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The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/screenwriting-in-color).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 494 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Movies are written in black and white but filmed in color, except for Mank which is about the writing of a screenplay for a black and white movie, so the general point still stands that screenwriters must think about color. And today on the show that is exactly what we’ll do.

We will also have a new round of the Three Page Challenge with a special focus on how opening scenes are setting up the reader for the movie that follows. And, of course, we’ll answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members Craig and I will discuss our Olympic ambitions.

**Craig:** Oh, we have those?

**John:** Or maybe you had those at one point.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** Like our sort of fantasy. If you could be good at one Olympic sport in winter and summer games which sport would it be and why?

**Craig:** Oh, OK. That’s fun.

**John:** We might also talk about sort of whether we should have the Olympics and sort of the international implications thereof.

**Craig:** I think that’s also a pretty good – that will get us in trouble. And I want trouble.

**John:** No troubles at all there. But Craig I don’t know if you heard. The WGA is on strike.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** As we record this the WGA is on strike against the ABC quiz show called The Chase.

**Craig:** Oh god. No. No!

**John:** Not your episode of The Chase. So The Chase is this quiz show that opponents in it are big Jeopardy! winners. Like Ken Jennings and folks. And so it is a show that is going into its second season of filming in theory and the WGA has not been able to reach a contract with this show. And we talk about on our podcast how the WGA covers things made for big screens and for small screens, including game shows. The WGA covers shows like Jeopardy! and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link. This is a show that should be covered by that same kind of deal.

So, the writers on that show are currently on strike.

**Craig:** Hmm. See, I’m looking at the information here. It seems like ITV America, which is the company that produces The Chase, does have an agreement with the Writers Guild of America East, which is kind of the necessary substrate for a strike. You can’t have a strike if you don’t actually have a relationship I think with the company, or if you voted for a contract, or whatever. Anyway, the point being they have a deal with the WGA-E, and they’re apparently just not abiding by it.

**John:** Well, it sounds like there are things that are in that deal that are not up to the level of what a deal needs to be. And so those writers need pension and health benefits. They need residuals. They need the basic protections and they don’t have those yet. So that’s sort of what is at issue right now.

This is being handled by the East because East handles more sort of this kind of show, even though the show actually films out here. So, we hope this is resolved by the time you are listening to this podcast, but just to know that there was a WGA strike that very few people are participating in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And a lot of people may not understand that game shows require writers, particularly these kinds of trivia shows.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The questions are writing. And people have to do the research and write them and put them in a script and stick them on a teleprompter.

**John:** I remember a campaign at some point called Somebody Wrote That.

**Craig:** The worst campaign the guild ever did.

**John:** Billboard, “Somebody Wrote That.”

**Craig:** I’m so glad you brought that up. It was my least favorite – the best thing about that, like we’re driving around LA and there’s this huge billboard and it has a quote from a movie and then a picture of a screenwriter and then it says, “Somebody Wrote That.” And I guess the point was like, see, actors don’t come up with these lines on their own, but my point was like who is that? Can you put their name on the billboard you idiots?

So, that was the worst campaign we ever did.

**John:** Yeah. But anyway so we will see what happens with this WGA strike action.

**Craig:** Well good luck to them.

**John:** In happier, more local news, so listeners likely know that my company makes Highland which is the screenwriting app for the Mac, which I use to write everything that I write. It is a free download on the Mac App Store and will remain a free download on the Mac App Store. It’s $49 to upgrade to the full version.

But for the past 18 months we’ve also done a student version which is the full pro version but just for people who are in university writing and film programs. And so we partnered up with individual schools to do that to make sure it all works right for them. And now we’re opening it up to everybody. So, if you are a student in a college level writing or film program and would like to get the full version of Highland free for a year there’s a whole new way to do that.

So you apply, you send in a photo of your student ID, and we send you the code to unlock it free for a year. So, if you’re a listener who would like this and you are in a university writing program or film program you go to Quote-Unquote Apps and click on For Students and we will get you set up.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s lovely of you. Well done.

**John:** Yeah, we do try.

Finally, we’ve been talking a lot about scheduling of movies. And this week a whole bunch of movies came sort of smashing around like little broken up iceberg pieces in the summer season. So Black Widow and Cruella are both in theaters and on streaming. It feels like everyone is just trying to figure out how big the summer box office is going to be and when things get back to normal.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is another whack at the piñata of the theatrical movie business. Specifically because Cruella and Black Widow, they’re big movies, right? So they’re on par with what Warner Bros recently did. And they’re also doing this premier access thing. So you pay for Disney+ and then if you want to see Cruella or Black Widow when they come out that’s another $30.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And is that $30 for the year and then you kind of get everything in that premier access? Or is $30–?

**John:** No, it’s just for that title.

**Craig:** Holy cajole.

**John:** I say that with such confidence. I cannot promise you with that confidence. But I really do believe that it’s for that title.

**Craig:** That’s my move. OK, well, I’m interested to know. But either way that is pretty huge. Because on the one hand you think, well, geez, $30 to see one thing streaming when you’re already paying for Disney+ is a lot, but I think a lot of parents remember that not too long ago, like two years ago, if you wanted to take your two kids and one of their friends to a movie it was going to be way more than $30 because of all the food and everything. So, it’s still kind of a deal.

This is one more shot at the sustainability of the theatrical business. I have no idea where this is going to go. This is nuts.

**John:** It is nuts. So two things. First off, one of the things we need to remember about parents with young kids is you are just desperate to get out of the house. So, going out of the house to see a movie with your kids is a totally viable way to burn some hours on a weekend, as opposed to watching at home. Makes sense.

But I also say like I’m not vaccinated yet but I feel like when I am vaccinated this summer I am excited to see Black Widow and Cruella on the big screen. So I’m increasingly saying what about my own possible movie-going experience in the future here.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that is in play here is the secret, not so secret, but the silent economic killer of the theatrical business which has always been marketing costs.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you and I both know that the marketing costs as they went up were also starting to, I’m going to use the word corrupt, I don’t care, corrupt the creative process of making films, because where it used to be that creative people would say here are the movies that we as a studio want to make, and then marketing people said, “OK, well, let’s figure out how to sell that.” Once you were spending more on marketing than on the movie naturally that flipped.

So the marketing people were telling the creative people what kinds of movies they should pay for. Now, with streaming you don’t have anywhere near the costs involved, because you’re not asking people to leave their house and go anywhere. In fact, every single show on Disney+ will serve as an advertisement for Black Widow or for Cruella.

Furthermore, social media has kind of taking over the job of advertising for you. People just talk about it with each other. So, if a movie like Cruella, I don’t know what Cruella cost, but it looks pretty expensive. A movie like Cruella before in the old days they probably would have spent $150 million marketing that thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, if they only spend $30 million marketing that is a massive difference in how the profitability line is on that kind of movie. It’s enormous. I cannot overstate how big of a deal that would be if the big marketing buy of theatrical movies went away. That more than anything will change everything. And I have to argue probably for the better. Probably for the better.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, the big marketing spends really anchor a movie in people’s heads. And so you don’t get sort of the giant change everything franchises unless you sort of have that marketing push behind them I would argue. But, yes, when Netflix makes a movie that costs $100 million it really kind of just costs $100 million because they’re not spending a fortune on marketing that movie because it’s just they’re pushing it through their own channels. They’re putting up some billboards in the city where the actor lives but that’s it. And they’re not sort of doing the big nationwide campaign for it otherwise. So it’s going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

I’m making a movie for Netflix now and it feels like the right thing to be making for that platform and that service, but it’s going to be weird not to see commercials for it and sort of a push for it.

**Craig:** I get that. I just think that if television has taught movies anything about the way streaming works it’s there is value in being unique and good. And that that is more important than kind of putting an advertisement for your movie on every carton of milk in the world because people will find it and talk about it with each other and watch it. And you do save a ton of money. And hopefully this leads to movies returning to a more adventurous mindset and not just a kind of franchise-obsessed, navel-gazing, big, big event movie for PG-13 audiences only.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Some follow up. Last week we talked about foreign levies and our own Stuart Friedel wrote in to say that foreign levies can be paid to your S-Corp but the WGA just needs a W-9 on file. So, if you are a loan-out corporation you can just register that with the WGA and they will pay it to your S-Corp rather than paying it to you as an individual person.

**Craig:** I did not know that.

**John:** Yeah, so things we learn ourselves. We have another foreign levies follow up here. Do you want to take that?

**Craig:** Sure. Bea asks, “Yesterday I got a WGA foreign levy for a project that was never made. It was a feature writer’s room, single day, major studio. Definitely hasn’t been made yet, if ever, but somehow the WGA is sending checks in its name. How’d that happen?”

**John:** So we won’t say what the name of this movie is, but Craig and I can both see it on the outline. I have absolutely no idea why you are getting this check for this movie that has not been made yet. Cash that check because the only reason the WGA got that check is because the studio wrote that check. And so it’s the studio’s fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not the WGA’s fault. Cash that check. I have no idea why you would be getting this check.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder if sometimes out of ease what happens is the countries will say like to Warner Bros, “Here’s a bunch of money that we have for your projects that are kind of…” Because remember they’re not collecting money off of the movies and shows that air. They’re collecting money off of the sale of blank tapes, disk drives, thumb drive, etc.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** So it may be that the studio kind of aggregates all of its expenses and says here’s how we will distribute that money, or here is how it should be distributed. They send a big list of information to the country. The country goes, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, let’s send out that money to the WGA for these things. That’s my guess.

**John:** That’s probably the best guess we can make for this. Basically they had a list of what writers did you employ during this year.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Bea’s name was on that list and that’s what happened.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Well, cash that check. Whenever I got sort of like small checks for not a lot of money I always treated it as like Panda Express money. Ooh, I can get some eggrolls at Panda Express. That was a treat for me when I got those small checks.

**Craig:** Orange Chicken, man.

**John:** Oh, I love the Orange Chicken.

**Craig:** Everyone loves Orange Chicken. They figured something out. I remember when in the mall I noticed for the first time Panda Express had smartened up and did the double tray of the Orange Chicken. Because remember it used to be the same size tray as everything.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And then they were like, OK, fine, we give in, you people. You love sugar and fat. Here we go. Fine.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Yup. It’s delicious.

**John:** Some follow up on Episode 491, the deal with deals. Danielle asks, “Following up on your conversation about writer deals, can you cover if-come deals? Specifically how they may or may not be hurting newer writers.”

Craig, have you ever had an if-come deal?

**Craig:** I was offered one many, many, many, many years ago and I said no. But I understood the general wisdom of it. I understood that.

**John:** So if-come deals are really common in TV. And so what will happen in TV is you are a writer with an idea for a series. And so you go and pitch to a studio or to a production company and they say this is fantastic, we really love that idea. We are going to make a deal with you that’s pending us getting a successful setup at a network. And so basically I’ve pitched to Sony and Sony says, yes, we love it, we’ll make you a deal. If it’s if-come on getting a network, so an ABC, or CBS, or somebody else to do it.

Super, super common in TV. And you can sort of get why they do it because that studio is going to be paying you but they’re only going to be paying you if they actually have a home for that project. And so it’s just sort of a given way of doing business in TV.

In features it’s weird and I don’t hear about it in features I think mostly because if you wrote a spec script and somebody wanted to buy it but not really buy it, or sort of have the option to buy it that’s just called an option purchase agreement where they’re paying you some money now and a promise for a lot more money down the road. That’s standard in features. What I’m guessing may be happening here in features would be let’s say, what did we decide it was, it was not the Slinky Movie, not the Uno Movie, what are we–?

**Craig:** Oh, what are we up to now? Oh, Mister Clean?

**John:** Mister Clean. So let’s say the Mister Clean Movie. So the Procter & Gamble or whoever owns Mister Clean says, OK, we love your take on the Mister Clean Movie and we want to be the producer of record on this, so we are going to make a deal for you, but it’s going to be if-come based on whether we can actually get a studio partner to actually release the thing.

I would not be excited about that deal.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because they are basically locking you up for a lot of time and they’re not paying you everything. There’s just no guaranteed money.

**Craig:** Well, even worse, what they’re doing is they’re purchasing insurance against an auction. And this is why I said no. And also I should say if-come was more common during the network dominance era, because now many streaming channels are their own studio, of course. But what they’re saying is like, OK, that’s a really cool idea. We can go and sell that to any one of 12 different places. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to lock you into what we’re going to pay you now and we’re only going to pay it to you once it lands at a place. That means is if there’s a huge competitive situation where everybody wants it the studio will benefit because the rights are going to go through the roof, the licensing fees will be massive. You won’t.

So, much better for you to be like, Nah. If I’m willing to bet on myself here I’d rather just see if a couple places want it and then they can fight over me and then I will also benefit from the competitive situation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, one of those.

**John:** It’s also important to understand that even if you have an if-come deal if they can’t find the buyer at the level that they were expecting, or the kind of situation they were expecting, they might come back to you and say like, OK, we couldn’t actually get that deal so we need to figure out a new deal that’s actually makeable for the thing we’re trying to do.

And so I’ve encountered that in my career where I got like a pretty sweet ass deal, on paper, but then we went out to the market. The one place that wanted it wasn’t going to pay the amount that would actually pay out the other places. So they were going to renegotiate your deal anyway. That also happens.

Having that quote, a good quote, could be helpful for future deals. So there’s some valid, some reason why you might want to do it. But I would say if you’re a newer writer being offered an if-come deal especially for a feature or for a TV project that feels like it already is kind of set up at one place, that just doesn’t make sense to me.

Like an if-come waiting for an actor to be attached, that makes me really nervous.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ll also get if-comes a lot when you’re dealing with a producer that has an exclusivity issue. So you go to a particular company and they’re like well we have a deal with Netflix and we are exclusive to them. So we’re going to make you an if-come deal because there’s nowhere else to go. That’s it. We’re going to go there or we’re going nowhere. At that point maybe makes a little bit more sense.

**John:** Yeah. But it also may make more sense to actually just pitch to the one place that you can go and try to make a deal.

**Craig:** Well, correct. And so then you’re gambling, right? And the interesting things about those arrangements is they can be a little incestuous. So these people have a relationship already with the streamer and they can make a kind of deal where you get screwed and so do you want to lock something in earlier? It’s complicated. Your agent or lawyer will have the best advice. But Danielle that’s basically the long and short of it.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, what is your favorite color?

**Craig:** Red.

**John:** My favorite color is blue. How long has red been your favorite color?

**Craig:** Since the first time someone asked me what’s your favorite color. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it’s always been red. There’s never been a question. And it’s not like, oh, I’ve got to wear red or I’ve got to paint my house red. I don’t do that. That’s stupid. I just like it.

**John:** Yeah. I’m that way with blue. It was always the first answer and I just like blue. And when I say blue I have a very specific blue. It’s like a Crayola Blue. The basic blue crayon.

**Craig:** Standard blue.

**John:** Is the kind of blue that defines my favorite color. But of course like all things as you grow up you develop maturity and you horizons expand and you come to appreciate many other colors that are wonderful out there. And so you get past the sort of like very rainbow colors of your youth.

But I want to talk about color because I’m reading this book, The Secret Lives of Color, by Kassia St Clair. It’s a couple years old but I’m just now reading it. Which goes through the history of how humans sort of came to be able to make the colors that we see and use. Like how dyes and pigments and sort of all these things actually came to be. Because dyes were incredibly expensive, and so it was so hard to find the things that actually got you to that color. And worth more than gold, ounce for ounce, over the annals of history. And it’s only through modern science that we sort of have the ability to reproduce all the colors that are out there.

And I’m reading this book but I’m also thinking about the script I’m writing and I feel like partly because I’m reading this book I’m just very aware of the colors of the scenes that I’m writing and sort of what is what color in what space. And even though I’m not writing those colors necessarily into scenes they’re definitely informing my choices. So I thought we might talk first about sort of how color works on screen and some of the iconic moments that we sort of think about where you couldn’t pull color out them.

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

**John:** So I think of movies with amazing color palettes. Amelie. The greens of Amelie. The pink in Grand Budapest Hotel. 2001 is mostly white. And then there’s some sequences that are all red. So in the movie Knives Out Chris Evans is wearing a sweater. Craig, what color is that sweater?

**Craig:** It was an off-white.

**John:** Yeah. It was on off-white.

**Craig:** It was a bone.

**John:** American Beauty has the red flowers and she’s in the red flowers. Midsommar has a really limited color palette and it’s just the explosive colors of the flower headdresses. So color is such a part of our movies and yet we don’t think about it that much on the page. So, let’s spend some moments thinking about it on the page.

**Craig:** Well it’s hard to do because it is purely visual. Sound I think occupies maybe – well, it depends on your mind. I think everybody’s brain functions differently. For me I find the ability to hear sound from a page much easier than to visualize color so much of what’s on page is dialogue. We’ve been trained since childhood to read books where people are talking to each other and so we are trained to hear words. And therefore we can hear sound effects. And sound effects are also very onomatopoeia-able.

So, well, I made a word. I can describe with words what a smash is. Describing colors turns basically into a simile fist. So it’s tricky to do. And it’s something that I think one of the first things that happens when a director reads a script is that can start to fill in more. The director who is going to be doing the first few episodes of The Last of Us, made this movie, Kantemir Balagov made this movie called Beanpole and color is an intense part of it and so much of our conversation already has been about color and specific color choices and what it means and why they pop up.

You’re actually putting your finger on something that I think is lacking probably in my toolbox. And I don’t think of enough. And maybe I should think of more.

**John:** Yeah. Something I’m trying to be more aware of as I’m writing, but you’re also right that a lot of times our color conversation becomes part of the conversation, becomes our discussion with the director and ultimately a production designer and an art director about how things are going to look beyond what’s just happening on the page.

And so when a filmmaker is thinking about how to shoot something there’s a discussion of color palette. And color palette not just like here’s all the colors, it’s like, no, no, we are being deliberate about what colors we’re using and what colors we’re not using. And really it’s that omission of colors that becomes even the stronger statement. So, in my movie The Nines it has three different segments. The first segment is really leaning towards reds and yellows. And so that informs the color of the light, but also just the wardrobe. We really go into yellows and reds. You will not see any blue or green anywhere in that section.

When we get to section three it’s all blues and greens. And we’re outdoors in the forest and it’s wet. And the light is whiter and bluer and colder. And you will not see any reds and yellows. That is a very common set of choices that filmmakers are going to make about how they’re going to shoot a thing just to make something feel deliberate and not random.

**Craig:** Correct. And I think you’re right that a lot of times it’s the subtractive aspect of it that strikes us. It’s a subconscious thing. We don’t really know that we’re not seeing something. Just like we don’t know we’re not hearing something. But it does create a subconscious, psychological impact which is something of course everybody wants. As opposed to just, oh wow, that’s a red movie.

So, removing things is a really interesting choice. The other aspect of color that I do think about when I’m writing, it’s not specifically a color choice, but overall is a question of saturation

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So saturation is just how – I guess it’s how vivid the colors are. So when you think about, like for instance you did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Very vivid, right. Candy colors, which is no surprise.

**John:** Once we’re inside the factory. But outside the factory it’s very desaturated.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you make these choices and generally speaking we think of very saturated color as heightened reality and desaturated, particularly very desaturated as verité. So, the opening sequence in almost all of Saving Private Ryan is really desaturated to the point where you’re like, wait, is this black and white? It’s that desaturated. And it makes us feel like we are in something that’s super grounded. And there’s no right or wrong, obviously. It’s a question of tone.

So, with the stuff that I’m writing now I tend to want to write towards desaturation.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a scene I was working on this past week where I wanted that desaturated feel and I was thinking about well how am I going to get that. What is the natural way to do that? And I decided it’s two sides of a FaceTime call. And so I decided on the side I wanted desaturated. Oh, it’s going to be raining on that side and it’s going to be a guy outdoors standing under extra covering, but it’s raining. And that is sort of naturally god’s desaturation. It’s like you’re pulling the color out of things.

**Craig:** God’s desaturation.

**John:** And let’s talk about how color is created, because you can’t talk about color without talking about light. So, what color is the light? Basically what time of year is it? What time of day is it? Sort of where are you at geographically and sort of emotionally at that time?

I just watched Another Round, which I really loved, and it’s set in Denmark. And most of it takes place in sort of summery months, and so it never really fully gets dark. And so the colors are really strange. And it’s sort of always at most like a twilight. And that really affects sort of how you feel about the things you’re seeing and the choice to set those scenes at those times of day versus bright sunlight really does impact how those scenes play out.

**Craig:** Yeah. The impact of light on things, it’s a little scary for me to write it because when you start to get into how the light changes, the color of something as something moves through it, you do risk that kind of purple dialogue that we want to shy away from.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** A lot of new writers are talking about the golden hue as it turns–

**John:** The crimson sky.

**Craig:** And yada-yada-yada. And, of course, when cinematographers read that stuff they kind of roll their eyes and they’re like, OK kid, but this is not actually how light works. But there is a feeling, and I always feel that the goal is rather than to be technical – I like to just be honest, you know, the way the light hits you it makes you sad. Just say that. I think cinematographers vastly prefer that because they know how to achieve that. Just like actors are just like tell me I’m supposed to be sad. I know I can do that. So, I do think about light that way.

And then there are gags, which is our all-purpose moviemaking, television-making term for special things. So there’s a gag where a particular beam of light is coming down through a shaft and it’s combining with something else. Well that you can always call out and describe because that’s really specific.

**John:** Yeah. Well one thing you may choose to call out and describe is the colors that we’re seeing on screen, especially if they’re impacting characters. So characters are making choices about what clothes they put on, how they do their makeup, and that will have an impact. And so I’m definitely not arguing that you’re going to label the colors for every single thing a character is doing or wearing, but it’s important to highlight some things.

Like in the thing I’m working on right now it’s basically a two-hander and one of the characters has sort of a uniform that he wears every day. He just doesn’t want to think about the clothes he’s wearing. And so I’m able to describe what that is that he’s wearing. And the other character I describe as being unafraid of color and pattern. And that just tells you, like, it was a signal to the costume designer you can push this guy a little bit. This guy lives in a heightened space. And so I’m not really calling out color so much as sort of like the range of choices that should be open as we’re visualizing this character.

**Craig:** It’s such a good point. And it’s why I wish that movies would function more like television shows in the sense of how a writer interacts with key department heads, like costume. Because, you know, I’m writing a scene, or I wrote it, in an episode and there’s a crowd of people. Who they are is not important. I just want people to notice one particular woman because something is going to connect through to later. She’s not going to have a name. She doesn’t have dialogue or anything like that.

So, what I’ve done is given her a particular piece of clothing with a particular color. As I’m doing it I’m well aware that this feels very Schindler’s List. There’s the little girl in red where everyone else is in black and white. And so I don’t want to be that. But what I want to be able to say to the costume designer is this is what this means. This is what I’m just trying to achieve. Now tell me how you would go about doing it. Let’s take a look at some choices. I can always go back and revise that. But this was the intention. It is a relationship that should exist in movies and weirdly in features, for whatever reason, everyone feels the need to aggressively sequester the screenwriter from everyone else. And it just, I don’t know why other than directorial insecurity. I don’t know. It’s just bizarre.

**John:** I’m thinking back to go, my first movie, and Sarah Polley’s character, Ronna, where’s this iconic sort of red leather coat. And that’s not scripted in there, but the idea that she would have a sort of signature look, that makes total sense. What is scripted in as a color is that Adam and Zack are driving a yellow Miata. And a yellow Miata is actually just a very specific joke. And I knew it would also photograph well at night and so you could see it in these dark scenes. But them driving a yellow Miata actually does pay off. It’s a recognizable car. It also tells you something about them as characters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that becomes important. Again, we’re always arguing for specificity, but as a writer you have to be very deliberate about what things you’re putting in and what things you’re putting out. So we’re not saying to make everything a color but to be thinking about color and thinking about whether color could be helping you tell the story, especially what’s happening in the scene.

**Craig:** 100%. And if you find yourself in a specific moment wondering what you can do to get the awesomeness of your mind’s image across think about color. Because there may be a point in your script where you may want to hammer it and help people see. I think about that moment in The Last Jedi where the one spaceship goes light-speeding through another one and splitting it apart. And it’s so white. But it’s also starlight white. And I don’t know if Rian made that clear on the page, because he’s also directing and he doesn’t have to necessarily communicate it on the page the way we might have to with a different director.

But it was a moment where you go, ah, sound stops, this incredibly bright light shines, and I can see where a signature moment could really use a full attention to color on the page. So, it’s a good choice to make when you’re looking for something special as well.

**John:** And I haven’t gone back through Scott Frank’s scripts for Queen’s Gambit, but that is a series that uses color quite aggressively to establish time period. Because different time periods have different colors that are predominate. And so calling out mustard yellow appliances, that’s not just painting the walls, that’s actually anchoring you into, oh, this is what this kind of kitchen feels like because mustard yellow is a very specific time period.

