Search Results for: notes on notes

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/unless-they-pay-you-the-answer-is-no).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

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

**Craig:** I’m good. How are you doing, man?

**John:** We should explain why you’re speaking French.

**Craig:** Ouais. [laughs] In French, by the way, if you’re cool you say, “Ouais,” which is like our “yes, yeah, yup, uh-huh.”

I was just en vacances en Quebec and got to polish off my French which I hadn’t used in a long time. Amazing how much you can remember once you’re there in the middle of it, you know.

But, I’ll talk more about that when we get to our One Cool Thing. I guess it’s kind of a spoiler.

**John:** Well, that sort of a spoiler there.

**Craig:** That’s okay. It’s not that much of big hoo-ha. And where were you over la vacances?

**John:** Upon la vacances, I went skiing in Colorado, which was really quite fun. And so my daughter, this is her second year going skiing. And she’s actually now good enough that she can go down the mountain with us and have a good time. And we had a very good time skiing. Very cold to start. First time we encountered the frost inside the windshield, which is not good.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But, it was all really good. And we had the rest of Christmas with my mother-in-law in Ohio, and that was all nice. We had a big giant snow, but it was one of those snows where you’re like, “Oh, great, let’s go sledding,” and you go out and you can move two inches in the sled. But it ended up being great snowman snow. And so we could build a snowman in like five minutes.

**Craig:** We kind of had weird parallel vacations, because I was also with my mother-in-law for a bit of time in Florida. And my poor wife had to figure out how to pack for Florida and Quebec. [laughs] It was pretty fascinating.

**John:** So, Craig, we had a podcast last week — that was just a clip show. It was a New Year’s Day clip show. This is our first real one of the New Year, so I thought we’d start off by talking about some resolutions and things we plan to do differently this year, or want to explore this year.

Then we’re going to talk about the WGA awards, and we’re going to answer some listener questions. Sound good?

**Craig:** That sounds fantastic. Oh my god! Yes! [laughs]

**John:** Now, previously on the podcast I talked about resolutions, and I don’t really have resolutions like I’m going to do that this year, or I’m not going to do something this year. Rather I declared areas of interest. So, previously you may recall I was interested in Austrian white wines, or archery. And this year I didn’t have any sort of affectation like that. I couldn’t think of one as December drew to a close.

But, as I was doing an interview yesterday for Big Fish — we’re doing long lead press for Big Fish for the Chicago run — the reporter was talking about how long it took to get up to this point. And I realized that I first read the book to Big Fish in 2003. I’m sorry, in 1998 is when I read the book for Big Fish, the manuscript.

2003, five years later, I finally got the movie made. And now it’s ten years after that that we’re finally doing the musical version. And I realized that, wow, I’m going to actually probably be making some version of Big Fish for the rest of my life. It’s one of those things that I will never actually finish it, because god-willing everything goes well in Chicago, and we go to New York, and we do a run there — the musical is never really finished.

It’s like a TV show, you’re done at a certain point. And a movie, you’re done at a certain point. A musical — I probably will never actually be done with it because there will always be other stagings of it. And even if it’s not all that successful, someone will want to do it somewhere. And there will always be revisions. There will always be a new cast. There will always be a new something.

So, I think my resolution is to sort of come to terms with the time of it all, and sort of the unfinishability of it, because it’s a strange thing for me that for 15 years I’ve been dealing with this one project, this little book that Daniel Wallace wrote.

**Craig:** Well, and if it’s really successful then perhaps they’ll make a movie of the musical, and then you’ll have to write the movie.

**John:** It was interesting. When we were dealing with Sony it was one of the things that came up is we had to address that ahead of time, sort of like who would have the rights to make the movie, and that gets complicated because Sony owns the rights to my screenplay, so we had to buy the rights back for my screenplay. But it’s all complicated.

And I don’t honestly even know who has the right to make the movie if it becomes that kind of thing, if it becomes the next Les Mis.

**Craig:** That probably turns on your contract with them.

**John:** Yeah. Probably.

**Craig:** But, you know, why count that chicken?

**John:** Maybe that’s a better thing I should resolve for this year is to not count chickens.

**Craig:** Don’t count them. Just let them breed.

**John:** How about you? Any resolutions for the New Year?

**Craig:** You know, I’ve never been a resolution guy. Resolutions for me are a bit like gifts. When I feel like I should have something — and it doesn’t happen often, I’m not a big consumer of goods — but when I want something I just get it. And when I feel resolved to do something, I do it.

I’ve never looked at the turning of the calendar as an excuse or as an inspiration to resolve anything. But, I think my resolutions — really what happens is then you’re left with the things you never, ever do. And your eternal resolutions. Maybe my resolution should be to just let those go.

**John:** That’s fair enough. Very Zen.

**Craig:** I think at this point, we are who we are.

**John:** Yeah, we are who we are.

So, one of the things that happened during our absence is the WGA Awards were announced, or the WGA nominations were announced. And so I want to talk through this because many of our friends are nominated for things, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** For Original Screenplay, the nominees: Flight, written by a guy named John Gatins.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** Woo-hoo! Who we both know very well. We actually threw a little party for John to celebrate an earlier nomination. And so we’re happy that he got this.

**Craig:** Well, you threw that party very generously.

**John:** Yes. And so I’m including you in it because you were there. But you were really just a guest rather than a host. Yeah.

**Craig:** You know what was great about that party was I met a guy there…the end. [laughs] No, I met a guy there who is very good friends with John’s awesome wife, Ling, and you know I’m a big musical nerd. And he played Marius on the stage on Broadway. So, we got to talk about musicals quite a bit. That was great.

And I caught up with some people I hadn’t seen in a long time, but all of it in celebration of our excellent friend — and well deserving friend — John Gatins. One of those guys who does it right. You know, I feel, it’s funny… — I was talking to Roger Kumble and to you, I think, about this, how there are so few of us left from when we started in the mid ’90s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And those of us who are, I feel like on some level we’ve done something right. And there’s a badge of honor for just persisting. And John has persisted over the years through thick and thin, up and down, and here he is with an amazing award for a movie that has persisted. Because the screenplay was written many years ago and he…

**John:** Yeah. I read it at least five years ago. And you probably read the draft that was sitting in the drawer, too. It’s been around for quite a long time. And I always say, “At some point the right combination of all of this is going to come together; you’ll be able to make that screenplay into a movie,” and it did. Hooray!

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Another person who I’m very, very excited to see on this list is Rian Johnson for Looper. I loved Looper. And I’m so glad that the WGA voters singled that out as being an awesome screenplay, because it was great.

**Craig:** Very well deserved. Another very good friend of mine. One of my favorite Swedes, and that really means something because my wife is Swedish, and one of my best friends, Alec Berg, is Swedish, so there’s a lot of competition there. He is one of my favorite Swedes.

Yes, excellent movie. I was very lucky to see an extremely early cut of the film. He was showing it to about four or five people just to get feedback early on. And I could tell that he had done something special there. A remarkable accomplishment considering the budget. And, also, Rian really is a true author of his films. He writes and directs them. They are always original. They are always original to him. It feels like they are very purely an extension of his intension and he’s just now, I think — I think now starting to be accepted by the major studio machine, whereas before he was a little more indie.

Great guy. Wonderful person. And very original piece that he did. And so it’s terrific to see him… — Well, it’s a tough one because I’m rooting for them both. The easiest thing I guess for me to do in a situation like that is just root against all the people they’re against.

**John:** [laughs] The people they’re against are also very talented people. Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master.

**Craig:** Boo. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola.

**Craig:** Eh…

**John:** And Zero Dark Thirty by Mark Boal.

**Craig:** Ah! Three idiots! No, they’re amazing writers. Incredible filmmakers, all three of them. And it’s tough. All I can say is I’m pulling for John and I’m pulling for Rian, but it doesn’t matter. I think at this point it’s… — You know, maybe it’s because I have a unique perspective. I’ll never be nominated for anything. No one nominates the movies I write, ever. They haven’t nominated the specific ones I’ve written, and they really haven’t nominated the good versions of the specific ones I’ve written.

And so I never think about awards. I don’t have to worry about it. And I just feel like writing a good movie that is honest to what you meant, and having that audience find an audience is the only reward that matters. And John and Rian both did that, in a big way, and obviously the other three did as well, and have done in the past. They’re all great.

So, everyone’s a winner.

**John:** Everyone’s a winner! Just to complete the list, for Adapted Screenplay we have: Argo by Chris Terrio; Life of Pi by David Magee; Lincoln by Tony Kushner; Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, based on his book; and Silver Linings Playbook by David O. Russell.

And of those, the only comedy-comedy is Silver Linings Playbook, and that’s a dramatic comedy, but really more of a comedy when you actually watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s definitely a comedy. And I have to pull for that one, of course, because my buddy — I should say my wrestling buddy Bradley Cooper is in it. Because weirdly, and I don’t why, [laughs], but I would say two or three times a week Bradley will just come up to me and start wrestling with me. And I’ve got to tell you: I would lose dramatically. One day he hurt me, because he’s really big, he’s really strong. And just a tough guy — a man’s man — who likes wrestling with…

**John:** Craig. I’m just going to let you talk and talk yourself deeper into this hole.

**Craig:** It’s fun. I like it. I’m just losing myself in his eyes, again, in my memory. I pull for Bradley. I think he did an amazing job, by the way.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Great performance. But yeah, I mean, look, you could say that’s a comedy, it’s kind of a comedy. But it’s the sort of comedy that gets nominated for awards because it’s David O. Russell and it’s quirky and interesting. It’s so rare that a broad, mainstream — not even broad, but just a mainstream comedy gets nominated.

Did I mention that I like to wrestle with Bradley Cooper?

**John:** Maybe once or twice.

One thing we should point out because people always ask the question like, “Oh, there are some strange omissions. There are things that you would think would be on here that aren’t on there.” The WGA Awards are only for things that are covered by the WGA contracts or by affiliated guild contracts. There are weird… — Sometimes other things can make it onto that list but not other things.

So, animated movies aren’t covered by the WGA. So, animated movies will not generally show up in these awards. Some British movies won’t show up in these awards. So, it tends to be American movies that you would see on this list.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also notably you won’t see Quentin Tarantino’s name because he withdrew as a member from the Guild, reportedly, by him.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] So, I think it’s accurate to say that he withdrew his membership from the WGA. I’m not exactly sure why. I suspect it had to do with credits or something. And these things happen.

I mean, some people get very angry about this. They say, “What is the point or value of awards if they don’t honor the best, but rather the best of people that fit the political specificities of the union that’s giving out the award?” And all I can say is, “Who cares?” I mean, it’s the Writers Guild. That’s what the Writers Guild Awards are for, it’s for Writers Guild movies, which happens to be most of them.

You don’t like it? Who cares? Nobody cares what… — I hate to say this. Because, you know, we just talked about Rian and we just talked about John, and I love them, and I want them to win an award, but nobody cares about the Writers Guild Awards anyway.

I mean, to be fair and accurate, the only awards people care about are the Oscars, of course; the Golden Globes, to a lesser extent, but only really as a predictor of the Oscars; the BAFTAs, from overseas, or perhaps as a consolation if you did not win an Oscar. But, really when you boil it down, the only award anyone really cares about is the Oscar. So, who cares?

People need to relax about this award stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s interesting that you go into umbrage and to pull it out saying that everyone should relax.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right! I’m upset and exerting myself in the expectation that everyone should relax.

**John:** You’re basically shouting at people to calm down.

**Craig:** I’m shouting! I’m saying, “You have to calm down! Just do it!” Oh, god, you know what’s so great? It’s 2013. Here’s my resolution: Get crazier on the podcast.

**John:** Oh, yeah. That’s what we need.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s what you need.

**John:** I want to see the little gauges spiking there. We’re going into the red and Stuart has to knob you down so that you’re not so…

**Craig:** No…I never clip. I will say this: In a couple of years when they do an in-depth profile of this podcast and the two of us, they’re going to refer to you as “long-suffering co-host John August.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It very well might happen. Although, I don’t think it’s going to be like a retrospective as much as it’s going to be evidence that’s going to be submitted in some trial.

**Craig:** Yeah. Fair enough. Whatever!

Hey, everybody needs to relax!

**John:** First question comes from Kevin in Atwater Village.

**Craig:** Relax, Kevin!

**John:** “Hi guys. I’ve been hearing recently about how movies are getting more expensive and harder to make. I was recently reading an interview where the director said, ‘They cost so much to make, you have to have a monster hit to pay it off. They’re pricing themselves out of production. Three pictures a year make enough to pay off. They’re making it so it’s impossible to make a film.’

“This was Paddy Chayefsky from an interview in 1981. So, my question is: have complaints about the cost and difficulty of movies always been around, or are we living in a time where making films has never been harder or more expensive? What’s your opinion?

“– Kevin.”

**Craig:** Ah, what do you think?

**John:** I like that he snuck in the Paddy Chayefsky quote, because it does seem to be one of those evergreen things. You’re always going to complain about how it’s never been harder. And you’re always going to say it used to be easier back then. There’s always the golden age that existed sometime in your youth when everything was wonderful and perfect. It tends to be like the 1970s for movies, or whatever. But now everything is terrible, and everything is too expensive, and everything is rough.

Although, if you were actually to talk to people in the time they would have said it was the worst time ever because they’re having a hard time making their individual movies.

I do think there are some things that are more difficult now than have probably been there before. Part of it we talked about on the podcast — it’s not just the actual negative cost of making a movie, although some movies are really expensive. It’s that it’s become so expensive to market these big giant tent pole movies. Even if your movie only costs $20 million, or $30 million, if you’re spending $50 million to market it, you’ve spent $80 million on your movie. And that’s a hard nut to earn back.

And it does feel like marketing has become more expensive every year, and that’s a genuine concern.

