iTunes and click subscribe for Scriptnotes. Just search for us and click subscribe. If you are there you can leave us a comment. We like those comments.

Next week we should really read those comments. We should go through those because it’s been awhile since we’ve responded. That’s great when people leave comments.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I think that’s it. Oh, if you have questions about stuff that we talked about today at johnaugust.com/podcast you will see a list of all the episodes we’ve done and links to the things we talked about on the show.

**Craig:** This was a packed podcast. Dense. The dense fruitcake of a podcast.

**John:** It was a long episode. It started with that dense infographic and I think it really sort of took its tone from there.

**Craig:** We’re saving lives, John. We’re saving lives. [laughs]

**John:** Perhaps.

**Craig:** I want to believe that we’re saving lives.

**John:** I do want to believe. Craig, thank you so much. Have a great week.

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

LINKS:

* profound_whatever’s [post on r/screenwriting](http://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1r5y6l/ive_covered_300_spec_scripts_for_5_different/) and its [accompanying infographic](http://i.imgur.com/T22gGBO.png)
* Deus ex machina [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina)
* [Directors Guild of America Board OKs New Contract, Triggering Member Vote](http://variety.com/2013/film/news/directors-guild-of-america-board-oks-new-contract-triggering-member-vote-1200874949/) from Variety
* [WGA Announces Contract Negotiating Committee](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/wga-announces-contract-negotiating-committee-655750) from The Hollywood Reporter
* [Writers in Treatment](http://www.writersintreatment.org/)
* [Screenflow](http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/) for Mac, and John’s video and post on [why he likes writing in Fountain](http://johnaugust.com/2013/why-i-like-writing-in-fountain)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 116, the damsels in distress episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m okay.

**John:** Oh, just okay? What’s going on?

**Craig:** You know what, we were in Austin, and we had a great time. It was exhausting and, yeah, I’m fine. You know, the weekend, these weekends are intense. And this one for whatever reason — Ooh, did you hear that?

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** It was like a truck…

**John:** So now we know we’re back in our environment.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re clearly back. Anyway, yeah, so anyway I’m just a little, I’m fine.

**John:** Austin was intense.

**Craig:** It was.

**John:** And it was intense for a lot of reasons. First of all, I got to hang out with people I really liked, and that was really fun. I got to drink on weekdays, which is not a usual thing for me. Also, we’ve talked about this phenomenon, within a two-block radius of the Driskill Hotel during the Austin Film Festival, I’m kind of famous. I’m like recognizably famous, which is not my daily life at all. And so I had a sudden sympathy for actual famous people who can never escape that. Whereas I can walk an extra two blocks and then no one in Austin knew who I was.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you know, you’ve probably had a little more practice with that sort of thing because you’ve been doing the IMDb thing for a long time. And your website. When I first started going to Austin, nobody knew who I was. And then if they knew who I was, they just didn’t care. It is true that the podcast has… — Well, first of all, people would come up to me and they would be emotional. And then I would get emotional. And also there’s this strange thing that happens when you are walking through a room and as you’re walking by people you can hear one of them whispering your name to another person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this is not humble bragging. It’s actually very — it’s not something you want. It’s actually distressing. I’m not saying to people don’t, I mean, of course, it was wonderful talking to people, and I loved every minute of that. And it really is incredible to meet all the people that listen to us. But, you know, I’m not, [laughs], anyway, look, I’m a big mess anyway this week. So, I’m a big mess. But, that was — it was emotional. And it was weird at times and intense.

And, you know what, wouldn’t trade it for the world. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. No regret.

**John:** It was a great, great time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today on the show we’re going to talk about a bunch of things including this article you just sent me from T-Bone Burnet who was at the Austin Film Festival, who I actually met at the Austin Film Festival. Did you meet him there?

**Craig:** I have met T-Bone in Nashville actually.

**John:** Very nice. So, he was there with Callie Khouri, his wife, who is also the creator of Nashville, so he was there. And he wrote this thing that you wanted to talk about, so we’ll talk about that.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I want to talk about damsels in distress, and that meme and that trope and sort of what we can do about that.

We have a bunch of reader questions — listener questions. A question about synonyms. A question about breaking the back of a script. We have a question about speccing a pilot. The end of the second act. And that uncomfortable middle in a screenwriting career. So, we have a big show day. A lot on our plate and our agenda, so we should probably get started.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m going to get my head straight, man. Let’s do this.

**John:** Let’s do this.

So, small bits of housekeeping. First off, t-shirts. We saw so many t-shirts in Austin, which was great, the Scriptnotes t-shirts in blue and in orange.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, the big news is that starting today we are selling another batch of t-shirts. They’re black and they look really, really good. Just like the last time, we are going to do two weeks of preorders, and that’s it. We basically take the preorders, we count up how many shirts we have to make in each size, and we just make those shirts. And so that way we don’t have to stock shirts. We don’t have to do this all the time. It’s sort of a once or twice a year thing we’re going to do.

So, starting today, we are taking orders. We are closing orders on Friday, November 15. We will start shipping these t-shirts out on December 2. So, if you are interested in buying a Scriptnotes t-shirt, they’re at store.johnaugust.com. And they’re available starting today.

**Craig:** Uh, can I get one?

**John:** You can get one. You’re guaranteed. As a host of a show, you’re guaranteed exactly one t-shirt.

**Craig:** Oh, this is why I do this show.

**John:** Yeah, for the t-shirts.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Just like going to the Austin Film Festival for like the little goodie bag, which has like the most impractical things to have.

**Craig:** They didn’t even give me one. What was in it?

**John:** So, there’s like a Stella Artois glass.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Like a small, miniature version, so it wouldn’t even enough to hold like a whole Stella Artois, but there’s a glass for it. Which is like, we all traveled here, so we’re going to have to pack this? No, so of course that just got left in the hotel room.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Although other years they’ve had like Tito’s Vodka, which is lovely, but you can’t take that on a plane, either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The gift bags, I understand why they exist. You’re trying to reward your sponsors. You’re trying to do nice things for your panelists. But they’re frustrating at times.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think given the nature of what’s going on over there, just some aspirin. Some aspirin. [laughs] Some Tylenol. Xanax.

**John:** All of these would be really good, helpful things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, t-shirts. On sale now. If you want a t-shirt, go to store.johnaugust.com.

Next up, I’m going back to New York for Big Fish on Saturday November 23. I’m doing at talk back after the matinee show. And so a talk back is basically you bought a ticket, you came to see the show. After the show you have a chance to talk with the creators, the actors, various people involved in the show.

We will answer your questions. We will talk about the things that you just saw. Those are a fun thing to do that I love about Broadway shows. And so we try to do a talk back every week. Saturday, November 23 will be my talk back. And so if you are interested in coming to that show, get yourself a ticket. Use the SCRIPT discount code by all means. But then email ask@johnaugust.com to let me know that you’re planning on coming.

Space is going to be limited. I think we can only take 60 people. So, if that fills up, we may be emailing back saying sorry, or we’ll do something to change the venue or make it work.