And so just be aware of that. I think if you’re doing anything period it’s worth looking at sort of what the colors were that were dominant at that time because it may be worth calling those out.

**Craig:** Time and place.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because there are places that have colors. The colors of 1980’s Soviet Union, well they’re colors. I mean, you know what they are. We certainly did our research and there’s certain ones that keep popping up and they’re glorious. I mean, they’re not colors we used. I guess on one level you’d go that’s objectively an ugly color, but on another level you go it’s weirdly kind of beautiful and hypnotizing. So think about that in terms of place as well because no question that color is reflected by culture in huge ways. There’s just certain cultures just have a different point of view on color than others.

**John:** So my advice for screenwriters going forward here, listening to this conversation, as you’re watching movies and TV shows be aware of color and be aware of when you think those choices of color were deliberate and sort of how early in the process those choices of color might have been made. Because I suspect you can retroactively write the scenes and decide, oh, they really called out that color quite early on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then as you’re going through the outside world just try to be more aware of the colors that you’re seeing. Because imagine yourself in a scene in a space. What would be the predominant color? And so if you’re hiking in the Grand Canyon you’re just going to be overwhelmed by that red color. And so that is going to influence any scene that is being shot there. If you’re in certain forests it’s just going to be overwhelmingly green unless you’re doing something to desaturate it. It’s going to be just super, super green.

So just be thinking about what the impact of color will be if you were to watch this on a screen.

**Craig:** Great advice.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to our Three Page Challenge. So, this time we’re doing things a little bit differently. So let’s establish first what’s normal about the Three Page Challenge is we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their movie or their script and we read through them and offer our honest feedback. We’ve been doing this since very early on in the show.

But based on our conversation last week we said like you know what’s interesting about the Three Page Challenge is we’re just reading these pages in a vacuum and we don’t have any sense of what’s happening in the rest of the story, so we don’t know whether these opening scenes are actually setting up the movie that we think they are.

So what we asked our listeners to do is to send in their three pages but also give us a log line or a description of what happens in the rest of the script so we can see whether we were right and whether we set these up right. So let’s welcome on our producer, Megana Rao, to get us set up for this.

**Megana Rao:** Hey guys.

**John:** Hey. So we sent out an email to our premium subscribers on Sunday afternoon saying like, hey, we’re going to try this thing. Send in your script and send in your log line, too. And how many responses did we get?

**Megana:** And we got 190 responses. I read all of those.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Oh man.

**Megana:** By Tuesday night my brain was absolute mush. So I had to ask Bo to help me narrow it down from like the top 10 to 15.

**Craig:** Thank you, Bo. Thanks for helping, Bo. But so you read nearly 600 pages.

**Megana:** Yes. But if I found two typos like pretty early on I was like I’m not going to keep reading this.

**Craig:** Ooh. I like it.

**John:** That was a new thing I asked Megana to put in as a check because I get frustrated when we do a Three Page Challenge and you and I spend time talking about stupid typos on the page. And so going forward if Megana sees typos they go away. We’re not going to consider them anymore. Because you just don’t send in your stuff with typos. Have someone else read this first.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you want us to care about, at the very least you have to care about it.

**John:** Yeah. And also so this episode will have an element of surprise and mystery because Megana has seen the writers’ log lines for these things, the synopses, but you and I haven’t. So we’re going to speculate what we think the script is about and then she will tell us what the writer thinks the script is about.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** All right. Let’s get us started. Megana, can you talk us through Rinky Dink by Stephen Brower. And we’ll have a PDF in the show notes, but if you could give us a quick synopsis.

**Megana:** So Elias, 28, films a promo video for his aunt, Janet Witherbaum, a bronze-level figure skater in her 40s, at a skating rink in Minnesota. Janet is raising money for her trip to the National Championships of Adult Amateur Figure Skating. Elias tries to teach Janet a TikTok dance which she doesn’t get. Through talking head interviews we learn that Elias’s parents have died and that Janet taught him to skate but doesn’t allow him to skate at her gala events.

**John:** Craig Mazin, what was your first read and instinct on Rinky Dink?

**Craig:** Well, I was enjoying. The Minnesota kookiness, like wacky Minnesotans is a well-mined area, you know, from Fargo, and the Fargo show. But I’m a sucker for a good ice skating comedy and it definitely feels like a comedy. And I liked the way it started. Janet was an interesting character. I liked the say she was described and I liked the way she performed. I could see it. I could see the whole thing.

I ran into trouble on page two. So, I was cruising along. But on page two what happens is we go from this POV of an iPhone that is recording her and then there’s a wide shot of her nephew, Elias, shooting her through the iPhone. OK, cool, I get it. We went from an iPhone POV to that. And then it just says, “Elias Talking Head.” And he starts talking and I’m like where is he? I didn’t understand until quite a bit later that what’s happening is Stephen is putting Elias in one of those like Office-style testimonials somewhere else, but that needs to be spelled out really clearly. Because I was baffled for a bit about where the hell he was.

My other issue was I couldn’t quite get a read on Elias’s age. I mean, we are told that he’s 28. And we’re told that he’s kind of sweet and very easily steamrolled, which I liked. But he was interacting with her the way teenagers interact with old people. You know? Like “Come on let me show you the latest TikTok dance or let me say randos.” He didn’t seem like somebody on the edge of 30. So I was a little confused by the character there.

But I like the setup of things. It seemed like there was an interesting concept. Elias was still fun. And I thought there was a really good line when he says, “This year I worked up the courage to ask Janet if she would mind,” you know, to perform. “And she said, ‘yes,’ she would mind.” Which I liked.

This is cold open for presumably a series. It does not end with much of a punchline. I think we talked about last week how important punchlines are, whether they’re dramatic or comic. And this one just sort of ends. So that was an issue.

**John:** Craig, I literally wrote “not quite enough punchline.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** So, this feels like Modern Family. This feels like Modern Family, sort of Best in Show kind of space in that – whether or not there’s a documentary conceit like the way there is in The Office, or it’s just like for whatever reason they can talk directly to camera in these confessionals, it has that feel. And I mean that in a really good way. Like if I were to read this whole script and the whole script was to this level I’d be like, oh, this is a person who can write a Modern Family kind of show and shows real finesse with it and the ability to tell a joke and sort of get things going.

I have the same concerns you do about Elias though because I had forgotten that he was 28 so I just kept aging him down and down as I flipped through the pages.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Weirdly I know a lot about his parents dying and stuff like that. I know a lot of backstory, but I don’t get the great sense of who he is individually and specifically. And I’m asking a lot for the first three pages, and so I don’t want to sort of push it too far, but I don’t have a great sense of who he was at the end of these three pages in the way that in a Modern Family or in The Office I felt like I would have in the first three minutes. And so that’s a thing which I think can be worked on.

But let’s talk about some of the things that work really well here.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Page one, “Right now and always she means business.” Great. That scene description on the page it’s working really nicely for me here. Elias says, “Sorry, are you sure though? That’s what it’s called.” “No, I know.” “National Championships for Adult Amateur Skaters.” The just repeating it again to get the extra underline on the joke works really well and has a good sense of it.

On page two, here’s an opportunity to just trim a line but also I think works better as a parenthetical. So, Elias has his talking head. And so the “’whole social media thing, so’… He crosses his fingers. “’Her idea.’” I wouldn’t have broken out to the action line for that. I would have just kept in parentheticals crossing his fingers. It saves you a line and also keeps that thought together because it really should be one thought.

**Craig:** Right. I totally agree with that. I thought that one thing Stephen did pull through these three pages in terms of Elias is that he has got one of those indomitably happy spirits. So even when someone is kind of being insulting to him, or mean, he just keeps on smiling. You know, he’s like okie-dokie. So, he has a little bit of that weeble-wobble, you can tip him over but you can’t knock him down. And so I liked that. I liked him.

And so that’s why I kind of have a suspicion about where this is going, but you know, look, I’m not in possession of a log line.

**John:** What you’re saying about indomitably happy, like if he’d called that out on page one or page two, sort of like shortly after meeting him, that’s a fair thing to note because that colors what we’re seeing of the rest of his lines.

**Craig:** Right. It could contextualize that stuff for people a little bit better. I agree. But I thought that what was working here was that Janet feels like an interesting potential villain and Elias feels like an interesting potential hero. I like that the hero doesn’t quite get that the villain is the villain. And I think mostly other than the kind of simple clerical business like letting me know that we’re dealing with kind of Office testimonial, including where are they when they do it, you just need to kind of give us a good ending there. Because it just sort of petered out.

**John:** So this is the part of this special episode where we speculate about what the rest of this pilot is. And so I’m guessing that while they are central characters to this that there’s actually a pretty – there’s a bigger ensemble at work here. Because it feels like that kind of show. And so we’re going to see more of that family. Meemaw may still be alive there. And I think since Elias is our point of view character it’s going to be sort of centered around him. And so he will be sort of the straight man in – the “straight man” – amid all these sort of crazy, kooky people around him.

And so this first episode will go up through her event to raise money for her going off to this championship. And that things will go awry in trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly we’ll have lots more characters. I can’t shake the feeling that this is going to turn into Elias versus Janet. And Elias is going to get a chance to skate in the Adult Amateur Figure National Championships. And either Janet is going to become his coach, or Janet will – so Janet has to leave the dream behind and help her nephew achieve his dream. Or, that they actually aggressively compete against each other, which would be fascinating.

But it does seem like ultimately this is going to turn into Elias hopefully in some final showdown a la Strictly Ballroom or something.

**John:** Megana Rao, can you come back and tell us what does Stephen Brower say happens in the rest of this script.

**Megana:** All right, so this is the log line we got from Stephen for Rinky Dink. “A charmingly delusional 40-something figure skater must prove her work among apathetic has-beens, cutthroat mothers, and snotty little children.”

**Craig:** Oh, so Elias is just sort of along for the ride.

**John:** Yeah, so she’s the central character.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** That can work, also.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I mean, we’ve definitely built shows around sort of a delusional central figure before.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense, right? So it’s maybe more of an ongoing thing. But, you know, this is the fun part. You kind of guess from these three pages. It’s no surprise that you might think that, OK, the thing that the three pages sort of highlights is what you would imagine everything to be about. But that’s interesting. I hope that Elias does get a chance to perform in that show. Because he’s sweet and he deserves it.

**John:** Nice. All right. Let’s look at Twilight Run by Andrew McDonald and Nick Sanford. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** Twyla, 30s, wakes up in a 1980s Camaro next to a character titled Dipshit. Dipshit tells her she needs to take the edge off and offers Twyla a pack of cigarettes that she throws out the window. We cut to Twyla, Dipshit, some henchmen, and a French scientist in the pasture outside of the car. The French scientist claims that he has a world-changing technology and will only deal directly with Twist Jackson.

Twyla tells him he’s out of luck. Suddenly, a cowboy figure rides in on horseback. This is Twist Jackson. He exchanges briefcases with the French scientist who tries to warn Twist of the Twilight Run. Twist shrugs off the warning and later opens the box to reveal a swirling green gas.

**Craig:** You know. The usual.

**John:** The things that happen. This is a heightened world. And so one of the reasons why this made the finalist list is because we could talk about tone. We can sort of talk about what universe you’re setting up. And this is a clearly heightened universe. And I think the things that worked in this were about setting up what kind of heightened universe it is.

I don’t sort of really know what the rules of this universe are, but things are a little bit goofy in sort of a Buckaroo Banzai or a Rick and Morty kind of sense. And it’s good to see that by the end of page three. I got a sense that there’s some logic behind this even though I don’t quite understand what’s happening here.

My biggest issue was Twyla who is identified as our hero. I know nothing about her by the end of this. I really have no great insight into sort of who she is and why she’s special, or what her deal is. And instead Twist Jackson is the person who is sort of occupying things. So, by the end of these three pages I wanted a better sense of what makes Twyla interesting other than sort of being kind of grouchy and spacing out. I didn’t get a great sense of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What were you seeing Craig?

**Craig:** Definitely Buckaroo Banzai. I mean, this just seems like an ode or an homage to Buckaroo Banzai. We could be totally wrong but that’s surely what it feels like at least through these three pages.

Couple of things. Tonally, there is a little bit of a mismatch because the first page feels tonally rather grounded actually. It’s just a couple of people in a car. They’re talking to each other. I was a little bit confused about, again, where we were. When I see somebody in a car in my mind they are – she’s behind the wheel. And then she looks over at – is she looking over to the right, to the passenger seat? Or is she looking out the window to a car next to her?

**John:** And I would say that the first two-thirds, “a woman’s face through a rearview mirror,” like I just didn’t really quite know what was happening there. And so even the second reading through I didn’t quite know what I was seeing, or why I was seeing it.

**Craig:** Correct. And I think that this underscores a larger issue that I want to talk to Andrew and Nick about. But the one thing I do know for sure is that the French scientist’s dialogue, “This discovery will change the world. I could have sold it to nations the world over. I made a deal with Twist Jackson. I want to deal with Twist Jackson,” even if the tone is heightened that’s just annoying. You have to kind of establish that a character lives in a world of bad dialogue to have him successfully deliver the bad dialogue. But we just met him. It’s literally the second – the first thing he says is, “Where is he?” which is, I don’t know anything, and then the second thing he says is this incredibly arch, villainy plot exposition thing.

So, again, you can get away with it if you know that that’s the world that guy lives in, but until you do harder to get away with.

Here’s the bigger issue, the biggest issue, and it ties directly to into what John is saying about how we don’t know anything about Twyla. There is no sense of perspective in these three pages. None. The perspective is I think a camera.

**John:** I felt like I was in a wide shot for the whole time.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. Because nothing is centered on somebody observing. Everything just happens and we’re observing, which is kind of no good. Especially when we’ve established a hero. The reason that we’re so confused about what the hell is going on is because you guys have this visual reveal that you just sort of toss out there. Like they’re in a flat open pasture. Well that is not where we expect a 1981 Z28 Camaro to be, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. So make a reveal out of it. Acknowledge that we’re not quite sure where we are, whatever it is.

And then this conversation, give me a sense that Twyla is having reactions. When Twist Jackson does show up, essentially completely contradicting what Twyla said, what does she think? We know what the French scientist thinks, but what does she think? When he shows up and grabs this thing what is she doing? She’s gone. She literally is gone. But somebody’s perspective has to be the perspective.

And it’s one scene. And in one scene, or one connected scene basically once we reveal where we are, one character has the perspective. One. So who?

I don’t mean POV. I just mean who are we kind of anchoring to?

**John:** Yeah. Like who is our entry point character? We’re sort of standing in their shoes as the scene is happening. And we don’t have that here yet.

**Craig:** We don’t.

**John:** Let’s talk a little bit about the words on the page. “Asleep, her head resting on a plain white pillow.” Well, there’s a color, just white. White pillow. Dipshit has prelap. It’s not really a prelap because it’s not like he’s going into really future stuff.

**Craig:** I circled that also. I was like it’s not prelap.

**John:** Yeah, so that’s just off-screen, or voice over. You can do either one of them. Both of them are acceptable here. But that’s not really prelap.

But that whole first sequence I just didn’t get the point of it. I really had a hard time understanding what that was. So, if you need that, if this really becomes important for your story that you need that, great, but I feel like just that precious time and you need – we talk about sort of the first line of dialogue in a movie, the first image in a movie is so crucial, so precious. Just to be wasting it on something that we can’t understand or really see, it’s not good. So I think starting someplace else will help you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also want lines to be motivated. We’re going to see this issue come up in our next three pages as well. So in the very beginning, “TWYLA, our hero. 30s, short hair, black bomber jacket. Don’t fuck with her, she won’t fuck with you. Lounging behind the wheel, she looks over at: SOME DIPSHIT…” This is what you’ve described. I’m looking at a woman. She is sitting there. And then she turns for no reason to a guy who then says something. Like he was waiting for her to look at him for him to say what he’s saying which makes no sense. Especially when he’s saying “you keep zoning out.” Why would he say that after she’s turning to look at him?

That’s not what zoning out means. If she’s zoned out and then she hears, “(OS) You keep zoning out,” and then she turns and looks. So you see what I’m saying? And again that helps drive perspective so we understand we’re with her. That’s kind of important.

**John:** Lastly, these three pages had more colons in it than I’ve sort of ever seen in a script. Basically Andrew and Nick have made a choice that colons are going to be there dashes. And it’s fine. I’m not complaining. It’s a way of doing things. And so in places where you or I might use dashes or some other piece of punctuation they’re using colons. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Works.

**John:** Go for it. There’s a whole range of styles of work and at least it’s consistent. There were no other real problems on these pages in terms of like formatting screenwriting stuff, so go for it. If that’s your style knock yourself out.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, you know, perspective guys. Big one.

**John:** All right. So Craig we’ve got to speculate. What happens in this script?

**Craig:** Oh boy. Well you’ve got this really weird thing going on in the very first shot that’s like some sort of dreamy thing. I think it’s Buckaroo Banzai and I think that Twist Jackson is maybe an idiot and I think maybe Twyla is going to have to save the world from Twist Jackson’s arrogance as he seeks to do something with the swirling green stuff that leads to the Twilight Run.

**John:** Yeah. I think the box with the swirling green gas is a MacGuffin and there are going to be a bunch of people after it. And what this deal was and sort of the bigger stakes of it all are going to be important. And that she will be forced to make a choice about which side she’s on. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** Now let’s find out how we did.

**John:** Megana, what’s the truth?

**Megana:** Wait, can I prolong the reveal and ask you guys a question?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Yes.

**Megana:** What do you think of the character description that’s “some dipshit who will get blown up by page nine?”

**Craig:** Great question. I personally have no problem with it. I think it’s a tone signifier.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So it’s the first indication that we might be dealing with a bit of a wacky heightened reality. I’m totally cool with that. That page unfortunately didn’t have anything that the movie viewer or TV viewer would detect that would indicate a heightened tone. It only had kind of a very mundane situation between two people. So it’s a little bit of a cheat. If the visuals matched that attitude I’d be totally cool.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. I mean, I should mention that I was never clear who the goons were working for. Sometimes it seemed like Twyla’s goons and sometimes it seemed like the French guy’s goons. So just be aware of that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s two sets of goons.

**John:** Too many goons.

**Megana:** So here is their log line. Five years after a deep undercover operation ended in failure a former ATF agent teams up with a smart but socially awkward tech specialist to infiltrate a deadly cult and stop an arms deal that if successful could alter the very fabric of reality itself.

**Craig:** That’s plot. We don’t quite get what the character stuff is there. It’s so funny, we only think about stuff with character. But again log lines are very plotty, aren’t they?

**John:** They are very plotty. Yeah, I guess I could buy her as a former ATF agent who then discovers this sort of heightened universe world. But I feel like Twist Jackson exists as a semi supernatural character, just sort of appears out of nowhere and rides a horse. So, yeah, it’s not quite what I would guess. But teaming up to stop a thing, sure, you’re setting that up right here on page three.

**Craig:** There’s no sense of tone in that log line which I think actually might be a mistake. I think it’s good to kind of indicate – the way that he’ll get blown up in nine pages. Indicate a little bit of a sense of that heightened-ness because otherwise people are going to read this and go like “What is this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Embrace the Buckaroo.

**John:** That could be Mission: Impossible.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That could be a whole bunch of different set ups.

**Craig:** It could be a billion things. And it seems like what these guys are going for is Buckaroo Banzai. I mean, the dude is named Twist Jackson for god’s sakes.

**John:** Cool. All right, it’s time for our third and final Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** By the way, we’re doing poorly. I just want to point out. O for 2.

**Megana:** Great. So South Carthay by Alex Rennie. In the middle of the desert 11-year-old Andy watches the 1988 film Hellraiser 2 with his brother Parker, 13, and their pit bull, Jules. Parker is blind and relies on Andy to narrate the movie to him. Their mother, Maggie, 35, speaks to her agent Karen on the phone in her home office. Karen tries to set up a meeting for Maggie’s new book in Santa Monica but between doctor’s appointments for her sons Maggie doesn’t have any availability. Karen urges Maggie to move from the desert to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Craig, do you want to start us off.

**Craig:** This, I’m going to talk about a couple things. My first question and I still don’t have an answer for it is what year is this.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Because they’re watching a movie from 1988, but I’m not sure if they’re just watching it as an old movie or if this is 1988. And it will become relevant in a little bit.

But there are two instances of a problem in here that I alluded to in the prior pages and that is – I don’t know what else to call it – the movie waiting. It’s like reality waits for something to happen. So here’s what happens at the very, very beginning. We get a description of a two-story house in the center of a barren desert. It’s very, very hot.

“The scene is suddenly interrupted by a demonic voice. Hellraiser, prelap,” once again not prelap, “you solved the puzzle box. You summoned us, we came.” And my question is how does that suddenly happen? The movie is on, right? Like it’s not like somebody suddenly starts up a remote for the movie.

What you can do, Alex, if you want to just not have rando dialogue and then that line have music that we go like what is this weird music. That’s weird music for this. And then the line would go, oh, that was score from a movie. But the point is the movie can’t wait. It can’t just suddenly come in.

Because we then go to a television screen and we realize that these two kids, Parker and Andy, have been watching it. Have been watching. Not just started, right?

I liked the reveal that Parker is blind. I thought that was really well done. Because first I was a little bit like I don’t understand why he’s asking these questions that he’s asking. And then I was like, oh, that’s why. And I love that feeling, right. There’s a joy as a moviegoer or television watcher to think that you got the writer and then you realize they got you. So I like that.

The problem of the world waiting for something to happen occurs again. These guys are watching TV and at the same time I assume their mom is on the phone with her agent. And that scene begins with the agent on the phone saying, “Mags, I sent them your book yesterday.” What were they talking about before? So the phone rings, I answer it, and then I just wait, wait, wait, oh the camera is here. “Mags, I sent them your book yesterday.” That is not how that works.

So you need to pick them up in mid-conversation, or have the phone ring and have her answer. Either way you can’t just suddenly have this line start in. Especially because it’s good news and it just makes no sense to have her waiting.

There’s a story problem here that you’re describing, or a character problem rather, that Maggie is being – she’s a book author and she’s being told she needs to have a meeting in Santa Monica at noon tomorrow and her problem is that Andy has a doctor’s appointment, so maybe they can do Sunday. This sort of like, ah-ha, single mom raising kids trouble. But the issue is this feels old because we’ve just spent a year not having to go to Santa Monica. Like you can Zoom. So that’s why I want to know what year is this.

**John:** Craig, I was also concerned about what year it was based on page two, “Maggie sits in front of a desktop word processor, a house phone pressed to her ear.” And I’m like, wait, what universe is this? First off, what is a desktop word processor?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** A desktop PC I guess? Her desktop word processor, are they talking about that post-typewriter but before it was a real computer thing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s a landline because that’s just what it is? Because that’s conceivable but that’s a very specific time period. And I don’t think that was really what Alex was going for here. So, again, one word choice of saying word processor rather than computer threw me and made me question what year this was happening in.

**Craig:** Or maybe it is happening in 1988 or 1989 and Alex just wants us to suss it out. And I guess what I would say is you need to give us a clearer indication than that. There just needs to be a clear sense, especially because they’re watching a scene from the 1988 horror feature. So they’re watching it on television. It’s either on video tape. The point is they’re not going to see it in theaters, so it’s not 1988. So when is it?

OK, so you’ve got to figure that out. And then finally I would say that the last bit here where Maggie is arguing with Karen about where she lives feels a little soft.

**John:** I didn’t buy it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t buy it. It just didn’t make any sense. Like it doesn’t matter that she got Road R as opposed to R Road. And she wouldn’t know that that’s where the airplane graveyard is. It doesn’t seem – and also this entire discussion feels very elementary. This is a real problem, but the way they’re discussing it and the way that Karen is responding just feels very elementary. Karen does not feel like a human. She feels like a plot machine.

**John:** So here’s where I liked about the characters, and the setup, and the world. And so I’m going to – and I guess this ties into where I think the story is actually going. I liked the brothers and one brother is blind. I liked the mom, the setup. I like them being out in the desert. I thought there was a promising space for a movie there. And I don’t think they’re actually going to stay out in the desert. I think they’re going to move to South Carthay, which is Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just my guess about why it’s titled that. So I like that in the setup. And so I dug these pages even though I thought a fair number of things weren’t working.

One thing I want to point out is just right at the top, “EXT. DESERT – DAY 1 A two-story house sits in the center of a barren desert landscape, dotted with patches of scrub brush.” You’re not giving me enough there. First off, there’s not just a desert. What desert? A California desert? Where are we? Anchor us. Because if you say desert I guess I’m thinking of the Sahara until you give me more stuff. So anchor us a little bit more.

And tell us what it feels like. You don’t have to describe every little thing, but is it just barely above a trailer park? Is it a two-story trailer home? Did it have that kind of feel to it? But I just don’t get a sense from this of what kind of space we’re living in.

When we get into her office we do get some more details about what her office is like and I liked that. I got a sense of character making choices that influenced the environment that they were in.

