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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 661 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why is screenwriting, both the craft and the profession, so difficult? Why are the people who were really good in school not necessarily good at screenwriting?

Craig: Nerds.

John: We’ll take a look at what’s weird about screenwriting and why skills in other areas don’t always translate well. Then it’s another round of the three-page challenge where we look at submissions from our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you talk about movies and series without spoiling them? We’ll offer our tips and tricks and suggestions.

Craig: We are five episodes away from 666.

John: Now, Craig, let’s talk about this because Drew brought this up. We need to think of something for episode 666, the number of the beast.

Craig: It’s almost going to line up with Halloween. It won’t but it’s close.

John: It won’t. It’s close-ish.

Craig: I feel like we should have Megana on because, A, it’s spooky season, B, 666, it feels like she would have input.

John: Yeah. Should we focus on devil and possession movies?

Craig: That’s a great idea, actually. The Exorcist is one of my favorite movies.

John: Let’s do it.

Craig: Yes. I am not a horror movie aficionado. I like a good horror movie, but I’m not somebody that subscribed to Fangoria when I was a kid and saw all those slasher films like the ‘80s. So Drew, you remember the ‘80s.

Drew Marquardt: Oh, yeah.

Craig: John and I would walk into a video store, not Blockbuster, didn’t exist yet.

John: Our local video store.

Craig: Local video store. There would be a wall, just a solid wall of videotapes of nothing but movies where people slashed each other with blades. They all had great names like I Dismember Mama. There were like twelve Prom Nights. I never saw any of them. Wasn’t necessarily my thing, but The Exorcist had a profound impact on me. I do think it’s an incredible film and well worth discussing.

John: Yes, let’s do it. I haven’t seen The Exorcist probably since it came out. Honestly, I think most of my experience with The Exorcist has been while my parents were out, I would be watching it on TV and get so scared that I have to change the channel.

Craig: That’s correct. The other film that we should probably take a look at is a movie that, and I’m going to get in so much trouble, but it’s too late at this point, right, for me, is The Omen. Because The Omen came out somewhat contemporaneously with The Exorcist, not inspired by, but it existed in part because of The Exorcist. The Omen is the film that made a big deal about 666. I think The Omen is an inferior film to The Exorcist. It would be interesting to compare and contrast.

John: Sure.

Craig: There are some wonderful things in The Omen. It’s still better than most movies that try and do possession stuff now, but not as good as The Exorcist. The Exorcist also, and we’ll get there at episode 666, is a fantastic example of a film that is in a genre where almost every movie is bad and somehow they were great. That’s fascinating to me.

John: Yeah. There’s lots of examples of police procedurals or we’ve got to find the killer movies. Then there’s Silence of the Lambs, which is just like such a cut above–

Craig: Something else, right? It’s not doing anything necessarily overtly different. It’s worth digging into what they do subtly that does make it better.

John: Fantastic. This discussion of the video store we used to go to, it’s reminding me of a conversation I had this last week with my reps. We were talking about how the business was overall. We’re saying like, “Okay, well, streaming has never come back to what it was before. There’s never going to be as many deals as there were.” They were referring back to, oh, but we’re now never going to get back to the era of made-for-home video and the ability to make a zillion movies because you knew you could make a profit off of them on home video.

Craig: Unless something happens. That’s the thing.

John: Unless something happens. It totally could happen.

Craig: Yes. I don’t think anybody saw home video on the horizon in the ‘60s, for instance. Maybe some engineers at early Sony and their Betamax experiments, they were thinking, “Oh, maybe.”

I always think of that moment in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones shows Will Smith how the aliens have figured out how to make a tiny CD and that he’s going to have to buy the White Album all over again. The entertainment business is really good at figuring out ways to get us to buy the same thing we already own over and over and over. Some new format, some new thing. It’s almost inevitable. We all figured like, “Oh, streaming, I guess, one day would be–“ We just didn’t realize how fast and how intense it would be.

John: I think we all assumed that, okay, well, this is going to kill home video because you’ll just stream stuff. We didn’t realize there’d be a made-for-streaming boom that would change the industry, but then it would contract again and leave a lot of people– there’d be a musical chairs quality of it.

Craig: We had a bubble. I think that’s fair to say. What did Landgraf call peak television, peak TV? 600 and some odd, maybe 666? It was possibly 666 streaming television series. That’s obviously the work of Satan. What it’s back down to, I think a lot of people are thinking is some abnormally small number. I suspect we still have more television shows available now than we did, say, in the ‘90s. It was networks and some basic cable.

John: In addition to things that were made for streaming, we have things that were made for international audiences, made for global audiences that are available now. We’re watching series that are in English or other languages from other places too. There’s a lot more content still.

Craig: There is. There’s a ton of stuff. The contraction, I think the absolute number of television shows is it’s not something that’s going to make anyone feel better if they were employed within that bubble. I don’t think they’re going to sit there and go, “Well, but there’s still a few more than there were in the ‘90s.” It’s not exactly a relief. Contraction is difficult, even if it follows expansion.

John: Talking with my reps this week, we had a dinner. I’ve got a sampling of what they’re experiencing because you and I, we all have our own experiences and our friends we’re talking to. Reps, they’re making a bunch of deals all the time. I was asking them what’s happening? They say there are a lot of deals being made and pilots are selling, and stuff is selling, and pitches are selling, but there’s not flow. There’s a lot of one-off things that are happening and it’s busy, but not in a regular way and it’s not a predictable way. You can’t say, “Oh, this is how it’s building up to this thing.” The machine is shuddering.

Craig: It’s trying to figure itself out.

John: Which feels accurate.

Craig: That’s right. We have one predominant streaming service that is very successful at what they do, which is obviously Netflix. There’s Apple, who I don’t think care necessarily because they have more money than most nations. There’s Amazon, who I think presents their streaming service probably as some loss leader to make money off of their core business.

John: They want to make a lot of movies.

Craig: They do. I’m thinking about what your representative said about the flow.

Amazon and Apple probably aren’t going to create this rhythmic vacuum that you need to fill. Obviously, Netflix has that machinery. How Max and Peacock and Disney Plus function, am I missing one? Hulu? Hulu is Disney Plus. Paramount is Peacock?

John: No, Paramount is Paramount.

Craig: Oh, they’re their own?

John: Paramount CBS.

Craig: Paramount Plus. Paramount CBS. Right. Of course. How could I have possibly confused these? All of them, I think, are still trying to figure out how much, how frequently.

John: What’s the right number?

Craig: What’s the right number? What’s the right rhythm? That makes complete sense to me.

John: On the feature side, what I was hearing from them is that studio sides are saying the covers are bare for right now. There’s not the next thing to put into production. Summer 2026 is going to be super jam-packed, every weekend is full, which is great. Good problems to have.

Craig: The strike.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: That’s bottom line, right? It’s going to happen. It’s a really interesting thing. When I talk to people, what I often hear is, “We need stuff, but it’s hard for us–“ This is them talking about their own internal process as buyers. It’s not as easy as it used to be to get your bosses to agree to buy something.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: So you are responsible if you’re on a certain level at one of these places. I’ve talked to people, streamers and everywhere, and they’ll say, “I need to get five shows on the air next year. I don’t have them. I can’t get them to pay for the things I want. I can get them to pay an insane amount of money, but only when the algorithm says that it fits their thing. But I know that we already have those–“

It’s almost like we have a bunch of people making a lot of food on the street, and we have a bunch of hungry people driving around, and there’s somebody next to the hungry people going, “No, just keep going, or try something else, or go somewhere else.” I can see why it’s difficult. Yes, the machine is not functioning particularly efficiently right now.

John: It’s like a dating app where the algorithm is wrong and swiping one way or another way. You’re not matching up with the interested parties.

Craig: Yes. Yes. That’s actually a great idea for a dating app, where if you swipe right or left, it has to go through an intermediary who considers whether or not you’ve made the right choice.

John: Yes. I like that.

Craig: Maybe changes it.

John: Yes. Maybe you designate a friend who is actually a serious concierge there who’s like, “No, I don’t think that we want this.”

Craig: “Actually, you really should give this person a shot. It’s a bad pick, I know. Give them a shot.” I think that might be nice.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Let’s get into that.

John: You don’t do app development, but my company does do app development. This is my segue into saying that we’re actually hiring a new person. One thing I’ve learned over doing 12 years of this podcast is our audience are the best, smartest people in the world. If we need to hire somebody for somebody, this podcast is the first place to start. That’s how we found the person who fixed our WordPress plugins, the video game that we’re doing. Let’s do this.

We are hiring a person to do marketing for us, for Highland, Weekend Read, Bronson Watermarker, Writer Emergency Pack, AlphaBirds, and we need somebody who’s more of a manager than a creative. Somebody who can oversee Instagram ad campaigns, app store search optimizations, really be able to tell us what’s working and what’s not, because it’s not in our skill set. We need somebody who just does this stuff that we don’t do especially well.

Craig: Where in the world will you find somebody that knows anything about social media optimization, SEO?

John: SEO.

Craig: Yes, I’m going to guess 89% of our audience is like, “I can do that. I’m already doing that.”

John: We should stress, you probably already are doing this. We don’t want somebody who’s like, “I could learn something.” No, you need to show that you actually have done this.

Craig: Some experience here.

John: Oh, we’re pretty flexible on what the position looks like. It could be part-time or full-time. It could be fully remote. It could be a Los Angeles person. You’re probably based in the US, but if we could hire you or contract with you overseas, this may be doable. Crucially, we need somebody who already knows and is in the Mac and iOS ecosystem, because that’s what we make. You need to be part of that space. You need to know what you’re doing here in this.

Craig: You need to be good.

John: You need to be good.

Craig: Do a good job.

John: We’re going to put up a link in the show notes to a webpage that talks through what we’re looking for. If you are that person or you know that person, take a look at that. If you are the candidate, submit your stuff.

Craig: This is exciting. Does the job pay $850,000 a year?

John: It does not. It pays an amount commensurate to what the job is.

Craig: That’s fair. That sounds fair. Yes.

John: We have some follow-up. Last week, we talked about Moneyball.

Craig: Moneyball.

John: It was such a good episode. Everyone completely agreed with everything we said on the show. There was no feedback whatsoever, right?

Drew: No, my inbox has turned into an AM radio call-in show.

Craig: That’s weird. Do sports fans have any opinions?

Drew: Oh, yeah. I get stats on Johnny Damon and his–

Craig: Johnny Damon. Great. Let’s have the Johnny Damon argument. I want to.

John: Craig, you were wrong about baseball. For one thing, there is a clock because now there’s a pitch clock.

Craig: Let’s talk about the pitch clock. We actually got that note from, I believe it was a scout with the Tampa Bay Rays organization, which is awesome. I stand quasi-corrected. One of the rules changes that I referred to, I referred to a bunch of rules changes in that episode. One of them, most importantly, is the pitch clock, which makes the game go faster. The word clock there, I think would better be described as timer.

It’s a little bit like the shot clock in basketball. You have a certain amount of time to do something, or there is a, in basketball, the foul or turnover, or in baseball, it’s a strike, or it’s a ball, depending on which side of the– but the game itself has no timer. You can have an at-bat that lasts one pitch long. You can have an at-bat that lasts zero pitches long. If there’s a guy at the plate and there’s a man on first, there’s two outs, and the pitcher picks that guy off first base, inning over, man at home didn’t swing, got no pitches.
You can have an at-bat that lasts 18 pitches, all within the confines of pitch clocks.

So yes, there is a small element of a timer, but the game itself, no one can tell you at the beginning of a baseball game how long that game will last. Everyone can tell you how long a football game will be in terms of game time play, or a hockey game, or a basketball game.

John: The larger point, in terms of being a clock and not being a clock, most sports are frantic. There’s just a lot of activity suddenly all at once. Baseball, yes, there are bursts of activity, but most of it is very open and people can take their time to do a thing.

Craig: Absolutely, and innings last as long as they last, and there are nine of them. In football, a series of downs, you can have possession of a football and you keep getting a new first down, that’s great, but the clock keeps getting eaten up.

John: Yes, so unless you’re able to stop the clock by doing the thing, yes.

Craig: You can stop, but when you stop the clock, there’s no more playing, right? Then everybody talks, and then they get back and then the clock restarts. While that is a good point from the scout that there is now an element of time, where there used to be no element of time– the only element of time that there used to be in baseball was, if there’s a visit to the mound, let’s say the pitcher is in trouble or there’s a situation that requires discussion, either the pitching coach or the manager would go out to the mound, bring in the infielders, and they would all have a huddle on the mound and chat.

The umpire, at some point, will mosey on over and go, “All right guys, it’s enough. We got to go get back to playing baseball,” When? Uhh when he feels like it. Like, “Ah, it’s enough.” That’s the only thing I remember prior to the pitch clock.

John: All right, more follow-up, we talked about residuals in 658 and the fact that they are now digitally depositable.

Drew: E&A writes, “While I appreciate the greater efficiency of having residuals be direct deposit, I would like to stand up for the joys of the home-delivered paper residual. It is always a cheery surprise, a bright spot in the day, the flash of green among the mailers, the happy announcement to the household, the ritual chant of, “Big money, big money, big money,” and finally, the reveal of a quantity which may range wildly, but which is always better than nothing.

Additionally, there’s the hopefully fond memories evoked by the source of the residuals, gratitude for the achievements of the WGA in securing these residuals, and sometimes even a sense of abundance in the universe. So until paper cuts or affluence dim our delight in the little green envelopes, this house will never direct deposit our residuals.”

John: I’m completely in agreement with E&A. I loved the green envelopes, and I loved opening them and I loved having– predict how big a check would be. I would say, “Oh, it’s from Sony,” and he would nail it within 1%. He was so good at it. It’s great. It just feels like found money.

Craig: A weird carnival skill.

John: It’s like, “I don’t deserve this, but it came and it’s great.” For the last three years, four years, they’ve all been going to my business manager anyway, so I haven’t seen them.

Craig: Yeah, I completely salute this person and the love of the green envelope and the excitement of that. No question. Partly it’s also just a function of age because I started getting green envelopes, I don’t know, in 1997? Yeah, after a while, you’re like, “Here’s another green envelope again.”

John: Here’s a proposal. The green envelopes are inefficient because those checks get lost and sometimes, they did get lost. It’s a good reason not to send them to people’s houses. Maybe we still do the green envelopes and inside it says like, “This is how much we just direct deposited for you.” Then you still get the feel, the joy of it, but you don’t have to deal with the check.

Craig: Sure. If they could maybe do that, that’d be great. What if there was an email that said– the subject header was, “Green envelope.”? You’re like, “Okay, when I open this email–“ Then there’s a bunch of texts just in case your email program gives you a little– no, it skips it. Then you open it and you scroll and there’s the number. That would be fine.

John: A little joy.

Craig: Yes. Why not?

John: All right, well, I’m going to propose that to the WGA. More about capitalizing off of a short what we talked about in episode 658.

Drew: Erin writes, I want to build on the excellent advice you gave Michael in episode 658 in which he asked what’s next after a short film he wrote won an Oscar qualifying award. If he wants to capitalize on the success, I would encourage Michael to write a feature version of his short film. Even if his short wasn’t initially meant to be blown out into a feature, there will be something, a theme, a character, what have you, that will make for a compelling feature script and he already has an award-winning short as a proof of concept.

The first question I’m asked when somebody sees and likes my short is, do you have a feature script? My answer is always yes, and because I always have a draft ready before attending any festival, it’s led to my scripts being read by reps and producers. I guarantee the director and/or producers are being asked this question, so he should also reach out to them to let them know he’s getting started on the feature so when they’re inevitably asked, “Is there a feature script?” they can reply, yes, Michael is working on it right now.

Craig: If you can. Not every short is expandable into a feature. I imagine many aren’t.

John: I think it’s good advice in general. Even if you can’t take this exact concept, something that’s in that space feels right because they like the short, they want something that’s like that but is a feature. That all tracks and makes a lot of sense.

Craig: Whiplash.

John: Yes, 100%.

Craig: It’s the theory of Whiplash, worked for Damien Chazelle, could work for you at home. I think that makes sense.

John: Totally makes sense. More on how to be a script coordinator. We’ve talked a lot on the show about the value of script coordinators.

Drew: Joshua Gilbert writes, I’m a long-time listener and a mid-level TV writer. Prior to staffing, I did all the writer’s office assistant jobs, writer’s PA, showrunner’s assistant, writer’s assistant, and script coordinator, the gig I did the most. As such, it occurred to me that if a YouTube video can teach someone to fix their sink, they can learn to script coordinate the same way.

So I created a two and a half hour training video in eight sections that gives step-by-step instructions for taking a script from first draft to shooting draft.

Craig: That’s interesting. Two and a half hours? There’s really two and a half hours of stuff to say?

John: There was two and a half hours of stuff to do to explain about how to do Roll20. You and I put those videos together.

Craig: That was extraordinarily efficient. Roll20, especially the old Roll20, they’ve streamlined it, was so unuser-friendly.

Listen, it may be that he’s just very patient in his explanations. Ally Chang, who’s our script coordinator on Blast Bus, I walked her through it. It was only about 30 minutes.

John: You’re approaching script coordinating from one point of view. You’re also a single showrunner who’s doing stuff and a single writer. People who are on more complicated shows, I think it probably is more complicated stuff. You’re integrating multiple things from different writers.

Craig: Yes. I could see that. There’s a little more traffic.

John: I’ve watched through it, too. He leaves no stone unturned.

Craig: Okay, so it’s an incredibly thorough, too. Thank God. I was just hoping that you weren’t like, “I watch it and–“ No, okay, if it’s super-duper thorough, then great. Look, either way, I just like complaining about things. He put it on there for free. It’s a free class. One more reason to not go to film school.

