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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 75 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, originally we were supposed to be airing a different episode this week, one that we’d already recorded with our dear friend, Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I saw her this last week and I said, “Oh, we’re going to air you episode this week.” And she’s like, “That’s so great and so exciting.” And now I feel like she’s become the Matt Damon to our Jimmy Kimmel Show.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re so sorry. Apologies to Aline Brosh McKenna; we ran out of time.

**John:** So, we do have an amazing episode saved and banked, and that’s partly why I can sleep well at night is knowing that we have this great episode to share in the future. But this week a lot of stuff happened suddenly and we realized like, wow, if we didn’t talk about it this week then it’s going to be two weeks until we talk about it, and it’s going to be far too long to talk about it.

So, we’re doing a new one. We’re recording this actually on Sunday night, after the Super Bowl, but I haven’t even seen the game, so I have no idea what happened.

**Craig:** It was amazing.

**John:** Oh good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stuff happened in it.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** With that kind of precise description we could have just recording this on Saturday.

**Craig:** I know. I really want to talk about it, but I can’t spoil the game for you because you have it TiVod so, alas.

**John:** Cool. I’ll watch it and I’ll skip through that part where they throw the ball until I see the commercials and that will be great.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know. Kevin Williamson had a pretty funny tweet. It was something like, “I don’t understand all this stuff that’s surrounding the Beyoncé.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh, Kevin.

**Craig:** Oh, Kevin.

**John:** So, this is a busy week for a lot of reasons. First and by far most importantly, your movie opens this week. Your movie opens this Friday.

**Craig:** That’s right. This Friday, in theaters near you.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Please, all of you loyal listeners, we don’t charge you for this, and you all are so nice to give us nice reviews, and you send us tweets and emails. But, nothing says love like a little bit of money. So, would you consider this wonderful weekend, beginning on February 8, Friday, seeing Identity Thief, of course if you are 17 or older, or if you’re not, accompanied by a somebody who is 17 or older.

**John:** That would be very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I’m proud of the movie. And I’d love for you all to see it. And we will, probably a couple of weeks after the movie comes out, maybe I’ll wait for three or four weeks just so it sort of has it’s run in theaters, I will put the script up on your site so people can check it out.

**John:** Oh, that’s very nice of you. Very generous. Now, tell us a little bit more about Identity Thief and what we should be looking for as we’re watching this movie. Is there anything that people who are fans of the podcast should really keep an eye out for?

**Craig:** Well, you know, in general I think people should just watch the movie and enjoy it and not think about it in any other way. But, I will say that of the movies that I’ve done, this one is probably the closest to being… — Well, I guess it’s probably the purest expression of what I’ve wanted to do in movies for a long time. And as it turns out, you often just don’t get the chance. Sometimes you are either writing movies that, because you can, and people have asked you to do it, and you’re happy to do it, and you want to do it, but it’s not necessarily your thing.

Sometimes you write screenplays that are your thing and they don’t get made. And so I’ve been doing this for a long time; I have a decent number of credits. This is the first one we’re looking at and I go, “Okay, well, it’s mine.” You know, even Hangover II, it’s not mine. Those characters were there. I came along, and I love that movie, and I loved working on III as well. But this one is mine, in a sense.

And, so, I’m very pleased with it. It’s very funny, I think, but it’s also very sweet. And there’s some nice emotion to it. So, I’ll be happy to talk about it more. I mean, obviously, when we do our next podcast we will have the verdict.

**John:** Yes. Both critically and…

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs]

**John:** …financially.

**Craig:** Critically I’ve given up. [laughs] I just have to say I’ve given up. I mean, I don’t think this is the kind of movie, I don’t expect that critics will beat this up. My expectation is that they will like it, but I’ve had that expectation before and been, you know, bathed in icy cold water of rejection.

More than anything, I just want the audience to enjoy it, and I want people to go see it. Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy are spectacular in it. And so go out and check it out. And then we can talk sort of about the differences between — and there aren’t many, you know — of what I wanted to do and what happened. I mean, there’s not too many of those. But, you know, we’ll go through it.

**John:** Cool. Also on today’s podcast I wanted to talk about some other bits of news. Big Fish tickets are on sale.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** I want to do some follow-up on Courier Prime. The TV show that Josh Friedman and I set up at ABC, Chosen, did not get chosen, and so it’s not going to pilot.

**Craig:** Aw…

**John:** But, I want to talk through what that process was like, because it was actually really interesting to see what TV was like this season versus like five seasons ago was the last time I tried to do a TV show.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I want to talk about villains, because both in trying to do Chosen and this other project I’m trying to set up, and actually a lot of listener questions this last week were about villains. And I want to sort of dig in on villains. And then get to some One Cool Things.

So, let’s start.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Big Fish. Tickets for the Broadway Musical version of Big Fish in Chicago, which is where we’re doing our out-of-town tryout, they’re on sale right now. And you’re going to hear this on Tuesday, and so they went on sale yesterday, which was Monday.

If you live in Chicago, or if you’re planning to head to Chicago this spring, you should come check out Big Fish. Our first performance is April 2 at the Oriental Theater. We run for five weeks and five weeks only, because another show comes in and takes over for us. So, if you’re a fan who wants to see what Big Fish is like as a musical, with singing, and dancing, and lights, and hopefully some tears, go visit broadwayinchicago.com and get some tickets.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Next topic. Courier Prime. So, last week on the podcast we talked about Courier Prime, which is this better version of Courier that we made. Alan Dague-Greene designed it and did a fantastic job. And people seem to really like it. And nice people wrote up nice things about us in Boing Boing and the New Yorker blog and Paris Review.

And that’s fantastic. And thank you so much for sharing it and it’s been weirdly the most popular, successful downloaded thing we’ve made.

A couple people have written with questions. I wanted to talk about a few common pitfalls and see if I can talk people through before they become pitfalls.

So, Craig, if you are going to be delivering a PDF to somebody, how do you create that PDF? What is the method you go through?

**Craig:** Well, you’re going to tell me I’m doing it wrong.

**John:** Okay. Usually, probably. That’s how I function.

**Craig:** Usually because I use a Mac, and so I find the simplest thing to do, typically, is to print the document and then select “Print to PDF” or “Save as PDF” and then I save a PDF. Although I think in Final Draft sometimes I run into trouble with that method. So, they have an actual menu option to print to PDF.

**John:** Yeah. You should always do your first choice there. Going to the print dialog box is almost always your best bet on a Macintosh. The reason why is that when you go through print the system really treats it like, “Okay, you were sending it to a printer and we will send all the information that we need to send to a printer to this document that we are making.” And that’s really helpful, especially when you’re using a different font because it sends that font information along with the file.

So, when you go through the print dialog box and print that way and do the “Save to PDF” as part of the print process, you’re much more likely to have a great outcome. And if you send that file to somebody else who doesn’t have your fonts installed, who’s on a different system, who’s on something else, there’s a very good chance it’s going to look and print perfectly.

If you go to Movie Magic Screenwriter’s “Export as a PDF” or “Save as PDF” in Final Draft, a lot of time it will work, but a lot of times it won’t work because it won’t have quite set all the information right. So, I would encourage everyone who is experimenting with Courier Prime, do that. If you’re going to send somebody a PDF that you’ve made with Courier Prime and you want them to actually see Courier Prime, do the print method of that.

Here’s a question for you, again. If you are in Final Draft and you want to change from another Courier to Courier Prime, how do you do that?

**Craig:** I think that there’s a set font command in there. You can change everything globally, I think.

**John:** There is. And it’s a little bit buried. Here is what you typically do in other programs. You might do a select-all, and then just choose a new font. That’s unlikely to have a very good outcome in Final Draft. And so the best way to change your fonts in Final Draft is you go into the “Elements” dialog box, and Elements being like scene headers and character names and dialog.

Go into that dialog box, pick General, or pick of the things, change that to Courier Prime or whichever face you want to use, and then there’s a button that says, “Apply font size to all.” And that will tend to do it globally.

Where people often run into problems and run into page count problems or other weird, spazzy things where suddenly like scene headers are in mixed case or they’re not all uppercase/lower case, is that they just try to globally apply, if they try to do a “Select All” and change the font.

So, especially in Final Draft, do that. I would recommend — you will have a good outcome that way.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Cool. So, Craig, what are you writing right now?

**Craig:** Good question. I’m actually, I’m in that fun place. This is the most fun time for a screenwriter when I’ve finished my writing assignments. So, I finished Identity Thief which you think, well yeah, because it’s coming out on Friday. But, the truth is that movie was supposed to come out in May and then they moved the date up because Melissa McCarthy’s other movie, I think it’s called The Heat, tried to jump in front of us into April.

**John:** How dare they!

**Craig:** So, of course, Universal properly said, “Well, wait, we want to be the first Melissa McCarthy movie. We don’t want to be the leftover.” So, they pulled the date up all the way up to February. And then Fox went, “Well, okay, if you’re going to be in February we might as well go to July.” I think they moved the other direction. [laughs]

But, suddenly, this movie that was supposed to be released in May had to be released in February. So, actually, I didn’t really stop working on that movie in terms of just all the stuff that happens even during production and post-production until, I don’t know, maybe a month ago.

So, I’d been working on that. And, of course, I’ve been working on The Hangover, and I’m working with Todd right now in post, just helping out in the editing room. But, I’m starting to look at what the next thing is. And it’s fun because now the way the agencies work is there’s sort of a red light/green light system. Either the writer is available, or they’re not available. And when they switch to green light, then you sort of feel like a, [laughs] like a newly single woman walking into a bar, and everybody is saying, “Well, would you like to write this? Would you like to write that?” And so I get to look at all these things.

It’s fun. So, I don’t know. I’ll probably figure it out in the next week or so what I’m going to do.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m in a sort of similar situation. There was a book that I was going to adapt and the deal took an incredibly long time to get to happen, and ultimately it just didn’t happen, which sometimes is the best situation where, “You know what, this just doesn’t feel quite right.” And so something didn’t feel quite right, and so the deal did not make, and so suddenly I had a free spot on the dance card.

And so there is this possibility that the TV show that Josh Friedman and I did, Chosen, was going to get picked for pilot, and it did not. And so I am kind of free right now, which has actually been kind of remarkable and nice.

So, there are these looming things like, “Oh, I would work on this, but then I have to do this other thing first.” And so actually this last week I got to do some stuff that I really wanted to do that had been pushed back for quite a long time.

I do want to talk a little bit about Chosen going away because that’s one of the weird thing about television is sometimes things just stop and they really are done. And I really kind of like that. One of the things about being a feature writer is that you work on these projects, and you work, and you work, and you draft after draft, and you’re just never quite sure if it’s going to happen.

You get a green light, sure, but there’s a large sort of like yellow light period where it’s just like, maybe, maybe, maybe you get an element attached, maybe something happens. Because TV has a season, and they have to decide like, “We’ve got to start shooting some pilots,” if they don’t decide to shoot your pilot, well, then you’re done. And it’s actually a lovely, nice thing.

**Craig:** There is a lot of built-in certainty. And there is a conclusion in television. I mean, well, if they do pick up your pilot then you’re right back into the yellow light zone because they won’t necessarily say that your pilot is going to get a series order. And then if you do get a series order then you don’t necessarily know if it will be back for another season, or is it going to get a full season, or a half a season.

But, you never get this in movies. Never once has anyone ever said to me, “We read your script. We don’t want to make it now, and actually we’re never going to make it.” [laughs] It just doesn’t work that way.

They’ll keep… — I was talking to a producer just this week about a script I wrote five years ago that he’s trying to get started again. It never ends. But in television, I mean, if we’re going to find a silver lining I guess is that there is a finality. You get to actually take a breath and say, “Well, that chapter is done. Let’s move on.”

**John:** Exactly. So, the TV show that Josh and I did, and I didn’t talk a lot about it on the podcast before, and we really never released the log line and we still are not going to quite release the log line, but it is a family drama with a supernatural element. And the sort of space it occupies is kind of like My So Called Life with Rosemary’s Baby quality to it.

Like, there’s something very, very wrong in the world and yet you’re following this family that’s entering into the situation. And it was a good experience. I wrote it. Josh executive produced it. Josh did an amazing job with the notes and getting everything to make sense and sort of helping me get the best version of the script together.

What was different this time than previous times, for this project I was writing it for 20th. And in television you call the part of Fox that makes TV shows, you call that 20th. And you call Fox the part that actually airs the shows. And so this was 20th, but instead of being for Fox it was 20th for ABC.

And so the studio was 20th and the network was ABC. And so every draft you turn in, I turned in a draft to Josh. Josh reads it quickly, gives me good notes and feedback. Both, sort of these are my notes and these are the notes that I would anticipate getting down the road. And he was always spot-on accurate with the notes that were down the road.

I would do some work there, turn it into the studio. The studio would call with notes. And in feature land when studios call with notes, it’s like, “Oh, give us a week or two and we’ll give you notes.” It would be like later that afternoon. Like you turned it in the morning and, like, whoop, here’s the notes call.

You might do some work on that. Once again, they’ll give you their notes and they also give you what they’re anticipating the network’s notes are going to be. Then you go into the network. They read it over the weekend. They call back with notes.

And, so, there’s a really fast churn through these things, but it’s also kind of exciting. And partly because the form of a one-hour drama, it’s only 60 pages, so you really can do some major changes on things if you want to.

We ended up collapsing two acts down into one act, building a new fifth act. And it was a good, rewarding experience. And it was all very, very fast, up until the point where it just became this waiting game where everyone had turned in all their pilots. And so the studio gets to look through all their pilots. And then it just became this game of listening and hearing people talk about what the network was looking for.

And so you’d hear these words like, “Oh, they’re looking for these four qualities of things,” or like, “they only want one-word titles.” And it was sort of amusing, but it was also sort of pointless to sort of pay that much attention.

So, once I stopped hearing a lot about our show, I was like, “Uh, you know, I don’t think we’re going to happen.” Also, we started to see what other shows they were picking up. You’re like, “I don’t know where we fit into this world. I don’t know how they would put us with these other shows.”

So, it wasn’t a big surprise when we got the final call that it wasn’t happening. But I just like that there was a call. I have so many movies that I’ve written over time where like eventually you just stop getting calls back from the producers and you just know that the project is probably not going to happen. Here there was actually some closure and everybody who I worked with could call and say, “Hey, great job. This didn’t go.” From the studio’s level, at some point they go to cable and they go to other places, but like this part is done. And that was nice.

I did enjoy that part of the process this year.

**Craig:** It’s good that you can. There is an art to dealing with bad news.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we have it all the time. And it’s very easy to internalize and to take it personally. And that’s simply no help at all.

**John:** One of the things that came up in Chosen, and it’s also come up in this other project that I’ve been working on this last week, is the idea of who the villains are and what the villain’s goal is. And so I thought would be something we could dig into this week. Because many properties are going to have some villain. There’s going to be somebody else who has a different agenda than our hero, and our hero and that villain are going to come to terms with each other over the course of the story.

What happened in the discussion on this other project, they kept coming back to me with questions about the villain, what the villain’s story was, and what the villain’s motivation was. And it became clear that eventually they were really seeing this as a villain-driven story rather than a hero-driven story. So, I want to talk through those dynamics as well.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, who are the villains you think of when you think of movie villains? Who are the big ones?

**Craig:** Well, you know, immediately one’s mind goes to the broadest, most obvious back hat villains, like Darth Vader, and Buffalo Bill, you know, people like that.

**John:** Well, it’s interesting you say Buffalo Bill. It’s like Buffalo Bill versus Hannibal Lecter.

**Craig:** Hannibal Lecter is not a villain.

**John:** And I think that’s an important distinction. I want to get into that as well.

When you think about villains, you need to really talk about what kinds of genres can support a villain that is actually a driving force villain. Because Identity Thief has bad guys, clearly; I’ve seen them in the trailer. But, do they have their own agenda that could be thwarted by our heroes?

**Craig:** No, they don’t. I mean, that’s the part of the movie that I think least reflects what my initial intention was. And to me those villains really are obstacles. To me, the villain in the movie is Melissa McCarthy. But, she’s an interesting villain that you sort of overcome and find your way to love. But she’s the villain.

**John:** Yeah, she’s the villain. She’s the antagonist.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Dramatically she’s the villain.

**John:** Yeah, so I think I want to make that distinction that almost all movies are going to have a protagonist and antagonist structure. So, you’re going to have a protagonist who is generally your hero. It’s the person who changes over the course of the movie. You’re going to have an antagonist who’s the person who is standing in opposition to the protagonist and is causing the change to happen.

So, sometimes, just based on the trailer, you can see, “Well, there’s two people in the movie.” They are going to be those two people generally.

A villain is a sort of different situation. A villain is somebody who wants to do something specific that is generally bad for the world, or bad for other people in the world. So, we could talk about sort of general categories of what villains could be. There’s the villains who want to control things, who want to run things. So, your Voldemorts, your Darth Vaders, your General Zods. I would say Hal from 2001 is sort of that kind of controlling villain where he has this order that he wants to impose on things. And if you don’t obey you’re going to suffer for it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have your revenge villains. You have Khan. You have. You have De Niro in Cape Fear.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would argue the witch in The Wizard of Oz is really a revenge villain. If you think about it, this outsider killed her sister and stole her shoes and she wants revenge.

**Craig:** She wants revenge. She also sort of falls into the power-hungry model also.

**John:** Yeah…

**Craig:** Dual villain motivation.

**John:** She does. But I think the power hungriness is something we sort of put on the movie after the fact. If you actually at what she’s trying to do in the course of it, like she doesn’t have this big plan for Oz that we see over the course of this movie.

**Craig:** You’re right. Basically, “You killed my sister and I’m going to get you. And your little dog, too.”

**John:** “And your little dog, too.” And, speaking of animals suffering, we have Glenn Close who is sort of the great villain in Fatal Attraction.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Who wants revenge. I mean, basically, “How dare you jilt me, and this is what I’m going to do to show you.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Then there’s the simpler, you know, this villain wants something and is trying to take something. So, you have Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I love about Hans Gruber is Hans Gruber probably sees himself as he’s Ocean’s 11. He probably sees himself as like, “We’re pulling off this amazing heist. And it would have been an amazing heist if not for John McClane getting in the way.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have Salieri in Amadeus. And Salieri is like he’s envy — he wants that thing that Mozart has. You have Gollum who wants the ring. Like those are really sort of simple motivations.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The last kind of villain I would classify is sort of the insatiability. And these are the really scary ones who like they’re just going to keep going no matter what. The Terminator. You can’t — unstoppable. Anton Chigurh, from No Country for Old Men, he scares me more than probably anybody else I’ve seen on screen.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and they embody the same sort of thing that attracts us to zombies as a kind of personality-less villain, and that is inevitability. They basically represent time.

**John:** They represent time and death.

**Craig:** Mortality. Exactly.

**John:** You will not be able to escape them. So, Freddy Krueger is that, too. Michael Myers, he’s the zombie-slasher kind of person.

**Craig:** Freddy Krueger actually, I think, is really revenge.

**John:** Oh yeah, that’s a very good point. His underlying motivation for why he hates — why he wants to kill all the people he kills is a revenge by proxy kind of.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they burned him, because all he did was rape some kids.

**John:** Yeah. Come on. Can’t a guy have some fun?

So, one of the challenges with screenwriting I’ve found is that you’re trying to balance these two conflicting things. You want your hero to be driving the story. And yet you also want to create a great villain and that villain wants to control the story as well. And finding that sweet spot between the two is often really, really hard. And this project that I was out pitching this last week, I pitched it as very much a quest movie, and here’s our group of heroes and here’s what they’re trying to do, and these are the obstacles along the way. And this is the villain. And so all the questions sort of came back to the villain.

And the questions are sort of natural, fair questions to ask, which I hadn’t done a good enough job explaining and describing was: What is the villain’s overall motivation? What is the villain trying to do? And because we had just done the Raiders podcast I kept coming back to like, “Well, in Raiders what is the villain trying to do?”

**Craig:** Well, he’s trying to do the exact same thing that the hero is trying to do, which is kind of interesting. He just has far less moral compunction. And I guess really the point there is that what the hero was trying to do initially wasn’t what he should be doing. And you can see that that chance occurs.

And this is how I tend to think of really good villains. What they want… — It’s a good topic, because I think there’s a very common screenwriting mistake, and it’s understandable. You have a character, your protagonist, and you have perhaps his flaw, and you have the way he’s going to change. And then you think, “Well, we need a villain.”

And you come up with an interesting villain. The problem is the villain’s motivation, and the villain’s villainy has to exist specifically to fit into the space of your main character of your protagonist. They are the villain because they represent the thing that the main character is most afraid of, or is most alike and needs to destroy within himself.

And if you don’t match these things together dramatically, then you just have kind of a kooky villain in a story with your character.

**John:** Yes. One of the challenges to also keep in mind is that you want a villain who fits in the right scale for what the rest of your story is. You want somebody who feels like the things that they’re after are reasonable for what the nature of your story is.

Let’s go back to Raiders. And so you could say Belloq is the villain. And Belloq wants the same thing that Indy wants. He wants the Ark of the Covenant. But Belloq is actually an employee. He’s really working for the Nazis. And I felt like this pitch that I was going out with this last week, people kept asking for like, you know, it was also a quest movie, so you could sort of think of like Raiders in the sense that it’s a quest — you’re after this one thing.

Well, they kept pushing me for more information, like, well basically who are the Nazis and what is their agenda? And you can’t really stick that onto Raiders of the Lost Ark. I mean, I guess with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we sort of know what the Nazis are and you can sort of shorthand them for evil. But you can’t literally stick Hitler there at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. It just wouldn’t make sense. It’s the wrong kind of thing.

**Craig:** It would be bizarre. Absolutely. You need to, and in that movie, they very smartly said, “Okay, we’re going to have a character who is obsessed objects and needs to become more interested in humanity, so let’s make our villain just like him, except that guy won’t change at all.” And so we watch our hero begin to diverge from the villain, and that’s exciting. And that’s smart.

And I have to say that there’s a trend toward this. You can find villains like this throughout film history, however, even in broader genres, like for instance superhero films, or even James Bond movies, there was a time when you could just put a kooky villain in because they were interesting. There is nothing thematically relevant about Jaws for instance from The Spy Who Loved Me.

There is nothing particularly relevant even about Blofeld. You know, they’re just mustache-twirling villains. Sometimes people will get this note, “This villain is too much of a mustache-twirler,” meaning he’s just evil because he’s evil. “Ha, ha, ha.”

And if you look at Batman, the Batman villains were very typically just kooky. They were nuts. The Riddler is a villain because he’s insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s so insane that he spends all of his time crafting bizarro riddles just because he’s criminally insane.