**Craig:** Exciting. I wish I could be there for that.

**John:** The last bit of housekeeping is a lot of people have asked how you and I record the show. And so obviously in Austin we were together in a room, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Most times we’re doing what we’re doing right now, we’re talking on Skype. So, there’s a post up on johnaugust.com right now to explain how we actually do the show, including our microphones, and our headphones, and what Stuart does, and how it all fits together.

**Craig:** Oh, I can’t wait to find out what Stuart does. This is exciting.

**John:** Yeah. So, Stuart, the magical elf, stitches our audio together. It works, and we’re happy to share our way of doing things, which is not the only way to do things, but it’s the way we do our podcast.

**Craig:** It is our way.

**John:** It is our way.

So, let’s get to our new business which is let’s start with the thing you emailed me today which is this Hollywood Reporter article about T-Bone Burnet.

**Craig:** Right. And, you know, so, this was something that Glen Mazzara of Walking Dead fame — among other things — put on Facebook. And it was about music and the music business. But Glen always posts interesting articles. I tend to read the stuff that he curates. And also I met T-Bone. He’s a really cool guy. I mean, honestly, first of all his name is T-Bone, right? And then he’s married to Callie and he’s awesome. So, I thought, okay, I’ll check this out.

I was so pleasantly surprised to find this umbrage screed in it that spoke to my inner angry, angry man. And taught me something about the attitude of Silicon Valley toward content that I didn’t realize. He had such a good insight. So, basically, I don’t have to read the whole thing. I’m going to summarize.

Basically what he says is, look, there was this cultural thing of what happened in Northern California. Northern California, those guys up there were, what do you call, the Grateful Dead, right? They love the Grateful Dead. The culture of Northern California is very Grateful Dead of the seventies. And the Grateful Dead as a band was all about live performance, improvisation, and bootlegging. They were never about one version.

No one cares about the one album version of a Grateful Dead song. The whole point of the Grateful Dead is that they didn’t care either. They were high out of their minds and it was entirely about the experience of the moment, and freedom, and just sharing stuff. And as he points out, the actual business that is connected to the Grateful Dead is “a complete travesty now.”

And then on the other side, you had Metallica which is a decidedly not hippie dippy Northern California band. And Metallica very famously took a stand against Napster and really said, “Look, we control the music we make and we make definitive versions. Obviously we tour and we make live albums, but this is the version that we are putting out there that we own and we frankly don’t want to be circulated around for free because we care for it and it matters to us.”

And his point is that the attitude of, “Oh, la, da, da, music, it’s free!” permeated Silicon Valley in a way that eventually led to the great reduction of the music industry through technology. That there’s a philosophical undercurrent to Silicon Valley, that content should be free. And interestingly, as he points out, these people who promote this technology and say, “Look, we just basically want to spread content around for free,” they also, while they’re doing that, are you making you pay for the conduits through which they spread it.

That there is an underlying hypocrisy to the whole thing, and as he points out, if we talked about tearing down the car industry in the way that we tore down the music industry, people would go nuts. He says, “People in Hollywood, we should go up there with pitchforks and torches to Silicon Valley now. Unfortunately that’s how sophisticated our response would be — pitchforks and torches.”

What a great, great essay.

**John:** So, what I find compelling about this last part about the car industry versus the music industry, or you can carry that through to the Hollywood filmmaking industry, is I think we have this mental model of what it is like to be working at a car plant. We have like what a worker there does. But we don’t have a mental model of what a grip does, what a gaffer does, what these people do, and sort of what the middle class life is like to make movies, or in this case what the middle class life is to be the artist behind things, the screenwriter, director, the creative producer behind a project. So, since we don’t have a model of what it’s like to lose those jobs, because they’re not going to one place, and there’s not a factory closing down, you can’t see that loss the same way.

But, just like in the music industry, there’s a middle class of film people that are sort of disappearing. TV has taken up some of that slack. God bless television.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it has been a real factor.

**Craig:** No question. No question.

**John:** One of the things I also found interesting with his point, this was his quote: “And what’s happened in reality is the power has been consolidated into very, very few companies, and the middle class musician has just been wiped out.” And this con, as he describes it, is that we talk about this sort of freedom and liberation and anyone can get to music and its democratizing things, but the same companies that were sort of fighting to shoot down Napster and file sharing and sort of all the ways that music became free, they paradoxically became more powerful, because they’re the last people standing.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** So, all of the middle group of businesses that couldn’t withstand that onslaught disappeared. And that’s how a lot of people made their living was through those kind of things. And so you can say, “Tough. You got to tour more. You got to do other things.” That’s not true if you’re with the people who are making those albums, and if your life was responsible for making those albums, you’re life has gone away.

**Craig:** Right. And the apparatus they use to support the tours is gone. He says the internet has been an “honest to god con.” And I really want people to think about this, because T-Bone is exactly right. They have fed us the opposite of what they have done. They have appealed to the artistic spirit of freedom. They have appealed to the artistic spirit of freedom. They have appealed to the artistic spirit of wanting to share what you create. And in doing so, they have devalued it and taken all of the money out of it. Or a lot of it.

They’ve done it in music. They want to do it in movies for sure. And I think that, frankly, the only thing that saved us in movies other than the slightly longer path towards quick downloads of movies has been that the movie industry saw what happened to the music industry and they were the canary in the coal mine and they’ve tried everything. And they are trying everything to avoid this.

But when you hear that Google and Amazon want information to be free, what you’re actually hearing is that they want to make all of the money off of your work, and you get none. And I’ve noticed that one of the weaknesses of our union is that in their hatred of our direct employers, they often look to the wrong places for salvation. And our — I sense the Writers Guild constantly looking at Google and Amazon, like they’ll come save us.

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Oh, they will bury us. They will bury us. They want to bury us. Of course they do.

Oh god, that felt good.

**John:** [sighs] A sobering bit of umbrage to get us started here.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Thank you, T-Bone. That was great.

**John:** We don’t have to provide answers, we just have to point out problems.

**Craig:** [laughs] And make ourselves feel better momentarily.

**John:** So, for our next topic, I think we can provide if not answers at least some context for better ways that writers can involve themselves in helping the situations. This is damseling, the idea of damsels in distress, which is not only what’s still in film, or sort of a classic trope. It’s a thing that you see not just in movies or television shows, but also in video games. And the best way I sort of got introduced to this idea and sort of the pervasiveness of this idea is this great three-part series that Anita Sarkeesian did called Tropes versus Women in Videogames.

And so videogames, because they tend to be so linear, the goal is often to save the princess. And so in save the princess you have Donkey Kong, you have Mario trying to save Princess Peach. We all get that. We sort of know what that is.

And on some level we know like, oh, god, women characters don’t do very well in videogames because they are just something to be saved. They are the goal. Either you have to rescue the princess or you have to avenge the death of your wife, or some girl who has been killed.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And that’s a classic trope in those thing. And even as videogames have become more technically and narratively complex, the underlying story behind the women characters tends not to be more complex.