John: Yeah, film school doesn’t teach you how to be a script writer, though, either. It’s one of those– just someone shows you.

Craig: Yes, but that’s one of the jobs that we have.

John: It’s a job. It’s a job. It’s actually a union cover job.

Craig: Film school just teaches you the job that no one has to give you. Just why? Anyway.

John: All right, last bit of follow-up here is from Lori, and she’s talking about, Craig, you use this word calculating a lot. “You need to stop calculating.” You actually use it in a Scriptnotes book. A little follow-up on this.

Drew: Yes, she says, “What exactly does Craig mean by that? Does he mean that writers shouldn’t have a strategy or pursue a set of goals other than writing good screenplays? If so, how do those good screenplays ever get into the hands of someone who can do something with them?”

Craig: Here’s what I mean. Calculating means figuring out how to game the system. What do people want? What does the market want? If I did this and this and this, then maybe this and this and this. There’s so much effort that you can put into that kind of thinking. “Everybody knows that if you write a such and such story that they want it, they don’t want these unless there’s a this in it. I’m going to do that.” That’s calculating. Not calculating is writing something that you love, that you believe in, that is personal to you, that nobody else could do, or that just expresses your unique creative talent and then putting it out in the world. Then other people work on the calculating part.

In fact, part of our jobs as individual writers in our careers is to resist all of their calculations when their calculations go against what is the beating heart of the work. Otherwise it will turn into crap, which happened to me repeatedly in my career because I didn’t understand that part of my job was to defend against their calculation. I thought in a somewhat humble way, all these calculations must have value. These people are paid for these calculations and the emperor has no clothes.

It’s not about being strategy-less. You write something great, then you’re like, “I wrote this, and I need Renée Zellweger to be in it. It was designed out of my heart for Renée Zellweger. I need to get this to Renée Zellweger somehow.” That’s not calculation. That’s just makes sense. That’s creative desire. Saying, “I wrote this for Renée Zellweger, but what I’m hearing maybe is that Sabrina Carpenter is looking to do something in a movie like this. If I just change the age and change the this and make it more Sabrina Carpenter, then get it to the person that I know who knows her friend, then da-da-da–“ What have you done? No offense to Sabrina Carpenter. If you write something for Sabrina Carpenter, truly–

John: Yes, fantastic, love that. All right–

Craig: I know who Sabrina Carpenter is.

John: I was going to say, nicely done. Weirdly, a Sabrina Carpenter, Renée Zellweger axis, it’s clear. There’s a vector that connects the two.

Craig: I actually am proud of what I just did. I really am. It would have been a very old guy thing to be like, “No, instead I’m going to make it for Reese Witherspoon.” Eh, contemporary, doesn’t work. It wouldn’t have worked. It would not have been as cogent of a point.

John: I like this. This discussion of calculating actually ties in very well to our main topic today, which is about screenwriting being a poorly defined problem. This verbiage I’m taking from this blog post by Adam Mastroianni, which is about why smart people aren’t happier. I think it also really resonates with last week’s episode where we’re talking about how we measure and quantify talent.

In this blog post, he’s talking about how it’s not just physical attributes that we try to measure and quantify. We do it with intelligence too. If you Google the smartest people in the world, you’re going to find physicists, and mathematicians, computer scientists, chess masters.

Craig: Donald Trump by his own admission.

John: 100%. You’re going to do that because if accomplished things that you can point to and say like, oh, it was your intelligence that did that. You can measure that. But a couple of weeks ago, I went to this event with Hillary Clinton who spoke and, Jesus, that is a very smart woman.

Craig: Just a little.

John: Her intelligence is not quantifiable in that way. She didn’t invent a thing. She didn’t solve some mathematical problem. She ran the state department.

Craig: She ran the state department of the United States of America.

John: Not a small thing. The things that I would say, if I could point to her intelligence, she can take a question and then pull it into its parts and come up with, on the fly, this seven-minute answer that goes from the personal to the political to everything. That’s experience. And it’s honestly the difference between what we’d say in D&D terms is intelligence and wisdom. She has the ability to take this whole thing and pull it apart.

Really what it comes down to, and this is from this blog post, is that we tend to value and aim towards these well-defined problems. A well-defined problem– he defines in four things.

That there is a stable relationship between the variables. You can see how everything connects. There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems or if they’ve already been solved. There are clear boundaries. There’s a finite amount of relevant information and possible actions. And the problems are repeatable. So the details might change, but the process for solving the problems does not.

Craig: Science.

John: Science is exactly that. It’s the scientific method.

Craig: The results needing to be robust, repeatable. What a joy it would be to work in something where you could actually go, “The answer to this question is yes.” That would be lovely.

John: A lot of us, and I suspect you were as well, Craig, we were good at doing those well-defined problems. All standardized tests, the ACTs, the SATs, they were those things. We were rewarded for that. We’re told we are smart because we’re good at these things. Unfortunately, the career we’ve chosen to go into does not reward that thinking at all.

Craig: It does not.

John: We’re dealing with these really undefinable things. We don’t even know what the edges of this is. What do they really want from here? How am I supposed to do this thing? Am I making the right choice to go, “Should I move to Los Angeles?”? These are not questions with single answers. Many of the questions we get from our listeners are grappling with this. When we say, “Don’t be so calculating,” I feel like so often we see people trying to take these difficult situations and boil them down to well-defined problems.

Craig: Yes, because it’s comforting. You probably remember in math class, there was somebody that was sitting next to you who was struggling with a process. Let’s say quadratic equations.

John: Do you remember the first time your teacher did the quadratic formula or showed how you discover the quadratic formula? There’s no way you end up with such a messy formula. It’s so ugly.

Craig: And so beautiful.

John: Beautiful. It works but it looks so awful.

Craig: We are used to science boiling things down to elegance. E = mc² is so absurdly elegant. It seems like a joke. Most things are not that perfect. The Pythagorean theorem is so gorgeously a² + b² = c². But there was always a kid that didn’t understand the concepts and would turn to you at some point and go, “Just tell me what to do. Okay, so now what do I do? Then what do I do? Then what do I do?”

Meaning, break this down like I’m a computer, code it for me, so that I don’t have to understand what I’m doing. I just follow steps, which are certain. Therefore, I can’t get lost. It’s not actually a bad way to teach certain people certain things that they are struggling to grasp conceptually. However, if they need that, it’s probably not really worth it for them because ultimately, they’re not actually learning anything. They’re merely just obeying steps.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What we have here in our business is a very– there’s an analytic way of doing things, and then there’s synthesizing things. We have to synthesize stuff. We have to make things out of nothing. It’s art, so it’s all objective, subjective at the same time. There are things that just we all agree on, then there are things that we cannot agree on, and then there are things that we find out most people agree on. There are things that no one agrees on, except 10 years later, they do.

Nobody can really teach this. Yes. What we’re taught is how to analyze, which is fair, and what we can test is analysis and memory. There is this concept, when we were learning about the SAT analogies, we were taught about this thing called the triangular non-relationship, which is that this– and these two things are only related because they both relate to something else, but they don’t directly relate to each other. I think that for people that are good in school and good at SATs, and also are good at screenwriting, those two things are not connected to each other, they’re connected back to one thing, which is a certain mind.

John: Yes, absolutely. Let’s think through some of the stuff that we’re dealing with as screenwriters that are these poorly defined problems and that we’re constantly grappling with.

What is this movie about? This movie I’m writing, what is it about? No, what is it really about? We know it’s not actually about the thing on the surface, it’s actually really about something else.

Who is this character? How do I show that to the audience?

What does this moment look like from the character’s point of view and from all the other characters in that scene’s point of view?

What do they say next and why?

What is the right title for this movie?

Am I using the word “being” too much?

How is this movie I’m writing different from every other movie ever made?

But how is it similar enough to a genre that people can relate to what the hell it actually is?

Then, completely independent of what’s happening on the page, the actual career of being a screenwriter is, how do I describe this thing to an executive? Who should I pitch this to? Should I be focusing on Sabrina Carpenter or Renée Zellweger? When should I send the follow-up email? Should I send the follow-up email?

I see this with my own daughter. She’s a sophomore now, and super smart, so good at so many things. She’s texting me, and it’s not about schoolwork, it’s about, what should I put in this box on this form for this internship I’m applying for? They ask me, “What is your desired hourly salary?” She says, “Should I put 15?” I’m like, “I think 20?” but there’s no answer here. I don’t even know what comes out of this. You’re nodding, because this is exactly what– you do it too.

Craig: We occasionally get these. It’s funny, Jessica is so independent and so much a force of nature. She reminds me so much of me when I was her age. Just all these things that a lot of people consider difficult that she’s just doing. But kinda had a little bit of a meltdown over figuring out how to pay the utility bill for her apartment.

John: We’re on the same page. We got a bill for power, but with some from the previous tenant, and it’s like, “What do you do?”

Craig: Actually, as it turns out, nobody likes doing that stuff. Everybody has to learn. I remember this as great, but it wasn’t great. It was stupid, but I still remember because this is one funny bit where Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live played a character maybe only once called Middle-Aged Man. He’s a superhero. He’s asked, “What are your powers?” He goes, “I can’t fly and I don’t have super strength, but I can explain what escrow is.”

These are the things that you sort of accrue. When you are in your 20s, you’re like, “What do I do with a utility–“ Those are all learnable things. That list of stuff that you put there. The other one that came to mind was, what is the tone of this? Also what is tone? What are we even talking about? These things are only defined by a strange passion and a confidence that comes from feeling good about it. It is all about feeling. When you look at people who are composing, why that note? Why not this note?

Feels wrong, feels right. For us, we have no choice but to actually find some genuine feeling. That feeling then we have to convert into some explanation to either get people to resonate with our same feeling and feel it or get them to hear a rationality that allows them to go along with it.

But for everybody else in our business, that area of what is it and I’m going to feel it and I know what’s wrong and what’s right allows for so much chicanery, charlatanism, fraud, confidence masquerading as knowledge, just bad faith, baloney, gaslighting, because it’s not science. Because I can’t just go, “Stop. Everything you just said is provably wrong and has been proven wrong.” Can’t do it.

John: Of course, we’re talking about this in a context of there’s now more data than ever and more data being used against us about the choices that we’re making. As we’re pitching to Netflix, they will say our metrics show that we need to have– we cannot show a dog in the first three minutes of the show or else, or there’s all this stuff. They have data. They can show that scientifically this is true, but of course, that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual feeling of what it is.

I love to contrast that development process to a film festival where they’re buying a film at a film festival. In that case, they’re emotionally responding to the thing they saw and it’s like, “Oh, this works for these reasons.” We want this movie and we are going to put this on our streamer.

Craig: I think our business has shifted, especially the feature business, very much in favor of that vibe in a way, there is more humility on the side of the buyers because they’ve almost finally admitted they have no idea. Therefore, instead of the old method, which is really– if you want to talk about something that changed our business, the old method of making movies was have a bunch of writers come in, hear pitches, buy scripts, have ten things in development that one of them eventually will be worthy of a green light and be made.

That’s gone away. Now it’s more like, hey, we’ve shown up with a script already, an actor, a director. Everything is here and we also have a budget. All you have to do now is just flip a lever, but all the components are in place. We basically cook the meal for you. It’s a frozen TV dinner. Just put it in the microwave, right? As opposed to, we would like to cook you a meal. We’re going to go gather ingredients. We can discuss if you want chicken or fish, right? And they like that.

John: The episode that Marielle Heller was on that you weren’t able to come for, we were talking–

Craig: Passive aggressive.

John: Sorry. It was a good episode.

Craig: I bet. Jeez.

John: We were talking through this new research study that showed that almost none of the movies that are greenlit came out of studio development.

Craig: Exactly. Which was all you and I knew. All we knew was studio development. In fact, the thing that we would complain about in the ‘90s was studio development and development hell and how we all knew we were going there and getting paid something and then we were just going to be strung out for a while and eventually it probably would just die on the vine like everything else.

John: We were getting paid during that time, which was important.

Craig: Important that we were getting paid. Now what has gone away is all of the money being spread around, but there is a little more certainty. It used to be, if you made a deal, there’s a 5% or 10% chance they would make your movie. Now it’s like we’re making a deal, it’s kind of a green light.

I remember the first time this happened to me, it was at Universal, and I think it was maybe Identity Thief where I came in to pitch the rewrite because it was a page 1 rewrite. There was a pre-existing script. There were two pre-existing scripts, I believe.

I came in with Jason Bateman and Scott Stuber and normally you would go in a pitch meeting, you would pitch to the head of the studio. Everyone was in that room, from Peter Kramer, who’s the president of production, but then Donna Langley also, and then Adam Fogelson?

John: Sure. That feels right.

Craig: Is that right?

John: Yes.

Craig: The guy that was the top of it. I’m like, “What the hell is going on?” When I walked out, I remember I was like, “Why are all these people in a pitch meeting?” He goes, “That was a green light meeting. The deal is if we’re going to pay you to write this, we’re making the movie.” That blew my mind. That was the first time I’d ever experienced that where that’s the deal now. Either no development or make movie. That in a way expresses humility on their end, I think. We don’t know. If you bring us all this stuff, fine.

John: What can we take from this is that, listen, I think there’s going to be moments where you’re going to have this instinct to reduce these difficult problems, these poorly defined problems, and you’re going to try to find edges of things that you can clean up and solve. I see people doing that with the obsession over like, “Oh, I need to get rid of all the widows and orphans in my script.”

Craig: Control.

John: Control. You’re trying to exert control over a thing that fundamentally doesn’t want control. You’re going to submit to a bunch of film festivals and screenwriting competitions so you can get scores and so you can be graded the same way you were graded when you were–

Craig: People love grades.

John: Yes. I miss them. Listen–

Craig: It’s validation.

John: I’m 30 years out of college but I miss that validation.

Craig: Absolutely. It’s validation. When I do see a lot of people on social media saying, “Congratulations to me. I was a semi-finalist,” and blah blah blah, I’m like, “I’m so sorry. It’s actually not relevant at all because there’s somebody who didn’t make it past the first round who has written something much better.” The people who judge these things don’t know either. Nobody in that world knows because the people that are at the highest level of our business also don’t know. They are constantly being surprised. Everybody agrees that this kind of movie doesn’t work until somebody makes one that does. Listen, if there was one genre we knew would not work, it would be to adapt a video game. That was the law. That’s the thing.

John: Two good series.

Craig: There you go. Superhero movies were just dead in the water forever. Musicals keep coming and going. I think Wicked is going to bring them back. Westerns disappear. Probably they’ll come back. That’s the joke. That’s the big joke. So why calculate? Just follow your heart.

John: Absolutely. All right, let’s take a look at some pages from our listeners. For folks who are new here, every once in a while we do a three-page challenge where we invite our listeners to submit three pages from something they’ve written, generally the first three pages. We give our honest feedback.

As a reminder, people want us to be reading this stuff. They’re soliciting this feedback. If we’re mean at any point or harsh, they asked for this.

Craig: That’s a weird phrase. They permitted this.

John: They permitted this. We’ll say that. If you would like to read along on these pages, you can follow the links in the show notes and click through. There’s PDFs for those. You can take a look and maybe stop this podcast, read first, and then listen to what we’re going to say about them. Let us start with Flunge-

Craig: Flunge.

John: -by J Wheeler White.

Craig: I apologize. If you guys hear a page flipping, it’s because I like a physical page.

John: Likes a physical page.

Craig: Forgive me.

John: Drew, for folks who are not able to look at the pages, can you give us a quick summary?

Drew: “In the middle of a fencing match, with seven seconds left on the clock, 17-year-old, Will Stetson, ignores all the onlookers and focuses on his opponent, Alexander. They stare each other down. We then cut to six months earlier where Will is elbowed in his high school wrestling match and starts punching his opponent in the face. Coach Vargas tries to hold him back, but when his opponent calls him a psycho, Will lunges at him and crashes into the scorer’s table. Later, in a school hallway, Coach Vargas kicks Will off the wrestling team. Will punches a locker. Outside the gym, a Mercedes pulls up in front of Will, driven by Alina, another teenager who is currently very angry.”

John: All right. Let’s start with this title page. I love this title page.

Craig: Flunge. Yes. It’s got a nice graphically designed title with negative space fencer in the middle.

John: Absolutely. Craig, do you know what a flunge is?

Craig: I absolutely do not know what a flunge is. A flying lunge?

John: Close to a flying lunge. It’s a combination of a flèche and a lunge. Flèche is where you’re racing up to your opponent, you’re running up to the opponent.

Craig: Oh.

John: The illustration in there is actually what a flunge would be.

Craig: It’s a flunge.

John: It’s a daring stab forward.

Craig: Flunge is going to be changed. That title is not going to last.

John: No.

Craig: Just going to be honest.

John: It looks great.

Craig: It’s fun for now.

John: Fun for now. Page 1 opens with, “Time left on clock, 7 seconds, score 14-14.” I think this is crucial information. I like having it here. I’m wondering how it’s going to be shown on screen. I don’t need it to be shown on screen on the page in a certain way, but I was wondering about that. I like that it’s 14-14. That you know that this match has been going on a while. You know that you’re near the end of this.

This setup reminds me of Challengers, and I don’t know how this is all going to be structured, but I feel like we’re going to be moving back and forth into this this match, which I’m excited to see. It may not be a true Stuart Special where we start at one point and then flashback in time. I think it is a back and forth.

Craig: This does feel like a Stewart Special, though.

John: Well, it’s a Stewart Special in the sense that it started at a time, and we can catch up to this.