But, what’s happened is, for instance, take Skyfall. And whatever people’s beefs are with Skyfall, I think honestly one of the reasons the movie has done better than any Bond movie before it, in terms of reaching an audience, is because the villain was matched thematically to the hero. The hero is aging and he is concerned that he is no longer capable to do his job.

And along comes a villain who is aging, who used to do his job and was thrown away. And so all of the internal conflict and sense of divided loyalty that our hero has is brought to bear by the villain. And so suddenly things begin to suggest themselves. Maybe the opening sequence should be one in which the hero’s life is tossed aside by the person he trusts. And then he meets a villain whose life was tossed aside by the same person.

And they just take different paths to resolution. Look at, the Nolan movies I think very notably have taken Batman villain out of the realm of broad and silly and thematically matched them specifically to Batman. The first one, you have Scarecrow, who is right on target. Batman is a hero born out of fear, and your villain is a master of fear.

**John:** Yeah. Fear personified.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, it’s a trend. It’s a trend to do it more and more. And I don’t think it’s going away any time soon. And, frankly, I think it makes for better stories.

**John:** What I would point out is the challenge is you can go too far. And so I look at the second Batman movie, in which we have the Joker who is phenomenal, and we love it, and we love every moment of it. In the third Batman movie I became frustrated by sort of villain soup. And I didn’t feel like there was great opportunity for a Batman story because we’re just basically following the villains through a lot of our time on screen.

It’s also dangerous because it raises the expectation, like, “Well, the villain has to be this big, giant, magnetic character.” And any time your villain is driving your story, then your hero is going to have a harder time driving the story.

What it comes down to is, like, movies can only start once. A movie can start because the hero does something that starts the engine of the film. Or, it can start because the villain does something that starts the engine of the movie.

In many movies with a villain the villain is really starting things. And so even Jaws, like you know, the shark attacks. The shark is the problem. The shark happens first. It’s not that you can envision a scenario in which a scientist found the shark and tracked it down and became the whole start of things. But, no, the shark happens first.

Where I ran into this, both with the TV show and with this other project we’re pitching, is this fascination of who the villain is and what the villain’s motivation is, it’s good to ask those questions, but in trying to dramatize those questions on screen you’re probably going to be taking time away from your hero. And your hero should be the most interesting person on screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I just don’t know enough about TV to… — I mean, I watch TV, but I don’t watch it the way that I watch movies. I don’t think about it the way I think about movies.

But certainly if you have a very oppositional kind of show, where it really is about one person versus another, they both ultimately will occupy a lot of screen time, I suppose. But, you know, that’s why I think it’s pretty smart what they do in Dexter, for instance. Every season there is one new arch villain who thematically tweaks at some part of Dexter.

But when that season is over, they’re gone because they’re dead.

**John:** Yeah. Did you watch Lost? You probably watched Lost.

**Craig:** I didn’t. My wife watched it and I should say on behalf of our friend, Damon Lindelof, my wife loved the final episode and cried copiously. I don’t know anything about it. [laughs] I know that there was an island, and a smoke monster, and in the end they were in a church.

**John:** Yeah, okay. The point I was going to make about Lost, which I could also make about Alias or many other shows that have elaborate villain mythologies, is that while it become incredibly rewarding that you did know what the villains were and why the villains were doing the things they were doing, if you had known that information from the start of the project — if you’d known what the villains whole deal was at the very start — it wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting.

Or, you would have spent so much time at the start explaining what the villain’s motivation was that you wouldn’t have been able to kick start the hero’s story. And so I guess I’m just making a pitch for there can be a good cause for understanding what the whole scope of the villain is, but you have to realize in the two hours or the one hour or the amount of time that you have allotted, how are you going to get the best version of the hero’s story to happen and service the villain that needs to be serviced.

**Craig:** Yeah. I tend to think about these things in a somewhat odd dichotomy. So, forgive me if this sounds bizarre, but villains — hero/villain relationships are either religious or atheistic in nature. Meaning this: The case where there is a villain who is doing an evil thing, and there is a hero who is trying to stop them is basically religious in nature. It’s a morality play. And good tends to win, obviously, in those morality plays. And, in fact, the satisfaction of the morality play is that good does triumph against seemingly impossible odds.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And we want to believe that about the world that we live in, that even though oftentimes it is the evil who are strong and the good who are weak, good still triumphs. So, there’s a religious nature to that struggle.

But, there are also atheistic type of stories. Or, actually they’re areligious types of stories, because they’re not making a point about the existence of god, but rather they are saying the drama that exists between the hero and the villain is one of absurd dread, the kind of existential nausea.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** For instance, the classic PBS series, The Prisoner, where the nature of evil was Kafkaesque. It was uncaring. It was inexplicable. It would simply emerge out of the ocean like a bubble or oppress you by simply being a disembodied voice. It was essentially that kind of unquantifiable dread of mortality and death. And so that will color — if you’re trying to tell a story that is steeped in existential dread, don’t over-explain your villains, because the point is there is no explanation. It’s absurd, as absurd as existence is, which is scary in and of itself.

**John:** Yeah. I think the root of all slasher films which, you know, Terminator is sort of an extension, like a smarter extension of a slasher film, but it’s that wave is coming for you and you will not be able to get away from it. Zombie movies work in the same situation, too. It’s not one zombie that you’re afraid of. It’s the fact that all the zombies are always going to be out there and the world is always a very, very, dangerous place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Zombies aren’t even evil. They’re just — they’re like the shark basically.

**John:** Yeah. They’re like the shark.

**Craig:** They just eat. And you can’t stop them. That’s why, by the way, so many zombie movies end on a downer note. They don’t make it. Heroes just don’t make it. You can’t beat zombies.

**John:** So, what I would say though is if you look at, regardless of which kind/class of villain you’re facing, you’re going to have to make to make some decisions about perspective and point of view. And to what degree are we sticking with the hero’s point of view and that we’re learning about the villain through the hero? And to what degree do we as the audience get to see things the hero doesn’t know from the villain’s point of view, and from the villain’s perspective?

And making those decisions is a very early part of the process. How much are we going to stay in point of view of our hero and to what degree are we going to see other stuff?

In Die Hard we stay with John McClane through a lot of it, but eventually we do get to see stuff from Alan Rickman’s point of view, and we see like what he’s really trying to do. With slasher movies, we tend to stay with our hero’s point of view for most of the time because it’s just actually much more frightening to not know where the bad guy is and what the bad guy is trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you have a villain who is smart, if you have a Joker, at some point you will want to see them explain themselves and have that moment at which they can talk about what it is they’re trying to do. And ideally you’d love for them to be able to communicate that mission and that goal to the protagonist. That’s often very challenging to do.

In Silence of the Lambs, to the degree that Hannibal Lecter is a villain. Hannibal Lecter is a person you fear in the movie. He’s in jail, so he can talk to her through the bars and we know that she’s safe and it’s reasonable for her to be in that situation and not be killed.

When we talked about Raiders, Belloq and Indy have that conversation at the bar. Indy’s able to get out of it, but Belloq is able to explain himself. If you can find those moments to allow those two sides to confront each other without killing each other before the end of the story, you’re often better off.

**Craig:** Yeah. You need some sense of rationality. It is discomfiting to watch a villain behave randomly. Random behavior is inherently undramatic. Even if your villain’s motivation is, in fact, just mindless chaos, they need to express that that is their motivation.

The Joker in the second Batman movie, they say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” and the Joker can express that. But, okay, that’s a choice, you made it. Your job now is to create chaos because you love chaos. But you’ve articulated a goal.

And if we don’t have that, then we’re just watching somebody blow stuff up willy nilly and we start wondering why. And you never want anyone to stop their engagement with the narrative.

One of the great things about all of those wonderful scenes between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter is that while they are doing this fascinating dance with each other, and falling in love in a matter of speaking, what Hannibal Lecter is promising her, and in fact the entire context of those meetings, the plot context of those meetings, is he is explaining to her why the villain of the movie is doing what he’s doing.

He is grounding that villain in some kind of rational context.

**John:** Yeah, which is spooky.

What I would recommend all writers do is if you have a story that has a villain, especially like a bigger villain, like someone who is doing some pretty serious stuff, take a second before you begin and write the whole story from the villain’s point of view. Because, remember, every villain really does see himself as the hero of the story. So, if you’re making Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton sees herself as a savior trying to protect this company, and protect herself. But she sees herself as the good person here. And if she’s being forced into doing murder or whatever to protect herself, she will.

Even, god, the Queen Mother in Aliens, she is protecting her brood. From her perspective, these outsiders came in and started killing everything. She’s going to protect. And when you see things from their perspective you can often find some really great moments.

Figure out where the story is from their point of view. But, remember, you’re probably not going to tell it from their point of view. You’re going to tell it from our hero’s point of view, and make sure that you’re going to find those moments in which our hero is going to keep making things worse for the villain, and therefore the villain is going to be able to keep making things worse for the hero. And there is going to be a natural confrontation, but that the final confrontation won’t come until the climax that you want to have happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a nice way of approaching certain villain stories where the movie is in many ways about figuring out the rational context for the villain. You’re trying to unearth a mystery, and that in fact if you figure out why the villain is doing what they’re doing you can stop them.

Mama, which is out in theaters right now, I don’t know if you saw it. It’s a good horror movie. It’s very thoughtful and is very thematic. It’s about something. I thought they did a good job. And that movie is sort of a good case-in-point of if you can figure out why Mama is so violent and evil, then you might have a shot at getting rid of Mama. So, you build the mystery in. And the mystery is, why is this bad person doing these bad things?

Se7en sort of worked like that, you know, with a kind of nice nihilistic ending.

**John:** Great. Well, fun to talk about villains. And our villain talk fits very well into what I want to bring up for my One Cool Thing, which is a book, a bestseller, so it feels really weird for me to be hyping a bestseller because people are buying this book anyway. But it’s Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

And I read it just because I wanted to read a fun book that I didn’t have to think about adapting, because so much of what I read for fiction is something that has been sent to me, like, “Oh, would you consider working on this?” And this one was just a fun book that I just bought on the Kindle. I was like, oh, I’ll read it on the plane. And I loved it.

And, of course, I couldn’t turn off that adaptation part of my brain. Because I loved it so much and was thinking, oh, this is a clearly a movie. And I later found out that Reese Witherspoon had the rights and now David Fincher is probably going to direct it.

But, the reason why I’m recommending it on this podcast for people who are interesting in screenwriting is it’s a great book, but it’s also a really fascinating exercise in figuring out how you would adapt this book. Because, the book is structured as alternating chapters about a woman’s disappearance. So, you have Amy who is the wife. And her chapters go forward in time from when they first met, when she first met her husband, Nick.

And so it’s how they fell in love and how they moved to a small town and everything that happened, up to the point of the day that she disappeared. The husband’s chapters start at the day that she disappeared and move forward. And so you’re alternating between the two of these chapters.

And so, when you first start reading the book you’re like, oh, well this will work really nicely. I can see this working as a movie because you would probably start the mystery, of her disappearance, and go forward in time, and you could intercut it with this backstory stuff. And you find out more stuff about the real nature of their relationship as you’re intercutting it.

But then Flynn, to her credit, does something really, really difficult and smart at sort of the midpoint of the book and you realize that, wow, this thing that you thought you could do so straight-forwardly is just not possible. So, I highly recommend it. It’s really nicely done. It’s a good, fun, quick read. So, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

**Craig:** Yeah. My wife read it and loved it, too. I guess I will put it on my iPad Mini.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** Sounds like a good one.

**John:** Great. And, Craig, you have a One Cool Thing, too, which is sports-related.

**Craig:** It is. It is Super Bowl Sunday when we record this. And I don’t know how much you follow football, or football-related news stories, but for the past, really the past few years, but accelerating there has been a rash of serious medical concerns and studies surrounding football.

And it basically goes like this: Large men smashing into each other at high speed is not good for their brains. They used to think that concussions were sort of the worst of it, and if you got a concussion in the old days they would have you sit down for two or three minutes, make sure you didn’t throw up, and then send you back into the game.

Eventually they figured out that was a really bad idea, that concussion and concussion related illness is very serious and the brain is even more susceptible to permanent injury if you get hit again while you’re in a state of concussion.

So, they treated that more seriously. But what they failed to consider was that head injuries that don’t result in concussion are still actually quite bad for you. And even worse, they are cumulative. One study suggested that even in a high school football game the average kid on the line who’s either a defensive linesman or offensive linesman smashing into each other, that it’s like being in four, or five, or six car crashes in an hour. It’s just not good for you.

And, here’s the really scary part is that as they’ve been doing studies, bad things have been happening. Specifically, former NFL stars have been killing themselves. And suicide and severe clinical depression is one of the side effects of what they call cerebral encephalopathy, which is just basically brain damage.

And very popular, I mean, Junior Seau — who was an amazing player, and also, you know, for a league that’s full of surly types, just a smiley happy guy, sort of famous for being smiley and happy — killed himself. And he’s not the only one. And these guys that are killing themselves are, now there’s this weird thing where they’re shooting themselves in the chest or stabbing themselves in the chest because they want somebody to study their brain. That’s how involved they are in their own illness.

There are also a lot of cases of just elevated, what you’d call other neuropathies, Parkinson’s and ALS, and it’s a bad deal. In fact, we have a friend, I’ll tell you once the podcast is over, whose father-in-law played in the NFL. And he had fairly early onset Alzheimer’s. So, everybody is looking at football and they’re wondering what are we going to do. And this is why I don’t let my son play football. But he does play baseball.

And in baseball no one is running into each other, but one thing that’s been coming up is that pitchers are getting injured by hit balls. So, basically they make a pitch, the hitter sends a line drive right back to the mound, it strikes the pitcher in the head. There have a been a couple of big cases recently in the MLB where pitchers have been severely injured, nearly blinded, shattered jaws.

Bu there’s at least one case I know of where a little league player got killed. And part of the problem is that really up until the major leagues, or their farm systems, even all the way through college, players can use aluminum bats. And they love aluminum bats because not only are they cheaper, and they don’t break, they send the ball back much, much quicker.

There’s just more energy. They impart more kinetic energy to the ball. And so the speed of the ball off the bat can be over 100 miles an hour. It’s scary. There is a product now that they’re starting to look into. So, this is sort of a One Cool Thing for hopefully this season, that’s basically a pitcher’s helmet.

And pitchers don’t want to wear helmets because they’re goofy and it’s hard to pitch, frankly, with this big, chunky piece of metal, or rather plastic, on your head. But it almost looks like the top of a bike helmet, you know, that sort of foamy part.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it can go underneath your cap and basically protect you from the worst of it, should you get hit in the head. And I know Easton, which is a very big sports supply company — sports equipment company, I should say — is developing one of these. I think Wilson is developing one of these. And so I kind of keep track of it and I’m hoping that they do bring it to market and that it is available for my son to wear, because I do get worried about that.

So, for those of you out there whose children play football, please be careful and monitor them carefully. And for those of you out there whose kids are pitching, look into this because I think it’s, frankly, I think Major League is going to have to adopt something. It’s just getting too dangerous out there. Protect your brains, people. It’s all you got.

**John:** Absolutely. What is the center of a person? It’s their brain. And so any trauma that is hitting you there is not going to be a — you’re going to be in trouble. You look at the boxers. You look at the boxers who got hit a thousand times, and there’s a reason why they’re not able to put a sentence together.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Boxing is essentially the worst thing you could do for your brain, but it is odd to me that in Major League Baseball for the last, I think, 30 years, you know, if you walk into the batter’s box you must wear a helmet so that if you got hit by a 90-mile-an-hour baseball you wouldn’t get brain injured. But, the pitchers…

**John:** The ball is flying in the other direction, they’re not worrying about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they’re sending the ball back just as fast at their heads, and they’re not wearing anything but a wool cap. Scary.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** There. Sleep on that.

**John:** There we go. Very good.

So, we’ve talked villains, and so the inevitability of death. This is a way to possibly avoid the inevitability of death.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’ve talked about affairs and murderous husbands, possibly in Gone Girl. Big Fish.

**Craig:** Big Fish. Tickets on sale.

**John:** Identity Thiefy.

**Craig:** Tickets on sale.

**John:** People can go see that. And Courier Prime, which is available for downloads. It’s at quoteunquoteapps.com, if you want the Courier font.

Links to everything we talked about on the podcast today are going to be at johnaugust.com/podcast. And, Craig, thank you for another fun episode.

**Craig:** This was a good one. And it was our 75th.

**John:** 75th. So, what is that, Diamond Jubilee?

**Craig:** You know, we are now that old married couple that’s the last one on the dance floor at a wedding when the DJ does that, “All right, everybody who’s been married for 50 years.” You know, we’ve got to do something for 100.

**John:** Oh we will. It’s going to be a blow out for 100.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I should be back from New York by then, and we’ll do something great for that.

**Craig:** Maybe a big live one here in town.

**John:** I think a big live one here in town. People seem to like that idea. So, if you are a listener with a suggestion for something we should do for the 100th episode, please let us know. And thank you all for listening.

**Craig:** Awesome. See you next time.

**John:** Thanks.

LINKS:

* [Identity Thief](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/identitythief/) trailer on Apple
* [Big Fish tickets](http://www.bigfishthemusical.com/#tktsinfo) on sale in Chicago
* [Every Villain is a Hero](http://johnaugust.com/2009/every-villain-is-a-hero)
* [Writing Better Bad Guys](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-better-bad-guys)
* [Screenwriting and the Problem of Evil](http://johnaugust.com/2010/screenwriting-and-the-problem-of-evil)
* [Gone Girl](http://www.amazon.com/dp/030758836X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Gillian Flynn
* [Researchers Discover 28 New Cases of Brain Damage in Deceased Football Players](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sports/concussion-watch/researchers-discover-28-new-cases-of-brain-damage-in-deceased-football-players/)
* [Easton-Bell Sports unveils pitcher’s helmet](http://www.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/22297882/27795470)
* OUTRO: [Last Dance](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oAkDLsvI3g) by Ariana Grande

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/three-hole-punchdrunk).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 74 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I hope you have Diet Dr. Pepper in hand, because we have a very busy show this week.

**Craig:** I’m opting for Diet Coke.

**John:** [gasps]

**Craig:** I feel like that gives me a little extra boost.

**John:** Well, you may need it, because we have five main topics today.

**Craig:** Oh god. Oh, god!

**John:** Can you handle it?

**Craig:** Yes! [laughs]

**John:** We’ll go through some feedback on the Raiders episode we did last week.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ll segue to the results of the listener survey that we put up. And we had a bunch of people who wrote into that, so we want to get to some of the responses.

There’s a new report that just came out this last week that tallies up all the spec sales and pitches from 2012, which is kind of crazy that someone did that, but good for them.

I want to talk to you about a brand new type face called Courier Prime.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** And we have three listener questions.

**Craig:** Great. That is a full docket. Let’s get to it.

**John:** Let’s get right to it. Well, let’s start with Raiders. So, last week we did a special episode which was just about Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it was just sort of a trial run, like what would it be like if we just talked about one movie the whole time. And people seemed to really dig it. I got a lot of good response on Twitter about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I saw a lot of it. And I think my favorite comment was somebody was like, “Oh god, they’re just going to talk about a movie the whole time and it’s Raiders, and everybody has seen Raiders so who cares?” But they were like, “No, actually, it was really good.” [laughs] So, that was great to hear.

And I love talking about Raiders. I wish every podcast were about Raiders.

**John:** Yeah. Some podcasts should probably be just about Raiders. I’m sure there actually is a Raiders podcast. And we’ll find it and Stuart will link to it. But, what I really liked is people would write in with their theories about sweater guy. And sweater guy is the guy who puts the apple on the desk as he’s leaving, and they’re like, what is his deal, is he gay, what is it?

And so my favorite response was from Christopher Wilson who tweeted, “Raiders sweater guy has written ‘I love you’ on the apple, which Brody then reads and wipes off on his sleeve before pocketing it.”

**Craig:** Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. It’s not true…

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** …but I wish it were.

**John:** That would be fantastic if it were. And I think in the ret-con version, I think if we were to go back and sort of redo it or see Indiana Jones from sweater vest guy’s perspective, that would be a very good explanation. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, that would be a feature film.

**Craig:** And what happened the days leading up to the apple incident. How he dealt with the aftermath of the apple incident.

The other thing that someone tweeted which I really liked, and I had never noticed it, and it’s funny how you just don’t see the things — and no matter how many times you’ve seen a movie you just miss these things. The famous shot of Indiana Jones going under the — in the beginning, when that wall is closing down on him and he rolls under it at the last second, then reaches back, grabs his hat, and then goes through again, the hat is actually dropped from above.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And somebody put a GIF on there and you can just watch it over and over. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Just ruined it.

**Craig:** I mean, everybody knows the shot of the snake that’s reflected in the protective glass between Indiana Jones and the snake. Everybody knows that goof. But that hat, how did I miss that? Incredible. Just incredible.

**John:** Sleight of hand. The GIF has ruined it for you. Or the “JIF.” And I guess you can pronounce it either way.

**Craig:** I say “GIF,” because it’s graphic interchange format, so it should be “GIF.”

**John:** I agree with you, but apparently the people who make it say it’s “JIF.” We’ll never resolve that issue as we will never resolve many sort of big, important movie issues.

**Craig:** I disagree with you; I think we just resolved it. And it’s “GIF.” [laughs]

**John:** So, one of the other things that happened on Twitter is I asked, well, if we were to do another one of these movie-centered episodes, what movie should we do? And, of course, a lot of people wrote in with responses.

It was interesting, a lot of people wrote in with like, “Do North by Northwest.” “Do Casablanca.”

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**John:** And I say, “Oh, come on,” because realistically those are fantastic movies, but no one is going to be writing those movies now. I don’t think it’s actually a helpful exercise. And that’s why I get so frustrated when I see those brought up in, like, How to Write a Screenplay books, because those aren’t movies that people actually get made.

So, I think if we are to do another one of these in the future, and I think we should, it should be a more modern movie that reflects the kinds of movies that listeners are actually making these days.

**Craig:** Yeah. Plus, also, if you want to read insight or analysis of Casablanca, go pick up every single book on film ever written. It’s been done. We get it. There’s nothing left to say about those movies.

It’s far more interesting, I think, to hear an analysis of a film that perhaps academics don’t think is worthy of analysis or isn’t sufficient for analysis, but we who write movies for large mass audiences do think is valuable for analysis. Why would we ever, ever waste our time analyzing North by Northwest? What else is there to say?

