Search Results for: index cards

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Hi! My name is Craig Mazin.

Aline Brosh McKenna: And my name is Aline Brosh McKenna.

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

Aline Brosh McKenna is here with us!

Craig: The Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes podcasting.

John: See, I debate that. I think she’s actually now the Steve Martin or the Alec Baldwin or the Tom Hanks, the returning guest host on Saturday Night Live.

Aline: Do you know which woman hosted the most?

Craig: Wait, wait, hold on. Let me think about this.

Aline: I’m almost about 62% sure this is right.

Craig: The woman that hosted — it’s a great question.

John: Melissa has only hosted twice, right?

Craig: I’m going to go with Candice Bergen.

Aline: That is correct!

John: Nicely done.

Aline: That is correct, may man.

Craig: Thank you. Thank you.

John: So, you’re really the Candice Bergen of the podcast.

Aline: Oh, I would be thrilled to be the Candice Bergen of anything.

John: And so your father was a famous ventriloquist we’re going to learn later. That’s the third act reveal is that maybe you were actually his puppet who came to life.

Craig: Why do I know that?

Aline: I don’t know why you know that.

Craig: It’s kind of weird, right?

John: I think it’s because I have seen old clips of Saturday Night Live where Candace Bergen was the host.

Aline: They did that skit when Justin Timberlake, I think it was, joined the Five Hosts. And she was in it.

Craig: Right. The Five-Timers Club.

Aline: And I think she might have been the only woman in the Five Hosting, yeah.

Craig: I wouldn’t be surprised if she would be. Paul Simon is also a member of that club.

Aline: John Goodman.

John: Oh, yes, John Goodman.

Craig: Nice. Well, you’re the Candace Bergen of the… — I like keeping the gender appropriate.

Aline: Yes. I like it. I would rather —

John: I think it’s good stuff.

Craig: You’d rather be a lady.

Aline: Yeah, I’d rather be a lady.

Craig: So would I.

John: Aline is here today because she wrote in with two topics that she really wanted to talk about. So, we’re so happy to have you here. The topics that you proposed to us, actually maybe kind of three topics really, the Rocky Shoals, page 70 to 90, that end of your second act going into the third act and the challenge that is for a writer.

We’re also going to talk about tone and sort of how important tone is in your script and how to create tone, how to keep tone.

We’re going to talk about mentors. And we’re also going to talk about procrastination. So, it’s going to be a busy podcast.

Craig: So much to do.

Aline: So much.

John: Four topics. Three hosts.

Craig: Plus we have Aline, which is already adds another 40 minutes of bizarre analogies.

Aline: Analogies. I’ve got my Dan Rather going on.

John: So, we’re here recording this live and in person. Usually we’re on Skype, but we’re all actually looking at each other. And I think the last time I was in this space was with you when we did the Frozen podcast which was a great episode. And last time you were here, Craig, was the Final Draft episode.

Craig: [laughs] Last time I was here —

Aline: Which is a classic.

Craig: Was one of my favorite days.

Aline: That’s a classic. It’s a classic.

Craig: It is in fact a classic.

Aline: It is a classic.

Craig: It’s hard to say that about something you’ve done, but that episode should go in the podcasting hall of fame as far as I’m concerned.

John: So, we’ve set a very high bar. But let’s get started. Let’s get started with those rocky shoals. So, talk to us about what you mean by this topic.

Aline: Well, this is something that I’ve always found to be true and in talking to other writers I have found it also true for them. Which is the first act tends to be the funnest and easiest to write. You often overwrite the first act. You often write the 38 pages when it needs to be 29, but it’s usually because it’s the thing that you spent the most time on which is the setup and the idea and you have the most information about it.

And what I’ve found is that after the first part of act two, where you’re sort of setting up the pins to knock them down — analogy — in the second part what you’re really doing is sort of building that on ramp to the third act. And I know Craig has talked many times about how you need to know that third act to write the movie, and it’s best if you know the third act, and I agree with that. And I find third acts not, I would say, on a par with first acts in terms of difficulty to write.

But if I’m going to have an existential crisis, if there is going to be a moment where I drive home from work and say to my husband, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how I’ve ever written one of these before, I don’t understand how these work,” it will always be around 71 where I start to feel like, you know, it should start to spit out material, and it’s probably the stuff you have the least of in the outline. But it should start to spit out steps to this thing that you know you’re going to.

So, often I know exactly what the third act is and I can see it. And it’s just over the crest, but I need those steps, and 70 to 90 are those steps. And if something is wrong, if you’ve conceived a character incorrectly, if the action in the third act is in fact wrong, if your thematic are wrong, that’s where it’s all going to fall down. It almost never falls apart in act one. For me it almost never falls apart in act three. It’s always 70 to 90 is the moment where I think, oh boy.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: In act one you’re setting things up. And that’s the part of the movie where you had the best idea of what it really was. That was probably what got you to start writing the movie. You had this idea, and that was probably act one.

Act three, you’re closing stuff down. You’re cutting off those threads, you’re tying stuff up. Final confrontations. But there is not a defined thing that’s sort of supposed to happen in that stretch that you’re talking about. There’s probably been some big thing that happened in the middle of your second act, but now you’re kind of waiting for this third act thing to happen. You’re waiting for either the worst of the worst, or this big twist, this big reveal, and you don’t want to do anything before its time. But, yeah, it’s a tough moment.

Craig: Well, it is. Although I kind of feel like that’s the point. You know, your character is going through this process and that’s the part of the movie where they’re lost, right? Your plot is building in a certain way and that’s the part of the movie where the plot and the simplicity of what’s supposed to happen doesn’t work anymore. It’s natural for us to get to that place and start to feel overwhelmed. Oddly, we give ourselves a break from page 30 — well, the ending is far away, I’m relaxed.

When you get to page 70 you think, well the ending is supposed to be coming up soon but it also still feels far away. It feels further away now that I’m at 71 then it did when I was at 30. But I feel like that’s the purpose of that section. In a weird way pages 71 and 90 in every movie is a horror movie, in every genre. That’s where the horror is. It’s where everything is supposed to basically fall apart, otherwise your ending is kind of a “who cares?”

So, if you start to embrace the fact that you’re supposed to feel that way, particularly if you’re connected to your main character and the movie is supposed to fall apart. You have to break it to fix it. Then maybe, you’ll still be scared, but at least you’ll understand why.

Aline: You know how Ted Elliott talks about that stuff where you make those first couple decisions about a movie and then you’re sort of — you have the consequences of those you can’t ever get back. I feel like to use one of my tortured analogies that to get — you’re going to have a lot of stuff and you’re winnowing. The process of a movie really is winnowing down thematically and plot wise.

And I always feel like it’s like you’re at the edge of a river. You’re Tarzan. You’re trying to get to this place across and there’s ten vines. And you can only pick a couple to swing across on. And I just have had a couple times where I’ve gotten there and thought which one is taking me, is the right path to act three. And I think that’s probably the section that I rewrite the most because often I have an act three I really like, but it might not land if the onramp is not — if I have not picked the right thing to swing across on.

John: One of the things I think you’re describing may be part of the problem. If you’re describing it as an onramp then you’re not describing what the actual — what’s the joy of that part of the movie? If it’s only doing work, then there’s not a joy to that part of the movie.

Aline: Right.

John: One of the scripts that I was working with at Sundance this last year, as I was talking with the writer we were trying to figure out how to move some scenes around, or sort of what could go where. And I had him really rethink the whole thing in terms of sequences. And so basically like imagine this is the sequence that goes from here to here, the sequence that goes from here to here. And within that sequence, those are the edges of your sequence — what is the movie? Like imagine that little sequence as its own movie.

And maybe that’s the key to what the 70 to 90 is, is think about, well, given where we’re at what is the movie of 70 to 90 and how can we make the most interesting movie in that place?

Craig: That movie also is… — One thing, it’s funny, I actually have a weirdly opposite point of view that it is true, as we make choices, the breadth of choices that are available to us begin to narrow. But that section to me is actually the one place where you get to not worry about that because, for instance, that’s the point in movies a lot of times when somebody gets really drunk, or gets high, or has a vision, or a dream. That part of the movie you’re allowed to almost become non-linear. And then arrive at something kind of —

Aline: But you need propulsion. It’s too late in the movie to not be propulsive. And I often find I’m in that section cutting stuff because it feels early act two-y.

Craig: Maybe so. I mean, to me if you’ve gotten your character to a place where they are disconnected from the life they had, but they are no longer at the life they need to live, then you’re allowed to get arty horror, I guess. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re allowed to break the rules of your movie and actually plunge them into a moment where out of it they can have an epiphany or something.

I was just telling John before the show began that I’m plotting out the story of the script that I’m about to write and I got to this point. And I understood that my character needed to have an epiphany, but well how do you have — it’s hard to create an epiphany. If you can create it that simply then it’s probably not that satisfying.

So, part of what I did was just relax. I don’t know how else to put it. Like you can start to beat yourself up when you get to that section because you feel like, oh my god, ugh. And then it has to make this half propulse and make the ending happen and all the rest. I just weirdly just relaxed.

Aline: But I do think it’s the point where the audience starts to get shifty. It’s just the part in the movie after the first hour and it’s the thing that I always refer to in meetings as you really don’t want people to be sitting there going, “Did I park on P2 or P3? Honey, was it P2 or P3?” And they’re thinking that. And that’s where if it’s going to go south it’s going to be there.

I mean, you have such tremendous goodwill in act one. You really do. And I always find, I have a friend who watches movies going, “I’m at an A. I’m at an A+. I’m at a B. I’m at a B-. I’m at a C.” Like that’s how he experiences a movie. And so often you watch a movie and you’re like, I’m at an A. I don’t know why people didn’t like this. I’m at an A. I’m at an A. But getting back to you’re like at a B. And then it’s always an hour in where you’re like, oh, we just wandered into D- here. Like we’ve lost our way.

That’s always the — that really is. That’s why I say, “Rocky shoals, men from the boys, you know?”

Craig: Yeah. Because you can get into a treading water syndrome where you kind of think, oh, I’m not allowed to have my ending yet. I need to do some work. You actually don’t. Like for instance one solution to your 71 to 90 problem is that it’s really 71 to 80.

John: Yeah, you’re cutting it short.

Aline: And you know what I will say? I worked with Alex Kurtzman and he said something to me that I really think about all the time. He’s like, “You always need less stuff than you think you need.”

Craig: It’s so true.

Aline: It is so true. You pack up for your screenplay and you’ve got like giant suitcases and a duffle and a carryon slung across you. And you always get through and go, “Why did I bring all this stuff? I didn’t need all this stuff.”

Craig: But you don’t know what you need until you get to the resort.

Aline: You don’t know what you need until you get there!

Craig: Yeah, but you should just be willing to not wear everything at once. Right.

John: Well, let’s talk about like that heading into that last section. If we talk about a movie as being a character’s transformation and hopefully you’re going to have this arc of transformation. They start at one place and they end up in a different place. And that transition to act three is really the lowest of the lowest, that moment of great transformation. Everything seems lost. All hope is gone.

There may be an opportunity in that 70 to 90 phase for the character to try a new thing, to try a new persona, to try a new approach that may not end up succeeding, but you can see it’s a step on their way to this next thing. So, they wouldn’t get to the character they’re going to be at the end if they hadn’t tried this new thing. And that could lead you into the new thing.

It may also be a moment for — I’m a big believer in burning down the house. Like literally I will burn down the house as much as I possibly can. And sometimes you’re burning down the house at the start and that’s instigating the whole story. But sometimes you’re burning down the house at the act two moment, that’s like that was the worst of the worst and their house got burned down. But it can be a fascinating time to literally burn down their house or destroy everything they have at that moment before the real end of act two. And so this is a section where they’re forced to sort of be on their own. They’re force to sort not be able to go back.

Aline: I’ll give you a somewhat, it’s not super specific, but in the script I’m writing midway through this character has had a relationship with — a woman has had a relationship with a man. And halfway through she realizes he’s not who she thought she was. And the third act is her realizing, oh, he’s a good guy. I’m going to go help him and save him.

But in between, oh, he’s not the person I thought he was, in that 70 to 90, she’s trying to decide or figure out is he the good guy or bad guy of this story. That’s really what’s she’s doing is she’s going back and forth between trying to figure out was I right to be drawn to this person or not. And at the end she’s, yes, and she goes — so, she is in a treading water kind of a thing where she’s investigating and it is a little bit like a horror movie because she’s sort of going down halls and trying doors.

And my challenge has been to pick the things that allow her to be in a little bit of a suspended state, which you often are in that section, right?

Craig: Without feeling like —

Aline: Without feel like —

Craig: The movie is just flat-lining across. I know what you mean.

Aline: Yes. Exactly.

Craig: Well, sometimes also the way to approach those sections is to think of them as false endings. So, okay, in her mind this movie needs to end on page 90. So, perhaps then she just decides I’m going to make a decision. I don’t know if it’s the right decision or not, but I’m making a decision and I’m going to confront this person and I’m going to blow this thing up. And that’s going to be the end of this movie. And she does it. But then it’s not, you know?

Aline: Right. Right.

Craig: Or sometimes if it is a heist movie, this is where we’re going to do the thing, oh my god, it just —

Aline: Well that’s exactly, really smart, because that’s the part in the heist movie where everybody is moving in and getting the thing and the acrobat is in the box and all that stuff is happening. And I think one of the reasons really truly that I find it challenging is not often because I don’t know what to do, but because the execution of that, if it’s elegant and wonderful like it is in Ocean’s, if it’s an elegant, wonderful, surprising thing, it elevates the movie and if it’s the kind of thing where the audience goes, yeah, yeah, okay, so that’s the part where blah, blah — I think the onus on the level of execution in that particular thing is quite high. I just think they’re not in a — an audience is not in as forgiving a mood.

Craig: Yeah, no, you have to write it well.

Aline: Yes.

John: [laughs]

Aline: The solution to all your writing problems is write things well.

Craig: Yeah, you have to do that part good.

Aline: But I do find, I always think of it as like going down a rapids thing and then you get there and you’re like, oh, you know, here it is. Rocky shoals.

John: Part of the challenge may be with your project, but all projects in that 70 to 90 phase is that you want to sort of keep your hero active. So, right now in your case like she’s opening doors and she’s investigating, but that character doesn’t necessarily know where the end is. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

Aline: Exactly. That’s right.

John: And I think part of the reason why movies often feel aimless in this part is you’re not communicating to the reader and to the audience what the character is trying to do and where the character thinks they’re headed. And so sometimes you just literally need to put a place or you need to put — explicitly state a goal, like I need proof that he is this person. I need proof that he really did this thing, so we know what they’re really trying to do.

Aline: I’ve noticed this a lot in action movies where they wrap their movie up on page 85 and they start a new movie.

Craig: Right.

John: Yup. Absolutely.

Aline: Every action, I mean, I actually really admired in X-Men it did not feel that way, the latest X-Men. I felt like it was a true continuation. But a bunch of the super hero movies I’ve seen and the action movies I’ve seen recently, it seems like you all just stop at the end of act two and then there’s new creatures, and new stakes. And then they go to a… — And that’s a note. In the third act you often go to a new setting, a new environment.

Craig: I actually don’t love that syndrome. And I think that’s part of the new creature of movie as theme ride theme room.

Aline: That’s exactly how it feels. It’s like that thing where you’re in that strap in a ride and you get around the corner and you see that last thing.

Craig: Right, you’re like, oh, I thought I was done, but there’s one more thing. You know, and that’s fine. But for an integrated story that you’re telling, I think, John’s got the exact right advice. There’s a — even if the character doesn’t have clarity, that’s good. But the audience needs clarity.

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: And you need clarity to know what the hell you need to do.

Aline: She doesn’t need to know what’s going on, but you don’t want the audience to be like, “What is she doing?”

Craig: Right. Even if she sets an artificial thing up, okay, I’m giving myself 48 hours. I’m like a jury now. I’m going to collect evidence over 48 hours and then I’m going to render a verdict. Verdict: you’re not good; I’m dumping you.

Aline: Right.

John: Another possibility would be to shift POV. So, if your story has really locked POV to one character —

Aline: That’s when you can switch.

John: That might be the right moment to switch and actually see things from the other point of view.

Aline: Listen, you guys are very expensive, so if we do a lot more of this on the air I’m going to be owing you guys a lot of dough.

Craig: Uh, you already do.

John: Yeah.

Aline: That’s a great idea because you know what’s funny —

Craig: As John Gatins says, “The meter is running.”

Aline: It’s funny when you have a single perspective movie, it does get exhausting. And that’s a great kind of technical tip just to try, even if you don’t end up keeping it, which is go to the other lead, go to the other main relationship and write what they’re doing for awhile and see if that is — because that creates a nice intriguing mystery for the audience, which is you want to get back to your lead. That’s an excellent tip.

John: One of the other exercises I do with people when I’m sitting down and talking about their scripts is I’ll ask them like, okay, you have written a thriller here, but let’s imagine this as a crazy comedy. Let’s imagine this as a western. This imagine this in a completely different genre.

Aline: Yes

John: And sometimes you’ll figure out what the beats would be in that other kind of genre and that you won’t necessarily be able to apply those directly, but it will get you thinking in different ways.

So, in your case, if your movie is predominately not a thriller, but these are thriller moments, like let’s talk about the real thriller of this, and then you can sometimes bend those elements back into your —

Aline: Well, I don’t think it’s funny because this is sort of what Lindsay Doran’s thing is, but every movie I’ve written in any genre, you always start going — someone always says, or you say to yourself, “This is really a love story about these two people.”

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: All movies are.

Aline: Always. All movies are.

Craig: If they’re done right.

Aline: They’re always a love story between two people.

John: 21 Jump Street is a love story.

Aline: Sometimes you have the wrong people. I mean, name any movie we love, ET, even movies that are — every Hitchcock movie. I mean, they’re love stories.

John: Cast Away.

Craig: All movies have a central relationship. All of them. And knowing your central relationship and playing that through. And she has this great thing. She talks about how some movies it’s do a thing, and then you get the relationship. And some movies the relationship is the thing.

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: Which I love. I love both kinds.

Aline: That’s great.

Craig: But I think it’s not — the Rocky Shoals aren’t so rocky. You know, we know this because we get through them. Once you’re done with it, and you’ve fixed it, and you know what you’re doing and you’ve solved that problem, when you look back you go, “There’s no rocks. There’s no shoals.”

Aline: Yeah, well, of course. Any writing problem once you fix it it’s like why was that a problem, yeah.

Craig: So, I guess my point is that over time, we’ve been doing this long enough to know, when you get to that place, see if you can’t subtract the fear of it from the equation. The answer may come, I don’t know if it will be a better answer, but it will probably come quicker. I do believe that. I believe that relaxing and not tensing up will probably make it go faster. I love speed.

John: Yeah, speed is good.

Craig: Speed.

John: Speed is also a solution to our next issue.

Craig: Segue Johnny.

John: Segue Johnny.

Craig: This is my new character, Segue Johnny.

John: So, on episode 131 we talked about procrastination. And there was this great article by Megan McArdle that we talked through. And her thesis was essentially —

Craig: She was great in Annie.

John: Megan McArdle was the best.

Aline: She was amazing. Amazing.

Craig: She was amazing.

John: And now look at her. She’s writing for The Atlantic.

Craig: Unbelievable. Oh, wait a second.

John: It’s really just incredible. No, possibly a different person. McArdle’s thesis was essentially procrastination especially for writers stems out of the fact that we were probably raised being the best writers in our class. Everyone was like, “Oh, you’re so good,” and it was really easy for us. And then we actually sit down to really do writing and it’s hard. And then we start to wonder, wait, am I even good at this. And that was the sort of thesis in her piece which I thought was terrific.

This last week I went sort of down a click hole and I came across this great article, this two-part post by Tim Urban on this site Wait But Why, where he looks at procrastination less through psychology and more as a process. What does it actually feel like to procrastinate? And when you go into deep procrastination, what is that really all about.

And I thought it was great. So, I sent links to you guys.

Aline: Well, here’s the thing. I was supposed to read it.

Craig: And you didn’t read it?

Aline: I procrastinated for too long. And I also know that John will always summarize things.

John: Oh, I’m going to summarize the hell out of this.

Aline: So well.

Craig: John always summarizes things.

Aline: So, I kind of felt like —

Craig: You didn’t have to do it?

Aline: No.

Craig: Well, that’s not procrastination. That’s just laziness.

Aline: It is. That’s right, they’re close, but they’re not the same.

John: Well let me talk through it, because I thought it was a great article, and we’ll have links to both of these posts, but talking through his thesis is a good way to sort of get into it. He sort of rails against fake procrastinators, and a fake procrastinator is the people who are like, “Oh, I look at Facebook two or three times a day.” It’s like, well that’s amateur. That’s not real procrastination.

He defines real procrastination as when the instant gratification monkey shows up and basically sends you through a stack of small little tasks and he calls it the dark playground, which is all things which would be perfectly well and good if you were in your real leisure time, but you’re not in your leisure time. You are in work time. And instant gratification monkey wants you to look at this thing, and look at that thing, and look at this thing, and that thing. Or, if you’re making plans, they’re like these really kind of vague plans, these sort of dreamy plans that don’t actually take you anywhere.

And eventually instant gratification monkey takes up so much time that like, oh, it’s too late to really get started tonight, so I’m going to have to get started tomorrow. And everything gets pushed back. The challenge with this kind of procrastination is eventually a panic monster will show up and scare the monkey away and you will get those things done that you have to get done. But all the things you kind of want to get done will never get done.

You’ll never actually do those things you kind of would love to get done because it’s only the most emergent situations happen. So, I thought it was a great article, a great sort of description of sort of what it feels like when you’re in that deep procrastination hole. And —

Aline: I could have been learning Spanish.

John: There’s so many things you could have been doing if you hadn’t been feeding that stupid little monkey.

Craig: Well, I love the dark playground metaphor. It was great, because he nailed the bittersweet pleasure of goofing off when you know you shouldn’t be goofing off. You are doing it because it does provide some instant gratification, but it’s bitter. You know you’re not doing the right thing.

John: It’s not actually as much fun as it would be.

Craig: You can’t really enjoy it and you start to feel — and all this comes from self-loathing. Look, all of the procrastination that keeps you from what he calls flow, which is the point where you finally just start doing the thing. And he says, “Look, everybody has got to go through,” I think what does he call it, the tunnel, the crisis tunnel?

John: Yeah. There’s like dark woods that lead you to the tunnel.

Craig: The hardest part when the monkey is the most angry is when you’re about to start. But when you finally do it and you get through and you get into the flow of it, then it is the happy playground, because you’re doing something that’s positive and good and you’re free. And you lose track of time and it’s wonderful.

But all this procrastination, all the tip-toeing, and the dipping your foot in the pool and then backing away, or reading email all at once, and so on and so forth is about your fear of what it means for you to be doing this thing that you on the one hand want to do, and on the other hand are terrified of doing, either because you’re afraid that you’ll fail, or you don’t think you’re very good, or you think — or all you can remember is the hard parts of it, but not the fun easy parts.

And, you know, I liked everything. I mean, I thought he laid it out beautifully. I will say in defense of procrastination that sometimes when I read stuff like this I think, well, you’ve absolutely described the process that we can generally look at as negative. And you’ve given us a prescription to avoid it, but we can’t really avoid it. I mean, we are human, and it’s going to happen no matter what.

And to some extent I’ve given myself a pass.

Aline: I have, too. After many years I have, too.

Craig: A loose rigid thing, like okay, I know I’ve got to be here, but I can wander to get there.

Aline: I’ve come to believe that it’s so widespread that I’ve just come to believe it goes with the territory. Nick Hornby has a hilarious thing about his day and how he starts writing at four or five o’clock and all the things he’s done before. It’s just so widespread that I feel like it must be part of it. And one of the things, you know, writers are so protective of their whole day. Like I don’t like to have to relocate.

Like if I have a writing day and it’s going to start at nine or ten, and I’m going to write till five or six, I don’t want a lunch.

Craig: Right.

Aline: I don’t want to go anywhere. And it’s not totally rational because within that, but I know, the reason for that is I want to get all my procrastinating done once. I want to just bang out as much baloney that doesn’t need to get done one time. And if I go away and come back, I’m going to have to have another session of —

Craig: Started up again.

Aline: Airbnb, whatever. And I don’t want to do that again.

Craig: Airbnb?

John: [laughs] That’s your click hole? Finding vacation destinations for trips you may never take.

Aline: That’s a new one. Get on there, because there is some really good stuff.

Craig: Airbnb, huh?

Aline: Oh my god, any place you want to in the world. Anywhere you want to go in the world. Some fabulous places to stay.

Craig: Really? So that’s better than hotels?

Aline: Yeah, because it’s someone’s fabulous house.

John: Oh, it’s much better.

Craig: That’s what I should do.

John: That’s what we did in France last year.

Aline: It’s less expensive. It’s great.

Craig: I was thinking of maybe going to London with Melissa. I should Airbnb it?

Aline: Oh, must talk to Ling.

Craig: Must talk to Ling? All right.

Aline: Yeah, it’s a great click hole. But I’ve learned that that’s why I don’t like to write at my house and then go write at the office, because then I know… — And the funniest thing is when you get into the productive work part, every time you’re like, what was hard? This is great. I enjoy this.

John: This is fine.

Aline: I enjoy doing this. Why don’t I just sit down and do this?

Craig: It takes effort to start.

Aline: Have either one of you ever once when you were not in production, because in production its different. Have you ever once when you were writing a first draft ever sat down, opened your computer, opened the document, and started?

Craig: Never.

Aline: Never.

Craig: Never.

Aline: Never. Have you?

John: I don’t think so.

Aline: Never.

Craig: Never. Why? I mean —

Aline: I have stuff to do.

Craig: Yeah, and you know, Dennis Palumbo has often said that procrastination for writers, I mean, procrastination is basically like masturbation, which of course is its own procrastination.

Aline: Yes. Yes.

Craig: When you’re not looking Airbnb.

John: Let’s talk about an instant gratification monkey.

Aline: And I actually think one of the reasons it feels sort of tawdry is because it has this onanistic quality.

Craig: Right. But, you know, if you masturbate too much, like I remember when I was a kid I would listen to Dr. Ruth and she’s like, “It’s okay. Masturbation is fine unless it’s destroying your day.” And I thought, listen, that’s good. Because it’s not destroying my day. I’m getting stuff done. So, I’m cool with this. So, assume that it’s not destroying your day. It’s okay.

His whole theory is that procrastination in part is allowing the subconscious writing mind to kind of just do some stuff. And we can’t access it, so it doesn’t even seem like anything is happening. But then when you sit down and write like, okay, things were kind of — we weren’t ready. It’s just you weren’t ready to write.

Aline: That’s exactly what I think.

John: Yeah, I think that’s an excuse a lot of times.

Craig: Ah, here comes the German. [laughs]

John: But truly, and this is as a person who has done some professional procrastination. I can say like, oh, I was really kind of thinking about stuff, but I really wasn’t thinking about stuff. I was just sort of clicking through headlines or doing other stuff. I generally have the experience, like Aline says, is once I actually finally sat down and actually started writing I was like, once I was 20 minutes into it I was like, oh, this is fine, this is good, this wasn’t nearly as bad as I figured.

Aline: And the funny thing is then if I need to take a break to go check an email or whatever, I can get back into the work. Once I’ve really started I can take little tiny breaks and get back in.

Craig: Sure. Because you’re in a groove.

Aline: But if I walk away for the day, or I go have lunch with somebody, and that’s the thing, it’s —

John: You’re never going to get back into it.

Aline: It’s an engine. And what’s frustrating is we don’t really know how to start it or keep it running.

Craig: Well, you know, the thing that I think is so frustrating about starting and scary about starting is what if you start and nothing happens. Right?

There’s that thing of the first, when you just start typing you’re like [gibberish] because it’s like you’re waking up and you’re supposed to running. What if I can’t? What if I can’t? But then it starts to be, okay, you essentially defeat the fear that you’re not going to be able to do anything, because of course if you start, what if there’s the day that you start writing and nothing happens? That’s it. You’re done.

Aline: Well, also we all know that sometimes you have days where you write great stuff. And some days you have days where you write terrible stuff. And you don’t know which one of those days is coming.

Craig: That’s true.

John: Absolutely true.

Craig: That is true.

Aline: And I think that’s a huge part of it is putting off like the verdict.

Craig: I will say that’s why I am a big believer in preparation, because I don’t mind having a bad story day. I have a bad story day, screw it. I’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll redo the index cards.

John: A bad writing day you really feel like that’s —

Craig: A bad writing day is like a punch to the guts. So, when you know that you’ve got your story laid out and it is the summation of only good story days, and all bad story days have been subtracted out of it, it’s hard to have a bad writing day.

John: One thing I will say in my defense: I write out of sequence, and so part of the joy of writing out of sequence, if I kind of sense that I’m not going to have a great day, I can do the less important scenes. Because there are always going to be some moments in a script that are kind of people walking through doors. And it’s really more about sort of the connecting A to B rather than like the best, most brilliant dialogue.

Aline: What I think is hard for people who don’t write to understand is it’s not like there’s a house there and you need to go paint it and you’re standing there with paints and you’re not going over to paint it.

What’s happening is —

Craig: Another one —

Aline: You’re standing there with paints. And there may not be a house there at all. There may be nothing there. And sometimes you get over there with your paints to go paint the house and you’re like, this thing has one wall, no roof.

Craig: I just can’t wait to see the animated version of all these, again.

Aline: That is the true fear is that, because I love to write dialogue. Scene work is my favorite thing. But that’s not the fear. The fear is that you’re going to get there and it’s not going to make sense, it’s not going to be purposeful. And anybody whose written everything knows what it feels like to delete 40 pages.

John: Yeah, it’s brutal. So, if you’d read the articles you would see that —

Craig: But you’re lazy.

John: They use that metaphor of a house often. And basically the idea that nobody builds a house. You sort of put down brick and you put down a brick, but you can’t really build a whole house. And really a screenplay is the same way. You can’t write a screenplay. You can only write a scene. And you can’t really write a scene. You can only write this little part of a scene.

Craig: You can only write a word at a time and a letter at a time. I mean, there is a comfort to sort of saying, oh, I don’t have to write a script. I just have to write some words today.

Aline: But what if you do all those bricks and then you realize like this whole chunk over here needs to go?

John: It’s incredibly frustrating. Yeah.

Craig: But no matter what, even if you get all the way to the end and you didn’t have to do that, you’re going to then have to do it. That never stops. But the point is then, okay, remove the burden of saying I’m writing something that we’re shooting. You’re not. You’re writing something that’s going to begin a conversation about whether or not we should shoot this and what should we shoot.

Aline: And it’s so much easier to write when you’re in production, because you have to. You just do it.

Craig: Well, it’s also you know you have the cast. You have the locations. You have the places.

John: Well, you also have the panic monster, though. That panic monster showed up, because if you don’t deliver, there’s nothing to shoot. And everyone is relying on you. So, the panic monster shows up. The little monkey is terrified. It goes running for the woods. And suddenly you’re just there like, oh, I guess I’m going to have to write this thing.

Craig: Well, the other thing is in production I have to say that’s when our self-esteem generally at its highest. We’ve gotten a script made. We are the writer. Everybody is waiting. We actually feel like we’re a big boy or a big girl.

Aline: Doing something purposeful.

Craig: You have like a job, like a real job that you have to show up to.

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: Suddenly we feel quite good about ourselves. It’s when we’re at home, either masturbating, or looking at Airbnb that we’re kind of like, is this…?

