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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 131 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are ya?

**Craig:** You know, I’m — do you ever get this thing, John, I’ll bet you you don’t. I bet you you don’t. But every now and again, and sometimes for stretches of days at a time, I’ll get that butterflies in the stomach anxiety thing.

**John:** For no good reason?

**Craig:** For no good reason. And I just sit and I wake up in the morning and there it is. And it kind of lingers all day. It’s really uncomfortable and I feel anxious and I don’t know why. I believe this is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry to hear it.

**Craig:** Do you ever get that?

**John:** I do get that sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, you do?

**John:** And, in fact, I will talk about a little section of my life. These last two weeks have been really busy with the contract negotiations. And then we were supposed to take a trip this weekend. And then the next week was going to be chaotic for different reasons. And I finally just had to say I cannot possibly take a trip this weekend. It just was going to be impossible.

So, we ended up staying home and it’s a lovely weekend in Los Angeles and it’s so much better and more fun.

But, yes, I sympathize with your Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I don’t know, is it technically some sort of like fight or flight instinct that has no basis? Do you know what it is?

**Craig:** It seems like it. I mean, every now and then I get that. It’s the feeling that you get when, I don’t know, you’re nervous or scared, except that there’s nothing to be nervous or scared about. So, you just get that fluttery — and I guess physiologically what’s going on is that adrenaline tends to divert blood flow and oxygen from your gut to your muscles and that what you’re feeling is the result of that. But it’s unpleasant and I’m not really sure what’s going on. And I just want it to stop.

And the problem with anxiety is that you — then what happens is you feel okay but then you get a little twinge of it again and then you suddenly worry, oh god, it’s happening, and then that’s why it’s happening. You know, it perpetuates itself.

**John:** Yeah. With me it’s usually I have convinced myself that I’m having a heart attack.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a panic attack. That’s a whole other…

**John:** Well, that’s true. That’s a whole extra discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah. I never had that. But people who get checked into emergency rooms all the time, with every symptom of a heart attack except cardiac damage.

**John:** Yeah. Well that’s me twice. I’ve twice had to go to the emergency room with all those symptoms.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And they said like, “Yeah, it was good that you came in. But, no, you’re not having a heart attack.”

**Craig:** Right. You’re just panicking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. The two of us are so panicky!

**John:** We’re so panicky.

Well, this week let’s talk about some psychological issues. Specifically I want to talk about procrastination and pageorexia based on partly a great article you sent through that we’ll talk about.

But we have a lot of other sort of follow up and bits and news and things. I want to talk about sort of all the changes in the industry with the Aereo lawsuit and the Comcast merger. So, let’s just get to it, okay?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, as long as I don’t freak out.

**John:** All right. Don’t freak out. I’m here to keep you company.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

First off, we can freak out just a little bit because we have a live show coming up. We have a live crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. And I’m so excited because we’ve talked about doing this for a long time. The Nerdist Writers Podcast is potentially the other great screenwriting podcast or writing podcast you should be listening to and we’re going to have a joint show. We’re going to have a joint live show — they do all their shows live — April [13th] at 5pm. It’s at Meltdown Comics. And tickets are available right now. So, you can go get them.

We have a link in our show notes, but if you’re listening to this on Tuesday I would really recommend you get tickets now because they’re $15. They will sell out. And then you’ll be sad that you weren’t there in the audience for us.

**Craig:** Once again you and are the Jon Bon Jovi of live screenwriting podcasting events. So, yeah, you got to get these tickets.

**John:** I guess we are the Jon Bon Jovi. I don’t even know what the Jon Bon Jovi means though.

**Craig:** Well, Jon Bon Jovi keeps selling out — he sells out everything. You, Jon Bon Jovi is a huge — people love Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** See, I’m learning things on this podcast even right now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I should say that this podcast, like all the stuff we do, we’re not making any money off of this. The proceeds from this benefit 826LA, the non-profit organization that sponsors writing programs in Los Angeles. So, it’s another good cause to support.

**Craig:** I mean, you’re familiar with Jon Bon Jovi in general?

**John:** Oh, in general I am. But I’m familiar with him as being a thing from the past.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, for us to be like the current things, that makes me feel really weird like, oh my god, we’re like some ’80s relic. And I don’t feel like a relic whatsoever. I feel vital and young.

**Craig:** So does Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** [sings] Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.

**John:** We also have some follow up. Last week on the podcast we talked about —

**Craig:** Just the best.

**John:** [laughs] I said, “Oh, there used to be this place called The Office where people would go and write.” And I spoke of it in the past tense and that was completely incorrect because it still exists. And so they sent a nice tweet, which I retweeted, saying like, “We still exist, we’re out there.” And I recommend people check it out.

There’s another place called Writer’s Junction which does the same function. So, I did mean for those to rhyme. But, if you are looking for a place to go that is not actually a coffee shop but is more like an office that you can go to and write, those are two options for you there.

Also, last week, Craig said The New Girl instead of New Girl for the TV show on Fox.

**Craig:** Sorry!

**John:** And I get it. I mean, it’s so easy to say The New Girl. But, it’s actually called New Girl.

**Craig:** And, by the way, my current television obsession — I shared this with millions of people — is True Detective. And about, I don’t know, 80% of the time I’ll say True Detectives with an S at the end.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s two of them.

**Craig:** There’s two of them and I’m basically a yokel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t get this stuff right.

**John:** You’re the Cletus of the show. You’re the Cletus and Jon Bon Jovi of the show.

**Craig:** Cletus. Cletus is the greatest character.

**John:** He’s so good. Because clearly he was meant to be just a one-time throwaway and they just loved him so much that they brought him back.

**Craig:** Did you ever see the one where Marge is trying to find a designer dress at a discount price because she has to go to this fancy party?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they offer her, [laughs], they tell her that they don’t have anything right now, but in her price range there is a shipment expected of partially burnt Sears sportswear coming in. And she’s not interested. And Cletus walks up and he goes, “What time and how burnt?” [laughs]

Perfect line. Ah! He’s slightly discriminating.

**John:** [laughs] He is. Yeah, so it’s a character that you couldn’t get away with — if he had like a race associated with him you couldn’t possibly do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But because he’s just white trash it’s still safe.

**Craig:** Oh, 100 percent. I talk about this with Malcolm Spellman all the time. We try and track what races are now safe to do. Like what racism is okay. I mean, poor white trash racism, thumbs up. Huge thumbs up. Irish people. Yeah. Green light. Green light.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Asians, I think, are successful now enough where it’s starting to get to be a green light. Bad news for Asians.

**John:** Yeah. But then you’re generalizing a whole giant category of people rather than being specific.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, but that’s the point of racism. [laughs]

**John:** That’s the point of racism. It should not be precise enough in your description.

**Craig:** That’s it. The whole point is it’s a very clumsy, ham-fisted way of getting a laugh, a cheap laugh out of an entire billions of people. But, yeah. I think that they are successful enough, powerful enough that it’s happening. It’s happening.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I feel it.

**John:** Craig, so we recorded — the last show came out on Tuesday and Tuesday afternoon we put out this new app and I sort of didn’t want to talk about it ahead of time, I just wanted it to be a surprise upon the world, but it wasn’t actually a surprise to you because you’d seen the build of this app quite early on. This is called Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s an app for reading screenplays on your iPhone. And can you summarize what your reaction to the app was when you saw it?

**Craig:** [laughs] Look, you don’t have to set a trap for me. I’m perfectly happy to just jump into your spikes and poison. I have no idea.

**John:** And told-you-sos?

**Craig:** And, by the way still — and told-you-sos. I still have no idea why anyone would want to read a screenplay on their phone. On their iPad, sure, I get it. On their phone, it’s just tiny, and I frankly don’t want anyone reading my screenplays on their phone.

So, you sent it and I’m like, “Why would anybody?” It’s perfectly — you did exactly what you set out to do and you did it well, but why would anybody want this. Well, apparently, I’m just, once again, totally marginalized by existence. Everybody wants it. I think it’s your biggest seller, right?

**John:** Which has really been remarkable. So, Weekend Read is a reader for your iPhone. It basically takes a screenplay and melts it down so you can make it look good on an iPhone, so basically you can take a PDF of a screenplay, sort of like what Highland does, it melts it down and just gives you the text so you can change the size and make it actually readable on your iPhone.

You and I both — well, you said you’ve never ever had to read a script on your iPhone, but I’ve had to. And you basically end up squinting and pinching and it’s terrible. That’s why you would never want to read a script on your iPhone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now you suddenly can. So, we launched the app on Tuesday and within like four hours we’d sold — we’d shipped more copies of Weekend Read than we did of FDX Reader, our first app, which has been out for two years. So, that was remarkable.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It seems to be quite popular among people. I just feel like many listeners of the show probably do read screenplays and many of them probably do have iPhones, so if you would like to try it out it’s free in the App Store right now. So, you just download it.

**Craig:** Look, congratulations. That’s spectacular. One thing that occurred to me when you were talking about how successful the launch had been is that you had — the app is a great name.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** It’s a really good name, you know. And it’s one of those names that manages to both say what the thing is but also sound interesting. It sounds like an actual name and not just a description.

**John:** Yes. So Weekend Reading in Hollywood lingo is classically the scripts that a development executive would read over the weekend. And so essentially a bunch of stuff will come in over the week and then they will sort of assign out the weekend read which is basically everyone on the team is supposed to read these scripts over the weekend. And so it felt like a very natural thing to call a script reader Weekend Read.

**Craig:** And now they’re going to read them on their phones. “Oh, good for you!” That’s my Christian Bale yelling at Shane Hurlbut. “Good for you!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** It’ll be nice.

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** Oh, yeah, that great audio of Christian Bale ranting at people?

**Craig:** That’s my favorite part. “Good for you!” [laughs]

**John:** Good for all of us. What Kelly Marcel pointed out, which I think will be interesting to see if it actually kicks in, is that a lot of times actors going out for auditions get sides. And those sides are just a PDF. And so it’s fantastic for them just like, well, it’s now on their phone and that’s kind of all they need. So, we’ll see if that works as well.

**Craig:** Oh, good, now the actors will just be reading their parts. “Good for you! Oh, good for you!” We got to throw a little clip of that in at the end of this.

**John:** It’s going to become a meme.

**Craig:** Did we ever talk about which side of that you come down on?

**John:** Both of them came out horribly in it I would say.

**Craig:** Interesting. I disagree.

**John:** You think Christian Bale came out — ?

**Craig:** I back Bale 100 percent on that one.

**John:** Okay. Here is my perception of what actually happened, being the person who was in Shane Hurlbut, the DP’s perspective. For people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, this was on the set of Terminator Salvation which was — Christian Bale played John Connor in a Terminator version. And he had a complete flip out on the set against the DP who was Shane Hurlbut I think is his name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recorded because people were already wearing mics. So, Christian Bale initially came off really badly in this and sort of had to do some penance to dig himself out of this hole.

My gut feeling is that Christian Bale was incredibly frustrated by the situation and he couldn’t flip out on the director, McG, and so he flipped out on the nearest person who he actually could kind of flip out on, which was probably Shane Hurlbut. That’s my perception.

**Craig:** My perception is that Shane Hurlbut was doing something that I’ve never seen any DP do which is go and tweak lights in the middle of a take. And I guess the deal was it’s coverage, so the camera is aiming at Christian Bale over someone else’s shoulders. Which means all the lights are behind the camera pointing out at Christian Bale.

And you try and clear the eye line for actors so they’re not being distracted. They can perform in the moment. And then while he’s talking here comes this guy that just starts wandering in behind the person he’s talking to and starts moving stuff around.

And I guess he had asked him a bunch of times, “Please don’t do that,” and then the guy just kept doing it and he flipped out. “Good for you!” I’m sorry. This is the weirdest tangent. Like a weird old tangent.

**John:** It’s a fine tangent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s get to the meat of today’s podcast.

So, you had sent this great article by Megan McArdle which is from The Atlantic on procrastination. And I loved a little piece of it, but it’s worth reading the whole thing because I thought it was a really smart piece and it’s actually part of I guess a bigger book about sort of the importance of failure.

But, tell me why you sent it and sort of what you got out of it.

**Craig:** Well, first I got excited because I thought that the child star of Annie had written this, but that’s Andrea McArdle. Megan McArdle — boy, I’m in the craziest mood today.

**John:** That’s all right.

**Craig:** I promise you I’m totally sober.

Megan McArdle wrote about procrastination which in and of itself is nearly impossible to do, because it’s been written about 1,000 times, but what I liked about this was that she zeroed in on why writers — I mean, this is the title — Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators. And she has a theory.