**John:** Yeah, instead of Casablanca, I think it should be Caddyshack.

**Craig:** By the way, it would great to have fun with… — I mean, the thing is Caddyshack is actually really hard to analyze because the story is all over the place. I mean, for instance, if it were me, if I got to pick the next one, Groundhog Day. That would be fun to go through.

**John:** That is a great one. But Groundhog Day is done a lot, though. There’s a whole book on sort of — there’s a lot of stuff written about how Groundhog Day was made. That doesn’t mean it’s not a great movie and you can learn a lot from it. It’s a high concept comedy. That’s a good choice; you’re right.

I was going to — if we we’re going for comedy — I was going to go for Clueless which is just a brilliant movie. Or Animal House.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, there are so many that we could talk about. But, what we should never do is analyze the same old movies that everybody else analyzes, for all of the reasons that you’ve mentioned, and all the reasons I’ve mentioned. So, there — there is your dose of umbrage for the day. Come on!

**John:** Now, one of the readers also sent through this script page which is apparently from Harrison Ford’s actual script from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I guess the backstory is that at some point this original script was up for auction, and so online there were scans of some pages, or photos of some pages. Now, I haven’t found a link yet from some other site that has it, because I kind of want to post it up ourselves, something that’s not really supposed to be out there in the world. But this page was really interesting, and what I liked about it was it was actually a page that we talked about in the podcast.

This is the moment where Indiana Jones is talking to the two Army guys and they’re in the big lecture hall. So, I want to read a little of what’s actually written in the script and then we can talk about some of the notes that Harrison Ford has scribbled on the script which I think are important as well. So, this is page 18, at least what I’m reading.

“…through rings in the corner of the Ark. The painting is…” So, he must be talking about the book. Basically the book has been flipped open and you see the Ark and the painting of the Ark. “The painting is very dramatic, full of smoke, tumult and sinewy dying men. But the most astonishing thing in the picture is the brilliant jet of white light and flame issuing from the wings of the angels. It pierces deep into the ranks of the retreating enemy, wrecking devastation and terror.”

So, it’s a very kind of literary block of scene description there, but it really gives you a very good sense of what that drawing is ultimately going to be in the book, and why the other characters are responding to it in that way.

This is the section where Indiana Jones says, “Lightning…fire…the power of God.” What I like about the handwritten notes in this is it says, “Imp,” which I think means important, and the question is, “Is Indy a believer?”

**Craig:** Oh! There we go!

**John:** “Where in bible?” And it’s scratching out some lines and it’s suggesting alts for things. And it’s just fascinating to look at while they were making the movie, these are the kind of questions that do come up on set. And as you’re on set working on Hangover II, or Hangover III, that kind of stuff does come up and that’s why it’s so valuable to have you as the writer on set is that you can say like, “Why am I doing this right here? What if I did this thing? What’s important about this scene?”

Even as you’re making a movie you’re asking these questions, and sometimes those questions get reflected in the text of the scene you’re shooting probably that day.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and first of all the question that he asks, “Is Indy a believer?” goes right to the heart of what you and I were talking about last week. That is the core of the movie. And the answer to that question, for me at least in that point in the movie is, no, he’s not, but he will be.

And it’s interesting that… — If you want to be a screenwriter, this is the way you have to think about movies. It is quite likely that no one sitting in the movie theater, save for a very select few people, ever watched Indiana Jones and thought this is a movie about faith, and belief, and this is a movie about one man’s journey from skepticism and scientificism to religiosity or spirituality.

But that’s what it is. For the actor who has to play the part, he must understand in those moments why he’s saying the things he’s saying, or else it just will be bad acting. And no matter what the movie is, actors need to understand what they’re saying and why they’re seeing it in the moment.

And because they are performing the character, inevitably they’re going to come to a line that is not consistent with the way they’ve been performing everything else. And in those moments, those lines get tested by everybody before you shoot, you know, on the day. “Why am I saying this? It doesn’t feel right.”

And when you’re a screenwriter on set, the last thing you can say is, “Well, I don’t care how it feels. That’s what I wrote. I believe it’s right. Just do it.” You’ll get a terrible line reading, or you’ll get an angry actor. Either way, it’s not productive. So, the question you have to ask yourself is: Is this person correct? Is the line reading incorrect for…is it inconsistent with the character I intend? Or, is the line inconsistent with the character that I intended as currently being portrayed by this actor? Or, is the actor just wrong?

And if the actor is wrong, part of our job is to explain our intention and see if they agree. Sometimes it’s that no one is wrong. It’s just that this other person is a human being and they need to make it feel real. And if it’s not real to them, you have to rewrite it so that it is real to them. Otherwise it’s going to stink.

So, for instance, at the bottom of the page, why don’t you read what it says there.

**John:** “Indy goes and shuts window, lost in thought.” That part? Or, the “Oh, please.”

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. [laughs] So, what Indiana Jones as scripted is supposed to say…

**John:** “Most certainly.”

**Craig:** …in response to the CIA guy. And Harrison Ford wrote next to that, “Oh, please,” because in his mind he’s like, “That’s not how Indiana Jones is going to talk. That’s not consistent with the character that I’m building in my mind. That’s not going to be consistent with my performance.”

Now, sometimes as screenwriters this hurts. You’re Larry Kasdan. You’re an amazing writer, and here’s a guy going, “Oh, please,” in response to some line you’ve written. But, by the same token, it’s an emotional response, and it’s just as emotional for them as it is for us when somebody suggests a line to us and we think in our minds, “Oh, please. That’s ridiculous.”

But, you have to be able to trust the people you’re with and even give them room to be a little brusque, because everybody… — The thing that scares us the most — and “us” includes writers, directors, and actors — is being embarrassed by the totally wrong thing. And that fear oftentimes comes out in a bit of a harsh way.

**John:** That’s true. What I’ll go back to with actors needing to change things on set is the challenge as a writer, and a director, and a producer, when you have actors who are trying to change lines is the actors are sometimes not aware, or sometimes they are aware but they’re being sort of deliberately blind to the fact that if they change their lines then all of the other lines change, too.

And that can be a very difficult situation on sets where writers just have to sort of negotiate between these actors who are starting to change their lines and suddenly it becomes a less-than-happy situation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** On good sets, with good actors, it’s a delight. And everyone is finding the exact right moments and they’re handing lines to other actors because they’re like, “I don’t need to say this, you can say this instead,” and everything is happy and joyful.

Sometimes it’s not that situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. And what you’re looking for, hopefully, in your creative partners and the main cast certainly fits that bill, you’re looking for people who act in good faith. We don’t always agree about things, but everybody should be working towards the notion that they want the movie to be good.

There are times when actors, and writers, and directors, behave badly. And they put their ego first, or considerations that have nothing to do with the movie first. And when those things happen they are toxic and they often ruin movies.

And they are scary. I mean, we’ve all — anybody who makes movies has been through those situations and they’re very, very difficult. Very difficult. I would so much rather have an incredibly, physically arduous shoot of difficult material with people that are working together than an easy, slam-dunk, walk-in-the-park movie production where the two main actors don’t see eye-to-eye about what the movie is supposed to be, who the star is, who the hero is.

I mean, I’ve sat in rooms with actors while they explain to me what their vision for the character was, and I thought in my head, “Oh no! They think they’re the protagonist. OH NO! What do I do now?” That’s a rough one.

**John:** Luckily in this situation we have Harrison Ford who is playing Indiana Jones. He is clearly the hero of the movie. And he seems to be making the right choices and asking the right questions. So, maybe it’s just one more sign of how Raiders of the Lost Ark became so good.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can even see on that page that he circles a big chunk of dialogue and gives it to Denholm Elliott.

**John:** Yeah. Nice of him to do.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Topic two. Two weeks ago on the podcast we asked, “Hey, we are trying to do a survey of who our listeners are and figure out what is interesting to them about the podcast, what we could be doing better, where these people live.” We asked like eight questions and so many people wrote in with responses.

As we’re recording this show we have 1,811 responses, which is nuts. So, thank you so much to everybody who chimed in and gave us their opinion. If you still want to do it, the survey form is still up there. It’s johnaugust.com/survey. And you can weigh in with your thoughts, and there is also a free response section.

But I thought we’d run through some of the stats. There will also be a link to the PDF that shows all the stats at johnaugust.com.

Geography: This was different than I would have guessed. So, we asked, “Where do you live?” And 30% roughly of our listeners live in Los Angeles, which is understandable because that’s where a lot of movies are made. Somewhere outside of Los Angeles but still in the US is 46%. The UK is 9%. And somewhere else in the world is 16%.

**Craig:** That’s still pretty high though, right?

**John:** It is high. But I would have guessed the somewhere-else-in-the-world would have been higher than that. That’s just based on the questions that actually come into the podcast are, I would say, almost 50% sort of international readers. So, I was surprised that we are still so North American centric.

**Craig:** Well, maybe it is that for those people who live elsewhere we are the most convenient place to ask questions.

**John:** That’s a very good point. See, you’re providing answers. I like that, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I’m here for solutions.

**John:** Most of our listeners listen every week. 72% said they listen every week.

**Craig:** That’s gratifying.

**John:** That’s so gratifying. So, I wondered whether people were cherry picking based on the kinds of things we talk about, but it sounds like most people really do listen every week. And most of our listeners have been listening since the beginning, or nearly the beginning. 62% said they’ve been listening right from the start, which is great.

**Craig:** That is good.

**John:** At least 62% of the people who filled out this survey, I should say. There could be a selection bias there because it’s our really dedicated listeners were the people who filled out the survey, but still, that’s awesome.

This was surprising to me. “Do you currently make your living in film or television?” 32%, yes.

**Craig:** Now, I am surprised that that’s actually that high. Are you surprised that it’s that high or that low?

**John:** I am surprised it’s that high.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too. And it’s cool. I mean, look, you know, sometimes we talk about stuff that really is only applicable to people that make their living in film and television. And I think, “Oh, what are we doing if only 4% of people listening actually care?” So, it was very cool to see that the number was as high as a third.

And, you know, the great majority of the rest want to work in the business.

**John:** Yes. 57% want to work in film or television. I guess, keep in mind that the “yes”s in that 32%, those could also be people who are working as assistants at places, who are working in those very entry-level jobs, which is great too. So they can also be people who are still aspiring screenwriters, but they are currently working at least in some aspect of the industry.

**Craig:** You’re right. Yes, you’re right. We may have a lot of assistants there, but they count.

**John:** Assistants count. Assistants are awesome.

Next question was, “How do you listen to the show?” 23% of listeners listen directly on johnaugust.com. That is, they go to the blog, they press play there, and listen to it playing in the browser. 16% listen to it just directly on iTunes. 47%, so almost half of the people, are listening to it on the iPhone or i-gizmo. Android, only 5%.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know, because Android stinks. And I like to think that the people that listen to us are cool and understand that things that are technological and aesthetic rip-offs should not be rewarded. [laughs]

**John:** See, what’s so unfair, Craig, is that I’m the one who actually has to check the email account, so when people write their angry things I’m the person who sees all those. Actually, well, Stuart sees them. Eh, Stuart can deal with it.

**Craig:** You know what, Stuart? Enjoy. Enjoy the avalanche from the 5% on their goofy Android devices.

**John:** They’re a very loud 5%. I will say that your Twitter handle is @clmazin, so if Android users want to talk to you about Android usage they can do that right there.

**Craig:** Yeah, bring the noise from your little pieces of plastic. Go ahead.

**John:** This was also important and surprising to us is that 35% of people do read the show’s transcripts, or at least sometimes read the show’s transcripts. So, every episode of the show has a transcript where Stuart and other folks have actually typed out everything we’ve said — god bless them.

And so we were wondering, “Well, is that good? Is that useful? Are people finding it helpful?” And people are apparently finding it helpful. So, if you don’t look at the transcripts, here’s what I can tell you: Every Tuesday we come out with an episode. Usually by Thursday, sometimes by Friday we have the transcript ready and up. That transcript shows up as a link at the bottom of the post, the original post on johnaugust.com.

You click through that link and it shows up as a special post that has all the text. And so if you are someplace where you can’t listen to the podcast but you want to read up on it, that’s an opportunity.

**Craig:** By the way, how do you listen to the show?

**John:** I listen to it on my iPhone with Instacast, which I think is the best podcasting app for the iPhone.

**Craig:** Interesting. I’m one of the 23% that listens to it directly on johnaugust.com, although I’m also one of the 35% that sometimes just reads the transcripts.

**John:** Ah. And how do you find the transcripts, because I honestly don’t read them. I just don’t have the time in the day to actually look through. Stuart sort of proofs them. Do you find them largely accurate?

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I mean, occasionally you see some slightly goofy typo or something in there, but by and large they’re very accurate. And I have to say the two of us come off so well in transcript form.

**John:** Ha! [laughs]

**Craig:** There’s something about the text that strips away all the goofiness. And I will also say you and I have a tendency to speak in complete sentences, which isn’t something you always see, or hear.

**John:** I want to answer in a complete sentence somehow because you just said that.

**Craig:** And you just did.

**John:** I did. Thank goodness.

Next question was about the Three Page Challenge, because I was curious whether people like it, don’t like it so much, they get sick of it. We try to space them out. We try to never do two Three Page Challenges week after week, because that’s just a lot we know. And some people don’t want to be able to do it.

But 35% of people say they love it, so that’s great. And 60%…58% of people say it’s just fine at the current levels, so don’t do it any more, don’t do it any less. And so we will keep doing them, but I think we will keep spacing them out; so, we don’t want to do it every week.

Some people had suggested like, “Oh, maybe just do one at the end of every show.” That doesn’t feel right either. I think we will keep them as sort of blocks, and some weeks we’ll have some of them, and most weeks won’t.

**Craig:** Sounds good to me.

**John:** People have asked for more guests. Well, you’re in for a treat because we are going to have more guests coming in soon, as soon as next week in fact.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This was an interesting question we had to do a little more digging on. So, we asked, “If we were to do another live session like the one we did in Austin, would you come?” And 54% of people said probably not. But then when you actually looked through the responses of people who live in Los Angeles, a ton of people would. So, it sounds like we could probably schedule one of these for Los Angeles, and we should try to do that at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be fun to do. It would be nice to meet the Scriptnotes Army. Should we have some…you know, like Lady Gaga has her Little Monsters and stuff, shouldn’t we have some sort of name for the people who listen to us, other than nerds, you know, ScriptNerds.

**John:** ScriptNerds, yeah. We could also probably have tee-shirts. I’ll talk to Ryan about tee-shirts, because tee-shirts are awesome.

**Craig:** Sell tee-shirts like we’re at a concert. I like it.

**John:** I like it. We need a big tee-shirt cannon to shoot it to the back rows.

**Craig:** That’s the vibe we’re going for!

**John:** Totally. It’s a party vibe. And finally we asked about how old people were. And our audience is largely, like 47% is between 25 and 35. 38% is over 35. So, we don’t have a lot of teenagers, which is great.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because, frankly, teenagers are annoying and stupid.

**John:** Yeah. That’s @clmazin on Twitter.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. All these teenagers with their Android devices. We don’t need you. Keep not listening. Don’t want you.

**John:** Now, we also had a section for sort of free comments, where people could write in and say whatever they wanted to say about anything. And so the most common thing filled in the little box was “Thank you.” It’s like, “Oh, how lovely!” People are so nice.

There were a couple of comments that sort of came at both sides a lot, so, more umbrage/less umbrage. I think we have plenty of umbrage.

**Craig:** [laughs] The great thing about umbrage is I just don’t care. I think the only way to have gotten more umbrage out of me is if 98% of people had said less umbrage.

**John:** Yeah, some common comments, I had Stuart sort of go through, because there were so many to look for. So I asked Stuart to sort of find common themes and threads. So, here’s his sort of sampler platter:

He said that some folks say we’re too kind. We shouldn’t be afraid to disagree with each other or say when we don’t like something. I think I speak up when I don’t agree with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I’m pretty sure that you hate my guts. I’m not sure what they’re talking about. I mean, sometimes they may think that we are over-agreeing with each other on these Three Page Challenges, but I think that’s only because usually there’s a right answer to those Three Page Challenges. Usually they are good or they are bad. I mean, we both do the same job. We’ve both been doing it for awhile. There’s a reason we have a podcast together.

I mean, and you know, I like you.

**John:** Aw…Craig!

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Some listeners said that they wanted to bring back comments, and that must be reflecting the blog, because I used to have comments turned on on the blog. I turned off the comments on the blog and I’m just so much happier without comments, so those aren’t coming back.

But, if you want to respond to something that happens on the podcast, send us an email ask@johnaugust.com, or just tweet us directly: @johnaugust or @clmazin.

People asked for chapter marks or section time stamps.

**Craig:** That’s a good idea.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a good idea. I did that for the flashback episode, the one where we did stuff from previous episodes. So, we’ll try to get chapter markers in, and maybe this episode will actually have some chapter markers in it.

People said that Lindsay Doran is amazing, and gosh, she really is just great.

Since the show started people say that they’ve had various things of success and they couldn’t have done it without us, which was lovely. So, thank you. If you have a success story and we’ve been helpful, a lot of you have been writing nice emails. And so thank you for that and continue to write those nice emails, because it does give us warm fuzzy feelings.

**Craig:** Yeah. And tell us your story, too. I mean, it would be cool if somebody had a success story and we actually did have some slight bit of help with it, tell us the story. We’ll read it.

**John:** Regarding the Three Page Challenge, a common comment was something like, “I don’t read along with you. Instead I read them myself and then I see if I agree with you.” That’s a great strategy. So, if you’re tuning in for a Three Page Challenge and you have the opportunity to, I might stop the podcast, print those pages, read them, and then look along with us. Because if you are just listening to what we’re going to say, by the time you read the PDFs you’re probably going to agree with us. But it’s great to sort of develop your eyes and your ears for sort of what the good and the bad things about some of these scripts are. But, looking at them yourself and then seeing if we agree with your opinions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Smart idea.

**John:** People asked for a ten-page challenge, an act one challenge, a full script challenge. That’s not going to happen.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Sorry. That’s a terrifying amount of work.

**Craig:** Not as long as I’m on this podcast!

**John:** [laughs] People have said, “Do an episode with some of the worst Three Page Challenges submitted and why they’re bad.” And this is a misunderstanding of, I think, the point of the Three Page Challenge. And also Stuart really is picking some of the best ones. And so he’s not deliberately, like, throwing the turkeys in there. There are some really, really bad ones. And I don’t think that really helps people.

I think what probably helps people is saying like, “This is what was promising about this, and this was what didn’t work about this.” Or, “This was just so fantastic and here’s why it’s fantastic.” It’s easy to write something terrible.

**Craig:** I saw that suggestion and I have to say part of me thought it might not be a bad experiment to try, and what we’ll do is we can leave off the names of the people so it’s not so personally gross for them, but the possible value is if people are listening and they hear us say, “Okay, so let’s talk about why these are huge, fundamental mistakes,” maybe they’d think, “Oh, I’m making that mistake right now.”

So, that’s one reason that we might want to do just like a horror show Three Page Challenge one week, just to kind of talk about some of the real glaring mistakes people make.

**John:** But here’s my problem with that. Anyone who sent in that Three Page Challenge, they are a listener to the show, so of the — who knows how many listeners we have — that one person is going to tune into that episode and see us saying that this a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible sample, and how is that person going to feel?

I just feel like there’s sort of compact of trust that has been entered into by sending it into us. I just don’t want to…

**Craig:** That’s a good point. You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** All right. I’m the nice one.

**Craig:** [laughs] So true.

**John:** People wrote in to say do a prompt-based challenge, which I think is sort of going back to — I used to do on the blog the scene challenge, where I would say, “Write me a scene that takes place in a laundromat and involves this kind of thing.” And so people would write in, in the comments, they’d write in this little scene that did that. And I would get like 200 of them. And it was exciting to do for awhile, and then it just got to be such an incredible drain.

I worry that with as many listeners as we have right now, it would just be unmanageable.

**Craig:** I don’t even like that kind of stunt writing anyway. You know, that’s like…I don’t like it. [laughs] That’s as articulate as I can be. I don’t like it.

**John:** So, we had a couple topic requests that I wanted to respond to. One topic was what to do when you first move to LA — where to live, where to get a job, how to approach your contacts out there — which I think is a really good general topic. So, we should do that sometime, sort of that first, you-just-arrived kind of thing. And that might be a good topic for a special guest, like a newer writer who is just getting started.

We had a lot of requests for certain kinds of guests, for directors, and writer-directors, and people in different things. And you’re going to see a lot more of that this year.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We had a specific request to do a cross-panel with the Nerdist Writer’s Panel, and that’s something we actually talked about with Ben Blacker. And that show is great. We love them. So, if we can find something to work out this year to do with them, that would be great.

And last topic was they really want Stuart on the podcast at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, at some point it does seem like he’s got to be on the podcast.

**John:** I just feel like Stuart is sort of our Maris from Frasier. And that if you actually reveal who she is at this point it sort of spoils everything.

**Craig:** Well, what if we just have Stuart on the way that Marcel Marceau is in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie. You know, he was the only person that said something and he said one word or something, [laughs] and then left.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing. Stuart actually is in every podcast. He’s just downstairs, you just don’t hear him. So, he really is part of every podcast.

**Craig:** He lives and breathes through ever second of this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Good point. Yeah, maybe, see, I’m the nice one now because I’m feeling like, “Oh, it would be nice to talk to Stuart.” But then, you know, I also feel like here’s what’s going to happen: People are going to listen to Stuart and they’re going to go, “Nah, I liked him so much better when he was a man of mystery.”

**John:** Yeah. Stuart is sort of a man of mystery, but this last weekend I went to a party at his house, and there’s a whole separate podcast which is just talking about Stuart’s crazy, insane house that was clearly built by 1980s drug dealers and is somewhere on the top of a mountain in East Los Angeles. It was just fascinating.

It was also fascinating to do some introspection on myself as a 42-year-old at a party of like young 20-somethings and what that is like.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, you can’t go back.

**John:** No, you can’t go back. But, we can go forward. And let’s go forward to our next topic which is…

**Craig:** What a segue!

**John:** I’m just getting so much better a year into this whole podcasting thing.

A reader — thank you so much reader for sending this to me — sent this thing called the Scoggins Report. And it’s done by Jason Scoggins and Cindy Kaplan. And there will be a link to it, and there’s a PDF you can download.

But what it is is they’ve taken all the spec sales and pitch sales from the year and calculated them up by studio and by agency and sort of genre and sort of what happened over the course of the year. And god bless you for sort of quantifying this information that would otherwise go missed. They call it a “terribly unscientific analysis of Hollywood’s movie development business.” And I think that’s the way to really look at it. I wouldn’t look for the exact percentages, but you can definitely notice some trends among what’s actually selling in Hollywood.

