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**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Episode 284 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today you might sense a little bit of a change. For one, the microphone sounds weird because I’m, well, doing kind of a weird microphone thing here for a reason. And, also, there’s no John August. He’s not here.

It’s me, today, with Derek Haas, who’s been on the show twice before. Today though, special day, because today it’s Craig and Derek answering questions. Welcome to the show, Derek.

**Derek Haas:** Thank you for having me again, Craig. It is my third time.

**Craig:** Third time?

**Derek:** That makes me a friend of Scriptnotes, right?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve always been a friend of Scriptnotes, but now you’re a valuable friend of Scriptnotes, which is a little bit better. Last time we spoke with you, I think you had still only one show, possibly two, now you have 12?

**Derek:** I was in Chicago the last time, and John was in Chicago, and yeah, we had just Chicago Fire. And it had just started.

**Craig:** Amazing. And now you have Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D., and Chicago–

**Derek:** Med.

**Craig:** Med.

**Derek:** And Chicago Justice starts in a month.

**Craig:** Wow. We’re running out of Chicago nouns. It’s remarkable. Before we get into the meat of today’s show, we do have some follow up to discuss. Sundance Episodic Lab. If you are a long time listener to the show, you know that we’re big fans of the Sundance Labs. It’s where they bring in writers and filmmakers to workshop new stuff. Ilyse McKimmie was a guest on the show. And they tell us that every year a few of the projects come in because people have heard about the labs on our show, which is fantastic.

For writers interested in television, Sundance is now taking applications for the Episodic Story Lab until February 1. The application can be found at applications3.sundance.org. And, of course, we’ll put a link in the show notes.

So, the Episodic Lab, here’s what goes on there. You work with accomplished showrunners, as well as non-writing creative producers and studio network executives. And the fellows – those are the people that are picked to do this – participate in one-on-one creative story meetings, pitch sessions, writer’s rooms, and group conversations focusing on the key creative and tactical elements that are central to their success in episodic storytelling. This is pretty good.

We mostly know Sundance for their Screenwriting Lab, but they’ve also had success in a lot of other mediums. For instance, Lisa Krone won two Tony’s for Fun Home – by the way, Jeanine Tesori also won a Tony for Fun Home, but she wasn’t at the Sundance Lab. Fine.

And Barry Jenkins is having an incredible experience with Moonlight. And so there are some previous participants that we’ll throw some information on for you to take a look at. Rafael Agustin, Calvin Reeder, and Ebony Freeman, and Mike Flynn.

So, that’s our follow up. Now, we’re going to get into questions. So, Derek, I’m not going to do a lot of questions for you.

**Derek:** Great.

**Craig:** Because people have questions for us. We’ve gotten questions, of course, from our normal listeners, and then I asked some folks on Reddit to lob questions at us. So we’ll take a look through those as well. Derek, just to start with you for a second, are you ever coming back to movies, or you’re a TV guy now forever?

**Derek:** I don’t see in the foreseeable future when we would have time to write a movie, just the way Hollywood is working these days, where you are beholden to the studio for six, nine months at a time. We just don’t have time right now. We do have a movie that Brandt and I wrote prior to Chicago Fire starting that just got shot this past winter and I’m going to see a screening of it on Monday for the first time. But it was a foreign film, all shot in France, starring Scott Eastwood called Overdrive. And I, like you, am curious to see how it turned out.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m not at all curious how it turned out.

**Derek:** Oh.

**Craig:** You’re not like me at all. No, I’m sure it will be excellent. But it sounds like we’ve lost you basically. Like we’ve lost so many people to television.

**Derek:** Yeah. Come on over, Craig. The water is fine.

**Craig:** Well…that’s what I’m hearing.

We’re going to start our questions with one from Kyle. And Kyle has an audio question that he sent in. And here’s what he asks.

**Kyle:** I’m a veteran, having served ten years honorably in the United States Navy. And I was recently awarded my MFA from a top college. I’ve been in LA since May of 2016 and I’m struggling to figure out how to get started. I’ve worked a couple feature films as a PA, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to write and direct. I volunteer at the WGA as often as I can, and I’m applying to any and every job I can find, but I’m not having much luck. What do I do? My savings are dwindling and I’m starting to worry. Is there some kind of secret? Is there some kind of website devoted just to writer’s assistants? Any advice you guys could have would be great.

**Craig:** OK. Well, Derek, what advice do you have for Kyle?

**Derek:** It’s the age-old question. It’s the hardest one to answer as a screenwriter. The most often that we talk to our friends about how they broke in we find that every story is different. In television, certainly the best thing you can do is be a writer’s assistant on a show that’s going.

**Craig:** But how do you get that?

**Derek:** It’s hard. I mean, you need to write a great spec pilot of a TV show. And then get it into as many people’s hands as possible. I’ve had four assistants since Chicago Fire started. One came as a recommendation of a friend who had gone to – like an alumni situation, where they had gone to the same college, and then slipped me her pilot. She then went on to work for NBC. She wanted to be on the producing side.

And then my second wanted to be an actor and came through from a Baylor recommendation actually. Baylor College, where I went to school.

**Craig:** Yep.

**Derek:** And then the last two have been through the Universal Writer Program and just reading resumes and reading scripts. And we’ve also promoted several of our writer’s assistants on to staff. To me, that’s the best way to break into TV. But, I mean, it comes down to write a great script and get it into as many people’s hands as possible.

**Craig:** Yeah, unfortunately that’s kind of the secret is that there’s no secret. It does come down to these things. Well, first of all, Kyle, thank you very much for your service to the Navy and to our country. I do know that the Writers Guild Foundation has a program for veterans. And I don’t know if you’ve taken a look at that, or not, but I would strongly suggest that you do. And you can speak to somebody, since you’re already volunteering at the WGA, just get in touch with somebody over at the WGA Foundation. I think their website is wgafoundation.org. They have a writing program. I think it’s called the Veterans Writing Program.

And that may be a nice entry point for you. But, yeah, I think Derek is right. Unfortunately, well, let me just say, that Kyle you’ve been LA since May of 2016. That’s not that long.

**Derek:** No.

**Craig:** You know, you do have to be a little patient here. But, also, just be aware this is not for everyone. It’s barely for anyone, frankly. Not a lot of jobs. And it’s a fairly narrow skillset. So you need to, I think, first assess your skills honestly and accurately and if you feel like, yeah, you’ve got what it takes, then you’re going to have to persist a little bit here.

**Derek:** My one thing I’ll add is I see a lot of writers who write one script in a year. And then they wait on 20 people to read the one script. And they get notes. And they go back and work on that script. And I’m just telling you the more things that you can do, there’s no reason why shouldn’t have two to three scripts written in a year. Especially if you’re writing pilots. I mean, we do 22 episodes in a year. That’s like doing 22 short films on the show. And Michael and I write six to nine of them. And so – and that’s 60 pages. That’s two-thirds of what a movie script is.

**Craig:** Right.

**Derek:** You really got to put the nose to the grindstone and write as many as you can in the genres that you like, that you actually feel passion for, not what you think that the industry wants. Don’t write a comic book movie if you don’t like comic books. If you like thriller, write a thriller. Don’t try to guess what’s going to be great and write something great.

**Craig:** I think that’s excellent advice. And, certainly, Kyle, make sure if your savings are dwindling that you also have a job. Get a job, you know. It’s good to put money in your pocket. You can write at night.

All right, next question. This is from Dave Jenkins. And he writes in and says, “I’ve been working with a team of producers for the past six years on an original script of mine. During that time, we’ve had three different directors attached, four development cycles, one financier, and more drafts than I can care to count. This was a low no dollar/no dollar option, which I agreed to due to their names and past credits. The initial contract was for two years. Subsequent extensions were granted as attachments came on board with the promise that I would be paid when financing came together. Unfortunately, this has not happened and the current extension expires later this month. So, my question is this: when is it okay to part ways? Is six years more than enough time? And how in the F did I get here? The producers still want the script but are unwilling to pay for it. They feel they’ve worked on it thus far. And as a result, should be given more time.

“I have other parties who have expressed sincere interest – producers, directors, and managers. But have warned that I would be burning a bridge were I to part ways like this. Any advice or drinking recommendations would be helpful?”

**Derek:** Wow.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, Derek?

**Derek:** My advice is that they’ve had more than adequate time to work on it. You have been way, way, way generous with them. And you should send them a letter right now and say we’re done, especially as soon as the last extension expires. And go on and feel completely unencumbered to them. You can take it wherever you want. You own it. And it doesn’t matter what work they’ve put on it. And don’t let their mafia scare tactics keep you from getting your script finally realized.

**Craig:** Wow. That was definitive. I’ll be a little more circumspect. Slightly. Not much more. I do think that Derek is right. They’ve had six years. They can’t get it done.

**Derek:** And paid zero dollars, by the way.

**Craig:** Right. So you’ve gotten no money out of it, but I understand neither have they. So, the whole point of these things is that it’s a mutual assistance society, but they haven’t gotten it done. And I think if you have other legitimate people who have expressed interest who might be able to get it done, at some point I think you do have to cut bait. And I don’t think you’d be burning a bridge. Or, hey, look at it this way: maybe you are burning a bridge. That bridge isn’t really going anywhere. So, you know, everybody in this town is always worried about burning bridges. And sometimes you just get paralyzed. You have to light one on fire every now and again. You know?

**Derek:** And movies do take a long time to get made. I mean, we’ve had movies that have been over eight years from when we started working on it, to when it got shot. And it’s true, however, after six years and four directors, they’re just flailing. And what they’re looking back at is we’ve put a lot of work into this. Now somebody else might make it and we’re going to get cut out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Derek:** And that’s what they’re operating from. But that’s not your fault.

**Craig:** It is. It’s not your fault. It’s not your problem. So, search your heart and ask yourself, do you still want to be married to this people or not. And if you don’t? Divorce.

We’ve got another question, an audio question, from Seth. Seth from Nashville. And here’s what he has to ask.

**Seth:** So, there’s a movie coming out that looks really good, but appears to share quite a few similarities to a movie that I’m currently writing. Is there any danger of me seeing this and it influencing what I’m writing? Would you avoid seeing it? Would you see it? Am I overthinking it? Is this really even a thing?

**Craig:** Well that’s an interesting question. Normally, people will say there’s a movie coming out that has similarities to what I’m writing, should I stop writing it. And we also say no. But this is an interesting question. Would you see a similar movie?

**Derek:** That is an interesting question. I would avoid it only – I don’t want anyone to think anything I did had anything to do with the other movie. So, I would avoid it until after you were done.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m the same way. I feel like if you see the other movie, it’s not even that you would be tempted or would have some kind of subconscious lifting of material from that movie. More to the point that I feel like suddenly your movie would be a response to that movie.

**Derek:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** I don’t want that. I want my movie to exist as its own, honestly, and without any kind of context of the other film. So, yeah, I think I would avoid seeing it. All right, we’ve answered that. Tice from Amsterdam – now, Derek–

**Derek:** Yes.

**Craig:** Tice from Amsterdam spells his name Thijs.

**Derek:** Ooh.

**Craig:** Now, when I saw that, I thought it was maybe Thigis.

**Derek:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not.

**Derek:** How do you know?

**Craig:** I looked it up. It’s Tice. Well, it’s Thijs.

**Derek:** OK.

**Craig:** By the way, I’m going to Amsterdam.

**Derek:** My last name is Dutch.

**Craig:** That’s right. But are you Dutch? Or did you just steal a Dutch man’s last name?

**Derek:** Well, I think we must be somewhere on the Dutch/German border, because half the world pronounces it Haas – actually most of the world pronounces it Haas, which is the German version. And my family pronounces it Haas. I actually did that test where they swab your thing?

**Craig:** Yeah. 23 and Me.

**Derek:** I did the 23 and Me. More England.

**Craig:** Oh, of course. Look at your face.

**Derek:** Whatever.

**Craig:** I say. So I’m going to Amsterdam in the summer?

**Derek:** Are you going to see Thijs?

**Craig:** Thijs. I don’t know if I’m going to see Thijs. It’s necessarily – he was not on my list.

**Derek:** Maybe if you answer his question sufficiently, you guys could have a drink.

**Craig:** He might open his home to me. Thijs from Amsterdam writes, “For various reasons, I’m a bit of a slow listener and it seems I’m getting more and more behind. I’m currently listening to Episode 173, from December of 2014, which is great so far. I have 20 more minutes to go.”

I love Thijs. He’s a good guy.

**Derek:** Why are we answering this question? He won’t get to it for another two years?

**Craig:** Well, Derek, be patient. Watch what happens.

**Derek:** OK.

**Craig:** “Every time you mention on the show things like tickets for live shows, t-shirts, and goodies, I obviously have no access to that. I know you cannot help me, but could you do me a favor? Could you leave a message for me in a future show, so I have at least something special to look forward to? I’ll probably listen to it in two to three years’ time.”

**Derek:** Wow.

**Craig:** Thijs. This is your special message. We are recording this in 2017. Early 2017. By your own reckoning, it’s probably 2019 or 2020. I hope to god the planet is still here. Right now it looks a little shaky. We love you Thijs.

**Derek:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Do you have anything?

**Derek:** I just think it’s going to be weird now when you show up on his doorstep in Amsterdam.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Derek:** And he has no idea what’s going on.

**Craig:** Why are you here? I mean, yeah, I listen to your show, but this is weird.

All right, those were some of the questions in our hopper, but I want to switch over to some Reddit questions now. Is there anything, by the way, that you would prefer to talk about, Derek?

**Derek:** I love answering questions.

**Craig:** So do I.

**Derek:** It makes it so easy.

**Craig:** I love it when you answer questions on Twitter and then sometimes if I see you doing it, oh…

**Derek:** Yeah, so I do regularly answer seven questions on Wednesdays and Sunday mornings. And I do it in the order received after I put the notice up. Mostly it’s questions about Chicago Fire or Chicago P.D. And then every now and then Craig, who does not watch either show, starts to answer the questions as though he is an authority on the show. And so you can–

**Craig:** It’s fun.

**Derek:** Maybe he’ll do it this week. You never know.

**Craig:** You know, you never know. So here’s a question from Reddit user Fighting Against Time. He says, “In a world where people are constantly looking for original voices and turning to web series to find them, like Insecure, Broad City, High Maintenance, et cetera, how the hell do you get noticed,” and this kind of goes back to Kyle’s question, “how the hell do you get noticed when everyone and their great aunt has some original thing on YouTube? The immediacy of film equipment and editing software has made it so anyone can put their ideas from page to screen with relative ease. But the oversaturation makes it so easy to get lost in the crowd. As an insider, what advice do you have to help great content be seen in a medium where somebody screaming at a cat gets five million views?”

All right, so Derek, how do you stand out?

**Derek:** Well, it depends, what do you want to do? Do you want to have your own television series? Your own web series? You still have to be original. Or you do unoriginal really well. I started watching this show Luther. Apparently it’s been on for a few seasons already, but I am catching up to the old. And it’s a cop show. It’s even got standard cop “I’m chasing a bad guy who is murdering cops, I’m chasing a serial killer who killed her parents, and she’s a criminal mastermind.” But they do it really well. The dialogue pops. The characters are interesting.

You can take something that’s already been done. You could do your own show about weed distribution like High Maintenance, but your voice has to pop. The voice doesn’t mean the original idea. The voice is the way you tell that story.

**Craig:** I agree. Look, there are ideas that are grabby for YouTube purposes, like somebody screaming at a cat. And I get that. But that’s not a destination for anybody. It is stuff that we sort of snack on. But it’s not a meal. And so the combination of things that has to occur to stand out, Fighting Against Time, is both a quality and a sense of extensibility. That there’s actually a show worth following. That there are characters worth following. That there are people’s lives that are worth investing in.

At that, to me, is the difference. It’s not so much how do I stand out. It’s how do I stand out and appear to be something that could go on. So, Derek is right. The idea sometimes is the least important thing. I mean, look, what’s the idea of Chicago Fire? Firefighters.

**Derek:** It’s a show about firefighters.

**Craig:** Right. What’s the idea about Chicago Med?

**Derek:** It’s a show about doctors.

**Craig:** Not only has there been a show about doctors before, there’s been many shows about doctors in Chicago.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** So the idea itself, it’s the execution, and the voice, and the characters. Those are the things that make it specific.

**Derek:** I might have said this before, but to me, when you’re writing something, the goal on almost every page is you need to surprise the reader. I can’t emphasize it enough. You want them flipping the pages, but you also want them to – as they’re going, think they know where this is going, and then it zigs. Even within a dialogue line. Some sort of surprise is – when you’re dealing with these old ideas – is the way you keep it fresh.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also feel like sometimes I worry that the generation that is being raised on YouTube now, like our sons, and my daughter, that they believe that the measure of success is something going viral, or something seizing America’s imagination briefly. But that’s not the case at all.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** That, in fact, what happens is those things pop for a moment, everybody freaks out for a week or two, and then they’re gone. Forever. And the people that made them are gone. Forever. Because it was just a thing that happened in a moment. In fact, it is this kind of strange workaday stuff that stays with us and I think gives you a career. I don’t see, with rare exception, I don’t see people getting careers because they screamed at their cat.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** All right. So here’s a question specifically for you, Derek. It comes Redditer King Cartwright. And he asks, “Derek, what kind of material do you look for when staffing your television shows? Do you ask for specs or original pilots? And what important traits do you look for in writers that you want in the room?”

**Derek:** A great question. I know in the old days and some other shows might do this, they wanted you to spec their show. We don’t want that. We look at original pilots. We want to make sure that whoever is writing has their own ideas. Has their own characters. Has their own wit and can write with surprise and, for lack of a better word, write fiercely. Nothing that’s just lying on the page. And I think it’s too easy if you were just trying to write our style, the style of our show. You already have all of those characters laid out for you, so you’re just riffing off of our characters.

And we found that the people who write the excellent spec pilots end up being our best writers.

**Craig:** Makes so much sense to me. I remember when I first started in the business. It was still the era of writing specs.

**Derek:** Write a Seinfeld. Remember?

**Craig:** It was write a Seinfeld. Exactly. And it seemed to me that all this would do is just engender an employee pool of people that were doing almost parodies of your show really. Because you’re not writing the show. You’re writing a copy of the show. It’s a strange thing. So it’s like a caricature. It’s just magnifying all of these things.

So, I think it’s actually great that you guys for original stuff. And then for writers that you want in the room, I mean, personality-wise? I mean, personality is obviously a huge thing for you guys, right?

**Derek:** Yeah. It’s funny. I think the more and more I get into it, the room part of it for me, personally, is overrated. We have a lot of smart people and a lot of people throwing out great ideas. But essentially the ones who can execute the ideas are the ones that stay around. And so having good ideas is definitely one part of it, but to me it’s a third. And the two-thirds is can they write. And I’d much rather have someone who was a bump on a log in the room who turns in a script that I realize I don’t have to work on.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, see, that’s the misery of the showrunner is that you have these people in the room, you’re relying on them, but if they don’t do the job well, you have to do it.

**Derek:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that’s just a disaster. OK. So, here’s a question from Huge 67. “What are the demographics of working screenwriters you know or know of? With a lot of fellowships specifically targeting diverse writers, have you seen a shift or predict seeing a bigger shift in the near future?”

**Derek:** Well, unfortunately in the time that I’ve been in the Guild, which is 17 years, I don’t think that there’s been much of a demographic shift. If it is, it’s been within two or three percentage points. But, I do know there are a lot of programs targeting diverse writers and a lot of programs targeting female writers, and specifically even that bilaterally, just based on gender. And so I know that it’s a problem within the Guild. And we’re certainly looking more and more for ways to diversify the staffs on the four shows that we have.

I’m hoping – hopeful – it’ll get better. It’s definitely – you definitely felt in the last three to four years a shaming that’s been going on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Derek:** Public shaming of the Guild and staffs. And I know there’s been a positive response toward it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in terms of the demographics of screenwriters I know, I do think there has been a notable increase in female writers. I’ve seen a notable increase. I’ve seen a notable increase just among people I’ve met, just offhand. And a notable increase of women being credited on films. So, that means that they’re being hired more frequently and writing more frequently.

So, I don’t know if the statistics yet reflect this, but it seems to me like there’s been an improvement in that area. That doesn’t mean that it’s where it should be. But, I just anecdotally I sense this. I need to look at the data to see if, in fact, that is true.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** But, in terms of seeing more black writers and more Latino writers, and more Asian writers, I have not seen.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** Now, because I’m a screenwriter, you know, I’m a lone wolf out there. You have a much better sense of it because you have staffs. So, it sounds like things are maybe slowly improving?

**Derek:** Yeah. And it’s funny, too, because when we ask for scripts when we know what are needs are going to be for the next year, we get scripts sent over from the agencies. And Michael and I and Matt Olmstead, who also is a showrunner on Chicago P.D., when we look at – we just look at the scripts with names on them. We don’t know – you know, you can usually tell what the gender is just by the name. But then once we’ve read the script, then we say, OK, these are the ten people we want to meet.

So, we’re not even thinking that way, but we do ask for the agencies to make sure you send us a diverse mix.

**Craig:** Would you ever consider something, I know some people do this, where they get scripts and they don’t see – they don’t even see the names?

**Derek:** Yeah, I’ve never thought about it, because I’ve never seen that done. I mean, we don’t ask for it that way.

**Craig:** Right. Well, that’s because you don’t care. [laughs]

**Derek:** [laughs] I just want the best.

**Craig:** I hear you, Derek. All right. Here’s a question from Redditer Bottom.

**Derek:** OK.

**Craig:** Bottom.

**Derek:** That’s the name? That’s like Shakespearean, right?

**Craig:** Bottom.

**Derek:** From Midsummer Night’s Dream.

**Craig:** I’m sure. I’m sure that’s what it means. Take that, Princeton. Baylor, woo! Here’s what Bottom wants to know. “I’ve listened for a while now. I notice that you and John are very good at having different POVs, even if you have opposing views. You’ll express them to each other clearly before dismissing John as a robot.”

Now, listen, I don’t dismiss him as a robot. I accurately label him as a robot. Bottom continues, “I direct and write, so I’m paid for my opinion. Sometimes I find myself in an awkward situation where my employer and I have opposing views, and sometimes I’m passionate about changes, or left dumbfounded about absolutely ridiculous suggestions. And it can be difficult to keep my cool. Do you guys have any suggestions, techniques that you use, either consciously or otherwise?”

Well, how do you keep your cool in these moments, Derek?

**Derek:** It’s experience. I think early on in my career, I felt the way you do, which is any change or suggestion that I didn’t feel merited a response from me would be met with haughty derision. But now I’ve just learned, one, good ideas can come from anywhere. And the best ideas should win. Two, you don’t have to get heated if your response is logically laid out. If you have the best response, it’s going to win. And if you don’t, sometimes you take one step backwards so you can take two steps forward.

I think you were the first one, Craig, to tell me that your first answer doesn’t need to be no. Your first answer should be yes, and then you take the time to figure out, OK, what’s the best way. Because maybe the way they suggested isn’t the best way.

**Craig:** Right. And so also when you say yes, even if you know the answer is no, saying yes gives you some time to then come back and say, all right, I’ve thought about it. It’s actually no, but here’s why.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** The difference is being heard. You know, so I would say, Bottom, that the key here is to first ask yourself what is it that you’re trying to achieve. Because when I’m thinking about these things, what I’m trying to achieve ultimately is make the script better, make the project better. Get it made. Right? All these things I want to do. But really at the end, get a movie made that does well.

My emotions in any given moment have nothing to do with that. Nothing. My pride and being right has nothing to do with it. My anger, my frustration, has nothing to do with that. So, what I try and do is put those in second position. I have feelings, you know, and there are times when you get that sinking feeling, and you just have to sort of say, OK, I’ll deal with that after. I will curl up in a ball after. Right now I have to be clinical about this. And I have to be part of a team that’s working on a movie together.

And if it gets to a point where they’re making suggestions that would destroy what matters, then, you know, I trot out my favorite line, which is, “I just don’t know how to write that.”

**Derek:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Which usually stops them in their tracks. Because I think everybody giving notes underneath it has maybe the suspicion that they’re wrong. You know? Like they’re a little worried, like, am I right?

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** So, people want to be heard. So, concentrate on hearing them and being respectful in that way. Put your feelings second. And I think you’ll find that actually you can keep your cool easier if you recognize that losing your cool has nothing to do with what you actually want.

**Derek:** And I think the moment you hit on is that time in the notes where you just say, “OK, give me time to think about that.” They’re not always expecting you to have an answer right there in that meeting. You write down the note. You say, “OK, give me time to think about that.” Then, when you come back with what you have thought about, a lot of times you’ll have solved maybe one of their problems without even knowing that that’s what it was. Oh, it’s the note beneath the note, as they say.

And, also, they really do judge you based on not only how you do on the page, but do I want to spend a year with this person? And if I’m in meeting one and that person is already fighting me tooth and nail on the most minor suggestion, then I’m going say, “When can I get rid of this person?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Derek:** “At what point can I get rid of this person? How much do I need them?” Anyway, it’s a collaborative business. I’ve learned that over doing this for a long time. Every part of it is collaborative. Unless you’re going to animate a movie that you’re voicing the characters, and you’re drawing the illustrations, and you’ve written it, and you’re directing it, then you’re going to have to collaborate with everyone. And so, work on it.

**Craig:** It’s so true what you’re saying that, you know, making movies, making television shows, it’s very hard. It’s arduous. The last thing you want is to be going into battle with somebody that is just fighting you all the time. There’s something that screenwriters do, or television writers, that I think is really counterproductive, and I always urge them to not do it.

Everybody involved in the making of something is talking about making the thing. A television show or movie. The only person not talking about that, at times, is the writer who is talking about their script. That script is not the thing that people are making. They’re making a television show or movie. So, I always caution writers to not get into a place where you become a defender of a document, because whether they love the document or hate the document, or love you, or hate you, the document is not the end point.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** So, everyone now shares a goal, except for you – that becomes, oh, well, yeah, OK.

