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

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 143 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Claire, why Claire? What is the reason behind Claire Schaeffer?

**Craig:** Claire Schaeffer is a senior, a 12th grader, at Flintridge Prep here in La Cañada and she is a devoted fan of our show apparently. My son, I believe did a musical with her and she’s a fan of the show and so I promised Jack that I would give her a little shout-out.

**John:** Well, that’s very, very nice. I worried that there had been news in your life that I had missed out on. Huge life decisions had happened in between our weeks of normal recording the show.

**Craig:** You know that if I wanted to be a women, I would have just simply hurdled into surgery. I don’t…

**John:** Craig Mazin doesn’t stop and think. He just goes right for it. He finds the best surgeon and if that’s too expensive then he finds the second best surgeon and that’s the one he uses.

**Craig:** Sometimes the second best is the worst one. You know that whole theory of the most overpriced bottle of wine on a menu is the second most expensive one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because nobody wants to buy the most expensive one so they buy the second most expensive one. Everyone knows that so they jack the price of that one up.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Many restaurants will actually deliberately stick an incredibly overpriced bottle on there so they can keep moving the second most expensive one.

**Craig:** It’s a real-estate agent trick. They’ll take you to a house that they know is wildly overpriced just to completely throw you off so that when you see one that’s normally priced you think you’re getting a deal.

**John:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** It’s a world of lies out there basically. [laughs] It’s just lies. We’re surrounded.

**John:** [laughs] The screenwriting advice here is that if your script is a little bit long, make sure that people are reading really, really long scripts right in front of yours and then your 130-page script will seem like, oh, that’s reasonable.

**Craig:** Breath of fresh air.

**John:** Yes. It’s benchmark setting.

This is going to be one of those shows, Craig, that is almost completely random. You and I both have many tabs opened in our browser because there are so many little thing to talk about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we’re going to try to get through all of them today. We’re going to talk about the first screenwriting book ever from 1912. We will talk about tropes and archetypes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We will talk about Barry Levinson and his unhappy credit arbitration situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’ll answer a question about managers. We’ll talk about film critics who are watching screeners rather than a big movie on a big screen. They’re watching a little movie on a little screen. We’re going to talk about keeping secrets from your readers, how you keep something on the page that’s different than what people might see on the screen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll talk about what happens to a Broadway show after it leaves Broadway which is the situation we’re in now with Big Fish which is really interesting and so different from anything in film or television. And, finally, we will do some more One Cool Things from the archives. We will look at which One Cool Things are still cool and which ones we’ve completely forgotten about.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is that show, that show with so much. And in all those things that didn’t even include the things we’re doing follow up on. So there’s still more.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s hydrate here. This is going to be rough.

**John:** While Craig is hydrating I will say that voting is open now for the Live Three Page Challenge. If you’re listening to this on Tuesday when the episode comes out, you can vote on Tuesday or Wednesday until noon for your favorite of the 57 entries for the Three Page Challenge, so they’re all at johnaguust.com/threepagelive, all spelled out, all one word. And you can see all those entries from different people. You can read them all and you can vote for up to three of your favorites. And one, two, or three of those will be discussed on the live show Thursday along with our special guest panelist judge, Susannah Grant.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Are there still tickets available for this event?

**John:** You know, it’s completely unclear. I watched the website this morning. We’re recording this on a Friday and it still showed the ability to purchase tickets, so if you’re listening to this on Tuesday and you’ve not otherwise seen me tweet that it is sold out, I’d say come, because they’ll be able — we’ll find a seat for you. So come to the show. It’s at the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yay. One of the interesting things about having all of these 57 samples all showing up at once is that they were just sitting in a folder on my desktop. And I thought, you know what, I wonder what screenwriting software people are using to write these different entries. And so I looked at all the metadata and figured it out. So, Craig, what percentage of these entrants would you guess were written in a Final Draft?

**Craig:** I have to say a number that’s going to bum me out, but I’m going to say 90%.

**John:** Ooh, it’s quite a bit lower than that.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** It’s about 54%.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s spectacular news.

**John:** So that 54% is when you add together Final Draft 8, Final Draft 9, and Final Draft 7. And so I kept them separated in little charts. There’s going to be a link to the chart in the show notes.

Essentially, Final Draft 8 was by far the most common thing; 18 out of the 57 entries were written in Final Draft 8. But a wide range of other software showed up there. So Fade In showed up there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Strong. Slugline was there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Screenwriter, Celtx, Highland, even some ones were written like TextEdit or Word were there too.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it was interesting that people were trying different things.

**Craig:** Well, that is. I have to say that number is exciting to me. I want to see that. I mean, listen, I’m sure the people at Final Draft are like, “Oh, my god, is this guy really doing this again to us.” But, you know, there’s no reason that Final Draft should have even 50%. Final Draft should have 5%. It is simply not the best available option out there. I don’t believe it is the best available option. But it is the most expensive available option. So that to me that should intersect around 5% of people that just bought it once a long time ago and don’t feel giving up.

**John:** I would say that, you know, 58 scripts is a very small sample size but it was an interesting sample size because I feel like the people who are going to be applying or answering in to the Three Page Challenge are going to be aspiring screenwriters. And aspiring screenwriters are people who probably bought screenwriting software recently or services in the case of things like WriterDuet or Celtx. So they’re honestly sort of in that next wave and if that next wave is not fully embracing Final Draft, that’s a change for that application.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I can also say in sort of anecdotally because I sell one of the apps that actually is there, we do keep track of the rankings of the different apps in the App Store. So all the screenwriting apps that are sold through the Mac App Store we can look and see where they’re ranked in the productivity category. And actually we have applications that chart sort of how we do. And the last couple of weeks things have actually changed and so for the first time Highland is sometimes surpassing Final Draft in number of units sold.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Which is great. We are priced a lot less than Final Draft, so our actual total gross is a lot less but it’s nice that people are using it.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. I am happy to see competition doing what it’s supposed to do.

**John:** Yes, creating an ecosystem is a lovely thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We have a follow up from Matt Selman who is a writer who is an executive producer of The Simpsons.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he wrote in to say, “Hi, guys, Scriptnotes’ listener Matt Selman here. I was enjoying your bit on Alloy and fan fiction and vampires. It’s a couple episodes back. And I just had to chime in about a Simpsons episode we did on just that topic, sort of. I produced a show called The Book Job in which Lisa is disillusioned again to find that her favorite Tween kids books are just product pumped out by an Alloy-like publishing house. Then a lot of crazy Oceans 11-type stuff happens. It’s actually a show about the challenges of authorial creation, business versus originality, the perils of procrastination, and an attempt at justifying/invalidating the joys of group writing which is the majority of what I do when I’m not writing emails to you instead or finishing a script.

“Maybe your listeners would get a kick out of watching it or at least it merits a link in the show notes. Sorry, it’s only on iTunes for The Simpsons Season 23 or they can pirate it.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] He wrote that and I didn’t add the whole, “Or you can pirate it” thing.

**Craig:** Oh Matt. First of all, Matt I believe is the showrunner of The Simpsons. He’s a spectacularly good guy. He’s a smart guy. And he is — I’ve come to know some Simpsons writers over the years, Jay Kogen who’s sort of all the way back from the beginning but guys along the way like Daniel Gould and so on and so forth and Matt is, he just fits that, the guys who work on The Simpsons are just smart guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not funny and great writers who also happen to be smart. It’s all connected, you know. There is a culture of intelligence there and Matt is a terrific dude. He really is, just picture a nervous man. That’s Matt. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** What does a nervous man look like? Sort of thin, like kind of kooky hair, looks nervous.

**John:** So I first met Matt Selman because we were shopping for a new house and we were going to open houses on a Sunday which is usually when open houses are happening. And we were in one of these and there’s a guy who sort of recognized me and you could sort of tell when someone recognizes you because they make an eye contact and they make an eye contact again. And it’s like they’re like trying to make sure/confirm if they really did recognize you.

And so he came over and introduced himself and he said, “Oh, hey, I’m the guy who wrote that Simpsons episode that was based on Go or not based on Go but that sort of like used Go in it.” And it’s the episode called Trilogy of Error and it’s an episode where time keeps repeating on itself and sort of like how Pulp Fiction works and how Go works, and there’s actually one whole plot line which is very much taken from Go. And that was my first introduction to him was that he had written the episode that was sort of inspired by Go.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s just a good guy. I’m not sure where, I think I might have met him at a roundtable or something somewhere along the way, but I’ve just always loved him and he was very nice to invite me to a table reading that they did of an episode a couple of years ago. And that was just really fun to watch the cast do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was just fascinating. It’s just very cool. What an amazing institution to be a part of and a good guy, Matt Selman. So thanks for writing in, Matt. We’ll put a link in there. We don’t want people to pirate your show.

**John:** No. They should buy it for real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you said about roundtables is actually very applicable because my next bit of follow up was at the live show we did at Nerdmelt where we did the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Panel, I talked a little bit about that I was going to go in on this panel. I was actually leading this sort of roundtable on a rewrite for a script and I was excited but also a little bit nervous about sort of how it was going to go and it was this week.

And it went really well, I think. And so I just wanted to talk through a little bit what that process was like because it was the first time I had ever kind of done one of these things.

I’d been in sessions that were much more like a little punch up where it’s just like what’s the new funny joke we can do here. This was after our first draft, and the writer was in the room, thank god, because I wouldn’t have really wanted to do it if the original writer weren’t there to keep going on to the next thing.

But the discussion, there’s a total of five writers in the room, was really about what are the possibilities of the next things we could do and really looking at what sort of what are the functions of each of the characters, how can this all work together. And so the day it was structured where I suggested that we actually just read the whole script allowed to begin with. And that’s sort of tedious. That burns like two hours. But I thought it was really important because otherwise there’s this chance that you’re all kind of reading a different script.

You’re all sort of reading the scripts you read a week ago or three drafts ago. It’s hard to focus on what specifically the movie is in front of you unless you actually sort of like read the movie that’s in front of you. So we all divvied up parts. We read the whole thing aloud, including all the scene description which is the worst part of the table read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I was really glad we did it because for one thing it gave that writer a chance to really hear his work all together out there like and sort of celebrate like this is what was there and like the stuff that was really good was really, really good. And in some ways, I think, that can help us sort of move past it and sort of look at it like that was that and what are the opportunities we have sort of kept on going here.

The stuff that felt long reading was probably needed to be addressed and the stuff that was really, really good, well, what was special about what was really, really good and how can we use those characters, those situations to best effect. So it ended up being a pretty good situation.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve never done that in, I mean, I’ve been to roundtables where there was a cast read through prior to it but in a lot of times if it’s early in the process there is no cast. And I’ve never done that. I’ve never done a reading. Usually we just start talking about the script and reactions and things, but, you know, I always feel like the — in the end those are difficult days for a writer to go through because you have everybody kind of coming out at it with all of their different opinions and feelings and you have to figure out how to parse out what makes sense and speaks to you truly and what just may be somebody’s opinion.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And that’s tough sometimes.

**John:** What I think is interesting about a roundtable that’s really driven by writers is that everyone who’s been at that table has had to implement these kind of changes. And so every time we talk about a possibility, we’re talking about it in a way of like figuring out like how do you actually write that, how do you actually get that thing to manifest; rather than sort of pie in the sky dreams, it’s like, what’s actually doable.

It’s like talking about building a building with people who build buildings. And so you really understand what is possible there. The challenge for me as like the leader of this group was to make sure that it didn’t all become like a volleying back and forth with the original writer who was there because there’s a natural instinct of trying to address your suggestion to the person who’s going to write next. And I try to make sure to try to stay a conversation among all of us, not just the guy who is going to go off and do the next pass.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is one thing about those roundtables that I don’t like and I try and guard against. And that is this strange thing where writers have almost, some writers have internalized a kind of very bland note style.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where suddenly they’re talking to a fellow writer like the world’s worst producer giving them these very obvious notes and pushing it towards formula. And I’m always careful when I’m in these things to never talk about things that I think are going to grind the edges off of a piece or to take away that which is unique.

If anything sticks out in a fascinating way but it seems like it’s not integrated, then maybe I’ll just say that. I’ll just say, how do we, this is a moment. This is the kind of thing that’s special about this movie. Don’t round that edge off, but let’s talk about maybe how to have it not feel like it’s unmoored from the rest of the movie. But I sometimes get dismayed listening to my fellow writers because it just feels like they’ve suddenly become the world’s worst director of development.

**John:** Yeah. It was interesting, I was happy to see this studio in this case, the writer I think initiated the idea of doing this panel. I was glad that the studio stepped up and did it because had they done another draft or two more drafts, I think there would have been some burn in and some burn out honestly on what was happening in the script.

And rather by doing it now, when it was still, it was formed but it was still fresh, it was, I think, much easier to look at the different ways we could go and to sort of chart a course because we hadn’t spent so much time trying to implement notes that were maybe the wrong notes. So I’m hopeful that it’s going to be a cool movie and it was a really good process, so I just wanted to — I’ll never actually say what the movie was or who the writers were, but they were actually fantastic. And so I was, I really enjoyed that process.

**Craig:** Awesome. Yeah, I love doing those things. I think they’re fun days.

**John:** Cool. So let’s move to our new stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the first thing is, and I can’t find a link of who sent this to me but thank you whoever sent it to me, I think tweeted this link to perhaps the first screenwriting book ever written. It is a 1912 book by Herbert Case Hoagland called How To Write A Photo Play. And I thought it was just great. And so there’s a blog post on it, so we’ll link to both the original text which is on archive.org but also my blog post about it. It was just so cool. I’ll read a little snippet from it. “To write a photo play requires no skill as a writer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “But it does require a quote constructionist. It requires the ability to grasp an idea and graft, please using the botanical sense, a series of causes on the front of it and a series of consequences on the other end. An idea so graft it will surely bear fruit; and to learn the art of this mental horticulture is necessary. First, to understand in a general way how motion pictures are made and what is done in the studio, in the field, and in the factory. Let us learn something of these things and begin at the beginning, in the office of the scenario editor.”

What I loved about this paragraph was that it just, first off, it’s just like, “You don’t have to have any skill as a writer” is just fantastic. And also the term scenario editor. What’s so great about Hoagland’s book is that, so he was a scenario editor I’m gathering based on certain introductory pages of the book. They were just in a completely different system. And so when they’re talking about a scenario, they’re not really quite talking about a screenplay. It’s really just a series of shots that is going to tell a story. And because they don’t have dialogue, because they don’t have a lot of normal film conventions, it’s just different.

And, you know, so they say, like, you could write a scenario in 10 minutes but more likely you’ll spend a week thinking about it. And so it really is just a very different world and yet so many of the same kinds of things apply about simple things like screen geography or a sequence of events.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I just thought it was great.

**Craig:** Well, Herbert Case Hoagland reminds me of, I’m trying to remember the name, I think it was something Pritchard, the man who’s written the poetry textbook in Dead Poets Society. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Who, you know, has his chart of how to evaluate poetry. You can see here at the very beginning of Hollywood moviemaking the very well-intentioned desire to help creative people work in a very structured format. We’ve said it many times, screenwriting stands apart from all other artistic pursuits as something that requires artistic skill and creativity and yet is not meant to be actually appreciated by anyone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not meant to be read. It’s meant to be transformed into a movie. It’s a very specific thing. And so naturally everybody is trying to come up with ways to help you do that. However, we also see here the birth of a terrible, [laughs], and apparently long-standing tradition of reductionist thinking when it comes to screenwriting and the overabundance of rules and caveats and “it’s really simple, press A, pull tab B.”

This is the thing that screenwriters have struggled with forever and god knows how many questions we get that are of a “should I pull tab A or when,” you know, these questions of ” is the midpoint break that comes before the second and a half act pinch point necessary for the downward motion of the reversal?” And you just sit there going, oh, my god, just tell a story. Tell a story.

**John:** There’s a moment in the book where it talks about sort of scene geography and it all has to do with hats. And so, basically, like, if a man puts on his hat and takes his coat, the next shot needs to be of him like arriving in a different house, because otherwise if he puts on his hat and coat and he’s still walking in the house, we’re like, well, why is he walking in a house. He should have left the house.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s absurd and yet at that time you have to think about sort of what these movies were like at this point, that probably was actually good advice to some degree because we just weren’t sophisticated enough to sort of understand how these things could work. It was all just shot by shot by shot by shot.