Aline: What is this?

Craig: If I went into a coma for a week, no one would know and it probably wouldn’t even change the process that much.

Aline: No, nothing feels better than when someone says, “Can you write this scene where we get from here to there,” like a really specific, purposeful scene that you know is going to be in the movie and you can just make it awesome with some paint.

Craig: Yeah. Somebody actually gives you a path to accomplishment, which we never have. And that’s why I often think when I’m in Ralph’s, I would like to work the night shift here because I know I could, if given the task to put these boxes on that shelf, that at the end of the night I would feel good.

John: Well, the thing I loved most about school was like it was really clear that I could finish.

Aline: That’s just what I was going to say.

John: Yeah, so like I loved being graded, I loved getting tests, I loved turning —

Aline: And that’s why it’s not smart people… — I mean, a lot of screenwriters are smart people. But a lot of people who are really book smart/school mart who try to be writers are very frustrated because you can’t just do your calculus homework and write your history paper and hand it in.

Craig: No extra credit.

Aline: And there’s none of that. And the completion can often be fake completion. And —

Craig: And effort is simply not enough. You could triple your effort and things get worse. It’s brutal.

John: Yeah, even like —

Craig: Why would anyone do this?

Aline: I have no idea.

John: Even like coding, like you’re building an app or a game, either it runs or it doesn’t run. Fundamentally there is a bullion sort of outcome. Like, yes, it worked or it didn’t work, versus this sort of mishmash where you just don’t know what actually ended up happening.

So, let’s wrap this up —

Craig: Worst job ever.

John: Worst job ever. Don’t do it.

Some of the standard advice for avoiding procrastination or to actually getting started can be looked at sort of through this lens. And so we often talk about Freedom, that little utility that you can put on your computer that shuts down your internet connection. It’s just a way of taking away your monkey’s toys. That basically the monkey has nothing to do because you’re not letting him. So, either turning off your internet connection, getting a computer that doesn’t have internet, or in my case I often will just go someplace and barricade myself in a hotel room without computers and without anything else for a couple days and break the back of a script.

Because I find I just can’t get started if I don’t sort of have a certain critical mass of material.

Craig: Yeah. I find that if I turn my email off, that sometimes is enough. It’s okay for me, like once I’m going, to just jump over, check Twitter for two seconds, or check the Yankee game or whatever.

But it’s the email is the killer. That’s the one where somebody will write something and now I have to write to respond to them and now I’m writing, like I shouldn’t be writing anything other than what I’m writing.

Aline: It’s so funny how when you’re procrastinating you’re grateful for every email because you’re like, ooh, I have to take care of this. And then when you’re writing it’s like why are you people bothering me?

Craig: If my phone, if people are texting, sometimes I’ll get into like a group text with some of my friends. And the texts are coming in. I’ll just turn the phone off, like completely. I don’t even hear the [vibrate noise]. I don’t want to hear any of it. I get so angry that anyone is infiltrating my little world.

John: How dare they?

Craig: How dare they?

John: Aline Brosh McKenna, you suggested the topic of tone. What shall we talk about with tone?

Aline: Tone. Well, it’s funny, it’s something that I feel like I have thought a lot about more over the years. And one of the things I’ve noticed is when someone gives me a script that I think is unsuccessful, often I think because information about screenwriting has proliferated, people are able to do sort of the basic building blocks of a story, but often it doesn’t feel like anything. It’s toneless. It feels like you don’t know how to feel.

And I’ve noticed that in scripts of people who are starting out, that writing tone and establishing a tone is actually very difficult and something that we don’t talk about a ton. And it’s a real intangible. And I have also found that when you’re developing a screenplay you can outline it, you can talk about it, you can talk about the characters, you can really talk and talk and talk, but the tone is the thing that you can’t really describe to people until it’s on a piece of paper.

Craig: You can use another movie as an example. I mean, I always think of tone, people talk about all the time about the rules of the world of the movie. Okay, so this is what physics is like in the movie. If it’s science-fiction, these things can happen. If it’s a certain kind of movie, people can get hit and not get hurt. Those are the rules of the world.

Tone is almost the rules of the way humans interact and express themselves. Is it the kind of movie where people can say and do outrageous things and it just kind of goes by? Is it the kind of movie that’s very hewing towards our natural understanding of the way the world is? Is it a tone where everyone is super buff and action hero and if you get punched you don’t really feel it? And if somebody dies you can quip?

All that stuff is about the rules of human expression and interaction.

Aline: And often when you’re reading something that’s not successful you’re like all those things are happening, competing things are happening. But, you know how when a movie starts and in the first ten seconds you feel like you’re in good hands or you’re not? And I always think of the beginning of True Grit. There’s that voiceover and then there’s the shot of the guy goes flying out of the bar and is on the ground and then the snow falls and there’s voiceover.

You just feel like, oh, I know how I’m supposed to feel. And that’s not theme. That’s a feeling. And because as screenwriters we don’t have actors, and we don’t have costumes, and we don’t have photography, we just have words. And establishing it through word choice and how the characters behave, your diction, all these things which I think are very hard — I think you can only learn them by doing them and by understanding that if you are writing a fast-paced action thing and you’re writing in staccato phrases and underlining things, it just will feel a different way.

Or if you’re writing a comedy and you’re putting jokes and asides, and I was writing with this young woman, we’re doing this Showtime pilot, and she was really surprised at how florid my scene descriptions are. And they have gotten over time, like I’ll put — instead of a line of dialogue, so it will say how are you today. And then in the scene description it’ll say, “I’m fine, thanks.” But there’s no line.

And that’s because over time it’s like the actor may not need a line. If it’s just a shot of them —

Craig: Making an expression. Without words.

Aline: Exactly. And I often will put in jokes and asides and comments, not in a distracting way, but in a way that says this is the tone of this piece. And in the piece we were writing it actually was important to establish the tone outside of just the dialogue and the description because just a flat description of what you’re seeing is continuity, it’s not a screenplay.

And it has been one of those things that it’s your voice, it’s the voice of the script, but we spend a lot of time talking about the mechanics and I understand why because they’re very difficult, but one of the things that Craig talks a lot about, which is theme, I feel like people don’t talk about theme enough. But I also feel like people don’t talk about tone enough and how to make it feel on that first page, you should feel like I’m in this movie and I know what movie I’m in. And then when you are developing a script it’s often that’s the thing that people either connect to the tone, knowing that you can always move the building blocks of a story around. And you’re going to be doing that.

You’re going to be shuffling those things around. If the tone is not successful, that’s a very difficult — that’s such a pervasive thing. So, it’s something to think about before you start writing. And as Craig said, you can point to other movies, or look at other screenplays. If you read that True Grit script, the script has just all that tone in it. You want people to feel, to understand the — not just what you’re trying to say, but how you’re trying to make them feel.

John: When hear tone I often think about the soundtrack for the movie. And honestly when a script has a very successful tone to it, I can sort of hear what that soundtrack is going to be just by looking at the page. It’s sort of suggesting what this world feels like, what kind of music I would be hearing underneath those things.

And what you’re talking about with word choices, that’s the same kind of thing. Those staccato sentences for the action sequence, that’s giving you the sense of what it kind of feels like to be in that moment, both how it’s cut, but also what the soundtrack sounds like, what the sound effects sound like. What those quick little moments feel like.

When you have those long florid sentences it gives you the sense of like this feels like a camera moving slowly through and panning across these things.

Craig: Pacing.

John: But also I love what Craig said in terms of it’s about what the characters are doing that often sort of really speaks to the tone. Like how the characters would interact with each other. How a character responds to something is really very key to the tone. And when you hear that in those first couple pages and really get a sense of like, oh, I get what this movie feels like.

Chris Terrio was up at Sundance and we were talking about Argo. And Argo has two vastly different tones if you remember the movie. There’s the FBI, really three tones — there’s the FBI people, and they are sort of walking quickly down hallways and talking at a little bit of a hyperactive kind of pace. You have the Hollywood people who are sort of doing their Hollywood thing. It’s basically a comedy when we’re there with them.

But then when we get to Iran —

Aline: Hostage drama.

John: Hostage drama, it can’t be either of those things. It has to slow down. It has to be very real. It has to be like real sort of moments of fear and uncertainty and anxiety. So, the challenge of that movie is how do you balance these three very different tones and make them all feel like they’re part of the same movie.

Aline: And the other thing that I realize more and more is that it’s so much about getting inside character’s heads. And tone is just so important for the interiority. And if you feel like you don’t have enough tone, write those scenes from the perspective of the character, how they would react to stuff.

That’s why I put comments, things that the character thinks in their mind or would say but doesn’t say. I put them in the scene description so that we know what they’re thinking and what they want to say and don’t. The interiority really, when I am reading a script and it seems blank, it just seems like it’s not being told from anyone’s point of view, or even an authorial point of view.

Craig: I know what you mean. Sometimes the way that you can establish tone is by establishing it almost in opposition to a different tone. I often think about how until Unforgiven came along, westerns had people constantly getting shot. And western heroes were constantly shooting people and then going, you know, quip, right? Or I don’t care —

Aline: That is a masterpiece of tone, that movie.

Craig: In that movie they make this choice, I mean, from the start he has trouble getting on his horse. Right off the bat, you know, so westerns, typically the tone is I jump on a horse, I ride. It’s a little bit like superhero stuff, you know. Here it’s like an old man who is struggling to get on a horse.

When the Schofield Kid shoots somebody for the first time, you can see his terror and his horror, because he’s never done it before, and it’s disgusting to him. These are tonal choices.

But then again, there are good and successful westerns that I love that are in the mold of the classic kind of — they’re great action —

Aline: But this is saying to you this is the kind of story we’re telling here.

Craig: That’s right. Sometimes you see an action movie and you’re like that was just fun. That was fun. The Matrix was, I mean it was cool, but it was fun.

Aline: But that had an amazing, cool, specific tone.

Craig: Wonderful specific tone.

Aline: That buoyed you over, even if you didn’t understand what was going on.

Craig: Correct. So that tone was like mysterious, S&M, leather, awesome superhero-y Whoa, and all that was really like cyber punky/awesome/cool, and it was fun. But I can also see a movie where somebody gets punched in the face and they are in terrible pain and they can’t get up and the person who hit them is petrified that they might have killed them. That’s a totally different tone. It’s all about that —

Aline: That’s right. And it was interesting, I watched Mud with my kids when we were on vacation and they’re accustomed to watching superhero movies where people just get killed, just all willy-nilly. And there was a scene in Mud where just the little boy was in peril for a minute and my son got really upset. And it was because the tone of that made you feel that pain.

Craig: That it mattered.

Aline: Exactly. And so the great thing as a writer, you’re in charge of that. That’s what makes you god is your ability to choose the tone. And one of my favorite movies is Tootsie, partly because I think it’s just a — that movie could have been so goofy, and silly, and corny.

Craig: 99 times out of 100.

Aline: 99 times it would have been.

Craig: Cross-dressing comedy, it’s Bosom Buddies.

Aline: And the masterful tone of that movie and keeping you in, you feel real at every step. So, I think it’s a little bit of a lost art and I think and I think it’s partly because it’s such an intangible. We don’t teach it. We don’t talk about it as much as we do.

I know you get exhausted by this, which is the endless act one break, act two low point, blah, blah, blah.

Craig: Structure, structure, structure.

Aline: Yeah, structure, structure.

Craig: Well, because the people that teach these things, that’s what they know. They don’t know tone because they don’t have a voice.

John: Well, the challenge is you can sort of teach structure because you can put it up on a whiteboard, or you can have slides to sort of go through it. But tone is all about the very specific words on the page.

Aline: Right.

John: One of the first projects I got paid to write was this —

Aline: By the way, Go is an amazing — the tone of the screenplay of Go is really bracing.

John: Thank you. Yeah, what characters would say in Go and do in Go is very, very specific to the world. And you can’t break that world. And an example of breaking it was I was over at Paramount and I was writing this thing for them. And it was sort of a cross between, it was like Clueless in an apocalypse context. And so it was these two school girls that have to save New York from the apocalypse.

So it had a very specific tone. But there was like one line, one of my favorite lines, that I was really trying to wedge in there. But it was too much of like a Heathers line. It did not quite fit the world. And I was so proud of that line and finally Maggie Molina who was my executive said like, “I know you love this line. It does not fit in your movie.”

And really what she’s talking about is it’s not the tone of the movie. It breaks the expectations of what this movie can be.

Craig: And then the line will never work the way you want it to, which is the most frustrating thing.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s interesting, when you talked about that concept, a lot of times the key to tone is in the concept. Certain concepts want certain tones. So, when I hear, okay, two privileged schoolgirls in Manhattan have to save the world from Armageddon, it can’t be too real. It can’t be too serious, because the concept —

John: The concept is absurd.

Craig: The concept is demanding that it be funny. I think the concept allows that the two girls can have a relationship that is meaningful to each other and dramatic for each other, but that the actual adventure of the world, they need to be able to see some crazy things happen.

Aline: But if you think about it, a lot of our filmmakers that we revere the most, contemporary filmmakers are people like Wes Anderson, and Quentin who have just very distinct tones, that have a very distinct, and their movies vary, but they have a certain feel to them.

John: I would single out Rian Johnson. Because Rian Johnson’s movies don’t all feel alike, but each of them has such an incredibly specific tone.

Aline: Right. Writers don’t just have one tone. I mean, the Coen Brothers are a good example. The tone of True Grit and the tone of —

Craig: And Raising Arizona.

Aline: Yeah. I mean, they couldn’t be more different. They just — what I love about them.

Craig: But they’re true to their own tones.

Aline: Love the movie or not the movie, whatever they’re doing it is total commitment to the tone of this. We are going full on to Hudsucker Proxy. We’re going full on to Big Lebowski. We’re going to embrace that tone.

And I think if you make a mistake, it’s better to do that as an aspiring screenwriter, because I would rather read something that had tons of tone and was like a little bit of a mess as a story than something where it sort of checked all the boxes.

Craig: Yup.

Aline: But it just felt like —

Craig: You can fix the story.

Aline: But it just felt like an unpainted wood. When somebody made those stores that are like unfinished wood furniture.

Craig: You’re like so into the paint and the wood today.

Aline: Yeah, I really am. Paint and wood.

John: You’re saying tons of tone, and I just worry that somebody could look like, “Oh, I should add some more tone to this.” That’s the last thing. It has to be really inherent to sort of everything. So, when you read a script that tonally is so unique and consistent, that’s when I start to think like, oh, this person has a voice, this person has perspective, this person has a point of view.

Aline: Is anything worse than going to see a movie and going, “What is this? What is it?”

Craig: I mean, it’s rare that you go to a movie where you think the tone is all over the place.

John: There are some.

Craig: I know.

Aline: I can think of some.

John: Indie films, you’ll see a lot more of that.

Craig: Well, yeah, that is true. I get that. That is true. I do agree though that when I read something that somebody has written and they are an aspiring screenwriter, that’s all I’m really looking for. I’m looking for — I would say specificity and tone and a general understanding of the music of speech. And if the script, if nothing happens in the movie but, boy, all the things along the way were really well done, well just write about something that’s interesting. But you can, which is so much better than being a bland writer.

Aline: And how many of the movies we love either the story is rickety or it doesn’t do any of the things it’s supposed to do. And you love it anyway because it has this great feel to it and these great characters and these great moments?

Craig: We’ll forgive.

Aline: We’ll forgive a lot.

Craig: We’ll forgive bad narrative for great character. And characters and tone go hand in hand.

John: Let’s talk about mentors. So, that was a suggestion of yours.

Craig: Where did Segue Johnny go? [laughs] Segue Johnny has left the building.

Aline: That was called a Hard Segue.

Craig: Topic over. New Topic. That was the McLaughlin. Next topic!

John: Next topic! Did you have a mentor when you started writing?

Aline: I did. I had many mentors. I had amazing mentors. I mean, right from the beginning I took a six-week screenwriting class. I talk about him a lot, this teacher named Dick Beebe. And we had to write a class —

Craig: I’m sorry, what?

Aline: Amazing name. And we had to write a script in that class. And he was the one who said you should be a screenwriter. And then he read that script three more times, which I now look back and think how did I have the balls to ask him to keep reading it.

Craig: Well, if he liked it I can see why he would keep reading it. I do that sometimes if I like it.

Aline: But the reason I wanted to talk about this today, and we can talk about mentors in general, but the reason I want to talk about this is you guys have spent a good amount of time on this podcast talking about why there are not more female screenwriters and directors. And we’ve talked about it also. And one of the things that studies have shown in the business world is that women are not as good at attracting and maintaining mentors.

And if you’re in a male-dominated field, you’re going to have to attract male and female mentors. And so one thing I want young women to think about is if you’re starting out as a screenwriter either right after college or right after film school, right after undergraduate, or even after film school, you’re going to go into a business which is dominated by men. And I think a lot of times we talk about mentors we think about giving women female mentors and that’s sort of how our brain works. She’s a woman, she needs a woman to help her and guide her.

For whatever reason, most of my mentors ended up being men. And it is a tricky dance when you’re a young woman to pursue men heavily for work without it seeming…

Craig: Sexy time.

Aline: Sexy times. They’re often way older than you and if you’re single, particularly if you’re single and they’re single, but if you’re single and they’re married, and I just think saying to women you can only have female mentors or pursue female mentors is not great advice in a business where 83% of the writers are male. So, I learned very early on that you had to find a way and to get a mentor you have to pursue them. And I had a funny experience where I went to something where there were a bunch of students and they wanted to talk to me. And a lot of them handed me their card.

And I was like, okay, thank you. I’m not going to take your card and call you. And then there was one kid who talked to me for a long time and then went to the organizer of the program and asked for permission to get my email. And then emailed me and said, “I hope it’s okay that I emailed. I enjoyed speaking with you. Ten minutes of your time. If I could have aó”

I mean, all the things you want to say. You have to pursue if you want a mentor. You can’t go up to someone and say, “Here’s my card. Please call me and mentor me.” In fact, if you are a young woman and you went to a man and said, “Here’s my card, will you mentor me,” and he called you, that’s bad.

Craig: That’s a problem.

Aline: You have to go to them and say, “I’m a writer. This is what I’ve written. Let me show it to you or let me talk to you about it.” You have to make a case for yourself. And it can be intimidating and it can be tricky, but what’s interesting and I think what we should say to women is for whatever reason that first teacher I had, that was a guy, then the first producer that I worked with consistently, who really, really championed me was a gentleman named Bobby Newmyer, just loved the movies that I wrote.

You know, that was his tone. He loved those kinds of movies. And then I had an agent for many years who is a woman and she was an incredible mentor and guide. So, I had both.

But, I really think to break into the business, male or female, you have to learn how to make people want to help you. And the best way to do that is to be awesome.

Craig: [laughs] Is to be the kind of person that needs help less than all the other people.

Aline: Well, no, I don’t mean to be an awesome writer. It means to have awesome deportment.

Craig: Be a good person.

Aline: To be friendly. And helpful. And when you make that coffee date, show up on time. Express interest in… — Like I have this kid that I’m mentoring. Every time I see him he’s looked up online what things I’m working on and he says, “Oh, so tell me how this is going, how this is going.” And last time I saw him I said, “God, I don’t have a lot of time. I don’t really need to talk to you about my stuff. I just want to hear about your stuff, you know, trying to break in.”

And anytime I’ve interacted with younger people that I’ve wanted to help, I’ve just noticed if you have — it’s not a mystery. Be awesome. Be polite. Be respectful. Be educated about the person that you’re going to.

I’m having drinks today with someone that I met at the live podcast, the cocktail, it was an interesting woman and I wanted to help her. And it took me a long time to find a time that was convenient. But she was patiently saying I’m here whenever you —

You’ve got to have a certain deportment. But I would say for women, absolutely look for female mentors, but be prepared to find a way to seek out, to attract and seek out male mentors. And what I would say to you is just make sure your messaging is very clear about what you want and that you want help with your work and that there isn’t sexy times afoot. I mean, if there is, god bless you.

But if you are trying to just attract a mentor for mentor’s sake, particularly before I got engaged and married I would just sort of over correct a little bit. Don’t meet for drinks. Meet at 9am for coffee. And if you have a number of interactions where you’re making it clear to this person you have a boyfriend, whatever it is, you’re not interested, and you’re very educated, have great questions about work. You’ve listen to these podcasts. You know, you have the right questions to ask.

People want to help. They want to be helpful. John has dedicated his life to helping young writers.

Craig: Dedicated.

Aline: It’s true.

Craig: St. John.

Aline: It is true. You?

Craig: Not so much.

Aline: A little bit.

Craig: This is what I do. Tough.

Aline: Yeah. But people want to help. I mean, I remember during the strike John would say if you’re a young writer come and walk with me.

Craig: [laughs] Like St. Francis of Assisi. Or Jesus. Come walk with me.

John: But also during the strike one of the great things about like if you’re a young writer, even if you’re not WGA represented, just come out and join us in the picket lines because we have nothing else to do, so we’ll talk to you.

Craig: Right. We’re super bored.

John: And we’ll give you some advice.

Aline: Yeah. And when I’m helping somebody and I say can you stop by my office at nine o’clock, the people that I have helped and befriended who became successful writers were in the lobby at 8:15 and had brought a paper.

John: Yeah.

Aline: And the people who came flying in at the last minute and wanted to tell a long story about why they relate and how they couldn’t find a parking spot, you know, that’s not — you have very few opportunities to demonstrate to people that you deserve to be mentored. And I would say, you know, try and avail yourselves of them. Don’t be creepy. Be polite. Understand boundaries.

But for young women, don’t be afraid to go up to male writers in your field who you think might be interested and say, “Help me out,” and in general across the board to be successful, even as successful writers you have to attract and maintain the sponsorship of people who are more successful than you.

Craig: I actually think that goes too for male writers. Don’t be afraid to find female mentors. I actually —

Aline: That’s true. I mentor girls and dudes.

Craig: Because there’s not a lot of them, because there aren’t a lot of female screenwriters.

John: I had the equivalent of like a Lindsay Doran coming out of grad school and she was hugely helpful. So, it’s often that teacher role.

Craig: Well, yeah, I didn’t go to film school. And frankly all the people that kind of mentored me early on were men, but I’m not necessarily sure they were good mentors. I think they were more benefactors than mentors, which is a different deal.

And I think that’s a good thing, too, by the way. Finding somebody that both appreciates what you do and is going to pay you for it can be terrific because that’s how you really learn.

But, at this point now I actually prefer working with women. I do. I just — I’ve come to the place now where I realize I just need mommies. I do. I understand myself a little bit better now. I need moms.

But I also find that they, for whatever reason working with women calms me down a little bit. I feel a little bit better about myself.

Aline: But, you know, we often have this conversation and men say like, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t be on the Women in Film Committee and I can’t be on this panel. And I can’t do that.” And I always say to them find a young female — if you really want to help have there be more female writers in Hollywood, find a young… — By the way, feel free to only mentor talented people.

John: Oh, absolutely, you should. I mean, you’re doing nobody a service if you’re mentoring really horrible people.

Aline: That’s right. They’re going to look for you and the reason I wanted to talk about this is I want to encourage people to look for mentors in a respectful and once again uncreepy way. But I also want to encourage established people to look for people to mentor. It’s awesome. It is a great feeling when you’re helping someone and you see them start to succeed and you get those emails that say, you know, and one of the things I love about this podcast is you guys do that en masse. And you constantly get feedback from people who say —

Craig: But it is important, so for instance John and I both do the mentoring program at the WGA. And I did a mentoring program separately through the Writers Guild East I think last year. So, there’s a young woman who I thought was terrific and I kind of did this process with her for about a year.

I’m also doing one through the Universal — I don’t know what the name of the program is.

Aline: Oh, yes, I know. Andrea talked to me about that.

Craig: Yes, it’s essentially, what is it? It’s for racial minorities and —

John: Diverse writers?

Craig: It’s for diversity. It’s for racial minorities and it’s for women. I think but mostly racial minorities. And that frankly is — I love that we do this. And this is great. But this is not mentoring. It’s different.

John: Yeah.

Aline: No, I know. But it’s resources, it’s true. But I just want people to think about —

Craig: This is just replacing bad film school.

Aline: But I’m saying, like in this discussion of tone, which people don’t talk enough about, we don’t really talk a lot about mentoring. We don’t teach women in particular how to do it. And it’s, again, it’s one of those intangible things which is super important and no one teaches you how to do it. And some people have an instinct for it and some people don’t.

Write the thank you note after someone has sat down with you. I was shocked at the number of people who sit down with me and then I never hear from them again. They never send me an email or a card that says thank you for your time.

Craig: I’m not. People are terrible.

Aline: Yeah, but it doesn’t advance their cause.

Craig: They don’t know what their cause is. They don’t know how to advance their cause. Let me just get a little upset for a second.

Aline: Okay, here we go. I wound you up.

Craig: You did. There are people who simply don’t know how anything works. I don’t know if they were loved too much, not loved enough, they just are genetically broken. I don’t know what their problem is. But they just move through life like this.

And then one day they look around and say, “Why is everything going wrong? Why is my life no good?” Because they’ve made a terrible, a string of terrible decisions like that. They don’t realize that they’re terrible decisions. They just don’t see it. They don’t see it.

And part of being a mentor is identifying those people very quickly. By the way, we can within seconds. You — you don’t have what it takes to be a successful anything. So, why would I waste my time trying to help you be a successful thing that’s very hard to be successful at?

Aline: But so much of it is deportment.

Craig: I love that word. Deportment. She’s so French.

Aline. You know, people who come up to you and then want to talk obsessively about themselves or tell you some dramatic story or some sob story. Complaining is not attractive.

Craig: The waves of crazy coming off.

Aline: Yes, complaining is not a good. And so they’re critical. They’re critical for women to get ahead. They’re critical because every study has shown you need to be mentored to get to the next level. And you know what? If you’re worried that someone is going to gossip because such and such, you’re single, and such and such married man is helping you? So what? If you know what’s happening and not happening, and truth is the work speaks for itself. The work speaks for itself.

And if you do good work consistently, people will see that you are talented and they won’t look back and say, “Oh, that’s because she’só”

Craig: She slept with all those mentors.

Aline: Yeah, maybe that’s why it didn’t work out so great.

Craig: I slept with both Weinsteins. That was a mistake.

Aline: Oh my god.

Craig: Why did I do that?

John: Huge mistake.

Craig: I should have just slept with one of them.

John: Yeah, together.

Craig: No, John.

John: That’s gross.

Craig: No, bad. Bad John. Terrible.

John: So I have four mentors now assigned by the WGA.

Aline: Mentees.

John: Mentees, yes. It would be great if I had four mentors.

Craig: Yeah, that would be cool.

John: People would take pity on me. We’ve got to help John August with his career. But I have four mentees.

Aline: You could apply to the program.

John: I could. I totally could apply.

Aline: Who would you get? No, it would be great if you applied to get a mentor. Who would John get?

John: That would be fantastic.

Craig: Zak Penn.

Aline: Zak Penn.

Craig: That would be the best.

John: I want Zak Penn and David Koepp. And sort of all those —

Aline: J.J. would be good.

John: J.J. would be great.

Craig: I want Leslie Dixon to mentor me. That would actually be awesome.

Aline: That would be great.

Craig: That would be pretty great.

John: So, but mostly my function with them is stuff will just come up in their work life. Like I don’t know what to do here. And so to be on the other end of that email saying like you’re not crazy. That’s a weird situation. Here’s what I would do. That’s what I’m actually able to provide.

Because I can’t really provide — I’m not reading their writing. I can’t provide great writing advice, but I can just — how to get through that day advice.

Aline: My young people, I often say to them, because a lot of times they’re wondering is this a real guy. Somebody wants to option my script or meet with me, is this a real person, you know?

John: You have a radar for that. So, one of my mentees emailed to ask, “I turned in my script and now they’re asking me to send in the continuity. I don’t know what that is.” What do you think they meant by the continuity?

Craig: So, I’m sorry, they sent in their script and they’re also asking for continuity? I would imagine that that would be just a list of scenes. No?

John: They meant the FDX file. They meant the original file rather than the PDF.

Craig: That’s the stupidest —

John: It’s so stupid. So, I emailed back saying like I don’t know. That’s actually not really a thing. That’s not a thing we provide.

Craig: No, continuity like in post-production is the list of scenes.

John: Yes, the list of scenes.

Aline: Well, that’s a great, another thing —

Craig: Who are those people?

John: And so I said I think they probably don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, A.

Craig: So scary to me that —

Aline: Let’s not work with them.

John: No.

Craig: By the way, that’s what I would have said. You’ve got to pull this project. They literally are dumb. I feel really bad for those people if they listen and love and they’re like, what, it’s just a vocabulary term.

Aline: When you’re coming up you don’t know whether you can say, “What is that?”

John: Exactly. And so I gave him permission to ask.

Aline: Right? The most freeing thing about having tons of experience is the number of times you get to say, “I’m sorry, what? What do you mean?”

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know is a great answer.

Aline: I don’t know is a wonderful thing. But when you’re young you don’t want to be walking around saying I don’t know. So, it’s great to have someone email and say, “Is this a thing?’

John: [laughs] It’s like the answer is no. It’s not a thing. It’s not a thing we provide, so ask them if they want the FDX file because it’s probably what they mean. Because probably they want to do a breakdown on the budget and so they really wanted that thing that they could feed into.

Craig: That is so weird.

John: They just wanted to use a fancy word for it. That’s crazy.

Aline: Are they from a foreign country?

John: They’re not from a foreign country. They’re from a big American country.

Craig: A big American country?

Aline: Wowser.

John: Yeah, one of two North American countries. They’re one of those two.

Craig: They’re from one of the two North American countries.

John: It’s time for One Cool Things.

Aline: Time has flown.

John: Craig, you start.

Craig: Yeah, you know what? I don’t have one. I mean, look, this has been a very long podcast. Nobody wants to hear my One Cool Thing this week. I do. I have five. I have 12 One Cool Things. I have 12 Cool Things, but I don’t feel like sharing any of them.

John: I have Two Cool Things. I have two movies that people can watch on iTunes or on-demand. First is David Wain’s They Came Together. David Wain was a guest on our podcast and his movie I saw on iTunes on Friday. It was delightful.

Craig: I’m going to iTunes that tonight.

John: You should. Absolutely. Because the things he talked about on our show —

Aline: iTunes the hell out of it. Don’t just iTunes it.

Craig: I’m going to iTunes it twice.

John: If you haven’t listened to the podcast, watch the movie then listen to the podcast, or reverse order. But he talked in the podcast about sort of the wraparound scenes they shot. And it’s so hard to imagine that movie without them. So, it was a great movie to watch.

Also, another movie, Mutual Friends, by Matthew Watts and Amy Higgins is also on iTunes starting this week. Matt and Amy had this idea where they were living in New York and they had a bunch of sort of screenwriter friends, like film school friends, and they said what if each of us wrote a little short film and the only rule is that everyone has to be headed towards one birthday party of this guy. So, they gave that guy a name. And basically it’s a whole bunch of little short stories that all lead up to one place.

And so everyone wrote their pieces and then they sort of stitched it all together in an Altman-esque way that ends up at one birthday party.

Aline: Oh cool.

John: So, it’s a great example of I think sort of a good film school idea, a great kind of first film way of doing it. And it turned out nicely. And it’s on iTunes now for you to watch.

Aline: Well I’m about to change some lives with my One Cool Thing.

John: Go for it.