**Derek:** [laughs] Right.

**Craig:** So, try and get in the same mind frame with everybody. Counterintuitively, by concentrating less on the document, you will end up being a better defender of the document. A more capable defender of the document.

**Derek:** Plus, I’ve found out that all these arguments you have in those first six months on a project, once the green light happens and you’re actually making it, all of those arguments go out the window. And now you’ve got a new thing that’s being made, which is the movie. And that argument you had six months ago about whether or not the guy would be eating a hot dog, that scene is gone. The hot dog thing that you argued for is long gone. And you will have time to put things back that you liked and all of those kind of things. But just get to that green light.

**Craig:** That’s right. You’re absolutely right. And this is something producers understand. This can be sometimes frustrating for writers when they feel like a producer is sort of going, oh yeah, we don’t have to do that. The producers just want to get to the place where they’re making the movie.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** They’re smart enough to know, and then we’ll do what we kind of want. That’s the big secret. This is the thing that studios don’t want us to know, but of course we all know it. The second that the movie gets made, you know, green light happens, they have lost a massive amount of control.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** Merely all control.

All right, so here’s a question for you, Derek. Derek, this is from Woodward or Bernstein.

**Derek:** This is Craig addresses me any time, by the way. If he calls me on the phone, “Derek! Derek!”

**Craig:** Derek! “I’d love to hear how Derek balances the demands of a career as a novelist,” oh boy, here we go.

**Derek:** Oh god.

**Craig:** “Balances the demands of a career as a novelist with those of a screen/TV writer, and especially if he has any tricks for how to easily switch between projects and mediums if he has to work on both a script and book during the same time period. I ask this as someone who has a first draft script assignment due in just a few days, and I am also handling notes from my book agent before she sends my manuscript to editors. Thanks.”

**Derek:** Great question. Yes, I’ve written five books while I’ve been doing this, and I have a sixth one that’s due in March, so I’m in the middle of that. As we speak, I don’t know how other people do it. I get up early in the mornings, before my kids get up. I get up at five in the morning. And I work for an hour and a half on writing a book. And then when that hour and a half is done, I’m done with it for the day. It’s the only way I can do it. I don’t know how other people do it.

Because then my kids get up, I make them breakfast, I get them off to school. Then I come in and I do my job that I’m supposed to do, this show-running on Chicago Fire. And I would never have somebody walking into my office and see me working on a book while I’m supposed to be working on the show.

That’s the only way I do it. I compartmentalize it. I’ve never had a problem flipping back and forth between projects, and as a TV writer, especially if you get in a position where you’re show-running, you will be flipping back and forth between episodes where something that happened in the past – you’re now in the future, then you got to go back to the past. And you have to write new scenes. And so that’s a skill that you should really try to master.

I mean, Craig, I know you’ve worked on multiple screenplays at the same time in totally different genres.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. The only way that I’ve been able to do it is to make sure that they’re at different stages. So, every project has a lifespan. You begin breaking a story, you write a script, then there’s revisions of the script. Those are three different things. I can’t break two stories at the same time.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** I can’t write two first drafts at the same time. I can write a first draft and then do revisions on something, or break a story and write a first draft. But, it’s hard. Honestly, it’s hard. I don’t like doing it and I feel like, I don’t know, sometimes I feel stupid, like I’m probably costing myself opportunities and things by saying I’m too busy and I can’t, but then I think, no, actually the reason that you get opportunities is that you actually concentrate on the jobs you have.

**Derek:** And you do a great job on them.

**Craig:** You try to–

**Derek:** If you spread yourself too thin, then you won’t be, yeah.

**Craig:** At that point, and we know writers who kind of have famously done this. You know, they went bananas and took every job. And then suddenly they failed at every job. How could you not? I panic if I feel like I don’t have enough time to do a good job. I literally start to panic.

**Derek:** Yep.

**Craig:** All right. Well, hopefully that helps you out, Woodward or Bernstein. Here’s a question more for me, but it’s for you as well. This is from Austin B, otherwise known as Time Machine 1994. “I’m curious on your thoughts on a few things, of which could be summed up in one answer.” That is an amazing sentence.

**Derek:** I want your thoughts on a thing–?

**Craig:** I’m curious your on thoughts on a few things of which could be summed up in one answer.

**Derek:** That might be a robot that wrote that.

**Craig:** [laughs] Maybe. But the rest of it sounds right. “I’ve heard before on the podcast that you, Craig, tend to look down on screenwriting pitch festivals. Have you changed your opinion on them? As a screenwriter from Florida, it’s hard to rub shoulders to get the deal, so pitch festivals seem like a really great way to get work out there. And if nothing, just to get practice at pitching and sharing your idea with strangers. Are pitch festivals a hopeless endeavor? A business to take advantage of writers? Or can there be a differentiation between pitch festivals that offer real growth, versus ones looking to make a quick buck? What would you like to see at a pitch festival?”

All right, well that’s a good question. I generally think that in fact they are a hopeless endeavor and also a business to take advantage of writers. And the reason why is precisely for what you just said, Austin. You’re a screenwriter from a Florida. It’s hard to rub shoulders to get the deal, so pitch festivals seem like a really great way to get work out there. The keyword is SEEM. They are aware that they seem that way. That’s why they exist.

I do not know of many success stories that come out of these things, or any success stories, but regardless, I always feel like if you had something that was worthy of being purchased by reputable people, it would have been purchased anyway one way or the other. I think pitch festivals by and large are kind of hokum and bunk. And, also, that’s not really how our business works. I mean, I judged the pitch contest at the Austin Film Festival, you know, the screenwriting conference this year. And it struck me that these people were mastering an art that simply doesn’t exist in Hollywood. There is no pitch something in a minute and a half art.

People really don’t pitch that much stuff like that anywhere anyway. That’s more like what movies tell you Hollywood is like. It’s actually not like that. There are much more substantive, lengthy discussions involved than these kind of rat-a-tat advertising sales-type pitches.

Derek, what’s your feeling about all this?

**Derek:** I couldn’t agree more. It feels like that was something that was done in the ‘90s and nobody does it anymore. I mean, if you look at what the studios make, they’re not making movies off of original pitches. And they’re certainly not going to hire you unless they know you can execute that idea.

**Craig:** Right. I’m with you on this. I just feel like it’s a little bit of a blind alley. And they are taking advantage of the fact that you don’t have a lot of opportunities, so they’re dressing themselves up as one. So, I would still say, yeah, be very, very cautious about spending money on these things.

**Derek:** Do you know I’ve never been to one. Even at the Austin Film Festival, I never sat in on those. I don’t even know what it is. It sounds like you’re doing a standup comic routine for a minute thirty.

**Craig:** Almost. So I judged the final round of it with Lindsay Doran and they get a minute or something and they come up, and it is a very practiced rat-a-tat patter. And it’s at this packed bar.

**Derek:** So it’s like log lines? They’re giving you basically?

**Craig:** It’s like, Jim is da-da-da, and blah, blah, blah. And the thing is some of them are really good, but they’re really good as a kind of strange kind of haiku that isn’t necessarily, I mean, ultimately you would say, oh OK, that’s a really interesting story. You seem like a funny, interesting person. I would read five or ten pages and see if it were any good.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** But the point is, we live in a time now where you can just put your script online. You can write a synopsis. It’s there. I don’t know.

**Derek:** And it seems like buying pitches is for people who have already sold scripts. Like they know that you can execute, so then they’re apt to hear your pitch, as opposed to I’m just going to buy your idea and hope you’re a good writer.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, if I say, look, I have an idea. This is what it is. I’ll just have a casual conversation about that. But, it’s not, yeah, you’re right. It’s not like studios are saying, whereas they did in the ‘90s, “Oh sure, yeah, I’ll have a meeting with so and so because they have an idea to pitch.” That just doesn’t really work that way anymore.

I think that the benefit of crafting these pitches is just maybe forcing you to think about your story in a structured way.

**Derek:** And public speaking, nothing is wrong with trying to be better at public speaking. It will help you in life.

**Craig:** I think that’s absolutely true. All right, here’s a question from Semi-Fake. “What questions should you ask when choosing an entertainment attorney?” And his second question, or her second question is, “What’s your favorite guilty pleasure movie?” Derek, questions to ask when choosing an entertainment attorney?

**Derek:** It’s funny, I was so young, and I’ve had the same one for 17 years, that I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t even know what to ask. I barely knew what Hollywood was, so I’m the wrong person to ask. But I feel like they should be telling you about themselves and what they’ve done and who their clients are. And so you don’t need to be asking questions. You should just know by who they’ve worked with whether or not they’re legit. That’s how I feel.

**Craig:** I agree. Same situation for me. I’ve had the same attorney for 23 years now, or 22. And, yeah, the question I asked was what can I do to thank you.

**Derek:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You know, I mean, and also what questions can you ask? Like how good are you at law? I guess do you have a degree? I mean, I don’t know.

**Derek:** Who are your other clients? That’s what I would ask.

**Craig:** Sure. But then they’re like, what do you care? You’re right. I mean, look, the thing about an entertainment attorney is if they do a good job, you keep them. And if they don’t do a good job, you change.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s as simple as that. Now, what is your favorite guilty pleasure movie?

**Derek:** Oh, do I have to feel guilty about them?

**Craig:** No.

**Derek:** I love Adam Sandler movies. And I have since they started coming out. Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison and Water Boy. And it’s great because my kids are now 11 and 10 and so I’m getting to show them, again. And they hold up. My kids are dying laughing at the same stuff I was laughing at 15 years ago.

**Craig:** That’s a good one. Favorite guilty pleasures. See, I would call those non-guilty pleasure movies.

**Derek:** Yeah, I don’t feel guilty about it.

**Craig:** I will watch Battlefield Earth if it’s on TV. I will watch it. I will watch it every damn time. Because it’s incoherent, but it’s a guilty pleasure. It’s just kind of remarkable in its badness. And so I’ll just watch it. I don’t know.

**Derek:** It’s good bad, versus just painful. Painful bad.

**Craig:** It kind of is good bad.

**Derek:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right, we’ll do a couple more.

**Derek:** Scientologists everywhere are writing in to the hotline. Do you guys have a hotline for very serious urgent questions from podcast listeners?

**Craig:** We have Twitter?

**Derek:** No, no, no, but I mean, is there a line that rings?

**Craig:** Oh, like a red phone?

**Derek:** That you pick up and they say, “Craig, how do I break into the business?”

**Craig:** Yes there is. [laughs] All right, here’s a question for Derek. This is from Ethan. “I was wondering how many drafts of a script you will go through before you are satisfied with the result? Have you ever found yourself doing too many drafts and just had to say enough is enough?”

**Derek:** Well, not the drafts that we write for ourselves. Michael and I send scripts back and forth. We typically do two to three drafts before we’re ready for somebody else to look at it. After that, you know, if it’s a manager who looks at it, or your representatives, or you’re ready to give it to a producer and you say, “Will you give this a quick read,” kind of thing. And then it’s on to notes.

But typically two or three drafts. But I’m not one of those who is doing 15 different versions of what… – If it’s not working at that point, that’s probably not the best way to spend your time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think probably because I’m in this routine of writing screenplays for studios, I don’t really have the luxury of–

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** You know, now, interestingly when I worked this script with Lindsay Doran, I wasn’t really doing drafts as much as pages. So there was no sense of a draft thing. And we would just rework, rework, rework.

**Derek:** Right. But you were also being paid, right? That was an assignment?

**Craig:** Yeah. I was being paid.

**Derek:** So it’s not a spec situation.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Derek:** I mean, when you’re on a movie, I think on Wanted we probably had 75 drafts before, you know, as we were shooting.

**Craig:** Geez Louise.

**Derek:** Yeah, I mean, like you said, it would be a scene here. And that constitutes a new draft.

**Craig:** Oh, well sure. Yeah.

**Derek:** You know, at that point you’re on all services, so you’re just doing whatever is needed that day.

**Craig:** Right. It’s a tricky thing to know when it’s done. You know? I mean, sometimes, you just have to look out for, I think Ethan, the syndrome of being afraid to show it, which can sometimes lead you to think, oh, I’ll just keep rewriting this forever. And then I don’t have to face the music.

**Derek:** The other big thing is that you get bored with your own idea. So, the scene that you wrote that when somebody read it they were shocked, surprised, whatever, well, on draft 10 they’re not surprised anymore, and all of a sudden that becomes vulnerable. And you have to tell yourself and your producer, “Remember how you felt when you first read that? That still holds.” I’m sure that’s even more for jokes.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. For sure. Yeah, jokes, exactly.

**Derek:** People who are dying laughing on the first draft, now they’ve read it 40 times and they’re like, “Don’t you think we need a punch up here on?” That would be hard.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is unfortunate, as some of stop writing jokes now.

All right, let’s go for – we have time for a couple more. Here’s kind of an interesting little specific craft question. This is from Flirsee. “How wary or aware should you be as a script writer…“ I love it when people call it script writers.

**Derek:** I like script writer. I’m a script writer. It sounds more British.

**Craig:** Well, and it’s also accurate.

**Derek:** I’m a script writer.

**Craig:** I’m a script writer. Script writer! “How wary or aware should you be as a script writer for weird repetitions in dialogue? For example, a line like, ‘Well, that went well,’ really bothers me because of the repetition. And I spend time looking for alternate words for either ‘well.’ Is this effort worth it? Or am I wasting time I could be spending elsewhere?

**Derek:** Oh, no, it’s worth it. I can tell you, we go through the scripts on our shows and if you see the same word three times, even like alternate character’s dialogue, I just think – it hits the ear wrong. And so, you know, if somebody says, “Really?” And then the next character says, “Really.” And the next character says, “Really,” you circle that. And you give it back to the writer. Find something else there. And I know you’re using “well” and “well” differently, but even that I would be like, it would hit the ear wrong.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I think this is probably the best sign that you’re a writer, Flirsee. Because that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re constantly looking for. And if you listen to our podcast and you hear some of the Three Page Challenges we do, we call people out on that all the time. Repetitions of words feel like glitches in the Matrix. It’s supposed to seem effortless and smooth. And it’s not effortless and smooth if you hear those repetitions. It’s just, yeah, your ear snags on it.

**Derek:** This sounds so obvious, but you should read your scripts out loud to someone. Read it to your wife, or your girlfriend, or your husband, or your mom and dad. Because you will find yourself as you’re saying words that you wrote out loud that looked so good on the page, and then they just make your mouth move in weird directions. Make you mealy-mouthed is what I was trying to say. Read your scripts out loud.

**Craig:** Absolutely. We recommend this all the time. Here is an interesting one. “My question is this,” from Croon 23. “Do you find screenwriters succeed making a living purely as writers, or do they often meld into directing, producing, and other aspects of film? Is this any more beneficial to getting your work made?”

**Derek:** The writers I know, most of them make their living just as screenwriters. But, what’s your passion? Do you want to direct? If you want to direct, and write and direct, then chase that. But if you’re just doing it because you think, oh well, I could do that, too, then you’re not going to be successful.

**Craig:** I agree. I don’t think there’s much value in asking a question like is this any more beneficial to getting your work made. It’s not beneficial if you’re not supposed to be directing your own work.

You know, look, I prefer to have somebody that is a better director than I am direct the things I write. I like that. So, you know, Mark Webb is going to be directing a movie that I wrote. He’s a better director than I am.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** By far. This is good news for me. Yeah, most of the screenwriters I know make their living purely as writers. A bunch of them as they get older will start to direct. Because, you know, the other thing about directing movies is you go away for a while. So, when you’re younger, you have younger kids. They’re in school still. It’s a little bit harder. But as you grow up, you know, and you grow older, then the opportunity maybe is a little more clear to direct. And there are some that are producers, too. But, yeah, there’s plenty of people that are–

**Derek:** But nobody is doing it calculatedly of career longevity. Yeah, if you don’t have a passion for doing the other things, then don’t do them.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that one. All right, let’s ask one last question here. “What’s the one thing you told yourself when you were just starting out that kept you motivated, even in the toughest of times?”

**Derek:** Let me think about that one. Do you have an answer?

**Craig:** No, because I didn’t tell myself anything. I was mostly just scared. It wasn’t like a mantra that I repeated. It was just my, “Uh…ugh.” That was it. That’s what I told myself. “Uh…ugh.”

**Derek:** [laughs] I’m trying to think. I mean, my thing is don’t be so hard on yourself. I think people try to be – they take every little slight – you have to have thick skin. I can’t say this enough. This business requires the thickest skin imaginable. The level of Internet trolling that goes on is nothing compared to just one note session on your script. And if you’re – you just have to be thick-skinned about your work and, I don’t know how else to say it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you said it beautifully. God, I wish I had something inspiring to say there. But the truth is, when I was first starting and I was trying to get going, I was mostly just scared. And panicky and nervous. And ambitious. And so I guess as I was telling myself was, “Mm…go. Work.”

**Derek:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Get.

**Derek:** Yes, work hard.

**Craig:** Work hard.

**Derek:** I know Michael and I were always – we were definitely always trying to do the unexpected. We were trying to zig when somebody would zag. We weren’t chasing what was the next thing that was going to be popular. You know, we weren’t trying to write a vampire movie because vampires were popular. We just tried to do things that interested us and we liked. And then always trying to surprise the reader. And then hopefully the director. And then hopefully the audience.

**Craig:** And now you have 20,000 shows on television.

**Derek:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Truly amazing.

**Derek:** We did just cross the – now Michael and I have produced over 200 hours of television.

**Craig:** Damn. That’s amazing.

**Derek:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** You guys are like, you’re going to be in museums, right? In the Museum of Television and Broadcasting?

**Derek:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Don’t you get like some kind of Hall of Fame thing?

**Derek:** I don’t think so.

**Craig:** A plaque?

**Derek:** No, I don’t think so.

**Craig:** Really?

**Derek:** No. I don’t think we’re going to get–

**Craig:** Do you get an island?

**Derek:** That would be…no. We were up at the Writers Guild doing that gambling, or what was that night? That poker night.

**Craig:** That was for the Veterans Program.

**Derek:** That was for the Veterans Program. We were doing this poker night. And they have a script library, which I just hadn’t been on that floor of the Writers Guild. I don’t spend a ton of time up there.

**Craig:** It’s the Foundation Library.

**Derek:** But I saw this library of all these scripts. And I’m looking, you know, and it’s in alphabetical order. And then I see the Chicago Fire pilot. And I look over and I see the Chicago P.D. pilot. And then I saw Wanted and 3:10 to Yuma. I was like, I am somewhere! I’m at least in the Writers Guild Library.

**Craig:** You’re in the Writers Guild Library. It’s huge.

**Derek:** [laughs] It’s huge.

**Craig:** That’s huge. Whenever, I don’t know why this is, but I’ll get these emails from the Motion Picture Academy saying, “We would love a copy of your screenplay for our library.” Like we would love a copy of Identity Thief for the Academy Library. And I’m like, oh OK, really?

**Derek:** [laughs]

**Craig:** All right.

**Derek:** OK.

**Craig:** All right. Did you see it? You want it for the Academy? OK. Anyway, oh, you want Scary Movie 4 in the Academy? OK.

**Derek:** Somebody is going to study this.

**Craig:** They’re completionists. You know, what can I say?

All right, well, that was an excellent show. Normally, we do a One Cool Thing, but you know, I’m always like trying to avoid the One Cool Thing.

**Derek:** Oh, OK. Well, you’re putting me on the spot.

**Craig:** No, no, no. I’m saying we don’t have to do it.

**Derek:** Don’t do it. OK. This microphone is cool.

**Craig:** This microphone is cool. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. And our outro this week comes from Bleak Gilliam. I feel like–

**Derek:** These are great names.

**Craig:** Like none of those names are real.

**Derek:** I want to steal some of these names.

**Craig:** Well, Godwin and Matthew are definitely real. But Bleak Gilliam. Amazing. If you have an outro, you can send us a link 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 is @johnaugust.

We are on Facebook, apparently, according to John. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment. And, Derek, do you know why people should leave us a comment?

**Derek:** Why?

**Craig:** John loves comments. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you will find transcripts. We try and get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all of the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. And also on the Scriptnotes USB drive at store.johnaugust.com.

That’s where John steals money from me, Derek.

**Derek:** Wow.

**Craig:** How much money do you think he’s making on this show?

**Derek:** How much money do I think John August steals from you? Well, here’s the way – I look at the raw numbers, OK. You guys have about 400,000 regular Scriptnotes listeners.

**Craig:** I don’t think that’s accurate.

**Derek:** Yeah. 400,000. Dude, we’re in a post-fact America.

**Craig:** Oh, right. Well, make it higher.

**Derek:** 400,000 each week. For a total of about 8 billion a year users. Now, if you consider maybe 10% of those buy t-shirts.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Derek:** What’s 10% of 8 billion?

**Craig:** Derek went to Baylor University. That’s Baylor University.

**Derek:** I don’t know math.

**Craig:** In Texas. What’s 10% of 8 billion? Really?

**Derek:** 800 million? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Very good, Derek. You just move the decimal. [laughs] Well, this was the best ending of the show of all time. We’re keeping all of that in there.

**Derek:** How much do agents make?

**Craig:** [laughs] This is why Derek’s agent is taking so much of his money. Derek, 10% is all of it. Thank you very much, Derek. You were a terrific guest. Thank you to all the people who wrote in questions and all of the folks on the Reddit Screenwriting Sub-Reddit that asked questions. We hope we gave you good answers. And we will be back next week with Mr. John August.

**Derek:** Yay!

**Craig:** Bye.

**Derek:** Bye.

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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 283 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We are starting off the New Year with a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at three samples from listeners and offer our honest feedback. We will also be discussing the DGA deal and its impact on writers.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: But first, really important follow-up. Craig, the t-shirts are back. People can order the Scriptnotes 2016 shirts for about one more week. So, they’re doing a second printing because people wanted them.

Craig: People wanted them.

John: If you want to get a replacement shirt for Melissa, this is your chance.

Craig: You know what? I probably should get a replacement shirt for Melissa. You’re right. Because I messed up that one. That’s a great point. Ah, I just got to remember now what she wanted.

John: Yes. I think she wanted a shirt that fits properly.

Craig: Yes, of course. And I like ones that are tighter. Okay.

John: Yeah. But, anyway, we’ll stop the podcast right now so everyone can order their shirts.

Craig: Yep. Good job everyone. You did it.

John: You did it. Some more follow-up. A few episodes we talked about reality and fiction and fact and our responsibilities. Will from Albany, New York wrote in to say, “One thing which drives my fiancé and I insane: empty coffee cups. It feels like on every television show and movie scene where a character has a takeaway coffee cup, the cup is so obviously empty that it’s painful to watch them pretend to drink from it.”

Craig, this annoyed you as well. I thought it had. And it turns out this was one of your previous One Cool Things.

Craig: Yes. So there’s an entire award for – Empty Cup Awards. And strangely enough I was watching television last night with Melissa, and that’s strange because I just don’t watch television, but she said, “Oh, the Menendez brothers. They’re doing a follow-up show on the Menendez brothers.” So I was like, all right, I’ll watch the Menendez brothers. Because I did in fact go to school with Lyle briefly before he got kicked out for plagiarism.

John: You went to school with everybody. It’s crazy.

Craig: Yeah, yeah. He was at Princeton. And then he got kicked out a second time for murdering his parents. Regardless, in betwixt the segments on the Menendez brothers, there was an ad for McDonald’s coffee. It was a very bad ad, I might say, because the premise was ridiculous.

There’s some sort of hip company and they’ve sent out their new intern on a coffee run. And he comes back with coffee from McDonald’s. And they’re all like, “Wow, this coffee is great and you saved us money.” No, in the world what would happen is if an intern comes back to the office with a bunch of coffees from McDonald’s, they throw them in his face and burn him.

John: [laughs] And then there’s a lawsuit, but yes.

Craig: Clearly.

John: Because the coffee was too hot. Yeah.

Craig: But the coffee cups were the most empty of all coffee cups I’ve ever seen. And Melissa said, “You know what else? Watch luggage commercials. Or just anything. Shows where people are picking up suitcases. Always empty.” Always. So, you’re not alone, Will. You’re not alone.

John: You’re not alone. Two episodes ago we talked about homeopathy and Jonathan Hall wrote in to say, “I was a little bothered by the way in which a distinction was drawn between science and other forms of knowledge. In particularly, religion and narrative. You explicitly linked homeopathy and religion, which I thought was problematic, as homeopathy makes pseudo-scientific claims about the physical world, claims which you – as you rightly pointed out – are scientifically falsifiable. But the key claims of religion are precisely not claims about empirical reality that can be falsified with physical evidence. Religious ways of knowing are rigorously distinct from scientific ways of knowing. So they shouldn’t necessarily be lumped together with pseudo-science.”

Craig?

Craig: Uh…what? I mean, look, if you are a religious person and you believe, you believe. You should not be concerned about my lack of belief. It doesn’t impact you at all. But I think it’s crazy to suggest that religion does not make claims about the physical world, or what you would call pseudo-scientific claims. Religion, in fact, claims how the world was created. It claims that the world is overseen by this presence of a god. There are an enormous amount of people in this country who believe that man and dinosaurs walked around at the same time and they were all on Noah’s Ark.

Of course, I mean, what? In Catholicism, they have an entire branch of just investigating whether miracles have occurred. The whole point of a miracle occurring is that something has happened in the physical world that is miraculous, and therefore not scientifically provable.

I’m sorry, Jonathan. I disagree.

John: I think my frustration is that when you ask people to take something on faith, they can take more things on faith and it just keeps snowballing. So, while I agree with you that people’s religious beliefs and religious faiths can be wonderful things, I think so often that same muscles that they’re using to have religious faith, they are trying to apply the things that can’t be scientifically tested, and that is my frustration with homeopathy.

Craig: Correct. I’m not really sure what a religious way of knowing is, so I don’t know how you can make it rigorously distinct from scientific ways of knowing. I know what scientific ways of knowing are, because science spells them out very clearly in steps. These are the steps you follow to pursue truth and knowledge. Religion has no such thing. I think you’re supposed to pray or look inwards, or imagine stuff. Sometimes people hear the voice of God talking to them. Sometimes they see God talking to them. Sometimes those people are highly respected, and sometimes they’re wandering around the street yelling at their own hand.