I also love that in the sense of like things never change. Here’s his warning about submitting your work to different places. He says, “Don’t send biblical stories to a manufacturer who makes the specialty of Western stuff. Study the needs of the firms producing pictures and direct your scenarios accordingly. On another page, the class of a story might be sought by the different studios it has touched up. And ambitious writers cannot do better than to subscribe to the Moving Picture World or some other trade paper and carefully study the comments on the films that appear week by week.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, so there is the beginning of chase the market. [laughs]

**John:** Basically it’s like, read the trades, chase the market, but he’s also saying, know your buyer which is absolutely true.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, sure. No, of course, and at that time, in an era where there was even less information than was available to us when we were pre-Internet, it’s true.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There were companies that just concentrated on one kind of picture and to send them a screenplay for a different kind would be pointless. But even so, you know, it’s just classic. It’s just because every stupid thing that people are currently trying to charge you money for,[laughs], it turns out that Herbert Case Hoagland wrote those stupid things already in 1912.

**John:** Yeah, and 1912 was really fascinating because like that’s really genuinely the very, very beginning of anything we want to consider a motion picture industry. I think Birth of a Nation is 1914 if I’m right. So it’s really, things are just beginning here. You’re moving out of the sort of the Nickelodeon time into the kind of full-length movie and that there was already this kind of book I think is just fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah, like right there in the beginning there was somebody telling screenwriters what to do. [laughs] It’s just genius.

**John:** And it strikes me that a lot of times when you’re at the beginning of something, you know, you’re still kind of figuring out the rules of things, you’re figuring out sort of what stuff is like. And so, I could imagine like the early like how to make a webpage books would have almost exactly the same kind of things that seem really obvious or weird about like, you know —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t use blinking text and it’s like, well, you should never say that but of course you had to say that at that time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this, Hoagland had no idea what movies were going to become, and yet weirdly he sort of anticipated what aspiring screenwriters would be like and the questions they would ask.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the truth is what he did here is actually very impressive considering that it is 1912. What is sort of sad to me is that there are people in 2014 who are basically saying this stuff, the same stuff that is 102 years old.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But pretending that it’s interesting or insightful or worth spending money on. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just sad, sad.

**John:** As we close out here, I also want to, you know, point people towards archive.org because — so archive.org is the Internet archive. And basically, they take snapshots of websites over a period of time, so a lot of times if you go to a website and you can’t find, and you’re curious like what that website was like four years ago you can enter that same URL in archive.org and find what that was like. But they also have these other great sort of treasure trove of just old materials and things that have fallen out of copyright. And so I bless them for putting stuff like this up online where people can dig at it because it’s just great.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Next up is a less happy topic, Barry Levinson and his arbitration with the Writers Guild of America. We don’t know of course all the details on this but we know that this is about the Philip Roth novel The Humbling. And Barry Levinson wanted to share screenwriting credit with Buck Henry and Michal Zebede or Michael Zebede. I don’t know how he pronounces it. And there was an arbitration. Barry Levinson did not like the outcome of that arbitration and left the guild or went fi-core in the guild. But just basically, Craig, how do you define fi-core?

**Craig:** Well, financial core is a state of what you would call a financial core non-member. You are no longer technically a member of the union. You can’t vote on collective bargaining agreements. You can’t vote in elections. However, if you’re working in a close shop state like California, you’re still subject to the collective bargaining agreement, which is why “quitting the union,” and going fi-core kind of isn’t worth it because in the end here’s what happens: you still have to pay dues. Your dues are reduced by the amount of expense that the guild puts out towards things that are unrelated to collective bargaining which isn’t much. So instead of paying what you and I pay, you’d maybe pay 93% of that rate.

**John:** But, Craig, then you wouldn’t get Written By magazine.

**Craig:** Ah, you don’t get Written By magazine which is a huge, yeah, that would be a huge bummer obviously, [laughs], for those of you wondering with what you should line your cat box.

**John:** I guess you could still buy it at the newsstand. So there’s some…

**Craig:** Yes, you could buy it at the newsstand. And there’s a big call for that. But the really ironic part of this is that if you go financial core you are still subject to credit arbitrations.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This doesn’t get you out of credit arbitrations. It’s kind of crazy. I’m not really sure how — I understand if you are incredibly frustrated that you would want to take action or do something. The problem is when it comes to this there is in fact nothing you can do.

**John:** Yeah. So George Clooney I believe on Leathernecks left the guild or went fi-core in the same way.

**Craig:** That’s the rumor.

**John:** Out of frustration.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the frustration, but I don’t if that’s, I wouldn’t know the details in that situation either. And I bring, I sort of mention this because people asked me on Twitter about the whole situation and the arbitration. The only thing I would add to it is that having been through arbitrations and sat on arbitration panels basically been one of the people who’s deciding credit, I can almost guarantee that Levinson himself has never served as an arbiter because I think if he had he would have been really, really frustrated but he wouldn’t have gone fi-core.

Because having been an arbiter I can tell you it’s really, really hard and yet everyone I’ve ever encountered in an arbitration has worked really hard to do a great fair job. The arbiters don’t know the names of the people involved in the thing. You’re only reading writer A, writer B, writer C, writer D and things that might appear incredibly obvious to Levinson are not obvious to the arbiter because the arbiter is just looking at the words on the page. And that is a real difference.

I’ve been through arbitrations where I’ve sought credit and lost and been really, really frustrated and wished I could convince other people of the logic of like why the decision was wrong. And yet, having been an arbiter myself, I recognize that that’s just the way it goes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, when you look at the situation here, it’s important to understand that we’re hearing one side of the story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if you do arbitrations, one thing that becomes very evident is that writers are delusional about their — not always delusional but frequently delusional about the nature of their contribution to a script. Because as an arbiter you get the scripts but you also get the writer’s statements. And many times I’ve done an arbitration where I’ve had three different writers, each of whom are stating very clearly that they deserve sole credit and it’s obvious. And you just shake your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you read the scripts and realize, wow, two of these people are nuts. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of them is correct. So we’re hearing one side of this. And here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying that he didn’t get credit and what he’s angry about is that he asked to see the arbiter’s statements which is our right if you’re contemplating a policy review board. You can see the arbiter’s statements. And when he looked at those arbiter statements, he didn’t like what he saw particularly in one of them that denied him credit.

He thought that this person had written a “muddled critique that made no sense. It was just way too messy and inaccurate and I asked the board to have this person read the stuff again because I couldn’t see how this was a qualified judgment and they said no.” Well, you know, Barry Levinson’s opinion of the quality of that statement is not necessarily something upon which one can turn a system of jurisprudence.

I will say this, here are some things I don’t know. I don’t know, first of all, I don’t which guild administered this. The Writers Guild West tends to administer most of these things but in cases where a number of the writers are Writers Guild East members, the East may run it. I know that the West staff is really good about reviewing the arbiter statements and making sure that they comport with our rules.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We don’t have a guarantee that an individual arbiter is going to be a genius.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** The staff does try and not call writers who they think are just bad at it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t want that either because they don’t want this. They don’t want a story like this. There were some comments on Deadline that were predictably way, way wrong, just factually incorrect. Some people seem to think that directors faced some sort of 75% threshold in order to get credit. Now, directors are essentially treated like everyone else, especially now, we did change a few rules, so there’s no — they would be looked at the same way everybody would be looked at in the situation like this. It’s an adaptation. Everybody has to hit 33%. 33% was Barry Levinson’s threshold which obviously is a guideline because there’s no such thing as a percentage like you’d actually figure out.

And two of three arbiters thought that he didn’t. Some people thought that the arbiters should be allowed to talk with each other and that it’s not fair that they don’t. They do talk to each other —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In a case like this, again, that was a change that we instituted. So if it’s not a unanimous decision, they talk. They have a teleconference in which anonymity is maintained and they discuss it. And if they can’t — if at that point they are still not unanimous but two of the three agree on something then that’s that.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He doesn’t like this decision. I get it. He thinks one of these arbiters was a knucklehead. He might be right. I don’t know. All I do know is that he’s gone financial core and that changes truly nothing, not even for him. I wish that he had thought to do what I did when I got a credit decision that I thought was terrible. I decided to run for the board. I decided to form a committee. I decided to change the rules. I did change the rules. I decided to do it again. I did do it again.

I actually did the work. Oh, and I served as an arbiter. And Barry Levinson apparently has decided that in his union, if he doesn’t immediately get what he wants or what he perceives as fair, the only recourse is to quit. And, frankly, I just find that to be babyish.

If you’re on a boat and you see a leak in the boat and everyone is telling you it’s not leaking, fix the leak anyway. Convince them. Don’t just jump off the boat and swim away. It’s stupid. It just doesn’t do anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I get frustrated sometimes with this attitude of like, “Oh, my union did this to me.” There is no union. There is just a bunch of people. That’s it. We’re all in this together or we’re not, you know.

**John:** Yeah. People do bring up the idea of like a director has different qualifications for it. And so, what I want to stress is that this is an adaptation, this is the rules are set up in a way that the director only has to hit 33% just like any other writer. What is different about a director in an arbitration situation is the director, correct me if I’m wrong, Craig, it’s an automatic arbitration situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** So, because he is a director or a producer on the film, it has to go to arbitration. There’s no sort of just like everyone just shakes hands and agrees on it. It has to be arbitrated.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was another thing a few people got wrong on the Deadline comments. There is no situation here where the writers could have all agreed amongst themselves. And that rule has been there since the very beginning and it’s a good rule and no one has ever really convincingly challenged its value. And the idea being if you have one writer who has the ability to hire and fire other writers, then it makes sense that you would want to just essentially require an arbitration to avoid situations where a powerful director who holds somebody’s economic life in their hands saying, “I think we should all agree that I should be credited here.”

**John:** Yeah, you don’t want that at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But in other cases where no one is production executive or a director on the project, you can actually all as writers talk and there’ve been many cases where I have talked with the other writers and we’ve figured it out ourselves and has not had to go to arbitration. And in many ways, that’s the best scenario where you actually just figure it out and people end up feeling happier about it because of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s exactly right. And even in situations where there is no automatic arbitration or there is an arbitration where there are five writers and four of them agree and one doesn’t, you can also write joint statements.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or statements in support of each other. There is no reason that this is necessarily as combative as people think. What ends up happening in these situations is everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts screaming about how this system is imperfect and they are absolutely correct. It is imperfect. The thing that I hear most from people who have gone through this and with which I completely agree is that we would be better off if we weren’t serving as arbiters for each other or at least or at least solely comprising the arbiters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We would be better off if there were some independent voices in there who were the kind of people that are routinely called as dramaturgical and literary experts in plagiarism cases or infringement cases in courts of law to help make these decisions because, frankly, knowing how to write a script is not the same Venn oval as knowing how to analyze components of literary contributions. It’s just a totally different skill. And, frankly, the other problem with our system is we’re busy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And with fewer and fewer screenwriters working, the idea that, you know, you’d want your jury pool to mostly be made up of people that are writing screenplays and active screenwriters and we’re busy and sometimes these arbitrations come in and they’re asking you to read eight drafts and a novel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s just — it’s a burden. They’re desperate, constantly searching for people to do these things. It’s rough.

**John:** I got two calls this last week about arbitrations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I couldn’t. I’m too busy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s also partly because it’s TV time. And so because the TV shows are being picked up and announced, those credits are having to be figured out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not a fun thing to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right, to our next thing. Several people wrote in with this kind of cool animated chart called the Periodic Table of Storytelling, or at least I thought it was cool. So basically it takes a bunch of tropes and ideas that exist in storytelling, various forms, largely cinema but also sort of general storytelling and kind of rearrange them into a chart that looks like a periodic table.

And the general categories which would be sort of the, you know, the columns on this chart are things about structure, settings, story modifiers, plot devices, heroes, character modifiers, archetypes, villains, meta tropes, production and fandom and audience reactions. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes because it’s a fun timewaster for awhile.

Two of the things I really enjoyed on this chart were Flanderization, and Flanderization is defined as, this is obviously Ned Flanders, but it’s when you take characters that are kind of normal and then over time you exaggerate qualities in him so much that he doesn’t resemble a normal person at all anymore. So in the case of Flanders, he was just like sort of the nice neighbor next door. And then they made him a little Christian, then a lot Christian, and then he ended up being sort of super-crazy Christian. And that’s just the arc that that character sort of took over time.

The other thing I liked was what they call the anthropic principle which in general the anthropic principle is that we are perfectly suited for the earth because if we weren’t perfectly suited for the earth we wouldn’t be here. Story-wise, the story equivalent of that is what we really call the “buy” is that like if it weren’t for this thing there wouldn’t even be a movie. So you’re willing to take as a given one or two things about the nature of this world because if it weren’t for these one or two things there wouldn’t be a story.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a cool chart. I mean, it’s very thorough.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s got a ton of stuff in it. I, from the point of view of somebody that tries to write things, I never really — these things I just find more amusing. It’s really, they are what they seem to be more than anything is a fan’s compendium of stuff they’ve noticed. But I don’t, I wouldn’t see any value here to somebody that was actually trying to write something.

It’s just more of a — it just feels like a very, [laughs,] I say Aspergers all the time. And I don’t want people to think like Aspergers is bad. Aspergers is awesome actually. I mean, people with Aspergers basically save our lives and, you know, figure out every bit of technology in our lives. But this is a little Aspergersy to me in a way that’s maybe not that useful.

**John:** Well, what I find useful is there are certain things on here that I will throw out in sort of casual conversation and then I will recognize that people don’t actually know what I’m talking about. So Chekhov’s Gun is an example of that and there’s a good entry on Chekhov’s Gun. And actually I should say that all the entries actually link back to TV Tropes which is a great way to waste about six hours of time just going through TV Tropes. Like Chekhov’s Gun which is a classic example of like if you establish a gun on the wall early in the story that gun has to go off or else everyone is going to be frustrated.

I think those are important things for writers to know and having a shorthand like Chekhov’s Gun is a good way of talking about like why something isn’t working right or why setting an expectation that is not fully met.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure. Yeah, look, Chekhov’s Gun was described by Chekhov.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there are things that are literary notions that have been given to us by great writers and I always think those are useful and we should know those things. But here, I think it may be a little bit lost in some other stuff. I mean, I got a little suspicious when the, you know, now they start combining these periodic story elements into molecules that are, you know, movies or episodes of things and the examples are Star Wars, Mass Effect, Dilbert, Avatar: The Last Airbender, My Little Pony, Here Come the Bronies, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann which I assume is something anime, Firefly, Death Note, Wall-E and Ghostbusters. That’s some hardcore cheese doodle stain nerdism there. And I love almost all of those things. Not the Bronies stuff, but I love almost all that stuff. I just feel like this is a bit too , it’s a bit too dorky for me I have to say. And I love chemistry. I love the actual periodic table. I love writing. This actually drifted into just too dorky for me. I apologize.

**John:** Well, let’s step away from that chart to another chart because I was up in Seattle this last weekend. And Seattle by the way is awesome. So if you live in Seattle, congratulations. You live in an awesome town. So at the Experience Music Project, EMP, the big museum, they have great music exhibits but they also have like a lot of other really cool stuff there and two of the ones we went through were archetypes of fantasy and then there’s also a sci-fi, horror section. These are all sort of down in the basement and they are fantastic.

In the archetypes of fantasy, they had very nice, both animated on screen but also sort of as you walk through displays set up talking about the different sort of archetypes of fantasy you see in everything from Game of Thrones to Harry Potter to The Wizard of Oz, like sort of all these kind of things.

And I’ll include a link to a photo I took sort of that shows a chart of how many, 20 different archetypes they have, from the night to the shadow, to the unlikely hero, to the hero’s muse. And when you look at it just as little charts it’s like, well, yes, okay, that’s a thing. But what’s so smart about the exhibit is they actually then took a look at like who are those kind of characters in actual stories.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it makes it real for people when they see like, oh, okay, that character is — like Robin Hood is that type, but also Han Solo is that type. And the sense of the commonalities we see across our sort of mythic stories. In some ways it may be a little bit more useful for the person who is writing a movie to really think about these characters and the kinds of roles they could play.