Look, I’m not sure if her theory is correct. But at least it’s a theory of why it seems to be so much harder for writers than for other people. And essentially her theory is that writers were likely the kids who found writing easy. That is to say writing relative to their peers. So, you’re in English class, you’re doing creative writing, you’re discussing a book, you’re doing a book report — you have to write anything. And everybody pats you on the back because being able to write instinctively and write cohesively and interestingly turns out to be fairly rare. I mean, just walk around. Go into any business and read what people are writing. It’s just hard for most people.

It’s a little bit like singing. Most people can’t sing, but a lot of people can. And people who can sing it comes easily to them, that’s great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And her point is that this unfortunately starts to — this creates a bad lesson for this kid, because they associate writing with something that is innate and fixed. That is to say this isn’t something I’m going to develop, it’s something that I was given. You have a gift as they say.

It turns out, of course, in the real world, no. You do have to develop your skills. Just because you have natural ability or a “gift” doesn’t mean that you are now ready for primetime or that there are other people that aren’t doing a lot better than you are. You have much to learn, much to learn. And you always will. You always will.

So, what happens for a lot of writers is that procrastination becomes the psychological extension of the fear that they don’t have anything more than what they have.

**John:** Yeah. I described it on the blog as the best scene is the scene you haven’t written yet. Or like you can’t fail at a scene you haven’t written yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s every chance — every time you sit down at the typewriter it’s a chance that you’re going to write something terrible. And so therefore maybe I just won’t sit down at the keyboard and I will do something else instead.

What I think is interesting about writing is you compare this to really kind of anything, like athletics, and so let’s say you’re a kid who is like really naturally athletic and great. And so you are very good at basketball or whatever. At a certain point it’s going to become objectively clear whether you are great at basketball or you were just good compared to your peers. Because you can actually see how good somebody is at basketball.

Writing is actually so much more amorphous. It’s really hard to say who’s a good writer, who’s not a good writer, who is a fantastic writer, who’s an okay writer. But weirdly the writer, him or herself, at a certain point develops a sense of like what is good and what’s bad. And they can recognize sometimes when they’re not writing their best. And there’s always that fear like, well, I might write something just awful. And everyone may — this is, again, the imposter syndrome — everyone may realize that I’m actually not that good of a writer at all.

And so by procrastinating, by putting off that writing you are delaying, you’re protecting yourself. It’s really self-preservation through procrastination.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because if you’re one of these people that falls into this category that there’s — Ms. McArdle sites Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck who is doing some research on this, and so professor Dweck has this idea that there are people who have the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset people, basically when they do something they look at it as an indication of essentially what my ability is. Period. The end. That’s it. if you have a fixed mindset and you sit down, and you start writing, and either you don’t like what you wrote, or other people don’t like what you wrote, this is going to shatter some fixed part of your identity. People might as well be looking at you and saying you have an ugly face, you know, you’re far too tall, and I don’t like your eyes. You can’t change it.

Whereas the other kinds of writers, the growth mindset writers, don’t look at their writing ability as some sort of fixed capacity tank. Do you feel like you have both of these or just one, or — ?

**John:** I think I do have both of them. But I think I definitely am guilty of sometimes picking the easier — that sounds wrong — but in her article she talks about self-sabotage. I’ve definitely witnessed myself self-sabotaging by creating a situation where it was impossible for me to sort of succeed. And so therefore I have an excuse for why that thing wasn’t the best thing I could possibly do.

So it’s like, well, it’s the best I could do in that circumstance. Well, I put myself in that circumstance so therefore is it really my best work?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or, not doing that thing that is so incredibly risky because I wasn’t sure if I could write it.

I would say over the last ten years though I’ve been much more aggressive about picking the thing that I’m both sure I can write and also not sure I can write. The thing that’s sort of outside of my comfort zone.

And even I guess sometimes at the start of my career, definitely going from Go to Big Fish, which are not sort of natural progressions, I really tried to push myself to do both of those things.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s very —

**John:** Are you a growth or a fixed? I perceive you — I’ll diagnose you first, but I think I’ll be wrong. I perceive you as a person who is fixed in the sense that you perceive yourself as a comedy writer and yet you very much also want to stretch beyond those boundaries of just a pure comedy writer.

**Craig:** I, yeah, well the thing is the genre that you pick is probably — it’s probably a symptom of your desire to stay safe and to succeed.

I don’t feel that I’m a fixed person. I do feel like I am always trying to get better and challenge myself, which indicates that I don’t have a philosophical belief that I’m just capped at a certain level. But certainly like you, I’ve made choices to protect myself and like you, lately and particularly lately, I’ve been making choices that do the opposite, that essentially put me out there in an area — I think you said it perfectly. I can do this and I can’t do this. That’s a good place to be. That means you’re not trying to fly, but you’re definitely taking careful steps somewhere. And that’s a good thing.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say beyond just my pure writing stuff, I think in public speaking and sort of my moderating of panels and my doing stuff at the Academy has been also an expansion beyond what I’m comfortable and safe doing, because it’s just so much easier for me to stay at home and just write on blog. And to go out and have to be in front of a big crowd of people was not natural for me. And yet I’ve gotten much more comfortable about doing it.

I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I’ll summarize it here because it actually fits really well with this sort of fixed versus growth mindset. I was on set and I was watching Spielberg direct this scene. And I was looking at sort of how he was doing stuff and how stuff was going. And I had this momentary flash where I realized like, oh, he’s just working really hard.

You associate these great directors as being these visionary talents who are born with these gifts. And while clearly he has gifts, he’s also just worked really hard. And I could see him — he’s Steven Spielberg, but he’s figuring out all these shots and he’s telling all these people what to do. And he’s really good at doing that, but he’s also just really focusing on it and he’s really working.

And it was one of those moments that was both sort of sobering in the sense that, oh, it’s not magic. But it was also like, oh, it’s not magic. Like I can work really hard, too. And that was actually greatly encouraging for me to see like, you know, it’s really, really hard work but I know I can work really, really hard.

And I think it gets back to Megan McArdle’s point is that oftentimes the people who succeed are the ones who just kind of aren’t afraid of failing. The ones who sort of can benefit from failure or benefit from struggles and learn how to sort of struggle.

**Craig:** That’s right. It puts you in a tough spot because most people on the planet don’t do jobs where failure is likely. They don’t. I’m not sure — most jobs are fairly safe things. This one isn’t one.

**John:** You can’t fail at a spreadsheet.

**Craig:** No, you can’t. I mean, you can, but it’s a different kind of failure. It’s not a failure of you. You can make mistakes but it’s not a failure of the expression of your point of view, your taste. Our brothers and sisters in the film review community, how do you fail? How do you fail?

If you can give Her a terrible review and still be at work the next week, how do you — there’s not failing there. But what we do, there’s failure every day. In fact, it’s built in. When we are hired, the contract is built around the notion that we’re going to keep failing. That’s why there is more than one draft even if it’s just optional. The entire editorial process is built around that. The reason you shoot more than you’re going to keep in the movies, because directors make mistakes all the time.

Why do actors get more than one take? Failure. Failure. Failure. The whole thing is a parade of it. And you have to make your peace with it, or it will absolutely destroy you.

**John:** It occurs to me that this kind of procrastination that a writer faces sitting down at the keyboard is really just a form of stage fright. It’s that fear that I’m going to get there at the keyboard and I’m not going to be good. And everyone is going to see that I’m not good and it’s going to be awful.

And so therefore I just won’t sit down at the keyboard.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the difference with stage fright is that eventually you have to get on. They’re going to call your name and you’re going to have to get up on stage and you’re going to have to start singing. And that’s, I think, ultimately what you have to face is a writer is that I have to sit there and I have to type this thing. And even if it’s terrible, I have to get through it because that’s my job. That’s what I’m here to do.

So, let’s just talk a little bit about sort of how you get past those humps and sort of what you find.

**Craig:** Well, I try and remember, and this is something that McArdle points out. I try and remember that there is no percentage for me to compare what I’m about to do or what I’m doing with finished products, which I think is the demon that plagues us constantly. I’m going to sit down. What should I write? Well, if I write this, that’s been done before. If I write this, somebody else already did that better. If I write this is it too much like that?

Constantly comparing the process, the messy process of cooking, to already completed perfect meals. You have to get ultimately to the place where it’s done. And, of course, we’re all trained to watch and appreciate the best of all those completions. So, I try and remind myself that there is nothing permanent about what I’m about to write. I can always hit delete.

It’s not like I’m expending resources, you know, rare resources to generate three or four pages, only to throw them out. I’m not building a wall, you know, where it’s going to cost me money to build it again. So, I give myself a break in that regard.

**John:** I think what you’re saying is exactly right in terms of recognizing that the finished product is not what you’re working on right now. You’re working on the process and in McArdle’s piece she points out that we always read, when we read like the great authors, we’re reading their final drafts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’re not reading everything they did along the way. We’re not seeing all their mistakes. We’re not seeing everything they threw out. We’re seeing the finished product. And it would actually be very helpful, I think, sometimes if we saw all the drafts that led up to it so we could see this.

Shakespeare actually weirdly, we do get to see all the different versions of things, and that’s kind of useful. You can sort of see how things grew and how things changed.

When I find myself procrastinating I, you know, the classic rule is you sort of set a timer. And it’s like for the next 20 minutes I’m going to write and I’m not going to do anything else. I’m just going to write. Jane Espenson calls this a Writing Sprint, which is basically no matter what, the next 20 minutes, the next 40 minutes, I’m going to write and I’m not going to stop writing until the timer goes off. That’s a great trick.

Freedom for Mac, the utility that we’ve talked about before on the show, which basically turns off your internet connection for a period of time, also really helpful. So, if you’re sitting there and you can’t get on the internet you’re more likely to be able to focus on the work you’re doing.

Anything else for you?

**Craig:** Yeah. The other little trick I do is to think about the scene that I’m supposed to be writing and then say, okay, maybe I’m scared to start writing this because I just don’t love it yet. There’s nothing in it that’s getting me super excited. And so I just try and think about it in different ways. Or just let myself think.

If it takes all day I’ll just think all day. If I have to take a walk, or you know me, a long shower is always great. But, when you find that thing that suddenly gets you excited then it’s a lot easier to sit down because it doesn’t feel quite so grindy.

And, by the way, interestingly enough, a lot of the times those things that got us motivated, they come out. It was something that we just needed to do it to not feel bad about moving our fingers over the keys. And there are days when you can take a walk and you feel like you can walk from one end of the earth to the other. And there are days when taking five steps just feels tough.

You have to actually honor that and not punish yourself for having one of those days. It’s totally normal.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

I want to sidestep to another sort of psychological thing which I actually witnessed this week in the negotiating room.

So, basically during the negotiations there is a lot of time where we as the screenwriters are just sitting there waiting for the next thing to happen. And so people are writing, which is great. So, you’re shoulder to shoulder with all these writers writing, which is fantastic.

But one writer who was sitting close to me was struggling to — his script was 116 pages and he really wanted to get down to 114, or 112. And he called it Pageorexia, which I thought was just the best term. And this wasn’t like a newbie writer. This was like a guy with multiple awards and nominated this year for awards. And I just thought it was hilarious that this is this guy who is getting paid a tremendous amount of money to do whatever he wants to do. And he still sweats all of these little details to try to get it down one more page.

He described it as, “Well, if they love it at 116 they’ll love it even more at 114,” which is such a classic anorexia kind of comment. It’s like he’s looking in the mirror and he’s not seeing what the script truly is.

**Craig:** Right. He’s got script dysmorphia.

**John:** Yes. But I would argue that in some ways that’s related to the procrastination thing that we’re talking about. It’s a perfectionism as a way of fearing failure. Rather than fear stopping him from writing, fear was getting him gripped into this sort of OCD must make everything perfect.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are constantly deluding ourselves that we have control over the response to our screenplay when we don’t. We write what we write. And we then give it to entirely different sentient organisms with completely different tastes, experiences, moods. And either they like it or they don’t. But that stuff is about trying to control that which we cannot control.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It does not — they will not like a 114 page script more than that script at 116, ever. [laughs] It’s never going to happen.

**John:** Yeah. What it’s doing is it’s crossing the line between like sort of professionalism, which is basically like making that look as good as it can. And perfectionism, or sort of needless perfectionism where you’re just moving commas around so that it breaks a little bit differently.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is a very smart man. So, I can tell him, and he knows that the 114 page script and the 116 page script will shoot exactly the same. You’re not changing the movie whatsoever. You’re just changing the words around on the page.

And yet sometimes we get obsessed about the words on 8.5 x 11 paper, not remembering like, oh that’s right, it’s actually just a plan for making a movie.