What is this religious way of knowing that’s so rigorously distinct? I don’t know what it is. That may just be my deficiency.

John: I believe there are scientists who are very, very good scientists who are also deeply religious. And they have found a way to sort of keep these worlds separate in ways that are meaningful.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Fantastic. That’s awesome. I hope that they are not practicing homeopathy, because that would make me question their scientific rigor.

Craig: Deeply. And speaking of which, we got another letter in. Letter. I’m old fashioned, aren’t I? Something else came over the transom. From Jennifer Fisher. And she writes, “If there’s an archetype for the cynic/skeptic/devil’s advocate” – three different things – “that’s me. But I think you may be wrong about homeopathy.” John, are you ready?

John: I think I might be ready. I might be wrong. So prove me wrong.

Craig: This is Jennifer now. “I’ve taken certain homeopathic potions without knowing what the side effect symptoms are or even that symptoms were to be expected. And experienced specific textbook symptoms. I’ve also had great success with Oscillococcinum, both before I knew anything about homeopathy and afterwards. Its effects then and now are exactly the same. You will probably put that down to the placebo effect.” Correct. “Which I also strongly believe in.” Not really. Sorry, I’m editorializing as I read the question.

“But when I first started taking Oscillococcinum, I highly doubted it would work. Call me an idiot, as I expect you will.” We’re almost there. “But I was surprised that as two creative beings you were so condescendingly dismissive of other folk’s beliefs and practices.” John?

John: Yeah, so I didn’t want to edit that down, because other folk’s beliefs and practices, that’s the religious aspect of it all.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yeah, come on, you’re stepping on my beliefs. It’s like, well, you know what? Science–

Craig: You’re beliefs are stupid. [laughs]

John: There’s science. And so let’s unpack some stuff in here. Placebo effect, yes, it’s meaningful. Oscillococcinum, like oh it worked for me. Well, what did it actually do? Did it cure your cold? The cold that was going to go away anyway? That is, you know, sugar pills can do that. They can do exactly nothing and that nothing will actually work because you were going to get over that cold anyway.

Craig: What do you do with this person?

John: I don’t know. I mean, here’s the frustration. She’s very bright. She’s articulate. She’s able to explain her case to a point. But at the same point I can’t do anything with this. Basically you’re saying like I know it may be a placebo, but it works for me. Well, you know what? Maker’s Mark whiskey works for me, too, but I’m not claiming it has any scientific validity. I’m just saying it’s helpful.

Craig: Well, Jennifer kind of gives it away at the end when she says, “I was surprised that as two creative beings,” and somehow being creative we should, I guess, we divorce ourselves from reason. “You were so condescendingly dismissive of other folk’s beliefs and practices.” And there it is. She felt that we were condescending to what she felt was true. This is her belief and practice.

Jennifer, you do not have a right to a belief and a practice without also somebody looking at it and saying, “That’s stupid,” if, in fact, the belief and practice is stupid. If you tell me that you strongly believe in ghosts, I’m going to tell you that is stupid. I’m not saying you’re stupid. I’m saying that is stupid. Because it is. Because there aren’t any ghosts. Nor are there Oscillococcinum shimmering microbes. Nor is there anything in an Oscillococcinum pill other than lactose and glucose.

You believe something that’s dumb. And so, yes, I am condescendingly dismissive of it because it deserves condescending dismission. Which is not a word.

John: But it should be a word, because we all know what that word means.

Craig: It should be a word. Exactly. So, first of all, you say that you’re an archetype for the cynic/skeptic/devil’s advocate. Those are three different things. Cynicism is not skepticism. Skepticism is not devil’s advocacy. You seem like a devil’s advocate, kind of, but mostly you seem like somebody who believes what you want to believe and you don’t want other people making fun of it. But we can make fun of it because it’s stupid and wrong. We’re allowed to. That’s part of our gig as reasonable people. Just as you point at other people who believe absolute nonsense and say, “That’s stupid and wrong.”

You say you’ve taken certain homeopathic potions. The use of potion is remarkable to me. Without knowing what the side effect symptoms are, or even that symptoms were to be expected. I don’t believe you. Why would you take something without knowing what it does or why it does it? Why would you do that? You just randomly drink stuff? I don’t believe you. You’re not running double-blind experiments on yourself. That’s ridiculous.

You’ve had great success with Oscillococcinum. I don’t know what that means. You can’t define it. [sighs]

John: Yeah, she’s random study out of a group of one person. Yes.

Craig: And then here’s the deal. Exactly. You are literally doing the thing that science is designed to prevent. Right? If you take a – imagine, Jennifer, a 1000-sided die. That’s a big die. Two dice. But let’s take one die. One thousand-sided die. And you roll that thousand-sided die and it comes up 1,000. And then you roll it again and it comes up 1,000 again. The odds of that happening twice in a row is a million. One in a million. It’s going to happen. Do you understand?

Science is there to aggregate an enormous amount of things to rule out these little blips and blobs. Your individual experience with homeopathy is meaningless. The fact that you think it’s meaningful is not my problem. It’s your problem. So, if you thought I was condescendingly dismissive in your beliefs and practices before, I’m sure at this point now you are ready to delete us from your podcast list.

But since we don’t get paid, it’s all right.

John: Yep. The last point I would like to make is that if a person individually chooses to take homeopathy, I think that’s really dumb. But whatever. They’re making their own choice. My frustration is sort of the whole back half of that episode which is that like there’s actually a cost to those choices. And there’s a societal and an economic cost, billions of dollars cost, to this. And it’s precluding other valid treatments from the funding and the awareness that they should be getting. And that is my real frustration with her reply here is that I’m dismissive of her beliefs. Well, I’m actually concerned that by taking homeopathy seriously, it’s like selling ghost insurance. You know what? Some people really believe in ghosts, so do we need to have ghost police out there? Because some people really genuinely believe in ghosts, so maybe the police need to start responding to ghost emergencies. I don’t think they should.

Craig: You’re being condescendingly dismissive. [laughs]

John: Yes. And so, yes, I’m being condescendingly dismissive by comparing it to ghost emergencies, but I think they’re equally real and valid.

Craig: That’s right. That’s right. Literally, there is as much chance of Oscillococcinum being an effective medicine as there is ghosts.

John: We’re going to get so many ghost emails after this.

Craig: Good. Good. By the way, let’s weed you all out. I don’t care.

Look, you know who ends up losing money on this gig? John August. Because he’s the one making all the money. We know that. This whole t-shirt thing. [sighs]

John: All right. Let’s get to happier news. Back on Episode 238, Dana Fox was our guest. And she was amazing. And so she talked about how she planned on segueing from being a writer-producer to being a writer-director. And this past week she did just that. She directed an episode of New Girl which aired this last week. And it was fantastic. So I’m just so happy and so proud of Dana Fox.

But it’s also a great segue to the other bit of news that happened this last week which was the DGA deal. So, the Directors Guild of America negotiated a new deal with the AMPTP, which is the group that represents the studios, which “more than triples residuals for members working on original content in the highest subscriber tier, among many other adjustments.” So, it’s basically how much the members are going to get paid for different things for the next three-year contract.

Craig: Right.

John: Why this matters to our listeners is the DGA deal tends to set the parameters for what the WGA deal is going to be. And that’s heading into negotiation right now.

Craig: Yeah. Well, it doesn’t tend to set it. It sets it. This is the deal. The way the AMPTP, that’s the consortium that represents the studios, they put together a package. There are all these terms in the package. Your minimum earnings. That number will raise a little bit. And how we pay out residuals. We’ll raise that a little bit. Here they’re saying instead of all these residuals getting pushed into a big pie and then split up equally among say Netflix shows, if your show gets really, really subscribed to you get more.

But all of that payment is one big number that they’re saying over the next three years, because these contracts are three-year contracts, we’re going to pay out this much money. That’s the number. Now, when the WGA sits down, it can figure out a different way to divide that number up. But that’s basically the number. You know, makes sense, because it’s not like the DGA is going to do this and then the WGA is going to get a better number, because the DGA will turn around and go, “What? What? No. Why would you give you them more?” So, that’s the number.

John: If the numbers are the numbers, what ends up being sort of fascinating about these deals are the things that aren’t about the numbers, which are about sort of specific concerns that an individual guild raises. And this is the one that sort of set off some alarm bells this last week. So, this is also from the DGA press release. “Another focus of the DGA was to address the lack of opportunities for those who aspire to become career directors by seeking to curb the practice of gifting limited first time directing experiences to individuals who are not serious about a career in directing.”

So, this is a new provision that’s in the contract that all first-time television directors in drama, who do not have prior directing experience, or who have not completed and enrolled in a studio-sponsored television director development program, or attend an orientation program provided by the DGA before their employment begins. Basically you have to be in one of these sessions in order to be a first-time drama TV director.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, Craig, you and I don’t work in TV, but a lot of our friends do. And a lot of them were really pissed off at this.

Craig: Yeah. Well, so this is absolutely a thumb in the eye of showrunners and to a lesser extent staff writers. The DGA resents, I think, systematically the fact that writers are in charge in television. And writers hire directors, specifically the showrunners, who are this hybrid of writer-producer. So, writer and employer. They hire directors. They determine who gets a directing job. And they will often give first timers a shot, whether they are writers on staff, who they say, okay, we’re giving you an episode to direct, or sometimes the actors. They’ll say we’re giving you an episode to direct. Sometimes those actors turn out to be fantastic directors.

Jonathan Frakes, you know, who made one of the best Star Trek movies. He started by getting episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation to direct. They don’t like this so much because they feel like writers are now gifting – they’re saying – gifting these gigs. And they’re putting this in as this weird kind of roadblock. It’s a somewhat impotent roadblock. I think that there’s some nervousness about how frequently this orientation day is going to be offered. If they offer it every single day, it’s not much of a roadblock. If they offer it once a month, it’s a huge roadblock. Because they’re saying, okay, we offer this on the first of the month. If you decide on March 2 that you want your writer to direct the episode two weeks from now, they can’t until they come here and do our orientation program. And god forbid you’re shooting in Louisiana. They got to fly them to New York or LA.

So, it’s an anti-writer, anti-showrunner thing. A lot of people are concerned that it is going to basically limit the opportunities of people that could be new directors. A lot of those people are women, are people of color. It’s going to keep a lot of the jobs in the same old pool of the standard DGA director who tends to be a 55-year-old white male. We, I believe, unfortunately can do nothing about this right now. It’s done, as far as I can tell.

John: So let’s talk about a little bit more of the problem, and then we’ll talk about the remedy. So, the reason I’m bringing this up in relation to Dana Fox is like Dana Fox was a first-time director of a television show. It’s a comedy, but if the same sort of basic rules apply. She knocked it out of the park. She did a fantastic job. But she and Aline Brosh McKenna theoretically would have had to have gone through an orientation to be allowed to direct an episode of the show. In the case of Aline, to direct an episode of the own show that she has created.

So she has been supervising directors all this time, but to direct the episode she’s supposed to get clearance from the DGA and go through this orientation to do it. That’s kind of crazy.

Craig: Yep.

John: So, I tweeted about sort of my frustrations over all this and Paris Barclay, who is the head of the DGA, tweeted back at me saying like with a link to this is the sort of the backstory of why we’re doing this. And it was this diversity report the DGA did. I didn’t really buy it. They’re basically trying to claim that like, oh, because first-time directing deals are so important we need to make sure that it comes from a pool of diverse candidates. And it looked very much like a solution in search of a problem. It was a way of sort of defending what I think is ultimately going to result in fewer first-time directors being hired for these projects because it’s not just that I need to pick a director to direct that episode next week. Directors for TV series are slotted out months, and months, and months in advance. And are you going to be able to say to this first timer, like, can I guarantee that you’ll actually have had that orientation session when I’m hiring you for something that’s six months away. Maybe you can’t. And so therefore you have to go pick somebody safer. And I worry that it’s going to actually preclude opportunities rather than opening opportunities.

Craig: It certainly seems like it to me. I can’t imagine how they can argue with a straight face that this is in order to promote diversity. They’re saying we don’t want new people. We want to just use the people we have. We prefer to have the people we already have. The people you already have are not as diverse as the population of the United States. That’s a fact.

So, on its face that is just wrong. It’s a wrong claim. And there’s no possible way that this is somehow going to – I mean, they’re saying we want to make sure that the pool – what does that mean? I don’t even know what that means.

First of all, to be clear, they can’t tell the companies who they can and can’t hire. It’s not like you show up at this orientation and they go, “You’re not the right kind of person. You can’t do this.” You’re doing it. You just literally have to sit there. You can play Candy Crush on your phone all day during this thing. There’s no grade. They can’t flunk you. They’re not allowed by federal labor law to prevent you from working if you pay your dues and you sign a contract.

In fact, if they really impose this and it becomes a huge problem, I think what you’re going to see is a lot of first-time directors becoming Fi-Core non-members of the DGA. And then you don’t have to do this damn thing at all. Yes, you still need a DGA-covered contract, and you’ll have to pay a slightly reduced rate in dues. You’ll still get residuals. You’ll still be covered by the DGA contract. But you won’t have to do this other stuff. Because it’s stupid.

Sometimes unions, man, they just – argh.

John: Yeah, it is frustrating. So, let’s talk about what the remedies are here. So, because writers are the most frustrated by this development, you could imagine becoming a point of discussion in the WGA negotiations, but it’s not really part – it’s not part of our contract. So, it doesn’t seem like a useful thing to sort of try to argue with the AMPTP while we’re doing our own negotiations. If it manifests in a way that it feels like it is precluding who studios can actually hire, then that is an actionable thing. And that feels like it’s a whole separate lawsuit situation. That’s like a labor practices kind of thing.

But it’s not a negotiation you go into a room and talk it out.

Craig: No, we don’t really have standing to argue about this in negotiation. First of all, the people that are most aggrieved are the showrunners, but they’re aggrieved in their capacity as producers. A union doesn’t represent employers. It represents employees.

Now, we can certainly say on behalf of our employees, on behalf of writers who want to be first-time directors that this seems onerous. And the companies can say, “Well, sorry. We’ve done it. That’s it.” They’re not going to get involved in some sort of tit-for-tat war. They’re not going to give the WGA some sort of return clause that allows them to mess around with the directors. Frankly, the AMPTP likes the directors far more than they like us. That’s why they make the deal with them first. And these are the little kinds of rewards they get. You know?

They’re going to keep chipping away at these things. And the only way to prevent, honestly, is for the WGA and the DGA to make amends and achieve some sort of detente. I cannot emphasize how apart the two unions are right now in terms of their leadership and philosophy. So, believe me, I don’t say this lightly. I’m not saying, oh, and it could happen next week. No. No. It won’t.

John: If the same kind of thing were presented but it was the WGA rather than the DGA, there would have been fire in the streets. Like basically that any writer who is going to be hired to do something has to go through an orientation program ahead of time, no one would have put up with it. And it’s so strange that we look at directors as a different class of things. This was a thing that the DGA could do that the WGA could never do.

Craig: Well, they have been flexing their muscle about this TV director thing for a bit now. In the last negotiation they were getting terms about scripts. That the director needed a chance to have the script with enough time to prepare. They know that in features the director is treated like royalty and in episodic television, which is – as we all know – that’s where all the employment is right now, the director is not. And so they are clearly pivoting to fight on behalf of the television directors. It’s interesting how both unions are becoming more television-oriented. That is why I think you’re going to start seeing more and more of this.

The DGA does not like the fact that writers are in charge in television.

John: Yeah. So, one of our very favorite features on Scriptnotes podcast is the Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay, or their pilot, and we take a look at them and offer our honest opinions. You can read along with us if you’d like to because all of the scripts we’re going to be talking about, the PDFS can be found in the show notes links. Just keep scrolling or go to johnaugust.com. You can see these pages.

So all three of these writers or writer teams sent in these things asking for our honest feedback, so we are going to be very honest as we do it.

Now, oftentimes it’s just me and Craig talking, but it’s always much more fun when we have a very special guest on. And so I’m so excited for our very, very special guest. One of our favorite people in the world, Kelly Marcel, welcome back to the podcast.

Kelly Marcel: Thank you. Hello everybody.

John: So, Kelly Marcel, you are the writer of many movies, but the one that we sort of like all fell in love with you for was Saving Mr. Banks. What have you been working on? I hear you’re working on a project with a certain fella.

Kelly: With which certain fella?

John: A certain fella who you have romantic feelings for? A certain former Scriptnotes guest, Steve Zissis. I hear you’re working on a project with him. Is that accurate? Fair to say?

Craig: Yeah, you guys have been cooking something up?

Kelly: We’ve been working on a project together. We’ve actually been working on two projects together. So, we just finished – workwise we just finished Cruella for Disney. And in real-life we’ve been working on making a miniature Marcel-Zissis.

Craig: Oh. Mini-Ziss.

John: The product of this things is about to hit the air, and we’re so excited for you.

Craig: To extend the analogy, we are going to have some notes. Congratulations on your new baby. It’s a great start. However, we have some concerns. Is that the penis? Is that what it’s going to be? Or–?

Kelly: He’s terrible Greek-looking.

Craig: Already. But he’s not born, you know. You know what? We like the Greek. It’s just too much Greek.

Kelly: Yes, can we tone the Greek back a little bit?

John: I think really the audience testing is showing us, like the top two boxes are strong, but there’s definitely areas we can work on. We can tighten some things up.

Craig: Yeah. We love, I mean, the feet we love. So let’s not even talk about those. Those are great.

John: Oh, god. Baby feet are the best.

Kelly: Feet good. Snout good.

Craig: The snout is terrific. Tests very, very well. It’s just…it’s the Greek. So, we’ll – we have work to do. [laughs]

Kelly: I’ll let Steve know.

Craig: I hope he has Steve’s eyes. That’s really the only important thing. Honestly, you know, the blimp face eyes. I mean, for those of you who remember back in podcast whatever it was when we it was our live show in Austin and we came up with a pitch for a lonely blimp that had floated away. I think it was the best movie idea we’ve ever come up with on the fly in one of these shows.

Kelly: I still think we have to write that movie.

Craig: We probably should. And Steve did this face of the blimp. And his poor – like his puppy dog eyes. He’s blimpy dog eyes. Well, congratulations. That’s very exciting.

Kelly: Thank you.

John: We’re all very excited.

Kelly: Thank you.

John: All right. Let’s get to our work. We have listeners who have written in with some three pages for us to take a look at. Let’s start with No Man’s Land by Julian von Nagel and Gathering Marbet.

Craig: We have some amazing names today. Everyone. I think all three of them we have awesome names. I don’t know if Godwin is like, look, my name is Godwin Jabangwe, so I need people to kind of match with that. Like Julian von Nagel and Gathering Marbet.

John: So good. I went with the Marbet. But Marbet is another fair guess for that name.

Craig: It depends on how Frenchie they want to be about it.

John: Yeah. So everything is French to me now. Let me read the synopsis for this script for people who do not have it in front of them. So, we open inside a hospital room in an alternate universe with ‘80s cyber-punk feel. Rusted tubes pump a murky liquid into the back of a middle-aged woman’s head. She lies motionless, slack-mouthed, and covered in sores.

The window opens. Eli, in his 20s, enters, a satchel slung over his shoulder. He pulls a makeshift device out of the satchel, switches it on, and shows it to the woman who we learn is his mother. He mentions he is pretty damn close, thanks to the poor rats. Eli proceeds to apply medicine to his mother’s sores. He tells her how security around the hospital has tightened up, but nothing can keep him out.

He promises to get her out of the hospital soon, before slipping out a window as a nurse enters the room.

We pull back to reveal Quo has been watching Eli all along. He instructs the security officer not to block Eli’s access to the hospital. On his way up to the hospital rooftop, Quo debriefs an unseen voice on Eli’s progress with the device. The voice asks about Eli’s father. Quo assures him that Eli’s father is dead. Quo watches Eli disappear into the streets below, vowing to pick him up. And that’s the bottom of our three pages for No Man’s Land.

Kelly: Ohhh.

Craig: Mm.

John: Who wants to start? Craig, do you want to get us going here?

Craig: Happy to. Happy to. We have some issues, Julian and Gathering. I got a little tripped up right from the very first line. Alternate universe, ‘80s cyber-punk aesthetic. You don’t necessarily want to announce to me that it’s an alternate universe with an ‘80s cyber-punk aesthetic. What you want to do is put me in the middle of a movie. And I will sense from your description that I am in an alternate universe and that I’m experiencing some kind of aesthetic. Many readers will not know what ‘80s cyber-punk aesthetic is. I would like to say I am one of them. I’m pretty familiar with cyber-punk. And I’m familiar with the ‘80s. But I don’t know the specific sub-genre of ‘80s cyber punk. So, I’m not quite sure what that’s about.

So, I got a little hurky-jerky from the start there. There is this hospital room is not hospital room the way we think of them. So, that’s probably how you would get that across. You know, you’d let the reader intuit this. The window bulged, which I didn’t understand. Because that sounded sort of metaphysically weird to me. Then this kid comes in and starts doing stuff that I think is supposed to be mystery. We’ve talked a lot about mystery versus confusion. I was mostly confused here. But I understood that a lot of it was mystery. I don’t know what the device is. I don’t know what it means that it turns on, but that’s okay, I’m sure I’ll find out.

I don’t know what the deal is with the poor rats. I’m sure I’ll find out. What I do know is this. This is his mother. Okay? And she is very, very sick. And she is in a lot of pain. And this dude is chattering in a way that did not feel appropriate for that. He’s giving us a little bit of an info dump. “You never kept me out of anything. How many times did you have to look up the lighter fluid before you gave up and got me gloves and a face shield?” It’s almost bad comedy about his recklessness and how he used to be a kid. And she groans. His mother groans, still motionless. She wants to tell him something. He just keeps yapping over her. “Hey, don’t worry about me. I’m not going to blow up myself.”

Eli, shut up. Right? Your mom is very much in pain and trying to tell you something. I got very, very – the relationships were not functioning for me. I mean, it was like, okay, here’s Quo. He’s watching. But Quo is apparently going to talk to somebody on a roof. Who is on the roof? Who hangs out on a roof? So, I had many issues here.

John: Kelly Marcel, how did you read this?

Kelly: I’m in agreement with most of what Craig said. And apart from Craig said I know this is his mum, I actually didn’t know it was his mum until we were well into him talking about the lighter fluid and all of that kind of stuff.

I felt like when he came through the window, I couldn’t really discern whether he was talking to the device that he had just switched on, or whether he was talking to the mum on the bed. So that threw me completely. I didn’t know who he was talking to. And also the description of him – resilient in spite of himself, the cautious gene just isn’t there – kind of took me off the page for a bit, because I had to sit there and think about what that actually looks like. Like what is that? How do you act that? How do you play that? I’m not quite sure how that’s telling me who this character is immediately.

And then tonally, and I think Craig was just saying this, I couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to be funny or whether it was supposed to be serious because of things like the conversation about the lighter fluid and his mum trying to talk, who is clearly in an enormous amount of pain and him not allowing her to talk. So, on page two I kind of don’t know tonally where I’m at.

That said, all in all I was kind of intrigued by it and I would have continued reading, because I did want to see where it was going to go.

John: I agree with you. I was actually intrigued enough that I would have read a few more pages. I had the same issues that you guys did, especially with looking at sort of the words on the page. I wasn’t actually so bothered by alternate universe/’80s cyber-punk aesthetic, because I had a vague sense of what it was. But by highlighting that at the very start, I stated reading the things in here and reading them with this like, okay, it’s like a cyber-punky kind of feel. And it was a useful shorthand for me. I don’t think I would do this personally, but it didn’t bug me so much to call it out as cyber-punk from the very start.

What did bug me was that a lot of the descriptions – there were just a lot of extra words thrown in that I thought hurt you sentence by sentence. So, looking at this first paragraph, “The uppermost screen, ducted to the ceiling, casts a SICKLY GLOW while emitting a RELUCTANT BEEPING.” I don’t know what ducted actually means. Like attached to the ceiling? Attached to the ducts of the ceiling? Is it duct-taped? And then what is a reluctant beeping?

Craig: You know, like beep. Beep.

John: That’s what it is.

Craig: Beep.

John: It’s Steve Zissis’s not really wanting to beep but kind of has to beep.

“Rusted tubes hang.” Well, pipes rust, but do tubes rust? I think of tubes being plastic. So, word-by-word I kind of got knocked off of the track. And I think if I would ask for anything it’s just to clean up a lot of this stuff in this first bit so we can get to the business which is that this guy is coming in and he’s talking to his mother. It’s not a terrible version of like monologue-ing to somebody in the bed, but it’s not acknowledging that she’s in pain or like sort of what he’s trying to do.

Kelly: Right.

John: If he’s trying to keep the one-sided conversation going to sort of not acknowledge that she’s in a lot of pain, I get that, but I wasn’t feeling that dynamic here on the page.

Craig: Yeah. I circled reluctant beeping as well because that’s nonsense. And I think a lot of times people do this. They get a little purple with these things. They forget how they read things. You know, so, you have the first paragraph, “…a tall, bulky machine with CLUSTERS OF KNOBS, switches, and several monitors precariously stacked on top of each other.” Or, there’s a large medical machine. The uppermost screen casts a sickly glow while emitting a beep – or while beeping. You know, we don’t really need – the tubes with murky liquid. Oh, each tube administers – this is – see, I really got tripped up on this stuff. Each tube administers a specific drug through needles that puncture the back of a middle-aged woman’s head. Ooh, okay, well that’s creepy. Except she’s lying motionless on a heavy-framed hospital bed. So how do we see needles going into the back of her head?

Kelly: Mm-hmm.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And, you know, people might think, oh, it doesn’t matter. No, this is exactly the kind of conversation that people have all the time. And the conversation is entitled how do we shoot this. And believe it or not, every time you do these things and you’re not clear about them, it stops people. Even if they don’t know why they’re being stopped. Although, I have to admit, I realized I made a mistake. Quo – there is no one on the roof. Someone is talking in his ear in an ear piece. But I think Voice (O.S.) is the wrong thing. That should be Voice and then in parenthesis it should say (earpiece). O.S. means off-screen but present, to me.