Again, not in a prescriptive way, like you have to have the barbarian face off with the trickster, but a way of thinking about what functions are your characters serving in your story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there’s lots of good stuff there out in the world that delves into this topic of commonalities between stories and narrative. I mean, narrative is just a — all narrative is is a symptom of being human. So, naturally there should be these archetypal things because there’s stuff in all of us that’s archetypal. You have fear, and bravery, and honor, and justice, and all these things that then emerge in the forms of people, flat characters, or complicated characters.

You should read those things. Look, everyone will tell you you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, and I always think, well, yeah, that’s great. You should. I mean, watch The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but — the thing he did with Moyer. But, read the myths. You know, when I was a kid I went through a phase where I just did nothing but read Greek myth.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was awesome. You read those myths and you start getting pure undiluted narrative because that’s what that stuff is.

**John:** Yeah. I went through a very hardcore mythology phase, actually probably a couple of phases. There was one in sort of early elementary school. It hit again later, and then sort of got into my Bulfinch’s Mythology in sort of late junior high/high school. And what’s fascinating about when you actually go back and really look at the myths is like there’s so much overlap and so many, like, you know, it’s almost like fandom or sort of like competing versions of how things fit together, like Demeter, and Ceres, and Persephone, and the underworld. It’s different kind of every time. And so there’s so many versions of what that story is. There’s no one completely archetypal true version of like what that thing is.

And in some ways seeing the multiple telling of it and how they different they all were sort of gives you permission as a storyteller to really think about what are the other ways I can tell this kind of story. And what is common between all of these versions of what is so different between all of these versions.

**Craig:** The New Testament is —

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Is basically that. It’s Rashomon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just that everybody agrees that Jesus was awesome. But Bulfinch’s Mythology is — that’s a book that should be on every writer’s bookshelf. Every writer should read Bulfinch’s Mythology.

**John:** At Barnes & Noble a couple weeks ago I bought myself, they have these really nicely bound special bound versions of The Great Tales of Mythology. It’s not a Bulfinch’s, but it’s a good mythology reader. And then the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I’d never actually read through Grimm’s Fairy Tales and basically never fall in love because you’re going to die is essentially what you sort of learn.

**Craig:** They’re grim.

**John:** They are in fact grim. What’s also so fascinating about Grimm’s Fairy Tales I discovered is that almost, at least half of them in the first few sentences there will be like some throwaway random thing about his father was a bull, blah, blah, blah. And it just keeps going on. Or like there will be a curse that’s set up that’s never actually paid off. It’s really weird to sort of notice which of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales have sort of survived into modern culture and which ones are just like, “I’ve never heard of that one before and I can see why.”

**Craig:** [laughs] It didn’t work out. The Brothers Grimm collected these stories, basically German peasant stories. And I had a roommate in college, not Ted Cruz, but my friend Eric Leech whose mother was German and she had given him at one point a book, a German book of those old stories and along with these illustrations. And children were constantly being injured on purpose or as a result of their misbehavior.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** They would lose their fingers and blood would spurt out. The stores, I mean, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were in a race to harm as many children as possible. [laughs] It’s horrible.

**John:** What I also found so fascinating about the Grimm’s Tales is that so rarely do you actually see — in Grimm’s Tales it’s actually kind of rare for its protagonist to take an action that saves him or herself.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** More likely it’s that somebody takes pity on them and then marries them. Or someone else basically rescues them in so many of the stories in a way that’s a little disappointing.

**Craig:** Well, they are there to serve a social construction that was, I guess, important at the time, or necessary to survival. But how many of those old stories involved stepmothers? Stepmothers were this enormous problem apparent, [laughs], that just asshole stepmothers.

**John:** I was looking in the introductory pages of this book, whatever the scholar was who was setting stuff up. He explains that stepmothers are actually sort of a bad translation of what the real concept is here. So, sometimes it was really just bad mothers, or second mothers, or stepmothers, or just other women who were around. But because in English we just have the word “stepmother,” we always take it to mean the woman who came in after mom died. And that’s not necessarily always what it was supposed to be in the Grimm’s stories.

**Craig:** Ah-ha!

**John:** Ah-ha! The same way that I think French has different words for like a cousin on your mom’s side and a cousin on your dad’s side. I may be making that up, but like different cultures describe relationships differently. And so we have the word stepmother, but there’s actually more subtle ways to talk about some of these things in other languages.

**Craig:** Well, look, as long as some kid gets his nose chopped off by a woodsman’s ax then I’m satisfied.

**John:** I am satisfied as well.

So, this last week, maybe it was two weeks ago, there was a New York Times piece called Memos to Hollywood. And the conceit behind it, which is not actually at all true, but the conceit behind it would be that A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis and other critics at the New York Times were writing emails to different people and they were just going to print what the emails were.

Well, one of them I found really fascinating because it actually touched on something that I never really considered. Or, I guess I considered it in the back of my head but never thought this could be real problem. So, I’m going to read one from Manohla Dargis. It’s directed to two directors. She writes:

“Do you know that, increasingly, your labor of love — the movie you spent months and probably years of your life on — is being reviewed by critics who are watching it on their computers? For years, the cost of striking and shipping film prints as well as renting theaters for press screenings led cash-strapped companies to simply supply DVDs to reviewers. Some reviewers have been happy to comply, and of course, the blurring between the big- and small-screen viewing, and the closing of theatrical windows, hasn’t helped. After all, if a movie is being released in theaters and on demand the same day, why bother watching it on the big screen ó or so the bottom-line thinking goes.

“These days, though, some companies don’t even bother to send critics DVDs: They’re only supplying Internet links that often have the reviewer’s name watermarked on the crummy-looking image, and even come with distracting time codes. So that moody shot that you and your director of photography anguished over for hours and hours? It may look beautiful, but there are critics who will never know, which certainly encourages them to pay more attention to the plot than the visuals. Viewers who bypass the theatrical experience and prefer watching movies on their televisions and tablets may not mind. Some directors, especially those whose talking heads and two shots look better on small screens, also won’t care; others just want their work seen however, wherever. But I bet there are directors who would freak if they knew how some critics were watching their movies.”

And, yeah, I think they really would. I’ve seen some of those sites, like I remember for Star Trek when we did — I did a panel at the Academy and we had a clip from the second Star Trek movie. And so they sent me a link that had like my name burned into it so I could just watch it ahead of time. If I had watched the whole movie that way I would not have liked it the same way I liked it when I saw it in the theater.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you are trying — if you care enough to send a movie to film critic I guess you care enough about their review, then you should send them a nice looking thing. That said, no one actually cares what they think. [laughs] The directors do, but the studios don’t.

When she says “cash-strapped companies are simply supplying DVDs to reviewers,” they’re not cash-strapped. They don’t care Manohla, they don’t care what you think. They don’t care what A.O. Scott thinks. They don’t care what any reviewer thinks whatsoever. They know perfectly well that when they have a movie that they think critics need to discover and love in order to get people to go, trust me, you’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice copy of it somehow or another. They’ll care.

But if it’s Star Trek, I mean, they couldn’t give a damn what you think. And, you know, these memos John —

**John:** Oh, I’m going to disagree with you strongly there. I guarantee you J.J. Abrams would not —

**Craig:** No, J.J. Abrams does. I’m not talking about J.J. Abrams. I agree, the directors would freak out. I’m talking about the people that are actually sending them, which is the studio, the bean counters, and the distribution and marketing and publicity departments. They don’t care. They don’t care.

**John:** I think that’s why this memo is directed towards directors. I think the fact is that a director might not even know that this is happening —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And this is pointing out that you really, in many cases you really don’t want that to happen. Now, I think there’s also some logic to some cases it doesn’t really matter. And there are movies that are coming out on TV at the same time and for those people maybe it’s fine to just provide the link because it may be the difference between getting your review and not getting your review at all. You probably want a review for a small indie film, something like, you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Short Term 12. That’s the movie that you want to make sure it gets reviewed. You send a link, you’ll do whatever just to get them to watch the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and look, she points out — it’s a bit dismissive about movies that are talking heads, so apparently talking heads are bad unless I suppose it’s My Dinner with Andre in which it’s great. Look, you know, I read this — I read the whole thing. I read this whole thing. And I just kept laughing the whole time. It’s like two people that truly have no idea that nobody gave a damn what they think, going at length in America’s “paper of record” about how people should be listening to them. And they’re writing these memos to people that just don’t care.

We don’t care. I mean, listen, directors should want anyone, not just critics, anyone to see a nice version of their movie. Of course. And, you know, I don’t know — I know that these people go on these junkets. I’d rather frankly have a reviewer, if it were up to me, watch the movie on their own than watch it in a room with all of these other critics and their weird herd-like junkets as they convince each other that something is good or bad.

But nobody really cares. I mean, these people are writing these memos about superhero movies like anyone cares. [laughs] And then they’re writing letters to their fellow movie critics complaining about them. This is such a critic’s thing. Let’s just talk about stuff we don’t understand and complain about it. They literally don’t know what they’re talking about, John.

**John:** I was surprised you took so much umbrage here. Really. Genuinely. Because I was going to save that thing they read about the superhero movies for our superhero show. But, obviously now we can’t do that, so I’ll have to find another way to make you angry.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s just…these people…they write:

To: Television

Cc: Movies

Subject: Get over yourselves

And then this nonsense about movie and television and how one, oh, “Current conventional wisdom holds that television has entered a golden age while movies are in a period of decline. Those are dubious notions…”

Nobody cares. Shut up. Just watch the television you like. And watch the movies you like. And stop talking about this nonsense. Nobody cares. These people, my god, is there any naval too small for them to not gaze at?

Thank you.

**John:** [laughs] Next, a question from Twitter. Bobby Bearly wrote in, and I don’t have his actual tweet so I’m just going to summarize what his tweet asked, which is, “How do you keep secrets from your readers in a script,” which is a question we haven’t really talked about on the show.

And so I think what Bobby’s referring to is there will be sometimes where there’s going to be a reveal in a movie, but the reveal in the movie isn’t going to make the same kind of sense on the page. And sometimes it will be about who a character really is, what somebody looks like, and that it’s really the same person the whole time through.

And so how do you do that in terms of what are the words on the page to show that you’re keeping a secret there. And are you in some way violating the trust of the reader by not being upfront about what was happening there?

**Craig:** Well, we’re supposed to violate trust to some extent. The existence of a movie is already the violation of a trust because you are portraying events to somebody as if they are happening in real time, or happening linearly, when in fact you who are presenting these things know exactly how this ends.

The entire thing is a betrayal of trust.

When it comes to secrets, tricks, gimmicks, twists, reveals, there are two things to keep in mind. The first is you cannot get away with the following statement: I know my movie seems really boring for 50 pages, but then when the big secret happens it will all make sense and be cool.

No. We were just bored for 50 minutes. You cannot use twist or revelation as an excuse for everything prior to that twist or revelation being boring. In fact, the reason that good twists and good reveals are so exciting is because they shock an audience who has been enjoying what they’ve been watching without it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club, very famous and somewhat recent examples of movies that have big twists, are remarkably enjoyable on their own terms prior to that twist.

**John:** Exactly. So, I think both Fight Club and Sixth Sense though bring up interesting issues about what you actually put on the page, because in both those cases — especially Sixth Sense — you want to make it clear that Bruce Willis is not actually touching anybody else.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And portraying that on the page can be really crucial and yet you don’t want to tip it too far. And so it’s one of those things where like with a camera you would do it a certain way. With just words on the page it’s sort of harder to show what the nature of that —

**Craig:** It’s tricky.

**John:** That physical geography is. The other case which comes up quite often is — and I guess this is Fight Club to some degree — but where you’re going to see like a shadowy figure and then ultimately down the road you’re going to reveal who that person really is. It’s the degree to which a screenplay is a plan for shooting a movie. Well, that character was in these scenes all this time and we shouldn’t see him. And so usually you develop some sort of terminology for what that thing is, what that character is, like the man with the gray coat. And then eventually you will reveal the man in the gray coat is actually this person, this other character who we’ve been seeing the whole time through. Like, Susan is the man in the gray coat. There’s going to be that reveal later on.

On screen we’re going to see that. On the page, sometimes that’s actually a little harder to catch. And so that’s one of those cases where if you’ve been conservative and not bolded or underlined things, this is the time to break out and actually bold or underline something so the reader is caught up with where a viewer would be, so they really can sense like, “Oh my god, they’re actually the same person.”

**Craig:** Yeah. You want to, as you’re going through we’ll call your — there’s the pre-twist and then there’s the moment of the twist. Your pre-twist stuff you have to make sure that when the reader goes backwards, and they often will — they’ll get to the twist and they’ll go, “What? Hold on a second.” Then they’ll go back because they think they’ve caught you in a mistake.

You want to have covered your tracks well. So, in Fight Club there’s a scene where the main character is acting as an interloper in an argument between Tyler Durden and Tyler Durden’s girlfriend. And then Tyler Durden is at the bottom of the stairs in a basement and she’s in the kitchen and, in fact, if you go back and look at how that scene plays out and how it would be written you would go, “Oh my god, oh, my god, it actually works with that.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you want to be careful about all of that stuff. The moment of the twist when you write the twist and you make the reveal you use the page. Give yourself page space. Let it really sink in. Make a deal of it. Use white space.

If you feel like putting nothing on that page except the reveal, do that. The page will show the emphasis. And use that space creatively, otherwise it’ll just be another action description. People will just literally go, “Oh, well I guess it’s as important as the fact that somebody walked into the room with his hat.”

**John:** Ah-ha! All right. We have a question from David Dunne who writes, “Part one, I don’t currently have an agent but my so-so manager of a few years has given me notes on a few different scripts and they sucked.” I assume the notes sucked, not the script sucks.

“He offered vague generalities, better this, bigger that, not feeling this/that, and virtually nothing constructive. I like this but take it further. Dig deeper here. This character is interesting but flat.

“So how much of his inability to give useful notes weigh in my decision to drop or keep him? If he were an all-star maybe I would overlook the shortcoming. We’re talking just so-so here.

“A related part of the question. A good friend sold a cable network show that’s going and he wants me on his staff. Should I drop the manager before joining, or if I keep him should he get a fee? How do you handle this in the most professional way?”

**Craig:** [sighs] Well, let’s run down the facts. Your manager is, as you call him or her, so-so.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All we have to judge is the behavior you’ve given us which is that his notes are bad, at which point my argument would be they’re not so-so, they’re bad. But either way it doesn’t sound like you’re getting anything out of this relationship. How important is it to have a manager who gives you good notes? It’s as important to you as it is. If you want a manager to get you work and you don’t care what they think about your script then it doesn’t matter. If you’re looking for somebody to help you grow and get better, then it does. And it sounds like that’s what you’re looking for.

You have somebody that’s offering you a job. And you don’t like your manager and you think they give you bad notes and this manager didn’t get you this job. My advice would of course be to fire the manager. [laughs] He’s done nothing.

**John:** When Craig Mazin wakes up in the morning he sits up, he says, “Fire your manager.” It’s your first instinct for everything, right?

**Craig:** I mean, normally, yeah. A lot of times people ask a question, like the prior question was about how to handle a secret in a screenplay. And my answer, my instinctive answer is, “Fire your manager.” But I control that.

**John:** [laughs] You do. But your second answer I thought was better in that case.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I want to go back and stick up for the manager just a tiny bit, but then ultimately I’m with you. Managers can serve two functions. There can be managers who are really good at helping you get your writing to the best state and they can sort of serve as a proxy for like what a producer might think. They could be reading every draft. They can sort of help you get your stuff in the best shape.

And there are some managers who do that who are really good. Not a lot of them, but there are some of them, and that can be useful.

A manager can also help you get work. And that sounds more like what you were using this manager for, hopefully, but in this case the manager didn’t get you work. It sounds like you weren’t working. It sounds like this friend is going to hire you on a show independent of what the manager did. So, I would also fire your manager. And then wait a few weeks and then sign on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. No brainer to me. I mean, he even says he’s not a super star. My guess is this is a marginal — there are so many of these people on the margins of Hollywood who, if you think about it, they’re posing as experts in the thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not. So, it’s a bit like you’ walking around with a festering wound and you like in a town where the way you know someone is a doctor is that they call themselves doctor. And these people call themselves managers. That word means nothing. It means that they can afford letterhead.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And we don’t even know if they can afford letterhead. That may just be credit card debt.