So, you got a quick chance to look at this, but I want to highlight a few things. The top buyer of spec scripts this last year was Paramount, and spec scripts and pitches was also Paramount. So, Paramount bought 20 specs and pitches this year, tied with Universal when you factor in pitches as well. That’s a lot. And that’s compared to like the lowest of the big studios was Fox with six. So, Paramount was buying a lot more.

The agencies that sold specs, William Morris sold the most specs according to this listing. UTA, then CAA, then APA, then Paradigm.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was actually interesting to me. The studio buyers, I think, kind of wobbles up and down each year. Sometimes one is on top, sometimes the other. I mean, for instance, they called out Warner Bros. as having really reduced the amount that they bought and suddenly Paramount really increased the amount they bought. And sometimes that just has to do with their own development cycles. So, sometimes they have a development cycle where they’re like, “We’re short on original material. Let’s just buy stuff this year.”

But that means next year they won’t as much. The total number of spec sales for 2012 was 132. In 2011, it was 132. [laughs] So, there is actually incredible stability to the overall appetite for specs. I was surprised by the sellers, the piece of data you just called out there. William Morris sold 35 specs. UTA sold 24. CAA only 16. That’s a fascinating number. I suspect that part of that has to do with the fact that CAA represents a lot of writers who do a lot of assignment work. And that William Morris may be willing to take more of a flyer on writers who are younger, or breaking in, or newer, or just more oriented to selling speculative material.

That was an interesting number to me. I mean, CAA’s numbers are quite low, frankly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when you look at combining specs and pitches, CAA’s number comes up quite bit, but William Morris doubles — nearly doubles — to 62. So, William Morris seems to be far and away the most entrepreneurial agency when it comes to selling specs and original material.

**John:** Now, one thing to keep in mind is that it’s not always clear how they’re getting their data. Are they getting data based on what gets reported in the trades? Or are they talking to individual people at studios?

For example, Fox only listed six scripts sold, but is mine one of them? Because I have a project that’s sort of at Fox that’s, you know, it’s a spec, it’s at Fox, but it’s sort of a special/unique situation. So, am I one of those six or am I not one of those six? It’s hard to know.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I guess I could probably look at the end notes and figure it out, but I’m just spitballing.

What is probably more useful for most of our readers is to take a look at spec sales by genre, because what they do is they break down into six rough categories and see what percentage of sales came from the different genres. So, the most common genre for a sale this last year was thrillers. 27% of spec sales were thrillers. 22% were action-adventure movies. 21% were comedies. 11% were science-fiction. 10% were horror. And 8% were drama.

So, that 8% drama, that feels true. Selling a drama spec is very, very tough these days. Horror and thriller, I think, kind of overlap a lot, so I’d be curious sort of where the distinction is made between those two. But, I would say those numbers feel kind of true to what gets sold, not necessarily always what gets made, but to what gets sold among specs.

**Craig:** Yeah. And one thing to remember when you’re looking at numbers like this is that the numbers are skewed somewhat by the nature of the original material versus material that’s adapted. Thrillers tend to be original because there frankly aren’t a lot of underlying properties that specifically fall into the thriller category. So, we know that when it comes to things like comedy or action-adventure or sci-fi, a lot of times there is underlying material. There’s an article, there’s a remake, there’s a sequel, whatever it is.

Thrillers, there’s not — it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of, for whatever reason, thrillers that people are interested in adapting. Most of the stuff I see out there for adaptations are sort of in the adventure area, or sci-fi, or comedy. So, that may be part of why thrillers are so high. I mean, in short, they buy more thriller specs because they have less other avenues to generate thriller material.

**John:** Yeah. I also have to say: dramas, even though we make very few dramas over all, I would say most of the dramas we make tend to be based on books and sort of big sell, big books that sold out of New York. So, it’s not surprising that of spec script sales there aren’t going to be a lot of them.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And I just did a quick check, and no, the script that I have at Fox did not show up on this thing, so there could be seven for Fox. The numbers could be off a little bit.

**Craig:** Bump Fox up to seven.

**John:** So, if you are thinking about a spec, if you are thinking about a pitch, I think it’s worth taking a look at. This is just how the movie business worked this year. I would say most writers these days are doing both film and television, so your career is not sort of pigeonholed into one or the other as much as it used to be, but useful to take a look at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I just want to give one final caveat, because I was talking about this actually on DoneDealPro the other day in terms of specs: You could look at this report and say, “Well, if I wanted to be a spec selling machine I would have an agent at William Morris, I would have a manager at Energy,” — which is a company with which I was up until this day unfamiliar — “I would be selling that script to Paramount or Universal. And it would be a thriller.”

However, please note that Paradigm sold the fewest specs, and say Fox bought the fewest specs, and say drama represented the genre of the fewest specs, and yet they exist and sales occurred. In the end, this is interesting to look at, but honestly irrelevant to you, because if you’ve written something that you love, that’s what you write. And if you love your agent, that’s who he is. And if there’s a company that’s really into it, that’s the company.

So, don’t chase. I guess that’s my advice: Don’t chase this stuff. The best agent to sell your spec is the agent who represents the spec you’ve written who loves it. Simple as that.

**John:** I agree. I would also remind listeners that a spec script might sell, but if the spec script doesn’t sell it is a writing sample that gets you a job, and gets you hired for another bit of work. And so writing the thing that you can write the best is always going to be your best option.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. So don’t chase.

**John:** Don’t chase.

Topic four. I think we’re at four. Maybe it’s five. Our next topic is type faces. And so, Craig, I think we may have talked about this on the podcast before. In my career and life before I became a screenwriter I was actually a graphic designer. And so I was the kid who walked around campus with the box of fonts. I had like the 3.5-inch floppies. It was full of fonts. And back in those days you had your bitmap fonts and you had your laser writer fonts. And I was the one who had sort of the alternate versions of things.

I was a big font nerd. And then I entered into a career in which my entire output is 12-point Courier, which is just…I don’t know if you can really say it’s irony, but it’s just sort of sad. It’s just sort of sad that I love fonts so much and most of my work was coming out in a really not-attractive Courier face. To the degree that when I bought my first laser printer, which was back when I was at USC, I hated the Courier that was in it so much because it was super really thin Courier, that I actually had this utility that pulled the outlines out of the printer and I used Fontographer to make myself my own Courier, which I called Dorphic. And my first scripts are printed in Dorphic.

So, if you actually look at my original things, like Here and Now, they’re printed in a face that basically looked like Courier, but it’s a little bit jagged, it’s a little bit off, and it’s Dorphic. And that was like my own little type face.

And so I used that for several years and then eventually Courier started looking better. I liked the standard Mac Courier. It was fine. And for awhile I was just satisfied with that. But now I’m not really satisfied. So, a couple months ago a very talented font designer named Alan Dauge-Greene wrote to me. He said, like, “Hey, would you ever be interested in doing a custom font for any of your app stuff?”

I said, “You know what I really want? What I want more than anything else? I want a much better version of Courier.” And so I’m so excited because now it exits. We made a type face called Courier Prime. And I had just sent you the webpage that sort of announces it, so you’ve had a chance to take a look at that.

**Craig:** I have. And John, how much is this new Courier type face going to cost me, the consumer?

**John:** Would you believe that it will cost you absolutely nothing?

**Craig:** What?! [laughs]

**John:** It’s completely free.

**Craig:** I mean, how cool are you guys? It is a really nice looking, I mean, I also — it drives me nuts. And I hate Courier. Courier is aggressively ugly. It is a pointless tradition as far as I’m concerned. I would love for you and your elves to figure out how we can get a fixed width font that looks cool and doesn’t look like butt, which is what Courier looks like. But while we’re all stuck with Courier, it is a much nicer Courier.

And the Courier marketplace is getting really confused, because when I started writing screenplays it was just Courier. And then there was Courier New. And there was Final Draft Courier. And there was Movie Magic Courier. And there are all different Couriers. And I never understood what’s the difference between all of these.

And they didn’t always match up right, you know, like suddenly if you changed Courier and then you moved to another program you get pages moving up and down. So, this sounds like a great universal solution to all of that.

Your Courier is cool. I already have it installed on my computer and I think it looks great. But can’t you just make a better one? Like a better font?

**John:** So, here’s the thing: I think Courier gets knocked because it so often is so incredibly ugly. And it was designed for an age of typewriters. And it is a mono-space font. Mono-space fonts have great qualities to them that things will always line up and every character can actually fit the same space. But they have some drawbacks.

They tend to be not as readable because your eye likes to see some differences between letter widths, and there’s not a lot of color on the page.

I think Courier for — first off, if you have Courier New installed anywhere on our computer, just get rid of it. It’s just the worst the worst face ever.

**Craig:** So bad.

**John:** Just the worst. A couple sort of unique challenges for any type face that is designed for screenwriters, and Courier Prime is specially designed for screenwriting. So, you could use it for coding. You could use it for a letter you’re sending to your grandma. But the reason why we did it for screenwriting is if you actually look at page of a screenplay, there’s actually not a lot of text on the page. There’s a lot of white space.

And so most Couriers look kind of thin and the page looks kind of — doesn’t have a lot of good color to it. You want something a little bit bolder. So, we were able to beef it up just a little bit more than you would normally see for a Courier. The letters are just a tiny bit fatter. The other thing we could take advantage of is like resolution of not just printers, but also your screen has increased as well. So, we’re able to open up the space inside letters a little bit more, and it just gives a little bit more — I don’t know — it helps the readability and it makes it look a little bit nicer and more inviting on the page.

The other thing we did, which I’m surprised that more Couriers haven’t done along the way, is right now Courier, basic Mac Courier and Courier Final Draft, for their italics they just slant the letters. What we did is we created a true italic where the font actually looks better and different when you go into italics.

**Craig:** I know. It’s cool. I like that a lot.

**John:** So, the lower case “f” is sort of the classic example of this, is that it really sort of leans forward in a kind of scripty sort of way. And yet everything matches fine. So, we had to pick metrics so that things wouldn’t break and that you could feel safe swapping it. So, we matched the metrics of Courier Final Draft. It just looks a lot better.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good job. I mean, and what a lovely service for you to provide to the screenwriting community. I hope it is wholeheartedly adapted by many.

**John:** Thanks. Cool. And so if you go to Apps, there is a link there for Courier Prime. It’s free to download. You can install it on Mac or on PC. If you’re installing it on Windows, it works great. If you’re using it with Windows Final Draft, there are some special warnings because Final Draft does crazy things, because Final Draft has to do crazy things. So, there are some special caveats for you there. But, you’re free to use it in any way you want to do it. And we have it on a very open license, so if you are an app developer who wants to use it inside your app, you can do that with immunity.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Cool.

Lastly, we’re getting into some questions. First question comes from April in Ohio. She writes, “A few months ago a friend of a friend of a friend said he would help me make some industry contacts, but I would have to contact them through Facebook. Their friend followed through and I’m currently Facebook ‘friends’ with several people working in the industry. Most of them are mainly actors, but a few work in other areas as well. I haven’t had any ‘conversations’ with these contacts via Facebook because I’m not really sure how to approach them. What’s the proper etiquette to reach out to somebody through social media?”

**Craig:** Oh, I mean, you know, you just send them a message and just say, “Hi, my name is so-and-so. I’m a friend of so-and-sos. I’m sorry to bother you.” You know, just be very humble and polite. And just ask your question and don’t expect an answer. And if you get one, you know, respond politely. Don’t stalk. Don’t be a weirdo. You know, the usual stuff.

**John:** Yeah, that’s exactly my approach. And I’m barely on Facebook. I don’t sort of accept friend requests from people on Facebook, but I’m very much on Twitter. And so sometimes people will send me something on Twitter and if I’m in the right mood for it, and it strikes me right, I might watch their little movie on Vimeo or read their blog post. That kind of stuff is fine as long as you feel like you’re just being, you know, appropriately respectful to what the relationship is, then it’s great.

So, I wouldn’t be afraid of doing it with those people. If they are, you know, friends of friends of friends, and they’re some actor who like occasionally works on a TV show, it’s unlikely that that person is going to be a huge asset to you as an aspiring screenwriter, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t like their video when they show up in something, or just participate a little bit in their online life.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, the Twitter thing is great because everybody is forced to write as concisely as possible, so you’re never stuck with these long screeds. I mean, if you send somebody this long thing they’re just not going to read it.

And the other thing is, I want people to understand that this is not about ego or we think we’re so cool we don’t have to respond. You cannot imagine the asynchronous aspect of people who want to send material and talk to people who are in the business and the available amount of time we have to do that. And frankly the available amount of will we have to do that.

I mean, we’re reading and talking about movies all day long. It’s our jobs. And then we go home and all we want to do sometimes is watch TV, or talk to our children, or take a nap, or just play a game, you know. And so at some point, it’s unfortunate, you start to get forced into being rude. Not overtly rude, but rude in the sense that sometimes I just don’t answer people because I just don’t have time or the will. I’m sorry.

**John:** Yeah.

Next question comes from Pat in Stamford, Connecticut. She or he…we’re going to say it’s a he. “I reached the point where I occasionally have to send out physical scripts, not just PDFs over email. The only hole-punchers I can find that would cut through an entire screenplay range from $180 to $300 and up. This seems far too expensive for something I will only use a few times a year. Is there another possibility I’m simply missing? Is there a model you recommend?”

**Craig:** [laughs] This can’t be real.

**John:** No. It’s completely real. “I feel slightly foolish asking, but somehow I don’t want to make sure I miss something somehow.”

**Craig:** He definitely missed something.

**John:** No, but here’s the thing Craig. I actually have two really good answers for this, and this is why I picked this question.

**Craig:** This can’t be real! [laughs] It’s just impossible.

**John:** No. It’s going to be great. I have three good answers. While you’re laughing I have three good answers.

**Craig:** Okay, good. Give them.

**John:** First off, the simple solution by far is if you go to Staples just get the three-hole punch paper.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Get that. That’s by far the easiest solution.

**Craig:** They did it for you!

**John:** They did. They already drilled the holes for you. It’s perfect and it works great. And honestly, you can kind of leave it in your printer most of the time because most of the stuff you’re printing out, eh, it’s still on three-hole paper, who cares.

So, first choice: Three-hole paper.

Second choice: This is something I actually found out about through Big Fish is there will be times where you have to do like colored revisions or you have to do something and you just can’t find the three-hole paper that’s already been drilled. They make a really big punch that can actually punch up to 130 pages at a time. The one that we ended up getting is a Stanley Bostich 3200 Heavy Duty Hole Punch.

This thing is actually kind of terrifying. You have to lean on it with your entire body weight, but it does punch through all of those pages at once. And if you had to do it for a bunch of scripts, that would be a solution. But, really, you’re going to use the pre-drilled white paper if you can possibly be on white paper. It’s really only if you’re going to do it on colored paper, something that you can’t find pre-drilled that it makes sense.

**Craig:** I just can’t believe that this person was not aware that they manufacturer three-hole punch paper. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that they knew enough about computers to send us this question, but not enough to Google “three-hole punch paper.” I can’t believe it. It’s a setup. It’s not real. This can’t be real.

**John:** I think it’s absolutely completely true.

**Craig:** Good god.

**John:** My last solution for you is this: You know, you don’t have to punch through the whole thing at once. You can just take ten pages, punch them, take ten pages, punch them. That’s what honestly you had to do back in the day.

**Craig:** That’s what I used to do, but you missed a fourth option which I have done which is you take your screenplay, and this is an extreme — when you don’t have the three-hole punch paper and you don’t have a hole puncher or anything — you take the script and you put it vertically like on a music stand or something. And you get your rifle.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re going to want to use a high caliber, but not hollow point or anything. You want to make sure that there’s no spread on the slug when it impacts the script. And naturally a laser site is really helpful here. And you’re going to fire three times. And, you know, for typical brads I think you’re going to want to maybe do, like 22 sometimes is just not big enough. Try a slightly higher caliber. Avoid ammunition manufactured in the Middle East or China. It’s just not reliable.

**John:** So, what I would say: make sure you really aim right, because there’s nothing more embarrassing when you’re just a little bit off and like, oh my god, it won’t actually fit in. And then you have to make a second hole right next to it. And that’s a tough shot, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And everybody knows what happened. And, of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t make sure if you do have a friend or assistant that’s helping you with this that they are not behind the script when you do discharge your weapon.

**John:** If they’re holding the script in the music stand, then you can sort of crouch down behind the music stand, not right in the line of fire.

**Craig:** I mean, listen. I’ve done that in a pinch. Don’t be like me. Don’t be stupid. I mean, I got lucky, but don’t do that.

**John:** You never know what’s going to happen. I would also say they do make the very powerful green lasers which are somewhat controlled, like you’re not supposed to shine them at an aircraft, because they could blind a pilot. But, when you’re not blinding a pilot with them you can use them to burn holes through the paper.

And so, again, the challenge may be that it’s a white paper, so you may need to find some sort of solution to actually make the paper dark enough so that the laser light will burn through it. But I can imagine you can build some sort of, like, sled, possibly out of Lego, that could slide in the right ways and so it could burn through a hole. And then you slide it to the next, they can burn it through the hole.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not a bad idea. I mean, the other option is if you’re friends with Cyclops from the X-Men, you could always have them come over and just give a quick, you know.

**John:** Well, Craig, I just don’t think you’re taking it seriously anymore. I mean, Cyclops is a fictional character.

**Craig:** No, he’s not. Oh, he is?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That’s James Marsden. And James Marsden is hugely talented and a very handsome man, but he can’t actually shoot light out of his eyes.

**Craig:** Oh, really? Oh.

**John:** Anonymous writes, “I’m a writer from the UK and have optioned two screenplays to people in Los Angeles.” Congratulations, Anonymous.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** “One of these options is now 14 months old and I’ve done several rewrites for the producer, and the producer hasn’t asked for any more rewrites. There’s a director circling the project, and I was wondering if there’s an action I can take other than sending emails asking what’s happening to move the project forward, or is it just a matter of waiting?”

Simplest answer of all: It’s waiting.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty much waiting. I mean, you can occasionally lob in a check-in email, but just understand it’s not paused because you haven’t checked in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s paused because it’s paused. They don’t have an interest there, or the person that they need to get interest from has not turned their focus upon it. The amount of waiting that occurs in Hollywood is extraordinary. It almost seems sometimes that this town has two speeds exclusively, just nothing is happening in a weird purgatorial way, or things happen so fast you can’t even catch your breath.

Nothing ever seems to proceed in any kind of regimented, expected way.

**John:** I completely agree. And that happens at every stage of your career. You just have to sort of get used to it.

One of the nice things about writing this pilot for ABC is that things do come more quickly, but then they just come way too quickly. And as we’re recording this podcast, I don’t know if the show got picked up or not for pilot, so I’m just waiting.

And I can lob in a phone call and say, “Hey, what’s happening?” But the answer is they don’t really know. Nobody really knows. There will be a decision and we’ll shoot a pilot or we won’t shoot a pilot, but my asking the question, I’m powerless to change anything at this point.

**Craig:** One thing that comes to min — sorry to jump back to the other question — If you have a large drill press you could drill press three holes through your script, but just wear eye protection.

**John:** Yeah. That’s actually what Kinko’s would do for you. Kinko’s actually has a drill and they can do that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. That’s very practical. A nice thing.

Speaking of practical things, do you have a One Cool Thing this week, Craig? I forgot to email you to remind you.

**Craig:** I mean, no, but the truth is now my One Cool Thing is Cyclops. And here’s the deal: I refuse to believe what you’re saying to me, because I’m a believer. And I do think, and I’m going to find James Marsden and I’m going to bring a script that was printed not on three-hole punched paper. And watch what I do, buddy.

And I’m going to take pictures of it and we’re going to put it on johnaugust.com. James Marsden, call me. We’re going to do this together.

**John:** I would just argue that if such a fantasy creature existed, Triclops would be much better because he could do all three holes at once. I’m just saying.

**Craig:** You know, now you’re not taking it seriously. [laughs] Okay, because Triclops is ridiculous.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is actually a video that, well, I posted a video that a reader sent in about a casting director named Pat Moran. And she is sort of a legendary casting director from the Baltimore area. And I just loved it because it’s something we don’t really talk about on this show that much is sort of everyone else’s sort of jobs. And casting directors are so great and wonderful and can make your life so much better, or so much worse if they’re really bad.

But I thought she was a fascinating example because she is a casting director for a small market. So, she gets to know everybody who’s available in that market, and that’s just a great insight. So, there will be a link in the show notes for this video about Pat Moran. And everything else we talked about it the podcast this week will also be in the show notes.

And, Craig, thank you again for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** I think this may have been our best podcast, frankly.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Pat, wherever you are, I love you. Thank you for that gift. This was a great podcast. And I’ll be back with Marsden. I will be back!

**John:** Cool. Thanks sir.

**Craig:** Thank you. Bye.

LINKS:

* [IndyCast](https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/indycast-indiana-jones-news/id275916349?mt=2) on iTunes
* The truth about [Indy’s hat drop](http://pikdit.com/i/indiana-jones-hat-didnt-fall-off-someone-off-camera-threw-it-at-him-cant-be-unseen/)
* [Harrison Ford’s shooting script for Raiders](http://bid.profilesinhistory.com/Harrison-Ford-heavily-annotated-complete-shooting-script-for-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark_i10030668)
* [Scoggins Report](http://scogginsreport.com/2013/01/2012-year-end-spec-market-scorecard/) on spec sales for 2012
* [Scriptnotes survey results](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/scriptnotes_survey.pdf)
* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime)
* [Stanley Bostich Heavy Duty Hole Punch](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000H0XFSC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000H0XFSC&linkCode=as2&tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* Casting director [Pat Moran](http://www.thecredits.org/2013/01/the-queen-of-casting-meet-emmy-award-winning-baltimore-legend-pat-moran/) from The Credits
* OUTRO: [Ben and Kate](http://www.fox.com/ben-and-kate/) opening theme by Michael Andrews

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/eggnog-and-dreadlock-santa).

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

**Craig Mazin:** And my name is A Very Christmas Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is our Christmas episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, we’re recording this a few days early so we’re not literally just sitting by the tree. There’s probably no eggnog in our hands. Maybe you have eggnog, I don’t know.

**Craig:** No. I think eggnog is gross.

**John:** I love eggnog…

**Craig:** Ew!

**John:** We might have to have a big fight about this. Eggnog is amazing. It’s essentially just melted ice cream that you get to drink out of a cup. And it’s just the best.

**Craig:** It’s melted ice cream with weird spice in it.

**John:** What is weird about nutmeg? Nutmeg is one of the most wonderful spices if used in moderation.

**Craig:** You know what it is? It’s the word “egg” and the word “nog” are so gross. Plus you have those two Gs, eggnog. It sounds like something that Orcs would say, and I don’t like it.