**Craig:** No question. That’s essentially where I’m at on this, too. Marketing is worse. I mean, marketing is very good, but the expense of marketing has gone up, I suspect, far beyond the relative costs of production. And because marketing is so expensive, it in a weird way starts to drive up production costs. Because if you know you’re going to be spending $80 million to market a movie, you want to make sure you can deliver the goods.

So, in a weird way the whole thing becomes upside down. You look at a movie like Identity Thief. I think it cost $32 million, or something like that, relatively inexpensive for today’s films. They’ll certainly spend more than that on marketing. I hope they do. [laughs] I think they’re going to.

**John:** I hope.

**Craig:** But I do agree with you that there has always been a rosy-hued, I should say, view of the past. Writers, and directors, and artists have always complained. They have always found something about their time to complain about. And that’s never going to change. I don’t think that much has changed in that regard other than if you are trying to make dramas for adults, it is unquestionably harder to do so now than it was even ten years ago.

That feels very true to me. But, other than that, I think it’s really the marketing stuff. And the cost of marketing, and the effort of marketing is entirely about the change that has occurred in our world around us. We live in a fragmented world. There are not three networks; there are 300 channels. There’s the Internet. It’s just very difficult to reach people.

**John:** I would also say that the cost of making movies, it hasn’t necessarily gone up. If you look at Steven Soderbergh’s movies, you look at Magic Mike, that’s not an expensive movie at all. And there are ways to make those movies for not a lot of money. And nobody noticed that that was an inexpensive movie.

Yes, that movie probably cost ten times as much to market as it did to make, but it was successful. And they were able to make that movie and they’re able to make more movies kind of like it on that business plan. I think it’s unfair to say that all movies are too expensive to make.

The challenge and frustration that I think is real is that the studios are only making the very expensive movies because they feel like that’s the only movie that they can justify spending the huge marketing budget on that they know how to do. Will something shift and we’ll find a way to sort of make cheaper movies that don’t have to be marketed the same way and can find an audience? Yes, probably. It will be the next generation of moviemakers will figure out how to do that and that will be great.

**Craig:** And we’ll be dead.

**John:** We’ll be dead.

**Craig:** Next question! [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m so loopy because I woke up at 2am LA time to get on a plane. So, you got me at my loopiest.

**John:** That’s nice. I’ve had two beers. I’ve had a beer and a half.

**Craig:** Oh boy! You’ve blown through half your beer budget for 2013.

**John:** It’s nice. A question from Raven. It’s talking about sort of how much you can fit into a scene header. “Okay, so at the beginning of the script I’m writing there’s a dream sequence in which a Vietnam war vet is reliving a traumatic experience, fighting as a tunnel rat in the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam in 1967.

“The very first scene begins in a tunnel in 1967. So, right now my scene header reads as follows:

Is that a fair thing to write in a scene heading or is that too much?”

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem like too much. I mean, I suppose you can just say… — If you wanted to be a little impressionistic about it you could say INT. TUNNEL. I mean. The audience is going to, unless there’s a big sign on the tunnel wall that announces the name of the tunnel or the kind of tunnel, they’re just going to see a man in a dirt tunnel. So, you might want to leave that out. Maybe just indicate it in the description. Or, if you’re going to subtitle it, indicate that there’s going to be a subtitle. But that seems reasonable to me.

**John:** Yes. It looks reasonable. You’re not seeing this in front of you on screen, but it looks reasonable.

Here’s what I would say is that always be mindful of, like, what are you telling the reader versus what are you actually telling the viewer. And if it’s something that the viewer needs to know, then you need to actually break that out as something you’re going to put on the screen as a title over to show 1967, or Vietnam. If it’s important that the viewer immediately know specifically where it is, and you’re going to print that on the screen, then give it to us in a title over.

If it’s just important for our understanding of where we are at this moment, or if we’re going back and forth between time periods and you need us to know that, “Okay, now we’re 1967 versus being the present day,” sticking that extra bit of information at the end of the scene header — totally valid — because we’ll get it.

I will say at the very start of your screenplay it tends to be helpful to be, what Craig said, is more impressionistic, where you’re just actually describing what the space is rather than trying to get a lot of specific historical detail or give things a specific name, the Cu Chi tunnel. Because if I don’t know what that is it might stop me if it’s the very first page, because, like, I don’t know what that is. Is that a description of a tunnel? Is that a kind of tunnel? Is that a specific tunnel?

So, being a manmade tunnel might be a better way to describe at the very start of your screenplay.

**Craig:** And it could indicate an interesting way to reveal something. For instance, INT. TUNNEL. That’s it. Just

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:**

Or, “He emerges outside and it’s a firefight.” You know, you can kind of lead the audience to where you want them to go, but if you’re just in a tunnel, that’s all they’re ever going to see is tunnel, so just call it a tunnel.

**John:** Agreed. And what Craig is describing there is, like, really letting the script be the camera throughout your scene and stuff. So, give us the information the way that we would experience it in the theater.

So, if we’re just with this guy running though this dark space, we can be in this dark space. We don’t need to know all the details before the audience would know the details.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Next question comes from Devin in Toronto, Canada. He asks, “What is the industry standard font for outlines, treatments, for series bibles, series documents? Is it okay to use a different font to punch up the headers in these documents?” Devin asks, in Toronto.

**Craig:** It’s Comic Sans.

**John:** Everything should be in Comic Sans from top to bottom.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Bold is great. But I really find, like, bold italics in outline, that’s how you really sell it.

**Craig:** No, I like to use shadow. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, shadow is always good. Oh my god. If you can find an old laser jet printer, or an old Apple LaserWriter, LaserWriter 2 maybe even, if you can get some Zapf Chancery. That’s how to sell it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what?

**John:** Sort of calligraphy.

**Craig:** Pull out your Banner Maker Pro…

**John:** That’s good. Some Banner Maker Pro. That’s great.

Here’s what I’ll say, because I’ve actually had to do it this season, and I’ve found that people don’t really care. So, a lot of times these things will be in Courier, which is fine. A lot of times they’ll be in Helvetica or something normal. I, being a former font nerd, and still kind of a font nerd, I used Chaparral Pro which is a great text serif face that people really like a lot. So, I use that for the outlines for Chosen.

No one commented negatively. People seemed to like it. But, whatever you like that’s a good, reasonable choice for a font is fine. And I found that there’s a wide variety of sort of formatting choices for what these documents look like. Sometimes they really do look sort of like scriptments, like sort of the James Cameron scriptments, where it feels like a script is slug lines and scene headers but just no dialogue.

Other times I’ve seen things that are just paragraphs, and paragraphs, and paragraphs.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s entirely up to you. This is the way I tend to do it. Basically if I’m writing up a treatment or an outline, I’ll have sort of a brief summary of the plot, like really brief, a tiny paragraph. Because I’m always thinking, “Okay, I’m going to give you this document. It’s for use. The document is not to be enjoyed, it is to be used. And ideally you, the producer or studio person, is going to use this to help me do my job. So, you’re going to either describe what’s in it to somebody you work with or work for, or you’re going to hand it to them.” So, I give them a little summary that they can use, and then I break out the main characters and do a description of each of the main characters along with a basic concept of what’s wrong with them and maybe what they need.

And then I start a new page of act one. And I do the scenes of act one and I number, sort of not scene by scene, but sort of sequence by sequence. And I like to break them into numbers. So, just number one, and then indent, and a whole paragraph there. Because this way people when they’re talking to you it’s much easier for like, “Okay, on four of act two,” so I’ll start renumbering for act two and I’ll start renumbering for act 3.

Personally, I like Baskerville.

**John:** Yeah. Baskerville is a good font. It’s a good book font.

**Craig:** It’s my font of choice. It’s very Holmesian.

**John:** Yeah. We should actually say here that handing in these documents, it’s controversial, and there’s reasons why it’s controversial. If these are for you own personal use, you’re welcome to make them — you’re welcome to sort of do whatever. But, if someone is asking you to turn this in and they’re not actually paying you to turn those in, that can be a problem. That can be something to be mindful of. And that’s a much bigger topic to get into. But, if you’re being paid to write that document, that’s great.

But if you’re being paid to write the screenplay and you’re writing this extra document before you’re writing a screenplay — or, worse than that, if you’re being asked to write this document before they’re paying you any money, before they’re making a deal for you to write a movie, that’s a real concern. Because you’re doing work for somebody without…you’re creating written material for somebody without payment, which is not good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, real fast, my feeling on this is if you’re hired to write a screenplay there’s nothing wrong with writing that document, even if specifically you haven’t been paid for a “treatment step” or “outline step,” because in the end it helps everybody get on the same page, so that when you turn in — if you choose to do this. So, when you turn in the script nobody can say, “Whoa, huh?”

“Okay, well, no, here’s the document. We all read it. Now, it’s our problem; it’s not my problem, or your problem.”

If you have not yet been hired to write a screenplay, you may not turn this material in. It is against Writers Guild rules. You are violating our working rules. And the company if they should ask for material like this is violating the MBA. And that is a no-no. We hear it about it more and more. We hear egregious cases where these things are required in order to get employment. That is an absolute violation of our rules. And the more people who do it, the harder they make our job for the rest of us.

**John:** And the good/bad thing which will inevitably happen — and I’m giving it two to three years at the very most — is one of these studio situations will occur where someone has turned in this material for which they were not paid and it will become a copyright trial. And it will be a huge big deal because they submitted a document that was about a movie and the studio went off and made that movie with a different writer, with a different script, and that person will have a copyright claim that will be very awful for everybody involved.

And, hopefully, we can change that business practice before it happens. But I think that trial is going to have to happen.

**Craig:** No question. You know, like you I have been attending a couple of these sort of — they’re formal meetings between some guild members and the studios under the auspices of the Writers Guild meeting with the studios to say, “Look, here are some things that are not going well and we need to fix these.”

And, when it comes to this issue — I have raised this a number of times. And you can see on the other side of the table an absolute real concern. I think that people who run these studios are well aware that this is a time bomb. And they don’t need much convincing at all.

I think that part of what goes on is that this stuff happens away from them, from the people who run the studios. A lot of times it’s the producers who maybe are willing to play a little more fast and loose because, frankly, they need to get it right, at least what they think in their head means right.

But, there is a real fear. The whole business, all of Hollywood, all it is is an intellectual property business. And when you look at our contracts, the companies and their business affairs people are so thorough about making sure that when they pay us they’re buying everything for everywhere for always. That the thought that there’s bits and pieces of material that they don’t control at all, well that’s just horrifying.

So, this is an area where I think we are one of those magical “we’re all in alignment” areas and hopefully it will work out and this will go away, this problem.

**John:** Yes. But, Devin, whatever font you choose, you’re fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I will say that if people want to look at some sample outlines, at johnaugust.com in the library I have the pitch documents and other sort of stuff for several of my movies, for TV shows, so you can see sort of what I did. And if it’s helpful you’re welcome to look through those.

Next question comes from Lori in Jerusalem. A question from Jerusalem.

**Craig:** Jerusalem! Shalom!

**John:** She writes, “My script, Whiplash, received a 9 out 10 on the Black List. And the reviewer said it had four-quadrant appeal.” So, I’m going to stop here. So, this is where, you know, I love Franklin. I’m happy that the Black List exists. This is what gets confusing. So, she’s talking about the Black List, but she’s talking about the service that she submitted to for the Black List. She’s not talking about the annual list of like the best screenplays of all time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, she submitted her script to this Black List site. It got a 9 out of 10. And it said it had four-quadrant appeal.

“According to Franklin, only 3.8% of uploaded scripts rate a 9 or a 10. And those include some pro scripts. There’s a widespread belief you simply need to write a really good script and the world will beat a path to your door. So, is it true, and can the Black List make it happen? If the Black List can’t make it happen for a 9-rated script, then why not? Is the issue the writer? The Black List? The script? Or the market?

“I thought it might be an interesting case study for the podcast to talk about.”

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. I think that service that the Black List provides is too new for us to really draw conclusions about its ability to pick winners. There is a difference between a script that generates a lot of positive feedback and a script that anyone wants to buy. It’s just a different deal, because you can really enjoy a script but think to yourself, “No one will go see this.”

You can really enjoy a script and think, “Well, it’s got four-quadrant appeal but I think it’s too expensive to make,” or, “It can only be made with one star, and she’s not doing this sort of thing.” Who knows? There are all sorts of factors involved.

I tend to hue on the side of things that says write a great script and the world will beat a path to your door. If people really like your script then I would presume somebody would reach out at some point and say, “Hey, we either want to option this or buy it, or we have something else that we would like you to write and we’ll pay you for it.”

That seems likely to me, but I want to caution all of you to remember that the only “yes” that exists in Hollywood is money. That’s it. If no one gives you money, it is “no.” So, no matter what people say, no matter what number you aggregate, no matter what nice comments you pull in, if no one gives you money the answer is no.

**John:** Yup. To me the Black List in its new incarnation, and what Franklin is doing here, it’s analogous to sort of what happens with screenwriting competitions. And so the big screenwriting competitions like the Nicholl or the Austin, the ones that actually seem to have some merit to them, winning one of those is great, it’s fantastic, and it will get you some attention. And it could get you started. But most Nicholl scripts don’t sell. Most Austin winners don’t sell.

And a lot of times people win those awards and never really go on to write other things. So, being rated really highly on the Black List, in the paid site Black List, will probably benefit you, but it’s certainly no guarantee of any success. So, we can continue to watch you. We can continue to watch — I’m sure Franklin is running a lot of metrics on sort of what happens the next year of those well-rated and well-reviewed scripts to see how many of them actually payoff for the writers involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just to be clear for those of you who are wondering and don’t know what four-quadrant means, the business tends to divide the audience up into male and female, over the age of 25, under the age of 25.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So, those are the four quadrants.