**John:** Yeah. It’s all emails now anyway.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** So, yes, we think you should fire your manager in the part one of the question. And then in the part two of your question, if you’re going to get this job staffed on a TV show, congratulations. Once you’re on board there that might be a great time to look for an agent because agents love people who work and who get hired to work. And if you are working on a TV show then you are by definition a working writer. And that might be a very good way for you to get started with an actual agent.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** Our next topic in our big, multi-tab episode, I want to talk about Big Fish and sort of what happens to a Broadway after Broadway.

So, Big Fish closed right at the end of the year and in the time since then we’ve had the cast album come out. But we’ve also started to announce that there’s actually a bunch of stagings of Big Fish happening this next year. I think there are 20 announced so far. The biggest one for Southern California, Long Beach actually bought out all of our costumes and props and things like that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And so they’re doing a big production here.

**Craig:** Including the elephant butts?

**John:** I think they bought the elephant butts.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I’m not sure on the elephant butts. Those are pretty big, but they bought stuff. So, I hope they have that, too.

So, that’s going to be kind of more like the Broadway version of the show. So, it’s like what you might have seen on the main stage on Broadway. We’re also going to be doing, the only one that Andrew and I are going to be sort of directly involved in is we’re doing a new staging in Boston at the Speakeasy Theater which is a really stripped down sort of 12 chairs, maybe no sets kind of version. We’re both going in and rewriting stuff designed to bring it down to a much smaller cast, a much smaller orchestra, which is actually really exciting. I get a chance to do that, again.

What’s so odd about this process is that I’ve done film and I’ve done television, and in film and television once something is done it’s just kind of done. You might go to a retrospective screening of Go or you’ll be flipping through channels and you’ll see the Big Fish movie on HBO, which is there a lot, but you’re sort of done. And weirdly here you’re not just done because Andrew and I control copyright on Big Fish and so everyone who wants to do a future version of Big Fish comes to me and Andrew and says, “Hey, I want to put on your show,” and we get to say yes or no.

And we sort of made the decision to just say yes a lot, like a lot a lot. And so we’re licensing it to these bigger places like the Speakeasy and in Long Beach, but also there are high schools that are going to be doing it next fall.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s great.

**John:** There’s religious groups that are doing it. There are churches. And I won’t see most of these productions, but it’s fascinating to think that these things are going to exist sort of independently of me. It’s kind of cool.

**Craig:** That is cool. I really like that you guys are opening it up to high school productions because both of my kids are big — they’re really involved in musical theater and they love it. And you do tend to get the same kind of thing happening in high school productions. And rarely do you get something that’s new, because if it’s new typically the rights holders want to kind of exploit the higher end of it, or they jack up the rates to such that high schools can’t really afford it.

For instance, Jack’s school was going to do Cinderella, which is an old play.

**John:** Yeah, it’s been out so it’s more expensive.

**Craig:** But now suddenly because it was revived they couldn’t afford it. They just couldn’t afford it, so they had to go to Once Upon a Mattress, which is about as overdone a high school production as you can get. I mean, it’s fun. Don’t get me wrong, and they did a great job, but Once Upon a Mattress is right up there with Fiddler on the Roof which my daughter will be in, [laughs], in a couple weeks.

So, it’s nice to see something fresh and new with modern music and interesting themes and storytelling, you know, and hopefully you can get out to some of those churches, John. [laughs]

**John:** I’m very excited. So, Liberty University is actually doing a Big Fish —

**Craig:** Wait, I’m sorry, hold on. You guys, the two of you —

**John:** Us. The two of us.

**Craig:** The two of you licensed your show to Liberty University?

**John:** We did.

**Craig:** I’m against this.

**John:** I didn’t even know that it happened until it happened. But I’m actually kind of excited. I honestly feel like Big Fish is the kind of show like we could probably run in Branson, Missouri for a good long time.

**Craig:** Well, you could. But, I mean, I just have to ask the question — I mean, was there at no point did you guys say, “We’re licensing our production to an institution that is just like off the charts homophobic?”

**John:** Uh, you know, it honestly happened, but like I found out that it was happening after I think the deal had already been signed. So, I’ll give you a little more backstory as to what the actual process is like. So, people can come to me or Andrew but we would ultimately say like, “That’s fantastic that you want to do it. Here’s where you go.” And so it’s a company called TRW who does the licensing for this show and a lot of other shows.

And so they’re ultimately the ones that are doing it. And so in our initial conversations with TRW about the places we were excited to see it, we really strongly — or I, I guess honestly I’ll put this on me — I strongly stressed that I really think the religious community will dig this show and will probably like it a lot. And so I said Utah and the South. And so they took me at my word and we have a staging in Orem, Utah and we have a couple stagings in the South.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, we have like Abilene Christian University and Liberty University. And then here is the thing: I’m not quite convinced it’s actually Liberty University. It’s the center that is next to their campus, but it may not actually be part of the campus itself. The website is not Liberty University.

**Craig:** Oh, well, those people love gay folks. [laughs] Oh, the people next door to Liberty University.

**John:** Oh, they love them. It’s just the best scenario.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, absolutely.

**John:** But in a weird way I feel — I feel kind of okay with that. It’s hard for me to explain why, but it’s just the show should work for people of , you know, across the board.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s no question about that. It’s a very family friendly show and it’s a very kind of wholesome, I mean, the word wholesome comes to mind. It’s about small town America in the ’50s and ’60s, that kind of idyllic time that a lot of socially conservative people yearn for.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, there’s no question it will work for them. But, you know, hey, look, I guess one way to think about it is that you are quietly putting some gay into Liberty University.

**John:** I think there’s already plenty of gay in Liberty University.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think you’re right!

**John:** So, just to wrap this up, so we’re finished on Broadway and while I would love to still be running on Broadway, it’s also sort of nice to put a little of it behind me on some stuff. We’re not quite done yet. We’re up for some Drama Desk Awards, which is great. I was especially — Kate Baldwin and Norbert Leo Butz who were so fantastic in the show, I was happy to see them get singled out for their great work.

And we’re actually up for best musical on Broadway.com, which is sort of the People’s Choice Awards of Broadway.

**Craig:** Oh, great.

**John:** So, there will be a link in the show notes. If you want to stuff the ballot box for Big Fish I won’t say no. And you can vote for Big Fish as Best Musical if you choose to.

**Craig:** You know, the People’s Choice Awards, that’s the only award I ever get.

**John:** [laughs] You and me, together at last.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** Let’s talk some One Cool Things. So, we’ve been going through, we had two earlier sessions where we talked through old One Cool Things. And we got up to number 80, so should we start?

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do it.

**John:** So, my number 80 was Unfinished Scripts which was a Twitter feed where it was sort of screenshots of terrible screenplays. And there is also Unfinished Screenplays which is the same idea. I’m not sure which one came first. They’re both kind of funny. I don’t really follow them much anymore, but I see them every once and awhile.

**Craig:** Yeah, mine was EyeWire which was a little web-based game that actually helped neurologists map the brain. I think they were rat brains, but still they’re trying to come up with a good map of that stuff. And I did that for awhile. It was fun. Then I stopped. But I think the idea was that you don’t play that every day. So, I had my time with it.

**John:** My number 81 was StageWrite for the iPad which was actually developed by the associate choreographer on Big Fish. And it is a way of keeping track of everyone on stage and sort of where they’re moving from set to set to set, to scene to scene to scene. And it’s great software for that. So, I don’t need to use it, because I’m not choreographing anything, but I see people using it still.

**Craig:** And mine was Kiva, which is a microloan website where you can essentially loan money to indigent people across the world, mostly in third world countries. And I still do that to this day. I basically have an amount that I just roll. And as people pay me back then I just roll it off to somebody else. And it’s a great thing to do. And I urge everybody to check it out at Kiva, I believe it’s Kiva.org. It’s super easy to do. And it’s a good thing.

**John:** My number 80 was Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger & Kenneth Cukier. It was a book I read. I liked it a lot when I read it. I liked it a fair amount when I read it and there’s been a lot more discussion of Big Data in the time since I remember reading that book. And sort of how much you can zero in on the individual person if you combine enough data sets and how that can be great but also troubling.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Motors Forum, along with the username FlasherZ who is an electrician. And I check in there all the time to get little bits of news and blurbs and stuff. Very useful. Very useful forum.

**John:** Hey, Craig, do you like your car?

**Craig:** It’s not really car, John. It’s everything. [laughs] It’s everything to me. Everything.

**John:** From your helpful forum I needed to point to my helpful forum, this is number 83, this Lifehacker post on using multiple audio inputs and outputs in OSX. And this came up because we had Derek Haas as a guest on the show and needed to be able to connect two microphones to my laptop and it was really confusing to figure out how to do that And god bless the internet that there was a little thing on how to do that.

**Craig:** Someone has thought of everything. Mine was the Animal Specialty Group which is an animal hospital in Glendale that saved the life of my dog who is currently prancing about in the yard as I speak. They are wonderful people. I hope to never have to see them again, but if I do they will be there for me.

**John:** My 84 was tips for singing the National Anthem which if you take nothing else is the lowest note you possibly can sing it should be the third note of the National Anthem. [sings] “Oh, say”…that say should be the lowest note you can possibly sing.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That way you have the range to be able to go to the top, hopefully.

**Craig:** The word that you should be afraid of is “glare.” And “the rockets’ red glare.” Glare will be the highest. If you don’t start low enough you will never get to glare.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Mine was BioShock Infinite. What a great game. I really enjoyed it. That — it’s funny, it ties back to our little twist conversation. There’s a huge reveal in it and frankly it was very complicated and I didn’t quite understand it at first. I needed to play through the game again really to appreciate it, which actually to me says they didn’t do that great of a job on that. It was almost too rich. You know, whereas the first BioShock when the twist happens everything suddenly kaboom in your head.

And yet also I have to say that the depth that Ken Levine provided through the game is — it’s essentially the most creatively and philosophically ambitious video game I’ve ever played on a console. It was really well done.

**John:** Mine for 85 was Ulysses III. It’s a Macintosh text editor. I like it but it’s not my go-to text editor. I use By Word most days.

**Craig:** Mine was That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC. Those guys are awesome. I still will occasionally amuse myself by just watching clips of those guys. They’re very, very funny.

**John:** My number 86 was the Internet K-Hole, which was a collection of photographs that this photographer woman has assembled on a website. And you cannot just not look at it. It’s just great. And it’s photos from sort of a punk rock lifestyle over 40 years maybe. It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Pretty cool. Mine is Slacker Radio. I use it every day in my car, also known as the Everything.

**John:** My 87 was Stag’s Leap, a book of poems by Sharon Olds. I still think about it. It’s actually a great collection of poems mostly about the disintegration of her marriage and just really brilliantly done.

**Craig:** Mine was ITER which is I think a French consortium coming up with a way to provide us with unlimited pollution-free energy. I’m pretty sure they’re still working on it. I’d love to see that happen.

**John:** Yeah, has that happened? That’s great. That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. I think they are still working on getting some bugs out.

**John:** My number 88 was FilmCraft Screenwriting by Tim Grierson. Tim Grierson did a series of books on screenwriting, on cinematography, and other things. And I’m actually in the book on screenwriting and it was a well put together book. It still sits on my coffee table. I think I’ve read the whole thing. But, I read my little part, so that counts.

**Craig:** That’s good. I had nothing that week.

**John:** [laughs] My number 89 was Scandal Revealed episode 221 from Matt Byrne.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you had so many.

**John:** There were so many. It was a weird episode. I don’t know why — basically all my old assistants are linked to different things.

**Craig:** And I had just a fact really that the LA Times reported that studios donated film set materials to Habitat for Humanity which is very cool. And also this was the first time that Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang did their American Heart Association thing where they offered to read your script to raise money for research into heart disease.

**John:** Great. Let’s stop there. Man, we got a lot of these.

**Craig:** What do you say —

**John:** We bang out ten a week we’ll get through them all.

**Craig:** This is like — this podcast had everything.

**John:** Lord.

**Craig:** I got upset. We covered like 100 topics. I don’t know if we should continue. [laughs]

**John:** I think we’re basically done. Although I have a One Cool Thing for this week.

**Craig:** Me too. What’s yours?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is, oh, you’re going to love this, Craig. You’re salivating.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** You’re going to love this so much.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** It is the WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand.

**Craig:** I mean, oh god.

**John:** So, it’s not for me, it’s for Stuart. Because Stuart who works downstairs, he works on a laptop and I see him slouching in his chair. I’m like, Stuart, that’s not good. He’s like, “I know it’s not good.” And so I said Stuart if I get you a stand for your laptop so you can stand up when you want to stand up, would you like that? He’s like, “Sure.”

And so I got it and I bought this one off Amazon. It was really good. He uses it right now.

**Craig:** He’s just shutting you up.

**John:** Well, he’s standing up while he’s shutting me up, so that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** I think you get more work out of Stuart if he’s in pain.

**John:** Ha! Crippled over in agony.

**Craig:** Yes. My, by the way, I’ve been playing Monument Valley a lot. It’s really, really good.

**John:** Isn’t that beautifully done?

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** Actually you can’t kind of play a lot because it’s really short.

**Craig:** Well, so I play a chapter and then I just put it down. So, I’ve spreading it out. But my One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS, as often is the case, called Sometimes You Die.

**John:** I’ve played Sometimes You Die. I thought it was great.

**Craig:** Really cool. It is very minimalist. The game play is — basically it’s a platform of sort, except sometimes you die. Sometimes you have to die. And when you die your little body, which is just a cursor, it’s just a carrot —

**John:** A square block.

**Craig:** A little square block. Your body is left behind and you can use your past dead bodies to get to where you need to go. But where the game is really kind of fascinating is in the sound of it and the look of it and the text on screen. It’s essentially saying what are you doing, why are you playing this?

And so in that regard it’s very, very cool. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

**John:** It reminded me a bit of portal, and not in the sense of like the fancy mechanics, but just the sense of kind of it’s talking back to you and it’s sort of — there’s a quality of existential doom to it that was actually quite fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think I played to the end but I’m not even sure if I’ve gotten to the end.

**Craig:** You haven’t because I did a little reading. I played to the end, too, but every time you play thought it you get a little thing. And the idea is that at some point you will have collected a couple of little super powers that allow you to play through the game without dying.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** So, I don’t know if I noticed when you played all the way through, now you’re allowed to turn your phone and your little carrot will — gravity will work on your carrot.

**John:** Ah, okay. So, now —

**Craig:** And then there’s another one later when you play through again where you get a pause button. So, there’s all these things that happen and the idea is eventually you can complete the game without dying.

**John:** That is genius. You’ve basically made a new game for me by telling me these secrets.

**Craig:** Voila.

**John:** And that’s our show. So, you can find links to things we talked about in the show notes which are at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. It’s also there where you can find transcripts for previous episodes. Just by the way, Craig, I had a listener who wrote into me on Twitter today who was thanking me for the transcripts because he’s deaf. And because he’s deaf the only way he can experience the podcast is through the transcripts. So, that was just really great that he took the time to write in.

You can listen to all of the back episodes, both on the site, the most recent 20, or the older ones you can find on scriptnotes.net. The ones that are on scriptnotes.net you can also find in the app, both for iOS and for Android. You search your applicable app store for those.

We have occasional bonus content things, so those show up if you’re subscriber to all the back episodes. Subscribing also gives you all back to episode number one when we didn’t know what we were doing.

We have a few of the USB drives left. They are at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Sam Worseldine.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** And if you have an outro that you’d like for us to play on the show, send it to us. Send us a link. Put it on SoundCloud and send us a link. We’d love to hear it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** If you have a question for Craig, you can find him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions like the one we answered today you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you are on iTunes just randomly and you want to leave us a comment or leave us a rating, go for it. Knock yourself out. It helps other people find the show. And that’s it.

Craig, next time I see you it will be the live show. I can’t wait.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Hey, hey John.

**John:** What’s up?

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Next time is going to be live.

**John:** It’s going to be amazing. You can see Craig Mazin do that voice live on stage.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Yeah. This is Craig. Yeah.

**John:** And he promises to dress the part, too.

**Craig:** [laughs] Always.

**John:** You don’t want to miss that experience.

**Craig:** Nothing is sexier than a 43-year-old man in J. Crew.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right. See you there.