**John:** Yeah. It has a very Germanic quality to it, but I have always loved eggnog to the degree that I remember once I came back from, like, a summer scouts meeting and it was, like, a hot day in August —

**Craig:** Oh god!

**John:** — And I was like, “Mom, I really want some eggnog.” And my mother, who is so generous, was just like, “Okay, I’ll make you some eggnog.” So, she literally made — like the skim milk in the fridge, and some eggs, and some sugar, and some vanilla, and some nutmeg, and she made in a blender some eggnog. And that’s why I love my mom.

**Craig:** You know, my grandmother used to tell the story about how when she was a child on a really, really hot day back in Russia she would drink iced cold buttermilk. [laughs] And, you know, that sounds pretty good because it’s butter, and it’s milk, and everybody loves butter, and everybody loves milk. But buttermilk is just rotten milk.

**John:** I would disagree. I would say buttermilk is soured milk. And it has a certain quality to it that makes it fantastic for biscuits, or for ice cream. Buttermilk ice cream.

**Craig:** You mean rotten quality? [laughs]

**John:** I think it’s delicious. But everyone has their own tastes. For example, do you like crème fraîche? Is that a taste you like?

**Craig:** It’s funny that you mention that because I was explaining to our video playback guy last week that I actually have a weird thing about white food in general. And crème fraîche is a great example of white food I do not eat. There’s something about white sauce type food — mayonnaise, crème fraîche, tartar sauce, there’s more I’m sure. Tahini. Even that’s something — I just can’t do it. I can’t go near it.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a puss-like quality to it that might turn some people off. Cottage cheese, I’m sure, falls into that.

**Craig:** No. I can do cottage cheese if I mix it with fruit.

**John:** That makes no sense at all, Craig.

**Craig:** If I mix it with fruit. That one is an exception. And I can do like certain yogurts and stuff like that. But there’s a lot of white food that just horrifies me. Mayonnaise is my number one, but crème fraîche, sour cream, because that’s what crème fraîche is, right? Isn’t it sour cream? Which is a lie…

**John:** It’s a special kind of sour cream, yeah. You’re just a food racist and we should probably move onto another topic.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like white food.

**John:** So, you’re making a list at Christmastime. There is a famous person who makes a list around Christmastime, well, Santa, but even more important than Santa, Franklin Leonard makes a list around Christmastime.

**Craig:** Yes. Dreadlock Santa makes a list.

**John:** And Dreadlock Santa this year made a list called the Black List, as he does every year, in which he surveys the development executives to ask them what their most liked scripts are. He always wants to make it clear that this isn’t the “best of” list; it’s like the most liked screenplays that people have read this year.

And so that came out this last week, or actually two weeks ago for people who are listening on Christmas day. And there were a lot of great titles there. Some people that we know, mutual friends. Eric Heisserer, Story of Your Life, was one of the highly liked scripts.

**Craig:** Great to see.

**John:** Jonathan Stokes, who is one of my WGA advisees, his script Border Country was listed there.

**Craig:** Oh! Awesome. Yeah, good for him.

**John:** And a person who wrote into our site for the Three Page Challenge, Austin Reynolds, his script, From New York to Florida, was also on the Black List.

**Craig:** What script did he send in for us?

**John:** So, the three pages I think we read was something that you liked much more than I liked in the first three pages, where there’s a kid in class who is scribbling…

**Craig:** Oh, I remember that guy, yeah.

**John:** So, you apparently have great taste.

**Craig:** Well, see that? God, I know what I’m doing.

**John:** Yeah. So, maybe we’ll go back through and re-edit that so we sound really knowledgeable and that we should single that out as being highly praise-worthy. But congratulations to Austin Reynolds; that’s fantastic. I’m happy that these people had good outcomes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As I was looking through the list, one of the things I was trying to look for — patterns — in addition to, like, names I recognize was: what are people writing about, and what are these spec scripts that people are working on? And one that really stuck out was by a writer named Young Il Kim called Rodham. And it’s the story of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s rise as a young lawyer, sort of rising in politics, and she falls in love with this guy Bill Clinton.

And I was like, that was a great idea for a spec. I have no idea — obviously the spec is pretty good because people like it, but people want to know like, “Oh, what kind of spec should I write?” That seems like a great idea for a spec. That’s public domain. It’s interesting. People are going to want to read that. Good choice. Good subject material.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is a good choice. And it’s accessible. And people can actually compare what you’ve written to their understanding of reality and see in evidence the drama that you have created. It’s a very smart way of approaching it.

**John:** So, today I thought we’d talk through some of our mail bag questions, but one of them was actually really relevant to what we’re doing right now which is an email we got from Brantley Aufill. And so it’s kind of long but I’ll read it because it’s nice. It’s happy. And so it’s a good thing for this time of year.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Brantley writes, “In September of 2011, I sent you an email about something you said on the podcast. Well, it’s like, ‘I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.'” I kind of remember saying that. So, talking about, like, what genre is your genre.

Brantley writes, “I remarked that I had just done exactly that having written a spec called The Hooverville Dead which found me my manager just a few months prior. Over the following months, I listen to Scriptnotes every week, and so many times it seems to be recorded just for me, as I was writing and rewriting, as the script started going out, as I began to get generals, as I began to do pitches, as I signed with my agents, as I tried to think over what to write next.

“The topics you and Craig were covering often coincided exactly with where I was navigating this crazy world as a new screenwriter. Flash forward to today. The Hooverville Dead has become my calling card and just made this year’s Black List.”

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** “I’m still doing generals. I have yet to make that first writer’s paycheck, but I have quite a few projects in ‘this might be the one’ column. I’m taking my next spec to a major studio with a producer already attached. I developed a TV show with a producer that we’re talking to networks about next month. I have different pitches at different studios, four of which I set up over a 26-hour period later this week.

“So, I’m reading book after book, writing up treatments, and pitching my take, and I’m on people’s minds as they think of a writer they want to work with. And I’ve been loving just about every minute of it. So, thanks to you and Craig for Scriptnotes; the last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind but I like to think the advice you two have been providing has helped me keep up just a little bit ahead of it. Thanks, Brantley Aufill.”

**Craig:** Wow. You know what? Thank you man. That’s really nice of you. I’m glad that you are obviously doing well, you know. I mean, the fact that you haven’t gotten that first writer’s paycheck is a quirk of the timeline. It sounds like you will be soon enough. And, you know, as we’ve been doing this and you and I interact more and more with people who are aspiring, and particularly people who are right on that bubble where it seems like all the pieces are in place, and people are noticing their writing and they actually have the facility to do this, they just haven’t quite gotten that first purchase yet.

What’s been salient to me more than anything is attitude. And it’s the people with the great attitude who strike me as the most likely to succeed. And that’s a terrific attitude to have. The attitude of the student, and it’s one that I think you and I both maintain to this very day.

So, good for you. I’m glad that we’ve been of help to you.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say in terms of attitude: acknowledging good fortune, and success, and people who have helped you along the way. Because so much of this business, and sort of getting started in any business, are going to be the frustrations and all the things that go wrong. But when things do go right, when someone helps you out with something, it’s great to acknowledge that. And the people who help you out along the way, just take a moment to thank them for that.

So, thank you for writing in.

**Craig:** It’s certainly no sign of weakness. We all need help desperately. I remember Scott Frank years ago saying to me, “I need more help than any writer I’ve ever met. When I’m figuring out who I should work with on something — producer, studio executive, agent, whomever — it’s entirely about who will satisfy my deep need for help.”

So, you’re dead on with that.

**John:** Cool. Let’s continue that thread with some other questions that people have written in with and maybe we can answer a few more things for other people and get them started on their way.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, this first one comes — a writer who had written into the site and it was in the backlog of questions, and then he reached out to you on Twitter. And so you flagged it and so now we’re following up.

It’s a guy named Christopher in London who writes, “Having written my first feature screenplay a year after moving to London I began to get as many people to read it as possible. By your normal chain of events — basically, through my girlfriend — the script found its way to a producer who had made one other feature, and a few shorts.

“He loved the script and wanted to make it, so we began a second draft with the promise that after typing the script he would send it to potential ‘financiers, directors, and cast.’ Fast forward two and a half years, after draft number 13 he still hasn’t shown the script to another soul. In the meantime, I’ve shopped the script out myself, and now that I’ve secured an actual production company interested in making the movie I want to move on from this producer.

“Now, after asking him to sign an agreement to state that the rights to this script reside with me, he has said he won’t sign it and is suggesting he has some claim to my script. What do I do?”

**Craig:** Okay. Well, he does not have a claim to your script. Legally speaking, in terms of copyright, you are the author of your script. You have written every word. He has not created any unique expression in fixed form. What he’s done is act as an editor, and just as editors in the book world don’t have copyright claims on Stephen King’s novels, nor does this person have a copyright claim on your screenplay.

What this person may have a claim for is the right to be associated as a producer with this film. That claim is not something that’s adjudicated against you. That is something that they would have to deal with with a new producer that comes onboard. And, frankly, it’s kind of not your problem to the extent that it’s not specifically your problem.

However, when you’re talking to these new people you have to say, “Look, here’s this person. I don’t want them to be involved. They didn’t write anything. They’ve been acting as a ‘producer.’ They’ve been nothing but a hindrance, frankly. You should be aware that they’re there and so that’s something you guys have to work out.” And most likely the actual producers, the new financing entity would reach out to this “producer” and say, “We want to settle you out.” Or, “We want to exchange this guarantee of an onscreen producing credit for your release of the material and disappearing.”

There are all sorts of ways to make people go away. But, the two prominent ways are money and credit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That said, it’s hard for these people to actually claim anything, because when push comes to shove they don’t have a contract with you beyond a verbal and implied contract. And so it’s one of those deals where that would have to be hashed out if it actually got to a lawsuit. You want to avoid lawsuits.

So, my recommendation here is that you, in conjunction with your attorney and the new producer, go instruct them to handle this person and make them go away as need be.

**John:** I agree. I would also say just take a step back and imagine that the other person was writing this question. And he would probably phrase his question to us this way: “So, I’ve spent the last two and half years working with this writer, reading every draft, giving notes on every step. Today he shows up at my door saying that he wants me to sign this release that I have no involvement with the project whatsoever. What do I do? I feel like this kid is being incredibly ungracious for all the hours, and hours, and hours of work I’ve put in on this script. What do I do?”

And it’s easy to see his perspective on this, too. I would say he hasn’t done a terrific job of all the other things of producing. Maybe he actually gave you good notes? Maybe he really did help you get the script into good shape, but he hasn’t been able to sort of move the project forward. So, I don’t blame you for wanting to move forward on your own. But, you are going to need to figure out some way to have him taken care of in this process because it does sound like he was involved for quite a long time.

Where it gets really frustrating for me is when, like, literally something kind of passed over a person’s desk and they’re claiming producer credit on it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that happens far too often and it’s really maddening. And especially newer writers can find themselves in frustrating situations with that. And I wish I had a magic wand to sort of make that all go away and be better, but it does happen.

And there’s people whose names are on lots of movies who are just really stubborn and they get their names on movies, even if they weren’t involved in the actual making of the film.

**Craig:** This is certainly not something that’s unique to our business, although you see it all the time. Very annoying people often are rewarded for being annoying. And this may be one of those cases. I would point out — he’s in London and I’m not quite sure what the differences are because, you know, here in the United States we have work for hire. Frequently what you’ll see is an option agreement between a producer and a writer which does contractually codify the relationship and grant the producer certain exclusive rights to represent the screenplay as the producer.

That may not be the case in England, but if it is the absence of that agreement speaks volumes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, this is really where you would need to speak to a lawyer, or a barrister, as the case may be.

**John:** Find somebody with a nice white wig who seems to know something about the law.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Go speak to Rumpole of the Bailey.

But, I think the fact that you’re dealing already with the financing entity — they have their own attorneys. They should be able to handle this. This is one of those areas — I look for these all the time. This is something to always keep your eyes open for: Moments where your goals and your needs align with those of other people. And then use them, [laughs], so basically draft behind them. It is in their best interest to get rid of this guy, therefore you should line up with them and allow them to do it for you.

**John:** And it may only be a series of phone calls between these people that it just gets taken care of. And if this guy doesn’t have a lot of other credits then that may be the case.

Our next question comes from Will in Seattle who writes, “On your most recent podcast you and Craig were expressing disdain at the lack of description in some of the Three Page Challenge scripts, specifically the use of ‘INT. OFFICE — DAY.’

“Your criticism came from not knowing what kind of office we’re in. However, in some of the most professionals scripts I’ve read, like Sideways or Up in the Air, the respective writers had a very minimalist style and often do little to describe in more detail the settings. Is it simply your assumption that we’re not Alexander Payne or Jason Reitman? Does the fact that they’re already industry professionals give them license to leave out the little things?”

**Craig:** I think in those cases the fact that they’re directing the movie gives them the license to leave out those little things. And this is something that I brought up on the DoneDealPro board.

There’s a backwards thinking among a lot of new screenwriters that only if you are directing the movie are you allowed to be specific about camera motion, camera action, and be very specific about things that would theoretically fall under the purview of the director, like, you know, perfecting the location and so forth.

And in my mind it’s the opposite. When Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor write a movie together, they can write “INT. OFFICE” because they’ve already discussed what the office looks like. No one is coming in to rewrite them. And Alexander is going to go out and scout for the office he wants and he’s going to tell people the office he wants, so he can save some space and time on the page. He’s quite likely not writing the script to do anything other than service him as he makes the movie. Similarly for Jason Reitman.

But if you are a writing the screenplay to attract a director, and to attract financing, it is critical to me that you use your one and often only chance to express the entirety of your dramatic intention for what this film should be, look like, sound like, and ultimately how this film will impact the audience.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t want to tell Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman how to write, and they can use their minimalist INT. OFFICE — DAY; if that works for them, that’s awesome, great.

But I’ll say that even if you’re the director, throwing just the tiniest bit of description to that — sort of like, is it a strip mall office, is it a corporate glass monstrosity office — it does help. And it helps everybody else who needs to read the script to get a sense of what kind of world that you’re pitching this story for. So, everyone else who needs to read the script to sort of do their jobs would be a little bit serviced by having a little more description there.

Again, totally your choice and what you want to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s how — Todd and I, I mean, no one is coming in to rewrite us. We’re writing a screenplay for him to direct, we still do that stuff. I mean, for that very reason: we want the army of people that are going to be working on the movie to have that many fewer questions.

**John:** When you’re first sitting down with the location manager, he or she is pulling out a bunch of folders, and he’s showing you things that are probably closer to what your vision is of the thing so they don’t have to first ask you, “Describe this office to me; what should I be looking for?” I think in that first meeting they’ll have some sense of what you might be looking for and what might be appropriate. That’s why you give that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Chris from San Francisco Bay Area writes, “I’m trying to find a musical script writer. What is this person even called? A book writer? Scriptwriter? Probably not a screenwriter. Are there resources, networks, or hangouts where these people exist? I’m looking for both options of partnering or hiring somebody to write the book or reviewing books that people have already written.”

So, sort of in my wheel house here. “Book writer” is usually what you call the person who is writing all the stuff that happens in a musical, a stage musical, the stuff that isn’t sung. So, the book is all that stuff. So, for Big Fish I’m the book writer.

Stuff that happens for Broadway tends to be centered around New York. Dramatists Guild is the organization that sort of loosely represents the interests of people who write for the stage. It’s not a guild the way that the Writers Guild is a guild. It’s a looser sort of association. Doesn’t have like collective bargaining power.

The Dramatists Guild is where you probably first want to check out because their house magazine is actually really good and has good interviews with book writers, and musical writers, and playwrights who are working on all this stuff, and will get you started there.

In terms of reading books, you can find published versions of some of the musicals you would want to see. And that’s going to get you started. There’s not the same kind of script libraries that you’ll find for screenplays. But you’ll figure it out. And I figured it out. I didn’t have great firsthand examples to look at, but you sort of figure out like what gets said and sort of how it fits in with everything else.

**Craig:** Can you tell me what is the difference between a book writer and a dramaturge? Or is it dramaturgue?

**John:** I think you can probably say either one of those. And, again, I may be slightly wrong here, so if I speak incorrectly someone will write in and correct me. A dramaturge is a person who is responsible for working with the playwright, and eventually the director, on the dramatic engineering of a piece. And so if it’s an existing work it can be working with the director to figure out how to mine all of the goodness out of it. If it’s a new play, it’s someone who is working with the playwright to facilitate things.

So, it’s not a writer per se, but it’s in some ways like a creative producer I would say.

**Craig:** I see. Got it.

**John:** A person who’s helping out that way.

**Craig:** Got it. Okay, great.

**John:** Cool. Our next question comes from Hamish who writes, “In podcast 67 you and Craig talked about how hacky it is to establish a character’s backstory via magazine covers. The same day I read the shooting script of Frankenweenie and spotted the following…”

**Craig:** [laughs] I love it already.

**John:** “Burgemeister unfolds the newspaper to read the front page. INSERT NEWSPAPER: The headline reads MAYOR BURGERMEISTER TO KICK OFF DUTCH DAYS. A photo shows Mayor Burgemeister complete with sash and hat.”

**Craig:** That’s totally different.

**John:** “Burgemeister is pleased with the photo.”

**Craig:** That’s totally — how do you not see that that’s totally different?

**John:** I think it’s similar enough that it’s a valid criticism.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. Here’s the deal. The difference is expositing — am I allowed to say “expositing,” by the way?

**John:** Absolutely. Totally. It’s your podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to invent it if it’s not actually a word.

It is creating the exposition for an event or fact as opposed to creating exposition for a character’s essence or quality. That’s the difference to me. I don’t want — and I would presume this isn’t the opening of the movie of Halloweenie. [laughs] I’m going to call it that forever.

You know, when you’re meeting a character in the beginning of a movie it is super hacky to give us key bits of information on a magazine cover about them. It is all too common to use every day news delivery sources in a film to deliver actual news. That’s fine.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think sliding back towards the hacky column, it is in his first reveal. So, you’ve revealed that you actually haven’t seen Frankenweenie, but I’ll tell you that the paper arrives, you see that he’s meticulous with his lawn, he picks up the newspaper and we see his face in the photo and it’s also revealed that that is his face as well. So, it’s meant to be the joke that it’s exactly the same shot as we’re seeing is the photo that’s on there. But, it is hacky backstory in the sense of, like, that’s how we are establishing that he is the mayor.

**Craig:** Well, you know what I like though is that you took something that has the potential for hackiness and you put some spin on it so that there was more than just the information. You made a joke out of it.

**John:** Yeah. So, there’s a little bit of a spin. But I don’t want to run away from the criticism that it is a little bit hacky to do it. And I feel that in Frankenweenie the nature of our world and sort of how it all works, it’s less awful than it could be in other situations.

The truth behind why I did it in Frankenweenie is that there’s so few frames and minutes and seconds in that movie to get crucial information out, it was the only time that we were going to be able to establish that he was the mayor of the town.

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to stand in stronger defense of your work than you have here.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Mike in Los Angeles writes, “Let’s say hypothetically I have 12 weeks to write a script from idea to finished first draft, like my thesis script for example. How do you or Craig break down your work into daily goals to make sure you hit that deadline? I understand once I get into the writing that I can divide it out in a daily page count, but I’m more interested in how you do it prior to the writing. How are you breaking story, working with characters? How do you do it?”

**Craig:** Well, for me I am, because I outline very thoroughly, I am less concerned about how much time I’m taking during that process. I sort of feel like if I get that right then I look at what I’ve got left. Presumably it will be at least half of the remaining time. And the process of then dividing pages by 5 days a week to give myself a couple days off isn’t going to leave me with some crushing burden.

Sometimes I will sort of work backwards. I’ll say, “Okay, I have 12 weeks. I know I don’t like writing more than four pages a day. I feel like that hurts. That’s 20 pages a week. Presume that the screenplay is 120 pages and then I’ll narrow it down a bit, so we’re talking about six weeks. So, I have six weeks to break this outline out.”

And then I take a nice breath and I feel like I have lots of time, but I don’t do that so I’ll waste it — don’t waste any time. I start right away. And I begin — we talked about this before — everybody has different ways in. I like to begin with some big basics, the premise of the movie, a protagonist who is appropriate for that premise, a theme that is appropriate for that character and that premise, and instigating a beginning that is appropriate for that person, that matches to the end that is appropriate for that person.

And then sort of laying out the second act as a proven ground for that individual to go from where they are in the beginning to that very different character place at the end. And then what happens in between is writing. Even if you’re not actually writing, if you’re just doing cards or scene ideas or thoughts, that is truly where half of — 70%, 80% of what matters goes.

So, that’s my method.

**John:** In the question he’s saying, “from idea to finished draft,” but I honestly feel like the ideas phase can be a very long, amorphous period. So like for the ABC thing I just wrote, the idea phase was, you know, there was the idea, and then it was talking to Josh about it, and going to pitch it. And so by the time I was actually writing an outline everything was really, really fleshed out. So, at a certain point we had it up on the board and I had act breakouts and then I had to write up this outline. So, it’s really hard to say sort of when the clock started ticking on it.

But that was a case where TV — a lovely thing about TV is because there are act breaks I can say, like, “I’m going to write an act today,” and then it’s just done. And that was really simple and it’s very quick to write a TV script for those reasons. And actually the last acts are really short, so it goes even faster than that.

For a feature project I try to give myself daily page counts. Once the clock is really ticking and there are 12 weeks to turn this thing in, I will give myself daily page counts. And if I do set myself to five pages a day you get done really early. And so some days you won’t actually hit that, but other days you will hit that and it will all get finished.

What I will tend to do is a little carrot and a stick. And so I’ll make some deal with myself at the start of the week saying that if I write five pages every day then I get to buy myself something that I really want. And if I don’t actually hit those five pages a day then I don’t get that thing.

Other times I’ve had to sort of punish myself where if I don’t hit — any day that I don’t hit my pages I will have to make an anonymous donation to an organization that I despise.

**Craig:** Ha!

**John:** So, I try to sort of get the work done and feeling good, and feeling great, but sometimes it is just a matter of like cranking through the pages so you can get something finished.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, our last question is from Adam Pineless. Pineless, like a treeless mountain. He writes, “I’ve heard some films have 10 to 15 other writers come in and punch up a script. What’s up with that? What actually happens?”

So, punching up is a thing that happens largely on comedy scripts, before they go into production. Craig and I have both been part of comedy punch-ups. Are they a good thing, Craig?