You can even point to this new Grand Theft Auto. There are female characters, but they’re not…

**Craig:** Barely. Barely.

**John:** Yeah, there’s not playable in the ways that other things can be played.

**Craig:** No. Well, let’s extend back a little bit. Damseling is something that has gone on forever. Videogames are obsessed with it in the way that super hero movies are obsessed with it. Even when super hero movies attempt to make female super heroes, they seem to end up in a damseling situation. And that’s not surprising in a sense. There is a certain kind of very male story that appeals to a very male fantasy to essentially be the all powerful man who rescues and provides for a woman who needs rescuing and providing for. That fits into the heterosexual, hetero-normal male perception, particularly for adolescent males and males with Aspergers. It seems like it gets right in there.

And I get it. I get that.

**John:** But we constantly reinforce this idea. So, you can say like it’s a primal innate idea. Great. But there’s lot of ideas that are primal and innate and we are able to sometimes acknowledge them, lampshade them, and move on.

So, one of the first articles I found when I searched for “damsels in distress” was this complex.com article about the 15 hottest damsels in distress in movies.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I thought it was exactly perfect. So, I want to read you…

**Craig:** It’s stupid.

**John:** It does two things at once. So, Rachel Nichols in Conan the Barbarian.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Sure. Live Tyler in The Incredible Hulk.

**Craig:** Hot always.

**John:** Yeah, I forget. Is she supposed to be the scientist, or is she just like the scientist’s daughter?

**Craig:** I believe she is the general’s daughter.

**John:** The general’s daughter.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Michelle Monaghan in Mission: Impossible 3.

**Craig:** Okay, yeah.

**John:** Maggie Grace in Taken.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** She’s literally, she’s the MacGuffin. She is the thing that is taken.

**Craig:** Right. She basically is the briefcase from Pulp Fiction. [laughs]

**John:** Yes. Kirsten Dunst in Spider-Man.

**Craig:** Well, of course.

**John:** Pretty much any girl in a super hero movie tends to become a damsel in distress.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is debatable. Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia.

**Craig:** Eh, I mean, you know, she’s tough. She comes out fighting and she is in distress because she’s a princess and they’ve captured her. But they rescue her in the middle.

**John:** They do rescue her in the middle. And also you sense that the classic image you see is like her in chains next to Jabba the Hutt, but it’s a setup. And so when you realize that this is all part of a plan kind of.

**Craig:** Right, I mean, but look: here’s the truth. For instance in Empire, she comes back real tough to save Han Solo and immediately gets all kissy face and then gets chained up in a bikini. It’s damseling.

**John:** It’s damseling.

**Craig:** It’s damsel.

**John:** You have a competent woman who is then reduced to being an object for the men to rescue.

**Craig:** To rescue and save. Exactly.

**John:** Blake Lively is classically the damsel in Savages, a movie that I talked about at Austin because I actually kind of really dig Savages for the weird things it did, but she is just the thing you have to rescue.

**Craig:** Yeah. I didn’t see it, so, but I’ll take your word for it.

**John:** Robin Wright as the princess in The Princess Bride.

**Craig:** Wonderful movie. Great character.

**John:** Wonderful movie.

**Craig:** I don’t believe she makes a choice in the film.

**John:** Nope. Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean.

**Craig:** Um…

**John:** Now, in later films they tried to sort of swashbuckler her more.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But she ultimately is the pretty thing you have to save.

**Craig:** She is beautiful. And one of the characters has to save her. I actually disagree with this one to some extent. I think that this one was an interesting — an interesting post-modern take on the damsel.

**John:** Naomi Watts in King Kong.

**Craig:** Well, sure.

**John:** The girl in King Kong is the damsel. Yes. Cameron Diaz in The Mask. And I had to think back to The Mask, but my recollection of it was it was a character who seemed to have her own thing and then just becomes a plot device.

**Craig:** She was a chanteuse.

**John:** She was a chanteuse.

**Craig:** And then she got damselled.

**John:** Jessica Alba in Machete. I never saw Machete.

**Craig:** It’s accurate.

**John:** Yes. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The fact that I have no idea who she is and that she’s really pretty and she’s in a Michael Bay movie are signs that she’s probably going to be a damsel in distress.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly, I don’t even know how the guy that made the list picked these 15, because there’s 15 damsels in distress every week.

**John:** These are the hottest ones, though.

**Craig:** Oh, these are the hottest ones. Oh, I see. Oh.

**John:** And, I have to give him props for Ursula Andress as Dr. Honey Ryder — as Honey Ryder in Dr. No.

**Craig:** Yeah. She was not a doctor.

**John:** She was not a doctor. Although, Dr. Christmas Snow from one of the Bond movies.

**Craig:** Christmas Jones.

**John:** Christmas Jones. You’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** Yes, you know me. I’m a Bond scientist.

**John:** Christmas Snow is actually Chrissy Snow from Three’s Company. Her name is Chrissy Snow.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I did not know that.

**John:** I actually have quite a bit of knowledge of Three’s Company. It’s very deeply ingrained in my soul.

**Craig:** [hums Threes Company theme]

**John:** You can knock on my door any time.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing. Well, first of all, I don’t know how familiar you are with Anita Sarkeesian, but she was sort of involved in this very disturbing episode in videogame culture, where she really is as far as I can tell the only person that is very verbal about feminist concerns. I don’t know how else you can point and say — I mean, you can call them humanist concerns about the way videogames portray women, and the vitriol that was piled on her was horrifying. And, obviously, confirmed everything she said and then some. She’s very smart.

And I want her to be listened to. I play videogames. I like videogames. I don’t mind saving the damsel every now and again, but videogames are trailing so far behind movies and film, which are all also damseling, so that’s how bad videogames are. They’re infantile. Their portrayal of women is infantile to the point where it’s how much bigger can the boobs get. It’s just stupid. It’s stupid!

**John:** I was looking through the TV Tropes article on Damsels in Distress. So, if you ever have a question about themes in movies, TV Tropes is a great place to go to. So, these are some of the themes that TV Tropes pointed out about Damsels in Distress. And then you hear them you think like, oh yeah, I get what that is.

Chained to a rock.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a Prometheus classic.

The Girl in the Tower. So, she’s isolated up there and you have to go save her in this tower.

Hypnotize the Princess, basically the bad guy has not only taken the princess, but has corrupted the princess so that the princess is going to do his will, sometimes even after you rescue her she’s dangerous.

**Craig:** Jafar.

**John:** Jafar.

The Living MacGuffin.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** MacGuffin classically is that plot device the hero is going after, but it doesn’t even really matter what they’re going after. It’s just the reason why the plot is there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I have your wife.

The president’s daughter, which if you really stop and think about it, like oh god, how often does the president’s daughter become a thing?

**Craig:** I mean, it just gets…

**John:** And the best topic for me I think is Faux Action Girl, which they define as it sort of seems like she’s a badass action chick, and everyone sort of treats her like that, but if you actually look at what she does in the movie, she’s not an action chick at all. She’s sort of dressed like an action chick, but she actually is kind of useless and doesn’t do anything for herself.