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

Links:

* [Voting for the Live Three Page Challenge is open](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive) until May 14 at noon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* John’s blog post on [which apps screenwriters are using](http://johnaugust.com/2014/which-apps-are-screenwriters-using)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 141: [Uncomfortable Ambiguity, or Nobody Wants Me at their Orgy](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy)
* Matt Selman [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Selman)
* The Simpsons, Episode 492: The Book Job, on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job) and [Amazon Instant Video](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006B318N8/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* The Simpsons, Episode 266: The Trilogy of Error [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_of_Error)
* John’s blog post on [How to Write a Photoplay](http://johnaugust.com/2014/how-to-write-a-photoplay) and [the book on archive.org](https://archive.org/details/howtowritephotop00hoag)
* Deadline on [Barry Levinson leaving the WGA](http://www.deadline.com/2014/05/barry-levinson-quits-wga-over-sloppy-credit-arbitration-on-screen-version-of-philip-roths-the-humbling/)
* [The Periodic Table of Storytelling](http://designthroughstorytelling.net/periodic/)
* Seattle’s [Experience Music Project Museum](http://www.empmuseum.org/), and [John’s photo of the Archetypes of Fantasy chart](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/archetypes.jpg)
* Joseph Campbell’s [The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Collected Works](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1577315936/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), and his and Bill Moyers’ video series, [The Power of Myth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A4E8E1O/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Bulfinch’s Mythology](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1440426309/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Memos to Hollywood](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/movies/critics-weigh-in-on-patriarchy-and-the-vanished-film-print.html) from The New York Times
* Big Fish’s [upcoming shows](http://www.theatricalrights.com/big-fish)
* Vote now (for Big Fish!) for the [Broadway.com Audience Choice Awards](http://awards.broadway.com/buzz/2014/5/5/votebway-vote-now-for-the-winners-of-the-2014-broadwaycom-audience-choice-awards)
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* [WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand](http://www.uncagedergonomics.com/workez-executive/) and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B9HGHPU/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Sometimes You Die](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sometimes-you-die/id822701037?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Sam Worseldine ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 141 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Not bad, not bad. Turned in a script last week; went really, really well, so that’s good. I get two weeks off now before I start my next thing.

**John:** And what are you going to do with your two weeks?

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you. Job number one for these two weeks is to kind of flush my system out. Like I don’t know about you but as I’m writing something I tend to eat worse and worse.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, right afterwards there’s a nice two-week period where I really try and flush my system out. Now, I don’t do any of these crazy — what do they call them, cleanses?

**John:** Yeah, apple juice, lemon peel, little cayenne pepper.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, here’s the story with those. They don’t clean anything. There is absolutely no good science behind that stuff whatsoever. Your liver is super good at cleaning your blood. You don’t need a cleanse to clean anything. You know me. Anytime I see the word toxin or energy, I get all itchy, but I’m just eating much less and I’m doing a lot of reading. So eating less, reading, and catching up on some video games.

**John:** That’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Craig, Have you staring playing Hearthstone on the iPad? Do you know what that is?

**Craig:** I don’t know what that is. No.

**John:** So it’s a card game that’s sort of like the Magic: The Gathering, but it’s all the Blizzard universe kind of things and it’s totally addictive. And so I recommend you fall into a deep K-hole and play Hearthstone.

**Craig:** All right. Well, right now, I’m catching up on my console games so I’m playing — I’m just finishing up the Arkham Origins DLC Cold, Cold Heart. And I have already started playing the South Park Game which is awesome.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Love, I mean, the actual game play, eh. The game play actually stinks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what’s great about it is in addition to all the normal South Park fun stuff, they’re very smartly making fun of some video games that I’m very well familiar with. There’s at one point you’re wandering in an alien ship and you keep finding these little audio logs and as you play them the person who’s recorded the audio logs keeps commenting on how he doesn’t even understand why he’s making audio logs.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And he’s found other people’s audio logs and he keeps listening to their audio logs thinking that he’ll learn something important and he never ever does and he just keeps…but yet he still listens to the audio logs. [laughs] It was a great tweak at BioShock.

**John:** What’s so fascinating about that trope of audio logs is that very rarely do you actually see a character over the course of the narrative recording an audio log and yet there are all these audio logs. So when exactly do they record these?

**Craig:** Right. Like, why are they recording them? I mean, the first audio log was, [laughs], he’s on the ship and he’s just saying, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. The aliens are coming there about to break the door and why am I wasting time recording this, I don’t know.” [laughs] It’s pretty great and then why do they leave them around? Yeah, no, audio logs are absurd. But they also did a really nice job of parodying, in a kind of a very straight way, nearly copying the music from Elder Scrolls.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. Those are smart guys, those South Park folks.

**Craig:** They are.

**John:** Today, on the podcast, we are going to talk about Game of Thrones. We’re going to talk about some Bryan Singer situation. And we’re going to talk about the numbers of women employed by the WGA —

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And minorities and older people. We’re going talk about this situation where the woman who wrote The Vampire Diaries is now writing Vampire Diaries fan fiction which seems absurd but it’s actually because of work-for-hire law and it’s just really an odd time that we’re living in.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’re going to answer a question about craft. We’re going to go through our old One Cool Things. So we have a lot today.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Big show.

**Craig:** Big show, big show.

**John:** First though, follow up. So we have our live show coming up on May 15th. The cocktail party hosted by Aline Brosh McKenna is all sold out, but there are still some tickets left for the show itself.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** So if you’d like to come see —

**Craig:** What?

**John:** I think there are.

**Craig:** I can’t believe it.

**John:** Well, we’re recording on a Thursday. So by the time this podcast airs, we don’t know if there are still tickets but there might still be tickets. But the special news for people who have tickets is we have an extra guest who wasn’t even a part of the original package. Susannah Grant is going to be joining us for the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** And she’s amazing. So she’s the screenwriter of Erin Brockovich, Charlotte’s Web. She’s the director of Catch and Release. She’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she will be up there on stage helping us figure how these three pages could be even better.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I can’t believe that these tickets haven’t sold out. First of all, let me just reiterate, we are the Jon Bon Jovi of screenwriting podcasts.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that makes no sense. I’m glad that people bought the cocktail party things.

**John:** Yeah. The expensive ones.

**Craig:** Yeah, and we promise to talk to you guys and not each other at the cocktail party. [laughs] We promise. But, yeah, these other tickets, how much do they cost?

**John:** 20 bucks.

**Craig:** 20 bucks to see David Goyer. 20 bucks to see McFeely and Markus. 20 bucks to see Susannah Grant. I mean, forget us. I mean, how much is those people.

**John:** They’re pretty amazing.

**Craig:** It’s just 20 bucks, yeah.

**John:** It’s just 20 bucks and like you pay $20 for any one of those people, but no, you get them all together as package.

**Craig:** You get them all together as a package and the money goes to the Writers Guild Foundation which is a charitable non-profit organization that supports screenwriters and people who are interested in screenwriting all day long.

**John:** That’s what they do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, they help veterans. They help young people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, for the Three Page Challenge, how are we going to do it? So last week on the podcast I said there would be a special way that people will submit for it. That is up and running as of today. So here is how you submit to it. You go to the same URL you’ve always gone to, johnaugust.com/threepage. When you get there, you’ll see that there’s now a form. And with that form, you will click some boxes and enter your name and information. You’ll click a box that says Attach File and you will attach your script there. It could be Fountain or a PDF. And you will click Submit.

And when you click Submit, it will magically get whisked into the system and the database from which we will call our entrants for just this live Three Page Challenge, the one that we’re actually going to do on May 15th. If the system works well, it’ll become the real system for Three Page Challenges from now forward.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** But we’re just trying it out for this one-time deal.

**Craig:** And if your script is picked, pages are picked, do we let them know ahead of time?

**John:** We will let people know that they’re in the final contention for that. Essentially, if you are going to be submitting under the auspices of this live Three Page Challenge, we’re asking, like, are you going to be there?

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so we’re only going to be looking at the ones of people who say they’re going to be there. What’s special about this one event is all of our listeners will get to read those three pages as well. So not only the final ones are picked, the listeners are going to help choose which one is going to be discussed live.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So for one week starting today, Tuesday through next Tuesday, so starting on Tuesday April 29th through Tuesday May 6th, for that one week you can submit your scripts.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That next Wednesday, for one week, you can vote on which one of those entrants you really want to see up there on stage. So you can read them both on the site. There’ll be links at johnaugust.com so you can read those samples. And I don’t know if there’s going to be 10 or 20 or 50 but there’s going to be some there.

We’ll also, if we can, put them on Weekend Read, so if you’re on your iPhone, you can read through them on there as well.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Technology!

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** While I was talking about Weekend Read, there’s a new update for Weekend Read, so people should update their app if they have it. There’s also an update for Highland. So if you’re on your app store, click on those.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool.

Let’s get to our business at hand. So I love Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I’m just a huge fan of not just the show I watch but just the fact that it can exist because it’s so incredibly complicated to make and they do such an amazingly good job. And I watched this last Sunday’s episodes which was really two Sundays ago for people who are listening to the show and the minute I saw this scene I said, “Well, there’s going to be a conversation about this one specific scene.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and I [laughs]…so I was little taken aback by the fact that there was a conversation about it and we’re talking about the scene where —

**John:** We should say, I guess we should say there’s a mild spoiler here but it’s actually not.

**Craig:** No, you know what —

**John:** On the order of spoilers for Game of Thrones this is incredibly minor. This isn’t like a death of a major character.

**Craig:** And it’s two week later, so forget it, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s like keep up or don’t. So Joffrey is dead of course and he’s lying in state so to speak in the Sept…Septum? Septom? Sept?

**John:** I think they call it a Sept.

**Craig:** Yeah, the septum is the thing in your nose.

**John:** And I think is it called Sept because there are seven gods? Is that why it’s called a Sept?

**Craig:** Maybe. Maybe so. I don’t know, but that’s where they are.

So he’s lying there and Cersei, his mom, is there and Jaime Lannister comes in. That’s Cersei’s brother and, of course, Cersei and Jaime incestuous lovers and Joffrey their incestuous son. Everybody else is cleared out of the room and basically Jaime comes on to Cersei and she says no and then he rapes her right there next to the body of their dead incest kid. And I thought, “All right!” you know, like, “Here we go again, Game of Thrones getting sick,” but people really got upset.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they got upset for a bunch of reasons. And I wanted to talk a little bit about it because it kind of ties into I think this interesting phenomenon. It’s a very human thing of what I call narrative directionality.

So some people got upset because they didn’t like the idea that Jaime Lannister raped his sister. Just forget the fact that he was a good guy now as opposed to before. They didn’t like that he raped his sister and I just thought, well, but you were okay with him up to this point when he pushed a kid out a window callously and didn’t even seem to care —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** When he was going to kill Ned Stark for no good reason. I mean, this is a bad guy.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, and the fact that he had sex with his sister and had an incest baby and then lied about it and knew that his sister was aborting the babies that she’s having with her actual husband. I mean, this is a terrible person by any definition of behavior.

But people really got upset about the rape part. And, you know, my feeling was that what was underlying this was that they were, and in the book it’s not rape. It’s sort of — it turns into like a weird consensual kinky sex bit.

And so they were saying, “Well, in the book it’s not rape but in the show they chose to make it rape so it’s that choice and that’s super bad.” But, you know, again, it’s like, well, forget that there was a choice between the book and the show. The book had Daenerys Targaryen raped repeatedly by her husband that she was forced to marry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then she started to like it and then she fell in love with him. Nobody had a problem with that either apparently.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this, they have a problem with it. And I think their problem is this: Jaime Lannister’s character was starting to go through this process where he was seeing things differently and behaving differently in a way that people thought he’s getting better and this fits into a very clean narrative direction. A bad person starts to change their evil ways. And what that moment did was reverse that directionality and say, no, actually, he’s still the same guy that did all that stuff. And people got really angry I think because the narrative turned left on them like that. And for me, I actually kind of think that’s great.

**John:** Yeah, there’s a lot to sort of unpack here. First off, you described it as being rape. And so when I first saw the scene, I’m like, oh, one of the first points of controversy will be was it rape or was it like bad consensual sex. And I think it’s better just to call it rape and just like discuss it as a rape and not just that they’re two really screwed up people and therefore that’s sort of the nature of their relationship.

**Craig:** Oh, no, it was definitely rape.

**John:** Yeah, and it was rape because of specific choices of what she was saying and her trying to push him away and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s call it rape and like not even sort of open that.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** But I would say the first day after the episode aired, that was a lot of the discussion like was it rape, was it not rape. Let’s just call it rape.

About directionality, I want to stick up a little bit for the sense of people’s ownership of the Jaime Lannister character and the arc they believed him to be on. And that’s understandable why you are starting to identify him as being a heroic character rather than a villainous character. And that’s natural. I think it’s okay to feel a little betrayed by him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And by proxy, this shows creators, because they had given you good reason to believe that he had made a change for the better. He was a crippled man who had learned the errors of his ways, who wanted to do better by his sister/lover and everyone else around him seemed to be doing the right kinds of things. So for him to change course in that moment felt wrong.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it’s not wrong though. I guess —

**John:** No, I’m saying, it felt wrong —

**Craig:** It felt wrong.

**John:** I can understand why it felt wrong to the viewer.

**Craig:** I am with you on the point that I think we’re supposed to feel betrayed and disappointed by him. What I was confused by was the extension of that to Dan and Dave because I thought, frankly, what this show does better than most every other show I’ve seen is repeatedly confound and thwart our desire to see a natural narrative path occur from wherever a character is in a given point in the show. I mean, starting with the beheading of Ned Stark and going onward from there, I mean, there’s a great moment in that episode I believe where The Hound says to Arya, you know, essentially I see the world for what is, how many Starks need to be beheaded before you start.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And it kind of, like to me, that was the theme of the show like, hey, this is the way — we don’t — this isn’t the kind of show where somebody who casually murders children and then quips about it as they’re falling to their, what should have been their death, that person doesn’t have some mid-life, good golly, I’m going to be a sweetheart kind of changeup. No, he’s a bad person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And bad people have moments, but, you know.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you that the moments between Arya and The Hound and sort of their — to the beats of their storyline in that episode were basically you were a fool for thinking that I changed. I didn’t change. I’m going to steal this guy’s money and keep moving on, because that’s who I am.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** And, you know, he wasn’t wearing like the scorpion jacket but it was essentially that sort of scorpion quality of like, you know, this is what I am.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s that trope of like, I am genuinely irredeemable.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I think what’s different about Jaime Lannister is like you have a handsome guy who looks like he should be a knight hero and he’s sort of dressed like a knight hero. So it feels like a greater betrayal that he is doing it. Whereas The Hound, well, he’s ugly, so of course he’s going to ultimately be evil and do that thing.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I just think that if the people that are complaining about what happened there go and watch the first episode and look at the way that Jaime Lannister delivers his line, “The things I do for love,” after he pushes that kid out the window.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think you can’t reconcile — that’s an adult. That is a grown man who is clearly got a sociopathic streak a mile wide. The fact that he’s been humbled and the fact that he can have a friend and that he maybe sees things differently vis-à-vis himself and his family, that’s doesn’t change the fact that he’s just an — he’s an awful person.

**John:** Yes. So what we’re really talking here I think is ambiguity, is that it’s frustrating sometimes as a viewer just to see this thing and say like, “No, but I want this person to be good or bad. I want this person to easily be placed in one box and I want this situation to be clear to me.”

And what Game of Thrones is saying is like, no, we are never going to make it clear and easy for you to say, this is a good person you should be rooting for. This is a bad person you should be rooting against. We’re always going to make it difficult for you.

**Craig:** I agree. And I think in this sense what they’re doing with things like this is very important. Because what happens in the way we experience narrative is we accept that there are certain rules in place to give narrative a structure. And then, every now and then somebody comes along and breaks it on purpose. Sometimes people break it because they’re just bad and they don’t know what they’re doing and everybody rejects it.

But sometimes people break it and they’re yelled at and it’s not understood or appreciated. But then, now the line about how flexible a character can be presented in narrative changes. Because it starts to make it freer for everybody else to say, “You know what? I actually think this person can do this and I think it becomes narratively interesting because there’s a context for it. Now, we’ve seen it before.”

So the first time, what is it, Rites of Spring was played people rioted because it was atonal. [laughs] But now that just seems bizarre to us. But I think that these things are important. When they are done with expertise and they’re done — and listen, this is not to say, just so that everyone is really clear, in no way am I defending what this character did. I mean, that was terrible, you know, but again he’s a murderer and a sociopath. So it didn’t shock me maybe the way it shocked other people but I’m not — I was a little surprised at how many people, because it was rape suddenly got super upset but didn’t get upset about the rape of Daenerys and didn’t get upset about the fact that Jaime Lannister tried to kill a kid.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But the rape here was the thing that really got them going.