**John:** There’s a movie I have over at Fox. And someone asked, “Oh, so what kind of movie is this?” And I was like, “It’s a six-quadrant.” [laughs] “I want to make sure this is for everybody. This is for the undead. Everyone who could possibly…like, bring your dog to this movie because it is very much to be that very big broad thing,” because again, this movie I’m trying to make at Fox is not inexpensive.

**Craig:** I heard that your script was only six sextants.

**John:** Oh, that wouldn’t be good.

**Craig:** Sorry. You’re missing one sextant.

**John:** That’s not good at all. So, we need to find how to get that last little seventh sliver in there.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** James Stubenrauch writes…

**Craig:** I’m sorry, James Stupid Hawk?

**John:** Stubenrauch. I’m over German pronouncing it. I bet he pronounces it Stuben-Rauch, or Stuben-Rock, but Stubenrauch sounds better to me.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be Stoiben-Raw?

**John:** There’s not a “eeh” over the “u,” so I think it’s just a simple “u.”

James writes, “My question is about how to get quality feedback on my work.” I think it dovetails well with this last thing. “Sure, I think my latest script is pretty good, and my mom thinks it’s simply amazing. My little screenwriting interest group in my small town gave it a good review. However, I want professional critiques. It seems there are couple ways to get real feedback.”

So, he has five, and I’ll list them and I want to sort of talk through these. “Number one, move to LA or visit for awhile and try to make contacts with readers.”

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** “Two, pay those people on the Internet who pose as script consultants.”

**Craig:** No! [laughs] He already knows no. He said “posed.” Go ahead.

**John:** Yeah. It has “Umbrage” with like seven exclamation points afterwards. “Number three, enter writing contests, especially ones that provide written feedback, like Blue Cat.”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “On average these contests charge $30 to $50 per entry, so for $150 I could get five real reviews.”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. “Pay the Black List $125 to $175 to get two or three of Franklin Leonard’s readers to review my stuff.”

**Craig:** Possibly.

**John:** Maybe. “Do the Three Page Challenge on that nice Scriptnotes podcast.”

**Craig:** Ah, now you’re talking.

**John:** Now you’re talking. He needs some feedback, but I thought we’d talk through his five things here first. We’ll start with the Three Page Challenge thing. I think it’s lovely that people think it’s going to help them. I think we can offer some general suggestions, but I don’t think anyone is going to sort of get broken out or noticed by this. And we can give you real feedback on those first Three Pages, but that’s about what your writing is like on those first three pages. It’s not really about the quality of your whole script.

And so I want to be realistic about that. I think we could say if you had a great first three pages, you have reason to be really, really excited. If we read your first three pages and we had real concerns, you have some reasons to have real concerns. But we can’t tell you what your script is like or if it’s going to work. We’re just looking at a little photo of you; we’re not seeing the whole person.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s not really the function of it anyway. I mean, I hate to say “you get what you pay for,” but in this case you do.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Really it’s just a gut check to see if you’re on the green or on the fairway or in the rough or still in your car, you know. That’s really all we provide. It’s not going to tell you if your script is any good.

**John:** Yeah. And so the Three Page Challenge is really kind of for everybody else. And so you’re very, very brave to submit it to us, and maybe we’ll love it and that could be great, but it’s really to kind of help everybody else who listens to the podcast and reads along.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, backing up the Black List. $125 to $175. Maybe? I don’t know. I think probably that’s money better spent than one of those paid script consultants.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, of all the things out there, that’s really the only one that I can kind of swallow, you know? I mean, you are — it is being monitored by actual people in the business. So, for instance, our friend from Jerusalem, her script has a 9 out of 10 and a lot of positive feedback. It means that people are noticing and they will be taking a look at it at some point, in some form, whether they read it entirely or they have their assistant read it or somebody.

So, it seems like there’s potential value there at the very least, which is more than I can say for the millions of shysters out there looking to take your money under the heading of “script consultant.”

**John:** Yeah. Quickly, the writing contests like Blue Cat that charge: Look, I think the ones that are worth even the postage for me would be Austin and Nicholl. I don’t know if the other ones are worth anything. Maybe they are and maybe I’m just wrong and people have tremendous success coming out of those. I just don’t think they’re worth the emotional investment, not to mention the money, to submit them.

Obviously not the people who want to be your script consultants. Don’t do that.

And, the last option is move to LA for awhile and try to make contacts with readers. And that’s probably the most difficult of all these for most people, but it’s honestly the way you’re going to get the most real feedback. And my experience has been, personally and also watching all of my assistants who’ve gone through this, is you just — once you’re in a culture of people who are doing this, you’re reading their scripts and they’re reading your scripts. And, you know, your reading their scripts and you’re like, “Oh, wow, this is actually a really good writer; I really like this script.”

And if they’re reading your script and you think it’s good too, you can exchange notes, or help each other out on stuff. Or, if you read their script and it’s just terrible you’re like, “Well, I’m going to really take his or her notes with a grain of salt because I don’t think this person knows what they’re talking about.”

When you’re surrounded by a culture of screenplays, you are going to get better feedback and you’re going to get a better sense of what really is going on and where you sort of fit in this pecking order here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Remember, your job here, your goal, is not to write a script that people like and say nice things about. Your job, and your goal, is to write a movie and to get a movie made. So, all this feedback stuff to me is really over-reinforcing the fetishizing of the document.

And I understand why we fetishize the document. It’s an incredibly hard document to produce. But, it is not the end of the line. At some point you need to start thinking about writing movies. And you’re not going to write movies from your house in your small town. It’s just not going to happen.

We keep saying it over and over, and people keep saying, “Well, what if I just send in $200 and then Blue Cat will give me an award?” Who cares? Remember the last guy who won that Blue Cat award? Do you remember his name?

**John:** [laughs] No.

**Craig:** No. No you don’t. No, nobody knows his name, and nobody cares. That’s the truth. Sorry Blue Cat. Blue Cat! Come on!

**John:** Yeah. Blue. So, there probably are scenarios… — Because we’re writing a transitional document, we’re writing a document that is hopefully going to become a movie, our goal has to always be fixated on trying to make that movie.

If you were really writing a short story that you wanted to win awards with, or you’re trying to write a book, even if you’re writing a book the game is to get the agent, or the editor, or the publisher to say yes to it. So, I think the title of the podcast is like, “Unless there’s money, the answer is no.”

**Craig:** Unless there’s money, the answer is no. Isn’t that terrible? And it’s so unfortunate because there’s thousands and thousands — so many wonderful, creative ways for people to say no to you. And so many of them sound like yes, which is horrifying really to contemplate, but it’s human nature. Nobody really likes saying no to somebody. Nobody wants to be mean. No one wants to see that look reflected back to them.

Certainly any of us who have been asked for feedback and who have said, “I just don’t like this,” have gotten weird — people get angry sometimes. And suddenly you’re in a fight. So, everybody wants to just be polite. But there is really only one yes. And it’s money.

**John:** Yeah.

Our last question of the day comes from Andrew in Philadelphia who writes, “In May of 2012 I graduated from film school in my hometown with a concentration in screenwriting in an undergraduate program. Every day since then I’ve been doing what I’ve done the past four years in school: write. Not wanting to sound arrogant, I know I’m a good writer. I’m good at it because I love it, I’m dedicated; because I’ve been studying and practicing even before college.

“However, because of family and financial obligations I am unable to move to LA right now. This is very frustrating for me because I know I need to be there. There are interesting job opportunities in NYC for which I could commute, but that silver lining gives me some anxiety. But I want some additional advice. What can I do from Philly, aside from writing, to feel like I’m accomplishing something?

“Is it best to continue my day job and write at night? Is it better to get an industry job in New York?”

So, a young graduate in Philadelphia. Craig, your recommendation?

**Craig:** Well, look, if you have financial issues and you need to be working and you need to be where you are, then you need to be working and you need to be where you are and that’s that.

You should write at night, always, if you can. And it sounds like you want to, so that shouldn’t be an issue. Maybe one thing to consider is making a little movie. Easier to do now than ever before.

One thing there are lots of are actors. Philadelphia, by the way — you know a fine actor from Philadelphia: Bradley Cooper.

**John:** Ah-ha. And I hear he’s also a terrific wrestler as someone might say.

**Craig:** [laughs] There was one day Bradley had his arm tightly around me…

**John:** What color were his eyes that day?

**Craig:** Oh, boy, they were blue. God, they were blue! And as I went swimming in his limpid ocean eyes it occurred to me that he was a fine actor from Philadelphia.

Actors are always looking for things to act in. And actors are in the same boat as you are. Most of them aren’t working, and aren’t being asked to act. Forget being paid to act; they aren’t even being allowed to act.

You’re always allowed to write. They’re not even allowed to act. That is very frustrating. So, if you hook up with some programs, and Philadelphia is a big city and they have some great universities and institutions, I suspect…

**John:** Well, and Andrew went to film school in Philadelphia, so he says, so he must know people who he went to film school with.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, get yourself some actors together. Write something that you know you can direct. So, write something that is achievable and small. And make it. Make it with your iPhone, for the love of god. It’s HD.

Make it with whatever you want. Make a little movie. Make a short.

Somehow Rian Johnson managed to make Brick. And, you know, the funny thing is, I don’t even thing he was in LA at the time.

**John:** He was in LA, actually. He went to USC for film school, so I think he did.

**Craig:** Oh, he was, okay. But you don’t need to be. The point is really if you are as good as you say, and you’ve got the goods, and you can make ten, or 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, or who knows, even a full feature, a little small movie, and it’s good, you’re done. You’re good. You win. Do it.

**John:** One of the things, this sort of goes back to my New Year’s resolution. I was talking about sprinting versus marathons. And so this TV pilot, I was actually able to sort of sprint in that I could write it so fast, I could sort of sprint through it. It never sort of got to be a slog because it’s only 60 pages. I’m just sort of zooming through it. It was very quick and easy to do. And TV pilots, at least you can write them in a sprint, and they’re very quick and simple.

A movie is a marathon. A movie is, you know, just a very long process. It’s a long process to write it. Like you always feel like it’s stuck sort of halfway in the middle of it and you’re fighting your way through it, but you get it done. And this musical like doesn’t even compare. It’s like a migration. You’re just traveling across the country in it and you sort of setup camp and setup villages.

What Andrew right now needs to do, and why I think the idea of making a little movie or making a short is crucial, is he needs to sprint. He needs to do some quick little sprints to make sure he’s got his skills up and sort of keep going while he’s earning some money in Philadelphia.

But what he shouldn’t try to do is bog down in the marathon of trying to make — he shouldn’t go on a four-year odyssey to make this movie in Philadelphia. He needs to make some small things and then save up enough money that he can get out to Los Angeles if that’s really where he wants to be. Because my evergreen advice is that the luxury of being 22 years old is that you are great at being broke. You are great at sleeping on floors, and eating Top Ramen three meals a day, and being poor.

And LA is just as good of a city to be poor in as anywhere else. So, you may think like, “Oh, I don’t have enough money to come to LA,” but it may be easier to do it now then to do it five years from now. And if you need to save — if it’s a year you need to save up some money to get out here. Great. Let’s spend that year earning your money, making some little short things, writing as much as you can, but do get out here because otherwise you’re going to find it hard once you get other obligations.

**Craig:** Yeah, man, you’re 22. The one thing you have is energy. Put it to good use. You’re unstoppable and you’re immortal, and unlike me and unlike John you don’t have children, as we’ve said before, devouring your soul on a daily basis. Just sapping your energy and reminding you that you’ve been genetically replaced.

**John:** They’re beautiful little anchors tying you down.

**Craig:** That’s right. And basically just slowly burying you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, it’s come to that time, but I think we kind of already know what your One Cool Thing is so why don’t you just start.

**Craig:** Ouais. It’s Quebec. So, I was thinking maybe over the holidays I would go to Europe because my kids are old enough now, they’re 11 and 8, and I thought, “Well, you know, they could appreciate now if we went to Paris, or London.”

But, you know, the time change and the getting them back in school, it’s sort of a nightmare. And if we had had the whole time of the vacation to do it, it would have been fine, but we didn’t. We only really had just a week.

And so my wife very smartly zeroed in on Montreal and Quebec City. And, you know, Quebec City in particular really is Europe in North America. It’s great. Beautiful, beautiful place. We had a great time. The people were wonderful.

I got to use my French, which is broken and limited, but still was enough to get by. And most people — in Montreal practically everyone is bilingual. In Quebec, you know, some people are bilingual. Some people sort of speak English the way I speak French.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it was great. And it was cold. [laughs] And it was really awesome.

**John:** You had about two hours of daylight, didn’t you? Darkness fell really early, didn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, it definitely got dark early. But, you know, I like cold places. The whole world — Quebec City just looked like a snow globe. The streets were almost impossibly picturesque. And we ate poutine. I guess that’s specifically my One Cool Thing. You know, poutine is sort of the national snack food of French Canada, and it is French fries with gravy and cheese curds.

And everybody goes, “Oh, gross,” and I think it’s because of the word “curd,” which is a disgusting word. Curd. Not the people, Kurd. Those are lovely people. I mean C-U-R-D. Just something about it sounds nasty.

But really all cheese curds are, they’re just string cheese, you know. When we call it string cheese it’s totally cool. That’s how I got my son to try it. I’m like, “It’s just string cheese in tinier bits.”

But, you know, cheese on fries is a good thing. And then gravy with cheese and fries is spectacular. Obviously not very good for you; don’t eat a lot of it. But, it’s really, really good, particular on a negative 18 degree day.

