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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 301 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re looking at The Addams Family, not just the 1991 film and its sequel, but the property itself, to see what lessons we can learn when adapting for the big screen. I think this is the first episode that’s based on a previous One Cool Thing. Because your One Cool Thing a couple weeks ago was The Addams Family pinball game. And look at us now. We’re talking about the entire franchise.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, you know, here I am, I’m playing the Addams Family pinball game, and it has all these wonderful recorded lines from the movie and then some new ones that they recorded for the game. And it just made me, well, nostalgic for The Addams Family. You know, sometimes you go back and you watch these movies that you loved and you’re a different person now and you just don’t love them anymore. Well, I am a different person than I was when the Addams Family movie, the first one came out, in 1991. I mean, that’s, my god, 26 years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I love it even more now. I think as a screenwriter I have so much more appreciation for how good of a job they did at a task that has ruined many, many a filmmaker, namely adapting a television show that a studio is probably saying do because people know the title. And turning it into something of quality. And that’s what happened there. It’s just a terrific film. So, it’s going to be fun to talk about that and the sequel as well today.

**John:** Absolutely. So, a bit of follow up before we get into that. A couple episodes ago, god, maybe 10 episodes ago we talked about the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide, or as Craig wanted to call it the ScriptDecks.

**Craig:** ScriptDecks.

**John:** Which was a catalog of all the back episodes where we asked our listeners to go through and single out the episodes that they thought people should definitely catch. Because we get new listeners every week and they are joining us at episode 301. And they’re like, well, which of the 300 previous episodes should I actually listen to, because it would be an entire life if you wanted to dedicate yourself to all the previous episodes, which some people have done.

So, people have been filing in these reviews of previous episodes and talking about why they were so important to them. And so that is now ready almost for consumption. So, Dustin Box has done a heroic job in putting it together. It’s about a 100-page booklet.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Of the episodes that people singled out with their reviews and what’s in there and the summaries. So, we talked about printing it. It’s not going to make sense to print it. But we’re going to release it as a PDF for folks. And so it’s in pretty good shape. The thing is the most recent episodes have no reviews at all because they’re so new. So if you are a person who has listened to the last 20 or so Scriptnotes and you want to single out any of those, I really need some more reviews of those because it just sort of stops at 280 right now.

So, if you can go to johnaugust.com/guide, and if there’s any episodes in that last batch that you want to single out for why people should listen to them, please do. And I think we’re only a couple weeks away from being able to share it with the world.

**Craig:** And what will it cost, John?

**John:** The plan is for it to be free.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Look at you.

**John:** So the theory is like it’s free, but if you want to listen to all those back episodes they’re of course available at Scriptnotes.net, which is $2 a month, and so you can go through and listen to all those back episodes. And we will be making more of the USB drives. They are actually extra cool USB drives. We think we’re going to be able to make the ones that I want. They will survive any catastrophe that happens in the world, I think. So, they are definitely a time capsule of the first 300 episodes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, we want to make sure that after the apocalypse those episodes are still available. It’s a bit like the seed bank. Do you know about the seed bank?

**John:** I know about the seed bank. But you also know that the seed bank flooded because of the permafrost melting?

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That happened like just today.

**Craig:** It happened today? We lost our seed bank?

**John:** We haven’t lost it, but it has been damaged by the flooding permafrost, because they deliberately built it in an arctic location that was safe and cold. It is no longer safe and cold.

**Craig:** I like that the thing that we were using to hedge against the apocalypse was damaged by the encroaching apocalypse.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We could do better. I mean, the seed bank should be a little more protected than that.

**John:** So, I mean, I don’t want to go too deep into the Alanis Morissette discussion, but is that ironic? Is it ironic that–?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, so it’s tragic. But how could that seed bank thing be ironic in the classic definition of irony?

**Craig:** Um, it would be ironic if – here’s how. The world ends because seeds become incredibly aggressive and literally tear apart buildings and everything. So, the end of the world that the seed bank was preparing for was brought about by an overabundance of seeds.

**John:** OK. But couldn’t you say that deliberately placing it in – picking the location that was safe and arctic ended up becoming its undoing, that’s ironic. Is it not?

**Craig:** Just feels like bad planning.

**John:** Yeah, perhaps.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like it’s not ironic to say that I put my – you know what happened, I put my documents for my fire insurance in the fireplace. That’s not ironic. That’s just dumb. And then the fire destroyed them. You know, that’s just dumb.

**John:** I was listening to a podcast today. I was listening to Trumpcast. And the interviewer used Begs the Question completely appropriately.

**Craig:** Oh yay.

**John:** It was just such a delight. I got this little tingle of joy.

**Craig:** It’s like when Haley’s Comet swings around every seven or eight decades. It’s nice to hear it when it happens. You sit up. You applaud. There’s still hope, John. There’s still hope.

**John:** There is still hope.

Let’s get to some questions. So Doug in LA wrote in with a question. “What does it mean when you say a scene is working? Is a ‘working’ scene the minimum viable shootable version of a scene? Is a script full of ‘working’ scenes in a great script? Or is the working scene like pornography – difficult to define, but easy to identify?”

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s an interesting question. I mean, the truth of the matter is when we talk about these terms of art, it probably means different things to different people. For me, it’s definitely not – I can at least rule out one of these. It is not the minimum viable shootable version of a scene.

When I say a scene is working, what I mean to say is that whatever the intention of that scene was, it is coming across clearly. It is interesting to me. And the craft of the scene unfolds in such a way that everything feels harmonious and dramatic and interesting or funny. Whatever the ultimate entertainment intent of that scene was, it is happening in a very satisfying way.

**John:** I completely agree. I would also add to it that there’s a time-based element to this. So, you could say a scene is working when it’s on the page. You could say a scene is working or not working when it is in front of the camera and the actors are trying to do it. You see that it’s just not working. And you have to figure out what’s happening there or not happening there properly.

You also ask is this scene working when you’re in the edit room. And you’re looking at there like this scene is not working. And so sometimes the writing really was the issue. But sometimes something else is the issue. And so you’re going through and trying to figure out how do we get this scene to work because it is simply not doing the job it is supposed to be doing in this moment. It is not living up to the narrative potential or to the tone potential of what that scene is supposed to be doing.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And it is probably the case that we use this term most frequently when we are in the editing room, because that is the ultimate test of the scene. There is a scene on paper that ideally when you arrive you feel like this is a good basis of a working scene. Now let us go make a scene. But when you are in the editing room, it is very common to look at something and go, “It’s just not working. I’m feeling a little bored. I’m feeling a little confused. Maybe it’s too long. Maybe it’s too short. Maybe there’s one of those intangible things. I know I’m supposed to feel something at this moment, but I don’t.”

So, it’s not working.

**John:** The moment of panic is when a scene is not working and you’re on the set. So, you may have gone through blocking with the actors and they’re trying to do it and they’re like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. This isn’t working for me. I don’t understand what’s going on.” And that can be a moment where as a writer you’re like the scene works, I know it fundamentally works, and yet you’re not able to make the scene work. And so therefore I’m going to have to have this conversation to try to figure out what it is that is not working for you and the director, of course, and try to find a way to make sure it works for everybody. Because if an actor has no idea what the scene is supposed to be doing, or cannot find his or her way into the scene, it’s unlikely – not impossible – that you’re going to be able to find that later on.

So, those are the moments I dread is when you maybe shot one, or you’re about to start shooting, and like they just don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. And those are the moments where the floor just falls out of your heart.

**Craig:** Yeah. That happens. Similarly, you will find yourself in situations where everybody seems to understand what they’re doing. And it’s all going according to plan. And you’re watching it and thinking, “It’s not working. There’s just something amiss here.”

And in those moments, I think this is where experience really comes into play. They talk about this in sports all the time. I mean, you have two teams that make it to a championship game. A Super Bowl. The World Series. And so therefore they’re all not only professional athletes, but they’re at the top of their game. They are the best of the athletes in that league. But one team has been to the big show before. They’ve played in the World Series before. They’ve played in a Super Bowl before. And very typically people will say they have an edge because they have a certain experience.

And you think, well, it’s a game. The rules aren’t any different. There is this comfort that you get from having been there before. The longer you do this job, and the more times you arrive at a place where something isn’t working, first of all the impulse to deny that it’s not working, it’s not there. Because you’ve already felt the sting and the consequence of that denial in the past. So, there’s no struggle against that. You immediately accept that it is true. But you also remember that you were able to fix things. And if you take a breath, take a moment, think about what it was that this scene was supposed to do, and look with dispassionate scrutiny upon what the scene is currently doing, a lot of times with just 30 minutes or 40 minutes you can cook up something new.

And production is used to this. You will get to a place where you’re not quite sure – it’s clearly not right. I remember Todd Phillips and I, we were – it was I think the third Hangover movie. There was a scene where the guys were in a car. And Todd was really adamant about not shooting car scenes the way most car scenes are shot today, which is on a soundstage against green screen. He really liked the old school style of processed cars where you’re towing a car and shooting it for real.

And so it’s a very involved bit of production work, because you can only go so far in that car. You have to turn around, go back. So, takes take a long time. And the scene just wasn’t working. So, we sort of hit the red button, stopped. Said, “Let’s just shoot something else today.” And then we took a day to figure out what it was and come up with something else. And we did. And then we did that and it worked great.

That is something that I think experience teaches you about non-working scenes, because I think a lot of people, particularly early directors, first-time directors, and early screenwriters are hearing people say, “We’re here and we spent all this money. We got to make this work.” And so you just go, OK, I’ll do my best. It’s not working though.

**John:** You and I don’t have experience working on traditional sitcoms where they have a process where over the course of the week they’re writing and then they have a table read and they have blocking. And so they’re working on the script as they go through it. And in that process, at the table read, or while they’re first trying to stage things, they could say like, OK, that’s not working. They can see it in front of their eyes. Like, OK, that’s not working. And it’s built into their process. Like, the things that aren’t working, we’re going to fix them. And by the time we’re doing the real taping, we will get it worked out.

And so it’s a luxury we don’t often have in features, because generally a scene is in front of the cameras, that’s the only time you’re going to shoot that scene unless something crazy happens or unless you are in a movie where you have the luxury of being able to shoot things multiple times. I would just say like if something is not working it’s not a sign that everything is doom and gloom. It may just be part of the process. And it can be a really terrifying part of the process in a feature. And it’s probably less terrifying in the television medium where it’s expected that you’re going to keep working on things.

**Craig:** There’s no question. This is why movies, to me, are the tight rope act of our business, because you’re asking people to sit in a theater and experience this one time. That’s it. There are no commercial breaks, nor can they hit pause. Television always has more leeway because there’s a certain casualness to the manner in which it is consumed. Not so with movies where you’re asking people to go somewhere and park and sit and watch it with total attention, captive audience, and then go home.

And, also of course, in television, even serialized television single-camera dramatic stuff, there are so many locations and sets that are reused over and over and over. Obviously in sitcoms, well, let’s talk about the traditional three-camera sitcom, the sets are the same literally every week. So, the variables are reduced down to almost nothing. The only real variable is what are these people doing and saying and thinking. But you’re not in a new location. You’re not stuck there all day with a scene that doesn’t work. You know what I man?

So, always much more pressure, I think, in movies. Very scary business. But I will say that when Doug asks is a script full of working scenes a great script, I probably would say no because that’s not how we judge a great script. We judge a great script as a whole. So, yes, all the scenes should be working, but also they should be working together. That’s kind of one of the big factors.

**John:** Absolutely. In the show notes I want to put a link into an episode of this podcast that goes into the backstory of The Americans. So The Americans is a fantastic show and for the last few seasons Slate has done a podcast series where after every episode they do a spoiler special where they talk about the episode, but they also interview the showrunners and somebody else involved with the production.

And this past week, they talked with the producing director whose job it is to direct the first two episodes of the season and the last episode. And to work with the directors who are doing the course of the season. And he was talking about being the guy, in shooting the last episode, he’s also the guy who shoots all the clean up on previous episodes. Because there will always be some things that don’t work or things that they missed because of weather or an actor changes or something. And so he shoots all those cleanup things. And that’s sort of a unique thing as TV shows, at least how we’re doing them right now, they have that opportunity to go back and like fix things in a way which is just amazing.

**Craig:** Indeed. Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. Tim in Ohio writes, “Can a writer take a previously produced show, write a few episodes for it, then submit it as a writing sample? My idea is to take the former number one show Dallas and spin it into a sitcom.”

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Generally speaking, what used to be common is now looked down upon, which is to advertise yourself as a writer by writing an episode of an existing show. So, when you and I came into the business and if you wanted to get into television, you would write a spec episode of Seinfeld, or a spec episode of Frasier.

People don’t really do that anymore. Now the folks who are hiring writers for television shows are looking for original pilot material to say, OK, how are you as a writer on your own creating characters and situations that are unique to you. But, in a situation like this, of course, you could certainly take a show like Dallas and turn it into a sitcom. That sounds very inventive. It could be really fun and funny to read.

A couple of warnings. One, obviously that’s never going to get made, because you don’t have the rights. So that really is just a calling card kind of piece of work. Two, it requires that the reader be familiar with the substrate. So, if Dallas was on the air when you and I were children, that’s a show from the ‘80s, it may very well be that some people who are reading this material and judging you as a writer are not that familiar with it. So, it might not work for them. It might not be that funny. But those concerns aside, I don’t see any problem with it.

**John:** No, I think it’s the right kind of idea. So, I don’t know if Dallas as a sitcom is the right idea, but the right kind of idea to sort of take something that people are familiar with and do a very different twist on it. That’s great. And it kind of busts the clutter a little bit, because these people are reading a zillion samples for things, they’ll remember this one if it’s a clever take on something that was familiar to them.

So, yes, I think it’s absolutely fine and fair. Are you violating somebody’s copyright? Well, not in a way that is meaningful, because you’re not trying to sell this. You are not trying to do anything other than prove your writing talent. So, it is a common practice to do spec episodes. This is essentially the same kind of idea.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our big feature topic which is The Addams Family. When you and I first talked about this on email, we were going to focus on one movie and sort of do one of those deep dives like we did on Little Mermaid or Indiana Jones. And then as we started sort of talking through it and you were watching one movie and I was watching another movie, we decided let’s just talk about The Addams Family in general. So, you were going to focus on the first movie. I was going to take the second movie. But then I think it’s also interesting just to look at how would you approach The Addams Family overall. Because it’s the kind of property that if we were doing it right now in 2017, you would probably put together a room. You would put together a room of writers and they’d spend four weeks on it and figure out what the movie was going to be and what the spinoff HBO show was going to be.

It’s that kind of big property that you do things with. And it’s so interesting that we have already a TV show and movies to look at. So, The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Yeah. This could have gone so, so wrong. And it went so, so right. I mean, let’s remember that The Addams Family started as a cartoon in The New Yorker. Charles Addams did these one-panel cartoons. And I see here in the show notes, thank you for supplying this information, John, began in the ‘30s. So this goes way, way back. And it eventually was adapted into a television show in the ‘60s, which you and I, I mean, I certainly was watching that when I was a kid. They were in black and white. Was that one of the shows that then transitioned to color at some point?

**John:** I honestly don’t remember. And actually my memory of The Addams Family versus The Munsters is kind of blurry. The general, like there was a house, and there was kooky people living in it, but it wasn’t a clear distinct memory for me. Like I can remember, I can keep my Bewitched and my I Dream of Jeannie separate. But these kind of got conflated to me as TV shows.

**Craig:** There was a time, because there were only three networks, where you could get away with this. You could have a hit show and then another network can go, “Let’s make a that show. Make that exact show, just change a few names. It will basically be the same show.” And that’s what they did when The Addams Family came on. It was a hit. And then The Munsters came along to be the same show. It was kind of remarkable.

The show was very typical for television in the ’60s. It was a sitcom. It had a laugh track. It was pretty cheesy. And most importantly because it was meant for families, it pulled punches. The cartoons that Charles Addams drew were – they were a bit like Gorey’s cartoons. They were dark, macabre. They didn’t pull punches. And then the show sort of did.

And then you come along to 1991 and in a very typical Hollywood move they say, “We can get the rights to this thing. Everybody knows the name The Addams Family. Most people know the big characters. They love that song. So let’s make a movie out of it.” And what’s so amazing about the film is that it didn’t pull punches. And so the opening shot tells you everything about what this movie is going to be and it is essentially a filmed version of one of Charles Addams’ most famous one-panel cartoons, which shows a group of carolers merrily singing outside of a door. And then you go all the way up to the top of this gothic mansion and there’s this ghoulish family with a vat of bubbling oil and they’re going to pour it on these people. And the key, really the key to everything that makes The Addams Family work as a movie and as a cartoon is that they are so gleeful about it.

They are not – they don’t look vicious. They look happy as a family. It’s this wonderful – in fact, this is to them what caroling is to not them. This happy, warm feeling. And that general tone sets the path for the entire film.

**John:** Agreed. So the first film is 1991. The second film, Addams Family Values, is 1993. On the previous podcast I said, oh yeah, the second film, Addams Family Vacation, which is not really a film.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But totally could be a film.

**Craig:** It could be.

**John:** So we’ll get into why that could be film.

**Craig:** It’s Addams Family Values, right?

**John:** Values is the second movie. There was a third film written that never shot. Raul Julia, who played Gomez, died. And they never shot the third film. But I think it would be interesting to figure out sort of what that would be.

There have been direct to video sequels since then. In 2010 it was announced that Tim Burton would do a stop motion version for Illumination, but that apparently never happened. But, wow, Tim Burton feels like a perfect match for The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In 2013, it was announced that MGM had hired Pamela Pettler, who did Corpse Bride with me, to do the script for the new animated version. I don’t know any more details about that, but it feels like she should be making something. And finally there’s a Broadway musical that our friend Andrew Lippa wrote, which has obviously played on Broadway but it is now in the UK and traveling around the world. So, we can also get into that for a little bit.

So, we can talk about sort of the common elements of all that, but also what is unique to sort of each version of The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Right. Well, so the 1991 film is written Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson. I don’t know if Paul Rudnick also worked on it. I can only guess. It seems like maybe he did. He is, I think, the only credited screenwriter on the sequel. And there’s a certain Rudnickian humor.

I mean, it’s funny, you can go through particularly the second film and the comedy is very one-liner based. And you can literally go through and divide the jokes into two categories. Jewish or Gay. It’s incredible. There’s like a whole academic study to be on what gay humor is and what Jewish humor is and how The Addams Family just is the king of both of those schools.

But Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson write the script for Addams Family, the first film. It’s directed by Barry Sonnenfeld who I think at this point – had he already done Men in Black? I don’t know.

**John:** But watching the film, it was so striking, because I recently watched Men in Black, and like his style is his style. It very much feels like Men in Black in sort of how it’s visually presented on the screen.

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, Barry Sonnenfeld started as a cinematographer. His style is very – is for the camera to be very present, very bold, big moves. But, here’s what kind of emerges from a screenwriting point of view, why I love The Addams Family. You have this enormous challenge ahead of you, and I always put myself in the shoes of Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson. What do you do?

And so they make this brilliant choice right off the bat. I’m going to take this cartoon and in it is all the DNA you need for a movie. Specifically, family bonded together by the opposite of what most families are bonded together by. And in there also is this strand of the celebration of non-conformity. We all get a little squeamish by those perfect families. Think of Ned Flanders on The Simpsons, right? They’re perfect, we just then want to hurt them because of it, right?

So The Addams Family celebrates the perfect opposite of that. And in that they love each other. And so what is the movie? From a plot point of view, I think they actually make this brilliant choice by picking the dumbest plot ever. In comedy film, there is no more hoary plot than – HOARY plot – not WHOREY plot – than the grandma is going to lose her house essentially.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they live in this mansion. They have all this money. And the plot of the movie is that their financial manager is scheming with somebody that he owes money to to take all of it away from them. And they’re going to do that by having this man pose as the long lost Uncle Fester, even though he is not, because Uncle Fester is the rightful owner of all of that. And once that happens, he can take it all, and kick the Addams Family out, and they get all the money for themselves. That is a terrible plot and it’s perfect for this because the joy of The Addams Family is not plot-based at all. It is entirely about how this family loves each other in the strangest way. This incredible romance between the parents, between Morticia and Gomez. And then ultimately what it means to actually be loved by a family in any way, shape or form.

And all of that requires comedy and set pieces to the point where you feel like you’re almost watching a standup show. And the choice of plot here is brilliant because really the movie is at its best when it doesn’t give a damn about any of that.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to your earlier comment about like it’s the intersection of Jewish comedy and gay comedy, there’s something really fundamentally queer about The Addams Family. And actually I searched “Addams Family Queer” to see who had done their Master’s thesis on it, and there really weren’t a lot of them online. But it is a family that is defined by its otherness to the world around it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in portraying itself as the alternative to everything out there, it is strangely normalizing. It’s all about this family that loves each other so much, even though they’re not like anything else around them. And all their individual, sort of the natural things you see in a family are magnified to these extreme degrees. So, Gomez and Morticia don’t just love each other. They love each other in a passionate way that is really bizarre. Like it’s almost uncomfortable, but also delightful.

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

**John:** And so Gomez is sort of feminine in sort of his fawning over his wife, but that’s kind of great. They seem to have a bondage/S&M kind of relationship. But that’s kind of great, also.

Then you look at the two kids, Wednesday and Pugsley, they have sort of the normal sibling rivalry, but taken to such an extreme degree that she’s always trying to kill him, like literally kill him. And you sense that she never really will because it’s the rules of the movie, yet she’s always trying to kill him.

And then the kooky Uncle Fester. And Grandmama, they are the most extreme versions of the wacky Jewish uncle or the Bubbe.