Craig had already pointed out the Hellraiser problems or the voice over that’s happening that becomes the Hellraiser dialogue. My way of handling this in general would be scratch that line “The scene is suddenly interrupted by a demonic voice.” You just hear character name Demonic Voice, “You solved the puzzle box. You summoned us. We came.” New action line. “A man’s voice screams in terror. Cut to…” And then you’re in. And that’s great. So we’re wondering what are we hearing rather than spoiling it by saying Hellraiser right at the start.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s a great idea.

And I want to point out that Alex does do a really good job of creating perspective because in this first scene it’s not there’s an indication in the action that we’re meant to identify with Parker and understand the scene from his perspective, but we do. It’s just written in that way. We understand we’re with him and his inquisitiveness and his confusion. And that’s good. I mean, there’s good stuff there. But I’m nervous about some of the elementary nature of the drama that’s being created.

**John:** A few other small things to look at. In American screenplays parentheticals get their own line underneath the character’s name. So on page one, that “unsure” right now is tucked into that dialogue line. We don’t do that in American screenplays. On page two, two action lines. “Andy thinks, picking at a set of stitches above his right eye.” That’s great. That can work. Later on, “Andy’s sandwich collapses as he struggles to keep it together.” Those are two completely separate actions that are just too close together. I feel like you’re just throwing too much business at this one character. And it’s distracting from the scene. So either he’s working on the stitches or he’s trying to eat this sandwich like he was falling apart.

Pick one. There’s just too much there.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And if you imagined him picking at the stitches with the hand that was holding the sandwich because they’re itching and then it collapses, that’s fine. But you’ve got to let us know. But absolutely. You don’t want to have him pick-pick, and then line, and then a line, and then he’s doing an entirely other thing that implies some sort of sandwich disaster occurred. So it’s just like time management issues here in terms of continuity of reality.

Guesses, I guess it’s time to guess, huh?

**John:** It’s time to guess. So I was speculating that this family is going to move to the Carthay Circle part of Los Angeles which is close to where I live and that it’s going to be about them adjusting to their new life there. But I don’t have any sense of what the actual plot is of this story. These three characters are centered to it all, and perhaps there’s maybe stretching, reaching that it could be kind of a Lost Boys situation where it’s like the boys have their own adventure and the mother is sort of a secondary character. That’s my best guess at this point.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does feel like, and I don’t like this necessarily, but it does feel like mom is being setup to just be mom from E.T., like problem to be avoided.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And who is having a generic single mom problem like divorce, or balancing job and children, without more flavor to it. It does feel like this is going to be about Parker and Andy and some kind of horror thing, I hope. Because that would be fun. And, yes, moving to LA. But, you know, I have no clue from this which is not, I mean, again, 0 for 2. So let’s see how we did.

**Megana:** OK, so Alex wrote in, “When the MacLaine family inherits their dream home they quickly discover that their new neighborhood hides a sinister secret and must work together to find the truth.”

**Craig:** There we go. Well I like working together.

**John:** I like working together. I think we were closer than I would have guessed.

**Craig:** Oh definitely.

**John:** Yeah. It also has like a Fright Night quality where you move to a new house in this neighborhood. I like that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, Lost Boys, right? You literally, I mean, that’s exactly what happened. They moved to a house. It harbors a big secret. But I’m really happy to hear that it’s all of them together so that mom isn’t just mom, but mom. Good.

**John:** Yay. Well that was fun. So, as always, we want to thank everyone who submitted their pages, especially Alex, Andrew, Nick, and Stephen for sending in your stuff. Thank you to Megana and to Bo for reading through all of these. You’re remarkable.

**Craig:** Thank you so much guys.

**John:** And again this is not a competition. This is just an exhibition where we all get to take a look at some writing and figure out what’s working well and what could be working better.

If you want to send in your own pages you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And there’s a form you fill out, including a new field for where you can put in your log line for your script. This is not a log line competition. We don’t really care about log lines. We are just curious what the thing is about. And so just for the reasons we used on the podcast today.

So, Megana, thank you very much for all your hard work and all your reading in making this happen.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana. Great job.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Emily VanDerWerff from this past week that was looking at the way professional critics and fans get drawn into what she calls The Loop of defending positions on a movie or TV show or piece of culture. So talking about the show Girls she writes, “I had tied my own personal opinion of the show to myself and from there it was far too easy to grow more and more defensive with every criticism the series endured because it was like the criticism was criticism of me.” And it just felt so true to a phenomenon I’ve experienced more and more and more over the last decade where I love a thing, someone hates that thing, that person is attacking me. And this weird way that we sort of claim ownership over things and form our identities based on what we like.

And just a really great article detailing her perspective as someone who gets paid doing this as a living and still gets stuck into that loop.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I’ve gone off on critics a billion times on the show. I’m not going to bore everybody by doing it again. But I will say that I do personally like Emily. I did a nice interview with her for Chernobyl. It was one of the early interviews I did and I thought this was – I read this, too. And I thought it was very thoughtful. And I just wanted to say you think you grow defensive with criticism of a show you watch, imagine criticism of a show you’ve written.

And what it kind of comes down to is what I’ve always said. I do think that these feelings we have about movies or television shows are a function of the relationship we have with them. And that means it’s not just about the show or the movie. It’s about us, and the show and the movie. Some intersection of who we are and where we are and that. And therefore it makes no sense – it literally makes no sense to explain to people why it is good or bad for them.

You can talk about why it was good for you. And you could talk about why it was bad for you. I wish that critics would just be more subjective. Like literally just say here’s how this made me feel. I don’t know if you’re going to feel the same way. But this is my thing. Instead of just declaring that movies are good, bad, stupid, etc.

But I enjoyed – the introspection here I thought was very valuable.

**John:** And a thing I think has changed over the course of our lifetime in terms of criticism is that it’s one thing to be a critic looking at a movie because that movie is finished. And so while people will come to that movie with new perspectives over time that movie is done. But what Emily was doing with Girls and a lot of other TV series is you’re critiquing something that is still ongoing where it hasn’t been finished yet and your criticism will actually change the thing. And that just becomes an impossible feedback loop as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just everyone to be mindful of the fact that the creative process is influenced by the criticism of it in not always healthy ways. And that if you are criticizing a piece of art to differentiate criticizing that piece of art from the person who made it. Because they really are not the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just the way that things are completely redeemed or vilified over time. I mean, blech.

I have a much easier One Cool Thing than that.

**John:** All right. Pitch it.

**Craig:** Cake.

**John:** I like cake.

**Craig:** Everyone likes cake. So, we over at the Mazin house have been engaging in a kind of homemade food exchange with another family in our town as we’ve been navigating the pandemic. So occasionally they would make something and bring it over and leave it on our doorstep and then we would make something and bring it over and leave it on their doorstep.

And so we owed them one and I asked what they wanted and they have three girls. And all three girls said chocolate cake. That was what they wanted. Which seems like, oh, OK, well chocolate cake. Who can’t do that? There’s a billion chocolate cake recipes.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m kind of a recipe nerd. I love the science of it. And so I went through and read all sorts of them and I landed on one, just faith, and it’s a recipe by a woman named Robin Stone. And it’s called The Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Ever. It might be. It’s really, really good. It’s really, really good.

And you might be saying well what’s the big secret in it? I don’t think there is a big secret other than she does have you adding a cup of boiling water into the batter at the very end before you put it into the oven. It makes it much–

**John:** I’ve seen that in other recipes recently.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting.

**John:** It’s a chocolate thing.

**Craig:** Exactly. But overall whatever the balance of ingredients were it just came out beautifully. Same with the frosting. She also has a recipe for chocolate butter cream frosting that goes with it and it came out also beautifully. So if you’re looking to make a chocolate cake.

**John:** I’m looking to make a chocolate cake. Craig, my question for you is this gives a choice between milk, buttermilk, almond milk, coconut milk. What did you use?

**Craig:** In that circumstance – and one of the things that made me a little nervous is that Robin is like whatever. And I’m like, all right, I’m a little more finicky than that. I went with straight up whole milk.

**John:** Whole milk. So super rich.

**Craig:** Well, it’s one cup of it. It’s not exactly half and half or anything. But, yeah, just one cup of regular old whole milk as opposed to any of the other stuff. But if you were lactose intolerant does that still work after you bake something?

**John:** Yeah, it does.

**Craig:** Then you might want to try the almond or the coconut milk. There’s not that much in it so I can’t imagine it would make a massive difference.

**John:** You’ve got a cup of boiling hot water in it to dilute it anyway.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Damn straight.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Always.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ella Grace. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for shorter questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com which is also where you’ll find the PDFs of for our Three Page Challenges. You’ll find transcripts there and be able to sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Olympics. Craig and Megana, thank you both very, very much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys. Thank you. And I just want to say a quick hello to listener Miranda, because I know she’s a big fan.

**John:** Oh, nice.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Well great. And that outro felt very Winter Olympics to me. I could imagine that being under a Winter Olympics Montage. Which is a good segue to a question from a listener, Adam in Los Angeles, who writes, “If you were an Olympic level athlete what sport/event would you like to compete in?” And so we’ll look at winter and summer. Craig, of the Summer Olympic events if you could be a medal-worthy athlete is there one sport that you’d go for?

**Craig:** Well, I suppose that one way to think about this is a little bit like how fun it is to fly in a dream. Because you’re never going to fly. So one possibility is pick a thing that you would never be able to do. Like in theory I could wrestle some people. I wouldn’t be any good at it, but I could wrestle for a bit at my weight class or something. I could throw a pole.

But the thing that I cannot do, ever, in any circumstance and have never been able to do, even as a child, is run for a long distance. I was not built to run for a long distance. So I would want to be a marathon runner. I just think that would be like flying. That would be so cool.

**John:** So I can run for a long distance. I ran a half marathon. And I assumed I could never run, but now I can run. But I don’t think I would actually want to be a long distance runner for Olympic stuff. I think I would actually prefer to be like a sprinter because that to me feels like you’re The Flash where you’re just so incredibly powerful out of the gate.

But what you were saying about flying made me think like, oh, maybe I should pick pole vaulting because that’s a thing in real life I would never, ever do, but it just seems so cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I don’t even understand how that happened. Why did – who figured that out? Why?

**John:** Yeah, we can pole vault. My guess is there’s a season of The Amazing Race where they were doing these – they were in these canal kind of places, flooded field canals, and you actually do use poles to get from one side to the other. So maybe that was sort of how pole vaulting became a thing. I don’t know. We could have looked it up by the time I–

**Craig:** Could have, but you know what? Nah. I’m tired of learning. I don’t want to learn anything else. I’m done. I’m done.

**John:** But I should clearly choose gymnast, because male gymnasts have the amazing skills, versatile skills. You feel like a real life Rogue. And great bodies.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was waiting. It’s about the body. The male gymnast body is stupid. It’s a stupid body. Yeah, like how? Oh my god. Could you imagine?

**John:** Now the Winter Olympics. Craig, what winter sports would you want to do?

**Craig:** Ooh, I do like the Winter Olympics. They’re fun. I mean, look, like the weirdo one like the biathlete where you ski and then shoot. That’s a silly one.

**John:** That was my top choice. Biathlete.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty silly one so I kind of like sneakily want that. But I think, so the guys who do the skeleton in the luge, and the women, are moving at insane speeds. And it’s terrifying. I think maybe if I could be one of those people. Just the idea of just firing down a shoot like a bullet for like a minute just seems like it would be pretty awesome.

**John:** I said that I was so excited to be a pole vaulter, but I don’t think I would be a ski jumper because that just–

**Craig:** Ooh, god.

**John:** No. That’s just too much terror for me. I’ve bungee jumped. Great. I’m not going to ski jump. That’s, no. That’s not good at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. The ski jump is kind of like you go down the ramp and you catch, just perfect, boom you launch off perfectly and you’re like I’m doing it. I’m going to go further than anybody. And then when you start to go down you’re like, oh, shit.

**John:** Well, Craig, you and I both grew up with ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Of course the agony of defeat. This big intro and then it goes “the agony of defeat” and they show this guy going off the edge of the ski jump and just falling. I still feel pain just thinking about that shot.

**Craig:** Why would anyone be an athlete after that? You’re just watching a human being tumbling down a mountain, breaking I assume everything. And, yeah.

**John:** In reference to our Three Page Challenges, I think figure skating is just remarkably great, and to be able to do that stuff. But I would just get such performance anxiety to actually have to masterfully do all these things, and be artistic, and hit all those jumps. That feels like too much.

**Craig:** Yeah. The artistic part – figure skating, I don’t love it. I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t love it. Not on the level of ventriloquism which is a ridiculous waste of everyone’s time. Actually, it’s the fact that figure skating is a remarkably demanding athletic pursuit, but they also have to wear these outfits.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t have to. I think they want to in a sense. But it just gets sillier and sillier. It’s like Vegas kind of. It just becomes so odd. You know what I mean?

**John:** As a young gay child I just loved my figure skating.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it. I do. And maybe it’s also like the performance aspect of it is so outrageously fake. Do you know what I mean? The smiles and the…

But I can also see where, you know – look, my wife loves figure skating. I mean, loves. So I watch it when it’s on. All right.

**John:** I never looked at the contents of my mom’s DVR after she died, but I guarantee you there were at least 16 hours’ worth recorded of figure skating on that. Just to watch at any point, which is great.

**Craig:** I love it. Who was your favorite?

**John:** Growing up it was Torvill and Dean. They were an ice dancing pair.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They were remarkable. They were the Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh of their time, but on ice. And they were just remarkably talented. But then like through the Brian Boitanos, through the Kristi Yamaguchis. Katarina Witt, who I saw at a post office here in Los Angeles. Just remarkable talents.

**Craig:** Torvill and Dean, were they married?

**John:** They were married but I think they ultimately split up, yeah, which was controversial and terrible.

**Craig:** Oh, it was controversial?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah. If I remember correctly. Chris Schleicher who is a writer who I only know through Twitter, but was a competitive figure skater before he became a writer. And I always find that so fascinating as a second act, you know, get out of figure skating and then become a writer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Interesting.

**John:** So, Craig, should we go to the Olympics in China? So that’s the 2022 Winter Olympics are going to be in China. And China has not done some good things.

**Craig:** You’re asking should you and I personally go?

**John:** [laughs] Oh yes.

**Craig:** Or should America go?

**John:** Should America send a delegation to the Olympics in 2022?

**Craig:** I got to tell you, and this is one of those hot button things. It’s practically designed for people to argue. But I remember as a kid feeling like boycotting the Moscow Olympics wasn’t great. The point of the Olympics was let’s get closer together.

I don’t think the Olympics, going to the Olympics, is any kind of tacit approval of what a government is doing. The United States went to the Olympics in Germany when Hitler was in power and Jesse Owens got to beat everyone in front of him, which is awesome. There’s a little chance to stick it to people at the Olympics also. And the way we kind of did to the Soviets in 1980 in Lake Placid.

But it kind of bummed me out. And then of course the Russians boycotted after. I feel like once you start it’s hard to stop. Because everybody has a reason to boycott everybody. There’s no reason that – if there’s ever an Olympics in Mumbai for instance, well, should the Pakistanis just immediately boycott? Do you know what I mean? You know, over Kashmir.

Everybody has got a problem. So, let’s preserve this one place where we just come together and we do it outside of the bubble of the bad things that we are or are not doing. And hopefully it brings us together and maybe solves a problem. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I wonder if we hadn’t had the situation where we boycotted one Olympics and they boycotted us, I wonder when we decided that Olympic athletes a chip that we would use in international trade. Because we’re not talking about like, OK, we’re going to boycott Chinese products or we’re not going to do business with China at all, because clearly we’re doing a ton of business with China.

So, it does feel weird on that level. And yet at the same time you’re dealing with a government that is doing some really bad things. So, I’m sympathetic to both sides and I’m happy to be the one who doesn’t have to make the decision.

**Craig:** Right. Turns out weirdly that they have asked me to make this decision.

**John:** Craig, as your profile grows then so does your responsibility.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know how this ended up in my lap, so I’ve got to really think about this. [laughs] I’ve got to be honest with you. I’m in a whole boatload of trouble over here.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [WGA Strike](https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/the-chase-strike-writers-wga-itv-1234936943/) against ABC’s The Chase.
* For current university students and professors: Learn more about the [Highland 2 Student License](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/students.php)
* [The Secret Lives of Color](https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Lives-Color-Kassia-Clair/dp/0143131141) by Kassia St Clair
* [Rinky Dink](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FRinky-Dink-Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=428197df8aa5744b9773ac3f65f597c5f8419e2fd6e60923f799f6b7e82795bf) by Stephen Brower
* [The Twilight Run](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FThe-Twilight-Run-Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=f3e0780b9271811e28acf59ac67b2286357b3148ddf029bb4e12671a3fa558d9) by Andrew McDonald and Nick Sanford
* [South Carthay](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FSouth-Carthay-Pilot-3_21_21.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=ba275113a62a9a36a5dbf43a1c70442a3d5dd4ac8d303ec137268bbe73da2528) by Alex Rennie
* [The Loop by Emily VanDerWerff](https://emilyvdw.substack.com/p/the-loop)
* [The Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Ever](https://addapinch.com/the-best-chocolate-cake-recipe-ever/) by Robin Stone
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/494standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/sexy-ghosts-of-chula-vista).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has one bit of swearing so just a warning if you’re in the car with your kids.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 486 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at listener’s pages and offer our honest feedback. We’ll also discuss some of the most common mistakes we find in these samples and how you can avoid them.

Plus, we’ll look at irony, which is not ironic. It’s just a topic.

**Craig:** It’s a topic.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss money and happiness.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Can’t wait to see what happens.

**John:** And what is the relationship between money and happiness. So, for these bonus topics you and I just sort of come up with them last minute, realistically I come up with them last minute.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And so I emailed out to all of our Premium subscribers saying like, hey, what do you want us to discuss in bonus topics. And at last count Megana had gotten 165 suggestions for bonus segment topics.

**Craig:** Oh boy. So, we’re locked into this show for at least another three years is what you’re saying.

**John:** Yeah. That’s basically what we’ve come down to.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** But, Craig, there’s big breaking news because this last week Craig Mazin announced that he is no longer going to be on Twitter. Tell me about this.

**Craig:** It had been something I was thinking about for a long time. I mean, I didn’t do the big huffy cancel your account thing. I’ve just made my account private. I’ve stopped tweeting. And I turned my notification filter down to the most narrow band, so I don’t really get any. So, if for instance – the thing that’s different, like I quite Facebook many, many years ago. If you quit Facebook you can’t really see much on Facebook. With Twitter you can. So, sometimes if I’m reading an article it will link to a tweet, so I’ll be there, but my days of tweeting and responding, that’s over.

And it’s because I just kind of felt a growing list of issues that were part of the Twitter experience. Some of which I think people generally are familiar with, like the addictive nature of it. Also, I felt like Twitter was starting to change the way I was thinking about things as I learned them. So, information hits you, like news hits you, and without even trying or thinking about doing it I start to have a reaction. An opinion begins to form immediately. Twitter demands your opinions now. Now! You must have it. And that’s probably not good.

There are a lot of things that I just don’t need to have an opinion on. There are a lot of things that I don’t need people to hear from me on. And I think that there was something that happened, you know Bean Dad, right? Remember the whole Bean Dad fiasco?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So when I was reading the Bean Dad thing and I saw how that was all going down I thought to myself I think Bean Dad probably thought he was going to get love for this. I think that’s what was happening. I think Bean Dad was like people are going to applaud my story. They did not. And it does seem to me that underlying a lot of the interaction that people do on Twitter at least, maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, there’s a sense of like I think people are going to like this. And I don’t want that. I actually don’t want likeability or approvability or agreeability to be behind opinions I have or things I say.

And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, every day without fail a number of people would have some advice for me on The Last of Us. Who we should cast. Who we shouldn’t cast. What it should be about. What it shouldn’t be about. Who I should be working with. And I don’t do well with that. It’s not that I don’t care. I do care what people think. It’s just that there’s no way to actually do something that way. For every person that feels very strongly that it should be blue, there is somebody else who feels incredibly strongly that it should be yellow. And so you can’t make everybody happy and people are very emotional about it. And they’re very insistent. And it just starts to mess with your head. And I want to just be somewhere quiet. And make the show without feeling like I’m surfing people’s feelings, because my own feelings are so hard to surf at times.

So, all of that kind of added up to “it’s time.” But there were some good things about Twitter, I think, for me in particular. I thought Twitter made me a more empathetic person. I do.

**John:** Talk more about that. So empathetic in terms of you’re seeing different people’s experiences, you’re seeing their opinions and understanding sort of what it might feel like from their perspective?

**Craig:** Yes. But the way to get – Twitter is really good at getting under the hood of those things. Because there’s a lot of culture where people say through essay or interview this is how I feel, this is my experience, this is what’s hard. There’s a lot of fictionalized narrative and drama that does all of that. But it all feels a little bit crafted.

And on Twitter what happens is you see people in a very under-the-hood specific way talking about not only how something good makes them feel, but specifically how something bad makes them feel. Like I don’t like this and here’s why. And I think it’s normal for people who are – look, nobody wants to feel bad about themselves. Let’s just start with that. We avoid that shameful feeling if we can. So here’s something, an aspect, that you can feel shame about. If you are wealthy you can feel shame about the money that you have compared to somebody who doesn’t. If you’re white you can feel shame about the way that racial superiority has kind of shaped the world and you continues to do so. If you’re straight you can feel shame about the fact that people who are not are being limited in their freedoms or are being mocked or made miserable.

And for a lot of people I think when somebody confronts them with a possible mistake, their first instinct is to say, “No, what I just did is actually, no, you should not be upset about that because I don’t want you to be because I don’t want to feel like I made you upset.” That’s really underneath all of it. I don’t want to feel the shame of knowing that I made you feel upset.

So instead I’m going to tell you why you should be upset. And Twitter is really good at allowing the upset person to explain it. And to get out of like the cycle of people going, “I’m offended,” and other people going, “Oh, god, you people are offended by everything.” And that whole like people yelling in each other’s face it kind of still happens on Twitter, but there are times where people explain it and then you suddenly go, “I think I understand not only why you’re upset but why you’re upset that other people aren’t upset.” I’m starting to understand.

**John:** For sure. And I think the rise of threading made that more possible where you can provide additional supporting evidence behind those claims. So some things I’m hearing from you is that it was not just the consumption cycle of Twitter, and the doom-scrolling which we’re all familiar with, that was part of it. But really the need to have a reaction to things and then to feel the need to process any new piece of information in terms of like what is my take on this, what is my response to this, just become exhausting. Particularly when it’s something that you’re in the middle of creation, like The Last of Us, I can totally see why it makes sense to jump off that.

I’ve at times taken the Twitter app off my phone which sort of breaks the cycle of it. And I found that to be helpful. This feels like a nice natural step for you, too.

But I do have a question for you because one of the things I’ve appreciated about Twitter is the sense of being caught up on the popular culture and sometimes it’s stupid culture that you don’t need to be caught up on, and sometimes it’s fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So three things in the Trending Topics of today, and I’m curious whether you even know what they are. Jewish space laser.

**Craig:** I know what that is, because I built it. [laughs]

**John:** Harsh advice for writers.

**Craig:** Not familiar with that, but I can imagine what it would be.

**John:** So this was somebody had harsh advice for writers. Your writer friends are also your competition. And so people sort of jumped off of that, in reaction to that, but also made funny responses to it which is just delightful to read.

Mount Rushmore 2.

**Craig:** No. No clue.

**John:** I just made that up. But it feels like something that could be on Twitter, right?

**Craig:** I do love Jewish space laser. We are blamed for so much. I wish that we had the ability to make a space laser. She said that it caused the forest fires, where Marjorie Taylor Greene said forest fires in California were caused by a large laser in space that was possibly built by the Israelis? Is that about right? Something like that?

**John:** That’s about right.

**Craig:** That’s all I need to know.

**John:** Or there was Jewish money behind it.

**Craig:** There’s Jewish money behind it. Yeah, because the one thing I can tell you as the most Jewish person you know is that we love forest fires. Oh, boy, do Jews love forest fires. Yeah, it’s our favorite thing. What a lunatic. Good lord.

**John:** Yeah, she is.

**Craig:** She’s nuts.

**John:** Good lord. All right, some follow up from previous episodes. Back in 483 we had the episode Philosophy for Screenwriters and I had pointed out that I didn’t see a lot of examples of female characters in stories having to make ethical or moral choices. Andrew wrote in to say, “Isn’t Sophie’s Choice a classic example of a female protagonist with a moral debate?” Yes, Andrew, you are right. It’s like literally called a Sophie’s Choice. And it’s a thing we use all the time. So it’s a very good counter example in terms of just like a character having to grapple with an impossible decision. So, Sophie’s Choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a very specific decision that rarely will people have to make, but yes it is. No question.