**John:** If I’m being honest, my not loving the scene was largely because I didn’t necessarily believe that it was happening right beside the body of Joffrey. And that to me just felt a little soap opera-ish in ways that the show usually isn’t. And so, it wasn’t that this rape happened, that it happened in that moment right there. I just didn’t fully believe it. And that’s just my own personal response to how that situation was created. But I think that’s actually not the important thing to discuss. I think what we’ve been talking about of the nature of what he did is really the meat of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do think that that location was directly taken from the book, so they —

**John:** Yeah. That’s true.

**Craig:** It’s interesting to see how they drift from and stick to the book. But in any case, so I guess I’m sticking up for the showrunners on that one.

**John:** Sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s switch to our next uncomfortable and ambiguous situation, which is that on April 16th a guy named Michael Egan filed a lawsuit against Director Bryan Singer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Describing abuse he said began when he was 15 years old. So we’re recording on this on a Thursday. I’m sure there’s been a thousand developments since we recorded this. So it probably doesn’t behoove us to get into too many details about the nature of this one allegation. But more to talk about sort of like what it is like to have this lawsuit happening now when Bryan Singer’s movie X-Men: Days of Future Past is supposed to be coming out. The nature of power in Hollywood gets questioned. The nature of relationships in Hollywood gets questioned. And sort of the big bag of hurt that this kind of accusation unleashes.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is not a good thing. I mean, we’re — part of the problem, this is a little different than some of the allegations that you’ll see sometimes because people do claim all sorts of stuff. I mean, you and I talked about how every movie gets accused of stealing some, you know, another idea or something like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this is — even when you’re talking about situations of assault and sexual assault which is always a very messy and tricky thing, sometimes these things don’t pan out. In this case, it’s a little disturbing to me that part of the deal here is that Singer apparently was associated somehow with this guy Marc Rector-Collins who has already, I think, been to prison for this sort of thing before or had been indicted or convicted or something. So there are some shady players involved here and this one I think is not going go away anytime soon.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t a crystal ball to tell you what’s going to happen. I can only look back at the past. And so, I can sort of share my own personal experience with the edges of this and sort of what’s been discussed because this one allegation came out.

So I don’t think I’ve ever met Bryan Singer in person. But I did encounter him for the very first time when I was an assistant. I was answering phones for producers and he called to invite my boss to a party and I don’t remember whether my boss was going to go or not. But he also, just on the phone, Bryan Singer invited me and I think just correctly surmising that I was a 20-something year old gay guy who might want to come to party at his house.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I didn’t go and that’s great and fine. But, in the years past and the decades since then, I would be at parties and Bryan Singer would show up with this posse of really good-looking guys who were about 20 and I —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This allegation of this guy was like he’s 15 and like I don’t remember seeing anybody that young, but it was sort of a thing and like everyone knew that like Bryan Singer would show up at a party with this group of guys. They’d swarm for like 30 minutes and then they go onto the next party. And that was just the thing that happened.

So a lot of the real meat of the story is more about like this posse of guys and sort of with that lifestyle was versus the nature of what actually happened in this one case. And I want to make sure that whatever the criminal or civil — whatever happens with this one thing is judged based on that one thing and that it doesn’t become this sort of indictment of this swarm of 20 year olds around him.

**Craig:** Well, sure. Yeah, I mean, it’s not illegal to have sex with 20 year olds. It’s illegal to have sex with, whatever, 17 year olds, I don’t know. [laughs] I should probably, I should look into that.

**John:** Yeah, well, there’s a complete age consent issue and there’s also the ability to give consent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those are two incredibly important things that anytime you’re talking about sexual abuse, rape, or anything like that you have to keep in mind were the people participating in the situation able to give consent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Based on age or based on everything else.

**Craig:** And in this case, there are allegations that some of the people were not of age to give consent at all and other people were under the influence of drugs and were coerced either by drugs that they weren’t even — they didn’t even realized they were ingesting — or by threats of violence in some cases I believe. This is not the first time that Bryan Singer’s name has been mentioned in connection with something like this.

He got in to a bit of hot water over a situation when he was making the movie Apt Pupil as I recall. There were some underage kids in a locker room scene and, [sighs], you know, look, I’m not a big believer in where there’s smoke there’s fire, so we can’t, we don’t know. All I know is this: there’s enough stuff around this one to make me nervous that — if I were Bryan Singer I would be very nervous right now.

And here is the other issue is that it’s spreading now to these other people and, you know, people can take a swing at somebody. When you start taking swings at five people, six people, seven people, my guess is you’ve got something behind those punches because otherwise you’re just going to, you know, what lawyer is necessarily going to start going that nuts, you know?

**John:** Well, yes and no. I do, and again, this is probably pretty early days of this so we don’t know sort of how many people they’re going to start pointing fingers at. The issue is, to me, basically you ask why now and sort of why did this person — why is this person coming out and saying, making these accusations about things that happened many years ago? Is it because Bryan Singer is suddenly a much bigger name because he has a big movie coming out and that it’s more lucrative to make these accusations now when there’s a much better reason to make them all go away? That’s going to be the natural question that sort of comes up out of sort of why this thing happens right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m really confused by that too.

**John:** I don’t —

**Craig:** Because, I mean, Bryan Singer has had big movies out between the time of the allegation, you know, when he said these incidences occurred and now. I don’t know why now, and frankly waited past the statute of limitations. The whole thing is odd —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But disconcerting. I will say this: I have never encountered any kind of weird sexual situation in Hollywood because I’m a married guy, right. I mean, I’m — so there’s just, there was never any — and I’m me. [laughs] Nobody wants me at their orgy, okay.

But I do know that this sort of thing does happen. This sort of thing happens between men and women. It happens between men and men. It happens between women and women. And there are a lot of bad people in our business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who have appetites in which they indulge and they feel entitled. And there are waves of young, impressionable, naive, desperate people who are here in this town looking for mommies and daddies and looking for fame and fortune.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And this tale is as old as Hollywood. I can’t speak to whether or not any of the people that have been accused are guilty or innocent. But I can say there are guilty people out there and I would love to see things get cleaned up because sexual abuse in Hollywood is pervasive I believe and it is just awful. It is awful that it exist and frankly it’s awful that we all kind of walk around knowing it exists but never being able to do anything about it.

**John:** Okay. Well, let’s talk though about like how would you actually implement these changes? Is it — do you basically start figuring out who the bad people are and stop hiring them?

**Craig:** Well —

**John:** Because, I mean, you and I off mic could make a list of like these are terrible people, and maybe do you stop hiring them because you are worried about the kind of PR disaster that this clearly has the potential to be. Well, even when we talked about like Orson Scott Card many, many episodes ago, we talked about that weird thing like you never want somebody involved as a creator to become like this negative anchor on your movie and that’s what we’re talking about here.

**Craig:** Well, I think that it’s — the tricky part is you don’t want to black list people and you don’t want to go on witch hunts, because suddenly, you know, let’s say this all turns into something very, very real and Bryan Singer ends up in prison. Now you’ve got, you know, what are you going to have a witch hunt of every gay director in his 30s? I mean, you got to be careful about this. But on the other hand, I actually think the only thing that can stop this is for these people to be exposed and stand trial and if they’re guilty go to prison because they’re doing criminal things.

Listen, you could be a sleaze. If you want to be a legal sleaze all day long, I don’t have to like it but, you know, it’s not —

**John:** But, Craig, a lot of, I mean, with this bad behavior we’re talking about though, maybe we should distinguish these kinds of bad behavior. There’s actually, genuinely criminal things where you’re doing things with underage people or people who cannot give consent because of drugs or coercion or whatever else.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But what about sort of the 18-year-old actress from Iowa who gets sent out for an audition with a skeezy producer/director or whatever and feels kind of coerced into —

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Coerced is the wrong word.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But we got to make sure that, I mean, there’s — I mean, again, there’s uncomfortable ambiguity here about like what is just like recognizing a bad situation and how do you deal with sort of skeevy producers and directors even if they’re not actually breaking the law, do you still hire them?

**Craig:** Well, it’s —

**John:** Interesting, even if they’re not found guilty , there’s till that PR disaster. That’s really what I’m talking about. It’s like —

**Craig:** No, I hear you. I mean, look, if you think that somebody is a ticking time bomb for activity that will impact your business negatively regardless of its legality, yeah, I would say, you probably should think twice before hiring them. Even if you’re just amoral. From a business point of view you should think twice about hiring them for sure. In terms of where the line gets drawn on the behavior, I think that our criminal justice system is fairly conservative in this regard. There’s a, you know, innocent before proven guilty. There’s got to be evidence. You get a lawyer. There is a trial. So if it’s not illegal, then it’s not illegal, then you just have to make a decision about whether it’s distasteful and embarrassing and detracting to your business. And you also have to be careful that you’re right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That you’re not simply acting on rumors. This business, in particular when it comes to gay men, less of gay women but gay men, this business since the beginning has just had this enormous percentage of closeted gay man who had to live kind of completely in secret in this way. And there is a culture of secrecy about it. And cultures of secrecy which are born out of necessity serve as a shield for then bad people who do bad things. Now, granted straight people have done probably I would say a larger proportion of the bad things. [laughs]

**John:** I would say a greatly larger proportion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the stereotype of the skeevy producer or director and the, you know, the girl just off the bus from Iowa, it exists for a reason because we see it happening all the time.

**Craig:** Right. That’s every day.

**John:** And maybe because it’s so commonly out there, we can sort of recognize the warning signs of it a little bit more easily. I am, I think I am generally in a macro sense most worried about the witch hunt aspect of it because even if it’s not a publicly-declared witch hunt , it’s that slow — it’s that reticence to hire anybody. You wonder like could there by some problem here. And the person who comes to mind is Lana Wachowski, because back when Lana Wachowski was Larry Wachowski —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, that was a big transition. And there’s a lot of reasons why you could worry that that was going to be a time bomb situation. It ended up not being a time bomb situation and things kind of turned out just fine. But I’m worried that you could create a culture in which you feel very nervous about hiring The Wachowskis because of this Bryan Singer situation or some other potential law suit out there.

**Craig:** You know, my point of view is that Hollywood is a fairly progressive place. One of the more progressive industries in the world. And when it comes to somebody, something like, someone who’s transgender, now at least in 2014, so who is transgender and who’s transitioning between genders, I don’t think that’s embarrassing at all for anybody.

I think, frankly, that people sort of line up to be first in line to say I support this person because we don’t look at it here, at least In Hollywood, we don’t look at that as anything wrong at all. I think where most reasonable people agree is that sexual coercion, sexual assault, rape and statutory rape, that these things are criminal and that they are not connected to gender issues.

I mean, listen, poor Lee Tamahori, remember his story

**John:** I don’t remember it well, but I recognize the name.

**Craig:** Lee Tamahori is a director and he was arrested for basically soliciting, I think, in drag on Santa Monica. And, you know, this was I think like 2000 — I want to say it was like 2005. And it was really embarrassing for him. And it clearly impacted his career in a way that Eddie Murphy and Hugh Grant’s careers were not impacted, I should point out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I think were that to happen now, I think it would be a different situation. I agree with you. Look, the last thing we want is a witch hunt. But also the last thing we want is to allow… — Listen, there was a culture going on. We know this because the guys that ran that Digital Entertainment Network, this guy Mark Collins, director, and a couple of these other guys, they fled the country and then got extradited and there were criminal charges. And one of them, I’m sure of it, I seem to recall was convicted.

There were bad things going on. And there are bad things going on. And so we have to balance witch hunter-y against, but I… — Listen, man, I have a daughter, you know? If I heard that somebody I knew professionally had sexually assaulted a woman, so we’re talking now heterosexual sexual assault, I mean, they’re out of my life, for sure.

Now, I also know as you do the odds of us not knowing somebody like that without knowing is zero, right? I mean, we have worked with somebody that we don’t know has done this. Has to be, right?

**John:** We have worked with a Jaime Lannister without knowing it.

**Craig:** That’s right. We have worked with a Jaime Lannister without knowing it. And I hope that all of the Jaime Lannisters get a light shone on them, because this is the worst, you know. It’s a terrible crime. And if Bryan Singer is not a Jaime Lannister, I hope he is exonerated. And if he is, I hope he goes to prison. I mean, you know, other people will make the X-Men movies. We’ll survive.

**John:** Yeah.

All right, next topic. Also on April 14th, or I guess two days before the Bryan Singer, the WGA released a report. I think it’s every two years they do this report. How often do they do the report?

**Craig:** I think they do it every year.

**John:** All right. This report was on sort of a representation of women and minorities and older people among writers in Hollywood. We’re going to put a link up to the executive summary, but some of the statistics were about female writers accounted for 15% of feature film work in 2012, the latest figure tracked in the survey, down from 17% in 2009. So, it dropped two points since 2009.

Minority writers remain stuck at 5% of film jobs, unchanged from 2009. But the survey shows minority writer earnings declined over the same period, even as paydays for white male writers increased. So, it was not a bundle of good news.

There was actually some good news in the TV side where women’s numbers had increased somewhat.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, looking through this, so if we’re looking for good news and there is not much here to celebrate. So, sort of good news, I guess, is that things didn’t really get that much worse. I mean, statistically speaking the percentage for instance of women working in film went like this from 2008 to 2012: 16, 17, 17, 16, 15. That 15 may just be an outlier. It may be up to 17 again next year.

And the numbers were very steady across the board for television: 28, 28, 27, 28, 27. And total overall employment is actually like one tick higher than it was in 2008. And it’s basically 24% to 25%. So, did it get much worse, no. I guess can we say that it’s good news that the bad situation stayed roughly the same bad? No, that’s not so great.

The one other bit of sort of good news is that there’s not much of a significant gender earnings gap in television. There is a slight gap, which obviously we don’t want to see again. Well, you know, it’s significant. In 2012 median television earnings $112,000 and for white males it was $121,000. That’s a difference of $9,000. That is significant, but it’s not — you don’t look at that and your heart doesn’t sink to the floor.

And what’s also interesting is that as male earnings went up, white male earnings went up, the female earnings went up as well. So, the lines kind of followed each other.

**John:** Yeah. It’s one of those things where if you actually look at it on the chart you’re like, oh, that’s not so bad at all. But then when you actually look at it like the actual numbers, it’s like, oh, women are still getting significantly less.

**Craig:** No, there is a clear problem there.

**John:** Really, the gap remained the same, it’s just that the numbers overall were the same.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess my theme of the good news is a bad situation stayed roughly as bad as it’s been. Yeah, I mean, for film the gap has narrowed somewhat significantly since 2008. The gap is much wider in film than it is in television which doesn’t surprise me because the income disparity in general in film is much wider than it is in television in terms of writing.

**John:** My takeaway from looking at this overall report, particularly in features, I felt like one of the realities is like there were fewer feature jobs. Overall the whole pot of future jobs, there were fewer of them. And that women and minorities probably seemed to take the biggest hit of those fewer jobs.

And so they took a disproportionately large hit I guess I should say. And also when there is more competition for fewer jobs, it becomes harder to push quotes up. And so if you are one of them women who got the job, or minority who got that writing job, it becomes harder to push your quote up higher because there’s a thousand other people who could do that same thing.

Another thing I thought was interesting was this statistic that since 2008 writers aged 41 to 50 have replaced younger writers age 31 to 40 as the age group who enjoyed the largest share of film employment. So, it went from younger writers claimed 37% of all employment to just 33% of all employment. That got flipped in 2010. So, writers age 41 to 50 were 39% of film employment. Writers age 31 to 40 dropped five percentage points to 32%.

So, it’s basically good news for John August and Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, it’s good news for John August and Craig Mazin, two white men working in film in their forties. I will say that the bad news for the studios here, if they’re concerned at all, and this is a point that I’ve made to them when we’ve gone out with the guild to talk about the professional status of screenwriters is that they’re not doing a very good job of training the next generation of screenwriters.

First of all, there’s this myth that twenty-somethings, everybody wants twenty-somethings. Nobody apparently wants twenty-somethings. You want to talk about a group that’s discriminated against? Twenty-somethings.