**Craig:** The Bubbe.

**John:** She’s the extreme version of the Bubbe. So, it’s all those things taken to sort of their nth degree, and yet in the nth degree they become very normal. It’s revealing how normal a family they are in relation to all the cold outsiders.

**Craig:** No question. I think that’s exactly why the movie works. And that is the – the interesting subversion that’s in it, there is something – we’ll talk about, OK, the Jewish side of the humor is this – it’s not a suspicion of the perfect WASPY family. It’s more like, ugh, who wants to be perfect like that? You know, we’re not perfect like that. We’re loud, or we’re weird looking. Those perfect people are kind of boring and stuffy. So this is the sort of Jewish humor that you saw with for instance Harold Ramis when you look at movies like Caddyshack for instance. That’s a very Jewish kind of expression. Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Caddyshack. He could have just as easily been in The Addams Family. You get a sense that if he had walked into the Addams Family mansion, he would have made some comments, but otherwise been perfectly fine.

And definitely when you think about the queerness of it, that there’s this straight world out there that doesn’t understand the true fascination of being yourself completely. Because in the straight world, you’re born straight, and nobody gives you a problem with it, so you’re just yourself. There’s no effort to it. And here they’re making a conscious decision. They do love S&M. They talk about it without ever going too far, but, you know, she says – I mean, Gomez is very upset because he is starting to think that maybe Uncle Fester is an imposter and it’s not really his brother. And she says, “Gomez, why torture yourself? That’s my job.” And it’s all – and when they’re literally torturing her, she loves it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She says, “You’ve done this before.” So, it’s very much about a total free acceptance of our non-conforming selves. And all of that is necessary. But I will argue that the reason – they lynchpin to this movie is Wednesday Addams and her portrayal by a very young Christina Ricci who did a sort of impossibly brilliant job. It’s one of the best jobs any child has ever done in any part.

**John:** I completely agree. So, we’ll skip ahead and give a taste of Addams Family Values, because my daughter watched this with me this week. And my daughter is 12 and has not seen any of it. She had no idea what The Addams Family was. And so she hadn’t seen the first movie and we just started watching Addams Family Values. And within the first five minutes she’s in love with Wednesday Addams. Because Wednesday Addams speaks her mind in an adult way but also in a kind of couldn’t care less way. She completely takes agency in every scene in a way that’s just remarkable.

And she says things that like no one should ever say, and yet she’s much freer for that. And so my daughter just completely fell for Wednesday because it’s just such a revelatory character. And Christina Ricci’s performance is superb.

**Craig:** It’s not surprising to me that she fell in love with her because the character of Wednesday Addams is almost a super hero. Everybody else is operating in this world where they are concerned about their love for each other, or money, or whether this brother is real or not. Wednesday Addams is operating on this plain above everyone where, A, she’s the first person to figure out that Fester isn’t really Fester. He’s an imposter. Although, spoiler alert, it turns out he really is Fester. She just knows that, inherently. She’s brilliant. She has this remarkable deadpan, which I think great deadpan characters – like I think of Martin Starr on Silicon Valley.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** What they convey in their perfect deadpan is that they’ve seen it all. It’s almost like you get the sense that that character on Silicon Valley or Wednesday Addams has literally already seen the movie, or the show. They know how it ends. It’s a confidence there. It’s a remarkable confidence. Unflappable. And violent but violent because of a passion to be in control of the world. It’s actually a very kind of traditionally masculine trait to want to dominate the world, right?

Wednesday effortlessly seems like she wants to dominate everything. You got the sense that if Wednesday just decided to end this movie early, she could. And that’s a wonderful choice. And Christina Ricci does these things when she reacts to things that are too cloying, too sweet, too nice, whatever they are. Her eyes go big and her eyes are just, I mean, they should – I wish we could copy them and put them in a museum to show people like this is what eyes can do.

How old was she when this movie was made? It’s just unbelievable that she could do those things.

**John:** Yeah. She was 12.

**Craig:** 12! My daughter is 12. Your daughter is 12. There’s just this preternatural confidence and ability that she had that was just so brilliant.

All right. So, I want to talk about a scene in Addams Family. To me, it’s the pivotal scene. It’s where the movie turns and you start to see why you fall in love with everyone.

So Christopher Lloyd plays this imposter. He’s pretending to be Fester. There’s all this hullabaloo going on. It’s not going very well. Wednesday doesn’t necessarily think – you know, she’s on to him. And he’s a bad guy. I mean, he’s a murderous thug who is basically being sent in there to be a criminal. And because of that, he’s finding a certain commonality. And the strongest connection he has weirdly is with these two kids because he likes them. He likes the things that they do. And at one point, when even Gomez is saying this man is not my brother. He’s an imposter. Imposter. You know, nice and big.

Fester sees Wednesday Addams and, oh, what’s the brother’s name again?

**John:** Pugsley.

**Craig:** Pugsley. Wednesday and Pugsley are pretending to sword fight and it’s nicely grim, you know. Pretending to kill each other. And he watches this. And so it was that old sword under the arm and Wednesday goes, “Oooh,” and pretends to die. And he’s, “No. No, no, no, no, no, no.” And he runs downstairs and teaches them the proper way to kill each other. And it’s in this moment that you understand that there is this connection between freaks that is deeper than the connection we suppose between people who are normal and therefore don’t need that depth of connection. And it pays off in this incredible scene where there’s a school play and it is the perfect example of the outsider behavior you were talking about and the insider behavior, because all of the perfect kids are like, la-la-la, school play.

And then up come Wednesday and Pugsley, who it appears have been well-instructed by Fester, who shows up to watch, proud of them, because now it is a family. And they engage in the sword fight and start lopping off limbs. They’ve rigged fake limbs. And fake blood is spraying everywhere. It’s spraying. And this is where I stand up and applaud. Spraying blood into the faces of audience members, like into their mouths, and this is a family movie and it totally works. It’s awesome. And it’s the best example of how this movie just refused to pull its punches. And you so loved it for that. And at the end of it, you cut to this great shot of this shocked into silence, blood-covered audience, and then the Addams Family standing up and applauding. Ah, brilliant.

**John:** So, the reason why that kind of sequence can work is because as the audience, our sympathies are with the Addams Family at all moments. And so even though we’ll meet other characters who are like normal, we will never go home with them. We’ll never follow them.

And so our experience of the movie is only through their eyes. And because we relate with them, that scene isn’t gory. That scene is hilarious. And so you can imagine the other version of that. Like the bad version of this where we have fallen in love with or tracked people who are outside looking at the Addams Family, they seem disturbed. And you would have natural concerned about the Addams Family, and then this bloody school play would read very differently. So it has to be the triumphant final act of these characters we’ve fallen in love with over the course of the story in order to see it. And you’re setting it up from the very first shot where we see the family trying to pour hot oil on the carolers.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s exactly right. So in that concept of DNA. You and I, we never say to people the Three Page Challenge has to be the first three pages. But, the first three pages should pack in an enormous amount of genetic information. That is the tension and the joy of The Addams Family is that they are on a superficial level horrible people who do horrible things and it’s even implied that they’ve murdered people, you know? But they love each other so purely and the movie is kind of a middle finger to the hypocrisy of family values, which was a big buzz word at the time, and obviously then became the title of the second movie. Because it was essentially saying everybody out there pretending to be all nicety nice, they’re great on a superficial level and rotten on an internal level. And we’re going to flip that. We’re going to make these people rotten on a superficial level and beautiful on an internal level, which is also a very gay/Jewish kind of mélange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so to wrap up the discussion of the first movie, you have these moments that continue to reinforce the notion that Uncle Fester is drawn specifically to that authenticity. And in fact starts to sense that it is the very thing that will reward him, even though he is a freak. The fact that it turns out that he really is the long lost Uncle Fester is sort of a cherry on top of the sundae. And, in fact, an interesting fact that I read, initially that wasn’t the case. Initially he was not really Fester, but he becomes adopted as Fester. And apparently the cast had a real problem with that. And this is from the documentary, The Making of The Addams Family, Sonnenfeld stated that he meant it to be unclear ultimately in the end whether Fester was really an imposter or not. But all the other actors rebelled and chose, guess who, Christina Ricci, to speak on their behalf who gave this very impassioned plea that Fester shouldn’t be an imposter.

And so, in fact, they ended up changing that plot point to make the actors happy and says Sonnenfeld, “They were right. It was the better way to go.” And of course it was, because – see the thing is it’s not saying, oh, it only worked because of a genetic connection. It works before the genetic connection is ever discovered. That really is your reward essentially. Like, oh, and you really are a part of this. But only after they’ve accepted you as part of it.

So, it was a lovely thing. And it set up a second movie quite brilliantly.

**John:** I agree. So, let’s talk through the plot of Addams Family Values. So this is written by Paul Rudnick. Same director. Same producer. In the opening, Morticia gives birth to a new baby. This is Pubert, who is actually part of mythology. I assumed it was made up for this movie, but it’s actually part of mythology.

Wednesday and Pugsley are jealous, so they try to kill the baby. And so there’s a lot of sequences of how they’re trying to kill the baby. The family hires a nanny named Debbie, who is played by Joan Cusack, who is just spectacular.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** She’s actually the Black Widow Killer, and so she plans to marry and murder Uncle Fester.

**Craig:** Which, let me just interrupt. Again, the dumbest plot ever. Perfect. Perfect. Thank god.

**John:** Wonderful. Debbie sends the kids off to summer camp and from there we’re cutting back and forth between the main A Plot storyline which is at the house and it is Gomez and Morticia and Debbie and Fester, and the other plot line is at Camp Chippewa where we’re following Wednesday and Pugsley there.

Ultimately Debbie marries Fester, but finds him impossible to kill. And she’s ultimately electrocuted by the baby at the very end. She’s basically kidnapped the entire family. She’s going to kill them. But the baby ends up killing her. So, that is his real crowning as an Addams is killing their killer.

**Craig:** So the plot of the baby is set up in I think the very last shot of the first film, where she announces that she’s pregnant and she announces this by showing this little onesie she’s knitting that has too many limbs. And, of course, Gomez immediately recognizes the meaning of it and is thrilled. And then they have this baby in the beginning and, of course, Morticia enjoys labor pains. And, by the way, just another brilliant thing that you got to give Sonnenfeld an enormous amount of credit for. They make a choice in the first film that they carry through the second film. In every scene, no matter what is happening, there is a key light going across Morticia’s eyes. And so Anjelica Huston has this wonderful face.

Now, a key light for those of you who don’t know, it’s a special light and it’s usually very well defined in terms of border. And very typically is hit across someone’s eyes to give a kind of dramatic pop. It’s like the Tabasco sauce of lighting. You use it very carefully in places. And they’re just like, nope. [laughs]

**John:** It’s not careful here. It’s just a giant spotlight.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** There are moments, clearly she had very little, like once they did her blocking, she was not allowed to change whatsoever.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because there’s one inch of like that her face can be in.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So that she’s perfectly in the light. And so watching it this past week, there are a few times where she steps into the light, but essentially she’s frozen throughout most of the movie because of that light.

**Craig:** Which actually weirdly works, because she has this kind of insanely contained character. So even when she’s lying in the stretcher, being wheeled into the delivery room, there’s a key light across her eyes. [laughs] It’s just amazing.

So you have this Black Widow plot. And once again, by the way, Wednesday, she knows. Always knows. And you go back and forth between these things and the truth is that it is kind of a rehash of the plot of the first movie, which I don’t mind. Someone else is trying to steal their money in their house. And it certainly cuts to the family themes. But the movie sings and is at its best, and I think is beloved for all of the scenes at Camp Chippewa because those again cut right to the heart of that let’s just call it the queer Addams Family academic theory of outsiders versus insiders. And it does it in a way that is now even bigger and more obvious.

And it is outstanding. Just once scene after another. Christine Baranski and Peter MacNicol both being like the perfect foils. Every scene there is just gold.

**John:** Well, it’s also worth noting that the summer camp mythos is also a largely Jewish culture thing, too. So like the East Coast summer camp vibe is a real thing. I was trying to figure out whether this came first or Camp Crusty. And they’re almost the same time. The Camp Crusty, the phenomenal Simpsons episode where Bart and Lisa go off to Crusty’s summer camp.

But both of them are presaged by Meatballs, which is an amazing sort of distillation of what the summer camp experience is. So, all the Camp Chippewa stuff is just delightful. I found that my memory of the movie was that, oh, it’s mostly Camp Chippewa.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s actually not that much. It’s just the stuff that’s there is like really, really good and funny. And you sort of remember the parts of the movie that Wednesday is in, and that’s the part of the movie that Wednesday is in.

Some things honestly don’t work phenomenally in this movie. And it’s worth noting what doesn’t quite work, because watching it this past week I had this suspicion that some scenes got dropped, or something got changed along the way. Quite early on Wednesday Addams starts to figure out like oh I think Debbie is not who she says she is. Debbie is going through these papers. But for whatever reason, Wednesday doesn’t say anything and Wednesday gets shipped off the camp. But Wednesday comes back from camp for the wedding, Uncle Fester’s wedding, and yet doesn’t say anything there either.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then goes back to camp. There’s a weird stutter step there. And I would love to talk with somebody involved with the movie to figure out what happened there. Because there’s something that got dropped or changed there, because it was really weird to have Wednesday in some scenes where she could have been taking some agency and she wasn’t taking any agency.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree. There’s an interesting – you could tell that they obviously had made this choice. They want them to go to camp. It’s going to be great. This is how they can have all their fun. But how do you get them there? So, once Debbie, the Black Widow, realizes that Wednesday is on to her, she makes this impassioned plea to Gomez and Morticia to send the kids to camp. And she says, “And they’re going to tell you they don’t want to go, but they really, really do.” And of course Gomez and Morticia are shocked, because that’s just – fresh air and sunshine is so horrible.

But they go along with the plan. They’re fooled, which is fine, but Wednesday doesn’t really protest, which doesn’t make sense. So, that was – it seems like a cheat. It is a cheat.

**John:** It is a cheat. And here’s the thing. I feel like you could get that cheat if it was because it is setting up the fundamental premise, like they’re off at summer camp. So I bought it that moment. It was the stutter step where they come back to the house and then have to go leave again. That was a bridge too far for me. And while it makes sense that they should be there at their uncle’s wedding, if they had revised it in a way that the wedding had to happen suddenly and they couldn’t be there, that would have made maybe even more sense.

And I do wonder if the choice – if what happened in editing or in some sort of reshoot was like, oh, we want to have Wednesday come to this thing, or they want one more scene with Wednesday and the family, so they stuck her into a sequence that she wasn’t naturally in.

**Craig:** It’s quite possible.

**John:** Just a guess.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s quite possible.

**John:** There’s another scene that doesn’t work towards the end or a little sequence that doesn’t work especially well towards the end. It’s that like Gomez and Morticia are phenomenal, but they sort of lose their agency once Fester and Debbie go off. And you sort of lose them as a centerpiece of the movie. So they go to sort of confront Debbie, and then they skulk away. And they go to the police station. There’s a scene with Nathan Lane which doesn’t need to be in the movie at all.

Curiously, Nathan Lane ends up playing Gomez in the Broadway musical, which is a small world kind of thing. But I was watching that scene wondering why that scene was in the movie.

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting. It is a mirror of a sequence in the first movie, and I suspect that’s why it’s there. Because they felt that it was successful in the first movie, although I would argue that – so in the first movie, towards the – by the end of the second act, beginning of the third act, there’s about ten minutes, which is by the way a lot for a movie that I think is about a 90-minute running time without credits. There’s ten minutes where the Addams Family has been kicked out of their house and they have to go live in this motel. And it is really a sequence of gags. And they’re fun gags. And they even set up this girl who ends up showing up as the girl in the summer camp who is like the perfect little girl.

But it’s just too much. And you start to feel once the Addams Family is – well, OK, now we’re doing a fish out of water movie with the Addams Family? But that’s really not the movie that we were doing. That sequence goes on a bit long in the first movie, and here in the second one it seemed like they were trying to grab at that again. And I agree with you, it didn’t really need to be there. It was more frustrating than entertaining.

**John:** Yeah. But it’s worth talking about the dynamics they were trying to establish with Debbie and Fester and Morticia and Gomez, which is that Morticia and Gomez’s perfect love is intimidating. Like it sets an impossibly high standard for love. And so Christopher Lloyd, who we’re not talking enough about because he’s just phenomenal in both movies–

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** He’s great. And like imbues this bizarre character with a lot of heart. And at every moment is making fascinating choices. The sequences with him and Debbie and with him and Debbie and Morticia, they are really terrific, yet there’s a sameness to them. There’s not a progress. And if I could hope for anything it would be a little bit more engine behind them so that we’re not coming back to the same vibe again and again.

**Craig:** I agree. And it’s worth noting that Christopher Lloyd carries the burden of the protagonist in both movies and does it beautifully well. And it’s a very similar protagonism in each movie. In the first movie he is someone who is struggling with a desire to be loved. He has this unhealthy relationship with this woman who has adopted him who is not his mother, but he has clearly this crazy mamma’s boy thing going on. And bordering on oedipal, because he so desires to be loved and accepted. And then he finds that love an acceptance from his actual family, the Addams Family.

In the second movie, you’re exactly right. They make a brilliant point of setting up a new need in him that is not simply there because. It’s there in response to Gomez and Morticia’s perfect romance. He wants what they have. And they have all these wonderful jokes where he just talks all the time about how he watches them through a keyhole while they have sex and they don’t really seem to care, which is spectacular. I mean, also in the movie you have multiple scenes where Wednesday and Pugsley are not just kind of pretending to kill their infant brother. They are legitimately trying to kill him. And every single time either the baby foils it or the parents foil it and they’re like, “Oh, you kids. I know it’s hard.” Which is brilliant.

But you’re absolutely right. The part of the laboring of the second movie is that Fester’s desire to have a romance and therefore his attraction to Debbie kind of flat lines. When he understands she’s manipulating him, she keeps trying to kill him and it never really works because he’s Fester and it’s really hard to kill an Addams. We know this. It does sort of flat line for a while. And you start to get a little frustrated that Fester isn’t getting it.

In the first movie, Gomez figures out pretty quickly that this guy doesn’t seem like. We aren’t ahead of him. He’s with us. In this movie, we’re so ahead of Fester that it does start to get a little plodding.

**John:** Yeah. My daughter was rooting for Debbie at times. And–

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. She’s sick. I love it.

**John:** You’re not supposed to, and yet, I mean, Debbie is a kind of very Addams character in a way. You know, to a certain degree she is a Wednesday Addams grown up in the sense that she’s completely empowered in what it is and what she does. And so she’s an outsider, too, she’s just homicidal in a not appropriate way.

And one of the strengths of the movie is like Morticia has a sequence where she confronts her and she’s like, “You do these terrible things, and I like that about you.” Basically sort of like you’re horrible and you’ve killed these men and I applaud that. And, yet, trying to explain that she could still have love for her I guess brother-in-law, it’s not really how everyone is related.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s her brother-in-law.

**John:** But in previous Addams incarnations it’s actually her uncle. It’s all crazy. But there’s a specificity to sort of why she’s doing what she’s trying to do, which is really nice. I just wanted more of that.

**Craig:** I’m with you. I’m with you. There’s this – I mean, you want to talk about like the best jokes in the movie, and it’s so – when I think about Paul Rudnick and his sense of humor, it’s so brilliant. And a great example of like, OK, we’ll put that one in the gay column. When Morticia does confront Debbie she does so at this new mansion that Debbie has purchased with all the money she’s stolen from them. And it’s just the opposite of the Addams Family mansion. It’s all pinks and blues.

And Morticia says to Debbie, “You have gone too far. You have married Fester. You have destroyed his spirit. You have taken him from us. All that I could forgive. But, Debbie, pastels?” It’s just so great. It’s like that’s the thing?

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Your bad design taste, you know, which is so not Goth. That’s the problem here. That, to me, is the brilliant consistency of the tone that they created in these movies that is just cherishable.

**John:** Let’s take a step back, because we brought up the idea that Fester is essentially the protagonist in both of these movies. Like he is the character who has to change over the course of these movies, and everybody else is just sort of swirling around, and like the family as a unit. And it strikes me that in most of these kind of stories there’s like two ways you could go. Either classically a story is a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. And both of these movies are essentially a stranger comes to town.

So, everything is perfect in Addams Family life, and then an outsider comes in and because he’s an outsider everything is questioned and there’s tumult. And ultimately order is restored. The normalcy is restored after the outsider is either tossed out or accepted into the family.

But I think the reason why I think you could make an Addams Family Vacation is there is a possibility of potentially a Little Miss Sunshine with the Addams Family, where you could take them out of that house and have them grow over the course of a journey. There’s a version of that you could make. It’s just we haven’t seen it yet.

**Craig:** Well, right. And that could descend a bit much into fish out of water, which is a certain kind of joke. I find that the Addams Family is so much more interesting when the fish that are out of water are the people visiting them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** As opposed to them going to visit other people. But, I would pay many, many hundreds of dollars to see a new Addams Family movie where Christina Ricci is the new matriarch, because she’s so incredible. And we have to talk about, again, her acting ability in the Camp Chippewa sequences. But interesting that her storyline goes completely against the notion of a character arc. Wednesday Addams has no character arc. She is always the boss. And the entire Camp Chippewa story is really like – it’s just watching a superior person win.

**John:** I would say Christina Ricci’s character Wednesday, she has a tiny bit of growth where she gets a little bit closer to the David Krumholtz character.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who is the asthmatic Jewish kid who is at the camp as well. And, again, it’s a tremendous stereotype and he is fantastic in that role. But her best acting is not a line she was given, but an expression she has to play.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s incredible. Incredible.

**John:** So you talked about her eyes. So, there’s a moment where she is forced to smile. And so the camera just holds her in a close up and you see her trying to evoke this smile and it’s one of the best sort of ten seconds of film you’re going to see. It’s just delightful. And that she could, I guess she was probably 12 or 13 at this point, pull that off is just remarkable.