**John:** I have good friends, Leanne and Matt, who live up in Montreal. And I would highly recommend it to anybody, particularly if you’re in the Northeast anyway; like why are you not going up there for just a lurk? Because it is the quickest European trip you can take, just across the border.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re in New York or Boston you can drive to Quebec City if you want. It’s great. And we took — to get back and forth between Montreal and Quebec we did the train, which was also awesome. It was great. Everything about it was great. Rave review. I love you, French Canada. And if you’re a fan of maple, then you should go there also, [laughs], because they’ve figured out how to make all foods out of maple.

**John:** Yes. So, my One Cool Thing this week is a tool I found myself having to use a lot this week just sort of randomly called Coffeescript. And Coffeescript is a programming language, kind of. It’s a scripting language but you can actually use it to write a little bit more sophisticated programs.

In my case I had these text documents that I needed to process in a very specific way. And I needed to write routines that could sort of go through there and filter the words and do specific things to them. And what I like about Coffeescript as opposed to other languages, like normal JavaScript, or Perl, or Ruby, or any of these other very talented and good languages, like I’m not going to knock any of those languages… — Coffeescript is so simple and so straightforward; it fits my brain so well that I can go six months without using it and like reteach it to myself in about five minutes.

And there’s something really great to be said about something that is so straightforward that I can willingly just forget it, and forget how to do it, and figure out how to use it again when I need to use it.

So, Coffeescript is available, just Coffeescript.org. And you’ll see sort of how it works. It’s actually a subset of JavaScript that’s just better and uses white space in a different way. And I would highly recommend it to anybody who needs to do a little bit of programming. Or, if you loved programming BASIC on your computer that you grew up with…

**Craig:** I loved that.

**John:** And it’s just the better version of that. It’s like if we’d started making computers and we’d all just taken a big step back and said, “What would be better than BASIC? Oh, we can do this thing called Coffeescript.” And it’s just lovely.

Or, if you loved HyperCard on the Macintosh, you know, the HyperTalk, the programming language. It’s like that in ways that are rewarding. And you can just read it in a very natural way. So, even if you’ve never experienced it before, you just look at the program and go, “Oh, yeah, I get what that does.”

**Craig:** And what are the specific applications that you would want to use Coffeescript for?

**John:** You’d use Coffeescript for things where you needed to process something through. Anything where you might want to use JavaScript. So, you can use it in web pages, and some people do use it in web pages.

It actually converts out one-to-one to JavaScript, so a lot of times if I’m mocking something up for the website or for something else I will write it in Coffeescript and it will pop it out as JavaScript and I can just paste that into something.

**Craig:** That’s actually a coding language in Quebec that is very popular there, and it’s made entirely of maple.

**John:** I bet it’s delicious.

**Craig:** You can eat it! You can eat it. You can put it on your poutine. It doesn’t do anything, [laughs], but it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Yes. The word for maple in French is l’érable. What a great word. Well, érable is maple. L’érable is THE maple. I’m on maple again. It’s really, really delicious. Somebody should make a… — You — You! — should make a new programming language.

**John:** Called Maple.

**Craig:** Called Maple.

**John:** There already is one called Maple. I don’t even remember what it is, but it’s like Maple 5. There’s some big computer thing called Maple. And I’ll have Stuart look it up and put a link to it in the show notes.

Which is why we should say, anything talked about today in Scriptnotes including, I don’t know, maybe we’ll put a link to Quebec City and Montreal, and certainly Coffeescript, all of these things will be at the bottom of the podcast. If you listen to it in iTunes, they will be at johnaugust.com/podcast which is where we store the show notes for all of our episodes.

And thank you again for listening everybody.

**Craig:** Thanks everyone. Welcome to 2013. Hey, John, let’s have a great year.

**John:** Let’s have a fantastic year. And one last resolution if I can ask people to do. If you’re a person who listens to the podcast on the website, that’s great, we love you. Thank you for doing that.

If you have iTunes, can you just click “Subscribe” in iTunes so it actually comes through to your thing, because it’s hard for us to keep track of how many people are really listening and sort of what our ratings are if you are just listening to it on the site.

So, if you are listening to this in a browser right now and you have iTunes nearby, just hit “Subscribe” right there in iTunes so it will show up right as we are tracking the metrics for things.

**Craig:** Yeah, because we don’t know if we have — we have somewhere between two and fourteen-billion listeners.

**John:** Roughly in that territory.

**Craig:** Yeah. We finally zeroed into that range.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much. Have a good week.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/best-of-outlines-agents-and-good-boy-syndrome).

**John August:** Hello, and happy new year. My name is John August.

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

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

Now, despite the fact that you just heard Craig’s voice, he is actually not here with us today. So I cut him in on GarageBand, and I feel a little bit guilty about that, but he says it’s okay. So, truly he’s alive; nothing bad has happened.

What did happen is that he and I both took trips with our families over the holidays, and kept trying to find a time where we could record a new podcast, and we just couldn’t make the times work. So, we will be back next week with a brand new episode.

This week, though, I thought we would take a listen back to some things from the very first episodes of Scriptnotes. This is about a year and a half ago. Our first ten episodes or so don’t show up on iTunes for whatever reason, so if you started listening to the podcast over the last year, you may not be aware of these early episodes, and so I took sort of a best-of from these early episodes.

First up, from episode 3, we look at outlining, white boards, and sort of how you plan out a script. Second, from episode 2, we go back and we look at how do we get an agent or a manager, which is that evergreen question we tried to address at the very start of the podcast; it’s still probably the most common question we get asked every time I open up the mailbox. Finally, from episode 8, we talk about the good boy syndrome, which is that way that screenwriters tend to want to please people, and that can be a very good quality but it can also be a very limiting quality. We also talk about surgery and gynecological issues — we used to talk about gynecological issues a lot on the show for whatever reason.

And that is our episode for today. So I hope you enjoy it. This is sort of a clips show, but as I rationalize it, this is my rationalization: screenwriting and television writing, the career of those things really relies on residuals, and residuals are for the re-use of preexisting material, so this is being very WGA in the sense that we are reusing preexisting material to entertain and educate you.

I hope you’re having a great New Years Day, and we look forward to seeing you next week. Bye.

[Transitional tune]

**John:** How do you start? Are you a whiteboard person, are you an index card person? How do you start beating out a story?

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m kind of an index card person. And I say kind of an index card person, because I feel like there’s actually a step before the index card person. I mean really, I’m a shower person. In thinking about it, all the fundamental breakthroughs that occur usually happen because I’m standing in the shower for 20 minutes thinking. And I don’t know why. That’s just where it happens, mostly.

**John:** That’s exactly where it happens for me, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Shower. I don’t know, there’s something about that. And it’s sort of my little sacred place where no one can come in, and I’m alone, and I can just let my mind wander. And ideally I like to try to figure out the biggest things.

Beyond the idea of the movie, what does this main character want? What is the dramatic argument of the movie, the theme, whatever you want to call it, and what would be the most interesting story to kind of get this person from where they are to where they need to be? And I just start thinking there. But yeah, eventually I’d go to note cards.

**John:** The main ways I see screenwriters breaking stories is either index cards where each index card has one or two, or maybe it’s up to 10 words, that describe an important beat of the story. So, it’s not necessarily a scene, but it’s a thing that happened. So, if you write an action movie, it would be an action set piece. If it were a thriller, it might be a major reversal. So, some way of breaking down the important moments of your screenplay.

And those could be, you might have 30 cards for a movie, you might have 10 cards for a movie, you might have 100 cards for a movie. If you have 100 cards for a movie, you’re probably making too many index cards.

**Craig:** Too many cards.

**John:** Too many cards. But cards, here’s what I’ll say that’s good about cards is that it’s very easy to take up a beat and move it someplace else, and sort of lay them all out on a table and figure out how stuff works. A lot of people like to tape them up on the wall, or use Post-It Notes. When I do index cards — and I don’t always do index cards — I really like to have a big, flat table that it’s just much easier to sort of move them around. And, if you’re having to write with somebody, the table is good, because you can both stand there and take a look at this map that you’ve laid out. It’s like, this is how we would go through it. So, that’s index cards.

You can also do different colors for different kinds of beats. So, if you have action beats that are always on red cards…

**Craig:** Yeah, some people — and they color code them for the characters, so you can see, I haven’t been with this character in a long time.

Lately, what I’ve been doing is kind of short-circuiting the card thing entirely, and actually just recording my voice. I’ll sit with my assistant, and I just start talking through what I want to do. And I record it, and in talking, just as in the act, the physical act of writing, you can start writing.

There’s something about talking it through, where you can arrive at things, it unlocks you a little bit. The enemy of writing is silence, and inactivity. So, talking it out loud seems to be a big help. Now, I’ll take that, she’ll sort of take everything that I’ve recorded, summarize out the crap where you know, I’ll say, “You know what, not that — this,” and then she puts it into Microsoft Word and now I have an actual outline outline.

**John:** And then 20 years from now it’ll be like The Raiders of Lost Ark sessions, and someone will unearth the original audio and the original transcripts, and say, like, “Wow, that is how the Hangover III got figured out.”

**Craig:** Right. Except the opposite of that, in terms of its interest to people. Like, “Wow, this is the least interesting recording of notes ever.”

**John:** And that’s one thing I was using more when I was doing TV shows is the whiteboard. And the whiteboard is sort of ubiquitous in television-land as you’re figuring out your episode. You might be figuring out your season arcs, and you’re really figuring out this given episode, what’s happening in your episode. Generally, if you’re writing as a room, or all the writers in the room are trying to figure out how to do stuff, they’re all staring at one whiteboard, and they have everything marked down in terms of this is what’s happening.

Usually one or two people are empowered with the ability to write stuff on the whiteboard, but others…actual, just simple screenwriters use it too. I know Joss Whedon is a big whiteboard fan. You feel free to sort of erase and make a mess on a whiteboard in ways that you might not if you were doing note cards. Like oh, I have to rip up this note card and do it again. On a whiteboard, everything is sort of possible. And you can sort of scribble and draw arrows, and move stuff around.

**Craig:** It just seems like it would get so messy. Constantly erasing and doing and erasing and doing. Because I like to — with note cards, I use a bulletin board and thumbtacks, and obviously this is all academic, people should do whatever they want, but I like that I can, with my thing lately, is that I can make two columns. Because actually, I’m like, I don’t know why, I’m one of the few people in the world that makes the columns go columnar instead of rows. I don’t go across, I go up and down. So, as the Act One proceeds, it starts at the top of the board and slowly goes down.

And then — oh, you do that too? Oh, okay. So, that’s … so, I have one column that’s whatever the scenes are, and then to the left of that, I do a column and next to each scene, I have a card that sort of explaining why that scene matters. What is the purpose of the scene, what is the character intention. How is the story actually advanced in a way that has nothing to do with the plot, but the relationship between the characters, or the internal life of the character, and I found that that’s really useful, because it forces me to always think, “What is the point?”

You know, it’s one thing to sort of say, “I have to get from here to here, let’s have a big chase.” Okay. Well now, how could that chase actually be purposeful for advancing the character ball. And I don’t know how you’d fit all that crap onto a whiteboard.

**John:** It sounds like you’re writing a lot more information on each of those beats right from the very start. Let’s say, you were working on something that’s happening at the end of the first act. So, you have an idea for what the action of that is, and you’re sort of — the idea of the location: there’s going to be a big event at a carnival. So does your card say carnival, and then you have a second card that has all the detailed information about what’s happening there?

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I would do one card that says “Carnival — Maxwell realizes that the bottle toss game is rigged.” And then next to that I would put a card that says “Maxwell realizes that he should never have trusted So-And-So. He should have been listening to So-And-So all along; she was right.” So this way, I understand, it’s sort of like one column is what, and one column is why.

**John:** That does make sense. It’s a lot more detail than I ever got, and I would ever get into with cards. I’m always the person with a Sharpie, and I write three words on a card.

**Craig:** Oh, Okay. I see.

**John:** So, it’s a very different way of going about it. And I’ve seen whiteboards where they really do kind of get into that kind of detailed information, and so there will be a headline in blue marker, and then detailed stuff below it and you have to really squint to see sort of what’s in there.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it’ll be one of the assistant’s jobs — like the writers’ assistant’s job — is to take iPhone snapshots of all the boards at the end of the day, and transcribe those as notes.

**Craig:** What I’ve been doing lately is having my assistant actually write the content of the note card on a little Word template with some sort of Sharpie-ish font. And then we can print them. And then if we want to change something, you know, I can just scribble on the card, or I can just ask her to change it, and then she can change it and print it again. Because, you know, we’ve sort of all caught up.

But, the truth is, whatever — I mean, this is my whole thing about outlining: for everybody who is sort of wondering, “Should I do it?” Listen: however you want to outline, outline. If you want to outline in great detail or less detail, it doesn’t matter. But I do think it’s really important to at least approach writing with more than just, “Okay, I have an image of a woman walking through a forest. Fade in: Forest — Morning.” These are how bad screenplays are written.

**John:** I will agree with you that many bad screenplays are written with just like, I have this one kind of idea, and no idea how to extrapolate from it. What I will say is that a lot of the screenplays where I’ve had the most detailed outlines, I’ve been most frustrated by the final results, and that I kind of got sandwiched in by the outline. And so some of my very, very favorite stuff I’ve written never had that level of detail or thought. So, some of them feel very organic because literally, it was like, it’s what the movie wanted to do next, versus what I as the author said should happen next.

**Craig:** Right. And I do agree that, I guess the way I would put it is this: You should always feel free to ignore your outline. But if all you get from your outline process is the beginning, the middle and the end, then I think you’ve already done your job.

[Transitional tune]

**Craig:** All right. Here’s the big question as we hit the midpoint of our podcast and everybody’s been really patient. They’ve listened to us talk about uteruses and the law. John, how do these people get a manager or an agent? [laughs] We ripped the Band-Aid off that 15 minutes ago. We’re still dancing around it aren’t we?