John: That is a fair assessment. So, let’s talk about Quo here at the end, because we get to the surveillance footage and then we’re seeing his perspective on all this which in general can work. So, you established your main character and you establish the people watching the main character. But Quo’s first dialogue here frustrated me. He says, “However he’s getting in, don’t block it. I don’t have room for oversights.”

Craig: What?

John: I have no idea what that sentence could mean.

Craig: It’s contradictory.

Kelly: Well, also we just saw how he got in. He’s watching him.

Craig: [laughs] And then there’s that. So, there’s like, wow, there’s many, many sins in this one bit of dialogue. Kelly is absolutely right. This guy is watching. He knows how he’s getting in. And if he’s saying, “I’m glad he’s getting in, don’t block the window.” Then it’s not – I don’t have room for oversights. That would mean… – He should say, “It’s an oversight, but I’m OK with it.” Right?

Kelly: Right.

John: Yeah. I was thinking oversights as like a different word. Like you’re assigning an oversight. It’s just weird. It didn’t feel like a good English sentence. And then Quo says, “It turns on.” “And?” “And nothing. He’s experimenting with rats. I’ll get eyes on that.” So, it turns on is the device, but like it was a weird thing. I wanted to single out that they’re really interested in the device and not the kid from the start. It tripped me up there.

Craig: John, don’t you find it a little odd that we get an enormous amount of description of the medical equipment surrounding this middle-aged woman, but this device, which is apparently important, it gets the following description: makeshift device.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think we could do better than that, right?

John: I think we could, too.

Kelly: And also it actually turns out they are – I mean, yes, they’re interested in the device, but then it turns out that after that they’re not interested in the kid, the device, or what he’s doing. They’re interested in his dad.

Craig: And then there’s that.

Kelly: There’s a lot of misdirect in three pages in terms of what are these people actually interested in.

Craig: Well, and that, you know, this is the thing. So we’ve done an entire episode about balancing mystery and confusion. And I think that Julian and Gathering, they clearly get the difference, and they have put in a lot of mysteries without necessarily being confusing. I think they could say, look, we’ve clearly indicated that these are supposed to be mysteries, but at some point you have so many mysteries, you don’t know which one to pay attention to. And they all just mush into equal value.

John: All right. So, should we move onto our next Three Page Challenge?

Kelly: Yes.

John: Craig, do you want to do the description on this one?

Craig: All right. This is All the Ghosts are Girls by Christine Trageser. I told you, all of our names, what do you think?

Kelly: Trageser, I reckon.

Craig: Trageser. I’m going to go with that, because she reckons. All the Ghosts are Girls by Christine Trageser. Nina Ocasion, twenty-something Filipino doll designer, presenters her Marty styling head doll to the company executives. She tries to show off the doll’s functions, but the demo fails. She blames the batteries.

Nina’s boss, Val, is tired of the excuses and questions Nina’s dedication to the brand. Karen, Nina’s coworker, defends her stating how Nina was at work all through the night repainting the model. Val is not convinced, even as Nina claims to have played with her Marty dolls until the seventh grade. Nina snaps, firing back at Val, and making out with the Marty doll to prove her love for her job. Val storms out in disgust.

Back in her factory loft, Nina confides in Susan, telling her how nothing ever seems to work out for her. Susan tries to console Nina, who maintains her innocence for the demo failure. A little girl appears next to Nina, Susan perhaps, who may or may not be there, and pats her shoulder as we reach the bottom of page three.

All the Ghosts are Girls. Who wants to take a shot at this?

John: Kelly Marcel, do you want to start us off?

Kelly: Sure. I actually really like the title of this movie, for a start. And l liked that Christine started the movie with conflict. That we’re immediately into a scene where two people are having a disagreement with each other over something. And it’s big.

It was really hard for me, because we got to the bottom of page one and I got a bit umbrage-y about something and it was hard for me to move on from that. And I will tell you what it is.

Craig: Oh, goodie.

Kelly: She describes everybody – I actually really like the descriptions of all the characters. It gave me a really good visual of like who I’m seeing and what I’m looking at. So we get a good description of Nina, the petite lumberjack, and Val who is waspy. And everybody that we meet. And then we come to a character called Karen and her character description is “African American.”

Craig: That’s enough. Right? [laughs] What else do you need to say?

Kelly: And so I just wanted to talk about that for a little bit. Actually, Craig and I had a text conversation about a script recently that he had read that also had the same character description in it. And that’s not a character description. That’s the color of somebody’s skin. And it really threw me on page one and stuck in my head and made the further two pages really difficult for me to read. So, I just wanted to talk about that for a bit, because I’ve seen it a lot. And it annoys me.

John: I think it’s a great thing to talk about. So, I’ll take the defense position here, just so we can actually have a full discussion. I would say that there are certainly characters in scripts who are sort of not crucial or important. Like Karen may not show up ever again. And so often you just do Karen, 40s, and you wouldn’t put anything more for her. We’ve all done that. There’s just a character who’s only in a scene and you really don’t fully describe them out.

Craig: Sure. Bank manager. Yeah.

John: The question becomes if you do then specify a race, it makes it sound like you’re not going to give a full character description, you’re just calling her African American. I just can see the logic of like we always tell people to be specific and to sort of like not let everything be default white. Not let everything be sort of default lowest common denominator.

Kelly: Absolutely.

John: So, in this case, Christine is saying like, no, Karen is not white. But it bugged you because it felt like you didn’t get the rest of your character description there. And you felt like it was a shortcut. Is that right?

Kelly: I did. And I totally agree with everything you said, but Karen then goes on to have quite a lot to say. So, she does need a character description.

John: You want something to give us a sense of her personality and who she is in this world other than just African American.

Kelly: Absolutely. Because she says as much as anybody else, and all those other people got a character description. And they didn’t get, I mean, apart from Nina who is Filipina, I don’t know what color Val is. I don’t know what color John is.

Craig: Well, Val is white.

John: Val is white. She’s waspy.

Kelly: Oh, okay. OK. All right. I’ll let that go.

Craig: You know, I like to think about wardrobe, hair, and makeup. That’s my first go-to when I’m introducing a character. What are they wearing? What’s their hair like? What’s their makeup like? Do they have scars? Do they have a weird eye?

You can’t – John’s right, and we all know there are sometimes when you have a character that you’re passing by and like, “Cop, black, yells at him, ‘Slow down.’” But, no, Karen clearly is a character and, yeah, she deserves more description than, you know, black. That’s not enough.

How is she dressed? Is she important? Is she thin? Is she sturdy? Is she blinged up? Does she have on like a watch with the Marty thing because she’s like a real corporate follower? We need something – especially when we have Nina as the petite lumberjack with giant glasses. I mean, that’s such an interesting way of describing somebody.

Kelly: Everybody else is really interestingly described. And I think, as well, it’s really important that, I mean, even if you just say that Karen is really good friends with Nina, because she clearly is. She totally stands up for her over the next two pages and tries to protect her from Val, who is pissed off with Nina. So, even that, you know, is important to know.

But other than that, I sort of loved it. It spoke to me about my childhood. I used to have those dolls that you’d put makeup on and stuff, so I really loved it. I was like, oh, I love those.

And then I did get very confused at the very end when Nina is in her apartment and she’s drinking and then there’s this disembodied voice talking to her. And her hair rises into the air and then falls again. So, she’s clearly talking to a ghost, which I can determine from the title of the film. But it wasn’t clear enough for me. Like, it says a girl with braids in a plain cotton dress. An apron appears next to Nina and pats her shoulder. Where does she appear from? Does she appear from thin air? Did she come from another room? Is this the voice of the person we’ve just been hearing? I got a bit confused about that. And if that’s our first introduction to these ghosts that are mentioned in the title, then I need it to be kind of a bigger moment or a clearer moment at least.

And I just, also as an addition, I didn’t really know where we were. Like what time period we were in. What year we were in. Because it seemed, the doll seemed quite modern, so I just wanted to get a sense of where I was in the world.

Craig: John, what do you think?

John: I really liked a petite lumberjack with giant glasses, but I felt like the opening sentence was really awkward. So, let me read it aloud for people here. “NINA OCASION, 20s Filipina doll designer, a petite lumberjack with giant glasses sets up her prototypes on a table at the front of a presentation theater for executive review.” That’s one hell of a sentence. It’s a long sentence. So, the problem here is that there’s two clauses and she’s basically trying to describe Nina twice, both as 20s Filipina doll designer, and a petite lumberjack with giant glasses. Break those into two sentences and make those two different ideas, because it was just one mushy thing for me. I couldn’t parse all that. And they’re both good ideas, but give us a description and then tell us what she’s actually doing.

I think like Kelly I was happy that it was starting on conflict. I didn’t believe all of Val’s lines. Val felt like she had been dialed in from a slightly harsher movie than everybody else, or a little bit more arch movie than everybody else. So, I didn’t necessarily believe Val, but I did like that there was a conflict at the center of this and that Nina was trying to stick up for herself. And once it was set up that Nina had been up all night doing this presentation, I could more believe that she would go off on her. Because we’ve all been in that situation where you’ve been shooting all night and something finally snaps and you do yell at people in front of the crew.

It felt like that kind of moment to me.

The ghost at the end. It’s in the title, so I get it. I had a hard time connecting storylines though. Like the Nina from the first part doesn’t feel like the Nina from the second part. The last thing I sort of expected in the second scene was like, oh, and now there’s a little ghost.

Craig, tell us?

Craig: Well, I think commas would be a great help here. Commas are wonderful little things and they can smooth out these issues. So, Christine is dropping some commas where she needs them. For instance, your problem, a petite lumberjack with giant glasses, if there’s a comma after glasses it helps an enormous amount. Because right now it says, “A petite lumberjack with giant glasses sets up her prototypes,” so is the lumberjack setting up the – no, no, she’s setting them up. She is a petite lumberjack.

Similarly, “VAL JEFFRIES, super WASPy 40s, queen bee marketing VP glances up from her phone.” No. Queen bee marketing VP, glances up from her phone.

So, commas will help you kind of break apart your little bits of pieces here. I had to go back and forth a bunch of times on some of the names, because we have a lot. We have a lot and we have them quickly. And they are all roughly the same length and style. We have Val, Nina, Karen, John, Susan. I think that’s all of them.

So they’re all like sort of — — — — and Karen, this is the real symptom of what happens when you under-describe somebody that’s important. So, Kelly has pointed out “Karen, 40s African American.” By the way, 40s, African American. Not 40s African American. Means you’re an African American from the 1940s. So, again, commas.

John: That would make a great character.

Craig: [laughs] 40s African American. Like where did she come from?

John: I mean, it’s impressive that Karen has become a boss of this toy company in the 1940s. So that alone is a distinction.

Craig: I mean—

Kelly: You have to say with “John, 50s, engineer” as well.

Craig: There you go. Exactly. The symptom of this is that when I got to Karen, who has her first line in the middle of page three. I had no idea who she was. I was like, who’s Karen? Who’s Karen? Karen, to the back of Val.

Kelly: Page two. Top of page two, Craig.

Craig: I’m sorry, top of page two. Oh, there it is. Sorry. Even then, “Why don’t we move on to the salon?” I kept reading and I kind of confused Karen with Nina at that point because Nina’s having a back and forth with Val. That’s what happened. And there’s this Karen. And then I got to Val. “It’s always China, China.” I’m like wait, oh, who’s Karen? And I had to look back. I couldn’t find her for a while until, oh, at the very bottom of the page, there she is, with nothing else. And, oh, she’s the boss. Okay. So, there was some confusion there.

But, my biggest issue, honestly, jibes with what John said. I don’t believe a single – it’s worse, Christine, I’m afraid. I don’t believe a single word of what anyone is saying here. Not one word. No one is speaking like an actual person in an actual situation, to me.

I don’t understand the way – why Val is overreacting. They’re at a toy company. Occasionally something fails. I mean, they all work for the same company. Things sometimes don’t work. They’re acting like the big boss has flown in from the company to make layoffs. And if you’re thing doesn’t work right, you’re fired on the spot. Everyone just seems really super keyed up over this thing because the servos aren’t working. And a lot of what Val is feeding back feels expositional. “I’m sick of product development’s excuses. You know, Nina, I thought moving you to this brand would be great for the team, but now I’m questioning your dedication.”

Okay, so I’ve learned some information and also that’s not a realistic thing to say. Why would you question her dedication? Because a servo isn’t moving? That doesn’t make any sense.

And then Nina says, “Sometimes China gets the face paint wrong.” What does that have to do with what happened here? And then Val, “Do I have to go on yet another factory trip to justify your screw-ups?”

This is crazy. You should have fired her weeks ago if this is who you feel about her. But the response is where I really started to lose touch with who this character is and the tone of this piece. Because Nina says, “I played with my Marty dolls till seventh grade. I love being on this brand.”

John: The line isn’t set up at all.

Craig: No.

John: And so the line that could get to Nina’s line is something like, you know, “Do you even understand what Marty is?” That’s the line that could feed the response.

Kelly: Right.

John: I marked the same thing. There’s no connection between these two ideas.

Craig: None. None. And then Nina’s response back is also nonsensical. Val says, “Yeah. Well I’m not seeing it.” And Nina says, “Why? Because I don’t walk around in hot pink suits and stupid heels like you?” That’s just a flat out non-sequitur. Well, A, fired. B, I would fire – if someone said that to me, and I were Val, I would fire them not for being insulting about my look. I would fire them for trotting out a non-sequitur in the middle of a business meeting.

It does not follow. It doesn’t follow. And then she says, “And I’m totally dedicated to this line. I’ll show you love.”

“Nina grabs the styling head prototype by the hair and makes out with Marty who suddenly begins to speak.” We need another comma there. And suddenly begins to speak. Who would do that? That’s insane. That’s not the kind of love you’re saying you’re supposed to have for a doll. “I played with my Marty dolls till seventh grade.” Little girls don’t make out with their Marty dolls. That’s not the connection they have to them. This is just bizarre.

John: Kelly, do little girls make out with their makeup dolls?

Kelly: I didn’t make out with mine. But I can’t speak for everybody.

Craig: There may be some girls that made out with their makeup dolls. [laughs]

Kelly: There may be some.

John: Some girls may do this.

Kelly: But then I also read this, just to go on the defense of her a little bit, I did read this as she’s totally mad, but that was the lead up to – that we were seeing that’s she’s mad. And that was leading us up to, oh, she’s seeing things. She’s seeing ghosts as well. And this is her like – she was having a mental break.

Craig: Okay, I did not see that. What I saw was this is a standard kind of working person’s movie where they’re being put down by the man. And then they go home and the twist is they share their apartment with the ghosts. And the ghosts are going to help her do her job, or something like that. But that the ghosts are real and that she’s not crazy. But the problem is she’s acting in a way that actually is crazy. Which is – see, to me, the setup here is like… – This is what I would do. I’m a doll designer. I make this doll. I’m super proud of it. It works great, but it’s kind of old fashioned. And Val is like this is boring. You don’t really know, like girls don’t like this.

And you’re saying, no, no, no, they do. I was one of them. And she’s like trust me when I tell you, your stuff is old and it’s lame. Catch up with the rest of this crew and get into the corporate mentality, or you’re going to go. It’s that simple.

And then she goes home and there’s this little girl who is like, “I love this doll.” And she’s like, “I know you do.” She’s like, “It reminds me of the doll I had when I was growing up.” And Val is like, “Yeah. But you grew up in 1883. That’s kind of my problem.”

And then you’re like, oh my god. That’s a ghost girl.

Okay, so getting back to Kelly’s point about how you introduce – you have two choices of how to introduce this ghost. Either it’s a shocking oh my god there’s a dead girl in the apartment, except that our main character isn’t shocked. Or, there’s a normal girl in the apartment and then, oh my god, she’s a ghost. You have to pick some sort of fascinating way to introduce this concept.

Anyway, that was a lot.

Kelly: I think what’s so interesting there as well is that Craig and I read this in such different ways, which is ultimately the overall problem of these three pages. You know, we’re reading two totally different movies. And that’s no good. That can’t work. We need to know what the film is.

Craig: Agreed.

John: This didn’t land as one film. So, all right, let’s get to our final entry in the Three Page Challenge. This is Escapism by Pascoe Foxell.

Craig: Pascoe Foxell. I mean, this is awesome.

Kelly: None of these people are real.

John: I think these people have figured out the secret to getting Godwin to pick their scripts.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Is an amazing name.

Craig: Pascoe Foxell.

John: So, I’ll quickly summarize this. A businessman sprints down the street pursued by a man in a tracksuit. A young woman, who we will soon know to be Zoe, watches from her apartment window, high above the action. As tracksuit guy catches up, the businessman hops onto a bus. Tracksuit guy rushes on by, not even glancing at the businessman.

Up in her apartment, Zoe takes it all in, and she brushes her teeth by the window. She goes back to her bedroom. Searches for clothes to wear. At the Rex, a rundown cinema, Zoe returns from her smoke break to witness a child mid-tantrum after dropping his ice cream. She acknowledges Callum, her coworker, as he walks through an employee-only door.

Zoe goofs off in the box office, playing with piles of brown sugar and lit matches. Her boss, Arjun, admonishes her for laziness and sends her downstairs to check on the toilets as we hit the end of page three.

Craig: Is Godwin writing these summaries?

John: Godwin is writing these summaries. And so I felt like we missed some crucial things in the summary.

Craig: So Godwin, the honeymoon with Godwin is over. Now he goes right into the way we used to talk about Stuart. [laughs] Godwin, you kind of missed the point here, buddy. The point of the pages here is that we’re in a Walter Mitty kind of thing where Zoe is seeing things that are astonishing and fantastic. And then the movie reveals actually, no, they’re quite mundane. So, for instance, at the Rex, a rundown cinema, Zoe returns from her smoke break not to witness a child mid-tantrum, but rather a child being devoured by a monster, which is then revealed to just be a child mid-tantrum after dropping his ice cream.

So, Godwin! [laughs]

John: Godwin! And we should note that this is listed as being episode one, so it’s meant to be a pilot. That doesn’t necessarily change what we read on the page, but it may change what we think about in terms of this is setting up a world for a TV show apparently.

Craig: Correct.

Kelly: [clears throat]

Craig: Oh, that sounds like – that’s the Kelly Marcel throat-clearing of doom.

Kelly: Actually it’s not. I loved – I liked this. But – but – I did. I loved it. I thought it was really beautiful if it’s a movie. I think three pages is an enormous amount of real estate to give to a lot of vignettes when you’re setting up a TV show. It’s not – you need a teaser. It needs to open with a bang. And I need to kind of know what this is about and where we’re going. You know, I need to have a cold open for a pilot. And this didn’t – this felt like a lot of pages for that.

John: Yeah. We get three of these like sort of vignettes back, to back, to back, and we still haven’t really gotten into what’s going on. Who is she?

Kelly: Is she mentally ill?

John: Yes. What is the framework around why we’re seeing what she’s seeing? So, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that has these sort of Walter Mitty-esque breaks, where it goes into musical numbers, but it’s really clearly set up like how they function in this universe.

Kelly: Right.

John: We have three of them in the first three pages here. And I don’t understand sort of how they’re going to be driving the show, or to what degree I need to be thinking of the real world in the show being the real world.

Craig: Yes.

Kelly: They’re beautifully done. They’re really – I thought they were lovely and really beautifully done. And they kept me reading them, but I also by the end of page three was like, ugh, I don’t know what this – I really have no idea what this is, what it’s about, and I felt like am I about to just watch a pilot that’s all this?

Craig: Yeah. Yep. Yep. That is a very reasonable objection. There are too many – so the Zoe looks at the mundane world around her and then per the title Escapism she imagines something much more fantastic. And the imagination here is actually quite impressive. I thought the scene of the monster eating the kid was actually scary. And I was so relieved when it turned out that it was just a kid crying because of his ice cream. And it was a little dog slurping in his ice cream. That was wonderful.

Kelly: Yeah.

Craig: And I really enjoyed the bit with the sugar, where she is lighting sugar on fire, and it was like some incredible fantastical sand planet. But there were three such sequences in three pages. And in addition to making each one successfully less special in a row with the procession of them, we’re also starting to get concerned that Zoe is doing this 24/7. That it never stops. That would be exhausting. I mean, you’d put a bullet in your head. Especially because I think the point here is that it’s volitional. That she’s choosing to do this.

Walter Mitty, you know, makes his choices occasionally when it is well-earned. And he’s super-duper bored. The one that did not work for me annoyingly enough was the first one, which is the one you want to have work the best. In the first one, here’s what we see. “A businessman sprints down the street, panicked, ragged breaths. Head whipping back to look over his shoulder. He forces himself to speed up.

“From somewhere up above a striking, noirish 25-year-old woman, all in black, looks down on him.” Now, I’d love to know where from above, but I guess, you know, because it’s her fantasy she could be perched on a gargoyle, the edge of a roof, something, but I want to know where.

“She’s keeping track of every movement. Excited. Her gaze flicks behind the businessman where a tracksuit-wearing man is coming fast. He’s gaining with ease, a wide grin stretched across his face. The tracksuit gets closer. Closer again. The businessman pushes hard. No good though. Closer again.”

And then it’s revealed he’s just running to get on a bus, and the tracksuit guy is just jogging. Now, here’s why I was annoyed. Because it’s the first one, you’re telling me what the rules are essentially. Now, here’s some bits that she’s imagined as far as I can tell. She’s imagined the businessman looking back over his shoulder, because in reality the businessman wouldn’t do that. And she’s imagining the tracksuit guy smiling with a big, wide grin as he pursues this businessman, because there’s no reason the tracksuit guy would be smiling like a dope for no reason. Right?

So, she’s put that in there. But the real thing is they are actually running. So, I’m already confused about what I just saw. And I feel like it cheated me. I would have rathered if the guy was running, and the guy was chasing him, and then we reveal that the part that she cheated was herself. And they really are running, but for a different reason. The cheating bothered me.

The cheating doesn’t bother when I see an alien that turns out to be a kid, because obviously that’s all invented. But the opening here put me off a bit.

John: Yeah. I had the same issue with the opening. I thought the other two were much stronger. I think my biggest concern was that she is not really part of the action at all. She’s just standing at a window, brushing her teeth. And it was a really not helpful perspective on what that is. Like, I could imagine a version of this where she’s ultimately on the bus and watching the guy get on the bus. And the other guy goes running past. That I could see. This is her daily life. This is the way she sort of zones out. And she’s closer and part of the action.

But watching from a window didn’t feel like it was letting me know anything about her or her life.

Kelly: Yeah, I agree. And it is the weakest of the three. I would love if we started the pilot with the little boy on the ground, because that’s a really shocking image. And it’s really well-done the way she does it. And then because these come one after the other, I wonder if the fix is that we then build story in between these – if she thinks up a new one for the running guys, or just makes that clearer, we build story in between these three vignettes that would happen over an entire pilot.

Because those three seem enough for a pilot, to me.

Craig: Well, if they recur somehow, I mean, generally speaking, if somebody is having these flights of fancy, it needs to be either disrupting their real life, or helping their real life, or commenting on their real life. These are not. But I would absolutely open this thing with a woman, Zoe, she’s walking into a foyer. And it’s kind of creepy. And she stops and she hears a noise. And we just think we’re in a normal horror movie. And she looks around the corner and she sees this thing and she’s absolutely terrified. And she’s about to scream when someone pushes by her and goes, “Oh, morning Zoe.” And she’s like, “Oh, morning.”

And then she looks back and now we see it’s just a kid crying, and a dog, and a thing. And we go, oh, I get her.

Kelly: Yeah. And then you introduce the boss guy and you see how these fantasies that she’s having are actually affecting her work life. Because that does happen on page three. Her boss comes in. She’s been burning sugar on her desk. And he talks to her about it. But I think you bring that right up front as well and then immediately you have story and conflict and this weird thing that’s happening.

John: Yeah. I really love burning the sugar because it’s such a specific character choice. It’s a thing you see her doing, so it’s not just she’s having a fantasy. She’s lighting sugar on fire on her desk, but it tells you something about who she is and sort of how seriously she takes her job. And so that’s a nice thing to move up earlier in these three pages.

Craig: Yeah. Just as good imagination here. You know, the way that these things work best is when what we’re seeing, especially when we know that it’s not real, is surprising to us when the truth is revealed. We go, oh, that’s the that. That’s cool. So I know after I see the kid and the fake alien that when I’m in an undulating, expansive, brownish yellow dunes, and a bright fiery orb of light searing in, I know it’s not real. But I don’t know what it really is. And then when she shows me that she’s holding a lit match over piles of brown sugar, this is just really inventive and it’s satisfying. So, I guess what we’re saying, Pascoe, is that this needs to be better tied into character. And we need to see more about why she’s doing these. Why she makes the choice to slip into fancy. What choosing to slip into fancy does to the rest of her life, for better or for worse, and we need a much better way in.

Kelly: Yes.

John: Agreed. So, as always, we want to thank everybody, all these writers, for letting us take a look at their three pages. They’re so helpful. So Godwin reads everything that comes in to the account. If you have three pages you want him to take a look at, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, and there’s a form you fill out. You attach a PDF.

He picks scripts that he thinks are most interesting for us to talk about. So, I want to stress that he’s not picking necessarily the best things he reads, but the things he thinks will be interesting for us to talk about on the air. So, if you have something you want us to read, send it in to that link and we will take a look at it.

It has come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing?

Craig: My One Cool Thing today is an article, eh, it’s sort of an article in the New Yorker, but it refers to another website. It’s an article about the Glossary of Happiness. So, there’s a gentleman named Tim Lomas. He is a professor at, or a lecturer, at the University of East London. Kelly, is that a good school?

Kelly: It is.

Craig: Oh, fantastic. Not like those pikers at the University of West London.

John: West London is the worst.

Kelly: Pikeys, Craig. Pikeys. Get it right.