**Craig:** There’s like a bookend. There’s two moments that I think of and that’s definitely one of them. Because in that moment she’s forcing a smile because she has a plan. And she needs to sucker everybody into thinking that she is now one of them. So she forces this horrible smile. And, of course, they’re horrified by it. But it’s incredible acting.

The other moment is a smaller, simpler thing, but it’s brilliant. They catch Wednesday, Pugsley, and the David Krumholtz character trying to escape. And they catch them at like a fence. And they start to sing Kumbaya. And Wednesday’s eyes get enormously big because it’s like she’s looking into the pits of hell. And she slowly backs up against the fence. It’s incredible. I just don’t know how – that’s the kind of thing where you go, listen, we’re writers, we feel great about what we do, but when you can find a human being that can do something like that, you just have to take off your hat and go, “Well done, actor. Thank god you people exist.” Because my goodness, that was incredible.

**John:** Yep. So, I want to wrap up by talking about a thing that fewer people have seen but is also really worth discussing because it has different challenges and different opportunities. So, there’s a Broadway musical version of The Addams Family. It was written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice did the book. Andrew Lippa, our friend, did music and lyrics. And it is fascinating because of what works differently on a stage.

So, the basic plot for people who probably haven’t seen it, so Wednesday is a little bit older in this. She’s late high school, maybe college. She brings her Midwestern boyfriend, Lucas, and his family from the Midwest also to come visit them at their house. And so this is, again, a stranger comes to town and this is that family and sort of what having that family there sort of unleashes within the household. There’s delightful songs. But I wanted to actually play one little thing, because I know it’s a song you like as well. This is – Uncle Fester sings a song in the second act called The Moon and Me.

So, this is part of Addams Family mythology is that Uncle Fester loves the moon. But in the song he literally loves the moon. Like he’s in love with the moon. The moon is a character. So, let’s listen to a clip.

[Song plays]

What I love about that song is that it reveals a part of Uncle Fester that would be very, very hard to do in a non-singing movie. It’s hard to get that character’s introspection without a song. And it sort of perfectly illuminates what’s going on inside his soul.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what musicals do best. And what movies tend to do worst. When you’re asking somebody to share this feeling inside of them, and it’s usually a romantic feeling. It’s usually a sentimental feeling. Movies are terrible at that. Just listening to people talk about how much they love somebody is a bit gloppy, you know? But when you sing it, it’s beautiful. And, of course, you have the delicious perversion of the fact that he’s singing it to the moon. And yet then again the answer to that which is, no, no, see, that’s your judgment. It’s actually beautiful and wonderful. And Kevin Chamberlin, who is a fantastic singer and great performer and Broadway legend hits that note at the end. It’s a high C. My god. What a – ugh.

**John:** Do that eight shows a week. Yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. And do that eight shows a week. It’s just nuts.

**John:** Yeah. But again it’s revealing, we talk about sort of the queerness of it. Like it’s really queer to love the moon. And yet he loves the moon and he loves the moon so honestly that it’s delightful. And so if a character said he loved the moon, well that’s a crazy person. But when you have a song to go with it you’re like, oh, I get it. I get sort of what your deal is and you’re not a bad person. You’re a person who is in love. And that’s – it’s a remarkable little moment that is much easier to illuminate with a song than it would be just a character in a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think Andrew’s key lyric in here and the really important one to speak to that is “though I’m told it’s wrong,” you know? And everything else is very sweet and it’s very much a straight kind of love song to somebody that you love. But he knows that other people think it’s wrong and he doesn’t care because the moon makes him feel great. And this is a real love. And you’re right. It’s definitely that kind of queer take on romance and acceptance and a kind of “I got to be me.”

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s wrap this up by talking about what we can learn from the Addams Family in terms of adapting a property. So, somebody comes to you with a preexisting thing. So, be it Scooby Doo. Be it some other Hanna-Barbera thing, be it something else that has characters in it, where do you start and how might you start differently looking at The Addams Family and the success they’ve had?

**Craig:** Well, the great hope is that there is some kernel of something that is going to light your way. And in The Addams Family, it’s quite clear from that great cartoon that they drew inspiration from, the kernel was this familial love and that inversion between superficial and internal and what looks bad and what is beautiful and good. And then if you can latch onto that, and in doing so you know you have a sentimental, positive payload for an audience that will deliver the joy of relationships to them, then pull no punches on the other side.

And so you’re looking for something that gives you these opportunities. So, when you talk about Scooby Doo, they’ve tried many times. They made some Scooby Doo movies. They were mildly successful. But the problem with something like Scooby Doo is that it doesn’t really have that payload. They’re friends, but they don’t love each other. You would have to start to invent these things. That’s where it starts to feel a little artificial and forced.

So, in a sense you’re looking for a property that maybe gives you a spark that you can then take forward. And the worst situation is when that spark is there and you deny it. And they did not do that here, which is why it’s successful.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m thinking back to Charlie’s Angels. And when I came to Charlie’s Angels, my first pitches, my first meetings on Charlie’s Angels, they weren’t about the plot or even specific set pieces. They were about the feeling of it and sort of what my feeling was towards Charlie’s Angels and having grown up loving it is that I was weirdly proud of the girls. I loved them and I loved their relationship between them. And they struck me as being like the three princesses who work for their father who is the king. And that it felt like a fairy tale in that way. And that the characters could be incredibly proficient when they were on the job and yet in the sense of this being a comedy they could be giant dorks when they were off the job.

And the tone that we sort of described in those initial meetings became the movie. Became what we ended up working on. It was like what it was going to feel like was much more important than what was going to happen at the start. I think the same would be true with The Addams Family. It’s like what does it feel like? And they found a good answer for that and were able to make that work for these two movies and other properties along the way.

**Craig:** No question. No question.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is the first episode of the second season of Master of None. So we had Alan Yang on the show for our live show quite a while back. But this second season started and the first episode I thought was just remarkable. Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari wrote it. Aziz Ansari is the only one of the recurring characters who is in this first episode. It all take place in Italy. It is all black and white. It is just delightful.

And one of the things I like about it is that if you’ve never watched the show, you could still completely enjoy this episode. It is just a remarkable good half-hour of really great comedy. And just it’s specific and it’s warm. Aziz Ansari directed it. It’s great. So, I strongly recommend you check out this first episode of the new season.

**Craig:** People are talking. People are talking. My One Cool Thing this week comes to me through Boing Boing. And I feel bad, because I’m not sure how to pronounce Xeni Jardin, but am I doing it right, do you think? Xeni Jardin?

**John:** That sounds about right. Xeni Jardin. That, too.

**Craig:** She’s fantastic. And so she put a link up to this and we’ll have the direct link in the show notes. It is – so some folks who are working with neural networks where those are the kind of learning computers, they attempted to see if the neural network could learn how to name colors. So, what they did is they fed it a list of 7,700 Sherwin Williams paint colors, along with their RGB values. Those are the numbers that ultimately define what the pigment will look like.

So, they give it to this and then they just start having it learn. And where it ended up was amazing. So I’m going to read you some names of some paints. Clardic Fug. Snowbonk. Light of Blast. Burble Simp. And my favorite, Turdly.

**John:** Turdly is good. But Sindis Poop is also quite strong.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. We’re thinking about repainting our living room in Stargoon. [laughs] Here’s the thing, that sounds ridiculous, but actual paint names are absurd. At one point, when it was kind of like in the middle, so like – and it’s fascinating to watch how it’s learning. So like initially it’s coming up with things like Rererte Green or Gorlpateehecd. Then, it starts to kind of get in a little closer with Golder Craam and Burf Pink. Then it’s actually locking into words, like Ice Gray. That’s – I mean, it didn’t match Ice Gray to a color that looks like ice gray. But then Gray Pubic is probably not a color that you’re going to see in a store.

**John:** There is one color here. It’s 216 200 185. Stummy Beige.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it actually genuinely looks like, oh, that’s what Stummy Beige would look like.

**Craig:** Yeah. That does look like Stummy Beige. I mean, Grade Bat doesn’t look like Grade Bat to me. And it’s not different enough from Grass Bat. But still, I mean, it’s pretty freaking amazing that it comes up with these like remarkable words that are sort of good, but wrong. It’s the uncanny valley of names. Spectacular stuff. So, I just loved it.

**John:** Great. We’ve talked in previous episodes about scripts written by AI and they’re not quite there yet, but eventually if they can name paint colors, then eventually they can do more and more of our job. At least the naming of our characters. I’ve seen a couple of like online character name things that are designed for like fantasy stuff. And they are kind of clever in the way they’ll put things together. Even these examples. Like, they’re all basically pronounceable. And like making something pronounceable is not simple.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** God bless them.

**Craig:** Listen, we’re laughing now. We won’t laugh when we’re in their labor camps as the neural networks have us creating huge batches of Sturbil Blue or whatever it is. But, still, for now it’s funny.

**John:** For now it’s funny. It’s funny until we die.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Our show this week is produced by Godwin Jabangwe, as always. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from 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. For short questions on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And leave a review there while you’re on iTunes. That’s always delightful.

You can find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. If you go to johnaugust.com/guide, you can leave a review for some of the most recent episodes so we can get the Scriptnotes Listeners Guide in top shape.

Transcripts go up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. We should have 300-episode USB drives eventually, but it could be a couple weeks. So, if you’re hankering for one of those, hold tight.

And, Craig, thank you for another fun show with the Addams Family.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [Addams Family TV Show Opening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL4CV5tlstM)
* [The Addams Family Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyyJYyIexq8)
* [Addams Family Values Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmhQzhUbdvo)
* [The Moon And Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYvPeSTS5zY)
* [Master of None – Season 2 | Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGE-Mw-Yjsk)
* [New Paint Colors Invented by Neural Network](http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-invented-by-neural-network)
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_301.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, my name is Sexy Craig Mazin.

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

**Craig:** Interesting. Mm.

**John:** Today on the podcast, we will be looking at how and whether screenwriters should use social media and in addition to answering some listener questions we will be asking longtime listeners to tell us which episodes are worth pointing out to newcomers. So, Craig, I was trying to hedge you off with the Sexy Craig, but you went right to the Sexy Craig. You went right to your safe place.

**Craig:** You want to head off Sexy Craig? You can head off Sexy Craig.

**John:** I thought maybe Smooth John could talk us through some of these rough patches in life.

**Craig:** So smooth.

**John:** So smooth.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the problem. Sexy Craig, it’s really, it’s just impossible. He’s impossible.

**John:** He’s just the worst. Or the best. He’s superlative in many ways.

**Craig:** It’s really about how sexy you’re feeling at any given point.

**John:** Yeah. I’m not feeling sexy right now. Let’s do some follow up. We’ve got a lot of follow up, so let’s try to crank through this. Joe Bruckner tweeted at us. He said, “In Scriptnotes Episode 72, you say we’ll be giggling about UltraViolet in a few years. Four years later, what’s the verdict, Craig?”

Craig, how do you feel about UltraViolet?

**Craig:** I would be giggling even I even remembered what the hell it is, so I guess that sort of says it all, right? It was like that weird digital locker that we were all going to be using for 14 seconds or something?

**John:** Yeah. So I had to look back at the episode to make sure that really was what we were talking about. So, yes, it was the studio’s plan for basically you buy a DVD and you also get a digital copy that goes in your magic locker. And so I just sort of assumed it had gone away and that it had died, but then I looked it up. And so on January 6 of this year the DEG reported that UltraViolet accounts grew by almost 20% in 2015 to hit more than 25 million with 165 million movies and television shows in UltraViolet libraries.

So, it’s one of those weird sort of undead things where it’s like it’s not really dead, but no one is talking about it.

**Craig:** No. And I – I mean, I guess, yes, accounts grew. Who the? I don’t know anybody using this. It is not culturally important. The studios do not talk about it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is certainly not relevant. And, yes, it is giggle-worthy. We were correct.

**John:** We were correct. So, I was on a panel at CES in Las Vegas. It was an industry panel and they brought me as like the filmmaker/screenwriter to be with all these studio people. And they were so excited about UltraViolet and how it was going to change the industry. And I was the one person saying like, “I don’t really think it’s going to change the industry.” And everyone is like, “Shut up. Shut up.” And I don’t think it changed the industry.

But if you are a listener who has inside information that it actually has changed the industry and that Craig and I are just ignoring it somehow, do let us know. But I don’t think we’re wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re not. I’m just going to say we’re not wrong.

**John:** Ivan Munoz tweeted at us to point us to this article by Christopher Mele for New York Times, talking about filler words and discourse markers. So, we talked about the discourse markers on a previous episode and how they’re crucial bits of connecting material between lines of dialogue in real life and in film. But this article was really interesting because it was talking about the other use of those kind of words, which is just for fillers. It’s not just the uhs and the ums, but the likes in the middle of sentences. The sort of stall and pause and the ways of sort of – just what I just did right there – of putting a gap in your speech.

And so I thought it was a really interesting article. Did you have a chance to take a look at that?

**Craig:** I did. And this is something that I’ve thought about for a long time, because I remember very specifically, I think it was maybe when I was in my sophomore year of high school. When I just decided that saying “like” was stupid. And I forced myself to stop saying like. And I do not. I just don’t do it.

**John:** A piece of advice that’s in this article, which is absolutely true from my own experience, is that if you tape record yourself long enough you will stop doing some of these annoying behaviors. And so doing this podcast every week, the first 20 or 30 episodes I edited myself. And when you have to take out all of those annoying pause-discourse marker-filler words, that is a drag. So you learn to be much, much better about not sticking those things in there.

So, I feel like I’m a much smoother speaker after having done this podcast for nearly 300 episodes.

**Craig:** No question. I’m kind of curious, were there certain pause words like that that I repeatedly did?

**John:** You know, you probably have more than you think you have. Sometimes I’ll see Matthew’s actual edit and you’ll see sort of what gets dropped out. Sometimes they’re just actual pauses. They’re just open spaces while you’re sort of thinking of the next part of the sentence and he can tighten things together. But there are some uhs, some ums. There’s little things that sort of get stuff stuck together again.

**Craig:** I mean, I would say that there are things like um and uh, if they’re not, um, see, I just did it. If they’re not, um, routine, then I don’t think that in and of itself is a signifier of something. I mean, the danger of certain of these words is that they signify stupidity.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. There’s actually no reason for the word like to signify stupidity as opposed to the word um. They are doing the same thing. But because like is associated with youth, and particularly a kind of flight-full youth, then they are viewed as signifiers of stupidity. And they’re not, but that’s a problem.

I mean, it’s all optics, really. You know, I have a friend who says, “You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying?” That’s his like.

**John:** That’s his like.

**Craig:** He will use – it’s a very long like, you know what I’m saying. What does it actually mean? Nothing.

**John:** It means nothing.

**Craig:** It means nothing.

**John:** A listener tweeted at me this last week and I don’t have his name in front of me, so I’m sorry, but he pointed out that I say somewhat or sort of alike, and it’s a way of sort of taking the spin off of things. And I think I sort of try to undercut what I’m about to say by using somewhat or sort of to dial it down a little bit. And that’s something I was actually happy he pointed that out, because I will try to listen for myself doing that and not do that as much.

But I think Ivan Munoz was trying to point out when he sent us this article is how does this influence how we actually write dialogue for our characters. Should we script in those little filler words? And the answer is really no, unless it’s actually crucial to the scene. Because you got to let the actor actually put in those filler words if it’s actually important to how they’re performing that line.

But I would not generally script those things in, unless it’s actually crucial to understanding how the scene is working.

**Craig:** Yeah. Every now and then I might have a character throw in a like to – because I think it would be funny in that particular spot of dialogue. But, other than that, no.

**John:** A lot of times what we are really doing for that is the parenthetical within a block of dialogue to indicate that there’s a shift, that there’s something that’s happening in there. You sort of scripting an action or scripting a reaction within that block of dialogue. And they may end up using a filler word to sort of cover that change, but that’s not necessarily a thing you need to script in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re writing a comedy, maybe it’s a dark comedy, and there’s a teenager. And someone is pointing a gun at them. That teenager can say, “Are you going to shoot me?” But if you script, if you actually write in, “Are you like going to like shoot me?” That’s funnier.

**John:** It’s much, much funnier.

**Craig:** It’s just funnier. So those are the only times I would ever do it is to call it out. You know, I’m saying to the actor you really should do it here, otherwise, you know.

**John:** Otherwise, I know.

**Craig:** Sorta.

**John:** Sort of. Kind of. Somewhat.

Several listeners pointed at this article. It’s actually a FDA announcement that these homeopathic teething tablets have been pulled off the market for concerns about them. So this comes directly from the FDA announcement. “Inconsistent amounts of belladonna, a toxic substance, in certain homeopathic teething tablets, sometimes far exceeding the amount claimed on the label. The agency is warning consumers that homeopathic teething tablets containing belladonna pose an unnecessary risk to infants and children and urges consumers not to use these products.”

**Craig:** You know, belladonna is nightshade. You know like – like witches, you use nightshade?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s belladonna. It’s deadly nightshade. That’s what it is. It’s actually got some great stuff in it, like have you ever used the – sorry to derail you here – but you ever used the patch for sea sickness?

**John:** I’ve not used the patch for sea sickness. Is that belladonna as well?

**Craig:** Well, it’s scopolamine which is one of the poisonous compounds in deadly nightshade/belladonna. And scopolamine is a very powerful drug. I mean, even when you use it for sea sickness, you – they make sure when you use that patch, it’s a very tiny, tiny amount. You have to wash your hands really thoroughly afterwards and do not put your hands anywhere near your eyes, because you will literally dilate your pupils and not be able to see very well.

And that’s a tiny, tiny amount. So, apparently these people went a little monkey with it. Go ahead.

**John:** So, what’s fascinating is like they’re saying like, “Oh, there was too much of this substance in there.” And when we talked about homeopathic treatments before, the problem is generally in homeopathic treatments there’s nothing in there. It’s just sugar. So this is just sugar and poison.

**Craig:** Right. So the fun part of this is it really exposes the stupidity of homeopathic “medicine,” because I presume that what they were trying to do was take deadly nightshade, belladonna, scopolamine, and a few other things that are in there, and then using their principle of nonsense, water those poisons down to less than could possibly exist. And then magically the water would have memory of it. And then help teething babies for some bananas reason.

So, there are really only two possible outcomes to the manufacture of a product like this. Outcome number one: they have manufactured a useless sugar pill that will do nothing for your infant or your child. Outcome number two: they’ll slip up and mistakenly put in an actual amount of poison, which will injure your infant or child. This is all you can get from homeopathic medicine. Just so people are clear. You will either get nothing or an unintended bad consequence. Congratulations homeopaths.

**John:** Here’s the embarrassing part. I’m pretty sure we actually used this brand of teething tablets when my daughter was an infant.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** And so here’s how we used them, and I think we were even told this will do nothing, but it will make you feel better to use them. We sort of took the tablet and rubbed it right on the part that hurt. And you know why it probably helped?

**Craig:** You were rubbing.

**John:** Because you’re rubbing the part that hurt. And you’re giving the baby something sweet that made her feel better about the pain.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** That’s what it is. It was the sugar being rubbed into her gum.

**Craig:** Yeah. You were just rubbing sugar into her gum. You could have just dipped your finger in some Sprite and it would have done the same thing.

**John:** Yeah. Or Whiskey, which is my go-to, instead of homeopathy.

**Craig:** Yeah. By the way, yeah. And way better. I mean, god forbid that – there’s no reason to buy these things. They have to stop them. By the way, I would argue that a company like CVS for instance, which in this case was marketing two of the products containing too much, meaning any belladonna – CVS should stop selling these things. CVS, for instance, is a huge pharmaceuticals/sundries chain here in the United States. CVS should stop selling all of this. They stopped selling cigarettes.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Right. So, they don’t sell cigarettes, because cigarettes are bad for you. They should stop selling these products because they don’t work.

**John:** I mean, cigarettes or baby poison. I mean, you got to make some choices about the things you’re not going to sell.

**Craig:** Right. I also feel like if you are selling a proper array of medicines, whether they’re over-the-counter, or prescription, and you are advertising yourself as a place where people will come to make themselves better, you should not sell any substance as far as I’m concerned that is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not one. And it makes me nuts.

**John:** It does make me nuts, too. All right, let’s move on to our next thing which will make us less nuts. So last week’s episode we talked about – we sort of ripped into an article about avoid screenwriting traps. I argued this article was ridiculous to say that scripts from professional writers and scripts from new writers are fundamentally different. I argued that the things that Craig and I are writing are on the page identical to what an aspiring writer should be writing.

Listener Cody wrote in with a counter point. Do you want to read that?

**Craig:** Sure. Cody says, “With factors like the Black List, a rise of literary managers, and a new generation of young executives, I’ve watched as screenwriting styles have evolved in even just the 17 years since I’ve been writing in Los Angeles. Aspiring writers look for inventive ways to make their work stand out, writing in a stylized, edgier voice to make it a better read, despite that it has nothing to do with what we see on screen.

“It’s a trick that clearly worked to impress development executives, gain heat, and land on the Black List, which helps many new writers get noticed and find representation.”

What do you think about that?

**John:** I am ready to concede Cody’s point here. And I would be curious to have Franklin Leonard on the show, or somebody else who is reading a lot of newer writers, to see whether they find this true as well. Is that I can imagine just like the way that a lot of times spec scripts have these like crazy inventive titles that sort of get attention, even though you would never release the movie with that title, I do believe that sometimes writers are deliberately kind of not even over-writing, but sort of like super-stylized writing in order to sort of get attention.