**Craig:** I do think they’re good things. But it depends on what kind of punch up session you’re describing or punch up employment you’re describing. Very often on true comedies that are very joke driven, there will be one day where eight or nine comedy guys will be invited to sit in a room with the screenwriter, and the director, and the producer, and typically a studio representative, and you’ll go through the script.

Sometimes you go through the script and just talk about the script itself and kind of get the collective wisdom of people who have written comedy scripts before who can give you advice on character, plot, theme, things that don’t work, things that do work. And sometimes it’s literally just a page-by-page, “Any ideas for some jokes here?”

And we do this for each other. Typically the pay is somewhere between — it used to be $5,000. It has dwindled as low as $1,000 at times. Sometimes it’s $2,500. And we tend to do this for each other. I go to a lot of these things. And I have a little roster of people that I rely on when I want to do one for something I’ve written.

So, that’s fine. And I should point out that those writers are never eligible for credit. It is accepted from the credit process as not considered writing; it’s just “stuff” really. It’s just thinking, group thinking.

**John:** Yeah, because none of the writers in the room are actually writing anything down on paper. There is no literary material being created. There is just a discussion happening.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Sometimes I’m hired to punch up a script where I’m given a screenplay. It’s almost always very close to production. And I’m asked to go through and fix some dramatic things, fix some character things, and add some comedy here and there. And they usually give you a cheat sheet of where they believe the hot spots are and what they feel needs help. And this is typically done on a weekly basis, one week, or two weeks, sometimes three.

That is where movies can be greatly helped by the right person, but if the studio is chasing subsequent writers and there is a succession of people coming in and doing these things the script becomes a sort of flavorless mush. This is all separate and apart from a general parade of rewriting which can occur in development where people simply don’t know what the movie is supposed to be. It hasn’t been green lit yet and they just keep hiring writers to try different versions of the same idea.

And it’s quite rare that films like that work out well. There is one movie in particular I was asked to write, and I chose not to, and it had been around — this was a couple years ago — and it had been around and in development for so long that the friend of mine who had actually done work on it at one point, the draft that he did work on had the World Trade Center as a major plot point. [laughs]

So, it had been well over ten years in endless rewrite hell. And the movie that resulted was not a particularly good film. It’s just one of those things. At some point studios can’t stop chasing something and they should just stop. But, you know, these punch up groups, these occasional roundtables are actually quite useful, I think, and I always say if you get two really good jokes out of five hours of nine writers pitching jokes, it’s a victory. You got two great jokes.

**John:** I agree. So, the sessions that we’re describing, I hear them called “punch-ups,” I hear them called “roundtables.” Sometimes they’ll be preceded with a reading, so they’ll either bring in the real cast or just funny actors to read through things so everyone can hear it together and see sort of what’s working and also hear what’s not really working.

They mostly happen in comedy because that’s where a day’s work can actually achieve something. It’s finding some jokes. Because if you get two great jokes, and one of them makes it to the trailer, that was money really well spent and time really well spent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, that can be really gratifying. And just sometimes it’s not even like a brand new joke, but just like a slightly better version of a joke can help. A character saying a funny thing can be really useful.

So, I think they’re useful for comedies. You don’t see them very much in dramas. Craig’s point about a long parade of writers over the course of time, I worked on Tarzan which is at Warner Bros. So, recently they announced a new version that they’re trying to do at Warner Bros. And god bless them, you know, maybe there are 15 writers who’ve tried to do Tarzan there.

So, if that movie were to get made at a certain point I’m probably still on the chain of title for that, that long history going back, but I don’t know if a single thing I’ve written resembles what’s in Tarzan right now. And that’s an example of like, well, of course you’re going to keep trying to make that because that’s a great property, that’s a great brand. It’s just a really hard movie to make.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, studios experience internal turnover as well. People who control the development of properties are fired, they’re hired. Producers lose their deals. They come and go. Things go in and out of style. There are movies that are written of a certain kind that are seen as outdated or out of step with what people want, and then suddenly another movie comes along that makes it instep and in line with what people want.

And so these things happen in fits and starts. Personally, if I were running a studio, and I looked down at my development slate and saw a few of these things that had been kind of lumbering along, soaking up development dollars year, after year, after year, I’d kill them. Or, I would hire a writer-director, or a writer-director team to develop it because ultimately the conventional process is just simply not working for this project.

**John:** Yeah. One of the projects — we may have both worked on this. Did you ever work on Scared Guys over at Sony?

**Craig:** I remember reading it at one point. I don’t think I — no.

**John:** So, it’s a project that was at Sony for — it probably still is at Sony, probably someone is writing it right now. Probably it’s like literally on somebody’s screen right now.

It’s a pretty good premise, and when I was brought in to do a rewrite on it it was Kevin James and Ray Romano as two incredibly agoraphobic guys who have to go on this adventure. I don’t even really remember the premise that knocked them out of their agoraphobic little happy niche, but they had to go on a road trip. So, it was two agoraphobes on a road trip.

And it was fine and I enjoyed writing it. It was like a true comedy comedy, which I don’t do very often, but I was just writer 14 out of 29 on it at this point. And it will be fascinating to see if that movie ever gets made.

**Craig:** Did you ever work on Stretch Armstrong?

**John:** I did not. But that’s another legend, isn’t it?

**Craig:** I don’t know how you even have a WGA card if you haven’t worked on that movie. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That movie has had… — I worked on that very early in my career. I think I was the four millionth writer. I believe they’ve hit a billion. I believe they are officially in the billions. And the movie moved from studio to studio to studio. I mean, at some point someone — either someone is going to blow everybody away by figuring it out, or everyone will suddenly realize you can’t make a movie out of Stretch Armstrong. It’s boring.

**John:** The thing is Stretch Armstrong is like two-thirds of a good idea, but it’s that missing third that’s going to be really hard to ever reach. Because it’s sort of a good trailer, but I don’t know that we’re going to want to see that as a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. The version that I wrote back with my partner, and this was sort of I would say 1997-ish, was a Tim Allen comedy, so there you go, it’s 1997. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it was Tim Allen in basically a family comedy where he’s a single dad raising a couple of kids and he gets stretchy powers. And it was very broad and goofy, but it was really about family and stuff like that, you know. And it wasn’t at all — it was so minimally about being a hero because, you know, at least then… I would say now I don’t acknowledge that stretching is a heroic property. [laughs] It’s simply odd.

**John:** There’s a reason Mr. Fantastic isn’t really that fantastic.

**Craig:** No. No. Not at all. It’s such an inappropriately named character. He’s Mr. Vaguely Interesting.

**John:** Ha! Yeah.

**Craig:** So that was that one. And that still hasn’t been made.

**John:** The other example you gave which is where during production there is a series of writers that come through is usually a giant disaster. And the exception would be the first Charlie’s Angels famously had, like a bunch of people came in during production. I was off shooting DC, my doomed television show, and they went into production. And all sort of the A-list kind of people came in and did a week. And they were like, “What is this movie? It’s going to be a disaster. This is going to be the worst thing ever.”

But, god bless them, everyone, like, did the best they could. So Zak Penn was on, and I don’t know if Simon was on the first movie, but everyone — people you couldn’t believe helped out for a week and god bless them.

And the movie was a wreck, but it all kind of pulled together in a way. And it was the weird kind of movie that can actually support the like 15 different tones all happening at once. And then I came back in and sat in the editing room for a long time and we reshot and it worked. So, sometimes it does work, but it’s a brutal way to make a movie.

That’s why you shouldn’t go into production without feeling pretty darn good about how your script is, unless you want to kill yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. Charlie’s Angels is one of those movies that almost its charm is almost in its strange, funky nature. You know? That because the title implied a very kind of drudging remake of what was basically a very bad TV show — I’m sorry, you know, just a goofy ’70s era procedural, very cheese ball show. To kind of come at it from such a wild angle really made it fresh and was cool, you know. Charlie’s Angels was a cool movie. McG did an awesome job on it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you did, as well, of course. And I guess Zak. I’ve got to give Zak credit. You know I hate that.

**John:** Oh, god, the worst.

**Craig:** The worst! I love him.

**John:** Just the worst.

**Craig:** I mean, I love giving him crap. And I love him also.

**John:** Yeah. I think he listens to the show, so right now he’s…

**Craig:** Hey Zak!

**John:** …he’s enraged.

**Craig:** He’s enraged. How can you tell? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] How can you tell when Zak Penn is enraged?

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** That’s a good sort of a Zen question.

So, that’s the end of our questions from listeners this week. There’s actually a ton more but this is all we have time for today. But you and both had like cool new things come out this last week.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** I just saw your trailer for Identity Thief, like the longer trailer for Identity Thief, and I loved it.

**Craig:** Oh! Awesome! Great.

**John:** And so I love Melissa McCarthy. And I love Jason Bateman, so these are good things. And I can stand you. But I was just really, really happy with it. I’m so happy for Melissa and that you gave her good stuff to do. And a lot of physical violence takes place against Melissa McCarthy. She gets hit by cars, and things are thrown at her, and…

**Craig:** Yeah. We put her through the ringer. I mean, I didn’t love the first trailer that came out, only because as a teaser it really was just about, like, “Here’s a couple of kooky jokes and here’s a basic idea for a movie.” And this longer trailer gives you a better sense of the fact that there’s a cohesive story and that there’s something happening and a bit of a journey.

What the trailer — and I love it, actually, too. I mean, I’m really happy with the trailer. And I don’t mean that in a braggy way because I didn’t make the trailer. Trailers are different things; they live apart from movies. And so I think the marketing guys did a really great job with it. And they are — as they should — they are selling the comedy because it is a comedy and there’s a lot of really funny stuff.

What the trailer won’t impart at all, and I don’t think any TV commercials will, so I’ll just sort of impart it, is that the movie actually has a lot of really touching stuff in it. And Melissa McCarthy, she makes you cry. I mean, there’s a couple of spots where she gets you.

And so I like sort of selling big comedy, which we have, and then kind of surprising people with something that’s quite human. So, I’m looking forward to it, but I’m glad you liked it. I liked the trailer, too, and naturally you will include a link.

**John:** Oh my god, of course.

**Craig:** And the movie is coming out February 8. You’ll be hearing about it consistently until then.

**John:** I didn’t realize it was coming out that soon.

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Wow, that is really quick. So, that’s why you’ve been so busy getting that picture all finished up.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, yeah, scrambling. Sitting with Seth Gordon, our terrific director today, and Scott Stuber, our awesome producer, and it’s been a real family on this movie. Everyone has gotten along and just… — It’s a funny thing, when people like a movie then your romantic notion of how everyone should work together is real. Everybody starts to feel like a family that’s raising a kid together, and everybody is looking out for the kid, and everybody is watching each other’s backs, and respecting each other and what they bring.

And, you know, when it’s not that way, that’s when things can sometimes go completely awry. But in this case everybody’s been just dedicated to it. Melissa and Jason have been just dedicated to it. And on the one hand I’m a little sad that I stole Melissa from you. On the other hand I’m full of glee.

**John:** Yeah. I can always get her back.

**Craig:** Try! You try. [laughs]

**John:** It’s not like she’s not busy at all. She doesn’t have a TV show…

**Craig:** I’m like — I’ve got a death grip on that lady.

**John:** Yeah. She’s just great.

So, people have to wait till February 8 to see the movie though, right?

**Craig:** They will have to wait until February 8 to see the movie.

**John:** Now, what they could do right now is my new thing, which by the time people are listening to this podcast is available on the App Store, which is — finally — Karateka, which I just sent you the download code so you can get an early sneak peek of Karateka.

**Craig:** Yes I did. And even though I know the name is Karateka I will always call it what I called it when I when I was a kid which is “Kerotica,” as in erotica.

**John:** That’s how I called it when I was a kid, too.

**Craig:** That’s what I used to say.

**John:** When Jordan Mechner and I first started talking about making it, one of the first questions I had for him was like, “So, how am I actually supposed to say it?” Because I just remember the box that I got when we bought it, you know, it was a summer gift for ourselves, and I said “Kerotica,” because I didn’t even know what erotica was, but that’s just how you would pronounce.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Jordan says Karateka. His official word is that you can actually pronounce it however you’d like to pronounce it. He will gladly take any pronunciations.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So, we’ve been out on Xbox, and Steam, and PS3, but now the iOS version is out and done and I’m so happy because this is the one I’ve spent the most time myself doing, because while I play Xbox and PS3 they’re not my sort of native things. And I’m very much iPad. And so this is the one I sort of got to sink my teeth into and figure out how we’re going to translate all of the stuff that would happen with controllers, how we could do it in a touch way, and sort of how we could figure out how to make this game feel right and playable when you’re just on an iPad.

So, if you have unwrapped your iPad that you got for Christmas, your iPad mini, and you’re sitting by your tree and you’re listening to this podcast, and you feel like downloading it, go to the App Store right now. Because it’s only $2.99, which is a bargain. And we don’t have sponsors on the show per se, but if you felt like, “Wow, I wish I could give John and Craig a little bit of money to help pay for the costs of the show,” that’s one way you could.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s a good game. The things I like about it: One, I mean, just the nostalgia factor; being able to say I’m playing Kerotica again is really cool. And I don’t play Karateka but I do play Kerotica.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The iOS games that are not puzzle-oriented sometimes suffer from clumsy controls. I don’t like playing shooters on iOS. I just find it really annoying. But the controls here are elegant, and simple, and transparent to you while you play, which is great.

**John:** Cool. One of the things we had to figure out is the interface for — it is sound-based, so as you’re playing the game you can sort of hear the rhythm of like sort of how they’re going to attack. You can figure out your blocks based on the music that’s playing. The problem with the iPhone, or the iPad, too, is like, what if you’re on the subway and you’re playing and you don’t have your headphones on? You don’t want to be annoying around other people.

So, we had to figure out an interface for how to show you, give you symbols that would show you what’s coming up, even if you have the sound turned off. And so that was the stuff that took like the extra months. People kept asking, “Hey, when is it coming out on iOS?” It was figuring out that stuff.

**Craig:** Well, time well spent. And the other thing I like is the — and you talked about this before — a rather unique approach to handling death in a video game, because usually you get unlimited lives and death comes with either no penalty or kind of a setback penalty where you have to go back to a checkpoint.

And here your lives change who you are and your character and the possibility of success. There are levels of success, and if you can manage to play through the whole game without dying you achieve the true success of the game. But if you don’t, your character actually becomes sort of different. And in that way you have also kind of created a very novel approach to difficulty management because the typical scheme is that you start a game with a setting — easy, medium, hard.

In this game there is a setting and as you fail the game gets easier, but in doing so rewards you less should you succeed in the end.

**John:** Exactly. The reward of the game is completing the story with your true love, and that’s the ultimate mission. So, you’re going to be able to keep fighting and keep going, but as a slightly more powerful but slightly less desirable guy. And it was Jordan’s idea, god bless him. And the next thing about a screenwriter, like Jordan, figuring out how to tell game stories is like he really thought about like, “Well, what is the story consequence of dying?” Well, the story consequence is that she doesn’t get to marry her true love. She gets to marry the next guy who comes along who’s not… — but it’s not love.

So, it’s been fun to see that play out and people really respond to that.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** Cool. Craig, it’s time for One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** One Cool Thing!

**John:** Me first or you first?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I actually have one, so that’s already a shocking thing. But you decide who goes first.

**John:** Let me go first. So, my One Cool Thing is a book that everyone can buy. And so, again, if you have your iPad in your hand, the first thing you should do is download Karateka for $2.99 on the App Store. Second thing you might want to do is go over to Amazon, or your bookseller of choice, iBooks, whatever. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan, which is really great and fun and a great Christmas time read.

It’s sort of big nerd adventure story, so adventure story in the sense of like it’s Da Vinci Code or like a Raiders of the Lost Ark, but very, very nerdy in the best possible way. And it involves fonts, and fantasy novels, and Google Books scanners, and it’s just really terrifically well done. And so I think people who are interested in things that screenwriters are interested in, who are listening to this podcast, would probably dig it.

**Craig:** Very cool. I still, in the back of my mind, you’ve told me that I haven’t done this before, and in the back of my mind I feel like I have. But I’m sure one of our intrepid listeners will call me out if I’m duplicating.

But, you and I both attended a party thrown in John Gatins’ honor last night. John Gatins is the screenwriter of Flight, which is getting a lot of attention this awards season, as well it should. John is a terrific guy. And at that party I met a gentleman who used to sing on Broadway. In fact, he played Marius in Les Mis on Broadway.

And I’m a big musical fan. Obviously you are, you’re making a musical. And for awhile now I’ve been listening to SiriusXM on Broadway in my car with satellite radio. And SiriusXM on Broadway has this fantastic — it’s not fair to call him a DJ because he — I don’t know how you would describe him.

**John:** Host. He’s a host.

**Craig:** He’s kind of a host. I guess he’s sort of a host of huge, long, four-hour blocks of programming. And his name is Seth Rudetsky. And Seth is an accomplished musician and he works on Broadway, typically as an accompanist and a musical guy. And he’s been around for a really long time in the Broadway world and he’s amazing. He’s just a really smart, smart guy.

And what I love about Seth Rudetsky is that he combines these things that mean something to me only in combination. He has an excellent grasp of music theory, dramatic theory, and the theory of musicals if we can posit that such a thing exists, so a very good sort of intellectual theoretical understanding of that stuff. He also has amazing practical experience. He’s actually done it. He knows what it means to start a show from start to finish, succeed — he knows what it means to succeed, he knows what it means to fail. He knows how the sausage is made.

And lastly he is incredibly good at actually conveying those insights that he has to the average listener and the lay person. So, when you combine all three of those things you learn so much from him, sometimes in these little short bursts. And it got me thinking that that’s really, I think, what you and I aspire to when we talk about screenwriting are those three things in combination. And Seth Rudetsky is the Scriptnotes of Broadway.

And I am a big fan of his. I’ve never met him. You have met him?

**John:** I feel like I met him. In the travels I’ve encountered him in someplace, and so I think I shook his hand. But I listen to his show as well and I think he’s terrific. And, again, I would aspire that our show could do a little bit more of that. And as we start doing more interviews in 2013, I think that’s a good place for us to be in is to have people talking about the craft in an enjoyable way.

And we can interview people as they talk about their experiences the way he interviews them talking about how they made their shows.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know what he does that I love? Sometimes before he plays a song he’ll talk about a tiny little moment in the song that you would never notice. But he’ll talk about why it’s good. And he has such a passion for it. And so he’ll say, “Just listen for that moment and here’s why it’s important because of this.”

And then you hear it and you go, “Oooh!” Like, for instance, there’s a song You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun. And it was written for a belter. And he was talking about how when you write songs for belters like Ethel Merman who originated the performance of that song, that you want to find those moments in a song that allow the belter to belt.

And he says, listen, you know, in the chorus, [sings] “You can’t get a man with a gun. With a g-uUN.” And that whole like “g-uUN.”

That whole thing is really designed to let Ethel Merman just be Ethel Merman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’d never really thought about that before. And then he plays the song and you’re like, “Whoa, he’s right.” [laughs] “There it is! Brilliant.”

**John:** I second your recommendation. He’s terrific. And that’s on XM. And XM is actually kind of wonderful.

I never had XM until we got this new car and it came with three free months of XM and you quickly become addicted. And so, of course, then you start paying the monthly subscription.

**Craig:** Well worth it, for Seth Rudetsky alone.

**John:** Great. So, those are our Christmas presents for you. We have Mr. Penumbra. We have Seth Rudetsky. We have Karateka. We have Identity Thief. Hopefully some answers to questions people had. If you want more information or links to any of these things you can look at johnaugust.com/podcast where we’ll have the show notes for each and every episode of the show.

And, Craig, Merry Christmas. Happy Early New Year.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I guess we’ll see everybody in 2013.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Unless those Mayans get us.

**John:** By the time this podcast airs won’t the Mayan Apocalypse have already happened?

**Craig:** So this podcast won’t air?

**John:** Yeah, oh my god. We just wasted a lot of time didn’t we?

**Craig:** A lot of our last remaining minutes. Brutal!

**John:** I should have spent it with my family but instead I spent it with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that. Feels right.

**John:** Thanks Craig. Take care.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-air-duct-of-backstory).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 67 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Oh man, I’m good. We’ve got one more week of shooting to go so I’m hanging on. I’m kind of hoping that I don’t get that weird body let down thing when you — it seems inevitable after you shoot you get a week or two off and you get sick.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like your body was so tensed up, it’s like it couldn’t possibly get sick, so it sort of sequestered all the germs. And then once you possibly can get sick you just get super sick all at once.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I’m hoping that doesn’t happen because I get basically a week to relax and then, you know, vacation stuff and traveling.

**John:** I always found in college I would get sick right when I came home for Christmas. It was like I was able to get through the semester, make it to my finals, and then I would get sick.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s a great way then to avoid your family at Christmastime.

**John:** Perfect. And I love it. Now, what is your family’s tradition around the holidays? Do you do Christmas? Do you do Hanukkah? Do you do other stuff? I don’t even know.

**Craig:** I’m so glad you asked that question because it allows me to go on a mini rant.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** So, I’m Jewish. I’m not religious at all, but I’m ethnically Jewish, and I was raised in the Jewish tradition.

**John:** Ethnically Jewish or culturally Jewish? Is there a distinction between those for you?

**Craig:** Well there is, yeah, because Jews are both a people and a religion/culture. So, there is a genetic component to being Jewish. That obviously is affixed to me, and happily so. But culturally speaking, even though I grew up in a culturally Jewish home and in a vaguely religious home, sort of moderately religious — I suppose we were religious the way that most Christians are religious. Sort of Christmas/Easter type Christians. You know, we were Hanukkah/Passover type Jews. Or, I should say Rosh Hashanah/Passover type Jews.

But now I’m not religious at all. It’s just not part… — I never felt connected to religiosity in any way. When people talk about being spiritual I literally feel like an autistic person who doesn’t understand something like emotion. I don’t even know — I know what the word means technically. I have no actual connection to it.

I am the least spiritual person in the world. I don’t believe in such a thing. So, I’m not religious at all. [laughs] My wife is also not religious, but she comes from an Episcopalian background and we celebrate Christmas in our house because Christmas is an awesome holiday.

And frankly also from a storytelling point of view, the story of Jesus is an awesome story. It’s a great, great story with wonderful…

**John:** It has good Star Wars elements to it. It feels, you know, desert, and someone comes out who is chosen. It’s nice.

**Craig:** And then the idea of enduring terrible things as part of sacrifice to save others who had condemned you. That’s all good, rich stuff. Whereas Old Testament stories tend to be far more simple and odd, like, “You all lied. I’m killing you.” [laughs] “You’re all drowning now because I don’t like you.” Stuff like that.