Craig: Pikeys. Sorry. A bunch of pikeys. Anyway, Lomas has launched something called the Positive Lexicography Project, which is essentially an online glossary of untranslatable words into English. These are these compound words that describe positive feelings about things, or sometimes negative feelings about things. But, for instance, here’s a word from Yagan. I don’t know who speaks Yagan. But the word is Mamihlapinatapei, which means a look between people that expresses unspoken but mutual desire. It’s that great? Mamihlapinatapei.

And then there’s like these words from Dutch. Queesting, which means to allow a lover access to one’s bed for chit-chat. So, there’s just all these great, great words that describe these fascinating things. And some of them are incredibly specific, like Utepils, which is Norwegian for a beer that is enjoyed outside, particularly on the first hot day of the year. [laughs]

John: I am looking forward to that beer. That’s certainly a good thing.

Craig: Exactly. So, tons of these words. Describe things in one word that we don’t have one word for. So, check out The Glossary of Happiness. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

John: Fantastic. My One Cool Thing is Search Party, a show on TBS, which I devoured and loved. It is a half-hour comedy created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter. Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers also directed most of the episodes. It stars Alia Shawkat, from Arrested Development. It is just terrific. So, it’s a half-hour, which really means 23 minutes if you’re watching it on iTunes, but it follows a mystery. So, it’s she and her incredibly self-obsessed friends are kind of halfway investigating the disappearance of a college acquaintance.

And it’s really just terrifically well done. And very specific and odd. And I think what I admired most is that it manages to be really funny but also does the mystery stuff really well. Like I was genuinely fascinated to see what was going to happen in the next episode as I was watching it.

Now, if you do take a look at it, really do watch the first two episodes. I almost bailed after the first episode because I hated the characters so much. And you will love them by the end of the second episode. So you have to sort of get past their uncomfortable edges, and then you will fall in love with it.

So, highly recommend it. Search Party on TBS.

Craig: Great.

Kelly: Totally agree with that. I think TBS are killing it right now, by the way. I think they’re doing some really interesting stuff over there.

John: Hooray. Kelly, what’s your One Cool Thing?

Kelly: My other half just told me about this amazing thing, which is that Sony are coming out with smart contact lenses. And basically they can record every moment of your life, which means you can relive memories through them.

Craig: Wait, like the Mission: Impossible contact lens things? They’re making those?

Kelly: Sony are making them. Yeah.

Craig: Oh, boy, the potential for abuse here is astonishing. I mean, how are they going to…? You could relive every morning of your life, and I could also relive every moment of your life. That’s terrifying.

John: Just think about the sex tapes that will be made now with this technology.

Craig: Terrifying.

Kelly: Oh, yes, let’s think about those. Yeah, no, I know, that is really terrifying, but also completely fascinating. I mean, I imagine that you could probably record stuff with those Google Glasses that came out, so it’s not–

John: Totally.

Craig: Yeah, but I know you’re wearing the Google Glasses, because I can slap those goofy things off your face. But I don’t know if you’re wearing contact lenses. So at any point anyone can be recording you surreptitiously and you won’t know.

Kelly: And that’s illegal, no? Isn’t that illegal?

John: It’s illegal, but it still happens. I would say that from now on you’re going to have to start blindfolding yourself and blindfolding your romantic partners just to make sure that they’re not recording you. That’s going to change everything.

Craig: Oh my god.

John: Now, Kelly, you wrote a movie called Fifty Shades of Grey. This could be a plot point in that, could it not?

Kelly: I mean, they have missed a trick. I’m telling you. Erika needs to write a fifth book, because, you know.

John: Yes. Definitely.

Craig: Wait, there’s four of those.

Kelly: Well, there’s Fifty Shades, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed, and then she also wrote a book from Christian Grey’s point of view. So–

John: Ah.

Craig: And what was that one called?

Kelly: Uh…Grey? I think it’s called Grey.

Craig: Grey.

Kelly: Yeah. But now she could write the contact lens book.

Craig: Oh my god. This is absolutely terrifying. I’m seriously terrified and I hope that he just had a dream and thought that this happened.

John: [laughs] I think he was watching Black Mirror and he thought it was a documentary.

Craig: He thought it was 20/20?

Kelly: I think it’s not fair, because what about those of us that don’t need contact lenses?

Craig: Well, you still can get – I mean, you can wear the contact–

John: You can still wear them.

Craig: Kelly, my god. [laughs] Oh my god.

Kelly: But I don’t want to just stick things in my eyes for, you know, no reason.

Craig: Well, of course, nobody likes to. No, but you can have a reason like I’m going to, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go sit down. I’m going to have a very good open chat with somebody where they kind of spill their secrets about something to me. I’m their friend and they’re confiding in me. But I’m recording it the whole time. And then I’m going to upload that to YouTube so the whole world can see it.

This is crazy. Oh my god, I think we just caught a glimpse of how it all ends.

John: Maybe so.

Kelly: Yeah.

Craig: Ew.

Kelly: Ugh.

John: Well that’s how this show ends. Our show, as always, is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Adam Pasulka. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. But for short ones, ask us on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Kelly, are you on Twitter? I forget?

Kelly: I am @MissMarcel.

John: Fantastic. We are also on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes podcast. You can find us on iTunes. Just look for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you can download the Scriptnotes app. Or there’s an Android app as well.

If you want to find transcripts, they are at johnaugust.com. They go up about four days after the episode airs. You can also find the show notes there.

If you want the back episodes, where we had Kelly Marcel on several times before, you can go to Scriptnotes.net and see what she talked about. There’s also a few last remaining USB drives at the store – store.johnaugust.com.

But for me, John August, for Craig Mazin, and for Kelly Marcel, guys, thank you so much. It was so nice to talk to you guys again.

Craig: Likewise. Come home soon, John.

Kelly: We miss you, John.

John: Oh, I miss you guys very much. And congratulations, Kelly Marcel.

Kelly: Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.

Craig: Bye.

John: Bye.

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You can download the episode here.

**John August:** Bonjour et bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Je m’appelle Aline Brosh McKenna.

**John:** Et vous écoutez l’Episode 282 de Scriptnotes, un podcast sur l’écriture de scénarios et des choses intéressantes pour les scénaristes.

**Aline:** Ah, très bien. Très bien, Paris.

**John:** So we are here in Paris. That’s why I’m doing my introduction in French. Aline Brosh McKenna flew all the way over here just to record a podcast.

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** That is the dedication of a true friend. Aline, welcome to Paris.

**Aline:** Thank you. And I am looking forward to the mocking that I will get from Craig for actually taking time during my family vacation to come here and podcast with you. But, come on.

**John:** Come on. It’s Scriptnotes. You have to do it for Scriptnotes.

**Aline:** Priorities. And also – all you and I know how to do together is podcast at this point. We see each other, we just instantly begin–

**John:** The microphones come out. And we start recording a podcast.

**Aline:** No matter where we are.

**John:** It’s really embarrassing, especially when there’s nothing to actually talk about other than filmmaking. Today on this podcast, we are going to be answering some listener questions about cheating reality and bilingual characters, appropriate for being here in French. And we’ll also be inviting a special guest on to talk about the process of adaptation and autobiography.

**Aline:** Great. That all sounds great.

**John:** That’s this week. But also something terrible happened this week, which was the death of Carrie Fisher.

**Aline:** Oh gosh. Quickly followed by the death of Debbie Reynolds.

**John:** Yes, which is terrible. So, we’re recording this where it’s all sort of brand new news. By the time this comes out, it won’t be new news. But I wanted to talk with you because Carrie Fisher, obviously we know her as Princess Leia, we know her as an actress, but I really thought of her mostly as a screenwriter. That was sort of how I encountered her.

**Aline:** Yeah. When I first came to LA she was sort of the premier script doctor. And, you know, was very witty and funny and was sort of brought in to make things sort of, as I understood it, wittier and funnier and warmer. But she also obviously had a great presence as an actor.

My favorite Carrie Fisher performance is Hannah and Her Sisters. It’s probably my favorite Woodie Allen movie, and that performance, the subtle competition between her and Dianne Wiest is great. So, yeah, that’s been really sad. And then also for me, as an ‘80s baby, the George Michael thing was devastating. And I spent a day listening to every George Michael song that, you know, back to back. It’s been a weird week.

**John:** Yeah. I wrote up a little piece about George Michael when I got the news, because just a few days before it happened we were listening to a George Michael song at a café in Italy and it’s like, oh, I wonder if George Michael is still alive. Like it occurred to me like is he still alive. And then two days he had died. And so one of the nice things about all artists, including Carrie Fisher, is that they can physically die but the work that they’ve created lives on forever. And so I’ve been trying to listen to George Michael songs, but also songs from other artists who I might not have thought of recently, just because that’s how you sort of keep them alive.

**Aline:** Right. And I think of Carrie Fisher as a wit and as a novelist and Postcards from the Edge. But, of course, my son is a huge fan from Star Wars. And so he was very sad and upset when we found out the news and we were waiting to hear when we first heard about the heart attack, we were waiting to hear if she was okay. And he was posting on Facebook about it. So she means something to different generations of people which is great.

**John:** Did you have a chance to meet her ever?

**Aline:** I never did. No.

**John:** So, I met her twice. The first time was at a screening of Big Fish. It was at the ArcLight in Los Angeles and it was sort of our LA premiere. And the lists had come down and Dick Zanuck was nearby and Bruce Cohen was nearby. And this woman came in and she sort of like, she put up the armrests and sort of like curled up on the seat. And it was Carrie Fisher. And she came to watch the movie.

And then a few weeks later, I think, I was at a birthday party that she’d thrown for her friend and met her there. And she was exactly kind of the person you hoped Carrie Fisher would be. And she was generous, and warm, and cool. And like you I sort of encountered her mostly as a script doctor. As a person who was paid a lot of money for weekly work on something.

And I remember I was an intern at Universal and they were discussing bringing her in to do a weekly on this project. And I heard her quote, which just blew my mind that we paid that much per week. And what her job would be. And that was actually very inspiring. Like, I kind of want to be a screenwriter if you can do that. [laughs]

**Aline:** Yeah. But it’s rare to be a famous actress and sort of screen icon and also be doing that kind of work a day work.

**John:** There’s a quote I saw this last week about this where in a Newsweek interview they were talking about her working as a script doctor. And they say like do you still work as a script doctor. She says, “I haven’t done it for a few years. I did it for many years. Then younger people came to do it. And I started to do new things. It was a very long, lucrative episode of my life, but it’s complicated to do that. Now it’s all changed actually. In order to get a rewrite job, you have to submit your notes for your ideas on how to fix a script.”

**Aline:** Oh wow.

**John:** “So they can get all the notes from the different writers, keep the notes, and not hire you. That’s free work. And that’s what I always call life-wasting events.”

**Aline:** Can’t say it any better than that.

**John:** Absolutely. So, we’ve all encountered that situation where you’re brought in to do this work or not do this work, and they mostly want your opinions.

**Aline:** Right. For free.

**John:** Some follow up. So, episodes you were not involved with, but maybe you listened to. Back in Episode 277 we discussed film versus reality. Justin in Beijing wrote in to say, “So, listening to the podcast about how film and TV teaches bad medicine, if my friend gets stabbed and my dumb friend pulls out the knife, should I put the knife back in my stabbed friend?”

**Aline:** What’s your follow up? I’m guessing you should not do that.

**John:** Yeah. Craig is really our doctor on the podcast. But I’m guessing you should not put the knife back in.

**Aline:** I’m guessing not.

**John:** But just yesterday I saw the movie Passengers and that exact moment happens where she pulls the thing that’s impaling her out. And I wanted to say, no, don’t, leave the bolt in.

**Aline:** Oh.

**John:** Because you will just bleed more when you pull that thing out. No. Don’t do it.

In Episode 280 we talked about the Reed College protest over Boys Don’t Cry. Did you listen to that episode already?

**Aline:** No. I’m really way behind.

**John:** It’s fine. But that was the one where I got really angry, and so actually had like more umbrage in that episode. We got a bunch of good responses about that, and some stupid ones, too, inevitably. But the one that stuck with me most was from a listener named Kate Hadley. And we’ll put a link to her piece up in the show notes.

What I liked so much about her piece is that she was able to focus on some things that Craig and I had not even considered. And one of the issues you have when you have cis-gendered actor playing trans is it sort of perpetuates that idea that a trans person is just playing dress up. That it’s all a disguise. And that it feeds into these terrible bathroom laws and stuff like that where there’s this perception that it’s just a man who wants to get into the women’s restroom. That it’s not a real person with a real identity.

So, she wrote it much more articulately than I just expressed it, but I’d really encourage you to take a look at what she said, because even though she, like I, disagree with the Reed College protest, she really was able to scratch at what I think was underlying that issue over sort of trans representation in film.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** Cool. Last bit of follow up here. Matt wrote in about French titles. And he wanted to clarify – we talked about the Zak Efron movie, which was called something else, but the Australian title was Are We Officially Dating, and it turned out that was the initial script title for the movie.

**Aline:** Wow.

**John:** So for the Australian version they went back to the original script title, which was unusual.

**Aline:** How did they know that?

**John:** You know, my hunch is it that it may have been one of those sort of foreign rights deals, or that it was a negative pickup in some way, so that–

**Aline:** It had been circulating with that on it?

**John:** Maybe so. Or, that some other international entity was a financier in it. So, in their head it was always called this other title. And the American people had changed the title.

**Aline:** Got it.

**John:** Aline, what have been the titles of your movies overseas?

**Aline:** I have no idea. I never look them up.

**John:** So The Devil Wears Prada would make sense.

**Aline:** I think it’s basically The Devil Wears Prada in most countries.

**John:** But I mean some of your things must be – like Morning Glory would be a very different title I bet in different countries.

**Aline:** I have no idea.

**John:** Cool. But we also had a follow up from Rodrigo in Brazil. And so if you can read to us what he wrote.

**Aline:** Sure. He says, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Brazil’s title for The Hangover is even worse. Instead of calling it Ressaca, which is the regular hangover translation, Hangover in Brazil is called Se Beber, Não Case!”

I really made that up. Made that completely up.

“Don’t Drink and Marry. Brazil has a long list of bad title translations. The best one I can recall is when Teen Wolf got translated to The Boy from the Future, because Back to the Future happened a couple years before earlier. And marketing. Which brings us to a topic I think you never talked about in your podcast. How important is the title of the screenplay and how often does it get changed until it hits the screen? All You Need is Kill, Edge of Tomorrow, Live, Die, Repeat comes to mind.”

**John:** Let’s talk about that. Titles for screenplays. How important is the title for you when you’re coming up with a screenplay?

**Aline:** Oh, I think they’re critical. If you don’t have a title – if things are floating around for too long with an untitled, it seems like something is wrong with your idea. You just can’t hone in on what the idea is.

I think that a lot of the genius of Devil Wears Prada was in Lauren Weisberger’s selection of a title. It’s just so evocative. It tells a whole story. You know, it encapsulates the whole movie. And 27 Dresses, that was kind of – that’s the whole movie also.

**John:** That was your original title.

**Aline:** That was my original title. Yes. That was the whole idea – the whole idea is the title. So, I think it’s a good – I have worked on things before where I didn’t have a title way into writing it. It’s not a good sign. It’s really not a good sign.

**John:** I can see that. So, Morning Glory, so she’s a morning TV anchor.

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** But was that always the title or what happened there?

**Aline:** Yes, that was always the title. That was the one that I worked on with J.J. and I remember – we were talking about it, maybe I had worked on it for like a month, and then the title kind of hit me, and I… – I don’t think that’s a great title because it has a pun in it ultimately.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And also because I didn’t realize that Morning Glory in lots of places in the country means boner.

**John:** Ha-ha. Excellent.

**Aline:** Did you know that?

**John:** I had no idea. But I can see that. It’s like morning wood.

**Aline:** Morning wood is morning glory. And also there’s a Katherine Hepburn movie. That I did know. But I don’t think it got – like Broadcast News kind of tells you not only what it’s about, but it tells you its sort of take on it, that it should be the news. And one of the problems with Morning Glory as a movie is we never really honed in on like what we were saying about the news business. So, the fact that it has one of those titles that’s a bit irrelevant.

And then I’ve written movies also where people for the life of them can’t remember the title. Laws of Attraction. Or, you know, I Don’t Know How She Does It. Well, I Don’t Know How She Does It is a book, I guess.

**John:** I Don’t Know How She Does It actually makes sense. Like it feels like something that a character in that world would be saying. And it expresses her underlying–

**Aline:** It’s a great title for the book. As a movie title, I don’t think it widens out at all. I mean, obviously we would have called it that because it’s the book title. But you need to have something that really is – I mean, I think The Hangover is a brilliant title.

**John:** Agreed.

**Aline:** It’s just very simple and very clear. And what you’re looking for is I think something very clear that describes the movie.

**John:** In Rodrigo’s question he references what was called Edge of Tomorrow, was a Tom Cruise movie when it was released. But originally the title for it was All You Need is Kill, which I think is a great title.

**Aline:** Great title.

**John:** But it didn’t test well, or they didn’t feel like it marketed – they were concerned about it. So then Edge of Tomorrow, which felt really like I have no idea what that means.

**Aline:** Edge of Tomorrow reminds me a lot of Edge of Night, which is a soap opera.

**John:** It also reminds me of Oblivion, which was the other Tom Cruise sci-fi movie.

**Aline:** Totally.

**John:** And so for the home video release they changed it to Live, Die, Repeat.

**Aline:** Wasn’t technically Live, Die, Repeat was the slogan, but it was like ten times bigger than the title? That was just somebody in marketing saying, “Don’t make me go and release this on home video with the same title. You’re killing me. Can we use this other thing?”

**John:** It’s challenging because it was a movie that was critically liked. It performed well, I guess. And sort of would otherwise deserve a sequel. But the title didn’t catch people.

**Aline:** That’s a surprisingly good movie. But I think it needs to be something where – I think a good test for writers is you want to be able to turn to your friend and say, “Oh my god, did you see this yet?” And have it be something which they’re not going to go, “Wait, which one is that?”

I think titles which are like Nowhere Fast, which are sort of like assemblages of vague terms, gerund nouns, or gerund adjectives – Running…

**John:** Running Water.

**Aline:** Running Scared. That is a movie, isn’t it?

**John:** Running Scared is a good one.

**Aline:** Yeah. Or Being Blank. There’s a lot of. Finding Blanks. And Being Blanks.

I have a script that I’ve been working on for a number of years. It’s this movie that I wrote about my mother and her friend. And it’s about these two French women. And I always refer to it as French Ladies. Because when I was talking to my agent or talking to anyone, French Ladies was what I always called it. But I was going to call it The Best Revenge. That was a title I was using was The Best Revenge. But I never referred to it as The Best Revenge with anyone, with my agent or anyone.

So, I started just calling it French Ladies. And then finally the producers were like, “We should just call this movie French Ladies because that’s the only thing we refer to it as.” And it just sticks to your ear.

So, it’s got to be something that you can turn to your friend and say, “Boy, we should really go see…”

**John:** Yes. 100%.

**Aline:** And they won’t go, “What?”

**John:** Yeah. I’m having a lot of what these days because it’s screener season, so you and I are getting all of the Academy screeners. And so a lot of these are movies I haven’t otherwise seen. And so we get this big list and I’m like I have no idea what this movie is. I’m sure it came out, but I have just no idea.

**Aline:** You know what’s the best, one of my favorite – well, The Meddler is a great title. And I loved that movie this year. One movie that I loved but the title took a long time to lodge in brain is Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I kept trying to recommend it to people and saying like–

**John:** Wilder beasts?

**Aline:** Something wild. You know, I couldn’t, it didn’t kind of lodge in my brain.

**John:** That was a previous One Cool Thing. The only reason I know about that is because the Kates recommended it.

**Aline:** It’s a great movie.

**John:** I’m looking forward to seeing it.

**Aline:** It’s a great movie. But somehow the title, Hunt maybe wasn’t a thing that landed in my brain as the thing that it was.

**John:** Yeah. With my movies, like Go was originally called 24/7. And 24/7 is an interesting title, but it wasn’t the right title for what that movie was.

**Aline:** That really makes me think it’s about a convenience store.

**John:** Totally. And it’s not about that. It’s not Clerks 2. But when I came to Go, it was like, oh, that’s what that movie feels like. And that was a title that I took from another pitch that I had set out that had never sold.

**Aline:** Oh really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Scavenged.

**John:** Scavenged. The Nines is a similar situation where The Nines was a short story I had written and it’s like, oh you know what, I’m going to take that title–

**Aline:** Didn’t The Nines come out close to Nine?

**John:** Yes. So that was a whole title mess. And that’s another thing worth discussing is that a lot of times you’ll have a great idea for a title and someone else will have already claimed it. So, it’s not a copyright situation. It’s the MPAA has a whole registry – actually, I take that back. I think it may be AMPAS has the registry. No, it wouldn’t be. Which one would it be?

**Aline:** It’s the MPAA.

**John:** It would be the MPAA. Has the registry of titles. And so you have to clear your title and make sure that it’s not confusing with another movie that’s out there.

And so The Nines was the first one to register The Nine. And then 9 came out, which was the animated version. There was also Nine the musical. And we were first. And so we had to give permission for those other things, so it becomes a whole negotiation.

**Aline:** You could have called it John August’s The Nines.

**John:** Yeah. You could have.

**Aline:** Like Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

**John:** Absolutely. Or Disney’s The Kid. There’s ways, you know, the studio title in there to get it done. But, yeah, going back to Rodrigo’s question, titles are crucial and important. And there’s honestly nothing more frustrating when you wrote a movie and you shot a movie under one title, and then it suddenly changes title at the end. You don’t even recognize this thing that you spent all this time working on. And I definitely know friends who have had that situation where like it’s called something crazy. Charlie’s Angels, the second Charlie’s Angels, the script I originally turned in was Charlie’s Angels: Forever. And that was going to be the movie title for a long time. And then they came back to us with a whole bunch of little things that had tested. They tested a bunch of different titles. And Full Throttle was a title just by itself that they tested. And so they decided to call it Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

**Aline:** But with sequels, I don’t know what the words are after the first part.

**John:** Yeah. I have no idea what the next Fast and Furious is.

**Aline:** Oh wait. But isn’t–

**John:** I’m going to get it wrong if I try to guess.

**Aline:** I don’t know. It’s all the kids have been talking about. We seem really old and out of right now. Because the trailer just came out a couple weeks ago and that’s all the kids talk about.

**John:** Your sons are in the other room, and they probably know the real title.

**Aline:** They know. They know.

**John:** But we don’t. Chris Morgan knows, but we don’t know.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a question from listener Tom Dowler who wrote in. Let’s hear what he said.

Tom Dowler: My question is inspired by Craig’s recent list of very commonly seen yet completely nonsensical medical practices. My wife and I actually keep an ongoing list of things only seen in movies that characters do all the time, yet no one does in real life. And that list includes things like someone sitting alone on the back seat of a car, but is sitting right in the middle of that back seat rather than directly behind the driver or the passenger seats. Or, someone who is stressed walking into a bathroom just to splash cold water onto their face and then star meaningfully into the mirror. Or, someone carrying on a complete conversation while brushing their teeth, but somehow not covering their chin in toothpaste suds or choking on their own spit.

So, my question is this: should we as screenwriters embrace these ridiculous conceits if they help us tell our story and fit in with the Hollywood establishment? Or should we strike out in the name of truth and reality? Do you risk alienating your audience if we present a vision of life which is unlike what they’re used to seeing on screens, even if it more closely matches real life? Thanks very much.

**Aline:** I mean, to me that’s an easy one. Those things are goofy and they’re kind of the mark of a bad – someone sitting in the middle is probably because it was easier to shoot, and I don’t think that would pull you out as much as sort of weird human behavior. The thing that I’ve noticed more and more that really pulls me out of a movie is Joe Cornish who is a director I worked with for a little bit has this thing where when people are being so serious in a movie that you just want to go over and tickle them.

Like there’s these movies now where everybody is just – it’s so dire. And everybody is saying things like so seriously. And it’s all so portentous. And you want to go and poke people and be like, “You fart. You laugh.” I really so dislike things where one mode of being subsumes every other mode of being. And I think you’ve got to be funny. You’ve got to preserve, even when you’re inside a big budget serioso space opera or action movie, I mean, sometimes those just get so goofy in terms of tone. And people sort of stentorianly explaining to each other the plot and you’re just thinking like – you want somebody to be like, “Do you want to get a sandwich? The cafeteria, ah, they got my favorite thing today.”

Like those glimpses to me of human behavior, the lack of that to me is the silliest, fakest, weirdest thing that will pull me out of a movie more than anything is… – And I’ve really noticed more and more that because we’re in this world where every movie is either Moonlight or some gigantic $250 million movie, it seems like all the human behavior now is being relegated to the tiny movies. And in big movies now people are acting like weird, solemn robots who don’t have bodily functions or senses of humor.

So, I think inhabiting, you know, if you watch Alien and see how many like real human little moments there are of humanity inside of that, that really grounds you inside those characters and that behavior. And I think it buys you permission later to have some big piece of like super serioso exposition or action.

**John:** What I hear you describing is both a writing concern, basically you’re not creating the scenes in which characters are going to have those sort of real moments and can puncture this veil of seriousness, but also performance and directing. So basically how you’re portraying your world so that people feel alive and present in this. And I think some of that is the writer’s responsibility, and some of that is just the weight of the movie and the weight of the movie machinery around it. So, you talk about these movies where people are being so incredibly serious. It’s as if they understand what movie they’re in. What I always love about Alien, and I’ve said this many times before, is that the characters in Alien think they’re in a movie called Space Truckers. And they have no idea that an Alien is supposed to show up. So they’re not philosophizing. They’re not planning for a horror movie to break out. They’re just being in the movie Space Truckers. And then things go horribly wrong.

But some of what the original question is asking about are things, are shortcuts that we’ve taken for production that are just convenient. And we’re sort of used to them now. They’re conventions. And they really are annoying.