**Craig:** I think someone saw The Avengers, huh?

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** I mean, look, I can’t say that it’s wrong to tell a very simple traditional narrative where you’re saving a princess in a castle. There’s something almost sweet about it. I mean, you guys did it with your videogame. With Karateka.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But where it gets sick, I think, is when it’s not a choice. When it’s just — there are these things that happen called sub-choices, where you never get to the area of choice. You don’t make a — you know what, we’re going to do a traditional simple sweet story where Mario finds the Princess in a castle. It doesn’t even occur to you that there would be another thing to do.

And this is an area where I actually am very proud of my particular genre, because I think comedies have often been ahead of the curve on this one. Not to say that female driven comedies haven’t really exploded in the last four or five years, because they have. Even in romantic comedies, where women are the protagonists.

So, let’s go all the way back to a super, super down the middle romantic comedy like While You Were Sleeping. She is not a damsel in distress in that movie.

**John:** No. She is driving the story.

**Craig:** She’s driving the story. And, to me, comedies — so, that’s why, when I look at damsel in distress movies, I kind of shrug and I just think, really, that’s, I mean, I don’t know. There’s just so much more…

**John:** They’re not the things you’re writing, but even sometimes if the girl is the central character, she ends up being in damsel. So, you look at Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. She ultimately gets trapped there with the witch and it’s not until everyone else shows up that she’s able to do anything. It’s sort of like dumb luck that she throws the bucket of water.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But she gets trapped there.

Bella in Twilight. She’s theoretically the lead character in Twilight, but she’s just there to be rescued most of the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We talked about Indiana Jones and what a great character Marion is, except this incredibly competent woman ultimately becomes a captive.

**Craig:** Right. And by the way, the screenplay I’m writing right now has a very competent woman who ends up captive. [laughs] And I think possibly chained to a rock. And you know what? I made that choice because the truth is the male character, who is the lead of the movie, must save her. But that’s what I needed.

**John:** So, I’m actually writing something at the same time too which in outline form one of the main guys needs to save his girlfriend, or believes he needs to save his girlfriend. And I looked at it again and I looked at it from the perspective of damsel and it’s like, oh, god, I’m trying to find a way to not do that, because…

**Craig:** Yeah, but you do it.

**John:** …it’s simple and simple is lovely, but it may not be the right choice.

**Craig:** Well, listen, then the point is we’re making the choice. And I guess that’s what I would say to people out there. I’m not here to tell you that you can’t write a damsel story anymore, because damsels don’t — women that I know aren’t damsels, but men aren’t heroes either. Okay? And, by the way, women aren’t heroes. Nobody is a hero or a damsel.

In Identity Thief, it’s clear who the damsel in distress is for the entire movie and it’s Jason Bateman. And basically Melissa is torturing the man. But at no point is she, I mean, there’s a point where they get thrown into the back of a cop car and she’s the one rescuing them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that was a choice for that, and this needs the other way. But make the choice.

**John:** Make the choice. And sometimes there are, I want to point out a few movies that have made the choice and sort of found ways to address the damseling that could be useful if you’re facing that situation yourself.

Pepper Potts in the first Iron Man. So, she is the girl in the film, and there’s the expectation like, oh, she’s going to be in danger, she’s going to be at risk. But she’s never actually damselled. She’s trying to do something and she ends up getting shot rather than being held as a captive. And she was being a hero. And she’s being a hero through that situation, so she’s an integral part of the story, but she’s not the object of what he needs to save.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I can’t say that not capturing the damsel, but shooting the secretary instead is necessary a huge step forward for female kind, but…

**John:** Absolutely. I bring it up because she is not the primary focus of these people going after each other. And she’s not being used as bait or as a chick at the end it, which I think is at least useful. So, a female hero being shot is not the worst thing to happen.

**Craig:** [laughs] — Says John August in service to advancing the cause of feminism. Go ahead and just shoot them.

**John:** Shoot them. So, Daphne in Scooby Doo. And so I had the pleasure of being involved in Scooby Doo. One of the things I enjoy about Scooby Doo is that Daphne, that character, she is always being held hostage, she’s always getting tied up, and she’s always in trouble. And so in James Gunn’s version of it, he hangs a lantern on it and he says that character, like they bring up the fact that she always gets held captive and she actually now will train herself and so she’s a stronger, tougher fighter because of that.

So, that’s a choice sometimes, too, is to acknowledge the fact that this is expectation of what’s going to happen to her, and hang a lantern on it, and then subvert the expectation.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so everyone will approach every movie with a set of expectations. They will approach the expectation in an action movie that this girl could become captive, so address it, and subvert it if that works in your story.

**Craig:** If that, yeah.

**John:** Shrek does the same thing. Where you see she’s a beautiful princess, she’s going to be in trouble. No, she’s going to call that idea out and say, “Nope, that’s not going to happen to me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Finally, Sansa in Game of Thrones. And TV is a little bit different because it goes on for so long, but without any spoilers, Sansa, even as we leave this current batch of the series, she is sort of the Princess in the Tower. She’s stuck there and yet while in a general sense there’s a quest to try to get her out of her situation, she’s doing other stuff herself. And so she’s not the sole goal of male characters going to try to save her.

And so she’s part of a very elaborate web of intrigue and decisions and plots, but it’s not just about her being a princess.

**Craig:** Well that’s an interesting concept for me at least. I like the idea that you can present a damsel in distress. And I do think of the character of Sansa as a damsel in distress. And then watch her evolve naturally as a character out of it. Even in movies you can do this.

So, like everybody, I worship The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II. And even though The Godfather Part III has parts that don’t match, obviously, to the quality of the first two, there is one thing about it that I think is extraordinary, and that’s the evolution of Connie.

Because in the first movie she is truly a damsel in distress. She’s being beaten by her husband, and Sonny goes and rescues her. I mean, she gets beaten up by her husband. And in the second movie she is a mess and she blames Michael for ruining her life. And she’s just a heap.

In the third movie she becomes this dragon woman, this amazing force who is holding the family together. Is the spine in Michael’s back. And who is the one that essentially creates the continuity of the line so that the Corleones will forever reign. And that is an amazing thing to watch.

I love that about the third Godfather movie. And I don’t know where the Game of Thrones will take us, because I haven’t read the books ahead. I don’t want to. I like watching them on the show now. But I hope that Sansa evolves. It’s fun.

**John:** Absolutely. So, none of this should be taken as a plea to sort of keep female characters out of danger. Danger is good. Danger is great. The issue comes when you take a character who is in danger just to propel the plot along, especially if you are taking a woman who is previously portrayed as being competent and deliberately making her incompetent at some moment in the third act, or kidnapping her in some moment of the third act so that the male character can go rescue her.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s just such a trope and I think it diminishes what stories can do and I think it sends a really weird message for people watching movies that this is how life should be. And that no matter how competent you are as a woman, eventually you’re going to have to have a man come rescue you.

