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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/what-script-should-you-write).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name, Craig Mazin.

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

**Craig:** I’m doing fine, John. Enjoying a nice day of not writing. It’s my favorite kind of day.

**John:** Those can be very good days. This last week my Tuesday, for whatever reason, was spectacular and I really considered maybe just calling it a week. And it’s like — I’m just not even going to try to work the rest of the week. I’m not going to try to do anything. I’ll just say that was a really good week and it was only Tuesday. Everything was coming up roses on Tuesday.

**Craig:** I’ve done it. I’ve done it. I’ve started on a Monday morning and thought, “You know what? Don’t feel it.” And that feeling stayed with me all the way through Friday. [laughs]

You know, I sometimes feel a little weird because when I do write I’m very intense and I can write a whole lot all at one time. I can kind of sprint. And then there are times where I just do nothing. And I always feel guilty because sometimes people say, “How do you do all the stuff you do? You have a podcast. And you write…and you…”

And I go, “Well yeah, that’s true. But I must tell you I actually spend enormous quantities of time doing nothing at all.” But I don’t say that because I think that would make them feel even worse. Like not only am I lapping you but I’m sleeping for most of the race.

**John:** Yeah. What was so marvelous about my Tuesday, it wasn’t really a writing Tuesday, but it was all the other parts of screenwriting, which is like the taking the meeting and the doing the stuff and making the phone calls. And so I was over at the Fox lot for some of this, and I always forget that like when you have lunch on the lot you see all the other people there.

And so like I met Seth Grahame-Smith, who weirdly we’d worked together and we talked on the phone but I’d never met him in person, so I met him. I saw my friend Josh. I saw my friend Dana who has a TV show. I got to see her wonderful offices. It was great. So, a very fun, good afternoon spent at the Fox lot.

**Craig:** You know what? I had that experience over at Warner Bros. I was over there the other day, and normally I’ll sit in the office with Todd Phillips and we’ll eat there while we’re working, but on this particular day we decided to go out and we sat on their little dining area and Chris Nolan came by. I met Chris Nolan — how cool is that?

**John:** Oooh!

**Craig:** Let’s see…Chris Nolan. Jay Roach. Baz Luhrmann came by.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it was so much fun for me. And, you know, they all know Todd. They don’t know me. I’m just sort of sitting there. Then at the very end I’m like, “Hi, how are you?” I get so awestruck.

I was standing in front of Todd’s office and Paul Thomas Anderson came by, which was crazy. I just love meeting people like that. If I ever don’t get star struck by these people, I’m done, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a different kind of thing. It’s like I’m not star struck in the way of like I want somebody’s autograph. But when you meet somebody in a social situation where they know the other person, it is a little bit unusual. Like Seth Rogan for the first time I met in a cafeteria situation. And it was like, “Oh, that’s Seth Rogan.” And he’s like, “Oh hey. I’m a big fan.”

I’m like, “Wow, you know who I am.” That’s incredibly exciting to me. So that is nice when it happens.

**Craig:** I never believe it when anybody says they even know who I am. I never believe it. I just don’t believe it. I don’t think it’s true. Jay Roach was like, “Oh hey.” He did that. And I’m like, “Nah, I don’t believe it; I don’t think you know who I am.”

But I guess the star struck part of it for me is when I meet people who are operating…who do the craft of filmmaking at a level that is just astounding to me. I’m particularly enamored of people who do things that I don’t even understand. I don’t understand how Paul Thomas Anderson does what he does. I don’t understand how Baz Luhrmann does what he does. I could never do it in a million years. It’s so much fun for me to watch. Chris Nolan.

So when I meet them I feel like I’m meeting wizards. It’s great. I just love it. I love it.

**John:** That’s nice.

So this week I thought we would talk about a couple of listener questions, just random stuff that came into the mailbag. And also talk about really an evergreen question that I often get after I’m on a panel for something, which is somebody comes up to me and asks, “Hey, I’m thinking about these two different things. I’m trying to decide which one to write.” And so I thought we would talk about which movie you should write.

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** So, for follow up, I have a couple things to go through. First off, last week was our first Three Page Challenge. And, Craig, how did you feel about the Three Page Challenge?

**Craig:** I enjoyed doing it. I felt a little guilty afterwards.

**John:** How so?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I just feel like, god, we were a little hard on the Beaver, but that’s kind of what people need, I think. So, I mean, I love the exercise. I was a little nervous that maybe I in particular was too harsh.

**John:** I can hear that. I temper that with the realization that everybody sent in those scripts anticipating criticism, so not just like a, “Hey — that was great.” It was, like, we were talking about what could make it better. And hopefully we had some suggestions for making it better. And most people who wrote in with responses, a lot of them on Twitter, and some on the actual blog post itself, seemed to dig the exercise, so I think we should do it again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree.

**John:** Not this week, but maybe every couple weeks we’ll do a few more of those. Because it is constructive and it’s very much about the words on the page which is hard to do in a podcast otherwise.

**Craig:** I also think it’s one of the only opportunities people can have to sample what’s coming. You know, if you’re not in the business you have no idea the kind of scrutiny and criticism you’re going to be in for. I’d like to think that you and are particularly good at it as opposed to what they might get at a lower level in Hollywood where ding-a-lings are reading it and giving notes. But this is what’s coming.

So, it’s probably a good thing. And I was very pleased with the feedback. I think it was sort of unanimously positive, so that’s great.

**John:** A few things to clarify. Craig and I — actually it was Stuart who picked which of the three scripts we were going to read. So, Stuart has read everything and Stuart picked three really good ones. And so that was actually a criteria going into it. Like these were three of the best ones that came in, not necessarily the very, very best, but of the sample that we had at that time those were three of the best ones.

I did write to each of the people who wrote in, each of those three guys who submitted their scripts, to let them know that they were going to be on the podcast, so it wasn’t a shock and a surprise. And two of the people wrote back after listening to the podcast and said, “Hey, that was actually really great. And it was scary but it was good.” And they thanked us for doing it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So good. I’m glad it was helpful for them.

So far we had 204 entries. Of those, 12% were written by women.

**Craig:** 12% were written by women?

**John:** And I don’t know quite how to process that. Is it that there are not more women writers? Is it that women don’t feel like writing into the thing?

**Craig:** No, there’s not…

**John:** I think there’s just not more women writers.

**Craig:** There’s just not more women writers. And this is, you know, I’ll go ahead and just jump on the third rail because I hate tiptoeing up to third rails; I like to hug them and let all the voltage course through my body.

You know, the Writers Guild every year does a study that tell us what we already know, which is that women are underrepresented as professional screen and television writers. Racial minorities are underrepresented. Gay people are underrepresented.

**John:** Are gay people actually underrepresented?

**Craig:** Well, nobody really knows because no one knows how many gay people there are.

**John:** Because there’s not a form to mark on the boxes.

**Craig:** Correct, that’s true. But, I’ll withdraw that. Transgendered people are underrepresented. But the argument has always been: Is this because of racism? Is it because of sexism? Is it because simply fewer of those underrepresented groups are actually going for these jobs?

The truth is, I don’t know the answer when it comes to race at all. I suspect that there’s got to be some element of racism going on. It’s just too stark. And also because I know too many black writers who tell me stories and I go, “God. Yup, that’s blatant.”

But when it comes to gender, and I’ve always said, look, women in very high positions at all these studios. There was a time when the majority of studios were being run by women, or if not run by women, women at very high levels. Women are heavily represented, I would assume equitably represented in the ranks of development executives. It seems to me that they are.

So what’s going on with screenwriters? And then we run this little…it’s not scientific, but here’s just the thing, open to anyone. And I know that we have women who listen to us and men, and only 12% of women send scripts in. — I’m sorry, 12% of scripts are sent in by women. I have to presume it’s because women just are less interested.

Am I wrong?

**John:** I don’t know that you’re wrong. And what’s interesting is I think this contest, this challenge, is really targeted at sort of new, incoming screenwriters. So this isn’t something that’s targeted towards people who may have left the industry for whatever reason. Like, is there a reason why women are coming into the industry and then leaving the industry because there aren’t opportunities there?

I would suspect most of the people who are writing into this challenge are new, young, aspiring screenwriters. And so, if there are fewer women who are new, young aspiring screenwriters that’s going to ripple up through the whole way. If there’s fewer women trying to enter the pool there’s going to be fewer women down the road.

**Craig:** No question. And, look, that’s not to say that there isn’t also sexism going on. I’m sure there is, which only makes it harder once you’re there. But, some of the numbers that you see when we say, “Why aren’t there more female screenwriters?” The kneejerk conclusion is because Hollywood is evil and hates women. And, in fact, part of the issue is women just aren’t as interested. And I don’t know why.

Are they more interested in other kinds of writing? Are they smarter because this is a really stupid thing to do?

**John:** [laughs] Because they recognize it’s a dying field that they should stay away from?

**Craig:** [laughs] Right. Exactly.

**John:** I think it’s worth studying. And I think what you’re pointing out is that we’ve always looked at the demand aspect of it as that women can’t get jobs as screenwriters, and maybe that’s true, but we should also look at is there a limitation somehow on supply of women screenwriters. And is that something that needs to be addressed as well?

**Craig:** Well, if you are one of our many female listeners, and we run this Three Page thing again, you know, come on.

**John:** And when we do this next time we’ll make sure to pick some women writers just to make sure that they are heard as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So after the last podcast we had a bit of bad news. Dick Zanuck died. Dick Zanuck, who is a legendary producer, who produced Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy. He produced Big Fish of mine and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He passed away, which was a surprise.

Dick Zanuck was 77 years old. And often when you have an older person who’s in your life, somewhere there’s like a little mental tick box on the record you keep for that person, like, “could die.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That sounds horrible and morbid, but I think there’s a reason why it’s shocking when a…

**Craig:** It’s not horrible and morbid; it’s just so you. I just love that you have, like there’s a MySQL column. There’s a thing called “Might Die.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it’s checked “yes” or “no.” Am I still in the “no” column though?

**John:** There’s some faculty we have in us that sort of when a person is a certain age we recognize the fact that, okay, we should be ready for the fact that this person might not be around forever. And the reason why it is so shocking and surprising when a child dies, or when a younger person dies, and it’s less surprising and shocking when an older person dies. I think that’s a natural instinct.

Zanuck was sort of a weird special case because while he was 77 years old, he was like nowhere near retirement. He was one of the most fit and active people you’re ever going to meet. And a very active producer. He produced all of Tim’s movies.

And on an earlier podcast you and I talked about the different kinds of producers and the different roles that producers play. And Dick Zanuck was a protector. He was the bodyguard. He would protect Tim Burton from the studio, or whichever director of the movie from the studio, but he’d also protect the studio. The studio felt comfortable with him because he would help protect the movie to make sure it didn’t get knocked off track. He was really good that that.

And what was so fascinating about his funeral which was yesterday — we’re recording this on Friday, the funeral was Thursday — was to hear people from all parts of his life reflect on not just what his skills as a producer but sort of his skills as a person. And it was a very Big Fishy kind of funeral in the sense that you had your laughter and your tears. And you had the recognition that this is a man who lived a very, very full life and had the love of his life and the love of his life up the very last moment of his life, Lili Zanuck.

And it, I don’t know, weirdly I hadn’t gotten emotional until I’d gotten to the funeral and suddenly I’m like, “Oh my god, I won’t stop crying.” It was the recognition that, I don’t know — I don’t ever want to die, but if I were to die that would be the way to die is to, like, you have breakfast in the morning, you have lunch with friends, you talk to your kids twice a day — he talks to his kids every day — he has everything just right, and then suddenly gone. There’s not that long dragged out thing. It was like — to go out happy and on top.

**Craig:** I want to die covered in snakes, like most people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, Zanuck was — you don’t want to use the phrase dying breed when somebody just died, but it’s true, it’s a dying breed of producer. The people who understood how to do what he did and when you described protecting both the director from the studio, and protecting the studio from the studio, and protecting the movie from the director and the studio, that to me is what producing really is. It’s protecting. And it’s just gone. You don’t see it anymore. It’s so hard to find guys who really know how to do that, you know.

They’re out there. I have been lucky to work with a few of them recently. But so many fewer than used to be. And it’s a bummer. It’s a sad thing.

But you’re right. I mean, there is something to be said to kind of go out like that. Personally, I’m going to retire long before I die. That’s my whole thing.

**John:** No. I’m never going to retire. He was actually one of the people who I thought about when I recognized like, oh, do I want to retire at some point? I’m like, no. I’m not going to retire. I don’t want to golf. I don’t want to do that. I want to keep making new stuff. And he kept making new stuff until the very end.

One of the things I tweeted about right when I found out that he passed away, I got an email from my agent saying we’ve heard that Dick Zanuck died but it’s not confirmed yet. And so I was sort of sitting on it for 20 minutes, like do I say anything about that, do I acknowledge it? Or do I wait for some confirmation?