Craig: Only because he’s a wrestler and then he becomes a fence– I doubt we’re going to go back and forth. I could be wrong. Also, it’s a television show.

John: Oh, a television show. Pilot, yes.

Craig: It’s possible, but I agree with you, the setup felt really exciting. First of all, I got excited by fencing because– listen, at this point just show me something, and fencing is fun. It’s swordplay and it’s exciting.

John: I had fencing in a movie that didn’t shoot, which I was really sad about.

Craig: Oh, you had a fencing movie?

John: I had a fencing movie.

Craig: Ugh. Do you want to sue this guy? John, that’s what people do.

John: Yes, absolutely. I had fencing in my movie.

Craig: This guy stole your idea.

John: Yes.

Craig: Jesus.

John: I’ll say that if there’s a contract lens that plays an important role in this movie, I’ve won. I’ve won the lawsuit.

Craig: You’ve won the lawsuit. It’s an interesting thing. We have a guy– this is how it opens. “William Stetson, 17, catches his breath. He’s in a full electric saber kit.” I assume that means that-

John: He’s wired up.

Craig: -fencing outfit. “Fencing mask pulled up, a single curl of light hair glued by sweat to his forehead.” Just be aware, that’s the kind of thing that they’re going to have a meeting about, and it’s going to probably look stupid. Maybe just say sweaty.

John: Yes.

Craig: “His eyes, consumed by a deep indecipherable fervor locked with his opponent’s, Alexander Sasha Su, 18.” Now, why do they both have their masks up? Is that a thing that people do?

John: Yes, between parries.

Craig: This is exciting to see on page, but just want to think ahead here. This is J Wheeler White, which is a fantastic comic book name, by the way. J Wheeler White, he owns a newspaper in Gotham, not in New York. They’re just staring at each other. If you’re staring at somebody, and they’re staring at you, the two of you are in a staring contest, that just feels a little weird.

If you’re staring at this guy, and he’s drinking some Gatorade, or doing something, and then he turns and sees you, and expresses something back, whether it’s hatred, jealousy, I’m going to get you, you lost, whatever it is, that creates a moment. I think, here, what’s happened is, they’re just staring at each other, which feels a bit odd.

John: I get that. Again, the reason why I would say Challengers is challenged. Have you seen Challengers?

Craig: I have.

John: Challengers is all stares across on that between people-

Craig: It is.

John: -doing stuff. I love it for that. In this first page, fans, teammates, former opponents, uppercase those. Those are other groups of people that we’re going to see. There’s a thing that J Wheeler White does where it’s a word then a single dash rather than a double dash. It’s consistent. It’s fine. It’s not what I would do.

Craig: I don’t do it either, but it doesn’t matter. I get it.

John: It’s consistent.

Craig: It’s consistent. As long as it’s consistent. It would be nice to know how big. It says hundreds of fans. Hundreds of people– that’s another thing you learn when you’re making stuff is, hundreds of people look like 12 people. Thousands of people look like hundreds of people.

John: I need a sense of– is this State Championships? What is this? That would tell us.

Craig: Olympics. State Championship. Is this a gymnasium? Is this Madison Square Garden? Just give me a general sense of the space. I think it would be helpful. What I really enjoyed was how this just flung us — flunged us — into a different thing, but this is way easier to do on page than it is to do– because the problem is match-cutting from eyes, especially when there’s a mask, even though it’s pulled up, it’s going to be visible. Eyes to eyes of a person that’s in motion, wrestling, it’s just not possible.

John: It’s not possible. There’ll be a sound pre-lap, there’ll be a thing, and then you just have to cut into it.

Craig: Exactly, so probably not– it’s exciting to read, but this is something that I actually think is fine, but later you’re going to have to fix it.

John: Absolutely. It’ll be on a foot and a step will go forward and you’ll realize you’re going to do a different space. There’ll be different ways to get there.

Craig: Exactly.

John: I’m loving everything on page 1 and on page 2. I thought the actual descriptions of what goes wrong in the match, and how it builds, I believed. It felt visceral and it’s funny.

Craig: Yes. I think the only thing that I would suggest here for this, because the point of this wrestling match is Will goes too far, right? He goes too far. He’s wrestling a guy, and he chokes him in a way that’s illegal, and ruins stuff.

John: He chokes him and then he starts beating him.

Craig: Well, because the guy fights back. Then he fights back again. It’s all precipitated by the fact that he’s choking this guy out, which is not legal in high school, or anywhere. That’s fine, but what I needed was something leaning into it. I think part of my issue was it just starts with this guy killing someone. That’s what he’s doing basically. How did we get to that? If you start leaning on someone’s throat– this is just logic stuff, and it’s important for tone. You’re in high school, you start choking this guy out.

Nobody says it– they’ll run in there and pull you off. You can’t kill somebody, and why would you think you could? The problem is this guy goes too far. I need to see him going too far, not already too far. Something leading into it would have been helpful.

John: Yep, agreed. Page 3, the one thing I want to scratch out here is mic drop. Vargas, the coach, says, “You smell like an f-ing litter box.” Mic drop. We don’t need the mic drop, he walks off. And at the bottom of page 3, we’re introduced to Alina Matero, 17, dark hair, clean girl aesthetic, currently very pissed off. That’s all we know about her. I liked that as the next thing we’re seeing.

Craig: I like that she seems rich. I’m guessing that he’s not. I don’t know what their relationship is, but she seems like she’s already heard about the wrestling situation. Again, tone. Page 3, Vargas, his coach says, “We were all watching Stetson,” which I think you need a comma there because it seems like we’re all watching Stetson. “We were all watching, Stetson,” that’s Will, “and good thing too, or that kid would be in an ambulance right now. Incorrect.

They watched him choke that kid out until that kid punched him to get him off of him. They didn’t do anything. And then, good thing you don’t know him.” I don’t know him either, and just because he goes to New Trier, I’m guessing that’s the school for rich kids?

John: Yes.

Craig: It doesn’t justify murder. This is so important. I need to understand why Will was trying to “kill” this kid. Why he was suddenly so vicious and so relentless that he would injure this kid and possibly render him unconscious.

John: Yeah so, thinking about that moment, if you switch it around and Will was the one who felt like he was threatened, or he was getting choked, and that he was the first person who blew up, and it was ambiguous whether the referee should have stepped in, that could have made sense.

Craig: This scene is broad. For me. This is what happens. The coach goes, “You did a dumb thing.” Will says, “No, I didn’t.” He says, “Yes, you did. You’re fired. You’re off the team.” “You can’t do that. Darn it.” Everybody deserves to be a character. Everybody deserves to be interesting. How does this really go down in life? I don’t think it’s like this. I don’t.

I think there is a possibility that as a coach you sit down with this kid– and there’s a scene where he says, “Just walk me through what happened. I want to understand why this happened.” Let Will explain. Just keep asking questions so that we start to understand Will, how his mind works, what the real problem was, and we’ll feel like maybe this coach is sympathetic, understanding, and the coach will listen to him, hear, get to the truth, and then say, “So you’re off the team. Sorry. Based on everything I understand, I appreciate it, I get it. You can’t be on a wrestling team.”

John: I hear you, and that is a version of the scene. I think there’s a way to keep the energy up the way that this scene currently does, but just with a little bit more finesse.

Craig: Actually, that was my problem.

John: That the energy was still too high?

Craig: Yes. We started with this exciting, flunging match, and then we go into an equally exciting and violent wrestling match, both of which it’s feeling like at fever pitch tempo, and then we get into this quick argument. The movie is going so fast, I felt like it’s a television show, it’s a pilot, you can breathe. If you look at Breaking Bad, everybody uses it as a great example because it is a wonderful pilot episode. It starts with, blah! And then it’s like, hmm.

John: It’s quiet. Yes.

Craig: It’s quiet.

John: There’s a description on page 3 that I did like. “Will tries to make himself big, arms out to his side, chest forward, steps to his coach, Vargas sighs.” That does a lot.

Craig: It does. Again, it’s a tone question. Will seems like an idiot here because you can’t big-guy your coach. What are you going to do? Beat him up. The coach isn’t buying it, but then I feel like, why would Will think that the coach would buy it and why is Will do–

John: I believe that’s a dumb high school character move.

Craig: To me, dumb high school characters are different to coaches that control their fate. Those are the people they don’t do this to. Those are the people that they get all solemn with because those are their father figures that they have daddy issues. Again, that’s part of what I’m saying here to J Will writers. The character right now of Will and the character of Vargas is angry coach, angry kid. I think we need to go a bit deeper in that, even in one page.

John: Great. Again, these are not well-defined problems.

Craig: No.

John: They’re all opinions and how it feels.

Craig: That’s right.

John: Before we move on, Drew, can you tell us the logline for what the actual–

Craig: For Flunge.

John: For Flunge.

Drew: “After being kicked off the team for one too many violent outbursts, a high school wrestler reluctantly joins the fencing team to keep his scholarship, unearthing a preternatural talent that may redefine the course of his life. An anime-inspired live-action sports drama series.”

John: Great. I don’t know that it’s a series. I think it’s a movie, but I’m curious–

Craig: It feels like a movie to me.

John: Feels like a movie to me. It feel like there’s a beginning, middle, and end, there’s a victory, there’s a thing.

Craig: It’s a classic. It’s like– What was that movie where Matthew Modine is a hockey player and then he becomes an ice skater? What was that one called? Look it up. It’s such a great idea. He was a hockey player who was like this, undisciplined, got kicked off, whatever personal problems, and gets stuck being paired up with an ice skater for figure skating.

John: It’s not Matthew Modine. It’s somebody who’s like Matthew Modine.

Craig: Oh, it is?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s not Matthew Modine?

John: Oh, shoot.

Craig: Who was that?

John: He looks like Steve Gutenberg, but it’s not Steve Gutenberg. We’ll find it.

Craig: That’s why we need our search engine optimization person.

John: Hey, can you tell me about a movie where a hockey player then becomes a figure skater? He gets partnered with a woman who’s a figure skater.

AI: The movie is The Cutting Edge. It’s a romantic comedy from 1992 where a former hockey player teams up with a figure skater.

John: Who were the stars of that movie?

AI: The stars of The Cutting Edge are D.B. Sweeney, who plays the former hockey player, and Moira Kelly, who plays the figure skater.

Craig: D.B. Sweeney. D.B. Sweeney and Matthew Modine were odd– My guess is that they bumped into each other at a bunch of auditions back in the day.

John: 100%. Absolutely.

Craig: What a great idea. Anyway, this reminds me in a way of like, okay, an athlete has to transition from one thing to another. It’s actually been quite a few of these. It’s not merely The Cutting Edge. Although what a great title and D.B. Sweeney. Anyway, I agree with the feels feature. What are we doing in Season 3, episode 7 for this? That’s my question, but meh.

John: Let’s move on to our next one. This is Cows by John and Mark DiStefano.

Drew: “In a bar for cows, Callie, a black and white spotted cow, and Wade, a bro-y bull, sit drinking milk. While Wade tells her wild stories about his recent trip to Moodrid, Callie stares at the bartender Jade who is also a cow, they’re all cows. They’re joined by Astrid, a Highland cow who makes fun of Wade from making his trip to Europe with his entire personality. They give Astrid a hard time because her new boyfriend is on a reality dating show, Udderly Single. Astrid wants to throw a watch party for the show, and Wade offers to organize it.”

John: This is an animated, televised, or it’s a pilot for an animated series. Let’s get into it. For what it is, it’s a good version of what it is, but I also think it’s not the pilot episode, or it’s not the first scene of what this should be. This is a Zootopia situation where these are anthropomorphic animals doing a thing. While this conversation tracks, it basically feels like it’s maybe a Friends-like sitcom, but with a lot of cow puns thrown in. It’s probably not the best way to setting up this world for me.

Craig: Yes. What I was struck by primarily was how mundane this conversation is. If you took away the fact that they’re cows, this is a pretty boring scene, unfortunately, because it’s just banter. It’s mild banter, it’s quippy. I don’t believe any of these people. The things that they’re saying to each other feels very canned, Disney television canned conversation. It doesn’t feel real. I have no idea who I’m supposed to be following here.

John: Yes. I don’t know who the central character is. I don’t really understand what the relationship is between the three of them. They’re all there.

Craig: They’re just talking. They’re just talking about something. There’s a lot of page time dedicated to the discussion of where he went to Moodrid and they’re like, “You’ve told us already.” This is not a good use of the first three pages of anything.

John: It’s just one scene also, it’s just like one continuous scene. There’s not a lot of story is happening here.

Craig: It says “Interior bar.” Now these are cows, so we’re in a cow world. “Bulls and cows mingle, dance on two legs”– I don’t know how that works. I’m just thinking about physics. I guess they’re just animated people but they’re cows. It would be nice if they made that clear– “And swill large quantities of milk. Callie sits on a bar stool next to Wade. This bar, where is it?

John: The scale of things also would feel strange.

Craig: What is the scale? What is the decor? What is the music? It says they’re dancing. To what? Can you help me feel like I understand where I am? Because all they’ve done really is, this just feels like a scene from the middle of a middle-grade sitcom where people are talking. Not an introduction to a new world where it’s about cows.

John: Yes, exactly. Here’s where I think writing the scene is useful for you. It’s like this might be a chance to say, “What does it even feel like to have these characters talking to each other? If you just do this as an exercise, it’s like let’s have a conversation where they’re talking. You get some sense of what their voices are. I can’t tell you individually what the three different cows’ voices are. You get a sense of what their banter feels like and what the kinds of cow-related jokes and puns you’re going to be throwing in here a lot would feel like. As an exploratory, let’s crank out some pages. Great, but it’s not the first three pages of this pilot.

Craig: No. If for instance, your hero is a cow named Vanessa and Vanessa works at this bar. Vanessa has to go from the kitchen, around past the bar, past the dance floor, over to cross a few booths, get to somebody, it’s bottle service, or she’s bringing them whatever grass tenders and whatever they eat. As she’s walking by, she’s catching snippets of conversation.

These things are only valuable as background snippets. I don’t buy that we would want to focus our camera and our attention on them because it won’t hold our camera and our attention. What I would understand is, okay, I’m meeting somebody. She’s tired, she’s cranky. Oh, but she has to be nice to these people. Maybe she knows somebody who’s like, “Oh my God, when are you getting off? We have to get out of here and we need to talk about this thing.” She’s like, “Yes, I will. I promise.” Then someone’s like, “Hey, blah, blah, blah, give me a, blah–“ whatever, it didn’t make a scene. This isn’t a scene, this is just people– We’re just like, talking.

John: All that said, there’s nothing objectionable or wrong on these pages. Everything flows right, and it has the jokoid feeling that feels–

Craig: You said jokoid.

John: Jokoid.

Craig: That’s a problem.

John: Yes.

Craig: That is a problem.

John: It’s a problem, but what I’m saying is you don’t look at these pages and they’re like, “Oh, this is incompetent.” It’s not that.

Craig: No.

John: I feel like these brothers– I assume they’re brothers-

Craig: Yes.

John: -they can do this. This just wasn’t a very good example of the top of their craft.

Craig: Yes. I think they need to raise the bar a little bit on themselves because it’s in the form of. By the way, when I started, the very first stuff I wrote was exactly like this. It was exactly like this. It was in the form of, but it wasn’t. That’s part of the normal progress. Somebody needs to go, “Okay, it’s in the form of, so that’s good news.” You actually have internalized rhythm and general– like the idea of how to get information out without reading it off of note cards.

Now we have to think bigger, think better, and be more creative. Just always ask yourself, is the job to do the stuff I’ve seen, or is the job to do something that’s better, or different, or just truer to me that feels like it’s something that came out of me and not an imitation.

John: Drew, what was the logline for this?

Drew: “An ambitious cow and her cattle friends navigate careers and relationships in the cow-centric city of Bovine.”

John: Okay. So it’s either Friends or Sex in the City, and there’s actually a pretty wide range between the two of those.

Craig: Then I would love to– I actually don’t know the answer to this, but what was the first scene of Friends? What happened?

John: The first time in the scene of Friends is at Central Perk and Rachel is fleeing from her marriage. She shows up in a wedding dress.

Craig: Okay. There you go.

John: That’s a scene.

Craig: That’s a scene, there’s a situation, it’s on. That’s not happening here.

John: No, it’s not.

Craig: It’s not enough to say, “And they’re cows.” That’s the other thing. You can’t just say Friends, but they’re cows. What about cows? Look, I’ve written a movie about sheep, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m obsessed with the things that make sheep sheep, but also make the individual sheep different from each other. What can sheep do that we can’t, and what can’t sheep do that we can? Why cows? What is that getting me other than, “Ha, ha, ha, they’re cows?” It’s got to be more.

Actually, that’s almost something that needs to happen in these first three pages, too. That a burden that Friends didn’t have was, why humans?

I need to know why cows.

John: The audience demands a certain amount of world-building and rule-setting in cow Friends that they’re not expecting in a friends-Friends.

Craig: And justification, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: What do we get, because they’re cows?

John: Let’s move on to our final three-page challenge. This is Never Die Alone by Yeong-Jay Lee.

Drew: A storm rolls in over a barge on Lake Superior. On the deck, men dig through their cargo of coal and pull out a gaunt young man with a neck tattoo. They chain him to an iron ball and push him overboard. We follow the body down to the bottom where the iron ball crashes through a sunken colonial boat, releasing a glowing sapphire, The Eye, which begins to float to the surface. Behind it, we see hundreds of bodies on the lake bed.