**Craig:** Right. And I would also ask/suggest that in the spirit of changing language to change the way we think or approach things, that we stop referring to grown women in movies as girls.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s just lame. And I occasionally have to catch myself, because it’s common parlance, you know, “He meets the girl.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh who’s going to be the girl in the movie, you know, it just — but it’s like why is that the one thing we’ve kept from 1930s Hollywood lingo?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know? Because while we’ll say “boy meets girl,” he plays a guy, we’ll say that, “a guy.” So, this man, but she’s the girl. She’s always the girl. So, I say maybe adults deserve woman at this point.

**John:** I agree.

Let’s go to our first question. This first one comes from Joe in Brooklyn, New York.

**Craig:** Hey, Joe, what’s up?

**John:** “I had a question about credits. If a writer gets a script made into a film, but is unhappy with the final product, can he get his name removed from it? Directors have the Alan Smithee pseudonym to follow back. Do writers have something similar?”

**Craig:** Yeah, we do. If the movie is not a Writers Guild covered film, then I think frankly it’s a matter of your individual contract, and if it’s not mentioned in the contract than you’d have to negotiate for a pseudonym. Your right of attribution, that’s a moral right, a Droit Moral, that we don’t have here in the United States. And overseas it’s entirely up to you. Here in the United States where we have work for hire, the Writers Guild and the contract that we have with the companies states that under movies that are created through Writers Guild contracts, we are allowed to use pseudonyms unless I believe we’re paid more than $250,000. It’s somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000.

At that point if they paid us that much, we don’t have the inalienable right to take our name off the movie. Their argument being you must be somebody that was worth something to us. Now we have the right to say no to your request to take your name off the movie. Let’s say we really want to say that John August wrote this movie, or “From the writer of the movie Go,” or whatever they want to promote, they’re not going to just let you on your own decide to take your name off.

You have to ask. In all cases, the pseudonym that you use needs to be registered with the Writers Guild so that it doesn’t duplicate the actual name of another person or the pseudonym that has been used by another person.

We don’t use Alan Smithee. Alan Smithee — it’s remarkable to me that frankly the Directors Guild allows that to perpetuate. I actually think it makes them look terrible.

**John:** Yeah. It’s petulant to me.

**Craig:** It’s petulant and it also is obvious. There are some very famous pseudonyms, Cordwainer Bird I think is the one that Harlan Ellison has used before that people in the know understand mean a certain person, which to me it sort of defeats the purpose of a pseudonym. It’s not longer pseudo.

Alan Smithee defeats the purpose of a pseudonym. For writers, we get to choose our own, and I know writers that have chosen to use pseudonyms. Easier to just not see credit, although if you use a pseudonym you will get the associated residuals and production bonuses and so forth.

**John:** Yeah, which can be very useful.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So, this $250,000 cap, I always take that to mean that at a certain threshold the studio believes that your publicity value is actually useful, and so therefore they want the ability to promote that. And I have seen movies where I don’t think they necessarily care about the writer’s name, but they’d love to be able to say, “From the writer of…something.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And that’s why they want to be able to do that.

**Craig:** And they picked that number, basically, and that’s how these negotiations work, because the contract covers everyone. So, obviously they wanted that number to be as low as possible, whereas the Writers Guild will want it to be as high as possible. I think $200,000 to $250,000 is unreasonably low, frankly, but it was set many, many years ago and we have other fish to fry when we deal with those guys.

**John:** Agreed.

Next question comes from Tucker. He writes, “You mentioned on a podcast a long while back that you often have to go away from your family on a retreat of some kind to ‘break the back’ of the script. I ask because I’m working on my first studio job at home, with a family around me, and they don’t understand why I’m acting like an insane person when ‘little things pop up that need to be done.’ Can you call Wells Fargo and chat with customer service for an hour? Can you handle the AT&T repair guy who needs to be chaperoned? Can you, can you, can you?”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** “I wish I was at some desert hotel somewhere.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, you know, I do think at some point we should do — there’s an entire podcast to be done about the spouses, the poor, poor spouses of writers. I think that Tucker has got a false dichotomy here. So, retreating and going into the desert is not the same as not being in your house with your family around you.

You can be around the corner. You can be at a Starbucks if you need to. I do believe that you must separate from your family and your children for certain hours of the day in order to get your work done. That’s not selfish. Everybody else gets to do it, so why don’t we?!

And you know they don’t understand what it means to be yanked out of your own head when you’re in it, either because you’re suffering in your head, or you’re succeeding in your head. The last thing you want is to be pulled out of it. And you can be irritable and it’s not good for them and it’s not good for you. And, you’re right, they don’t understand.

What they do understand is daddy is working. And daddy goes around the corner to work. Or daddy goes into the backyard. Or daddy goes down the street. You don’t have to go to the desert.

**John:** I think you’re right about the sense of a writer needs to take responsibility for how he or she is both being a writer and both being a member of a family. And so that daily work balance is going to be an ongoing negotiation between the writer and the family.

Tucker, I think, is sort of asking two questions. He’s asking that daily life question. That first paragraph, though, was about breaking the back of something. And that’s something I actually do. And even before I had a family, I would go away to barricade myself in a room to get started on a script, and I still do it to this day.

To me what’s so helpful about going someplace else to start is that I’m out of my normal environment, and so I’ve shown up someplace to do nothing other than work on this thing. And every waking moment can be about that thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I’ll often go to the place where the movie is going to be set so I can sort of live in that environment and sort of see what that’s like, although I’ve often gone to Vegas to do it, too, because Vegas midweek is really cheap. And when you get completely stir crazy in your room in Vegas you can just wander and go someplace else. And you can be alone around a lot of people very easily in Vegas, especially I’m not drinking, I’m not gambling, so I’m a weirdo in Vegas, but it’s kind of great. And there’s food, and all that stuff is lovely.

**Craig:** You’re right. Aside from the context of your relationship with your family, you may be the kind of writer that needs to separate from reality itself and enter a bubble world in order to enter your bubble world. I get that. I can enter bubble world wherever. You can put me on my roof and I can do it. But there are a lot of people that really benefit from that.

I know Rian Johnson just spent quite a long time in Paris because he was breaking the back of his next movie and he needed to essentially go separate from everything and, you know, we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the relationship between the way we’re feeling in the moment around us and how we’re feeling when we’re writing. This is why writers drink. This is why they do all sorts of self-destructive things because, frankly, it makes the writing easier.

It doesn’t make your life easier. So, if you can find safe ways to do it, like sitting in a room in Vegas and not killing prostitutes, then I say absolutely.

**John:** So, my breaking the back process is I will generally hop on a plane, be someplace, and every waking moment is about that script or about one boring book that I’m allowed to go to. So, I don’t turn on the TV. I don’t turn on the iPad. I don’t turn on my phone. And it’s only about that. And what’s useful is I’ll wake up in the morning and I will force myself to hand write a scene before I’m allowed to get out of bed.