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. You’re News Rooming.

**John:** I was totally News Rooming it.

**Craig:** You were News Rooming.

**John:** And then I was like, “Oh, but I hope it’s not Deadline Hollywood Daily that prints it first.” But then they did say it first. And so like it was confirmation so I could say what I wanted to say, but then it felt like I was responding to her post.

**Craig:** Yeah, god.

**John:** But what I needed to say, and what I appreciated so much about Zanuck was that he recognized the long game of it all. And he recognized that relationships were more important than any one movie. And so when we would have to call me with bad news, he would pick up the phone and call me with bad news. And he would call me to tell me that I was fired, or that they weren’t making a movie, or that stuff had fallen apart, and he was brilliant at being able to that and not making it feel like the world was going to end. And so many people are so afraid to share negative news, and you have to. And he was terrific at that.

So I will very much miss him. But I will also miss the qualities that I thought he brought to that part of the industry.

**Craig:** That was so beautiful that I can’t help but fondly imagine what it’s going to be like when I die and you do that first podcast after I’m gone.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. The eulogy podcast will be the new trend by that point.

**Craig:** I think actually that podcast will just be like, “Hi, this is John August. This Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I’m John August. And, anyway, today we’re gonna go on. We have some news. There’s nothing really to follow up on.”

**John:** That was the moment of silence was when you should have spoken.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s like a weird little pause.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions, Craig.

**Craig:** Let’s do it, while I’m still alive.

**John:** Paul from Onalaska, Wisconsin — come on, Onalaska, Wisconsin? That’s a great name.

**Craig:** Onalaska.

**John:** Onalaska. “In a previous podcast you told the story about how Hayden Christensen and his brother were pitching a show to a USA studio exec. That exec turned around and developed a similar show, seemingly based on Christensen’s idea.” Emphasis on seemingly, allegedly. The court case that happened said that they did actually have to proceed and investigate further, so.

“With that in mind, what are your thoughts on pitch festivals or websites like logline.com? It seems very risky putting your ideas out there, especially at pitch festivals for aspiring screenwriters looking for a foot in the door. To me it seems like a bunch of production companies and producer wannabes are getting together to find good ideas without having to hire the creator of the ideas. Will they likely take it, put their own people on it, and develop it as their own? Is it worth it, or do we stay away from these things?”

**Craig:** And, you know, this is one thing where I think everybody involved is silly. They’re not going to steal… — Let me just say this, because I know you and I [laughs] have said this.

**John:** We’ve said it so many times. But say it again.

**Craig:** I’m gonna say it again.

**John:** Or put it on a tee-shirt.

**Craig:** Now the umbrage is coming.

No one wants to steal you idea.

This is, for our podcast, this is the “You don’t have Lupus.” It’s not Lupus, okay? Nobody wants to steal your idea people. This fantasy you have that you’ve come up with the flux capacitor and they’re going to take it from you and stick it into the DeLorean and rip you off…

**John:** Or how about the windshield wiper…

**Craig:** Is not valid. The pitch festivals — listen to me carefully — the pitch festivals are not there to steal your ideas. You know what they are there to steal? Your money. Okay? That’s what it’s about. Yes, it’s a scam and stupid — don’t do it because no movies come out of pitch festivals. The point is, they’re gathering $50 to $100 from each one of you people. That’s the thing.

Get it? It’s like Die Hard. They’re not terrorists. It’s just a bank robbery. Okay? So that’s the deal. John?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** John? I feel good. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, your instincts were right but wrong.

**Craig:** I feel really good about that.

**John:** Yeah, you got the umbrage out? You hulked out there?

**Craig:** [yarr] I feel good. I’m calm. I’m calm.

**John:** So, to summarize: pitch festivals — probably a bad idea because they’re a scam that wants to take your money, not because they want to take your idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. I mean, this whole concern that — first of all, I’m sure they make you sign a billion waivers anyway. Yeah, of course they’re making you sign away your rights. But they’re not there for your ideas.

I mean, if John and I ran a pitch fest, we could make a lot of money, just to listen to you, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And these things are enormous, right? Have you ever — I’ve never gone to like whatever that one is downtown.

**John:** At one point, I think in Austin, I was on a pitch panel festival thing, and I found it painful because people were trying to pitch their ideas and there was a special format they were supposed to do and it was awkward and some of the things were terrible.

So, no, but I’ve never been paid to do this. Blech. No.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. So, anyway, the point is no they’re not trying to rip you off. No, you shouldn’t be doing them anyway. No one is trying to steal your idea. They’re just trying to make money off of you. You do not have Lupus.

**John:** Question number two. Oh, I think I should respond to this one first because you’re just going to go into full umbrage mode.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** Sharice asks, “Me and a couple friends are very interested in shooting a pilot for TV show on any network about our lives and daily activities. Who should we contact? Sent from my iPad.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, Sharice, so here is why I’m going to treat your question seriously and sort of not mock you for it, because I think it is great that you are probably a younger person who wrote in with a question and you said, like, “I want to make a TV show and I’m going to go online and figure out who makes TV shows and ask my question.” So, I don’t want to mock you for doing that, because maybe you’re like 16, and baby, that’s awesome.

So, here is what I will say about you wanting to make a TV show with your friends: I think there’s probably never been a better time for you just to make a TV show with your friends. And that’s what YouTube is for, honestly. You should be shooting whatever you want to shoot on whatever cameras you sort of feel like shooting. Write as much as you feel like writing beforehand. And just try to make it together.

Because, if you are this 16-year-old girl who has interesting friends, maybe someone will see it and want to do something more with it. So I don’t want to sort of squash your dreams of that.

Sometimes there are really talented people who get together and it’s like, “Oh, we’re just gonna shoot something,” and it becomes something useful. Like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Those guys were smart and they wrote a show, and they shot their show, and people liked it.

What I would say, and what Craig would throw a chair at you for, is the idea that, “Oh, I have an idea. And if I have an idea then someone’s going to want to pay me to write and make this show.” That’s not going to happen because you’ve not shown that you actually have the ability to write something, to do something, to make something. So, you’re going to have to do that, and there’s probably never been a better time to do that than now.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, everybody’s experience with their friends is colored by the fact that it’s their friends. It’s, you know, “you had to be there” — you ever hear of that expression?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My guess is that your friends, like 99.9999% of everybody’s friends, are not interesting enough to anyone else to actually pay money to watch. I mean, if you go to a restaurant and people literally all stop eating and just gather around you and listen and applaud as you and your friends do your stuff, then you’re on to something. But other than that, it’s just funny to you guys, you know.

You can be inspired by it to create characters that are universal that people might relate to, but generally speaking you don’t want to start from a position of narcissism. Very, very difficult to make a show out of yourself and your buddies.

**John:** Yeah. So Go, my first produced script, is very much influenced by people I knew and grew up with. And that said, I wasn’t trying to make a movie about them. I was just taking the very, very most interesting things I could find about them and their lives, and in most cases asking permission to say like, “Can I borrow that thing where you set the hotel room on fire?” And I put those together as a package, but it wasn’t literally about them.

You may find that you actually have a life that’s interesting enough that it’s worth becoming a TV show. You might be Lena Dunham and you just wrote kind of a lame email. Who knows?

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And even in Go you took characters that were influenced by people that you knew in real life but you put them in a situation that was very compressed and very dramatic.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You weren’t just sitting around Diner style. I mean, I think movies like Diner have ruined more people than anyone else. I mean, because they seem easy. They’re not. [laughs]. And it kind of helps to be really, really smart and really, really funny when you write them. But ultimately they’re about bigger things. You watch Diner, there’s quite a bit of drama in there as well, so, there you go.

**John:** There you go. Question three is actually related to this. “If someone writes a screenplay that includes characters taking part in illegal activity that’s a comedy, but part of the comedy is that the screenplay is based on true events and the writer is totally open about that, then when the film is released can the writer or their characters,” basically, the writer’s real friends, “get arrested for that illegal activity?”

**Craig:** Oh, wait, hold on. [laughs] First of all, no one’s getting arrested. But can you explain what this guy is talking about?

**John:** “Does the law look at films and can investigations get underway based simply on speculation? I may just a neurotic plagued to paranoia, but it’s a concern for me.”

Well, he answered his own question. You are a neurotic plagued with paranoia. Basically this guy is saying, “I want to write a script about some crazy stuff that happened. It’s kind of based on my friends,” and he’s worried that because everyone will know, or it will be promoted as like sort of based on some real stuff that happened, that the police could come after him for…

**Craig:** Hey listen, listen. Here they come. [police sirens] Here they come, buddy. They’re coming for your script. “Uh, we have a report of a possibly too-true-real-life scene in route.”

Yeah, listen: You can’t use someone’s life freely. They actually own their life. You have to get the rights to their life if you’re going to use their life. However, if you’re picking little incidents, things that would… — At the end of movies they say, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead are intentional,” I think is the language. You should ask for permission if there’s something specific. If you have a friend, however, that exhibits some behavior that you find interesting that other people also exhibit, it’s fair game.

If there’s something real specific though that you’re taking, then you should ask them and get permission. Either way, you’re not arrested; it’s not a crime. It’s a tort.

**John:** His concern isn’t for himself and being sued for having taken somebody’s life rights. His concern is that the people who he is fictionalizing in his story, that would become the basis for them getting in trouble.

So, the examples he brings up…

**Craig:** Oh, I see, like the law will say, “You wrote a character that did a crime; we’re going to come after this guy because of your script?”

**John:** Yeah, examples he has, like being of a foreign nationality and working under the table in the US. Collecting disability checks but working part-time as an independent limo driver.

**Craig:** No. No, it’s fiction. You’re creating fiction. Your script is evidence of nothing in a court of law.

**John:** I agree. So don’t be paranoid.

**Craig:** I mean, neither one of us are lawyers, so if somebody ends up in jail, whoops. But I just don’t see how a lawyer could possibly say, “Look, he wrote a script…”

The only instance where I could see that — now I understand the question, I’m so sorry — but the only way I could possibly see a screenplay being evidentiary is if, for instance, you killed Mike. And a week before you killed Mike you sent a spec out about how this guy kills his husband. And it was the same exact method, and motive, and all the rest. Then they would go, “Um, this is admissible.”

But if somebody reads a script and says, “Well this character reminds me a lot of his friend. And in the movie this character is doing something illegal.” No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Don’t worry about.

So, let’s get onto our big topic this week which is what script should you write, which is kind of an evergreen question because when I was first starting to work as a screenwriter I was writing spec scripts. And so I could write anything. I could write a comedy. I could write a drama. I could write an alien western. I could do anything I wanted to do. And that freedom was great, but it was also a little terrifying because I wasn’t sure if I was spending my time writing the right thing.

That question continues throughout your whole career, because you’re always choosing, well what is it that I’m going to spend my time working on? It gets more complicated as you become a writer for hire because there could be money involved. There could be personalities involved. There could be reasons why you want to take one project or another project, or why you don’t want to take any of the projects you’re being offered and go off and write that spec script for the thing you want to do.

So, the decision about what you’re going to spend your time doing is going to be a factor in every screenwriter’s life, at every stage of the career. So I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I see this online a lot, too, where people are juggling three or four different things. I mean, I like the notion of thinking, “Which one of these ideas would actually seem most like a movie? Would people want to see one of these?” Although I still think the primary question should be, “Which one of these do I feel the most interested in writing? Which one of these ideas inspires the most passion?” Ultimately that will lead to the better script.

And I’m confused by people that are like, “I don’t’ know. I like them both the same.” And I feel like, eh, you’re not really a writer.

**John:** So here’s some criteria that I thought of and maybe we can add to this list as we go through in that sort of decision matrix of how to figure out which of these projects you want to write.

First off, people always say “write what you know,” which I think is terrible advice.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** From people who don’t know anything.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** To me, the criteria should be write the movie you wish you could see. And by wish you could see, I’m literally talking like write the movie you would pay money to see opening weekend. Don’t waste your time writing a movie that you’re like, “Oh, I’d catch it on cable.” Why are you writing that movie?

If it’s not a movie that you were dying to see you shouldn’t be spending your time writing the movie.

**Craig:** Right. That’s good advice.

**John:** If you’re writing something because you think it will sell, it’s probably the wrong movie to write. And that is just personal experience. The movie that I wrote, I was like, “Oh, I’m going to do this because I think I can totally sell it and I see other movies that are like it that are selling, and I read on Deadline Hollywood that this thing sold.” Don’t. Because it’s unlikely that it’s going to be the movie you really want to make. You’re going to be thinking about the dollar signs every time you sit down at the computer. And trends change. And so by the time you finish that script six months from now, that may not be the kind of movie that’s big or selling right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, the process of writing a movie, selling it, getting it into production, having it made, edited, released, marketed, that entire process after you type The End is a very cynical process. It cynicizes everything — that’s not a verb but I’m going to make it up. So if you start that cynical it’s just going to get even worse. Start pure. Let everybody else smear mud all over it because they will.