I heard a story, which may be apocryphal but it sounds absolutely true, because I feel I like I may have seen this in one of his scripts, that James Cameron when he got to — this is back in the time where you actually would type scripts or they were sort of printed out of things, so they weren’t PDFs. So, he would number it from 70 to 79 and when he got to 80 he would start it again at 70 to 79 again, so he could squeeze an extra 10 pages in. And no one would sort of notice that like it was doubled up there. Isn’t that a great idea?

**Craig:** [laughs] I totally believe it. I mean, the “it’s too long” is the traditional problem of the screenwriter. I’ve really never had a problem of a script that was much too long. The current script that I am doing is more of an action movie, and so I’ve given myself more length than a typical comedy. And it’s in at 119. And that’s 119 with proper margins and double spaces before the slug lines. And I feel good about that.

I called up Scott Frank in a little bit of a panic —

**John:** Scott Frank will tell you to turn in a 180 page script. Scott Frank writes long…

**Craig:** Scott laughed at me and then slapped me around and said, “No one gives a damn. I’ve never turned in a first draft that was shorter than…” Yeah. Exactly. “If it’s under 150 it’s a hallelujah for me.”

The one thing that I do spend time on, and I know Scott does — a lot of writers do — is page breaks at important moments.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I do look and see, okay, look, if there’s a big reveal or a moment, I don’t want that to be split up by a page break. If there’s an interesting speech. In fact, I don’t want any dialogue split over page breaks. I hate it. So, I try and — I mess around with stuff like that. But, you know, that’s when the script is done. And that’s just a fun hour or two.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s segue to our next topic which is a bunch of stuff happened this last week and it’s going to be happening in the next few months which could make everything quite a bit different in the next couple of years. So, I just want to give a little sense of what’s gone on and forecast — a very murky forecast — of what could happen in the weeks ahead.

So, this last week it was announced that Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable, which will create the largest cable company in the universe, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it was the number one cable company, Comcast, buying the number two cable company, Time Warner. It raises just a lot of questions about sort of how powerful can one company be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Also, happening soon we have Aereo, the company that’s being sued by the broadcast networks. Aereo essentially retransmits over the air broadcast via the internet. And it’s a whole question about sort of what is possible there. What’s going to be legal there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we also have, you know, this is the new season of House of Cards starting. A real question about Netflix and Amazon and now companies are making things that are like television but are not classically television. And how are we going to write for those and how are we going to get paid for those? And that’s a big thing.

**Craig:** It’s a mess out there. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess out there. And they’re actually all kind of related because — so, let’s go back to the Aereo lawsuit.

So, essentially Aereo’s lawsuit is — the broadcast networks are suing this company, Aereo, which provides television, a local channel television, but what they do which is very clever, they have these tiny little antennas and essentially as a subscriber you are renting this tiny little antenna which is often hooked to a tiny little hard drive which allows you to record the over-the-air broadcast in your market and so that you can look at it on your iPhone, your iPad, your computer.

It’s a way of getting your broadcast television to your computer or your other device. And it has this sort of geofencing on it and stuff so you’re not supposed to be able to get it outside of your region. Classically that would be called retransmission.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when cable companies come into a market, or cable companies are in a market, they have to pay the broadcast channels for the right to retransmit their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they have to pay, the classically New York, CBS, and I guess it was Comcast had the fight over basically how much Comcast would have to pay CBS in order to rebroadcast.

**Craig:** It happens all the time. Yeah.

**John:** And so if you lose a channel, like basically for awhile CBS wasn’t on Comcast, and that was because they were fighting over the price. And the broadcasters make about $4 billion a year in those retransmission fees. So, if Aereo were to succeed the broadcasters would feel like, well, we’re going to lose all that money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand how this is legal at all. Anyone that watches a baseball game has heard, or any sports event, “This telecast cannot be rebroadcast or retransmitted without the expressed given permission, blah, blah, blah.”

Yeah, how do they do this? It doesn’t seem…

**John:** I’ll tell you exactly how they get away with it. It’s because of Comcast itself. So, Comcast won an earlier Supreme Court decision with their basically personal DVRs. So, what Comcast was letting it do, and I remember blogging about this a zillion years ago and actually coming down on kind of maybe the wrong side of it. But, so Comcast, the DVR decision, was essentially Comcast wanted to say like, “Okay, so we have this cable subscriber. And rather than having a DVR in their house, they can have their DVR at the cable company.”

**Craig:** Right. A cloud-based DVR. Right.

**John:** Exactly the same thing. But it’s one DVR per household, so it really is an individual’s DVR. And so the retransmission is public retransmission, not private retransmission. So, that is the very fine line that Aereo is trying to go for. And apparently the reason why they introduced service in New York City is because it was already in the second court, the second district court when it had that ruling for Comcast that was beneficial. So, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens.

This case, and now I think it’s supposed to be heard by the Supreme Court in April, so we’ll have a ruling there.

The question is, from a writer’s perspective, and an industry’s perspective, what happens if the Supreme Court says you can do this sort of private rebroadcasting? Well, I think if you’re a cable provider you’re going to say like, well, I’m not going to pay this local channel all this money for this. I’m going to do this thing with the antennas and it will be cheaper for me just to do this thing with the antennas.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m always fascinated by these businesses that operate like fatal viruses. There’s the classic question in epidemiology. Why didn’t say small pox just kill everyone? What stopped it? And the answer what stops it is it’s too good at killing people. And it just kills at its hosts in an area too quickly and can’t transmit itself.

I’m fascinated by these companies that their business model is to feast on the corpse of the thing that’s giving them life until there’s nothing left.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing though. I think from what Aereo would argue back, and I’ll just play devil’s advocate for Aereo here, is that it’s essentially the same thing as what the Cablevision decision was. The subscriber is still getting exactly the broadcast that they would have gotten with their own rabbit ears.

And so they’re still getting all of the commercials. They’re still getting — Nielsen still measures those people. So, technically it’s not that they’re stripping out commercials. It’s not that they’re taking the content away. They’re just giving it to them in the way that they want. And so Les Moonves of CBS said, “Well, if this lawsuit happens maybe we’ll just become a cable channel.”

Well, maybe they’ll just become a cable channel. Or maybe they’ll just start offering on CBS.com all of your shows for a subscription.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which then raised the question of like, well, does that mean that five years from now, CBS, NBC, everything we associate as being broadcast television could ultimately become a subscription service?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, it could. I mean, the fact that anything is broadcast over the air anymore is, obviously, it’s archaic. But it is so much part and parcel with the way that networks work. And there are still a bunch of places in the country where people use antennas and pick signals out off the air.

**John:** Yeah. And complicating these things even more, when we switched over to the digital channels — there’s piggyback digital channels. There are basically secondary channels that can go along with this. And so you’ve seen like My Network TV in certain markets or there’s another thing with like Axion or something, that’s considered a piggyback. It’s a secondary digital channel. And the rules for how we treat those are still kind of amorphous. Are they broadcast? Are they not broadcast? Do they fall under those rules? Do they fall under some sort of digital distribution rules?

That’s all strange and complicated.

**Craig:** Mess. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess.

So, but let’s talk about Comcast because what’s so weird about Comcast is if the merger happens, it’s already the nation’s largest internet service provider. It’s the nation’s largest video provider. It’s one of the biggest home phone providers. It controls a movie studio, because Comcast owns NBC Universal, so it controls a movie studio, a broadcast network, and a whole bunch of cable channels. That’s a big company.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where do you stand on big companies?

**Craig:** Well, my feeling is that as a professional writer who makes a living from these big companies, that I want them to survive but only to a point. I want them to survive with robust competition.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem. I know the Writers Guild immediately freaks out every time this happens. They absolutely lose their minds over vertical integration and multi-national corporations consolidating the business. My feeling is, good, I’m okay with that. As long as there’s not one or two of them, you know.

We currently have Sony and we have Comcast Universal. And we have Warner Bros. which will exist with its networks and its movie studios and its television production regardless of the cable situation. We have Disney and we have Fox and we have Viacom. There’s big companies out there all fighting with each other. Those companies have the resources to not only make large scale entertainment but they also have the resources to pay us and to negotiate pretty good — pretty good deals with our union, as you’re in the middle of right now.

I think the Writers Guild, this is an area where I’ve never understood the Writers Guild’s full blown paranoia. Paranoia, yes. Hysteria, no. They’re constantly looking at Amazon and Google as some sort of rescuers. I keep screaming to everybody they’re the opposite. They’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Non-union shops that are used to bullying everybody out of everything.

I mean, we have five major movie studios, right? Five?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How many major search engines are there on the planet? One. That’s the way Google works.

How many major e-tailers compete with Amazon? I’m going to go with none.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem with these companies doing what they need to do to survive as long as I have options. Frankly, in my house I don’t get my internet from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my phones from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my television from Time Warner or Comcast. You know what I get from Comcast?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** I get paid because I’m working for Universal. [laughs] That’s what I get. I get paid.

**John:** Ha-ha! You get checks.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m still living — I get checks. So, I’m still living in a world where these companies have vital, large scale competition and I support their — I back their survival as long as there’s enough of them to keep each other honest. How about you?

**John:** All right. I’m concerned about this merger because it’s literally like, it’s just like number one and two, it’s like 75% of cable in the country would be controlled by this one giant company which doesn’t feel like a lot. And cable is also one of those weird things.

So, broadcasters are subject to these regulations because the broadcast spectrum is there are limited resources, therefore we have a lot of controls over sort of what you can do there and how many players you can have because it’s a limited resource.

But cable is actually a limited resource in the sense that every community had to make deals with the companies who are bringing in this wire. And basically because, so you’re not ripping up the streets a thousand times, they’re sort of near-monopolies in a lot of these markets.

And I do worry that because they are the fastest pipe into the house and it’s essentially only end up having one or now maybe two choices, a duopoly situation where AT&T is the other way you can get the stuff. It could just become really problematic.

And I’ve sympathized on both sides of the net neutrality debate, but I think it becomes a little bit more pressing when you have this giant company that controls the access to households, to so many households, and is making its own content and can therefore in the world of no net neutrality prioritize its content over anyone else’s content. And that is challenging to me.

**Craig:** In my mind, I don’t see that the company would do that. I don’t think that Comcast/Time Warner would — their merged cable system — if they were to tier stuff would say, hey, it’s going to cost you more to watch these other channels. It’s going to cost you less to watch the ones that we control.

**John:** But that’s exactly what they’ve done in cable. Cable is tiered. I mean, it already is tiered right now. You can get these channels with this. You can get this, a higher tier, you get these channels.

**Craig:** But in the way its tiered, they don’t — in other words, Time Warner never gave you a break on HBO. They charge you more for HBO because it’s worth more. My point being that they never — they know the consumers — the demand from consumers is what drives the market price. And if they try and use monopoly pressure. Well, first of all, they’re going to run into anti-trust problems if they start bundling, because that’s basically bundling. You’re not allowed to do it.

But also they’re just going to run into marketplace problems because people are not going to want that. Where I kind of see benefit for professional writers on these non-net neutrality side is if these companies said things like, “Well, we’re going to start charging a premium for super fast delivery of movies. All movies. Not Universal movies. All movies.” And then we would get better residuals. So, that — I could see that as a benefit for writers. But, I don’t, I mean, look, I personally suspect that cable has got another 10 or 15 years left. Physical cable. Because I think ultimately —

**John:** Before there is some sort of pervasive Wi-Fi?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So, I mean, this merger I don’t think is a cause for us to twist our underwear up.

**John:** All right. We’ll see.

We have some questions. Let’s go to some questions. So, Mark in Portland asks, “If pagination isn’t that important,” I think he’s talking about last week’s episode where I ranted on pagination. “If pagination isn’t that important, why use Courier or Courier Prime font?”

I would say that use Courier because Courier is what is expected in screenplays. It’s not that it’s better, or that it’s perfect, or that will exactly match the one page per minute guideline. It’s just what we’re expecting in a screenplay. And anything that’s not that will be met with an “Uh-huh? That’s not what a screenplay should look like.”

**Craig:** Yup. It’s basically tradition. Simple as that. It’s the tradition that comes from an old school way of thinking about stuff as being a page a minute and all that. And really it was way to try and — all of these things were really ways to foil writers who were trying to cheat either by not writing enough, or by jamming too much into a space. The studios got wise to all of our tricks.

It’s an easy way for them to go, “Oh, okay, well at least we’ve eliminated one variable. They can’t use the super tiny font. They can’t write everything in Times 12, you know.” But, yeah, it’s tradition.

**John:** I think we use Courier and Courier Prime, even though we have better fonts now, or different fonts that you could use, simply for the same reason why when you’re turning in those papers in college or in high school they wanted you to use a certain font so you wouldn’t cheat.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s style sheets. I mean, Warner Bros. I think still includes all that stuff in the contracts. Margins and all that.