I will have breakfast, and I will force myself to hand write a new scene before I can do the next thing I want to do. And so in that process I can write 17 or 20 pages by hand in a day. If I do that for three or four days, I’ve got 45, 50 pages of my script started. And that’s usually breaking the back for me. Once I feel like I have — I’m writing out of sequence, so I’m not necessarily just writing the first act. But I really know who those characters are. I know what the world is. I know what the voices are. And I’m back into sort of full writing mode.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because a lot of times between big writing assignments, I’m not writing that much. And so sometimes I just need to actually sort of build up some steam and sort of get those muscles back working.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Then it’s much easier for me to get started doing stuff. I try also not to put all those pages together right away. I want to get up to like 60 or 65 pages of sort of knowing that I have that much material before I start pasting all those things together and seeing the whole script. If I do that too early, if I start looking at the whole script too early I will start editing and moving commas around and I will never get the full thing bit.

**Craig:** You know, and for me, that is part of it. Part of the work that I do. What’s interesting is that while we can agree that separating from people while you’re in that space is a good thing, even if you just are going around the corner, or if you’re going somewhere else, what we also know is that we’re very different. All of us are very different.

I’ve heard so many different — everybody it seems has their own unique approach to tricking themselves into writing and part of the struggle of being a new writer is you’re figuring out what works for you. And so, unfortunately, you’re just going to have to figure it out.

**John:** Yes. You are the guinea pig and the scientist.

**Craig:** All at the same time.

**John:** Next question is — I didn’t write down the person’s name, but it’s about speccing a pilot. He writes, or she writes, I think it’s a he: “I’ve been trying to start a career as a screenwriter for the last 18 months. And though I’ve gotten some positive feedback, I have not yet secured representation from a manager or an agent. A producer approached me recently about writing an outline for a spec TV pilot, which I did.

“He liked the outline, and now wants me to write the full script for the pilot.”

**Craig:** Oh, does he?

**John:** “And is asking what I expect in terms of compensation.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I looked at the scheduled minimums in the WGA basic agreement.”

**Craig:** Rational.

**John:** “But I have gotten the distinct impression that the producer is not willing to pay me the amount that document stipulates.”

**Craig:** What?! [laughs]

**John:** “His company is not a WGA signatory. And I’m not a WGA member, so I feel like I have no leverage here. I want to do the job because it would be my first paid writing gig, but I don’t want to undervalue myself. I feel clueless about what I should do next.” Craig Mazin…

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** …help this person out.

**Craig:** [stifling a scream] Okay. So, look, everything that has happened is as I have foreseen. [laughs] Of course you want to be a paid writer. Of course. And of course. You don’t want to undervalue yourself. And of course you feel clueless about what’s going on. And of course the producer has presented himself as somebody who knows exactly what’s going on. And of course he wants you to write this for free. Of course.

You know why? Because all that makes sense for him. The one thing that he has over you is he’s not an artist who is — I don’t want to use the word desperate. He is not an artist who craves approval for the art. He is a businessman who is going to make money off of you. Okay?

So, he is in a great space because he can ask for these things with no problem, knowing full well that you have an emotion involved that he doesn’t have to deal with. Please resist this emotion.

Here’s the deal: in your letter you say “I feel like I have no leverage.” Incorrect. You have all of the leverage. Let me repeat. You have all of the leverage. Not 99%. 100%. And the leverage is that you own the writing. It is yours. The copyright is yours.

Everything that is attached to it, and every decision that will be made, up until the point where you assign copyright to somebody else, all of that is yours. And his game is to convince you that you have nothing. [laughs] Do you see how this works? Pretty amazing. So, friend, here’s the deal. You can do whatever you want. What you can’t do is work for hire.

Work for hire means I don’t have the copyright anymore. Somebody else has the copyright and they’re commissioning the work for me. That’s what you do when you run into a studio. You dig? And that is a Writers Guild job, and there are minimums, and credit protections, and health, and pension, and all sorts of great things, residuals and so on.

Until that moment, you do not sell it. You can option it. Haven’t sold it yet. Okay? Or, you can write it and shop it around. And then is somebody is in love with it, they can take it into a studio. But you do not sell it. A financier may come along and say we want to do it independently, non-union. Great. Here’s my lawyer. Work out what I get when this movie — and now I’ve got a backend on this thing. Whatever you do, just remember you have all the leverage.

**John:** Yeah. So, what Craig is making the strong distinction between is a work for hire, which is what writers do when they work for a studio. They are a work for hire and you are assigning copyright to that person and they are paying you to write.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That is a very different thing from here’s writing something. This producer may ultimately option that thing you write and try to set it up at a studio, or you may just honestly have a handshake, like a shopping agreement essentially. “I’m allowing you to take it to these places and that person may be able to set it up.”

So, you value their interaction. You value their notes. But don’t value their money because it’s not going to be that much money. So, write the thing so you own it. And once it’s written, if that person still wants to do something with it, you can have that conversation about an option agreement, some sort of shopping agreement. But do not write for this person for less than this amount of money.

**Craig:** And as always, please seek the advice of an attorney.

**John:** So, this is a related question. Toby writes, “I’m writing because I have achieved a level of success that is not quite amateur, but not quite big time pro. I have been paid and I am patterned with a bestselling novelist to adapt his next release. However, I have found the biggest problem a writer of my level has is the pressure to work for free is unrelenting.”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** “I would say that almost 100% of my non-general meetings have been with producers who have property they want to turn into a screenplay. These producers are people who have had at least one producer credit to their name and seem to have credible projects with life right, novel rights, etc. They’re just unwilling to pay any money for a draft.”

**Craig:** Oh, imagine that.

**John:** “To illustrate my point, I’ve included an mail exchange with my former manager in which he is asking me to extend an option on a spec script of mine that he originally optioned for free. He clearly wants the script but is unwilling to pay for it.”

This is a quote from this manager. “Reality is that it will be unrealistic for you to think that anyone will pay an option for this script. It is simply not done anymore. I also have spent an undo amount of time on all of our projects…”

**Craig:** Undue amount. Undue amount!

**John:** Oh yeah. An undue amount.

**Craig:** Undue. It wasn’t due.

**John:** Yes. Oh, it’s actually the wrong kind of due, that’s true. “Not to mention the notes I give to make your script better early on. I offered my services on this one as a gesture of good faith for all the time you’ve spent.”

**Craig:** Argh. Argh.

**John:** “But I don’t think you’ve ever really accepted the fact that there is no monetizing the time we spend in this entertainment game unless the projects go.”

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Craig Mazin, do you find any part of that quote to be true?

**Craig:** It’s actually amazing how it’s all the opposite of true! Every word is the opposite of true. What a con artist! What a con artist.

First of all, let’s go backwards. “I don’t think you have ever really accepted the fact that there is no monetizing the time we spend in this entertainment game unless the projects go.” Wrong! There is no monetizing it for you, the not writer who doesn’t write stuff, unless the projects go. This is just me, me, me, me, me, but it’s not about the writer because we get paid all the time for movies that aren’t made.

You know why? Because there’s a value to what we do that is so important that they’re willing to give us money for stuff that they don’t even know they want to make. But, go back a little further. He has “spent an undo” — misspelled — “amount of time on all of our projects Not to mention the notes I gave to make your script better early on.”

Dude, screw off. We don’t need you. Okay?

**John:** Yeah. By the way, those notes you were giving, that was to build this relationship that you are now throwing under the bus so you can get a free extension on this offer.