In the neighboring Sault Ste. Marie, a shabby car pulls up to a trailer home. Inside, Adam Withers, 17, asks his mom, Sarah, 37, if he can go and hang out with the new girl, Jenny. Sarah’s reluctant and sets a curfew for 12:00. Adam admits he’s lost his phone, which upsets Sarah, but she still lets him go. When he’s gone, Sarah returns to her phone call and cigarette.

Craig: You left out the fact that it’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

John: What’s this?

Craig: Gordon Lightfoot.

John: Gordon Lightfoot, right.

Craig: One of my favorites of all time. Love Gordon Lightfoot. One of my favorite Canadians. Never met him.

Drew: This is my neck of the woods.

Craig: He’s a genius, though.

John: Let’s start with the title page. I’d love to see contact information and a date. Just useful. People can find you.

Craig: Or at a minimum contact information.

John: I circled a lot of things here, and I want to talk just a little bit about stuff that got me tripped up on this first page. “I barge traversing the Stygian Lake in pouring rain.”

Craig: Stygian.

John: See, I didn’t even know how to pronounce that word. It’s a thing I’ve seen, and never actually pronounced it out loud.

Craig: The Stygian decks.

John: Yes, we’ll need the word Stygian. It’s dark.

Craig: It’s a bit ornate for this.

John: Also, because you’re saying barge, I know it’s the River Styx. Wait, so are we on a barge of the dead? I didn’t know if we were going to shore or away from shore, it’s traversing. I didn’t know where we were at, which becomes important because it’s clear that they’re headed away from shore because they’re going to dump this body.

Next two sentences, “A few men wearing raincoats pace the deck as the barge slows to a stop. Lights from a town dot the horizon. They unfasten a large tarp–“ Wait, they unfasten, the lights unfasten? It’s the men. This is one of those little small things where we’re reaching back, what is this pronoun referring to?

Craig: Yes. In the prior sense, we have a little bit of an issue here, too. Yeong-Jay, I think, you don’t have to use your full vocabulary-

John: No.

Craig: -which is impressive. When you say, “Lights from a town dot the horizon,” the way I just read that makes sense. What we read is, “Lights from a town dot the horizon.” Town dot. It just doesn’t work. You don’t need that so much. Lights dot the horizon or the distant lights of a town are seen on the horizon, if you want. Horizon isn’t a great word for night. We don’t really see the horizon at night. We just see lights in the distance. We don’t know if it’s the horizon.

More importantly, information. “Two dig through the coal.” You just want to say two– Again, what? Two? “Two dig” is not a strange one, T-W-O dig. “Two dig through the coal to reveal a face buried within. They extract a gaunt young man from the pile. He bears a neck tattoo, “Beloved.”

John: Is he already dead or not, important?

Craig: That’s my problem. I couldn’t tell if they were murdering a guy or they were just dumping a corpse. I think it’s a corpse. I hope it’s a corpse.

John: He’s unconscious, he’s not protesting.

Craig: Generally, we don’t describe corpses as gaunt young men. We say-

John: The body of a gaunt young man.

Craig: -they extract the body of a– Exactly. It’s important information because I just presume they were killing him.

John: Now, what happens after this is they are going to attach to the body, this heavyweight, it’s going to sink down, and they were going to follow this down. In an unlikely way, but in a way, that is very elaborate, it’s going to crash through the sunken thing and let loose this stuff. It felt like an opening title sequence. It felt very heightened in a way. It’s like, okay, is this whole thing super heightened? Great. If it is, but then the scene after this is not heightened. This is a very plain scene that made me wonder.

Craig: I’ve seen this transition before where you see something insane happen, and then we cut to many years later, which I assume this is many years later.

John: Oh, no, I thought it was the same time, but we don’t know. It’s end of music cue on page 2, but then we’re in a kitchen, and–

Craig: I don’t know what time. I need to know if this was earlier or later. I don’t know if this was the 1960s or ‘70s. When you play The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it implies– When was that? The ‘70s? ‘70s. It implies that’s the timeline, even though this body doesn’t crash into the Edmund Fitzgerald, he crashes into an early colonial trading vessel.

Now, I will say that what happens here is awesome. The problem is it’s overwritten. I got lost in all the words. I’m just going to read it. “The iron ball carries him, the corpse, through the sundered wooden hull and into the captain’s quarters festooned with the trappings–” Two things. “Of a wealthy and worldly trader. The ball crashes into an ornate glass cabinet, scattering the antique curiosities within. Among them, a black leather coffer–” a lot of people won’t know what that is, “Imprinted with a cross. As it tumbles through the water, it unlatches–” I’m not sure–

John: What is it? Is it the ball we’ve been following or is it this coffer?

Craig: It’s probably the coffer, but opens, I think, would be fine there. “And The Eye drifts free. It is not an impossible sapphire–“ It is not an impossible sapphire. It is a sapphire “Glowing uncannily in the darkness.” I have a problem. Until that thing comes out, how the hell am I seeing any of the rest of this? I’m in the bottom of a lake at night.

Now, you may think, “Oh, magic light.” If you then do a light trick here, that’s part of the problem. Just like, “How do we actually do this?” Then it says, “It,” meaning the sapphire, “Floats toward the surface. As it rises, pull back to reveal hundreds of bodies scattered across the lake bed.” That’s cool. That’s a cool image to see all those bodies. Do they move?

John: Yes.

Craig: Does one of them twitch? Does something happen to make me go, “This was worth watching all that?” This is actually exciting stuff. It feels very Pirates of the Caribbean or Caribbean if you will. It’s your choice, but it’s overwritten, so actually I got lost.

John: Yes, I got lost, too. Now, I was missing a cut, too, at the end of this thing because we’re about to go to Sault Ste. Marie night, but it wasn’t clear that this was that we were leaving this sequence and going to a new thing. That’s where I thought I needed a transition.

Craig: Looking at it, I think maybe it’s not. That’s why I’m so confused because it says “Exterior Lake Superior – Night,” and then you’re right, it goes “Exterior Sault Ste. Marie – Night.” Maybe it’s at the same time. I generally don’t think that in the early 2000s, guys on boats who find buried bodies in coal, which is a weird thing to have on a boat in the 2000s, would just dump the body. It feels more like something that happens in the 1800s. Something feels– I’m confused.

John: I’m confused about times, too. We have two scene headers back to back that are both exteriors Sault Ste. Marie. Don’t do that. You need to–

Craig: Yes, that’s problematic for everybody.

John: Then we’re ultimately getting into this kitchen of a trailer home. We’re meeting Adam and Sarah, who’s apparently his mother. They’re speaking with a distinctive Yooper accent.

Yooper accent, for our international listeners, is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and it is a Finnish-Canadian thing. Just imagine it has a Finnish quality to it and the oo’s are different.

Craig: That’s why it’s Sault Ste. Marie?

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s just wrong. You’re just abusing the French language. Sorry, U.P.

John: Adam asks, “Can I go out with Jenny?” He’s 17 and he’s asking a can question, which is, sure possible, but I didn’t understand the relationship based on this can–

Craig: He’s 17 years old.

John: “I’m going out with Jenny.”

Craig: Yes, thank you. You have a driver’s license. Good. What is going on here? Why are you asking your mommy if you can go out?

John: Is she on a sex line? What is she doing? We don’t know. You’re setting up that we should be curious, and I actually need to have a little bit more information because at this point, I don’t know if she’s just customer service.

Craig: I think she’s in a meeting is my guest. I like that you were like, “Is she a sex worker on the phone?”

John: It’s night, though.

Craig: Oh, it’s night. There’s also a fawn drinking from the lake at night.

John: We don’t know if this is the same night where this body was thrown over or if it’s 20 years later.

Craig: We don’t know. Also, how late at night is this?

John: Yes, no idea.

Craig: I don’t–

John: We need this information. We know it’s before midnight because he has to be back by 12:00.

Craig: Right. Oh, yes, also 17, I guess, maybe.

John: He’s lost his phone. I don’t know.

Craig: You’ve lost your phone. What year is it again?

John: We don’t know what year it is. It’s an early 2000s Fleetwood trailer home, but it could be an old– Is it a brand new– 2000?

Craig: That’s right. We don’t know what year it is. If, for instance, it was back in the Nokia days, yes, you’d lose your phone and whatever. It’s fine.

John: It doesn’t matter much.

Craig: It doesn’t matter. I need to know. That said, look, Yeong Jay, this actually feels like there’s something awesome happening here. I love stuff like this. I love the use of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You’ve given us moments that feel like they’re from the 1800s, moments that feel like they’re from the ‘70s, moments that feel like they’re from the 2000s. We don’t know what’s going on. Pull back on the adjectives, there’s just a lot. Maybe if the other things were clearer, they would be more enjoyable, but when you have something awesome happening, let it be awesome. You don’t need to put as much ketchup on it.

John: Agreed. Drew, can you tell us the summary of what happens in this?

Craig: Never Die Alone.

Drew: “A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.”

Craig: A Necromancy of Thay. Obviously, he’s going to become a red wizard. Listen, necromantic magic is very powerful, as we both know. There’s a lot of great spells to use there. A couple of interesting cantrips. Chill Touch.

John: Toll the Dead.

Craig: Toll the Dead. Classics.

John: Classic.

Craig: Nerd.

John: It’s a–

Craig: But I like stuff like this. I see it’s a movie?

Drew: It didn’t say but I’m–

Craig: The idea of a teenager becoming a zombie lord is awesome.

John: Sure.

Craig: That could be awesome but who’s the villain? We need a little bit more of a sense of just read that again. It said what happens to him after–

Drew: “A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life, discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.”

Craig: The last bit is the problem. Plunges him with whom? That’s the most important thing to know from that logline. Plunges him into a battle with a mysterious visitor for his soul, with Satan, with the spirit of his own grandfather, whatever it is. That just sounds existential, which feels boring. I think this could be cool.

John: Yes, it could be cool.

Craig: Yeong-Jay got a good vocabulary, I’ll give you that.

John: All right. I want to thank our three entrants into the three-page challenge this week.

Craig: Brave people.

John: Brave people. Thanks to everyone else who sent in your pages. If you would like to send in your pages, you go to johnaaugust.com/threepage, all typed out. There’s a little form there that you read through and click, and then you attach your PDF to it. If you’re a premium member, we will often send out a little email saying, “Hey, we’re about to do a three-page challenge, and we’re looking for things in a certain space,” and so that’s a benefit if you’re a premium member.

We really want to thank everyone who applied because you guys are heroes and let’s talk about the actual words on the page.

All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, my one cool thing is a movie I watched over the weekend called Strange Darling, and it is terrific. It is written and directed by JT Mollner. Everyone says– Which is true, that the less you know going into it, the better because it’s full of surprises, which is great.

That said, you need to know that it’s bloody because if you don’t like a bloody movie, you’re not going to want to watch that. Also, you’ll know from the very start that it’s in six chapters, but the chapters are not in order. What I think is so good about watching this as a screenwriter is you recognize, “Oh, that’s right. A story is told by the way the audience receives it and the order the audience receives it, not chronologically.”

The choice to put the chapters in this order is an incredibly important screenwriting decision, and you could not reverse it out of this. The story doesn’t work if it’s told chronologically. It’s such a great example of knowing what your audience is thinking and then being able to subvert those expectations by–

Craig: Putting things–

John: Putting things back.

Craig: Being intentional. That sounds awesome.

John: Intentionality.

Craig: I also have a movie.

John: Please.

Craig: My winkle thing. I think it’s a A24 movie, possibly, called My Old Ass.

John: Oh, yes. I think people love it.

Craig: It’s lovely. It was written and directed by Megan Park, Canadian. In my list of Canadians, it’s going to be hard again, to get past Gordon Lightfoot, but she has moved up the list. What I really like about it, it’s a comedy, but it’s like a weepy comedy. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s very simple. It is simple, short. It’s a formula without being a formula, which I love. It follows the stuff about the formula that connects to us on a deep level, which is why the formula became the formula, without just feeling like it’s walking along a similar path.

It does its own thing. It felt to me incredibly current. It was easy for us when we watched John Hughes’ movies in the ‘80s to go, “Oh, this older person gets us. He’s generally speaking, in our world.” This felt like that for 20-somethings now. It just felt correct, felt true. It stars Maisy Stella, who was fantastic. She’s opposite two people. One is Aubrey Plaza-

John: Iconic.

Craig: -who was great. One is this guy, Percy Hynes White, who I wasn’t familiar with, but I think he was in Wednesday, and I think he was briefly canceled and then got uncanceled. I thought he was spectacular. The two of them together, I just thought it was just fascinating. It was really, really well done. There’s a high concept at it that they treat as low concept as possible. There’s no spoiler here, it’s in the trailers. I guess she’s 22 or whatever she is in the movie?

Drew: She’s 19.

Craig: 19. It’s all the same to me, I’m 53, it doesn’t matter. 19 years old. She’s about to leave home. She lives in Canada, which took me a while to figure out, but Maisy Stella is from Canada. She takes mushrooms with her friends, has a psychedelic experience, but the psychedelic experience is merely that her 39-year-old self shows up and just has a conversation with her, and starts telling her things. That high concept is played as low concept as possible. It’s almost like they saw a looper and went, “We could be even less invested in the who cares how this worksness of it,” which I thought was really smart. It was just very beautifully done, well written. Really well written.

John: Yes, I love that.

Craig: Also, well directed. I really appreciate directors who don’t make me look at how they’re directing so damn much and just let the story lead us and just get out of the way. It’s like invisible directing, my favorite kind.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you’re an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great, you’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Craig, thanks so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so I was just describing this movie that I like so much, Strange Darling, and I didn’t want to spoil anything about it. So I wanted, in our bonus segment here, talk through how we discuss and convince people to see movies or talk about movies without ruining what’s actually in them. For example, I saw the new Joker movie, and there’s things I really liked about it, but things that I think didn’t work about it. It’s tough to discuss those things without revealing big stuff that happens in it.

Craig: For starters, I think, we overestimate our ability to convince people to do anything.

John: True.

Craig: We get excited about, I’m going to convince you to see this because I liked it. I see that you’re not leaning in hard enough. Let me give you another bit, or let me tell you that something happens that completely flips you out. When you get there, you’re going to be so happy. Then maybe you won’t because that’s how that goes. So I think we start to tread towards spoilers when we’re worried the people are going to do what we want them to do.

The easiest version would be to say, you’re describing this movie and you’re like, “You should see it. I think you would love it. If you don’t, I’m sorry. I think you’re going to love it. You just look in them like stuff happens that you will like.”

John: I also feel like anything that shows up in the trailers or shows up in the first three minutes of the movie, that’s–

Craig: Fair game.

John: Yes, it’s completely fair game.

Craig: Like My Old Ass. There’s not this moment– Obviously, in the movie, it’s like, “What? Who? You? What? What do you mean?” The characters can experience that. We all know from the trailers that’s what this thing is about, so that’s fine for us because it’s in the first, 10 minutes of the movie. It’s all the stuff that happens after. Yes, there is something big that happens that if I mentioned it or even refer to it obliquely, would be a massive spoiler. Even saying there’s a massive spoiler in a way is a spoiler.

John: That is one of the challenges, too. That’s what I was running into with Strange Darling, it’s like, if I say things about the performances or the surprising things in the performances, as you start to watch the movie, then you start looking for, “Oh, when is this surprising revelation going to happen?”

Craig: I had this wonderful experience– I think I might’ve mentioned on the show, of showing Bella Ramsey The Matrix. Not only had she not seen it, she knew nothing about it. That was so glorious. I was like, “So you’ve never–“ She’s like, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know anything about it.” I’m like, “I’m going to tell you nothing. Let’s just watch.”

And the delight– And it was experiencing it again in the best possible way, as opposed to, ”Oh yes, The Matrix, man, it’s going to blow your mind. It’s got this mind-blowing thing in the middle, it’s going to freak you out.” Then everything’s going to be, “Don’t worry, you won’t know what’s going on, you’ll be confused, but then you won’t be–“ None of that, just go ahead.

John: My experience with this recently was showing my daughter Too Many Cooks. It was fun watching it with her, because it was like, “Oh, okay, I sot of get it.” Then in the end it was like, “I did not like that,” because it goes to this incredibly dark place.

Craig: You shouldn’t like it, you should appreciate it.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Exactly. Sometimes you just want people to have the same experience you had, but by telling them anything about your experience, you’re ruining their chance of having that experience that you had. It’s hard.

John: There’s a movie that I’m talking about doing a remake of, and so I described it to Drew, but I had Drew watch it. I was talking through, “Oh, these are moments that I think are really good, but there’s something coming out that you haven’t hit yet that’s actually a really good version of this scene and this moment.” It’s that balance between you want to provide a framework for why it is you’re liking this thing, even if the movie is not necessarily great. What the potentials are there, and still not spoil the experience of actually getting there.

Craig: Then burdening the person with pleasing you. I just want them to watch something, I don’t need them to turn to me and go, “Oh, you were right, that is awesome.” I don’t want them thinking about me at all, just watch it. I always say to people, “Listen, I love this, you may not.” I say, “If you feel, as you’re going through, “Okay, I’ve seen enough of this, I get what’s going on.” Just stop. It’s fine, just bail out.

Drew: What do you do if, so I feel like I’m at a lot of parties or get-togethers where maybe one or two people haven’t seen a movie, but then like, you brought up My Old Ass, and there’s a thing I want to talk to you about, but John hasn’t seen it, so I don’t want to– Do you just say like, “Oh my God [beep].”

Craig: No, don’t say that.

Drew: Okay.

Craig: Also, just be patient. You’d be like, “Okay, at some point, when it’s just the two of us here,”–

John: Absolutely, when he goes off to get a beer then we’re going to talk about this.