**John:** Yeah. Another question from me. If you think there’s any chance at all you might be a director or that you might want to direct a movie, or might want to direct the movie that you’re writing, write the smaller thing that you could actually direct yourself. Write the one that was in your wheel house and range ability to direct.

So, if you’re thinking about writing a giant Fast-and-the-Furious-but-with-robots movie, or Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and you want to direct, probably Sex, Lies, and Videotape would be your way to go — you know, characters in a contained setting.

I say this just because while there are rare exceptions, there’s the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, where some guy just writes a script and somehow makes it, most cases you’re going to need to write something that’s actually of a scale that you could do it yourself if it’s really going to be your first movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And in that case I think production experience helps, if you’ve actually spent time on movie sets you can see the dramatic difference between a day of shooting where two people are talking over a table, and a day of shooting where there is a car chase. The amount of screen minutes you can generate in a day is dramatically different. And so if, you know, “What I’d like to do is make a little movie and I have $100,000 cobbled together from various sources to spend,” write with that budget in mind. No question.

**John:** Yeah. Or do Buried. Buried was very much written as a script that the writer could direct. The writer ended up letting another director do it, but it’s a guy in a coffin. I mean, it’s obviously a huge challenge to write that movie, but it’s a very specific — it’s a script that was written to be shot, and there’s a lot to be said for that, if that’s your goal. If your goal is to direct. Or, I think in his case, he was actually an actor as well, so like in his head he might have been acting in that movie. That’s smart.

**Craig:** I have another one to add on. I don’t know if it’s on your list, but the sort of the better version of “write what you know” is “write what you’re supposed to write.” I know the kinds of movies I’m supposed to write, and I write those. And that’s not — it’s not narrow. There’s actually a pretty decent range of kinds of comedies I can do. Like for instance, Identity Theft is, I think, the closest to the sort of movie I ought to be writing more of, and I’d like to be writing more of, but I can also do this kind or that kind. But what I don’t do is I don’t write horror movies. And I don’t write romantic comedies because I don’t understand them.

There was a romantic comedy that very good directors were talking to me about, and it was a really good idea, and they had really good casting ideas, and we had lots of interesting conversations. But in the end I realized I’m actually not capable of writing a romantic comedy. It’s not what I ought to be writing. I don’t have that gear.

You have to accept the kind of writer you are. Forget writing fancier or writing less fancy, just write what you ought to be writing.

**John:** My agent has a list beside his phone, or he did at some point earlier on in my career, of like “These are the genres that John just won’t write.” And because these things would keep coming up and it’s like, no, because that’s not my kind of movie.

And so, prison movies. I like prison movies but I’m just not going to write a prison movie. That’s just not my thing. Futuristic prison movies, which is like a subcategory that was really big for a while, and so I had to keep passing on futuristic prison movies. Jewel heist movies. I don’t care. I don’t like them. I don’t like caper movies. That’s not my thing at all. And kind of war movies. There’s people who are great at writing movies, and so you should go to one of the war movie people to write the war movies because I’m just never going to be that guy.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can try if you want. it will just come out dead. It’s just not a good idea.

**John:** So write something that intrigues you. And so often I will pick something that is like I’m a little bit nervous about writing it because it’s not exactly what I’m sort of known for, and I think I have a wider range of genres than many other screenwriters do, and so sometimes I’ll pick something that I’m a little bit scared of, but I’m not going to pick something that’s just completely out of left field.

And it’s not for fear of being pigeon-holed. It’s for fear of like I’m not going to care about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you want to be… — Look, the nice thing is you want to be able to have some sort of… You want to be in touch with your own voice so you know if you are straying a little bit outside of your wheel house that you’re still bringing your voice to whatever it is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you can’t — I can’t bring my voice. I mean, I suppose I could. Well, I think about for instance horror movies. You know, I could take a stab at one of those, but I’d rather watch Kevin Williamson do it. He’s better at being funny horror writer than I ever could be, so what’s the point? Just let him do it. He’s really good at it.

**John:** Yeah. And potentially a controversial note, but I think one you might agree with. All things being equal, write a comedy. So, if you’re choosing between the drama and the comedy, and all the other criteria has sort of balanced themselves out, if you’re a funny person write the comedy.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Because you will get more enjoyment out of writing the comedy. They’re generally more fun to write. They’re generally more fun to read. It’s easier to keep the ball up in the air in a comedy than it is in a drama. And there’s a lot to kind of be said for that.

This thing I just, a friend of mine just read this last week, which is one of the first originals I’ve written in quite a long time, it’s a comedy. And he said, and he didn’t mean to say it in a bad way, he’s like, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were funny.” And I was like, “Oh, well, thanks.” But I’m not sort of known for doing comedies recently. And so it was new for him to see me writing a comedy and it made him want to write comedy more because I said, like, yeah, you know, it’s actually kind of great. And it’s like stuff is easier. It’s…

**Craig:** If you’re funny.

**John:** If you’re funny. And that’s the thing. And you may not be funny. And, you know, maybe you won’t know until you write something, until you write the first 30 pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re not funny it’s harder. You know, David Zucker has a great saying. “Kids, don’t try this at home.” Comedy looks easier from the outside, and in some ways there are a lot of things that work in your favor as a writer, but it’s very specialized and either you’re going to be able to do it or you’re not going to be able to do it. Your premise is well-put. All things being equal, yeah, of course.

Writing comedy in Hollywood is a little bit like being a left-handed pitcher in the major leagues. There’s fewer of you. And you’re needed more. So it’s a great thing to be. if you’re a left-handed pitcher nobody tries to make you a right-handed pitcher. Ever. It’s just a good skill. It’s a rare skill in Hollywood. So, yeah, jeez, all things being equal, if you love writing comedy and you’re good at it, absolutely.

**John:** And let’s see if we have more bullet points to add as we try to wrap these up. And the reason why this topic is on here at all is I was speaking at the Writers Guild a couple weeks ago and these two guys came up. They were writing partners. And they said — I think they may have been brothers even — “We’re considering these two things.” So I had them describe like the one sentence version of what the two projects were. And I said, “You need to write that one.”

And I could do it because I could tell there’s one they actually cared about and there’s one they were just going to write because they thought it could sell. And if you’re writing something just because you think it can sell it’s not going to be the interesting one.

And here’s the other thing: Just because you’re picking this one to write, that doesn’t mean you never get to write the other one. Write the one that is sort of most appealing to you to write, get it done, and then quickly write the next one.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, the summary would be: Write the movie you wish you could see. And write the movie you would actually pay money, your own dollars to see in the movie theater on Friday. So, if you can’t say that you’d really see that movie, you’re probably writing the wrong movie. It’s probably not the movie for you to be writing.

And I think that’s a good criteria because if the movie you desperately want to see is the four-hour version of Pride and Prejudice done with puppets, then that’s the movie you should probably write because it’s going to be different than every other movie that’s out there right now. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to make, but I can respect the person who writes that movie because they really want to see that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Write comedy if you’re funny. And write small if it’s something you want to direct yourself. Don’t write super small if it’s something you want someone else to direct.

**Craig:** I agree with all of that.

**John:** Craig, do you have a Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I have a Relatively Cool Thing.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** I say “relatively cool” because in fact it’s not cool. But it’s cooler than the alternative. I was sort of hesitating to even talk about it, but I think it’s probably a good thing to talk about.

So, I am a cigar smoker. I love cigars.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** No, oh yes.

**John:** Craig, I want you to be alive for the podcast in 57 years.

**Craig:** I know. Now here’s the thing: Cigars…

**John:** Oh, they’re healthy.

**Craig:** They’re not healthy. [laughs] But on the other hand, as far as I can tell from the various research, if you smoke a cigar without inhaling any of the smoke, which is the way I smoke, and most cigar smokers do, the incidence of cancer and so forth is actually fairly low. It’s pretty close to the baseline. But that said, not a great idea anyway. There’s still carcinogens in the smoke and there’s a slightly elevated risk for lip, tongue, and so-forth cancer.

Again, if you don’t inhale at all. If you inhale even a little bit you’re in big trouble. But, given that, I wanted to sort of wean myself off. But the truth is I love nicotine. Nicotine does wonderful things to my brain. I smoked cigarettes for seven years, many years ago. I quit the week before I got married actually because I thought, can’t do that to my wife, you know. And so I haven’t smoked a cigarette in over 15 years. But what do you do if you like nicotine, which is a spectacular drug — it’s sort of like caffeine but much, much better.

What do you do? So, here’s my sort of Cool Thing for the week to help wean myself off cigars and reduce the number down to maybe one a week. They now have electronic cigarettes. Have you seen these, John?

**John:** I’ve heard of them. I’ve never seen them so I want a full description.

**Craig:** It’s actually a pretty amazing invention. And I’m talking about it mostly because I know there are people out there that smoke regular cigarettes and I want them to stop because that in fact is absolutely 100% for sure super duper bad, as we all know.

So, the idea of the electronic cigarette is: what if we could make a device that would allow you to inhale vapor that had nicotine in it and then just a bunch of inert stuff that doesn’t do anything? And typically the stuff is propylene glycol which is the inert substance that they use in fog machines or in asthma inhalers. Or, vegetable glycerin which is, again, just an inert substance. It does nothing to you.

So, we create this little device. And the only chemical that’s in it is just nicotine, which in and of itself is not carcinogenic at all. So the way it works is there is a battery and there are two kinds of batteries that they use. One is manual and one is automatic — the automatic one is the one that is sort of amazing to me. There’s a little membrane inside of it, and as you inhale the membrane moves forward and closes a circuit that then sends electricity into the next part of this thing which is what they call a cartomizer which…is bowdlerization the word when you combine words together to make a word?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a bowdlerization of cartridge and atomizer. And all that really is is a cylinder, and inside the cylinder is cotton wadding of some kind, some fibrous wadding, and a wire. So, the battery, so you inhale, the membrane in the battery closes circuit. Electricity goes through the battery, hits the atomizer wire. Wire heats up, heats up the liquid that’s soaked up in the cotton wadding. That essentially vaporizes. You inhale the vapor. You breathe it out. It’s water vapor when you breathe it out.

**John:** So there’s no second-hand smoke?

**Craig:** No second-hand smoke. No smell. No odor. No ash. And also none of the carcinogenic byproducts of combustion, and there’s a whole big bunch of them, because as it turns out the things that kill you in tobacco are not nicotine at all.

**John:** Yeah. The tars, the resins, and everything else.

**Craig:** All of that stuff. Exactly. So then the question is: what about nicotine in and of itself? Is that bad for you? And you know, it’s kind of interesting. Some people sort of say, well, it’s a little bit bad for you the way caffeine is a little bit bad for you. And some people say, in moderation, frankly no, it’s not that bad for you. So certainly if you smoke cigarettes there’s no question that you should stop and smoke one of these things instead. No question.

**John:** Thank you for your description of the actual cigarette, because I didn’t understand how they actually worked. So, do you throw away that thing when you’re done with it?

**Craig:** Well, there’s a couple different kinds. The kind that you might see, gas stations are starting to sell these things now, these sort of disposable ones, and yes, you would throw one of those away.

For people that do this regularly you would actually buy some batteries and some cartridges that you could refill on your own.

**John:** I was thinking about throwing away the battery, it feels horrible. So that’s not a great thing for the world.

**Craig:** True. You don’t want to just chuck batteries. The batteries that you can buy for these things are rechargeable batteries, and you can use them over, and over, and over, and over, and the cartridges. And then you can even buy, there’s like a whole cottage industry — it’s one of the dumbest words I’ve ever heard: vaping. So that’s what they call it, vaping, instead of smoking, which is really annoying.

But, regardless, there’s a whole cottage industry of people that make what they call E-Juice or Electronic Cigarette Juice which comes in various flavors, some of which are to mimic tobacco flavors. Some of which are kooky flavors like chocolate, and cherry, and all this nonsense, which I don’t go near.

But, it’s so much better for you than smoking a real cigarette and I think it’s better for you than smoking a cigar. And, also, you can do it indoors because there’s no smell. You can smoke it anywhere.

**John:** Yeah. I grew up in a smoking household. And so smoking has appalled me my entire life. So, this does sound vastly better. What I wonder, and you know, there’s obviously the possibility that it becomes a gateway to like somebody trying this and then going to real cigarettes. I also wonder if there’s a happy gateway where like someone who smokes goes to this and says, “This just feels really stupid and plasticy now. I’m just going to stop doing it all together,” which could also be great.