**Craig:** Right. You joined with me in partnership. And the partnership was this: You’re going to help me. I’m going to write a script. I’m going to get paid, and you’re going to get 10%. Isn’t that wonderful? And now you’re complaining that I’m making choices that might keep you from your belief of how we’re going to get your 10%. And suddenly all these things I did for you were favors.

No they’re not. And this is why managers make me sick sometimes, because they do this nonsense. They play these nonsense games. And because their business is crunched, crunched, they psychologically abuse the people they are supposed to be protecting. This is an abusive email.

And I’m so glad. The only thing that keeps me from not driving to Toby’s house and killing him is that it says “former manager.” Thank god.

But, listen, guys, this is tied into the same email before. I don’t care. And I have never met a writer, a successful writer, who cares about what these people need. I’ve got my own problems over here. I’m trying to write screenplays. And it’s hard. I don’t care what the producer needs. I don’t care what the manager needs. They’re supposed to be helping me! That’s the point.

Is that selfish? Eh, I guess I’m selfish. All I know is that if I write a hit movie, they end up getting so much more money than I do that I guess I can feel okay about it. [laughs] So, that’s the story. I get paid now. They get paid later. I get paid a pretty good amount now. They get paid crazy amounts later if the movie works. And I’m cool with that, but then please don’t play games with me.

**John:** Let’s go back to an earlier part of Toby’s letter where he writes that he is in these rooms with producers who have rights to things and would like him to write a script, but they don’t want to pay him to right that script.

And this is a thing that you and I all have friends who are in similar situations. Even Kelly Marcel, who was on our last podcast together, the Saving Mr. Banks was kind of that situation where she wasn’t really paid to write this script originally.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s true.

**John:** Well, she said in the podcast. I asked was this essentially a spec script you were writing for this producer. And she said, “Yes, there’s no money in British film.”

**Craig:** Oh, okay, yes, that’s true. And by the way, in England, yes, I remember that now. You’re absolutely right. And in England, there is such a different deal going on, because there is no work for hire and it’s a whole crazy thing. And I don’t understand how British law works, but here…

**John:** So, I would say in general, I’ve been in these kind of situations, even sort of at this point in my career. When that comes up, what they really need to be expressing this to you as is like, “Let us partner on this thing.” And I think if you’re considering coming in to write thing, it can’t be a work for hire because they’re not hiring you.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** They’re not paying you.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, it’s essentially like you are partnering up with them to try to develop this property into a thing that is a thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s a negation on both sides, because if they have some bundle of rights, well that bundle of rights is important for you to be able to write your essential spec script. And so that’s complicated. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but it’s going to be complicated. And that’s why you’re lucky to be, Toby, at a point in your life where you do have an agent and a manger and you have producer credits and you can figure this out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And you are essentially becoming their partner, not just the writer that they’re hiring, because they’re not hiring.

**Craig:** And that’s the kind of push and pull of this. They have rights that they need turned into a screenplay and they can’t do it on their own. You have the ability to turn books into screenplays, but you don’t have the rights. Well, that sounds like a negotiation to me. And the product of that negotiation is an option. Right?

Now, the option could be for a dollar. It could be for zero dollars. It could be for $10,000. It depends, frankly, on where everybody is. And are there other writers they want for this? Or are you absolutely perfect? And is this a book that you absolutely love, or this is a book that you would do anything to write? Either way, when this idiot says that options simply aren’t done anymore, he’s lying.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Lying! He’s a liar. I know that this is crazy that there are liars in Hollywood, but there are liars in Hollywood.

**John:** Let’s end on a craft question. Matt writes, “I’ve read and seen two schools of thoughts and wanted to get your opinions on both. One states that the end of the second act should be the ultimate low point, the all-is-lost moment. The other states that it’s the time when the protagonist makes his decision to go forward with his new life, or fall back on his old ways. Which one is better? Which one gets shot down more by agents or producers?” What a bad way to end the question.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** What is the end of the second act to you, Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** To me, it’s neither of the things that are put here. The way that these are described are typical for books and things written by people who essentially analyze. They’re after the fact thinkers. They watch movies. They read scripts. And then they try and find patterns in them and then present those patterns. But they’re not before the fact advice. We writers, we live before the fact. We must build it, right? So what’s before the fact advice?

For me, what’s roughly going on at that point in the movie is this: the character used to believe something. They believed it, maybe for bad reasons or good reasons, but it was the thing that helped them survive. It was a thing that they would have believed for the rest of their life on some deep fundamental level had the movie not occurred.

There is another thing they should be believing, and they will believe it by the end of the story. In fact, they will believe it so strongly that they will behave in accordance with it, even at risk to their own life. However, at this point in the movie, they have become aware that what they used to believe in is not true. And what they ought to believe in is simply too scary to comprehend. They are caught. And they are adrift emotionally and they are adrift almost intellectually and they don’t know what to do. They realize they can’t go back and they don’t know how to go forward.

**John:** I don’t disagree with you, Craig, but what I will say is that what you just described does feel kind of screenwriting book theory. I think it’s Craig Mazin’s screenwriting book theory, but it does feel sort of general framework-y in terms of like the generic sort of movie protagonist hero, this is where he or she is at in their situation. So, I’m in no ways diminishing sort of what I think that is largely true, I would just point out that did sound like it could be from a screenwriting book.

**Craig:** Well, I will say that that is a portion of a thing that there’s a bunch of stuff leading up to it, in fact, this was the thing that I did in Austin that is…

**John:** I was going to ask if that was…

**Craig:** It’s sort of not, at least as far as I know, not screenwriting book-y, but look at some point all these answers I suppose will sort of — I will say there doesn’t even have to be this in the script. You know what I mean? There’s no trap where you have to do this kind of thing. But to me when it happens, this is why. It’s not — I’m more concerned about why things happen and less concerned about that they should happen.

**John:** I would challenge you to take a look at the end of the second act from the audience’s perspective, which is we’ve watched this journey, we’ve watched this movie. Whatever has been happening, that thing has just ended. And now we’re into one last push. And to me, the end of the second act/start of the third act means that we as an audience are aware that we are on the final part of this journey. And that the movie is getting ready to reach it’s big conclusion.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so it’s a thing that as an audience, even if you’re not really aware of like character motivations and stories and how thematically things are working, you have a sense that like that thing is done and now we’re in this last stretch of the movie. And that can apply to almost any genre of movie you think about. You get that sense like this is going to be the last push.

And when it’s not the last push you feel like it’s jarring. And so it has to be setup just right that you can sense like that’s done, and now we’re in this last thing.

**Craig:** Well, you know, here. You and I are kind of like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant, because we’re feeling different parts of this thing. I always think about a movie working on three essential axes at any given point. There is internally what’s going on in the protagonist’s mind. There’s what’s happening between the protagonist and the people around him. And then there’s what’s happening externally in the world around all of them. So, I was kind of sort of talking about a very internal thing. You’re talking about a very external thing, too.