**John:** And Airy wrote in. She said, “Regarding the female character philosophical question, in Godzilla: King of the monsters,” which I’ve seen, “Vera Farmiga’s character Emma has a bit of a villain philosophical speech where she explains why it’s a good thing to let the titans roam free and take back control of the earth.”

And I will say that it’s a really odd moment in this movie that I guess I was surprised to see a female character having that sort of villainous turn. So, yeah, that’s another counter example. There aren’t a lot of them, but I do like that people are finding some of them and I think it is still a very fertile ground for people to create female characters who are grappling with these decisions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Women can root for the destruction of all humanity, too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can be just as good as men at rooting for the destruction of humanity. I love those speeches. Those are my favorite. Isn’t there like a factory that makes that speech and they just update it?

**John:** There is. Well it’s always the eco-terrorist who really wants to turn his back to the Stone Age.

**Craig:** Look what we’ve done to this planet. Why should we be here? We’re a virus. We’re a parasite. Yup, factory just churned out another model.

**John:** Oh, it’s good stuff. J. Harris wrote in to say, “Could you discuss the use of irony within your screenplays, including situational irony, verbal irony, dramatic irony, cosmic irony, and tragic irony?” And it occurred to me that we have not really talked irony as a literary concept very often in the podcast. I think it’s because I don’t like the term. I find irony to be one of the most pedantic sort of – just the fact that you’re trying to split this into five categories of irony kind of drives me crazy.

And yet I think the use of irony is so fundamental to narrative and to dialogue and just to so many different things. I thought we might spend a few moments talking about irony as it is used in screenplays.

**Craig:** Sure. I do talk a little bit about it in the How to Write a Movie podcast, mostly I think in terms of what we’re breaking down here as possibly situational irony. That’s probably the one I think about the most when I think about writing.

**John:** Yeah. And so we’re not going to reference the Alanis Morissette song because I think that’s partly what turned me off of ever using the word irony.

**Craig:** It’s a song about non-ironic things.

**John:** Yeah. And the pedantry of sort of like well it’s a bummer but it’s not ironic. Well, ironic is maybe just not a great word for it. But it’s a phenomenon and it’s a feeling that permeates so much of what we write. So let’s talk about this umbrella feeling of irony, even if we’re not sort of going to zero in on the subcategories of it.

Irony in a very general sense is the contrast between expectation and reality. What you thought you were going to get and what you actually get. And in many ways to me it feels like the punchline to a joke, even if it’s not a funny joke. It’s the idea of you thought you were going this place, but I took you this place.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think contrast between expectation and reality is an excellent way of thinking about it. And I would just add one little Philip to that and that is that the reality that you weren’t expecting is related to what you were expecting.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, if a banker is walking down the street and a piano falls on him and kills him, that was not expected. It’s also not ironic. But if a safe falls on him and kills him, he’s a banker, got killed by a safe which is a thing he uses at the bank. There is a connection between the thing that wasn’t expected and reality vaguely. And that’s where you kind of start to feel the usefulness when we’re writing because it is a fun and interesting game to figure out how to connect the surprises in some sideways interesting contrasting way with what you thought you would get.

**John:** Yup. And so I want to avoid talking about a character being ironic, because I think when we say that we really mean that a character is sarcastic and is sort of using words in a specific way. I want to talk about irony more in the sense of what it’s doing for story. So let’s look at how irony is often helping to create the conflict, the tension, the plot itself. A classic example is the audience knows something that the characters don’t.

So, the audience knows that, oh, that’s actually the characters mother rather than his sister. Or that there’s a bomb underneath the table and they keep lingering around this conversation. There’s a tension being created there because that is suspense, that is comedic. At the end of Romeo and Juliet all the trouble of the poison. We know that the poison was real, or not real, and the characters in that scene don’t. So, we feel the tension because we have information the characters don’t.

**Craig:** And typically this will be referred to as tension. I mean, while technically it is a form of irony, it’s pretty rare that people would call it ironic. It’s that feeling that you get when Clarice Starling shows up at a house and it’s supposed to be a billion miles away from where Jame Gumb is and whoops, actually he’s right there. That is the house. And she’s there and she doesn’t know he’s the guy and we do.

So, that’s tension. But technically irony, yes. Typically we don’t use it that way.

**John:** Yeah. More classically sort of ironic is in Aladdin he wants to become rich so he can impress Jasmine, but she’s repulsed by his riches. And sort of the fancier he gets the less she likes him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s irony.

**Craig:** Good old backfiring. Yup.

**John:** In The Incredibles Mr. Incredible gets sued for saving a person from suicide. There’s an irony underlying that situation. So because the suicide and saving the life are related and they’re not related in the ways you would expect them to be related. It’s helping to ignite the plot of the story as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s pretty common that you create these odd details that make you think, oh, how strange. Irony tries to make sense of the chaos of reality. So, it’s not just that some random thing happens to somebody to help them or hurt them. But it’s almost as if somebody, like God, or a writer, did it in such a way as to make a comment about that person and their life. Like, oh, you wanted – have you ever seen, I’m not a huge fan of the movie itself, but there’s a movie called Wish Master. Have you ever seen Wish Master?

**John:** I have not, but I have a sense of what may happen there. Is there a Monkey’s Paw kind of quality there?

**Craig:** There sure is. So the Wish Master is a gin, you know, that’s the root of genie. But he’s evil. And he’s released from his captivity and he grants wishes. And whatever you wish for you get. But only in the most literal sense, which ends up killing you every time. And so it’s just one situational commentary/irony moment after another. Backfiring supreme.

**John:** On the thread of like what you’re wishing for, the whole category of situational irony, like because of who you are this is ironic that it’s happening. In The Wizard of Oz everyone wishes for, everyone wants the thing that they actually already have. Scarecrow actually is quite smart, but he’s looking for a brain. That’s natural.

Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Harry Potter has to kill Voldemort, wants to kill Voldemort, but the only way he can do that is to let Voldemort kill him. So there’s a reversal of expectation there.

Classically The Twilight Zone episode, which are all sort of Monkey Paw situations. The main character wants to be left alone so he can read, but then his reading glasses break so he’s stuck there alone but can no longer read the books he wants to read.

Oedipus is searching for a murderer who is actually himself. Those are examples of sort of situational irony where a fundamental reveal in the plot, in the story itself, is character’s misassumptions about themselves or their situation.

**Craig:** And I think we like it as an audience because it does organize stuff. Irony implies intention. If someone has to die in a story you could just shake a big old bingo roller full of little balls with possible deaths on it, pull one out, and kill her. But that doesn’t feel as interesting to us as something that is intentional. Well if it’s intentional then it’s probably going to have that ironic vibe.

**John:** Yeah. We like there to feel like there’s some order and some sense to the universe. And so when we see a twist ending that works really well it’s probably because like the punchline to a joke all that setup was there, you just weren’t anticipating the setup taking you to that place. And that’s the pop. That’s the little bit of surprise you get.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But even when it’s not the whole movie, or the whole story, we use irony in smaller places to provide some texture and some detail. So, you have a married couple in counseling and they find out that their therapist has been divorced three times. There’s an irony to a divorced marriage therapist. You have a fire station burning down. You have a police car that the tires have been stolen from it. There’s an irony to that that feels – it makes the world feel just a little bit more, I don’t know, detailed, textured. It makes it feel like there’s some intention behind it.

**Craig:** Interesting. Yeah. It’s just more interesting. I mean, because you could, I mean, look the marriage counselor when they say, “Well what about you? What’s your secret?” And she says, “Oh yeah, no, I got married when I was 22 and we have the occasional fight, but mostly it’s been wonderful and we don’t really have challenges and we’re still married. It’s been 40 years. And the secret is just, you know, like all these things that I showed you on this worksheet, yeah, just do the worksheet. That’s great.” That’s super boring. It’s super boring.

And we like the idea of a failure somehow having some wisdom from their failure that they can impart that helps other people, but they’re struggling to help themselves. This is interesting. Our minds are wired to contrast. You know that vision and hearing are entirely based on contrast. So, hearing in particular, if someone plays a pure tone at a frequency and just keeps playing it you’ll stop hearing it after, I don’t know, 20 seconds. Because it’s not changing. So the little fibers that are twitching against the nerves in your ear, they activate because it’s a new. And then after a while they’re like, OK, we get it, we’ll stop. This hasn’t changed. The way that they encode videos, you know, with MPEG and all that stuff is basically by just encoding the things that change. Why encode the things that don’t?

So, this is kind of how it works for us when we’re watching stuff. We want those weird changes of things we would expect because that’s the information that makes it through our filter. Otherwise, boring.

**John:** Yeah. But we want things ideally to change in a way that matches to some degree our expectations. And so as you said earlier, if it’s just random then eventually you’re going to give up on it because you cannot follow what’s actually happening.

**Craig:** It’s just noise.

**John:** So it has to feel like, OK, there’s an intention that’s taking you to a place. And so often dialogue, irony and dialogue, is giving you that texture and giving you that bit of surprise. That little pop that keeps you coming back to it. And so sitcom writing is so full of joke after joke after joke, and it’s these little bursts of ironic surprise that sort of keep you going through it.

Generally in verbal irony it’s the difference between the literal meaning of something you’re saying versus the figurative meaning of what someone is saying. And so that’s how you get into your double entendres, your shade, your sarcasm, your passive-aggressive, “the good news is we’re all going to die.” It’s all those things that sort of have a little bit of a spark that sort of keep you engaged in a thing, keep the ball up in the air.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Irony is a useful way to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Use it.

**John:** Use it. Use it, and use it smartly. And so be thinking about it not just on a big story-wide scale, but on a smaller scale. And I would urge people to not be thinking about these little subcategories of stuff, because that’s literary criticism and papers you write when you’re a sophomore, but it’s not the kind of work that you’re doing writing a new scene in a script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Your use of irony and use of these techniques is setting a tone for what your script is doing and the way the characters talk, the way the world works. And as long as you’re consistent with it it’s going to be great. But if you try to dial that in for the first time on page 60 it’s going to bump.

I remember a script I wrote at Paramount years, and years, and years ago I had this one great line of dialogue and I was so excited about it. And my executive called it out. “That’s a great line for a completely different script. It just does not make sense here.” And I’m like, yeah, you’re right. Just it’s a great line.

**Craig:** Yeah. Irony is a fundamental ingredient. You can’t bake cookies without sugar and then sprinkle some sugar on these little flour dough balls and call it a cookie. It’s got to be in there. You just have to plan it.

**John:** All right, well let’s move to some actual writing on the page that we can look at and see if there’s any irony on display there. This is our Three Page Challenge. So for folks who are new to the podcast here every couple weeks we open up the mailbag and look through and see these submissions that our listeners have sent in, generally the first three pages of their script. It could be a TV script. It could be a feature script. And we look at what we see and give you our honest opinions on what we’re seeing that works and what could be a little bit better.

So we get in a zillion of these. And Megana Rao is responsible for looking through all of these. I want to invite her on because before we get started on these three specific ones she and I were looking through some of the examples and had some general guidelines and suggestions for everybody else sending stuff through. So, Megana, why don’t you come on board here?

**Craig:** Take it away, Megana.

**Megana Rao:** Hey guys.

**John:** Hey. So, how many of these samples do we get in on a given week in preparation for a given episode?

**Megana:** I usually look through about 100.

**John:** That’s a lot. And when you’re looking through them are you mostly focused on this is an interesting story idea, these are interesting problems I’m seeing, this is really good, this is really bad? What are the kind of things that bring it up to this next level for you?

**Megana:** Yeah, I think I’m looking for people who are taking risks, doing something interesting, or within three pages are quickly establishing the world and giving us some character development. And I think recently as I’ve been getting better at this, filtering through what’s just not going to work, too, issues of formatting or if I can read in the first couple of lines the writer is just trying to do too much within the description, I think it’s much easier for me to filter those out.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t want writers to ever be embarrassed. We don’t want people to feel like, you know, these people are doing this voluntarily which is great and awesome and so thank you for sending this in, but we don’t want to embarrass somebody and it does nobody any good for us to slam on somebody.

We want this to be helpful and educational for the person who sent it in, but really for everybody. And so we’re trying to find that balance of like examples that have enough things to talk about that can be improved but also have some good things to talk about as well.

Some of the pages you’ve sent through recently in this last batch, some things that I noticed, I’ve put them into kind of two buckets. One is sort of sloppiness where I just sense that this writer did not proofread carefully. And there were mistakes where like the wrong word was used. There’s extra spaces in places. It’s not even that it’s formatted wrong, they’re literally just typos. And second is unfamiliarity with the screenplay format. And it’s great that some people are sending in some of the first stuff that they’ve written, but I also feel like they have not read enough screenplays. And I think the great thing about 2021 is you can find the scripts for any movie that’s ever been produced online.

I just feel like you need to read like 30 scripts and really get a sense of what that format feels like. Because sometimes I get stuff in that’s like, oh, that’s just really don’t know what a screenplay is or does. And they just need to take in that format a little bit better.

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

**John:** Some other sort of ongoing things I’ve noticed in a lot of these pages is confusion about punctuation. Confusion about where do commas go. You can make different choices about where to put some commas, but some of these commas are just really in the wrong place. I see semicolons sometimes. Almost never have I seen a semicolon used properly. If you’re thinking about using a semicolon you really need to stop, take a few steps back, maybe look up what the usage of semicolons is, and see if that’s really the right choice.

**Craig:** It’s not. [laughs] It’s not the right choice ever in a screenplay ever.

**John:** I mean, I can think of, having written 120 or more scripts, I’ve probably used a semicolon in a screenplay three or four times. It’s just not a common thing you’re going to use in a screenplay.

**Craig:** I literally don’t think I’ve ever done it.

**John:** Yeah. You probably want a colon. You may want two dashes. More likely you want a comma or a period. Simplicity is generally your friend there.

A thing I noticed in this last batch is people tend to not put a space before parenthesis, and so they’ll have a character’s name and then there won’t be a space for the parenthesis, the character’s age, or what the description is of that person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Put a space there. That’s great. Same with brackets. You’re doing like day or night or after something, just give us that space before then.

Lastly I would say on the title page, Written by, Screenplay by, Story by, those are all credits you’ll see. Something you’ll never see on a real screenplay is Story Edited by.

**Craig:** Story Edited by?

**John:** Or Story Editor. That’s not a thing.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. That’s not a natural credit.

**Craig:** Don’t do it.

**John:** Written by, Screenplay by, Story by, nothing else is really appropriate for the stuff that you’re sending in to us.

**Craig:** The semicolon of credits.

**John:** It is.

**Megana:** And I guess the only other thing I’d add is verb tenses. I see a lot of people, just even within the three pages, flipping through a bunch of different verb tenses and that’s just something I think to be mindful of.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about that. Because screenplays are written in the present tense. And they’re never written in the past. They’re always in the present tense. And you can use the present continuous, like “Joe is putting on his shoes when he hears a noise.” “Is putting on his shoes” is great and fine. But you’re not going to use that for everything. Use that in cases where action could be interrupted. Most of the time you’re going to be using the simple present. “Joe puts on his shoes. Joe opens the door to find something.”

If you’re using present tense continuous there’s got to be a reason why you’re using that other than just the normal present tense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s just a lot of overcomplicated – all right, so John and I have a slightly different view about whether you should be going back over your stuff, but I’m such a go-backer over my stuff. And at least in this point I think even if you don’t want to creatively go back over your stuff just take a moment to go back over your stuff just for compression and concision. And just look for the bunch of words and things that maybe you just don’t need. And just concise it up a little bit if you can. It does help, right, because there’s a buildup of stuff over time.

We start to think of the things that have survived a month, or two, or three of rewrites as worthy of lasting all the way to the screen, but maybe they’re not. Maybe it’s just that you haven’t roughed them up when you could have. And these little dinky things, sometimes if you don’t do it right away you’re never going to get around to it and it’s just suddenly – there is a cumulative effect of too many words. “Too many notes,” as the emperor said.

**John:** And what Craig is saying about going back over your stuff, I think just so that everyone is clear, I try not to go over my last week’s work before I start on today’s work. I try to stay within the scenes that I’m working on. But in that scene that I’m working on I will go through that hundreds of times to keep tightening it up and to keep working on it.

And so he and I are both believers in, yeah, there’s probably your first approach to how you got through that scene, but there’s going to be a tighter version of that. There’s going to be just better choices of words and really making sure everything fits lockstep. Because screenwriting is very concise. You’re trying to use the fewest words to create the best effect possible.

So, sometimes we don’t see that in the pages that we’re getting and we’d love to see more of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And as a reminder we’re going to be talking through with some descriptions of these things, but if you’d like to actually read the pages we have PDFs. They’re attached to the show notes of this show. Or you can go to johnaugust.com. So you can read along with us as we go through these.

**Craig:** Let’s get onto it.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s talk about specifically the three pages that were sent through this week. Megana, can you give us a summary of this first one which is Echopraxia by J. Vernon Reha.

**Craig:** Or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story.

**John:** Which we’ll talk about as well.

**Megana:** OK, great. 19-year-old Bianca fiddles with the radio as she drives through a quiet neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. She approaches a stop sign, but instead of slowing down she accelerates through the intersection and crashes. Time slows as we watch the fall out of the crash and ghostly images of dead squirrels in buildings flicker on screen. Bianca speaks to us in voiceover as we watch the scene of the accident from a bird’s eye view.

Police and paramedics ID Bianca’s body, but find that the car she crashed into is mysteriously empty.

**John:** Great. Craig, so you set up the first question here. So Echopraxia Or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Story. This is by J. Vernon Reha. I bumped on that subtitle.

**Craig:** Well these are more common now. I have to say. This is sort of – it’s a trend. Nobody wants to just write a thing that’s called Rebound or whatever you might want to call something like this. So, it has become common to do these funky, twisty titles like for instance Echopraxia. There’s also a trend to do funky, twisty titles where you say something like Rebound, colon, and then some sort of Charlie Kaufman-ish overly worded musey kind of Synecdoche, New Yorker-y kind of thing.

And in this case J. Vernon did both. Echopraxia or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story. This is essentially a promotional choice. I don’t think that J. Vernon is expecting that there’s going to be a movie with this on the marquee, or in whatever the tiles are on HBO Max or Netflix. This is really about getting people to go, “Oh, I think I’ll read that one from the pile.” That’s my guess.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a fair guess. And a couple of the other samples we got through had something kind of like that. It kind of annoys me and yet I can see why somebody does it. So, I’m not going to come out strongly against it. I can’t imagine some buyer is going to go, “Ugh.” It doesn’t feel kind of fair on the title page and yet I can see why people do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s promotional. But, you know.

**John:** Well let’s get into the pages itself. So, the first page of this is essentially the car crash and going up into the car crash. And that first line was an example of sort of the not putting a space before the parenthesis. It’s not a big deal, and yet at the same time it’s like the first word I see a problem. And that doesn’t give me a lot of faith in what’s going on.

Mostly what I wanted to see in this opening section, because I think some of the writing of the actual crash is really nice, is stuff was in the wrong order. Stuff was in the wrong place. So it says, “I/E. CAR – MORNING,” well right now the writer is starting on Bianca. But then later on it’s talking that it’s early, the sun is still rising. We keep hopping around in terms of are we talking about the day or are we talking about Bianca. Give us one thing, then give us the next thing, then give us the next thing.

So I feel like if you’re going to set up what time of day this is, or what this feels like, what the neighborhood is like, do that first. And then get us to Bianca. And then get us into the crash.

Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** There are a lot of really interesting things going on here. There are some things that are also poking out where I just think I’m not sure how this works practically. So, for instance, “She turns on the corner of Fourth and Lake.” And then you point out, “It is early – the sun is just rising.” OK, couple of things. There is practically no difference between the sun rising and the sun setting, unless we literally see a west or east sign with an arrow, like in a cartoon. We don’t know which one it is. So we’re going to need some other indication that this is morning. Any other little indication would do if that’s what you want.

Similarly, turning on the corner of Fourth and Lake, is that important? Do I need to know it’s Fourth and Lake? Do I need to know it right now? If I do, I need to be outside of the car. I don’t want to see her turning on the corner of Fourth and Lake. I want to see a car turning onto Fourth and Lake. If it’s just her, I just need to see that she’s turning. That’s all. She turns to head down a different street. It’s early. The sun is rising. Did the sun just get into her eyes? Has it shifted? You know, give me some stuff there.

This is where it gets a little trickier.

**John:** Craig–

**Craig:** Go on.

**John:** Let’s just talk through sort of how you might do that on the page. So I could envision, if the first slug line of this was “A quiet residential road in Liberty, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis, one of those neighborhoods where all of the homes are eerily similar. It’s early.” And then some other description about dew on the laws. You know, newspapers on sidewalks. Whatever you want to do there. And then a car turns onto Fourth and Lake. And then we are interior the car afterwards. That’s a much more natural way to sort of – it helps us see what are the shots. It lets us visualize the movie a little bit more easily.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or stay inside the car the whole time. And then we don’t get out until the crash happens. So you have choices to make. “Bianca is pretty, but nondescript, with a face you could forget.” Well, why don’t we just start by saying, “This script is fine, but nondescript, with a story you could forget?” Why would you want to advertise? This feels like a reaction to a “hot but doesn’t know it.” But it’s not actually giving me anything. I don’t know what she looks like at all. And I definitely don’t want to be told that I need to cast an actor whose face is so generic I’ll forget them.

I want to know what her hair is like. I want to know what she’s wearing. I want to know if she has makeup on.

**John:** Are her nails painted?

**Craig:** Are they dirty?

**John:** A 19-year-old young woman could be a zillion different things, so give us some choices here.

**Craig:** “She Flicks through radio stations,” so J. Vernon capitalizes flicks, which I think is OK. At first I was like, oh, is that a mistake, but I see there’s a flick, flick, flick, flick thing going on. Flicking through radio stations is something that was far more common when you and I were learning how to drive. Because now you tap, tap, tap I think to get through radio stations at this point. But I get the point. What I was a little bit more concerned about was that this is being intercut with the following: “A child runs into the street for a ball. Flick. Squirrels chase each other up a tree. Flick. A man and his wife shout indistinctly behind an open window. Flick Flick Flick…”

How are we supposed to get to any of that? Are we just dead-cutting to a squirrel? Are we dead-cutting to a window and people maybe behind it and you can’t hear them. Are we dead-cutting to a kid in the street which you know you’re going to think is going to get run over? How do we do that? And why?

**John:** Yeah. And how does it relate to Bianca? Is she noticing this? I assume that we are in POV because of how this scene started, but this didn’t feel like POV, so–

**Craig:** Right. It doesn’t feel like POV. And the reason that I’m kind of picking on this is because I really like what happens next.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** And that’s what sort of matters. And so I’m wondering maybe we don’t need all this junk because really what’s important is that she does something surprising which is she intentionally crashes into another car. And I would love to know, since it’s day, I don’t know why we’re being blinded by approaching headlights? It’s morning.

**John:** I noticed that, too.

**Craig:** I’d like to see what kind of car that is. That’s actually going to be very helpful for what comes next. Is it a Prius? Is it a pickup truck? What is it? Then she crashes. The description of the crash was fascinating. I mean, obviously we’re getting into science fiction here but it was really cool.

**John:** Yeah. So this is the moment that gave me some hope because I felt like the writer was picking very specific visuals to dramatize what was actually happening here. So I love a good car crash in slow motion. And I love how it’s going to feel. I love the description of glitching. It let me know that something unusual was about to happen. And that was great. And so I loved that we got there.

So, if earlier it was just more normal and got to that moment, great. If earlier, you gave us a sense that something was odd and then we got to that, great. But I wasn’t led into this moment with any confidence. And so if I had been a little more confident going into it it would have felt even better.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then the first line comes from Bianca, who has just theoretically killed herself. And it is in voiceover, “Sometimes I wonder if I have a personality.” That’s not kind of – you want that line, whatever that line is, it needs to grab you by the face and go here we go. This is fascinating. She’s making a statement. And it doesn’t quite do that. It’s a little bit more of a thinky line than a grabby, shocking line.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s close. And I would have loved to have – there’s going to be a first line, and whatever that first line is I would have pulled it up earlier towards the crash so that we have something to anchor us to before we get to this sort of wide open street scene, or people we’ve not established before looking at the results of the car crash. I would love to hear that line somewhere in that car crash scene.

But I like the voiceover over all as a feeling. And so I was, you know, excited to see it. I don’t think the line is quite right, but I like where it was headed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tonally it seems like it’s dancing around the right thing.

**John:** So, Craig, the answer to your question, they are both gray 2004 Ford Fiestas.

**Craig:** Now I see.

**John:** Which feels like well that’s got to be important. I feel like that is an intentional choice. And yet I don’t know what’s important and what’s not important because there hasn’t been any signaling to me as a reader. So if that feels like the kind of thing which is so important that I might underline it or bold face it or somehow call it out or stick it on its own line. Because that’s weird.