**John:** Well, also the Old Testament stories are so sort of transparently interpretations of very classic myths. Like all those things existed for a long time, they were just sort of woven together to become the Old Testament, but you find the exact same kinds of stories in other cultures at the same time, too.

Whereas the Jesus story at least has a lot of new elements to it even though there were other outside savior figures. And you can find the roots of the Jesus story in other cultures as well. It is newish.

**Craig:** It’s newish. I mean, if you read the story of Krishna it will shock you how Jesus-y it is. I mean, the idea of a virgin birth, someone who dies for your sins. Someone is convicted unfairly and who is perfectly sweet and good, that did pre-date Jesus.

But, that said, the story feels like a more modern story in part because it is.

**John:** But also it has three acts. It has an arc to it which is unique and different. I mean, there’s a saga to it that doesn’t exist in sort of the other Old Testament stores which is nice.

**Craig:** It’s true. I mean, there’s a saga to Exodus. That is, I think, the most interesting Old Testament story because it has the plagues, it has an adopted child who grows up in the family that he then rebels against. And then there’s plagues. And finally the Pharoah relents. But then there’s a reversal because he decides, “No, you can’t leave, I’m going to chase you down and kill you.”

But then God comes with a pillar of fire. But then fascinatingly and anti-dramatically then they just wander around for 40 years.

**John:** Yeah. That’s not so dramatic.

**Craig:** It’s a really bad third act. [laughs]

**John:** So, like you, my family is — we celebrate Christmas and we do all that stuff. We’re not sort of actively religious. And so I always sort of never kind of wanted the Christian label on me, but then when I was in Africa years ago working with this charity group, everyone was like, “Oh, are you Christian?” And it’s like you’re just sort of Christian — if you’re not anything else you’re Christian. So, I’m fine sort of being culturally Christian. That’s why I asked the difference between ethnically and culturally, because I’m ethnically nothing. But culturally, yeah, I come from a Christian culture. So, even though I don’t actively practice any of those religious tenets on a weekly basis, eh, culturally I’m Christian.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think all Americans to some regard are culturally Christian because, for instance, I consider myself in a weird way culturally Christian as well, because I really love Christmas, and I like Easter. It’s fun, I like those things. But I’m not at all a spiritual or religious person in any regard toward any religion.

I will say that Hanukkah is dopey. Hanukkah is a lame-o holiday. It was an event that is of almost no religious or historic importance to actual Jewish people. When I say “actual Jewish people” I mean like actual students of Judaism. Hanukkah is incredibly minor. It’s on par with Jewish Arbor Day.

**John:** But it got elevated just because it was so close to Christmas and it felt weird that they didn’t have an equivalent holiday around that time of year.

**Craig:** It is totally manufactured in the way that Christians manufactured Easter out of pagan holidays. And so the bunny is a part of Easter because it was the Spring Fertility holiday and they kind of just glommed in. It’s the same deal.

And Hanukkah is just dopey. I mean, the whole thing is that there was a minor miracle involving a couple people who they got lights on for a little bit longer than they should have.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like your iPhone battery lasting a really long time.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Uh, let’s have a holiday.” It’s ridiculous. The whole eight-presents-over-eight-nights is ridiculous, because really you only get one good present and then a bunch of dinky ones. So, basically, really all they’re doing is spreading out the stocking stuffers over seven nights.

You know, it just — I mean, I understand why it was important for us as kids to have something, but you know, frankly, Christmas is so much more religiously significant to Christianity than Hanukkah is to Judaism that even as a Jew I’m like, “I don’t even like the idea of putting up the Menorah next to the Christmas tree in the mall.” You know, I just feel like, no, just do the Christmas tree.

If you want to be properly-Jewish, then at Passover and Easter — which are connected because, of course, the Last Supper was a Passover Seder — do something there. That’s important.

**John:** I hear you.

**Craig:** So, anyway, that’s my religious rant for today.

**John:** Cool.

Today I thought we would talk about perspective within scenes and sort of perspective overall in a story and sort of how screenwriters work on shifting perspective and telling a story with a clear perspective. And then get into three more examples — actually four more examples of our Three Page Challenge, because we’ve had so many good ones come through and Stuart picked out four new ones for us to look at.

So, that will be our agenda today.

**Craig:** That’s our day.

**John:** That’s our day.

So, a small update on the last podcast, I talked about how for this ABC pilot I’m writing I wrote it all in Fountain for the first time. And I used this beta of a new software program that’s coming out which is really good and I liked it a lot. And so just an update on that: So I finished, and so stuff is handed in.

And so I ultimately ended up using Highland to convert the Fountain to Final Draft so I could go through Final Draft, because I needed to do starred changes. And that’s one of the things that’s still problematic to try to do in Fountain or any of the sort of non — any sort of plain text thing — is when you need to mark what’s changed from one draft to the next draft, so if I’m sending pages through to Josh I can say like, “Hey, just look for the starred changes.”

That’s a thing that Final Draft is really good for. And so while I think these writing tools are really great and really helpful, I’m still very much acknowledging that there’s things that big professional applications like Final Draft are really good at. And starred changes is one of the things that it does really well. Screenwriter does it well, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Did you see that Fade In actually has built in Fountain exporting and importing I think?

**John:** Yeah, which is terrific. And where I find stuff missing, and I’m not talking about Fade In specifically, but as I was working with this draft in Final Draft I was making small changes, and so like literally just adding a few lines of dialogue, and I found it really maddening suddenly to have to use Final Draft Syntax for adding characters and stuff. Because I found myself typing I was like, “Well, that’s in parenthesis so of course that’s a parenthetical. Why are you making me go through and select it and tell you that it’s a parenthetical? It’s a parenthetical.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s one of the things that in my fantasy Final Draft would just have a little mode, a little tick box you could set that’s like, “In the Fountain mode,” and it would just be able to interpret. It’s actually very hard to.

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting one because it’s the one thing about Movie Magic I love the most. When you’re in dialogue and you hit parenthesis, or if you are — before you type, if you have parenthesis it puts it in parenthetical.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because their point is, and they’re right — how often do you have to type a parenthesis that isn’t a parenthetical?

**John:** Yeah. Or, how often is the parenthesis going to be in the very start of the line of dialogue?

**Craig:** Right. Just know open parenthesis means go command-4 into Parenthesis Mode.

**John:** Yup. Should be. So, anyway, it’s been interesting to sort of see that process sorting itself out.

And for people who are curious about Fountain we actually have a new Glassboard setup to talk over Fountain issues. Glassboard is a sort of semi-private message board system. So, if you have issues that come up in Fountain or questions about Fountain, myself and the other developers of Fountain are there to answer questions or talk about new stuff that can come up.

So, there will be a link to that new Glassboard for Fountain on the links for Scriptnotes at the bottom of this podcast. So, always just johnaugust.com/podcast and you’ll see a link for that.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, let’s talk about perspective because this actually came from you. You were talking about how with what you’re working on right now with The Hangover 3, there’s issues that come up sometimes about really conveying what the perspective is within a scene.

**Craig:** Well, it occurred to me because I’ve been — now that we’re getting close to the end I’ve been sneaking away from the set and spending time with the editors, just trying to kind of help get a few of the scenes together in shape for when Todd comes in and really starts working on his assembly. Because I’m there and I do it with him I know, “Okay, this is what he intended for this,” or “This is what he intended for that,” sort of like hopefully we can hand over an assembly-plus as opposed to just an assembly.

And one thing that I noticed is that a lot of times when editors are assembling all the footage, what they’re doing is following the lines. So, let’s say you have a scene where three people walk into a room to talk to one person. They will sort of follow the dialogue. But, of course, when you’re editing you have a choice. You don’t necessarily need to show who is talking. You could show somebody else.

And sometimes what ends up being missed is where the perspective of the scene is away from the dialogue. Sometime you’re writing a scene where people are talking but one person is staring at the person that’s being talked to. And that person is not saying anything. That person is falling in love; that person is growing angry; that person sees something in their hands; that person realized they’re lying. That’s what I mean by perspective.

And it started to occur to me that it’s something that we bake into our scenes a lot, but if you’re not you should be. And the notion that the scene, no matter what’s going on in a scene, ultimately the reader must be emotionally connected to a specific singular relationship — a person to another person; a person to an object; a person to an event.

And things should be going on around that. But there has to be a focal point of concentration for the reader and then ultimately for the audience. And it doesn’t have to be with who’s talking. Sometimes it’s not at all with who’s talking. And it’s important for us to think about where that perspective is and then come up with interesting ways to draw us out of it and switch it if need be.

**John:** So, the exact case that you’re bringing up is very classically what you want to do. The center of the scene, the most important person in the scene, the base of a scene, is not necessarily the person who has the most lines in the scene. And in many movies that will be kind of obvious, because if your hero is in a scene — if Indiana Jones is in a scene with other people who are doing more talking, well obviously it’s Indiana Jones’s movie, so we’re going to spend most of our time with him, so it’s really natural that we’re going to favor him in the cutting and in our head as we’re sort of shooting the movie in our heads. We always know that Indy is the most important person in that room.

With your movie, because you have multiple protagonists and you have a lot of stuff going on, it might not necessarily be clear who the important person is to follow in this thing and who should be at the center point of the scene. So, how would you bake that in on the page? What would you do to convey that? Are you just saying, like, hold on this person and throw the other dialogue in OS? How would you convey that on the page?

**Craig:** Well, you shouldn’t. I mean, in a sense you want to be able to shoot everything because you don’t know what you’re going to want to play off camera and what you’re not going to want to play off camera. But in action description you should do what you normally do, that is to say emphasize what matters. So, while one person is talking you could say, “While Jim rambles on, Sandra can’t help but keep staring at the man’s withered hand.” Okay?

**John:** Yeah, or “Sandra burns a hole through him with her eyes.”

**Craig:** Yes. Now, when it comes time, of course, you know, again, editors may make a mistake, but that’s okay. Everybody gets their first and second drafts, and the point is that the filmmaker, the director, should understand what the perspective of the scene is as well. But their understanding of it is going to come from the script and from their discussion with you, which is why it’s so important to emphasize perspective.

In fact, as I often do, I got angry [laughs] on DoneDealPro because somebody was saying, “How do I — I want to sort of describe how the camera is moving here.” And really it was about emphasizing perspective. And people were like, “Don’t put in camera directions. Don’t direct with script.”

No. No, no, no, no, no. Go ahead and put in camera directions if it’s important if that’s what’s going to convey the intention of where the perspective of the scene is. It’s important to know where the camera is going if it’s not doing what would be expected.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay? So, if we’re watching two people and it’s a spy thriller, and they’re having this discussion, and the intention is that we slowly pull back and away from them to reveal the back of a man’s head at another table listening, and he has a little thing in his ear and he can hear what they’re saying, it’s important for you to put that direction in.

Because it’s about figuring out what the perspective is and who we’re supposed to be with. I mean, think about the scene in The Godfather where Michael goes to have dinner with Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. I think it’s McCluskey.

And his mission is he’s going to kill both of them. And he’s nervous because he’s never killed somebody up close like that before. He’s never committed murder like that before, even though he’s a war hero. And he’s sitting here in this restaurant, and the two of them begin talking — not him, the other two are talking — and while they’re rambling on we just stay with him and he’s just staring quietly. He even starts nodding in answer to what they’re saying, but we don’t even see them anymore because it’s all about that feeling you get in your head when you begin to swim in your own thoughts and you start to panic internally.

Well, you have to describe that on the page. You have to. And if you don’t, I think you’re missing the point of what it means to bake in the perspective of the scene.

**John:** I agree.

Now, as we’re talking about perspective, we’re talking about perspective within a scene. Also, a whole movie has perspective, and in the movie which characters are telling the story and which characters have storytelling ability.

One of the things I’m working on for the ABC pilot is we limit perspective very strictly to the four members of the family. So, every scene has to be driven by one of the four members of the family which is a huge opportunity and obstacle that we present for ourselves, is that we only have information that the four people in the family can see.

And when you setup those kind of limitations, you have to really think about like, “Well, how are we going to get this information across to the audience and which of our four people can have that information?” But, by limiting yourself to that perspective and letting it be clear that we’re never going to go off with the villains and see what the villains are doing, it changes the nature of it.

And the times when we sort of bend the rules and we can sort of follow this little bit of a conversation with people who weren’t originally in the scene, that’s nice; it gives you tension.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s good to — just the fact that it is part of how you’re approaching the show conceptually forces you to think about it. And I see sometimes when we read bad pages, a lot of times it seems like whoever is talking, that’s where the camera is supposed to be. And we just follow line to line, like a play.

**John:** And because we have limited perspective to these four people, obviously if there’s only one of our four family members in the scene, they are the most important person in the scene. There would be no question that someone else is going to be dominating that scene. It has to be our person. Even if our person is not doing the main talking, we know what it is. And it draws you in closer as an audience to those people because you’re seeing them all the time. You’re not going off and hanging out with other people.

**Craig:** Right. Good.

**John:** Cool. Great. Well, thank you for talking about perspective. Let’s get into perspectives on these four Three Page Challenges that we got in this week.

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** Awesome. What do we want to start with? Do you want to start with Hunter?

**Craig:** Hunter? Did you say Hunter?

**John:** Hunter. Hunter Altman.

**Craig:** Hunter did…is that the one with the swamplands of Florida?

**John:** Yeah. Why don’t you start with Hunter in the swamplands of Florida.

**Craig:** Okay. So, in these pages here, I don’t believe we have a title for this, we begin in the swamplands of Florida and we realize we’re in, it almost seems like the Everglades or something. An alligator surfaces and we move past the swamp to find an old, small old minor league baseball stadium. This is the home of the Swamp Gators and it’s pretty run down and pretty small-time. It’s at night. Everyone has left. Nothing there but the sound of the sprinklers over the fields.

And then we find groundskeeper Tony, who is 50s, and he’s cleaning up and he’s alone. He switches off the lights, hears a noise, turns back to investigate with his tiny little flashlight, and then sees something inhuman staring at him from the bullpen. The thing pounces on him and kills Tony.

**John:** And that’s three pages.

**Craig:** That’s our three pages. So, you want to start?

**John:** I’ll start. I like it. I thought Hunter has a very good ability to describe things. He uses that ability a little too much. I thought he had really good specific details about this place. I felt like I could sort of see it, and smell it, and live it, and breathe it. And for a horror movie, like, it’s kind of accepted that we’re going to be sort of a slow start. And you’re just going to be, like, painting the world. There was just a little too much painting for me. I could have just gone through and edited a little bit of this out.

But, he really has skills at sort of describing things, so good on him for that. My biggest issue with it was Tony, our guy. Because we’ve seen that trope of the groundskeeper who is there alone at night and hears a noise and goes out to investigate. It’s just so stock that I feel like you need to push back against that and give us something else more specific or more interesting to be doing here.

Because if you’re sticking with the idea that he’s a groundskeeper, okay, but give me something else. Is he hitting a few balls of his own at night because that’s the only time he gets to do it? Is he dying of emphysema? Is he cooking meth in the back room? Is he super Christian? Does he collect one kind of thing that he finds in the stands?

Just give me something more specific than just, like, he’s the guy who cleans up and then he finds some monster out in the fields.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with everything. I mean, to continue your theme, the initial theme of praise, good writing here. In particular the beginning, I really liked, “Around it, insects buzz, frogs croak, birds call. You can feel the sticky humidity just by looking at it.”

Well, what’s nice about that is I can feel the sticky humidity now just by reading that. So, that’s good. I felt there — I felt I was there. I liked the touch of how rundown the scoreboard was. But then I would say, okay, there’s only so many times you can make me read stuff. So, you have me read, “THE SWAMP GATRS THAK YOU FOR COMING. DRIVE HOME SAF,” which is bulbs burnt out — it was a nice touch.

Then I have to see the banner that says “1987 is The Year Of The Gator!” Then I have to read “Hit one over the Gator and win a free seafood dinner!” There’s a lot of reading going on. So, by the time I got to the bottom of page one with the sprinkler — the sprinkler sound was great, but then there were three more paragraphs describing what the stadium looked like and it was not required.

Yeah, absolutely, everything that happens on page two and three we have seen a billion times. The old disposable character gets eaten by something. And, you know, I understand to some point there’s only so much character building you can do there because the dude is about to get eaten, but I think John is right; you want to try and maybe give us some twist on the same old thing.

I would say that, a couple of suggestions for you, Hunter. One is on the bottom of page two, “He’s not more than 20 yards from the glowing EXIT sign, when he hears — [/] — SOMETHING. He’s not sure what. He turns back.” Well, someone’s going to have to record that later, Hunter, [laughs], so can you give us a little more, buddy? It’s got to be more than “SOMETHING.” Is it a clank? Is it a cling? Is it a growl? Is it a shuffling noise? Is it a drip-drip-drip? But it can’t be “SOMETHING” in all caps. That’s just malpractice.

**John:** That’s cheating. I agree.

**Craig:** And then, finally, the death itself comes exactly as you would imagine it. There’s absolutely no question that he’s about to get killed by a thing that he’s investigating, but it comes from the front of him, it doesn’t come from above, or from behind, or from below. There’s no misdirect. There’s nothing. It just sort of happens as it should happen. But I like the touches that you did. “A smeared brown trail.” I like the way his page is laid out.

Like if you look at page three — for those of you who are new writers, take a look at page three of Hunter’s pages. It is divided up perfectly. It’s the perfect proportion of scene headers, description lines, dialogue. Short. Punchy. Lots of good caps where it needs to be. That’s the way you should write. That’s the way it should look.

**John:** Agreed. Some of the dialogue wasn’t spectacular but I liked the breakup of the page a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, here’s what I’ll say about this trope is we have the maintenance guy, the minute he sort of calls out to, “Hey kid, park’s closed,” I would love to see that guy not go out and investigate but actually get out of there and call the police or call security. Just not do exactly what we expect him to do in this kind of movie. And I think to the degree you can surprise us, that’s great.

Also, in the middle of page two, this is — again, you need to go back through and really proofread. It says:

Well, we’ve just established this power box twice, I think. Or maybe there were meant to be two? It’s confusing and not necessary. And, honestly, think about the cut. And literally the cut would just be like you put in the key to unlock something, or you turn something off. You don’t have to sort of establish that there is something and then have someone do something to it. Just have them do something to something and that will establish that exists in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s great advice. Think about the cut. Because that’s exactly what I was thinking about when I started feeling like there were too many things to read. Because, you know, I don’t want to just keep looking at signs. So, you get to look at one sign briefly. And, you’re right. The notion — for instance, another possibility is he goes, you know, “You kids, park’s closed,” and have him walk towards the bullpen and there’s a kid there. And they’re playing. And he gets rid of them.

And then he hears another thing, [laughs], do you know what I mean?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We have choices here of how to kind of subvert people’s expectations. But in these particular pages we just did the most expected version.

**John:** Yeah. And I should have said as we started this whole thing off is for people who want to read along with us at home, links to all four of these PDF samples will be at johnaugust.com/podcast for this podcast. So, you can pull them up and read along with us as we look through them.

So, the next one we’re going to take a look at is by Kevin Wolfe & Adam DeKraker. And, again, we don’t have a title on this, but here’s what happens:

We open in an operating room with a screaming pregnant woman. There’s two doctors, Juliet Abbas and Jonas, and they’re working on a delivery and they’re arguing about a C-section. As they cut the woman open Jonas gives an “Oh my god” as his eyes go wild in excitement. The EKG flatlines.

Next, we’re on a rooftop garden in Brooklyn with Ronnie Van Dam, a 30-year-old Hitchcock blonde. We see her condo building, her unit, her amazing kitchen. We see a New York Magazine cover that calls her the “Queen of Green.”

Later, as she’s cooking, she’s watching a syndicated talk show with Paula Cruz, whose first guest is Dr. Abbas from the first scene, who is a fertility specialist.

And that’s our three pages. Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you want me to start?

**John:** You can start.

**Craig:** Oh, boy. Okay. Well, look, the dialogue here on page one is pretty bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** First of all, the coming in mise-en-scene in this — in medias res, whatever the phrase is, in medias res.

**John:** As stuff is going on.

**Craig:** In the middle of it, sorry. It’s not mise-en-scene. It’s medias res. Coming in the middle of this woman, she’s screaming. This is the first line of the movie:

This would the first human being that ever said, “Stop! Please! Why are you doing this?” while people cut her. It’s just so wooden. I don’t understand what’s happening frankly in this operating room.

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** They’re doing what appears to be a C-section, however the woman is not anesthetized. I don’t know why. If that’s a point I think that needs to be called out. If it’s not a point then anesthetize her, for the love of god. “A steady drip of BLOOD trickles from the table and pools around their feet.” What hospital is this where that is allowed? [laughs] That doesn’t happen in hospitals, I mean, unless you’re in trauma surgery.

**John:** Yeah, but there’s nurses to pick that up. Is it just the two doctors and there’s no one else in the place?

**Craig:** Well, and also, blood doesn’t trickle from operating tables. You have suction. I mean, it just doesn’t work that way. I just doesn’t trickle like a horror movie and pools around their feet. I’ve never seen such a thing.

And then we have, you know, this dialogue. Dr. Abbas says, “Scalpel.” Dr. Jonas, who’s wearing wire-framed glasses, apparently that is super important in the middle of all this…

**John:** Yeah. I think he’s a Nazi.

**Craig:** Apparently. Pleads in a thick accent, “We need to slow the hemorrhaging.” Dr. Abbas says, “Focus on the delivery.” Dr. Jonas, “We can still save the mother.” Dr. Abbas, “Scalpel.”

Doctors don’t do this.

**John:** [laughs] And the woman is apparently still conscious to be hearing this.

**Craig:** Conscious. Yeah. [laughs] Not saying anything. Now she’s interested, I guess, in what they have to say.

**John:** So, it’s possible, is she being bound down to the gurney?

**Craig:** I don’t know!

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on.

**Craig:** I don’t know! And then Dr. Jonas places a scalpel into Dr. Abbas’ hand. So, now you have a doctor handing tools to another doctor which, again, speaks of complete ignorance of how surgery is done. And Dr. Abbas lifts back a flap of skin to reveal the womb. Dr. Jonas, “Oh my god.” Dr. Abbas is wild with excitement. But she drops the scalpel which hits the floor with a clang. Well, you don’t do that when you’re excited. you do that when you’re shocked or horrified. The others step back in horror. The EKG flatlines.

**John:** But the others step back in horror. Well, what others are there?

**Craig:** What others? Yeah.

**John:** There aren’t any others in the room.

**Craig:** Well, no, there’s “Four figures in surgical scrubs and masks huddle over a pregnant woman.” But two of them are doctors and the other two are just huddlers.