**Craig:** That would be great. And they do have various levels of nicotine. I mean, I only use the kind that is the literally the lowest possible amount of nicotine. And there are some indications that very little bit of nicotine actually even makes it into your bloodstream by the time you heat the wire up and do all this stuff. But it is, to me, it should be viewed as a way to get yourself off of this other stuff. Because the truth is we can say to people quit smoking or smoke less, and they don’t. This is sort of like the smoking equivalent of a needle exchange.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. A reasonable solution to a problem that is going to be there whether you like it or not.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I mean, we can say that people with free needles are going to go heroin crazy, but the truth is, no, they’re already kind of crazy with the heroin so you might as well keep them from getting AIDS. I mean, bottom line.

So I think that this thing is actually a spectacular invention and I urge anybody that is struggling with cigarettes to give it a shot. The version I use, a very popular one, it’s the Joyetech 510. The 510 model.

**John:** When Apple comes out with theirs it will be so much better than all the other ones.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it will be the best. It will be the best. But until that time I use the 510 with a Boge cartomizer. And I use E-Juice from Johnson. So there you go.

**John:** Good. My One Cool Thing is similar in a way in that it’s nothing I can actually fully recommend to people to use, but maybe to borrow a friend’s to see sort of what it’s like because it’s an intriguing vision of the future.

I bought one of the Nexus 7s, which is the little small Android-powered tablets that Google sells directly from their website. And I bought it because I really wanted to see what that form factor was like, because it’s a 7-inch which is sort of in-between what an iPhone size is and what a full iPad size is. And I wanted to see what that was like. I wanted to see what the most up-to-date version of Android was like, and what it felt like on the tablets. And consistent with a lot of the reviews — I didn’t read the reviews ahead of time, but now that I’ve gone back and read the reviews, I think a lot of them are largely right, is that it’s a pretty good little tablet.

And for $200 there’s actually a very valid case to be made for buying this if you can’t buy an iPad. Like if you were a kid who was using his own money to buy something, and you have $200 and you want a tablet, you can get this tablet and it would actually be pretty good.

I’m not in love with the Android of it all. And there’s stuff that gets to be very frustratingly… — I try to differentiate between stuff that’s just different from how I’m used to it on Apple stuff and stuff that it’s just like, well, that didn’t seem like a very smart decision.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s some things which are interface stuff which is just really kind of random. You can’t figure out where you are at in the applications. But the size of it is actually kind of appealing. And for an e-reader, for a book, it’s actually really good. It’s a nice size. I find the iPad is really heavy to read a book on.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** This is a much more reasonable size. So, it was interesting. Part of the reason why I bought it is I wanted to see whether we should be converting some of our apps that are on iOS over to Android and whether this is going to become a really viable tablet. I don’t feel the pressing need to be working on a Reader app, a Screenplay Reader app for this now, quite yet, because it doesn’t feel…

**Craig:** What is the app store situation for that? Because I don’t have any Android stuff. Is the app store full?

**John:** The Android app store is — here’s a difference, is that on Android platforms you can install things from multiple places, and so you’re not locked to just the one official app store. There’s Google Play which is the main app store. And installing the apps from there or from Amazon’s app stores are the most places you’d find them.

For developers, it becomes much more complicated because with an iPhone or an iPad there’s only very few number of devices you have to be able to build for. With Android you really have no idea what screen size you’re going to end up on. You have to make so many more allowances for what the actual hardware is, then it becomes much more problematic. And because of that, sometimes the apps aren’t as sort of fit and finished as they are in the iOS thing. But there are official places where you can buy apps and people could theoretically — some developers make money selling apps there.

**Craig:** It used to be when we were young, if you recall, John, that the knock on Apple was that they were restricted by the fact that they controlled the software and hardware together at the same time. And it seems — and they were restricted in part because the PC clone industry was able to essentially outsource a billion little pieces form a billion different people and reduce the price on these things. And Microsoft was sort of the king in terms of the software.

But now you can see how controlling that pipeline completely from soup to nuts has given Apple a tremendous advantage.

**John:** Yes. If you read the articles on how Apple sort of buys the future, because in success they have so much money that they are able to go to factories and say, “Hey, you are working on this new display technology. We will give you $200 billion to build a new factory, but we’re going to ask for the first 18 months of your output. We get to buy all of it.” And that’s how they sort of get the new technology before anyone else can because they have enough money and leverage to be able to do that.

So, controlling that whole thing has been amazing for them.

**Craig:** Yeah. The guy that run that is now running the whole company. Obviously they take supply chain extremely seriously. They’re clearly the best at it. No one comes close.

**John:** So, my bottom line on the Nexus 7, because also my mother-in-law has the Kindle Fire, so I’ve also been able to try that. It’s a much better device than the Kindle Fire for just using, like maps on this thing is terrific. And a couple years ago on the maps application on this all by itself would have been worth the price of admission.

The Kindle Fire has a better catalog just because Amazon has so many more movies, and shows, and books you can get on it. The Google Play thing is okay. But you also have the Amazon Kindle store is an app just on the Nexus 7 and it’s really good.

Part of the reason I also bought this is because I was curious; there’s all this talk about there’s going to be an iPad Mini probably coming down the pike, and I thought that’s going to be a terrible idea. That’s going to be a really bad size for a screen for everything. And I was wrong. And I think it’s a good size for a lot of people, especially if it comes down to price where more people can buy it. I think it can be terrifically successful.

And I definitely recognize that the iOS apps that we’re building right now, we’re going to have to plan for screens that size and I think they’ll be successful.

**Craig:** And this is the Nexus 7?

**John:** The Nexus 7. So I would recommend, like listen: If you’re really curious about where the Android platform is and sort of what the best of it is, I think it’s a good way to spend $200 because you get like the actual most recent device. You don’t have to pay for a contract if you’re buying a phone. You get a chance to play around with it.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And if this device becomes popular or if the iPad version of this becomes popular, you can definitely see like loading up schools with these, because if it’s a $200 thing you can actually afford to buy them for the whole classroom and use them as books for things. Whereas at $400 or $500 the iPad becomes too expensive.

**Craig:** Right. And do they have a Kindle app?

**John:** They do. There’s a Kindle app on it just like there’s a Kindle app for the iPad. There’s a Kindle app for this and it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Maybe I’ll buy one for my son. Because, you know, mostly I just want him to read books.

**John:** Yeah. And the frustration that there aren’t as many great games on it will mean that he’ll read books.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Although I will say my favorite book reader device is still by far the $79 Kindle from Amazon, which is the non-backlit E-ink screen. It has ads on it but it’s a really good reader and it’s so lightweight that I’ll actually stick it in a jacket pocket and carry it around with me.

**Craig:** What about that Barnes & Noble one? Is that dead? The Nook?

**John:** The Nook? This, I think, is going to make a little bit harder case for the Nook. There’s a version of the Nook now that has lighting on it that people like a lot, that has a touch screen that has lighting on it that some people like a lot. So, god bless them, they’re still making stuff.

But I think a lot of nerds were buying the Nook and then rooting it to sort of put it back to a real Android software and they’re using that to develop and stuff. And I feel like this Nexus 7 would replace that instinct.

**Craig:** One last question about the Nexus 7. Can I smoke it?

**John:** You could totally smoke. And you put little batteries in there and the wire hits the membrane, and just inhale. It’s really good.

**Craig:** Even your pretend smoking didn’t sound right.

**John:** Yeah, god, I’m not an actor, but my fantasy is at some point when I become quite old — when I become 80-years old and have lived a good long life — I want be like the Gore Vidal who sort of like enters in and becomes the wise old man in movies. But they can’t have me smoke because I just couldn’t do it. And you can always tell when an actor has no idea how to smoke.

**Craig:** Clearly.

**John:** They hold a cigarette wrong. Everything’s just wrong about it.

**Craig:** They hold it wrong. They inhale sort of like a cigar and puff it out. I will tell you this, I’m on record: Once I cross 85 I’m going out, buying a pack of Marlboro Reds and get going. [laughs] Because I don’t care anymore.

**John:** A better idea might be to buy a pack right now and stick it in a vault, because they won’t be selling them.

**Craig:** They won’t. And I actually do believe, in all seriousness, that the electronic cigarette will kill regular cigarettes. I do.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I think that — here’s the trick, not to bring it back around to that, but really it comes down to the government. If the government gets stupid in their anti-smoking zeal and bans these things, that will be a tragedy. Interestingly, there have been a number of major medical associations, I think the American Medical Association, perhaps, or the Heart and Lung — one of the larger medical associations came out and supported these things and said these should be legal for sure. This is way better than smoking for people who smoke. Way better.

**John:** Yeah, you convinced me.

**Craig:** So get smoking…

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** …and I may pick up that Nook…I mean, not the Nook, the Nexus 7 just to give it a swing and see what it’s like. And if I hate it I promise to take a video of myself smashing it with a baseball bat.

**John:** Yeah, $200, it’s not mad money. I mean, $200 is real money to be spending on something, so I don’t want people to wantonly say, “Oh, John August recommends it,” because it’s a half-hearted recommendation. But I did find it fascinating, and for people who are curious about it, I was curious and my curiosity was sated.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well that was a good Cool Thing.

**John:** Awesome. All right. Thank you so much, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Talk to next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/six-figure-advice).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. This is John August.

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

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

How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m doing great. I know that that is a rhetorical question, but actually lately I have been having…

You know those days where you can’t seem to get on top of your own schedule? You are running behind on everything, and even the strange little quirks of circumstance seem to conspire against you and make you later, and later, and later? And for the last week everything has just been falling into place. Like today I knew that I had to be here to do this podcast with you and I was at Universal and this meeting was running long and then there was a lunch, and it just worked out almost to the minute that I was here on time.

Because… — I don’t know. The clouds parted. The sun shone through. Just things have been going my way.

**John:** Well that’s great. Congratulations.

**Craig:** No, no, no. That’s not great. That means that very soon…

**John:** Oh, I’m sorry, yes. I feel bad for you because it clearly means that your run is about to end and you will be sad soon.

**Craig:** The regression to the mean will occur.

**John:** The regression to the mean will inevitably occur.

**Craig:** Inevitably.

**John:** I had a… — I was in New York for almost two weeks to do casting for Big Fish. And I had to speak… — I was invited to speak to the film school out in the Bronx. It’s this public school that has this amazing film program there and so they invited me to speak. And it was… — Of course I’m going to go out and speak to them.

And I was so convinced that I was going to make it there in plenty of time. I was taking the 6 and I was going to get up there, and the trains conspired against me.

**Craig:** Mmm.

**John:** So, it was one of those days where I had the opposite of the Craig Mazin luck, and I watched as my speaking time passed while I was still on the train that was stopped on the tracks for about 15 minutes.

**Craig:** No way!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was stopped?

**John:** It was stopped.

**Craig:** Oh, eh, it was probably a suicide.

**John:** Oh, yeah. That’s a good way to think about it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my minor inconvenience versus some family who lost a loved one.

**Craig:** Well you always want there to be some kind of death at the other end of any kind of commuting stoppage. I feel like if I am going to stop, there should be a price in blood.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I did finally make it to speak to this film school in the Bronx, which is this amazing film program which I was so incredibly envious of these students because they are in high school but they are studying making movies. And they have to do all of the normal stuff you have to do in high school, and all the basic requirements, but they get to shoot movies and talk to filmmakers. And I am just incredibly envious of people who get to come of age in this time of wonder.

**Craig:** Yeah. What school is this in the Bronx?

**John:** It is called — and I will put a link to it in the show notes — but it was called the Cinema School. It is a New York Public School, but it is especially funded for the arts. And so I think it is an equivalent of the Fame school if you were a dancer, but if you were a director or a screenwriter you might get to go to this school.

**Craig:** Right. Like there is the Bronx High School of Science which is the science version of that; it’s public. And it is selective I presume?

**John:** It is selective. Yes. You have to sort of apply to it and get in to it. But it is not a charter school in the normal sense.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It somehow magically works and they got money to do it. And God bless them.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s like Hunter High School and Stuyvesant High School, Midwood — I think it is called — yeah, it’s like a pre-med.

New York actually has a really cool system like that; it’s smart that they have a movie one.

Yeah, you are envious of those kids in a positive way, and I hate them for having advantages I didn’t have. So…

**John:** That pretty much explains the difference between you and me.

**Craig:** Yup. White and dark. Here we go. Yin and yang. Let’s do this. [laughs]

**John:** I was talking to Dana Fox this week, who is busy casting her TV show. She has a… — Dana Fox, who is my former assistant and a very good friend, she sold a show to Fox, the studio, and Fox the network about her brother, Ben Fox.

So there are so many Foxes involved that it is kind of crazy.