I can imagine that happening and I don’t have evidence that it’s not happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. That seems plausible to me. I’m not sure, and here’s where Franklin would grimace, or will grimace when he hears this, I’m not sure that it’s relevant particularly whether you get on the official Black List. I don’t know how relevant that is. Because a lot of those scripts were good scripts that get on the Black List and also are going into production. There’s the whole correlation and causation thing.

And standing out and being noticed for a flashy, wild read happens. It, for instance, got the guy that wrote the Lax Mandis script, he sure got attention. It wasn’t the good kind. Getting attention is important. Getting attention doth not a career make. It doesn’t even make a sale. It just means attention.

So, I’m all for writing something that is stand out. You are always, I think, best advised to write something that stands out because your voice is unique and you have written something that is producible and should be a movie. Gimmicky stuff is gimmicky. So, I smell the rise of gimmickry. I do. I can see Cody’s point here that there’s a lot of that going on. I know that titles have become a playground for gimmickry.

**John:** What I do wonder if what Cody’s leaning towards is that in some ways some of these spec scripts are super voice-y, it’s like this crazy writer voice that’s coming through the script and it may not be the kind of thing that we’re necessarily being asked to write as we’re writing stuff for studios. So I can see that as being a possibility in the sense that my script Go, which sort of broke out, it is written a little differently than some of the other stuff I’ve written, but not crazily. And so I just don’t feel like in my career there was a huge shift from the scripts I’ve written for myself and the scripts that I’m writing for other studios. But this is a 20-year career. And I can imagine there might be more pressure for some new writers now doing that.

I still do not believe that the article that was the jumping off place for all this proved its point that writers need to be writing vastly different scripts for readers than they are for producers or going into production.

**Craig:** I completely agree. At some point you have to decide what is the hurdle you’re trying to jump. It’s not like the hurdles are lined up in linear fashion. It’s not as if you manage to get yourself a good rating to the regular Black List site, and then the next hurdle is to get a manager. And then the next hurdle is to get on the official Black List. And then the next one is to get an agent. And the next one is to sell your script. And the next one is that it gets made.

Not at all. The hurdles are all horizontal. None of those hurdles lead to another hurdle inexorably. So, the question is which hurdle are you trying to get over?

**John:** Get the movie made.

**Craig:** Yeah. Get the movie made. Some of them will kind of – they will help, to some extent. But the only hurdle worth getting over is sell a movie, get a made. That’s it.

**John:** Yeah. And get the next one set up.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** Start a career.

**Craig:** Start a career.

**John:** So, next up, on a bunch of previous episodes I’ve threatened that we would read through some of the reviews that people leave for us on iTunes, because people leave such nice reviews on iTunes. And this week it’s actually relevant, so I thought we’d read three recent reviews on iTunes and talk through them and sort of what they mean about the future of the show. So, Craig, do you want to read this first one?

**Craig:** Sure. This first one is titled, “Best Dose of Reality Ever, Five Stars,” by S. Wright. This is from November 11, 2016. And S. Wright writes, “The reason I love this podcast is for all of the pain and suffering it saved me. After writing three scripts, and despite living in Maryland, not Los Angeles, my hubris buried the needle. Then I found this amazing and honest podcast. I quickly listened to all of the earlier episodes. And now I’m a loyal listener of over four years. They dashed my dream, but it felt so good. These are two of the smartest guys and I am truly thankful not to be pursuing a sale anymore. It remains my favorite podcast.”

**John:** Aw. Thank you, S. That’s very nice. So, a second review comes from T. Tippet. It says, “More Umbrage.” It’s five stars, from November 29, 2016. “Just started listening and actually went back to start from the beginning on their app. And John and Craig are awesome. It is great as a new/aspiring screenwriter to be able to learn the ins and outs of the business from two guys who are very ‘inneresting.’ I would and have recommended this podcast to anyone interested in screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. Keep up the great work, guys.”

**Craig:** All right. Well, that’s lovely to hear. We will. We will!

**John:** We will. We promise.

**Craig:** We have one more. And this is from Levy Ryan from December 23, 2016 entitled “Post-Partum Depression.” Uh-oh. “Started listening four months ago and just polished off the archives. Well, what now? Listen to Mr. Kasdan again? The way Episode 247 ends has you sitting in silence for an hour afterwards.”

**John:** Very nice, Ryan. So, I wanted to bring up those three because one of the things that’s really weird about our show as opposed to other podcasts is that that back catalog actually does get listened to a lot. And so on Twitter kind of every week somebody writes in saying like, “Oh, I just finished going through all the archives and I’ve been through now 289 episodes and now I’m caught up.” And that sense of being caught up on a podcast, you know, with Serial or something that’s shorter and contained, you can sort of see that. There’s a narrative. But some people actually have listened to the whole show.

And so this last week on Slack, Godwin our producer, suggested, “You should do a book of the Scriptnotes transcripts.” Because we have transcripts for every episode. And so Godwin’s suggestion was we could do a physically printed book so you could have on your shelf like the transcripts of the entire series. Just like how we sell the USB drives, it would be really cool to have a printed book for the whole show.

**Craig:** Ooh, like bound in Corinthian leather?

**John:** Corinthian leather, perhaps. And so Dustin, who works for me, a designer, I asked him to do up like one chapter which would basically be one episode, the transcript, to see sort of what it would like. And he did it and it looked really good. Craig, it’s in the folder if you want to take a look at sort of how it looks.

**Craig:** Ooh. I’m going to look at this while you’re talking. No one else can see it, but I can see it.

**John:** We’ll put a link to that in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** Argh.

**John:** But what’s – so what’s fascinating, Craig, is I think that looks really nice. How big a book do you think the Scriptnotes transcripts would be? How many pages?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, I’m looking at this. It does look really nice. Oh my god, how many pages? Well, well, I guess I could do the math because these are so many pages for one episode. My goodness. Oh my god. [laughs] OK, so good lord, we talk a lot. So about 14 pages here. Quickly doing the math. We’re talking about 520-page book.

**John:** No, it’s actually between 3,000 and 4,500 pages. So when you actually do out all the math for all of the episodes.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It gets really, really, really big.

**Craig:** Oh my god. How is that possible? Because we have to put in all of the Three Page Challenges and–

**John:** The other stuff. And so it gets to be quite big. So, there’s not going to be a printed copy of the entire Scriptnotes catalog. But, the process was really good because we could certainly do an e-book version of this. And so we’re talking about doing that. So, it’s something you could get on your Kindle or your iPad or your other device. Something you could get as a PDF. It would be the entire catalog, which would be great, so people could have that.

**Craig:** You’re going to get so rich.

**John:** So, so rich. But, one of the other suggestions that we sort of came to is if you are one of these people who is trying to catch up on the whole thing, you might not really want to listen to every episode. You might want to listen to certain episodes that are especially good or especially relevant or about a specific topic. And when we have them on the website, it would be great to have some sort of reference for that.

And so that’s where I thought we might be able to enlist our listeners, because some of our listeners really have listened to every episode. And so what I’m asking for is if you have recommendations for these are the episodes that you can’t miss, or that you should definitely try to single out if you’re listening through the catalog, right into us with those. And don’t just write into the Ask account I set up a special page for you to leave a review and a recommendation for this is a good episode because of these reasons.

So if you go to johnaugust.com/guide, there’s a little form you fill out. You put in the episode number, you tell us who it’s for, and then give us a little blurb about that episode. And if we get enough of these and good enough ones of these, we’ll try to put out some sort of e-book or even a printed book that people can sort of look through as sort of an index and a guide to Scriptnotes. Because we’re coming up on 300 episodes. It would be great to be able to point to people like, oh, if you’re curious about these things, this is the episode you should go to. Or, if you don’t really care about screenwriting, but you just want to hear the funny episodes, this is a way to do that. So, these reviews would really help us figure out which episodes to highlight.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea. I’ve decided it’s my idea. I had a terrific idea.

**John:** So tell us this great idea. Can you summarize in your own words what the idea is?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re reaching out to our listeners and asking them what their favorite episodes are. And we’re going to even categorize their favorite episodes in such a way that new listeners can find our show and start with some of the most loved episodes. I am so smart.

**John:** You really are smart. And what is the URL people should go to if they want to tell us what the best episodes are?

**Craig:** They should go to craigmazin.com. [laughs] They should go to johnaugust.com/ – I love when they say forward slash in ads like we don’t even know. Forward slash guide.

**John:** Yep. So this all goes into a database. If it works out well and it’s interesting, we’ll try to do this thing. So, it’s all on your guys at this point. Thank you in advance the people who might want to leave some reviews. And, by the way, you can leave reviews on multiple episodes. So if you know like the ten best episodes, just leave ten separate reviews for those episodes and we’ll get them all.

**Craig:** Brilliant. Brilliant.

**John:** Brilliant. So, so much of what we talked about today was generated based on things people tweeted at us. And so you suggested that we do a segment on social media and how screenwriters should use social media.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it for a while because the truth is it’s not quite as casual as it used to be. They – they meaning the studios – they actually care about this stuff now. It’s remarkable. I’m still not sure that they should be caring about it, because I’m still not sure how directly impactful it is. But, it is to some extent. So, we know that when we’re talking about casting movies and we’re looking for very popular movie stars, the amount of followers they have is actually a topic of discussion in the room. It matters.

**John:** It’s not when they’re like casting, “Oh, should we cast Will Smith,” but it’s like when you’re casting that third or fourth person down. Sometimes you are kind of looking for the degree to which they are moving the needle.

**Craig:** That’s right. Or sometimes when they’re saying, “Hey, we want to make a movie starring this person that maybe you wouldn’t think of starring in a movie, but look at how many followers they have.” They will do things like that. They will also talk about how many times a trailer is retweeted or mentioned. And every showrunner is now being tasked directly with tweeting, live-tweeting, engaging with the audience.

For screenwriters, for feature writers, it’s a little less directly connected, but we’re starting to see more and more writers achieve a high profile on Twitter, and for some of them it translates into a real career. So, I thought we should talk about how that all works and maybe some advice on how to do it well. Because, you know–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I think you and I actually do it pretty well.

**John:** I think we do it pretty well, too. And it’s worth pointing out that Aline Brosh McKenna, who has been a longtime guest on the show, she’s finally on Twitter now. And she’s finally broken the seal and gotten on Twitter. And I think that’s partly because she is a showrunner now and there is that responsibility of being able to speak for your show and sort of engage with the fans of your show. I don’t feel it happening as much with screenwriters right now, but I think it’s also because we are much more loosely coupled to our films than TV writers are to their TV shows.

There’s less of a direct relationship to our movies. We’re not the spokespeople for our movies to the degree that a showrunner is for her show. And do we know what we’re talking about? We kind of know what we’re talking about. Craig, you have 94,000 followers on Twitter.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s my army. And they really are my followers, just so you know. If I tell them to do something, they’re doing it.

**John:** They’ll absolutely do it.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But you did not have those last year. So, they were a growth. They’re largely due to things you talked about in a very honest way about your former roommate.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was somewhere around like, I don’t know, I was actually fairly new – I was late to Twitter. I wasn’t an early tweeting tweetie guy, and you know that because I’m saying things like I wasn’t an early tweetie guy. I had about, I don’t know, 12,000 followers or something like that. And then the Ted Cruz thing happened.

But, you know, I’ve held onto them.

**John:** You’ve definitely held on to them. And you’ve done a very good job sort of managing them. You engage with them in ways that I would not engage with them, but we can get to that when we talk about sort of how you deal with people.

**Craig:** It’s fun.

**John:** I have about 59,000 followers. And I was very early to Twitter, not surprisingly. I was on Twitter in 2007, before everyone was really saying Tweet. It was like a “Twitter post.” I was on Twitter before there was actually an App you could use.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** So you were texting to a number. So I used it at Sundance when my movie, The Nines, was there. And it was great. But it’s so interesting to go back and look at your very early tweets, because it was just a very different medium at that time. It was before there was native retweeting. It was a really different world.

We talked about it’s important for actors, but I would say it was also a little bit important for me with Arlo Finch, because novelists are incredibly closely coupled to their work. And so when we were going out to sell Arlo Finch, this wasn’t a major factor, but I think they did take notice of like, oh wow, he has a bunch of Twitter followers. And they look at that and say like, “He sort of knows how to go out and promote things.” And that is probably useful to a publisher that wants to make money off this book.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s absolutely true. The thing about screenwriters and Twitter is our movies come out very sporadically, and that’s for the best of us. You know, you have a movie come out once every two or three years, you are among the crème de la crème of screenwriters. So, there’s a sporadic nature to that.

So it’s not quite as vital, I think, for screenwriters in terms of the commerce. However, if in those in between times you do build up some goodwill and some notoriety, when you do have something that you want to promote, they’re there, which is helpful.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But no question if you are a novelist, and that is yours, I mean, so many of the writers that follow me, for instance, I’ve noticed, are novelists.

**John:** And some of them do a great job. So, let’s talk about sort of why it might matter for a screenwriter. And so I have four basic thoughts about why it might matter to be on Twitter and to sort of use Twitter well.

I think Twitter helps prove that you’re not a crazy person. And so one of the first things I do if like a new person’s name comes across my desk is I will Google them and I will see if they’re on Twitter, because then I can go through their timeline and see like is this a crazy person, is this is a crank? And that can be very helpful to know that, oh no, they’re actually a sane, rational person. Or, they are a crazy person and I won’t engage with them. So, Twitter is a very public way of sort of seeing whether somebody is somebody you want to engage with.

It can show if you’re funny, if you’re supposed to be funny. And Twitter doesn’t have to be funny. Twitter tends to be sort of funny. It tended to be funnier before the election. But it does sort of show who actually has a sense of what a joke is, and that can be really important if you’re looking for a funny person.

Twitter can potentially connect you with interesting people. And by this I mean it lets you be reachable by other interesting people, so like because I’m @johnaugust on Twitter, people can reach towards me and I can sort of engage with them if I choose to. It also lets me reach out to certain people. And if I don’t know somebody, I can tweet at them and sometimes they’ll respond.

We’re going to talk about sort of like best practices for that, but it’s a way to sort of get towards somebody that’s not crazy and stalkery.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, finally, the most important thing I think is it allows you to publicly respond to things. Rarely are screenwriters sort of in the midst of controversy, but if there is a controversy, that Twitter handle is sort of your public face and it lets you sort of directly address something that’s going on in a very quick and sort of clearly your voice way.

**Craig:** That is an excellent summary of what you have there. And a couple of those things I hadn’t really considered. But, yeah, prove you’re not a crazy person. It is true. I mean, whether it’s rational or not, when we meet somebody for the first time and we don’t know much about them, and I’m saying this in the absence of Twitter, and someone else says, “Oh, they are extraordinarily popular and the following people just love them,” I think, OK. That’s relevant.

Well, Twitter sort of does that. If I meet somebody and I see who’s following them and I see who they’re following, then I get a sense that, OK, this person is at least acceptable enough that the following other people that I accept have accepted them. And that matters. There is a social currency to that.

**John:** And I find that there’s more of a social currency to Twitter for me than for Facebook, because if I see he’s friends with that person, it’s like I don’t really know what “friends” means, but if I see that other person has engaged with them on their timeline then it’s like, oh OK, there’s something there. They’re actually pals in some meaningful way.

**Craig:** Precisely. I mean, the problem with Facebook is some people just will – people say can I be your friend? So they’re asking you for something and then you have to agree. And many people just say, sure, you can be my friend, you can be my friend. So, sometimes somebody will ask to be my friend. And I try and keep Facebook for my actual friends.

**John:** So do I.

**Craig:** But they’ll say I want to be your friend and we have a mutual friend. And I’ll click on it and it’s Derek Haas every time. Because Derek – he’s cool. He’s like, you want to be my friend? You’re my friend.

On Twitter, people have to follow you. You know, it’s not like they’re asking do you want to be. So, people make a choice. I can’t stop. So, here would be something cool. It would be cool if Stephen King followed me on Twitter. I don’t think he does. But I follow him.

Stephen King has to make a choice to follow me. That’s kind of cool. You know?

**John:** It is kind of cool.

**Craig:** Because if he does, it’s awesome. I don’t he does. But he should.

**John:** He totally should.

**Craig:** He should. I’m wonderful.

**John:** So, Craig, can you give us some suggestions about best practices or what you should do if you’re new to Twitter or how to use your Twitter account?

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And these are – I’m going to tailor these for writers. And they’re best practices and they’re also worse practices. And to be honest with you, I see all of this. And as many times as I see people doing it right, like Megan Amram, who is just the queen of Twitter, I see people doing it wrong and I cringe. I cringe and I cringe and I triple cringe.

So, some easy positive things. If you can be funny, be funny. Being funny on Twitter is a tricky thing because it’s like you are doing a late night monologue and there are 14 billion other people doing a late night monologue right next to you. So, just a little advice, if it’s sort of the obvious joke, don’t do it. Because there’s so many other people doing the obvious joke. And if you’re not that funny, don’t worry about it. Just don’t push it. You know, it’s not that big of a deal.

**John:** What I will say is if I have the idea for like there’s a news event, something has just happened, and I have the idea for the joke, and it’s like five minutes after the event has happened, I will search for what I would sort of use in the joke term to see if someone else has made the joke. Because you just know it’s going to happen so quickly. So, you got to be quick with it, or just let it pass.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think sometimes in lieu of being ha-ha funny, being clever is good. Because a lot of times I don’t – it’s a little bit like when I watch The Simpsons. When I watch The Simpsons, I don’t actually typically laugh out loud that much. I just appreciate how clever it is going through. It is entertaining me and it is comedic, but it’s a different kind of appreciation. There’s a wryness to it. And I think that that’s perfectly fine on Twitter. Being passionate is always a wonderful thing, especially if you’re positively passionate. Everybody likes somebody loving something. They do. It’s informative. And it’s attractive, honestly, to hear somebody talk about something they love.

Here’s some things to not do, and I see this all the time and it makes me cringe – when you are promoting something, promote. Fine. But do it sparingly and do it informationally. And avoid the walking billboard syndrome. There are some people that are just – they so obviously have gone on Twitter because someone has told them this is a wonderful way to promote your brand, and they just keep whacking that button over and over and over until nobody cares, because they get it. You’re just there to manipulate people into doing what you want, which is the worst way to get them to do what you want on Twitter. And I would suggest that you’ll never know, because losing followers is sort of old school. Getting muted is new school. That’s what you don’t want.

You don’t want people muting you.

**John:** Yeah, so essentially those people who are still following you, they’re just actually not seeing your tweets. And so you’re basically shouting and they’re not hearing you at all. And I find the awkward self-promotion tends to be from people who I don’t think are actually on Twitter that often. Basically they go on Twitter maybe two times a week and maybe scroll through it and then they tweet the thing they need to tweet. And then they get off Twitter. And so they don’t sort of understand the conversational nature of it. They don’t sort of read the room. And so they just go in, they promote something, and then they disappear. And that’s not a great choice.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. I mean, you really do have to think of yourself like a late night talk show host. And all of your tweets consist of the stuff you would do during your show. And then the commercials in between the show. Well, you got to limit your commercials, and they have to be varied, and the preponderance of the stuff you put out has to be show. So, there are some people who come on and they’re not even doing it frequently. They come on every couple of weeks and what they’ll do is either promote themselves or they’ll just retweet other people’s promotions, which I think is generally the worst.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, basic rule of thumb, if somebody says something lovely to you, you give it a little heart. But you don’t retweet it. That’s just my rule.

**John:** I don’t retweet the praise. And so I will give the heart or I will give the reply thanks, or the actual acknowledgment of the specific thing they said, which is great and lovely. And it’s all good. And when you do that, by the way, when you actually reply to somebody, that also shows up in your timeline if people are actually looking at your tweets and replies, and it sort of shows like, oh, you’re engaging the person in a normal, human kind of way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But honestly the heart, the little like, that’s generally enough. It’s the head nod to say like thank you for that, I get that, I see that. And it’s appreciated.

**Craig:** 100%. I mean, the worst of it is when somebody does the like and does the thank you, but puts the period in front of the name of the person they’re doing it to so everyone in the world can see. Automatically, look what I did. Look at what they said about me. It’s just so transparent.

You know, begging for approval on Twitter is a bad deal, because the good news is you’ll get it, and the bad news is you’ll get it. And so it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It really doesn’t. Just be secure. Yeah, just be secure about it.

**John:** Let’s talk about how you convey what you’re actually feeling or how you put into words the thing you want to say. Because that sense of authenticity is really tough when you have 140 characters. And so sometimes people do the sort of tweet storms, they’ll do the threaded comments. By the way, if people don’t know how to do threaded comments, let’s just have a little sidebar here, because it’s really helpful if you can sort of do threaded tweets so that it actually works right. You do the first tweet, then you reply to your tweet. You can delete off your name, but it will keep those things threaded together. The metadata will hold it all together. It lets people sort of see your tweets in a proper run, so they’re not just randomly spread out tweets.

If you have more to say than one tweet, maybe consider doing the multiple tweets, but don’t do that too often because you’ll annoy everybody.

**Craig:** Threaded tweeting. I think I’ve screwed that up twice. Or thrice.

**John:** It’s really easy to screw up. My best tip for you is to write the tweets in advance, like sort of figure out the tweets and make sure they’re the right length. And then you do the first tweet. You reply to that first tweet, paste in the second thing. You reply to the second one to the next thing. It’s not at all obvious or intuitive, but it’s a way to get it done.

**Craig:** So on the third one I’m replying to the second one?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, then I’ve done it right, I think. I think. Well.

**John:** But it’s really easy to mess up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t do – I’ve done only maybe in my Twitter career I think three rants. I’m not a big ranter. The things that I think tend to work well are honest expressions. You will inevitably upset people with some of the things you say, particularly if you’re talking about things that are aggressive in some way.