**John:** Scotty Shumaker writes, “I’m a 22 year old recent college graduate working as a night shift janitor at McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.”

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** “I came here to find some adventure and pay off student loans. Because I work alone in a deserted science lab for 60 hours a week I’m able to pass the tedious hours mopping and scrubbing urinals by listening to you guys. I have probably listened to over 100 hours of Scriptnotes in the past few months as well as all seven Harry Potter books, all three Lord of the Rings, and about 100 episodes of a podcast called Inside Acting. I just wanted to say thank you and let you know that your wisdom and umbrage has made its way down to the seventh continent.”

**Craig:** That is amazing. I mean, first of all, there’s something — doesn’t that sound like the first five pages of a movie? You’re the guy —

**John:** Oh, come on, it’s a great setup.

**Craig:** You’re there at the science base on the south pole, but you’re not a scientist. You’re a janitor. You’re just the janitor.

**John:** You’re the janitor.

**Craig:** And you’re just scrubbing stuff. And then one day you come out of the bathrooms and everyone is dead.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And there’s something — yeah, I mean, it’s great. Anyway, my former college roommate, Eric Leech, I believe worked down at that very station. He’s an astrophysicist. And I think he was there for a year. It’s dangerous down there. When they have their winter, and our summer, you get like 15 seconds or 30 seconds to walk around before they make you come back in. It’s brutal.

**John:** It’s bad.

So, Craig, I’m hoping that over our many, many episodes of the podcast I’ll get to know all of your college roommates who have all gone on to become famous people.

**Craig:** Well, Eric and I share a common opinion of the junior senator from Texas.

**John:** A third roommate.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz. Yeah.

**John:** A question from Khrob in San Francisco.

**Craig:** Khrob?

**John:** Khrob. K-H-R-O-B .

**Craig:** Oh, Khrob.

**John:** Khrob. “Where’s the line for things in your script that are very clearly referencing the specifics of another project? If the Tae Bo movie had a shot — ” So, last week we talked about the Tae Bo movie, or the theoretical Tae Bo movie. I guess it was a real Tae Bo movie.

**Craig:** It was an actual Tae Bo movie.

**John:** “If the Tae Bo movie had a shot of the protagonist clearly doing Daniel-san’s Crane Kick practice, but was otherwise its own film, at what point would that cross from reference to homage to plagiarism? If a show like Futurama or The Simpsons builds a whole episode around a known property, the Futurama episode of Titanic, for example, do they pay for that or are they allowed to use specifics given their status as satirical shows?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, you can reference any movie you want.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine. It’s fine to reference the movie. And I would say like that whole thing about doing the shot, the Crane Kick position, that’s obviously a reference, we get the reference, you’re not stealing anything.

But I will tell you in a very real sense it does happen sometimes where people get uncomfortable, even not a legal standpoint, but sort of like, “I’m not sure we’re in a parody spot here. I just feels like too much the same movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It does happen. That’s a conversation that happens all the time.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, if you’re trying to parody something, parody is generally protected under the copyright law and fair use. But, let’s say you’re just making a reference so that the reader understands the kind of thing you’re going for, you know, you say something like, “The two of them begin fighting in the elevator. It’s like From Russia with Love,” but you know, something, something.

**John:** Over peanut butter.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just so that people understand what you’re going for. That’s okay. I mean, don’t do it lot. You know, it starts to get a little weird. But it’s fine if you feel like it’s going to help convey your intention. You’re not copying something, but you’re saying it’s a little bit like this, but imagine that in this new circumstance. Just, you know, underline the film title and keep going.

**John:** Keep going.

Hope writes, “I’ve heard you and Craig mention several times on the podcast that now more than ever people should try to shoot their own small projects, like a short film. This helps them learn about filmmaking, see their words on a screen, and has a slim but real possibility of getting them attention either online or at festivals.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would this advice still apply if you have no intention of becoming a writer-director? Is an award-winning short that you wrote a useful calling card as an aspiring screenwriter? Have there been any screenwriters, not counting writer-directors, who have gotten their first success in the industry through a short?”

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sure.

**John:** I’m sure there are. But I would say my general advice about like shooting your own stuff is not just as the calling card for yourself, while it can be really great as the calling card, it’s just so you actually understand what it is like to make something as a finished product rather than just a screenplay. And so that’s why — I think that’s why we talk about the importance of going out and actually shooting some stuff, just so you have a sense of what that is, because that is incredibly useful.

But if you wrote a really great short film, and even if you didn’t direct it, I think that is good for you. I think it is great exposure.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, the whole point of making your own thing is to be a better writer. And if you say, “Well, I actually don’t want to direct, I just want to write,” which is completely noble and that’s pretty much what I do, then just do it anyway because it will make you a better writer for the person that is going to be directing it.

**John:** Yeah. A question from Oscar. “A script of mine was optioned by a producer over a year ago. It was a one-year free option. Nothing came of it, even though the producer pushed it and still wants to try to get it made. I don’t want to pull the rug out from under him, but several other producers have asked me to send them the script if nothing was done with it at the end of the option period. How do I handle this? What are my ethical options?

“I realize that legally I can do with my script whatever I wish because the option has expired, and wasn’t formally renewed. But I’d like to do what is right by the initial producer.”

So, what’s your advice for Oscar in this situation?

**Craig:** In this situation I don’t think the ethics are — there’s no shadowy ethics here. the ethics are that you made a business arrangement and the term of the business arrangement is up and it is now your choice. And you are able to ethically, guilt-free, do whatever you want with it.

The only question I think you need to ask is do you want to give this producer more time? Do you think that this producer actually can get it done, that their passion sets them apart from these other people? And that if they have another three or four months something terrific is going to happen and that’s the person you want producing the movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I would say — it’s not clear entirely whether this producer has had the option and no one else has been reading your script, because you need other people to read your script. I mean, you want people to read your script. And so no matter what, make sure it gets out in the world so people can see it.

If these other producers are asking about it because they have some plan for how they’re going to do it, I think honestly at this point you listen to their plans and if they sound like interesting plans you let them pursue it.

Now, it could come to a situation where they start to get some stuff moving and this initial producer gets upset and just the whole awkward terrible conversations, but those are awkward, terrible conversations that are happening because there’s movement and because there’s things that are going on with your script. So, that’s only a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s an interesting — I was talking about this the other day with a fellow writer. There is an interesting psychological phenomenon in our business as it relates to the relationship between writers and executives or producers. We writers are expected to be rejected constantly. And either rejected off the bat or hired and then replaced and fired.

We are meant to expect this and to absorb it politely and without fuss. They are not at all expected to handle rejection politely or without fuss. And very often are nasty about it. And I think you just have to remind yourself they — while the day that they’re complaining to you that you somehow have rejected them, they rejected five people before they got on the phone with you.

**John:** Yup. It’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** Part of life. Circle of life. Lions and gazelles.

**John:** And as a circle of the podcast, because it’s now time for One Cool Things.

Craig, do you want to start, or should I?

**Craig:** Oh, you should totally start.

**John:** Okay. I actually have two Cool Things, so I’m going to give both of them here.

First one is The Fog Horn, which I thought we had talked about on the podcast, but maybe we haven’t. Many episodes ago, god, 90 episodes ago we probably talked about Popcorn Fiction which is Derek Haas’s short fiction website.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The Fog Horn is an app. It’s a thing that you can find in the iPhone App Store, the iOS App Store, which is sort of like Popcorn Fiction, but it’s just short stories that every month they put out a new batch of short stories. It’s one of those sort of online magazines. And some of the short stories are terrific, so I would recommend you check out The Fog Horn online. It is a very good experience both as an app and some really good writing in there.

My second Cool Thing was something that, we’re recording this on Saturday, so this happened Friday, was Ellen Page’s coming out speech. So, Ellen Page, star of Juno, came out this week. And if you just saw the headline, like Ellen Page comes out. It’s like, oh, fine, good for her. But I actually — I really strongly recommend you watch the video. We’ll include a link to it if you haven’t watched it yet. Because it’s really just terrifically well written and terrifically well presented in terms of why she feels — why she hasn’t come out publicly before now, why she thinks it’s important to come out.

And last week we talked about sort of a hero sort of needs to be in charge of his or her own story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s really very much about that. It’s basically until you can claim your own sort of self-identity you can’t actually control anything else in your life. And so it’s a really smartly done thing and I just sort of — I want to vote for her for something, because it was just an incredibly well presented, incredibly articulate and heartfelt description of both what was keeping her from being public. It was basically the lie of omission. And why she was excited to not be lying anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I strongly recommend you check that out.

**Craig:** It’s great. Chris Nee, the creator of Doc McStuffins —

**John:** We love Chris Nee so much.

**Craig:** We love Chris Nee. And Chris made a really good point that one of the great things about the way that she came out in this video was that it was about a minute of “I’m gay” and really seven minutes of her acknowledging that all the people in the room didn’t need her to come out. They were already doing great work. They were already doing great stuff.

She said at some point, “So you guys are doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, and the truth is you didn’t need me to tell you any of it. That’s the weird part of this.”

And I love that she didn’t — it’s so easy for celebrities to turn everything into me, me, me, and frankly coming out of the closet is a me, me, me, and somehow she made it into a you, you, you, which was awesome.

**John:** It was really smart. So, the context of this was HRC’s Time to Thrive conference which is this sort of youth and teachers conference they were doing. And it was exactly what you described. It was five minutes of you, you, you, this is the nature of the struggle, and it’s because of what you’re doing that I’m able to come out. And so it was just a thank you.

And it was just perfectly done. Perfectly delivered.

**Craig:** It was. Well, you know, my One Cool Thing is also a person and it’s, I’m sad, I’m sad John because we found out this week that this coming baseball season will be Derek Jeter’s final season.

**John:** I can’t tell you how incredibly heartbroken I am to hear this.

**Craig:** Well, you should be, and I’ll tell you why.

**John:** I did know that Derek Jeter was a baseball player, so I get some points for that. [laughs]

**Craig:** Allow me to extend what his value is. Are you a Simon & Garfunkel fan?

**John:** I’m aware of who they are. That’s the best…

**Craig:** They are not baseball players. The famous folk singing songwriting duo of Simon & Garfunkel.

So, in their song Mrs. Robinson there is a lyric that says, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”

And apparently this drove Joe DiMaggio nuts because he was a notorious grump. But Joe DiMaggio is in that song because he exemplified a kind of purity of a time. He was a class act playing America’s game. He was remarkably talented. And he just managed to do it all right. And we love that in our heroes. I mean, he had his stumbles and his falls, and he had his injuries and his mishaps, but he was classy. He was the Yankee Clipper.

And baseball has had lots of heroes and lots of great guys and lots of goats. God knows, so many goats. And in a time when America’s pastime has just been about the most tarnished it has been since the Black Sox scandal of the early part of the century, Derek Jeter has exemplified what it means to just be a classy, great baseball player. He’s done it right the whole time. He’s enormously respected.

And more importantly, now I feel old because Derek Jeter isn’t going to be out there anymore manning shortstop for the New York Yankees. This is going to be a tough season. He’s a shoe-in first ballot Hall of Famer. Never one iota of concern that he was on steroids. He wasn’t that kind of player. But, he has hit some magic benchmarks, well over 3,000 hits and a career average of slightly over 300 which I know is something that you always look for.

**John:** It’s really my first criteria, career average.

**Craig:** It’s sad because one of the greats is riding off into the sunset. One of the truly great, great players of a great, great game celebrated by a great, great country. So, Derek Jeter, today and for many months to come you will be my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Now. Craig, is it possible we’ve pinpointed the source of your anxiety. Was it his retirement that is causing your anxiety?

**Craig:** No. No. I’m not quite that, [laughs], I don’t like Derek Jeter at all, actually.

**John:** Not that much. You appreciate it more from a distance. And that’s our show. So, if you would like to know more about the things we talked about today, the show notes are always at johnaugust.com/podcast. You can see the things we’ve talked about. You can see some sort of article that Stuart will find about Derek Jeter. You will also find Ellen Page’s coming out stuff. Many of the articles we talked about today on the show.

If you are on iTunes looking through the App Store you can find the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to our most recent episodes, but actually our entire back catalog as well. You’ll also find Weekend Read there while you’re there.

If you have iTunes open and you want to leave us a comment or a rating, that’s awesome as well. You can subscribe to us there in iTunes.

And so, Nerdmelt, so we should say the live show at Nerdmelt, the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. Tickets are available now, so don’t wait too long for that because that will sell out. There will also be other live shows coming later on in the spring, but we’ll have those details when they come.