**Craig:** I’d go further.

**John:** Why would two identical cars crash into each other?

**Craig:** That to me requires actual direction on the page. First of all, gets its own paragraph for sure. And then her car we now see is crumpled. Her 2004 gray Ford Fiesta is crumpled and smashed. We come around to see the other car on its back. Also gray. And then as we move around the back we see an upside down the word “Fiesta.” Then we go it’s the same exact model and make. Two of the same cars just smashed into each other. Because you want the audience to go Whoa, not like, Huh, those are similar.

**John:** Yeah. There must have been a sale on 2004 Ford Fiestas.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** So then we get into two detectives, one with glasses and one with a beard, talking. I want to cut most of their dialogue because it was just yada-yada. They’re basically saying that she’s alive and stable, but there’s no other body in the other car. I felt there were ways we could visually see that and get to that point and have it be the moment of discovery rather than two people talking about something that has already happened.

It would be great to see people looking in the car and there’s no body in the other car. There’s no person in the other car.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Rather than reported moments, seeing the moment feels better to me.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, you can do a thing where a detective shows up and he walks over to the other guy and he says, “OK,” and the guy is like, “Yeah, she’s…” And they’re wheeling her into – that’s Bianca Armitage, 19, no criminal history, family has been alerted. We’re running a tox screen. Looks like she’s going to make it.

OK, what about the other guy? Or what about the other car? And the cop says, “There was no one in the other car.” And that’s it. And just like, what?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s weird.

**John:** What? What?

**Craig:** We don’t need this back and forth. “It’s the strangest thing.” No one ever says that. Ever.

**John:** A real head-scratcher.

**Craig:** It’s the strangest thing. Real head-scratcher. These guys are actually diminishing the drama of the situation that you’ve created by kind of being weirdly bland about it.

**John:** Yeah. So I can envision a scenario in which the crash has basically just happened, or we’re coming in like 30 seconds later and there are neighbors who are like looking at Bianca and like, OK, she’s alive in there, and they’re looking. And then we dolly around to the other car and there’s nobody in the car. And that’s surprising. That is shocking. That’s a cool moment. And then we reveal that the license plate is blank. Like that is really creepy and interesting and goose-bumpy.

But having these detectives who aren’t going to be important characters have this dialogue isn’t doing it for us.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And then going to the reporter.

**Craig:** No. No, no.

**John:** That just has to go.

**Craig:** No, no, no.

**John:** I never believe the reporter covering this thing. You don’t cover car crashes like this.

**Craig:** No. I mean, Memphis is – maybe in some tiny, tiny Podunk town in a county where nothing ever happens. But this is Memphis, Tennessee. It’s not necessarily New York, but it’s a real city. And, no, car crashes happen all the time. They stay on somebody going, “A car crash happened.” It’s just, no. No.

**John:** So, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this on the show, but at the end of my street there are car crashes all the time, or at least there used to be car crashes all the time until we finally convinced the city to change how traffic flows and put in some one-way turns and things like that. But I would just be watching TV and I’d hear the squeal of tires, crash. And like, OK, it’s a crash. And so I’d put on my shoes, I’d get my phone, and I’d go down. And so I’ve had to deal with so many flipped over cars over the last couple of years.

**Craig:** Oh god. Jesus.

**John:** And it’s terrible. And so I know what these crashes are like and never does a news crew show up. I mean, this is Los Angeles. But even in Memphis, Tennessee a news crew is not going to show up. This is just not realistic or believable.

**Craig:** It’s not news.

**John:** Not news.

**Craig:** It’s not news.

**John:** It’s not news. Then we get to the hospital room and I’m curious what happens next. And so I will say that the good writing of the car crash and of the mystery of like, wait, where is the other person in the other car, who is Bianca, is Bianca possessed by some other spirit, I’m fascinated by all of those. So that’s what makes me curious about what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** And that is exactly how I would think about rewriting this. What would the person watching this be most curious about? And I can assure you it is not a reporter talking about a crash. It is not two detectives yapping back and forth in a bland way. I want to know, wait, was there somebody in that car? Can you convince me there was nobody in that car? What does it mean that these two cars are exactly the same? What does that mean? And where is that car now? That’s what I want to know.

So, think about what people would want. Give it to them. But in an interesting way. This is the big secret. Now you know.

**John:** Now we know. All right. Let’s move onto our next Three Page Challenge. Megana, tell us about The Little Death by Autumn Palen.

**Megana:** All right, so Brandy, a young woman in her 20s, stares blankly at the ceiling of her bedroom. Tony, male 20s, emerges from beneath the covers and asks if she “got there.” Brandy admits that she did not and that she has never “been there.” Brandy reveals that she’s been too scared to masturbate on her own. Tony asks why not and we see a series of quick cutaways of Brandy’s fears, i.e. that someone will walk in on her or that she’ll electrocute herself with a vibrator.

They banter about what Tony can try next.

**Craig:** You really can’t electrocute yourself with a vibrator. I mean, if it was plugged into a wall?

**John:** These are battery controlled. So back in the days of plug-in vibrators, which I’m sure was a thing at some point.

**Craig:** Was it?

**John:** Then you could have, but you can’t.

**Craig:** Not in my lifetime. I think there have been batteries for a long time.

**John:** It’s probably more like hair dryers in bathtubs was maybe a thing. I bet some people actually did die of that. Exposed wire.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Early on, I think like in the 20s, a man would get on some sort of bicycle contraption and then an egg beater type electric vibrator would be attached to a woman. And this was all done under the heading of curing her hysteria. But, no, not since I would imagine the ‘40s has this been.

By the way, that actually counts. I have to say, people may think we’re just being picky, but it counts. Because people need to know that the characters are living in our world and thinking somewhat logically.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, it does make me think though I’ve seen so many examples of like shows from the ‘70s where a woman was murdered because someone threw a hair dryer into the bathtub. But how was it ever a believable death? What person is using a blow dryer while in a bathtub?

**Craig:** Well, you know, people are incredibly stupid.

**John:** Yeah, I guess they smoke in bed.

**Craig:** They do. The good news is that somewhere along the line the ground fault interrupter circuit was invented so in your bathroom all those things you would plug a hair dryer into now has its own little circuit breaker. So, you probably won’t die.

**John:** All right, Craig, so The Little Death, what is your take on The Little Death?

**Craig:** Well, there’s nothing wrong with it. OK. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s just not a lot right with it. Because it is somewhat familiar. We have seen conversations a little bit like this in all sorts of sitcoms and things like that, and other movies. My biggest thing about it was it read, it flowed, the dialogue sounded perfectly fine, I just didn’t believe much of it.

So, Tony seems to have feelings. Tony is just totally cool with everything. And Brandy is in a very strange place because she’s never had an orgasm before, which is not horribly uncommon for women in their 20s. It’s a thing. OK, so I’m with it. But she neither seems to be open or closed about it. She just sort of tells it in between like let me just tell you a big secret of mine. And his reaction is like, oh, OK, let me just try a different thing. And, does that work?

It all feels a bit sort of shruggish. Like a shrug. Like I’m watching a fairly mild discussion between two perfectly nice people.

**John:** So, I enjoyed that it was overall sex positive. I enjoyed Tony’s sex positivity and that Tony was trying hard. And I really like that. I like the specific details of like “wipes his lips with a thumb and forefinger.” Great. Love that. I see the image. It’s terrific.

And while I like him being sex positive, I don’t have a sense of where are they at in their relationship. Like how long – who are they specifically individually and how long have they been kind of a couple. And I think we can get that information into this scene. Or we can get some sense of what their connection is in this scene.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Some of the problems are like, Brandy, 20s. 20s is anything from 20 to 29. That’s a huge range.

**Craig:** It’s a big spread. Yeah.

**John:** So I think you got to give us a very specific age on Brandy. Like is she still in college? Or is she killing it as a consultant at a top law firm? It’s just too general here. And that’s I think my biggest problem with all of this is that it didn’t feel like it was rooted in very specific characters encountering a specific situation.

**Craig:** I mean, look, Brandy has a problem. Right? It’s not like Brandy loves this situation. She doesn’t love this situation. She’s sort of trapped by a fear. I’d love to know a little bit more. I think this fear part is the part that I believe the least, not only for the aforementioned batteries can’t kill you reason, but also because that doesn’t actually seem like why women are too scared to masturbate. It’s not a fear of physical death as much as there’s shame, culture, family issues, religion, whatever it is. It seems like it’s probably a little more complicated than that. So it seems so readily and immediately psychologically accessible to her.

Also, she seems to not – at least in these pages – she doesn’t come off as aware that this is a problem. So it’s only a problem suddenly and then it’s a problem always. Meaning, she’s letting him do this. Now, if she has a problem and she’s allowing him to do this, either she’s saying, “Here’s the deal. It’s not going to work, but you try and let’s see if you can be the one.” Which I don’t get from this. Or, she’ll fake it.

But what she’s not going to do is think, oh, for some reason this time it will be different than all the other times and I’ll just sort of mention that it actually turned out to not be different from all the other times. It just feels like there’s not backstory built in. There’s not experience built in. We’re dealing with sex, so there’s shame around it and it’s tricky and it’s psychological. And both of them just seem too simple. They just seem like incredibly simple people.

**John:** I think my biggest issue with how the pages were flowing is I didn’t get a good sense of – I think the tension of the pages is that she’s telling the guy sort of what these different encounters were, because he’s reacting to them. And I think all those cutaways back to “I just told you that story, I just told you that story,” get rid of those. I think you have a stronger story.

I think it’s more interesting if we’re, as the audience, are being led into these things and she’s not telling him those things. Because then it becomes a source of tension between the two of them. Because someone who can be too nice and too supportive and it can drive you crazy, I think that could be the source of real good comedic tension within the scene. Where she’s like I don’t want you to even try. I don’t want to deal with this right now. I don’t want to try to fix this. And then we don’t need to sort of have the escalation and the rule of three in terms of like all the things that have gone wrong.

Just the one occurrence could be great. Right now on page two, “The sound of the door slamming open snaps her from her daze. Brandy jolts up, focus fixed on the door in a panic.” And right now she says, “I didn’t know you were home.” That’s kind of generic. If she says, “Grandpa!”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s funnier.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we don’t even need to see grandpa. We just know like, oh god, I can’t even imagine how terrifying that would be.

**Craig:** Or we just see grandpa. We see him staring there dropping his little bag from Trader Joe’s on the floor in shock. No one says a full, complete sentence when they’ve been caught masturbating, I have been told.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Allegedly.

**John:** Allegedly.

**Craig:** It just seems way too, yeah, sort of rigged. By the way, I didn’t quite understand thumb and forefinger. Do you understand her to mean like wipes his lips, like wipes his mouth with the back of his hand?

**John:** No, so sort of pinching – using thumb and forefinger on each side to sort of clean off his mouth.

**Craig:** I dispute that that would be effective. [laughs] I dispute that.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. That seems odd.

**John:** I would also, getting back to sort of the basics here, it’s such a clichéd moment of like the guy comes up from the covers and asks like “how was that/did it?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I just feel like I’ve seen that so often. I could cut those first couple lines and – or even if he just says, “No?” And you could just get rid of the question, I guess.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. Why did Tony stop? What clue did he have that it had ended? Right off the bat I was so confused. Did he set an egg timer? What happened?

**John:** We won’t know.

**Craig:** And he was like, “How was that?” And she’s like, no. And he’s like, “No? Really? You mean that you didn’t have an orgasm right when I arbitrarily stopped going down on you?”

That’s what I mean. They just seem a bit dim as people. So, make them smarter.

**John:** Yeah. We like that. Let’s get to our final Three Page Challenge. This is Chula Vista by Kristen Delgado. Megana, talk us through it.

**Megana:** Enrique, 17, and his father, Ignacio, 34, are selling a wealthy homeowner, Mr. Lawson, 45, on their landscaping services. Mr. Lawson’s daughter, Stevie, 17, pokes out and tries to talk to Enrique who barely acknowledges her. Enrique secures the sale and as Enrique and his father are leaving Ignacio asks his son who the girl was. And Enrique pretends he doesn’t know her. As they leave the Chula Vista neighborhood Enrique tells his father that one day when he’s a doctor he’ll buy him a home there.

Then we see a tired-looking Enrique getting ready for school in the morning. He almost forgets to pack the burrito his mom packed and the dad makes a joke that Enrique is too good for it because he’s going to be a doctor.

**John:** Great. We’ll start on the title page. This includes an image. It looks like an image that’s maybe custom made for this script. You and I have talked about images in screenplays before. I felt like this set a nice tone and a picture of it. What did you feel about this image?

**Craig:** I liked it. I liked it. I thought that because the image was a bit soft and watercolor-y and defocused that it immediately said this is romance. And not just because a boy and a girl are sitting there on the ground by some lit candles at night and all the rest. Just the Chula Vista itself, the valley, the world, the sunset, the lights. Everything felt romantic.

So, even if this turns out to not be a romance, which I suspect it will turn out to be a romance, it put me in a nice place. I was happy. It felt sophisticated. You know? It was an interesting image.

**John:** Yeah. I liked it, too. One challenge with images in screenplays is that images want to be centered across the width of the page, but of course text in screenplays shift slightly to the right because historically we’ve had bindings, we’ve had three holes on the left hand side. So it bugs me a little bit that the image is off-center compared to the text. So it’s a thing you could figure out how to manipulate in whatever program you’re using. You could figure out how to do it in Highland. Being off-center bugged me more than the fact that there’s an image there. That’s me.

**Craig:** It looks on-center to the title and her name.

**John:** To me it’s on-center to the page but off-center compared to the title.

**Craig:** I printed it out, so there may be some funky printer stuff going on.

**John:** Ah, so it may look different to you.

**Craig:** But it’s a nice image. You know what? Actually, Kristen, this is by Kristen Delgado, the only thing I would think about is if you have a little Photoshop-y thing or Gimp is a free one that you can get that’s like Photoshop, to somehow just do something with the edges of this thing so it doesn’t seem like such a hard edged Internet grab. You know what I mean? Like something that’s a little softer and kind of blended somehow. Fading on the edges. That sort of.

**John:** Let’s get to the script itself. The writing of the script itself. And so I believe after these three pages that this is a story about Enrique and his probably coming of age story in 1979 Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve never seen that before. It does feel like probably about a rich girl from Chula Vista and his dad is going to be the gardener for this family. I got that off of these first three pages and I would be curious what the complications are in that relationship that go ahead. And obviously the image was helping send me to that place.

Craig, what was your overall take, your overall feeling of these three pages?

**Craig:** Nervousness. Because I think you’re right. And that is what they’re promising. And I feel like I’ve seen this. A lot. I mean, there have been a billion Romeos and Juliets, but more importantly it seems like we’re getting a little bit of a kind of already done quite a bit take on being the child of immigrants and the mixing of immigrants with people who aren’t immigrants and different races and different classes and looking down at people.

It feels like this is well trod upon territory. And I didn’t get anything different from these than I normally would. It feels like I’m getting set up for Enrique to start to turning his back on his parents and his family because he’s a little bit embarrassed about them because he kind of aspires to be more with the rich kids. And so there’s going to be conflict there. And the first page I was a little nervous because Mr. Lawson does not seem like, again, this doesn’t seem like the way people are. Someone says, “We’re doing landscaping. We noticed your grass is kind of high.” “Uh, yeah, I haven’t had a chance to get to it.”

But more importantly he goes, “How much?” “$30.” “Great. Go ahead. Do it.” That’s it? Did he not think of this before? It just seems so kind of like mild. And the other thing that was kind of odd is Ignacio in Spanish says, “What a fucking asshole.” And I’m all for the good old classic fucking asshole rich white guy, but I don’t see what Mr. Lawson did. He answered the door.

**John:** He didn’t shake his hand, but he did say yes. He got a job. So I was also thrown by that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the part that he closes the door in his face. Also, that’s – that’s not even how racists work. Like they do shake your hand. Then they close the door and then they bad mouth you. It feels like there’s a slight kind of – there’s a bit of a corniness going on to something that I think as a culture we’re getting and more honest about. I mean, there’s just more honesty.

I’m nervous that this is not going to give me something new. That said, it might. I can’t tell from three pages.

**John:** Yeah. So, Mr. Lawson, 45, dressed for racquetball at the country club.” So, I don’t really quite know what dressed for racquetball at the country club means. Unless he’s carrying his racquetball racket, I just see a guy in shorts and a headband maybe. But I immediately stop and think like you don’t actually go to the club dressed that way. You change into that kind of stuff at the club.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It was a weird first image for me. I love, obviously, hair and makeup and clothing details to help us tell about the character, I just – it felt like we were trying to get to like you’re interrupting some other moment. And so figure out what that moment was.

I like the idea of Enrique, and we’re starting this story with Enrique trying to get the job to mow the lawn there. And I thought his first dialogue does make sense. But what Craig is saying is like Mr. Lawson is going to hear that and then immediately sort of know what’s going on. He’s going to check the Blakey’s home, OK, this really is a person. You know you’re not making this up. And he’s going to push a little bit more. And I just didn’t see that pushing.

And if this scene were a few lines longer there could be a little bit more back and forth in looks in terms of Stevie, the girl who is coming out, and sort of what that whole dynamic is. I just felt like it got a little rushed to get through this and I didn’t believe that he got this job.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if this is a rich guy, if that’s the point, then nice house in nice neighborhood, he either has somebody mowing his lawn, or he’s like a little kooky and doesn’t give a shit. But he’s not going to be this kind of stuffy classic country club kind of white guy and be neither of those things, just be negligent about his lawn. It just seems odd.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There must be a reason why he’s been mowing his own lawn if he has been. Also, where did Stevie come from? She just like suddenly steps out from behind her father. That’s weird. Does she just follow him around and hang out behind him and then just slide into? You know what I mean? You have to think about, OK, on the day where is she? Can she just be coming around the other side of the house? Or coming down the stairs? Or something.

**John:** Yeah. You could mention her coming around the other side of the house and she’s using the hose to spray off her feet or something that are dirty. There’s got to be a more interesting way to sort of see her than just like behind her father.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another opportunity here is while I do like the idea of getting the job for the first time, that is a lot of work to set up. If it works for the story, he could have been cutting the grass here for a time and he’s basically saying, “Oh hey, I need a check,” or “I need to get paid.” And that’s that moment. And then there’s actually money exchanging hands which could feel good and actually help set some stuff up a little bit better.

So, I think there’s just opportunities here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like Mr. So-and-so who has been doing your lawn, he’s retired, he just retired last week. We’re doing your neighbor, Mr. Blakely’s, lawn. If you like we can just pick up yours now. There’s some kind of – it just makes sense, you know.

But Stevie, yeah, like if that’s the thing, if this is the Enrique and Stevie story, this is not – this is weird. It’s like a weird dud of a moment.

**John:** Yeah. So then we get to Ignacio and Enrique in the pickup truck and this could be a really good moment. It’s not working for us right now because I don’t get what the real vibe is between father and son here. I felt like the “when I’m doctor I’ll move here,” I didn’t buy – that just felt like an author talking. It didn’t feel like an actual kid talking.

**Craig:** Corny. It just feels corny. And similarly like a dad, generally speaking, if you think that maybe like your son likes this girl and you’re like, “Oh, who’s that?” “Oh, she’s this girl from school.” You’re like, “OK, cool.” You don’t say, “That’s what I said about your mother.” Eww.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Eww. That’s an eww. You just don’t do that with your boy.

**John:** Yeah. So, but I wonder what their vibe is. Is he ribbing him? What’s going on? I like the dad is drinking a beer, so there’s stuff you could do there. Also crucially, it’s in this pickup truck sequence that we’re establishing Chula Vista as a place and we’re seeing this sign. So think about, again, this is the inside/outside of the car. There’s a good argument to be made for being outside of the car, see the sign, the truck drives past, and then we’re inside the car with them.

Because if we’re inside the car with them it’s very hard to then pop out to see the sign and then be back in the car. If the sign is important, which I think it is, because I wouldn’t know that Chula Vista is necessarily a neighborhood, then tell us that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think this little spot here is one, Kristen, that I want you to think about really carefully. Because you have a point of view, you have a perspective, and you have a feeling about this place. I can tell. And I am not from there. So your job is to make me feel what you want me to feel. And in this moment you want me to feel some sort of connection and kinship to this place. But what you’ve done is you just have a guy that I just met just announcing something that frankly he wouldn’t normally announce. Because they’ve been living there a long time. So, how common is it for you to drive around the place where you’ve been living with somebody else who has been living there and then they suddenly announce, “Man, this view never gets old.” And then a fact. “You can see the whole valley.” No shit, dad. We drive here every day. I live here.

**John:** I can see, too. I have eyes.

**Craig:** So you need to figure out another way to make me feel this thing that maybe dad is upset that Enrique takes these things for granted or maybe that he doesn’t look closely enough and that he’s teaching him a lesson. But then the lesson has to be inspired by something that’s lacking that he sees in Enrique. So these are the things you’ve got to kind of figure out so that I feel what you want me to feel. Because I can tell you feel stuff. I just want it for me.

**John:** Absolutely. But if you’re trying to tell us that as the author, as the writer, then give us the wide shot and describe what it feels like and give us a sense of like this is the panorama and we get a sense of what the music is like. Oh, that’s really pretty. Rather than having the character comment on how pretty it is. Just show us how pretty it is. And that’s a thing you can do as the writer.

I felt the transition between this truck scene and then Enrique’s house, getting ready the next morning for school, was just a weird jump. And it didn’t feel like a natural handoff between this truck thing and then the next thing we’re getting ready for school. There needed to be some other moment between those two things.

**Craig:** Night.

**John:** Or maybe this wasn’t the next – night feels natural. Because as time progresses we’re used to – you know, a couple episodes back we talked about that we are time lords. And as an audience the next thing we want to see is night. We don’t want to see like the next morning getting ready for school. So, you could do the same kinds of things in the scene, but have it be a dinner thing. Like maybe he has to get all his homework off the table to set the table for dinner? Great.

**Craig:** Or maybe he’s just alone in his room thinking. You know, or he’s walking around thinking. We learn something about him or we learn something about Stevie. But if you go from day to morning you’ll just be so confused. Like, wait, why are they going to school suddenly in the afternoon. It won’t feel like morning.

**John:** It feels like a scene got dropped out in the edit and it’s just weird. Let me save you some grief in pages. The first time you have characters who are speaking in Spanish, do that “in Spanish” and then you never need to do it again. So if you’re going to use italics from that point forward you don’t ever need to do that again.

This is something I should have mentioned. The setup overall. If you have a parenthetical, that first letter inside a parenthetical is not uppercased unless it has to be uppercased. But that “in Spanish,” that should be a lowercase “in” for that parenthetical.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s just a strange convention, but that’s how it is.

**John:** Yeah. I want to thank these three writers here for sending in their pages, but also all the writers who sent in pages because it’s a tremendous amount of work for Megana to go through them but we get such a broad sampling of what our listeners are writing in with. So thank you very much for trusting us with these and for sharing your work with other people so others can learn.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** If you have three pages you want us to take a look at, don’t send them to the “ask” account. Instead, you need to go to johnaugust.com/threepage which is all spelled out, threepage. And there’s a little form there. You say who you are, that it’s OK for us to talk about on the air, and then you attach a PDF. So if you want to send in your pages that is where you send in those pages.

But thank you to everyone who submitted, especially these writers for these pages.

**Craig:** Thanks folks.

**John:** All right, it has come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Nope. [laughs]

**John:** All this time you’ve completely forgotten about the conceit of the show.

**Craig:** I whiffed.

**John:** Which is absolutely fine. So I will give two One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** One of which I think you would especially enjoy. So the thing you would enjoy is GeoGuessr, which could have been a One Cool Thing many–

**Craig:** I’ve played that. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great, great game.

**Craig:** I think it’s been one before. Yeah, it’s fun.

**John:** So, tell us about GeoGuessr. That can be your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I’ll steal it. So in GeoGuessr you’re basically using the Google Earth function where you’re looking at a street view and what it does is it just generates a random street view somewhere in the world. And your job, and you can click around on the image like you an on regular Google Street View. You can move this way and that way and up and down. And your job is to figure out where it is, down to as close to the exact point as you can.

So what you’re doing is you’re looking for clues. Obviously any text on the side of a building or a truck or even license plates. You start to think, OK, am I on the left side of the road driving forward or the right side of the road? What are those trees? And then if you’re lucky enough to get a crazy phone number, you can really get close.

So, you know sometimes you do really well. Sometimes you’re like I honestly don’t know where this is. And sometimes you can get within – the best ones are when you’re within three meters of it or something, which is just a joy.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But you get points and it’s for nothing other than just your amusement. It’s just fun. It’s a fun game.

**John:** Yeah. So my family has been playing that to pass random time. And it really is a good detective sort of game and you can work really hard to get yourself within three meters and then other times it will come up with one that you’re like I think I’m in Australia but I could also be somewhere in South America. You just have no idea because it plops you down in the middle of no place. But it’s always fun to find new places.