But if you are honest, and you are authentic, in the long run presuming that you aren’t professing honest and authentic opinions that everyone detests, you will be viewed positively. The worst of it is the lying. Humble-bragging is not bad because it’s bragging. It’s bad because it’s false. Because it’s manipulative. You know, when you see a writer go on and say something like, “OK, woke up, realized I have three scripts due, and tomorrow we start shooting one. And my agent keeps calling. And, argh, this is going to be a crazy day,” I just want to reach through the computer and punch them in the face. And punch through their face. Through. All the way out the back. And then do that thing where you twist your fist around a little bit. And then pull it back out, just to make sure I get all the bits.

Because that’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah. And so the person who did that didn’t mean for it to be read that way, but that’s exactly how we do read it. It’s like, oh, look at me, look at my luxury problems that I have three movies to write and another movie in production. You’re not doing yourself any favors by tweeting that. Don’t tweet that.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this weird counterpart that has risen somewhat recently that I call – I don’t know what to call it – because it’s kind of the negative counterpart to humble-bragging. So I call it bravery-complaining. And bravery-complaining goes a little bit something like, here – here’s the one I’ve written as a sample. “Some people clearly want me to believe I’m not capable of telling this story. But I am. I’m a writer. And I won’t be ignored.”

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** OK. I don’t know who those some people are. I don’t know what the story is. I don’t know if you are capable of telling it. I don’t know anything other than this: that tweet was designed for a whole bunch of people to say, “We are behind you. You are amazing. Don’t let anyone get you down.” Blah, blah, blah. It’s fake.

And, more importantly, that tweet exists to help no one but yourself.

**John:** Yeah, going back to both of these kind of tweets is the relatable version of that tweet actually has something that like everyone else can sort of nod to. It’s like, oh yeah, I’ve felt that same thing, too. So, they’re able to be very specific about sort of this situation, but everyone can sort of see like, oh yeah, I get that. In sort of the same way that standup jokes work is because, oh yeah, I recognize that situation and you’re making a good observation about it. The two examples you gave, the humblebrag and the bravery-complaining do none of those things. They’re just about look at me. They’re sort of narcissistic and unhelpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can proud-brag if you want. Proud-brag. And if people are like, “Jeez, it’s a little braggy,” you can say I know, I’m sorry, but I’m really proud of myself. That’s honest. And you can sad-complain. You know? And you can ask for advice if you really do need it. And if you’ve gone through something where people knocked you down and you got back up again, then maybe you can use it as an instructive example for others, so say look, if you’re in this position just know there is a better way. There is hope. That’s instructive and helpful to others.

In the end, we’re not coming to Twitter to help you. We’re coming to Twitter for you to help us. That’s why I follow people. I want information coming from them to me. I certainly don’t want them begging me to fill whatever emotional gap they have on that particular day.

**John:** Yeah. So, an example of authenticity, sort of earlier on as I was here in Paris, about two months in I got really homesick. And on Instagram I posted like the photo of the kale salad I found. And in the description I wrote how incredibly homesick I was and this was like the thing that actually sort of got me through it. And I got some really genuine responses to that because it feels so kind of embarrassing to admit that you’re homesick in a really pretty lovely place, but I was genuinely homesick. And people could sort of see it was truly how I was feeling and I was dealing with it. And people could sort of nod along with it.

And so that’s specific but also kind of universal and relatable. That’s fine. But it’s honestly a better Instagram post than a tweet because it literally wouldn’t have worked the same way on Twitter.

**Craig:** Well, it might. I mean, look, that’s a sad-complain. I mean, there’s this component, because the bravery complaint I wrote had this very important thing that bravery complaints have, which is the bravery part. Where they’ll say, “This is something that I think is wrong, but guess what? It won’t work.” OK. So are you asking me to empathize with you? Or are you telling me you are untouchable? Because what I’m hearing is somebody whose feelings have been hurt, insisting that their feelings haven’t been hurt, which is a very fourth grade boy way of dealing with the world.

**John:** 100%. So the other thing I notice a lot among writers on Twitter and sometimes frustratingly aspiring writers is that they are suddenly giving advice to the world about how to write. And some of these people are good people, and I’m not subtweeting anybody by saying this, but there are writers out there who I think are good writers but I think they should also really watch how much they are sort of offering advice out to the world about how to be a writer, or talk about their process in such exhausting detail.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, you and I do this every week. We come on this show and we give a lot of advice. One of the things that I find, well, I’m just pleased by is that from the very start, from Episode 1, neither you nor I have taken on any kind of Yoda like persona. We are not cult leaders. We do not profess to stare into the great cosmic eye. I think we are fairly self-deprecating in a funny way. We both know our limitations. We both know we’re not perfect.

We give honest advice in the most honest way we can. There are some people on Twitter who are clearly dolling out advice as if they are sitting cross-legged on the top of a mountain in Tibet, having achieved some kind of nirvana. And they’re doing it in a way that I can’t help but think is about them. Is about crafting an image for themselves as a guru, as wiser than they are.

It is important for writers who are achieving at a certain level to pass on and – not to die – but to pass information on. It’s crucial. I’m actually really emboldened by what I see, because when you and I started nobody was telling us anything. And now there’s this wonderful culture.

All I would suggest is it’s a question of tone. When you are sharing your earned wisdom with others, do it in a way that is self-aware, that doesn’t have an air of infallibility, because you are not. And unless you’re Larry Kasdan, or Scott Frank, or Callie Khouri, maybe just dial the Yoda vibe down a notch. Just a notch. Because the more authentic you are, I honestly believe the more you will be listened to.

**John:** I would agree. So, some advice if you do have that sort of moment of insight is look at how Jane Espenson offers out advice. She will find something delightful and she will write about it and say like, “Isn’t this delightful?” As if it’s a little discovery she saw in somebody else’s work. That’s wonderful because she’s not claiming brilliance for herself. She’s saying like, oh, I found this thing, or like, oh, is this a clam that’s developing? A lot of times there’s a sense of a question, and so like you might say like, “Has this ever worked?” That can sound really negative. But has there ever been a good joke about blank? That’s a structure of a tweet that offers both advice but also invites a reply. That’s a great way to sort of approach those kinds of moments where you kind of have a Yoda thought but don’t phrase it as a Yoda thought.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great point, John, and Jane is wonderful on Twitter. If you’re going to talk about some wonderful piece of writing, make it somebody else’s, for god’s sakes. You know, you and I on the show, we love talking about other people’s writing. We love talking about other writers. We have them on the show. And then occasionally, and we are long overdue for one of these, we do a big deep dive into a movie we love and we really talk about why we love it.

We’re not so much sitting here over and over saying, “When I had this brilliant idea for…” That’s not what we do. Because it’s weird. It’s weird. We’re all proud of the work that we’ve done, some of it at least. But it’s a strange thing to teach people with your own work. It’s so much more interesting to teach them with other people’s work. It immediately eliminates any whiff of self-promotion or a general sense that this so-called guru is actually desperately insecure and needs our worship.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think a general point to take out of this is like to talk about the things you love. And so talk about the writing you love. Talk about the things you see out in the world that are fantastic. So that means movies and TV shows. Don’t crap on people’s movies. And don’t crap on people’s TV shows. Because, you know what, they worked really hard on those movies. And you’re doing nobody a favor to say what a terrible movie that thing was. Rather than do that, find something really good somebody can watch and get them to watch it.

Or like a great movie is on HBO right now and you’re watching it, tweet about that and why you love this thing, rather than crapping on something.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Look, live by the sword, die by the sword. If you want to go on Twitter and you want to take shots at other people’s movies, they’re all coming back to you. All of them. Every last one of them. And god help you if you complain when they do. And generally speaking, the people that take swipes at other people’s movies and television shows do complain when it comes back to them. Which delegitimizes them even further. The last thing you want to become is a Twitter sideshow freak.

**John:** 100%. And what we say about don’t crap on people’s TV shows or movies, do not crap on other writers. And I see this every once and awhile and nothing drives me crazier. So, to publicly trash a writer is kind of unforgivable. But to do the subtweet where it’s clear you’re talking about a specific person, even if you’re not naming that person, is just – it’s not classy. It just shows your own insecurity and your own sort of desire to lash out at somebody, but your fear of lashing out at somebody. It’s not cool. It does no one any service.

**Craig:** No subtweeting does anyone any service at all, but you’re absolutely right. To subtweet writers or movies or shows is gross. I mean, we either are or are not a community that sticks together. And any writer that works on anything knows that it is hard. And there is no circumstance – none – in which I would go after a writer or their work on Twitter. Absolutely none.

**John:** Yep. So, Craig, let’s try to give some practical advice. Let’s say you’re on Twitter, you have put out some tweets that people are loving. You put out some things that people are not loving. What do you do with the trolls? Because you get a lot of trolls?

**Craig:** I do? [laughs]

**John:** You get some negative things headed your direction. So what’s some good advice for dealing with negative things headed in your direction?

**Craig:** OK. Well, it’s part of life on Twitter. The quickest thing to do is to mute them. I generally do not block people. The only people I block really on Twitter, anti-vaccination people. Because I just – I just – it’s fun. It’s just fun for me. But other than that, and there aren’t too many of those, at least I haven’t encountered too many. For the rest of it, I just mute them. They have no idea and it’s wonderful. And now I don’t know that they’re there. And so they’re gone.

**John:** And for people who don’t understand the difference between muting and blocking, muting just means that you don’t see their tweets anymore. And so they don’t know that you’ve done anything, but they’ve just disappeared. You’ve made them invisible. And it’s a delightful little feature that people should use much more frequently. Blocking is like sort of a public act and they can see that you’ve blocked them. There’s really very rarely a point to blocking somebody. Just make them mute and make them invisible.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s all.

**John:** Now, you and I probably should have prefaced this whole conversation is that the trolls and the negativity that we deal with is nothing compared to what some people on Twitter deal with, especially women on Twitter. So, I do want to say that like – to acknowledge that we are in a place where, you know, we’re getting some haters, but we’re not getting the kind of haters that some women and people of color and other people–

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Craig sometimes does.

**Craig:** You know, I’ve been threatened with death and told that I should be put in an oven. And I’ve been called a kike. And I’ve gotten some pretty heavy stuff. I think murder threats, that seems like about as bad as it gets, right?

**John:** It gets bad, yes. Murder is bad.

**Craig:** Murder is bad.

**John:** Murder is bad. I don’t want to sort of say like, oh, well the mute button will solve all your problems. It certainly won’t do that. And I think there’s definitely a call for better actions on Twitter’s side, but it’s not sort of within the power of this podcast.

But I want to offer some examples of people who we think do Twitter really well. We talked about Megan Amram, Jane Espenson. Adam Rose is a guy we both know. He’s an actor and a writer.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** He’s great at it. He’s also great in other media, so Instagram and Snapchat. Derek Haas I think is great. So, we were making fun of him for his Facebook friending, but he does a great job as a showrunner. Every week does ten questions that people can write in about his shows. There’s no one better in the world at Twitter than Rob Delaney, so the creator of Catastrophe. He was a Twitter person before he was the creator of that show. He’s brilliant.

A guy who is not a big writer yet, but I thought was really good on Twitter and is how I first got to know him is Aaron Fullerton. He hosts the 3rd and Fairfax podcast, but he’s a staff writer.

Kumail Nanjiani, star of Silicon Valley, is great on Twitter. And so he’s the person who I don’t actually know, but just because of seeing him on Twitter I just really like him. And he’s so smart at being able to both be funny and political at the same time.

**Craig:** Kumail is the best. You have to follow Kumail. I’m saying it. You’re done. You’re following Kumail.

**John:** And then also Felicia Day, who is sort of early to Twitter, she’s sort of an Internet person, but she’s really good at it. And I didn’t appreciate how good she was at Twitter and the Internet and what a unique skillset that is, but she’s really good. And she built her career off of doing that and being able to marry the things she was making with the things she was presenting online. She’s really great. So, definitely another person to watch and model as you start to look at Twitter as a way to build your portfolio.

**Craig:** Brilliant. Brilliant.

**John:** Some general advice from me about interacting with people you don’t know on Twitter. So, if you are tweeting at somebody who does not follow you, that’s fine. But don’t multi-tweet. Like tweet them once and if they don’t reply back, let it go. And don’t try to reengage with them for a while. Just because there’s sort of nothing more frustrating than like when somebody keeps trying to get your attention and you don’t really want their attention.

If you’re going to reply to something they say, try to add to the conversation. Don’t just sort of say, “Hey, notice me.” That’s the “hey pretty lady” kind of thing. Don’t do that. Contribute to the conversation or just give a like. That’s plenty.

And if you’re asking a question, make it a good question, because people will reply to an interesting question or a new way of thinking about things. But look at sort of the other replies they’ve gotten and that they’re not answering the same question again and again. So if they’ve already answered your question, don’t ask the same question.

**Craig:** Hey, I have one for people that follow you and me. Don’t ask us to retweet your short films.

**John:** We won’t do it.

**Craig:** Because we can’t. Because if you’re asking, you can only imagine how many other people are asking. We just can’t do it. We can’t watch them and we can’t retweet them because we don’t have the time. And also that’s not why we’re there. We’re not there to advertise your work. It’s nothing personal. It’s just there’s too many people asking. And so the only real possible policy is to never do it.

So, we apologize. Really, we want to help everybody as we can, but you know the life boat will get swamped.

**John:** It will get swamped.

My last bit of advice is a utility I found really helpful, which I think I turned you onto, called Fruji. And it’s from Roman Mittermaier, who is a Scriptnotes listener. And it’s a really useful utility for figuring out who follows you. And so basically you log in with your Twitter handle and then it charts who is following you. And so it’s been really useful for me to figure out, oh, those are people I didn’t know who followed me who I actually really like, who I should follow. And it sort of creates relationships in ways that are really interesting. So, it’s a good way of sort of keeping track of connections you might not know you have in your Twitter timeline. So, an example would be Stephen Falk, who is the showrunner of You’re the Worst, I figured out followed me on Twitter and that was great. And I love his show and so we can have a conversation about his show, even though I’ve never met him in person.

**Craig:** I’m Fruji-ing right now.

**John:** I thought I sent you that when your Twitter population exploded.

**Craig:** I probably did it and then I just stopped doing it. And now I’m doing it again. I don’t know why.

**John:** Yeah. You should do it, because you’ll be fascinated. I mean, when Stephen King follows you, that will be how you figure out that he followed you.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a good point. Maybe he’s following me already. No, he’s not.

**John:** So, anyway, our general advice for social media, honestly we’re Twitter people, so it’s mostly Twitter advice. But I think a lot of this applies for YouTube. YouTube is where Aline and Rachel first got to know each other, which is great. Facebook is useful for some people. It’s just not useful for me. But, sure, leave us a comment on our Facebook page.

Snapchat is great if you understand how Snapchat works. It’s just not for me.

**Craig:** It’s for my kids.

**John:** Some people are finding great stuff on Snapchat. And Instagram is really good as long as you’re doing something visual. And so I find, like there’s photographers who I got to know through Instagram. There’s a photographer who actually took my headshots who I got to know because of Instagram and he was great. And definitely I would say use social media. Just be smart about social media. Listen a lot before you start speaking. And sort of figure out what the culture is before you go in and start chatting up people.

**Craig:** Smart.

**John:** Cool. Let’s answer a listener question. And so–

**Craig:** Should we?

**John:** We should. So, Space Jennings wrote in with a question about short films. Let’s take a listen to that.

Space Jennings: I wonder if you can answer a question related more to filmmaking/screenwriting. I’m trying to write my very first short film to direct, and I wonder if you can provide your opinion on what you think makes a truly great short. What do you think is too short or too long? What would you avoid in a short film? What makes you cringe watching a short film? And what’s absolutely essential to include and how to basically make it stand out? More importantly, I’d like to hear your opinion on what you think makes a really bad short film and what not to do. Thanks a lot. I love the podcast. Best thing I ever discovered. Keep it up.

**John:** So I love this question because this last week I went in and spoke to my daughter’s school here in Paris. And because they’re doing this short story competition, so basically everyone in the sixth grade has to write a short story. It’s part of this Parisian competition. And so they wanted to ask what makes a good short story. And I think the things that make a great story are the same things that make a great short film is that they are short. And by short they need to be simple in a way that it can be about one idea.

I think a great short story and a great short film, they sort of have the structure of a joke in that there’s things that set up and they lead to a punchline and then they’re over. Even if they’re not a funny short film, it leads up to a thing, a conclusion, a clear end, and then it’s done. And when I see bad short films and bad short stories, it feels like it’s trying to be the first chapter of something much longer. Or something that’s much, much longer and sort of got compressed and squeezed down.

It has to be a clear simple expression of one idea that follows sort of one story with a beginning, middle, and end, and really wants to be a short. Not just a movie that happens to be short.

Craig, what are your thoughts about short films?

**Craig:** First of all, Space Jennings, incredible name.

**John:** What a great name.

**Craig:** I wish my name were Space. It is not. For me, great short films employ full use of every second of the time they have. Because they’re short films, my understanding is – just this is the contract between me and the short film. I’m in the audience. You have five minutes, ten minutes, 20 minutes, I think beyond 20 minutes you’re running out of short film territory kind of. Maybe 30, right?

You don’t have a whole two hours to tell your story. You are telling this compact tight thing. That means it must be machined. Perfect. No wasted space. Every decision must be beautiful and purposeful. And so that requires like John said a certain narrowing of focus. It still needs thematics and still needs that beginning, middle, and end, but you have to really make use of everything. I want to feel like every choice you made was purposeful.

The last thing in the world I want to see in a short film is something that I think, oh, you could have cut that out.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** If your short film can be shorter, it should be shorter, right? So efficiency and just a careful crafting of each moment.

Bad short films tend to wobble. The worst short films are moving towards a twist you see coming. The worst short films are moving towards a twist. You may not know what the twist is, but you’re like, ugh, it’s obviously something kooky is going to happen. It’s either this, or this, or this. You’re not actually in it. When you go and watch old Twilight Zones, and Space, you should, the most incredible thing about those shows, especially the best of them, is that you’re watching the Twilight Zone. You know what that means. It means that at some point there’s going to be this crazy twist ending. Oh my god. But so many of them are done so well that by the time you’re a minute into it you’ve forgotten that. You’re with people. And you’re just watching a story unfold. The way that when I went to go see Titanic, I actually forgot the boat was going to sink, because I was into the love story.

I mean, I didn’t forget-forget, but my mind was no longer on it. So, to me, avoiding that syndrome of, ugh, just get to the big stupid twist already. This is all filler. No. The joy of the joke and the punchline that you’re telling with a short film, whether it’s comedy or not, but that rhythm, is that all the lead up is and of itself delicious and meaningful and fascinating. It will make the ending so much more relevant.

So, watch old Twilight Zones and read short stories, because all of the DNA is in there. If you read The Lottery, if you read The Catbird Seat, you will see how to make a great short film.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to one of my favorite little short films, which does the classic sort of joke format, but does it really, really well, called It’s Not About The Nail. I think it’s Jason Headley directed it.

**Craig:** Oh, so good.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s wonderful.

**John:** It’s a great example of you have this idea and it’s clearly just a short film idea. And that’s what is so crucial to me is that it has to be an idea that wants to be expressed as a short film and it’s not just trying to be a short movie. It really is compact in that setting and it doesn’t need to be a second longer or a second shorter. So, I will put that in the show notes as well.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** I think it’s time for One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing – actually I have two One Cool Things. I’m going to cheat. The first is archive.org. So this is founded back in 1996. The Internet archive is sort of this giant dump of all of the Internet from different ages. And so basically it crawls the entire Internet. It saves a copy of it. And so it has 150 billion web pages going back to 1996. And so the point is it’s trying to offer permanent access to parts of the web as pages get taken down or changed.

And so it’s so fun to go there and enter in the URL for a website that you go to, so like I go to johnaugust.com and you can see the original version of johnaugust.com and sort of all the changes along the way.

What’s so helpful, though, is also it finds when things have been changed. And so a week or two ago I saw this tweet saying like, oh, the Trump White House has changed the Bill of Rights page on the whitehouse.gov site. And they’ve changed people to citizens, so that the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens and not to people in the United States. And like that’s horrifying and shocking, I can’t believe that. Wait, I kind of don’t believe that. And so I could go to archive.org and look at that same page back through the years and find out that page was actually that way three years ago. So it wasn’t a new thing and I could tweet out and say like, hey, I know this feels true, but that was not actually true. And put the link to archive.org.

Incredibly useful. So many people don’t know about it, so definitely it’s a great sink hole to find yourself drifting through old versions of things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My second thing is very relevant to these next two weeks, because the LA elections are soon. And so I had to fill out my ballot here in Paris to send back to LA. And Ballotpedia is just the best resource I have found for ballot measures that are coming up. And so it’s like Wikipedia, but it just goes through and like here is the ballot measure, here are the arguments for it, here are the arguments against it. Here is who is supporting and here is who is against it. Really useful. And very clear information about ballot measures which are I think designed to be completely perplexing.

**Craig:** Yeah. The people who write them generally write them to promote the opposite of what they actually intend. It’s remarkable. It’s all flimflam. If you see a ballot measure that’s called Fewer Taxes for You, it means more taxes. [laughs] And if there’s something called the Medical Freedom Act, it means they’re trying to take your medical freedom away. It’s amazing how pernicious this is.

**John:** So, definitely please vote on March 7, because there’s actually a lot happening in Los Angeles. Measure S is the one that’s getting the most attention. You should vote against Measure S. But you should go to Ballotpedia and figure out what all those initiatives are, because it’s really, really helpful.

**Craig:** I don’t live in Los Angeles, so I’m just with you in spirit.

**John:** There’s an LA County measure though that you do need to check out as well.

**Craig:** Yes. I will take a look at Measure H. Measure H.

**John:** Very good.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a lot like my One Cool Thing last week, which as you recall was an app called Fran Bow, which is a creepy, creepy game, which I loved.