**Craig:** “Good for you! Good for you!”

**John:** Craig, have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You too, man.

Links:

* [Generalized anxiety disorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_anxiety_disorder) on Wikipedia
* Get your tickets now for the [Nerdist/Scriptnotes Live Crossover episode](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/tickets2/index.php?event_id=791/) on April 13th at Nerdmelt, with proceeds benefiting [826LA](https://826la.org/)
* [The Office](http://www.theofficeonline.com/intro.htm) and [the writers junction](http://www.writersjunction.com/) are both open
* Weekend Read in the [App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-podcast)
* Christian Bale [gets upset on set](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0auwpvAU2YA) (very NSFW language)
* Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators by Megan McArdle in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/)
* [Freedom for Mac](http://macfreedom.com)
* Comcast/Time Warner deal will [face antitrust hurdles](http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/13/technology/comcast-time-warner-antitrust/)
* The [Aereo lawsuit](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2014/02/14/aereo-vs-the-broadcasters-six.html?page=all) on Upstart
* [McMurdo Research Station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station) in Antarctica
* [The Fog Horn](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fog-horn/id778971478?mt=8)
* Ellen Page’s [coming out speech](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hlCEIUATzg) at HRC’s Time to Thrive conference
* Wallace Matthews on [Derek Jeter announcing 2014 will be his final season](http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/68961/for-once-jeter-can-savor-the-moment), and Jeter’s career on [Baseball-Reference.com](http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/j/jeterde01.shtml)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kim Atle

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/wed-like-to-make-an-offer).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 77 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, your voice is back, but your voice was gone for a few days, is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. I got a virus, so I wasn’t able to speak very well and I’m still pretty rundown and sluggish. So, if I sound sluggish it’s viral. It’s viral sluggishness.

**John:** So, I hope that a lot of people in your life have come up to you with suggestions for things you should do to get rid of this virus. Hopefully like really kind of impractical or sort of new-age things; I think that would go well with you, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m the perfect person to come up to and recommend Echinacea because it gives me a chance to talk about how Echinacea has been proven to not work. Or things like zinc, which works sort of very minorly and in a tiny, tiny window, or other nonsense, none of which works.

**John:** Maybe a cleanse. Craig, maybe you need a cleanse?

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, you know, I feel dirty. I feel dirty. No, no cleanses for me. I’m a big believer in the immune system.

**John:** Ah, that’s a good one, yeah. And bolstering the immune system when the immune system needs to be bolstered, but there’s good ways to do that through vaccinations. But you’re not going to vaccinate against whatever this virus was, because who knows what this virus was.

**Craig:** It’s pretty much your standard rhinitis. Your typical upper respiratory tract infection. Nothing you can do about it accept suffer until it is gone.

**John:** All right. Well, let us not suffer anymore. Let’s get to our topics. Today I thought we’d talk about three things. First off is a new Vanity Fair article about the history of the spec market –the spec script market — which I thought was really good, so let’s talk about that.

Second, I want to talk about how you get ready for a pitch, if you’re going in to pitch something. What are those things you do in those last hours before you go in to pitch something.

And thirdly, I want to talk about your movie, Stolen Identity…

**Craig:** [laughs] Well played, sir.

**John:** Opened at $36.4 million this past weekend. We are recording this on Valentine’s Day, actually. So, Happy Valentine’s Day, Craig.

**Craig:** Happy Valentine’s to you. And if you wouldn’t mind, there’s just a couple of quick follow up things I wanted to mention before we roll into the spec stuff.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** First, I owe a bit of a retraction / apology and then a nice little follow up on our Raiders thing. So, real quick, many podcasts ago I told a story about Kevin Smith at Comic-Con dressing down film critic Jeff Wells. And it turns out that I screwed up. That, in fact, the film critic that he dressed down was not Jeff Wells. It was a guy named Ron Wells. So, sorry Jeff. [laughs] That was my fault completely. And I apologize. Obviously a somewhat understandable mistake, the last name is the same, the first name is one syllable; not understandable in the sense that nobody likes to hear their name being called out and associated with a story that is all about how they screwed up and it’s not them.

So, Jeff Wells, I’m super sorry. Ron Wells, it was you all along.

So, that’s the retraction apology. And now a little follow up on Raiders. I got an email from Larry Kasdan. And here’s what it said. And it was for both of us, but he didn’t have your email, so he sent it just to me and then I forwarded it to you:

“Craig and John. Your podcast about Raiders blew my mind. Fantastic. The best analysis I’ve ever seen by a power of ten. I loved it and I learned a lot. Lawrence Kasdan.”

Now, how about that as a little feather in our cap?

**John:** Well, that’s fantastic. And for folks who really have no idea what we’re talking about, Lawrence Kasdan wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark. And so our podcast talking about it, apparently he listened to which is just weird, and meta, but great. So, hooray.

**Craig:** Pretty great. And, always nice to engage in an hour long discussion of a movie and then have the writer respond back and say, “Hey, you got it right.”

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, good for us. We win, again.

**John:** We do. Craig, it is weird to have you doing business on the podcast. It’s so — like you came with a prepared list of things you wanted to talk about. It’s just unusual.

**Craig:** It is unusual because, and I suppose people have picked up on this by now, my entire approach to podcasting is to be as ill-prepared as possible, almost really to be aggressively unprepared.

So, this time I came slightly prepared.

**John:** And you did ask Stuart to remind you about your note there.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one should be under the impression that I was really on the ball here. I was not.

**John:** I’m just saying, like if you were to go in that direction in the future, I would welcome it.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. This is a gentle suggestion that maybe I should actually…

**John:** There’s carrots. There’s sticks. There are many things. I can offer you carrot sticks, but it’s something that in the future as I get busier and busier with Big Fish, if you were to choose to do that, that’s just a thing that could happen.

**Craig:** I love that we’re having this discussion here on the podcast. And, you know what? You’re right. I’ve always been very careful to tell people when they compliment me on the podcast that you do all the work. That is correct. You pick the topics. You edit the show. You really do everything.

So, you’re right. I should step up and do more and maybe even come up with a thought about what we should talk about.

**John:** Every once in a while you do. I will give you credit for that. There have been times where I said, “Hey, we’re going to record a podcast.” You’ll say, “Let’s talk about this.” And we have talked about that.

**Craig:** Right. Those are far and few between. Probably of our 77 podcasts, maybe I’ve done that four times.

**John:** Well, today we’re going to talk about three good topics, and I think we’re going to have some good conversation on them, so let’s get started.

First off, this Vanity Fair article in the March 2013 issue is by Margaret Heidenry, I’m guessing, which I thought did a terrific job explaining sort of the history of spec scripts as a sales thing. I mean, screenwriters have always written scripts by themselves, and just defining terms, a spec script is technically any script that you’re writing just for yourself, that you’re not under contract to write it for somebody; you’re just writing it because you can just write a book. The same way novels are often written on spec.

But, what this article does is sort of track the history of when that began as a process of “I’m going to write this script and sell it to a studio,” which was a new thing, when it became really huge, which is the ’90s, and sort of what’s happened to it since then.

So, I strongly recommend everyone read it. But, I want to talk through some of the points because I thought they were really, really interesting.

The story, if I were to fault it for anything, it got a little bit heavy in the Schmucks with Underwoods references and the Sunset Boulevard of it all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But the history stuff of it was really new to me, so I thought that was cool.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we’ve talked on the podcast before about sort of the danger of this lottery mentality. I think a lot of people approach screenwriting as a career thinking, like, “Oh, I will write a script and I will sell that script and then I’ll have a million dollars. And then people will make my movie and I’ll be set.” And that’s not the way that most screenwriting works, particularly now. But it didn’t work back then that way, either.

So, this article starts back in the days of the studio contract writer system, which I guess we should really talk about because it’s such a different experience than what we have right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, so, in the old days writers were essentially employees of studios. They got buildings to work in called The Writer’s Building. And they were under contract the way that actors used to be under contract. And you would work for a studio. You wouldn’t work on a project; you’d work for a studio and the studio would assign you to projects and off you’d go. And you would earn your weekly salary.

And you would type up what they told you to type up. And, frankly, a lot of wonderful movies came out of that system, but also a lot of junk, too. I mean, let’s not get too rose-colored about the past. Barton Fink does a great job of sort of portraying the worst of the old studio system days where writers were cogs in machines being assigned to Wallace Beery wrestling pictures.

**John:** I was just at a meeting over at The Lot, which is the old Warner Hollywood, and they sent me to the wrong place. But they said, “Oh, you’re going to The Writers Building.” I just love that there’s still a building called The Writers Building.

**Craig:** That’s right. In fact we have Phil Hay, and Matt Manfredi, and Ted Griffin, and Alec Berg, and Dave Mandel all have their offices in that building, which I love.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, just as in professional sports, there was the emergence of free agency. At some point in — that studio system collapsed and writers became freelance and able to sell their wares wherever. And they weren’t tied down by these contracts.

And essentially the era of the entrepreneurial screenwriter began. And it began perhaps most in earnest with one script in particular, and that’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

**John:** Yeah. So, her article goes through, she thinks the first spec screenplay that would sort of count under our terms is the 1933 Preston Sturges’s script called The Power and the Glory, which sold to Fox for $17,000 back in 1933.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s probably — that feels right. It was unusual for a writer at that time to just have the time and initiative to go off and write something for himself, but he did. And so that was the first thing that sold, and didn’t do very well, but Butch Cassidy has got to be what we think about for the first groundbreaking spec sale.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, Butch Cassidy managed to do two things at once. It sold for a big huge amount of money and it was a big huge hit.

**John:** Yes. Those are good things.

**Craig:** And Hollywood is as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone. They say, “Look, we spent a lot of money on a completely original screenplay and we got this big huge hit movie out of it. Maybe we should do this more?” And so began the heyday of the spec seller.

**John:** It wasn’t overnight. And it’s important to understand that William Goldman at that point had already written other scripts. He had had movies produced. But this was a thing he chose to do, just write for himself. He was at a point in his career that he could have gone and just pitched it to somebody, attached some actors, and set it up at a studio in a normal way. But he just decided to go off and write the script by himself and let his agent try to sell it.

And so it was a surprise that it sold for $400,000, which is a little over $2 million now. And that was unique, and wonderful, and great. And it was unusual at that time to come in with, like, “Here’s a fully developed script. We can make them make this movie and attach actors and succeed.”

What — I don’t know sort of the movies that have come directly before and after that, but my perception of Butch Cassidy is that it was so different that it might have been hard to pitch it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that is a good argument even now for when you spec some things rather than pitch some things is if it’s going to be so hard to explain what your vision is for the movie in a pitch, sometimes a spec is a better place to spend your time.

**Craig:** That’s right. And even if people can understand the pitch, and want to buy the pitch, you are no longer able to work in isolation. You don’t get the opportunity to present your screenplay and say, “This is how I want it to be.” You are immediately involved in a collaboration. Sometimes that collaboration is rewarding and sometimes it’s not. Either way, it’s a collaboration.

William Goldman obviously thought to himself, “I would like to write the screenplay without anybody in my ear saying, ‘Don’t do that. Do this instead.'”

**John:** Yes. So, in the article they point to the 1988 Writers Guild strike as being the other major turning point for spec sales.

The 1988 strike was a five month strike, which is a very long time for screenwriters to be not working in their normal capacity. So, during that time a lot of people wrote spec scripts. They wrote scripts because they could. During that strike you could not work for the studios, but you could work for yourself.

And so the wonderful thing about being a writer is you can just write. And so many scripts were written during that time. And as the strike wore down and was resolved, those went onto the market.

It was also a time when the business was expanding. So, you had studios like Disney that were going and trying to make a lot more movies over the course of the year. I remember during the Katzenberg era, wasn’t it like he wanted to make 30 movies a year?

**Craig:** Well, you know, between all of their divisions — Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, and Walt Disney Pictures — one year they released more than a movie a week.

**John:** Yeah. Which is crazy now. We would never do that.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** So, the business was expanding. You had a bunch of writers who had written stuff who could now sell that stuff. It was a really great time to be selling a spec script. And so suddenly you had — “common” makes it sound like everyone was doing it, but it was not unprecedented to sell your script for six figures, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even seven figures.

The first million dollar sale, which is in the article but I also think I remember, that was Ticking Man, which is the Brain Helgeland and Manny Coto script, which still has never been made.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. It was an interesting time because the reason the strike occurred in the first place was also in part the reason that the spec boom occurred. The strike in 1988 was in a weird way a redo of a failed two-week long squib of a strike in 1985.

The studios on their own had unilaterally decided that they were only going to pay one-fifth out on video residuals. And their argument in 1985 when they did this, or ’84 when they first started doing it, was that the video market, this VHS market, was very new and they needed a break on all the residuals because it was a new emerging market. It was a bunch of baloney.