So, he talks about a character sitting in the middle of a backseat, which is of course ridiculous. No one ever does that. People also don’t drive around with their head rests missing, and yet you see that all the time in movies so that you can see into the backseat more easily. A lot of times we’ll remove the rearview mirror so you can have the shot going through the windshield. And you don’t realize that the rearview mirror is missing, but it’s gone in more than half the movies you’ve seen.

**Aline:** I notice more things that are there because of vanity. Like when people are waking up in full makeup. Just giant eyelashes. I’m really noticing that. And also the constant kissing without teeth brushing. Just people – you don’t even want to – forget kissing. It might even be easier to stomach kissing than speaking. People wake up in the morning and look at each other and have these conversations that it would be like, you would really be shielding yourself. Or you would say, “Wait a second.”

**John:** So, you guys are doing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. So, when you’re filming those episodes, and you directed episodes, how much are you willing to bend reality? Are you sitting, Rachel, in the middle of the backseat?

**Aline:** Well, there’s some stuff like that that is just production stuff. But the thing that we’re always battling is the vanity and the touches and the touchups. And they’re always attacking the actors with the makeup brushes and the hair. And that’s a constant back and forth. Especially when we have to go quickly, because those people have a responsibility to do their job. They want to do their jobs. They want to erase every under eye shadow. But Rachel and I both would always try and err on the side of like, well, she’s had a shitty day. She loves a day where she’s not wearing makeup and she’ll always – I’m always getting texts from her saying, “Can I please not wear any makeup in this scene for this reason?” And sometimes she’s even like stretching it, because she just wants to not be doing it.

But, you know, the perfect hair and makeup, you have to – like our show has a certain extra crank over reality. So it’s not a movie where you can – you know, it’s not Kids. We’re not really doing something where people’s hair looks exactly the way it would like Donna Lynne when she’s playing Paula, like clearly someone – her hair wouldn’t look quite that great for the office. So, you’re kind of walking a line where like you need some aesthetics, but not so much that people seem distractingly done.

So, I think for every piece you’re doing, when you’re making it you have to find sort of your level of – but a lot of those things that he’s – I mean, there’s two different things. Things that are bent for production, which you have to do kind of frequently, and shooting in cars is kind of a nightmare, and so things are often kind of wonky. And then there’s stuff where people are just behaving not like humans.

**John:** Yeah. My last bit of advice would be to recognize when you’re about to walk in to one of those tropes, and if there’s something you can gain out of not doing that trope, or sort of calling out that trope, that could be great. And so, I mean, that tooth brushing thing might be like if you’re movie can stand the joke about the tooth brushing, do that as the joke. Acknowledge sort of the trope of it and move past it. Or like don’t let people have that conversation while they’re brushing their teeth. Or make the other character stop them from having that conversation while they’re brushing their teeth.

**Aline:** One scene that really stuck with me was in Fun with Dick and Jane, the original one, Jane Fonda sits on the toilet and pees while she’s talking to him. And pees, and wipes, and gets up. And that really always stuck with me in life because it was like, god, you’re never really seeing people peeing in movies, or talking while they’re peeing, or continuing conversations in the bathroom. And I just feel like as a culture we’ve moved away from movies where people pee in toilets while they’re talking, except in these super small movies. But in a big movie now if you did that, it would be–

**John:** Oh, we get noted to death on that. Because it’s like, you know, we get notes from the studio executive about that’s not going to look really good. I don’t want to see Charlize Theron peeing. And then on the day you get that note, and then there will be the second guessing, and it wouldn’t got shot. Or if it did get shot, it wouldn’t make it through the edit. They’d say like, “What parts did you not like in the movie?” “I didn’t like the part where she was peeing.”

**Aline:** She was peeing.

**John:** And then we could cut from that. That’s the frustration. And because these big movies have all that weight and all that responsibility of they have to test well. Anything that people don’t like is going to get nixed.

**Aline:** Right. And in the context of doing that sometimes you’re straining out human behavior. And, you know, at the end of the day, don’t we still go to movies to see how people behave, should behave? So, I think it’s good to preserve those things and it’s a mark of a good writer that you can inhabit those big moments with the little moments.

**John:** I would also point out that I think female characters have a much higher standard for what kind of real behaviors we’re excited to see them do on screen, versus male characters. So, like Seth Brogan peeing on screen. Great. You know, beautiful actress peeing on screen? No, we don’t want to see that.

**Aline:** There’s definitely movies I’m watching where I’m going where is the salon? They’ve been roughing it in the outback for six weeks and her hair looks fabulous.

**John:** So Passengers is a beautiful movie, and I really enjoyed large parts of it. Chris Pratt, who is a very handsome guy, gets to look really crappy at times, which is completely appropriate and character appropriate. When Jennifer Lawrence needs to look bad, it’s basically like she’s a little shiny. That’s about as bad as they make her look. And, yes, part of it is the sort of romantic comedy fantasy. Like if you were on this cruise ship and you had all this stuff. But did she spend four hours on makeup just to get up in the morning? The suspension of disbelief is really high.

**Aline:** But I think it’s establishing a language for your movie. Because if you’re making La La Land and there’s this sort of veneer of wish fulfillment about it, and he dialed in the level of wish fulfillment, because they’re not perfect. They don’t look perfect. The movie has edges to it. But for large parts she looks beautiful and is wearing aspirational things. And he looks quite handsome and is wearing aspirational things. But not to a level that pulls you out of the movie. But if you’re making a grittier film, then people need to look like that.

And what is often, I personally find annoying, is when you have actresses in a littler film where they should be grubby and instead they look like they just wandered from the Méche Salon on Robertson, having just gotten their tips done. So, I think that’s more on production though than writing.

**John:** Yeah. I remember interviewing Winnie Holzman when she was talking about My So-Called Life. And they set up rules for that first season where Claire Danes’s character could only have certain outfits. So basically they picked her outfits and then she would have to repeat outfits, because she didn’t have an unlimited wardrobe, which I thought was actually a very smart idea. A good sort of structure to impose upon yourself. Like we’re not going to go nuts with her wardrobe.

**Aline:** And that suited the tone of that movie which was a real exploration of her psychology. And I think when you can tell – we always talk about this, how you can tell within 30 seconds whether you’re comfortable in a movie or not. It’s just so instant. And there are those little, you know, humans are so incredibly good at scanning faces and behavior for authenticity. And the minute you see somebody doing something which doesn’t suit the world, which sticks out in some way, it’s very noticeable. But a lot of what he’s also talking about are just like poor writing clams.

And talking to yourself is a thing that writers get stuck with because they’re struggling to get exposition out. And so I think if you’re writing a scene and you’re really super tempted to have someone talk to themselves, just try and think of another way you can do it. Just try and think of another means to get that information out.

A lot of it is you may not need that information to come out then. It may be something that can come out more naturally later, and you can sort of have the character express the emotion that you’re looking for and find out the exact news item in another way.

**John:** Absolutely. The moment where the character steps in the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face, which is so cliché, and I don’t think people do in real life, find another way to sort of – you can use the look of what he would be doing in that moment to do–

**Aline:** Have you ever done it?

**John:** I’ve never done it.

**Aline:** Never splashed yourself with water. Have you ever, though, looked in the mirror and said, “John August, you go out there and give the best meeting of your life.”

**John:** Oh, I have looked at myself in the mirror and psyched myself up, but I’ve never actually spoken. So, actually, I’m curious about your opinion on mirrors. I think mirrors are incredibly helpful sometimes when I’m writing dialogue because sometimes I’ll need to look in a mirror and actually have and sort of talk through that conversation, or think through stuff. Somehow looking in a mirror is actually really helpful for me in writing sometimes.

**Aline:** I don’t do that. To me, the characters are like in a little screen projected in the back of my head.

**John:** For Big Fish, when I was writing the death scenes and stuff like that, I would look at a mirror and get myself to cry and then I–

**Aline:** No!

**John:** And then I would write those scenes. And so it was very, very method. But I would bring myself to tears and get myself–

**Aline:** This is where Craig makes jokes about your robotic programming and how you have to mimic the feelings of a human by recreating them in your software.

**John:** Absolutely. All I can say is that algorithm worked.

Final question comes from Brian Sanchez who writes, “I’m a new listener to the podcast and you guys have inspired me to try to write this idea I’ve had in my head for a sitcom, mainly just to see if I can do it. It features a Latino family and I would like the dialogue to ring true to how an actual Latino American household sounds. Growing up with Cuban parents, we constantly switched between English and Spanish in the same conversation. When writing these scenes, would you put the translations in the script, or would this be confusing to the reader?”

**Aline:** Well, in French Ladies what I did was I translated little things. I mean, I left small sentences that the other character – so if one character spoke and said something that the other character could respond to in English. So, if the French character said, you know, “Let’s go to the café for lunch.” Then the other character would say, “I don’t want to go to the café for lunch,” so that you would hear whatever information you needed to know in English. And so I often did it that way by the responding, the other character would tell us what had been said.

And then for the reading purposes I would say in French, Subtitled, and then just write it in English. That’s mainly what I did. It really depends on who you’re writing it for. And if you’re writing it as something you want to sell to an American TV audience, then – but if you’re sending it to someplace that is a Spanish language place, you could probably do both and you could then subtitle whatever one you… – You know, I’m always impressed in The Americans they super committed to the Russian. Giant long, long, long scenes, very articulate Russian. These are very highly educated people and they must have a ton of people working on that. But they super committed and then you just sit and you read the subtitles. And…

**John:** I love The Americans. And we watched all three seasons while I’ve been here.

**Aline:** Four.

**John:** Actually, I’ve only been through three seasons. Sorry. So don’t tell me what happens next.

**Aline:** Four is real good.

**John:** Oh, wait, no, maybe we did watch four.

**Aline:** Let’s tell everyone what happened now.

**John:** Let’s spoil things for people. I love to watch that show. And so we’re plowing through the show, I’ll tend to be looking at something on my iPad at the same time, or I’ll be playing a game. And then it gets to the Russian sections and you can’t follow it because you actually have to look at the screen to do stuff.

**Aline:** Are you that person who watches stuff and then is also doing other stuff?

**John:** Oh, we’re very much that family.

**Aline:** Really? So you’re watching a series and you’re also playing a game?

**John:** Sometimes, yes.

**Aline:** Wow.

**John:** I won’t do it for like a movie. But for an ongoing series, especially like things that are talky that you can sort of figure out. So I’m looking up and down to do that.

**Aline:** Wow. Wow.

**John:** Yeah. But back to the issue of multiple languages, I would say there’s two things to be thinking about. First off is what does it read like on the page. And so how do you make sure it makes sense on the page. And so italics may be a way to do it. You might just have an introductory note saying like everything you see in italics is actually in Spanish. Some way to do that just so it’s as efficient as possible on the page so you’re not wasting page space.

But really the bigger issue is thinking about what is it going to feel like to the person watching the show. And are you going to expect that they can understand the Spanish or not understand the Spanish? Maybe you’re targeting this for Telemundo where everyone would get both languages and that’s awesome.

**Aline:** Sure, I mean, Jane the Virgin is a bilingual show. In Jane the Virgin they subtitle it and I’m assuming they just reverse the subtitle or dub it for the reverse. I think anything which is clear and easy to understand.

**John:** Yeah. So, if you’re sitcom is sort of like Jane the Virgin, I would say like pull some Jane the Virgin scripts and do whatever they do because that’s working quite well for them and they’re in their fourth season.

**Aline:** They’re in their third season.

**John:** Yeah. And they’re a good show. Their show is partnered with yours currently, or not?

**Aline:** No. They are with Supergirl and we’re with Vampire Diaries now.

**John:** And when are you back on the air? So we’re recording this at the end of December. When is your next episode?

**Aline:** January 6 we are back on the air with two episodes back to back, eight and nine.

**John:** Holy cow. I’m so excited.

**Aline:** Back to back. Yeah.

**John:** I love your new introduction for the show.

**Aline:** Thank you.

**John:** I think I sent you guys an email about it, but I just adore it. And it was such a great choice to go through and sort of reframe the show based on sort of what the nature of the central dramatic question of this season is, which is like I’m just a girl in love. You can’t sort of blame me for this thing, which was actually established in the very pilot episode. It’s the thing that Donna Lynne Champlin says in the pilot.

**Aline:** Yes. You’re in love.

We – because the premise of the show changes every season, the credit sequence for the first season makes no sense, because the first season is all about, oh what, you’re here, I’m here, what, that’s so weird, that’s funny. And then the second season is really her being like, no, no, no, you love me. You love me. So, it required that.

So, we’re doing a new one, if we get a third season, we’ll be doing another one for that season. And sort of because the premise for the show is rather slender, one of the reasons that to us it seems sustainable was because we were going to take a slightly look at being an obsessive ex every year. And so that’s what keeps it kind of going. And so every year will be a slightly different look that dynamic.

**John:** Yeah. You’re not The Americans where there’s just a new Cold War bit of espionage you can throw in. It’s not a procedural where every week there can be a new thing.

**Aline:** It’s kind of unique to our show because if we had stayed in the mode of the first season, we would have run out of steam pretty quickly. And also the trajectory of being obsessively in love with someone is something that has different phases to it. And the first phase is like, what, you’re here, I’m here, that’s so weird. I don’t know why I’m in your Starbucks on the other side of town. And then the second one is like, no, we’ve slept together, and you love me. And so they’re different phases. And when we pitched it we had pitched four completely different phases of her pursuit.

**John:** Yeah. I was just impressed that you blew up your series so completely in the second season, which was a great choice. So, hooray, congratulations.

A thing we do on the show quite often is How Would this be a Movie. And usually in those cases we’re looking at three different stories in the news and discussing sort of how would you take them and make them a movie. Today we actually have a special case because we have a story, a true story that we can look at and look at sort of how it is progressing towards becoming a movie.

So, I’m going to try to give the very short encapsulation of the idea. But we’re going to hear sort of how it expands and the other ramifications of the idea. This is a story that starts in 1949. Max Schneck was found murdered. It was a scandal covered for months by all the major newspapers here in France. Journalists told the story of a man killed by his supposed lover, who cut him into pieces and traveled through France with parts of his body in his suitcase.

The story of the murder became the basis of a book, The Indestructible Mr. Schneck, written by his granddaughter, Colombe Schneck. She’s a friend of Aline’s. And she’s sitting right beside you. Welcome Colombe.

**Colombe Schneck:** Hello. Very nice listening to you. And I learn a lot.

**Aline:** So if you’ve heard those little laughs, those are Colombe.

**John:** Yes.

**Aline:** Can I say who Colombe is?

**John:** Please. Tell us everything.

**Aline:** So, Colombe’s father and my mother were friends from school, so I’ve known Colombe all my life basically. And Colombe was a journalist and she was on television and then it’s fair to say – and the radio – and it’s fair to say when she got to be about 40 they did what they do in America which is they take women and they remove them. They remove them because they can’t be seen in public. [laughs] And it was a good excuse and opportunity for Colombe to do what she had been wanting to do, which was to become a writer. And it’s just funny for us having known each other since we were born that we both ended up becoming writers.

And so Colombe has written numerous novels, nonfiction books. She’s also on the radio and has had a radio book review show. And she’s now also getting into filmmaking and has been making documentaries. And this book that you’re talking about is a book she wrote, was her second book. Her first book. Her first book. Is that the one that you’re thinking of turning into a movie?

**Colombe:** Yes. Exactly. This is the first book I wrote ten years ago. And when I wrote it I was kind of innocent. But what it means to write a book about your family. I had bumped, I don’t know, how do you say, into this incredible story in my family. I learned by accident reading a glossy newspaper. I love to read glossy newspapers. Old one. That my grandfather, Max Schneck, was murdered in 1949. At the time was a huge story in all the newspapers. You know, John, you just told us the punchline which I was I think incredible to learn that your grandfather was cut into pieces, was gay. Pieces of his body were traveled by his murderer all over France.

So, for years I kept that story in the – I don’t know how you can keep this kind of secret, because the kind of shame in my family because of that. And one day, I don’t know why you begin to think you can write. It kind of makes a mediation and freedom and say maybe I could do something about that. And I began to write the story of my grandfather with the help of my grandmother. We never talked about it for 40 years.

So, I went to do some research and went to find the newspaper of that time and I found out all this story was fiction. The newspapers made a fiction about my grandfather. He was killed by a man, but it was not his lover. They were both in love with the same woman. He was cut into pieces. He was killed by [[unintelligible 00:38:37]]. But the worst story was as interesting as the fiction story. So, I wrote a book, very simple, very short, about my grandfather and my grandmother, because all the way, all the year I wrote the story I talked to me grandmother about her life, her love for her husband. And I spoke also about my grandmother was kind of a character I didn’t know.

I tried to be sincere and tried to do something. I didn’t know it was a book or nothing. I didn’t know I could write a book. But at the end I read the thing and I thought, well, maybe I could send it to a publisher. And this great publisher published it. It was a success.

But the thing which amazed me – I wasn’t ready for that – is my family wasn’t very happy about it. I thought they would be happy to know the truth. That at least I was writing and publishing a book. And they were very mad at me. And I was very surprised. I thought they would approve.

So, ten years after that, I published many books about my family. I continue doing the bad things. And begin to do some documentary films. One day I talk of maybe it would be interesting to – I had many production house ask me to write to do the film about my first book, and it never seemed right. I didn’t like the way – we didn’t find the good films.

After all ten years, I could make the film myself and write the screenplay and maybe direct it. And that the story would be interesting, is not only the story of my grandfather, but what happened in the family when you write a book about your family.

**John:** Great. So let’s stop there and let’s all have a discussion about sort of the different ways this kind of story could be told. Because when I first met you, you told me the story. And I thought, well, that is fascinating. And so I encouraged you to pursue the movie and we talked about Sundance Labs, or other ways you could develop this kind of story.

The things that really triggered for me, is like obviously it’s this initial sensational story, but there’s a truth underneath the sensational story. But also the degree to which a scandal in the past has ripples into the present. How you don’t really want the story, the true story, necessarily to come out. And how the very process of investigating the facts, the truth, can rip a family apart. Those are very much the ideas behind Big Fish as well, which is that you have a journalist coming in who is trying to find the truth of his father’s life and ripping things apart in the process. And sort of the conflict in that. What is the writer’s responsibility to the truth versus his or her family?

Those are all great themes. But also I think really difficult and a really challenging sort of first movie to make. Aline, what’s your–?

**Aline:** What I think is really interesting about it is that there was a secret that was in the family, something she hadn’t talked about, and then sort of by lying around in her house and reading some tabloids she stumbled upon this thing. And it’s almost like this thing reached into the future and made her into a writer. And what I think is interesting is since the book was published in those years, she’s fully become this thing. And I think partly maybe people’s shock was a reaction to there’s also a thing when you become a writer.

Like I ran into my high school boyfriend really early in my 20s and he said, “What are you doing?” And I said I’m a writer. And he said, “You’re a writer?” And then he said, “You tell people that?” And for some reason people find it insulting. And also because when you’re a writer your responsibility is to tell the truth and this was a truth that people don’t want.

And I remember the very first time I met Peter Morgan, who writes primarily nonfiction-based things, we were sitting on a panel together and somebody was talking about the difficulty of working on real life stories. And he said, “We’re assassins aren’t we?” And that really has stuck with me, because I have another friend whose sister-in-law is quite a famous novelist and her rule is if you don’t want me to write about, don’t do it or say it in front of me. Because otherwise it’s fair game.

So, I do think it’s really interesting that this story is the thing that sort of made Colombe a writer. And then she experienced kind of a larger version of what most people do, which is people didn’t want her to be telling her truths. And she’s then gone on to tell stories about the apartment she grew up in and her family’s experience in the Holocaust. And they’re really amazing books. Are any of them available in English, by the way? No?

**Colombe:** No, it’s French-language published, and German, and Lithuanian.

**Aline:** Not English yet?

**Colombe:** Not yet.

**Aline:** They’re really wonderful books. So, but I think it’s a very good way to approach it. So it’s like a detective story where you’re becoming this thing and you’re following this thing and sort of how it affects everyone you know.

**John:** But what I find so fascinating is that you are a character in this story. In almost any version of the story that we’re telling, you are the protagonist of the story. You’re the character who changes. Who comes from being a person who is not investigating the past, to starting to investigate the past, and the process changes you and makes you into this thing. So, in any version of the story presumably your grandfather is a character in the story and we’re going to see an arc through there. But it’s so interesting, like Big Fish is obviously autobiographical both to me and to the original author, Daniel Wallace. But we got to be able to hide behind, like, oh, it’s a fictional story. That’s not me. That’s not my name. That’s not who I am.

And this – it’s going to be a process no matter what you do. That character is you and you’re going to be exposing yourself–

**Aline:** Can you think of a movie like that where somebody has – I mean, there’s All the President’s Men. There’s lots of movies like that. Spotlight, or whatever. But what are movies where the person, the first person, I’m sure there are. I’m thinking about–

**John:** A movie that I didn’t end up writing, but I ended up sort of circling around was called Born to Run. And was about this journalist who decides to start running. And one of the challenges I really faced is that he was the character in the story, but I didn’t feel like he was a movie character in the story. And so where are your responsibilities? Your responsibility is to yourself, to truth, to the story, and in order to make the best version of the story you may need to change certain aspects of what you really did.

**Aline:** You’ve already written the screenplay?

**Colombe:** Yes. And one of the characters in the screenplay, the character who is telling the story, says I’m a thief, because you take story from, you know, from your family, from people around you. But you also are a liar. I’m a thief and a liar. But I changed things to make it as a story, as a good fiction.

So, that writer is a very bad character. And I want to tell about that. But there’s no other way around. [[Unintelligible 00:45:05]] how much he steals from his family life, his wife, his mistress, and put them in a book and his films, like for the arrangement. And how it’s difficult for his wife to see her character in the arrangement of the awful wife. But there’s no other way around it. There’s a way we should all do that. We are all thief and liar. And those are the things of a good writer.

**John:** But usually we get to hide behind the veneer of fiction and pretend like, oh, no, no, that’s not really you. And, of course, in this situation there’s no way to do that. And so you also face the dilemma of, you know, your family already had the frustration over your book. But a movie is going to be reopening those wounds.

**Colombe:** It’s a mother/daughter story, so I changed – this is the real lie. This is my imagination and I could put so much more writing and that’s when I have fun.

**John:** There’s the simplification that can happen, because obviously there’s going to be more characters than you need to do. There are characters who aren’t going to be relevant to this. So, you can do some trimming around there [[crosstalk 00:46:06]].

**Colombe:** I remember one of my book, I wrote about my family, there’s one character close to my family was a person, a real person, was very unhappy at me because I didn’t put her in the book. She was really like pissed off and furious. And she doesn’t want to speak to me anymore because I didn’t put her in the book. And she felt she was very important in my family. But, I didn’t need her for the story. So, that’s true, we are all liars. We take people and, no, no, yes, this one yes. This sentence, I like it, but I’m going to change it. So, that’s a problem.

**John:** One of the most frequently asked questions we get on the podcast is I want to do a story about a real life person, and what are my obligations and responsibilities? And it’s obviously messy, because if someone is in your life and you’re portraying sort of who they are in your life, that’s fair game to a large degree. But if you are libeling them, then that can be a real issue as well.

And so, I mean, obviously you’re going to be sensitive to like not making them absolutely monsters. Or, if they’re monsters, not making them do something that is patently false. Or like kill a person that they didn’t actually kill.

But it becomes a real tricky issue.

**Colombe:** Yeah. When I take a character, pass them around me, and put it in a character in a book, in a screenplay, it’s not the person anymore. It’s a personage. It’s a fiction person. It’s not the person. I don’t feel – maybe I can take a few things, but most of those things come from my imagination. I will change them. I will talk to him and I don’t feel any responsibility for the person. Because that’s not even him anymore.

**John:** Yeah. I always feel like my first responsibility is to the audience. And it’s the person who is going to be watching this movie and making sure that they can follow and understand the story I’m trying to tell them. And, yes, you have other responsibilities to, you know, the other filmmakers involved and to the people giving you the money, and everyone else. But, I mean, your first responsibility is what does this story want to have happen so you can tell the best version of the story.

**Colombe:** For instance, for this first screenplay I’m writing about my grandparents, my grandmother [[unintelligible 00:48:04]] I was a great character for a book. She was very, how do you say [[unintelligible 00:48:09]] in English? Cranky. And she was bit panicked. And she was really – she was very funny. She was a very good character. But so I took so many things from her, which I will, but also I put more so I make it more funny, because I need more. You know? I need some humor.

**John:** So let’s talk about where you are at right now with your process and trying to get this into a movie. Because when I first met you, you’re a novelist who has made documentaries. You have this great story. To me, it seems like a slam dunk. Well, she’s going to be able to do this. But it’s not easy to do this. It’s a challenging step. And probably different – I’m not saying more challenging – but different to try to do it here in France than it would be to do it in the States.

**Colombe:** Yeah. When you write a novel you do [[unintelligible 00:48:52]] fiction. It’s great because you have all the freedom of the world. You can invent your methods. You can invent the way you write. You go where you want to go. There’s no rules. Which his kind of frightening and difficult sometimes, because you have to invent what you’re going to do.

And when I begin to write screenplays, which I like very much, it’s suddenly you have rules. You have things you cannot do. It’s a more collective process. And I like it very much.

And the problem I had is I put too much talk, too much blah, blah, blah…

**John:** Just dialogue, yeah.

**Colombe:** Dialogue. I’m a writer. And difficult to admit. I need to translate this blah, blah, blah into images. So this is the difficulty I had.

As a documentary writer, which is great, documentary film director I like because you don’t have to invent anything, you know. You film and great things happen in front of you. It’s wonderful. It’s like, wow. I haven’t done anything but the person are doing things for me.

This I had to myself. So, this is what the difficult things I had to–

**Aline:** Translating. That’s a great way to put it. Translating the blah, blah, blah into images is as concise an explanation of what being… – And when I started writing I was also very dialogue-based, because that’s just how my brain works. And I was writings wraps and wraps of dialogue. And I would have to go back and put in action things into the page so that it wasn’t just tons and tons of people talking.