So, GeoGuessr. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

My One Cool Thing is a newsletter that comes out every week by Noah Kalina. I know him through a podcast I also listen to with Adam Lisagor, but his newsletter is terrific. I don’t think it has a name, it’s just his newsletter. He is a photographer in Upstate New York and he just goes on these sort of weird missions that he’s inspired by things and finds all the poppy seed bagels in his neighborhood in New York and figures out the poppy seed distribution on these bagels and photographs them beautifully. And it’s fun. Every week it’s sort of a weird little adventure.

It reminds me of, folks who are fans of Reply All, it feels like Reply All, or those episodes where they go off on these weird missions to figure out stuff. It feels like that. So, there will be a link in the show notes, but check out the back episodes and maybe subscribe to Noah Kalina’s newsletter.

**Craig:** I’m just looking at it right now and he actually did like a little MythBuster’s thing to see if it’s true that if you eat a bunch of poppy seeds that you will test positive for opiates. Because obviously that’s where heroin and morphine and all those things ultimately derive from the poppy plant. Not that poppy seeds get you high.

And he ate six poppy seed bagels in a week and then he did a drug test and he came back positive for narcotics, opiates specifically.

**John:** Yeah, opiates.

**Craig:** It worked.

**John:** So, lesson learned.

**Craig:** Lesson learned.

**John:** And so the podcast I was referring to is All Consuming. And so that’s where he and Adam, they look at all the products that show up on Instagram and they buy those products and see what they actually are like in real life. And they are delightful people and I also listen to their podcast.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** That is our show for this week. I want to thank Megana Rao for reading all those submissions. Thank you very much our producer.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nora Beyer. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a Premium member where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on money and happiness.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, the first of our Premium subscriber questions, or suggestions comes from Lianne in Burbank. And she writes, “In your own personal experiences has becoming wealthy actually made you happier? Has there been a certain threshold of your income where you noticed diminishing happiness returns? Is being truly wealthy all it’s cracked up to be, or are there difficulties beyond the glamour that you find often aren’t discussed?”

**Craig:** That’s an interesting question.

**John:** Craig, what’s it like being rich?

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you. [laughs] There are levels of wealthiness, but safe to say that John and I do pretty well. So, here’s my experience, Lianne. Being wealthy has not made me happier. Being wealthy has made me less unhappy, because when problems arise, as they often do in life, sometimes they’re mundane, something is leaking. Sometimes they’re very involved. Someone is sick. Money can solve problems. Money can’t make you happier, but money can definitely make some unhappy things go away faster or more efficiently. And I don’t kind of undersell that. That actually is a big deal.

The ability for money to diminish misery is impressive. That’s not everything. But it is impressive.

What it can’t do is keep you off the psychologist’s couch. The problems that you carry with you, your shames, your fears, all that stuff that was kind of in you and fomented within you by childhood, that’s still there. And sometimes being paid a lot exacerbates those things. It makes you feel guilty, undeserving. It makes you feel like you’re an imposter. You’re a liar. You’re somehow ripping people off.

There’s all sorts of crazy things that can bang around in your head if you are somebody that deals with some core shame issues…and some of us do not. But, you know what, making bad stuff go away, hooray money.

**John:** Yeah. And I think what Craig is describing is there really is a threshold beyond which it’s like, oh, some of the things which are not annoyances or aggravations or really anxiety I guess is probably the best way to put it diminish because I’m not going to be so worried about that thing. And so I do remember going from, after having been hired to do my first project, I’ve talked about on the show how I used to have just a spreadsheet and I knew what my monthly expenses were. And I knew I can afford to live for three months, or six months. I could just sort of count down and I could watch the money run out. And that was really stressful.

And once I started making enough money that I didn’t need to worry about that so much I was happier just because I didn’t have that source of constant dread and anxiety. Not really unlike having a president I couldn’t count on. A president I was convinced was actively trying to destroy the world. When you free yourself of that you’re like, oh, you have more space to be a little bit more happy.

But it plateaus and I think you’re sense, Lianne, is that there’s a plateau, there’s a zenith at which more money doesn’t make you any happier and I think that’s very, very true. And I don’t know the specific dollar figure, but when you – I think it’s when you don’t have to worry about every expense. When you can be just like, oh, I’ll just put that on a card and I know I’ll be able to pay for it. That is a nice feeling, knowing that I don’t have to worry about certain kinds of choices that just don’t really matter.

But I think Craig and I have both described how one of the ways you can stop that anxiety from coming back in is to just not live beyond your means. And we both know people who have made a lot of money and then have lived beyond their means and are on this terrible treadmill where they have to sort of keep making money or else everything falls apart.

**Craig:** Right. So those people never get the benefit of what we’re talking about, which is a sense of security, financial security. And it is, when you don’t have it, and I’ve certainly – I was definitely, you know, on the month-to-month living plan when I first came to Los Angeles, it is exhausting. You’re expending a lot of energy in fear and concern about how that functions. And if one thing goes wrong, there’s not a lot between you and real trouble.

So living beneath your means is incredibly important. It’s also, generally speaking, it’s a value. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s a value. I think that there’s a grace to it. And also one really nice thing about making a lot of money is that you can be charitable. And some people aren’t. And OK, fine. I’m not going to yell at them. But it is rare that I feel as effective and impactful on the world as I do when I’m making some kind of significant charitable donation. More so than writing television and movies and things, which I know people see and they may or may not care about. But actually making charitable contributions to either political causes or medical help or developing nations, whatever it is that you pursue, you know, curing diseases, it feels good. It does.

And I know that John you and Mike are pretty charitable folks as well.

**John:** For sure. A thing that I think people can intuitively sense and yet they can get tripped up on is buying the next thing will not make you happier. And buying that fancy car, you may enjoy driving it for a time, but that will fade. And buying a bigger house, you know, beyond a certain point just becomes an extra source of anxiety and stress and tension.

We have friends who have multiple houses and that fills me with dread. I would constantly be thinking about that house that I’m not at and sort of something going wrong with that property.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s just a choice I made to not invite that into my life. And people, obviously there’s many ways to do things, but I think not getting caught up in the expectation to really be happy, if I had this thing I would be happy, that’s not true. Happiness comes from having enough. Having plenty and not needing to have more.

**Craig:** Sharing is generally when I feel the best about spending. Sharing. That’s a great feeling. It’s a great feeling to have friends over and cook them dinner and know that you’ve bought lots of good food and you don’t have to freak out about it and you could put a good bottle of wine out. That, to me, the kind of quiet – here’s what I’m not, for instance, I’m not a collector. And I now a lot of people who are collectors. And most people are collecting things that don’t cost a lot of money, but there are people who make a lot of money and then they just begin collecting incredibly expensive things.

I’m sure Jay Leno is a great guy. This isn’t even a criticism of him. It’s really more just a difference of opinion. I don’t understand why he has 800 cars. I just don’t understand it. I don’t. Just drive one, and then, you know, rent it or something. I just don’t understand the idea of having them all. Or I think Seinfeld has like 80 Porsches or something. That gets weird for me. It just feels like a dragon sitting on its hoard.

So I think just sharing and that sort of thing is fun. But, you know, again, look, here’s the truth. The guys like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld have so much more money than I do that they can hoard things like cars and such and then in their charity however they perform it donate vastly more money than I do. So I can’t really criticize them. It’s just a difference is how I would put it.

**John:** It’s a whole different conversation to have about that level of super wealth and sort of like what that does. When a person has the wealth of a nation, that is such an odd difference from the lives that you and I are leading. I’m still scrubbing the bathroom. We’re still doing our own laundry at our house. So it’s a different kind of life than some other people have. And that’s fine, too.

Craig, have you ever heard this explanation for why altruism exists? That sense of an evolutionary adaptation to recognize that the best place to store food is in your friends’ bellies. After a hunt there’s more meat than you can possibly eat and so you cannot store it. So, the best thing you can do with that meat is to give it to everybody else so that they will share their wealth the next time.

**Craig:** I wrote a paper about this in college. And I think the center of it was there’s a story. In the ‘80s there was a terrible plane crash. Plane went down in the Potomac. I don’t know if you remember this. Right there in DC. It was a frigid wintery day. A plane goes down. There are people alive but they’re in this icy water. And a man driving by stops and basically jumps into the water and saves some people. And the question was why. He doesn’t know them. And it’s quite clear that there is great danger connected to jumping in that frigid water. He himself might also die. So why/how evolutionarily does this make any sense at all?

And the answer, or at least an answer is this. That evolutionarily we are better off as members of a society, strength in numbers, right? So, we are selected for pro-social instincts. People who generally feel a connection to a group beyond just their own immediate family members will tend to do better overall because they stay inside of a group. But that tendency, that pro-social tendency is stupid. Meaning it can’t make choices in a moment about what would be advantageously pro-social. It just is pro-social.

And so that’s why you find people who just that instinct kicks in. And it’s the instinct of holding a society together which in its own way is a beautiful thought.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve talked about empathy on the show as well. In leaving Twitter you said it taught you empathy. And for me pulling over to the side of the road and jumping into the frigid water is like it’s because I could imagine myself as the person in the water and needing somebody to help save me. And so it’s easy to see that other side. And the folks who don’t have that are sometimes our elected president and that’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** Or run movie studios. [laughs]

**John:** True. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Irony](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-irony-different-types-of-irony-in-literature-plus-tips-on-how-to-use-irony-in-writing#what-are-the-main-types-of-irony) and [cosmic irony](https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-cosmic-irony-definition-and-examples/)
* Three Page Challenge: [Echopraxia or an Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F12%2Fechopraxia-three-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=3daf6520c3d18584e970f76e9b48965308dfbca379eb9e229603392f8b8c2ece) by J Vernon Reha
* Three Page Challenge: [The Little Death](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F01%2FTheLittleDeath_AutumnPalen.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=0abfaa550f0e35fa9e1fe7d11adc10079351101e68f0a6e46563289eb367bd82) by Autumn Palen
* Three Page Challenge: [Chula Vista](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F11%2FChula-Vista-pg-1-3-Kristen-Delgado.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=4d0c0d1249961917d27dcfa77679d4b7713ef86147a3a00e2860e4bfacd3d97e) by Kristen Delgado
* Thank you to all of our Three Page Challenge submissions! [Apply here](https://johnaugust.com/threepage) to be considered for our next round.
* [GeoGuessr](https://www.geoguessr.com/)
* [Noah Kalina Newsletter](https://mailchi.mp/6068da7c609b/noahkalina)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nora Beyer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/486standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-eric-roth).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 475 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show I’ll be talking with legendary screenwriter Eric Roth about his writing process and his very long career which is probably the envy of any screenwriter out there.

**Craig:** Screenwriters envious? What?

**John:** What? I mean, Craig, can you think of anybody else who has had the length of career that Eric Roth has had?

**Craig:** Well, you know, my go to on this one is Robert Kamen.

**John:** Oh yeah

**Craig:** Who is right up there. I mean, Robert Kamen as we like to point out stretches all the way from Karate Kid in the early ‘80s to Taken and more in the 2010s. So, he’s been crushing it for a long time. But Eric Roth is no doubt one of our all-timers.

**John:** Yeah. So the first movie I can think of that was Eric Roth’s was Forrest Gump. But that was at the midpoint of his career. So, his first movie credit is back in 1970.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And he’s still working more now than ever. So he has A Star is Born. He has the upcoming Dune. He has a lot of other projects. He has Mank which he talks a little bit about on this interview I did with him which is a Netflix thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So he’s got a lot of great stuff out there. So this interview was done a few weeks ago on Zoom. It was for the Writers Guild Foundation. It doesn’t sound as crisp and clear as when we’re doing our live shows all in a room, so keep that in mind. But I think there’s really great stuff in here.

Craig and I will be back at the end for our One Cool Things. And a bonus segment for Premium members where we talk about, oh, that thing that happened this week. What was it, Craig?

**Craig:** The thing that was the week and that was our presidential election.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll be back at the end to talk about that. But for now let’s transition to a few weeks ago and my discussion with Eric Roth.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. It is my great, great pleasure to welcome you to this WGF event. We are here talking with the legendary Eric Roth. I’m so excited that we’re going to have a good long chat here on Zoom in front of 500 to 800 people watching us. So, we are in our respective homes. Just for folks who maybe don’t know your credits off hand I’m going to read just a shortened list of some of your credits. Forrest Gump. The Postman. The Horse Whisperer. The Insider. Ali. Munich. The Good Shepherd. Lucky You. Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Ellis. A Star is Born. The upcoming Dune. The upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. Producer on Mank. There’s so much to talk about with you. But thank you for being here. It’s a pleasure to see you.

**Eric Roth:** I do. I’m glad you do this. I said to you earlier they sent me a list of people who could moderate it and I don’t really know you that well and I thought, well, he’s a talented guy, why not talk to you, you know? I love that.

**John:** So I’m excited to get into this. And usually in one of these things we would start back in the beginning about how you got interested in screenwriting and all that stuff and we’d spend about 20 minutes getting up to something like the present time and then start talking about the things we should talk about. So I’m going to do it the opposite way. I’d love to talk about what your writing process is like, what you’re working on, how you work in October 2020 as we’re recording this. What does your daily writing life look like?

**Eric:** My writing life really hasn’t varied since I gave up the typewriter which wasn’t as long ago as you might think. Because I’m really a luddite. I still work and I’ve talked about this a lot, so if anybody is bored with it they can tell me, but I still work on a DOS program. I have two computers. And I think half superstition and half a fear of not being able to learn Final Draft or something. It’s a program called Movie Master that actually is what they formulated Final Draft from.

The problem with it is that after like 40 pages it runs out of memory. So you’ve got to make sure – it’s about an act break, you know. And so I can’t do anything with the internet on that computer. That’s just solely for work which is good. And I still have to print out everything and I can’t email on it. So, the problem starts to become if you’re getting lucky and somebody is going to do the movie, it’s on their computer with Final Draft and creating the real document.

Other than that I start at like eight in the morning every day. I mean, I always use the example of John Cheever. He’d go to work every day. Take the train in from Long Island in his nice suit and a hat and he’d go and worked in a basement in New York City in Midtown. And he’d take off his pants and he’d take his shirt off, worked in his t-shirt and his underwear. 12 o’clock he’d get dressed again, go have a martini lunch. Come back. Work till four or five o’clock. Get dressed again and go take the train home. So it was like a job. And a great job for him and better than anybody probably.

And I feel the same way. I’m pretty disciplined. I don’t do as many hours as John Cheever. But come one o’clock, I mean if I’ve done four or five hours that’s about all creatively I feel I can do. And then I’ll work again at night. I’ll start around 10 o’clock and if I’m going good I’ll go as late as I can go. If not I’ll just do an hour so I can go to bed.

If I’m really crunched I get up really early like three or four in the morning and see as much as I can do. [Unintelligible] I like to bet the horses, so that’s my afternoons a lot. I have too many children and too many grandchildren, so I spend a lot of time, if I could, aside from the Covid. I’m a blessed human being. I mean, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to – I think the biggest thing that I taught myself and it’s obviously to be successful to do it, but I tried to pick – and I’ve been wrong many, many times – but projects I felt would somehow enhance my own self number one, and two some kind of legacy that I wasn’t just writing things for pay, which is a nice thing too. But if I could have a choice why not something I really cared about because I believe wholeheartedly that passion is two-thirds of the game and the other third is this kind of bastardized art form we do which is really a craft of a kind. And you can be a great craftsman. I’m not sure you’re an artist as a screenwriter, but that’s a whole different conversation.

**John:** There are so many threads I want to pursue off of this, but I’m going to start at the most recent one which is the degree to which a successful screenwriter like you are is largely – there’s an aspect of stock picking. Because you have your choice of the projects you could work on. Obviously you’re initiating yourself things, things you get offered. And there’s a decision process about which ones you’re going to pursue. So it sounds like you’re trying to pick projects that challenge you. Are they the ones that scare you a little bit? Are they the ones that you know you can do it? What is the decision process? Is it about who else is involved?

**Eric:** I think in a more intellectual way I try to pick things that the themes interest me and then who are the people involved and the characters. And I’ve done a number of adaptations. People think I’ve probably done more than I really have. But, I mean, even things like Benjamin Button was just a bad F. Scott Fitzgerald story if it’s possible that he wrote something that was bad. But of course the idea was a guy aging backwards. And I never came up with that one. But the theme of that I said well that’s interesting to me.

Elvis Mitchell, if you know who he is, the critic from the New York Times. And he does a NPR show. He’s a wonderful man. And he said that he felt – and it sort of stopped me because I thought it was kind of accurate, and I’m jumping. My mind works this way. That my films are about loneliness. And so I guess somehow – and then he started talking about it, and maybe you can make that case and maybe you can’t. But it resonated with me. I think there’s some truth to it. So maybe I pick out themes that have to do with some melancholic kind of [unintelligible]. And something about loneliness, you know.

I never had my own room my whole life. So, I guess I don’t know if I need that. I mean, I lived with my brothers and then – my brother I mean. And then I went to college and had roommates. And I got married very young. And then et cetera. So, maybe that’s part of it. This desire to have human contact nearby. I get very kind of funky in a hotel room alone at night. So not that I do anything exciting. I get too aware of everything I guess.

**John:** Now you can chart some of that fear of loneliness over the course of the 15 movies that I listed. But talk to me about the movies that I didn’t list, because I’m sure over the course of your career there’s at least as many movies that you spent a tremendous amount of time on, you worked your ass off on, that don’t exist. And to what degree do those movies still stick with you? The scripts that you wrote that are not reflected in your bio?

**Eric:** I’ll tell you one thing. I’m very lucky that my batting average is pretty great. So I don’t have that many. I regret they never made a movie that Brad Pitt was – it was actually Brad Pitt’s idea, Hatfield McCoy, that I think is a really good script. I told him eventually, said I’m going to give this to Kevin Costner to do it on television, very successful for him. I liked that very much because it was like about – that feud was kind of very interesting because there was no difference between the people. It wasn’t like the Hutus and the Tutsis, where there was religious differences between the Jews and the Arabs. You know what I’m saying.

And these people all came from the same place. But anyway it was interesting. It came down to the coal companies paid one group for the coal that was under their land because there was a lot of coal in one area and not the other. So that was one.

I wrote a big space thing that probably I don’t know if it was worthy of getting made, but the idea was that three prehistoric men were taken – they were triplets I guess – were taken to another galaxy where they’re like sponges, you know. I’m trying to think what else.

**John:** I can see a loneliness to that.

**Eric:** It’s very lonely.

**John:** It fits Eric Roth’s canon of loneliness.

**Eric:** Hatfield McCoy, the main character is lonely. So that one worked. I’ve had, just bragging I guess, like 25 movies made. And some of them I think are better than others. And some are my fault and some are other people’s fault.

I think I’ve had maybe seven that didn’t get done.

**John:** That’s amazing. That’s a remarkable batting average.

**Eric:** I think I started slipping as the business changed in the sense that I was able to write kind of the movie star driven movies to a certain extent. And then as that changed, you know, as movie stars became too common there was a change of course. And so I think those became – A Star is Born is kind of important to me because it reestablished for me that I could still do this in a way. Not that I had a question mark. But I think there were a few things that kind of lagged in the interim. I’m sure there will be others that come to me that didn’t get done. There’s a few. And there’s a few I wish didn’t get done.

**John:** We won’t make you names the ones you wish didn’t get done.

**Eric:** I’ll name them. I have no problem. I’ll tell you a very quick story that–

**John:** Tell me which one.

**Eric:** So this one I think people enjoy. So I wrote a movie called The Postman early on. And I wrote it for Tom Hanks and a whole bevy of directors were going to do it. Good directors. And it was supposed to be a satire, sort of Swiftian look at post-apocalypse idea, was supposed to be after nuclear war. A man who delivers the mail. Etc. Etc. And it was very tongue and cheek. But I thought it was kind of a good satire.

And then a number of years passed and Kevin Costner hooked onto it and he made it. And during the making of it the writer Brian Helgeland who is a wonderful writer who did Mystic River and he won an Oscar and really talented man. He had done the rewrite and he called me and he said, “What do you want to do?” He was very generous. “Do you want your name on this? What do you want to do? Do you want to just keep credit? Whatever you want to do.” And I said let me check. And I asked my agent. I said what do you think. And she happened to represent Kevin Costner and said, “You’ve got to put your name on it. I’ve seen the dailies. The movie is amazing.” I said really. OK. All right. I’ll take my credit.

And the movie won a Razzie as one of the worst movies ever made. [Barbara] gave us a Razzie, so it was pretty great.

**John:** I want to get into sort of the profession and this idea of rewriting and being rewritten and rewriting other people, because we’ve both done a lot of that. And I think we can clear up some misconceptions about that. But I want to get back to a little bit more of the daily work that you’re doing. Because you certainly treat your writing like a job. It’s not a thing you occasionally do. You treat it very seriously. You said you’re at your desk at eight in the morning.

There’s a scene for you to write. What is your first step in approaching a scene that you’re writing on a day? Outlining? What are you doing?

**Eric:** Well to go a step further, if it’s an adaptation I’m underlining the book and I find I underline the whole book, so then you say where do I begin. I’m not huge on outlines. I know, and I think every one of my movies has had the same truth. The first scene has never changed once I figured out what it was. And the end scene. The only one I can remember is in Munich Steven switched it to be at the World Trade Center for a good reason. It was in a different location, but the scene was basically the same. But the middle is this great big adventure. So I don’t know what it is. And it’s obviously a little more concise if there’s a book. But if it’s more original writing, no matter if there’s a book or not, then sort of that’s what the journey is for me.

So when I start a day, assuming I’ve gotten through the first two or three scenes, hopefully when I leave the computer I know the next two or three scenes, what I’m going to write the next day. That makes me feel very good. I sleep at night. If I don’t it makes me a little anxious.

**John:** Talk to me about when you say you know the next two or three scenes, that you know in a general sense what’s going to happen or how you’re going to get through the scenes?

**Eric:** I know what’s going to happen. I know where the characters are going. That doesn’t mean it works out always, but the characters lead me down there. And as long as I can stay with as I say the theme that’s all important to me. Like for instance I’m doing this little thriller right now for Oscar Isaac and Ben Stiller that I think is quite good. It’s from Jo Nesbo who is a Swedish mystery writer. He’s pretty terrific. Short story. And it’s an oddball story.

It needs me to keep figuring out where they’re going to go next, because it’s not a chase per se but it is in that English style of Strangers on a Train kind of thing. And so I know for instance that I know the next scene is in Paris in a hotel. I know what happens there. I know they have to then figure out how to get to sort of a farmhouse. And I know what happens at the farmhouse because I figured out that he does something deceptive. So I know those three, so I’m hoping when I get there I’ll know what the next three are. I know the trajectory of it though. I know what the outcome of the script is.

So, I’m on my track. Now this one has been a little trickier because I tried to be a little probably – I think it ended up being more clever than half. I tried to make it a little more post-modern kind of like adaptation or something. And I’m still with that but I had to tone it way down. So this one I actually had to rewrite quite a few times.

**John:** Can I stop you for one second? You say you rewrite a few times. So this is as you’re still doing the first draft you’re making big changes? Or this is after?

**Eric:** I start on page one every day.

**John:** OK so you are that kind of classic, like go back and read through what you’ve written and move forward?

**Eric:** I read everything and I make little whatever comments, fix grammar and spelling, whatever else. And it makes me go through another process and makes me more familiar with it. And they do say though that if you’re going to spend your time doing that you don’t give as much time to the ending because mathematically you’re running out of time at some point.

**John:** But let’s talk about the first new scene you’re working on. So you’re talking about the scene that’s happening in a Paris hotel room. You know sitting down basically what needs to happen in that scene, but what is your process in terms of figuring out who is going to say what, what’s the action in the scene, like how it’s going to unfold? Is that just a sitting and thinking thing for you, or is that fingers on the keys kind of decision?

**Eric:** I think it’s a little more intuitive. I’ll give you an example. I’m doing this thing for HBO, a TV show that Alex Gibney is going to direct with Laura Dern. And it’s a six-parter. I’m just doing the first episode. A true story about a woman who is a psychiatrist and her job is to interview serial killers and recommend to the court whether they’re sane or insane to be executed. And so I’ve sort of just begun, but now I’m coming to the interrogation of the guy that becomes our lead character in the first episode. And except for basic stuff I wanted to get out where he asks her questions, where did you go to school. I mean, it’s sort of expository stuff that’s just bad writing.

But I just started writing dialogue between them. And so some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but I just sort of feel my way. And I’m pretty good at it. I mean, I try to write a little off topic. I think the subtext is much more important than textual. So, that’s a thing I’ve had to learn over the years and it’s not something that I think you’re just given unless you’re just such a wonderful writer. But the best writing is not talking about what’s going on.