But if you remember at the time, 1982/1983 was really when video was just starting to take off. The Betamax/VHS war had been settled. By the time 1988 rolled around it was quite clear that video was enormous. It was an industry all of a sudden. Renting videos and watching videos and buying videos — this was a huge part of the Hollywood system.

In fact, video was so lucrative for the companies that essentially the name of the game was make as much as possible and get it on video. So, the studios were incentivized by the market place, by the consumer, to create an enormous amount of product. The writers, angry about how they’d been screwed over in the early part of the ’80s decided to go on strike to undo the residuals formula that they detested.

They failed to do so, even after the longest strike the Writers Guild has ever endured. But what happened at the end of that strike was a confluence of the following things. Studios needed to make a lot of movies because video made almost all movies profitable on some absurd level. They were incredibly short on movies to make because nobody had been writing anything for a half a year. And writers had been writing stuff during that time for themselves that they were now willing to sell.

Talk about a seller’s marketplace. So, all of these writers went out with all of these scripts. The studios were desperate to make movies. And people started buying things. And, of course, this being Hollywood, when something sells for $500,000 every agent gets on the phone and says, “Okay, it’s the new deal, $500,000 now for a script like this.” And then it just goes up, and up, and up.

And at some point what ends up happening, like in any marketplace, whether it’s for visual art, art you hang on your wall, or whether it’s for tulips, you start to get into the realm of a bubble.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s kind of what happened.

**John:** And this is the point where we move from history, like all that stuff that happened before we got here, to literally this is what Los Angeles and Hollywood was like when I got out of my car, sort of 1992. The business was expanding. Spec sales were happening. There wasn’t a lot of sort of common popular press about Hollywood, but there was Premiere Magazine. So, Premiere Magazine would write the articles about the big spec sales and like, “Oh, my, I want to be in screenwriting because the spec sales are happening.”

You’d see big articles about Joe Eszterhas selling a script for $3 million.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, yes, it feeds that bubble. You know, like all bubbles, more people enter and it seems like it’s going to keep growing forever. What I think the article does a nice job is also pointing out a few of the unique factors that were happening right then.

First off, this was still a phone call and paper business, and so if you had a spec script going out you were literally making a bunch of copies, or the agency was making a bunch of copies, sticking them in envelopes, messengering them out to the studios. And agents were on the phone.

And that’s inefficient, but that inefficiency actually probably jacked up prices because no one had perfect information. You didn’t really know who was bidding on things. And so if the agent said, “I’ve got an offer,” it was very hard to check to see whether that was true or that wasn’t true. Even things like tracking boards were very new. There wasn’t a lot of ways to share information. So, you had to sort of take it on faith that, “This thing that I’m kind of into, that I would like to buy, well, I need to hurry and buy it right now because otherwise it’s going to become unavailable.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a very simple human phenomenon: We want what other people want. Not always, but often. And I think for a lot of that period when you were an agent you would simply just lie and say, “I’ve got two studios. I’m not going to tell you who, but they’ve already put bids in, so you’re stupid if you’re not putting a bid in. And also, your boss is going to beat you over the head with this when it’s a hit at this other studio.”

I’m not a studio executive, but I hear something like that and I start to get sweaty because, what if it’s true? And, of course, nobody knows anything. And it might be right; that might be right. If two other people want it, maybe I should want it, too.

It was much easier to create hype back in the day. And it didn’t hurt that some of the big notable spec sales continued to work out. Lethal Weapon is a great example.

**John:** Absolutely. So, Lethal Weapon was a very big sale at its time, but that became a huge franchise. And so you look, and that was money very, very well spent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you had, in the article they cite Alan Gasmer who one year sold like 30 spec scripts, which was remarkable.

But friends of mine were in that pool of those spec scripts. I was in my first year of Stark at USC and this was the very early days of cell phones, so not very many people had cell phones at that point.

My friend Jen, we were at a night class, and my friend Jen, her cell phone rang, she ran out into the hallway, and it was sort of a big deal to run out of a classroom and to take a phone call. But she came back in and she said, “Al and Miles just sold their script for a million dollars.” And so, Al Gough and Miles Millar.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And it was very, very exciting. And we applauded for them and she hung up the phone and we got back to…poor Mitchell Block who was teaching a class about how to get money from public television to do small documentaries.

**Craig:** [laughs] What a hard class to keep teaching after that news.

**John:** Exactly. But, I mean, that fever does continue. And I think “bubble” is a really nice way to describe it, because I remember the housing bubble that happened in Los Angeles where suddenly you would go to an open house on a Tuesday and there’d be five offers by the end of the day. And you’re putting in backup offers. That was really, really common at one point. And now it’s gone away. And the same thing happened with specs.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is general human nature but it’s exacerbated by this business which is such a chasey business. Everybody is always chasing things, you know. And so they get so excited whenever there’s this — nobody wants to feel like they’ve been left out of a party in Los Angeles. This is their biggest fear. Whereas my fear is having to actually go to a party.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, when the spec market was booming, it sort of fed in on itself. But with all things like this, eventually there is a correction as they say in the Wall Street Journal.

**John:** And that correction came partly because of overspending, but also because of other factors, just a change in times.

First off, most of the studios became bought by much bigger corporations. And so those corporations sometimes had deep pockets, but they were also very risk-adverse. They also had reasons to be using the material that they already owned, intellectual property that they already owned, or to gather up intellectual property that they could use and exploit.

So, it became much more reasonable for Disney to try to base things off of theme park rides, or for Fox to sort of look at what their publishing arm had and try to base off the books that they had. They wanted synergies. And that whole word synergy came about because these corporations were getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and looking for reasons to sort of justify why they were all under one big umbrella.

Second off, we talked about how paper and phone calls sort of helped inflate things, because information was hard to come by. But with PDFs they were just attached to an email, so they could zip out and everyone could have it at once. It was much easier to sort of leak things to other people just through email. And emails were just faster and quicker. And we didn’t have to wait on somebody calling back.

Like one of the most powerful plays an agent can have sometimes is just not calling somebody back and driving that paranoia. Email doesn’t do the same thing really.

**Craig:** No, it doesn’t. And then you also had the rise of the tracking boards online, which essentially eliminated the chicanery that would go on where you could essentially pump and dump a spec. People started talking to each other. Simple as that. The business had… — You know, it’s funny. It’s all sort of probably an antitrust violation, but one of the things that goes on at studios is they get very angry at any studio that breaks ranks and overspends on something.

When Jim Carrey got $20 million for Cable Guy, every other studio went bananas at — I think it was Sony that paid the $20 million — went bananas at them for basically resetting the pay scale for every A-list actor. They hadn’t just cost themselves $20 million. They’d cost everybody $20 million. And they do this with screenplays as well.

When you work in Hollywood, you have a quote. That’s what you get paid. And the way that business affairs departments work is, okay, if you got paid this and then your movie got made, then you get a little extra. And if your movie was a hit you get a little extra after that. They have all these little formulas. If anyone dares violate the formula and overpay somebody, everybody else goes bananas.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so I think there is a natural tendency once the tools are in place for the studios to start talking to each other and saying, “Let’s not get suckered anymore, not by the writers, by the agencies.” The agency became the enemy here. CAA and William Morris and ICM and UTA and Endeavor were and continue to do everything they can to get as much money out of the studios as possible. And the studios, frankly, have gotten much better about talking to each other to prevent that.

**John:** Yeah. We talked about how the rise in spec sale prices came because of supply and demand. Essentially the studios had demand and then they would buy scripts because they had to fill a pipe. Those pipes became much smaller. They didn’t need as many scripts. And so as demand fell so did the prices for these things.

You know, first off, they’re just making fewer movies. Like that idea of, “Oh, we’re going to make a movie every weekend,” that went away because home video became less lucrative, less important. Movies themselves became more expensive, so we’re going to step up to the plate fewer times and bat at fewer things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Plus, as these corporations grew, there were fewer buyers. There were fewer buyers because Warner Brothers takes over New Line, so you can’t — Warner doesn’t want to bid against New Line on a property.

**Craig:** They can’t.

**John:** As more labels get folded under each other they start having to negotiate who gets to buy something. So, if Fox 2000 doesn’t want to bid against Fox on a property, even if they might both want it, only one person is going to bid, so you can’t play them against each other.

**Craig:** That’s right. And there was this whole world of mini majors that existed with the Carolco and Orion and MGM and UA. And all these people just started disappearing and boiling down to five major buyers who were very corporate, who realized that marketing expenditures now were so enormous that it almost seemed that that department was the one to satisfy more than any other department. Specs were considered an inordinate risk.

The success of Batman in the late ’80s, I think, woke the whole town up to the notion of franchises that they were already sitting on that they should just exploit.

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

**Craig:** And then as things were sort of struggling and petering, the writers decided to go on strike again.

**John:** Yeah. That probably didn’t help. It was a rough time to do that. I think we should fast-forward to today because we talked I think two or three weeks ago about that spec sale report which showed sort of how many total spec scripts sold over the course of this last year, which I thought was really fascinating. And the numbers have trended up over the last three years. And there are more spec sales selling now than before.

They’re not nearly at the stratospheric prices that they used to be, but there are some that do sell. And often they’re selling for smaller figures to smaller places/labels that you may not necessarily have heard of. They’re happening in genres that are less expensive. So, it’s the horror and thriller ones are the ones that are selling. It’s not the giant action tent-poles.

It’s not Lethal Weapons that are selling. It’s smaller movies that they can make for a price that are selling specs, but they are still selling. They are still selling.

**Craig:** In general, yeah. I mean, there are some exceptions. All You Need Is Kill is a big huge action-adventure that sold for a lot. But, yeah, it does seem like a lot of the smaller genre movies are what they’re picking up.

**John:** Yeah. So, I want to sort of wrap this up by saying our sort of standard disclaimers that it’s interesting to think about and talk about spec sales because that’s often what people think about when they think about the life of a screenwriter is like, “Oh, you’re going off and writing a script and someone will buy the script and make that into a movie.” But that’s not the bread and butter of what most actual writers do.

And it’s not really necessarily the reason to write a spec script. Most spec scripts will never sell, but those good spec scripts will get those writers future work and future employment. Most of the things that are on the Black List won’t sell, and they won’t get made. But those good scripts on there will get those writers meetings and give those writers projects down the road to write and keep food on the table.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Cool. So, one of the things that a writer is going to be doing if he’s not selling a script is going out to pitch a project, and so I thought that would be our second topic today, because yesterday I had to pitch two different movies in the same day…

**Craig:** Eke.

**John:** …which was exhausting. Have you had to do that?

**Craig:** No! That sounds crazy. Why?

**John:** it’s just the way my schedule worked out. Because I’m heading off to New York to start some Big Fish stuff, so it was the only day where I could go in and meet on these two different projects. And it was tough. One of them was a phone pitch and one of them was in person.

But I want to talk a little bit about getting ready for a pitch, not the days of prep going up to it, but just like literally the couple hours ahead of time. Because one of the projects was the very first time I’d ever really pitched it, and so it was all sort of new and fresh, and it could be a little bit less formed because it was one of those pitches, like, is there even an idea here that we feel like could make a movie? It was a property that they owned the underlying rights and they weren’t sure if they wanted to make something out of it, but I thought there was something cool to make out of it.

The other one was based on a book, and so they’d already read the book, and I’d already pitched it other places so I definitely knew what the pitch was. But that was a pitch that I hadn’t done for four weeks. And so I had to refresh myself on it.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So, I thought we’d talk about that.

What was the last thing you had to pitch, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you mean to pitch to say get a job as opposed to pitching an original thing?

**John:** Either. And we can talk about what the difference is there.

**Craig:** Probably, well, it’s been a long time frankly. I mean, I was with a director the other day talking about rewriting a project that he’s attached to. So, I was sharing my thoughts and my opinions about how it should go, but that wasn’t really a formal pitch.

**John:** No. You’re sort of describing a take but it’s not “buy this.”

**Craig:** I think if I collect enough information together to sort of say, “Okay, yeah, I do want to do this, and here’s the story,” and he agrees, then I’ll go and pitch it probably to the studio. But it’s been awhile.

**John:** Yeah. I find every couple months I have to sort of dust off my sort of pitching brain and go in and do that. And I genuinely enjoy it. A few things that I found really helpful, and so I’ll talk first about this one project that I’d already pitched before, so I sort of had it worked out, but I had to sort of refresh myself on it.

If I’ve written something down, a lot of times I will write up sort of the pitch. And I’ll write it up sort of the way I would normally speak it. And that’s a document I will carry with me, but I’ll never really look at. So, for Chosen, I had to pitch the Chosen pilot to Josh, and then I had to pitch it to Fox, or 20th, and then 20th again, and then I had to pitch it to NBC and ABC. And so I had to pitch that thing a lot.