And that’s something I still find that – over time that’s something that’s difficult for writers is to figure out how can I just have this happen without commenting, or announcing, or, you know, it’s a skill you learn. It’s like any of the other things that you learn. But I think it’s very brave and interesting to go from journalism, to fiction, to nonfiction, to documentary films, to fiction films is, you know, she’s made the transition so many times before.

**John:** Yes. That’s why I’m convinced you’ll be able to do it, because I think screenwriting is like journalism. There’s a lot of structure to it. It’s like fiction writing in that you’re trying to build out a world that doesn’t exist beforehand. It’s documentaries in that you are trying to find a way to tell a story cinematically rather than just with words. So, I have a hunch it’s going to work, but I’m fascinated to see sort of what’s going to happen next.

So, thank you for sharing this part of the process so early on.

**Colombe:** I don’t know. [[Unintelligible 00:51:15]] New things, you know, when I first went into journalism, or to write a story, I didn’t know how to do it, you know? I just had to do it. And well I shouldn’t think too much about what I’m doing. When I was writing my first fiction book, my first book about my family, I think maybe it’s going to be nothing, or maybe it’s going to be a book. I don’t know. I’m going to do it and we’ll see after. When I did documentary films, it was the same kind of process. Now, I’ve kind of experienced what I’m able to do, the way I’m working, and so I’m less innocent about the way I’m going to do these fiction films. But I still – the truth is I still don’t know.

I can even things and face problems and try to respond to it. I don’t know if this is a good American way to do it. But–

**John:** Yeah. It’s absolutely the American way to do it.

It has come time for our wrap up segment which is One Cool Things. So, at the end of every episode we talk about One Cool Thing. So, I don’t know if we warned you about One Cool Things.

**Aline:** I will tell you my One Cool Thing. I have a very good One Cool Thing. So, I’m in Paris and the dollar is quite strong. And then there’s duty free. So, I went to Hermes to buy a scarf for myself and for my mother. So, I–

**John:** This is the most Aline One Cool Thing ever. It’s great.

**Aline:** Yes. So I go in to buy the scarf and I’m picking out some ones that I like. And I find one that I like and the woman and I were speaking in French, which is always fun for me to get to use my French. And she’s chatting away in French. And I pick one and she says, “No, that’s not good for you.” [laughs] And I said, “Oh, really? I like this one.” And she says, “No. No, no, no. This is not good.”

And then I am trying not to be bossed around by her, and I’m saying, “No, no, I like this one. Show me some other ones. But I like this one.” She’s just showing me other ones and I’m noticing that that one is scooting away from. It’s just scooting down and into the drawer, never to be seen again. She was just not going to sell me the scarf that she thought did not look good on me.

And so she just kept bringing me new ones, and new ones, and new ones until I found one that I liked as well. And it just was the perfect French experience of buying something, you know, overpriced in the best way and being completely bossed and judged and having their aesthetics imposed on you. And I couldn’t have been happier. By the end we were great friends.

**John:** Speaking for Craig I have to say like that’s crazy. There’s no way that’s a One Cool Thing. That is actually some sort of like weird – it’s the failure of the commercial system. That’s amazing, and yet I do understand sort of what happened there.

**Aline:** I absolutely trust her and I know that this was better than the thing I had picked out.

**Colombe:** One of the cool things I’ve done this year, and this is not far from Aline. For my screenplay, the mother and the daughter are walking in the shop, selling clothes, which is kind of my fantasy. Walking in the story, selling clothes. A family business [unintelligible 00:54:17] store, you know, like we have. So, for a week, I went to a store being a seller to help me to write my screenplay. And I just love it. I just love it. To be able to – it’s like to be in a movie theater. You know?

You hear and you watch the women coming in and they all when they come in the store they all are depressed. That’s what the seller told me. They need something, but they don’t know what they need. So you have to help them to go out from the depression. It’s a depression selling them a dress or scarf or anything.

**John:** Or a Hermes scarf.

**Colombe:** Or Hermes, yes. So you look at them and you listen to them. And you help them. So, this week of selling clothes was one of the best things I’ve done this year.

**Aline:** Wow.

**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is a book. It’s called Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.

**Aline:** Colombe and I ripped out some girly stuff about clothes. Yeah.

**John:** So it’s a book I read. It’s by Cathy O’Neil. She’s also the host of a podcast I like a lot. I’ll put a link in the show notes to it. But her book is really good. It’s about the degree to which the algorithms behind big data, which are meant to sort of make things more equal and fairer, like for like credit lending or for sentencing for criminal offenses, for getting into college. They have all these computer algorithms, which should make things more fair. Because they’re supposed to be taking race out of it and things. But they end up sort of baking the race and poverty into it. And it ends up making things much, much worse.

And so just a great book, a quick, easy read.

**Aline:** I have notes on our One Cool Things. I think they’re clams. They’re just too on-the-nose. Yes, all of us. We just did. It was too on-the-nose what we did.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** If I had had the algorithm book and you had had the Hermes scarf that would have been more interesting. Yeah, we’d make different choices.

**John:** Yeah. We got to do this again. That is our show for this week.

So, as always, our show is produced—

**Colombe:** Très bien. Merci.

**John:** Très bien. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also from Matthew. If you have an outro, you can send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. On Twitter Craig, who is not here, is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Aline is not on Twitter. Sorry.

**Aline:** Oh, you know what? I’m going to do it.

**John:** Oh, okay. So when Aline has a Twitter handle–

**Aline:** I’m going to – should I do it? Rachel tells me all the time I should do it.

**John:** You should totally do it.

**Aline:** I’m going to do it.

**John:** Once you have a Twitter handle, we will give you – we’ll put it on the air?

**Aline:** I’m doing it. Are you sure? Oh, okay, you’re on Twitter and Instagram.

**Colombe:** @ColombeSchneck.

**Aline:** Colombe Schneck.

**John:** Colombe Schneck is also on the Instagram and on Twitter.

**Aline:** Okay. If I go on Twitter and I don’t like it…

**John:** It’s fine. She’ll leave. You can leave and protest. Because actually part of the process of being on Twitter is leaving Twitter. [laughs]

**Aline:** That’s a thing everything does at some point?

**John:** You have to do it. You have to leave it.

You can find us on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes podcast, or on iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you’ll find the app for listening to the back episodes. You can find the show notes for this episode, and all the back episodes, at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

We have like 20 of the USB drives left. Very, very few. But you can always get to all the back episodes of Scriptnotes on Scriptnotes.net.

And for Aline Brosh McKenna, Colombe Schneck, I’m John August. Thank you very much for joining us on Scriptnotes.

**Aline:** Au revoir.

**John:** Au revoir.

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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 281 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Except not today, because today on the podcast we’re not going to be talking about screenwriting at all. Rather, we’re going to be looking at the practice of homeopathy and what it can teach us about how narrative shapes belief.

Craig, are you ready? Are you set?

**Craig:** I’ve been looking forward to this. Of course. Like beyond. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, my whole life.

**John:** And so much have you potentized your umbrage on this topic?

**Craig:** It’s weaponized. I’m bringing weaponized umbrage today. Yeah.

**John:** Yes. And you do that by diluting your umbrage down, so it’s just infinitesimally small.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But then that makes it much more powerful.

**Craig:** Yeah. By having no umbrage whatsoever, my umbrage will be that much more effective.

**John:** It’s going to be great. So, let’s talk about what homeopathy is, just so we’re defining our terms properly. So, homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine. It’s based around the idea of like cures like. That is that a condition can be treated by use of a substance that is similar to it, or creates similar symptoms. So, a practitioner of homeopathy is called a homeopath. And they create treatments through the process of homeopathic dilution, which is what we were referring to right there, where substances are repeatedly diluted which is believed to increase their potency.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, Craig, how much did you know about the history of homeopathy before we started this episode?

**Craig:** I knew a bunch, because I was pre-med, so you tend to study the history of medicine. I took a great class in college called The History of Medicine, which was wonderful. And also I grew up in New York and then New Jersey and Hahnemann – there’s still a very large Hahnemann Medical Center in Philadelphia. And so I knew the name Hahnemann. And quickly came to learn how stupid everything he believed was. [laughs]

And I’ve always been this way. I’ve always felt like this strange person walking the earth who doesn’t understand why so many people believe things that are just absurd. And so I naturally gravitate towards them to learn about them.

**John:** Absolutely. So we originally were going to have this as part of our fact and fiction episode, where we were talking about courtroom stuff and other sort of weird, like hospital things, and like we had so much to say about homeopathy that we couldn’t fit it all into one episode. So, this is going to be the full-on – this is the tasting menu, everything you could possibly eat about homeopathy will be in this episode.

So, let’s dig in. Let’s start with the history of homeopathy, because I knew almost nothing until I started researching it this morning.

So, some of the ideas behind homeopathy go back a very long time. That sense of what can make a man ill can also make them healthier, so that goes back to sort of prehistoric times, but very early sort of philosophers talking about how the body works. Granted, they didn’t have a great sense of how the body worked overall, but there was that sense of like, oh, you have a little bit of this thing which will make you feel better because it’s like that thing.

So, that goes back a very long ways, but the guy you were referencing, Samuel Hahnemann, was the guy who sort of came up with the term of homeopathy and is really the mastermind, if you want to say mastermind, behind the whole “science” – air quotes – of homeopathy. So, talk us through sort of where he came from and sort of what is guiding principles were.

**Craig:** Well, Hahnemann was German and his belief was that small things that were similar to the diseases that they might treat could work. So, if you were suffering from a disease that was caused by – let’s say like for instance malaria, that was a famous one. Then, if you could find some substance that caused the same symptoms as malaria, but just give people tiny amounts of it, that should kill malaria. There’s actually no reason to believe this whatsoever. None.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It is essentially the ultimate begging of the question. They just decided that it was true. And then went from there. Now, in defense of Samuel Hahnemann, who was working in the 18th and 19th Century, no one knew a damn thing back then. No one. They were really struggling.

**John:** This is the era of bloodletting and leaches. Medicine, as such, was pretty barbaric. And so when you approach something with like, oh, I’m going to approach this with “scientific rigor” – air quotes again – it seems very impressive because it seems like you are trying to really suss out the origins of the problem. So, what you said about malaria, this actually fits into – he was translating a book by William Cullen, and Cullen had sort of cited that Peruvian bark, this cinchona, was useful in treating malaria. And he said it was because of its bitter and astringent properties. And so when Hahnemann was doing the translation of this book, he made a big footnote saying like, oh, it’s not just that. It’s because it caused symptoms similar to the disease it was treating. So, literally in doing the translation he sort of changed the translation to say, oh, it’s not just this bark is useful. It’s useful for exactly these reasons.

It turns out that the bark was useful because it had quinine in it. And so quinine cures malaria. But he was making a leap of logic to say like this is the reason why these things are working.

**Craig:** Yeah. This period of time, it’s somewhat tragic, because Hahnemann dies in the 1840s, but as you get into the second half of the 19th Century, suddenly things start to turn. And that’s when you get Louis Pasteur. And that’s when you get this enormous explosion of proper science dealing with microbes and disease. And that’s also where you start to find vaccinations come into play. And some people might think, well, this is a little bit like vaccinations. It’s not. It’s not at all like vaccinations.

Vaccinations are – the science behind vaccination is to take something that causes a disease directly and then weaken it and give the body a small amount of that weakened version so that it can create an immunity to that without suffering from the effects. Homeopathy is about finding things that cause the same symptoms and then saying, oh, that will cure it.

Or, as we’ll see as it develops, taking things that maybe cause a problem and giving you an amount that is essentially not really there.

He is a victim of the time he was in. No such excuse for the people who believe in this baloney today.

**John:** Yeah. So, what Hahnemann was doing, he set out to do his provings, and by provings, it’s not that he was testing the validity of his underlying premise. It was really basically just saying like, well, what are some things that cause similar symptoms? And basically he was looking for and testing on his family and everyone else around him what can I give you that’s going to cause these symptoms, because if it causes these symptoms then I can use it to treat diseases that sort of have the same symptoms. And so he was gathering up all this “research” – again, air quotes – putting together his findings, and his complete overview was called The Organon of the Healing Art, which was originally 1810.

First off, The Organon is just a great title.

**Craig:** Amazing, right?

**John:** The sixth version, which came out in 1921, is still used by homeopaths today. So, that’s where he introduced the concept of miasms, which are infectious principals underlying chronic diseases.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** And so we can see what he’s doing here. He basically – he has a postulate. He has this idea, but rather than trying to prove this idea, he just sort of builds from hit, and builds this whole big system on top of this idea without ever trying to prove the underlying idea. And sort of when he has to come up for an explanation for things, he invents new words. And in inventing new words, he also invents new words for things that already exist. And so traditional medicine he calls allopathic medicine, which is sort of used pejoratively for all that other sort of normal stuff that isn’t the real good homeopathic stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s not enough to come up with a principle and then instead of testing the principle for truth simply just start exploring things that might help you further the cause of your principle, you also had to demonize everything else because of this competitive sense that there must be an answer. And this is really the stuff of cult or religion. You begin with an article of faith. Everything that you pursue begs the question that the faith is true. And other practices that question your faith are bad. It’s just straight up religious.

**John:** It is. And also along those lines, you need to have an opponent. And that opponent can’t just be a passive thing that’s out there. So, it’s one thing to call everyone out there who was doing the normal medicine allopathy, but you have to have someone who is actively against you. And that became the medical establishment. The growing medical establishment that says no, no, no, this is not actually real; what you’re doing does not actually work.

And so early 20th Century popularity of homeopathy began to wane. There was this report called the Flexner Report, which is an evaluation of medical schools, and found that the schools teaching homeopathy were lacking. Medicine itself had become less barbaric. We talked about Louis Pasteur. We have the dawn of microscopes. We have the ability to look inside and see what’s actually causing disease. And what’s causing disease does not seem to be these underlying miasms. It was actually something visible now with modern technology.

So, by 1950, there’s no homeopathic colleges in the US. There were estimates of only 50 to 150 practicing homeopathic physicians in the US. And a lot of those practitioners were older because they had started at an earlier age. And so for a while it looked like it was going out. And then it came back.

**Craig:** Yeah. A little bit like measles.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. Funny how that works. An idea that roars back into life. So, not just in the US, but Great Britain, and in France, India, you see homeopathy in lots of places worldwide. I see it when I go into the pharmacy in France. It is a thing that has come back roaring. And there’s not good science behind it then or not good science behind it now.

There’s actually a lot of good science around it now, but it’s all sort of negative. So, before we get into sort of the reasons why it doesn’t work, we should talk about – let’s talk about the storytelling that happens in this history, because I do find it just so fascinating. Because you mentioned cults, and as I was reading through this I was reminded a lot about sort of all the early churches. Look at sort of the origins of really any church that set up in opposition to the orthodoxy of the time, or even like Joseph Smith and Mormonism. You look at L. Ron Hubbard. There are charismatic people who are challenging the system. They’re saying the normal system isn’t working. I have secret knowledge to share. And don’t listen to those other people when they tell you that what we’re doing is crazy.

**Craig:** They’re picking at this thing that we have, or just a normal human state of mild paranoia. And the normal human state of mild paranoia stems ultimately I think from our mortality. So, on some level we’re told that we’re going to die. That is very hard to process. It just doesn’t – the brain is not particularly good at reflecting on its own lifespan and eventual demise.

So, we begin to wonder if maybe everything is not true. Perhaps this is all an illusion. Or I’m not going to really die, of course. And even if that’s subconscious, you are suddenly susceptible to people who come along and say you’ve been fed a bunch of lies, and you probably always suspected that you were fed a bunch of lies. What if I could show you the truth?

This makes for wonderful movies but terrible medicine.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the characters we’re describing in Hahnemann and L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, they wouldn’t be classically the hero of a story. I mean, I guess there could be some sort of call to adventure, but more likely they are the wise old man who shows up to tell the hero, “No, no, no, there’s a better way.” They are Morpheus in The Matrix. They are Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. They’re the person who says the world you see is not the world that has to be. The force permeates all things. There’s more to this world than they will let you know. That’s the function that these characters tend to play in these stories.

And you can see why they’re seductive because we don’t want the world to be the way it is. We want the world to be the way we want the world to be. And if someone offers you that solution, you’re going to say, well yes, show me how to do that.

So, in homeopathy, the key to getting the world the way you want it to be is dilution. So, we need to talk about the concept of homeopathic dilution, because that’s sort of an article of faith you kind of have to take. And say like, well, I know that doesn’t make sense, but trust me, it works. But let’s talk about sort of what’s really going on there and sort of the mathematical problem that comes with this dilution.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, for starters, you just have to look at the words and kind of gawk that anybody ever bought it. They’re saying if you dilute things, you make them more powerful. That is simply the opposite of true. It’s not not-true. It is the opposite of true. It’s like saying if you shine a light, something gets darker. It is just defying the meaning of the words.

**John:** That’s an article of faith. That is basically I know that everything you’ve ever seen works a certain way, but trust me, it doesn’t work this way in this case. You’re asking someone to make a big change in belief right there. Like that is the fundamental ask I think of homeopathy is like I know this seems crazy, but no, it really works.

**Craig:** And, you know, for a long time what they were talking about was essentially invisible to the eye. So, you could accept it if you chose, just like God is invisible to the eye and people choose to accept God. So, Hahnemann creates a scale, the centesimal or C scale. And this scale is a measurement of how diluted a substance is. Remember, these are substances that either mimic the symptoms of your problem or directly cause your problem. But, of course, we’re not going to just feed somebody the thing that’s causing them the problem. No, we’re going to dilute it. That will somehow make it stronger and also beneficial. So, we’re going to dilute a substance by a factor of 100 at each level of C.

**John:** So, a 2C dilution would take a substance that was diluted to one part in 100, and then that diluted solution is diluted again by a factor of 100. So, it’s like two 100s down.

**Craig:** Correct. So, essentially one/ten-thousandth, right? And so each time you do this, I guess it’s logarithmic, right? I think that’s the proper use of the mathematical term. So, by the time you get to 6C, you’ve taken a substance and you’ve diluted it to one part in 100, then you’ve taken that dilution and diluted that one part in 100. And then you’ve done it again – take that, and dilute it one part in 100. And so and so on. And Hahnemann remarkably – now, we all know, like everyone has heard, every kid has heard the story of the guy who says I bet you that a king – if you give me one penny on one square of a chessboard and then double that for the next square, I will take that as my payment if you fill up all the squares. And before long, the king is out of money because when you double things it gets bananas really quickly.

Well, Hahnemann didn’t care. He advocated 30C dilutions for most purposes. 30C, that means one in a hundred, and then take that and make that one in a hundred, and do that 30 times. So, apparently according to physicists, the greatest dilution that is reasonably likely to contain even one molecule of an original substance is 12C. And 12C, John, what is that equivalent to?

**John:** That is a pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic oceans.

**Craig:** I mean…

**John:** A pinch of salt.

**Craig:** One pinch. [laughs] One pinch of salt in an entire ocean. That’s 12C. Hahnemann wants 30C. So, if you want to make 30C, you need to take one molecule and put it in a container that is more than 30 billion times the size of Earth. And then he’s saying that one molecule in the container that is 30 billion times the size of Earth will cure your disease. That’s what he believed. And, in fact, that is still what these people believe.

**John:** Yeah. And so there’s a footnote here or like an asterisk for like people will say how is that possible. And so the sort of modern belief among homeopaths – not all homeopaths, but some homeopaths – is that there’s a sense of water memory. So, basically the process of dilution, it has changed the water to some degree. There’s a memory of what that substance was in there and it has changed the water, so it still has the effect. And that is completely inconsistent with our understanding of water. And how things work in the real world.

**Craig:** Or anything.

**John:** So, you can take a vial of water that has been treated and a vial of water that has not been treated and there’s no scientific test that can determine any difference between the two, and yet that is the belief.

So, again, that is faith. That is a belief in an invisible thing that is happening there that cannot be measured. And that’s troubling. Yet, we should say like it kind of doesn’t – maybe there is some mechanism that is actually doing it. And so I think we have to step back and say, well, even if we don’t know quite the mechanism behind it, what does it matter if it works. I mean, Craig, if it works, it works.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, listen. I mean, that’s the nature of science. If we don’t understand something, but we see that it has an effect, we try and figure out why. We know things – there are things that happen now, we’re not quite sure why. We’re still trying to figure out why people sleep. But we know they sleep. We’re just not quite sure why it’s necessary. And so we’re trying to figure out the answer.

That, of course, is different than we don’t see anything happening, but maybe something is. As it turns out, if homeopathy worked we would be hard at work trying to figure out why.

Good news, everybody. Homeopathy, of course, does not work.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a sad thing. Because we can actually study it. And we can study to see whether it has the effects it claims to have. And it doesn’t.

**Craig:** No. Not even close. And I hate that we have to do these studies. It’s so absurd. So, Australia, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council reviewed more than 1,800 studies on homeopathy. And let’s just stop right there and go, oh my god. Right?

**John:** That’s a lot of studies.

**Craig:** The waste of money and time. You might as well do 1,800 studies on whether or not somebody humming is going to cure their own cancer. It’s insane. But because some dude came up with this baloney in the 1700s, we have to have 1,800 studies. And, oh, big shock – they only found that 225 of those were even rigorous enough to analyze. And why? I suspect because 1,575 of them were sponsored by homeopathic institutes and were absolute crap.

But when they looked at the 225 rigorous studies, they found it does not work.

**John:** Yeah. There’s no good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy is effective in treating health conditions. I share this frustration with having to spend the time to research these things. I mean, it’s good that even if we do spend the time to research these things, and we spend the money, and you got to check them. And it’s important to check even things you think work to make sure that there’s not sort of research or bias in there. But, yeah, it’s maddening.

When we were preparing for the original episode, you had done specific research on one type of homeopathic medicine, which I was not even aware of, but I think it deserves sort of a special spotlight because it’s sort of extra crazy pants. So, talk us through it.

**Craig:** It is. It is. Well, in its own way it kind of epitomizes the crazy pants of all homeopathic “medicine.” Actually this substance – substance – it’s a sugar pill – spoiler alert – is very popular in France. It’s actually manufactured by a French company. And you will see it being used here in the United States. I think sometimes when people buy these things they just simply don’t understand what homeopathic means, so they don’t realize what they’re buying. And they’re packaged and marketed to look like medicine. So, you’ve probably seen this in stores, those of you at home. It’s called Oscillococcinum. Or Oscillo, it’s shortened to. And it’s manufactured by a French company.

And it is sold as a cure for the common cold or a fever related to a common cold. So, what is Oscillococcinum? It is a homeopathic medicine. It is based – oh, and let me just add. They sell so much of this. Millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars of this. Keep that in mind.

It is based on the theory, which I will suggest is nonsense, and you decide, of a French physician who in 1919, you know, the height of medical enlightenment, thought he had discovered a shimmering microbe that he called Oscillococcinum. You get it? It’s like oscillating. So, he believed he found this little shimmering microbe and he found it not just in one of his patient’s samples under a microscope. He saw it in all of the samples that he took from his patents who all had different diseases.

Now, as it turns out, that’s probably because his microscope was faulty and he was just seeing light. And he thought things were shimmering. Microbes don’t shimmer, as it turns out. Because this isn’t fricking Star Wars.

So, he had a bad microscope, saw an artifact in every slide he had. Another spoiler alert: no one, except for this dude, has ever found this “shimmering” Oscillococcinum microbe because it doesn’t exist. But, okay, that’s quackery level number one. Let us advance, John, to quackery level number two.

Homeopaths said, oh, you know we have this wonderful theory that if you take stuff and you reduce it down to impossibly tiny amounts, it can cure the thing that that thing causes. So, if Oscillococcinum, which doesn’t exist, causes the cold, we should reduce Oscillococcinum, which doesn’t exist, down to incredibly tiny amounts. So they harvested that from – and here comes quackery level three, John, you ready?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Okay. Where else would you get Oscillococcinum from other than the liver of ducks? Why?

**John:** Well, that makes a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] Right?

**John:** I mean, there’s duck liver everywhere here. I mean, it’s super common in France, so it makes sense.

**Craig:** It’s common. Right. So, let’s just take some duck liver, which will definitely have Oscillococcinum in it, but we’re homeopaths, so let’s reduce it down so many times in water that, quackery level four, even if they had started – and I love this statistic – and this is true of the people selling you Oscillococcinum now. If they started with a duck the size of the sun, there still would not be a single molecule of it left in an Oscillococcinum pill based on how many times they reduce it.

Let me state that again. The duck, which does not contain Oscillococcinum because it doesn’t exist, is reduced so many times down that even if they started with a duck the size of the sun, there still wouldn’t be any molecule of duck or Oscillococcinum in an Oscillococcinum pill.

**John:** Here’s my question. Is it vegan? Because–

**Craig:** [laughs] It is. It absolutely is.

**John:** There’s no duck in it, because even though it’s harvested from duck, at this point there is no duck in it. So, a vegan, I think, can safely take this medicine. I haven’t Googled yet.

**Craig:** Well.

**John:** I’m sure there’s debate online about, because–

**Craig:** They may not be able to. And here’s why. Because while there is no microbe in Oscillococcinum, nor is there a single molecule of any active ingredient in Oscillococcinum, nor could there ever be because the active ingredient is imaginary. What there is in the Oscillococcinum pill for sure are two ingredients – lactose and sucrose. Sugar and sugar.

**John:** Yeah. Lactose is a milk sugar. I mean, that’s not vegan, Craig. You’re spoiling it here.

**Craig:** Sorry.

**John:** If someone could just make this a vegan cure, why – god, I’m so frustrated.

**Craig:** It’s really a bummer. They were so close. They are selling you sugar pills, not the euphemistic sugar pills. They’re selling you actual sugar pills and they’re telling you that they’re selling you sugar pills. It’s on the box. Gah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I mean, I assume that this is as confusing and upsetting to you as it is to me.

**John:** It is sort of maddening. And I think if there’s good news is that it’s maddening to lots of other people as well. So, FTC recently proposed new labeling for homeopathic medicines basically selling the box has to say this doesn’t work, which is a bold claim. I will also link to this Alan Levinovitz article for Slate arguing that the labels may actually backfire, because when you call out the scientific validity of things, in a weird way it kind of reinforces it.