**John:** I think you get an agent or manager through…I can think of three ways. The first is recommendation. So someone has read your work, has met you, and said, “This guy is awesome. This guy should be writing movies for Hollywood and I’m going to take this script and I’m going to take you, introduce you to this agent or manager, and say you should represent this person because this person is great.”

If that person has the ear of the right agent or manager and there’s already trust and taste being established between them that agent or manager will read your material, say yes or no, and be interested and excited about possibly representing you. That’s how I got an agent, is a friend took the script I had written to his boss.

He was interning at a small production company. The boss liked it, wanted to take it to the studio. I said, “I really need an agent, can you help me get an agent?” He said yes and he took it to an agent he had a relationship with. The agent read it because this guy who he trusted said that it was worth his time reading. He took it, read it, met with me, and he signed it.

That’s a very, very common story for how writers get represented. Second way, I would say, is agents read material that they found through some sort of pre-filtering mechanism. A pre-filtering mechanism could be a really good graduate school program. If you graduated from a top film school and you were the star screenwriter of a USC graduate film school program, some junior agent at an agency is likely reading those scripts and saying, “Oh this is actually a really good writer. This is a person we should consider.”

Even without that writer hunting down that agent the agent was looking for who are the best writers coming out of these programs or the best writers coming out of a competition. These are the Nicholls finalists. Those scripts get read and those people will be having meetings with the people they think are potentially really good clients.

**Craig:** Makes sense. What’s the third one?

**John:** Just scouring the world to find interesting voices. I don’t know how much of this story is really accurate, but the apocryphal story of Diablo Cody is here’s a young woman who’s writing a funny blog. An agent reads the blog and says, “This woman can really, really write. She’s funny, she has a voice. I bet she could become a screenwriter.”

I don’t think all those details are quite accurate, but there’s always those writers who they were doing standup and they’re clearly very funny and someone sees their act and says, “I think that person is a performer but I also think that person is a writer and there’s something there that’s worth pursuing.”

**Craig:** I like those. Of course, all of them are predicated on you being a good writer and writing a good script, as is always the case, but those all make sense. I actually asked an agent at CAA named Bill Zotti, I gave him a call earlier today and I asked him the question. Of course, he groaned because it was that question, but he had a couple of pieces of really good advice that I figured I should pass along.

One is to make sure that, if you are specifically pursuing an agent, to really know who they represent and ask, “Is this agent appropriate for my material?” He said one of the most frustrating things is when he’ll get query letters or log lines for the kind of movies that his clients just don’t write.

Right now there are a lot of resources out there that are relatively inexpensive, like IMDb Pro for instance, where you can actually see, “OK, let’s say I write movies like Judd Apatow. Who represents Judd Apatow? Let me see. I write movies like John August. Who represents John August? Let me see.”

If I send that person a query letter and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan of John August, I’m aspiring to write like John August, here’s my log line,” you might actually have a shot. Whereas, if you send it to a guy that represents writers who write rated R broad comedies, that person’s going to go, “Well what do I care? It’s not for me.”

Do your homework. If you’re going to go through the effort of trying to break the rocks to get a rep, do your homework about the rep. The other advice that he gave that I thought was pretty smart was to get a job in the business, which seems so blindingly obvious, but yet so many people resist it. I know why because it’s hard and it involves a commitment that you may not be willing to make.

He said listen, 80 percent of the people in the mailroom at one of the big talent agencies are not really interested in being agents. They’re there to learn the business because they want to do other things. They want to produce. They want to write. They want to direct. When you work in that business and you work in that place you get to know the other people there.

You work next to a guy who suddenly is now an assistant to an agent. You say to him, “Listen, I’ve written a script and I’m going to tell you what the idea is.” If he loves it he’s got a chance now to impress his boss with a great piece of material so he’s going to read it. These personal connections are invaluable.

It’s nearly impossible to do that kind of thing from Rhode Island.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say what your example stresses is the horizontal networking. Everyone always thinks, “Oh to become successful you have to meet more powerful people and get more powerful people to love you.” It’s really not that case at all. It’s been my experience, but it’s also been the experience of all my assistants, the way they got to their next step was by helping out everyone else at their same level.

They were reading other people’s scripts and giving them notes. Those same friends were reading their scripts. Eventually they wrote that thing that was, “You know what? This is the script I’ve been waiting for you to write and I think I know the right person to take this to.” It’s always been those people who were doing exactly the same stuff you were doing who were the next step.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think people should think, as they are horizontally networking, about how they should market themselves. The funny thing is Hollywood, with one hand is saying, “Get out, stay out,” and with the other hand, is saying, “Please, somebody show up,” because they’re hungry for new talent, they’re desperate for new talent.

Nothing makes them happier than a writer who’s better than a guy who makes a million dollars that they don’t have to pay a million dollars to.

They’re actually looking, believe it or not. If you can market yourself properly; for instance we have a couple of friends who wrote a pretty crazy script and just put it out on the Internet and marketed it as this insane thing. It caught on.

**John:** You’re talking about the Robotard 8000?

**Craig:** I’m talking about the Robotard 8000. You may say, “Why would you put your screenplay on the Internet, and why would say it was authored by the Robotard 8000?” Well, why, because they have agents at CAA and they’re working. It really got them a lot of attention.

Also, it didn’t hurt that other writers that people trusted were saying, “We read this script. This was really funny.”

Similarly, I’ll tell you, if I were 22 again and I were in a writer’s group, I would say…You and I didn’t have this in the 90s. Let’s get a web page for our writer’s group, and let’s just start blogging about the experience of our writers group. Let’s track the progress of our scripts and the log lines and the rest of it. If one of us catches somebody’s attention, suddenly our writer’s group has a little bit of buzz to it. “What will this writer’s group come up with next?” That’s why that Fempire thing was so cool, with Diablo…

**John:** Dana and Lorena.

**Craig:** Dana and Lorena. It was like, Okay. There’s a group. Now, it’s not really a group; they all have to write their own scripts. But something about it, there’s a little bit of sparkly dust to it. It’s interesting.

How do you make yourself interesting? Maybe then somebody will be attracted to your script.

**John:** We talked about marketing, but it’s really almost positioning. People need to know how to consider you, or what to consider you as. Here’s a terrible way to go into your first meeting: You wrote a really good comedy script that people liked, so they brought you in, a manager and agent sat down to meet with you. They say, “I really liked your script; it was really funny. What do you want to write?”

It’s like, “Well, I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.” The manager is going to hem and haw and make conversation for about another 10 minutes, but they’re not going to want to sign you because they were thinking about you as a comedy person. Let them pigeon hole you for five minutes until you actually get something going. They need to know how are they going to make the next phone call to somebody else, saying, “This guy has a really funny comedy script, but he’s exactly the right person to hire for your period action movie.” That just doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. Listen, these guys, what is their training in? Managers and agents are not there to tell you what to be. Their expertise is watching trends and patterns and pulling people out that fit what they believe is going to generate cash. They can’t tell you who to be. What they can do is see who you are and say, “That looks like money.”

So know who you are. Go in there and be who you are.

It doesn’t mean that you have to go in there as Michael Bay. Not everybody has to make $200 million movies; not everybody has to sell $3 million scripts. To be successful in this business, you just have to work. If I could walk into an agent’s office and say, “I will never make more than $200,000 a year, but I will make $200,000 every year for the next 20 years and I won’t bother you a lot,” that’s an instant signing. Why not? That’s great.

It’s not about how much you’re going to do, but just will you do. If you walk into an office and you say, “Look. I wrote this script and this is how I want to come off. These are the movies I love; this is the niche I want to fill.” If they feel like that’s a real niche and that niche needs filling, that’s a big deal. But they can’t tell you who to be.

[Transitional tune]

**John:** I thought I’d start today with a quote because someone on another message board had left a quote about writing, which was really good, that referenced a Winston Churchill quote. So then I looked up the Winston Churchill quote, and it was great. This is the original Winston Churchill quote, which someone will probably actually find was not really something he said, the same way that all great quotes are always ascribed to Martin Luther King but he didn’t really say them at all.

But this is a good quote. “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.” Winston Churchill writing a book.

**Craig:** It reminds me of… I think it was Antonioni. Somebody said, talking about making a movie, when you start making a movie your goal is to make a great movie, then as you proceed you just want to make a good movie, then at some point you just want to make a movie, and the last stage is you simply want to survive. [laughs] Very similar sentiment.

**John:** Definitely. I find any of the sort of project that takes months to do, I end up always going through that stage. I always think, “Oh, this movie that I write will be different.” I’m on my 40th thing right now. I just printed, about 20 minutes ago, I printed for the first time because I realized, “Oh, I actually have enough pages that I could print, and it won’t be embarrassingly small.” There’s actually enough that I could actually spend a good hour going through pages. I definitely find that manic depression, peak-and-valley thing happening.

A mutual friend of ours, who probably doesn’t want to be mentioned in the podcast, so I won’t mention her name, described when she was first starting on a project that she was sort of like a grandmother going in the ocean in that she would dip her toes in and splash some water on her ankles and then get back on the shore. Then she’d go in a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper, and eventually she’s in the ocean and she’s swimming, like, “Oh, I’m in the ocean. I’m swimming.”

That very much is what it is when I’m starting almost any project, is I’m always reluctant to start and then I finally get in and get going and recognize, “Oh, you’re more than halfway through.” Suddenly all the stuff that was keeping you away from the script starts sucking you into it. It sort of occupies every available brain cycle. I’m hitting that point in this project right now.

**Craig:** That’s a great time. There’s something magical that happens around page 70 for whatever reason, the notion that you’re leaving the forest and no longer wandering in. It just lifts you up. Page 50, for some reason, seems like the worst page to me.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a bleak time. Weirdly, on two recent projects I’ve had to turn in pages early because we could have theoretically lost a director. Both on Preacher and on Monsterpocalypse — I wouldn’t have lost Tim, but we needed to get timing and schedules and stuff figured out — I had to turn in like 45 or 50 pages.

Fortunately, they were a really good, strong 45 or 50 pages. And I felt really good about them, and people liked them, which is hooray, fantastic, that’s exactly what you want. But then to get the mojo back, like, oh my god, I felt like I was done to finish those 45 pages, and then you have everything else ahead of you. That can be a daunting period.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think the people that employ us have any sense of how emotionally fragile we are when we’re doing this stuff. Minor interruptions, anything sometimes, can cause three days of downtime and fetal position. The truth is there’s nothing we can do about it. They have to do what they’re doing. We all live in the real world. We’re writing movies that require many moving parts and the participation of a lot of people. You don’t always have the luxury of being able to just go through the way you want to but, god, anything that stops momentum is the worst.

**John:** It’s rough. The challenge I always have if I get notes too early on in a project is I’ll start to question fundamental decisions I’ve made about a story. Thank god in the case of both of those two movies people liked it and said, “Go, write, full speed ahead.” But if they had said, “Oh, we’re reconsidering this aspect of it,” I would have been doomed. That’s the risk.

**Craig:** We should remember this. There’s a good topic to be had, I know it’s not today’s topic, but the notion of the Good Boy Syndrome, of how you balance being a responsible professional who’s open to criticism because oftentimes criticism makes us write better work, how to balance that with the demands of your own voice and your own instincts so that you’re not bargaining away what matters the most. That is an internal war. Sometimes you have to be a bad guy for everyone’s sake because you’re right. Topic for another day.

**John:** I don’t know. I would actually propose that we talk about that today. The topic we were going to talk about today was film school and I can sort of talk about film school any time, I have my notes here and I can get back to that. I love this idea of the Good Boy Syndrome is that most of us as screenwriters tended to be decent students.

If we weren’t teacher’s pets, we were at least responsible enough to get stuff done. A lot of times my early writing was getting my mom to read it and say, “Oh, this was really great.” She was proofreading it, but mostly it was, “Hey, mom knows how smart I am.” So we don’t want to be the villains, and sometimes we have to be the villains.

When I was first directing for The Nines, where I decided, “Oh, I should direct this movie,” one of the things I had to get out of my head was this sense of having to feel like a host, having to feel like the person who was putting on the event, putting on the party, and having to make sure everyone’s happy and comfortable.

That’s not my job to make sure everyone’s happy and comfortable. My job is to get this movie made, and I can be nice and polite and friendly while getting this movie made, but it’s not my job to make sure the gaffer’s having a great day. It’s my job to make sure the gaffer know what it is I need to have done or the DP knows what I need to have done, so that everyone can do their job properly.

As the screenwriter on projects, a lot of times so much of our work is theoretical and mushy and you could go 1,000 different ways and there’s not a huge time pressure usually. You want to be the good guy, you want to be the hero, and it’s not always the right choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s not always the right choice. Think about two diametrically opposed extreme kinds of screenwriters, and they exist. On the one end you have a guy that is the classic resistant, defensive, “I’m not listening to you. I know what I’m doing. Don’t change anything. Don’t tell me what to write. You’re all idiots.”

When we look at that guy, we see someone who’s put his ego or his own fear or emotional needs ahead of what ultimately could be better for the movie. Because even if 90-percent of the people with whom you’re collaborating are idiots, 10-percent of them aren’t. Maybe even only one of them isn’t. Or maybe they’re all idiots, but the truth is one of them is going to be performing. You simply cannot do this job in creative isolation. Let’s call that the bad boy.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, you can have screenwriters who are so eager to please and over collaborate and who are steeped in enough self-loathing that anybody telling them, “I don’t like this,” triggers that impulse of, “Oh no, oh no,” that they agree to everything. Suddenly they find themselves under enormous, anxious stress because they are now writing toward pleasing people as opposed to making a good movie.

Both writers, in the end, will end up with a bad movie and negotiating within yourself, you need both sides of this or else you’re going to get crushed.