Craig: Yes, I just want to talk real fast about this. I don’t want to pull you away from them or anything like that, but if you love it and you want to have that moment where you love something with somebody together, just be patient. If you do the thing, what happens is, I think people resent it. They resent it because they feel like, “You know what? Then I’m not going to see it, actually.” Fine, you love it so much that you need to talk about it, I don’t want it.

John: I listen to Slate Culture Gabfest, and on that show, they will often do a segment about a movie, but then if they need to, as their bonus segment, they’ll do like, “This is the spoiler part of this stuff, and then we’re going to talk about all this stuff.” That’s also another good approach. It’s just like, there’s the conversation you have going into it, and then the expectation that behind a paywall or behind a little divider curtain, “Here’s where we’ll talk about the other stuff.”

The same thing could be true for online posting. It’s like you put it in a place that is spoiler forum or you use the spoiler tag on things so that people don’t see the stuff that they don’t want to see.

Craig: So much easier in that format. Spoiler tag is great. Sometimes I’m looking for something about, let’s say, it was Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’m like, “Okay, I know this thing is supposed to be here, I can’t find it. Let me go and see what the answer is.” Then it’ll go on Reddit and someone will be like, “Oh, here it is.”

Then there’s all this other discussion, and people are really actually pretty decent about spoilers. Then you’re like, “I don’t actually want to know that, so I won’t click on that. I won’t click the fog of war there and reveal it.”

John: Yes, which is crucial. And the fog of war is actually the right, I think, metaphor for that. Because in fog of war, in gaming terms, is that as you pass through a space, you expose the stuff around you, and therefore you can start to see those things. Going in, you’re not supposed to know what the geography of a place is.

Craig: Right, sometimes there are movies where I’m like, “Look, I have no interest in seeing that movie. It’s not my genre, it’s not my thing.” People are talking about it, it’s annoying. I’m just going to go see what it is so that I don’t have to be annoyed and walk away from people. As if I’m going to see that movie one day, I know I’m not.

John: Mike’s thing is he’ll just like, “I will look up the Wikipedia article on it and just read it because I know I’m never going to see that movie, but I’ll know what actually happens.”

Craig: At least, I just don’t have to walk away from people. Sometimes people say, “Do you care if I spoil it?” I’m like, “Absolutely not. Just spoil away.” Never going to see it. I think the real problem is when we’re trying to convince people to do something that maybe they don’t want to do. It’s like we make a trailer that gives away too much with our mouths.

John: Yes. And I’m sure you’re constantly grappling with that on your show. It’s like in your ideal world you would love for everyone to come in completely clean and not have a sense of what– I haven’t watched the trailer for your show because I don’t want to know anything about how it’s going to be this season.

Craig: You don’t get hard information but you definitely learn things. It’s an interesting thing, adapting something that exists.

John: Yes, that’s true.

Craig: I don’t worry so much about the spoiler stuff because, to me, if you’re not in for the journey and the interesting things we do in a different format, then if you’re just watching it to find out the– It’s not Lost, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: I don’t need to know what happens. What is the island? There is none of that for us really. It’s not about that. It is why I had the nuclear reactor blow up instantly in Chernobyl because I’m like, spoiler, it blows up. Let’s just get that out of the way. It blowed up.

John: Yes, absolutely. Cool, thanks.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Quote-Unquote Marketing Director – Apply Here!
• Veteran Script Coordinator on YouTube
• Why aren’t smart people happier? by Adam Mastroianni
• Middle Aged Man – SNL
• FLUNGE by J Wheeler White, COWS by John and Mark DiStefano, and NEVER DIE ALONE by Yeong-Jay Lee
• The Cutting Edge
• Strange Darling
• My Old Ass
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/cork-grease).

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

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

**John:** You are listening to Episode 629 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, should you break up with a producer you like but who doesn’t seem to be moving a project forward, how should a writing team discuss their individual work, and when is it okay to say no to inclusive casting? We’ll answer these and other difficult questions, plus a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at listeners’ pages and give our honest and only semi-filtered feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, we’ll delve into some advice we’d love to give ourselves. All right, Mazin.

**Craig:** That’ll be interesting.

**John:** We got some time travel. We got some hypotheticals, all that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** But we got follow-up first. This first bit of follow-up is, Craig, you had asked last week how many of those How Would This be a Movie things that became actual movies had we recommended. I think, Drew, you did the research on this.

**Drew Marquardt:** Yep, I went through. Of the 12 that were actually made, 4 of them were ones you said could be a movie.

**Craig:** Okay. So offhand, that doesn’t seem like a great average. In baseball, it’s excellent. Now my new question is, of the eight movies that we said shouldn’t be made, how many of them were considered successful, meaning were we right anyway?

**Drew:** There are some asterisks on that, because Zola is one that you said no, but there’s something to take from it. I guess that’s not so much an asterisk. But there’s another one, the Kamiyah Mobley Story, that you had said no, not quite. That was the one where the girl realized the woman she thought was her mother her whole life wasn’t actually her mother. You said not exactly the story, but there’s a version. Then you went on to essentially pitch A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One.

**Craig:** I guess this goes to show that John and I are about as good at being movie executives as movie executives are, because I feel like this happens all the time.

**John:** We try to pick the winners. We definitely gestured in the direction of things that could get made. But actually, more stuff was able to get made than we even picked. Our little Scriptnotes studio did not choose to make those films, but other people did, so good for them.

**Craig:** Right, not bad. Batting 333.

**John:** Now, Craig, in Episode 627, Aline and I did a How Would This be a Movie without you. Sorry.

**Craig:** No, it’s fine.

**John:** But we actually had a success we didn’t know was actually a success, because one of those story topics we discussed was about this guy, a mathematician who figured out a way to game the lottery and win. It turns out there actually has been a movie that was basically the same premise.

**Craig:** That preexisted it or…

**John:** That was made two years ago. The story that we were talking about was actually 30 years old, but there’s been a recent movie that actually was largely the same premise.

**Craig:** You guys were asking if this could be a movie, when in fact it already was?

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** That’s a double asterisk.

**John:** A double asterisk. This is Jerry and Marge Go Large, which is a movie that I’ve only seen on in-flight entertainment options. It’s about a mathematician who scams the Michigan State Lottery to save the small town where he lives.

**Craig:** That is a pretty good idea.

**John:** It’s a pretty good idea. It works. One last bit of follow-up I see in the Workflowy here.

**Drew:** Chris in Oakland writes, John’s been talking about learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, and he recently started learning an alphabet that was created as a better fit for the sounds of English. “It’s called Shavian. It was created in honor of George Bernard Shaw. He wanted to get rid of silent letters and all the bizarre spelling and have something that made sense.”

**Craig:** I clicked on the link to this website and immediately started laughing, because it’s its own alphabet, and it looks so much like what I would call science fiction writing.

**John:** Yeah, or fantasy writing.

**Craig:** When you’re on an alien ship.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** This is alien writing. This isn’t going to happen. I guess that’s my biggest issue is why are they doing this? It’s not going to work.

**John:** Because you can. It’s one of those things, if you could go in from the start and actually have it make sense, this is a way that it could make sense. I spent a couple minutes going through this. I’m actually impressed by some of the choices that they’ve made, because there is a logical consistency with how these sounds work in English and what these shapes are on the page, which totally makes sense, because the IPA, for all its wonders, is a beast to read and there ends up being so many special marks on it to get the actual flow of it right. It’s hard to really read it. I think you probably could train yourself pretty quickly to be able to read this in a natural way.

**Craig:** Sure, but you won’t.

**John:** You won’t.

**Craig:** I understand why they did it, and I assume that they did it really well, but this just seems like a strange exercise, because it is impractical. It’s not going to happen.

**John:** It’s like Esperanto in the same way. It’s an artificial system that improves upon how we’d naturally do things, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever going to get used.

**Craig:** Esperanto at least has the benefit of being the first. They didn’t know that Esperanto would be a total failure when they invented Esperanto, but the people that did this know about Esperanto, so they really should know better. But I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that perhaps the people that have invented Shavian understand that really this is kind of an academic exercise. I hope that they know it’s an academic exercise.

**John:** I do recommend everyone click through the links, because it does look really cool, and it does look like all the sci-fi science you’ve seen, which I support. I enjoy that as a thing. One of the interesting choices, as I was clicking through and reading stuff, that was very, very smart in here is that… We’ve talked about on this podcast, I’m sure, that certain Englishes are rhotic and not rhotic. In America, we say water, and we actually pronounce the R’s. In a lot of the UK, it’s watta.

**Craig:** Watta.

**John:** Watta.

**Craig:** Watta.

**John:** You don’t pronounce those final R’s. Cleverly, Shavian, their symbol for that last -er, -ar, -ir sound is one glyph that marks it as that sound. If you are pronouncing this with a British accent, you just wouldn’t pronounce the R. If you’re pronouncing it with an American accent, you would pronounce the R. You don’t have to put a separate R there that is pronounced or not pronounced based on your dialect.

**Craig:** But isn’t that what R is doing, in ours?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We see an R, and we either pronounce it or we don’t.

**John:** But if you were to put the R in Shavian, then basically everything you see there is supposed to be pronounced, and so it would not be the same word for these two people.

**Craig:** We’re running into problems already. I have huge issues with Shavian, clearly.

**John:** Is it solving a problem we desperately have? Not really. We got the IPA. We got other ways to do this. I just love people who are spending the time to tilt some windmills and do some fun things.

**Craig:** I think this is where you and I find ourselves differing. You love them.

**John:** Which is fine.

**Craig:** I’m like, what is going on with you? That said, I’m also the person that sits and builds large Lego sets, and there’s no purpose for that.

**John:** Absolutely. If these were not designed to reproduce language in a way that is spoken, but were instead a kind of cipher that was used in word puzzles, Craig Mazin, you would love it.

**Craig:** The point of the cipher in the word puzzle is to decipher the cipher.

**John:** Not to use it on a daily basis.

**Craig:** Correct. I do love deciphering ciphers though, and there are so many. John, there are so many.

**John:** There are so many ciphers.

**Craig:** So many.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions. Often, we do these late in the podcast. Let’s start it this time with some-

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** … past questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s start with George in Berlin.

**Drew:** George writes, “How do you balance specificity versus not excluding actors for consideration based on things like race? Where do you find it important to be more general or more specific? Are these the kind of things that you would try and rewrite after a film or show was cast?

“I’m currently writing a family drama, and the way the family functions is informed by the fact that they are a white, middle-class family in the north of England. There’s a level of arrogance and refusal to change written into the family, as a byproduct of their situation. They’re white, they’re middle-class, living in a predominantly white, smallish town in the Northeast, and this has obviously massively shaped their worldview. If my protagonist were, say, the child of immigrants, and the family were members of a minority community, I think their experience of growing up in the Northeast would have been radically different. It doesn’t necessarily mean their life would be better or worse. They would just be different people objectively.

“I want to be specific. I want to hone in on the cultural nuances and the specificity of the situation, but I don’t want to write nonwhite actors out of consideration for the role just because I wrote from the perspective of a white, Northeastern English experience. If the family’s roots were Asian, Indian West African, or East African, the family and the characters would be different in each of those culturally specific situations.”

**John:** I like how thoughtful George is being here. He’s trying to balance this sense that he has written a very specific family that is attuned to the experience he needs in this story, and at the same time, he would love to be able to open roles up to nonwhite actors, and feels like it’s just not going to work because of the specificity he’s put in there.

**Craig:** I think George is being thoughtful, but perhaps too thoughtful, meaning it seems like George is writing a defense against somebody being angry with him because he wrote parts that were specifically for white people.

Now, here’s the thing. As we change the way we cast things, and try and include traditionally under-represented actors, that’s about getting rid of what I believe we’ve called default white, so that kind of thoughtless, “Okay, I’m going to write a character, and that character is plumber. Unless I say otherwise, we’ll just assume that’s a white guy.” That’s the way it used to be. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re not doing that for small characters, large characters, big characters, small. However, when we are writing characters that are specifically connected to a culture – that’s an important word, not race, but culture – then we have to write for that culture.

In this case, George, I would suggest that you don’t think about race as much as culture. You are specifically writing about white, middle-class, Northern England culture. Therefore, you may say you don’t want to write nonwhite actors out of consideration for the role, but you have. That’s what you’ve done. That’s not a crime, because this is about white culture in northern England, so that’s okay. That’s okay.

I don’t think we should be twisting ourselves into pretzels when there is an easy answer for things. If you were writing a story about Pakistani British culture in northern England, you would be excluding white actors from consideration for the role, because it’s about Pakistani British culture. This is fine. If you’re not specifically writing about that culture, then yes, I think open casting is a wonderful thing and should be promoted and celebrated. But I think you might be complicating this a little bit, George, because you’re a little nervous maybe that someone’s going to go, “Why did you write parts for white people?” Because you’re writing about white stuff. That’s why.

**John:** Sometimes Craig just answers a question so thoroughly and completely that I have nothing left to add, and that’s one of these happy situations. Craig, well done.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Chris in Glendale writes, “When Academy voters vote on Best Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, are they expected or required to actually read the screenplay, or are they allowed to base their vote on just watching the film?”

**John:** Easy answer. You are not required or expected to read the screenplay. I would say over the last 10 years, there’s been a much more concerted effort to make screenplays available to everybody who wants to read the screenplays. They can actually look at the words on the page. But no, you’re not required to.

Most people are not basing on that. Instead, they are basing their vote on what they perceived was the best writing, the best storytelling, the best work that was probably attributable to the screenwriter, and yet there’s no perfect way to know how much of what seems like the screenwriter’s job was that screenwriter doing that work there. You don’t know.

**Craig:** You don’t know.

**John:** In many ways, the award can also be called best film that probably had a great screenplay.

**Craig:** I think that applies to best directing and best casting and best editing, and even best cinematography, which you think is evident.

**John:** But no. Look at the acting awards. All those acting awards are also dependent on great editing and-

**Craig:** Great editing, great directing, and great writing. It’s really hard to get a Best Acting award if the script is bad, if the director is bad, if the movie is bad. These things are actually not particularly determinable. It’s all gut checks. I find it all fascinating from an anthropological and sociological point of view. But even though the word “best” is in front of all these categories for all the awards, in reality there simply is no way to determine that. Really, it’s just the one more people voted for.

**John:** One of the weird things about a screenplay though is that the absolute best screenplay of the year, if it’s not also a fantastic movie, no one’s going to pay attention to it. No one says, “Oh, that was a great screenplay, but the movie was only so-so.”

**Craig:** No one would know.

**John:** That’s never going to happen.

**Craig:** Also, the converse is true. When a movie gets the Best Director nomination, but doesn’t get Best Screenplay, how is that possible? How can you get the Best Director nomination but not get a Best Picture nomination? How is that possible? How can you get Best Actor and not Best Screenplay? How is that possible, since a screenplay was the thing that created the character in the first place and wrote all the words down that the character says? How is any of that possible? Really, if we wanted to be purists, there would be one award, and the award was Best Movie. That’s that. It’s a short ceremony, and everyone goes home.

**John:** There are awards that day. The National Board of Review is just Best Movie. They don’t give anything else.

**Craig:** That makes sense. By the way, also unnecessary, because we don’t need to say what the best movie is. The fact that everybody disagrees on what the best movie is is probably an indication that it doesn’t really make sense. Best movies, movies that made us happiest, all in favor. Same for television. But I don’t run these things.

**John:** As he’s headed off to the DGA Awards.

**Craig:** I myself am not nominated for a DGA Award, but I am rooting for Peter Hoar, who directed Episode 3 of The Last of Us.

**John:** Excellent. Another question.

**Drew:** Freshly Repped writes, “I started working with a new writing partner in August. We wrote an animated pilot that everyone seems to like, so much so that we got repped off it. First script, first submission, first agent. Both of us have been writing for years before this, but this is easily better than anything else either of us have. Now that we’re repped, my partner wants to show our agent her individual samples and the writing she’s done with her wife. I feel like this is a no-no, given that he’s trying to pitch us as a team. We have no credibility yet, since we’ve never staffed or sold a thing. My partner thinks there’s nothing wrong with bringing him other material, because we each have individual contracts with the agency, and nothing in those precludes us from working with other people. I’d love to hear your thoughts and appreciate your help.”

**Craig:** Tricky one. What do you think, John?

**John:** Tricky one. I would love to hear from some writing teams for what their perspective is, because I’ve never written as a team. You wrote as a team a zillion years ago. My instinct is that the letter writer is correct in assuming that it could confuse the situation about who they’re representing and what the voice is of this team. I think you should focus on the work that you’ve done as a team and not be showing the work you did separately at this moment in your careers.

**Craig:** Here’s the part, Freshly Repped, that is a little dicey. That is that it involves your writing partner’s wife. Look. You can certainly imagine a situation where your writing partner is at home, and she’s telling her wife, “Hey, good news. Me and this other person, we’ve got ourselves an agent.” The wife’s like, “Oh, what about the thing we did? You love that, don’t you?” She’s like, “Uh-huh.” Now, maybe she does, or maybe she’s just trying to keep her wife happy, because happy wife, happy life. I don’t know.

The other thing is, I don’t know if that stuff’s good. It may be that it’s worth having a conversation with your agent and saying, “Look. This is going to happen. I can’t stop this from happening. I don’t want to stop this from happening. That would probably be a huge fight and cause resentment. But please be honest with me when you read it. If you think it’s really, really good, then it’s good for me to know, because I kind of need to know that it’ll be a little bit of a divided attention situation. If you think it’s bad, I back you on… If you need to be polite about it, but not be super active, then we can all just play the game together quietly and politely.”