Craig: Oh, boy, here we go.

Aline: What am I holding here?

Craig: That’s an iPhone purse?

John: Purse kind of thing.

Craig: What the hell is that?

Aline: This has changed my life. And every time I wear this people sprint across the room to find out where I got it and how they can get it.

Craig: Notice that neither John nor I even noticed you had it.

Aline: No, this is a lady thing primarily.

John: Can you describe it?

Aline: Please describe it.

John: So, I see her iPhone and it is sort of a gold case. And at the bottom of the case where it would plug in at the bottom there are in fact two hooks that go to a gold strap.

Craig: Like a purse strap.

John: Like a purse strap. And so now she’s stringing it over her body like a Bandolier.

Craig: So it’s like the iPhone becomes the purse body.

Aline: Yes so here’s the thing. You’re always clutching your phone in your hand, especially as a mom. You’re always clutching your phone in your hand. This is a very slim case that goes right around the phone, so there’s not a lot of case-y-ness to it. And you don’t have to pull the phone in and out of a little big. It’s basically a sling for the phone. Goes over one arm. It’s called Bandolier. It’s called a Bandolier and the website is Bandolier Style.

Craig: By the way, the Bandoliers, those were the things that held the bullets. Weren’t those the things that held the bullets?

John: Yeah.

Aline: You don’t have to take this in and out of your purse. You just wear this all the time. In fact, I was in a production meeting yesterday and the woman said I was trying to figure out why you were wearing your purse the whole time. And then she saw it and then she said where can I get that. I have given this to so many people. It’s mostly a lady thing.

It’s basically an iPhone sling. And I have the gold and I have the snakeskin. There are ones with studs on them. There are many colors. Bandolier Style.

Craig: Oh, there’s ones with studs on them? Oh, then now I am going to get one.

John: Yeah, John Gatins would get the one.

Aline: He would get the most bling’d one out.

Craig: He would get the rhinestone number.

Aline: It’s life-changing. I’ve changed lives. Lives.

John: And so I see in the back that there’s actually a slot for credit cards, too. So, you could use that in lieu of —

Aline: And you know what this is particularly good for?

Craig: What’s that?

Aline: Room key.

Craig: Ooh…

John: Ah!

Craig: But doesn’t have your room key against your phone erase the room key?

Aline: Ah-ha, yeah, that can be an issue. But it didn’t, we just went on vacation and it didn’t do it.

Craig: It didn’t do it? I feel like the room key science has gotten better. That they know now to not —

Aline: Ugh, the room key used to be such a crapshoot.

Craig: The worst. Like you’d put it anywhere near anything.

Aline: Yeah. True. But this is really good for — you know, this is also for the ladies who want to go to the night club. Put a couple bills, your ID, and your credit card, and have your iPhone, and then you’re not schlepping a big purse. This is also great when you’re in production because your phone is on you at all times. If someone emails you it’s not stuck in your purse.

Craig: And you don’t have a pocket for instance?

Aline: Women don’t put their phones in their pockets.

Craig: Now what is that?

Aline: Because it messes up the line of your pants.

John: Yeah. Makes sense.

Craig: Messes up the line for pants?

Aline: Women don’t put wallets, keys, coins, or phones in their pockets.

John: Their pants are slimmer, and so it creates this weird bulge. And it’s like well what’s wrong with your body?

Aline: You don’t want bulges.

Craig: You don’t want bulges?

Aline: No, you want no bulges.

Craig: Because you think that men don’t want bulges?

Aline: No, you don’t want lines or bulges. It messes up your line.

Craig: But why? I don’t care about bulges.

Aline: Because of your aesthetics. Aesthetics. Aesthetics. Aesthetics.

Craig: I’m just trying to tell you as a straight man the aesthetics that we’re looking for don’t really get disrupted by —

Aline: You don’t want a girl with like weird bulgy things in her pants.

Craig: You’d be correct. You don’t understand what I’m looking for.

John: Craig’s eyes never go below the navel.

Aline: Here is what I’m going to say to you. Next time you see a hot girl, check for bulges.

Craig: No, but my point is I wouldn’t. You see, the next time you see a hot girl, you could have just ended it period.

Aline: She won’t have budges.

Craig: You could have just ended it.

Aline: She won’t have bulges. The Venn Diagram of people who have bulges and hot girls do not overlap. Although I do have friends who can pull off the — you know, there’s a certain Tom Boy thing that certain girls can do. And that allows them to do. But I can guarantee you I have never put my wallet in my pocket.

Craig: Sexy Craig doesn’t mind a girl with a bulge. Sexy Craig is adventurous. Hey.

Aline: A girl with a bulge.

Craig: I’ve noticed you’ve got something bulging there. Take it out. [laughs] Take it out. Sexy Craig wants to see it.

John: And that’s our show this week. If you’d like to leave us a comment on iTunes, we love those comments. You can find us just by searching for Scriptnotes on iTunes. While you’re there you can also look for the iPhone app so you can listen to all the back episodes through there. We also have an Android app if you’re on an Android device.

We also have a new batch of our little USB drives that have all the back episodes on them. So, the first batch only had the first 100 episodes, but now we have 150 episodes.

Aline: I want to listen to them, but you know what happens?

John: What happens?

Aline: I procrastinate.

John: Ah, it happens. You have to listen to podcasts while you’re doing household chores. That’s the best time by far to do it.

Aline: This is really the only podcast I listen to. I tried.

John: You tried other ones?

Aline: I tried. I’m like Craig. I tried like Craig.

Craig: I don’t understand podcasts.

Aline: I’m rather monogamous. I’ve tried.

Craig: I’m somebody that provides things for people that I don’t understand.

John: Slate mentioned us again today.

Craig: Oh, they did?

John: The Slate Gabfest. They were talking about the David Wain episode.

Craig: Oh great.

John: Yeah. That was lovely.

Craig: I wonder if we can get Sexy Craig on their show.

Aline: Sexy Craig also sings.

Craig: No, that’s Singing Craig.

Aline: Oh, singing Craig.

Craig: That’s totally different. And then there’s Segue Johnny. You’ve got to keep these characters straight. There’s a lot of different ones.

John: On the topic of segues —

Aline: I like Hard Cut Johnny, by the way. Hard Cut Johnny I like.

Craig: Oh, Hard Cut Johnny shows up all the time.

Aline: And Hard Cut Johnny has a huge bulge.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: Hard Cut Johnny will smash his beer bottle and shove it in your face. [laughs]

Craig: Yeah, Hard Cut Johnny doesn’t respect life. He’s got no time.

John: If you have a question for me or for Craig, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Aline Brosh McKenna is not on Twitter.

Aline: I’m not a tweeter.

John: You’re not on Instagram either? You’re just not?

Aline: Not really.

Craig: Can we visit your Pinterest?

Aline: [laughs] You cannot. I did not sign up for that one.

John: Oh, it’s fine.

Aline: I know it’s a real girlie thing but I don’t have one.

Craig: What is your MySpace page?

Aline: You can leave it in chalk on my cave wall.

Craig: Yes.

John: If you have a longer question or a question that you have to get to Aline Brosh McKenna, I guess, you could write to ask@johnaugust.com which is a great place where those longer questions would be. And, let’s see, we talked about subscriptions.

Oh, also we should say if people wanted to listen all the back episodes you can go to scriptnotes.net. That’s where we have all the back catalog for $1.99 a month. You can get access to all those things.

Our podcast is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you for all your hard work on that. And that’s our show this week. Bye.

Aline: Bye.

Craig: Bye.

Links:

• Aline Brosh McKenna on episodes 60, 76, 100, 101 119, 123 and 124
• Justin Timberlake joins the Five-Timers Club
• Scriptnotes, Episode 131: Procrastination and Pageorexia
• Why Procrastinators Procrastinate and How to Beat Procrastination by Tim Urban
• airbnb
• Scriptnotes, Episode 99: Psychotherapy for screenwriters
• Freedom blocks digital distractions
• Deadline on Aline’s Showtime pilot pickup
• They Came Together and Mutual Friends are available now on iTunes
• Bandolier hands free crossbody iPhone accessory
• Slate Culture Gabfest “Grief Sandwich” Edition
• Outro by Scriptnotes listener JT Butler (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/falling-back-in-love-with-your-script).

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

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

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

Craig, I’m going to try to speak a little bit more slowly and distinctly this week because I don’t know if you listened to the live show, the Crossover Episode we did, but I was speaking about 10 billion miles per hour. I could barely understand myself speaking and I’m not sure what it was. I think that someone may have put speed in my water. It was crazy. I was a crazy person.

**Craig:** Well, there was one point where you said something and you’ll hear me say, “What?” And then you repeated it and it still took me a second to figure out what you were saying. I think you get amped up when you’re in front of a live crowd.

**John:** It’s the live crowd that does it and we’re going to have another chance to see me in front of a live crowd on May 15th. We’re selling tickets for our big live show, our Summer Superhero Spectacular with amazing guests. So those tickets went on sale last Thursday. And as we’re recording this there are still tickets available. There’s also tickets for a cocktail party. So please come join us for that if you’d like to. There’s a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** And we saw an email from our friend Christopher at the Writers Guild Foundation. He said that we sold, I think, something like nearly half of our tickets in the first hour.

**John:** Which is pretty darn good.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just reiterating that you and I, what are we, John?

**John:** Are we like a big deal? Are we…?

**Craig:** We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of screenwriting podcasts.

**John:** Oh, okay. I can’t believe I forgot our tagline. Well, here is why I always forget the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts is because it’s something you believe. It’s a thing I don’t really understand, but maybe that’s what makes this all work.

The other thing we’re going to be doing at the live show is a Three Page Challenge live with people who’ve sent in their scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, we’re going to do it differently and we’re not quite sure how we’re going to do it but I know it’s not going to be a thing where you email Stuart your script and then he has to read them all and picks them. It’s going to be something more like there’s going to be a page you can go to. You’re going to click submit. You’re going to attach your script and hopefully even people will vote on which projects are going to be part of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Okay. So a question for you then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let me play the role of listener.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I have submitted a Three Page Challenge to the big festering Stuart pile. Should I resubmit to this new thing to get a chance at being picked for the live event?

**John:** Yes. So I will say that you should not send again to Stuart. You shouldn’t send to that normal address because that is not for the live show. For the live show there will be a special application process only for people who are going to come to the live show themselves.

**Craig:** Ah-ha, there’s the qualifier.

**John:** So if you have submitted previously and you’re coming to the live show, by all means you would submit again. But if you are not coming to the live show, then you should not submit to this thing because it’s a different thing.

**Craig:** Right. And we need you to be there. The whole point is that you sit in a chair, an actual hot seat. It won’t be hot until you sit in it.

**John:** Well, we are going to do our live guests first so they could be warmed up. You could be sitting in the chair that David Goyer sat in or that Christopher Markus or Stephen McFeely.

**Craig:** Have you spent any time with any of those gentlemen?

**John:** [laughs] I spend time with all those gentlemen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I like them.

**Craig:** I like them, too. But they’re not going to put out any kind serious heat, not the kind of heat that comes from being the focus of the Three Page Challenge.

**John:** I would take that headline to be “David Goyer will not bring the heat.” That’s I think your prediction.

**Craig:** David Goyer, cold butt.

**John:** [laughs] I think David Goyer’s ass is the least of your concerns. If you are going to come to a Three Page Challenge on Scriptnotes you are going to submit by some process. We will announce next week on the show about how that’s going to be because we’re still figuring this out. But I think it’s going to be a good fun time.

**Craig:** You know the coolest thing about Goyer is that he’s all tatted up. He’s all sleeved up. So the funny thing is David is like — he’s like a mythological creature, like a griffin or something, the body of this and the head of that. He’s got the head of an accountant and the arms of a guy that works in a carnival.

**John:** Yeah. You would think that David Goyer wrote Sons of Anarchy. I mean, when you see his arms, you’re like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, he clearly writes on Sons of Anarchy. But no.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He writes superhero movies.

**Craig:** He’s got Sons of Anarchy arms and 1980s sitcom writing staff head.

**John:** It’s the male equivalent of like a head for business and a body for sin.

**Craig:** That’s right. Party in the back and business, whatever.

**John:** Speaking of ‘of.’

**Craig:** Of ‘of.’

**John:** Of, speaking of ‘of,’ speaking of prepositions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I’m going to transition to talking about the other thing I just did in that WGA Theatre which was a live panel with Kelly Marcel, Linda Woolverton and Scott Neustadter which was great. So we did that on Saturday. And if you want to listen to that, it’s not really a Scriptnotes episode. So when we have these kind of bonus things that sort of they’re like a Scriptnotes but they’re not really a Scriptnotes. We put them up on the app. So if you have the Scriptnotes app or if you go to Scriptnotes.net, you can listen to that episode. So that’s for people who are the premium subscribers who want to listen to all the back episodes.

Every once in a while there is some bonus content. This is one of those every once in a while bonus content things.

**Craig:** That right there is reason that people — how much does it cost for the premium thing?

**John:** $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** Okay, I mean, so for 2 bucks a month, you get access to something like that. I mean, that’s a great line up of writers. Kind of a no brainer.

**John:** So if you want to listen to that, you can find it on the Scriptnotes app. You can find it in your app store for both the iOS and for Android. So, Craig, today, you’ve brought a topic and I’m so excited about your topic because I think it’s a perfect thing for us to talk about on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was thinking about this idea and sort of keyed off of something that you were suggesting that we’re also going to get to later, a little bit of the conundrum of how you get started on things. But as I was thinking about that I thought, you know, it’s so common that when we do finally figure out what it is that we want to write, it’s so exciting because it’s new. And we are full of this passion and energy to tackle something new. The sky is the limit. The possibilities are endless. It’s all quite fresh and compelling.

But at some point along the way, whether it’s in the middle of writing the script or as you’re beginning to actually create your draft, or if you’re on your 12th rewrite you’re going to lose that spark. A little bit like being married. You got to kind of tend to it or else these things can fade.

So I wanted to talk a little bit today about some practical tips for staying in love with the thing you’re writing.

**John:** That’s an amazing topic because actually Kelly Marcel and I were talking about that in front of the live panel, because there was literally a dinner I was at with Kelly where just in the process of describing this rewrite I was doing, I did kind of fall back in love with it. And it wasn’t until I actually spoke aloud what I was hoping to do and sort of saw her enthusiasm that suddenly like I wanted to get back to it. So let’s talk through some strategies there or do you want to start with sort of why you fall out of love with things.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s natural. It’s only human. We can’t stay at some sort of pitched level of passion with something. We’ll burn out. Our brains are, you know, it’s literally neurological. For instance, if somebody plays a tone, a pure tone at a set frequency, it will start to fade in volume to you because our brains are designed to pick up changes in things. Steady, fixed, unchanging input starts to become noise.

It begins to disappear to us. And similarly, the passion that we have is a result of something changing in our minds, we found a new thing. But eventually, because it’s kind of in a fixed state, all that adrenalin will go away and the passion will go away and the excitement will go away because it’s just like a pure tone in our head and we’re kind of attenuating.

**John:** Well, as you started a project, that project was new and exciting and all those notes were new. Like, it was the first time you were hearing it. It’s like, this is so exciting. But then as you keep going, you’re working. You’re just doing work. And it’s changed from being that pure tone to being — you recognize all the flaws in it and it’s just not new to you anymore.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s fundamentally, of course, it’s that way because you’re looking at the same thing on the page again. So it becomes very hard to, you know, if you’re going back for a rewrite, well, I have what’s there. It’s there. And sometimes you’re going to mess with it because you’re going to mess with it because you want to change things. But also, it’s not new or exciting. It’s not that shining white in the distance.

**Craig:** Which, again, analogizes quite well to a marriage because over time anybody, any two people that could somehow live in this vibrant state of new love or infatuation or something, if they were to stay like that after 20 years, we would have to lock them up. Something would be seriously wrong with them. They would be inhuman. It is only natural to start to become accustomed to certain things, but there is a great reward in looking past a kind of superficial, you know, “I’m used to this,” and reconnect with the thing that mattered.

And what you just described when you were talking to Kelly and she was reflecting back this kind of excitement to you that you maybe had lost is exactly my first tip which is to bring in a third party. Not to extend that to marriage but, I mean, I guess for some people that works. I’ve certainly asked and got nowhere. I don’t know if you’ve ever bothered asking. I’ve asked. It’s amazing how fast the no comes on that one.

So bring in a third party. Of course you’re bored with the thing, with the story you’ve told yourself a billion times silently. But when you start to tell it to somebody else a couple of magical things happen. One, you start to see them getting excited and that re-excites you. And the other thing is that simply by saying it out loud you will start to fire all those nerves again in your head that made you excited about it the first time. You’ll start to feel the drama inherent to it. It won’t feel old. It will feel new again.

So if you started to fall out of love with what you’re doing, sit down with a friend and by the way I would recommend a good positive friend. Like Kelly is great because she has, I think, a natural enthusiasm for narrative. There are writers who are frankly a little bitter or a little judgy. And if you start to talk to them, what you might get reflected back is all of their weirdness. Now, granted sometimes people just don’t like it, but then there are other times when people are just weird. And so you want to find somebody that you trust and who’s enthusiastic and passionate and talk to them about your idea, just start telling the story. Just say, “I want five minutes to just tell you something.” And see if that doesn’t kind of relight your fire.

**John:** Two things that come to mind with this. First off we’ve talked about how when you’re making a comedy and you’re editing a comedy, so often you’re like, “I have no idea what’s funny anymore because I’ve seen the same joke in the editor about 50 times.” But then you show it to an audience and people start laughing, you’re like, “Oh, that’s actually funny.” And this is really the small version of that, by stating your idea out loud, by talking about your thing, you’re actually getting this engagement going and realizing, oh, that thing, it actually does have some worth. People like it.

**Craig:** That’s right. And what you’re describing, that syndrome of rediscovering that a joke works because you’re showing it to people that haven’t heard it 20 times but have never heard it, I’m kind of putting that under the tip of save your babies. We’ve all heard kill your babies and we understand that it’s important to guard against self-indulgence and not to presume that just because you imbue significance into a piece of your story that the audience will. But it’s just as important to safeguard against the opposite which is to just get tired of the things that you once loved and thus just start mutating them or eliminating them without giving other people a chance to experience them for the first time.

**John:** Yeah, this is the criticism we often make of development executives is they’re reading the same kinds of drafts again and again and they get bored with things because they saw before so they’re always looking for, like, “Well, we don’t need that anymore,” because like they’re used to it. To their eyes, we can cut that. You can kill that because we don’t need it.

Well, you actually did need it. You just don’t remember why you needed it. You don’t remember what it felt like that first time you read the script. And so , yeah, again, fresh eyes are so helpful.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** A thing I wanted to say about sort of bringing in a friend, a positive friend to see it is often you’re probably going to take, hopefully, you have good writer friends and we all know that there are some writers who are positive and cheerleading and there are some writers who can be super negative. But there’s that middle ground where you need to sometimes just say upfront to the writer, “Look, can you read this for me and like I don’t want sort of all the notes and criticisms. I sort of just mostly want to talk about the things I’m excited to do next.”

Because people can do that. I know I can do that and I can ask a lot of times if somebody is giving me a script to read, “Hey, do you want like the typos and the things that are logic errors and all this or do you want me to tell you that it’s awesome and why it’s awesome?” And that’s fine. That’s absolutely a valid way to approach reading a script just saying like, I’m excited to tell this person why their script is great.

**Craig:** Yeah, when you give something to someone, it’s fair to give them the context. Say, “Okay, well, look, I’m looking for help on this. I’m looking actually for you to tell me, okay, what’s working and what’s not working,” or “I’m giving this just so that you can see what I’m doing now.” And it also good to say to somebody, “Look, I kind of need a boost. Can you read this and sort of pick me up?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s all great. I think that when someone is telling me something that they’re doing, not showing me a screenplay but just telling me, my default is to be encouraging.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** My default is that I just don’t see the point frankly in saying, “Well, I don’t think that’s going to be very good.” Based on what? Based on your weird, negative suspicion that they are either going to muff it or that what they’re describing isn’t really as good as they think or anything like that. I just feel like, you know, my attitude is anything can be done well by someone. And so if somebody tells me something and it’s yet to be in fixed form, I want to just love it and I want to kind of encourage them because that’s what we need.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Another tip. It’s sort of an obvious one, and again, we have to be a little careful about not overdosing on our medication, but taking a break can do wonders. Sometimes when you fall out of love or lose that spark or that passion, you just need a break. You need a couple of days. Maybe you need a week. It’s okay.

**John:** Yeah, my husband and I, we take vacations away from each other once a year and it’s a very good idea, because if you’re just with the same people having the same conversations every day, you take them for granted. And so then, if he’s gone for a week, all those conversations stack up and it’s actually really nice to have those conversations again.

So the same with your script, sometimes you need to take, just set it aside, come back to it. Usually, we say that in the context of you set your script aside so you can see all the flaws. But maybe you’ll set the script aside and come back and like remember, “Oh, these are the things that are actually terrific about it.”

**Craig:** Exactly true. My wife and I have always had a good balance of together/apart. That we can find ways to give each other a ton of space and independence. But then when you do come together and you have those moments or sometimes for us it’s the break is just being together but in a different place alone. You’re just recontextualizing things.

And sometimes when you’ve lost the spark, just go write somewhere else and I will tell you there is nothing wrong with indulging in the romantic fantasy of the writer in the cafe if you’re not normally that person. There’s nothing wrong with going to write on the beach. There’s nothing wrong with going to write in your backyard or on the front lawn or anywhere that makes you feel like a writer and gets you excited again. It’s totally cool. Think of that as the equivalent of porn. [laughs]

**John:** Well, I think what you’re bringing up though is it may not be that you have fallen out of love with the script, but you’re just actually sick of writing. You’re sick of your process of getting the words down on the page. And so it may not have anything to do with this particular project, it may just be because it’s actually a drudge to sit down at your desk and write your thing. So maybe working somewhere else for awhile will get you excited again.

**Craig:** Yeah, the process itself can make everything seem drab and humdrum, so see if you can shake it up either with a break or a recontextualization. Another tip is if you’re working on something and you’ve lost your passion and connection with it, watch something or read something that is related, either related thematically or in terms of the setting of the movie or the kind of movie. And allow yourself to admire what they did right, but also notice what you think you’re doing better.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you realize, hey, this girl I brought to the dance, she ain’t that bad kind of thing. She’s okay.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. On this podcast we talk about the plus-one problem, or sort of crap-plus-one, which is like it’s a dangerous habit of watching something terrible and saying, like, “Well, I’m not as bad as that thing is.” And so we’re not saying to do that all the time but it’s a useful practice when you start to doubt yourself is to look around you and see like, well, what else is out there. And sometimes you’ll be inspired because, like, “Ah, I can do what that thing did and I can be that great kind of movie,” or “I know I’m doing better than this. And I’m going to just keep pushing the bar forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it also gives you a sense of where your movie will exist in a continuum of movies like it or stories like it and you can go, “You know what? What I’m doing is interesting and unique. It is like these things but different than these things. I can see where it will fit.” It starts to make it realer for you again and it gets you off your butt.

**John:** So a related suggestion which is something that I often bring up when I talk to writers at the Sundance Labs because they’ve usually been working on their project for a long time, and sometimes they’re brains are just frozen, especially if they’ve had like three days of detailed meetings with other writers. They just can’t think anymore.

So an exercise I’ll do is I’ll say, “Okay, I know you’ve written this charming, quirky comedy, but let’s imagine this is a thriller. What would this be like as a thriller? And what would this feel like if it were a thriller?” And we just walk through, like, the kinds of things that would happen if this movie were a thriller rather than comedy. And they’re like, “Okay, now it is a historic tragedy. Let’s talk through that.” And just by not forcing yourself to think of your movie in the way it exists now but like under wildly different things, it can sometimes just un-stick you a little bit and get you thinking about it in a different way. And even if it doesn’t give you an actual actionable idea, it can just sort of free you up a little bit and it gets you more excited about digging back in on the thing you actually wrote.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly true. And there’s another thing that I think concentrating on that early spark can do for you even if it has faded. We may lose a little bit of the heat and maybe you’ll never recapture that first exciting bit of like, “Oh, my god, I’ve got this great idea and suddenly I’m flooded with ideas and flooded with characters and dialogue bits,” and it’s not yet real so you’re not beholden to anything that’s kind of like boring and every day like how to make a structure and what scene comes now, right? We may never get back that, but don’t forget that early stuff because in those early bursts you will see the things that matter the most at the end.

When you’re done with the process, it’s the stuff that got you excited in the first place that is the core of why you’re doing this and the core of what must be protected and expressed in your screenplay and dollars to doughnuts it’ll be the thing that the audience responds to as well. And it all happens in that first big bang explosion.

**John:** Yeah. One of the things I sometimes do early on in the process but I think it’s also great for sort of falling back in love with it is to write the trailer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s really, just imagine like what is that trailer for the movie I have made and what is the coolest version of that? And how are you going to market this movie? And if the answer is like, no, there’s no way to do it, then maybe that’s a problem. But more likely there are some really cool moments that you have in your script that could make the cool trailer. Imagine that trailer because that is ultimately what someone else is going to be intrigued by.

And so, it’s kind of dressing up your movie to be sort of unrealistically attractive at a distance. And so, what does that look like? What does that trailer look like? That can be a useful way of sort of getting back into it.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah, I do the same thing. I think that when we have an initial burst of passion about a movie, at least I do the same thing you do. I start to imagine what the trailer will be like. I mean, I don’t see it clearly but I can see things happening in bits of stuff exploding and so on and so forth. And that is not unlike what happens when we first meet somebody and we start to like fantasize where it all goes, and now we’re old and our grandchildren gather around us. It’s all a normal part of kind of falling in love with the idea.

And so, on the one hand, you could sort of write it off as this irrational exuberance, to cite Alan Greenspan, but on the other hand there is something of great value in that that you shouldn’t forget even if it detaches itself from the emotional rush and all the things that it does to your limbic system. There is intellectual value in there too. There is stuff that dramatically, I think, you’re going to want to keep sight of.

And lastly, I would say for people that have fallen into a little bit of a loveless rut with the idea that they once loved, just understand it’s normal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It happens to everybody. And it doesn’t mean you don’t love it anymore. It just means that you’re going through this sort of a natural maturation of feeling for this thing and don’t freak out.

**John:** Yeah, I think we all know couples who are so intensely like crazy Romeo and Juliet in love with each other. And then they, but of course they don’t die, and so they stay together for awhile. But then like when it’s not Romeo and Juliet and everything is not turned to 11, they break up because, like we just lost the passion. It’s like, well, yeah, or maybe you just actually kind of matured a little bit or maybe, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t stay together but I’m also saying like you kind of bailed on it because it wasn’t like it was in the first week and, well, of course, it wasn’t like it was in the first week.

**Craig:** Right, what could stay that way?

**John:** Exactly, like, you would self-destruct, spin apart like a centrifuge. So I agree, it’s a natural part of the process and I think on the show we’ve talked about there are a lot of things that are just truths that you kind of only can really understand when you’ve lived them, which is that the first cut of your movie you will want to kill yourself because it will be awful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Every set of notes will have one thing that’s just crazy, and like a crazy idea that will destroy your entire movie. Those are just givens. Those are going to happen. And this is another given is that like you’re going to hit a part of the process where you just don’t love it anymore and you don’t love this thing that you’ve made and that’s natural. And you’ve just got to push through it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that you actually still do love it, it’s just that you’re not obsessed with it. You’re not infatuated with it. You’re not overwhelmed by all the things that ping around in our heads when we first conceive of something and we get like a real head of steam. But you want to really love your idea, write it well with discipline and, you know what I mean, and care and all the rest.

**John:** So while we’re talking about creative marriages breaking up, the other thing that breaks up creative marriages is the outside force. And so in real life marriages it’s the other woman, but in creative marriages between you and your script, it’s that other idea.

**Craig:** It’s kind of heteronormative of you by the way.

**John:** I know. It is. It’s that other, I don’t that I used any girl terms in that, did I?

**Craig:** Yeah, you said the other woman.

**John:** I did say the other woman, yeah.

**Craig:** You are being heteronormative.

**John:** I’m sorry I —

**Craig:** And on behalf of the LGBTQ community —

**John:** [laughs] I’m so apologetic to have used it. Actually, I have a lesbian relationship with my script so that is the other woman out there.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s just everything about that, I just want to do a podcast about that, about your lesbian relationship with your script.

**John:** Oh, by the way, I played Gone Home which is —

**Craig:** Oh, so great, right?

**John:** So great. And it’s so related to that topic for reasons we won’t spoil.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** That other idea that’s out there seems so provocative for the same reason that a fling/cheating on your spouse seems so great because you’re only seeing what the possibilities are there. You’re only seeing the great stuff and you’re not seeing all the bad stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you’re so familiar with your spouse or you script that you know all their flaws, you know all the ways that they’re not perfect, and you know sort of, ah, the things that drive you crazy about them. That other thing out there is bright and shiny and new and flawless as far as you know.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, of course, there’s a natural instinct to pursue that. And there are times where, yes, you know what, maybe you have done everything you can to make this one thing work and you’re going to move on. I guess, that does sort of fall apart here because we are sort of serial monogamists, I guess, when it comes to writing screenplays.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But there’s times where, like, yes, you should be done writing that script and you should go pursue that other great idea. But a lot of times that great idea, take a note of it, remember it, but stay working on your main project.

**Craig:** That’s right. I mean, listen, there are bad marriages. There are some marriages that just deserve to stop. And there are times when you’re not simply falling out of excitement with your screenplay. You’re looking at it and you’re thinking, I don’t like you at all. I’m getting nothing from you. I don’t want you to be in my life anymore.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ideally, that doesn’t happen too often. Ideally, you develop your instincts to a point where you don’t begin the marriage of yourself to a script until you know it’s going to be okay. But you’re right. When these other things pop up, go ahead and look all you want and really noodle on some index cards and put it off to the side and just understand that when, yeah, like our screenplays are basically like spouses that keep dying on us.

But like you stay married until they croak and then you turn to the next one. But there are people who I think flip from project to project because… — We had somebody ask us a question at the Nerdist crossover that sort of keyed this for me. You know, like I have seven different things going on and I think a lot of that has to do with being distracted by the new man or woman or transgender or a gender non-specific —

**John:** Just say person.

**Craig:** Non-specific gender.

**John:** Person.

**Craig:** I’m really trying man.

**John:** You’re trying.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m trying. Look, I think, at least one of us is trying. That’s for sure.

**John:** Ah-ha, yes. Well, yeah, I guess it is essentially a fear of commitment. The reason why he’s not able to lock down and pick one of these things to write is because of the fear of commitment. And at the first big 100th live show I remember somebody asked the question , like, “Well, which of these things should I write?” and I said, “It’s the one with the best ending,” which was really another way of saying, “Write the project you think you are actually going to finish that you can see through to the end.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And that’s ultimately what a commitment is, is you’re going to commit to finishing the script and making it the best it can possibly be.

**Craig:** Yeah, because there are rewards for commitment. I mean, commitment isn’t a sexy thing. Sex is sexy. But the commitment gives you rewards that are, I think, they’re more substantive in a sense because you get to finish and you get to follow it through and then deliver it to other people. And it becomes meaningful to other people. No one will ever find any meaning or entertainment in the thing that you loved and then abandoned. No one.