So, according to 2007 government data, Americans spend about $3 billion a year on homeopathy.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** And the market is growing. And so time and time again studies show that when you actually say like this claim has not been supported by the FDA, they don’t actually change their purchasing behaviors. So, in a weird way it makes it clear this is an alternative to a normal system. So, I’m not so optimistic that even a label on the box will stop people from using it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the problem with the FDA warning, which is very weak sauce, and I wish–

**John:** And I should also say, I think it’s FTC rather than FDA.

**Craig:** Oh. It’s FTC.

**John:** So, it’s the Federal, Fair Trade – what is FTC?

**Craig:** Fair Trade Commission? Federal Trade Commission?

**John:** Federal Trade Commission?

**Craig:** Federal Trade Commission.

**John:** So it’s not the Food and Drug, but it’s actually the people who are responsible for the things you buy, rather than the drugs you take.

**Craig:** Got it. Well, that disclaimer unfortunately just says, “We can’t say whether or not this works.” They don’t say, “This does not work.” They’ll say, “There is no scientific evidence.” And you’re right. People ignore that, because they just think, oh, because the big pharma is making money off of it.

What they need is a statement akin to the kinds of things they put on cigarette packs. These will cause cancer. Here’s the sort of opposite label for Oscillococcinum. This does nothing. It should be in huge big words in a huge box on the label.

**John:** We just came back from dinner here in Paris and I was looking at this woman’s cigarette box. And it says, sort of the translation is like, “This will kill you,” in big letters.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I like how direct it is here. So, “Tue,” the verb for in French for killing you, is nice and short and effective.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the efficacy of this. Because we’ve established why scientifically it doesn’t work, but why does it seem like it works? Because people who take this are taking it not just once. They’re taking it again and again. And why are they taking it again and again? And this gets into the root I think of sort of what really happens here. I think the bigger question for why this goes beyond on homeopathy. It goes to our basic psychological nature and our inability to process why something can seem like it’s working when it’s not really working.

**Craig:** Well, certainly we know that there’s a placebo effect. And there’s always an ethical question around placebo effect, because it’s real. So, we know that if you convince people that they’re taking potent medicine, they have a tendency to feel better. And that’s not a fake tendency. They can actually physically get better faster. So, there’s an ethical question. What if you know something is a placebo. Should you tell everybody?

There are different kinds of placebos. The placebo effect that I think is most defensible and most common is the placebo effect that comes from very low dosages of medicines that at higher doses have legitimate effect. There doesn’t seem to be a very strong placebo effect for literally sugar pills.

So, there are some other things that are going on. For instance, you’re feeling sick and you take Oscillococcinum and, you know, the next day you feel better. You might have – probably would have – felt better anyway.

**John:** Absolutely. So, that’s the disease running its course. So, let’s take a common cold. Let’s say you’ve got a cold that people are usually sick for like four days. So, on day one you take this homeopathic medicine for your cold. On day two and day three, you’ve still got the cold, maybe you’re feeling a little bit better. By day four, you’re good.

So, you’ve taken this homeopathic medicine and think, well, you know what, on Monday I was sick and by Thursday I was better. So, hey, I guess it worked. Because you have no counter example. You can’t know how long a cold would have lasted if you’d done nothing. And it feels like, you know what, I took some action and I’m better because of it, so I guess it must have worked, because now I’m feeling a lot better. And that repeated again and again across a whole bunch of people, that’s why it feels like it works.

It’s a form of magical thinking. Magical thinking in general is that sense of you are trying to draw a causal relationship between two events. And sometimes it’s an action and an outcome, but it seems like those two things are related, so I guess they’re related. And that’s how we get to a lot of our beliefs about how the world works is by drawing these inferences whether they’re valid or not.

**Craig:** And unfortunately there’s a tremendous overlap between people who have a tendency for magical thinking and people who have no respect for the scientific method whatsoever. So, a lot of times people get a cold and they go to CVS and they pick up NyQuil and some Advil and some Oscillococcinum. And they take all of it. Well, you know, I got better. Obviously it was that magical combination of two things that are medicine and one thing that’s a sugar pill. You know? They just don’t weed out these factors whatsoever. I think that there is another subset of people who are more distressing to me than I would say just the people who are making the casual error of purchasing this nonsense.

There are people who view as medicine and their own self-care as an act of protest. And that goes back to that paranoia, you know. So-called smart people are lying to you in order to take your money. They want you to be sick, so you have to buy more of their junk. And, in fact, these are the secrets that they’re keeping from you. And not only will you get better if you take this, but you are a more virtuous person who is striking a blow for freedom and truth.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the more radical version of I would say like a consumerist approach to healthcare, which is basically like I’m going to keep shopping for an answer until I get the answer I want. And I’m going to pick that answer and that answer is going to be the one that has the most benefits for me and the least drawbacks for me. Factually-based is not a high priority.

So, you know, the same way we sort of shop for clothes, we want to shop for a medicine. Like, I want the one that does exactly these things, but doesn’t have any of these bad side effects. And they’re not recognized in the realities of the situation. Like, things are real.

So, I want to circle back to placebo effect because it’s such an important aspect of what’s happening here. So, most of the people who are feeling better, it probably is a placebo effect to some degree. Sugar pills are classically placebo effect. And there’s nothing wrong with placebo effect. And we should note that when drugs have to go through real FDA trials, they’re tested against a placebo.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in order to be approved, they’re supposed to show that they are much more effective than, or at least noticeably or measurably more effective than an equivalent placebo. And that’s because the placebo effect is so strong, they want to measure them against–

**Craig:** But like think about – here’s the crazy part. If you really think about what you just said, which is absolutely accurate, what regular medicine manufacturers are doing is they’re saying we have a medicine, we think it works. Let’s compare it to Oscillococcinum. [laughs] Because if it doesn’t work better than that, it’s not real medicine. That’s literally what they’re saying. They’re saying Oscillococcinum is our gold standard for doing nothing. So let’s compare it to that.

**John:** Yeah. In the show notes I’ll put a link to a great episode of Science Vs. where they looked at antidepressants and whether antidepressants work, because there’s a lot of science out there that’s suggesting that in many cases they’re not noticeably better than a placebo. And so, well, what do you do? Because they seem effective in a lot of people, but it could be a placebo effect that’s doing a lot of that work there. And so that’s an ongoing scientific controversy.

I’m delighted to have that kind of controversy about a real thing rather than imaginary things.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** And I’d also say, we were talking about the common cold, and so some of the things we offer as solutions to the common cold really are placebos and we should acknowledge that they are placebos. It doesn’t mean that they’re not useful or palliative because if it feels good that’s sort of part of the job. Like comfort should be part of it.

So, when I start feeling a cold, my go-to is Makers Mark. Makers Mark bourbon for whatever reason, it makes me feel better. It’s probably just because I’m taking some action. It’s probably because it’s alcohol.

**Craig:** Ah, there you go. [laughs]

**John:** But it makes me feel better. In the same way my daughter starts to feel a little pukey, I’m like–

**Craig:** Bourbon?

**John:** You give her like the one children’s Motrin. And it’s not going to do anything, but it makes her feel like something has been done. And that’s reasonable. And that’s the kind of thing I wish people would embrace rather than–

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, we all are – this is particularly effective for children. Because children, their brains are still forming. They’re supposed to be completely ignorant and foolable. Every parent knows that, you know, when their three-year-old falls and bumps their knee that they want a Band-Aid. They’re not cut. The Band-Aid is doing nothing. But they want it. And it will make them feel better. And that’s fine for children.

Obviously, yes, only you would wonder what magical ingredient in bourbon could possibly be making you feel better. [laughs] But there’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But there are costs to the wholesale acceptance of thorough complete nonsense. If you give your daughter three Motrin when she has a fever, it will impact the fever. No question.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s medicine. But there’s a cost to believing in this junk.

**John:** Yes. Let’s talk about it. So, I think the underlying pervasive problem for me is that when we choose to be irrational about some things, like our own healthcare, we open ourselves to be irrational about lots of things. And so there are many things out there in the world which a lot of people are kind of irrational about. Climate change. Vaccination. Conspiracies about everything, including 9/11. Psychics. Birtherism. And all sorts of other kind of non-medicines that are thrown out there as being alternatives to western medicine, many of which are actually dangerous.

**Craig:** Yeah, dangerous by addition because they themselves make you worse, or dangerous by subtraction because you’re using them instead of things that work. And there are some very, very sad clear examples of let’s call it homeopathic style magical thinking that has led to harm. Latril, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that word.

**John:** I don’t know what Latril is.

**Craig:** So, in the ‘70s, some ding-a-ling decided that there was this substance in peach pits that could cure cancer. And there is a substance in peach pits. It’s cyanide. It does not cure cancer, at all. And people were spending money on it and dying, not surprisingly, either because they were ingesting too much cyanide, or because they were not following a prescribed course of medicine by actual physicians, or because they were going to die. So, Latril was a huge problem.

And then you had this crazy thing that I think it’s finally going away. This crazy thing that happened where people who were HIV-positive were suddenly denying that HIV was the real cause of AIDS. They believed that, I don’t know, toxins in the atmosphere, or the – or even worse, the drugs used to treat HIV were the real cause of AIDS. And there’s a woman named Christine Maggiore who was HIV-positive and she wrote a book about this. She was kind of the champion of this movement. It gained traction. A one point the Foo Fighters were on board with this ding-a-ling.

And here’s what happened. What happened was that her daughter, named Eliza Jane, contracted HIV from Christine, who refused to take antivirals. And Eliza Jane died of AIDS at the age of three. And then Christine Maggiore died shortly thereafter from AIDS. What a shock. And, you know, if you want to die as a result of your own ignorance, I understand. But she willfully infected her own child and killed her own child. That’s just terrifying to me. Terrifying.

**John:** There’s also a lot of examples of situations where people, especially parents, take something that is actually a real thing and try to apply it to stuff that’s not the actual situation. So, there’s a thing called chelation which is when you have heavy metal poisoning, like seriously heavy metal poisoning that could kill a person. Arsenic, lead, mercury. And there’s a medical practice for how you do it, but parents will try to do it themselves for things that aren’t metal poisoning because they think, oh well, I’m making my kid cleaner on the inside. You can kill your kid that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And my worry is that the same type of belief system that can make homeopathy seem like great, it’s nice, it’s safe, can get a parent to chelation very, very easily.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Think of homeopathy as gateway stupidity. What we’re saying is homeopathic medicine can’t do anything to you. It can’t harm you. The Amazing Randi, James Randi, who is a wonderful skeptic and magician, there’s a terrific video of him swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills at once. [laughs] Because there’s nothing in them, right? But that is your first step down the road of I don’t believe in truth. I believe instead of this modern phenomenon called My Truth. I hear people say this. “Well, my truth, or your truth.” No, there is no my truth. And there is no your truth. There’s just truth. Either something is true, or it’s not. And if you start wandering down the path where you decide that universal truth is less important than what you choose to be true, well, the foundations of everything real beneath your feet begin to crumble. And you will end up in trouble, inevitably.

**John:** Yup. So, the most recent horrible example of this was Pizza-gate. And so for listeners outside the US, or any listeners inside the US who have blissfully been able to not be aware of what Pizza-gate was, it was just this crazy scandal that sort of burst out of Reddit. It’s so hard to believe that it existed, but it did exist. But essentially these people believed that there was a child sex trafficking ring happening at a pizza place in Brooklyn that major Democratic officials were involved. Hillary Clinton was involved. There were secret code words. That it was all this big thing.

And it seemed like one of those crazy Internet things until somebody like shows up there and starts shooting. And that’s what happened. And so Pizza-gate is not the same as homeopathy, but I think it’s that same sense of like I’m going to choose to believe what facts I choose to believe, and if anyone confronts me about these imaginary facts I believe, I’m going to say that you are just trying to suppress my truth. You’re trying to conceal what’s really happening behind.

**Craig:** Right. Because it feels true. And if it feels true, it is true. Except that’s not how truth works. And as we proceed in this incredible age of enlightenment and technological advancement, when I look all around me I see this ever widening gap between rationalists and irrationalists. And there are so many more irrationalists than rationalists. And what’s so crazy is the rationalists are giving us everything. Our iPhones and our computers and the Internet and the microphones we’re using and the medicines that have extended our lives. And the vaccines that give us the luxury to walk around in a crowded building and not worry about getting the plague. These people are thriving and giving us everything. The irrationalists take these things and use them to spread irrationality.

So, they use the Internet, a rational thing, and they use medicine, a rational thing, and their extended life spans, and all of it to spread things that run counter to what the rationalists say and do. And I worry that we are going to end up in this crazy bifurcated world between people who are recessing backwards towards caveman-like magical thinking. And then these other people that are moving forward towards some sort of star child status. I don’t know how we lost our love of rationality. But, homeopathy is such a canary in the coal mine for me. It really is. I hate that more people are using it. It makes me angry.

**John:** Yup. So, let’s talk about the real problems of using it in a medical situation. So, one of the problems is just finite resources. There’s only so much money to spend on medicine and on drugs and on healthcare. And if you’re spending $3 billion a year on stuff that absolutely cannot work, that’s $3 billion that you’re not spending on research, on actual medicines that could work.

I don’t want to pretend that our modern healthcare system, specifically our modern drug system, is wonderful or ideal. It’s not. It’s messed up. It’s deeply messed up and needs to be changed. But the solution is not an invented system that has no basis in science whatsoever.

**Craig:** That’s right. We know for sure that heart disease kills most people that are dying of medical causes in the United States. Heart disease, number one. What if we just took that $3 billion and just donated it to heart disease research? That would be better.

**John:** It would be better. I mean, in some ways I think taking that $3 billion and putting it in a hole would be kind of better also, because that’s what you’re essentially doing and you’re encouraging this false set of beliefs by spending that $3 billion on these sugar pills.

**Craig:** It’s true. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Sort of to get around to sort of like how homeopathy represents these bigger issues, let’s look at how homeopathy started and how it all began. So, Hahnemann took a very simple idea, a simple and sort of compelling idea. It was easy to summarize that idea. He spread it by denouncing the experts. He created alternative vocabularies for everything. He renamed his opponents, so he called them allopaths, basically don’t even refer to them by their normal name.

And when he was confronted by facts, he just kept spinning. He just kept inventing new things until he died. And this is essentially, you know, we urged you before to use the term begs the question properly. This is begging the question. This is circular reasoning that’s not ever proving its underlying premise.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a bit like you know how we’re going to make America great again? We’re going to make America great again.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Sold.

**John:** Sign me up.

**Craig:** Yeah. And let me just come up with a bunch of funny names for the people running against me and lies schmies. Yeah.

**John:** Good stuff. So, what can you do as a person, as a citizen, to look at homeopathy in a better way and sort of like help us move past our current situation with homeopathy?

**Craig:** Well, my advice is not to – it’s not wishy washy in any way. It’s more of an imperative. None of you should pay a single penny for any product described as homeopathic. If it says homeopathic on the box, it does not work. By definition. It cannot work. It is not even meant to work. That product exists to enrich liars. That’s it.

How often do we come across things where we can say happily, “This isn’t a fuzzy issue. There’s no middle ground. There’s no good homeopaths who are getting a bad rep from the bad ones.” The story has one side. Homeopathy is stupid and wrong. And if you believe in it, you are doing something that is stupid and wrong. And if you take it, you’re doing something that is stupid and wrong. And the only worse than doing something stupid and wrong by mistake, which we all do, which is part of the human condition, is doing something stupid and wrong on purpose, knowing it’s stupid and wrong. That’s a moral crime.

So, you want to help? Stop doing it.

**John:** I agree. I’d also say along with don’t equivocate, like don’t draw false comparisons. So, there are things where you sort of squint and look like, oh, that kind of looks like homeopathy. But actually investigate it and see whether it is homeopathy or not homeopathy. So, we talked about vaccinations. Yes, vaccinations, you’re taking something in to prevent a disease, but that’s not homeopathy. That’s actually a real thing. So, don’t throw out vaccination because homeopathy doesn’t work.

Same thing with like there’s allergy treatments where you’re actually building up your body’s immune system so it doesn’t react to certain things. Like they just announced a way to do that for peanuts, which is great, because that was actually killing real kids. So, there’s things that sort of look like homeopathy but are not homeopathy, so don’t confuse those things, too. Don’t throw out everything. Just look at sort of what homeopathy is doing and say like, “That’s not it.”

I like Craig’s suggestion for if you see the homeopathy, then you know it’s not real. Just replace that mentally in your head with like ineffective. Ineffective cold medicine.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You wouldn’t buy anything that was called ineffective cold medicine. Don’t buy something called homeopathic cold medicine.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or replace it with the word scam. So, scam cold medicine. Okay, yeah, I get it.

**John:** Although Zicam was very effective, and Zicam is a lot like scam.

**Craig:** Zicam is not that effective.

**John:** It was effective in terms of its marketing.

**Craig:** Yes. In terms of its marketing, you’re right. Yes, they were dancing very close to… – Hey, listen, we’re in a freaking post-Trump world now where he went to this rally and people were like Lock Her Up, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I remember Lock Her Up. That was funny. That played well before the election. We don’t need that anymore.”

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** It was like, he’s just telling them now. And they’re like, “Yeah.” [laughs]

**John:** He’s doing his own commentary track. That’s the crazy thing.

**Craig:** He is. And he’s doing what homeopathic medicine does, which is to say you should take this. It’s a sugar pill. It doesn’t work. Take it. It works. Wait, what? So, part of what people struggle with, I think, is if you take this away, what is left? And unfortunately – and this is where if you are somebody who wanted to believe in this, but maybe we’ve gotten through to you and you’re thinking, okay, okay, I submit. But the alternatives aren’t great. Well, no one promised you a rose garden. Here’s the deal with science. You can’t blame science for correcting itself. I think people do this all the time. They’re like, well, what do the doctors know? They used to say that you should do this. And then they said you should do this.

Correct. That’s what science does. Science does its best and is constantly examining itself and then changing to reflect new information. That is exactly why science is valuable. You can’t reward fake science for being consistent. That’s the hallmark of fake science. There’s no prize for being consistently wrong the way that homeopathic medicine has been consistently wrong.

So, similarly you can’t really punish science for being inconsistent. That’s part of why science works. And we know that while science may stumble and move forward and backwards, you know, two steps forward, one step back, when they do arrive at things that work, they’re life-changing.

Lipitor has saved so many lives. And it works. And it’s good. Science is ultimately a matter of statistics and best guesses and margins of error. And that is messy, I think, conceptually for people. But it turns out messy is far more effective than fake meat.

**John:** I agree. And let’s talk about what you can do as a writer. So, if this has inspired you to think about these topics, what can you do as a screenwriter? I would argue that you need to be careful with your narratives, because we brought up The Matrix, we brought up Star Wars. It’s very easy to play into the narrative where your hero is told that the world is not as it seems. They are standing up against a system. These are all common tropes for our movies and they’re there for a reason, but maybe think about not making the villain of your story medicine, or a system which is actually sort of there for the good.

Stand up for facts and truth in your stories. Have your heroes stand up for facts and for truth. And up against lies. That’s always a great thing. And don’t make your heroes sort of like gleefully, blissfully ignorant. Don’t reward them for their faith in an invisible thing beyond all reason. That’s my concern is that so many of our compelling stories are about that sort of belief in the invisible magical force that surrounds us in the universe. And so we see these stories and we’re just like, oh yeah, that’s right. I’m like Luke Skywalker. I believe in the Force.

And it’s like, no, no, you believe in an imaginary speck of duck liver that’s not actually there in the thing you’re drinking. That’s my concern. So, I would just argue for look for ways to tell stories where the heroes are not those guys who are believing in the impossible thing just because.

**Craig:** Yeah. The heroes of rationality. I agree.

There are times when the nature of drama requires you to tell an outlier story. And there are stories where people fought against the medical establishment for something and prevailed. And that’s fine, too. But when you’re telling that story, at least acknowledge that while there may be a bad guy, that science itself is not the bad guy. That, in fact, whoever is fighting this fight to advance their belief, which turns out to be true, is a scientist. They got there rationally.

So, the worst thing is when they paint… – Look, movies want to paint the world in the most simple, gleeful way. You know, folks, if you just walk outside and chew a simple leaf, like these noble savages, you will held. No. No. Those people aren’t noble or savage. That leaf doesn’t work.

The ones that do work get turned into medicine, like aspirin, which comes from the bark of the willow tree, I believe. Or, I mean, there’s a whole bunch of drugs that come from plants. And we use them. We don’t use the ones that don’t work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, these people don’t know anything. I mean, really, do you think that the Oscillococcinum people are like, wow, we figured it out and then Bayer wasn’t like, “Ooh, we’d like to get in on that.” Doesn’t work that way.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** A good friend of mine back in Los Angeles, who I deeply love, but he will consistently believe impossible things. And so about once a week I have to sit him down and really talk him through this thing that he’s thinking and really explain why it can’t possibly work. And by the end of a session I can sort of get him thinking like, oh yeah, okay, I get that. But he’s not able to sort of generalize that through to the next situation that is nearly identical to that. And I think in all of our lives there are going to be some people who are like that. And you got to pick sort of who are those people who you’re going to help walk through those roads.

So, if you’re a person who is post-homeopathy and that this has at all been inspiring you to get past your belief in some of these systems, it’s great that you’re there. Just pick up the torch and like carry it on. And get some other people in your life to be thinking rationally about some of these situations.

**Craig:** Amen.

**John:** Great. It is time for out One Cool Things. So, keeping with our medicinal topic here, I’m going to say my One Cool Thing is French Pharmacists. So, yes, French pharmacists will have homeopathic medicines on the counter. They’re not pushing them, but I do see them there. But, I’ve had three exposures with French pharmacists and they’ve been remarkably helpful in ways that American pharmacists never will.

So, they will actually, like there was a problem with one of my prescriptions. They’re like, “Okay, I’ll call your doctor.” Like, they’re never going to call the doctor. But, no, they called the doctor, then they called and they said like, “I couldn’t get through to the doctor, but I’m still working on it.” Twice they did that. And then they found like cheaper ways to get things to happen. They’ve been so remarkably helpful and useful.

Another fun fact about French pharmacists. If you are gathering mushrooms out in the woods, you can take them to a pharmacist and the pharmacist will identify which ones are the poisonous mushrooms.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** They’re trained in identifying poisonous mushrooms.

**Craig:** It’s so French. So French. I love it.

**John:** It’s amazing.

**Craig:** A-mazing. Well, I’ll keep in line as well with our topic here. If you are interested in being like me and John and being skeptical of bad medicine and bad science, I urge you to check out a website called Quackwatch. Quackwatch.org. it is not a pretty website. They have invested no time or energy in good web design.

However, they are a great clearinghouse for information on all of the terrible, bad medicine and medical ideas and health scams that are floating around out there. Think of it like your medical Snopes. And when someone tells you, “I’ve that blah, blah, blah,” go check it out on Quackwatch.

Sometimes things are new and sometimes things are effective. A lot of times what you’re hearing is pre-packaged or repackaged/reheated crap. And Quackwatch will help guide you through that miasma, as Hahnemann would say.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Tim Minchin. He’s the composer and lyricist of Matilda.

**Craig:** Wait, what? [laughs]

**John:** And the upcoming Groundhog Day.

**Craig:** Wait, wait, wait, what?

**John:** He did not compose this specifically for us. This is something I found online where he talks about homeopathy and I felt it was so appropriate that even if it does not have a [hums], it should be our outro for this week’s episode.

**Craig:** My heart stopped there when I thought it was, like, oh my god, Tim Minchin listens to our show.

**John:** Yeah. I know.

**Craig:** He’s like my hero.

**John:** That Broadway and medical outrage combination. Like it’s Craig’s day.

**Craig:** Genius.

**John:** Tim Minchin lives in Los Angeles apparently. Did you know that?

**Craig:** You’re kidding. I want to hang out with him so bad. So, I don’t know if this clip is from Storm, his incredible poem.

**John:** It’s related to Storm, but it’s not from Storm.

**Craig:** I think Storm was one of my prior One Cool Things. God, I would do anything just to hang out with that guy for an evening. Anything.

**John:** So, our sense of like we would do anything to meet has worked once before where we met the wonderful Kates from Australia.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This guy is also Australian. He’s in Los Angeles. Somebody who listens to the show knows him. So, maybe we’ll make this happen.

**Craig:** Make it happen.

**John:** All right. If you have an outro, or you’re Tim Minchin and wanting to write into us, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions.

On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re on Facebook. So, if you have not already left a comment about our last topic, where we talked about transgender issues, you can let us know what you thought about our homeopathy episode.

**Craig:** Heavy fire.

**John:** Heavy fire. You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you’ll find the app to download. Some people were having problem with the app. It’s great that you wrote in to me, but it’s also great if you write into the folks who actually make the app, which his Libsyn. So, even though it’s underneath my umbrella of a company, it’s actually the folks at Libsyn make the app. So, if you find a technical issue with it, talk to them because they are the ones who interface between the library and everything else. They can help you more than I can help you on the app.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find transcripts for this and all of our episodes. Between Godwin and John who does the transcripts, they are up about four days after the episodes. That’s also where you can find transcripts for all the back episodes and the show notes for today’s episode. We’ll try to have a lot of links in there for the things we talked about.

And, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right. Have a good week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [What is Homeopathy?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy)
* [The History of Homeopathy](https://www.homeopathic.com/Articles/Introduction_to_Homeopathy/A_Condensed_History_of_Homeopathy.html)
* [Oscillococcinum – “Oscillo”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillococcinum)
* [FTC Labeling](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/996984/p114505_otc_homeopathic_drug_enforcement_policy_statement.pdf)
* Science Vs [#11 Antidepressants](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/11-antidepressants/)
* [French Pharmacists](http://ouiinfrance.com/2014/06/12/differences-between-pharmacies-in-france-and-the-united-states/)
* [Quackwatch](http://www.quackwatch.org/)
* [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)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Tim Minchin ([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_281.mp3).