But I tend to feel like the truth is, good stuff wins; better stuff beats not-as-good stuff. If your writing partner and her wife are writing things better than you are writing with your writing partner, it’s just going to happen. There’s nothing you can do. I suspect that’s probably not the case.

**John:** No, it’s not the case. If you look at the first paragraph here, “First script, first submission, first agent. Both of us have been writing for years before this, but this is easily better than anything either of us have.”

**Craig:** I’m going to assume that, Freshly Repped, your perspective is honest and at least close to accurate, in which case, have the confidence to just… My advice would be to let it happen and just let the natural course of events take their path. The agent will not waste your time. It would be so much better for you and your new relationship with your new writing partner to let the agent say, “Guys, I’m going to concentrate on the two of you, instead of one of you and her wife.” I would just see how it goes. There’s no way to get around it, basically. That’s my feeling.

**John:** If we do have teams who want to write in with their perspective, I’m really curious what you guys would recommend, because I know it’s always challenging. People are writing separately and together. If you can offer some best practices, we’ll love to hear it.

**Craig:** I don’t love that the partner is doing this. I wish I could know if they were being coerced or not, because that does happen.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** It does.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Hrothgar in LA writes-

**Craig:** Hrothgar.

**Drew:** “A few years ago, one of my scripts was featured on a script hosting service and later optioned by an actor producer. Working with this producer has been great. They have good notes, communicate regularly. They seem like a genuinely good person. But they’ve also never produced anything. It’s been several years now. And though we’ve attached a qualified director, the project feels like it’s moving forward at a glacial pace.

“Recently, another director found me online, expressing interest in the project, but only if they direct. What’s more, they claim to have financing, and based off of their resume, I’m inclined to believe it. I want to remain loyal to my original team and be patient, but I’m also deeply broke, and staying the course gets harder and harder every year I lose money being a screenwriter. I don’t want to be an asshole, and I want to make good art, but I’m also tired of selling my plasma to afford ramen.”

**Craig:** Oh, good god.

**Drew:** “How do you know when someone just can’t get a project off the ground? Is it foolish to chase the shiny offer and maybe actually get paid or does loyalty actually count for something in show business? If you do ever take a project away from a producer, how do you go about doing it?”

**Craig:** What do you think, John? Hrothgar is selling his plasma for ramen.

**John:** It’s making ramen money. For a different project I was working on, I did look up the business of selling plasma. It’s profitable-ish. It’s a thing people do. You can’t sell blood, but you can sell plasma.

Here’s my guidance for Hrothgar. I think you’re right to be independent of this director coming by and expressing interest. I think you’re right to be wondering whether this is ever going to move forward with this director and producer situation. I think it’s worth having a conversation with them about it.

You can honestly say, “Listen, guys. Another director has approached about doing this. They seem to actually have money and a plan for production. I want to talk to you about this. I don’t want to blindside you, but let’s be realistic. Are we actually going to get this thing made?”

That’s a conversation you can have. It’s also a conversation your reps can have. Nothing in your letter says that you’re repped by anybody, but the fact that this did get set up and has some stuff around it leads me to believe you might have some reps who can help you out in this situation, which is part of their job.

**Craig:** I think that’s right. There’s nothing disloyal or unethical about telling the producer, “I have good news. We may have found a director and financing.” You would be actually committing malpractice if you didn’t mention it. This sort of thing happens all the time. You’re not saying, “Hey, this director is going to make the movie, and also, you’re gone.” The actor producer stays. They stay on as a producer. It happens all the time. It’s a credit, so that gets figured out.

Now, if the director is saying, “I have financing. I want to direct. Also, no other producers,” that’s different. Then they can fight about it. But you don’t have to fight about it. You were the hot one in the bar, so let these guys beat themselves up over you. But you don’t need to… This isn’t about disloyalty. You need to pursue it if it’s a legitimate offer and situation. You owe it to yourself to pursue it. Of course.

**John:** First sentence, it says, “Optioned by an actor producer,” so there was a contract at some point that was official. It wasn’t just, say, like, “Hey, I really like this. Let’s just talk about stuff.” But it doesn’t seem like it’s significant money, certainly not enough for Hrothgar to be able to live and afford his ramen with just this money. It does make sense to have a conversation with them about this outside party. It gives you an excuse to have the bigger conversation. It’s like, is there any plan to actually get this thing produced?

**Craig:** When these things happen, sometimes there are some hurt feelings that are just mis-expressed shame, because they haven’t been able to get it going. But if you are kind and generous about it and just clean and simple, I think the producer has as much interest in you and seeing the movie get made. It’s the attached qualified director that’s going to get pinged off of there. You don’t have any loyalty to that person at all.

I apologized to that director, but this is one of the weird cultural things about Hollywood where we overindulge directors and their feelings, and routinely discount and underindulge the feelings of writers. You’re selling part of your blood to eat food, and you can’t afford to worry about this director’s feelings. They didn’t write anything. They didn’t do anything. They haven’t done anything yet. Just attaching themselves clearly wasn’t sufficient, so I think if there’s an alternative, you must reach for it.

**John:** Also, I’d say that the fact that some other director has expressed interest, maybe there’s other folks out there who are also interested, and so this could be a moment to really look at, is there an interest out there for this project in general. Yes, have the conversation with this new director, but also be looking, is there another way to get this thing actually made, because you’ve probably been so fixated on trying to make it with this one producer and this one attached director. There may be other ways out there.

**Craig:** I do admire you, Hrothgar, in that you’re even thinking about these questions and loyalty and art. When I was poor, I did not. I just didn’t feel like I should be selling my blood. I will say, maybe this will sound mercenary and counter to the far more self-care-oriented and self-regard-oriented values of Generation Z and Millennials, but I feel like getting some financial stability in your life will give you freedom to grow and be a better artist, especially for screenwriting, because screenwriting is one of the only arts in existence that doesn’t become complete until people produce it. That is its completion. Yeah, get yourself paid, Hrothgar.

**John:** Do it. Let’s do some Three Page Challenges. For folks who are brand new to the podcast, welcome aboard. Every once in a while, we do a Three Page Challenge. We invite our listeners to send through the first three pages of their script. It could be a pilot. It could be a feature. They sign a little release. We discuss it. We put the pdfs up online so you can read through them with us if you want to. We’ll also give you a short summary. But as a reminder, everyone here has asked for this feedback. They are coming in here with eyes wide open that we may not love everything that we see.

But this is a chance for us to really talk about the words on the page, because it’s one thing for us to describe character arcs and the importance of white space, but when we actually look at those examples on the page, we really can drill down to the specific things, the choices we’re making word by word, sentence by sentence, as we do this craft. I think it’s a thing we love to do. It’s an exhausting task for our producers. Drew, thank you for sorting through the hundreds of people who have sent these things through.

Let’s start off with Routes by Colton Miller. Drew, can you give us a summary for those folks who are listening at home?

**Drew:** It starts in suburban Los Angeles. Young sister Samantha, 17, and Brooke, 12, burst out of the front door of a house to escape the abusive chaos inside. Sam leads them to an old Chevy Impala, and they quietly escape with nothing to their name. The story then transitions to six years later, where an 18-year-old Brooke is now in the back of a rideshare in Los Angeles. She’s lost in thought. Brooke is brought back to reality by the rideshare driver, indicating their arrival.

**John:** All right. Routes, three pages here. Just taking a look at the title page, simple, straightforward. They got the email address on the bottom, so if someone wants to track down Colton’s information, they know where to email him.

**Craig:** I do like a simple title page.

**John:** Craig, I was struck by how real-time these first two pages are. It’s a lot of scene description. It felt like overwriting for me at times. I actually kind of dug it. I liked how bit by bit it was. It just felt like we were in one static camera shot of looking at this house and eventually these girls coming out and getting in the car and backing away. It was a strange use of time on the page, and yet it kind of worked for me. I’m curious what you thought.

**Craig:** I agree to a large extent that there were some beautiful moments that were very visual. I could see everything. I could hear things. I could almost smell the outside. I really enjoyed some of the description of the inside of the car. There were a lot of evocative things.

My issue is that in fact it is kind of unshootable as it currently is on the page – and we can get into why – but easily adjusted to be shootable. Then there’s just a question about how we frame the timeline, because – just a simple thing – it begins with a title that says “six years ago.” “Six years ago” is not a great title to put on a film as the first thing, because six years ago from what? Now? If it’s for now, just give me the year maybe.

**John:** Give me a year. Agreed.

**Craig:** Then give me a new year or just the word “now” when we get to now. It’s a little bit of a wonky bit. You can also not include it at all, just show the first couple of scenes, and then when we get to the next time in “INTERIOR RIDESHARE (DRIVING) – NIGHT,” you can say “six years later.” You can also wait. You can see this older version of Brooke, and then, “We’re here.” “Yeah. Thanks.” She gets out of the car, walks towards something, title, “six years later.” You could always do that as well. Let’s talk a little bit, John, about where we are having an issue maybe with time and how we’re managing time here.

**John:** The first thing I underlined on Page 1 is fifth paragraph down, “All is quiet. The car is motionless, lifeless.” All cars are lifeless. That was my first-

**Craig:** Not in the Transformers.

**John:** That’s true. It could transform.

**Craig:** Or it could be the Love Bug.

**John:** It could be. We could think of more examples of living cars, I guess. But it wasn’t necessary. The problem was that it made it think, is this a movie about a car, because all we’re talking about is this car, when really we’re just trying to set up we are looking at this house. That, I liked.

There’s next paragraph down, “Until – we hear plates crash. Muffled yelling. Shattering broken glass. O.S. from inside the house.” You would never really use O.S. that way. We understand what it means, but-

**Craig:** “From inside the house,” is redundant.

**John:** Is enough. That’s O.S. Where we’re having some time problems and some geography problems, once these girls come out, they are whispering in a wide shot, which doesn’t actually work. It feels like a closeup of feet. You’re trying to get two things in a frame that don’t actually fit together. This is where it felt like if you’re writing the novel version of this, sure, you can do that, because you’re in this imaginary space, but it doesn’t actually work here. We can stay in this wide shot. We don’t need to hear them whispering. We can see what’s happening. We see they’re sneaking to this car. And then cut to we’re inside the car and we’re in a better place.

**Craig:** Completely agree. There’s nothing wrong with starting with silence. And then it says, “Until – we hear plates crash.” Now, that’s kind of a weird start to an argument. Generally speaking, it isn’t like people are quietly talking and then someone just starts whipping plates. We might want to hear a little bit of a raised voice and then more of a raised voice, and then the plates crash, and then there’s glass, just because suddenly plates crashing out of nowhere is going to feel a little contrived, I think.

“The front door to the house swings open, revealing two girls, 17 and 12, in ratty long-sleeve shirts and sweatpants.” Now, when we have two people, you might want to be a little bit more, so it doesn’t seem like they just are wearing a uniform of long-sleeve shirts and sweatpants.

“The older girl holds the younger girl’s hand. This is young Samantha, ‘Sam,’ and young Brooke, 12.” You probably don’t need to say “young” here, because we know their age. We’re going to see them later. It’s Brooke. She’s now 18. So I don’t think we need to do the “young Sam,” “young Brooke” here.

I will read the following: “Sam and Brooke walk briskly towards the car in the driveway. With urgency but trying to not draw attention. Push in on Sam.” Let me stop there. How are you pushing in on Sam while they’re walking briskly toward a car in the driveway? That’s not a thing. You can’t. You’re moving with them, right? I assume. You’ve even called out it’s urgently, briskly. This is where I’m starting to get confused. How close are we? How far are we? Are they moving? Are they not moving? That’s where things like “push in” are tricky.

**John:** Agreed. There’s moments where we clearly have “cut to,” closeups on things, which is great and fine. “Close on Sam’s hand. Her right hand clutches Brooke’s hand. Sam’s fingers – with chipped black nail polish – wrap tightly around Brooke’s palm.” Great. Okay, we’re seeing those things. Again, in a normal script, I would say this is overwriting, but what they’re trying to do here is actually just play in real time and milk this moment. Great, go for it. I have no objections.

**Craig:** I would suggest that there’s a perfectly good version of this where Sam and Brooke say nothing, because here’s what Sam says: “Whispering to Brooke, ‘Let’s go.'” I’m pretty sure that was already said.

**John:** We get that. We get that.

**Craig:** It’s not like Brooke is going to go, “I’m going to hold your hand and walk outside, not asking any questions until you go, ‘Let’s go.'” They’ve already gone. They’re going. It’s happening. And then Brooke, “Sam?” Again, probably would’ve been like, “What are we doing?” “We’re getting the fudge out of here.” That already happened inside. I think you probably don’t need this dialog. If you’re scared, Colton, about having non-dialog pages, that’s okay. You’ve actually done such a nice job of putting all this beautiful white space on the page and giving us reportage, punchy bits. I think all that’s really good. Do you know what I really like, John?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** “As Brooke adjusts in the seat,” this is the car seat, “her bare feet,” which is interesting. I think that wasn’t indicated earlier. It should be. We’re going to notice that. “Her bare feet slide around on a pile of waxy yellow McDonald’s burger wrappers and other trash littering the floor.” That’s cool. I like that. I heard it. I saw it. It teaches me things. It was cool. I like it.

**John:** Craig, this first scene, is it day or night?

**Craig:** In my mind, it’s night.

**John:** Yeah. Look at the first page. It was day.

**Craig:** What in the world? Whoa. Mandela effect moment.

**John:** I totally saw it as a night scene.

**Craig:** How is this not night?

**John:** How is this not night?

**Craig:** How is this not night? It’s clearly night.

**John:** The question was, I was thinking, what sounds do you hear? I was thinking night sounds. You’ve got the crickets. You’ve got the city hum. Nothing’s silent, and so what does it sound like? Night and day sound so differently.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I think this is a night scene. Now, I can see what Colton’s going for. This was a day scene, and then we’re going to cut to a night scene. But in my head, I was thinking it’s night scene and night scene.

**Craig:** You can absolutely cut from night to night. Here’s why in my brain I just immediately made this night. “It’s quiet in Reseda.” Now, yes, Reseda is a suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles, but it’s a massive sprawl. There is highway noise, distant sirens, cars honking, traffic, the lawnmower guys with the leaf blowers. There’s no silence in Reseda in the day. Night, yeah.

Also, people generally don’t have these big drunken fights in the middle of the day. They do. I’m just saying it’s probably more likely… It feels more of a night thing. More importantly, if it’s day, other people are awake. That means people are hearing it. That means they’re going to come outside and see. No one is on the street in the day, apparently, to notice this or to see these two girls walk out in Reseda. Also, it’s just less dramatic, isn’t it, if it is in the day?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just cooler at night. Anyway, I think night.

**John:** If it’s early morning day, that could be great. That would be a good choice.

**Craig:** Sunrise maybe.

**John:** Gotta be specific.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line for this. We’ve only looked at these three pages, but we ask the Three Page Challenge writers to tell us what happens in the rest of the script.

**Drew:** “An adrift recent high school graduate journeys across the U.S. one summer in search of her estranged older sister who ran away five years ago, desperate to finally find her and bring her home.”

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** That tracks.

**Craig:** Completely tracks. With that in mind, another recommendation, Colton. The young Samantha, Sam, 17, is – my guess – a troubled person, because Brooke is trying to find her, which means she’s sort of lost. It might be interesting to see a little bit more than just the nail polish, just something, because by the time you get to… Nobody who’s a troubled 23-year-old was a not-troubled 17-year-old. I’m just going to go out on a limb here. There’s already a problem.

This is Reseda. It’s Los Angeles. What does a troubled 17-year-old look like? Is she pierced? What has she done to her hair? Is there a bruise? Is she cutting? Is she too thin? Is she missing a tooth? Does she have braces? Just give me a little bit of a sense of who she is, more than just this, especially if we’re going to be hunting for her and she’s not going to be in the script for a while.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a look at our next script. This is Megha Genesis by Priti Trivedi.

**Drew:** Megha, a 37-year-old skateboarder, confidently maneuvers through a crowd in Austin, Texas. Skating to her family home, she encounters her mother, Deepa, who enthusiastically insists on dressing her in dated power suits for an upcoming job. Amidst the fashion chaos, Megha reveals in voiceover that she’s about to have her first day at two very different jobs. We then cut to a week earlier, when Megha sits on Zoom with a recruiter and is offered a job teaching executives.

**Craig:** Stuart special.

**John:** Stuart special. Title page, clean and simple. A lot of people would put an email address on there. I think it’s a good idea, just because if someone absolutely loves this, that’s how they can get a hold of Priti to talk about how much they love the script. But now, as we get into the actual script itself, Craig, do you want to go first? Want me to go first?

**Craig:** Happy to start. A little bit of a fish with feathers here. There’s something that happens almost immediately that causes a loss of confidence. This is why the first page, the first third of a page is so important. You just want to start to invite people to feel safe as they read.

**John:** Can I guess what it is that you marked?

**Craig:** Sure you can.

**John:** “Confidently boardslides.”

**Craig:** Actually, that wasn’t it, because I had already lost faith before that point. It says, “This is Megha, 37, whose short hair and slight frame make strangers routinely confuse her for a 13-year-old.” No, they don’t. No. Nobody who’s almost 40 is confused for a 13-year-old. That’s not a thing. There are people who are almost 40 who are confused for somebody in their 20s. That can happen. 13? No. The tone is in deep question here. That really threw me for a loop. Then, yes, “Confidently boardslides down a railing, nods hello to some teens practicing flips nearby. They nod back.” Not a great ending to a scene. Nod. Nod.