**John:** Agreed. So let’s talk, let’s shift gears and talk about, that was sort of the middle of a relationship that we’re talking through. Let’s talk about the early part of a relationship, because there were two videos I saw recently that I thought were really great about capturing how you find your way into a script, which is really that beginning of that relationship, like how do I know how to even really begin here.

And the two videos are, one is by Tony Gilroy and one is by Michael Arndt. And they’re both on johnaugust.com and they’ll also be in the show notes. And they’re both great. And what I loved about them is they had very different approaches to how you get started on a script.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I want to start with Tony Gilroy, because Tony Gilroy who did the Bourne movies, he did Michael Clayton.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He’s just the best. I think he’s fantastic. So he was giving a talk for BAFTA and their little BAFTA screenwriter series. And on the two examples he gave, one was from Bourne and one was from Michael Clayton, he didn’t kind of know what the movies were but he wrote a scene. And he wrote a scene that essentially was the kind of scene he wanted to be in the movie. And it wasn’t until he wrote that scene that he had sense of like what it was that he was trying to write.

And so the case of Michael Clayton, it was a scene that I remembered but I don’t think of being the showcase number of the scene, of the movie, which was where George Clooney’s character goes to Denis O’Hare’s house and Denis O’Hare has just run over somebody. And Denis O’Hare is talking about what he wants Michael Clayton to do for him. And it’s a great scene but I wouldn’t necessarily know that it was the show stopper for me, but for Gilroy it set up what that movie was going to feel like to him.

**Craig:** Right. And similarly, he wrote a scene in Bourne where Jason Bourne expresses that he does not know who he is but he knows what he can do. And the things that he can do and the circumstances that are evident to him suggest that who he is is a dangerous person and possibly a bad person which I think is great.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a scene in a cafe where he talks through like, “I know where all the exits are.” And she goes, “Of course, you know where the exits are.” He’s like, “I know the numbers on all the license plates in the parking lot. I know the easiest ways to kill somebody.” Like he knows all these specific skills.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that to me really is the Bourne movie. It’s such a great encapsulation of who that character is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s hard for me to imagine that whole Bourne franchise existing without some version of that scene.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. And what I loved about what Tony was saying was that where he starts, the kernel, the thing that kicks off the explosion could be something that he observes or reads or sees or thinks. But how he knows it’s a movie and how he understands that he can write the movie is by thinking about character and what is fascinating about this character in a way that is resonant to anyone who understands or is interested in human behavior.

And for Bourne, it makes complete sense. The movie will be on one level about a guy who has amnesia and is being hunted and has to fight and kill his way with his secret skills to survive and figure out how this happened to him.

But on another level, the reason that we like those movies and that we go to any movie is because it connects with something inherent in all of us, something universal. None of us have woken up one day not knowing who we are but being able to beat up two guys and shoot somebody dead from 500 yards.

What we identify with there is somebody who’s trying to figure out who they are in a world that’s only giving them circumstances, but not substance. That’s universal. So I loved what he had to say here because I thought that that’s something I try and do now more than ever is to key in on something at the heart of this character that is universal and has nothing in sense to do with the specifics of the story but has to do with their inquisition into their own lives or into the lives of others.

**John:** In both cases you have a lead character who is establishing who they are in their specific world and what they want. Because if you actually looked at the very start of Michael Clayton as a script, it actually doesn’t start with George Clooney’s character at all. It establishes sort of the plot franchise of basically what’s happening, the premise of what’s happening in the story. But that scene that he wrote is the first description of sort of what a fixer is. And so it’s basically telling whose character it is and what their job is. So this is Michael Clayton. This is what his job is. This is Jason Bourne and this is what his job is or at least what his skill set is.

And so it’s not necessarily establishing what the plot of the movie is going to be. It’s not the A plot of it but it’s the trajectory of this character in their world. So with George Clooney we have a character who is a fixer. He fixes people’s problems and very naturally he finds himself in problems that he can’t himself fix or has to find a fix for himself.

**Craig:** And therein is the movie, because in both circumstances Gilroy is giving us two superheroes, one of whom is legendary for being able to fix anything, and as the movie Michael Clayton bears out, does. And the other movie is about a guy who is perhaps the best assassin on the face of the planet. And yet, they are both deeply troubled and in these scenes where we find out who they are, all we’re hearing really is about their limitation.

What Bourne is saying is I know all these things but I don’t know who I am or why I am or what I’m supposed to be doing or even if I’m a good person or a bad person. And in the scene that Gilroy shows for Michael Clayton, what we’re seeing is Michael Clayton frankly being at a loss not sure what to do, being screamed at and showing us, revealing to us with a lack of dialogue how tormented he is frankly by his position.

**John:** Yeah, I think weirdly the video that we’re going to link to, they cut that little scene with Michael Clayton a little too short, because if I remember that scene correctly, I think after Denis O’Hare goes off on his long rant about what actually happens, I think Michael Clayton does sort of come back and say like, “This is what we’re going to do.” I think he is the one who had to say like, you know, you’re going to grow up and you’re going to do this and really talks him through. We see his competence.

I want to try and make this actionable though for other writers who aren’t Tony Gilroy, because if you’re Tony Gilroy, you already know how to do this. What I think the general take home from the Tony Gilroy advice here is you have your character. Your lead character start talking and is talking about their life. And you basically try to find that character’s voice and a way to articulate who that character is in a scene and doing that before, for Tony Gilroy, before anything else actually happens.

And I will say my own personal experience this has helped tremendously. So Go, my first movie, there were lots of little scenes that I wrote for that that had no movie around them. I basically wrote these little scenes and I sort of wanted a movie that could hold these scenes. That was useful. This thing I just turned in, I knew in general what kind of happened but 11:30 at night I got out of bed and just wrote, hand wrote a scene that is the first scene of this project because it was exactly a character talking through what her situation was —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And trying to figure something out. And in retrospect it was very Michael Claytony because she was talking about who she was and how things were changing and she wasn’t sure what she should do. So basically she was asking for advice, but in asking for advice she was telling us where she was and what her capabilities were.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you’re zeroing in on the advantages that this character holds because they are a hero and they will prevail so they must be there. In evidence this is not, we don’t learn these things somewhere down the line. Even The Karate Kid, he learns moves but he doesn’t learn courage. It’s there. But then we also connect that early on with what they’re missing.

**John:** Well, one thing I want to say about sort of in arguing for the Gilroy approach is that trying to write the scene before you’ve written anything else is I think it may be a good way to fall in love with your project. I think it may also be a good way to know, can I even write this? Like if you don’t have a clear enough idea of who the characters are that you could just write a scene where they’re talking about themselves, then maybe it’s not really the idea you’re going to be able to finish.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I can imagine there’s going to be lots of things that you’ve done all your cards and then you actually start to try to write a scene, you have no idea what these character sound like.

**Craig:** Right, you don’t have to — look, you have to write a scene with your character, but what you do have to love is your character. I think a lot of new screenwriters and some even screenwriters that I know, what they think about are the things that happen. And what I liked about Tony’s approach and I try and mirror it myself now more than ever is to think about the character because that’s all I care about. I think that’s all people care about in the end is the character.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he does such a good job of getting inside that and frankly he offers a warning, a fair warning to anyone out there considering being a screenwriter. If you do not feel that you are insightful, not just generally insightful, but particularly insightful about human behavior, this is not for you. It’s not going to work.

**John:** Yeah. He actually very specifically is saying that he doesn’t think you can teach anyone to be imaginative.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** We can teach, we can kill it and you can magnify it, but you can’t sort of teach it. And so if you are not inherently imaginative, there’s not a class for that. There’s not a way to sort of get there.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so if you weren’t a person who dreamed up stories beforehand, I don’t think anyone is going to get you there as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** Well, there are various ways to be imaginative and to express your imagination. Visual artists are remarkably imaginative in ways that I’m not. I know I’m not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But to be a screenwriter and to tell stories in television or movies about human beings or even about animals that are acting like human beings, you need to understand human behavior. It’s not enough to be able to paint a gorgeous pallet or to be an aesthete. You need to understand what makes people tick, and then you need to be able to create somebody that is as flawed as the people we meet every day, and fascinatingly so.

**John:** Well, speaking of flaws, I think it’s a great way to get to the second video which is by Michael Arndt. So this was something that was originally a bonus feature on a Blu-ray for Toy Story 3 and someone put it on YouTube. I found it. I asked Michael Arndt like, “Is it okay that I link to it?” He said, “Sure, go for it.”

It’s this video he did talking about how to set the story of Toy Story 3 in motion and sort of the struggles they had. And to me this very much felt like a case where maybe because it’s the Pixar way, they sort of had to figure out everything first before he was allowed to write it. And so it ended up being a very agonizing process to figure out what could happen to sort of get the story kicked into gear. Ultimately, it’s really about flaws and it’s finding what the nature of the flaws were in the relationships between these characters, what the fears were that could get them started.

So again, it is character-based but it wasn’t where he wrote one scene and that became the launching pad for the whole story. It was all very carefully considered on an outline level before he got to go off and write stuff.

**Craig:** I’ll be honest, I appreciated the video and I thought that everything he said was accurate but I didn’t love it because I thought it was missing a fundamental part that I also see in the Pixar movies, and that fundamental piece was theme. It was the sense of an individual’s personal philosophy. That seemed to be missing. He focused quite a bit on the idea of what an individual’s passion was.

But, Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Star Wars he’s not sort of joyously living each day through passion. Frankly, he’s sort of an aimless wanderer who just wonders if there’s something better out there. And while that story is fundamental, almost to the point of mythologically so, it’s still — there is a good theme resonating through it. So, for instance, he talks about Toy Story and doesn’t really get into what I think those movies are about and he expresses quite well that, listen, he wrote Toy Story 2. I don’t mean to say he doesn’t understand those movies. He clearly does. But when I watch Toy Story, I do see a character who, as Michael says, is his passion is being Andy’s favorite toy and that that passion is also connected to his flaw which is jealously guarding that position.

But what he’s not talking about is that the movie on a level beneath that is about an individual whose function is to serve as a friend and he does not know what it means to be a good friend.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that stuff, so I wanted more of that and it wasn’t there. I liked the video and again I thought there were a lot of great signposts along the way. But it did veer a little bit too much into the “here’s how you tell a story, do this, do this, do this.” Not all stories work that way.

**John:** Yeah, and he actually says at the end of the video like not all stories work this way. And in his email to me he did stress that like he was fairly happy with the video and yet it was created for this Blu-ray thing for sort of a very general-purpose audience. So it wasn’t as screenwritery as he would love it to be.

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

**John:** Yeah. So I think he understood those same flaws. What I think is a nice contrast though with Gilroy is that it wasn’t a case of, I write one brilliant scene and then I figure out the rest of the movie around it. Here, pretty much the Pixar process is you figure out the whole movie and then you start writing it. And some writers that works great for and other writers not so much.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Some people can really see the whole movie before that dialogue is written. We’ve all talked many times about James Cameron’s things which are scriptments and they’re very detailed outlines that don’t really have your dialogue in there and yet they really work. And so it’s entirely possible to do that. In my experience though, it’s not until I have those characters talking that I really genuinely believe that they can exist. And honestly, once I hear them talking, I may make some fundamentally different story decisions —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Because I now know who those characters are.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I mean, first of all, you can write a scriptment and you could be incredibly well prepared before you start writing a screenplay but you still need that moment, that genesis moment before you can do the scriptment, which is very much my, I mean, I don’t really do scriptments much.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I need a genesis moment. I mean this Cowboy Ninja Viking movie, so the graphic novel is about a man who is like a Jason Bourne kind of guy except he actually doesn’t do anything. He essentially has multiple personality disorder and these three characters in his head are the ones that do everything. And for me in just thinking about the idea when I went in to meet on it in the first place I said, “Here’s what I think the movie is. It’s not — this is a scene. It’s the beginning. It’s one scene but it informs what I want to talk about.”

And it’s a kid who’s a very scared little kid who gets beaten up and these friends come to his aid and they just destroy the people that hurt him. They hurt them very badly, in fact, one of them has to get pulled off this kid because he’s going to kill him. And then our little hero boy realizes he did it, but he doesn’t remember doing it. He just sees that there’s a knife in his hand and his knuckles are bloody. And he’s terrified.

And to me, I go, okay, I understand the movie now. I understand that this is a story about a guy whose heroes are his villains. And he’s not in control of the things he does and in fact there is something terrible in him that he simply fragmented away from himself and put in to other people and that needs to be resolved. The movie of course is an action movie where there’s villains and our heroes have to beat them up and stuff. But then I go, okay, I understand why I’m doing this.

**John:** Yeah. Now, so the Gilroy approach though, Gilroy would write a scene where the character, where your boy was saying that, saying some version, the best version of the boy saying that.

**Craig:** I don’t, to me, I’m not as reliant on dialogue specifically as Tony puts forth in his BAFTA speech because I think sometimes there are these incredibly evocative scenes that don’t have a word in them, but what I was able to do when I came in and met on that project the first time is describe that scene in detail because I had seen it in my head and if I felt like writing it, I could have written it. I just don’t like to write things and hand them before I have the job. But yes, I had it. I had that scene and then I wrote it and it’s there. It’s still there. We have these little scenes that somehow survive the thrasher and that’s always been there.

**John:** Yeah. Well, great. So we’ve talked about finding your way into a script, how to stay in love with your script, how to keep that, how to rekindle that spark and keep your passion for a script alive.

But let’s talk through our passion for things that we thought were One Cool Things and see if they are still One Cool Things.

**Craig:** To see if we’re still married to those One Cool Things.

**John:** Yes. So starting with Episode 35. Do you have the page open right now, Craig?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Do you have the page open?

**Craig:** [laughs] I didn’t realize there was going to be homework.

**John:** There’s homework.

**Craig:** I’m going to it. It’s johnaugust.com. And then I click on One Cool Thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay

**John:** If you go to that page along with Craig and do the work. If you scroll at the very bottom, we’ll go from the bottom to the top. So we started at Episode 35 with One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And Craig’s first One Cool Thing was the Franklin Ace 1000.

**Craig:** I’m staring at it right now.

**John:** Still cool?

**Craig:** The coolest.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing was the Musicnotes version of Jar of Hearts, basically, that you can — Musicnotes is a great service for downloading sheet music. I still use it probably once a week.

**Craig:** Fantastic. So far we’re good.

**John:** We’re good. You just want to quickly bang our way up the list?

**Craig:** We’ll just go yes or no.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So for me iScore, totally.

**John:** Old Jews Telling Jokes, no, I’m sick of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. 1Password, use it every day.

**John:** Ski Safari, not playing it anymore but it was a good game first time.

**Craig:** Will read your script fund raiser from Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang, I believe we might have save lives. Super cool.

**John:** Key Ring thing I still use. Basically, it puts all your bar codes under one little thing. It’s great.

**Craig:** [laughs] I had nothing for the next one?

**John:** You didn’t. I had the UC Verde Buffalo Grass which I’m looking at right now. It is great. It is a pain in the ass to get it growing but then it’s so low maintenance it’s wonderful.

**Craig:** My next was the trailer for the movie Flight which is awesome and John Gatins was nominated for an Oscar.

**John:** Yes. Stencyl, I’m not using it anymore but I think it’s still good. I know it’s still under active development. It is a game development tool for Mac and iOS devices.

**Craig:** My next one was MacBook Pro with Retina Display and that is my main ax.

**John:** New York City Subway by Embark, I still think it’s a terrific subway app.

**Craig:** The Baseball Codes, I’m still reading this book. It’s like I snack on this book all this time later. So, yeah, I guess, I still think it’s great.

**John:** Mine was ScanCafe which is the place where we sent off all our photos to get scanned. It’s fantastic. I strongly recommend ScanCafe or another service. Just, if you have a bunch of negatives, send them some place, get them scanned so you’ll actually have them and be able to look at them.

**Craig:** PB2 Peanut Butter Powder, I haven’t eaten that crap in a long time. [laughs]

**John:** The Cambridge Ivory Wirebound Notebook, it’s still good. It’s not my — I’m not using them daily though.

**Craig:** Audio Essentials, I don’t even know what that is.

**John:** Hooktheory was this book on how cord changes work and it’s actually still been incredibly useful and I’m doing a lot more stuff with key changes and it’s just been terrific.

**Craig:** E-cigarettes, boy, I was ahead of the curve on that one, huh?

**John:** Yeah, but you’re not smoking them anymore, are you?

**Craig:** Eh, occasionally.

**John:** Oh, there’s ambiguity in there.

**Craig:** Occasionally.

**John:** Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, this thing was a piece of crap. So it worked for about like two months, but then it eventually ran out of charge and a couple of months later I tried to charge it and it would just refuse to charge. And so it’s now in the recycling.

**Craig:** Oh, Nexus 7. Jiro Dreams of Sushi will forever be the coolest thing about sushi.

**John:** It’s a great, great documentary.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The World in Words podcast, I’m not listening to. I’m sorry I’m not listening to it. I’m not.

**Craig:** Inrix Traffic App, use it every day.

**John:** AquaNotes are the little things you can write on notes in the shower. I used it for a little while and then I’ve stopped using it. So I’m not sure it’s worth it.

**Craig:** We both did Jambox somehow, I don’t even know what that is.

**John:** Oh, Jambox was the speaker system, the little Bluetooth speaker system.

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

**John:** So I use them a lot. We use them all the time for just audio around the house. It’s great like you just take into the kitchen, plot it, listen to some podcasts, listen to some music. It’s great.

**Craig:** What do we do like a couple more so that we don’t — this will take hours.

**John:** This will take hours, so we’re going to stop at 60.

**Craig:** Okay, great. Okay.

**John:** So mine, well, the easiest one ever, the Los Angeles Public Library.

**Craig:** Is that still cool?

**John:** It’s still relatively cool, though my daughter has gotten through the stage where she reads like a thousand books. Instead she reads like thousand-page books. She just finished Harry Potter Five.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we don’t go there as often anymore.

**Craig:** Does she like Fablehaven books or that’s a little younger, I think, than your daughter.

**John:** That’s young for her.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see. My next one was the simplex algorithm which I still don’t understand. People have tried to explain to me. I’m useless.

**John:** Mine was the trailer for Derek Haas’s The Right Hand and the book itself. I remember the trailer. I didn’t read the book. I’m really sorry, Derek. I don’t know why I haven’t read the book.

**Craig:** Wow. You made it your cool thing and you didn’t even read it.

**John:** Mine for Episode 53 was Sleepwalk With Me which he end up being a guest on the podcast.

**Craig:** How prescient was that?

**John:** We’re smart.

**Craig:** Very smart. My next thing was The Words. I love that movie. I really do.

**John:** So I still haven’t seen the movie but I ran into the filmmaker and it turned out that that was actually one of the projects that was at Sundance a gazillion years ago.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** And so I knew him from there.

**Craig:** Which filmmaker was it? There’s two.

**John:** Really boisterous guy.

**Craig:** Was he short or was he tall?

**John:** Tall. Tall and thin.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s Klugman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, it was Jack Klugman’s nephew I think or something.

**John:** That’s great. That’s crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah, a good guy.

**John:** Mine was the HealthMap Vaccine Finder. I have no idea what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah, sorry.

**John:** Then I had Tejava ice tea which I drink every day.

**Craig:** Oh my god, I had a three-episode run where I didn’t do anything.

**John:** Yeah, three episodes you did nothing.

**Craig:** I just gave up.

**John:** Fifty-six was the Voyager Q Quad Interface Dock and hard drives.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** These are the little, it looks like a toaster and you shove a hard drive in it.

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

**John:** I still use those every day. I think they’re great.

**Craig:** Okay, that’s cool.

**John:** Oh, my god, you still didn’t have a one.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jordan Mechner’s the Last Express for iOS. I will be honest, I did not finish the game on iOS but I thought it was a really nice.

**Craig:** You thought it was cool. Well, my next one was The Room which was super cool and The Room 2 was super cool and I love it.

**John:** Absolutely right. Moom is a utility for the Mac that I use every day for resizing windows.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. My next one was Nogales, Arizona, and I still think fondly about how great the people of Nogales were when we were shooting Hangover Part 3.

**John:** Mine was the Kindle Paperwhite which I still use a lot. I love it.

**Craig:** And then on 60 mine was the Austin Film Festival which I attended last year and I will attend this year and I will attend every year until they tell me, “You’re no longer relevant. Go away.”

**John:** Mine was Screenwriting.io which we still keep up to date.

So Screenwriting.io answers all the really very simple basic questions and it’s designed for like, if you’re type something into Google about a screenwriting question like how do I format this kind of thing, very likely the first answer will be something on Screenwriting.io. So Stuart keeps that up to date so people can ask questions if they have a basic screenwriting question. Stuart.

And Aline’s was The Man Repeller Blog. That was, Aline was on the show that time and she had The Man Repeller Blog. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Do you think it’s still out there. I’m clicking.

**John:** We’ll ask. We’ll ask.

**Craig:** I’m clicking. It’s still going. It’s still going. Yeah.

**John:** Nice. Cool. All right. That was 15 or 25 of the choices from One Cool Things. We’ll do some more on a different week.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** We have a question that comes from Kate Powers. And she says, “I am the same Kate Powers who asked at the Holiday Writers Guild Foundation Scriptnotes for guides about taking meetings with folks who dismiss my experience as a bad fit for their projects.” And so, do you remember her? So I think she was going for staffing season and she’s been staffed on these, I think it was she was on these like murdery shows and she’s going for something light or something like this —

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And she was kind of paranoid about like how people would perceive her, but she said we gave her awesome advice, as always.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** “Not long after taping, I co-wrote an episode of the now filming the second season of Rectify and now I’m in the thick of getting to know you coffees and drinks of agents and my god I’d be freaking out so much worse if I didn’t have the calming influence of your podcast.”

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** “Should I make a ringtone that’s just Craig saying, ‘Your agent works for you,’ okay?”

**Craig:** Ha!

**John:** That’s actually, it would be nice.

**Craig:** It would be nice.

**John:** She says, “On the subject of specing, have you or any writers you know encountered a spec project based on your own work? That is, a fan writes you and says, ‘I loved what you did in blank so much, I took all the names and places and events and turned them into a graphic novel, an opera, something else. Would you like to see it?’ Whether you have first-hand experience with this or not, I would love to know your thoughts and Craig if he has them on how to best respond to this information. It seems heartless not to respond at all and to take it as purely naughty, you shouldn’t do that, legal approach with someone who identifies as a fan seems wrongheaded. Is there a way to walk that line so the original author doesn’t get into trouble.”

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** So do you get what she’s saying here?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** So she’s made something —

**Craig:** I’ve had stuff like this. I mean, particularly —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, oddly around the spoof movies I did with David Zucker. People loved it, sort of do their own fan spoof movies and use the characters from, they love this, the Anna Faris character and the Regina Hall character and they would send me things sometimes and while they are fans, I’m very respectful, and I would say thank you and that’s so nice, but I would just sort of stick by the general I’m not allowed to read stuff rule because the truth is people could be writing things with your characters and then one day you might be writing something else with those characters and then they’re going to go, “Hey, you stole my thing.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, unfortunately, I do counsel it as sort of wall yourself off from reading that stuff because it’s a rough world out there.

**John:** We’re in a very strange time where obviously fans want to feel ownership of the things that they love and so if they’re doing like a super cut of your movie intercut with another movie, that I’m not so nervous about. It’s when they’re taking and creating a new original content with my characters that I start to get a little bit — I feel a little bit weird about it. Of course, we’re a time now we’re like that becomes its own art itself. Fifty Shades of Grey is of course Twilight fan fiction that became its own thing. And so it feels weird like if Stephanie Meyers had read it and then —

**Craig:** Not, that’s not, oh, you mean Stephanie Meyers who wrote Twilight.

**John:** Twilight, if she had read that and said like, “You know, you can’t take my characters and do this,” and yet who knows. Or if J.K. Rowling reads any of the sort of fan fiction about the stuff. I would say, I think there’s a way to respond to it saying like, “It’s so great that you love that, it feels weird for me to be looking at stuff with my characters, my situations. Once again, I love that you love it,” and not sort of commit yourself to that you’re going to watch it or that you support it. It’s just saying that like, “Thanks for thinking of me.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s fair for us to protect the space in our heads from that stuff. I just read an interview with Vince Gilligan where he said essentially that he doesn’t look at any of the forums or many, many discussion groups that popped up around Breaking Bad, not while he was writing them, not now, because he just, in a sense, human thought is viral and it can kind of get in your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the point is just ideally your expression would be limited to what you want it to be and not be infected by other people’s positions or points of view particularly when sometimes the very fact that you’re hearing it is less reflective of the quality of what you’re hearing but rather more reflective of the volume of what you’re hearing if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely makes sense. One last thing about this question is, we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, a fan whose name I’m not going to be able to find quickly enough but he made a video of me and Craig talking about a previous One Cool Thing —

**Craig:** I mean —

**John:** Which was this little stove I made.

**Craig:** Why did he make me so fat?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m like so fat.

**John:** Well, because you have to caricature something and I guess he did your eyebrows too. You have giant eyebrows and you got a big gut.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, like my eyebrows are like Brezhnev eyebrows and like I’m just obese.

**John:** But I’m sort of like I’m a very tall-headed weirdo who then becomes a zombie. So I get off a little better than you but not crazy better.

**Craig:** A little bit, yeah, but he’s got like toilet paper trailing from my butt. I mean, I really was like a huge goofy monkey to this guy. I don’t know why. [laughs]

**John:** What’s so strange is I assume he’s never been to my office, but like he actually, like the door where you would have come out of the bathroom is exactly where the door actually is.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** So maybe he actually has been here and that’s a little terrifying to think about.

**Craig:** He may be in there right now. Mm-hmm. That was very nice that he did it, though.

**John:** It was really cool. I liked that people —

**Craig:** It was cute.

**John:** Want to spend, like, that took hours to do.

**Craig:** I know. That’s the thing, like, I actually do appreciate that. I mean, I have to look past the fact that he just, [laughs]. I remember I did a movie once with Jeffrey Tambor and I had the — I’ve done three movies with Jeffrey Tambor but I had the story boards up for this scene and the story art, storyboard artist, for whatever reason had kind of drawn Jeffrey Tambor really chunky and he’s not. He’s not an overweight man at all. And so he was sort of walking by and then he stopped and he saw these storyboards and he went, “Excuse me!” [laughs]

**John:** A final question comes from Gary in Orlando Florida. He writes, “Can you do a mini podcast talking about your journey into getting the t-shirts made. I’m currently looking at doing some screen printing at home of some of my art and putting it on Etsy. I know you’ve obviously had a higher production budget but I would love to hear about it. Thanks.” Because I can give this in a 30-second version.

All the t-shirts we’ve done, the Scriptnotes t-shirts, the other special Fountain t-shirts, all that stuff, we’ve basically been doing through the same place. And so, Ryan Nelson makes our art. We have a t-shirt printer here in Los Angeles and we’ll put a link in the show next to that. We take it down there. We talk to them what we want. We sort of already have our colors picked. They can buy any colored t-shirt we want so we can be very specific about color tones, but you really do need to see stuff in person.

So I would just say anything you buy online you’re never going to be quite sure. Ryan goes down there in person and makes sure he works with them. We’d like our printer. Basically, we order all the t-shirts at once. That’s the thing, it’s like it’s so much cheaper to figure out how many you need and get them all at once because if you try to do a piecemeal and add like 10 at a time, it will cost you so much more.

And so the secret to our t-shirt business which has been relatively successful and relatively sane is know your quantities ahead of time. Do it like production is one phase. Shipping is one phase and then be done with it. If you’re trying to ship and print all the time, you will do nothing but print and ship.

**Craig:** My secret is to have you guys do it.

**John:** Yes. Craig did lend us his assistant one day to help fold t-shirts when we had too many t-shirts.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right.

**John:** Oh, do people want more t-shirts? This is just a general question. I guess, you can’t actually answer because it’s not a two-way podcast. We could make more t-shirts but I’m not sure we’re going to make more t-shirts. So if you really, really want more t-shirts, that’d be a great thing to tweet to me or to Craig or to send in.

**Craig:** I wish we could have a hoodie like with a little logo on it or something.

**John:** That’d be kind of nice. So tell us what you’d love to see, because I honestly think we sold fewer t-shirts the second time than the first time even though our listenership is up so much. I think it’s because the people who really wanted a Scriptnotes t-shirt were satisfied with the Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re good.

**John:** They don’t need 15 of them.

**Craig:** What about intimate apparel?

**John:** Ha! Perfect.

**Craig:** I love that phrase.

**John:** That’s what everybody wants.

**Craig:** Yeah, intimate apparel.

**John:** Mm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Gym shorts.

**Craig:** That’s what Intimate apparel is to you apparently.

**John:** Yeah, it is. When you’ve been married as long as I have, that’s intimate apparel.

**Craig:** I know, gym shorts.

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that Craig will love when he actually gets to playing it. It’s called Monument Valley. It’s a game for the iPad. It’s just terrifically well done. So Craig had mentioned before The Room which was a puzzle game for the iPad. This is a puzzle game too but it’s really more of a —

**Craig:** Like a platformer, right? Kind of?

**John:** It sort of looks like a platform originally. What’s so brilliant about it though is you’re this little girl character who really needs to walk from one place to another place but the world itself, it’s sort of M.C. Escherish and so like you’re walking and suddenly you’re walking on the side of a building and things are sort of crazy. Actually, if you think back to The Room, you know sometimes you get towards the end of one of the boxes, one of the levels and it’s sort of like that shape, the glowing shape will appear.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And you have to rotate it so it all lines up right.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s like that. So sometimes like a walkway will connect based on how you’re rotating it. And then she can walk across that walkway.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s smart. Yeah, somebody sent that link to me, and visually it was very reminiscent, almost disturbingly close to Journey which was the independent game that came out for the PlayStation. I was a little put off by that to be honest like, it looks like they kind of ripped off Journey, I mean, the character, at least the character basis. But if the game play is great then I’m in.

**John:** The game play is really smartly done, great music, just enough text so that there’s some sense of story. It was really cleverly done.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** And you can actually finish it. It’s not like one of those infinite platformers. There really is an end. It’ll take you three hours or so but you’ll get to the end of it.

**Craig:** Oh, I like finishing things.

Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a little gadget that you can stick on your key chain. It’s called Charge Key by a company called Nomad. It’s quite brilliant. It’s this little flexible sort of rubbery, plasticky thing. And on one end is this very slender USB thing that you can stick into any standard USB port. And on the other end is a charger for the iPhone, not the old-school iPhone but I guess everything from iPhone 5 on or something.

**John:** What is it called? Lightning connector?

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess that’s what’s called, the lightning connector, right. So it’s called Charge Key and boy does it work. And so the thing is sometimes you’re somewhere and you want to charge your phone. You just don’t have a charging cable but there are USB things everywhere like in every office.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sometimes in your car, and now you don’t need a cable because it’s just sitting right there in your key chain, at a place, flexible, slim profile. I think it cost like 25 bucks or something and I got one for myself and my wife.

**John:** That sounds like a great idea.

**Craig:** She will not use it and her phone will run out of batteries. Every time.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Let me ask you a question, John.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because now I’m starting, it’s been a long time since I felt umbrage but I… — When you call Mike, does he answer the phone?

**John:** Very rarely do we call each other. We’re more of texting kind of situation.

**Craig:** Okay. Somehow, he responds? [laughs]

**John:** He does respond.

**Craig:** I cannot tell you how many times I call my wife or I text her and there’s nothing for like two hours. And then I’ll come home and there she is just sitting there. And I’m like, “What did — did you not get the text or the…?”