Well, this is another one. This one is even creepier.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** This one is macabre and downright disturbing and yet brilliant and I love it. It’s called Rusty Lake: Roots. And it is very similar to Fran Bow in that it is a simple point and click game where you’re solving puzzles of various kinds. But, you are doing so as part of a family over the years who live in a house by a lake and terrible, terrible things are happening. And oh my god. It is done in the most bizarre way.

It is so worth playing. Rusty Lake: Roots. Available on iOS and possibly on Android, but I don’t care.

**John:** Is it a better iPhone game or an iPad game?

**Craig:** I think all games are better iPad games, like this, these kinds of puzzle-solving games, just because it’s not meant to be played casually. You’re meant to sit there and really work on it. So, I would definitely recommend iPad.

**John:** Very cool. I will check it out.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And that’s our show this week. So, our show as always is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Eric Pearson. 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. For short questions, on Twitter, social media. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. I’m also on Instagram @johnaugust if you want to see me there.

Our show is on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, you can leave a comment like the three we read aloud today.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all back episodes at johnaugust.com. While you’re at johnaugust.com, please go to johnaugust.com/guide and let us know which episodes you think are the ones that people should definitely tune into if they’re coming to the show new.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find the transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episodes air. And you can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. It is $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** $1.99.

**John:** And you get access to the whole back catalog. And you can also listen to them through your app of choice. Scriptnotes on iOS and on Android. And that is our show for this week. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Talk to you soon. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [UltraViolet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraViolet_(system))
* [Stop Using Filler Words](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/verbal-ticks-like-um.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1&referer=https://t.co/v2Lw3fCWIc)
* [Homeopathic Teething Tablets](https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm538684.htm)
* [Scriptnotes Listener Guide](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [Fruji](http://start.fruji.com/)
* [It’s Not About The Nail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg)
* [Archive.org](https://archive.org/)
* [Ballotpedia](https://ballotpedia.org/March_7,_2017_ballot_measures_in_California)
* [Rusty Lake: Roots](http://store.steampowered.com/app/532110/)
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_290.mp3).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So this is Episode 272 of Scriptnotes. Now usually we go to the Austin Film Festival and we have a big live Scriptnotes show but this year was different because I wasn’t going to be there. So Craig was going to do some little interviews with some individual writers but kind of at the last minute, he got together a bunch of people and they got a big room and they got mics and so they did a big live drunken Scriptnotes show. So this was a secret show that wasn’t announced. People just showed up and it turned out really well. So thank you, Craig, and thank you to Austin Film Festival for letting this happen. The guests in this episode are Katie Dippold, Phil Hay, Tess Morris and Malcolm Spellman. If you’ve listened to previous episodes with these guests and Craig and alcohol, you might guess, “I bet there is some strong language.” And you would be correct. So this is probably not the best episode to listen to in the car with your kids, but listen to it by yourself in your headphones and enjoy this live secret show from Austin. Thanks.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And we are coming at you live, although if you’re hearing this, it’s not live but it’s live to us, from the Austin Film Festival and Screenwriting Conference where it is now 10:00 AM local time — sorry, 10:00 PM local time. We’ve been drinking a little bit so this will be spectacular. We are going to be a little free form tonight because of aforementioned drinking.

But first, I do want to thank, we have for those of you listening at home, we have a ballroom full of people who have all come to see this. So thank you, guys. Thank you, guys, for showing up. This was — we didn’t put this on the schedule. It’s kind of like a secret thing. We didn’t know if anyone was going to show up. You showed up, so thank you. And we, in return, have a fantastic show for you this evening. And when you hear the topic, I think you’ll be particularly pleased. But I would like to introduce my guests tonight and really maybe the best show we’re ever going to do. Sorry, John August, but it’s maybe the best show we’ve ever done. By the way, I also — John always says what number episode it is, I have no idea. It’s in the 200s, I believe. To my left, I have Tess Morris, screenwriter of Man Up.

**Tess Morris:** Hi.

**Craig:** Next, we have Phil Hay, screenwriter of Ride Along and Clash of the Titans. Do I need introduce the next person? Malcolm Spellman, writer of Empire. And then last but not the least, the great and mighty **Katie:** Dippold, Ghostbusters and The Heat. And we’re all pretty drunk. So in thinking about what we would talk about tonight, it occurred to me that every time I come here, there are, I don’t know, a hundred different topics that you can talk about. You all go to these seminars, they’re all very specific but I think, really, everyone is here mostly for one thing and no one ever talks to you about it, so I thought we would. And it is how the fuck do I get into Hollywood? So at last — oh yeah, for those of you listening at home, there may be adult language in this one. Okay. So, what we want to do tonight is just talk about this topic and I’m going to talk about it with my guests and then we will open up the floor to questions. By the way, questions about anything you want for anybody up here.

**Tess Morris:** Within reason.

**Craig:** No. It’s my show.

**Tess:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Anything you want. But what I want to do is start out by asking these simple questions that everyone has and they’re not easy to answer, which, to be fair, is why oftentimes we don’t really talk about it. But hopefully, in this conversation, we will get a little bit of wisdom that might be of value to all of you who are trying to break into this business as screenwriters. So I’m going to start by asking a question. Anyone, feel free. What do you think is the most important thing that anyone in this room can be doing, aside from like writing a great script, which we all know? Is there any one thing any of these people can be doing to improve their odds of breaking into this business?

**Katie Dippold:** I can start because my — well, my entrance in was I was at an improv theater, the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York. So I was doing improv and sketch there and my first thing was I — we did a showcase to be a performer on Mad TV. And they liked — we had to write your own characters and I felt that I was brought out to test and it was clear that they liked the stuff I was saying but in no way how I was performing them.

And so I gave them a writing packet and that was my first job. But so, for me, my entrance was just doing like a, you know, UCB and doing an improv theater. I started taking improv classes. But the other thing that was important for me was I was also — I found a day job that — it was a temp job and they never asked me to do anything for three years to the point that I–

**Craig:** That’s a long temp job.

**Katie:** Very exactly.

**Craig:** It sort of stretches the boundaries of the word, temp.

**Katie:** Yeah, it really does. Well, I had this boss who — she would ask me to move like a text box in a PowerPoint slide like just — and I would do it and it would take like a second but I would look like a hero. And I would sometimes worry, was there some longer projects I was supposed to be doing but wasn’t paying attention when they told me? But what was great about the temp job was I could just — I read scripts all day and then just work on scripts. So, to them, I was working away because I was reading and writing, tapping away on the keyboard, you know.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of obvious effort going on.

**Katie:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you weren’t actually doing anything for them?

**Katie:** Right. Exactly.

**Craig:** So there you go, that — just get that job. That’s easy. Now, Tess, you did this–

**Tess Morris:** Yes, Craig.

**Craig:** From across the ocean.

**Tess:** I know, all the way in the United Kingdom.

**Craig:** All the way. And I would venture to guess–

**Tess:** Craig, if you’re just going to do your British accent every time we talk, there’s going to be a problem.

**Craig:** No.

**Tess:** Okay.

**Craig:** No. No. No. No.

**Tess:** Are you sure?

**Phil:** It’s happening. It’s happening, Craig.

**Tess:** No, not no. No

**Craig:** No.

**Tess:** No.

**Craig:** No. I did promise you that we’re a little drunk.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** Now, most of these people, I’m going to assume almost all of them do not live in Los Angeles. So you have an interesting perspective, you have a unique perspective on this. How did you do this from all the way over there?

**Tess:** Well, I mean, believe it or not, there are writers in England, at least–

**Craig:** What? What?

**Tess:** Are we just going to keep–

**Craig:** No.

**Tess:** Okay. We’ve just been out to dinner with a lot of nuns just so you know as well.

**Craig:** There was a room full of nuns next to us.

**Tess:** There were 12 nuns next door to us just to share that with you all. We all were incredibly uncomfortable with that.

**Craig:** I wasn’t.

**Tess:** You were. I would say there’s no difference at all, really, in terms of what I think is like different things you can do, whether you live in the UK or Australia or America or wherever. I think the best thing you can do, and I’ve said this a few times today, sorry if you’ve heard me, is my favorite quote about writing was by and said by Philip Seymour Hoffman and he said that writers need to fill up. And I’ve always thought about that because I think often we can kind of run on empty and we don’t go and live our lives and we can start to think I don’t know what the fuck I’m writing about or what I’m doing. And I think sometimes the best thing you can do is actually step away and go and fill up a little and live your life and then come back and do some work. I mean, you can’t do that all the time obviously. It’s a bit of a luxury. But I think it’s an important thing for your mind and your brain. That’s quite a serious answer for me.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. You’re kind of bringing us all down. So–

**Tess:** Sorry.

**Craig:** No, it’s okay. But it’s a really good answer because I think you’re absolutely right, that a lot of times, people, you know, Brian Koppelman, who, along with his partner, Levine. We’ll just call him Levine.

**Tess:** Levine.

**Phil:** The Levine.

**Craig:** Did Rounders and they have Billions on Showtime right now. He had maybe the best advice I’ve ever heard for any writer was calculate less. Because I think a lot of people who are trying to break into the business are constantly calculating, what can I do, what contest should I enter, where should I go, how should I network, what should I write in my query letter, what should I not write in my query letter? I’m sure a lot of you have the stuff spinning around in your heads all the time and none of it actually is going to help you do the job. I think the idea of just living and reading and experiencing life will help you.

**Tess:** Yeah. Like relax.

**Craig:** Relax.

**Tess:** From the most unrelaxed person you’ll ever meet in your life saying that.

**Craig:** She’s a little — yeah, she can be a little tense. Phil, what do you think?

**Phil:** I mean, this came up in some discussions I was having today. And I think what these guys are saying is exactly right. And what I could maybe add to it is to try to conquer fear as early as you can and don’t operate on calculation and fear and am I missing out, am I doing something wrong, am I making the right choices, because I think I can tell you from, you know, 18 years of experience that nothing has turned out exactly the way I thought it was. And what I’ve realized is that there’s no way to plan or concoct a scenario that — and then fulfill it if you’re doing this.

And I think what you can is to focus on what you can control, which is your life and enjoying your life and finding stuff to write about by living your life and understanding that in the end, I mean, I guess it’s good advice for life in general. But it’s hard to learn and it took me a long time to learn to try to divorce the process from the result. To try to divorce what you’re hoping to happen from the actual work that you’re doing in front of you. That, to me, I wish I had learned that earlier because you spend a lot of mental energy worrying about the outcome or trying to game the outcome or trying to make good smart choices and the only good smart choices you can make, I believe, are emotional choices of I know this is right for me, I have to do it no matter what other people are saying.

**Tess:** This is a therapy session, yeah?

**Craig:** It should be. God knows we all need it.

**Phil:** I have a quick question for Tess though that it was, you know, a technical question. Do you translate your scripts into American yourself or is there somebody who does that?

**Tess:** No, I get Craig to do it for me.

**Phil:** Okay. Good. Yeah.

**Tess:** And then when I need to be even like do the worst British accent in the world, I get Craig to do that as well.

**Phil:** Okay. Thank you.

**Craig:** Well, Malcolm, all these people have said what they think is the right answer, and now, you will tell us the actual right answer.

**Malcolm Spellman:** I thought Phil’s answer — all their answers were good. I would say.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Phil:** But especially mine.

**Malcolm:** If I can get specific, because you took my answer by the way. I was going to say try and get better as quickly as you can. I think a common thing for novice writers is to react to feedback the wrong way and they slow down their progression on getting good and they also fuck up their ability to engage. One of the first things that’s going to happen out the gate is people are going to tell you what’s not working about your work. And the sooner you get to learn how to navigate that exchange, the more likely you are to have an ally who might move your shit around and pass it along to people.

The other thing I was going to say, which is it’s a difficult one because I’ve heard it, but I feel like we’ve heard this so many times in festivals and I don’t know if anyone has ever really said it because you’re scared of someone blowing up your life. I will say, if you are younger and do not have a family, you should move to Los Angeles. It is something everyone looks to hear they don’t have to do, that’s how you know you should do it. And in the group of writers we all hang out with, there’s two outliers here now with Kate and Tess.

**Craig:** The Kate. The Kate.

**Malcolm:** No, but–

**Katie:** That’s how I asked to be called.

**Malcolm:** Up until now, I’ve never been on a panel that didn’t have writers who moved to Los Angeles first. So when you’re dealing with something like the high 90th percentile, that’s one of the starting moves and you’re saying to yourself, well, can I do it without doing something that 90% of working screenwriters do, you’re fucking around in territory where you’re not going to win.

**Craig:** You got that?

**Phil:** We are going to give away some JetBlue miles in the night tonight.

**Craig:** The question that is probably asked most frequently behind how do I get started, how do I break in, is – it’s associated with that, how do I get a representative? How do I get an agent? How do I get a manager? I personally have no idea. I’m kind of fascinated to hear what you guys have to say, “How do people go about getting a manager or an agent?” And address, if you can, the Catch 22 that I know is on their mind. If I don’t have an agent, it’s hard to get an agent. Do you know what I mean?

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what do they do?

**Katie:** I will throw out there that I think it’s almost important to like think like them, like what would make you take on a client and I don’t mean in terms of writing the thing that will sell. Because I think, most importantly, you should write what you’re passionate about. The thing that I’ve written that got me the most like action, so–

**Tess:** I like that.

**Katie:** I feel bad about it immediately saying it that way.

**Tess:** No, it’s good. It’s good.

**Katie:** But like I wrote this pilot that was super weird but it was the thing I was most excited about wanting to see, you know. And that got me like on Parks and Rec. And then it also became like a sample in features for like general meetings and stuff. But where did I start?

**Craig:** Like where did you start with this answer?

**Katie:** Okay. So okay, yes.

**Tess:** You were having dinner with the nuns.

**Katie:** All right. So, okay.

**Craig:** You’re supposed to tell us how you get an agent.

**Katie:** Where are we?

**Craig:** This is Austin.

**Katie:** Austin.

**Craig:** it’s a city in Texas.

**Katie:** Austin. Okay.

**Craig:** You’re not in Los Angeles now.

**Katie:** My God, there’s people here.

**Craig:** **Katie:**, this is real.

**Katie:** This is happening?

**Craig:** This is happening.

**Katie:** This is happening?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Katie:** How?

**Craig:** Yeah, this is real.

**Katie:** But, no. I think like it’s just because I have a lot of friends, you know, that are, you know, still trying to break in and I don’t — the thing I said to them like I can give your script to my agent but I guarantee they will only read you one time. So just like make it great, you know. So it’s like they just want to read something that they’re like, “Oh, this is someone that I can imagine is going to, you know, really go places, you know.” So I guess, yeah, just like make that thing great just in — also in terms of what you want to see because I think that’s, you know, what your passion about is the thing. Not just writing what you think will sell, because they see that kind of stuff all the time, you know.

**Tess:** I think as well don’t you think now in like in the modern world, as my mum might say, like you can now, like I was on a panel this morning where a writer was talking about, you know, he’s making webisodes and doing all that stuff that you don’t even need an agent or a manager for at this point. You know, like now you can actually get your stuff seen in a much easier fashion than when I was first starting out. So, actually physically making some stuff and then being able to send — I mean, you know, now, if I get sent — someone sends me a link now that’s longer than 30 seconds, I’m not watching it. My brain is not going to last that long on a link, you know.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s a great advice. I would say it’s okay to write things longer than 30 seconds.

**Tess:** No. But what I want to mean is, is that we’ll–

**Phil:** I’m going to give you some respectful push back on that.

**Tess:** No. What I mean is — what I mean is, is an agent more likely to watch something that’s a minute long or read something that’s like 20 pages long. And I think now you actually have at your dispense like you can go and make some stuff that they can click on. I mean, obviously, my attention span is not great as demonstrated, but I’m not an agent. But if someone sends me something to watch, I’m more likely to go — I imagine this agent, “Oh, here’s an interesting like minute long sketch. That’s a voice. That’s interesting.” Rather than having sent a half an hour script and they’ll be like, “Oh, I’ve got to read that again.” So I think there’s a brave new world in that sense.

**Craig:** Well, you know, reading — you’ve reminded me of something that is absolutely true and I think it all the time. I do not like reading scripts, I — which is a weird thing to say for somebody that only writes screenplays. But reading screenplays is hard. It’s a hard thing to do because it’s not what — it’s not an end form of something. It’s not a novel. A novel is meant to be read, that’s it. And a screenplay is meant to be turned into a movie. It’s this weird middle thing. It’s hard to read. It can be arduous. So part of what I sometimes say to people is you need to start realizing before you write anything that you’re in this weird hole with the person that’s going to read it. They’re already angry that they have to read a screenplay.

**Phil:** You’re trying to defuse their anger–

**Craig:** Right

**Phil:** Long enough to inspire them.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to almost delight them so quickly and they’ll be like, “Oh my God.” like getting a child to eat vegetables in a weird way. I mean, have you guys seen the Rick and Morty where he has to listen to the man’s tale? Have you seen that? And the look on his face, it’s so true. It’s like, “Oh no, not a screenplay.” But you are in a weird hole and you have to kind of acknowledge it and you have to grab it. And you’re right in that now, unlike when I think all of us started, you have the opportunity to actually make things easily with equipment that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars when I was starting out.

**Tess:** My first short film had a budget. This is like 1997. I had a budget of £30,000. You can make five movies for that now.

**Craig:** Right. Right. And, by the way, nowhere to put it.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the other thing. You make the movie and you’re like, “I guess I have to enter it into festivals.”

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** Now, you can just, “Hey, world. Everyone in the world, you may now watch my movie.” which is a remarkable opportunity. Phil, what do you have to say about getting a manager–

**Tess:** How long is your attention span, Phil?

**Phil:** I’m just getting warmed up. I’m not even near taxing my attention span at the moment.

**Craig:** Phil is at 5% capacity.

**Phil:** I think that making something yourself is definitely the right thing. And I think I have one maybe practical thing to suggest in the category of making alliances, I think, is the most important thing when you’re starting out, whether that’s with other writers, whether that’s with people who are going to help you shoot a movie, whether it’s going to be, you know, just people who are kind of at the same area, in the same place you are. And I think, and again, forgive me if this is obvious, but I feel like who you really need to be finding are assistants to give your script to. You need to find assistants to agents, assistants to–

**Craig:** You didn’t mean you have to go hire assistants, I think–

**Phil:** No. No. You have to hire an assistant immediately.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re like, “Whoa.”

**Phil:** Because in my wealth seminar, I say you show that you are successful and successful comes to you. Would you pass the packets out, please? Packets are coming out.

**Craig:** Phil is the Tom Vu of the Writer’s Guild. Yeah.

**Katie:** I think this is a really smart tip because actually my first agent was an assistant first, and so he was looking for material. And I feel like that’s the thing like–

**Phil:** Right. It’s somebody who can be helped by finding you.

**Katie:** Yes.

**Phil:** Whereas an agent who is already established, they would love to find a great client. But they are not terribly motivated to do that. They already have a way to do that. They already have a list. But if you find an assistant, that’s someone who’s in the same position you are. They’re trying to make a move. They’re trying to break in. They’re trying to do something that’s going to standout. And so if you can give them something of quality, that is something that they will be extremely motivated to do their best to share with the people that they work for and–

**Craig:** Kind of like — it’s like matching hunger, right?

**Phil:** That’s right

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The hunger to be a writer and there are people out there who have a hunger to represent writers or to find great screenplays. And it’s so frustrating because sometimes I think to myself, oh you know, somebody may say to me, “Hey, would you like to do this?” And I say, “Oh, I can’t. I’m doing this.” But they say, “Well, who do you think would be good for this?” And I think, “Oh my God, there are a million people who would probably be very angry at me right now because I don’t know their name but they would be good for this.” And so — but finding the people that are actively looking is actually a brilliant suggestion. Now, easier said than done, if you’re not in Los Angeles, again.

**Phil:** Los Angeles makes that so much easier.

**Craig:** What do you think about — Malcolm, I will ask you, what do you think about these services that are out there? Franklin Leonard has The Black List. There are pitch contests. There are — there’s a competition here. What do you think about those things? Is that a viable way in?

**Malcolm:** There seems to be, I say like we’ve joked about this sort of in our group a little bit like 95% of the people who can make it as screenwriters and now with the Internet and with all of these contests, with that system being built in place, that’s the 4% that there’s only 1% of people who could actually make it as a screenwriter that aren’t going to find a way in now. And so I think it’s a really good system.

I’m now encountering writers. I just had a sit down with a young dude who went through the, you know, all the legit contests. He placed high in all of those and that got the attention of probably assistants or whatever that wanted to help whatever and he found his way towards more and more legit people. Now, he’s out in Los Angeles and got into one of these programs or whatever. You know what I’m saying? So, yeah, I think that’s a very, very good way. And if you’re just doing blind submissions, I will say, I think agents are a terrible way to go. You go with managers because agencies don’t do what they used to do. When we was coming up, you know what I’m saying? That’s what managers do now.

**Craig:** No. That’s an interesting question about managers and I acknowledge that you’re right about this. I mean, look, I question the whole–

**Tess:** You just said that someone else is right. Yeah.

**Malcolm:** What did you say, Craig? You just heard that right?

**Craig:** I do that all the time but only with John August. I don’t do it with you guys, because he’s always right. Do you guys have managers? What do you think about this whole manager thing?

**Tess:** I only have — I have an agent in the UK and I have an agent in the US. But weirdly, the last few weeks, I’ve been like, “Do I need a manager?” Like a lot of people keep saying it to me. And then I’m like, you know, everyone says, “Oh, but then you’ve got to pay them more and all that like bollocks.” But like — I think like in the UK, our agents tend to do much more of a manager job than your agents here do. So my agent in the UK like manages my career and we talk and we have a schedule and we like, you know, like have a strategy. Whereas here, my agent is like, “Here’s the money. Here’s, like, here’s what you’re going to get.”