**John:** [laughs] Those mysterious huddlers.

**Craig:** But it gets worse. It gets worse from here. [laughs]

**John:** Why don’t we talk about this first page just because I don’t know if we want to go back through and look at these things twice. Here’s an example of the Dr. Abbas and Dr. Jonas — the character names and the headers over dialogue, get rid of the “Dr.”s because it actually makes it more confusing because it’s harder to tell them apart with those. So, those should just be labeled as “Abbas” and “Jonas.”

Now, so Dr. Juliet Abbas, we get Juliet is a woman, so that’s okay, fine. But “DR. JONAS (late 30s), wearing WIRE FRAME GLASSES, pleads in a thick accent.” So, I assume like, oh, Dr. Jonas, I guess is a man. But then the next paragraph of scene description, “Dr. Jonas places a scalpel into Dr. Abbas’s hand. For a split second, the light catches a TINY JADE TURTLE CHARM on her wrist.”

And that made me think, “Well, is Dr. Jonas a woman?”

**Craig:** Right, does she have a turtle charm?

**John:** Yeah. The “her” isn’t connected to either one of them.

**Craig:** This is an example of a mess. And, guys, I’m sorry — or ladies — I don’t mean to be mean about this, but this page is a mess. It’s a mess. You wouldn’t want to watch this the way you’ve written it. I don’t how else to put it. It’s kind of a mess. And tonally speaking it’s playing as high camp, and I don’t think that’s what you want, because then on page two we suddenly enter into a Nancy Meyers movie.

So, now I’m really confused because now we have this woman at a rooftop garden in Brooklyn and she’s the queen — we know this because a magazine tells us — she’s the Queen of Green, meaning that I guess she grows stuff. And she really wants to be pregnant. And I know that because in the elevator she looks at a pregnant neighbor and then she watches a show about pregnancy and has a reaction to the doctor saying, you know, “We can get people pregnant when they’re not pregnant.”

But there’s better ways to show me that somebody wants to be pregnant than that. That’s about the goofiest way.

**John:** Yeah, I also want to maybe make a new challenge to all screenwriters in the world: Let’s stop doing the thing where we show a magazine cover to establish who somebody is. It’s just so hacky to do that. Because you always have this fake headline that would never actually be on the magazine. It’s always people who never would be on the magazine anyway.

It’s just a terrible way to do things. It’s the air duct of backstory.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is the air duct! It’s the air duct of backstory and exposition. And, also, it’s so weird that they have at their own — like if you were on the cover of a magazine, to casually leave it around your own house is so weird.

**John:** I was on the cover of Written By Magazine, but I don’t leave it around the house just sitting out there.

**Craig:** No, it’s weird.

**John:** It’s weird.

**Craig:** And it would be even weirder to read it. And what happens is you start — something like that, just so that people understand. She comes in from her rooftop garden with her basket of stuff, her beets. Her basket of beets. She plops the basket onto the kitchen counter. “A carrot tumbles out and lands on a copy of NEW YORK MAGAZINE. Ronnie is on the cover with the headline ‘THE QUEEN OF GREEN.'”

Nothing can take me out of a movie more than a magazine cover with our character’s name on it with the fact describing that she’s the queen of gardening while a carrot that she just gardened tumbled onto it. Everyone in the audience will be thinking, “Oh, look what the movie’s telling us.” They’re not in the story at this point. There’s got to be a better way to get that information across.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Must be. And then this talk show, you know, again, while we’re calling for moratoriums can we call for a moratorium on the introductory talk show that tells us who someone is?

**John:** Yeah. It’s not good.

**Craig:** So, we have a talk show now. And the talk show host, “Welcome back, doctor. We always love having you here and you know why? Because we love babies!” Ugh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Eh, I don’t know what to say about all of this.

**John:** I would say it’s just not especially promising. So, this seems to be some sort of like mad pregnancy thriller, I think. That’s a valid genre, sort of. It feels a little bit Lifetime-y, but that’s a valid genre to do.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I just think this didn’t start off in a very promising way.

**Craig:** No, it’s just playing incredibly campy right now. And you don’t want to be campy, unless you want to be campy.

**John:** Unless you want to be campy, but this isn’t the right kind of campy. This doesn’t feel like it’s going…

**Craig:** No. This is feeling pretty goofy. I think you guys need to really take a step back and if you’re writing a movie that’s sort of like Rosemary’s Baby or Coma or something like that, find your tone. This stuff is really over-the-top right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sorry.

**John:** That’s okay. We agree. I think they were brave to send it in.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs]

**John:** Thank you for sending it.

**Craig:** It’s the attendance award of Scriptnotes. You were brave for sending it in. [laughs]

**John:** Next up let’s talk about The Transcendentalist by Scott Gorsuch.

**Craig:** All right. Are you summarizing or am I summarizing?

**John:** You’re summarizing this one.

**Craig:** I’m summarizing this one. Okay. So, this story opens with the image of a small boy slipping down through water in a lake, fully clothed, apparently drowning, blood gushing from his head while a voice over asks, “Ever think about past lives? What you might have been?” As the boy disappears into the depths the man’s voice, voice over, “I didn’t used to.”

And now we’re back now, and presumably that little boy has grown up, we think, and he’s woken up with a shock on a bus. He looks sad, a little bit out of place. He walks to his house. There’s some furniture missing and it turns out his girlfriend has left him. She’s moved out, left him a note. He calls up his friend Steve to say, “Hey, can we meet for a drink? Lydia has moved out.”

The two of them share a couple of beers in a pub. They talk about the fact that she moved out. And talk about why it may be that David had sort of failed here. That’s our character, David. And those are our three pages.

**John:** They were kind of a dreary three pages. And dreary, partly intentional. I mean, you’re opening with a good image of a boy drowning. That’s bleak. You’ve got a guy on a bus, like a sad George Bailey. That’s kind of dreary. But I just felt like I was slipping into a dark and not especially inviting place reading through these pages.

And there were a lot of specific sort of problems on the page that I want to talk about, because we don’t get a lot of sense of plot here yet, so there wasn’t a lot to sort of get me there in terms of talking about story, but just the words on the page could be better and could help me out a lot.

Right from the very start, the small boy slips down through the water — SMALL BOY should still be capitalized, even if that’s a character we’re going to meet later on. If it’s an actual person, give us some uppercase there.

Capitalizing “Winter” mid way through the page felt weird to me. I know, technically I guess we’re supposed to capitalize “Winter,” but it felt weird to me. It stuck out.

And we do this weird thing at the bottom of page one where we’re outside the house and then we’re inside the house. And then he’s like, “Lydia, are you home?” And he’s been wandering around the house. But we never really got inside the house and so I kept waiting for like, “What, are we looking through the door? Oh, no, I guess we really are walking through the house.” Give us a new scene header there. So, “EXT. DAVID’S HOUSE – FRONT PORCH.” He can do the “‘Lydia? You home?’ No one answers.” Next, new scene header, “INT. DAVID’S HOUSE.” Then you can walk around.

And once you’re inside the house it’s fine if the style you want to use is that you’re just doing little slug lines for the different rooms of the house. That’s cool, that’s a valid style. But if you’re going from EXT to INT, those really are different places. Give us a scene header for those.

It has a really unrealistic phone conversation on page two. So, I’ll read it aloud here for you:

So, it just started weird. Like on one just starts talking into a phone. And so there wasn’t a sense of, like, he called somebody and acknowledged who it was that he was talking to. That’s not how phone calls work. And so you could slip a jump cut in there and that would be valid. If you just gave me like, “JUMP CUT,” I’d believe that some time had passed. But it didn’t feel real in the moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really liked the opening. I didn’t mind the dark, sort of glum tone. Maybe this is going to be a cool mumblecore movie, who knows. I mean, I really enjoyed the opening visual. I thought it was well-written. And I liked him being on this bus and I liked how sad he was.

And I liked the way that he found out initially that Lydia had left him. “He scans the room. There’s an empty silhouette on the wall where a painting had been and impressions in the carpet from a missing chair.” Those are really nice details.

“He thinks maybe someone has broken in. He snatches an umbrella, creeps into the kitchen.” By the way, I agree with you about the slug lines. We have to be INT here, “INT. HOUSE.”

He comes around it, now there’s a note stuck to the fridge. And then on the note we hear the voice over of her reading the note and that I did not like. Frankly, I don’t think you need that at all. I don’t think you need the note at all. And I totally agree with you about the conversation. Really I would have loved to have picked that up in the middle. So, in other words, “He comes around the corner and he sees a note stuck to the fridge.”

We don’t have to read the note. The next thing we should see is him already on the phone. “I know, I’m sorry about that. Been really busy.” So, it’s a little bit of a mystery what’s going on. And then he says, “Listen, Lydia’s moved out.” And then we get the answer when he tells Steve. Don’t give us information twice.

You have information? Play the mystery of it. You gave away a gift you had built into the setup of the scene, if you think about it.

**John:** So, here’s an even more drastic cut that I serves you even better. So, “No intruder. A very conspicuous note is stuck to the fridge.” So, can either pull it down or you can just leave on the note. “Cut to: INT — PUB.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He’s with Steve. And Steve is holding the note. Because right now the note happens about halfway through it and its this whole shoe leather to get the note out. Steve is holding the note and all he has to say is, “While you were at work? That’s harsh.” We know what happened then. And then you can have the conversation about Lydia. Like you don’t need to say her name before that point.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Or, or, let’s go even further. So, he sees this note. The next thing is he’s in a pub with his friend. And let’s go back to our discussion about perspective. His friend is rambling on about something we don’t care about while David just sits staring at his beer. Staring at his beer. Staring at his beer. Then he finally looks up and says, “Lydia walked out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** See, I mean, there’s 100 different ways of doing this, but this isn’t an interesting way. This is a very boring way of doing it. So, even in these things think about drama and think about teasing the audience along.

It’s great to leave them confused for 30 seconds. 40 seconds. A minute. You don’t want them confused for five or ten minutes, because then they’re not watching what they’re supposed to be watching. But confusion for a short burst that you can then satisfy is good to do.

The discussion that he has with Steve is boring. I don’t know what else to say about that. it’s just boring.

**John:** So, back to your issue of confusion and satisfaction: that’s what I want people to take out of this is that it’s great to be confused for about ten seconds and be trying to figure it out. Like basically you want people, your audience and your readers, to be curious enough to want to figure out what’s happening. “Oh, I figured it out!” And they get that little burst of dopamine when they’re like, “I figured that out. I’m so excited. I’m so smart.”

And you’ve rewarded them for figuring that little thing out, for figuring out like, “Oh, his girlfriend left him!” That’s great. And the trick of writing is anticipating how you’re going to get those little bursts of insight in your reader and your audience as they put the puzzle pieces together.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? Part of the fun of screenwriting is to keep the audience wondering if you’re in control or not. Because if you just lay everything out for them and spoon-feed them it’s boring. But if you let them think for 30 seconds, or however long, that maybe you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and then you go, “No, no, no, no, no. See, I had you the whole time.” They start to trust you. And it becomes comfortable. And it becomes fun to watch, you know, because you know the movie is not going to let you down.

You’re not going to suddenly — because we’ve all had those moments in movies where we realize, “Oh no, I have no idea what the hell is going on, and neither do they.” Or, “They thought I would, and I still don’t.” That’s terrible. And it means that they’ve lost control.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a movie I was helping out on recently that really managed that problem where most of the movie was working really well, but there was this subplot which was just, like, from Mars and just didn’t fit in the rest of the movie. And so every time you cut to that subplot you’re, like, you lost a little bit of faith in the film because that does not make any sense. And if that thing that doesn’t make any sense is part of your movie, then your movie doesn’t really make any sense. And I don’t know if I trust this movie to get me to a solid place.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** So, our final script of the day is So We Had a Three-Way by Shawn Morrison, which is a great title. I just love that title.

**Craig:** Great title. Love it, too.

**John:** Let me give you a quick summary of this, and it’s going to be super quick because it’s almost all dialogue. We open at an Indian restaurant where 30-year-old married couple Daphne and Lucas Gilman are checking out the menus. We see that Lucas is a bit neurotic. He’s talking about should I have the Mango Lassi but he really wants a ginger ale. And he’s sort of talking himself into and out of things.

Daphne suggests they have sex in the bathroom. So, they go to the bathroom and they try to have sex. Lucas has a hard time getting aroused, partly because he’s nervous about touching the dirty walls. And there’s dialogue that’s happening as all this is going on. So, it’s really just a three-page dialogue scene.

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

**John:** I liked it a lot, too.

**Craig:** And that’s nice for me because you know I tend to get hardest on comedies, and this is certainly a comedy. But, let me talk about why I liked it.

First of all, how convenient for me that so much of this initial scene over their Indian food is about perspective. So, this is what I’m talking about. Lucas is going on. He’s rambling on about what he should order. Should he order the chicken? Should he get the Mango Lassi? Should he get the ginger ale, because I can always get the ginger ale but I can never get the Mango Lassi. And she is lost. She is not in the moment at all. She’s somewhere else.

She’s staring at her bread and she’s looking at the bread. And she’s looking at the bread. And then suddenly her face lights up. And the way that Shawn wrote this, I get that the perspective is between her and her idea, and not at all about this guy yap-yap-yapping. It’s an interesting way for her to reveal what she’s about to say which is “Let’s do it.” And he doesn’t’ understand what she’s talking about until she makes it clear, and then he doesn’t understand when. And then she makes it clear and she convinces him to do it.

Inside the bathroom we get the comedy of — we get a very real kind of comedy. And that’s the collision between an exciting fantasy that you think would be fun and the unfortunate realistic circumstances you’re dealing with to actually do it. And there have been a zillion movies where two sexy people go into an airplane bathroom and have sex. But airplane bathrooms are not sexy. And I don’t even know how you have sex in an airplane bathroom. And I don’t know why you would want to have sex in an airplane bathroom. It’s hard to pee in an airplane bathroom.

And so this is really about that. It was about juxtaposing sort of fun, spark-of-the-moment with the reality of it. And then also playing off the comedic differences in their personality. She’s obviously just like, “Let’s go for it, let’s do it.” And he’s a germaphobe who’s freaking out about the walls. And then layered on top of that you have additional comedy of two waiters just listening to dialogue off-screen.

And this is — from somebody that has to sit and edit comedy — it’s a gift to structure scenes where you can hear things through the wall like that, because it gives you such wonderful options when you’re actually shooting and editing. You can do almost anything. The waiters could hear anything they want to hear there.

But what they heard was interesting. And there was great — the way that she kind of escalates her talk was really funny. He starts worrying about the curry smell. It’s the little details that seem so real. I know this guy. And I get what she’s doing.

But what’s the best part to me was at the end of page three when she says — I’ll read this:

So, [laughs] she’s boasting about something, also giving him information that he didn’t know. Now he’s thinking about other guys she had sex with. And then when she finally delivers she’s terrible at it. This is all very good. I mean, this is really well-written. I thought they were great pages.

**John:** Let me back up to the first page. And I’ll read the scene description. “DAPHNE AND LUCAS GILMAN are the only people in the place. Daphne is 30, pretty, dressed like she’s from Vermont.” Which is great description. I don’t completely what that is, but it feels specific.

**Craig:** It’s like LL Bean, you know? I get it.

**John:** Exactly. “She idly pulls apart naan bread, mind adrift. Lucas studies the drink menu. He’s also 30 with a sensible beard and soft kind eyes.”

I get what that is. I can picture that guy. And then his first line of dialogue, “I hope their chicken is all white meat.” Tells you so much about Lucas.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** He’s just adventurous enough to go to the Indian restaurant, but he doesn’t actually really want to commit to the Indian restaurant. Now, the rest of the dialogue — you pointed this out, but I want to be really specific here — he gets all the first couple of lines but it’s broken up in a very smart way. And so:

So, by putting in that line of scene description it shifts the perspective back to Daphne. It also lets Lucas’s Mango Lassi thing all be one block and feel like one idea.

It’s just such a smart way to break up that thing which you could do all a one block, but the jokes wouldn’t play right if you didn’t have the scene description breaking that up.

**Craig:** Right. Because we wouldn’t know that we’re not supposed to give a damn about his Mango Lassi discussion. Without the breakup, without keeping perspective on her, we might think that this author actually wants us to care about this guy’s drink dilemma.

Interestingly, by the way, my take on Lucas from that first line was this is actually a hipster guy who goes to Indian restaurants all the time because he’s hipster and he eats adventurous food. He’s just also very fussy in a hipster way because he doesn’t like bad Indian food. [laughs] Do you know what I mean? I got like a whole other level off of him. I don’t know if it’s true or not.

**John:** I love a good, fussy, hipster.

**Craig:** Yeah. A fussy hipster with this beard and his eye. I mean, it was just all — I thought it was really well done. Three really good pages. I would definitely read more. And I also thought that these two together, and obviously we get from the title where this is going, and I like it.

**John:** Yeah. I like it, too.

**Craig:** I want to see what happens. And this is… — Okay, larger point about comedy, and I kind of brought this up a little bit before when we were talking about the Margarita Moms script, or Margarita Night. People will roll their eyes sometimes and say, “Oh, god, they’re doing a movie and the concept is this.” Yes, concepts are concepts. Okay. They’re going to have a threesome. It’s going to go poorly. It’s not going to be what they thought. It’s going to hurt their marriage, and it’s going to help their marriage, and they’re going to end up together okay or not. Whatever.

We all get where this is going. The point is it’s not where you’re going and it’s not what you’re doing, it’s who you’re doing it with and where they end up. And it’s the characters, especially in comedy, it’s the characters. And I like these characters. I thought Shawn did a really good job. Nice work.

**John:** Yay Shawn!

Yes, I mean, obviously we don’t know sort of what’s going to happen 20 pages from now, 30 pages from now. We have some sense of it by the title, but I’m rooting for this. I think it can work.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Great.

Now, Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Ah! See, I know those reminder emails are doing their job.

**Craig:** They are doing their job. Maybe that will be my One Cool Thing one day is your reminder emails. I opened up my One Cool Thing to Twitter suggestions, and you guys can keep bombarding me with those because I’m going to need them as we move forward.

But this week I found my own Cool Thing. And it doesn’t exist quite yet. It’s not going to exist apparently for purchase until the end of next year. But, I love it so much because it combines two of my great loves. One is medicine and the other is gadgetry.

John, have you heard of Scanadu?

**John:** I don’t know what it is. Tell me everything.

**Craig:** Okay, Scanadu is basically a tricorder. It is, if you’re a Star Trek fan; I don’t know if you are.

**John:** Oh my…yes!

**Craig:** So, Dr. McCoy would have his tricorder. He’d wave it in front of you and go, “This man has a blockage in his left intestine and he’s going to die.”

So, Scanadu is intended to be a $150 palm-size device. And it will scan your vital signs in under a minute and give you a diagnosis on your phone. [laughs] Now, you might say, “Whaaaat?” Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. It is going to be combined — so it’s going to do very simple things like it’s going to measure things like heart rate; electrical heart activity which is basically a little EKG; pulse transit time; temperature; heart variability; and blood oxygenation. And then transmit all of that to an app on your phone which will then be able to essentially comb through it and say, “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” “You got a little something to worry about.” “Oh my god, get to a hospital.”

But, it’s then going to be combined with two additional tools. Once called ScanaFlu and the other one called ScanaFlo. So, ScanaFlo is basically a pee strip. And it’s going to give you a ton of variations to measure your pee and tell you what’s going on, particularly if you’re a woman there’s a bunch of things like pregnancy issues and preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes. But also can look for everybody — kidney failure, urinary tract infections, and stuff like that.

There’s also going to be ScanaFlu which will use your saliva and test for strep, flu, both A and B, Adenovirus and RSV, which is a particularly annoying respiratory illness that most children will eventually get.

What’s so cool about all of this is that it’s basically going to handle a lot of the nuisance stuff that puzzles parents. Your kids get sick and there’s really that, “I hope this isn’t a bad thing. It could either be a nothing or it could be something horrible. I don’t know. Is it strep or do you just have a cold?” Do you know what I mean?

And it’s so cool to be able to put these tools in people’s hands and have them be completely non-invasive. I just kind of love it. And I can’t wait to have one. I want it! I want Scanadu, ScanaFlo, and ScanaFlu. That is something I will pee on every day.

**John:** [laughs] Just pee on your iPhone. That’s really what you should just do.

**Craig:** [laughs] Eventually.

**John:** Because the iPhone already has a little dot inside the headphone jack to know if it’s been submerged in water. You know that? If iPhone is submerged…?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, but you can just pee on your iPhone and it will tell you something.

**Craig:** That’s ultimately where we’re going. But I just love — and first of all, for $150, just to un-clutter pediatrician’s waiting rooms, you know, so that you can basically literally text your doctor and say, “Here are the ScanaFlu results. It’s strep.” And then they can write a prescription. You don’t even have to go in. It’s amazing.

**John:** Great.

So, my One Cool Thing actually exists. You can buy it today. I suggest you do buy it today. It’s an application for both the Mac and the iPad called Soulver. And so what Soulver does is somewhere between a calculator and a spreadsheet. And it’s really good for when you need to figure something out, or especially if you need to figure something out and sort of go back and change the variables later on.

So, it can do some natural language things where you can say like 15% of $60, or you can sort of build sentences they can sort of solve. I tend to use it on just different lines, just sort of setup where your variables are and then you sort of move things around.

I needed to use it this last month. We were figuring out stuff for Big Fish and box office stuff and number of seats. And there were a bunch of little variables we needed to sort of figure out. And you can stick those things in and then you just very easily change any of the variables in it. And I can save that and reopen it at any time. It’s great for those situations where you really don’t want to build a spreadsheet because it’s not like you have multiple columns of things. It’s just pretty simple equations, just there’s a lot of steps. It’s fantastic for that.

So, it’s available for both the iPad and the Mac. I really recommend it. I find myself using it at least two or three times a week. Soulver.

**Craig:** Soulver.

**John:** Yeah, it’s Solver, but just with a U in it.

**Craig:** Soulver.

**John:** Soulver. It’s soulves your soul.

**Craig:** Mm, nice. I’ll check that out. And, well, no, I’m not going to say anything about it. I’m going to try it and then it will be my next week’s One Cool Thing. There’s another app I’m hearing good stuff about.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** Yeah, from our Twitter brigade.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast. People who want to read along with any of these samples, again, go to johnaugust.com/podcast and you will see links to these PDFs. You will also see links to the other stuff we talked about like the Scanadu.

**Craig:** Scanadu!

**John:** And Soulver. And Fountain. And the Fountain Glassboard. And I will talk to you again next week, Craig.

**Craig:** See you at the next podcast.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.