And, in that case I would only have a couple days off, but what I found to be really, really helpful is because I had this written document, in the couple hours before I would have a meeting I would go through and I would rewrite the document. And I found that actually just going through and rewriting and sort of putting it in my — the way I was thinking about it today, really helped it fit — it helped it come out of my mouth better when I was speaking it to a group because I had just written it, and so it felt real and it felt sort of alive in my head. I could sort of see it all again.

Just reading it didn’t do enough. Sometimes reading is sort of passive. Writing forced me to really engage with what the story was and what the points were. I could remember sort of like how I was getting from A, to B, to C, to D.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Yeah, you want to be able to inspire confidence. And part of what inspires confidence is sounding like you’re in control of your own story. Sounding like you’re in control of your story doesn’t mean you are; it just means you sound that way.

But it’s important to sound that way because the worst thing is to be in control of your story and sound like you’re not. Then you’re pitching yourself out of a gig that you deserve.

**John:** For this other property I pitched yesterday, I didn’t have a written pitch, but I had slides. So, I’d done slides and keynote on the iPad. And so because there were some very distinct visual images I needed to be able to show, I just brought in a little keynote presentation I did with it.

And it had been a couple weeks since I looked through it, so I went through and I sort of did the quick version of it just to myself going through the slides, and that helped me sort of put it all back together. Basically you’re just trying to recreate the best performance you have of what it is you’re doing.

And think of it like an audition. And I do definitely treat it like an audition. Even in that drive over as I’m headed there, I won’t listen to the radio. I won’t listen to a podcast. I will just speak the pitch. And I will start the pitch. And get the pitch rolling. If I can’t get my mouth to move right I will do those little vocal exercises I learned in college to, you know, just be able to speak, and speak clearly and intelligently.

I definitely find that the beginning of the pitch is crucial. And if the first few minutes are awkward you will never recover. You’re never going to get them back. So, you have to really think about, like, how are you going to introduce this property? How are you going to introduce this project? You can talk about: If there’s an anecdote, that’s great; if it’s something about the people who are in the room, that’s fantastic. With this book I could talk about…the producer had called me, we traded voice mails, and finally I just bought the book on my Kindle and I read it overnight and loved it.

And that’s not important in a weird way, but it just gets the ball rolling. It gets stuff started.

**Craig:** Well, it is important though because it shows that you care. I mean, we’ve talked about this before. It’s a weird thing to pitch something because you’re a salesperson. And when sales people come up to me, I’m annoyed and skeptical frankly, as I should be. Because we all know enough about sales — we’ve all seen Glengarry Glen Ross to know that there’s a lot of flimflam often involved.

But, if you care, and you are passionate about the material, then it’s not flimflam. Frankly, you are doing them a favor. You are giving them a chance to buy something that should be bought, because you’re going to do a really good job. And if you convey that and you get that across, it’s a very important thing. But it has to be true.

**John:** It has to be true. I mean, I think it’s a good idea to acknowledge someone else on your side, on your team who’s in the room with you. Just because if you’re going to be doing most of the talking, at least you’re sort of giving them a nod to say, like, this is an important person who’s here and there’s a reason why this person is in the room.

Then you’re going to talk about the things, you know, this is sort of Pitching 101, but you’re going to talk about what the story feels like. Sort of what the world of the story is and what kind of movie it is. You’re going to talk about the most important characters. If it’s based on an underlying property, you’re going to talk about what’s fantastic about the property, but also be honest about these are the challenges with this and this is where I think we can go in a better direction.

Because, they would hopefully have some exposure to what the underlying thing is. And they probably have some genuine concerns. So, if you head them off and sort of state their concerns, like you’re going to be worried about these three things, then they feel, “Oh, not only am I smart, but this writer is smart and understands what it is that I need to hear from him to get me past my basic objections.”

So, if you can start that way and then get into your actual, “This is how we open,” you’re going to be in a much better place.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the “This is how we open” is important because, you know, you pointed out it’s sometimes hard to begin a pitch. It’s such a formal, strange thing to do. And we’ve all seen parodies of it in movies about Hollywood. It seems so ridiculous.

You know, in The Player it’s, “Night. Chinese Lanterns.” It’s always so absurd sounding and kind of gross. But, what saves you is your first scene. Because the first scene of a movie is a similar difficult transition. People are in their seats, and they’re eating popcorn. It’s quiet. There’s a company logo. And then something happens. And that something is designed to be a wakeup and an introduction, whether it’s gentle or abrupt. That’s why it’s there. So, use that.

If you’re not pitching your first scene the way people would experience it in the theater, I think you’re pitching it wrong. You may spend three or four minutes pitching that first scene, and then eight minutes pitching the rest of the movie. That’s okay. But there’s an excitement about a first scene, a well-crafted introduction to a world, and a character, and a problem, and a situation that gets everybody in the front of their seat and makes them think, “Okay, that’s a sample of how this person is going to be in control of this story, hopefully.”

**John:** In my experience I’ve found that the degree to which it’s not quite clear when you started pitching is often very helpful. And so a lot of times you can start by talking about the character. And obviously you’re talking about your main character, and you can just sort of describe him. And we meet him and this is what’s happening. And because you’re often meeting your hero in the opening scene, that’s a nice way to transition into it. So, like you’ve gotten into it without the sudden like stop, and then like “Tracking through the Los Angeles hill sides.”

It makes it feel like you are starting your story with your hero if that is the right way to start your movie.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Cool. So, that’s pitching.

And now I want to get to the third topic which is what I’m sort of most excited to talk about which is your movie, Stolen Identity, which opened so huge…

**Craig:** I think that’s great. [laughs] We should have called it that.

**John:** [laughs] Which opened so terrifically over this last weekend. And I got to see it at the ArcLight and loved it. I saw like a 5:30 show. It was pretty full.

And it’s always weird when you go to see a friend’s movie, in this case two friends’ movies, because I wanted it to be good for you, and I really wanted it to be good for Melissa. And Jason Bateman I know, but he’s fine. Whatever, Jason Bateman. But I wanted it to be good for both of you, and it was really good for both of you. I was very, very excited to see it.

**Craig:** Thank you. I had a weird week.

**John:** Yeah. I know you did. So, tell us about that.

**Craig:** Well, I will. So, we’ll start with the good news. The good news is the movie is a big success. And the audience that we set out to make the movie for showed up in droves. We’ve gotten great word of mouth. It had a terrific opening weekend, far beyond our expectations. Frankly, if it hadn’t been for the snow storm we could have made upward — nearly $40 million. So, it’s a lot of people buying tickets; a ton of people buying tickets for the movie.

And we’re still doing well. I mean, even on Tuesday, a Tuesday in February we made almost $3 million. So, that’s great. That is incredibly gratifying and it confirms what I suspected, because I watched the movie with test audiences long before the movie ever came out. So, I got to see audiences enjoy the movie and laugh all the way through and have a great time. Not everybody, but most of them.

And that’s why probably if you look back a couple of podcasts ago when we talk about Stolen Identity, or Identiweenie, as I like to call it.

**John:** I was also going with Identi-Thiefy.

**Craig:** Identi-Thiefy. When I was talking about Identi-Thiefy I was like, “Oh, and you know, I think the critics will like it.” Oh Craig. Oh stupid, stupid Craig.

So, my love affair with critics continues. Not big fans of mine. And this is the bad part of the week. And I want to talk about this in a way that perhaps people aren’t anticipating. Here’s what I don’t want to do: I am not going to discuss why the critics didn’t like it. Why so many of them seemed very, very angry about it. I’m not going to talk about Rex Reed. I’m not going to talk about the state of film criticism or try and explain any of it. I’m not going to do any of that. Not interested.

The critics will continue to do what they do. And I will continue to do what I do. And there’s nothing that either party is going to say to each other that’s going to change anything. So it goes. So it goes.

What I want to talk about is how terrible it all made me feel. And I want to talk about it because this is a podcast for screenwriters. And some of you out there are trying to be screenwriters and in success will have a movie in theaters. Some of you already are and have had movies in theaters. All of us who have movies in theaters, me more often than some, [laughs] but all of us will come face to face with bad reviews at some point or another. Or at all points.

And I am going to be very, very frank with all of you. It feels terrible. It was awful. I hated it because I think in part I love the movie, and I was proud of what I had done. I had watched it with people and I saw how Melissa and Jason had made people laugh, but also moved them to tears. And it was so great to watch. And then here come these reviews that basically say everybody stinks, especially this Mazin guy, how atrocious, how stupid, and illiterate, and so forth.

And for about three or four days I was kind of paralyzed in emotional anguish and misery. And I felt very, very stupid and very, very sad for myself. And rejected. And frankly just in pain. It really hurt. It hurt my feelings. Sometimes these phrases from childhood express our emotional states the best: My feelings were hurt.

And I wish that I could say to anybody out there that there’s a strategy to avoid this. There isn’t. In fact, I think this is what needs to happen: It is a sign that you care. Do not bargain this pain away. It may sound foolish, but the reason you’re in pain is because you care. The reason you’re in pain is because they’ve attacked you and your expression. And they’ve discounted it, and debased it, and frankly just made fun of it which is very much what goes on now in film criticism. There’s a mocking quality, all of it. You feel like a kid in the school yard who’s just been beaten up.

And good. That power that they have over us to some extent is real and will always be there. If you begin to close yourself off to being hurt, I fear that you begin to close yourself off from caring about what you’re doing. So, a good sign, I think, that I was in such terrible pain. But that’s not really to paint it with any kind of a brush. It stank. I’m just now kind of coming out of it.

I can’t even say that the big weekend sort of cured me of anything, because the truth is if you read terrible things about yourself and then lots of people go to see the movie and they send you all of these wonderful cards and things — cards? Sorry, what am I, in 1970? — emails and Facebook posts and so forth, we have a natural tendency to discount the positive and over-emphasize the negative because the negative feels more honest somehow or more real. That is an illusion.

I think that there is just as much dishonesty in negativity as there is in positivity. So, when it happens to you, or if it has happened to you, all I can say is, “Yup, that stinks.” And there is nothing we can do about it except to endure it, and then when it’s done let it go and then get back to work.

And I’ll tell you for me the tough part is I know it will happen again, and again, and again, because I think what I like and what I do, they don’t like. [laughs] And never will. And so this will happen again to me, and again and again. And I just have to find solace in the fact that the audiences do seem to like it. And they are who I make the movies for, for sure.

And so this pain goes along. There’s this phrase that Nietzsche popularized. I’m a big fan of Nietzsche, John. Have you ever read any Nietzsche?

**John:** [laughs] I’ve read some Nietzsche. It’s a little sad that you’re bring this up in the podcast, but yes I have.

**Craig:** Oh, why is it sad? [laughs]

**John:** It’s such a paragon of bleak times for me, yes.

**Craig:** Oh, it is? You mean when you read Nietzsche?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sorry. Well, we’ll work you through your therapy after. But Nietzsche is my favorite of all philosophers, if you can even call him a philosopher. I think he’s sort of something more than that. But he spoke often of this concept of Amor Fati, which is the Latin phrase that means essentially “love your fate.”

And this is my fate. [laughs] I get it. I am not to be feted at fancy dinners. I will not get awards. I will not get Red Ripe Tomatoes. I will for many, many people always be looked at as a goof and a bad writer. But, I don’t believe I am one. And so I just have to accept it. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to continue to be. And so it goes. Amor Fati.

And here’s what he wrote. I just want to read one little thing that he wrote because this is sort of how I feel about it all. Nietzsche wrote, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” And I love that.

And so I’m going to really try next time to — I’m going to try looking away. That shall be my only negation. So, next movie I have out, please remind me to look away.

**John:** Can I challenge some of your theses here?

**Craig:** Yes, of course.

**John:** Great. So, I’ll start with this last one, which I won’t challenge, but I will actually encourage. And Frankenweenie was the first movie that I did not read reviews. And the reviews were pretty good. So, it was kind of easy to not read the reviews because I’d say they were going to be good reviews, so that’s fantastic, and most people seemed to really like the movie. But I didn’t read them.

And because I didn’t read them I didn’t become obsessed with them. Because my experience has been even in times — exactly your point, that you will read ten glowing reviews and one negative review, and you will focus on the negative review. So, I decided, you know what, I’m not going to read any of them this time. On Frankenweenie I read none of them. And I would encourage that.