**Craig:** He actually sounds like a pretty good agent.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, he’s saying, “Here is money,” which is–

**Tess:** Well, no, as in like there’s no like, you know, there’s not really like discussions–

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Tess:** Of like should you do this job. It’s like you should do this job.

**Craig:** There’s money.

**Tess:** There’s money.

**Craig:** Do the job.

**Tess:** Yeah. And then I go, “I don’t think I want to do this.”

**Craig:** Do job.

**Tess:** Do job.

**Craig:** Do job.

**Tess:** Job, do.

**Craig:** Job, do.

**Tess:** Job, do. It’s good for my attention span. Okay. Do it. But, yeah. But I do think that I know lots of writers who prefer having a manager than an agent.

**Craig:** Because most of these folks out here, I think Malcolm is absolutely right, their first interaction is — out of curiosity, how many of you do have a manager? Quite a few.

**Tess:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Quite a few. I would say maybe — I would say 20% there. Agent? Less. Much less. Maybe 5% or less. So–

**Katie:** Can I ask?

**Craig:** Yes?

**Katie:** How many people live in Austin and how many people live in LA?

**Craig:** Holy gajolie. This is — this podcast is a total waste of time. They are all from Los Angeles. What are we doing? Why are you here? What is happening?

**Phil:** I am taking the JetBlue miles and going to St. Croix.

**Craig:** JetBlue, off the table. All right. So most of you are from Los Angeles, what the hell? All right. Totally different topic then.

**Tess:** Anyway, moving on.

**Phil:** The managers, I would say, I think it has become much more, I mean, since I started with my partner, Matt, 18 years ago and I think it was actually very uncommon for writers to have managers, it was just not really done. And now, I think it’s more common than not it seems. And we had once for a small period, a couple of years we had a manager. We don’t now. For the majority of our career, we haven’t.

**Tess:** Did you sack him?

**Phil:** It was interesting, it was a company called AMG that was created. They were managers.

**Craig:** He fired him hard.

**Tess:** He fired their ass.

**Craig:** It was a hard firing.

**Tess:** Awesome.

**Craig:** Hard fire

**Phil:** Hard fire.

**Craig:** Hard fire.

**Phil:** No. But what was interesting was they were great, they did great work but they were basically an agency and they were constructed to be another agency, so it’s kind of having two different agents. And I think if you want to have a manager–

**Craig:** What the fuck?

**Phil:** There goes Malcolm.

**Craig:** Malcolm has left.

**Phil:** He’s jogging.

**Craig:** He’s literally jogging out. What the fuck?

**Katie:** Malcolm, bye.

**Phil:** What is he doing?

**Katie:** Okay. Malcolm turned to me and he was like, “I have to go to the bathroom. So I should just go, right?” And then I said, “Yeah. Yeah. Like I got you.”

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Katie:** And then it was immediately–

**Craig:** You thought that I got you, you would cover–

**Katie:** Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what I thought I could do.

**Craig:** The incredibly obvious exit to the bathroom?

**Katie:** I thought I would make him invisible.

**Tess:** I mean, you really, really covered Malcolm there.

**Phil:** No. No. We both have an improv background. We could easily do a quick object transformation up here while he’s going to the bathroom, if he would have just given us a little more warning.

**Craig:** **Katie:**, you’re a terrible friend.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just a bad friend.

**Katie:** I immediately threw him under the bus. I’m like here’s what happened.

**Craig:** I know. He wasn’t even out of the door and you’re like, “Okay, he’s going to the bathroom.”

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve lost Malcolm.

**Phil:** My incredible salient point was that if you have a manager–

**Craig:** Oh, you’re back to you? Oh, you think that you can still keep going like Malcolm didn’t go to the bathroom?

**Phil:** I can do this.

**Craig:** Okay. Fine.

**Phil:** I can pull this out. All right. I’m the Chuck Yeager of podcasts.

**Craig:** Let’s go, Phil. Push the envelope, man.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Face those demons.

**Phil:** If you are going to have a manager, make sure they do something different than the agent does.

**Tess:** I thought you were going to do a JetBlue joke again.

**Phil:** I was — believe me, I was constructing it. But it wasn’t A+. It was a B- and I wasn’t going to do it.

**Craig:** Never do a B-.

**Phil:** This is an A+ crowd.

**Craig:** It’s an A+ crowd.

**Phil:** And they’re not going to stand for it.

**Craig:** Most of them are from Los Angeles. They have high expectations.

**Phil:** That’s right. Yeah.

**Craig:** Look who’s back.

**Phil:** Malcolm is back.

**Craig:** So Malcolm Spellman has returned from the bathroom.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So–

**Katie:** It’s fine. They didn’t notice.

**Phil:** This is what we call in the improv game, pulling focus.

**Craig:** We certainly had no idea what was going on and **Katie:** definitely did not tell us. And kind of an odd question for you guys. But, you know, something that John and I talk about quite a bit is, well, I don’t mean to be grim. But Malcolm is correct. The odds aren’t great. And for a lot of people, they have a dream, a desire, an ambition to be screenwriter and we just know that it won’t work out for everyone. Obviously, it will work out for you. You, meaning, you, not the idiot next to you, but you. But for those for whom it does not work out, I kind of want to encourage people or at least give them permission to say, “I don’t have to do this.” And just an interesting question for you guys because I’m kind of curious, if you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?

**Phil:** Regional airline pilot.

**Craig:** And you really do have the face for it.

**Phil:** I still might be.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Phil:** I don’t want to be presumptuous. Just Spirit Air. I don’t need to be flying those big birds to Osaka.

**Craig:** Do you even need to know how to fly, to be a pilot with Spirit Air?

**Phil:** No.

**Craig:** You just have to fit the uniform of the guy that died from a heart attack.

**Phil:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Phil:** I just need to drop my voice an octave and just get everybody comfortable and–

**Craig:** All right folks, at the left side of the plane, you will see… – What about you, Tess? What would you be doing?

**Phil:** So that’s what I would do.

**Tess:** Interpretative dancer.

**Craig:** You know, this is not helping you guys. Those aren’t real things.

**Tess:** No. Well, no, Craig–

**Craig:** What?

**Tess:** They are. Because it would be doing something that I love.

**Craig:** Interpretative dancer is not a job. You know that.

**Tess:** It is a job.

**Craig:** Where? Where?

**Tess:** In interpretative dance institutions around the world and–

**Phil:** See, Craig, in England, they have government funding of the arts.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Phil:** And–

**Craig:** They may actually have that–

**Tess:** Well, not anymore. Brexit fucked us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** No. What I would — no. My–

**Craig:** This is where it all breaks down.

**Tess:** The link is–

**Craig:** We’ll be getting to your questions very shortly. I promise.

**Tess:** Fine. No. The link is that I think I would be — okay, maybe it’s not a proper job. But it’s sort of I could make it a proper job because I would love it enough to do it and I think like–

**Craig:** Will you do it right now?

**Tess:** I would if you give me another three Shiners. Four?

**Craig:** That’s — I don’t–

**Tess:** But I’ve got a different panel to attend. No. No. Tomorrow morning.

**Phil:** This is an audio podcast.

**Tess:** I know.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phil:** That’s going to be–

**Tess:** Believe me, no, you will be able to hear the dancing.

**Craig:** I was going to — I was also going to take a video but–

**Tess:** No. But the point is that I — when I wrote the script — when I wrote Man Up, I was living at home at that time and I was like 33 and I was like I said to my mom and dad, “Oh if this doesn’t — this is my last chance saloon. And if I don’t sell this, then I’ll go and get a proper job.” And I honestly didn’t know what I meant by that, because I’d only ever been a writer. But I do know that I think, in terms of doing something else in my life, I would always want to do something creative.

And I think, also, it might be good for some of you to accept that you’re not necessarily writers, but maybe you’re a producer, or maybe you’re an editor, or maybe you’re a — you know, like, there are lots of writers I know that obviously have come to the conclusion that they might not make their money, everyday money from it, but there are certainly lots of other kind of avenues that you can go down that will still keep you in the filmmaking and television world. And then you can write for the sheer joy of it on the side.

**Craig:** Which — I mean, yeah.

**Tess:** Or interpretative dance on the side.

**Craig:** But all joking aside, there is a remarkable freedom to writing for the sheer joy of it.

**Tess:** Totally.

**Craig:** And I sometimes think to myself, look, when I started writing screenplays, I was not being paid to write screenplays. I started as a temp. I didn’t have this incredible–

**Tess:** Three years.

**Craig:** Three-year temp job where you don’t do anything. I had a proper temp job where I had to do way too much for the small amount of time I had. And then I would write at night, but I understood, when I was writing at night, that I wasn’t writing for anyone. Just me. And, you know, it’s funny. I was talking to Alec Berg. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Alec Berg. He worked on Seinfeld and he ran Curb Your Enthusiasm, and now he’s the showrunner on Silicon Valley and he’s a brilliant guy.

He said, the other day, he was reading something that he had written years and years ago. And he said, “You know, it wasn’t great, but it was free.” And he said, “And I miss that. I miss being free. I can’t write anything. I have to write what I’m supposed to write, and there are these constraints that have nothing to do with what I want.” And there’s a remarkable freedom that you have that actually, we don’t. That is an advantage, in a weird way, that you have to surprise everybody, and we really can’t.

**Tess:** Well, I think it’s quite like — I don’t know about you lot, but, like — and I’ve been writing for, like, 17 years, and the best things that I think I’ve written have been things that I haven’t been paid for. [laughs]

**Craig:** Oh, 100%. Yeah.

**Tess:** Because, like, I don’t have the pressure and no one’s waiting on anything. Like, to do that alongside your paid work is the best thing you can do. If you are a working writer in this room, which I’m sure some of you are, then that’s another thing that you should always be doing. Like, do unpaid stuff for your own brain as well.

**Craig:** What about you, **Katie:**? Where would you be if you weren’t doing this gig?

**Katie:** CIA.

**Craig:** Oh, you’d be an agent?

**Katie:** That was my other dream, and then I would think about — but I had applied and did not get in. So it was never a backup career in any way.

**Tess:** Did you really not get in? But you are actually in this — yeah.

**Katie:** No, I truly applied. But I–

**Craig:** You applied to be, like, at the mailroom at CAA?

**Tess:** CIA.

**Craig:** Oh, CIA?

**Katie:** CIA, yeah.

**Craig:** I was like, why do you want to be an agent?

**Malcolm:** She’ll kill you, dude.

**Craig:** It’s the shittiest job. I honestly was hating you, and now I like you again. So you wanted to be in the CIA?

**Katie:** I applied for that and the FBI.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Katie:** Both rejected.

**Craig:** Why did they reject you?

**Katie:** I feel like–

**Craig:** They don’t say, do they? [laughs]

**Katie:** No — well — okay. I think–

**Phil:** You didn’t want to take it down to the ATF? You drew the line at FBI?

**Katie:** It was honestly, like, the–

**Phil:** Federal agency, just like any other. Just as good.

**Katie:** Yeah. I think I was real excited about it, but I had nothing to offer. I had no skillset that would be–

**Tess:** But you had your temporary job on your resume.

**Katie:** I did, yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** Weirdly, that did not–

**Tess:** So weird.

**Katie:** Yeah, really weird.

**Craig:** Make them think that you were vital to our nation’s security.

**Phil:** She’s been working in the office from Three Days of the Condor already.

**Katie:** Can I tell you something someone said to me once? And I don’t know if it’s controversial or very boring.

**Craig:** We’ll be the judge of that.

**Katie:** But it had a big impact on me. I was an intern at Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and the writers there were all very lovely and awesome. And there’s this writer, Kevin Dorff, and he was giving advice and he’s the best. Me and a couple of other interns were asking about — and I guess this is more about comedy, but we were asking, like, you know, like, “What do you think? How hard is it to break in and stuff?”

And tell me if you agree or disagree, but he said, “If you’re good, you’ll make it.” And, like I weirdly found that inspiring, you know, that — I don’t know. Because I feel like there’s a lot of bad people who make it, you know, but I feel like at least with comedy, if you get to a point where — I don’t know a lot of comedians who are, like, amazing that don’t eventually make it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I think that that’s true. I mean, Malcolm alluded to this and Phil alluded to it as well. There is this incredible hunger for quality in Hollywood, which may strike you as odd considering all the movies that they make. But they’re looking for really smart people to make the movies that they want to make. And they are short on people that they think are terrific writers. They’re always, always, always looking.

And terrific scripts do get noticed, there’s no question about that. I mean, in a weird way, when people say, like, “What are my odds of making it?” I just think 0% or 100%, in a weird way.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it, you know?

**Malcolm:** Yeah. I think there’s more professional football players than there are working screenwriters.

**Craig:** Yeah. John and I have gone through the numbers. There are more NFL players than screenwriters.

**Katie:** I feel like we haven’t — like, I feel like, if we’re getting really into it, I feel like if I’m in this room–

**Malcolm:** The CIA talking.

**Tess:** You are in this room.

**Craig:** Yeah. Again, this is real.

**Tess:** You’re in.

**Phil:** This is happening, yup.

**Katie:** I feel like I would want to know — if you have this great spec, how do you get that? Like, what do you do with it if you don’t have any connections or you don’t know anyone? Like, my path was the improv theater, but if you’re not doing improv–

**Craig:** Right.

**Katie:** Like, I’m not sure what the answer is. If you don’t know anyone but you have this spec, what do you do?

**Craig:** Well, you know what? I told these guys, when Malcolm and Tim Talbott wrote a screenplay together and it was horrible and wonderful. It was the most disgusting, hysterical, terrible, great thing I’d ever read in my life. And they were asking, like, “What do we do?” And I said, you just put it on the Internet. It seemed perfect for the Internet. [laughs] Because I said, no one’s ever going to make this movie ever in a million years. I think Tim–

**Malcolm:** Fuck you, Craig.

**Craig:** No one’s ever going to make it and no one will ever make that movie. It is a crime against humanity.

But it’s wonderful and it so clearly indicates remarkable talent. And not surprisingly, these two guys who were writing under the pseudonym Robotard8000, one goes on to work on Empire, the other one wins the Waldo Salt Award at Sundance for his movie, the Stanford Prison Experiment.

But you can put anything on the Internet if you stop caring so much about, “People are going to steal my…” People are going to steal — stop it. Just never say that to me. Don’t worry about anyone stealing anything. Just put it out there. Put it out there. I think maybe somebody will notice it if it’s wonderful. Or no?

**Tess:** Also, do you think, like, if you were at a festival like this and – which you all are, hi – we’re all here still, yeah?

**Katie:** Mm-hmm.

**Tess:** Okay, good.

**Craig:** This continues to be real.

**Tess:** Yeah. No, I just always have to check with her now, so–

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Tess:** I feel like **Katie:** knows. No, but–

**Katie:** I just stared blankly.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Katie:** I wasn’t sure where we were.

**Tess:** I feel like if you can tell me your film in one sentence and it sounds amazing, I would want to read it. And I’m not sure how many people can actually do that.

**Craig:** Well, everybody, go up to Tess after this and tell her–

**Tess:** No. Honestly–

**Craig:** Tell her your–

**Tess:** If you can tell me, like, a new idea — if you can say to me in 20 — obviously, my attention span coming into it again. [laughs] No. But if you can say to me it’s a film about boom, boom, boom, boom and I’d be like, “Wow, that sounds, like, really interesting.” And it’s quite rare to be able to do that. And that’s your job as a writer to get your idea into that one nice little neat sentence, that then someone who is an agent or manager here or whoever, might go, “That sounds really interesting.”

**Katie:** I think that’s really smart, because I also — it’s like what you were saying before too about having immediately climbed out of this hole, because I think when someone says, like, everyone in Hollywood is so self-absorbed, you know, so, like, the idea of someone coming up and saying, “Hey, can you read this thing?” You know, they’re going to be like, “Ugh,” you know?

So, like, what can be said? How do you get through that thing? What could possibly be said to you that you would be, like, “Oh, okay.” Or, you know, that’s almost like — it’s a weird thing. It’s, like, also coming up with how to not scare someone off.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Out of curiosity, just so we know if we could stop talking or not, how many of you have a question that you would like to ask of these people? Oh, barely anyone.

**Tess:** Don’t have any.

**Craig:** No. Please, sir.

**Male Audience Member:** I, personally, as a screenwriter, am a particularly anxious person. I imagine a lot of you can relate to that. You know, you often doubt yourself to a great extent. So I’m wondering, what was the point at which, in your career, you just sort of let go of doubt and realized, yes, I can do this? What did it take to convince yourself that you had what it took?

**Malcolm:** No. No. No, no, no. It is funny. I tweeted the other day, most of my career, before I got on and even when I got on and went cold, and got on, and went cold again, at no point did I ever think it was really going to work out. And this is probably the first time — I’ve been working professionally on and off for 15 years — this is the first time, like, the last couple years where I actually feel that I got something going on, so you got to have the ability to – like, you don’t even have to have faith that you’re going to make it. You got to have the ability to punch through that shit.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Phil:** You’ve made it, Malcolm. You’re here.

**Tess:** But I’m the same as Malcolm. I don’t know about you guys, but, like, it’s only in the last few years, having been working for 17 of it, like, that I feel — like, last year, when I came here, I said to you the other night, like, I felt like an imposter last year.

**Craig:** Ridiculous.

**Tess:** No, but I really did.

**Craig:** No. She had a movie here, playing.

**Tess:** Yeah. And I felt like–

**Craig:** And she felt like an imposter.

**Tess:** Because I’m an idiot. But, like–

**Craig:** No, you’re human. I mean, this is the way we are.

**Tess:** No, no. But that’s okay because I just — you know, like, it’s — you have to just — you really can’t ever think that anything’s ever going to get made, because when it does, it’s a miracle. Not a religious miracle — maybe it’s a religious miracle, I don’t know. But you–

**Craig:** We should ask the nuns. They were there. We could have asked them.

**Tess:** They were right there.

**Craig:** They were right there.

**Tess:** All 12 of them.

**Craig:** There was 12 of them?

**Tess:** A murder of nuns.

**Craig:** A murder of nuns.

**Tess:** A murder of nuns.

**Craig:** A passel.

**Tess:** A what?

**Craig:** A passel. [laughs]

**Tess:** A passel.

**Craig:** A passel of nuns.

**Tess:** A pail of kittens.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, is that a thing?

**Tess:** That’s what it is. But yeah, I think you have to — I never think anything’s going to happen until it happens.

**Craig:** Phil, you seem like someone who’s actually bizarrely well-adjusted, probably because you’re not Jewish.

**Phil:** Tremendously confident.

**Katie:** Yeah, and just at dinner, you were saying, “I’ve got it all figured out.” Like I’m king of–

**Phil:** I was saying that.

**Katie:** King of Industry, I think, is what exactly you said.

**Phil:** Again, the packets are going to be distributed in a moment and… – No. When I hear you say that, I say, “Here’s somebody who’s probably on the right track,” because I think that doubt is a very good thing to have — I mean, the people that I worry about are people who have it all figured out, and think that they have it all figured out–

**Malcolm:** They got producers.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Phil:** Yeah. I don’t think anybody that is on this stage, or any of our friends around that do this for a living–

**Craig:** It never ends.

**Phil:** Don’t. And if there’s a day when I feel no doubt, Matt Manfredi is there to give me doubt in myself.

**Craig:** He’s there to remind you that you’re stupid.

**Phil:** To remind me of my limitations.

**Craig:** Excellent question, sir. Yes, sir?

**Male Audience Member:** Although it’s not obvious, I’m no longer a promising young man. So, I’m wondering, I mean, does that make a difference? You know, even if a script gets me into a meeting, are they just going to go like, “Whoa, this guy’s way too old.”

**Craig:** Well, you know–

**Male Audience Member:** I mean, should I just start paddle tennis or –?

**Craig:** Listen–

**Tess:** Do that anyway, because that’s fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. Definitely don’t not start paddle tennis. But I don’t think any of us can necessarily say for sure what it’s like to be — I mean, we are the age we are, okay? But that said, because screenplays — good screenplays are rare, I think that it is not a disqualifier in any way. I will tell you that Hollywood is as subjective, not more so, to all of the human foils and biases that exist in the world. And if you are older than normal, or you are not a — you’re less white than normal–

**Male Audience Member:** I got that.

**Craig:** Or less of a man than normal, or less straight than normal, or less able than normal, it’s a thing, right? You’re talking about a business that is routinely casting people to play types. They are only interested in presenting reality with the most beautiful people of all. That’s what they do. They are soaking in it.

But, a great script and a great interaction with somebody will always win. You just have to be aware that you may have to fight a little harder. That’s just reality, I think.

**Katie:** I think that’s a great point though to throw out there, is I think it is crazy rare for there to be a great script floating around. Like, most scripts are really bad.

**Craig:** Really, really, really.

**Katie:** I think that’s motivating. Like, you know what I mean?

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Not your script.

**Katie:** Maybe the person next to you. The person–

**Craig:** No, but the person next to you, their script is shitty. Your script, awesome. Next question.

**Male Audience Member:** Hi, my name’s Hunter. This is a question mostly for **Katie:**, but you guys can answer it, too, about the screenwriting process. So Ghostbusters and I think The Heat as well had a lot of improv in it, clearly. So what’s the process of, like, for writing a comedy for having a lot of improv–?

**Craig:** Yeah, what do you even do, Kate?

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, do you even write or — that’s my favorite question. So, like, do you just do blanks and then they just fill in?