“Oh, my phone is at the bottom of my bag and it’s on vibrate and…oh well.” Or, “No, it’s out of batteries because I turned the camera on and let it run for…” I mean, I swear, I swear, what do I do? What do I do?

**John:** I don’t know how to deal with those kind of women problems. The first thing is it never occurred to me, but of course there’s a difference because like we’re always going to feel our phone on vibrate because it’s in our pocket.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s in our pocket. But here is the thing, women have pockets too!

**John:** Well, not all of her clothes have pockets.

**Craig:** Well, yes.

**John:** I’m going to defend her here.

**Craig:** Decent point.

**John:** But I’m also going to put a link in the show notes for a really great article about sort of preserving battery life on the iPhone because it is weird how some people like, “My phone will die halfway through the day.” And other people are like, “I very rarely have issues with that.”

**Craig:** I never had problems with it.

**John:** And so it turns out that one of the biggest culprits is Facebook’s location feature. And so if you turn that off, you’re going to be at a happier situation. People have that instinct to like close out apps, that doesn’t save you any power and actually causes you to use more power because every time you relaunch the app it’s having to do a lot more work. So let the phone do its thing about sort of putting those apps to sleep. But basically location services are a huge drain which I already sort of sensed like if you try to use the Find My Friends feature, that drains your battery quickly.

**Craig:** I’m going to grab my wife’s phone which will be easy to do because I know where it is, it’s at the bottom of her bag, on vibrate.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m going to turn that thing off so that the phone will have battery for days so that she can also not answer it.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Gym shorts. I should get her gym shorts.

**John:** [laughs] That’s what you should get her.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have so many solutions for real-life marriages and for creative marriages —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Between you and your script.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So you can find links to the charger thing, to how to conserve your battery life, to Monument Valley, and many of the other things we talked about today in the show notes. You can find them at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. That’s also where you can find transcripts for this episode and for all the back episodes of our show. If you want to listen to those back episodes, you can find those at scriptnotes.net or through the app. So the Scriptnotes app, you can look for it in iTunes or through the App Store for the iOS and also for Android at all the places where you would find that.

We have a couple of the USB drives left if you still want those. Those are at store.johnaugust.com in addition the few last bizarre sizes of t-shirts. I shouldn’t say bizarre sizes.

**Craig:** Yeah, now you’re just a body fascist.

**John:** I’m a body fascist. I would say there is a few select sizes of t-shirts left.

**Craig:** Oh, man, I hope people write letters.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Mathew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Chris Belle who is a.k.a Mr. Stone Bender. We have some great outros but if you’d like to send us an outro we would love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can figure it out. Basically, as long as it includes [hums theme] in some version, you’re great, you’re set.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** If people have a question for you, Craig, how should they reach you?

**Craig:** Well, they can reach me on Twitter. I am @clmazin.

**John:** I’m @johnaugust. For longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And that’s our show.

**Craig:** Good show. Solid.

**John:** That’s was, I think it was a solid show.

**Craig:** Tight.

**John:** It was nice to be back doing it at our normal space, not a creepy basement underneath a comic bookstore.

**Craig:** Boy, that was scary down there.

**John:** And it really, I mean, someone’s died back there. I don’t know how recently but someone’s died.

**Craig:** Someone’s dying there right now. Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Thanks, Craig. Have a good week.

**Craig:** You too. Bye-bye.

**John:** All right, bye.

LINKS:

* [Get your tickets](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* The bonus panel is available to premium subscribers at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-rewriting-and-refocusing) or through the Scriptnotes app for [iOS](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scriptnotes/id739117984?mt=8) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.johnaugust.android.scriptnotes)
* Tony Gilroy’s [BAFTA/BFI screenwriters lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kv3DcXIUaRw)
* Michael Arndt [on setting a story in motion](http://johnaugust.com/2014/michael-arndt-on-setting-a-story-in-motion)
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 124: [Q&A from the Holiday Spectacular](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Scriptnotes listener Tom LaBaff [draws Scriptnotes](https://twitter.com/TLaBaff/status/454819091669594114)
* [Imprint Revolution](http://www.imprintrevolution.com/) prints our shirts
* There are still select shirt sizes (and a few USBs) left at the [John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Monument Valley](http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/) is available now for iOS, and soon for Android
* [Nomad](http://www.hellonomad.com/), makers of Charge Key (and Charge Card)
* [The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain](http://www.overthought.org/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Chris Henry ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-deal-with-the-deal).

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

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

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

Craig, you’re at home, your son was using up all the bandwidth. We’ve had some challenges but I think we’re doing better now.

**Craig:** Yeah, basically I just yelled at him and now everything is fine.

**John:** That’s great, great parenting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last weekend I had a parenting challenge and we actually did something new where I asked five questions on a piece of paper and had her sort of fill out like what she thought was like the right amount of screen time, what she thought would be the right consequences of these kind of actions, and drew up a little agreement. And so far so good. Better.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if it’s a gender thing or if it’s just an individual thing. With my son, I find that what seems to work best is a kind of a military precision with him. So generally speaking to help guide him we don’t discuss the why he’s doing things or why it’s wrong or what it’s supposed to be. Instead it’s just very like, here’s the rules, this and this and this. And he says, got it. [laughs] Then he just does it.

But we do have this interesting thing we do where sometimes at night he’ll write up a little something where he expresses his feelings. It’s easier for him to just write it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he gives it to me and he goes to bed because he doesn’t want to talk about it. And then I read it and then I write back a response. It’s very parental and nice. And then I slip it under his door and when he wakes up in the morning he reads it. And in a very kind of father-son way that works really well for us. We are allowed to be kind of vulnerable and sweet with each other that way.

**John:** Yeah. I do the exact same thing with my daughter, so it’s a good idea.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** So our parenting advice for the episode would be to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we have a show chock full of other stuff today, so let’s get to it.

We’re going to talk about the Writers Guild and producers who have reached a new agreement. And so we will have Chris Keyser on to talk about that.

We are going to talk about screenplay formats and not just our sort of new format but sort of how we got to the current screenplay format and some of the alternatives that have already been out there and sort of what they look like and their pros and cons of that.

And then I also want to talk about the process of assembling a first draft, because I just today shipped in a brand new first draft of something and it was a completely different way than I had ever written before. So I want to talk about that process.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But before we get to Chris Keyser I have a little bit of follow up. James in London emailed us two episodes ago about Courier Prime and how the underlining wasn’t right. Do you remember that?

**Craig:** Yeah, I do, yeah.

**John:** And I was like, well, you’re wrong because I underline things in script a lot. And I think the underlining in Courier Prime is really good. The underlining does actually, like the Gs carve out in the underlining, which I think is a good thing.

He emailed us back to say, “I have since looked further into the matter and I feel I owe you an apology. The difference in underlining is due to changes in Final Draft 9 and not the fonts. I have attached a couple of screenshots showing the difference.”

**Craig:** Oh! Ha, that’s weird because they did spend three years on that.

**John:** So I will describe for our listeners sort of what the difference is. Like the underline is weirdly, bizarrely thin in the Final Draft 9 version. I don’t have an answer for why it is that way. But actually it’s a Final Draft 9 thing and he was not being crazy, we were not being crazy. It was a Final Draft thing.

**Craig:** How many times they —

**John:** Final Draft.

**Craig:** Do we say, oh it’s just a Final Draft thing?

[*Intro tone*]

**John:** So on Wednesday this past week the Writers Guild and the studios reached a tentative agreement for another three years of contract, which is great news. Press releases don’t work very well on radio, so we’re so excited to have Chris Keyser, the President of the Writers Guild of America, on the show today to talk us through what is new in the deal.

Chris, welcome to the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Chris Keyser:** Thanks, guys. Thanks, John. Thanks, Craig.

I haven’t seen you in over a day, John.

**John:** It’s been a very long day without you.

So I was on the negotiating committee, so I got to see Chris in action sitting at the table right next to me as we were negotiating this deal and this contract. And you went off and shot a whole pilot in the meantime too, so.

**Chris:** I did. And now I’m editing it. So I’ve stepped out of the editing room and — but I’m glad to talk to you guys.

**John:** Good, fantastic. So what should writers know about this deal and sort of what has happened over the course of this negotiation?

**Chris:** There are actually a lot of things that I think this negotiation accomplished. Most people I think will look at it in that it’s two separate things. One is a whole bunch of stuff that we got that came off of what people will think of as the DGA pattern, a pattern that in fact we had a lot to do with because there were conversations that went on for a long time between the WGA and the DGA about all the stuff that had been negotiated. And then separately the new provisions on options and exclusivity which are the first time for those issues to be discussed in the MBA. And actually I think potentially a big step forward.

So we should probably talk about one and then the other. And I’m happy to do whichever thing you want to do first.

**John:** Let’s do the basics, because a lot of stuff going into this negotiation was about talk of really rollbacks.

So I think far in the distance as this negotiation was approaching, there’s a sense like, okay, it’s just going to be a very standard negotiation. We’re going to end up doing a lot of the same things the DGA deal did. It should not be complicated.

And then the first proposals we got from the studios were actually not what we expected.

**Chris:** No, they actually contained about $60 million in rollbacks which seemed outrageous during the time of unprecedented profitability for the companies. Nevertheless, that’s where we began. And so that’s coming off of an initial list of rollbacks and then a decision on the part of the studios, the companies not to come in for any early conversations but just to arrive on the first day with those rollbacks on the table.

We began on our end with a letter, as you probably all remember from the co-chairs of our committee, from Chip Johannessen and Billy Ray, essentially informing our members of what those rollbacks were. And I think that was a really important moment in the course of the negotiations. It put the companies on notice that we were not taking this lightly. I think it energized the membership in a way.

And we went into the room with interestingly I think a little bit of momentum. I don’t know whether it was a strategic mistake on the part of the companies. You’d have to ask them how they felt about it in the long run. But I think though it looked like it was a potentially dangerous moment and it could have been. There were many days sitting in the negotiation room when we were still at risk of some of those rollbacks actually trying — being imposed on us if we could not get out of them. But instead, what it turned out to do was to kind of invigorate us on our side and put us on the offensive almost from day one.

So first off, all of those rollbacks were off the table and those rollbacks included some major — would have — major concessions first of all in pension and health — mostly in health. Also some rollbacks on the screen side of the business that would have decreased the salary of screenwriters by raising the low budget minimum. So that was actually a very dangerous moment for us at the very beginning.

But all of that stuff actually went away. And by the way, those were the highlighted rollbacks. But the truth was as we got into the deal there were also a bunch of hidden potential rollbacks that we actually were able to avoid as we went and negotiated a number of the different specifics.

**John:** One of the things I found most interesting as I was sitting there learning about this stuff is that when we say the DGA deal, I sort of assumed that all the unions had kind of agreed on what the levels were for things. Like on the future side, what we describe as being a low budget or medium budget or high budget, I assumed those would be common across all of the guilds. And they’re not at all.

And so when the studios try to say like, oh we want to have the low budget and the medium budget things be similar to the DGA things, that can be really, really bad for our side because we may have much better definitions for what those terms mean than the DGA does.

**Chris:** Yeah, I think it — and you’re talking specifically about the rates for basic cable where the budget breaks for basic cable are different between the WGA and the DGA deal. So what ended up happening was we were looking at getting what’s called an outsized increase in the script minimums for hour-long dramatic basic cable series. And the question was, were we going to do it on our old budget breaks or would we be asked to adopt the DGA budget breaks. If we did that, we would have lost much of the gains that came with those minimums because the shows would not actually fit over those budget breaks.

But we held firm. So what ended up happening is it doesn’t look like a remarkable gain because in fact what we got — I mean, in terms of the budget breaks because the budget breaks are exactly the same as they’ve always been in the WGA deal. We do have, in fact, one of the gains we made was a 5, 5 and 5% bump in script minimums for basic cable dramatic series without a change in the budget breaks.

So that’s a good result of the negotiation that will not be clear in the materials that were put out for the negotiation.

So the DGA made a deal off of its contract and we made a deal off of our contract. And our point of view was you can’t change our minimums. That’s a rollback. And they didn’t get a rollback. We shouldn’t get a rollback either. So we didn’t. We both ended up with gains over what was existing in our current contract.

**Craig:** I want to take a step back for a second, Chris, because we’re going to go through all the points of what this deal means for us. But for the sake of context for people listening, there’s kind of a meta victory baked in to all of this. And that is a victory of prudence. I don’t know how else to put it.

The companies came to us with this jerky first offer. And there are so many ways to take the bait there. And quite expertly you and David Young and the negotiating committee and Billy Ray and Chip, you all chose the path of no bait. We’re not taking the bait at all. We’re not going to antagonize. We’re not going to throw a tantrum. We’re going to very calmly tell our membership. But basically, we’re not going to take the bait.

And they blinked. And I think it’s important for people to understand that there’s no fun victory in any of this. You never get to punch this guy in the nose and see him go down and then just dance around him. It’s always some quiet unseen victory. Those are the only victories worth having in these things.

**Chris:** Right.

**Craig:** So you guys did a really good job right off the bat of not taking the bait. And I think that the prudence paid off in a huge way. There is this saying that some used to promulgate years ago that the guild never won anything good without a strike. I would submit this negotiation as the perfect rebuttal to that. We got a lot here.

**Chris:** When the companies put out those rollbacks on the table and we came in with that firm undeniable response, I think they rightly believed that we could go back to our membership and take a strike vote. And that we would get a strike vote. That’s what the truth in the room that we were not going to put up with, in a period of unprecedented economic success for those companies, rollbacks in our P&H or for our most vulnerable members at this point, our screenwriters. That continued into the conversation about options and exclusivity throughout all of which I think they rightly assumed that they were sitting on a tinderbox.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** We didn’t explode anything but we made it very clear what was at risk if we didn’t get some deal on this.

**Craig:** It’s a great example of walking softly and carrying a big stick because, yeah sure, I’m sure they were probing with the theory that we were all just battle-weary still from 2007. And why not see if we can get away with something crazy. And so they do what they do and you guys had the perfect response.

I was really happy to see the term — we used to traditionally always get these 3% bumps in minimums. And for people that write in features, minimums are sort of irrelevant because it’s sort of an overscale business and most of us — most people who work in screenplays get more than scale. But even if you do get scale, 3% isn’t going to change your life.

But in television it’s the basis for residuals. It’s a really important term. And we would always get 3% and then suddenly it became 2%. And now I’m happy to see that it’s coming back for 2.5% and now 3% — back to 3% again.

**Chris:** Yeah. David Young calls it breaking the 2s and it was a very high priority for us. I’ll just quote him again, something — a quote that the negotiating committee heard over and over again. I think anyone who went to any of the outreach meetings, I think he quotes Einstein — whether it’s actually an accurate quote or not, who cares: that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** So 3% every single year, year after year actually makes an enormous difference in income for writers both from their minimums they get paid but also in residuals. But in addition to that, I think that we believe that it drives eventually overscale income that as those minimums rise and at some point double over the course of a decade because of it, so too does above scale income rising. We all know that one of the pressures right now is on downward pressure on above scale income, not just for screenwriters but also for television writers.

And it’s a tough thing for us to take on because it’s not actually within WGA’s purview. But we do effect it indirectly by guarding our 3% bumps in minimums. And I —

**Craig:** Right.

**Chris:** And I agree with you. It was an important gain in this year’s negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** An unusual thing about this negotiation is generally the parties sit down, they negotiate for a long period of time and hopefully by the end of this negotiation they reach a conclusion, a deal. And this time, it didn’t happen. So we got through a bunch of it and then we announced to the members that we were taking a break and that we were coming back to focus on one specific issue which was options and exclusivity.

So can you talk us through what options and exclusivity really mean, who is affected by it, and sort of why it became an issue this round?

**Chris:** Yes. It’s a little bit of a long story and that would actually happen in the negotiations as well.

Options and exclusivity became an issue because of traditional television schedule, the 22-episode television schedule or more — 22 episodes or more television schedule which had writers writing on the same schedule essentially from the beginning of June until sometime in March or April. And then taking something around a two-month break before they were either hired again when their show came back or not or had the chance to go after a different job the exact time as everyone else.

It has begun to be replaced by a new system of short orders which meant that increasingly television writers were finding themselves working for eight or 10 or 12 episodes on a series much less time and for much less pay. And then waiting under both either exclusivity or an exclusivity and an option deal with their studios, and I’ll describe what that means for a moment, unable to get work sometimes for six, nine, 10 months in a row because you — as people know who write cable programs, you may be in a room, write all the episodes. It may be some time before all the shooting is done and then some even more months until that series airs. And then who knows how long until the studio and the network decide they’re going to pick up the show again and put you back to work.

So what ended up happening was writers had small amount of pay over a small period of time attached to which they had a very long period where they were effectively unable to get other work.

Why were they unable to get other work? One of two reasons. One, because some people had exclusivity agreements which meant that they were actually not permitted even when they were not writing to go write for anyone else. The studio that had them under contract essentially had a lock on them.

But even if they didn’t have an exclusivity deal, they had an option on them in first position for when the series came back which meant that anyone who wanted — and it’s not that they weren’t free to go look for other employment in television — could only look for employment in television in second position. So I’d go to another show and say, “Hey, I’ve got some number of months off. I’d love to be on staff on your show.” And that other show would say, “Yeah, but we don’t know when your first show is going to come back on the air and they’re going to take you out of our writers’ room potentially somewhere in the middle. And we can’t afford that. At the very least, why would we hire you as opposed to somebody else who’s free and clear?”

So effectively, what was going on is that people were working for short periods of time and being held under an option to that same studio for long periods of time without pay. At some point, that becomes an untenable financial situation for people. They can’t actually make ends meet. And what’s more and the argument that we made is it’s fundamentally unfair.

**John:** So I have friends who were in exactly that situation where they were sort of in limbo because the TV show they’d been writing on had shot. It was waiting to find out whether they were going to get another season of the TV show. And during that time, they were stuck. They couldn’t write on any other shows. They weren’t even supposed to go out and do feature work during that time, which seemed crazy. And you don’t know how long that’s going to be.

So to literally be taken out of the market for such a long period of time is so damaging to writers, especially young writers, people who are just first-time staff writers. They suddenly can’t work anywhere else.

And so these are the kind of writers who end up having to go get other jobs because like literally like Starbucks kind of jobs because they cannot work in the actual industry for which they’re supposed to be employed. It was incredibly frustrating to me. But I think it’s also frustrating for television. I think it’s bad for television.

**Chris:** That’s right. I mean, it’s difficult in a couple of ways. First of all, I think you were alluding to this: Imagine somebody who beforehand was writing 22 episodes a year, that kind of experience. And now, they’re — maybe they get eight episodes in a full year and maybe the next year they don’t get that because their show doesn’t get picked up. And so you end up with people instead of who have hundreds of episodes under their belt by the time they want to run a show or move up the ladder and become co-APs or whatever it is, they now have episodes that measure in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s because that’s all they can add up to if you’re only doing a short order every season at best.

And so it’s very bad for that reason. The other reason why it’s bad is because — and we actually felt that the studios would respond to this and maybe they did even if they didn’t say so out loud — is that a marketplace where all the writers are tied up not working is bad for every television show that doesn’t have the dibs on that writer.

So if you, John, have a new show and you want to staff, you may well find out that there are five or six writers who are not currently writing but they’re not available to you.

The second argument really is that for every show, every studio that isn’t holding a given writer under contract, they’re at a huge disadvantage by this tight labor market because, for example, I said like say you, John, you have a new show that gets on the air and you’re looking to hire a writing staff. And in fact, there are many writers who are not currently working but they’re not available because they’re all sitting doing nothing because they’re under option to people who aren’t using them currently. How much better it would be if the labor market were freed up and that people who had shows and needed writing were able to hire those people? And those people would then be able to choose which show to work on.

In the long run, that benefits everybody. The companies certainly never expressed the feeling like this would in the long run be down to their benefit. But I actually feel like it’ll be beneficial to everyone to have a labor market in which people can work whenever they’re available.

**John:** I strongly agree.

Chris, can you talk us through what is new and different in this options and exclusivity agreement, because I think there’s some confusion as if, you know, we didn’t actually give up anything that was already in the contract. None of this was ever covered by WGA contract. This is sort of brand new territory for the MBA.

**Chris:** That’s right. This is the first time ever that options and exclusivity have been covered in the MBA. And like everything in the MBA, these are minimums which is to say that they only set a floor from which we can negotiate even better deals for ourselves and our individual contracts. There is nothing in the MBA that gives the companies the right to have an option over you or to exclusivity. They need to negotiate for that. The options and exclusivity provisions that are in the new MBA restrict the company’s ability to negotiate for options and exclusivity in the following way.

If you are a writer who earns after January 1st 2015 under $200,000 a year or after January 2016 under $210,000 a year, the companies are not permitted to negotiate options and exclusivity clauses with you. Instead, your treatment is governed by the MBA. And this is what it says. First of all, there’s no exclusivity anymore for any of those writers. So when you are not actually working, you are free to work for any other company. You want to go out and write — you get a chance to do a rewrite on a movie during your hiatus, you are free to do that and they cannot say to you, “No, we get a first look at your services.”

Second thing is about options. So the companies have a 90-day period after when payment is due for your writing services during which they still have a hold on you. This is roughly the same as the kind of hold that they might have had at the end of the 22 episodes, 22-episode order.

But beginning on the 91st day, you have the right to go out and look for any job you want. The requirement is that when you get a bona fide offer, you bring it back to the studio and they have two choices. Within three days, if your show has already been picked up, only if your show has been picked up, they may exercise your option and put you on that show and you need to begin being paid to write within 14 days. Or if your show has not been picked up, they leave you free to go. And you are then permitted to go and get another job in first position. And the company with which, the studio with which you originally work then retains second position.

So in other words, once your job is over, once that second job is over, if your original show gets picked up, they can come back to you and say, “Okay, we want to put you on that show under the terms of the deal that you negotiated.” Effectively, you are free to go get work in essentially any situation after those 90 days are done.

**Craig:** Unless they pay you a holding fee.

**Chris:** That’s right. So that’s the other thing. The other thing they can do is they can, after that 90 days, they can pay you to extend your option. And that holding fee is one-third of WGA minimum for either Article 13 or Article 14 writers plus pension and health. That’s fundamental for us because what we said was the right, which is not just the right of writers but of all human beings, is to actually be able to apply their trade, to go out and make money for the thing that they do. We don’t work for free nor do we forgo employment for free.

So beyond the reasonable period at the end of a season, of a show, there’s no reason why a writer should say you may hold me without either compensating me or, like I said, I wouldn’t put it that way, you can’t hold me without compensating me. And if you do not compensate me, you must let me go. The argument we made in the room over and over again, it was made very powerfully by a lot of members of the committee, was that anything less than that is a form of servitude. And that we would not live as indentured servants of the companies.

**Craig:** Well, one thing that I think is revolutionary about this — beyond the fact that it’s addressing an area that had not yet been addressed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement — is the idea, is the philosophy behind the idea that this applies to people who earn less than X. And in this case, X is $200,000 per contract year. Unless I’m incorrect, my memory of the MBA is that the only other place that there was anything like this was in relation to pseudonyms that we have a right guaranteed by the MBA to use a pseudonym unless we make more than I think it’s $200,000 or $250,000 on a project.

But what’s so brilliant about this is that one thing that we’ve always struggled with and what the companies throw in our face all the time is that this is a mature contract. And it is a mature contract. It’s — I mean, this is the product of — we’re coming up on 70 years now of negotiated settlements and it is a mature contract where we are literally arguing over whether we should get raises of 2.5% or 3% and so on and so forth. And we all know that certain residual formulae are set in stone. But this is shining a light. And I think this is the future of our guild and our negotiations with the companies.

And that is to say let us agree that certain areas here are mature, but let us now carve out exceptions and protections for new writers who are being paid what I call close to scale because those are the writers who are suffering the most from these kinds of practices. It’s harder to argue as some did.

When I was on the board people were still fighting the DVD battle and they were saying, “Well, we’re losing millions of dollars.” And I was listening to millionaires telling me that they were losing millions of dollars. And it was true.

But what was also true is that they were millionaires. And I really like the idea that we’re forgoing this need for a universal benefit for all union members and saying we’re okay to settle for getting the goods for the people who need it the most. To me, that’s what a union is for. And I think this is a big deal. I just think philosophically from an approach point of view, there’s a lot more to be mined from this tactic than there is from saying everybody deserves it or nobody gets it.

**John:** Well, I think it’s also — it’s looking structurally what are the biggest problems facing actual working writers. And you can’t be a working writer if you’re not allowed to work. And that’s I think a great place for the guild to come in and take a look at it.

But I would stress, though, it’s not necessarily just the people who are making below $200,000 or $210,000 in the second year of this that are going to be affected because I think the people who are above that level, their agents, their representatives are going to go back and say, “Hey, I know we’re above this cap but we want those same protections that the people below the cap have.” And some of those people will get it and some of those people won’t get it. But I think it sets a standard or a pattern for how you talk about options and exclusivity for even people who are making —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Significantly above that level.

**Craig:** Sure. I agree. Yeah.

**Chris:** I think one of the problems that we’ve had is, look, it’s obvious, is that individual agents negotiating for individual clients have been unable to exert the leverage to avoid onerous options and exclusivity clauses in contracts. The philosophy of this is that there are some writers who are beginning, who make less for whom the job of negotiating this individually through their agents is an impossibility. Much like negotiating a minimum salary for those people would be an impossibility. They’d be under pressure to — downward pressure to accept less and less and less.

But having set a floor below which the companies cannot go, we hope to provide an opportunity for the agents of better paid writers to make an argument that said, “If you’re paying my staff writer and my story editor and not holding them under option, you’re not going to tell my co-producer and my producer that he or she needs to be under an onerous option.” We put the power back in the hands of the agents where that also belongs.

**Craig:** Chris, you and I have had a discussion about the free rewrite problem, whatever name we want to give it, that’s really what it is. And one thing that I’ve expressed to you before and I’m kind of hoping that maybe this is a little bit of an illuminated path to it is the idea of carving out a protection in the MBA for writers that are earning close to scale, particularly when it comes to one step deals.

I’d love to see a term where we were okay with going in there and saying, “We’re negotiating for a two-step deal guarantee. But not for everybody, just if you’re making this or under.” And I think there’s nice precedent now for that kind of work to be done.

**Chris:** Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s where we have to go after we hang up. It’s high on the list.

**Craig:** Great, good.

**John:** So Chris, talk to us about when the things in this deal go into effect because it’s not all at once.

**Chris:** No. In general, the terms of the deal go into effect May 2nd of this year. That’s when the new three-year term begins. Options and exclusivity are effective January 1st 2015. That’s because it actually is a very large change in the way business affairs has to do business. So it gives them, the companies, a bunch of months to actually get their houses in order. And actually for us to begin to educate writers and agents about how this is going to work.

**Craig:** It makes sense too because the term is based on a contractual year income and that hasn’t happened yet. It’s a little strange to look back at income that was accrued under a contract that didn’t have that provision.

**Chris:** That’s right, that’s right.

**John:** So before any of this goes into effect though we have to ratify this contract. So what is the process for that? What do writers need to do or WGA members need to do?

**Chris:** Well, they can either vote online or in the old-fashioned ways. And all of the packet of materials will be going out — I apologize, I don’t know exactly what day but in the next day or two. The contract has been recommended by both the guild — the Board of Directors of the West and the Council of the East and by the negotiating committee. So all that’s left is for the members to vote and I hope to ratify the contract.

And so you’ll get the material in the next few days. And I believe the voting deadline is the end of — it’s like the 29th of April. Don’t hold me to that. It could be just a day or — it can’t be a day or two later because it needs to be ratified or we need to turn it down by the date on which the contract expires which is May 1st. So voting needs to happen.

And I — look, it’s the same argument that we make all the time. I think a good turnout and I hope a good turnout that votes in favor of this contract continues what I think the negotiation began to suggest to the companies which is that we are, after all these years, and an argument I think that I’ve made and you’ve made, John and Craig, we’re actually much more unified than the companies might have perceived that we were or the world continues to claim that we are.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** And one — another piece of evidence of that and that means people voting.

**Craig:** I think for me, by far the most important factor and the most beneficial thing for us when dealing with them is our leadership and how they view our leadership. And again, I have to say they took our leadership this time around, which includes the two of you, seriously because our leadership behaved in a serious manner. Not in a loud manner but in a very serious manner. And if they feel they’re dealing with serious people, in their minds they know if serious people turn to the membership and say, “Hey, everyone, this is bad,” everyone will believe them and become instantly energized.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We don’t need to be marching around with pitchforks until such time as a reasonable man asks us to.

**Chris:** Yeah, I think —

**John:** That’s a very good point.

**Chris:** I think that — yes. Look, I mean it’s self-serving for me but I will agree with — one of the things that we are susceptible to and I think a fallacious argument is that ignoring the fact that science gives consent in fact and that the assumption that when our members are not active, they are inactive because they don’t care, I think many of them are inactive from time to time because they have many other things going on.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Chris:** They have their lives that are complicated both in a work sense and every way else. And if they feel as if things are going in the right direction, then they’re less likely to actually feel the need to actively engage. I don’t take that always as being a negative. Sometimes I think that’s a quiet sign of competence.

**John:** Chris Keyser, I would like to thank you personally for your quiet confidence during this whole negotiation. It was great to see this. And I really thought the team was terrific, including David Young who I had not really encountered before but just did a terrific job negotiating that contract. So my personal thanks to you for a really great negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean I’ll back that up. I would say, Chris, and this is self-serving for me because I’ve supported you strongly from the start but I think you’re going to go down as one of our great presidents. I really do. I think that you have accomplished not only an extraordinary amount of good during your time, which is of course not yet over, but you have set an example and kind of put forth proof of an argument of a way to do this that is better than the way it has been done. And that is extraordinarily valuable for us as a union going forward.

**John:** Well, Chris, we’ll let you get back to you cutting your pilot and thank you so much for joining us on here to talk about the deal and congratulations. And everybody, remember to vote.

**Chris:** Okay, thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks, Chris. Thank you.

**Chris:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[*Intro tone*]

**John:** So Craig, we we’ve talking a lot about our potential new screenplay format and I thought today we could spend a few minutes talking about sort of how the screenplay format came to be and sort of what some of the other alternatives that have existed out there are. And it’s a little bit of a history lesson but also alternate history lesson of the way things could have gone.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m going to start with — actually, a guy wrote in — emailed us. His name is Stokely Dallison and he wrote, “I suspect you may have forgotten what it’s like to be a new screenwriter. In my view, it’s a wonderful comfort to adopt the same format as thousands of scripts that have come before. Every script the same font, the same spacing, the same three holes with two brass brads. It feels good to be part of something relatively old. It feels good to know that my script, however inadequate it might be, looks the same as all the great scripts that have come before.”

And I thought that was actually a really charming thought —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Because I remember writing that first script and it’s like it just seems so weirdly magic that I — oh everything — it’s got to look just like a real script and the esoterica of the screenplay format is both something that sort of keeps people away, but once you sort of get inside it’s like, oh, I know how to do this. There’s something about that format and it does feel sort of special. And so whatever we do, we have to acknowledge that there is something special about it.

What’s interesting though is what we take as being the screenplay format is actually fairly recent. And there are other ways it could have gone and there are other ways — you’ve seen movies that were written in completely different ways.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so there’s not one magic way for it to work.