**Craig:** Yes. I mean, I could say that is pretty Foxed up, but, well, I’m not going to say that.

**John:** Yeah, that would be kind of a hackneyed joke.

**Craig:** I did not just say that. It didn’t happen.

**John:** No. But I’m not going to let Stuart cut that out. That’s going to stay.

**Craig:** No. He shouldn’t cut it out. It is evidence that I didn’t do it.

**John:** Ah, okay. Yeah. But talking to her about casting, because she is in the middle of casting right now, and I just came out of a casting thing, made me really think about the difference between feature casting, and TV casting, and Broadway casting.

When you are casting a feature, you have actors come in and they are reading the sides; they are reading the scenes from the actual script of your movie. Or, sometimes you will write special scenes that are better for figuring out who these people are. But your only question is: Can they perform the scenes that are in your film?

When you are casting a TV show it is really a different experience because you are wondering, “Well, will they be good in the pilot, but will they also be able to do stuff like three years down the road when our show is a giant hit?” It is all of this sort of… — You are banking on what that person is going to become. It is a very different process.

**Craig:** Mmm. Yes. I could see that. Casting for movies is very limited and narrow and, yes, you are going to…

And also, you only have to perform it once for a movie. But you have to find somebody with some kind of stamina, social stability, the availability to just commit to this for a really long time. Totally different animal.

**John:** It is. If you are casting a feature, sometimes you are willing to put up with an incredibly difficult person because it is just a feature, and they are going to shoot however many weeks and then they are done and they are gone. You never have to see them again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you are casting a TV show, you are saying, “Do I want to show up to work every day to deal with this person?” And a lot of times the answer is no.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. So, how is that going for her?

**John:** Good I think. I think it is going to have an amazing cast. It’s a good, funny script. She’s awesome.

**Craig:** She is definitely one of the… — I would say she is probably the sunniest writer I have ever met.

**John:** Yeah. Sunny is a nice word. I like sunny.

**Craig:** Yeah. Very sunny.

**John:** Right now, she is a consulting producer on, or some sort of producer, on the New Girl, and the new show has a similar vibe and, I think, a similar opportunity for future success as that show.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Speaking of success, I thought today we would focus on, well, what I would call “Six Figure Advice.” Because we did a previous podcast, I called it “Five Figure Advice,” which is when you are just starting to work, and you are starting to make five figures. So, $50,000, $60,000, you are getting paid to write and that is a great thing. So we talked about what life was like at that level.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now I want to talk about the six figure advice. So, you are making more than $100,000, probably a fair chunk more than $100,000, and a lot of your decisions about things might be a little different. Your life looks a little different. And, based on my experience with screenwriter friends, the people who have problems with money and finances, a lot of times it really happens at about this level.

Because when you are just starting to make money you kind of know what that is like. You sort of know what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck. You know how to sort of pay for things and sort of how much, you know, to pay off your credit cards and that kind of stuff. When you hit the six figures, you are not sure if you are rich or not. You are not sure how much money is really coming in. You are not sure what your life is supposed to look like. And people make the wrong assumptions about what their life should look like. And then they end up having to take jobs out of desperation because they burned through their money quicker than they thought they would.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well that is a really good way of putting it, that people sit around and think to themselves, “What should my life look like now that I am a writer of a ‘this’ kind of movie or now that I have made this much money in a year?” And that is exactly where people go wrong because if you decide what your life should look like, what you are really basing it is on other people’s lives.

And what I have come to discover is, you have no idea truly what is going on in other people’s bank accounts. There are people who make so much more than I do, and you would never know. There are people who make so much less than I do, and you would think they make way more.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** People spend and borrow at rates that are widely disparate. So, put out of your mind what you think your life should look like, and instead just take a look at what is real for you; so that is sort of a basic starting place.

**John:** Yeah. The underlying advice behind all of this is: really pick a life that is comfortable for you, that you can easily maintain, at even less money than you are making right now. And pretend that you never make more money than that, and then you won’t go bankrupt. Then you won’t run out of money most likely.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess, first of all, don’t be the kind of person that defines your life by the stuff that you buy, which is hard for some people I think.

But I like, sort of the first advice is, because I feel when you start making a certain amount of money and you are looking at ways to maximize what you earn, the number one way to maximize what you earn is to pay less in taxes. [laughs] That is… — Because that is something that you actually have some control over, whereas an agent will take 10%

So we talk about incorporating, and we talk about saving money for retirement. So I guess we should probably start with incorporating.

**John:** We should talk about incorporation. So, maybe a little bit of prefacing: By the time you are making six figures, you likely have some sort of a team who is working for you. So you would have an agent, certainly, at this point. You would have a lawyer who is making your deals. Those are kind of givens; it is unlikely that you are paying a lawyer per contract or something. You have a lawyer who is taking a percentage, taking 5%.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You might have a business manager — sorry — a literary manager, someone who is your manager, who is legally not soliciting work on your behalf but is working for you. So that might be another percentage of some money going out.

You are also probably incorporating at some point in this stage. It always used to be, the rule of thumb I always heard is, when you are making more than $200,000 a year consistently…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …then you incorporate. I don’t know if that is still the advice, but…

**Craig:** Yeah. I have heard the…

**John:** Your lawyer would tell you that.

**Craig:** $250,000. I mean because the deal is that there are benefits that come with incorporating but there are also some costs that go along with incorporating. And so the math is to do the cost benefit and the break point where it seems like it evens out is somewhere in that $200,000 to $300,000 a year range. So, you are right. The first thing you have to ask yourself is, “Is this real? Am I actually going to be making this on a year-to-year basis?”

So you have to actually get good at sort of figuring out what your deal is, and whether you have just had one big success that you may not be able to replicate. And the key is year after year. If you sell a script for $1 million in 2013, and then you don’t sell anything in 2014, you would get hurt by the corporate stuff in a weird way, I think.

You need to kind of be able, I think, you need to be able to replicate your success, in some way, year after year after year. And to that end, and it is a little difficult to do sometimes, talk to your agent and say, “Let’s just have a, forget about coddling me, don’t worry about my feelings, let’s just be super realistic so I can plan for my family — for me and for my family. What do we expect?”

**John:** And really, you can only be planning it based on, I think, writing assignments. Because you can’t plan, “I’m going to sell a spec every year.” That is just not going to happen.

**Craig:** You are so right.

**John:** Yeah. You are only going to be making $200,000 to $300,000 a year if you are pretty consistently being hired to write things for people. And, so if you have nested jobs where you are doing a rewrite on something and you are starting a first draft on something else, and that is pretty consistently your life; if there are always two things that are vying for your attention, likely you are going to start to make the kind of money where incorporation makes sense.

But if it is just a situation where you sold one script, then it is not time to incorporate yet. I didn’t incorporate until after Go. So, I had already sold three things — been hired to write three things — but I wasn’t making enough money that it made sense for me to incorporate.

So when I get my residual statements it is really interesting, sort of like a little history lesson.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** The residuals for Go go to John August. The residuals for everything after that point go to my loan-out corporation, because by the time I made the contracts for those other movies I was a loan-out.

Glossary entry here. A loan-out is another word for a corporation. So a loan-out is basically the company; rather than hiring you specifically, they are hiring your corporation. And your corporation is hiring you and loaning you to the company to do the work.

**Craig:** That’s right. Usually people are an S Corp. There are two kinds of California corporations, S Corp… — Actually, it is a federal designation, S Corp and C Corp, I think. And the idea is not to shield you from any legal stuff; it doesn’t. All it really does is give you the benefits of some tax work so that you minimize the amount of tax you pay. That is pretty much what it comes down to. Taxes.

**John:** It does. And when you are saying shield you from taxes, what it lets you do is expenses that you are accruing in business, you are able to take them, to pay for them as the business rather than having to pay for them as an individual.

So, rent on an office, an assistant if you have an assistant, agent fees, other things like that can be taken out on a corporate level before you are writing the check for yourself as an individual.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, essentially, the corporation is paying you on an annual basis, or more often than annually. But in return for that, you have to do quarterly taxes and a lot of other special filings that are a hassle.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, first of all there is an expense involved in just incorporating itself. But, there is another thing, one of the more hated aspects of the tax code is called the Alternative Minimum Tax where basically if you are an individual and you make a lot of money you can write-off a whole bunch of stuff if you want, but then they basically at some point say, “You have still made too much money. We are just going to now add more tax on.” You can’t write-off all that stuff because you are not a business. You are an individual. You couldn’t possibly be doing that much as an individual that is a business expense.

But corporations don’t have alternate minimum taxation. If you run a business and you bring in $1 million, and you spent $1 million to get that $1 million, you have a net taxable income of zippo.

So, while screenwriters don’t have the kind of expenses that go along with a shop, we do have our internet, and our cable, and if we go to see movies for research, and buying books, and traveling, and leasing a car, and all this other stuff. Oh, like I have an office, you know, so my rent here. And all of that gets taken off of the amount.

So, right off the bat, you have to talk to your accountant if it is time for you to incorporate and you incorporate. And I would say every single professional screenwriter we know that has been working for more than a couple of years is incorporated.

**John:** Yeah. Now I want to back up, because my understanding when I first formed a loan-out was that there was some legal shielding, that there were good reasons for, like, not losing your house for going through a loan-out rather than going directly, making a contract directly. But that is not your understanding?

**Craig:** Eh, they call it “piercing the veil,” where if you have a corporation that is really just you, and your corporation incurs some kind of legal liability, they will go after you. They can go after the officers of the company if their feeling is that people are individually doing wrong, but then hiding behind a corporation as if the corporation did wrong. There are fewer protections than you would think.

Now, that said, I should point out we don’t have that problem as screenwriters, because the only real liability we can incur is when a studio…

For instance, when The Hangover, when Warner Brothers, and Hangover Part II, and Todd Phillips, and I, and Scott Armstrong were all sued by this kooky guy who claimed that we stole his life, I got served papers until he withdrew the suit. But in our deals with the studios, they always indemnify us. They always say, basically, “You say that you didn’t steal it and we promise to cover your legal fees and all the rest of it if you are sued.”

So, given that, because I don’t really know what other legal liability we could incur.

**John:** But couldn’t it be sexual harassment or some other kind of discrimination?

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** I just could envision some other things which they might go after you differently as a corporation.

**Craig:** That’s true. I guess, like, for instance if you are on a set and you do something to sexually harass somebody. The point is, no, your corporation is not going to protect you from that because your corporation didn’t sexually harass somebody, you did. [laugh] And they are too smart for it.

I mean you can’t… — Maybe I suppose in some narrow place it might be advantageous legally, but really what it comes down to is taxes.

**John:** Yeah. Now on the subject of taxes, at this stage you would likely have an accountant who is figuring out your taxes, because your taxes would be more complicated than what you are likely to be able to do with just simple Quicken and the tax software.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It gets more complicated. A lot of people will have a business manager. I had a business manager right about the time that I formed the loan-out corporation. But I think you don’t. Is that still the case?

**Craig:** I do not. Yeah. I do have a tax guy who handles my taxes. And I have obviously an investment guy who handles investments. But when it comes to… — Business managers tend to do things like pay your bills, calculate the taxes that you might expect to owe and make the installations, handle your payroll. Because one of the quirks of being a loan-out company is that you tend to have to employ a payroll service to make it seem like a real company. So you actually pay yourself from one account to another, which is a bit odd. And then they handle things like your dues and, I don’t know, stuff like that.

I do all of that on Quicken. It is not that hard, you know. So I take 45 minutes every third day, pay my bills, do it all through Quicken. Bing, bang boom and I am done.

**John:** Yeah. So I have a business manager so I don’t do that. And partly it is because I will be gone on a set and I won’t be able to think about that stuff. I will just submarine into a project, and I won’t come out for a long time, and stuff wouldn’t get done otherwise, which is just the reality of sort of my life and my situation.

The danger of having a business manager, I would say, is it can insulate you from the realities of your money.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the people who run into problems, they really have no sense of how much money they have or what they could be doing or should be doing, and that can be very dangerous. So I think it is less likely that your business manager is going to rip you off. It is more likely that you are not going to be paying attention to how much money you actually have and will get into trouble because of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, there are two problems with business managers as far as I can tell. One is precisely what you said, that you become infantilized to some extent, and everybody is different, and I suspect that you are pretty grown up about it. But some people really do in an almost child-like way hire these people to be their mommy and daddy, almost like they are living on an allowance from these people. And so they don’t know what their liabilities are, and they are not really in control of their destiny. The other problem is that they cost 5% often, and that is a lot of money.

Any percentage of what a very successful screenwriter makes is an enormous amount of money for what oftentimes amounts to somebody who is basically doing what I am doing 45 minutes every few days on Quicken.

**John:** Yup. I’m paying a flat monthly fee…

**Craig:** Okay, that’s better.

**John:** …which is, I think, a little bit more reasonable.

**Craig:** Yes. And that is fine. And I would say that I am in the minority, probably, of screenwriters in that I don’t use a business manager, but I do stay on top of my money and I know where it is. I like to have control of these things.