So, traditionally — and frankly if you look at these numbers, I really have to question the guild’s commitment to this notion that age 40+ is now a protected class, when frankly 40 to 60, that’s the largest earning class in the guild. And that the class that is hammered and needs promotion is the under-30 group. They are —

**John:** Well, Craig, let’s talk about how many people could really fit in that cohort though of the under-30. Because let’s really realistically 25 is about as young as a writer you’re going to get, so there’s really only five years of that.

**Craig:** Well, if you double the percentages —

**John:** It’s still really low.

**Craig:** It’s still much lower than 51 to 60. And I think what we’re going to see is this trend that you pointed out here of the flip between the 30s and the 40s, that’s like guys like you and me going from our 30s to our 40s, which is exactly what happened in 2011.

Because I don’t think the studios are doing as good of a job as they used to bringing people up, bringing them through, and bringing them along. I think, frankly, you’re looking at a bunch of people that are just dropping out in their 20s and 30s because there is not a living to be made as a feature screenwriter.

**John:** Well, I would also argue that a lot of those people who would be the 25-year-old feature writer are now 25-year-old TV writers, because that’s where the jobs are. And so perhaps the feature jobs —

**Craig:** Not according to their chair. It suggests similarly terrible numbers.

**John:** Let’s see. I’m looking at my television one.

**Craig:** Well, for the 30s they’re solid, but still your 40 to 50, that’s the highest numbers.

**John:** That’s the bulk. Right.

**Craig:** And the under 31s is, again, dismal. I mean, that’s a pretty remarkable thing. I have to say like of all the — and let’s add onto that number, because that’s the one that really jumped out at me. That a lot of the efforts that have been made to bring woman and minorities into professional writing positions have been made in the last five to 10 years. Which means a lot of the efforts are going to be for newer writers who are in their 20s, so you’ve got this triple problem where suddenly you’re in your 20s and you’re a woman and you’re a minority, or you’re a minority, and you’re in this like jammed up class that’s just getting hammered out there.

Why? I guess — let’s take a step back, John. What do you think is going on here? Do you think that there is an explanation other than just flat out sexism, racism, ageism?

**John:** Oh, I think you can’t ever have just one explanation behind things, but I think there are fewer candidates than they want for some of those things.

So, let’s take, oh, I’ll talk about my experience dealing with a producer of a big TV show. And we were talking about hiring directors, but hiring writers is really the same situation. And she said that they actively really tried to hire female directors for the show and the first season they were able to get two on. And they brought one back the second time because she was great.

And that one female director was so good they could never get her back again. And they tried other people — they had a hard time finding candidates that they thought were actually good enough to do this.

That’s on the buyer side. But, you can also — there’s also the challenge of you have to want to become a screenwriter, or a television writer. And in some ways there is a self-perpetuating cycle. If you’re a young woman who doesn’t believe that she can make it as a TV writer, or as a feature writer, you may never try to make it as a feature writer or a TV writer. And that can take the numbers down, too.

We saw it to some degree even in the Three Page Challenges, looking at sort of what percentage of people who submitted to Three Page Challenge were men or women. And it was surprisingly there was a huge disparity of men to women writing in for that.

**Craig:** Right. And I think you see that also in the Nicholl Fellowship that I think they get roughly about 30% submissions from women, which is obviously out of whack.

I mean, look, it may be that that number is depressed because women are negatively influenced by the fact that they are a minority in success, or it may be a depressed number because there just may be less interest. We don’t know.

Look, if you’re a woman and you’re interested in screenwriting, that’s not a very satisfying answer, but of course you might be one of the 30%.

**John:** Yes. Well, because the minute I say what I just said, there’s a natural response to it, it’s like, but no, I’m one of those women who wants to be this thing and you saying that I don’t want this thing is negative. I’m like, I’m actually saying exactly the opposite.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m saying that in some ways in my conversations with people who are trying to make hiring decisions, they are often saying that we are really looking for women or minorities for these things and we’re having a hard time finding them. And so be that there need to better programs to get people trained to do those things, better mentorship of writers to writers, specifically women writers to women writers to try to make sure all those connections are actually happening, I’m saying that, yes, there is a problem. I’m just saying that the problem isn’t necessarily that these people aren’t willing to hire somebody; they just may not be able to find a person they feel is qualified to hire.

**Craig:** I agree. There is no real clear path to figure this out.

**John:** I’m going to back up if I can to page ten of that report, because if you actually —

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m looking at that now. The employment rate by age group. Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s really interesting. So, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m puzzled, because so here it’s saying, all right, employment rate by age group is the highest in the twenty-somethings, where in 2012 it’s arguing that 80% of the twenty-somethings got employment versus a lower percentage. But, how do they figure that out exactly? How do they — ?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Employment rate is defined as a percentage of current guild members who are actually employed. Okay, well that’s a very misleading thing. Because I would imagine that the current guild membership is probably skewed more heavily in the older ages, which means that the percentage of people employed would be lower because there are fewer guild members in the 20s. This is a bad graph.

**John:** Okay, I can see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** You know what I mean?

**John:** It’s because the guild has so many —

**Craig:** Current members between 30 and 60, right. So, if there are very few current guild members in their 20s, so yeah, if there’s like, you know, 40 of them that get work —

**John:** So, if you are a guild member in your 20s you’re likely a working guild member in your 20s.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You’re actually actively working. I guess that’s true.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a bad graph. I think the graph that matters is the share. Because if you look at share of film employment, there’s no reason frankly… — Like I grant you, forget 20 to 25, but if you look at 25 to 30, there’s no reason that 25 to 30 year olds should be employed at such a lower rate than 30 to 35 year olds even, you know?

That’s a little odd to me.

**John:** I’m trying to read through to understand what share film employment actually means. Does it mean out of 100 jobs how many were occupied by people of a certain age? Or total amount of dollars earned in film? And it’s really unclear from this.

**Craig:** I would imagine it has to do with how many jobs, like how many workers worked. You know, like how many jobs out of the available jobs went to twenty-somethings. How many jobs out of the available jobs, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m guessing.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** That’s the problem with these statistics. They get a little crazy.

**John:** Yeah. But what’s so fascinating about those two charts is if you look at them you can draw completely opposite conclusions about where the real problem is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you were saying the real problem is that we’re not doing enough to help the younger people. The other chart makes it seem like the younger people are doing just great. It’s the older people who are —

**Craig:** Yeah, that other chart sucks. [laughs] I will tell you there is a chart that, I mean, you want to look at the only chart that matters? How about money? Let’s just look at money, because that’s the only thing that matters in terms of like what’s actually happening for people. Average earnings by age group.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Under 31s are way — I mean, you want to talk about a disparity. Like we’re here talking like, man, there is a 10% gap between men and women. Absolutely. There is a 100% gap between twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings in television. And there is similarly a very large gap as well in film. The 40-somethings like you and me, their median earnings in film in 2012 were about $90,000 and for twenty-somethings they were more like $50,000.

**John:** 50.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely shocking. And I will point out to you, and this is why sometimes the guild makes me nuts. They will never mention this because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Their narrative is… — And do you know why it doesn’t fit their narrative? Because there are so few twenty-somethings and because the grouchiest people, forgive me for being stereotypical, [laughs], but the old people are grouchier.

Like me and you, right? We’re part of the old people now. And they’re grouchy.

**John:** I do find it fascinating — we’re looking at figure 13 in the chart if you’re following with us. And so there’s, I don’t know if you call it an S-curve or what you want to call it, but essentially earnings peak in that 41 to 50-year-old, and they go down 61 to 70 they’re at the lowest point back down to where the twenty-somethings are.

But then it actually rises again. And if you’re 71 to 80, because I think basically if you’re 71 years old and you’re still getting hired, you’re getting a big paycheck.

**Craig:** You’re the best. Like basically you —

**John:** You’re Alvin Sargent.

**Craig:** You are exactly right. Yeah. And frankly there are so few screenwriters in that cohort that Alvin Sargent has a huge impact on this graph. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. One Alvin Sargent. He’s the entire dot there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, but this is to me, when you look at these graphs the thought that the Writers Guild actually considers white men in their 40s to be a protected class somehow is insane. And frankly speaks to who runs the guild, which would be men in their 40s and 50s.

I look at this report and I mean I recognize women and minorities, we got a long way to go there. A long way to go. But I’m also looking at twenty-somethings because I feel like the bottom is just not there anymore.

**John:** Well, also the women and minorities who we need to get started in the film industry are largely those people in the 20s.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, you help that whole cohort up, you’re going to help people.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Craig, how often should we do this kind of report? How often should the guild do it?

**Craig:** Well, you know, my feeling because this report is expensive and it uses our dues, my feeling is I think if we did it once every four years or once every five years we would be fine. And by that I mean even collect the data, because it doesn’t change. The data simply doesn’t change in any significant way. Look at figure 8. This is median earnings for employed women, minority, and white male writers. And it’s just the same crap. From 2002 to 2012 it’s the same.

And my issue with the guild is that they shell out cash to do these reports to make themselves feel better. Frankly, they could do it once every ten years. Hell, at this point you could probably do it once every 20 years, because all they do is they put this out there and go, “Isn’t this terrible?”

But, hey, how about, I don’t know, like doing something about it. Like creating a program. Why doesn’t the guild take the money they’ve thrown to these reports and just start doing specific training or sponsoring positions or, I don’t know, something. Try something else other than just putting the same damn graph out every year going, “Oh, dear, no.”

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to take the counterpoint that I think you need to do it more often than that because it just becomes too easy to forget about all together. So, the good thing about this report coming out is it creates a moment of conversation about the problem itself.

And so I totally hear you in terms of the spending a tremendous amount of money on it, so perhaps a better way to do smaller, much cheaper reports that don’t try to be as comprehensive or cost so much, but that remind us of the actual nature of the problem.

**Craig:** Well, I’m with you on that. Look, if this report were followed by action, and then that action was subject to a follow up report to test for efficacy, I would be all for it. And I feel like sometimes the guild hates to try things because they think that they’ll fail. I don’t mind failure. That’s part of the scientific process. And this is a scientific problem. Sociology is a science.

So, try something. See if it works. If it does, keep doing it. Do it more. If it doesn’t, try a new thing. But you have to try something. You can’t simply just collect data for the rest of your life and bemoan the fate of everything. I mean, geez, if I were a black kid, I’m 22 years old, I want to be a screenwriter and I’m looking at these reports going back all these years I’d think, well, so I can pretty much assume the next 10 years will be the same. Why wouldn’t they be?

**John:** Yeah. There’s no reason.

**Craig:** Yeah. This trend is pretty steady. It’s bad.

**John:** I think you’re probably right.

All right, our next topic. This is based on a Wall Street Journal article that we’ll have a link to in the show notes. But it’s about The Vampire Diaries and the woman who wrote The Vampire Diaries. So, this is a little snippet from it:

Lisa Jane Smith started writing her first book, “The Night of the Solstice,” when she was in high school, and was around 20 when MacMillan published the novel in 1987. The book, a middle-grade fantasy novel, was a commercial failure that sold around 5,000 copies. But it captured the attention of an editor at Alloy, who asked Ms. Smith if she’d be interested in writing a new young-adult series, concocted as “Interview with the Vampire” for teens.

So, basically she wrote this book about a high school girl who is torn between vampire brothers. She wrote it as a trilogy in nine months for a small advance of a few thousand dollars. What she apparently didn’t realize is that she was writing it as a work-for-hire and that became a huge issue because down the road as The Vampire Diaries, actually many years later as The Vampire Diaries became a TV series, they decided to have someone else start writing the books for The Vampire Diaries and shut her out.

The strange twist that happened recently is, so Alloy made some sort of deal with Kindle for Kindle World, which is their fan fiction thing, so that writers who wish to write fan fiction for The Vampire Diaries can and they can sell their fan fiction through the Kindle World store. So, Lisa Jane Smith, or LJ Smith, started writing paid fan fiction for the series that she herself created, which is just bizarre.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’s just a weird — I think it’s just a fascinating case study in like what it is like to be a writer now and sort of just the importance of understanding what rights you control or don’t control as a writer.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, look, on the one hand this is actually a wonderful story because the way technology has advanced it’s actually given an opportunity to a writer that would simply not have existed. She just would have suffered the indignity of this had her career been shifted back twenty years. When you are hired under work-for-hire, what it means is you’re being commissioned to do a work by somebody else.

And this, by the way, only exists in the United States. As you are commissioned to do that work, you are considered an employee. You do not own the copyright on the work. The copyright is controlled and owned by the commissioner. You and I when we write screenplays for studios, it’s work-for-hire. So, we don’t own our copyrights. We are typically compensated quite well and we also get the benefit of the union because we’re employees, so there are certain terms that are collectively bargained and residuals that approximate royalties and things like that.

But in the book business, I would imagine it gets pretty bad.

**John:** It could.

**Craig:** Because I don’t believe there is a union, like a true federally-chartered labor union that organizes writers who are writing novels on a work-for-hire basis. I don’t know what she got paid. She might have been paid very little. I’m kind of shocked that she didn’t know the nature of the contract. Some lawyer must have understood it and explained it.

But the other fascinating part of this is that these companies realize that there’s money to be made in allowing fan fiction to occur. So, fan fiction exists sort of on an underground basis and these companies realized, well, if these people are going to do it, you know the deal with fan fiction is if you want to actually take it to the next level, like for instance E.L. James did when she wrote Fifty Shades of Grey, at some point if you want to sell the stuff you have to change the names and you’ve got to change certain details so you’re not infringing on the copyright of in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it turns out that Twilight is some weird touchstone for S&M. I don’t understand why, but it is. [laughs] Like a Mormon lady wrote this thing that everybody else looks at and goes S&M. Whatever.

So, things have to be changed. But these companies that own these properties, and they have to own them. See, that’s the key. If an individual author wants to do this, like let’s say Stephanie Meyer did say I want people to be able to write Twilight FanFic, she can individually license that right to Amazon and then get money for it and then people can go ahead and use the real names and the real places.

But in the case of something like The Vampire Diaries, because the company was commissioning these works as a work-for-hire, it’s their — they can do that. And now it’s open the door for the actual writer to write these things again. And the fans of her work are really passionate and they’re very excited about reading what they consider to be the real sequels to those books, and not the ones written by the other authors.

**John:** And Alloy Entertainment still gets paid for it.

**Craig:** They get paid.

**John:** I think because of the deal with Kindle Worlds, like they still — they actually own the copyright on it, which is also crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s interesting to me that the deal with Kindle World is that the company or the copyright holder, which may be an individual author, licenses the right to Kindle World for their user, for Kindle World users to write fan fiction, approved fan fiction, with the character names and all the rest. But, then if the FanFic writers want to do that, they have to sign away their copyrights back to the company?

**John:** Yeah. There’s something crazy like that. So, Alloy is still making money off of that, which is crazy.

**Craig:** Wow. And so what’s now, I really get it, because now what’s going on is these companies are going, “Well, why should E.L. James make $40 billion? We should be making the $40 billion.”

**John:** So, Craig, I have a question for you. Let’s bring it back to us. So, let’s say you write a spec script and it becomes a movie, it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. You write Raiders of the Lost Ark and it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. And people want to start writing fan fiction for it and put it in this kind of situation. Do you think that you have that as one of your separated rights? Or is that something that they own as part of their separated rights?

**Craig:** It is not one of our separated rights. Yeah, no.

**John:** So, they can license that and be making money off of people writing fan fiction.

**Craig:** Absolutely. We have, our separated rights are quite limited. And the closest thing we have to something like this is the right to a novelization. Under certain circumstances we have a right to publish our screenplay, under certain circumstances. But, no, they can absolutely… — Listen, they can remake your movie and they can have somebody else right a sequel to your movie, no problem. And I can easily see a situation where they went ahead and licensed this stuff to Kindle World, said go ahead, write your own sequels to this stuff and you can use Indiana Jones’ name and we’ll own it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, which I think frankly if they don’t do it I’ll be shocked. I’m sure the studios are looking at this now and thinking, “Why shouldn’t we do that?”

And to everybody out there, don’t do it! [laughs] Okay? Don’t write anything that is a work-for-hire ever unless you’re getting paid a lot of money and it’s under a collective bargaining agreement. Just don’t do it. I mean, works of fiction —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You know, works of fiction. Just don’t do it.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. I think it’s going to be fascinating because it’s going to happen. And it will be really curious to see what the first incarnations of that are. And I also think there are some interesting challenges to put, because we do have the ability to write the novelization. And to what degree can you stretch the ability to write the novelization to mean to write essentially literary derivative works of that original creation.