Second point. I would remind you of an earlier conversation we had where we discussed film criticism versus film reviewing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so film criticism is the actual study of film and what film is doing and what it means, what the trends in film are. Film reviewing is, “This is what opened at the movies this week.” And film reviewers are the people who had it out for you with long knives this last time.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** My third point is that I feel like some of the reasons why they had their long knives out for you is because you are the guy who wrote Hangover 2. And that if this exact same movie, if exactly the same print was shown on the screen, but that opening card had read Kristen some-last-name, and it was her first script sale, they would not have been anywhere nearly as harsh.

It’s because you were the guy who wrote the Hangover that I felt like, well…

**Craig:** Well, the Hangover and Scary Movie whatever.

**John:** Oh, yeah, and Scary Movie, yes, yes.

**Craig:** That is true, contextually I think there is — and it’s human, you know, but here I am, I’m trying to explain it away. I don’t want to do that. I’m willing to stipulate that they genuinely hated it.

**John:** Yes. And so I would stipulate that there were people who genuinely did not like the movie, but I would also argue that any reasons for singling you out for it in many cases was because you are that guy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My next point, and I would offer as a counter example: Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck was a joke. Ben Affleck was a punch line. And Ben Affleck is now considered the best director. So, for you to say that this is your fate, and that you will always be perceived as this person, that’s absurd. And the fact that Ben Affleck…

**Craig:** Well, I know what you mean…

**John:** That like Ben Affleck can go from being the punch line and the guy who was dating J-Lo to acknowledged as a really good writer-director, I think, should be some evidence that you can arc.

**Craig:** Yes. You’re right. And really all I’m saying — I’m not saying that I am incapable of writing something that maybe one day critics will like, although that’s not certainly my goal. I guess what I’m saying is I have to be okay with the fact that it might not ever happen. That essentially I have to stop caring about it at all because the truth is it’s immaterial to what I do. It’s immaterial to what we all do, I think.

I don’t know any writer that thinks that writing towards critics is a good idea.

**John:** I would agree. I think we talked about as part of my New Year’s resolution is not counting chickens before they hatch. This is not counting your emotional chickens before they hatch. And it’s trying to divorce yourself from the expectation of like “I will be a better person if a lot of people like this thing I just made.” And that’s not the reality and that doesn’t last.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. So, not counting the emotional chickens, precisely. And, you know, in a very real way I want to thank you. I’m so glad that you liked the movie, because I know that you are a very, very honest person. And that means, frankly, more to me than buckets of bloggers and their pun-based reviews. So, thank you.

And I’ve heard some great things from a lot of people actually. I feel bad in a sense, I feel goofy, and that’s why I needed to do this, frankly. I needed to be a little mawkish. But I also wanted to be honest because, look, in the end, what the hell else are we doing this for but to help each other? Not you and me helping each other, but to help our little community of people. And this is something that happens and it wrecks people, you know? It does. It really messes them up and it makes them sad. And I don’t like that. I don’t want any writer to be out there feeling as bad as I felt last week. It sucks.

And when I talk to writers, suddenly they have their stories and you start to realize, god, this isn’t cool. This isn’t healthy. We shouldn’t get quite so dark about it. But yet by the same token it’s kind of a sign that we care.

The only thing I can say about reviews that I know is wrong is when they say, “It was cynical” or “It was lazy.” No. If it were cynical or lazy, believe me, I would not have shed a single tear about the reviews.

**John:** Yeah. Now, Craig, I enjoyed so many things about it. And I don’t want to sort of spoil it for people who haven’t seen it by focusing on any one, although having directed a movie and having directed several things with Melissa, it’s so fascinating when you recognize an actor’s face so well that you recognize like, “Oh, that’s what Melissa looks like when she cries.” And so when she cries in the movie — not a huge spoiler, there’s some actual genuine tears in there — it was fantastic. And it was just so exciting to see like, “Oh, that’s Melissa. That’s what it looks like when she cries.”

But I also can’t watch a movie without some sort of producer brain kicking in, or someone who has been through the experience of making movies. And so I have one question for you which if you’ll indulge me.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which is a game I like to play called Guess the Reshoot.

**Craig:** [laughs] Go.

**John:** So, I’m guessing that when they go from St. Louis back to Denver there’s a car shot which was a reshoot which was done significantly after the fact. Because they shot the car, it’s daylight.

**Craig:** You mean that little car ride back to Denver?

**John:** Yes. It’s the one where she’s sleeping with her eyes open.

**Craig:** No. Not a reshoot.

**John:** That’s crazy. Because it looks like he’s in a wig. It just looks like it was shot seven months later.

**Craig:** You know what? I think something kooky happened with the green screen at some point. You know, these days… — Well, first of all, the movie did not have a large budget. I think it was maybe $33 million or something like that. Pretty tight schedule because Melissa has her show, Mike & Molly, and then literally the day after we wrapped on Identity Thief she flew to Boston to shoot The Heat which is coming out this summer, which also looks really, really good.

So, there was a tight schedule. And sometimes you’ll still shoot characters driving in cars in actual cars on little trailers which you pull around, but largely now they’ll kind of cheat and they’ll do a green screen thing. And then put plates in and so it looks like they’re driving but they’re not. And something seemed to go a little kablooey on a few of those. [laughs] I don’t know what else to say.

**John:** Sorry, it was a bad plate shot rather than a reshoot. It’s weird; I noticed first that his hair just looked bizarre in it, so I assumed he was wigged because his hair had changed for some other role. And I’ve been through that so many times, on Charlie’s Angels and on The Nines.

**Craig:** There was, I think, only two or three days of additional photography. And that wasn’t where it was. But it was elsewhere.

**John:** Okay. Then I have to single out, first off, Amanda Peet who is just a national treasure, and she’s so good in your movie playing, you know, what seems like a — it’s basically a reactive role. She’s sympathetic but she’s strong enough to say, “Well, this is not a good idea.” And yet she actually can bend to the fact that the plans change.

The scene with Melissa and Amanda at the kitchen is so good. [laughs] It’s so specific.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I have to give Amanda credit because when she came onboard, the idea of that scene was her suggestion. And I loved it. And so then I went and wrote it and then, you know, shot it. And Melissa, definitely the Bermuda Triangle is Melissa’s invention inside of that scene. But, yeah, big fan. Big fan of Amanda.

And, obviously, look, Melissa McCarthy is spectacular. And I love Jason, too. I think they’re both great. And it was — not to drag it back to mawkishness, but I was so angry about some of the stuff that was said about her. It just…ugh. I got very, very angry.

**John:** I got angry to hear the reports about it. But, again, I deliberately didn’t read it because I knew, “Don’t read things that you know are going to just piss you off.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you’re smart.

**John:** Craig, over the course of this podcast have you come up with a One Cool Thing that you want to talk about?

**Craig:** I’ll bet I can figure one out by the time you finish your One Cool Thing.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing is something called Dungeon World, which sounds like it’s a fetish magazine, but it’s actually a role-playing game. It’s a new take on something that’s like Dungeons & Dragons. And it’s incredibly simplified and stripped down.

And so I had tweeted a few weeks ago about TSR which is now part of Wizards of the Coast, they had released all of their old modules as PDFs. And so I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. But this thing, Dungeon World, another reader had sent me the link to it. And it’s very, very cool. It’s a cool idea.

So, it takes all the sort of, the stuff of D&D and boils it down to a really, really simple system that doesn’t have turns or initiative. It’s all just talking. And it’s a very clever idea.

It’s a Kickstarter project that got funded, so it’s in this weird in between state where it’s sort of open source and sort of a physical product you can buy, but I’ll have a link to it. And if you’re at all curious about sort of what a reboot of Dungeons & Dragons would look like. It’s worth your time to check it out.

**Craig:** Well, while you were talking I did actually think of a possible Cool Thing. And, you know, I love Possible Cool Things. You do things that actually are currently cool, and I do things that might be cool if they ever happen. And you know I love science and I love medicine.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** So, the Holy Grail — what do you think, John, if you ran a pharmaceutical company, what to you would be the Holy Grail medicine, to find, to discover, and bring to market?

**John:** A cure for cancer.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you would be right if companies were interested in saving lives, but they’re not. Remember, you are the CEO of a corporation with shareholders and they want money. Now, reevaluate your answer. What would be, you, money bags, what would be the drug you’d want to bring to market?

**John:** A sexual aid?

**Craig:** No. Although sexual aids definitely have sold well. If I were in charge of a pharmaceutical company and I did not care about saving lives, I only cared about my bottom line, I would want to bring an anti-obesity drug to market.

**John:** Oh yeah. I’m an idiot, of course, that’s exactly right.

**Craig:** Boom. Yeah, I mean, you would just make a killing, right?

**John:** And at times they have had anti-obesity drugs, but they’ve always done terrible things to you and they get pulled from the market.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. Here are the problems with anti-obesity drugs to date: A, they don’t work; or, B, they work but they’re addictive because they’re basically speed and they mess up your brain and your metabolism; or, C, they have terrible life impinging side effects like damage to your valves, the cardiac valves. All sorts of problems.

And it makes sense because if you try and pull on strings and gears inside the metabolism to move it one way, it seems like you’re affecting the body in a huge important way. It’s going to, perhaps throw other things out of stasis, and then you have a huge problem.

So, they keep trying and they keep trying. There is some glimmer of hope all of a sudden. You know how Viagra came to be discovered as a sexual aid?

**John:** It was as a side effect on another drug they were testing, right? It was a heart medicine I thought.

**Craig:** Yes, it was a heart medicine. I believe you’re exactly right. Same thing for what’s the Minoxidil…

**John:** Yeah, Propecia.

**Craig:** Yeah, the stuff that grows your hair. That also, I think, was for some sort of heart condition and they went, oh look, people are suddenly hairy.

**John:** I’m correcting myself already. So, Propecia is a different thing than Minoxidil, but Minoxidil, you’re right, was a heart thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was a heart thing. So, they call these off-label applications. You have a drug that does one thing, it’s intended to do one thing, it’s FDA-rated to do one thing, but then, “Oh off-label it also does this other thing. Maybe we should use it for that.”

Of all things, there is a drug that is used to treat canker sores. And what researchers have found is that this drug happens to be extraordinarily good at turning obese mice into normal weight mice. And apparently does so safely. That this drug is one of those drugs that’s been around forever. There’s a ton of research to back up its general safety to people. It doesn’t seem to do anything wrong. It just, at least in fat mice, makes them skinny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, soon they’ll be starting clinical trials on people. Now, at that point we’ll read about how their hands are falling off, or their hearts are exploding, but still, considering the enormous health implications out there for being extremely overweight or dangerously overweight, the idea that there might be a medicine for something like this, particularly for people who are just biologically inclined to gain weight like myself, it’s encouraging.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Because, let’s face it, the whole eat less and exercise thing for 99 percent of people doesn’t seem to work.

**John:** It’s a very challenging chore.

**Craig:** So One Almost Cool Thing.

**John:** That’s a very cool thing. And if I were to be writing a spec TV pilot, for example, I would think of House of Cards but in the pharmaceutical industry and you have that drug. So, writers, go off and do that.

**Craig:** Come on guys. Go off and just kick us back 1 percent.

**John:** We’d like it.

Craig, thank you so much for a fun podcast. This is our last one that we will be recording in the Los Angeles region. I will be in New York and then Chicago doing Big Fish stuff, so I’ll have a different microphone so I’ll sound different, but it will still be fun.

**Craig:** Well, you know what? You’ll always be you.

**John:** I’ll always be me. I’ll always be me no matter what time zone I’m in.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, standard reminders: If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe to us in iTunes because that’s how we can actually know that you’re listening to it. While you’re there you could leave us a nice review, because we like those, and we actually do read those. And they’re lovely and they’re a great counter to the negative reviews of movies we’ve made.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. It would be nice to read a couple of good reviews for once. [laughs] Sure, why not? I’ve admitted I’m human.

**John:** Those are reviews we actually will read. People have continued to fill out the screenwriting survey, but I think we’re kind of done. So, thank you so much for all the people who contributed to that, we’re going to take that link down because we have like thousands of responses, which is great, and we’ve learned a lot about who our readers are and what we want to do.

And that is our show for the week.

**Craig:** And just remember we are Lawrence Kasdan approved.

**John:** We are. That’s nice.

**Craig:** See you next week.

**John:** Thanks bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [When the Spec Script was king](http://m.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/03/will-spec-script-screenwriters-rise-again) by Margaret Heidenry in Vanity Fair
* [Examples of early screenplay formats](http://www.screenplayology.com/content-sections/screenplay-style-use/1-1/)
* [Amor Fati](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amor_fati) on Wikipedia
* [Dungeon World RPG](http://www.dungeon-world.com)
* [Canker sore drug helps mice lose weight without diet, exercise](http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/10/health/mice-weight-loss-drug/index.html)
* OUTRO: [Roll a D6](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54VJWHL2K3I)