**Craig:** No. Well, I have to say that, first I hear — I can’t tell you how many times I will hear somebody say, “Well, you’ve probably forgotten what it’s like to be a new screenwriter.” No, I haven’t. No. [laughs] I don’t think there is a screenwriter alive who still doesn’t feel like a new screenwriter on some level. And certainly we don’t forget what it’s like. I do want to just put that out there. Never think that we’ve forgotten magically the pain of becoming a screenwriter or starting out.

There is something that’s comforting about being able to write in a format that makes your screenplay look professional. But unfortunately that’s not really important. And I would argue that a lot of new screenwriters will obsess over those things in order to avoid the other things that are unique to their screenplay like, you know, the content.

**John:** So let’s take a little history trip and figure out how the screenplay came to be. Because when the first movies were made, the first screenplays were really just a list of shots. And if you think about it, these are silent films. So literally you are just making a shot list and just like a train comes, close on a man’s face. And that’s sort of what the original screenplays were like, were just a list of these shots.

And it was almost — it was basically a set of instructions for like what the order of the shots were going to be. And if there was going to be a title card, there wasn’t really dialogue, so it could just be a title card or like one of those intercut cards that show like some line that someone is supposedly saying. But that’s as much as there would be.

It’s Thomas Ince who is often credited with sort of being the father of the modern screenplay because he’s also the father of the modern studio. He was the one who said — he bought a bunch of land in California and he’s like we’re going to make a bunch of movies. And in order to make a bunch of movies, he wanted to make sure that he could basically hand a blueprint to anyone, any of his directors, and say like this is what it’s supposed to be. Shoot exactly what I’m giving you.

And so our idea of a screenplay being the blueprint for a movie is really credited to him. And so a bit of trivia, if you actually are down in Culver City, there’s a street of Ince. There’s the Ince Gate —

**Craig:** Ince, yeah.

**John:** To the Culver Studios or one of the studios down there. You will actually see the word Ince down there.

**Craig:** Wasn’t he the guy that got murdered on a boat or something?

**John:** I’m sure there’s a fascinating story. Like all of old Hollywood is great and wonderful. And so —

**Craig:** Right. Everybody was constantly being murdered.

**John:** Well, this was the frontier. This is like a brand new town. It was all —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was all made up from scratch. So he’s the guy who sort of I think is generally credited with being the guy who said this is a plan for making the movie. It’s typed out this way. It’s basically those shots.

Now I still, remember, he was essentially making silent films. And as we started adding dialogue in, that’s where the scripts became a little bit more like a play because you actually have to have people talking to each other.

So scripts going back to even like Casablanca, they written in what’s called a continuity style, which is sort of like a shooting script. It’s basically a sequence of shots. And even when there’s dialogue, it’s really about the shots. And it’s as if you’re sort of directing on the page. It’s like — it feels like a director’s plan for what it is that you’re shooting.

This evolved over time to what is called the master scene format. And I don’t even — I mean, I’ve been writing scripts for a long time but I didn’t know that the way we were writing our scripts is called the master scene. Have you seen that terminology?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never heard it before, but I did see it in the example that they used for an early master scene format screenplay. It’s The Apartment by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. And they wrote that in 1959. And that does look very much like the screenplay format we use, if not exactly like the screenplay format we use today, which by the way I have to say, so on like one hand you’re right that it’s not like the movie business was founded on this format that we currently use. On the other hand, we have been using it for at least 55, 60 years, which implies that maybe it’s time for, you know, a change.

**John:** Or that we got it exactly right and nothing needs to change at all.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Well, let’s talk about The Apartment, because actually I was really struck by it. And there’s going to be links in the show notes to sort of all the scripts we’re talking about. So The Apartment, it really looks like a modern screenplay. Like if someone dropped it on your desk, it’s like, well, this is a screenplay.

But it’s considerably different from the continuity style of script. It’s literary. It’s kind of designed to be read. It’s not designed just as for a director to know what shots there are. It’s designed for a person to be able to see what a scene feels like just on the page. There’s a lot description about sort of — there is screen description. It’s really talking through what the characters are doing, what things feel like, what things looks like. And in a weird way, I think this is a good point that this site that we’re going to send you to makes, is that it actually gives the director more leeway.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so rather than calling out every shot, it’s describing sort of what the scene is like, and sometimes the suggestions were sort of like how it’s shot. But really, it’s going to be a director to figure out what those shots are in there to tell the story. So even though the writer gets to have a more free rein and more words to describe the scene, the director actually gets a little bit more leeway for figuring out how to shoot that scene. It’s a significant evolution.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can see in the Master Screen format — that’s what they’re calling it Master Screen format?

**John:** Master Scene format.

**Craig:** Master Scene format that everybody is starting to approach filmmaking in a more artistically free way. It is being unyoked from the factory. Early Hollywood was a factory. They would just burn film and lights and people would stand in spots and they would make movies in a matter of days. I mean, it was just — they would just churn them out.

And so it was really an ADs’ business if you think about it, you know. I mean, that what we currently think of as a first AD, they are the people on the set who are scheduling, figuring out how many pages you’re shooting in the day, marshaling the crew, making sure that the props people and the this and the that and everything is in place.

ADs were kind of the early directors, in some regards were like that.

**John:** They were.

**Craig:** And then as you see the influence of European cinema and also the increasing freedom, the artistic freedom of Hollywood, which I think was just naturally building on itself, getting bored with the kinds of stories they were telling and trying to find new ways to tell them, started to — and also probably because of the influx of playwrights into the process because of the demand. You can see now that the format is allowing both the writer and the director the freedom to tell a story in a creative way.

**John:** Yes. So if you look at the Master Scene format, which is really what we think about the modern screenplay format, it’s very tempting to read the dialogue and skip over everything else because the dialogue tends to be the meat of what is happening in modern screenplays.

You can get the gist of what’s going on by reading the dialogue. And so the dialogue is centered. And your eye kind of goes — falls to the center of the page. And all the scene description and the transitions and the scene headers stay towards the edges. But that’s not the only way that it can happen. And one of our listeners, Matt Markwalder, sent through a bunch of examples of Kubrick scripts which are wildly different and actually sort of do the opposite.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think and probably in direct response to how people read scripts, he decided to do a completely different thing. So in Clockwork Orange, first off, everything is double spaced. And dialogue has wider margins and action is sort of put over to the right. And so the action is deliberately sort of minimized and sort of put over to the side, but in a way that you tend to sort of read it. It’s like the line length is really, really short and your eye goes to it. Whereas dialogue tends to be bigger, wider blocks of things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So an example, I’m skipping to page 28 of A Clockwork Orange. Scene 22. INT. CAT LADY HOUSE. That feels kind of normal. “The cat lady enters and dials a number.” That sentence is centered in two lines in the middle of the page. So it’s like it looks in sort of the area where you would normally expect to see dialogue, that’s where that line is. And the cat lady has this long speech that’s double spaced and goes all the way to the margins of the page. Is just a really interesting way to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, and then he changes it up because then when you get to Full Metal Jacket, it reads like a novel. He’s just in — he’s burying dialogue and action description into flowing paragraphs, not really breaking them out or formatting them any differently than each other.

It’s almost as if Kubrick decided I’m just going to format my screenplay the way I feel the movie is. I’m going to let the formatting reflect the tone and the vibe of what I’m going for which is awesome. And I suspect that when the entrepreneurial screenplay market really took off, the need for screenplays to be uniformly formatted became really important because now it was a commodity. And you had to formalize it. But I regret that. And I would love to see people have the freedom to write their screenplays however they choose to get across the vibe of the story they want to tell. I think that’s very powerful. And I think you and I are going to do it.

**John:** [laughs] So in Full Metal Jacket, for those who aren’t looking at this on the screen right now, the dialogue is actually in quotation marks. It just looks like a page of normal text really. It’s a very —

**Craig:** It’s like a book.

**John:** A completely different way of doing things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I also want to take a look at some of the other types of scripts that are out there that aren’t screenplay formats or at least normal screenplay formats. The most obvious one which is similar but different is the three-camera comedy, or the multi-cam comedy. So everything you see there has a laugh track to it on television tends to be that. So I’m looking at the page from The Millers.

**Craig:** The Millers, the show, the TV show, yeah.

**John:** So in multi-cam, action is basically on the same lines, has the same margins as we sort of expect in a screenplay format, but it’s all upper case. And it’s usually minimized. They don’t try to write as much in there as you would otherwise. Everything is double spaced. The whole page is double spaced. Character names, where they expect to be. But the dialogue blocks are a little bit wider. Parentheticals fall within the dialogue block themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s really different. One of the things I do sort of enjoy about multi-cam and you can see sort of why they do it is partly because you’re scheduling things sort of on the fly so quickly. Skipping to page 37 of the script I’m reading at. INT. NATHAN’S HOUSE. KITCHEN LATER, D3, D3, indicating day three. And this is a thing you’ll commonly see in TV shows indicating what day or what night it is. But underneath that line, in a parenthesis is, “(Nathan, Debbie, the Sarge),” and what it’s showing is like who is in this scene.

**Craig:** Who’s in the scene, yeah.

**John:** And that’s a really useful bit of really kind of metadata that is useful to have especially as you’re trying to schedule this thing. Who needs to be there, what characters even if they’re not speaking in the scene need to be there in the background.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is useful information. And obviously a sitcom’s script is formatted in part to serve the need of a churning production that is weekly and involves live theater essentially for most of them. But I have to say just aesthetically I find it ugly.

**John:** I find it ugly, too, but that’s what I’m used to. It’s what your — it’s what you grew up with. And I’m sure to people who are used to multi-cam, they don’t find it ugly at all.

**Craig:** I guess I would say that what I find ugly about it is that it is the most formalized, that even screenplays allow you a little more leeway about how you approach things. But it’s so rigid in that sitcom format. And, you know, my instinct now is to see how we can allow screenwriters to express a movie on the page in a way that is more idiosyncratic to the story they’re telling and how they want to tell it and their dramatic intention.

So I’m probably just reacting to that because it’s very rigid.

**John:** It’s very rigid. So actually it’s interesting because in stage plays there actually is a wide range of sort of how those stage plays look. And so something I found in Big Fish is that I was looking at other books for musicals and it’s like, oh, there isn’t really — there’s much less consensus about how those things are supposed to look.

Typically, in plays you will find action will always be put entirely in giant parentheticals, which I find maddening and really not attractive to look at. But it’s a common way to do it in stage plays. Dialogue can be sort of where we expect it now, but blocks tend to be a little bit wider. Are lyrics all the way to left, are they inset differently? Are they all upper case? That all changes.

But of course there’s another way you can do plays, which is just to have — which is more like sort of the reading plays that you and I are used to where a character name is, you know, upper case, bolded maybe even with a colon after it. And their dialogue just goes after it. Since plays are mostly people talking, that could be an efficient way to show that on the page. And it may make more sense to really let the page be dominated by the dialogue because the action is going to tend to be much more minimal than it would be under the screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, the key thing — the thing that’s going to unleash us all is this getting away from pagination. The more I think about it, I just know we’re right. I just know it.

**John:** So let’s talk about what those fundamental units are, because the fundamental unit could be a scene. It can be a sequence. It could some sort of other unit. But there needs to be some area of story by which you can say like, these are the outer perimeters of what this moment is because if you look at the Kubrick scripts, it’s very difficult to tell sort of where we are at in those things. And sometimes I wouldn’t even know like are we in the same location? Have we moved to a different place in time? That’s challenging to figure out in some of these Kubrick scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. No, I’m not an anarchist about this sort of thing. I do think that, you know, if you are — granted if you’re directing your own material, the only person that truly needs to understand it is you and you’ll explain it to everybody else around you. But for those who are writing screenplays for other people to read, I think sequences — sequences. I think letting the dramatic action delineate where the pieces begin and end is the way to do it, not location.

**John:** So the Coen brothers’ scripts, I don’t know if you’ve actually read any of them on the page. They tend to get rid of scene headers altogether. They tend to be, you can see that we’re in the new place or new time. But they’re not using the classic sort of nomenclature for sort of what those are. That may ultimately be the way to look at this is that as you’re moving from place to place you’re showing us where we’re at, but it’s not formalized in those scene header ways. So we don’t think of those scene headers as being — we don’t give them more importance than they deserve. And right now, I think they get way too —

**Craig:** They’re so important. Yeah.

**John:** I think they get elevated too high.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly, you pick up a screenplay, if you were from another planet and you came here and you picked up a screenplay you would think that the most important part of storytelling is whether you’re inside or outside.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the dumbest thing. And half the time now the way we shoot movies, it doesn’t — you’ll say, you know, EXT. OUTSIDE OF INTERGALACTIC FEDERATION BUILDING. That means you’re inside on a stage. There’s no inside or outside. I mean half that stuff doesn’t even matter anymore. How do you write exterior/interior on a script for Avatar? Explain that. I mean what’s the point?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I totally agree. I think the slug line thing is the weirdest thing. It forces us into categories of time. A lot of time I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say morning, afternoon, dusk, noon, or just day. What does day mean? I don’t even know what day is. What’s day?

**John:** Yeah, and how specific are you allowed to be about what time of day you’re at? Do you need to clarify if you move to a different day. Like I just like The Millers script indicated it was day three, like that is a useful bit of information yet does that need to be reflected on the page right at that moment? Perhaps not. And maybe there’s a different way that you can indicate that, so that it’s part of the metadata for that sequence, but doesn’t have to be written down the road.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Because I’ve had this conversation with a number of ADs on a number of movies where they will sit down with me and say, “Walk me through the days of the week or the month on this? Let’s actually…” And in fact, I remember on Identify Thief, Seth and Jason and I sat down one day and really dialed in the days of the week, so we knew that this thing actually made sense and that it wasn’t taking either two days or 12 days. Because we didn’t, you know, if you have four nights in a row and then say you had a three-day road trip, it just doesn’t quite work.

So at some point, you do that. And if you want to — if we have a format that uses technology and allows us to flexibly include a file that they can pull up as they wish, that just shows a day, night, time passage summary.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That would be really cool. But I don’t need to look at it while I’m reading the script.

**John:** Exactly. So that’s a useful bit, just like costume changes. It’s one of the first things when you have a costume designer comes on to a movie is really doing that day/night breakdown to make sure like, are they still in the same outfit as they would be in the previous scene? And sometimes I will get involved with that because I need to sort of clarify like no, no, this is a different day. Like they could have changed clothes, they would have changed clothes between this time. Or no, they have to be wearing the same thing because they literary came right from there to there and it’s going to bizarre if they’re suddenly wearing new clothes.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact you’re zeroing in on something that’s really interesting about the current screenplay format, is that it overemphasizes some things, and ignores other things entirely. And what ends up happening is we go — right before you shoot a movie, right before you begin principal photography, the entire production gathers together all the heads of the department and most of their keys under them, and the director and the producers and hopefully the screenwriter is there as well. They should be. And everybody goes page by page and they ask questions.

And a lot of those questions will shock the hell out of the screenwriter because they’ll think, oh, I thought that would be obvious, but it’s technically not in the script, so yes, they don’t realize that they’re coming home in the same outfit that they went to work in, you know. But if we could help guide those things because the format allowed us to flexibly do so, that would be really cool.

**John:** Yeah. So I think that it becomes a matter of you write your script, you write what is going to be a thing. Let’s not focus on sort of what it looks like. But you’re going to write your thing and you’re going to figure, you’ll write your script, Hollywood script/screenplay. Don’t worry — we won’t worry about margins or sort of other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But then you figure out what are the sequences? What are the units of story that are important? And within those units of story then we can sort of have those, you know, if this were the web, each of those units of story would be essentially a page and there could be extra metadata associated with that page. So you could have all the information that is about who is in the scene, day or night, where this falls in the timeline of the actual story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the situations where we’re in multiple locations, you can address those facts that you’re in multiple locations over the course of the sequence. So those intercut phone calls which are always a challenge, that can all be part of that because it’s — there’s a fundamental story unit that’s together.

**Craig:** What a waste of space when you have two people talking. You have interiors and exteriors, blah, blah, blah, intercut, nonsense words you don’t — it’s like, duh. You just write, you know, he calls her up. She’s sitting in her apartment. They have a discussion, on the phone. Everybody knows how phone discussions work, but somehow screenplay formats are like slogging like Frankenstein through the mud. It’s like we all know how to write our name, but if you need to program in Basic, you go 10, print name, 20, go to 10. You know, it’s just it’s so clumsy and unnecessary and we need to be free of it, John, free, free.

**John:** So the other thing I will say is, you’ve written some animation and I’ve done a lot of animation, is you recognize that they ultimately number things as sequences. And it will be a bunch of what we would consider scenes. They will consider one whole sequence. Almost more like what we think was as reel, they will think of as a sequence. And it’s a much, ultimately a much smarter way to address it because they’re not worried about sort of like this location, that location, whatever. It’s about this unit of story. And that’s probably a smarter way for us to format.

**Craig:** Yes, for sure. I mean, you start writing. Let’s say you’re writing in our new format. And when you reach the end of your first sequence, you indicate it’s time for a new sequence to begin. You might naturally say, well, how will I know when that sequence is over? You’ll know. You’ll know. [laughs] Because you’ll just know. It’s so obvious. And it will just be similarly obvious when the next — it’s like, oh god, we got to do it, John.

**John:** We got to do it. So this is actually a great segue for our last topic of the day, which is I just delivered like literary two hours ago delivered the script that I owed and so I turned it in.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** But this is the first time I went hardcore on a way that I’ve kind of been working, but I went much more hardcore on it this time, which is that I wrote each bit separately. So I didn’t sit down with one file and write from the beginning to the end. I only wrote separate scenes or sequences, whatever you want to call it. And I just wrote the pieces.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I skipped all over the, you know, the story of this episode and wrote the pieces I wanted to write, I had a really good outline and I assembled it all at the end. And so I want to talk through sort of how I did it this way. And, you know, I think it’s actually useful for what we’re doing in terms of like what a format could do that could help us down the road.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So for this time, I used WorkFlowy which was a One Cool Thing from before which is an outline or it’s an online outliner that I really just love. And so even right now, I’m looking at WorkFlowy because I keep show notes for the podcast in it. But I just made a pilot and I wrote the, you know, these scenes that were in it. Basically these are the events that happened. And I rearranged them and so it was equivalent of my index cards. But I would sort of have a list of basically these are the scenes, these are the things that are happening over the course of it.

And then as I had more details I could fill in underneath those scenes. I sometimes would start writing dialogue. I’d write the important stuff that needed to happen in those things. And when I chose to write one of the scenes, I would just open up a brand new file in Highland and just type it. And I’d write it and when I was done, I would save it, I would scratch that off the list and keep moving on to the next one.

What’s so good about this is, well, once I start on a first draft I’ll go someplace and barricade myself and write drafts by hand. And I’ll do that so that I can’t go back and edit. This was sort of the same idea, is that I would write something and then I would not go back to it and futz with it. I would go on and write the next thing. And I would write the next thing. And I wouldn’t go back through and sort of start at page one and keep building forward. I actually got a lot more done I think because I wasn’t going back and tweaking all those things I’d written before.

**Craig:** You know me, I’m a big go-backer, tweaker, you know, but that’s just my flow. I like that feeling. It just makes me — I’m happy, you know, and whatever makes you happy and whatever gets you through the process. What I very much am addicted to, I don’t know, it’s probably the wrong phrase, but I’m committed to is the notion of thoroughly outlining the movie before I start because I feel like if you do it and I do think in terms of sequences when I’m outlining as supposed to locations which is an indication that we should be writing in terms of sequences and not locations.

It helps you place all of these things within the context of character and theme and all the rest of that stuff as opposed to just, there’s a car chase. Yeah, but what happens in the car chase that makes it relevant to the character beyond, you know, chase man and get him, you know, that sort of thing.

So I like outlining a lot. But there — look, there are writers who don’t and still get there on their own and do it well. I just think that when you’re putting a first draft together, you are entitled to do whatever you need to do to get there. That’s basically my feeling. You get to use anything that supports you through the very difficult process of making something out of absolutely nothing.

And just as long as you can accept that this is — there is no end to your first draft. There is simply ceasing and then returning to it. Do what you need to do.

**John:** So in this case, I ended up with a folder full of essentially 40 — 30 to 40 scenes. And classically what I would then have to do is I’d have to open up a new document and open up each one of those individually and sort of copy and paste them into one big thing and sort of get them all arranged properly.

So being the person that I am, I asked Nima to write me a new little app called Assembler.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** And because that’s what I do.

**Craig:** It’s what you do.

**John:** So Assembler is a thing which we might end up releasing or we might not. It looks ugly right now, but it did the job. Essentially, what Assembler does is it takes a folder full of little files, little text files because that’s all Fountain is little text files. And you choose a folder, it pops up, and you can just drag the order that you want the files to be assembled in. You hit a button and it assembles them and opens up in Highland. And so I had simply an assembly.

And I think that assembly is a really good way to think about that sort of pre first draft. It’s like it’s all the basic scenes, but they’re not necessarily nipped and tucked in the right way. So it’s — it wasn’t my first draft certainly, but it resembled what the script was going to be. All the scenes were there. And then I can sort of go through and then really do that detail work of making sure that this scene is really leaning into the next scene and tumbling into the next scene in ways that was useful and meaningful. Even as I was writing, I knew what had come before, I knew what was coming after. But I want to make sure I was making great word choices that were going to send me into the first line of the next scene. All that stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that was a great way. So I went from that first assembly to this first draft in, you know, four days and felt good about it because I knew all the bits were there and so I could really focus on making everything that’s best and not sort of like struggling to get those last little bits done.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s interesting. I think what I’m doing is an analog version of what you’re doing. I’m just doing it with index cards.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** That I’m basically breaking down my pieces into index cards. And the index cards typically are sequences. And that’s how I’m sort or organizing things. And what I’m doing — when I’m doing those index cards, is there’s a depth sort of textually there’s a depth because there’s a little summary on the card. And then what I like to do it is I like to have another card next to it that’s the what does this mean? Why is this in the movie? Why did this deserve to be in the movie card?

And then underneath that, the woman that sits with me and helps me, you know, takes all the notes and puts this all together for me, she’s also then writing down a whole bunch of notes related or thoughts, bits of dialogue, concepts, purposes, points, characters, et cetera that are related to those index cards.

So by the time I’m writing my draft I have this interesting assembly of headers and what’s and why’s and then details for these sequences in a non-digital, semi-digital format. And then I just start to write. It’s funny, even though we have — they look so different, there’s something very similar about the process.

**John:** I would agree. As she’s assembling this stuff, or as you’re sort of putting these things together, is that ever one file or it is just still a bunch of cards?

**Craig:** Well, we have one file that she kind of master, she sort of has this master file. And then a lot of times as I’m heading into a section, I’ll say, well, all right, let’s — now, we are on page 60. And I know that I’m about to head into this sequence where, I don’t know, the soldier is going to fly into the temple with his parachute and do a thing.

So let’s talk about it again. Let’s just run through what was there before, but now let’s rediscuss it in light of what has led up to it now through the writing. And so she’ll take that portion out of the master document and build a new thing that’s just like, okay, here’s what you’re doing for the next few days.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** And then I’ll add more detail and layers into that. That keeps in mind what’s come before it recently. And then I’ll use that. Like it will sort of sit next to me.

Sometimes I don’t even look at it because just the fact that I’ve talked it through, now I know it. And I know what to write, you know?

**John:** There’s a story that John Gatins told before, so I apologize to listeners if I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I think it’s such a great illustration of the trap you can fall into when you just kind of start writing, is that there was a guy who was hired to paint the stripe down the middle of a road. And so the first day he had his little bucket and his paint and he painted a mile and he came back and his boss was like, “That was really good, you painted like a whole mile. That was terrific.”

And the next day, the boss comes back to see his work, he’s like, “Oh, you painted another half mile. Okay, well, that’s great. Still pretty good. That’s better than most people.” And the next day, he came back and he’d only painted a quarter of a mile. And so the supervisor said like, “What’s going on? Like why did you slow down so much?” And he’s like, “Well, I have to keep walking back to get to the paint.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that can actually be what the situation you find yourself with a script, is that if you’re starting at page one every time and just like, write, sort of rewriting it to get up to the next page, and then rewriting it to get up to the next page, every day you sit back you’re going to have spent a lot of your creative energy rewriting those first couple of pages and you’re going to probably make less and less progress through your script. So yes, I bet those first pages are going to be incredibly tight because you went through them a bunch of times. But you’re not actually moving the ball forward.

So, you know, what I’m describing in terms of not letting myself, but just doing separate sequences and not letting myself assemble the whole thing is to keep myself from doing that, because it’s just a bad habit I’ve noticed.

So before I would write pages by hand and fax them through to my assistant who would type up the pages and stick them in the folder. And I would do that until I got to where I felt like I was probably halfway through the script and then start assembling and then start doing it. This was just the most hardcore version of that where I wouldn’t let myself assemble it at all until I knew I actually had all the scenes written that I thought I needed and could put them together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do see it differently than you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My feeling is that, I guess I stick to my loose, rigid, you know, I have loose, rigid scheduling and I have loose, rigid rewriting. And that is to say there’s this much time to write it and I’m going to use that time. How I use it? That’s my prerogative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I allow myself the — I’m okay with spending 40% of my time on the first 30 pages if I feel that that’s what’s going to help me efficiently write the last 70 pages. As long as I am productive I feel like I’m allowed to be productive in any direction I want to be.

Where I agree with you is the idea that you’re going to fastidiously whittle every word. Well, you can do that but just be aware that it would be really helpful if you were an awesome genius. And it would really helpful if you didn’t need money or to kind of work a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if you wanted to just write one astonishing script every five years, I’m okay with that, you know. I mean, look, Rian Johnson is not prolific.

**John:** No, he’s not.

**Craig:** But, you know, but when the script comes out and he makes the movie, it’s really good. So that’s cool, too. As long as you are, I guess the way I would — I would just hand it to the writer and say you know if you’re being productive or not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Listen to yourself. And if you’re just rewriting to avoid writing then stop.

**John:** I agree. As we close this out I will say this is the first time I ever used Highland from start to finish on something. It was the first time working on a long script on Highland. And it was really good and illuminating in the sense that I recognized the pros and cons of Highland. So the new build that’s going to be coming out probably by the time or shortly after this episode airs actually reflects a lot of the stuff that were sort of happening while I was writing this much longer script because as something would break or something would annoy me, I could yell down to Nima and have him fix things.

And so one of the things, a situation which happens in all apps, but was particularly frustrating to me in Highland this time is you’re deep into the script, you’re on page 40 into the script or something and you need to refer back to something that happened earlier on. So how do you go back there and then find your place, find your way back to where you were at?

So assuming you’re in the middle sort of page 40, but you need to find something earlier on, how do you get back to where you were on page 40?

**Craig:** Well, I’m the worst because I’m a scroller.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] So, I, you know, I have — most major programs have some sort of outliner available to you, but I just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll because I can kind of like see as the pages are flying by roughly. I know where to land. So it’s not efficient, but I’m a scroller.

**John:** So the thing which we put in this next build which I really love and found myself using a lot was called Markers. And so it’s really something I took from Final Cut Pro which is the video editing software. And a marker is something you can just drop and then you can find it again. And so you hit Control M and it puts a marker wherever you are. And then you can go wherever else you want to go in the document and the Control option then will take you back there.

So you can drop as many markers as you need. It’s like a little shortcut to get back to that place you’re at.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you end up scrolling back and like did a little something, you know, on page 20, but you need to get back to where that thing is, Control option M it will take you back to where you were before.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s cool. And I would love to sort of see the ability, you know, we talk about our new format and obviously we’re not talking about an application to read that format, but rather we would hope that applications like Highland and others would take advantage of what the format would offer.

And I would love to see sort of tabbed sequences. That would be great. You know, so when I’m working, I could just go up and go, okay, I’m going to go back to the car chase. I’m going to go back to the beginning, I’m going to back to the middle, wherever it is.

**John:** So Final Draft 9 has an aspect of that. It’s not great. But you can add sort of the information that gets you there. Slugline already does have a really good version of that. So in Slugline you drop little hashtags and those become your sections. And so you can do things for individual scenes. And it shows you an outline view that you can hop to anything in the script at any point. So it may be worth taking another look at that because it’s really — that is really good. It’s a kind of thing that they did great.

**Craig:** Is it — yeah, I mean, like you know, for instance Fade In has the outline that’s sort of running along the right side of the screen. So I can just jump, you know, from that. But there’s something about — I like what you’re saying about Slugline where it’s I can basically say, they’re chapter headings and they’re like little — it’s almost like a little Rolodex-y kind of thing along the top of the screen —

**John:** That’s exactly what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s smart. I like that.

**John:** It’s on the left side of the screen, but it’s the same idea.

**Craig:** Oh, I like it on the top

**John:** So you can either have it show all your section headings or if you have notes, it will show you the notes and you can jump to wherever those notes are.

**Craig:** All right. Good.

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing this week. Mine is a book. It is called The Way to Go by Kate Ascher. And it’s a book that I think you will love, Craig. I think, you know, most screenwriters will love because screenwriters are curious.

And so what Kate Ascher did in this book and she’s done two other books that are sort of similar to it, is she looked at how planes and trains and cars work. And it’s like a big illustrated book, almost like kind of like one of those kids books where they talk through like, you know, how engines work. But this is like really sophisticated details. So it gets into like lots of details about like the modern air transportation system and sort of like how cargo containers are constructed and how things fit together, how locks work, how the Panama Canal works. And so it’s this great, incredibly well-illustrated book that sort of shows how stuff works for transportation. So I think it’s something you will enjoy.

**Craig:** There were those — I think it was David McCullough was the guy that did the books where he broke out the buildings for you.

**John:** It’s very much in that style.

**Craig:** Yeah, I love that stuff. All right, and it’s called The Way to Go?

**John:** The Way to Go.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a character. It’s a little random, but I watched Pitch Perfect last night. I hadn’t seen it before. I really, really liked it a lot. But my favorite character in the movie is the character of Lilly. Have you seen Pitch Perfect?

**John:** I saw Pitch Perfect. And I love Pitch Perfect.

**Craig:** Do you remember, Lilly?

**John:** Is Lilly Rebel Wilson?

**Craig:** No. Although Rebel Wilson was hysterical.

**John:** Oh, is Lilly the one who wouldn’t sing and then finally sings at the very end?

**Craig:** Lilly is the one that’s super-duper quiet and really, really weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m just obsessed with this character. So her name is Lilly. And the actress is Hana Mae Lee. And Kay Cannon is a very nice lady and a very good writer. I just love her name because it’s Cake And really. It’s like Kofi Annan is like Cake and On.

Anyway, so Hana Mae Lee portrays Lilly. And she is just the strangest thing. She barely speaks. She has this tiny little whisper. That’s why I did my little name that way. And in the movie does one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen any character do in any film including Lynch films. I mean it was the weirdest.

So Aubrey, this character Aubrey is the very controlling head of the group. And she’s so tightly wound that she has this problem where when she gets really upset and really emotional, she pukes, which is funny. And at one point in the movie, she gets super-duper angry at everybody and she just pukes like a ton. And it’s gross. And you’re like, okay, it’s just like one of those scenes in a comedy where somebody pukes and it’s like, ahh.

[laughs] And then at some point, they start fighting and Lilly trips and falls and lands in the puke.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then lies back in the puke and calmly begins making like a snow angel.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it was so shocking to me. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I just — I just stared at it. And I watched it like three times because I couldn’t believe they did it, and I’m not even sure why they did it. And nobody in the movie really comments on the fact that she did that. But she did it.