And so in this one I’m just trying what’s it going to sound like between this serial killer who killed like nine people and her. And so try to keep human and humorous of some kind and also get as much information we can get out of it. So I just dive in. And I’ve always done that. So it’s not a matter of just self-confidence from being successful. I think it’s just – and I embarrass myself by sort of saying the dialogue out loud. I’m like the worst actor ever. Because everybody’s voice sounds exactly the same. Which does remind me, I mean, as a rule that you want to have everybody’s character be something unique and sound different.

This came to me in a way, even though I think I knew it somehow instinctively from being just I like literature, so I read a lot. That Michael Cimino, if you remember that director, Michael and I were doing a movie. I had a rewritten a movie called The Year of the Dragon. It was OK. But it was by the same guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs. But he had given Mickey Rourke a wallet that had the character’s full life, like pictures of him in Vietnam and his children and driver’s license. I’m sure Mickey Rourke never looked at it, but it spoke to the fact that he had to know that person inside and out psychologically. And that’s how I feel as a writer that you have to do that. You have to know every one of your character’s complete lives.

**John:** You’re saying that you need to know your character’s complete lives, are you writing that down or are you just spending time thinking about that? How much of that bio work is something that a person could actually read versus just stuff you are thinking about in your head?

**Eric:** No, I don’t write it down. Except for little scribbles. Like in this thriller I decided that she was going to be a – because I thought it was clever – that she was going to be like Gillian Flynn, like someone who wrote Gone Girl. So she’s an author which I think is interesting because then it makes you wonder whether this whole thing is just a tale that she’s spinning, you know. So then I started figuring how old is she? And you go through it. And what are her neuroses? I’ll give something a little bit away, but like in the Laura Dern one I have her being like because she’s always stressed because of these horrible people she’s dealing with, I’m going to try to make her like a kleptomaniac. I just want to see it works.

So, what does that say? And then what does that say about your relationship, because her child then becomes a kleptomaniac? You know, that’s what I want to try. I probably shouldn’t say this too loud because it’s giving away something. But it’s just interesting to me. And so I don’t think I’m wrong. I’m maybe not right, but maybe that is a question.

I always think I’ve done that, though. That I just said to hell with it. Let’s get old and go down like the same bridge. I don’t mind trying things that are a little bit out of the norm, you know.

**John:** Now, you describe this Laura Dern project, there’s the Ben Stiller thing. It seems like you’re working on a bunch of things simultaneously. How many different projects are underneath your fingers at any given point?

**Eric:** This is unhappily, because I’m not really – it makes me very anxious. But I do have them stacked up which is nice for me, congratulations, but it just happened to be they dovetailed. And sometimes that happens. And the good news is I spent four years on, or five years on this book, with Killers of the Flower Moon, which everybody should read. It’s a wonderful book. And my screenplay I think was accurate to the book, but it was the book and the story of very quickly Osage Indians 1821 – 1921 I mean – poorest people in America and discover oil in this terrible land in Oklahoma they’d been driven to. And then every killer in America comes to kill 184 of them for their money. And this really heroic guy comes in.

So that’s still, you know, that’s supposed to start filming once the Covid clears out, and it’s Marty Scorsese, in March. So I have that. So there will be continuing rewrites with that. Leonardo wanted some things changed we argued about and he won half of them, I won half of them.

So that’s happening. And then these other two are works that are ongoing. And then there’s some older ones that pop up and I have to then address, which is just a factor of having been lucky enough to have a lot of work and some things are just dragging. We had this whole situation that’s developed with Cleopatra. I had done like seven drafts of Cleopatra at that point for Angelina. And it became a mess with the hack at Sony and Scott Rudin and this and that.

And now the project was announced the other day that Patty Jenkins is going to do one with Gal Godot and a very good writer named Laeta, I forget her last name.

**John:** Laeta Kalogridis.

**Eric:** Exactly. And so I’m debating whether this is going to be worth me racing with them. Probably not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Eric:** But that’s an old project. In other words I hadn’t worked on it for five years or something. But I think, look, that’s a function of some luck. Some people have given me the opportunity. And obviously I’ve been successful at it, which sometimes by design and a lot of it is not, you know.

**John:** Talk about rewrites. So talk about the rewrites that you go through in terms of getting the project up to the point where you’re happy with it. And then the rewrite process after you’re happy with it to get other people happy with it.

**Eric:** I mean, when I’m done – when I feel it’s done I’m done. And then I’ll turn it in. I don’t like turning it in just to a producer. I usually try to go around them and turn it into the studio at the same time if I can. And then we get the notes. I have rules about notes and now because I have enough cache I can say you cannot – only give me bullet points. I say would you consider this character doing that? Would you consider…?

I mean, I don’t like when they write these ridiculous essays on showing how clever they are with the notes, you know. And obviously if I did something stupid it wasn’t my intention to write something stupid. So that’s notes.

So then I’ll begin to rewrite. And rewrites are hard for me because I think I’m more of an instinctive writer. So, then I’m lucky enough to have worked with some really great directors. Some who are writers of their own and that’s easy in some respects because they get it and we can work it out together. Like Michael Mann. He’s a very tough guy and is hard to work with, for the right reasons. But he’s a writer so we would battle things out. But he knew if I didn’t quite have it we could feel the direction. While on the other hand, who can I think of, Robert Redford was a little more difficult because he wasn’t a born writer. So he wanted to prove things.

Marty Scorsese and David Fincher are very different people but phenomenal. Marty is the most willing to have you be inventive. And he’ll figure out how to film it and if he thinks it works. And he’s very generous if he doesn’t think it works. He says, “Let’s try it this way.” And David on the other hand is very, very specific. Very literal in a great way and as smart as a whip. And really fights you to get to where you want – he says, “I want you to tell me what you’re trying to articulate.” He just has a different way of doing things. And they both end up in different places. Their movies look different and they’re different people but they’re both incredible experiences which is incredibly rewarding. Which will just give me the time that – I have a movie coming out called Mank that I produced with David and his father wrote and we worked on the script to hopefully bring it up to where it’s really great. But it’s his father’s script.

And it’s about Herman Mankiewicz’s writing of Citizen Kane and his world with Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst and Orson Welles. And I think it’s an incredible movie. I’m tooting trumpets here but it’s black and white. It’s as skilled as David Fincher can be I think. And I think it’s probably limited for appeal to people because it’s such a narrow subject, but it’s a master work I think because of David’s abilities.

**John:** Its appeal is exactly the folks who are listening to this Zoom right now. Because it is about a writer’s relationship with a director and a visionary film that may or may not come into being based on how people did the stuff.

**Eric:** I think one of the reasons David brought me on was because I’ve been sort of an insider in Hollywood in that way for many, many years. You know, I’ve worked with everybody from Kurosawa through Spielberg through whoever. So I’ve had many relationships with many writers, directors, actors. So I know the process. I know what’s wounding about it. So when he asked me what does it feel like to feel like you’re not going to get credit I can write that. I know what that feels like. So it’s a real experience yeah.

**John:** Well talk us through that. Talk us through advice for writers who are dealing with a director for the first time and what those initial conversations are like. How do you feel out a director and sort of understand what that relationship is going to be like in that first meeting? Because I’ve been through some of them and I’ve come in with assumptions. Sometimes I’ve been right. Sometimes I’ve been wrong. Sometimes it has gone well. Sometimes it has gone really, really poorly. What advice can you offer to folks who are listening about that first conversation?

**Eric:** I want to talk about sort of earlier in my career because I think it’s a little different now because I’m kind of cocky. I’m a little cocky now.

**John:** You’re a legend.

**Eric:** Well, a legend, so funny. But I can come in and I can back up things. I say you might want to [unintelligible]. Early on I did – this is a good story and it’s not [unintelligible] it’s true. There was a director named Stuart Rosenberg who had done Cool Hand Luke and he was a very good Hollywood director and a nice man. And I was really young. I mean, I was 19 when I went down and rewrote The Drowning Pool in Louisiana. And then I was on Onion Field with him. And Onion Field ended up getting made by a man named Harold Becker and it’s an interesting movie.

But Stuart and I fought for like two weeks over one particular scene. And I thought it was a great scene and he didn’t think it was so great. And he finally said to me, and this just always stuck with me that “you can leave it in the script but I’m not going to shoot it.” So that was the end of that conversation. And that was the truth. So at the end of the day if the director is not going to be flexible you are stuck. So, you better try to find a way to be as best communal as you can be and also make the scene as good as possible. So you have to find, I think, and sometimes I’m good at it and sometimes I’m not as good, another way to do the scene. Another way to tell that piece of drama if that’s what you need to do. And each director approaches it differently.

Amenable to a point and yet I get very stringent if I think that they’re varying from what the piece is about. And then I think – I’ve been lucky because the people I’ve worked with, I mean, in the main are really good directors. I mean, it’s also something I don’t think I could do. I mean, I tried it when I was younger and I actually won some awards, a short. But I always felt like this isn’t me. I thought if I went on to direct I’d be like a B-minus director and what was the point of that, you know? And I didn’t want to leave my family and a whole bunch of other reasons.

But the directors have been, I mean, I think have yet to figure out the way they want to get at something. And if you want to be a dick about it you’re going to have a lot of problems. On the other hand I don’t think you should just roll over. It’s a balance. It’s a tightrope walk.

**John:** Yeah. A thing that people have a hard time understanding about the job of a screenwriter is obviously we’re putting words on the page the same way the novelist is, but there’s a whole social aspect to it. You have to be able to read people in the room and understand what they’re actually going after. Even before you get to directors, initially with producers and with studio executives, find out what they’re actually really after and what the note is behind the note.

**Eric:** Yeah. That’s well said, John. In other words it’s really trying to read the note behind the note. Because the initial note will just annoy you. I mean, in most cases you probably thought about it. Just somebody gave us a note on something recently that they felt there was too much description and I took umbrage at it. Said I’ve been very successful with a lot of description. But I got it. In other words I think it made it harder for them to read. It was too dense. And once I settled down and I thought well that’s OK. So in other words you have to be somehow – unless they’re nasty, then you don’t need to suffer that in any way, shape, or form.

But I think you have to be finding a way to be as communal – look, it’s a communal craft, right. Even though I do believe it’s a film by is a director’s film when all is said and done. They put all the pieces together. The architecture, the ship is the screenwriter. And you’re not going to go on the journey without that. But the director has to get it to the right place in the right way.

**John:** How different is it now than ‘70s/’80s, your early credits? How different is it doing this job? Or is it not really that different?

**Eric:** I don’t feel it’s that different oddly because I guess maybe I just stay with my process. I used to, I mean, just on a personal level I had a lot of kids and a lot of little kids. And I used to love to just – they would run around and I would just write in the living room, sitting down to type something. But I don’t know. I had a couple oddball little interesting movies made in the ‘70s that probably would be, you know, interesting today if they were streamed. And then I had some big movies. So, I don’t know. I think eventually it comes down to feeling like the same task to me. But, you know, I’m looking, you know, it’s like my dad said when you talk how does it feel to be 80, or whatever he was at the time, he said, “You know, I don’t look out of those eyes. I don’t look out of 80-year-old eyes, I look out of whatever eyes I am.” And that’s the same thing at 75.

I’m quite – this is just a kind of sweet, sad thing, but lovely in its own way. I’m very close with David Milch who I think is our American Shakespeare from television. David has some challenges with some Alzheimer’s. So I went and visited him. I visit him like once a month. And he was talking about how time goes so. And I said sure does. And I thought to myself, gee, when I was 60 I said, well, I mean 15 years from now 75, or 20 from now, that seems like forever. Well, it was a blink. It was a complete blink of the eyes. And now I’m 75. I said do you have any regrets. And he said, “I wasn’t more generous of spirit.” Which meant he felt that he had been too selfish his whole life. And whether that’s true or not we can think about.

But it made me think. I mean, I think that’s an important kind of lesson. I’ll put that in something, you know. Because that’s just something important.

**John:** Thinking about David Milch and his tremendous success in television and you said the American Shakespeare and I can believe that, he was making television at this pivotal moment where it became just a dominant American art form in terms of a written art form. And the writers who created that were so acclaimed and rightfully. It’s a little frustrating to me. I’m wondering if it’s frustrating to you that we as screenwriters are writing the features that are so iconic and yet there hasn’t been the same appreciation that we sometimes are writing these films that are known for that.

If you were to go back and rewind your career 25 years would you have still done features and focused on features, or would you have been more attracted to 25?

**Eric:** No. First of all I think, you know, I was taught that television is smaller than life and that movies are bigger than life. So I still look at the 40-foot-screen as being 40 even though it’s irrelevant I guess now. And I’m not sure I’m as good a short story writer as you have to be, even though I think I’ve written some good TV episodes. I wrote one for David that they never aired because it was never shot because of this show getting canceled. I thought it was probably as good of writing as I’d done. But I can just be brave because it wasn’t sort of my betting the farm.

No, I grew up with movies. My first experience was watching like War of the Worlds in the Brooklyn Paramount balcony. And it was like oh my god. This is like something that takes me somewhere else. Then I was very big on psychedelics in the ‘70s and late ‘60s, so I liked sort of mind expansion stuff where you can try to go further and farther. So I never felt that way about television.

And I think the difference is that you have some incredible writers who are also directors though. And that’s a great advantage. Because Ingmar Bergman or Fellini. In other words you could start naming them, Antonioni, and then Francis of course. So these people could then realize what they wrote. So, I don’t think there’s anything better than Godfather II probably that has ever been done. Or to me 2001 changed my life in some way. So Kubrick was able to get that out of his writer and was able to write what he did.

I think, I don’t know, maybe there isn’t an American Shakespeare in screenwriting. I think part of that is because you have to be a director maybe to do that. And then maybe Chayefsky was, you know, of a sort. There’s probably a few others, you know.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, and Sorkin would be in that list, but he’s also–

**Eric:** Aaron is wonderful.

**John:** Tremendous television stuff that he’s done before this. Nora Ephron.

**Eric:** I would think, like Bob Fosse, he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he’s a director though. I think there’s a major advantage in being able to direct and if you’re able to be good at being a director.

**John:** I’m going to tackle some questions from our growing list of questions here. This one is about adaptations from [unintelligible]. He asks, “There’s a ‘don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.’ How do you negotiate what should be kept in an adaptation and what should be left out when you’re adapting a true life story?”

**Eric:** That’s a great question. We just had this discussion the other night because I watched The Trial of the Chicago Seven. And I thought Aaron did a really great job. And I first had a chip on my shoulder, I was a little jaundiced because I knew Abbie Hoffman quite well and I knew some of the people and I had been involved with [unintelligible]. Anyway, and then it got, I’m not sure, I have to ask him because there’s a scene at the end of the movie, because I think the move eventually really becomes pretty great. And he has a scene where someone gives a speech in the courtroom and I’m going to guess that he wrote a speech that was not what was there. And so then we got into a debate about what you can do.

I said, well wait a minute, this is like an historical event. And it’s a trial. And then somebody pointed out I had done the same kind of thing in something of my own. And so that I think I guess your first rule is you’re a dramatist, you know. I’ll give you another example.

I did a script for Tom Hanks called Garden of the Beast which is an historical book which was about the American ambassador to Germany during WWII who was kind of a very big Nazi aficionado. Spoke German. Had gone to school in Germany. And then he saw kind of the errors of his ways as certain things happened. But I dramatized a couple things that Tom objected to. One was that I had a scene – I don’t think this is a big deal – but Hitler used to watch King Kong like three times a week. And so I had a scene where he and the ambassador are discussing whatever the drama was while King Kong was being played. Now that probably didn’t happen. I don’t think that changes the course of it or anything. But Tom took to me to task for it.

And then I had Hitler offered him a ride back to the embassy and I had him get in the car with Hitler with all the people on the streets. And I wanted to see how that felt like for anybody being inside of that and with flowers all over them. Tom objected to that. And he wasn’t right or wrong. In other words so that – my first job is I think as a dramatist. And we say this actually in the Mank movie that you can’t view somebody’s life in two hours. You only can do an impression of it. And the genius of Citizen Kane is that I think it’s the first movie that showed, and maybe there’s a Russian movie, that showed a character from multiple points of view. That’s very rare. In other words usually it’s [unintelligible]. But if you have a wife you have her point of view. If you have a child.

The other thing is I usually pick kind of bad books. So, you know, bad books and bad plays make really good movies because one of the reasons is you can just go take off on your own. So you can change things. I think you have to be careful in certain respects to what is the sensibilities of people. In other words I don’t think you just blithely decide to change what somehow is slavery or holocaust. In other words I think you have to be very careful.

But I mean there is a criteria that you have to dramatize it if you’re a dramatist. So you’re going to combine things. And this Killers of the Flower Moon is a perfect example because that was where I realized I had done the same thing at the end of a particular courtroom that’s at the end of the movie. And I had dramatized something that was not happening there, but I wanted to have.

So, I say go for it, but be a little bit cautious because you can get your assistant kicked if you’re going to start rewriting history that’s affecting people’s sensitivity. And I have never tried to do that. But, yeah, I think there is a burden.

I mean, look, a lot of people don’t like Forrest Gump. They think it’s a poke in the eye at liberalism and all sorts of things. I don’t have the same feeling about it. And Bob Zemeckis and I are quite different. He’s very, at that time, more universal poke in the eye guy. He didn’t give a shit if he made fun of the Black Panthers or Ronald Reagan. And I was a good staunch, I was born as a red diaper baby and I had great communist beliefs. Became watered down over the years.

So the movie was criticized probably rightly in some respects, but I think as Quentin Tarantino said, “I think people have lost the sense of irony.” Because the whole thing is supposed to be – it’s supposed to be a satire, you know. But I think you’ve got to be careful of that is my point. I think you have to really look – and particularly today, because people are very aware of their everything – heritage, what they feel about themselves. I mean, they should. They should.

**John:** Speaking of Forrest Gump, a good segue into a question from JJ. Can you talk about the process of getting hired for adaptations in particular? How do you get started doing adaptation work? So I think it could be, you could talk about Forrest Gump, obviously many of your later projects they came to you with a book and you could say yes or no. But earlier one there were going to be projects where do you want to do this. Do you want to come in and talk to us about this? Your pitching approach to a book. What are those initial conversations like as you’re describing how you want to take an adaptation?

**Eric:** Well that’s a good question. The good news is that those were things that were presented to me by like studios. It wasn’t anybody else really. Or a producer. There was an entity. It wasn’t me bringing them a book and trying to stand on my head and say this will make a good movie. So that was I think ahead of the game. Forrest Gump came as a book. I didn’t think it was a great book. And the man who wrote it should rest in peace. He gave me something that was like a gift. But it was a little farcical for me. And then I thought well this is a good way to tell the story of this year that I just lived through with time passing and all that stuff.

And I’m trying to think. Benjamin Button was as I said a short story of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. He just did it for money. He did it for Colliers Magazine and had no stake in it at all. So I had the sort of permission to do whatever I wanted with it.

Munich was a true story. I was rewritten on Munich by Tony Kushner who I thought did a pretty great job in certain areas. Other areas I still resent. Not him personally. I mean, we can talk about that getting rewritten if you want. That’s why I brought it up.

**John:** Well let’s talk about rewriting. Because that’s a thing I promised we would get into. So, obviously you’ve come onto projects where there was already a script and you were coming in there to do work on it. And you’ve also had projects that you started and then someone else has taken over the project. So let’s start with when you’re coming in on an existing project and there is a script and you’re talking with folks about stuff. What are those initial conversations and how do you treat the material that you got from the start? Are you treating it like you’re treating a book that you’re being sent? This is the starting place and I’m going to write a new script? Are you trying to incorporate as many scenes as still possible there? What is the decision process for you?

**Eric:** I think it depended on where they are in the sequence of getting the movie made. Because I would never want to go in and destroy somebody’s having a movie get made. I’ve some good jobs in more limited basis. I thought I did good on Black Hawk Down. I thought I did some good writing on that. Leonardo and Russell Crowe was in. Ridley Scott directed it.

**John:** Was it Blood Diamond?

**Eric:** No. Something of Lies or something. Anyway, my point being I just don’t think I did much to help them. And they didn’t want much. But I don’t think what I did was great.

On the other hand I’ve come in on things like Cleopatra where I started from scratch. There had been a couple scripts before I did and good writers, but I just had a different point of view. And Benjamin Button was another one. And usually if I have the time I’ll put in the effort and start over if I think there’s a way. Or I’ll just say I can’t be helpful. I think it’s a more interesting conversation about not so much the work but I’ve rewritten people where it’s bruising to other people. And it’s one of the things I don’t like about doing it. As writers we scavenge each other. And then they don’t have a – something I’ve always spoken to that when you fight for credit and then if you don’t get it you don’t exist in that sense, however much time. And I feel the Writers Guild should change that. But I’m in the minority. I felt like they should have an additional writing credit or something, because everybody should at least share in what they did.

But the Writers Guild feels in the main that it diminishes the credit of the writers that get credit.

And then I’ve had obviously people come in and rewrite me. And I haven’t liked it. I said, you know, you feel like you’ve failed, you’ve been rejected. I knew for instance on this movie The Horse Whisperer, I liked Redford very much but I lived with him for like two months, two or three months. And I realized at one point he’s going to look in the mirror and not want to see me there. And so that’s what happened. And so a good writer, Richard LaGravenese, came in and did very good work. And I’m still not wild about the movie which I don’t think had enough adventure in it, but not Richard’s fault.

But that hurt. I was wounded by that. And you sort of lick your wounds. But I guess I’ll give you a funny story because it’s about this. I think it’s about rejection, you know, which every writer feels from day one. And I asked Warren Beatty the other day, I’m dropping a name here, but have you ever – I don’t know why this occurred to me. I said have you ever been rejected in your whole life. And he had to think for a long time. I said are done thinking? He said, “Yeah, I wanted to do Fistful of Dollars,” or one of those Clint Eastwood westerns. They picked Clint Eastwood. And he said, “But I got to do Bonnie and Clyde, so it worked out OK for me.”

**John:** It worked out.

**Eric:** The only thing he could think of about rejection. He didn’t say there was a woman who didn’t want to go out with me or whatever.

**John:** No.

**Eric:** A man. Whatever he felt. But that was it. I said pretty good. I think him and I’m dropping another name. I worked for Mick Jagger on a thing and he’s the other one I thought this guy has never had a moment’s rejection in his whole life, you know.

**John:** We have real time follow up here. So Body of Lies was the movie that you were thinking about.

**Eric:** Thank you.

**John:** So we have 1,000 people here in the audience.

**Eric:** See, bad title. Bad title to begin with.

**John:** Not a good title. Not a good title. Titles are important. They help frame what things are going to be, the projects.

**Eric:** Oh boy, is it ever. And names, by the way. Don’t you think character names are key, too? Unless it’s a satire or something. If I see a name – here’s one of the things I don’t like about Dune. Because I had read Dune when I was like 15 and I thought it was OK. I wasn’t as wild about it like 16-year-old boys mostly are. But then as I went back into it now to do this version for a guy I like very much, I did a good rewrite on Arrival, which I think I did a good job on, for Denis Villeneuve.

So we were cogitating the whole thing and there was a character named Duncan Idaho in it. And I said wait a minute this is like the planets are billions of miles away. This isn’t a translation of some other language. That’s his name. And I said well how the hell does that work? But that was a famous character and still will be.

**John:** So you just don’t have characters saying his name aloud very often in the movie hopefully. So it doesn’t bum people so much.

**Eric:** I mean, it’s fun to do – I think if you can give characters to somehow reflect the tone of the movie, like I did something today. I called the villain in the thriller Mr. Lime. And the reason was because that was an Orson Welles’ name in The Third Man. So those few who will know that will – or they’ll just think that’s a stupid idea.

**John:** A question here from Ellen Cornfeld. She writes, “How to learn to trust your own voice when you are a people pleasure by nature and surrounded by smart voices giving you terrific feedback on your scripts?” So, basically really a question for you. You’ve written this thing. You had an approach. You had a point of view. There’s a thing you want to do. Now you’re getting these notes back. How do you stay true to your own voice and your own instinct when you start getting that feedback?

**Eric:** I think you have to find a different approach and try to hopefully make that similar to what you could then live with to be, you know, that says what you want it to say. It’s difficult because you feel inundated. There’s sort of a higher power that’s looking down and giving you these [theote] of notes. And obviously I have the power more now because I’m more successful, but when I was younger I’m sure I felt kind of a little buffeted by it.

But I’m not saying not to stick with your vision but I think you have to maybe find a way to do your vision differently I guess. And that’s probably I guess a little more communal in that respect, or a little more where you can mediate things. Because it’s not black and white I guess. And sometimes you’re surprised at the end.

What happens, I mean, eventually which is kind of funny is that you stake your claim on something and you really stick your sword in the ground and you’re not going to move and then you slowly move and eventually it’s gone and it becomes gone and you don’t remember even you were involved with it, you know, and that scene just goes into some void in the ether.