**John:** Yeah, because I don’t understand, are they nodding like, “Oh, that’s cool,” or like, “Dude, you’re old.” I don’t know what the tone is here. It clearly was trying to do a tone. I also don’t know, is she skating home? Is she skating from point A to point B and she’s going through the park, or was she at the park, skating? Those are very different experiences. If it’s a 37-year-old who gets around on a skateboard, yeah, I get that, but it’s a 37-year-old who also boardslides.

**Craig:** She’s in a park, so I’m thinking that she’s just enjoying a fun afternoon of boarding. This is also an issue that there’s no reason for this, because I didn’t learn anything really, other than the fact that she can skateboard. But does she fall? Is she really good? Are people impressed? Are people not impressed? What am I supposed to deduce from this? I’ve learned nothing about the character. I’ve only learned a fact, that she can skateboard. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** We often talk about the difference between mystery and confusion. It’s not mysterious really that she’s a 37-year-old skateboarder. It’s just kind of confusing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to know about her or think about her, based on this little first chunk, which seems like we’re putting way too much emphasis on this, but again, you have to start someplace, and this was not a place that was making me feel confident to start.

**Craig:** Then she does arrive home on her skateboard, which, okay. “The windows are ringed with multicolored string lights.” I don’t know what we’re supposed to draw from that, because it doesn’t sound like it’s Christmastime. Maybe this is how they decorate their home, which is fine.

But when we get into her room, we go from her skating up to, boom, she is standing in her room, static. That’s not a good cut. When people are in motion, you generally want to go from them in motion to them in motion, or them in motion to them entering the frame. You just don’t want to pop them into, I have just teleported into a room.

More tonal issues. “Her mother, Deepa, 60s, barges in with an armful of business clothes that were stylish when she first bought them in the late ’80s,” and she starts dressing Megha. It says the following. John, I will charge you with figuring out how to direct the following. “Deepa starts draping pinstripe jackets, ruffled blouses, and pencil skirts onto Megha, who is soon engulfed in a blizzard of synthetic fabrics and shoulder pads.” How do you do that?

**John:** It’s not going to work. How do you put a pencil skirt on her? I don’t know what this is.

**Craig:** How do you do that? How do you do that?

**John:** You don’t.

**Craig:** You can’t. Why is Deepa’s mother saying the following? Priti, if this hurts a little bit, I apologize, but it’s going to help. We’ve all been here. This is important, because it’s her mother. Now, funny moms are a long and storied institution in films, but they still have to be mom, which means they talk to their child as if they’ve met them before. This is what Deepa says: “Try these on and we’ll see what fits you. Oh, I’m so glad I saved these. You always said you’d never wear a suit to work, but I knew that someday you would get a real job and make real money.”

Now, are there moms that make passive-aggressive comments about their kids finally getting a real job and making real money? Completely. Are there moms that sometimes think they’re complimenting their child by saying something like that, when in fact it’s slightly hurtful? Absolutely. But are there parents who say, “You always said you’d never wear a suit to work.” No. Parents don’t cite back to you things you’ve always said, “But … ” It feels a little ChatGPT to me.

**John:** I also had a question about, we are told that she is 60s, “Slightly taller and rounder than her daughter.” Is she native-born American or has she immigrated to America? I want a sense of culturally, where is she at? What accent is she using? These are all things I could make assumptions, because I’ve seen other shows, I’ve seen other movies, but you shouldn’t just have me make that assumption, because it’s a different experience if it’s coming from an immigrant background versus she was born in Austin, Texas.

**Craig:** There’s Megha’s cousin Bina, who’s fine. She’s hanging off the bed. I like that she calls Deepa “Auntie.” Deepa: “Oh, I forgot my pumps.” “Megha shakes off the clothes like a dog shaking off water.” That’s a funny thing to write. It’s a funny thing to read. It is not possible to do.

**John:** Both the clothes on and the clothes off, you can sort of see it in a Disney Channel kind of way. It’s just feeling incredibly broad. Maybe this is an incredibly broad story that we’re trying to tell here, but my guess is it’s not aiming to be that.

**Craig:** There’s some geographical things. We’ve got a drum kit and a recording setup in one corner of the room. Bina is on the bed. She’s hanging off of the bed. I don’t know quite what that means, backwards or just sitting on the bed?

**John:** Head hanging off maybe.

**Craig:** Head hanging off. “Looks up from her phone, bursts out laughing,” has a little exchange. Megha says, “I feel like a pomegranate.” “Bina does a rimshot on the drum kit.” How’d she get over there?

**John:** Talented long arms. Again, tone. It’s incredibly broad you’re going there.

**Craig:** Then Bina seems cool. Bina seems like she’s on Megha’s side. She’s like, oh my god, “Auntie, you’re going to drown her. Polyester doesn’t breathe.” Bina’s like, yeah, don’t wear any of that. Then Megha’s like, “Maybe I won’t wear anything,” ha ha ha. Then Bina says, “Stop! You need clothes! You need to make a good first impression.” Wait, now who’s Bina now? Did she not get that that’s a cheeky comment?

Now, clearly, Megha is going to be involved in some sort of job that is sex-work-adjacent here, because that’s what is being implied, that she’s going to be working two jobs, like a straight one and a sexy one. But why is Bina saying, “Stop!” “Stop! You need clothes! You need to make a good first impression,” reminds me of Patton Oswalt talking about Germans and their lack of a sense of humor, like they don’t understand humor, and so they just take it very, very literally. I’m confused by these characters.

**John:** I’m mostly confused that they’re the ages that they are.

**Craig:** They’re kind of weirdly old for this.

**John:** They’re kind of weirdly old. If these were 23-year-olds, yeah, I could kind of see that, but they’re not. She’s living at home. She’s 37 years old. Something has gone wrong in her life or very strangely in her life that this is her situation. By the end of Page 2, I guess I need to know more about that rather than about clothes, because there’s some fundamental premise thing I’m missing here. By the end of Page 2, I don’t know anything about Megha. I want to, but I don’t know it.

**Craig:** I would say, Priti, that when we get to Page 3, what I think you really need to work on in a fundamental way is dialog, because Daniel and Megha are both speaking in a kind of super textual way. Everything that they’re thinking, they’re saying. There’s no sense of complexity. They’re just announcing things. It just feels very wooden, and I don’t want it to be. I want there to be subtext. I want there to be feelings. I want there to be emotions. I want them to be concealing things, hiding, playing, flirting, arguing.

**John:** Agendas.

**Craig:** Agendas, passive-aggressive, making choices to not complain about something that someone just said that’s a little off, anything that you can do there. This is all super textual. I think that you’ve got some dialog issues you need to work out. You may have full, great understanding of these characters, but in the execution, we’re not getting any of it. I would focus my work on that, Priti. Great title though, Megha Genesis.

**John:** I really do like it.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** We’re inclined to like anything that reminds us of Megana Rao, our beloved producer.

**Craig:** Do you think that Megha’s pronounced MAY-guh, because it’s like Sega Genesis?

**John:** I think the title is MAY-guh Genesis. That would make the most sense.

**Craig:** MAY-guh, yeah, I think that makes more… Who knows? Maybe it’s not. But it’s a great title either way. Love that.

**John:** I love it. Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Nobody puts baby in a corner, and no one can put Megha in a box. In this comedy series, a former academic turned adventurer attempts to live the corporate life and rebel against it at the same time, all while acting as a catalyst for change for everyone around her.”

**John:** That’s not what I got off these pages.

**Craig:** Deeply, deeply confused. What was the sexy stuff? What was that? I’m so confused. Adventurer?

**John:** Academic turned adventurer. Let’s say that she was top of her class, but then she just ran around the world and just lived her 20s and 30s just crazy. She was everywhere, she was doing everything, and now she’s come back home and she’s trying to make a start of it. Great. These were not the pages to get me into that story.

**Craig:** No, nor was there any indication that there was anything adventuresome about her whatsoever.

**John:** She had a skateboard.

**Craig:** That’s not high up on the list of things that adventurers do. If she’s an Indiana Jones roaming the world, that’s a very specific kind of person. That’s an adrenaline junkie. That’s somebody who’s faced danger and death. That’s somebody who seeks out the exotic and extreme. She’s just a 37-year-old skateboarder, and then she’s just letting her mom throw clothes at her, and then she’s just having a boring Zoom. I don’t understand it.

**John:** Adventure may not mean Indiana Jones. It could mean just something like Instagram influencers before their time. She’s always just going from the next place to the next place and never having a normal job. Sure, great. Or maybe she worked in the Peace Corps. That’s not what we’re getting here. If you’re going to use a voiceover, which you are right now, let that help understand what her perspective is and why she’s a 37-year-old who seems to be just starting out.

**Craig:** Lots of issues there. Keep going. Keep working at it. Address some fundamentals. I think that’s step one here. I think step one: dialog.

**John:** Dialog, agreed.

**Craig:** Dialog.

**John:** Our third and final Three Page Challenge is Thoughts and Prayers by Eric Hunsley.

**Craig:** Good title.

**John:** Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** In an amphitheater during a summer evening concert, a concertgoer, Paulie, and their companion, Dawn, prepare for a picnic. Simultaneously, a clarinetist revealed to also be Paulie tunes up his instrument backstage. However, up in the lighting grid, a gunman, revealed to be yet another Paulie, assembles a rifle. The musician notices the gunman pointing the rifle down at him and freezes, and then Paulie wakes up out of the dream with Dawn sound asleep next to him.

**John:** On our first page here, Thoughts and Prayers, Episode One, so this is meant to be part of a series. We have a full grid of information with email address and phone numbers and things like that. Sure, but no one’s going to be sending you a postcard, so email address is probably fine here. Phone number used to be important. When Craig and I were starting, we didn’t have email necessarily, so people would call you. I got cold calls from producers who had read stuff. Sure. That doesn’t happen anymore. Email’s plenty fine.

**Craig:** You could get a text. People do like texting.

**John:** People do like texting. If you can text, you can email. But yeah, you can get a text.

**Craig:** The kids love texting.

**John:** They do love texting. Craig, I had to read this twice, but on second reading, I did actually quite appreciate what was going on here. I had some very specific issues and concerns, but I liked a lot of what I saw here. The thing I would want to point out is, of all these Three Page Challenges, we’ve had some good use of white space. The pages have looked nice, and so I want to call it out for all three of these entries.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It took me a bit. I think it would take everyone a bit. Then again, what I find is, if there’s a little bit of difficulty in, let’s say, Page 1… I don’t know if you had the same feeling. It was just a concertgoer off-screen. That was a tough one. I was like, what’s happening in my POV? I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. I have a suggestion for how to mitigate that, perhaps. If you get to a place – and we do, on Page 2 and 3 – that makes you go, “Oh-”

**John:** “I see what you’re doing here.”

**Craig:** “… that’s interesting,” then all is forgiven. If you don’t, nothing’s forgiven. In this case, we did get to something interesting and provocative and very bait on the hook that justified a little bit of the trickiness at the beginning. Where did you start to get yourself a little bit lost?

**John:** Right at the very start, I was nervous, as we were moving into the POVs, but also there’s some repetition of words that don’t help you. “POV – concertgoer strolling on the lawn towards the stage.” We were strolling a few paces behind Dawn Berenger. The double strolling is not helping you there.

**Craig:** Double stroll.

**John:** This relies a lot on POV, but then I felt like we were popping in and out of it in ways that were not helpful. We could’ve lost the bottom half of this first scene. “How’s this?” Male voice, “Perfect.” She lays out the quilt on the grass. We don’t go in for that first matching of actions. They just go right to the clarinetist, because we’re about to set this routine where we see similar actions happening in all these places, and we’re starting to realize there’s some pattern thing happening here that’s going to be interesting. But I didn’t need it on Page 1.

**Craig:** Here’s my suggestion. It’s just food for thought, because I think it would help what you’re doing. It’s not to change what you’re doing, but to help it. That is to not not see our concertgoer, but rather to not see his face. You’re allowed to do that. We’re walking a few paces behind Dawn Berenger, 40s, and her date. We can’t yet see his face. She’s holding a picnic basket, stops, turns, hands the basket to him. This looks good. You don’t need him to say anything other than, “Perfect.” We don’t need, “Earth to Paulie. We’re gonna eat?” “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.”

“The concertgoer’s POV scans the lawn, taking in the crowd.” If that’s meant to be purposeful, it’s not going to do what you think it’s going to do. It’s just going to be an unrooted, information-less POV scan. What you want instead, I think, is to be behind him and note that he’s turning his head as if scanning the crowd, and then, “Paulie, we’re gonna eat?” “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.” Then the picnic basket hingey bit I think would work a little bit better because-

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** … there’s a human there. It’s not just a nobody. It’s not a POV camera, which is a very specific science fictiony way of doing stuff.

**John:** Agreed. You know that I was a clarinetist.

**Craig:** As was I.

**John:** We talked about this on an earlier show. Craig, you do not swab a clarinet before you put it together to play it. You swab at the end of a performance to get all the spit and the stuff out.

**Craig:** Correct. You’ve got your little spit valve, and then you do your cleaning. What you do before, maybe you put a new reed on, you put a little-

**John:** Cork grease is what I was thinking would be a better choice for what he could be doing, because as you’re assembling this thing, you have this little thing sort of like ChapStick that you’re putting on the corks to put it together.

**Craig:** I can smell it now. That white goop, I can smell it. It’s pungent.

**John:** Most people are not going to know that you don’t swab a clarinet before you put it together, but enough people will get that right. It’s going to work great. It actually makes more sense with what you’re trying to set up and do here-

**Craig:** I completely agree.

**John:** … in terms of putting a gun together.

**Craig:** Yeah, because he’s got ammunition cartridges, and maybe he’s putting rounds into a clip. Similarly, a professional clarinetist would have a few reeds. They would select one. They would put it in the mouthpiece, tighten the clamps. There’s lots of good stuff.

**John:** Craig, I have so many sense memories of what it is like, what a new reed tastes like, how dry it is, how it pulls the saliva out of your mouth.

**Craig:** Sticks on your tongue. I also have memories of what an old reed looks like, all chipped at the end like a broken fingernail.

**John:** Absolutely. You’re always picking which of the reeds is going to be good enough, because if a reed is too firm, it’s not going to work right. You start with really soft 1 reeds and you move up to 2s and 3s. It’s a whole thing.

**Craig:** I assume that you, like me, we couldn’t afford lots of reeds. My parents would dole reeds out like I was asking for a kidney. Assembling the mouthpiece, getting it ready, all that, the mouthpiece is the biggest issue. Cork grease to put the pieces together of the body of the clarinet. You got your two pieces, and then you got your mouthpiece going in the top, but the mouthpiece gets the most attention.

**John:** 100%. These are all things, small little changes, but I would say overall, I was digging this. I was a little disappointed it ended in a dream.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Because I was thinking this is going to be some sort of cool heisty thing. For all we know, then the whole sequence continues beyond this and it actually is more than this, but we have not taken a look at the log line. I would say overall, I was digging these pages. I thought they were a nice use of the reader’s attention and really rewarding the close reading of lines.

**Craig:** I completely agree. My hope – and Drew’s about to let us know – is that it’s not just a dream, and that there is something weird going on where Paulie is three different people and he’s gone through a reverse cloning machine or something. I don’t know. I guess it’s probably time to find out.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Having just closed the case of a mass shooting in his community, a police investigator must now track down a new threat. Pro-gun legislators have become targets of a serial shooter who, rather than going after the politicians themselves, hunt down their loved ones.”

**John:** Okay, so it’s not a science fictiony kind of premise. It literally was just the stress of it was making him feel this thing.

**Craig:** I’m not as big of a fan of this now, and here’s why. In a weird way, Eric, you’re kind of a victim of how interesting these three pages are. It’s such an interesting concept that you want it to be relevant beyond just, “I’m anxious about mass shootings.” Totally. Many of us are, and certainly, police officers and detectives, law enforcement officers who are charged with protecting us from these things or stopping them or finding the people who perpetrated them are even more anxious. But this is so specific and science fictiony that it’s going to be hard to just go into a straight-up political thriller.

**John:** Yeah, it is. I do wonder if Eric has written a cool short film that just wants to be its own thing, and it’s not the right way into the story he wants to tell, because I like the log line, I like these pages, I don’t think they’re the right combination is my guess.

**Craig:** Also, you don’t suck on the reed. You moisten it.

**John:** You moisten it.

**Craig:** You moisten the reed.

**John:** You let it plump up in your saliva.

**Craig:** You gotta get it soft. This has become more of a clarinet discussion.

**John:** It basically has become a clarinet discussion. But also, you do swab out your clarinet at the end of a session, but during the time, during a long rehearsal, you are also sucking the spit back in, which is really gross, but you gotta do it.

**Craig:** You just gotta do it. One last thing. This is just a formatting thing. Typically, until you’re in production, you don’t need to put scene numbers on your scenes.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** But if you do want to put scene numbers on your scenes, that’s fine. You just want them to be consecutive at that point, because on Page 3, we go from Scene A to Scene 13, which implies that scenes have been omitted, which again is fine, but that’s really only relevant to production. Typically, in production, it would say “Scenes 9 to 12 omitted.” Not particularly useful here, and certainly not a good idea, if you do include them, to have them be non-consecutive.

**John:** I will also say that I’m looking now, it’s Episode 1, so this is part of a series. As a series, this moment works a little differently than as a feature, because if this were the opening sequence to a feature film, I’d be like, mm. With a series, I can imagine this kind of thing maybe playing a little bit better, but-

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** Not for you?

**Craig:** No. It’s a tone thing. It’s giving us a big tone hit. Any time you have a dream where someone wakes up… It’s very useful to do. People have fascinating dreams. I have no problem showing a dream that somebody has, and then they wake up. I particularly appreciate that Paulie didn’t gasp awake. Thank you.