**John:** Yeah. That’s maybe a reason why some writing teams are successful is that one of them is that good cop people pleaser and the other one is the asshole who says, “No, we’re not doing that,” and you do need both functions a lot of times.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sure the roles change, one guy can be the placater, the other one can be the defiant one and then for the producers and the director, whoever else is on the other side of the script, they can see, “Okay. Well, at least some sort of truce is being brokered. There’s a negotiation happening.” But if it’s just you, you have to be both of those things at once. Very difficult.

**John:** In projects that have come in to do rewrite work on, especially in the weekly rewrite work, part of my attraction for that is I do get to be the hero. I get to be the good guy. I get to be the person who arrives and fixes this problem and makes everyone feel better about the situation and then I get to leave. That’s the remarkable thing.

You recognize that a lot of the stuff that you’re finding in the script, a lot of the cruft and stacked up bad decisions weren’t because the previous writer or writers were bad writers. It’s that they were trying to address concerns that other people had, often not the same person’s concerns. So the director needed this and the producer said this and the star said, “I really want a scene where I’m eating hamburgers,” and all those things got put into the script that weren’t necessarily the right choice for the script at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. When you come on specifically to help something they’re literally saying, “Look, we need things. Give them to us.” So your job is very clear and you are sort of rent-a-writer and you don’t have to get super visionary about it because you’re only there for a week or two. And sometimes that kind of detachment is precisely what the movie needs. It doesn’t always mean that you’re coming in to deliver hackwork. Your emotional distance may be very useful.

But when you’re writing a script from scratch or you’re doing a page one rewrite or something like that you do need a vision and you do need something that you must protect. I’m still dwelling on the fact that you used the word “cruft.” Is that what you said? Cruft?

**John:** Cruft.

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** Cruft. My use of the word comes from coding, and cruft is extra stuff that’s in code that doesn’t actually do anything, it just junks it all up.

**Craig:** Like an inefficient…?

**John:** Yeah. Again, I’m probably using the term slightly incorrectly, but cruft to me is sort of like the breadcrumbs that are left from previous ways of doing things. So it’s the loops that don’t really need to be loops. It’s the extra stuff. So it’s not the comments. It’s not the actual explanatory stuff. It’s vestigial stuff that’s left.

**Craig:** It’s vestigial. I was going to say it’s like a little tail hanging off of a baby’s butt.

**John:** Baby tails.

**Craig:** Baby tails. By the way, that is not normal.

**John:** If you have a tail, you should probably see somebody because that could be a problem down the road.

**Craig:** It’s biological cruft.

**John:** I’ve had tail bone problems before and I think part of the reason why we have back problems is that our ancestors had tails and things just worked differently. From sitting in my chair for so much of my day I will develop aches in my hips and the sacrum, which is where your tail bone is. If I just had a tail I could crack something, but there’s nothing to crack.

**Craig:** The human back is the greatest refutation to intelligent design theorists. It’s the worst design ever.

**John:** We’re a series of compromises. Just like every movie is essentially a series of compromises. The human body is a huge series of compromises. We’re born at nine months not because we’re ready to be born, but because otherwise our giant heads would not fit through the pelvis.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s why the first two and a half months of an infant’s life are useless.

**John:** It’s the fourth trimester.

**Craig:** It’s the fourth trimester. Horses are born, they plop out, they stagger around for two minutes, and then they’re running around eating oats. We can’t even hold our heads up.

**John:** We’re sad and we’re pathetic.

**Craig:** Useless. We’re cruft. [laughs]

**John:** There’s a lot of cruft there. Because of this sort of biological problem, this engineering problem, the first two months of a child’s life for parents is just horrible.

**Craig:** Worst. The worst because your child gives you nothing.

**John:** Their brains can’t actually do any of the stuff that would cause you to have a parental attachment. They can’t smile at you, they can’t roll over. They can just poop and eat. We love them just because we have so much sunken cost into them during those two months. It’s tough. It’s not intelligent design.

**Craig:** I’m sure there is a biological, hormonal component to postnatal depression, but I do honestly believe at least half of it is the crash that comes from the expectation what it means to have a baby and then have no emotional connection to it. Babies, that first four, five, six weeks they don’t even recognize you. It’s awful.

**John:** My biggest frustration is couples, women mostly, pregnant women, who will go through this whole elaborate thing about exactly how they want the birth to be, because like with the birth is a big, bigger thing. And they haven’t planned for like two minutes after the birth. They know exactly how they want the room set up, and what they want the doula doing, but they haven’t figured out like, “Oh, what are we going to do in that first horrible month when no one is sleeping?”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And you know what? It’s people when they’re having babies — this is now, we’re once again back to gynecology, which I love — when people are going to have their first baby, they want to apply as much control as they can. But the only thing they can control is the birth, and they’ll get really, really finicky about it, but the baby upon birth dashes all of your plans to hell, because she’s screaming.

So that’s it. Plan’s gone. When I had my second kid, I didn’t care about any of that birth nonsense. All I cared about was lining up a night nurse. To me, that is like I would sell anything for a night nurse. I would rather have a night nurse for the first month of an infancy, for a new baby, than a car.

**John:** A night nurse, for people who don’t know, is a woman — generally — you hire and who comes and takes care of the baby overnight. Basically feeds and diapers the baby overnight, so that the parents can sleep. You don’t hire the night nurse for the baby. You hire the night nurse for yourself.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So you get a night of sleep.

**Craig:** And you cannot imagine the difference it makes in your experience with this child. The day is annoying anyway, because the child gives you nothing and screams and cries and poops, but at least you’re not exhausted to the point of tears. You’re functional. Again, nothing to do with screen… Although it is, you know what? If you’re a screenwriter and you’re having a baby, you can’t write without a night nurse. So that’s it. [laughter]

**John:** Actually, I have a better way to sort of bring it back to the actual process of screenwriting is that these couples — these women who are planning for the birth, and they’re focusing all of this energy on the birth — are very much like the producers and studio development people who are focusing on the screenplay.

So they’re trying to make this movie, and they’re focusing only on this script that’s in front of them. But they’re not focusing on, like, “Oh, you know what? There’s actually going to be a movie.” And that the minute you start production and the minute you get to that first test screening and all the stuff down the road, they’re not thinking about that final movie.

They get so obsessed with this little one moment on this page, and making sure that thing is exactly what they want it to be, that they sometimes stop thinking about the entire… the actual point of the work that they’re doing, which is to make this movie.

**Craig:** That is a genius analogy. It’s so true. The obsession over minutiae when you’re writing a screenplay is entirely about people who are afraid — and we all are, not just them; all of us, everyone’s afraid of this — exercising control over it, but it is endlessly amusing to me that all the things that we all have god knows how many hours of conference calls over tiny little things get dashed to pieces when the director shows up and says, “You know what? On the day, I think it should just be this.” And everybody’s like, “Okay,” because you’re the director.

That’s like, “I’m giving you the baby now. You raise the baby, but boy, we really sure put a whole lot of time into thinking about what it should wear on Wednesday morning.”

It’s a perfect analogy, and the more you recognize as a screenwriter that many of the notes are about exercising control out of fear, the more you can actually relax about them. Because we get bad notes sometimes. They’re not trying to hurt you. They’re just trying to protect their fear level, which is extraordinary.

**John:** And generally, as you’re getting notes and you’re job as a screenwriter is to figure out who’s notes are really coming at you, and which are the important notes.

And the best analogy I can actually think of is something that happens every time you go into a creative meeting. You’re in somebody’s office, and an actual okay question to ask is, “Where should I sit?” because there’s one chair that the person who’s the most important person in the room wants to sit in, so you make sure that person gets the chair they want to sit in.

And you should be sitting someplace where you can look directly at that person, and you can turn your head and look at everybody else, but really you’re talking to that one person. And when you go into those meetings and you figure out who is the actual most important person in the room — that’s the same experience of these notes. It’s that you could try to address everybody’s notes and make sure everyone gets heard, but then you’re just being a good boy, and you’re not necessarily being a good writer.

**Craig:** That’s right. And the instinct or ability to determine who needs to be listened to primarily — that is unfortunately one of those things that requires some experience. I mean, I’m sure some people are better at it than others right out of the box, but for new screenwriters, you are going to have some dramatic, clumsy meetings where you blow it. And you just blow it because you’re learning how all this stuff works. In the end, everybody figures it out.

**John:** One of the very smart things my first agent, who in the last podcast I talked about how I let him go —

**Craig:** Oh, your first agent in quotes, the one that doesn’t exist?

**John:** Yes, who apparently doesn’t exist — my imaginary first agent. One of the smart things that he did or I did myself somehow, was he sent me out on fifteen meetings, like right away. And they were really unimportant meetings. They were sort of the junior executives at various production companies. And so they’d read my script and we’d talk, but it was mostly, I think, just to burn me through my first fifteen terrible meetings, so I got better at it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I like this. Yeah, that’s smart. Good… It’s sort of like spring training for meetings. I like it.

**John:** So we have a little time here, so I think I may jump ahead, and I do want to talk about film school, but I think we can tie a lot of this back in here. So we’ll see how this goes.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** This last week I got to talk at UCLA. So it was a group of students who had just watched The Nines, and had watched God, the short I did with Melissa McCarthy before that, and so it was great to be sitting in a room with people who had just very recently seen the two movies I had done and could talk about them in a smart way. This was mostly a graduate group, some cinematographers, some directors, and I got to see what the UCLA Film School looks like, which is pretty nice. It’s not as nice as the new USC building, but it’s pretty nice.

And then over the last month I’d been up to USC three times to talk to students, both in the screenwriting program and some of the incoming freshmen, and it’s got me thinking a lot about film school, and college and graduate school overall.

So I made a list of eight reasons why you go to college or grad school at all, whether it’s film school or any sort of college program, some reasons why you’d want to go. As I’m talking, keep note of those and see which ones you think are actually important and which ones I’m just talking out of my ass.

**Craig:** I’m getting a pen. I’ve got an index card. I’m taking notes.

**John:** All right. Reasons to go to college or a grad school program. The information, literally so you learn this thing that you’re supposed to be learning.

Two, a degree or some sort of certificate that proves that you know how to do this thing. And in some professions, that’s incredibly important, like engineering — you have to be certified to be able to do certain things. Medical school, obviously.

Number three, access to special equipment.

**Craig:** Wait, wait. You need a degree to do medicine?

**John:** In the U.S., you do.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Is this going to be problematic for you there, Craig?

**Craig:** Ooh, no. I, I… Send him out. I can’t do it. Not today. Okay, go on. Number three?

**John:** Number three, access to special equipment. For some things, that’s really obvious. If you’re doing nuclear engineering, you probably need some kind of special stuff, but even, like, a law library is sort of special equipment. It’d be hard to do law school without access to some sort of law library.

Number four, structure. That’s the sense that’s like, “That’s me learning calculus.” I never had a real calculus class. And so I kept thinking, like, “Oh, I could teach myself calculus.” But I’ve never taught myself calculus, because I would need the structure of having to actually work my way through the book.

The last four reasons are sort of people-related.

Number five, professors. Professors are experts, like the learned people in that field who are the teachers who will teach you.

Number six, peers, people who are there to do the same thing that you’re trying to do.

Number seven, alumni, people who are going to be helpful for your learning process, but ultimately to get a job and to sort of thrive in your career.

And the last reason, so these are kind of out of order, but the last reason is because you enjoy it, because you want to have a good time, and it’s a good way to spend a couple years.

**Craig:** None of these reasons are sex.

**John:** Well, sex is enjoyment.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. Okay, fine. Now I understand number eight. I didn’t understand until you said that. Okay.

**John:** I would argue that a lot of our traditional liberal arts education or our four year college education is really about the four years aspect. It’s like you’re taking kids when they are 18 years old and letting them grow up to be 22 years old without killing themselves, and they’re going to have sex in a safe environment — a safer environment — and drinking a lot, but they have a safe place to land.

**Craig:** All right, all right. That’s a pretty good list.

**John:** Of those eight, let’s think about film school, and which of those do you think are important for film school or not relevant anymore.

**Craig:** Let me go down the list. Info — of questionable importance for film, to me at least, and I’ll preface this by saying I didn’t go to film school. But I think that much of the information that we need to write good stories is available elsewhere. It may not be available to the extent or in the concentrated form, but that’s covered by some of these other things. So I’ll give it sort of a…

**John:** Partial.

**Craig:** …a partial. Degree — totally irrelevant.

**John:** Completely irrelevant. I have no idea where my MFA is. I have an MFA in film. I have no idea where it is. I assume I still have it someplace. No one will ever ask me for my film degree. No one cares.

**Craig:** No, no one cares. Special equipment — used to be the case. No longer.

**John:** Very true.

**Craig:** Used to need the moviolas and all the rest of it. Now, you just need a laptop.

**John:** It’s interesting looking at USC, because USC just built an amazing new complex for the cinema school, and at the same time, with their freshmen who are showing up there have 5D or 7D cameras of their own, and they have Final Cut Pro 7 on their laptops, so they’re able to make… Smartly, USC is having them make a lot of stuff right away, so they’re shooting stuff constantly and they’re doing it all on their own stuff.

And so downstairs at the USC complex they have these amazing rooms and rooms and rooms of Avids and George Lucas kind of special equipment. And there’s some special things it would be very hard to get any place else, like they have motion capture equipment and 3D labs and stuff like that that would be hard to find other places. But equipment is not nearly as important as it used to be. When I went to film school, you were going to have hard time getting a 16 millimeter camera any place else, and getting your film processed — that was all a big deal.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And now it’s not.

**Craig:** It’s just all gone, so that’s…

**John:** And, Craig, with your 4S, you have a better camera than anyone in film school had up until…

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?