**Katie:** I would say the goal is to write the best possible — like, so, for example, a scene. Just write the best possible scene you can and then when you — you know, if you get someone like Melissa McCarthy or Kristen Wiig, you know, like, the goal is to shoot a version of the scene that you set with, that you know technically works. But then you hopefully cast these improv geniuses that are going to just add so much funny shit and make you feel really lucky when you’re sitting behind the monitors, like, thinking, like, “Oh my god, did that scene work in the first place?” [laughs] You know?

Or also, I would say, like, the best times or, like, if you write the scene the best version you can, and then you get someone like the Melissa and Kristens or whatever, you know, like they start bringing their own stuff, and sometimes what’s great is then you see what they’re doing and then you try to like, “Oh, that’s really funny.” So then you throw an alt back at them and then they’ll take that and do something funnier with it. [laughs]

**Craig:** Right.

**Katie:** You know, ideally, it’s like a collaboration still, you know.

**Tess:** I think, like, all the best improvisers will always give the writer credit because they can’t improvise off of nothing. They have to improvise off your scripts. And I had it with Simon Pegg who he is like one of — he’s an amazing improviser and he would always go to me, “Does that still track?” If I say — you know, like, so we do like what our director called a loosey-goosey.

So we’d shoot 10 versions of the scene and then he shouts, “Loosey-goosey,” and they would basically be able to do whatever they liked. And maybe 20% of those loosey-gooseys were great, 80% were not great. And then you see them in the outtakes and then you think, “Oh, they’ve all improvised it,” or whatever, but you’ve got to have something to start from in the first place.

**Craig:** That’s the essence of it. I mean, you want somebody like Melissa McCarthy.

**Tess:** Yeah, oh, my god.

**Craig:** Or Zach Galifianakis or Simon Pegg or Kevin Hart to be able to do what they do. But what they’re doing is related to the intention of the character, the situation the character is in. Whatever they’re doing ultimately has to arrive at a place you have predetermined.

They begin where you say, they end where you say. They are intending what you say. The actual words that they use for it, or those little funny moments and wonderful little things are amazing but must occur in the context of what you have provided. And you’re absolutely right. The good ones–

**Tess:** Always acknowledge.

**Craig:** Always acknowledge.

**Phil:** It’s a moment that requires extreme vigilance as a writer. It’s where you can be the most useful because in the moment as a comic actor, you have a killer instinct which is to kill, which is to do the funniest best thing that you can imagine. And that’s not necessarily going to serve the story.

And in fact, that may take you out of the relationship that is being developed. The laughter and the success in the moment on the set with all the grips laughing and everyone going, “Yeah,” may turn into a huge problem later because it’s violated something about the scene. And I will say specifically, as someone — I’ve been able to work with Kevin Hart a lot and he is someone who seems to improvise a lot but in fact does not.

**Craig:** I know.

**Phil:** Right?

**Craig:** He doesn’t.

**Phil:** And because that’s not his approach, he–

**Craig:** What Kevin is brilliant at is making scripted lines sound improv.

**Phil:** Exactly.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**Phil:** And which is a wonderful thing, and why Kevin is — everyone has their own process and all the people we’re talking about are really great actors who all have their specific way in, but it’s interesting because sometimes something you see that feels — the greatest thing as a writer, you hear something that feels very in the moment and feels very spontaneous. A lot of those things are actually scripted and that’s wonderful when it does turn out.

**Tess:** But your job as well, which is great, is that, like, I would watch Simon do like a brilliant piece of improv and then everyone would like laugh and they’d go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then I go over to my director and go, “Just so you know, we still have to get that beat just because it needs to make sense story-wise.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** And he’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve got it.”

**Katie:** I agree with what Craig — you need to have the intent of the scene there and I have to say like Melissa and Kristen Wiig, they also are so good at knowing, like they’re great writers, so they know the story. So, like, they’re really exceptional at improvising. Everything they improvise doesn’t have to be tossed out because sometimes like improv on set doesn’t just mean like saying all these crazy, funny things. Like they also know how to improvise in a way that’s still on story and on character that’s always usable, you know.

**Craig:** You know, Melissa McCarthy and Zach Galifianakis had a scene together in the third Hangover movie. And we had this bucket of lollipops. They were like props, it was like dressing, set dressing. And she just put it in his mouth and then she took it out and put it in her mouth.

And we were just watching it like, “Oh my god, this is the most amazing. Why would she do that?” It’s incredible, but it was absolutely in keeping with what was happening. They were falling in love but they were both wrong. There was something seriously wrong with both of them in their minds. They were off, terribly off. Like two horrible people are falling in love and that’s what they would do. They would share a lollipop together like freaks.

She’s amazing. Anyway–

**Katie:** If I give one more example of her?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Katie:** In The Heat, there was a scene in the script that was literally nothing. It was that she was going to go in to see if her prisoner was in the cell and then he’s gone, and so she asked the guard, like — I can’t remember what was in the script, but she was like, “Where the hell did he go?” And the guard is like, “Oh, that agent took him away.”

And then she improvised this telling off and just tearing down this guard about what she was going to do to him for letting this guy go about how she was going to like, you know, rip her — put her fist down his throat. Like it was like the craziest thing I’d ever heard and I was like, “Oh my god, this woman is amazing.” And it was like exactly still everything, like with the scene, exactly what you wanted to get across in the scene but in a way that — I don’t know, I just think she’s magical.

**Craig:** She is. By the way, great advice, you know, Katie and I can absolutely assure you of this. Just work with Melissa McCarthy. It is just a win. A huge win.

By the way, Zach, also a huge win. Kevin, huge win. So that’s all we really like to do, that’s really the answer to that. I think we have time for maybe like two or three more. We’ll do two or three more. Yes, Ma’am?

**Female Audience Member:** Hi, my name is Tiffany. And I just wanted to mention that there is another coast that’s super cool. It’s a little town called New York City in case you haven’t heard of it.

**Katie:** That’s where I started.

**Female Audience Member:** And that’s where I know where I know my friend Kate is and I’ve also been to UCB, so I just want to say that that’s a really good place to get your start, too.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s my hometown. You know, I was born there.

**Female Audience Member:** Oh, well I didn’t.

**Craig:** Brooklyn.

Female Audience Member: Well, you should have mentioned it. Why didn’t you mention it?

**Craig:** Staten Island.

**Female Audience Member:** How come you asked everybody if they were from LA if you were from New York City?

**Craig:** Because I don’t like to break it out in front of all these other people.

**Female Audience Member:** Oh, okay.

**Phil:** Anybody here from the North Coast, Cleveland, Ohio?

**Craig:** Nobody. No.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there but bugs. Literally nothing but bugs. Please continue New York.

**Female Audience Member:** Yeah. Okay. So I–

**Craig:** Sorry for being interrupted by this fucking asshole.

**Female Audience Member:** I know, such an ass.

**Phil:** It’s my fault.

**Female Audience Member:** So my question is for Malcolm and Kate who are involved in TV. So I have a new series that’s getting some traction and I actually have a production company who’s shopping it, and I’m going out to LA for my first big agent meeting. And I just wondered if you had any advice.

They are looking for a showrunner for me to be attached to because I’m a new creator and I was just wondering if you had any advice on how to navigate that process. Once you get your meeting that everybody wants to get, then you finally get it, like nobody seems to sort of know how to prepare me for that.

**Katie:** I’ll be honest because I — if there is a great showrunner, they will always be working. You know what I mean? Like, the great ones are always busy, you know. Like I–

**Malcolm:** So your showrunner sucks.

**Katie:** I’m trying to think of like – yeah, because I think it’s good to know who’s new on the scene but at the same time, it’s hard to know. Like there’s a guy named Anthony King who is from UCB New York, who I always thought if I ever have a TV show, like I would want him to show-run it, you know. But I think he’s even — I don’t know, I don’t know. That’s a terrible answer but that’s literally like I thought of, like, this one person. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** I would say it’s a tricky dance. I did the showrunner’s training program and heard a bunch of like — they bring in like 30 showrunners. And you get to hear the stories of creators who brought on showrunners, and you’re going to have to be really, really honest of what’s your expectation.

If you’re timid about what you expect the process to be, it’s going to become something that by the time you figure out what it is and if you don’t like it, you’re fucked already. You know what I’m saying? And that doesn’t mean you should go on with your guard up at all, but you have to understand just the title, showrunner, says everything about what’s happening.

Someone is going to be handing over $50 million or $100 million dollars to somebody, and it’s going to be that showrunner. And at that point, and once you understand that, then you have to decide what’s your relationship with this person going to be, what’s your disposition. You know what I’m saying?

Like some people are — someone like me is just going to go bad. You know what I’m saying? Like it’s just it won’t work. No. But it won’t. Craig knows it. Like, just that wouldn’t work for me. You know what I’m saying? And–

**Female Audience Member:** Wait, you wouldn’t–

**Craig:** That is correct.

**Female Audience Member:** You wouldn’t work for yourself. Is that what you’re saying?

**Malcolm:** No, no. If your disposition — you can collaborate, but if you’re creating something, right, and you’re handing it to someone who’s going to run it, then you understand they are the showrunner, they run your show. And at that point, you’ve immediately put yourself in a secondary position and there’s nothing wrong with that but–

**Katie:** So I have to imagine you — because I have not done this experience, so I’m turning it to him. But I have to imagine you want someone who’s also going to — especially if you’re going to be involved and be there every day, I imagine you want someone that’s going to help you with your vision, right? Like, is that the goal when you find a showrunner?

**Malcolm:** If we’re going to be honest, you know what I’m saying, if someone’s going to take your show away from you, there is zero you can do to stop it because they get to do that because they know how to handle $50 million, right?

And that just happens when it happens. And we have some dear friends who that happened to and they’re major writers. The more frank and the more comfortable you are being honest, and if you have a sane disposition and you have real clarity, you can start having real conversations up front where you’re not being confrontational. You understand that no one can give you $50 million. You will fuck it up, you know what I’m saying?

Female Audience Member: Yes.

**Malcolm:** And so–

**Craig:** Just based on looking at you.

**Female Audience Member:** Clearly, I don’t know what to do with $50 million.

**Katie:** So do you think it’s important to be like strong on top? Like, I mean just really start up?

That sounded really weird. That sounded so weird. What I meant was–

**Phil:** This depends on the relationship.

**Katie:** What I mean is when you’re having sex with someone.

**Malcolm:** You cannot be defensive at all. You cannot be defensive at all. If you do not say what you think and what you expect it to be, it’s going to go bad and you need to get out of this person what they expect it to be. And that you do. Strong doesn’t mean you’re trying to control this person–

**Katie:** Yes.

**Malcolm:** Because they know — they got it.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** Their title is showrunner, so they got your shit already. Strong is, “Yo, this is how I move. This is what I expect. How do you move? What do you expect? Oh, I’m not going to like that, so let me just tell you right now I probably shouldn’t be in this situation because,” you know what I’m saying? Like that’s what strong means.

**Female Audience Member:** Got it.

**Katie:** Can I add one more thing?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Katie:** And this is just from experience in features. I feel like whenever a situation is political and shitty, the thing I found helpful is just telling yourself to just focus on the work. As much as you can, take the ego out of it and just, like, what is the best way to make this the best possible thing. And I feel like that usually lends itself well to people wanting you to be involved and just having a better–

**Tess:** Taking the ego out, that’s the best bit of advice ever.

**Craig:** That is. It is spectacular advice. I was saying to Malcolm earlier, but the phrase I use is “Keep your eye on your own paper.” You have something that you can control which is what you do. Keep your eye on that as best as you can. But I think Malcolm’s advice is spot on and correct.

Yes, sir?

**Male Audience Member:** This is to all of you. But based on what **Katie:** was saying about, she says to her friends, “I can give my script to my manager, but he’s only going to read you one time,” how do you know the script is ready for that one shot?

**Malcolm:** You’ll know. The one thing that is true is when you write something that stands out, it creates energy. Everywhere it goes, people start saying, “Fuck. I’m going to give this to somebody.”

**Craig:** But he’s asking even before you give it to somebody, like the first person you give it to–

**Malcolm:** You have to — but that’s what you do. That’s how you know.

**Craig:** So you don’t know until you give it to them?

**Malcolm:** You give it to people and it starts to take on a life of its own.

**Katie:** But can you give it to people before he gives it to the agent? Do you know what I mean? Or are people, friends and family not really good judges maybe?

**Craig:** Probably not.

**Katie:** My mom says it’s great.

**Tess:** I think you should have like–

**Craig:** I always give my stuff to your mom, by the way, because she loves it.

**Katie:** She’s’ really — she’s smart.

**Craig:** She always says, “This is better than what **Katie:** does.”

**Tess:** Why don’t you give it to my mum?

**Craig:** No, no, your mom hates what I do.

**Tess:** Oh, okay.

**Craig:** Hates what I do.

**Tess:** I would say I have like three or four trusted people that I always give stuff to before I give it to anyone. Actually, sometimes you’re one of them, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Malcolm:** Everyone gives their shit to Craig.

**Tess:** I know.

**Malcolm:** It’s an amazing thing that has happened.

**Tess:** When is he ever working?

**Malcolm:** Everybody gives their script to Craig now, except for me.

**Tess:** But Lindsey Doran said something great in your panel earlier. She said better is better, which I thought was brilliant. And you’re always going to be able to make something better, basically. But if three or four people are giving you the same no and the same thumbs up or the same thumbs down, that’s usually a good barometer that something is at least ready to go to the next stage, I think.

**Phil:** I think part of it, too, goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is to try to get yourself on the right mindset. If you’re in the mindset of not being in a rush, then you’ll be more capable of judging your own work. Because if you are–

What just happened?

**Craig:** It’s just unbelievable. He’s selfie-ing while you’re talking. Malcolm decided to just selfie.

**Tess:** No. Stay on track. Stay on track.

**Phil:** I’m going to land this bird.

**Tess:** Come on.

**Phil:** I’m going to land this bird. Don’t worry. Don’t you bail out on me. Get the landing strip in the Azores.

**Tess:** Focus.

**Phil:** My point was it’s not being in a rush. It’s not saying I got to get this out because I’m in a hurry, I got to get the process going. And it’s really hard to know. But I think, you know, for myself, Matt and I wrote — I think the third script that we wrote together was the one that we tried to go out with.

And I think we wanted to go out with the second one and we got good advice from someone who said, “Geez, you guys are really promising but I think you can do better than this.” And we were like, “But wait, but no, no, now. Like, it’s time.” And I think if you can look at it yourself and look at it through the lens of not — don’t give yourself any credit or any benefit of the doubt, and look at it kind of hard and say, “Is this the best that I can do?” And more importantly, “Does this speak for me? Does this say something about me?”

Because I think the other general advice that has come up, to put it in Tin Cup terms, to not lay up–

**Tess:** Tin Cup the movie?

**Phil:** The movie. The Kevin Costner movie.

**Tess:** Kevin Costner.

**Craig:** Don’t lay-up. Don’t lay-up.

**Phil:** Ron Shelton.

**Tess:** And Rene Russo?

**Phil:** Is, you can’t afford when you’re starting out to lay-up. To take, like, a good kind of reasonable shot–

**Craig:** A safe shot.

**Phil:** To get you close to the pin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Phil:** You have to try to hit a hole in one.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Phil:** And so you have to say, “Okay, is this going to make noise? Is this something that’s going to be me, and it’s unique, and it’s going to make someone say, ‘Hey, who wrote this?’” It doesn’t have to be the most technically perfect script in the world. It doesn’t have to be a great example of how you construct the second act, da da da da da. It just has to be – da da da da. That’s my proprietary, da da da da.

Do you know what I mean? If you can look at it and say this is like something that — it’s like a shout. It’s like someone will say, “Oh, yeah. Okay, great.”

**Tess:** You know when you’ve written something and you can go, “Oh, it’s not shit.” Like–

**Craig:** Yes. That is true, but, also sometimes you don’t. You don’t really–

**Tess:** It takes a long time to know when something’s not shit.

**Craig:** Yeah. And remember that our business is an outlier business. It is not an averaging business. Even though some services like The Black List, for instance, will provide you with an average, your script is a 7.9. That’s quite wonderful, out of 10. But really, if you get all 1s and one 10, you’re better off than someone who gets all 8s. It is an outlier business. You don’t know necessarily. I wouldn’t get hung up so much on, “Is it ready?” The answer is no, it’s not. Show it anyway–

**Tess:** Get some feedback.

**Craig:** Get some feedback. It will be ready when it’s in theatres. God’s honest truth.

Unfortunately, we have time for one last question. I’m so sorry for the people standing in line, but we do have to — yeah, sorry.

**Female Audience Member:** All right, so I thought this might be a good question for this panel, but please don’t judge me. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch comedies. So, do you have any suggestions for good comedies to watch before 2005?

**Phil:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** No.

**Phil:** That’s the greatest question possible.

**Katie:** My answer–

**Phil:** Tim Herlihy, where are you?

**Tess:** Tim.

**Craig:** All of Tim Herlihy’s work.

**Katie:** I feel like my answer is boring because it’s recommended in, like, every screenplay class ever–

**Craig:** Groundhog Day.

**Katie:** But I just think it holds up – wait. Do you know what I’m going to suggest?

**Craig:** Groundhog Day.

**Katie:** No, Tootsie.

**Craig:** Oh, Tootsie’s amazing.

**Tess:** Oh, Tootsie is like the most–

**Craig:** The last comedy to win an Oscar, by the way.

**Katie:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Tess:** But also, Tootsie’s like structurally the most perfect film. Like, one of the most perfect films ever made.

**Craig:** Except for Groundhog Day.

**Tess:** No, no, I put Tootsie–

**Craig:** Well, you’re wrong.

**Tess:** Above Groundhog Day. Okay. Maybe not. On the level.

**Craig:** Fair enough.

**Tess:** But Tootsie is like — read the script for Tootsie, and then watch it.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And then you’ll go, “Go Tootsie, go.”

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**Phil:** I would like to offer what I consider to be the funniest movie of all time for me. But the fact that it is to me, and to maybe other people too, still as funny as it was when it was created is This is Spinal Tap.

**Tess:** Nice.

**Phil:** Which I think is incredible. That’s the one movie that I would put above all.

**Craig:** Lindsay Doran studio executive who shepherded This Is Spinal Tap all the way through.

**Tess:** I would like–

**Phil:** That’s why she’s Lindsay Doran.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Tess:** Yeah. I would like to put forward a film that is 30 years old, but I re-watch it at least once a year, that still stands up, which is Beverly Hills Cop. Like, just–

**Craig:** Dan Petrie here.

**Tess:** Where?

**Katie:** Come out on stage.

**Craig:** He’s here in Austin. Would you like to meet him?

**Tess:** Yes.

**Phil:** Turn around, Tess.

**Craig:** Okay. You will. And he comes in like the Kool Aid Man. He’s–

**Tess:** I’ve got an interpretive dance for him.

**Craig:** There’s a fair chance he’s down in the bar right now.

**Tess:** We’re going to find him afterwards.

**Craig:** Yeah.

Malcolm, what’s a comedy that you think is like a must-see? Let’s go ‘70s, ‘80s. Even a little bit of ‘90s. I’m out of gas.

**Malcolm:** I’m out of gas.

**Craig:** What the fuck? You’re on a show. This is a show. You have–

**Tess:** Was it a donut?

**Craig:** That was the last thing you had to say, and you’re out of gas?

**Katie:** No, no, no. It’s okay. Is that a comedy?

**Craig:** And by the way, the easiest question in the world. Just say Meatballs, and you’re done. It’s like the–

Not Meatballs? Meatballs?

**Malcolm:** Meatballs.

**Craig:** Meatballs.

**Katie:** I got your back. Don’t worry, they won’t notice.

**Phil:** Can I do one more before you go, because I think you’re going to have the best one, I’m sure.

**Craig:** Of course you can. Of course. Yeah, please, please, do it.

**Phil:** The Bad News Bears is another one that I think is — because it is a drama and a comedy and everything, and it’s one of the greatest movies ever made.

**Craig:** Amazing. You’ve seen Groundhog Day?

**Malcolm:** Slap Shot.

**Tess:** Yeah, nice.

**Craig:** Slap Shot.

**Phil:** Valid answer.

**Craig:** By the way, Slap Shot, amazing. Groundhog Day, for screenwriters, I would suggest is the most important comedy to watch, because it is the finest screenplay, I think. Just purely screen play for screenwriters. And it is profound, and beautiful, and amazing, and hysterical. That said, also Airplane.

**Katie:** Yeah, I feel like I’m missing — we’re missing a chunk of the ‘80s. Like that we’re — I just keep thinking of movies like Trading Places, and all those movies that–

**Tess:** That’s the Morris family Christmas movie, Trading Places.

**Craig:** I mean, we could be here all night just for citing comedies for the person that’s never seen one. But, I think we’ve done a pretty good job. Well, with that, it is my duty to say, well that’s our show.

You guys were amazing. As always, since recently, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. it is edited Matthew Chilelli. There you go, you guys listen. Our outro this week comes from someone. If you have an outro for us that you would like to try, please send it in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, I am @clmazin, and John August is @johnaugust. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment, and I’ll tell you why — John August loves comments.

He loves comments, you guys. He reads them and he loves them.

You can also find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, and that’s where you’ll find the transcripts. We try and get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes of the show at scriptnotes.net and also on the Scriptnotes USB Drive at store.johnaugust.com where revenue is generated that I do not get because John is stealing it from me.

I want to say a great thank you to Erin Halligan, and all of the wonderful people at the Austin Film Festival, Austin Screenwriting Conference. They’ve done an incredible job for us. And thank you for showing up to a secret thing at 10 at night. Hey, everyone, let’s go get drunk. Thank you.

Links:

* [Katie Dippold](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1767754/) on IMDB
* [Phil Hay](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006534/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on IMDB
* [Tess Morris](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2208729/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on IMDB
* [Malcolm Spellman](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1173259/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on IMDB
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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