And so anyway, I love her. And I just want to read a few lines because she doesn’t say much. She just says these individual tiny little lines. One of which is, “I ate my twin in the womb.”

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** And one of which is, “Hi, my name is Lilly Onakuramara. I was born with gills like fish.” And then she says — they’re discussing the fact that Aubrey had puked the year prior, and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t want to have what happened last year happen again.” And Lilly says, “What happened last year and do you guys want to see a dead body?” [laughs]

It’s so weird. She’s such a strange subversive character in the middle of this very mainstream comedy. So my One Cool Thing this week is Lilly.

**John:** That is awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. And that’s our show. So you can find links to the things we talked about at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. There you can also find transcripts to all the back episodes. You can also find the actual audio for episodes online both through the app, we have an app for Android and for iOS devices so you can listen to them there. And you can also subscribe and get to all the back episodes, back to episode one where we barely knew what we were doing.

**Craig:** Barely. Now we slightly more than barely know what we’re doing.

**John:** Yeah, we still have Skype issue sometimes. You can also buy the first 100 episodes on a few of our last remaining USB drives. That’s at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Blake Kuehn. It’s great. It’s sort of this ’80s awesome kind of tribute thing. So thank you, Blake, for that. If you’d like to write us an outro, there’s a link in the show notes for how you can do that.

If you have a question for me, you can write to @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions go to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s our show.

**Craig:** That was a big, huge, long, great show.

**John:** It’s a huge episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, huge.

**John:** And cutting back and forth in time and so it’s —

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** This has been almost 90 minutes of —

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** No, it’s been 100 minutes of our taping this show.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, we need to charge people for this one. That’s it.

**John:** That’s it.

**Craig:** Yeah, see you next time.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* WGA President Chris Keyser on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0450899/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Keyser)
* Deadline’s January article on [Chip Johannessen and Billy Ray’s letter to WGA members](http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/writers-guild-producers-pension-health-contribution-cuts-new-contract/)
* [Thomas Ince](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_H._Ince) on Wikipedia
* [Sample pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/four-alternate-formats-final.pdf) from alternatively formatted screenplays
* Screenwriting.io on [multicamera script formatting](http://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [The Way to Go](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594204683/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Kate Ascher
* Lilly Onakuramara on [the Pitch Perfect wiki](http://pitch-perfect.wikia.com/wiki/Lilly_Onakuramara), and [a YouTube compilation of some of her best moments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdG6v7gkxm4)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Blake Kuehn ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/my-girlfriends-boyfriends-screenwriter).

**Disclaimer:** Hey, this is John. Two things about today’s episode. First off, this is one of those episodes where Craig swears a little bit. So, if you’re in the car with your kids, standard warnings there. It’s not terrible, just a few f-bombs, so they’re near the backend of the episode.

Second off, we now have an app for Scriptnotes. There’s an app for iOS and for Android. So, I talk about it at the end of the show in the One Cool Things, but in case you want to listen to this episode through the app, you can. It’s available right now for iPhone, for Android devices, however you want to find it.

On iPhone it’s in the App Store, so just go to the App Store on your phone and you’ll find it there, Scriptnotes.

For Android, I don’t know how you find Android apps, but it’s there wherever you find Android apps it should be there.

A few things about the app and how it all works. Scriptnotes is always free and it will always stay free so that the most recent episodes will always be free the way they always have been. The app is going to let us sell the back episodes. So, it’s a subscription that you can get all the back episodes you want, sort of the Netflix model, all-you-can-eat. Nothing has really changed except that if you want to listen to it through the app, or to go to those back episodes, they’re all available now.

So, if you like your current setup, don’t change anything. Stay awesome. Stay cool. And enjoy this episode of Scriptnotes.

[Intro tone]

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

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

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

Craig, you are in my house. We are doing one of those rare episodes where we’re actually live in the same room together.

**Craig:** Yeah. And as always there’s a certain frisson. There is a je ne sais quoi.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a little bit different when you’re here.

**Craig:** I noticed that everything that I said was very positive and what you said was studiously neutral to negative.

**John:** It’s good to have you here.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, we will just do a little bit of quick follow up on our last episode. People tweeted us saying like, “Oh, I’m a reader at CAA and what you said about coverage was not accurate. It was only half true.”

**Craig:** I noticed that. Now, did that individual follow our invitation to explain? [laughs]

**John:** No. That’s the reason why we’re doing follow up. So, if you listen to our podcast and somebody says, one of us say something that’s actually incorrect or you disagree with, that is an ideal opportunity to write in and say, “You were wrong about this thing.”

And so I would invite this person who said I was wrong about coverage to email me and tell me how I was wrong, because that’s the only way we can grow is by being corrected.

**Craig:** We’re not particularly sensitive about being wrong. We like learning.

**John:** I love to learn.

**Craig:** There was another person who wrote, who tweeted both of us, and said something like, “I really liked how John and Craig said they didn’t know anything about drugs and then spent 40 minutes talking about drugs.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I actually know a lot about drugs. And I’ve done drugs.

**John:** I know quite a bit about drugs. Yeah.

**Craig:** And you’ve done them.

**John:** But we’re just not doing them now.

**Craig:** Just right now. All we were saying was don’t do them while you’re writing. Why did that get — I didn’t understand that. Sometimes people are mean.

**John:** Sometimes people are just irrational. And I think Twitter brings out the worst characteristics of that where it’s just like it’s 140 characters, “I’m going to send it off.” Not as bad as like comments on a blog post, like reading below the fold of the post.

**Craig:** YouTube comments are the Mos Eisley of the internet.

**John:** They really are.

So, the third voice you hear in the room with us today, laughing occasionally, is Mike Birbiglia who is our special guest.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** And so Mike Birbiglia is a writer, director, performer, what other — ?

**Mike Birbiglia:** Yeah, sure.

**Craig:** Standup comedian.

**John:** Standup comedian, yes. Performer, that’s sort of a catch all category for that. Now for people who can’t think of who Mike Birbiglia is off the top of their head, he was in the second episode of Girls and he was —

**Mike:** In the first season.

**John:** That’s a very crucial point. So, you were the guy who she was interviewing for a job at some sort of publishing company?

**Mike:** Yeah. I don’t remember! [laughs]

**John:** Anyway, you were a guy at a desk.

**Craig:** Method actor. You were really into it that day.

**John:** He was deeply into it.

**Craig:** “I don’t remember.” What’s your character’s name? Uh…

**Mike:** But it was a fun scene. I loved shooting the scene.

**John:** I honestly feel like that scene kind of codified what her relationship was going to be towards work from that point forward. It was a really crucial moment. So, this is Mike Birbiglia and Lena Dunham in their first meeting in Girls.

[Girls scene begins]

**Mike’s Character:** I think the only other place that you’re allowed to brag like that is on your online dating profile. Not that I have one.

**Lena’s Character:** Oh, no. Of course not.

**Mike’s Character:** Mm-hmm. So, you live in Brooklyn. Is it Williamsburg?

**Lena’s Character:** No, I live in Greenpoint.

**Mike’s Character:** Oh.

**Lena’s Character:** You know, big difference, Williamsburg/Greenpoint.

**Mike’s Character:** Oh sure.

**Lena’s Character:** Are you in Brooklyn or?

**Mike’s Character:** Yeah. On Cobble Hill.

**Lena’s Character:** Oh, that’s like grownup Brooklyn.

**Mike’s Character:** Yeah. I’m like a real live grownup. Can’t you tell?

**Lena’s Character:** [laughs] So, in your neighborhood do you ever drink at that place Weather Up?

**Mike’s Character:** That’s a little bit hip for my taste.

**Lena’s Character:** Are you kidding? You’re very hip. But I do object to any bar that calls its bartenders mixologists.

**Mike’s Character:** Exactly.

**Lena’s Character:** And they wear tiny vests.

**Mike’s Character:** I know!

**Lena’s Character:** If I’m going to drink in your neighborhood I want to go to Washington Commons —

**Mike’s Character:** — Washington Commons. Oh my god! I love that place.

**Lena’s Character:** Hands down.

**Mike’s Character:** I like a bar where the median age is about 55.

**Lena’s Character:** I like a bar where the average patron would be described as crotchety.

**Mike’s Character:** Crotchety is good.

[Girls scene ends]

**John:** Welcome Mike Birbiglia.

**Craig:** Mike Birbiglia!

**Mike:** The part they don’t hear devolves into this really awkward rape joke.

**John:** Yes.

**Mike:** She makes a rape joke kind of flippantly and then I say, “That’s really not work language.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Mike:** That’s not — off is okay.

**John:** What was so great about that scene is it happens in a very natural romantic comedy kind of way. Like, oh, this guy is going to be a love interest. And then it so abruptly curtails in a way that I think is a remarkably good scene.

**Mike:** That was so fun. That was the most fun day of work I’ve ever had.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Mike:** It was the easiest, most fun day of work. I love Lena.

**John:** So, can you come back and do another arc on Girls?

**Mike:** I’d be thrilled. Yeah. I don’t know that it’ll ever happen, but that character kind of discounts himself by the end of the scene as being anyone she’d ever want to run into again.

**Craig:** Just like your real life.

**Mike:** [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

**John:** So, Mike is here because you are in town doing big legitimate shows. So, you just did Jimmy Kimmel. You’re going to be doing Conan.

**Mike:** Yup. Conan Monday and then I had tweeted at you guys I’m fans of you both and I listen to the podcast aggressively.

**John:** Wow. So what does that mean? You actually get yourself really pumped up and you start pen in hand?

**Mike:** I think it’s one of the favorite things in my life is listening to the podcast.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Holy cow. That’s some high pressure.

**Mike:** You know what it feels like? I’ll tell you what listening to the podcast feels like. I said this on Twitter, but it’s like hanging out with really smart people and talking about writing except you don’t have to talk.

**Craig:** That’s very nice.

**Mike:** And I love not talking. Because I talk for my living and after awhile you’re just like, “I just like listening to people who are really smart.”

**Craig:** I’d like to get that deal where we could do the podcast but not talk.

**John:** That would be fantastic. Craig, that’s called listening to a podcast.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** But because you don’t listen to any other podcasts, you have the joy of the monologue that you don’t have to be a part of.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I don’t… — How many podcasts are there at this point, like four or five now?

**John:** There might be at least six or maybe a dozen podcasts out there.

**Craig:** I just don’t have the time.

**Mike:** I mean, once it gets to ten they’re going to just stop making —

**Craig:** They’ll stop making.

**Mike:** Yeah. I’m sure. We’ll all have the good sense to do that.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** But I’m just a big fan of the podcast and as a guest I just want to say up top, I want to discount myself and say I am the least pedigreed of your writer guests admittedly, but I’d like to think of myself as a writer/listener who like won a contest.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed.

**Craig:** [laughs] You’re a little better than that.

**John:** Yeah, underneath your seat at Jimmy Kimmel there was a little note saying like, “You get to be a guest on this podcast.”

**Mike:** It was part of a gift bag.

**John:** I first met you at the screening of your film Sleepwalk with Me. And so that was the Writers Guild Foundation, I think, did a thing at the Writers Guild Theater. And Joss Whedon hosted a Q&A afterwards. And so you and I were up there. And so we talked very briefly in the lobby beforehand about Lena and how awesome things were.

Congratulations on Sleepwalk with Me.

**Mike:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Great movie.

**Mike:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Great movie.

**John:** So, it’s a movie that people can find on iTunes and Netflix and it came out last year and had the indie release, the big thing you were sort of marketing was to make more than Avengers did.

**Mike:** Yes.

**John:** And how did that go?

**Craig:** You got close.

**Mike:** Here’s what we did. Opening weekend we had the highest per screen average of any film that year, higher than Avengers. The one caveat is that we were on just the one screen.

**Craig:** Right. Of course.

**Mike:** And Avengers was on the 2,000 something screens. And so we did beat them in that category. In the overall I think they did close to $1 billion. We did about $2.3 million.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Still, that’s close.

**John:** Yeah, that’s right. I mean, with a margin of error.

**Mike:** They both have the word part “illion.”

**Craig:** That “illion.” A lot of kids who haven’t yet gone to second grade will flip the billion and million.

**Mike:** Yes, exactly.

**John:** That’s the original thinking. Generations —

**Craig:** For that age group you have done better than The Avengers.

**Mike:** Absolutely. And, honestly, it’s thrilling. Jokes aside, it’s thrilling to be able to make a movie that eventually gets to an audience. And people who love it, love it, and then people who hate it, hate it. And that’s fun, too.

**Craig:** I don’t know how anyone hates this movie. I mean, I don’t know why people hate movies in general anyway, but —

**John:** Positive moviegoing.

**Craig:** Positive moviegoing right here.

**Mike:** I loved that episode by the way.

**Craig:** Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And we’re talking about, you know, the guy, the Hulk, Hulk Film Crit, And Hulk Film Crit, one of his things is he had this amazing encounter with Quentin Tarantino who sort of lectured him on never hating a movie, which we’ll get to that later.

But I want to talk to you about your movie because the truth is you’re not any less credentialed than anyone. You wrote a screenplay and you directed your own screenplay and you made a movie. And you made a great movie.

As far as I’m concerned there’s no other credentials required. What’s fascinating about that movie is that it is, I think, unique in the history of adaptation. I don’t know if anyone has quite done what you’ve done, which is to take what is essentially a well crafted standup act in the vein of a one-man show kind of standup act, and adapt it for film and not just do kind of…forgive me, the guy who did the one-man show and then committed suicide, which is probably where you’re headed.

**John:** Spalding Gray.

**Craig:** Spalding Gray. So, before you Spaulding-Gray yourself, just know that even what he did, he shot himself talking to an audience. You dramatized the whole thing. So, my first question for you, if it’s not too early with the questions…

**John:** Go. Go.

**Craig:** Is how did you do that?

**John:** What was the genesis? I don’t know sort of how Sleepwalk with Me came about.

**Mike:** The genesis was I studied screenwriting undergraduate and I was very serious about it. I went to Georgetown and I was with a bunch of peers who were very serious about it. Jonah Nolan was in my class. Jordon Nardino. A lot of really great writers who went on to be working Hollywood writers.

And then I was not able to figure out how to come to Los Angeles and be a writer, and I was pursuing standup comedy at the same time. And so I was like, well, standup comedy at least, similar to the character that I play in the film, Matt Pandamiglio, not unlike Mike Birbiglia —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** I was working at the DC improv comedy club and I could see that there was a business model to standup comedy that I could understand. It’s a meager business model, but it’s a business model. You drive somewhere, you perform for 20 minutes, they give you $50. Like it made sense to me. And because I’d been on both sides of it at a comedy club I understood that. So, I pursued that for many years and at the same time I simultaneously started merging the dramatic playwriting standup, or playwriting and screenwriting elements with my standup comedy. And that is what became the one-man show Sleepwalk with Me, and then subsequently My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** And then what I really wanted to do was make a film. And then there was a company that was interested in adapting that into a film. They paid us to write it. They didn’t like the script. They didn’t see it. And I asked them if I could take it from them and make it myself. I was going to — we made it for about $1 million, which in film is nothing.

**Craig:** No, that’s a challenge.

**Mike:** I know people think it’s a lot of money, but in film it’s almost nothing. And so that’s how it happened. I mean, writing the one-man show took about seven years. And then the adaptation took about two or three years.

**John:** But so let’s talk about writing a one-man show, because I see you doing things that sort of look like standup but you actually look at what that show is, or what My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend is, and they’re much more structured experiences where they’re clearly like and now we’re in a flashback where we’re telling this kind of thing. And they have rhyme and they have structure to them.

What is the writing process like for this? Are you thinking about like this is that story and this is how I can get that story to hook into the next thing?

**Mike:** Well, I was very lucky. Early on when I moved to New York City I started seeing all of the one-person shows on and off Broadway. I saw I Am My Own Wife. I saw Bridge & Tunnel. And then the one that really hooked me emotionally was this one called the Tricky Part.

And if writers are in New York, by the way, see cheap theater. It’s totally available.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** See tons of it. It’s so educational. You can go on these like BroadwayBox.com and there’s all these like Broadway deals if you Google just like “theater deals cheap tickets.” You can get cheap tickets and see a lot and learn a lot.

I saw this one called The Tricky Part, directed by Seth Barrish, and starring Martin Moran. It’s this very dramatic story but had a lot of levity to it as well about this guy who was sexually abused by a clergy person in his church growing up. But it was very funny.

**Craig:** Not a rabbi. I should point that out.

**John:** You never hear that, do you.

**Craig:** You do, but less.

**Mike:** But there was so much humor to it, and it was so — how do I say — very conversational the way he told the story. You felt like you were talking to a friend. And I thought, oh my god, I got to talk to that director, Seth Barrish.

And I really like sent him a letter. I sent him my comedy CD. And I said, “This is what I’d like to do.” And I sent him the script for Sleepwalk with Me, an early draft of it, the one-man show, and he was not so interested but he listened to the CD and he said, “It’s funny, but it’s not quite there yet. And I’ll teach you sort of how I approach one person theater.”

And what he taught me, and I think this applies for film, I still use it for the films I’m writing right now, and he and I still use it when we work together with our one-person shows, is finding a main event that the whole film or play builds towards. And if that main event is interesting enough, all you have to do is build backwards to it so that secretly, as a writer, your little trick is that you know that no one has any idea that where you’re going is pretty fascinating.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** And I feel like that’s been the guiding principal for all of me and Seth’s work.

**Craig:** In the movie, it’s the wedding.

**Mike:** I can say what it is.

**Craig:** We can give spoilers. It feels like it’s the wedding to me. Or the —

**Mike:** Yeah. I think we can say, I mean, I feel like it’s been out so long that we can say what it is.

**John:** It’s the jumps through the window.

**Mike:** Yeah, I would say —

**Craig:** Well, the jump through the window is sort of the breaking point.

**Mike:** Right.

**Craig:** But so that’s like, I understand what you’re saying. There’s a surprise thing that happens that you never see coming.

**Mike:** Yeah. In Sleepwalk there’s two simultaneous. One is the wedding. Or one is us getting engaged and the wedding plans. And then jumping through the window. My sleepwalking getting so bad that it nearly kills me.

And then once you have that, that interesting main event, I feel like you can build backwards towards that. I feel like it’s something you guys talk about all the time is finding your ending before you begin.

**Craig:** You got to know what your ending is.

**John:** Now, talk to me about writing this stuff, are you perceiving yourself as a character or are you perceiving yourself as I am just the —

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the part that I find so fascinating that you would —

**John:** The boundary between who you are as an actual person, Mike Birbiglia, and who you are as this character playing. Because in the one-man show version of it, is it Mike Birbiglia or is it Matt?

**Mike:** Yeah. In the one-man show version it’s me. Definitely me.

**Craig:** And why did — I’m stacking questions.

**Mike:** I get this question a lot.

**Craig:** What’s the point? [laughs]

**Mike:** Of changing the name?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** So, two of the models when I was writing the film, two of the models for the film were Private Parts by Howard Stern.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Mike:** And Annie Hall by Woody Allen.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Mike:** And in Private Parts Howard Stern keeps his name, Howard Stern. In Annie Hall he’s Alvy Singer. And I thought Woody Allen is a career that I like to emulate. He’s made some 30 or 40 films at this point.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** Howard Stern is doing a great job in radio but he doesn’t want to make more movies. And I just want to make a lot of movies. And so I thought I don’t want to set myself up for this odd paradigm where people are expecting to come see Mike Birbiglia do Mike Birbiglia things over and over again, because I just honestly don’t have enough stories for that.

**Craig:** Your life is not interesting enough to support the entire career.

**Mike:** By no means.

**John:** And people, I feel like they set up their lives in ways just so they’ll have interesting stories. It’s like they’re deliberately seeking danger and seeking these crazy events so that they can have that.

**Craig:** Which is one thing I love about Mike and his story is that you seem like the kind of person who is, in watching your film, incredibly resistant to anything happening to you that’s exciting.

**Mike:** True.

**Craig:** And that, in fact, it is only when you’re sleeping that the exciting things happen, totally against your will, and I love that.

**Mike:** Thanks.

**Craig:** I think you’re a great character for somebody to have written. Granted, in real life it’s got to be a huge pain in the ass.

**Mike:** Also it was really challenging dramatically to write a character who is incapable of doing most things.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** Because so much of drama is based on action and his character is based on kind of inaction.

**Craig:** But then there’s an action that comes out, I mean, the first sort of — well, it’s not the first one. But the first time in your movie I got fooled, obviously I don’t get fooled when the sleep doctor is talking to you. I get what’s going on there. But I got fooled with that woman in that room until she gives you the pizza neck roll.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I thought it was happening.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you kind of trickily were able to be active. It’s kind of the point really is that you’re active when you’re not guarding against being active.

**Mike:** Yes.

**John:** Now, a question about the writing process on that. Were you able to incorporate like bits of stories into your act, into your standup, to figure out sort of what was funny?

**Mike:** Yes.

**John:** And that’s a unique thing that a normal writer wouldn’t have the opportunity to do.

**Mike:** Yeah, very much trial and error based. And that’s the thing that I love about standup comedy is that as a writer I can write, I can put something on stage that night and I can get a sense this either works or doesn’t work, or it needs work. And in my screenwriting process, like I’m writing two scripts right now, and I’ll just invite my actor friends over and we’ll just do readings of it.

**Craig:** Great.

**Mike:** And it’s so helpful.

**Craig:** Isn’t it? I mean, it’s amazing. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this. Even if your acting friends are terrible actors, it’s okay. Just to hear it out loud is so informative.

**Mike:** I encourage it so much. That was actually the thing — I made a bullet point thing of what I actually could talk about on this podcast that could be helpful and my biggest thing is DIY. Which is just people wherever you are, if you live in Washington, DC, you live in Cincinnati, you live in a suburb of Nebraska. You can develop a community and you can do readings and you can shoot shorts on really inexpensive cameras. And you can learn things on your own and kind of get better.

**John:** One of the things that I think is so fascinating about filmmaking is that everyone feel like, well, I would never be able to be a director. I could never do all of these complicated jobs. But I guess I can write a script. And so they write their scripts in secret and in private and then they get frustrated like, well, what do I do next? Well, you have to do something. You have to do something beyond just sitting at your computer.

You have to like get it out there in the world and let people see it and do things. So, readings are great. Shooting short films are great. People need to experiment with what it is that they made on the page and what it actually feels like out there in the world.

**Mike:** And failure is great.

**John:** Failure is wonderful.

**Mike:** Failure is the best thing that can happen.

**Craig:** That’s good news, because it’s here constantly. [laughs]

**Mike:** [laughs] This is the town of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It walks hand in hand with all of us, doesn’t it?

**Mike:** Well that, when I was in college I directed my first short. It was actually called Extras. It was in the late ’90s, before the TV series, and it was about three professional extras who were roommates and two of my friends played the other parts. And it was a complete disaster. I lost like thousands of dollars, but I learned so much from it.

**John:** Yeah. That’s your film school. It’s really trying stuff out and seeing what works.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know, it’s interesting because in your film, when you look at the character of —

**Mike:** Matt.

**Craig:** I was just going to say you. I’m saying you.

**Mike:** Yeah, yeah, my character.

**Craig:** Look at you. Everything you’re doing circumstantially would make me not like you. Right?

**Mike:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** And you very candidly turn to the camera and say, “Before I get to this next part, remember, you’re on my side.” But we are on your side. And the reason we’re on your side is because you are in a very kind of modern, confessional way sharing with us your failure. We watch you fail. We’re watching you fail at work. And we’re watching you fail at home with your parents, and your girlfriend. Just the negotiation of the apartment is a failure.

Everything is a failure. The awesome woman — who is the woman who plays your manager? She was hysterical.

**Mike:** Sondra James. A wonderful actress.

**Craig:** Hysterical.

**Mike:** She’s on Girls sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. Great. I mean, she was just pitch perfect. There is that amazing segment of just incredibly old, food coming out of their mouth, managers. But you’re failing everywhere and so we love you. And we love you so much that we’re kind of doing, we’re peeking through our fingers sort of in fear because we know you’re doing the wrong thing.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is so interesting to me. It’s hard to ask you these questions, “Is that intentional?” It’s what was true.

**Mike:** Yes.

**Craig:** But was it also something that you were aware of as you were writing that you were doing something that you would have to do anyway if it were a fictional character?

**Mike:** I’m not sure what the question is.

**Craig:** The question is, if you write a character who is agreeing to marry somebody that they don’t want to marry.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t like that guy. We need to do something about that character to make us connect with him so we are on his side.

**Mike:** Yes.

**Craig:** And experiencing his journey. So, when you were writing were you aware of that?

**Mike:** Well, one of the things that’s odd about the process of the film is that the monologues that are in the film where I’m driving and talking to camera are in the past tense. And I look and I say before I tell you this part of the story I want to remind you you’re on my side, etc, etc.

When we filmed it, we filmed it in more of a Ferris Bueller style where in the middle of a scene I would break and look to camera and speak to camera. When we got in the edit we were like, “Oh, this doesn’t work at all,” because it’s actually too sad what’s happening.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** And it needs to be in the past tense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Mike:** It needs to be tragedy plus time to be funny. And because we need to know that he’s okay. And so when I’m driving and I’m looking at the camera you’re like, oh, he’s all right. He’s telling us the story and he’s telling us in the past tense, so he’s clearly okay. He’s not dead.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** He’s figured it out. He seems like his mood is okay.

**Craig:** There’s a happy ending somewhere.

**Mike:** So we did that and we picked that up in post as a past tense thing. And it actually fixed the movie. The movie was tanking with our test audiences before that point.

**Craig:** Right. And then you take that out and you see this big jump.

**Mike:** Yeah, because people were like, “It’s just too sad. This story is so sad. This guy keeps failing and he’s messing up other people’s lives. And we’re not okay with it.” That’s how people were when they first saw it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, getting back to the sort of the losery persona of the main character here, I would say we identify with a lead character who is trying. This goes back to Lindsay Doran’s argument. If you came in as being really cool we wouldn’t kind of care about you because we wouldn’t have —

**Mike:** [Crosstalk] …it’s like my least, it’s my biggest pet peeve.

**Craig:** Right. Cool characters.

**Mike:** Cool characters.

**Craig:** I got a note, my favorite stupid note I ever got was can the main character be a hero in the beginning.

**John:** That’s one of the worst possible notes.

**Craig:** Sure. Absolutely. How long would you like to shoot — we can shoot it in a day and put it out. It will be called Nothing Happens.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And just a guy will come in, punch a bad guy, and then roll credits.

**John:** Definitely. That’s a trailer. You get to make a trailer.

**Craig:** You can’t even make a trailer.

**John:** That’s true —

**Craig:** You would run out of time. You would never get to the point where James, what’s his face, sing’s I Feel Good. Yeah, you would never get there.

**John:** It would be very rough. So, we need to see your character trying.

**Mike:** Sure.

**John:** And it’s great that your character fails and fails a lot, but able to pick himself up and dust himself off. And so shooting those extra bits that put it all in the past tense let us know like he is going to be able to pick himself up and dust himself up. So, even though things will get worse, they’ll ultimately get better. There’s a happy ending there at the end. You created a bookend for it that let us know we’d be okay.

**Craig:** So, you’re sitting there in a movie theater. The movie is done. And there’s a focus group and they’re saying things like, “This guy Matt Pandapiglia is just an asshole. And I hate him. I hate what he does. He’s a jerk. This character sucks. Why is she with him at all?”

And you’re sitting there like, It’s me!

**Mike:** It’s even worse after the movie comes out.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Mike:** Like I think there was a Jezebel article that came out after the movie came out.

**Craig:** Oh Jezebel.

**Mike:** And they said —

**Craig:** They’re angry.

**Mike:** Well, they said, and I like the site. I like some of the writing on the site a lot. I consider myself a feminist. They said, “Why Matt Pandamiglio is bad for your relationship,” or something like that. I’m paraphrasing. I might get it wrong. You can look it up if you want. But something to do with the fact, like this kind of personal jab. And I just disagree. I disagree. I think this movie is about these two characters who are not together at the right point in their life and at the end they go separate ways and it’s better for both of them. I truly believe that.

**Craig:** She’s since gotten married.

**Mike:** She’s wonderful. She’s doing great. [laughs]

**Craig:** And you’ve gotten married.

**Mike:** She’s married. I’m married. We’re both very happy. We’re very close.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** And very happy. Like when she saw the movie, we had an opening night screening in the Opera House at BAM. She came to the screening. She was crying afterwards. She said it was like so moving to see that part of our lives documented.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** And for people to criticize it for that, I just, it was really disconcerting.

**John:** Well, okay, let’s talk about this aspect of autobiography, because you can’t write autobiography without other people and other real people being involved in that. So, as you’re figuring out the standup, the one-man show version of it and the movie version of it at what point did you have to figure out much you’re writing the real people versus the — this is the real person and this is what the person is in the drama —

**Mike:** That’s a good actually and that’s part of the reason I changed the names. I didn’t want my dad to be my dad. I wanted it to be Gary Pandamiglio. I didn’t want it to be Vince Birbiglia, I wanted him to be Gary Pandamiglio. Interestingly, and the same with my mom, and the same with my girlfriend.

I think there’s a degree to which you really need to protect people in your life, even if it’s just changing names, things like that. That’s just how I feel. What’s amazing is my parents saw the movie and they had no sense that it was based on them at all. They thought it was entirely fiction.

**Craig:** This is very common.

**Mike:** Didn’t recognize any —

**Craig:** People don’t see themselves.

**Mike:** They didn’t recognize any qualities that they have.

**Craig:** [laughs] While they were probably exhibiting those qualities —

**Mike:** With some direct quotes.

**Craig:** The direct quotes. They did not recognize. Well, you know, famously Dr. Evil is just an impression of Lorne Michaels.

**John:** Yeah. And he doesn’t see it at all.

**Craig:** Did not notice. In fact, as the story goes, Mike Myers takes Lorne Michaels for a walk before they’re going to show the movie —

**Mike:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** And he goes, “I just want you to know, so you don’t freak out, but Dr. Evil is basically you. But don’t, you know…” And he’s like, “Okay.” And then he sees the movie and he goes, “I don’t see it. I didn’t really see it.”

**Mike:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** But you also get a license to push the characters a little bit, I mean, by changing the names. I mean, I’m sure that they are exaggerated and —

**Mike:** Absolutely. And that’s what I want to do moving forward with my next movies, too. But while we’re doing impressions, I want to do my impression of you guys.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, he’s got an impression of us.

**Mike:** I don’t do impressions. I want to preface it with that.

**Craig:** I’m so excited.

**Mike:** But I feel like, so we just have to name an object and then we’ll have me do John and Craig talking about the object. So, like this is a coffee cup.

[as John] Yeah, I’m holding a coffee cup. So — so this would be like, so today we’re going to talk about coffee cups. And, I think, I love coffee cups. I think we that we should give coffee cups a chance.

[as Craig] What are you talking about? This coffee cup is garbage. They’re giving you something that’s practically garbage. There’s almost no coffee in it. You’re going to hurt your hand. It’s scalding hot. There’s no insulation.

[as John] Yeah, but, I think we should all — let’s give coffee cups a chance.

I feel like that’s the show in a nutshell.

**Craig:** Which one was which? I don’t know, was I the first one? [laughs]

**Mike:** That’s the show in a nutshell.

**Craig:** Yeah, pretty much.

**Mike:** And I love that. I love the scenario. I don’t do the voices, but it’s the essence of the show.

**Craig:** The essence of it, yeah. Well, you know, John is from Colorado. He’s American. And I’m from New York. [laughs] And I’m an ass. But for New York, I think I’m a nice New York.