**John:** …the mid-’90s, probably.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s nuts-o. So, I mean, special equipment — certainly doesn’t play anymore. Structure definitely, I think, is a huge benefit of film school. You are forced by the demands of your curriculum to write, produce, cut, edit, do whatever else is required. It forces you out of your normal state of procrastination, so that’s a helpful thing.

**John:** A helpful thing.

**Craig:** Professor mentors — obviously, you can’t get them unless you’re… I mean, you can’t get professorial mentors unless you’re there. I would argue, however, that you can get mentor mentors elsewhere. You don’t need film school to get a great mentor. And frankly, one of the hidden dangers of film school is that a lot of times, the professors are slightly more academic than you would want, I think.

**John:** I think it’s a really valid question to ask about any film program you’re looking at, is like what have these people actually done? Do they really know what they’re talking about as it relates to the film industry right now versus the film industry 20 years ago? If you’re going to film school for critical studies, that’s probably much less important, because you’re talking about the history of film. Well, you want somebody old, that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, if you are trying to be a director, a writer, a producer, and you’re not going to NYU or USC or UCLA, I’m not really sure why you’re going to film school at all. Because I don’t know if they are attracting the kind of people that really can steer you in a smart way. I mean, maybe there are other ones out there, but sometimes I meet people who are going to film school at a tiny, I don’t know, Arizona State Film Studies program, I just don’t know why they’re there.

**John:** I would say that number six might be a reason why — it’s the peers situation. I think of anything, I think peers is probably the most important reason now to consider film school. It’s that I look at these kids who are in the UCLA program and especially the freshmen, entering freshmen at USC’s program, is they are surrounded by 100 other people who want to do exactly what they want to do, and want to stay up all night doing what they want to do. And that’s a huge help.

They can make a lot of really amazing things. The people who were most helpful for me as I got started in the film world were not the people I knew who were more powerful. They were people who were doing exactly what I was doing. I showed up in Los Angeles knowing 25 people who were exactly the 25 people in my film program, and those are the only people I really knew for two years, and they became best friends and mortal enemies and everything in between, but they were incredibly important to me.

**Craig:** But that would still, I think, and when we get to alums, it argues for going to an excellent program, because the better the program, the better the peers, and certainly, in the case of USC, NYU, UCLA, the alums are… That’s the one I said wait okay yeah, I mean, man I wish that I had had USC alums helping me out when I showed up. I didn’t have anybody. That’s obviously a big one. And then sex — I feel like, ah, it’s an expensive way to get laid.

**John:** It is a very expensive way to get laid. I think, you know. We’ve intended to label our podcasts very conservatively, but “an expensive way to get laid” is really a good title for something. [laughter]

**Craig:** Yeah, tuition, also known as an expensive way to get laid.

**John:** I think going to undergrad with that as one of your stated goals is completely noble and good, but you shouldn’t be paying $35,000 trying to get into a top-tier film program for just that reason.

**Craig:** Yeah, super bad idea.

**John:** Plus the people who are going to applying to a film school program aren’t necessarily going to be the most attractive people you’re going to meet.

**Craig:** Exactly, for $35,000, this man or woman should be spectacular and do everything.

**John:** Instead, they’re going to be able to talk about the early films of Tarantino, but that’s not necessarily what you want out of that.

**Craig:** That’s correct.

**John:** Let’s recap this list. What is still important about film school in 2011? Partial credit on the information. When I went to film school, the Internet really wasn’t what the Internet is today, so I couldn’t find out about that stuff. I had Premiere Magazine. That was my source of film information, so I showed up not knowing what the studios were.

I’d not really read a script, the first script I read was the printed script in Soderbergh’s diary for Sex, Lies and Videotape. So I’d seen kind of a screenplay, but it wasn’t even formatted properly. Now the Internet is lousy with information about that.

Certificate? Useless, you don’t need a degree. I would say if you’re going to film school and an amazing opportunity happens halfway through, bail.

**Craig:** Totally, what’s the point of going? It’s a vocational school.

**John:** A mutual acquaintance of ours, Jon Glickman, was in my graduate school program and bailed, and now runs MGM Studios.

**Craig:** It’s not like he just became successful. Jon produced the first movie he ever wrote. He and I began at the same time, and you don’t need… If you get the job, go. That’s the whole point.

**John:** But it was a good thing he was in that graduate school program with me, because I remember being in the elevator with Jon Glickman. We were going to a class, and Joe Roth was going to speak in the class. Joe Roth, who was running at that time… I guess he’d left Disney, was running Revolution, or was right at that time.

**Craig:** It was Caravan, the forerunner.

**John:** Caravan before Revolution. I’m in the elevator. It’s me and Jon Glickman and Joe Roth. This is before the class, and Jon Glickman, to his credit, and his audacity, is like, “Hey, I’m Jon Glickman, I really want to work for you. After class, I’m going to give you my stuff and I really want you to hire me at your new company.” Joe Roth did.

**Craig:** It’s amazing is that he went to go work for Joe Roth. Joe Roth was partners with Roger Birnbaum, and then Joe Roth went off later to do Revolution. Jon has stayed with Roger the whole way through. Talk about a fateful elevator meeting. You’re right, I guess that falls under peers and alums.

**John:** Yeah, getting to meet people who will help you. Access to special equipment, not nearly as important. I think there’s still some amazing things you’re going to be able to do at USC Film School or UCLA Film School that are going to be hard to do on your own, but the special equipment is a much less important thing now.

**Craig:** You know what, it literally comes down to lights. That’s the only equipment I can think of. Lights and maybe a dolly.

**John:** I would say some of the 3D stuff, and some of the gaming, there’s some really special digital things that USC does now.

**Craig:** Like mo-cap and so forth?

**John:** They have a whole mo-cap stage.

**Craig:** By the way, in five years, watch.

**John:** Five years, it’ll totally happen. We’ll have mo-cap, easily. Did you watch the Trey Parker South Park documentary? It’s really good.

**Craig:** I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve got to watch it, I love it.

**John:** They talk about the six days to air, so they do South Park episodes in six days. What’s encouraging to hear is that they used to spend a ton of money on the technology to make it happen, and now they’re just buying Macs off the shelf, and that’s mostly what it’s done on. They’re able to do it in six days because technology has advanced, not because they necessarily want to do it in six days, it just became possible. Structure, still important?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so.

**John:** I think it’s really important, and having to get stuff done at a certain time is really important. A smart thing that USC is doing with their incoming freshmen is in addition to their class structure, because incoming freshmen, they have a lot of general ed requirements, so they’re taking a lot of stuff that’s not film related. They have this amazing game that’s being played this first semester where students are shooting projects constantly on their own. It provides a structure even though it’s not classically your education.

[Siren]

**Craig:** Siren.

**John:** I think they figured out that you’re not really a doctor, and they’re…

**Craig:** No, that was the ambulance I called for this guy. Just so you know, he was open, I was about to go in. We had him prepped, and then you dropped…

**John:** A crisis of faith.

**Craig:** No, you dropped this bomb on me all of a sudden that I can’t do unlicensed surgery in my office in Old Town Pasadena. Anyway, we wheeled him down over to the Cheesecake Factory, and left him there on the corner. He’ll be fine.

**John:** He’ll be fine. Cheesecake Factory is a pretty good restaurant, I think he’ll be fine.

**Craig:** He’ll be fine. Everyone’s such a baby about unlicensed surgery. God.

**John:** I know, come on. What is it, a manicurist can do your nails, but you can’t remove someone’s appendix?

**Craig:** This was a little more complicated than that, to be fair. I was doing a bypass, and I knew I was in over my head. I opened him up — sometimes I get excited about these things. I don’t think them through.

**John:** Again, women with childbirth. They have the doula, they have the whole water birth thing all set up.

**Craig:** That’s me.

**John:** Yeah, that’s you.

**Craig:** I got so excited about doing surgery, I really controlled everything up to the point where I was staring at a beating, exposed heart. Then I froze up.

**John:** Did you ever play the Macintosh game, the surgery game?

**Craig:** I totally did, I remember it exactly.

**John:** You had to draw with the mouse the little scalpel line. If you’d go too deep, he would start bleeding out.

**Craig:** I loved that game. They would also throw things at you, like, “Uh-oh, he’s going through bradycardia,” and you had to know, “Do I inject him with lidocaine or epinephrine?” And if you screwed up, the patient would die, and I killed thousands of Macintosh patients. Thousands, I don’t think I ever made anyone live. This is when I realized I shouldn’t be a doctor.

**John:** The thing about those early games is so many of them, you would just always lose, and then you just kept playing.

**Craig:** I think that’s why. It’s funny, they just released for the iOS platform this classic game called Out of this World, which was this gorgeous, rotoscoped game, revolutionary game from 1990. It’s impossible. I’d forgotten how impossible it was.

**John:** The nostalgic stuff being brought back to new platforms is a weird trend. There’s one video game I’m involved with that’s doing a bit of that. The fascination with pixel art I hope goes away.

**Craig:** It will. It was stupid to begin with, so we’re just remembering a stupid thing, and then we’ll stop, because it was stupid.

[Transitional tune]

**Craig:** We’ve often talked about the value of production for the screenwriter. The experience of seeing your pages produced will always make you a better writer, always. It’s so much easier to do that now, with actual expertise, than it ever was before.

Like you said, you could run around with a chunky VHS camcorder when you were a kid, or eight millimeter film, but then you’ve got to cut it, and edit it, and put it in the soup and transitions, all the rest of it. What you can do now almost compels you to do it. There’s no excuse to not.

**John:** At UCLA, they screened God, my short film, and that was a thing I made with Melissa McCarthy, and I’d taken part of the reshoot crew for Go, and we just splintered off and we shot the short film in two days at my house. That was $30,000 to do, and that was using short ends of 35 millimeter film and borrowing time on an Avid, and all those processing kinds of costs.

The thing that I can’t believe now is there’s just a superimposed title that says “God” over this opening tracking shot, and that was three days of opticals and $4,000 to get that one word over a moving image. Everything that we had to do to shoot God back in ’99 would be simple to do on any camera right now. We’d do it all on a computer.

**Craig:** No question. By the way, good on you for seeing how brilliant Melissa McCarthy was so early on.

**John:** I have a good track record of spotting people who will do well. After she got cast in Go… She was fantastic in Go. I watched the cut, and I was like, “My god, she’s terrific.” I bumped into her at Starbucks, and I said in that sort of brief, awkward seeing her again, “You’re amazing. I’m going to write a short film for you, and we’re going to do it, and it’s going to be great.” Then two weeks later I had her licking a parking meter for my movie. She used that as her audition real for years and years after that.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s awesome.

**John:** People say, “Do I have to move to Los Angeles?” That’s the reason you have to move to Los Angeles. Not just so you got your first movie made, but that you bump into her in Starbucks again, and you make short films with her, and make a series of movies with her after that.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** We talked about a lot of stuff today.

**Craig:** We did amazingly well. I want people to give us some credit. I want credit.

**John:** I hear some applause, but I’m traveling back through time for it.

I feel like we covered a lot today, and I’m really glad we got back to the gynecological issues that really were the genesis of this whole podcast.

**Craig:** Eventually we’re going to have a huge audience that just comes for that. Next week’s podcast is entirely about vaginosis.

**John:** I like it. Things I know, we’ve gotten some reader questions, and I’ve put that up on the blog. Before we go, I’ll say this. If you have a question that you want Craig and I to talk about, if you want Craig and me to talk about it — that was bad — email at ask@johnaugust.com. There’s a big bucket of questions, and if you ask a question that would be interesting for Craig and I to talk about, we’ll talk about it. Other than that, thank you for listening.

**Craig:** Yeah, thanks. People keep coming up to me and saying they’re listening to this. They really are, that’s awesome.

**John:** Thank you, Craig, and have a great weekend. We’ll talk to you soon.

**Craig:** All right, bye bye.

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/eggnog-and-dreadlock-santa).

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

**Craig Mazin:** And my name is A Very Christmas Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is our Christmas episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, we’re recording this a few days early so we’re not literally just sitting by the tree. There’s probably no eggnog in our hands. Maybe you have eggnog, I don’t know.

**Craig:** No. I think eggnog is gross.

**John:** I love eggnog…

**Craig:** Ew!

**John:** We might have to have a big fight about this. Eggnog is amazing. It’s essentially just melted ice cream that you get to drink out of a cup. And it’s just the best.

**Craig:** It’s melted ice cream with weird spice in it.

**John:** What is weird about nutmeg? Nutmeg is one of the most wonderful spices if used in moderation.

**Craig:** You know what it is? It’s the word “egg” and the word “nog” are so gross. Plus you have those two Gs, eggnog. It sounds like something that Orcs would say, and I don’t like it.

**John:** Yeah. It has a very Germanic quality to it, but I have always loved eggnog to the degree that I remember once I came back from, like, a summer scouts meeting and it was, like, a hot day in August —

**Craig:** Oh god!

**John:** — And I was like, “Mom, I really want some eggnog.” And my mother, who is so generous, was just like, “Okay, I’ll make you some eggnog.” So, she literally made — like the skim milk in the fridge, and some eggs, and some sugar, and some vanilla, and some nutmeg, and she made in a blender some eggnog. And that’s why I love my mom.

**Craig:** You know, my grandmother used to tell the story about how when she was a child on a really, really hot day back in Russia she would drink iced cold buttermilk. [laughs] And, you know, that sounds pretty good because it’s butter, and it’s milk, and everybody loves butter, and everybody loves milk. But buttermilk is just rotten milk.

**John:** I would disagree. I would say buttermilk is soured milk. And it has a certain quality to it that makes it fantastic for biscuits, or for ice cream. Buttermilk ice cream.

**Craig:** You mean rotten quality? [laughs]

**John:** I think it’s delicious. But everyone has their own tastes. For example, do you like crème fraîche? Is that a taste you like?