**John:** Yeah. On sort of control, insurance is the kind of thing that you are going to start thinking about more as you get into six figures. So you will have health insurance through the WGA. If you are working consistently, you are going to have health insurance, which is great. But you may need disability insurance, which was a real surprise when it was first raised to me.

As presented to me, disability insurance is important if your earning potential is much greater than your actual assets are going to be. So, as it was explained to me, and you can correct me if you feel that I am misspeaking, if I got hit by a bus and was no longer able to write, at a certain stage in my career that would have been really catastrophic because everything I could have made I would not be able to make anymore, and that was going to be a real problem. Now that my assets are bigger than sort of the money that I can make over a couple of years, it is less of a factor.

But for a time, it was really important that we find somebody to give me disability insurance. It ended up being, like, Lloyd’s of London to protect me in that situation.

**Craig:** You are absolutely right in the way you described it. I never did it. And I didn’t do it because there were a couple of problems. One, when you get disability insurance as a screenwriter, it is a little punitive because they are going to presume that whatever money you made this year, or whatever money you made in the most, that is what they are going to have to pay out. So they jack your premiums up pretty high. And the truth is, what disability short of brain damage is going to incur in such a way as to keep me from writing. If you smash my fingers I can still write. If I get hit by a bus, and I am laid up for a few months, I can still write. It is not like we drive a bus or use our eyesight. I mean, we can be blinded. [laughs] I started running down the list of stuff where it was so extreme that, basically, it was far more likely that I would be dead than disabled to the point where I couldn’t write anymore. So…

**John:** Yes. A traumatic head injury; that’s always my favorite.

**Craig:** Pretty much traumatic head injury. Eh, I don’t know. It is a little bit like earthquake insurance. Like, for instance, here in California, the State of California requires insurers to offer the option of earthquake insurance or they are not allowed to basically sell any insurance in the state. The insurers, of course, turned back to California and said, “We can’t offer earthquake insurance. It is impossible, because when an earthquake happens we are going to be bankrupted.”

So they came up with this nonsense called the Fair Plan, where basically they charge you a very high amount of money and, in exchange for that amount of money, you are insured against earthquakes. But you are not really insured against earthquakes because there is a premium. So if there is earthquake damage, you have to pay 20%, I think, of the value of your house just right off the bat.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then they cover the rest of the structure. But the point is there is never 20% damage to your house. It is like 5% or all of it. So if it is all of it, just walk away. If it is 5%, you are not going to get any insurance money anyway. So very few people take the earthquake insurance, and that is kind of the way I saw disability.

I’m sure people are going to write in angrily and say that I am insane and I should get it, but…

**John:** Yeah. And I am not sure it is going to be as important for you to get it at this stage in your career as it was a couple of years ago.

**Craig:** So I got away with something. [laughs]

**John:** You snuck away with it.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Look at my friends Chad and Dara. They just recently got disability insurance because they are at exactly that stage in their career where their earning potential is much greater than their actual assets would be at this point.

**Craig:** Right. That makes sense.

**John:** And life insurance is a similar situation where life insurance is important for a family up to a certain point of income, up to a certain point of assets. But once the assets are actually significantly bigger than the yearly income it is not as big a deal.

**Craig:** It is not as big a deal. And obviously, the older you get it becomes less and less important.

**John:** Now simpler decisions, I think they are simpler decisions, for younger people who are facing this is your student loans. And I think I see people rush to pay off their student loans, which I think can be a mistake. Student loans are the cheapest loans you are going to find outside of a mortgage. If the money is burning a hole in your pocket, I guess better to pay off your student loans than buy a fancy car.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it is not the best use of your money.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, let’s talk about loans in general, because as you make money you do… — Look, you don’t need to become obsessed with finances. I actually, I don’t really like the subject of money. And when I say I don’t like it, it is not that it turns me off, it is just not… — I don’t have any passion for it.

But it behooves us to at least know some basics. And one of the basics of finance is what is the cost of money, what is the interest rate, what do people charge you for loans. And right now they are at historically low rates.

Student loans have traditionally always been artificially low because they are supported by the government, to some extent. And you are right; if you can, there are some kinds of loans that are good to have. I have a mortgage. I could pay off my mortgage, but I don’t because the interest is deductible for my taxes. I might as well just hold on to that money, let it grow at a certain rate, take the tax benefit, and if it is such time that rates should move in such a way that it doesn’t make sense, then I will pay it.

So, there are certain kinds of loans where it is okay to have. Here are the loans that are not okay. So, yes, student loans, yes. Mortgages, yes. Smart mortgages. Credit cards. Never.

**John:** Yes. You should never. And if you are making this much money you should never be carrying a balance on your credit cards. That is ridiculous.

**Craig:** Ever. I mean, I don’t care what you make. If you’re…

**John:** But particularly at this level of the podcast you should not be paying less than everything.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because credit card interest rates are always much, much higher than what you can get in the bank, and oftentimes wildly higher to the point of usury. You see rates of 17%, 18%, 19%, 20% when the prime rate right now is almost zero. Money is almost free at this point.

So, get all of your money off your credit cards. If you have any on your credit cards it is insane. And then start, I would say the next best thing you could do is figure out retirement, which seems a little weird, because I started thinking about that when I was 21. But it is the best savings, the best investment you can make.

**John:** Yeah. So, to back up a little bit, if you have a loan-out corporation, one of the advantages of your loan-out corporation is you can set up a pension plan.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that is one way to sort of divert some of your money to that pension that is in your name. And you can’t sock away all that much money, but you can sock away some money, and that helps.

Writers Guild has a pension. It is not going to be a ton.

**Craig:** Well, it depends on what you earn and how many years you have earned. I mean, it could be nice.

**John:** Yeah. But most of what you are thinking about for retirement is really just the money you didn’t spend. That’s the money you earned that you stuck in an account and forgot about. And that is your retirement.

**Craig:** Well, there is, look, level one as you alluded to, there are what they call Qualified Plans. A Qualified Plan is any kind of investment plan where you put your money in, specifically for retirement. You can’t touch it until you are 65; if you do there are penalties. But if you can be good, and not touch it until you are 65, there is a tremendous tax savings on that money.

Traditionally, you don’t actually get taxed on that income. So if you can sock away, and when you have a corporation you are right, you can set up your own 401(k) plan. Maybe you put in $40,000. That is $40,000 untaxed dollars. And when you are a big shot screenwriter, your tax rate is nearly half. So, that’s a lot of money that you are saving right then and there.

So, job number one is maximize as much as you can into a Qualified Plan. It saves a huge amount of money.

Then, I think the next thing that you are talking about is saving. The lost art of saving.

**John:** Yeah. Keeping the money. Just don’t spend it. Don’t be Derek Haas and set up your line of credit at the Hard Rock Casino.

**Craig:** Well, you know, you can, because I have gambled with Derek, and he is like a leprechaun.

So, like, he has a line of credit and then amazingly… — I didn’t understand how that line of credit stuff works, and then I did it with him. We were at the Wynn. So, you open up a line of credit, let’s say for $10,000. And then you sit down at a table and you say, “I want a marker for $2,000.” So they give you $2,000. You don’t have to give them any cash. And then they have you sign a check, and the check is to them for $2,000. Right.

Then, let’s say you win, and now you have $4,000 in chips. You go to the cashier and you say, “I would like to buy back my marker.” And you give them $2,000 in chips and they come back and they give you that check and you rip it up. And ripping that thing up is the greatest feeling in the world. It is actually, really; it is like a huge dopamine reward. Super… — God, gambling is pernicious.

**John:** Yeah. It’s all the fun of destruction, plus there is money involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. And just like how cool — you are like, “Look at me. I’m ripping up a check! Screw you. I win.”

**John:** On a less dopamine-inducing aspect of money, if we are talking about retirement, I think we have to be honest about the lifecycle of a screenwriter.

And so you are unlikely to be making this six figures for your whole career. And your whole career may be a lot shorter than you would like it to be. There are not many screenwriters in their 50s who are making that much money.

And that is the issue, is that your maximum earning as a screenwriter tends to come in maybe, it’s not your first year. It is probably years five through ten.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And after that point, some people will continue to make a ton of money, but most people won’t so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, what they don’t… — Everybody has their eye on what they call their big break, where you break into the business. And no one tells you that right after the break is a cliff where almost everyone that got their break falls off the cliff. And this is what is so, and frankly, it has gotten worse as far as I can tell. It is a harder business to stay alive in, because when you and I broke into the business Hollywood was making way more movies.

Now they make fewer, which means they develop fewer, which means they hire fewer of us, which means there are fewer of us.

When people ask, “How long can I expect to work in this business?” obviously the answer varies wildly according to your talent and your abilities to make your weight. But let’s just talk about averages. Not long. In truth, it is a bit like professional sports where a lot of people get their break, they play for a season or two seasons, and then they hurt themselves, or they just don’t quite click. And they are gone.

And there are guys who work five years and then are gone. There are people who work ten years and then are gone. To have a career that goes more than 20 years, you are in rarified air. You are in limited territory. There are not many of us. Look, I am on year 16 right now. You probably are similar to that I would imagine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would like to think I can get another four years. I would like to think I can hit that big 20 year mark. I think I will, but to be one of those guys that can put together… — Look, when I look at some of the names of people that say to me, “I’m having trouble finding work,” my heart sinks. It is a very difficult thing to make an actual, real career out of this.

And, please, for those of you who do have that wonderful day where you get that break, do not confuse that with a career. That is the beginning. In fact, the hardest work is yet to come. So, be prepared for that. If you are, you have got a shot.

**John:** Yeah. What I will say is you and I are approaching this from a pure screenwriting point of view, where we are writing screenplays that will become movies. Some A-list writers and sort of near A-list writers transition to TV and do other amazing things because TV is better in many ways. And sometimes people extend their career at the edges of what is a traditional screenwriting career.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So there are other things other than just falling back and teaching at a university, but it is important to be realistic about how much time a person ends up having a screenwriting career.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know, there is also something very cruel about the way the business functions. There is this famous experiment that was done many years ago with rats where they would put them in a cage, and then they would flash a green light, and then shock the bottom of the cage. And they had another cage where they would just shock them occasionally, but there was no green light. And the rats in the green light cage lived twice as long because they were able to prepare for the pain.

But random jolts of pain are disturbing. Similarly, random jolts of success are disturbing. And, you know, Pavlov found out that if you didn’t always reward the dog when you rang the bell, but occasionally, it was even a stronger effect, because there was this anxiety of maybe this time. That’s why casinos function so well. And screenwriting can do that to people. I have seen people just go for years and years, and then there is this burst of activity, and like, finally, it is going to be okay.

And they ride that for another three or four very difficult, difficult years. And then it happens again, or it doesn’t, and I have to say at some point, you turn around and go, “Wait a second, did I just waste 15 years of my life in panic?” And it is just a very hard career.

I have to say, of all the arguments that the Writers Guild make to the studios about why we should be paid more, or how we should be paid, or two-step deals and all the rest of it, I do feel one of the strongest arguments we make is that the studios have effectively made this, it’s like it’s not a career anymore. They have ruined it.

I don’t know why anybody would get into this as a 21-year-old expecting to be able to support a family and make it to retirement as a screenwriter. It is just brutal.

**John:** Well that was a very depressing look at six figure advice, which really wasn’t meant to be so depressing. If you are making six figures, that’s good. It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. Congratulations, you are making six figures.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we realize that this is sort of esoteric advice because most people aren’t going to have a screenwriting career that gets them to that point and they won’t need to incorporate, but we always get those kinds of questions. And when we talk to real screenwriters who are working, some of the first questions they ask is, “Hey, do I need to incorporate? What should I do? Do I need insurance?” And so we thought we would talk about that.

On a future date, we will talk about seven figure advice, because then everything changes, because then you are looking at, well, like what kind of wood is best for the yacht that you are building.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And where can I legally kill and eat a panda.

**John:** Yes. And then there is eight figure advice, which is really esoteric because I don’t think there is any screenwriter who makes eight figures.

**Craig:** Not in one year. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. Not in one year.

**John:** I think a couple of the super producers make eight figures in a year, but there is no screenwriter. And precious few directors make eight figures a year.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know one who definitely had a pretty good year.

**John:** I don’t want to… — One who you are working with who had a very good, lucky year.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know how lucky, but definitely it was… — He earned it, but man, that was a big year.

Yeah. I have to say, in summary, that if you are making six figures, I am thrilled for you and frankly any depression I have is related to the fact that it has become harder to become one of those people. And I want screenwriting to be a successful, viable career where people can actually work at it for the big bulk of their productive years. And right now, the squeeze is very difficult. And I do think that the studios are going to have to confront the fact that they are depleting their farm system in a dangerous way. And screenwriters need to be nurtured just like anything else.