Actually, I’ll run through — I was going to do a Go coloring book, and so I engaged with my lawyer to figure out like can I do that? And basically like is it an illustrated screenplay? And we ended up not doing it, but it was a really kind of fascinating test case like whether I still owned those rights as part of my separated rights.

**Craig:** If they can argue that it is something like a graphic novel or a comic book, then the answer is no because that falls under the heading of merchandising. And so a coloring book I think they would easily argue is merchandising and, no. [laughs]

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** We have a very — our separated rights you can —

**John:** And who would determine that? Is it their list of arbiters, or how would they figure that out?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean essentially if there were a real challenge. I mean, first of all the guild’s lawyers would have to agree with you. Because the injured party would be the guild. And so the guild’s lawyers have to agree with you. And I’ve found that quite often they don’t agree with writers. You want them to sort of naturally want to advocate and push the boundaries. The legal department at the guild, one of my big gripes is that they are far more concerned about their case load and winning cases than they are about taking chances and pushing the ball down the field.

I understand they’re always concerned about setting a negative precedent, which I understand.

**John:** Exactly. They just don’t want to lose because losing can cost them more.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s go to a question. We have a question from Henry Fosdike who says, “Chatting with other writers, we find that we all have those words we just can’t seem to break away from. He nods is my curse, for about 40 or 50 times in the first draft. Other friends struggle with synonyms for walk, pace, trudge, trundle, or to explain a character turning on the spot. He spins, turns, twirls. I’d be intrigued to hear which words crop up in your drafts a lot.”

**Craig:** Oh, good question.

**John:** I would say my first instinct is to sort of go back to the Hemingway of it all, and like Hemingway famously didn’t want to use anything other than He Said for dialogue. You don’t try to put synonyms for that. Just like basically use the generic word that sort of gets rid of it.

But, I do find myself sometimes a little bit frustrated by, particularly when you have to write a lot of action. You start to recognize that walks, heads to, spots, notices. I started using “clocks” too much, like just to recognize something. And it’s like I stopped using clocks.

How about you?

**Craig:** Well, my philosophy about this is that it is far less important for us as screenwriters to dwell on this than it is for novelists because our work is not meant to be read by the consumer or the audience. It’s meant to instruct our dramatic intention of people making a movie.

So, there are certain words that I give myself full license to use because I understand they have a function like seize, crosses to. I like crosses to as opposed to walks to. Nods is really just about somebody shares a look with. I do a lot of that. Smiles. I’ll do smiles, really just to say that somebody is kind of listening and paying attention and absorbing it in a certain way as opposed to another way.

There are a bunch of things I do like that, but they’re really all there just to give a — to let the director and the cast know, oh, there’s a moment here where the actor is going to respond or react. And that’s all it is. Just holding a place there so that you don’t think that you’re not supposed to respond or react, that the writer is saying now cut to this person. It’s almost like an editorial thing, you know.

I don’t have any sort of, I mean like clocks, maybe I’ll throw that in once in a script or something if it’s really appropriate. But I try and keep it to very bland, vanilla kinds of things like that because I want them really to be editorial input and not purple prose. There’s not much sense in evocative action descriptions because, you know, no one is going to hear them.

**John:** Well, let’s throw this back to listeners. If you have a phrase you’re sick of seeing a thousand times in scripts or that you find yourself using too much and you’re trying to avoid, just tweet that to us because we would love to see what those are.

**Craig:** I will give you one that I’ve worked on a lot. Chris McQuarrie has this theory that every time you use an exclamation point it’s a failure, in dialogue. So, I’ve really been trying to cut back on any use of an exclamation point ever.

**John:** Yeah. And all your double exclamation points, even those?

**Craig:** I actually never — occasionally there is the —

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever used a double exclamation point.

**Craig:** How about an interrobang?

**John:** I have used, not the true interrobang, but I have used an exclamation point/question mark probably three times in my career.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nine times out of 10 you actually can get rid of the exclamation point. And basically texters have ruined exclamation points. 13-year-old kids have ruined exclamation points for all of us.

**John:** Well, they have. Also I find in emails sometimes now you can’t just say thanks, period, because it sounds negative.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, it sounds like you’re a dick.

**John:** “Thanks.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like it’s sardonic. Like you’re eye-rolling in a thanks. Yeah, everything has to be, “Thanks!”

**John:** “Thanks!” Yeah. A little up talk.

**Craig:** Right. A little up talk.

**John:** Let’s go to our Old One Cool Things. So, if you want to follow along with us, every week on the podcast at least I have a One Cool Thing. Craig sometimes has a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so last week we started going through our list of old ones to talk through which ones are actually still cool, which ones we barely remember even mentioning before. So, if you want to follow along with us, we are at johnaugust.com/onecoolthings, all one word. And I think we were at number 61 last time.

**Craig:** Yeah. We got to 61. Oh, I don’t think you got to 61. Maybe you did.

**John:** So, my 61 was What If? which is still a great blog to follow. There’s going to be a book coming out, so we’ll link to the book, too. Basically it’s scientific explanations, answers to questions like what would happen if a baseball thrown at the speed of light hit the earth. And it really talks through the physics of that and has great illustrations.

**Craig:** Excellent. Let’s see, number 62, mine was Red Cross donations to Hurricane Sandy relief, which I think they probably capped those off now.

**John:** I think so. Mine was Letterpress for iOS which is still a great game.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t play it as much now, but for awhile there it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah, it was 3s before there was 3s.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Mine for 63 was Reach Gum Care Soft Woven Mint Floss which is still the best floss in the world.

**Craig:** I didn’t have one that week, probably because I was stunned by that one.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Then, let’s see, we didn’t have one for 64. 65, mine was brining which I swear by still to this day and you should all do it.

**John:** Ticket to Ride is still a great board game, but the iPad version is incredibly solid. The multi-player for like local people in a room is also terrific.

**Craig:** The next week I had the only one and that was Don Rhymer’s cancer blog, Let’s Radiate Don. Sadly Don did pass away last year, but I think about him all the time. My office is still next to the one that he occupied. And he will remain cool for all of time.

**John:** I agree. The week after that I had Soulver which was a calculator kind of thing for iOS and for the Mac. I do use this occasionally, but I don’t use it as much as I sort of thought I would use it.

**Craig:** Mine was Scanadu which I think is still possibly vaporware that’s like an all-purposes medical device that would attach to your phone and tell you if your kid had a fever, or an ear infection, or something. I think they’re still working on that.

**John:** I had Karateka for iOS which was the game version that we made of Jordan Mechner’s Karateka. I also had Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Both are still really great. So, full disclosure, I actually tried to make the movie version of Mr. Penumbra and we couldn’t actually get it to all happen. But I got to talk to Mr. Sloan over a couple weeks about that and it’s still a great book and I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** Excellent. Mine was Seth Rudetsky’s Seth TV. And Seth TV, he is the best. He is the best. And I got to meet him. And I was on his show. And bravo, he is the greatest.

**John:** Bravo!

**Craig:** Bravo! And you should definitely if you care about music at all, you should take a look particularly at the things he does called Seth Deconstructs. They’re fantastic. They are sort of the Scriptnotes of Broadway.

**John:** I had a thing about Coffeescript which is my favorite scripting language, like for quick and dirty programming stuff. It’s still the thing I go to most whenever I need to actually write some code.

**Craig:** And mine was Poutine, the national food of Quebec, which continues to be incredibly delicious.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was Starred changes, which is basically I don’t think people necessarily understand this, at least they didn’t understand it in Broadway, is the idea of putting asterisks in the margin to show what is different from this draft to the next draft. I think it’s genuinely useful. It’s a thing we are working to try to get into the Fountain spec.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Model S.

**John:** Ah, you loved your car so much.

**Craig:** So, you saw in the news I was on the PCH there naked in my Tesla Model S. Anything that happens with the Tesla Model S I get 4,000 tweets. People, you got to understand something: I’m not Elon Musk. I don’t make the Tesla. I’m not driving every Tesla. Everyone is like, oh yeah. There are I think 60,000 Teslas on the road and I’m merely one of them. But I do love it so.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was Pat Moran from The Credits. I really don’t remember this all that well, but I’m pretty sure Pat Moran was talking about sort of what a casting director does. I love casting directors.

**Craig:** Well, the next week I had the Easton-Bell pitcher’s helmet. They are still working on this. And there have been more incidents in Major League Baseball, of pitchers getting hit. No one in the head. There’s been a couple in the face that this would not have helped, but the whole idea of this helmet is to prevent brain injury. So, they’re working on it. I’m hoping it gets out there.

**John:** Let’s do five more. Mine was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which was a best-selling books, so it’s like I’m not the first person to tell you that it’s really, really good. But it’s really, really good. And I was so excited this last week to see the trailer for David Fincher’s movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck who is perfect casting for that. I’m really curious to see how that movie is going to play.

**Craig:** Excellent. My next week was a canker sore drug that helped mice lose weight without diet or exercise. I have been just drinking that stuff. And, [laughs], I don’t know if it works or not. But it’ll take them years to test it.

**John:** Mine was Dungeon World, the role-playing game, and we played it. We played it a bunch.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was awesome.

**John:** It’s good. It’s a good lightweight system. Lots of really smart things.

**Craig:** We haven’t finished that game.

**John:** Yeah. We do. You basically got to the part with the gnomes and then Malcolm Spellman had to leave because of his dog. But there’s still stuff.

The week before that I had Apple TV. Apple TV remains great. I’m really curious what the next iteration of that will be.

**Craig:** As am I. I had — really, I had? No, this is backwards. I was going to say, I had Homeland on Amazon Instant and Blu-ray? I’ve never watched that show. My wife watches it.

No, I had Waking Mars for iOS. You know what? Very beautiful game. I actually never ended up playing much of it. I got a bit bored.

**John:** Mine was Homeland, which I still just love, although I’ve only seen the first two seasons, so I need to get to the third season here pretty soon. But it’s one of those great shows to catch up on and see that it really was as good as everyone was saying.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** My One Cool Thing this week is a movie that people should see in theaters if they have a chance to see it in theaters because I dug it. I saw it with Kelly Marcel. It’s called Under the Skin. It is written by Walter Campbell, based on a book by Michel Faber, directed by Jonathan Glazer who did Sexy Beast.

The IMDb description of it says “an alien seductress preys upon hitchhikers in Scotland,” which is kind of true but actually not really what the movie feels like at all. And so I went into it thinking it’s going to be like Species but like classier. And it sort of is. And yet what ends up becoming to me is sort of amazing meditation on sort of life beyond good and evil. Because she’s not actually — she’s not evil in any classic sense. It’s just she’s just a predator. She’s like a lioness who’s just out there. Even though she looks, Scarlett Johansson looks like a beautiful Scarlett Johansson human being, she isn’t at all. And her performance is fantastic. The way the movie sort of limits to her perspective is great.

I dug it. And there’s moments in it that are Kubrickian in just the most remarkable sense. So, I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** I’ve heard it’s awesome. I’ve got to go see that. I might go —

**John:** Oh, and it has a great soundtrack as well. So, beyond that you’ll probably want to get the soundtrack because I’ve been playing it nonstop.

**Craig:** I’m going to go see some movies this week I think. I’ve got to say that. I still haven’t seen The Grand Budapest.

**John:** Oh, you have to see that.

**Craig:** I know. I know! That’s why I said —

**John:** And I was the guy who didn’t like Wes Anderson and now I’m fully —

**Craig:** I’ve always liked Wes Anderson, so I’m really stupid for not seeing it.

My One Cool Thing this week is CarboLite. CarboLite is a fake frozen yogurt that has eight calories an ounce. I have no idea. I assume it’s manufactured in some Gotham City chemical factory. It’s manufacture in an ACE Chemical Plant where the Joker —

**John:** Smilex?

**Craig:** Yeah. It fell into a vat of Smilex. My wife and I call it Plastic Cream because we’re pretty sure that that’s what it is. It’s — I can’t understand how they make it. Sometimes it’s disgusting, and sometimes it’s quite tasty. Either way, it’s like eating yogurt except that there’s nothing there. It’s the weirdest thing. And it’s not sold in too many places, but if you can find it give it a try. They have lots of different flavors, but basically the flavors come down to this: brown and white. [laughs] And they’ll tell you that this week’s brown is Chocolate Pudding. And next week’s brown is Nutella. And this week’s white is Vanilla. And next week’s is Angel Food Cake.

Yeah, it’s brown and white.

**John:** So, is this something you get in the supermarket or something you get at like a Yogurt Land?

**Craig:** It’s at a yogurt store. And it’s never at Yogurt Land because they don’t have it. So, it’s usually at some sort of independent yogurt store. There is a place in La Cañada called Penguins that does it. There’s a place in, you know the Ventura and Laurel Canyon shopping center with the Daily Grill? That place underneath it does it.

It really is like eating the future. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** God only knows what’s in it. God only knows.

**John:** We’ll see if we can find a link to it, but it reminds me of this SNL sketch, That’s Not Yogurt, and these guys are eating this delicious white thing. It’s like, “Wow, this yogurt is really tasty.” And the announcer keeps going, “That’s not yogurt.” No, well what is it? Really, I’m concerned. I want to know.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no way you could possibly be allergic to anything in CarboLite because I believe it’s all completely inert. [laughs] It is a horror show, but I kind of love it.

**John:** When you see Under the Skin, there is this viscous goop in it, and maybe that’s what CarboLite actually is.

**Craig:** I mean, just the name alone. CarboLite. Isn’t that what they — oh, that’s Carbonite. They froze Han Solo in Carbonite and then when they melt Carbonite it turns into CarboLite.

**John:** I was mortified because on the new page for Highland’s release we talked about how your scripts are no longer frozen in Carbonate, and I let that slide. But, no, it’s Carbonite.

**Craig:** It’s Carbonite.

**John:** And someone wrote in to say, “Uh, uh, uh,” and we got it fixed.

**Craig:** Carbonate is right out. Wrong.

**John:** Wrong. It’s like silicon and silicone. It’s not the same thing.

**Craig:** It’s totally different.

**John:** That’s our show this week. You can find links to the things we talked about in our show notes at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes, which is also where you can find transcripts for all of our back episodes. If you want to listen to the back episodes you can do it through scriptnotes.net, which is where we have all the back episodes listed there. The subscription for $1.99 a month, you get free access to all of those and occasional bonus episodes.

You can also get them through the apps. We have one for iPhone, for iOS, and Android. So, check your app store.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Adrian Tanner. If you would like to write us an outro, there’s a link in the show notes for that.

If you have a question for me, you can write to @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Wow. This was a good show.

**John:** And that’s it. It’s a good show. It’s long, but we got a lot done.

**Craig:** You know what? Listen, man, we’re given them more for their money.

**John:** That’s really what it is. Your zero dollars got you about 90 minutes of show this week.

**Craig:** Oh, god. Well spent people.

**John:** Well done. All right. See you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [HearthStone](http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/)
* IGN on [Cold, Cold Heart](http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/25/batman-arkham-origins-cold-cold-heart-dlc-review) Arkham Origins DLC
* [South Park: The Stick of Truth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006IOAHPK/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* If you are attending the show, [submit your Three Page Challenge here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/) and [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [Game of Thrones season 4, episode 3](http://www.hbogo.com/#series/browse&assetID=GOROSTGP42365?seriesID=GOROSTGP31734?assetType=SEASON?browseMode=browseGrid/) on HBO Go
* LA Times on the [Bryan Singer lawsuit](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-xmen-director-bryan-singer-accused-of-1999-sexual-assault-20140417,0,5240173.story#axzz30Dlb8J5C)
* The [2014 (and past) WGAw Writers Report Executive Summary](http://www.wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=922)
* [Alvin Sargent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Sargent) on Wikipedia
* [Vampire Diaries Writer Bites Back](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495491652398358), from The Wall Street Journal
* [Interrobang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang) on Wikipedia
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* Preorder xkcd’s [What If? book](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544272994/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Under the Skin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(2013_film)) on Wikipedia
* CarboLite [nutrition facts on MyFitnessPal](http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/carbolite-frozen-yogurt-467427) and Yelp on [where to find it in Los Angeles](http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=carbolite&find_loc=Los+Angeles%2C+CA)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Adrian Tanner ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))