And both of those must be serviced. And, similarly, the interpersonal as well. But the question of how to create that moment, I think, oftentimes I find thinking internally gets you to what you need to make happen externally. But that’s me. You know, that’s just my…

**John:** Cool. And I think we’re at the point for some One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Ooh, I’m so excited.

**John:** Mine is really simple. So, it’s a podcast. Craig doesn’t listen to any podcasts other than our own podcast.

**Craig:** What’s a podcast?

**John:** But I listen to some other ones, and one of them that I like a lot is called Planet Money. It’s an NPR podcast. And they talk about financial issues, economic issues. It’s a good, chatty, really well produced podcast about those topics.

The reason why I bring it up this week is they’re doing a whole series of podcasts about they’re making the Planet Money t-shirts and they’re sort of going all the way back to like the growing of the cotton and sort of how the whole thing works, and how the whole supply chain comes together, which I find fascinating and in our very connected world, how this all works.

So, that series is just starting, but they’ve had little blips of episodes where they talk about even the process of like getting the money from, they Kickstarted it. So, like transferring the money from the Kickstarter PayPal to their own bank account took like four days. And why did it take so long? So, there’s a special episode where they just talk about the clearinghouse for checks and how that all works.

And it’s this incredibly bizarre, antiquated system that we have in the US that needs to be overhauled, and yet it would be very difficult to overhaul. So, I endorse the Planet Money podcast. That particular episode and especially the upcoming series on t-shirts.

**Craig:** And this is called a podcast?

**John:** It’s called a podcast. People listen to it on their mobile devices sometimes.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** It’s actually the thing you’re doing right now, but you kind of just think we’re having a conversation.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. People are listening to this?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Oh god.

**John:** There’s actually not an audience in front of Craig. He thinks it’s just a conversation between us.

**Craig:** I am mortified. [laughs] I have said things…

**John:** I’ve been recording this whole thing, Craig.

**Craig:** You’re supposed to tell me that. That’s against the law. And I am mortified. Some of the things I’ve said. Oh my god!

**John:** I know. Terrible, terrible shocking things.

**Craig:** Terrible, terrible shocking things. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is by far my one favorite, my most favorite Cool Thing of all the Cool Things I’ve done, which I think is 12 at this point.

And, John, do you know what my One Cool Thing is this week?

**John:** I don’t.

**Craig:** It’s you.

**John:** Come on. That’s too…

**Craig:** No, no. No, no, no, you’ve got to her me out.

**John:** Rawson Thurber already used, oh, he used both of us I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know, and it’s totally different anyway. Listen, here’s the thing. So, I don’t know what people know of our story, but you and I have really gotten to know each other over the course of the podcast. We knew each other before the podcast, but we just sort of knew each other. It wasn’t like we hung out or anything. We just kind of knew each other.

And so we’re in Austin and I don’t know what it was, whether it was alcohol, or just whatever is going on in your life, but it was the best John August ever. It was such a great John August time. And at one point, and hopefully you remember, you came up to me, you saw me, you came up to me, and you hugged me.

**John:** I came up and hugged you from behind on the little Driskill balcony downstairs because I was saying good night to everybody and I felt like I need to hug…

**Craig:** Oh, sure, walk it back. Walk it back all you want.

**John:** I’m not walking it back at all.

**Craig:** Listen…

**John:** I would say that I was the bounciest, Tiggeriest form of myself at Austin.

**Craig:** Yes. You were great. It was so much fun hanging out with you. I had such a great time. And because we spend actually a lot of time together but not together, it’s such a strange friendship that we have because it’s a podcast friendship, but we were really — I mean, look, you may still hate me, but you were such a great friend over the course of that weekend. So, my One Cool Thing is John…

**John:** Aw…

**Craig:** No, my One Cool Thing is Austin John August. [laughs]

**John:** Thank you. Why can’t John be like Austin John all the time?

**Craig:** Well, that’s exactly right. And, you know, we were talking about doing our next, one of our next podcasts with Aline Brosh McKenna, the Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes, and she had this great suggestion that we should just drink through the whole thing. I really think we should. I think it’s going to be fun.

**John:** I suspect that may end up happening.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yes. But first we’re going to have to go through our standard boilerplate. If you have a question for me or for Craig that is short, the best way to get to us is on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. He is @clmazin.

If you have a longer question, like some of the ones we read today, ask@johnaugust.com is the best place to send those questions.

If you would like a t-shirt, they’re going to be at store.johnaugust.com, right now, hopefully, up and running. They’re black and they’re cool. So, we take preorders for two weeks, and then we make all the t-shirts, and we send them out. So, that way we don’t have to keep making t-shirts all the time. It’s just a one-time thing.

If you are listening to this podcast, this is a podcast we’re making, they are available on iTunes.

**Craig:** A what?! [laughs]

**John:** iTunes is this magical portal through which you can subscribe to things. So, subscribe to us in iTunes and while you’re there you can give us a comment. That actually weirdly affects sort of how we rank in the whole ratings of the iTunes universe. And that’s kind of useful because that way more people can find us. So, if you’d like to do that, we welcome those.

And we should actually probably read some of those aloud on the air, because those are kind of fun.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s embarrassing to me. Do you know I want to, down the line, could we do an Austin John August t-shirt. Because that is a great professional wrestling name, by the way. Austin John August!

**John:** That would be good.

**Craig:** This really feels good to me. I’m really digging this right now.

**John:** It’s very nice. One of the other sort of memes of the Austin Film Festival is that everyone with a shaved head sort of looks like me, or I look like everyone with a shaved head. So, there were a lot of false spotting of John August. Like John Hamburg sort of looks like me. And there was one guy who on Twitter kept saying, “I thought I saw John August, but it was actually a random person.” Then like right as I was getting in the van to go back to the airport, he spotted me and I shook his hand. So, it was nice that we finally connected.

**Craig:** I look like no one.

**John:** You look like Craig Mazin. That’s just what you should look like.

**Craig:** No, I’m visual noise.

**John:** You’re a special snowflake.

**Craig:** I’m just visual noise. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] All right, thank you so much, Craig, and we’ll talk next week.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** All right, bye.

Links:

* The [John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/) is open for business!
* [Get your Big Fish tickets now](http://www.bigfishthemusical.com/), and use discount code SCRIPT (for November 23rd or otherwise)
* John’s post on [how we record Scriptnotes](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-we-record-scriptnotes)
* T-Bone Burnett [in the Hollywood Reporter](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/earshot/t-bone-burnett-silicon-valley-652114)
* [Anita Sarkeesian](http://www.feministfrequency.com/) and her Tropes vs Women in Video Games project
* Complex’s [The 15 Hottest Damsels In Distress In Movies](http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/07/the-15-hottest-damsels-in-distress-in-movies)
* TV Tropes on [damsels in distress](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DamselInDistress?from=Main.DistressedDamsel)
* MacGuffins on [TV Tropes](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin) and [Screenwriting.io](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-mcguffin/)
* [Planet Money podcast](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/npr-planet-money-podcast/id290783428?mt=2)
* Planet Money on the [American check system](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy)
* Craig’s [One Cool Thing](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings) is [John August](http://johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chielli