**John:** Yup. We are the research and development for the film industry. And if they cut the R&D, then innovation will suffer, and things will get very, very bad.

**Craig:** Very, very bad.

**John:** I was just talking with a mutual friend of ours who is now segueing out of screenwriting and into digital development, so doing stuff for the iPhone and for other applications. And so she was meeting with VC people, and the VC people would say, “Oh, we like your idea but we only write like $10 million checks. We don’t really do the $3.5 million checks.”

And I was torn between my desire to congratulate her, I guess, and find those people and either throttle them or take their wallets.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I feel what we are mostly wrestling with here is just a lack of money. And if we could open up some purse strings here, I think there would be a happier time for a lot of us.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t see that happening any time in the near future.

**John:** Yeah. We need another Village Roadshow or some other outside entity, to come in with a lot of money, and start throwing money around. And they will make stupid choices, but their stupid choices benefit us greatly.

**Craig:** I think even more than that, what would be useful is a new market. You know, whatever, if they could figure out downloads in a way that was really awesome or, I don’t know. It is getting tough out there man.

**John:** Yeah. But you know what? It won’t be our generation that figures it out. It will be the next generation.

**Craig:** We will be old and doddering in our chairs watching the world burn around us, giggling into our glasses of panda blood.

**John:** Do you know who is going to benefit from it?

**Craig:** No, who?

**John:** The kids at the Cinema School in the Bronx.

**Craig:** Those kids.

**John:** Those kids will figure it all out.

**Craig:** Those kids are going to graduate and go, “Wait, what?! I get what?! I’m going to earn…oh God.”

**John:** Those fools.

**Craig:** “I should have gone to pre-med.”

**John:** Yeah.

Craig, thank you for another podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. It was a good one.

**John:** I will talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/good-actors-and-bad-writing-partners).

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

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

**John:** This is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screen writers.

How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m doing fine today. How are you, sir?

**John:** Very well. We are recording this on Halloween, so I should ask you, how has your Halloween been so far?

**Craig:** Nothing Halloweenie has happened yet, although my wife did say this morning something that I never thought I would hear her say. “I’m going out to get the dog a costume.”

**John:** You’ve hit that phase, haven’t you?

**Craig:** We have a new dog. She’s a Labradoodle puppy. She’s 15 weeks old. And it was kind of a fight to get my wife to even agree to have a dog, just as it was a fight to get her to agree to have a child and then a second child. So this is why it’s so improbable, but here she is getting her a costume.

**John:** What’s interesting is because Halloween is falling on a Monday this year, for people with kids, Halloween is still the actual Halloween day. It’s like that’s when we’re doing the actual trick or treating and that kind of stuff. But for people like Stuart, my assistant, who’s in his mid twenties, this whole last weekend has been Halloween. It’s been like a long blur from Friday, to Saturday, to Sunday of Halloween activities. It’s a generational observation, I would say.

**Craig:** Halloween is certainly an enormous amount of fun when you’re in your twenties. It’s another great excuse to get drunk, plus girls… Somewhere along the line, everybody sort of made the observation that every costume became sexy blank. So whatever it is, sexy.

It’s basically, “Let’s see your boobs.” So it’s a pretty good holiday actually for straight guys. But once you have your kids, it really is flashlights and traffic safety. [laughs] Totally different experience!

**John:** In Los Angeles, we do our trick or treating on that actual holiday. My husband grew up in Columbus, Ohio where they actually moved the day of trick or treating, so they will decide as a city or as a village what day they’re going to do trick or treating. I guess it’s because of football. They don’t want to compete with the local high school football game. But they would do their trick or treating on like say, the 26th.

**Craig:** That’s not cool.

**John:** It’s bizarre. I could imagine there being good reasons for doing it. It just seems like creating more problems for yourself.

**Craig:** There was an article about a guy who owns those — I don’t know what you call these, like — popup stores that just appear about a month and a half before Halloween, sell costumes and then disappear on November 1st. And he’s a billionaire.

One of the things he’s been trying to get the country to do is establish the last Saturday in October as Halloween for safety reasons more than anything else, I guess. I don’t know why. It was cuckoo. — It was to make money. I’m sorry. I forgot, it was so he could make more money. But it had something to do with safety.

**John:** For a holiday that was created by Pagans to celebrate some sort of God, or Samhain or killing of things, it is strange it has become the thing it has become.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before. I’m really fascinated with Jack Chick who writes Chick Tracts, the super fundamentalist Christian tracts. He really hates Halloween, so I always check on his site to see whatever his latest tract is about how basically Halloween is Satan crawling inside kids and sending them to Hell. It’s awesome.

**John:** He’s probably right.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** On the topic of things evolving beyond what they originally were created to do, just today we announced Screenwriting.io which is a new spin-off site we’re doing for johnaugust.com. And it actually got me looking back through what I’ve been doing on the site since the beginning.

So johnaugust.com, it really started that I was answering these questions for IMDb. They had this Ask a Filmmaker column and they asked me to be one of the guest columnists for that. I ended up being a guest columnist for three years. But it started back in 2000 and it was hard for me to believe that it was all the way back in 2000 that I started doing this.

People would write in questions to IMDb and I would answer their questions. They would write into IMDb and then an editor there would go through the questions and pick out the best of them, email me and I would email back answers. I was publishing through a third party. It was all very basic and very HTML-y. It was an interesting thing for me to do at the time.

I became frustrated that I would answer the same kinds of questions again and again. For a site that was setup to be about searching and finding information, it was really hard to find the prettiest questions. So I did johnaugust.com as sort of a way answering those questions more definitively on my own timetable with the hope that once I answered a question, it could actually kind of stay answered for awhile.

And so for a long time, I was answering all of those questions and eventually, I got tired of answering those questions and the site sort of progressed beyond just those questions. So today, we’re introducing a new site that’s just back to that spirit of answering those really simple questions about things like, “What is a slug line?” or, “Do I have to format screenplays in a certain way?” It will be interesting to see.

**Craig:** That’s great. And out of curiosity, .io, where is that?

**John:** .io, I think is technically the Indian Ocean. So .io has become a newly popular domain extension because it’s short and it’s kind of feels like it could be part of a word. It’s the same way .us became something folded into Delicious and other sort of things. .io is sort of a new thing.

So it’s exciting. It’s actually been in beta for awhile, that we’ve been figuring out how to do this. And now, we’re launching it upon the unsuspecting public to see how they like it.

**Craig:** Another excellent service from the John August empire!

**John:** I think the empire is what we’re going for. But on the topic of questions people write in seeking answers, I thought we might just do some viewer mail today.

**Craig:** Yeah, viewer mail!

**John:** Now you were just at the Austin Film Festival and you got to talk to some people who listen to the podcast.

**Craig:** So many more, than I thought would be. Dozens of people came up to me, all very, very pleased with the podcast. They listen to it. I did write down — because there were a lot of parties and mostly you just get drunk and talk to people — I was very drunk when I sent an email to myself saying, “Remember to mention Stacy Ashworth on the podcast.” She was there. She really wanted us to say her name. I can’t remember the rest of the context. But Stacy, I followed through.

**John:** That is your Casey Kasem dedication for Stacy Ashworth.

**Craig:** That’s my long distance dedication, I guess.

**John:** I love it.

Here are some questions that came into the site and I thought we would just take a few minutes to answer them. First is from Mike from Twitter. Who knows where Mike actually lives, because on Twitter, you could live anywhere. Mike asks, “I know bad actors can ruin a great script, but can great actors improve a terrible script?”

**Craig:** They can improve a terrible scene, but I don’t think they can improve a terrible script. I mean, I would watch two terrific actors read any bad scene from any movie and I would be fascinated by the two and a half minutes it took. But a movie is a collection of scenes taken as a whole to create a narrative. I just don’t think great acting can save bad narrative over the course of an hour and a half.

**John:** I would say that in terms of a comedy — because sometimes a film comedy can actually just be a collection of very, very funny moments that somehow all holds together in a way that is rewarding. It’s hard for me to say that some of my favorite comedies…

Like Stripes isn’t a very good movie, but I enjoy the movie because I enjoy the performances. I enjoy what happens in it. Sometimes comedies, yes, a great performance, great actors can make something happen that couldn’t otherwise work.

**Craig:** The criticism that you usually hear about Stripes is that third act just kind of falls apart, and that’s sort of true.

**John:** Once the RV shows up, it’s a very different movie.

**Craig:** They kind of give up. But I have to say, that could have been fixed and it could have been even better. It’s why Stripes, for instance, isn’t as good as Groundhog Day, or I don’t know. It was an interesting time. Caddyshack is actually a better movie to me than Stripes.

But there was some pretty great screenwriting in the first act. I loved the way they set those characters up, so it wasn’t a bad screenplay.

**John:** No. I was sort of picking Stripes as a random example, but I can actually think of a more recent example of something I love that performances are really the reason why I’m loving it. It’s American Horror Story. Are you watching this show?

**Craig:** As you know if you ask me the question, “Are you watching this show?” the answer I’m going to give you for every show is, “No.” [laughs] I’m the worst, but tell me about this.

**John:** Let me tell you about American Horror Story. It comes from the very talented people who do Glee and who did Nip/Tuck before that. It has many of the best and many of the most frustrating qualities of Glee and Nip/Tuck in that it feels like it’s running full speed towards a cliff. And it’s not afraid of the cliff. It’s just going to run as fast as it possibly can towards this cliff.

You’re watching this show and it’s about a family that moves into a house that is obviously haunted in Los Angeles. And it’s not that it’s a slow build to anything, like things happen really, really quick in the show. By episode three, they’re trying to sell the house and move out of the house because they recognize that something really horrible is going on with this house.

There are many aspect of the show that I enjoy, but by far the aspect I enjoy most is Connie Britton, who plays the wife and mother and is just amazing. She’s the glue holding this whole thing together.

You’re watching this show and the experience of watching this show — it’s not even that’s it good or bad. I can’t say that the writing is fantastic or that the writing is the problem. But the feeling of watching this show is, you know when you’re kind of sick and you have Vicks VapoRub on your chest and your mom puts too many blankets on you and you start to smother? That’s the feeling of watching this show.

It’s kind of great and awful at the same time. But she is an example of one actor who can pull something off. I feel like they could give her the absolute worst script possible and I would watch it just because she’s amazing.

**Craig:** Well, there are some actors that definitely cut through anything and they seem to make everything better. Philip Seymour Hoffman, it doesn’t matter what he’s in, and he’s been in some kind of bad movies and he’s been in some amazing movies. But in all movies, I always feel like I’ll just stop and watch him. I can watch an entire movie of him doing nothing — and I think he made that movie with Charlie Kaufman. [laughs]

But, yes. There are actors that sort of strike us in a certain way. But of course, that’s just one actor and what about the rest of them?

A movie that comes to my mind, I saw The Help. The story of The Help is a fairly traditional one and I presume it’s the story that’s in the novel. But Viola Davis is another actor who is so good. I would watch her do anything. She’s amazing.

**John:** I think we’re going to answer this question, “Can great actors improve a terrible script?” Yes. I don’t think they can necessarily pull off the whole movie, but they can certainly improve a scene or a sequence. There are definitely movies that you love where you recognize that the movie itself isn’t really cooking on all burners, but that one actor is sort of making it worth your time watching.

**Craig:** When you say “terrible,” I don’t think you can say “terrible.” But good actors can make mediocre movies very watchable.

**John:** The next question comes from Dan in Los Angeles. “Two writers co-write a feature script. The partnership breaks up. Writer A unilaterally takes the script and with a manager wants to option it at a production company. Writer A asks Writer B to take her name off the script since she is no longer interested in working on it, and the manager thinks it’s a simpler sale if her name is removed. They’re only offering a verbal guarantee that she’ll be compensated.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Dan goes on to say that, “It sounds ridiculous to me and I would like to tell her to get something in writing, but it seems like anything in writing would freak out the manager since it creates a paper trail that there was an uncredited writer.”

**Craig:** [laughs] This is stupid. First of all, great lesson here. When managers are talking, it means you are being lied to. “It will be an easier sale with one name.” No. If it’s a really good script, it would be a perfectly easy sale with four billion names. It could have been written by the country of Pakistan and it would be a perfectly easy sale. People like to buy scripts. They don’t care how many names are on the page.

Now here’s the deal. Writer A and Writer B wrote something together. They are the authors of that script. If somebody wants to develop that script further down the line and Writer B has lost interest, no problem. The script can then be written by Writer A who is now writing separately and as an individual who’s employed.

But under no circumstances for any reason should you ever, ever agree to have your name taken off of a script that you have co-written. That is insane and pointless.

**John:** I agree with you. If you are actually leaving the film industry completely and never have an intention of coming back to it, there might be some circumstances which would kind of make sense. Or if there was such a huge disparity between your name and reputation and their name and reputation, I could see there being some cause for that.