But typically, we know something about the person before, so that we understand a little bit more or we can connect with them a little bit more and their anxiety as they’re in the dream space. We also probably get a sense that it is a dream space. It’s just to meet somebody like this and have it be so…

Also, here’s the other issue. Dreams are not this cinematic. Dreams don’t cut perfectly between three different perspectives. They certainly don’t have weird POVs and then third-person views layering and cutting back and forth like that amongst the same person. It just doesn’t seem like a dream.

**John:** It isn’t dreamy, no.

**Craig:** It seems too real.

**John:** Those are our Three Page Challenges. Thank you to everybody who wrote in. Thank you to these writers, but also everyone else who wrote in with their pages to take a look at. If you have three pages you want us to possibly examine on a future episode, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all typed out. There’s a little form there. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf, and it goes into the inbox. If you’re curious about doing this for us, please submit. Craig, it is time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Submit.

**John:** Submit. My One Cool Thing is a product I bought off of Instagram. I thought it was really well done. It’s called Delve Deck. It’s by a company called Boardwalk. I think I got this ad served to me by Instagram because I do Writer Emergency Pack, and we buy Instagram ads for Writer Emergency Pack, so the algorithm just always serves me things that are kind of like Writer Emergency Pack.

In this case, Delve Deck is a bunch of conversation starters. You pull a card, and it has a single question on it that you can randomly choose. It might be for a party. I was thinking it could also be for a writers’ room. I may send one of these with my kid, who’s going to be a summer camp counselor, because it feels really great for talking to a bunch of kids about-

**Craig:** Icebreaker.

**John:** Icebreaker kind of things. Nicely made. It’s a little LA-based company. If you’re curious about it, we’ll put a link in the show notes to Delve Deck.

**Craig:** “Have you ever murdered someone?”

**John:** The answer is no, but I did stop and think about that.

**Craig:** Next card.

**John:** I want to make sure that I got the answer right. I will say our bonus segment is going to be three of the cards that I pulled out of there randomly, genuinely randomly.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ll answer those questions.

**Craig:** Fantastic. My One Cool Thing is a restaurant. I don’t normally do restaurant reviews. I’m always a little nervous that if I talk about a restaurant on our podcast, we’re suddenly going to start getting emails from restaurant promoters, because we sure get a lot of emails from publicity people trying to get people on our show. We’re just not that kind of show, John. That’s not what we do.

**John:** Not good.

**Craig:** That said, I did visit a restaurant here in Vancouver that I thought was so delightful and interesting. Have you ever been to a restaurant that was specifically Afghan cuisine?

**John:** I have not. That is one of our goals for 2024 is to try three new cuisines, so Afghan would be a good choice.

**Craig:** I have never myself been to a specifically Afghan restaurant. Afghan cuisine, as explained by the owner, is kind of an interesting blend of where Afghanistan sits. It’s somewhat Mediterranean. It’s somewhat influenced by Indian. It’s somewhat influenced by more Eastern Asian. It’s got a lot of things going on. This particular restaurant is called Zarak, obviously here in Vancouver, where I’m currently staying. It is family-owned. I thought it was fantastic. Really, really good. One of the best old-fashioneds I’ve ever had-

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** … which is saying something, because I’ve had them everywhere. The cuisine was outstanding. Just a really, really good time. It’s one of those things where, at 52 and living in Los Angeles, you think, I’ve eaten everything. No, I hadn’t. It wasn’t like there was anything that was served where I was like, “What is this?” But the specific way that Afghan cuisine is prepared I thought was really delicious. If you are in the Vancouver area and you’re interested in trying something new, or if you are already a fan of Afghan cuisine, check out Zarak, Z-A-R-A-K.

**John:** Excellent. I do want to make it up to Vancouver at some point while you’re up there shooting. If I do make it up there-

**Craig:** Zarak.

**John:** … I’ll hit the restaurant.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Zarak.

**Craig:** Zarak.

**John:** Love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments and advance warnings when we are going to try to do another Three Page Challenge, so sign up there. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re here on our bonus segment. Thank you to our premium members who make these bonus segments possible, and the rest of the show. As I said in the One Cool Things, I got this thing called a Delve Deck. I’ve pulled three cards out of here, and we’re going to just try to answer these questions. I looked at them earlier on, so I have some answers, but Craig, you’re good at thinking off the top of your head.

**Craig:** We’ll find out.

**John:** First question. Drew, I want to hear your answers to this too.

**Drew:** Oh, no.

**John:** “If you could ask any living person a question and be assured a true answer, who and what would you ask?”

**Craig:** Wow. If you could ask any living person a question and be assured a true answer? Oh, my.

**John:** This feels a little bit like Speak with the Dead, the spell in Dungeons and Dragons, except it has to be for a living person, and they are compelled to tell you a true answer to that one question. I think there’s different classes of questions you might want to ask. Some cases, there’s one person who knows the truth, and you could ask that one person the truth and actually finally know the answer. Who killed JonBenet Ramsey, I’d want to ask John Ramsey, because he might know, or just know that the family was not involved at all. I might ask OJ Simpson.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t waste that one. He already wrote a book called-

**John:** If I Did It. The hypotheticals there. There’s another class of questions, like, what does this person truly think, truly believe? Craig, what are you thinking? Of living people, who would you want to ask a question of?

**Craig:** That’s actually a very difficult proposition, because there are certain people who might have information that is valuable, but just because they tell me doesn’t mean anyone else would know or believe me or believe that they told me that. If there were a way for me to capture, for instance, on camera, Donald Trump answering truly, do you really think that you were a good president, although he probably does.

**John:** He probably does.

**Craig:** He probably does. He probably does.

**John:** I guess focusing on something that is more objectively true, like how many abortions have you paid for, something like that, which you could capture.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting one, not that it would matter to the people who would vote for him.

**John:** It wouldn’t matter.

**Craig:** Nothing matters to them.

**John:** Literally nothing matters [crosstalk 01:07:58].

**Craig:** Literally nothing matters. I might be interested, I suppose, to ask, let’s say, I’d go with Barack Obama, because I feel like he would give a very thorough answer.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** I would ask Barack Obama, do we have solid evidence of intelligent life on other planets, and what is the nature of that evidence?

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** He’s gotta know.

**John:** He’s gotta know.

**Craig:** He’s gotta know, right?

**John:** The argument that he doesn’t know is that Trump then would also know, and Trump can’t be quiet about anything.

**Craig:** I think they might’ve just hidden it from him. I feel like there’s so much stuff they just were like, “Let’s not tell him.”

**John:** Drew, what question would you ask, and of whom?

**Drew:** This is tough, because I feel like the ones that are popping in my head… What’s nice about John Ramsey or OJ Simpson is you would probably get a confession, which would do some good, whereas a lot of them, someone might just be like, “No, I had nothing to do with that,” and then it’s a waste. I might go for family drama. Maybe I would ask one of my parents-

**Craig:** If they really love you?

**Drew:** If they really love me, yeah. No, that one’s too close. Your parents especially are people you don’t have the whole picture of. You just get the pieces. I don’t know, I’d go for gossip, like, did you ever cheat on each other or something.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. Drew, you’re so dark.

**John:** I do like it though. I do like it.

**Craig:** I like it too.

**John:** Next question. What is something you’re still angry about?

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Craig has had some anger and umbrage over the years.

**Craig:** Nothing but.

**John:** Nothing but. I would say that in my personal and professional life, I don’t actually have a lot that I’m actively angry about. I don’t ruminate about past wrongs that were done to me often, or if that does happen, at least I’m not able to think of them now. I tend to be angrier on behalf of other people or angry on behalf of society. I’m angry about things that happened that I don’t feel have been adequately adjusted for.

**Craig:** There’s so much that I’m still angry about. What, among the many things, is most notable from all the things I’m still angry about, hard to say. I could go for small things and big things. I guess on a big scale, I am still so angry about Andrew Wakefield and his stupid, fraudulent, non-study study that ignited a bonfire of anti-vaccine rhetoric. That guy, I don’t believe in Hell, but if I did… The misery and ruin that he has caused, and the fact that he is so unrepentant and so stupidly, stubbornly in self-aggrandizing denial, it’s infuriating. He’s a real villain. Apparently, I’m still angry about it, John.

**John:** Apparently, you are. I hear that in your tone. Drew, anything you’re still angry about?

**Drew:** Off that, I think COVID response, the way that everyone handled it. It might be worldwide too, because some countries just didn’t have any lockdowns. That felt like something that we could’ve handled, but instead, selfishness just seemed to win, or maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe that was something that was always going to be an endemic thing.

**John:** I do hear what you’re saying, that sense that obviously no one could know exactly all the information, but the people who weren’t listening to people who had the best sense of what to do, I’m angry on behalf of and because of our citizens at times. I get angry about January 6th and the attempt to pretend like it was no big deal or not acknowledge this thing that we saw live on television.

**Craig:** No, you didn’t.

**John:** No, you didn’t.

**Craig:** It was Antifa.

**John:** You can’t trust your eyes.

**Craig:** That was Antifa. It wasn’t like anybody pooped on the Speaker of the House’s desk. It’s all just insane. Have you guys seen the Herman Cain Awards, that Reddit?

**John:** It’s given to the person who dies of the thing they were making fun of?

**Craig:** Yeah, basically.

**John:** Is that the idea?

**Craig:** Yeah. When you say given to the person, it means every day, 12 people. But one of the things they do there is they will provide you with a slideshow, and it’s almost always Facebook posts from an individual mocking medicine, Dr. Fauci, vaccines, the fact that COVID even exists, masks, all of it, and then, inevitably, of course, they contract COVID, and then shortly thereafter, somebody else posts to say, “So-and-so has gone to the Lord.”

There’s this thing that so many of them say. It’s actually disconcerting, because it makes me feel like maybe they are NPCs, because it’s so consistent, and it’s so weird how they all use the same phrase. When they get COVID, so many of them say some version of, “I have COVID. Guys, this thing is no joke.” It’s like, you mean the thing that you’ve been turning into a joke for years, that thing that you’ve been making fun of? Now you want me to know it’s not a joke, because you have it, and you’re in the hospital? They, over and over, go, “Oh, this thing is no joke.” They’re shocked.

**John:** Related to that is people who, when they get COVID, they pretend it’s something else or it’s not really because of the COVID, it’s really because of something else. It’s like, no, it’s because of COVID. This syndrome that you have right now, you have long COVID.

**Craig:** It’s like homophobic relatives telling you that so-and-so died because of pneumonia. You’re like, “Your 31-year-old gay son died of pneumonia in 1983? Uh-huh. Sure, sure, Aunt Ethel, sure.”

**John:** If you could go back and talk some sense into your teenage self, what would you say? Third and final question. Time machine, magical, however you want to get back to give some advice-

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** … to your teenage self-

**Drew:** Oh, no.

**John:** … your specific teenage self-

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** … what would you say? Mine I’ve talked about a couple times on the show.

**Craig:** What would you say?

**John:** Simple one is, stop playing clarinet, and instead, stick with piano, because you will play piano the rest of your life. You will not pick up that clarinet again.

**Craig:** Put the clarinet down.

**John:** Clarinet down.

**Craig:** I’m sure that your teenage self would hug you and say thank you.

**John:** Thank you. Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** It makes so much sense. Or you don’t have to go back to piano. Learn guitar. Guitar will serve you better. Then obviously, come out sooner. That’s every gay kid.

**Craig:** When did you come out? How old were you?

**John:** I was 22.

**Craig:** It was 1993?

**John:** 1992.

**Craig:** For 1992, you were pretty early there, I would say, relative to so many other people I know. Give yourself some credit.

**John:** Some credit. I could’ve come out in college. It would’ve been fine.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Could’ve. Didn’t. That’s okay. I think I would probably tell myself that despite the fact that I was not given a lot of positive feedback at home, that the positive feedback I suspected I should be getting was in fact the positive feedback I indeed should have been getting, and that I was the kid my parents insisted I was supposed to be. I wish that I knew that sooner, because it’s incredible how many years I lost as an adult to trying to get the approval of other people, when in fact that was never going to work. In the end, either you approve of yourself or you do not. If you don’t, you’re in trouble. Now, I don’t know if giving myself that advice would’ve worked. Then I would’ve hit me, just to really underscore it. “Stop hating yourself.” Punch.

**John:** “Stop hating yourself.” Punch. Let’s say you only had two or three sentences of advice. What would you actually tell young Craig?

**Craig:** At the risk of sounding sappy, “You are absolutely worthy of love and respect, and you are good enough.”

**John:** You are. There’s many men in their 40s who are still struggling with that.

**Craig:** No question. There are people in their 90s. It feels a little generic, because it seems like it’s such a problem for everybody, except when it’s you it’s not generic. Your self-loathing is incredible specific to you. That’s probably what I would do. Now, I assume that Drew is going to go back and tell his teenage self to go ask his mom if she’s been cheating on his dad, but let’s see.

**Drew:** There you go.

**Craig:** What will you do, Drew?

**Drew:** Oh, god. This one’s tough, because I feel like I was a decent teenager for a while, I was a theater kid, and then when I was a senior in high school, I became a real douchebag, because I felt like that gave me some kind of cache. I had an acid tongue, so that was helpful, especially when you’re 18. The meanest person usually wins. I still feel really, really horrible about all of that. I’m trying to boil it down to a concise thing.

**Craig:** Don’t be a douchebag.

**Drew:** Don’t be a douchebag. There’s no value in that. Carry it with you.

**Craig:** That’s one of the natural responses to not liking yourself. Suddenly, you’re mean. I’ve been mean, definitely. When you’re miserable, you’re mean. Facts.

**John:** Hurt people hurt people.

**Craig:** Hurt people hurt people.

**John:** A couple other really simple ones, just quick things younger John August should’ve known, first off, you should change your name, which I did later on, so that’s fine. That I can run. I never thought I could run, and then actually, in my 40s, I learned how to run. I was like, oh, actually I could’ve been running this whole time. That’s great. Also, to not worry about my hair. I shaved my head at 23, 22, basically the same time I came out. The best thing I ever did to stop worrying about my hair. I wasted teenage years worrying about my hair falling out. Doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I get it. Because I didn’t really start losing my hair until I was in my 20s, it wasn’t, I don’t think, as troublesome. I think if you start losing your hair when you’re in high school, it can really rattle you. It’s a fairly rarer circumstance. You’re in your 20s and you’re a guy and your hair is starting to thin out, you’re like, yeah, me and about 12 other guys. You shouldn’t blame yourself for that.

**John:** I’m not going to blame myself. But I think my advice to the younger version of myself was, it’s going to happen. There’s nothing you can do. Don’t let it occupy more thoughts than it deserves.

**Craig:** Have you, for Halloween or anything, put a wig on?

**John:** Yeah, but not a good quality wig. That’s something I would love to try to do at some point is to actually see what I would look like with really good toupees, because sometimes Instagram reels will show me, here’s this toupee thing. I’m like, “Jesus, that’s a really good toupee.”

**Craig:** I did this one episode-

**John:** For the episode you had hair.

**Craig:** I had hair, yeah. On Mythic Quest, I was playing a guy in the ’70s, and they were like, “Let’s put some hair on you.” I was like, “Fine, do it.” It was eerie. It was weird. It was weird to have hair. It felt strange. I can’t say that I was like, “Oh, I should be doing this all the time.”

**John:** Was it hot?

**Craig:** No, it wasn’t particularly hot. I sort of forgot it was there. Then when I would look in the mirror, I was like, “Whoa.” I showed a picture of it to my wife when I was in the makeup chair, but I was wearing a mask, because it was still COVID time. I’m wearing a mask, and then I’ve got hair on. I sent her the picture. She said, “Who is that?” She didn’t know it was me.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Even though you could still see from my nose up.

**John:** Drew, in your acting career, did you have to wear a lot of wigs?

**Drew:** No, I never got to wear a wig. I dyed my hair once. That’d be fun.

**John:** Alas.

**Craig:** Wig yourself. You know what? Wigs are cool, actually. I have to say, at the Emmys, there was the inevitable parade of drag queens when Drag Race wins, because they literally win every year. By the way, side note, for the television Academy, I think there should be a rule if you win five years in a row, you’re done. Mercy rule. It’s crazy. That said, still awesome to see the parade of drag queens and the wigs.

**John:** Incredible.

**Craig:** The wigs are astonishing. I was like, there’s a world where I just wear a wig.

**John:** Just wear a wig all the time.

**Craig:** I don’t pretend it’s not a wig.

**John:** Men used to wear hats.

**Craig:** Or wigs. Founding Fathers, wigs.

**John:** Wigs.

**Craig:** Wigs.

**John:** Love it. We answered our three questions here. Well done. I’ll keep this around on the desk, so if we need a future One Cool Thing topic, it’s handy.

**Craig:** Pull a card.

**John:** Pull a card. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Weekend Read 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [ROUTES](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ROUTES-three-page-challenge.pdf) by Colton W. Miller, [MEGHA GENESIS](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2023%2F09%2FMegha-Genesis-3-page-challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=cb5c2802694bc33dab7ab90c86312f541b276f73dbbf856b40d410f14a3d959c) by Priti Trivedi, and [THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2023%2F12%2FThoughts-and-Prayers-2023-12-29-3PC.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=a7e4f2257027ed7a199f18d21648744ce3e1ebf5d818a06321afc61c095df938) by Eric Hunsley
* [Delve Deck](https://www.boredwalk.com/products/delve-deck-conversation-cards)
* [Zarak by Afghan Kitchen – Vancouver](https://www.zarakvancouver.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matt Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/629standard.mp3).