**John:** You’re on the nice side of New Yorkers.

**Craig:** Yeah, it can be much worse than this. It could be much, much worse than this. That was disturbingly accurate.

**Mike:** I identify with both, so the yin and the yang of that. Like when I hear you points I’m like, oh, that’s a nice bit of positivity about that. And then when I hear your points I’m like, yeah, these motherfuckers.

**Craig:** Ha! [laughs]

**Mike:** Fucking idiots.

**Craig:** Yeah, come on, man! Right?

**John:** So, to transition to the next film you made, which was much more like a Spalding Gray, sort of one man talking in front of an audience thing, this is My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. So, was this a monologue you had already, or a one-man show you’d already put together before you had done? Tell us about the history of this.

**Mike:** Yes. It actually is. It’s a concert — it’s now a concert film that’s on iTunes and Netflix if people want to see it. And it’s an album on iTunes. And it’s a one-person show that Seth Barrish, again, directed. And that we worked on starting — I did a piece on This American Life. People might know me from that as well. I’ve done a handful of stories over the years on This American Life. And Ira Glass, who co-wrote my film, and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend was based on this incident I had. The main event is that I was hit by a drunk driver in Los Angeles. And then in a really strange turn of events made to pay for the other driver’s car.

It was $12,000. And it was infuriating. And the parallel story in that is that my wife and I, my now wife and I, were going through this really hard situation where we were deciding whether or not we were going to get married. And neither of us really believed in the idea of marriage but we were getting pressure from all sides.

And so — and I have this problem where when I think I’m right about something, it can be a real issue. A little bit maybe like Craig, where I just want to be right. I’m like, “Argh,” I get really riled up and it’s like, “I’m not paying for this car! And I’m not getting married! And I’m not going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

And the whole show, and the concert film, builds to a head where I’m dealing with both of those things at the same time and it’s —

**Craig:** Like most good stories, the object is to be less like Craig. Ultimately to get over that.

**Mike:** It’s not always written that way, but it’s the subtext.

**Craig:** The subtext is don’t — that I am the pre-actualization character.

**John:** Yes. Let’s listen to a clip from it. This is from My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, and this is as you are first meeting — you’ve met this girl Jenny who you have a crush on and you agree to sort of go out on a three-person date and hopefully not have it be a three-person date at the end of the night. So, let’s listen to a clip.

[Clip begins]

**Mike:** We’re at the pub and it had taken so much convincing for Andy to get Jenny to come out there. By the time she came out she thought she was on a date with him. Yeah, that wasn’t the idea. And so I had to convince him to fall away as the night went on, like the red rockets and the space shuttle. And eventually she realized she was on a date with me. And she was not happy about that.

But, she warmed to me as the night went on because she was drinking and like, no, by the end of the night we’re laughing and having a good time and I caught a break which is we shared a ride back to our hotel with one of their friends. And she and I were stuffed in this little backseat together. It was really quiet, so I could hear her soft voice. And she told me she had just come off a long difficult breakup.

And I told her about my breakup. And for a moment there in the backseat it felt like we were holding up two halves of a broken paper heart. And we get back to the hotel and I offer to walk her to her room and she said, sure. And we get to the door and I didn’t want this night to end. And so I build up the courage to lean in to kiss her and she says, “Oh, no thank you.”

[Clip ends]

**Mike:** It’s entirely true that story.

**Craig:** “No thank you.”

**Mike:** Oh, no thank you.

**Craig:** That’s one of the greatest responses to an attempt at a kiss ever.

**Mike:** Yeah.

Craig. “Oh, no thank you.”

**Mike:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “It was nice.”

**John:** I want to talk about the visuals you built in there because actually it’s much more sophisticated than a person might guess at the start.

**Mike:** Oh thanks.

**John:** The visuals of this crowded Irish pub. And then being in the backseat of the car. So, by telling us specifically they were in the backseat of the car we have an image of the two of you guys together there. The image of like the broken paper heart, holding up the two halves of the broken paper heart.

The hallway. We’re seeing these places that you’re putting us and it’s very specific and it’s very — it’s writerly. And it’s not simply just a joke. You’re actually creating — you’re painting a scene which is a crucial thing that we don’t think about people doing in monologues. But it’s so smart.

**Craig:** Yeah. And while you’re painting the visuals, you’re also telling us something about your internal life which is that you are a romantic but you’re also anti-romantic. You’re anti-romantic enough to make fun of the idea of holding up two halves of the paper heart. And yet you thought of that. You know? And that’s a great human kind of real romanticism which I love.

**Mike:** Yeah. I think that — I actually think, and that’s why I’m saying I encourage people to make things. I feel like by making and directing Sleepwalk with Me I actually — this show became better. I had started this show and it was Off-Broadway before I made Sleepwalk with Me. And then I toured with it after Sleepwalk with Me to about 100 cities around the world, London, Australia, Canada, 70 cities in America. And it actually — I rewrote it, and rewrote it, and rewrote it, even after it had closed Off-Broadway. And then by the time I filmed it, like you said, it had become more cinematic.

**John:** So, structurally the show works as an extended flashback, basically.

**Mike:** Yes.

**John:** So, quite early on we’re establishing like who you are as a character in this story that we may be hearing. That there’s a girl. That there’s going to be this car crash. And you have a very specific rhyming element that you say for the car crash. It’s T-boned. And it’s not actually even that funny, so it’s basically the car gets hit from the side and being hit in the side is called being T-boned.

And I thought it was so smart because I noticed it when you first did it. It’s like, that’s a strange — it’s not getting a laugh, and he knows it’s not going to get a laugh, so it much be there for a reason. And the reason why it’s there is because at the end of the show you’re going to come back to T-boned and it’s like, “Oh, we’re back in that same moment and this is all — this extended flashback is now over.” It was very smartly done. It felt very cinematic in a way.

**Mike:** Thanks.

**John:** It’s like, you know, this was the signal that we were out of this flashback and now we’re back into the present time.

So, talk about touring around and doing things, because when you say you rewrote it does that mean that you have — the show is not on index cards. It isn’t like joke cards anymore.

**Mike:** No, I do do it on index cards also. I have a running document which is, you know, at this point I probably did 30, 40 drafts of that show. And then —

**John:** What does it look like to you? Because since it is just you talking, so is it —

**Mike:** It’s just a Word Document.

**John:** It’s just a Word Document where you have it in paragraphs?

**Mike:** Yeah. A lot of times if it’s a joke it’ll be it’s one paragraph and that kind of thing to give it a tempo feel on the page. But, yeah, I keep rewriting and rewriting. And there’s a lot of things where I feel like the best movies and plays as well are things where you’re laughing, you’re laughing, you’re laughing, you’re laughing, and then at the end you go, “Oh my god, it’s a fucking story.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** And that’s what really lured me into like the stuff that I sort of model my own stuff after is like James L. Brooks’ films, Broadcast News and Terms of Endearment. Like you look at a film like Broadcast News which I’ve probably seen 10 or 15 times, and it’s just — I’m just laughing all the way through. And then when it just punches you in the gut at the end of the movie you just go, “Oh my god, this is why we see movies.”

**Craig:** Well, laughing opens you up. You know?

**Mike:** Yes, that’s right.

**Craig:** You’ve lost your defenses and you’re expecting to laugh again. So, nobody sees it coming, you know? I remember talking to David Zucker and Jerry Zucker about the first time they screened the movie Airplane! for a test audience. And in their minds everything was jokes. They were just obsessed with how the jokes would play. And they were just thrown on their heels when at the end of the movie the plan finally lands and the audience bursts into applause.

**Mike:** Oh, that’s amazing.

**Craig:** Because they cared that the plane would land. You know? And they just thought, “It doesn’t matter. We’ve told them in every possible way this is not a real plane.” It is to them. It matters. And so the human desire to give a shit is not defeatable.

**Mike:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, you might as well work with it, which you did. I mean, you really did it beautifully in your movie. It’s even interesting watching you — if you were to say to me here’s a movie by a comedian about his career in which he gets up and starts getting laughs I would go, “Wow, that sounds kind of like a douchebag scene.” And it’s not.

**Mike:** Totally agree.

**Craig:** It’s not because you earned it, you know, because I watched you suffer. So, I totally agree. I know exactly what you mean.

**Mike:** Yeah. Well, one of the obstacles of that in the writing process and we really struggled with this is there were certain drafts where it was how do we show that he’s doing better. And it would be like, “Well, the audience applauds more.” And it’s like, nope, it can’t be that, because the audience watching it in the theater, if they disagree with the applause then you’re screwed.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** The movie is over.

**Craig:** The movie is fake. Right. It’s self-congratulatory.

**Mike:** How many movies have we seen about performance where you’re not applauding when the characters are applauding and you just hate it? And so we were like — I love the movie Once, the film Once, I really love. And I thought that that’s the perfect treatment of performance which is at the beginning he plays covers and this woman convinces him to play originals. And then he plays originals and we get it. We don’t have to like the originals.

**Craig:** But he’s grown.

**Mike:** We just get that there’s a growth happening. We can relate to the growth.

**Craig:** Well and even then, in your moment, the turning point, you see a guy laugh. I mean —

**Mike:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I mean, you were kind of close on one guy.

**Mike:** I’m glad you noticed that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then I see you going, “Holy shit. Someone laughed.” You know.

**Mike:** I can’t believe someone laughed.

**John:** Your reaction is more important than his reaction was.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And it was great that it wasn’t like [loud laughter], you know, it was just one guy going, ha! [laughs] And you’re like, huh.

**Mike:** The guy laughing is our producer, Jacob Jaffke. He’s the audience member.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s kind of just slouching.

**Mike:** Yeah, it was a great moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was very smartly done.

I have sort of a question that’s more about your style of comedy.

**Mike:** Sure.

**Craig:** Partly it feels modern to me because it is confessional. And I think there is a spirit of confession in modern comedy, you see it with Louis C.K., and you see it with Patton Oswalt. And you see it with a lot of guys.

**John:** We see it with Lena Dunham. You see it with —

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yeah.

**John:** Or, were you talking about this on stage?

**Craig:** I’m talking about on stage. And it’s not like that that’s new because Richard Pryor was doing it, too, but it’s very au courant. But you’re also very old fashioned actually in a way. You don’t curse in your act, so very kind of Seinfeld in that regard, or Cosby. And like Cosby, there’s a craft. You’re not winging it. But you’re not delivering something that feels over-workshopped or stale either.

Where do you see yourself sitting kind of in the continuum of comedy?

**Mike:** It’s funny you should say that because my new tour, which if people are interested in seeing me, for exact time/tour dates, you can see thirty cities, it’s going to be 100 cities, which is like I haven’t really told people.

**Craig:** Oh, we’re breaking news. Nice.

**Mike:** Yeah, breaking news. And it’s called Thank God for Jokes. And it’s all about what jokes mean to me. And I think what they mean to everyone. Which is to say that I feel like the moments in my life where I felt closest to anyone, to my family, to my wife, to my friends is when we share jokes.

And I feel like culturally we’re not really allowed to tell jokes at work. We’re not really allowed to tell jokes to strangers. You can do it, but there’s a real risk to it. And I think that the reward of comedy is worth the risk, like taking a chance and making a joke with someone actually payoff in this way that’s kind of amazing.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** And makes you feel really close to people. And I actually talk about cursing in the show because I have four albums out there at this point and none of them have curses on them, none of them have explicit lyrics. And the reason is — I’m not proud of this reason, but it’s true — is that when I started doing comedy my mom was so ashamed that I was doing it that she said, “Just don’t become one of those dirty comedians.”

**Craig:** Ooh.

**Mike:** And I said okay.

**John:** Oh little Mike.

**Mike:** She goes, “You don’t have to use words like that. I mean, for example, Oprah is very funny.” And I was like —

**Craig:** Hysterical. [laughs]

**Mike:** So be kind of Oprah.

**John:** You need to be more like Oprah.

**Craig:** You are almost as funny as Oprah.

**Mike:** Yeah, I’m working on it. But so I didn’t curse.

And then oddly it ended up being this really good turn in my writing because even if you think about, you don’t want to really as a writer say any word 75 times more than another word. If I walked on stage and said “avocado” 75 times in an hour, after awhile people would be like, “This guy talks about avocados a lot. Is he selling us guacamole?”

And it ended up being a really good thing. In this new show I do curse a few times, but it’s with real purpose. And so, yeah.

**John:** So, this new show, is it more like standup, or is it more like a one-man show?

**Mike:** Right now it is standup. The way my shows have evolved over the years is by the time I film it it probably will have more of an arc to it. I have in mind an arc, but I want to let it evolve.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about what else you’re going to be doing because you said you’re working on two screenplays, so these are things for yourself to direct or things for other people?

**Mike:** Those are two films for myself to direct and I think in one of them I play a big part and one I play an ensemble part. And it’s really funny because a lot of times people go, “Who are you writing them for?” And I’m like, “I’m writing them for me.”

I feel like it’s almost old Hollywood in a way to say, to brag and say I’m writing this for New Line. It’s like I feel bad when people say stuff like that. I’m like, “Oh, too bad about you.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** How’s that going to get ruined.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s my life. Okay.

**Mike:** I’m sorry!

**John:** And do you see yourself sticking to films? Are you going to try to do some television? If I were a television executive I would say, “Well, let’s give him a show.”

**Mike:** I feel like, and I get that phone call quite a bit, more than one would think, and I don’t want to do that. Because I don’t think I have a lot to contribute to television and I feel like — I look at Louis and Lena and I just go, “You guys got it. You’re doing it. Way to go.” And I just don’t think that I have much to add to that conversation. But I think in film I — I think you got to do what you love. I love films. I feel like that’s why I like the podcast so much because you guys do, too.

There’s something about that 90 minute to two-hour experience that you cannot compare to anything.

**Craig:** And one story that resolves that exists in its own space. I’m with you. That’s always been, you know, that’s what I… — I mean, I talk about television all the time with people and I don’t, I think that’s the best way you just put it. That’s what I’m going to start saying instead of, “Uh…” which is my usual answer. I can just say, “I don’t think I have anything to add to that conversation.” That’s exactly right.

I think in terms of — and you clearly do as well, which is interesting, because standup comedy is very segmented. It’s serialized. And you can see how somebody like Jerry Seinfeld was able to just serialize it. But you really do tell encapsulated stories with conclusions. So, it makes total sense.

There’s something, you know, you said you love movies. And you seem like a very positive person, which I love, and when I was watching your movie there’s that scene where you talk to that other comedian and he’s so pissed off.

**Mike:** Yeah. Marc Maron plays the character, Marc Mulheren.

**Craig:** Well, no, not Marc Maron.

**Mike:** Oh, Alex Karpovsky plays the guy, yeah.

**Craig:** Marc Maron actually was very kind of avuncular. I liked his spin. He was sort of like, “Hey kid, it’ll get better. Now let me go bang this chick.”

Why, I think as somebody that works in comedy but would just be terrified to do what you do, to go on stage and do this, it seems so hard and it seems so raw and vulnerable. Why are comedians so mean to each other?

**Mike:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Can’t they just love each other?

**John:** Are they mean to each other? Or is that just one perception?

**Mike:** I think Craig’s right. I’ve been doing, at UCB Theater in New York, I’ve been recently doing an improv show. I was in an improv group in college actually with Nick Kroll who is another actor.

**Craig:** Yeah, funny guy.

**Mike:** Yeah. And I’ve been doing this show in New York called Mike Birbiglia’s dream. It’s a long form improv show with Chris Gethard who is super talented. And sometimes Vanessa Bayer does it, and Aidy Bryant, and Christina Gausas, and Tami Sagher, and all these really great people. And I love the camaraderie of it. That’s why I do it.

With standup comics, a little less camaraderie there. It’s a little bit — I don’t know, it’s a little bit of a Rat Packy thing. People break each other’s balls a lot.

**Craig:** Sure. But that’s different. I sense that there’s a —

**Mike:** Yeah. But I agree with you. I don’t know what to say about it. I think it’s a very lone wolf profession.

**John:** Yeah, is it because of the lifestyle? Is it because of the touring and because you’re always on your own and you don’t have your own group?

**Mike:** Yeah. I think you spend a lot of time alone and there’s just, I don’t know.

**Craig:** There’s that sense that people are clawing for some diminishing resource that’s being dangled in front of them, you know, when in the movie he says, “All my friends, they’re hacks and they’re getting sitcoms.” You know, that idea that there’s some closing window of success.

**Mike:** Yeah, I agree. And I think on your episode about positive moviegoing, the title of the episode Positive Moviegoing, I really liked how you guys were talking about screenwriters want other screenwriters to do well.

**Craig:** Largely. [laughs]

**Mike:** For the most part.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Mike:** Cinephiles, I mean, I consider myself just a lover of movies. I just want movies to be great. Like this year, I love Spectacular Now, and Frances Ha, and I love Gravity. You know, and those are three very different types of films. And I loved that they were all made. And I want more made. I want more great movies.

**Craig:** Yeah, screenwriters, maybe it’s because it’s not us, it’s our work. We write screenplays, we hand them over. They’re made. We make them sometimes. But you guys, it’s you, it’s your faces. It’s your voices. And it becomes very personal. I could see that where it’s sort of like, okay, if John hands me a script or I hand him a script and we go back and help each other and say, “Well what about this? What about this?” That’s about the work.

If John walks off a stage and I’m like, “No, no, no. Your face — your hands, what are your hands doing buddy?”

**John:** Yeah, everything is wrong. Let’s talk about from the perspective of a 20-year-old college kid listening to this right now. And so he’s like, “I want to do what Mike Birbiglia is doing, that thing where I’m writing for myself and performing stuff.” How would that kid get started? What’s the roadmap for him or her?

**Craig:** Sleep disorder. [laughs]

**John:** Figure out what your biggest, strangest tick is and really dwell on that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** It is a really hard thing to say. And I think, I’m sure you guys have this with screenwriters all the time where it’s like, so I always feel like saying, “So the path is there is no path. And I’m sorry about that.” And you have to figure out what it is by studying what other people’s paths are. There’s tons of books on it. There’s this podcast. I would honestly say listen to every episode of this podcast to people who are aspiring writers. It is a wealth of information and it’s free.

**Craig:** There’s our promo. There it is. [laughs]

**Mike:** It is really a service. And what writing comes down to, being a performer, too, a writer-performer is you have to write and you have to perform. And that means you have to write anything and you need to perform anywhere. And because it’s about the ten thousand hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about. You have to get on the stage for ten thousand hours. You have to write for ten thousand hours.

**Craig:** You drove around from town to town. I mean, that happens.

**Mike:** I hosted lip sync contests. I performed in the center of a walkathon for lupus in a gymnasium, you know. I mean, these are real life stories. This is still my life. I mean, I get booked at corporate events where I’m performing for bankers. And I have to do it. And, like, it sucks. It’s not fun. But it’s part of my job.

**Craig:** You should open with that. “This sucks.”

**John:** “I resent being here.”

**Mike:** This isn’t fun!

**Craig:** Yeah. “This is not fun. It’s part of a job. But you guys understand what it’s like to do something that sucks, that’s not fun. You work for AT&T.”

**John:** Yeah. And in about two hours I’m no longer working for AT&T and you’re still stuck working for AT&T.

**Mike:** You guys are really good at this.

**Craig:** I can’t believe that half of you haven’t killed yourselves by now.

**Mike:** You guys are coming up with great ways to not get the check afterwards.

**Craig:** We’re really good at that.

**John:** That’s how it works. But what you’re saying in general is what we kind of say on the podcast about screenwriting in general. There’s no one path that sort of goes through it. And so you can’t get started until you get started. And you have to write. And in this case of performing, you have to find places to perform. And whatever those places are you have to do it. And just make that leap and trust that you’re not going to — you will fall on your face, and that’s okay.

**Mike:** Yeah. I remember in Washington, DC when I was starting out, I would go — there were not — this is in the late ’90s, there were not standup comedy open mics. I would go to music open mics and I would sign up. And then they would say my name and I would walk up and I would do standup comedy. No one is expecting standup comedy.

**Craig:** Right. The guy says, “Um, that was a comedian.” [laughs]

**Mike:** And a lot of times it’s pushing a square peg into a round hole, or whatever that expression is, and it sucks.

**John:** People always forget that Lena Dunham made two movies before she made Tiny Furniture.

**Mike:** Yes.

**John:** And so she just started. And she didn’t ask for permission. She just went and did it.

**Craig:** Well, you know, people ask us how do you get started, how do you break in, da, da, da, tell me how you…

And I’ve done it. We’ve done it. We’ve both told the “how we got started” story. But always with the caveat this could have only happened to me.

**Mike:** That’s right.

**Craig:** There’s no one else that could possibly succeed following the Mike Birbiglia plan. Not possible. Even if you replicated all of it and jumped out of a window, you can’t do it. The only thing that we individually have to offer is what’s unique to ourselves, which means that we’re going to all start differently.

The only thing I see that is common throughout all these stories, other than some — hopefully some — level of talent and some level of drive, is honesty with one’s self.

**Mike:** I agree.

**Craig:** I just don’t know how delusional people can make it. And there’s a lot of delusional people out there who substitute delusional confidence for substance.

**Mike:** I always say that when I go back to the screenwriting class, I studied under this guy, John Glavin, taught me screenwriting in college. And whenever I go back I always say as a writer all you have to give is yourself.

**Craig:** That’s it. That’s all you’ve got.

**Mike:** And if you’re not willing to give yourself, go home.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool.

It’s time for One Cool Things. Did you come prepared for the One Cool Thing? You can take a pause while we —

**Mike:** Yeah, I can pause. I’m going to pause.

**Craig:** I got to pull mine up on my thing here, because I wrote it down in my thing.

**Mike:** I want to do the one that you guys did a few things ago, like Knock Knock, where you knock your phone.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. That’s great. I use it all the time.

**Mike:** That’s so cool.

**Craig:** It seems like it might have updated.

**John:** It did update.

**Craig:** It’s getting much, much better. They must have listened to me.

**John:** They listened to Craig complain about it enough.

**Craig:** They must have listened to the center of the world. Yup.

**John:** So, while Craig and Mike are figuring out their One Cool Things, I will tell you my One Cool Thing is actually a podcast One Cool Thing is that we finally have an app for Scriptnotes.

**Mike:** Oh, great news.

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** I sent you the link to this and you didn’t even open it.

**Craig:** No you didn’t. You totally did not send me the link to this.

**John:** Okay. Well, I’ll show it to you on my phone.

**Craig:** How dare you make an app and not tell me.

**John:** So, there’s now an app. The whole reason why we switched to our library over from where we were hosting to this new thing which was complicated was because there was this hope of being able to offer an app so people could listen to all the back episodes and all the episodes we’ve done on one handy app.

So, if you are listening to us on iTunes, that will continue to work great, and our last 20 episodes will always be free for people to listen to and that’s great. If you have the USB drive and want to buy the USB drive with the first 100, that’s always an option.

But what the Scriptnotes App lets you do, it’s available for iOS, for your iPhone and for Android, it lets you listen to any of the episodes of the show. And if you want to listen to those early episodes there’s a monthly subscription which is — we’ve already talked about the monthly subscription.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it’s $1.99 a month and it lets you listen to any episode from anywhere back. The Netflix model of all you can eat. So, if you want to subscribe for a month and listen to 100 episodes and then cancel, that is absolutely welcome. And you can do that.

**Craig:** Does this charge recur?

**John:** The charge recurs.

**Craig:** Oh, so we’re like porn now?

**John:** We are basically.

**Craig:** Oh, well, it’s worked for them.

**John:** It’s worked great for them. So, cancel after a month if you have caught up and don’t want to listen to more.

**Craig:** No one is going to cancel.

**John:** No one is going to cancel.

**Craig:** They’re going to find these $2 charges on Grandma Tilly’s bill in 2070. And I love it.

**John:** So, if you would like the Scriptnotes App it is available right now in the iPhone App Store.

**Craig:** I’m so excited. The best thing about doing the podcast with John is that I know no more about what’s happening than anyone else listening.

**John:** So, Craig, you will check your email and you’ll see it’s there. So, this is what the little app looks like.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m going to check my email. You totally didn’t send that to me. You totally did not.

**John:** I totally did.

**Craig:** You totally didn’t.

**John:** And so here’s all our episodes.

**Craig:** What?! Oh, come on, that’s awesome.

**John:** So, it looks a little iOS 6-y because it’s actually the Libsyn people who do most of the podcasts in the world. It’s really their app with our sort of content in it. So, it doesn’t look as good as Ryan Nelson, our own programmer had done himself, but it works. So, it’s there for you and it’s available on iOS and even on Android because we don’t want to be just —

**Craig:** Snobby.

**John:** Snobby Apple people. So, that’s my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** All right. That’s pretty freaking awesome.

**Mike:** I got one.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s hear it.

**Mike:** Well, actually I did a really small part in this film this fall called The Fault in Our Stars. And it’s with Shailene Woodley and a bunch of really great actors. But the cool thing is it’s based on a YA novel by John Green of the same name, The Fault in Our Stars. And I guess, I have to say before I read it I had never read a YA genre book, because I thought it wasn’t for me. But it’s like this really compelling book about these two kids who have cancer and they fall in love in the cancer support group. And it’s about their journey.

And I just think it’s one of the best books I’ve read in years. It’s really touching. For any age.

**Craig:** YA novels are actually — one of the things I love about that genre is that they are still dedicated to storytelling, to proper storytelling.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They don’t need to soak you in a —

**John:** Wild conspiracies. The Dan Browns of the world.

**Craig:** Or just confuse me. You know, like a DeLillo novel. You’re confused, you know, or Pynchon. They’re not aspiring to that. They’re just trying to tell a good story. And there is something nice about a good well crafted piece of mainstream narrative.

I remember reading the Hunger Games books, and I struggle sometimes reading first person books, but I was like these are really well put together. So, all right, that is cool.

This is kind of a One Cool Thing in advance of Christmas because people are looking for gift ideas. And I try not to put things that are like super expensive, but this is kind of like $300.

**John:** That’s expensive.

**Craig:** It’s expensive. Okay, so it’s $300. All right. But it’s Christmas.

**Mike:** Okay, yeah. So, maybe your one gift.

**Craig:** I love karaoke. I love singing. I love karaoke. But the home karaoke modules and things —

**John:** Are terrible.

**Craig:** They’re terrible.

**John:** You shouldn’t use those.

**Craig:** They’re awful. Until…there’s this new thing now called Singtrix. And it’s pretty cool looking because basically they have a pretty good speaker and then they have this module that lets you actually properly affect your voice. You can add some reverb, or this or that, and they’ve broken out also the different parts of the music so that you can adjust it and make it sound good, so it doesn’t sound terrible. And then their library is enormous, but it’s based on, it’s through an app.

So, then you mount your iPad there. It comes with your microphone. And if your family or your friends love karaoke, and you have $300, you have more money than sense, Singtrix!

**Mike:** Singtrix.

**John:** The model of this, is it a razor and blades model? Are they charging your per song also?

**Craig:** No. I believe that you have access to their library as part of your purchase of the $300 exorbitantly expensive Singtrix.

**Mike:** But that could be for the whole family.

**Craig:** That is in fact for the whole — so that is a gift that the family got for itself that really is just about the one person in the house that wants it, imposing it upon everyone else, and then angrily insisting that they will enjoy it, which is what will happen in my house with me, explaining to my kids.

**John:** “No, it’s your turn to sing a song. You will sing the song.”

**Craig:** “I said we would do things together as a family which means you’re all going to sit there and listen to me do something for myself.”

**Mike:** [as Craig] You will sing the song!

[as John] I think that you should sing the song.

That’s John.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sing it!

**Mike:** [as John] I think that you should sing the song.

**Craig:** Just sing it.

**Mike:** [as John] Well why not sing the song.

**Craig:** Ugh, sing it already.

**John:** There’s nothing better than when you sort of force your kid to like play a board game as a family and like they resent every role of the dice.

**Craig:** Any time a parent says to a child, “We’re going to do something together as a family,” the child knows they’re about to do something they don’t want to do.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nothing is more anti-family than family activities.

**John:** Except half an hour into it they’re totally enjoying it and you can remind them, by the way, you did not want to do this.

**Craig:** You’re the worst dad ever. That is the move you should never do. “By the way, if you go back a half an hour ago you will see that you were acting like an asshole.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you’ve lost them again.

**John:** Noted.

**Mike:** I also want to say, I know this doesn’t count as my One Cool Thing, but my friend Mike Lavoie who was a producer on Sleepwalk with Me and worked with me for many years, like seven or eight years, introduced me to your website many years ago. He was the one who introduced me to it. And so I want to say hi to him.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** A little shout out.

**John:** A little shout out. Mike, I am so glad you came in here.

**Mike:** That was awesome.

**John:** You’re a fantastic guest on our show. For like a damn near stranger, I can’t believe how well this —

**Craig:** He’s a super fan.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A super fan.

**Mike:** Avid listener.

**John:** And that helps. It does help a lot.

**Craig:** Writer, director, actor.

**John:** But talk about things we didn’t even know about, the performance stuff, the standup stuff. It was great.

**Mike:** It was all the insecurity I had as we were going through is that people will go, “They’re assuming as they talk about it that we like his movie, too, and we hate it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean the people at home listening?

**Mike:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, they may very well hate it.

**Mike:** Yes. So, if you are writing in the comments, don’t write like, “Hey, by the way, I hate it.” We know. I know you exist. You don’t have to write about that.

**Craig:** Yes, we’re aware that some of you out there. No, if you hate this movie —

**Mike:** Then maybe it doesn’t apply to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also I hate you. Stop listening.

**Mike:** [laughs]

**John:** Thank you all so much and join us again next week. Oh, we should do our normal boilerplate here at the end. So, if you have questions for me, or for Craig, or for Mike Birbiglia, we’re all on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust.

**Craig:** I’m @clmazin.

**Mike:** I’m @birbigs.

**John:** And @birbigs would be a great place for you to find out more information about his upcoming tour and for new dates. You’re going to see him all over your television on various talk shows as well, so tune in for those.

**Craig:** Yeah, lesser shows than this, like Conan.

**John:** But while you’re on iTunes leaving us a comment about our show, you should also check out his movies and specials and comedy albums.

**Mike:** Yeah. Sleepwalk with Me. My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend.

**John:** They’re both there as movies and then also your albums are there as well.

**Craig:** Buy all of it. Just buy all of it.

**John:** Just buy it. Don’t think about it.

**Craig:** Don’t bust my chops over here. Just buy everything.

**John:** Buy it all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. Great. Thanks Mike.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

LINKS

* Write in and [tell us if we’re wrong](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com)
* [Mike Birbiglia](http://birbigs.com/), and on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Birbiglia), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1898126/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/birbigs) and [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/mike-birbiglia/id25234092)
* The Tricky Part [write up in The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/nyregion/a-map-of-the-soul-combines-two-one-man-shows.html?_r=0), and in book form [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307276538/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* Use [BroadwayBox.com](http://www.broadwaybox.com/) to find discounted shows in New York
* Download the Scriptnotes app now for [iOS](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scriptnotes/id739117984?mt=8) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.johnaugust.android.scriptnotes) devices
* [The Fault in Our Stars](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525478817/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by John Green
* [Singtrix](http://www.singtrix.com/) home karaoke
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Cole Parzenn