Like one of you is Scott Frank and the other person is someone you have never ever heard of, then I can sort of imagine some scenarios in which this could make sense. But that doesn’t sound like this case at all.

This just sounds like there is a partnership that isn’t working out and one of the writers wants to take the script. And this happens a lot. Writers do get divorced. They break apart and it’s horrible to figure out who gets ownership of what different thing. You have to figure that out and you have to put it in writing. But you’re not going to change history to pretend that one person wrote something and the other person didn’t write something.

**Craig:** No. I mean, actually when it comes to the divorce, the divorce is difficult prospectively for what comes after you split up. It is not a problem at all to figure out who divides up these scripts. The answer is you don’t. It’s like: okay, husband and wife gets divorced. The kids still have a mom and a dad. It doesn’t change.

So that’s it. You don’t take you name off of a script. I don’t think any circumstance really matters unless they were literally shoving bucketfuls of money down your pants. And in this case, they’re not.

**John:** But in terms of scripts you’ve written, I agree that you’re not changing the past and who wrote the things. But moving forward, if you’re not a writing team anymore and one of you is going to be handling it independently, you have to figure that out. So that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** There’re also those things that aren’t quite script, but they’re the ideas you were going to work on.

**Craig:** Those are the perspective issues, the things that are not quite yet written. That’s where it gets tricky. The nice thing about this question is it has a clear answer and the answer is, “Good God, no!”

**John:** Next question. “Hello and Shalom from Ruth in Israel. Flashbacks: I understand they’re often a fallback, reverse the pace, and other commonly cited ills. However, in Slumdog Millionaire and Forrest Gump they work.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Let me confess that this was an incredibly long question, like paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs. I just excerpted it to two sentences I found most interesting and then the third sentence was, “How do you feel about this?”

**Craig:** I’m glad you said that because it sounded to me it was a question where somebody said, “What do you think about flashbacks? In these two movies it works. Should you never do this?” Obviously in those two movies it worked. So the answer to that question is: no, you shouldn’t never do it. Flashbacks are a perfectly good instrument to use as long as they’re interesting.

I like to think of flashbacks as having certain requirements that other things don’t have. They either have to be very short and very funny or they have to add a revelation that re-contextualizes the character for you in an exciting way. So you don’t use them for boring purposes like figuring out what that guy had for breakfast that morning. A good flashback can be awesome.

**John:** I think it’s worth asking why flashbacks get such a bad rep, and it’s because they’re used so horribly in so many screenplays. You so often see a flashback that is setting up some piece of, “this is what it was like when he was a boy” and the flashback was over and it’s like, “I didn’t care about that. I really didn’t need to know what it was like when he was a boy. I didn’t need to know why he put on the blue jumper at that moment.”

Flashbacks work in the kinds of movies that need flashbacks to move forward. Either your story is the kind of story that supports flashbacks or it’s not going to support flashbacks, but if your script has one flashback, it’s probably an indication that you should have no flashbacks in your script at all. It’s a kind of screenwriting device that you’re either going to use a fair amount in your screenplay or not at all.

**John:** Another reason why flashbacks get a bad rep is because screenwriters use them to paper over their mistakes. Typically example is, you’re doing a thriller, just the audience doesn’t understand the logic of how this character knew that a woman was going to be there at a certain time and he says, “Well,” and then you flash back and see that he was following her. Well, that’s just dumb.

You’re literally using a flashback to plug a hole in your story and it’s unsatisfying. It’s dramatically boring. We had a flashback in Hangover 2 which I thought was interesting. Because we learn something about the character of Zack and the way he sees the world — or rather Alan — and the way he sees the world around him. Everybody is a 12-year-old boy to him that he likes. So it’s fun.

**John:** By the way, that flashback in Hangover 2, I don’t know if we talked about it on the podcast itself, that was ridiculously difficult to do. That was one of the most impressive sequences in the movie because clearly you had to bring in those 12-year-old boys to re-shoot half of what you were shooting in the movie, which was great.

**Craig:** It was. I remember Todd was saying, “I can’t believe we’re doing this because I have to shoot the movie twice,” and some of those scenes were big scenes like a riot in the middle of Bangkok. It’s like you finally finished it, “All right, now bring in the kids and let’s do it again.” It was an enormously big thing to do and, frankly, we didn’t know if it was going to work.

The first time we ran the movie for an audience that flashback came and went and it wasn’t quite rolling laughs and we thought, “Oh no, that was a big waste of time.” It was the only time in my career that reading the cards helped. What happens is you test a movie and everyone gives you the score and usually you can tell from the score and the response what the deal is and you don’t read the cards which is everybody’s comment.

Famously they’re really crudely rendered opinions.

**John:** — Written on a pencil on somebody’s knee, so they’re really hard to read anyway.

**Craig:** — By a guy that’s high. Card after card people singled that out. It wasn’t so much that they were laughing, but they were fascinated by that, so we kept it. You can certainly use flashbacks. Make them interesting and make the important dramatically. A great example of a movie that uses flashbacks brilliantly is Dead Again, which is almost all flashbacks. The whole movie’s flashbacks and it works great.

**John:** A similar kind of problem is with voice over. Voice over is used so terribly in so many movies that it’s become the, “Oh, you need to avoid voice over no matter what you do.” It’s because it’s used badly to pepper over problems and to get around situations that should be resolved in a completely different way.

Any time you see something advised that you should never do something in screenplays, you need to take a big step back and recognize there’s a reason why people try to avoid it, but there’s also probably a reason why it’s awesome when it’s done just right.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Fourth question. Connor from London writes, and I picked sort of an international sampling as you see. London, Connor. “I’m currently at a film school in London studying screenwriting. For someone living an ocean and a country away from Los Angeles, I was wondering what you would recommend. I want to work in the US, however I’m unsure about the best way to approach it. My tutors urge me to stay in Britain and work in the British film industry, yet the number of opportunities available to me over here are dwindling by the day. I’m 19. I write bigger, high concept comedies and I don’t have an agent. What do you recommend?”

**Craig:** Obviously this advice has to be given in the context presuming that Connor is talented. If Connor is not talented it doesn’t matter where he lives. [laughs] However, if we are to presume that Connor has what it takes to write big budget action movies —

**John:** — It says high concept comedies.

**Craig:** — High concept comedies, I’m sorry. Yes, I would probably recommend the move. I would say Los Angeles. I have some friends that live in the UK, a friend that lives in Ireland and works in the movie business there. It’s difficult. It gets more and more difficult. You are relying not only on the dwindling private sector but also a cash strapped government, because a lot of film is publicly financed there. It’s just on a different scale.

You will find that if you are making very specific, smart, smaller comedies you can probably get away with that in the UK a little more easily than you can here where things have to appeal to an international audience. From what he describes, I think I’d say: yeah, move. You’re 19, you don’t have kids, you don’t have a spouse.

**John:** I think you should move. If you want to write smart, little comedies he could do a good job there. Between the movies that get made and the television that gets made there, there’s a lot he could do in Britain, but if he’s trying to write bigger feature comedies he has to go to a place where they make bigger feature comedies and that’s Los Angeles.

I always say if you want to write country songs you should probably move to Nashville because that’s where they write country songs. Also, he’s 19-years-old. It’s much easier to pick up and move at 19-years-old than it will be at 30-years-old, so the fact that he has few burdens on him, he can come to the US on a student visa, take classes at USC or wherever he’s going to do it, and get started.

**Craig:** Yeah. Go for it man. If it doesn’t work out take a mulligan, fly back home. I spoke at BAFTA LA, which is a pretty good organization that connects people from England who out here trying to make their way in the business, so you can network with your fellow countryman and find your way.

**John:** Come. Los Angeles is nice.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** It’s really nice this time of year. We don’t have the burdens of snow and rain. It can be a nice place to come.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Do it.

**John:** Craig, it was fun answering some listener questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those were pretty good questions, I have to say. I like that we were hitting multiple continents this time. This is nice. I’d love to see the vast reach of the John August empire extend into deeper Asia perhaps.

**John:** It’s actually fun because looking at people who come to just the website I’m able to track who comes from different places, and you get these weird little pockets. Obviously the US, Australia, Great Britain are going to be the largest ones, but a lot of readers in Germany. I guess that’s partly because so many people in Germany speak English and it’s easy for them to fall onto the blog.

You get South Africa hits and stuff like that. There are also just weird little pockets in India you get people listening.

**Craig:** Welcome our Indian listeners. It would be nice, I think, for people to not only write in with questions but if there’s a topic you want us to talk about, we have an ability to blather for half an hour about almost anything.

**John:** It’s really a skill that we’ve honed over years and years.

**Craig:** Honed. Carefully honed.

**John:** Well, Craig. Happy Halloween. I hope the trick or treating goes really well. What costumes are your kids going for this year?

**Craig:** My daughter’s going to be a witch.

**John:** Classic?

**Craig:** Yes, classic. She needs the green face paint. That’s what they’re hunting for today. And my son is for just

**John:** — [hesitates]

**Craig:** — Yes? Go ahead.

**John:** Granted, the green face paint is very classic and it’s very wicked witch sort of thing, but I feel with the rise of Hermione Granger and the Hogwarts of it all you could go for a non-verdant face.

**Craig:** No, no. Listen, she watches “The Wizards of Waverly Place. She’s entirely steeped in the world of the neo-witch and she’s basically said, “I’m a classic Margaret Hamilton witch girl. Green face.” I think mostly she wants the makeup, frankly. She’s firm on that. My son is going to be, like so many 10-year-old boys, a nondescript commando working for some unidentified military unit that allows you to carry Nerf guns.

**John:** Will there be some black camouflage or anything like that?

**Craig:** There’s going to be some camo, yeah. Going to be a little bit of camo. We’ll be walking around with those two. Then the dog, I’m as excited as you are.

**John:** By the way, there could not be a safer Halloween costume for trick or treating at night than camouflage.

**Craig:** Exactly. The only costume that’s more dangerous is dressing as pavement, which I will be doing.

**John:** We don’t know what the dog’s going to be dressed as.

**Craig:** It’s a big surprise.

What about you and the family?

**John:** We are trick or treating in a nearby neighborhood. Our neighborhood is actually surprisingly difficult for trick or treating because we’re on a hill. It’s 30 steps up to get to our front door from the street. No kid is going to walk up 30 steps. You’re going to burn up the fun sized Snicker Bar just getting up to our front door. We have very few trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.

Just blocks away in the Zak Penn neighborhood wonderland of trick or treating. In fact, I’ve helped out Josh Friedman trick or treating sometimes at his house and they’ll get like 1,000 kids.

**Craig:** Wow. You should definitely knock on Zak’s door and report back on what he’s giving out.

**John:** It’ll be good stuff.

**Craig:** If it’s not good stuff we should have words with him for sure.

**John:** I think so, because he’s doing well. He’s got a TV show, he’s rewriting a zillion movies. He’s doing great.

**Craig:** He’s Zak freaking Penn.

**John:** He is Zak Penn.

My daughter’s going to be Wonder Woman for the fourth year in a row. She’s a girl that makes up her mind, sticks with her mind. Wonder Woman, by the way, has a fantastic both mission and genesis. First of all, she’s made out of sand. She’s made out of beach sand that’s been brought to life.

**Craig:** I did not know that. I thought she was just part of that tribe?

**John:** She is. She’s Amazonian, but her actual genesis, and I don’t know at what point this got retconned. Her mother wanted a daughter so she fashioned her out of sand on the beach and the gods brought her to life. That’s why of all the Amazonians, she’s the most powerful of all of them.

**Craig:** Her mom gave her that chest? She gave her huge sand boobs? Thank you. Thanks mom. You’re cool.

**John:** She’s pretty great. The other amazing thing about Wonder Woman is her missions in life, she also wants to beat up bad guys like all heroes do, but she’s also more about social justice and making the world a better place, whereas Batman, for instance, has more limited ways of seeing the world.

**Craig:** Batman doesn’t care about that stuff. Batman votes Ron Paul.

**John:** I think so. We’re going to save the Dark Knight, the Frank Millers and all that, for later in her education. I will say if you have a young daughter, I’ll put a link to it, there’s this amazing My First Reader Wonder Woman book that is incredibly girl positive and the illustrations in it she looks like a teenager girl and not a voluptuously slutty Amazonian warrior.

**Craig:** Losing interest. Losing interest. [laughs]

**John:** But for your daughter.

**Craig:** For my daughter, yes, of course…

**John:** Happy Halloween and Happy Halloween to our listeners who will be getting this the day after Halloween probably. Keep sending in your questions and you can also become friends with us or like us or whatever action you’d like to take on the Facebook page, which will be set up by the time this is posted, and follow us there.

**Craig:** Awesome man. Good podcast.

**John:** Thank you. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Bye guys.