So, I think you have to be brave in a way. Be brave without being stupid I guess.

**John:** Always a good combination. I’m going to combine a couple questions here. People are asking about writing for an actor or writing with an actor in mind. Do you prefer writing something where you know who is going to be playing that role? Or would you rather have it be blank as you’re starting?

**Eric:** I think there’s an advantage to both. In many cases I’ve known who the actor was, so that was easier. Like Tom Hanks for Forrest Gump was the dream. Brad Pitt was Benjamin Button so I knew what he could possibly do or not do. I was a little more taken with in The Insider that Russell Crowe when he was hired I had already written the part and the part was very difficult because I couldn’t interview the real guy. So I had to go on basically who is the guy and I tried to then develop a character which you could always do. You say, well, who is this man who was a scientist for tobacco companies? And what does that say? That he wants to be a big fish in a little pond of scientists? Or he is insecure about his science knowledge? In this case he actually really just wanted to get his pension.

So I wrote what was I think a full-blooded character and then Russell came on and Russell had a lot of questions. And I can’t tell you the number of times I had to get on an airplane and go down there because Michael Mann didn’t want to fight with him and he didn’t want to have that kind of relationship. So I would go and say – because Russell wouldn’t come out of his trailer and I’d say what’s going on. He’d say, “I don’t get this.” And so you go through it and you hopefully convince him that this is the way that it should be. And then you make some accommodations. Things on that movie I’ll never forget is that Al Pacino called me one morning and he said, “You have a three-page monologue here. I could do it in one look.” I said if you can do it in one look do it. And he did. He did.

**John:** That’s good. It saves some camera. Saves some reel.

**Eric:** And he really did. He really did.

**John:** Eric, what’s been your experience, because I’ve had the same thing with actors who are incredibly challenging to deal with over little things on scripts and stories and I’m always wrestling with to what degree are they being reasonable but they can’t connect these dots either intellectually or emotionally they can’t make it work? And to what degree is it insecurity? With a Russell Crowe or with other actors you’ve dealt with how do you think a writer can or should interact with actors who are doing that thing? It could be on an independent film, a small independent film set that our people are working on, or a giant mega budget picture. What works?

**Eric:** I mean, I think rehearsals are really important. And read-throughs because I think you get a sense of what they can do or can’t do, or where there’s going to be bumps. Like for every movie I’ve written I think I go to the set, because I have anticipated what’s going to be a scene that’s going to be a problem. Or I’ll go to watch what I enjoy. But I think you have to befriend the actor in a good way, even if they’re a dick. And try to find a way so you understand their psychology.

I mean, I’m going to do it, and he’s a nice person, I’m going to do a movie in the future with Joaquin Phoenix which is a really tough subject matter, but he works very differently. And he really wants to get into the weeds and the emotions and the things. Like he doesn’t rehearse at all. He doesn’t like rehearsals. But I’ve already established a relationship with him and I think we intellectually can understand what we both want from it. So he’ll trust me to some extent and I’ll trust him. And some of that is just having the experience of having done it for so long, because I work with so many people.

But I remember as a young boy I was literally 19 years old walking on the set of The Drowning Pool, same Stuart Rosenberg had directed, and Paul Newman was the star. And they needed a rewrite and I came with my new pair of corduroys and my nice new briefcase and walked on the set. And Paul Newman said, “Our savior is here.” And I said good luck to him, me and him. And I don’t know they accepted me then. I guess I’m amenable. I mean, I don’t kiss ass particularly but I think it is a team effort of a kind.

So, if you can be smart about the way. I mean, I don’t think there’s any one way to do it, but I think part of it is your own personal skills with people.

**John:** As you’re talking about this 19-year-old you walking onto this set, if you could give advice to that 19-year-old you, obviously you made some really good choices along the way, but are there any other pieces of advice you wish you could whisper to that 19-year-old?

**Eric:** I think writing wise I wish I could be a little more concise. I think I tend to over-write because I’m a frustrated novelist. And so I write these long prose things and I think it probably gets in the way of things. So if I could articulate things a little more articulately in a smaller way. I don’t know. I can’t think of too many movies that I missed, in other words that I was offered and I said no. There’s a couple. The biggest one for me was I was offered to do Cuckoo’s Nest originally. And I was doing The Onion Field. And my agent said they’ll never make that movie. And then literally like a week later Jack Nicholson signed to do it.

And I did come back and I rewrote the fishing boat scene, because I was good friends at that time with Michael Douglas. But that was the only one I think that I said wow. But I don’t know, Bo Goldman who wrote it, even though he rewrote somebody, a guy named Larry Hauben who just out of the blue decided to write a script from it because it was owned by somebody. But Bo Goldman I think may be one of the better screenwriters who ever lived. I mean, he did Howard and Melvin and he did the best divorce movie, Shoot the Moon, I think. I haven’t seen it in so long. And Scent of a Woman.

**John:** All right. So, you’re going to whisper to him like do Cuckoo’s Nest but basically do everything else. Just follow your instincts because it’ll suit you very well.

**Eric:** Look, I don’t think everybody has that leisure. They have to work. So that you don’t get to always do – I think what you need to do though is try to do, and I’ll give you a funny example of this. So I had no money and I really needed work and I did Airport ’79 The Concorde. And I wrote a very wonderful line called, “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing.” Anyhow, I tried to write, I mean, this is arrogance in a way, but I tried to write the best disaster movie, that’s what they called those then, ever made. You know?

And actually I got sort of half kudos for it. The critics in the New York Times said this is either the worst disaster movie ever made or the best. So, but I did try to make that something special for me. You know, I put in like Saint-Exupery about flying. I had Alain Delon reading poetry. You know, it was ridiculous, you know.

But I think you have to believe in what you’re doing and hopeful you make the best of it.

**John:** All right. Eric, thank you for making the best of it for all these amazing movies you’ve done and thank you for this conversation. I want to thank the Writers Guild Foundation for having us both here. So, they do amazing work throughout the year.

**Eric:** Yeah, they’re amazing. Amazing.

**John:** These panels are great fun but all the outreach they do to developing writers and other folks is remarkable. So please do support the Writers Guild Foundation. Thank you, Dustin, for putting this together. And, Eric, thank you so much. It was great to chat.

**Eric:** Thank you. I loved meeting you this way.

**John:** Yeah, it’s nice. Cool.

**Eric:** See you at the movies. Not really. See you on the television screen I guess.

**John:** And when do we see Mank?

**Eric:** Mank will be, I mean, I think late November/early December maybe. Dune will be next year. And Killers of the Flower Moon the year after maybe. But Mank I want everybody to look at. I think you’ll find it pretty special.

**John:** Exactly.

**Eric:** Thank you.

**John:** Great. Thanks. Bye.

All right, we are back here in the present. We are recording this on a Friday morning. As we record this it has not officially been announced that Joe Biden has won but it seems kind of inevitable that he’s won. So we’ll be talking about that in our bonus segment. But this would be the time where we would do our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yes.

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

**Craig:** I do. So last week my One Cool Thing was maybe America. This week my One Cool Thing is the person we should be talking about, but instead we keep talking about this orange ding-a-ling and his nonsense. Or alternatively in a hopeful tone we talk about Joe Biden and the fact that he is going to be the new President of the United States. But the person we should be talking about Kamala Harris. Because in our ridiculously long short life as a country we have had zero, that is exactly zero, female Vice Presidents or Presidents. Zero. And now we have one.

And, also, she is a woman of color. This is the first Black woman to serve, aside from the first woman to serve as either President or Vice President. The first Black woman to serve as either President or Vice President. The first Indian woman to serve as Vice President or President. This is the most historic election since Barack Obama’s election. And I am just amazed and thrilled and I feel a little bit annoyed that Orange Thunder keeps stealing the limelight when this is the big story. That we have finally broken through the stupidest barrier of entry to high political office that we have. So congratulations us.

**John:** Yeah. And I hope that by the time people are listening to this podcast we will have seen her on a stage and Joe Biden on a stage and other things so we can say like, oh, that’s right. This is what it’s going to look like and that’s kind of exciting and cool. Because you just need the visual sometimes. And I think probably because of the pandemic we just haven’t had the visual at times.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think when we see that that will be great.

**Craig:** And also good for all of us. More Maya Rudolph, clearly.

**John:** Oh, come on.

**Craig:** This is a huge Maya Rudolph boom ahead, which is good for everybody. We get four years of her saying Joe Biden which puts a smile on my face every damn time.

**John:** It’s going to be great. My One Cool Thing is two related things. First off is one of the few physical magazines I still read which is MIT Technology Review.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** This magazine dates back to like the 1900s. It’s a very storied magazine talking about technology and sort of how things evolve. And one of the fun things about the magazine is that they will show like 30 years ago, 60 years ago this is what we were writing about and sort of compare stuff.

The best comparison for it would be Wired Magazine if it wasn’t so gadget focused. It’s really just more about the overall science and technologies behind things. But the actual article I want to point people to is by Richard Fisher in this last month’s issue called How to Escape the Present. And what I liked about it is it was talking about how human beings grew up in sort of cyclical time. It was all just the seasons and they planted crops, they grew stuff, and your ancestor’s life was not different from your kids’ lives. Basically everything stayed in this little circle.

And eventually we started figuring like, oh wait, there was the past. The past happened. And we started to think longer about the past. We started to be able to think about the future and like plan for future things. He points to a moment in the 1700s where you started to see writers talk about what life would be like in the 20th Century and the 24th Century and had these sort of grand visions of things.

And his point is that we’ve sort of stopped doing that. If you look at sort of how we think about the future it’s really, really short term. And in fact we sort of are obsessed with only the present. And that we are on these incredibly short cycles. So we have the 24-hour news cycle. We have two or four year election cycles. And it makes it very hard for us to do the long-term thinking that we need to do. It’s sort of like a cliff we run into and we can’t think about what happens after that time. And I think, Craig, in our lifetime I’ve definitely felt that.

I feel like as a kid I used to have a better sense of where the future was headed than I kind of do now. And it’s weird talking about this after this election, because I don’t even have a good sense of like what happens next week right now. And this present-ism is really troubling.

**Craig:** Well, we are told constantly to live in the now, as if that’s a virtue. I’ve always been a thinker about the future kind of person, because I like it. Our brains are not very good at this. We know that. But it is true that our culture essentially has made us obsess with a belief that by analyzing the state of affairs in this second we will somehow be able to control what happens next, or get certainty about what happens next, when all we really know for sure is that we will never have that, ever.

So we are taunting ourselves and torturing ourselves with this feeling that well if I just keep watching TV certainty will be created in my mind. Are you like this John? People will text me in these situations. I don’t know why it’s me. And they’ll say, “Can you just tell me what’s going to happen?” Like I would know? I don’t know. None of us know. Everyone wants certainty and they look to somebody to give them some kind of reassurance. But we don’t know until we know.

Math is a beautiful thing. It became incredibly clear, for instance, that Joe Biden was going to win because math is math. And much like Covid it doesn’t care what Donald Trump thinks. So that was nice. But I agree. I that we are locked in this obsessive now-ness because an industry that turns our attention into money has risen up to dominate our culture. And so it will keep doing that.

**John:** But speaking specifically to our audience, people who are writing movies and television shows, I do think that we only think about the future in clearly dystopian terms. We basically have a model of The Terminator, we have Hunger Games. Basically Mad Max. Everything is going to fall apart and what it’s going to look like when–

**Craig:** The Last of Us.

**John:** Yeah. The Last of Us. Go for it, Craig. What’s it going to be like when everything falls apart? And sure, we can do that. But we sort of stopped doing Star Trek. We stopped thinking about the future in terms of optimistic ways. And I feel like there’s a need and a vacuum out there for an optimistic vision of the future and sort of what we should aim for rather than what we fear.

**Craig:** Well, even Star Trek in its most utopian era, which was its network era, created a very virtualized view of where we as a human species would go and then immediately flung us into space to start shooting people. That’s sort of what happens. Because drama is drama. And that’s how it goes. And the earth is always under threat. And the whales are going to do something. And this is going to happen and that’s going to happen. I mean, that is part of what we do.

**John:** Famously The Next Generation wanted there to be no conflict among the crew. And I was like you need conflict for story. So I’m not asking for no conflict. I’m just asking for a vision of the future that is expansive and possibly hopeful.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, look, for art that is ultimately boring. What we like to see is triumph. So triumph requires bad stuff happening. The things that are the toughest are the ones – and you don’t see this very often – where there’s a vision of the future, there is a struggle, and the struggle fails. But then the purpose of that art is to say there but for the grace of God go we, can we figure our crap out and not be like that?

**John:** Yeah. A movie that you and I both like and refer to often is Her.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Which does posit a near future that is – the future doesn’t look bad. So his situation is not great, but the future itself is not a thing to be afraid of.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And just give me some more Hers out there, folks. I’d love to see it. Let’s make a few more of those.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I will not be delivering that. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s not in Craig’s–

**Craig:** Not coming from me.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. So thank you everyone for listening. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They’re great and they’re very comfortable. They make a great gift for the holidays. You can find them at Cotton Bureau or in the links in the show notes which you can find at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the transcripts there.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record about the election. So Craig, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** So, Craig, I went into Tuesday, well Monday and Tuesday, sort of getting into the election period noticeably more optimistic and hopeful than most of the people around me and on Twitter. And I felt like I wasn’t allowed to sort of express optimism because I was going to be ridiculed for it. And then as stuff happened on Tuesday I felt like oh should I have been more pessimistic. And then I realized like, oh, but being more pessimistic wouldn’t have actually helped this feeling right now. What were you feeling on Tuesday?

**Craig:** Yeah. On Tuesday I was feeling pretty confident that things were going to go well for Joe Biden and therefore for America and therefore for humanity. And they did. It was important to remind myself as Tuesday went on that we were facing an odd situation where the first votes were going to be counted last.

And this is something that I guess, I mean, look, on some level I’m sure most Republicans who are screaming falsely about fraud understand this all too well and they’re just yelling because they don’t know what else to do. I’m not sure Donald Trump understands it because he’s legitimately stupid. But the votes that are being counted now, those votes were cast before the votes that were cast on Election Day. And we knew that the votes that were cast before were largely going to break Democratic because for some reason, and I can’t explain why – I could – Democratic voters seemed more concerned about not getting Covid than Republican voters.

And sure enough that’s what happened. But therefore you had to be braced for the fact that on Tuesday or by Tuesday evening that things were not going to be simple. I was not onboard with the Ragin’ Cajun, James Carville, stating that it was going to be a huge rout and we would all know by, I don’t know what he said, 10pm Eastern Time or something. No. No.

**John:** Yeah. So I wasn’t there. It’s always hard to remember sort of what you were thinking at a certain point in time. But I was thinking that like, yes, if we did have a decisive victory in Florida then clearly it was going to be over. But when it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen that melting dread kicked back in.

It’s an experience I’ve felt enough in my life that I recognize what it is and sort of how I need to address it. And for me it was like go into the other room, sit on the floor, and actually just sort of doing the breathing exercises to calm myself down and just to not participate in the torture of it. And I just went to bed early. And that was the right choice for me.

Of course I’m thinking back to the 2016 election and the special episode that you and I recorded when the results came out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that sense that time forked and we ended up on the darkest timeline and then 2020 was just like the darkest part of the darkest timeline.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I was feeling on Tuesday night like, crap, am I in the coin toss where it actually went the other way? And that is such a terrifying feeling to know that, OK, this could actually all go horribly south.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so I did the same thing you did because I understood that being on Twitter and absorbing everybody else’s anxiety was not going to be good for me. What ends up happening, when people are anxious they’ll teach you – were you a lifeguard? I know you were an Eagle Scout so I figure you were a lifeguard.

**John:** I never actually lifeguarded but I’ve done a lot of CPR training.

**Craig:** Got it. So you know, as did I when I was going through that as a teenager, that when someone is drowning they’re very dangerous to you, because they’re in a full panic and they will try and drag you down. Not on purpose. But they will cling to you in panic and forget that you’re a living person and they can swamp you. And that’s pretty much what’s going on on Twitter on Tuesday. As I look around I just think everyone’s anxiety is just spiraling out of control and they can swamp me with this and it doesn’t have any connection to what’s coming. Right? Because we just haven’t seen it yet. It’s the thing of we’re looking at light in the sky but that’s old light.

So I turned off Twitter and I went and played MLB The Show 20 for quite some time. Did pretty well. Did pretty well. My character in Road to the Show has finally made it through his six qualifying years in the major leagues. He’s a free agent. He got a great deal. He’s a really good pitcher. That’s not important right now.

Here’s what matters. What matters is that it started to turn around as it was always going to go. And I never thought that Florida was going to be Democratic. I mean, yeah, you can fantasize about it. You can fantasize about Texas. And certainly Texas is moving steadily in a direction, so that’s nice to see. But it was – what did we all say? Like adults. This is going to come down to Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and to a lesser extent Arizona. And that’s what it did.

**John:** It is interesting to wind back a year and think about sort of what this election looked like a year ago. And we were told like, OK, the Senate is unwinnable just based on the states and the races and that it’s going to be really tough kind of overall. And I think, yes, we felt this certain optimism going in and we are not the podcast to actually figure out what happened with the polls, but clearly something about the polls got it wrong in a way that has to be figured out.

I mean, the question of can you even poll the American public or is there something special about this situation. Because the 2018 polls weren’t so wrong. I think the closest thing that I encounter in my work life to this is when – you and I have both been through this – when we have a movie that’s opening on Friday night. Because leading up to a Friday night you get tracking. And tracking starts two to three weeks before a movie comes out. You start to see what the interest is among potential movie going audiences for this thing you created.

And you’ll hear like “oh the tracking is great, the tracking is not going so well, they’re going to spend a little bit more,” and it’s all this sort of – it’s basically polling but it’s for your movie’s opening.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Then, we’re here on the West Coast, we know by about 5pm or 6pm how the movie actually did on that Friday night because we get the East Coast numbers and it can be cause for celebration or it can be cause for absolute just devastation because you realize like, OK, we tanked and this is not going to work. And I’ve been through both and it’s just the same kind of rollercoaster.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s unpleasant. And that said tracking is fairly accurate. I’m pretty good at reading tracking. And so back when we used to have movies friends would call me and say, “Can you tell me what my tracking means?” And I would say, OK, I think this is what it’s going to be, and generally speaking that’s what it was going to be. Within a small variance tracking is pretty effective.

I don’t know if our polling industry is broken. I think perhaps what we’re dealing with is a political freak and that’d Donald Trump. And if there’s any weird hope that I have, because I know the next two months are going to be awful, 2.5 months, and I know that he’s not going to go away and he’ll still be out there. And people who like him will still be out there. But one day he will be gone as time does its thing and I don’t think that this is a movement that exists outside of him. I think this is just him. And I think he’s warped polling as well.

**John:** I agree with you there. Because the whole issue of what is Trumpism, because he has no actual central philosophy. It’s just a kind of narcissism. And what that looks like independent of him is really hard to see. And, yes, there are some common themes of people who support him, but it kind of feels like it’s a “him” thing and not something that can be applied to another person.

I don’t see Ted Cruz, for example, being able to take the reins of that horse.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so we should acknowledge our ignorance about future events, but going back to my One Cool Thing from this week is be thinking about not just this next cycle but sort of an overall what are we trying to do, where are we trying to go. And that’s why figuring out how we’re dealing with climate change, how we’re dealing with systemic racism, how are we dealing with the projects that are going to take us decades is so crucial and so hard to think about when we’re stuck on what’s going to happen two months from now because we just don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are in trouble. And I keep looking back at this weird line in our history. You know, the McCain concession speech from 2008 is not old in the long run of it.

**John:** But it feels like a different lifetime.

**Craig:** Feels like a different nation. And I think in part that’s because between 2008 and now you see the rise of Facebook. And I think what Facebook has done to our national conversation is fatal. It is a fatal poison to our national conversation. It has united people who otherwise would have been separated by the insanity of their thoughts and statements. And it allowed them to – I mean, Facebook, when we look back at this there’s going to be a point where people say, “Wait, Facebook let QAnon be a thing for tens of millions of people for years.” They let it happen. And I don’t think we can wrap our minds around that yet. And we’re still dealing with it.

But what they’ve done, what they have enabled, is so horrifying. I don’t know what to do about it other than to say Facebook to me I look at the way I look at RJ Reynolds. A corporation that is just hurting people in our country.

**John:** Yeah. You can delete your account, so that’s what I’ve done.

**Craig:** And I have. Years ago, in fact.

**John:** And Facebook, yes, but there’s going to be other Facebooks. There’s going to be other things like that.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And just being really aware of sort of how something that can start off with one intention and become a very different thing. One of my One Cool Things last week was this book about money and it gets into the creation of mutual funds and how mutual funds became money and they had to all be bailed out. And how bitcoin became money and how basically things that start with one intention, it can become a completely different thing. And we just need to be really vigilant about what can be the next thing that sort of pulls the country apart again.

It apparently didn’t take foreign interference this time to have us all at each other’s throats. And so–

**Craig:** Well, the foreign interference is lasting interference. What they did was pour a lot of gasoline on something and then it’s still burning. I mean, the dumpster fire continues on. Because all foreign interference is is gasoline. That’s it. Putin just puts some accelerant on there. But he knew that our dumpster of racism was full. And all he needed to do was just set it off and it would burn for four years. And it is, still, burning.

And that’s on us. So if we want to be optimistic about it we can say maybe this needed to happen. You know? Like we had a Civil War that didn’t let quite all the blood out. Maybe this is what we needed to do and this will somehow let the blood out. I don’t know. But it has had a lasting effect.

My great hope is that once we get a grown up administration back of professionals we can not only wrap our arms around the pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, but we can also finally do the work that is required to harden our defenses against this very consistent, predictable enemy.

It’s not like we don’t know who they are, where they are, or what they’re going to do. We know all of that.

**John:** Yeah. Now, going into this, obviously to control the Senate would be amazing and there’s certain things you can do when you control the Senate that you can’t do otherwise, but the Trump administration has made it clear how important the President is just in terms of putting people in places that actually do the jobs that need to be done. And so that’s the Cabinet, but sort of all those roles in the government and sort of the trust in the folks who need to monitor the things that need to happen. Folks who need to actually mobilize the pandemic response. Just to have sane grownups doing those jobs is going to be so crucial and it will save hundreds of thousands of lives.

**Craig:** Well, what the Trumpy people call the Deep State, the word we used to use for that was Government. And the reason that the Trumpy people like Steve Bannon didn’t like the “Deep State” is because who those people were were the people who sat down and said things like, “I’m sorry, Steve Bannon, or Donald Trump, what you just said is either illegal or stupid. Or something we’ve tried a hundred times that doesn’t work. We’re smarter than you. We have more experience than you do. And we’re here to tell you you’re just wrong.”

And they didn’t like this. So, rather than say, OK, we will learn or get smarter or have the confidence to listen to people who have studied a topic their whole lives, or worked on something their whole lives, we’re just going to denigrate all of them or get rid of them. And instead fill these rooms with people that just nod along with the Chief Nut Job. That’s what we have.

And as a result–

**John:** Authoritarianism, fascism. Yes. We have all these things. It’s been bad. And so it will hopefully–

**Craig:** Get fixed.

**John:** It will get better. It won’t get fixed, but it’ll get better.

**Craig:** It will get better. A lot better.

**John:** As we wrap up election season, and it sort of felt like a show I was watching and participating in and I will miss some of it. I won’t miss most of it. But I wanted to single out some characters, some actual real people, whose stories I got to know in this show. Some people I’m going to kind of miss. So, Marquita Bradshaw who I only found out about very recently from Tennessee seems just amazing. And so she feels like a character in the story about someone running for Congress and she was great. And I was sorry she didn’t win.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jessica Cisneros. Alex Morse. Abby Finkenauer who lost her seat in Iowa, she’s remarkable. She and I went to the same college. She was great and I just cannot believe that she wasn’t reelected. Mark Kelly. The last time I saw you, Craig, in person was at a Mark Kelly fundraiser.

**Craig:** It was the last party I went to before the country shut down.

**John:** Yeah. And Theresa Greenfield, also from Iowa. Again, just the kind of person you want to have in that office. And so my hope is that people will see these folks who ran, some of them won but some of them didn’t win, and will keep running because we need to have smart, dedicated people running for every office in this country to make sure we build a future that we all want.

**Craig:** Yup. Yup. Well, they’ll be back.

**John:** They’ll be back.

**Craig:** They’ll be back.

**John:** Cool. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Eric Roth](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0744839/)
* Thanks to the [Writer’s Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) for organizing this event!
* [MIT Technology Review](https://www.technologyreview.com) and [How to Escape the Present by Richard Fisher](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/21/1009443/short-term-vs-long-term-thinking/)
* [Why Joe Biden is Going to Win by Kendall Kaut](https://kendallkaut.substack.com/p/why-joe-biden-is-going-to-win)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/475premium.mp3).