**Craig:** It’s funny that you mention that because I was explaining to our video playback guy last week that I actually have a weird thing about white food in general. And crème fraîche is a great example of white food I do not eat. There’s something about white sauce type food — mayonnaise, crème fraîche, tartar sauce, there’s more I’m sure. Tahini. Even that’s something — I just can’t do it. I can’t go near it.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a puss-like quality to it that might turn some people off. Cottage cheese, I’m sure, falls into that.

**Craig:** No. I can do cottage cheese if I mix it with fruit.

**John:** That makes no sense at all, Craig.

**Craig:** If I mix it with fruit. That one is an exception. And I can do like certain yogurts and stuff like that. But there’s a lot of white food that just horrifies me. Mayonnaise is my number one, but crème fraîche, sour cream, because that’s what crème fraîche is, right? Isn’t it sour cream? Which is a lie…

**John:** It’s a special kind of sour cream, yeah. You’re just a food racist and we should probably move onto another topic.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like white food.

**John:** So, you’re making a list at Christmastime. There is a famous person who makes a list around Christmastime, well, Santa, but even more important than Santa, Franklin Leonard makes a list around Christmastime.

**Craig:** Yes. Dreadlock Santa makes a list.

**John:** And Dreadlock Santa this year made a list called the Black List, as he does every year, in which he surveys the development executives to ask them what their most liked scripts are. He always wants to make it clear that this isn’t the “best of” list; it’s like the most liked screenplays that people have read this year.

And so that came out this last week, or actually two weeks ago for people who are listening on Christmas day. And there were a lot of great titles there. Some people that we know, mutual friends. Eric Heisserer, Story of Your Life, was one of the highly liked scripts.

**Craig:** Great to see.

**John:** Jonathan Stokes, who is one of my WGA advisees, his script Border Country was listed there.

**Craig:** Oh! Awesome. Yeah, good for him.

**John:** And a person who wrote into our site for the Three Page Challenge, Austin Reynolds, his script, From New York to Florida, was also on the Black List.

**Craig:** What script did he send in for us?

**John:** So, the three pages I think we read was something that you liked much more than I liked in the first three pages, where there’s a kid in class who is scribbling…

**Craig:** Oh, I remember that guy, yeah.

**John:** So, you apparently have great taste.

**Craig:** Well, see that? God, I know what I’m doing.

**John:** Yeah. So, maybe we’ll go back through and re-edit that so we sound really knowledgeable and that we should single that out as being highly praise-worthy. But congratulations to Austin Reynolds; that’s fantastic. I’m happy that these people had good outcomes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As I was looking through the list, one of the things I was trying to look for — patterns — in addition to, like, names I recognize was: what are people writing about, and what are these spec scripts that people are working on? And one that really stuck out was by a writer named Young Il Kim called Rodham. And it’s the story of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s rise as a young lawyer, sort of rising in politics, and she falls in love with this guy Bill Clinton.

And I was like, that was a great idea for a spec. I have no idea — obviously the spec is pretty good because people like it, but people want to know like, “Oh, what kind of spec should I write?” That seems like a great idea for a spec. That’s public domain. It’s interesting. People are going to want to read that. Good choice. Good subject material.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is a good choice. And it’s accessible. And people can actually compare what you’ve written to their understanding of reality and see in evidence the drama that you have created. It’s a very smart way of approaching it.

**John:** So, today I thought we’d talk through some of our mail bag questions, but one of them was actually really relevant to what we’re doing right now which is an email we got from Brantley Aufill. And so it’s kind of long but I’ll read it because it’s nice. It’s happy. And so it’s a good thing for this time of year.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Brantley writes, “In September of 2011, I sent you an email about something you said on the podcast. Well, it’s like, ‘I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.'” I kind of remember saying that. So, talking about, like, what genre is your genre.

Brantley writes, “I remarked that I had just done exactly that having written a spec called The Hooverville Dead which found me my manager just a few months prior. Over the following months, I listen to Scriptnotes every week, and so many times it seems to be recorded just for me, as I was writing and rewriting, as the script started going out, as I began to get generals, as I began to do pitches, as I signed with my agents, as I tried to think over what to write next.

“The topics you and Craig were covering often coincided exactly with where I was navigating this crazy world as a new screenwriter. Flash forward to today. The Hooverville Dead has become my calling card and just made this year’s Black List.”

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** “I’m still doing generals. I have yet to make that first writer’s paycheck, but I have quite a few projects in ‘this might be the one’ column. I’m taking my next spec to a major studio with a producer already attached. I developed a TV show with a producer that we’re talking to networks about next month. I have different pitches at different studios, four of which I set up over a 26-hour period later this week.

“So, I’m reading book after book, writing up treatments, and pitching my take, and I’m on people’s minds as they think of a writer they want to work with. And I’ve been loving just about every minute of it. So, thanks to you and Craig for Scriptnotes; the last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind but I like to think the advice you two have been providing has helped me keep up just a little bit ahead of it. Thanks, Brantley Aufill.”

**Craig:** Wow. You know what? Thank you man. That’s really nice of you. I’m glad that you are obviously doing well, you know. I mean, the fact that you haven’t gotten that first writer’s paycheck is a quirk of the timeline. It sounds like you will be soon enough. And, you know, as we’ve been doing this and you and I interact more and more with people who are aspiring, and particularly people who are right on that bubble where it seems like all the pieces are in place, and people are noticing their writing and they actually have the facility to do this, they just haven’t quite gotten that first purchase yet.

What’s been salient to me more than anything is attitude. And it’s the people with the great attitude who strike me as the most likely to succeed. And that’s a terrific attitude to have. The attitude of the student, and it’s one that I think you and I both maintain to this very day.

So, good for you. I’m glad that we’ve been of help to you.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say in terms of attitude: acknowledging good fortune, and success, and people who have helped you along the way. Because so much of this business, and sort of getting started in any business, are going to be the frustrations and all the things that go wrong. But when things do go right, when someone helps you out with something, it’s great to acknowledge that. And the people who help you out along the way, just take a moment to thank them for that.

So, thank you for writing in.

**Craig:** It’s certainly no sign of weakness. We all need help desperately. I remember Scott Frank years ago saying to me, “I need more help than any writer I’ve ever met. When I’m figuring out who I should work with on something — producer, studio executive, agent, whomever — it’s entirely about who will satisfy my deep need for help.”

So, you’re dead on with that.

**John:** Cool. Let’s continue that thread with some other questions that people have written in with and maybe we can answer a few more things for other people and get them started on their way.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, this first one comes — a writer who had written into the site and it was in the backlog of questions, and then he reached out to you on Twitter. And so you flagged it and so now we’re following up.

It’s a guy named Christopher in London who writes, “Having written my first feature screenplay a year after moving to London I began to get as many people to read it as possible. By your normal chain of events — basically, through my girlfriend — the script found its way to a producer who had made one other feature, and a few shorts.

“He loved the script and wanted to make it, so we began a second draft with the promise that after typing the script he would send it to potential ‘financiers, directors, and cast.’ Fast forward two and a half years, after draft number 13 he still hasn’t shown the script to another soul. In the meantime, I’ve shopped the script out myself, and now that I’ve secured an actual production company interested in making the movie I want to move on from this producer.

“Now, after asking him to sign an agreement to state that the rights to this script reside with me, he has said he won’t sign it and is suggesting he has some claim to my script. What do I do?”

**Craig:** Okay. Well, he does not have a claim to your script. Legally speaking, in terms of copyright, you are the author of your script. You have written every word. He has not created any unique expression in fixed form. What he’s done is act as an editor, and just as editors in the book world don’t have copyright claims on Stephen King’s novels, nor does this person have a copyright claim on your screenplay.

What this person may have a claim for is the right to be associated as a producer with this film. That claim is not something that’s adjudicated against you. That is something that they would have to deal with with a new producer that comes onboard. And, frankly, it’s kind of not your problem to the extent that it’s not specifically your problem.

However, when you’re talking to these new people you have to say, “Look, here’s this person. I don’t want them to be involved. They didn’t write anything. They’ve been acting as a ‘producer.’ They’ve been nothing but a hindrance, frankly. You should be aware that they’re there and so that’s something you guys have to work out.” And most likely the actual producers, the new financing entity would reach out to this “producer” and say, “We want to settle you out.” Or, “We want to exchange this guarantee of an onscreen producing credit for your release of the material and disappearing.”

There are all sorts of ways to make people go away. But, the two prominent ways are money and credit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That said, it’s hard for these people to actually claim anything, because when push comes to shove they don’t have a contract with you beyond a verbal and implied contract. And so it’s one of those deals where that would have to be hashed out if it actually got to a lawsuit. You want to avoid lawsuits.

So, my recommendation here is that you, in conjunction with your attorney and the new producer, go instruct them to handle this person and make them go away as need be.

**John:** I agree. I would also say just take a step back and imagine that the other person was writing this question. And he would probably phrase his question to us this way: “So, I’ve spent the last two and half years working with this writer, reading every draft, giving notes on every step. Today he shows up at my door saying that he wants me to sign this release that I have no involvement with the project whatsoever. What do I do? I feel like this kid is being incredibly ungracious for all the hours, and hours, and hours of work I’ve put in on this script. What do I do?”

And it’s easy to see his perspective on this, too. I would say he hasn’t done a terrific job of all the other things of producing. Maybe he actually gave you good notes? Maybe he really did help you get the script into good shape, but he hasn’t been able to sort of move the project forward. So, I don’t blame you for wanting to move forward on your own. But, you are going to need to figure out some way to have him taken care of in this process because it does sound like he was involved for quite a long time.

Where it gets really frustrating for me is when, like, literally something kind of passed over a person’s desk and they’re claiming producer credit on it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that happens far too often and it’s really maddening. And especially newer writers can find themselves in frustrating situations with that. And I wish I had a magic wand to sort of make that all go away and be better, but it does happen.

And there’s people whose names are on lots of movies who are just really stubborn and they get their names on movies, even if they weren’t involved in the actual making of the film.

**Craig:** This is certainly not something that’s unique to our business, although you see it all the time. Very annoying people often are rewarded for being annoying. And this may be one of those cases. I would point out — he’s in London and I’m not quite sure what the differences are because, you know, here in the United States we have work for hire. Frequently what you’ll see is an option agreement between a producer and a writer which does contractually codify the relationship and grant the producer certain exclusive rights to represent the screenplay as the producer.

That may not be the case in England, but if it is the absence of that agreement speaks volumes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, this is really where you would need to speak to a lawyer, or a barrister, as the case may be.

**John:** Find somebody with a nice white wig who seems to know something about the law.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Go speak to Rumpole of the Bailey.

But, I think the fact that you’re dealing already with the financing entity — they have their own attorneys. They should be able to handle this. This is one of those areas — I look for these all the time. This is something to always keep your eyes open for: Moments where your goals and your needs align with those of other people. And then use them, [laughs], so basically draft behind them. It is in their best interest to get rid of this guy, therefore you should line up with them and allow them to do it for you.

**John:** And it may only be a series of phone calls between these people that it just gets taken care of. And if this guy doesn’t have a lot of other credits then that may be the case.

Our next question comes from Will in Seattle who writes, “On your most recent podcast you and Craig were expressing disdain at the lack of description in some of the Three Page Challenge scripts, specifically the use of ‘INT. OFFICE — DAY.’

“Your criticism came from not knowing what kind of office we’re in. However, in some of the most professionals scripts I’ve read, like Sideways or Up in the Air, the respective writers had a very minimalist style and often do little to describe in more detail the settings. Is it simply your assumption that we’re not Alexander Payne or Jason Reitman? Does the fact that they’re already industry professionals give them license to leave out the little things?”

**Craig:** I think in those cases the fact that they’re directing the movie gives them the license to leave out those little things. And this is something that I brought up on the DoneDealPro board.

There’s a backwards thinking among a lot of new screenwriters that only if you are directing the movie are you allowed to be specific about camera motion, camera action, and be very specific about things that would theoretically fall under the purview of the director, like, you know, perfecting the location and so forth.

And in my mind it’s the opposite. When Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor write a movie together, they can write “INT. OFFICE” because they’ve already discussed what the office looks like. No one is coming in to rewrite them. And Alexander is going to go out and scout for the office he wants and he’s going to tell people the office he wants, so he can save some space and time on the page. He’s quite likely not writing the script to do anything other than service him as he makes the movie. Similarly for Jason Reitman.

But if you are a writing the screenplay to attract a director, and to attract financing, it is critical to me that you use your one and often only chance to express the entirety of your dramatic intention for what this film should be, look like, sound like, and ultimately how this film will impact the audience.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t want to tell Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman how to write, and they can use their minimalist INT. OFFICE — DAY; if that works for them, that’s awesome, great.

But I’ll say that even if you’re the director, throwing just the tiniest bit of description to that — sort of like, is it a strip mall office, is it a corporate glass monstrosity office — it does help. And it helps everybody else who needs to read the script to get a sense of what kind of world that you’re pitching this story for. So, everyone else who needs to read the script to sort of do their jobs would be a little bit serviced by having a little more description there.

Again, totally your choice and what you want to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s how — Todd and I, I mean, no one is coming in to rewrite us. We’re writing a screenplay for him to direct, we still do that stuff. I mean, for that very reason: we want the army of people that are going to be working on the movie to have that many fewer questions.

**John:** When you’re first sitting down with the location manager, he or she is pulling out a bunch of folders, and he’s showing you things that are probably closer to what your vision is of the thing so they don’t have to first ask you, “Describe this office to me; what should I be looking for?” I think in that first meeting they’ll have some sense of what you might be looking for and what might be appropriate. That’s why you give that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Chris from San Francisco Bay Area writes, “I’m trying to find a musical script writer. What is this person even called? A book writer? Scriptwriter? Probably not a screenwriter. Are there resources, networks, or hangouts where these people exist? I’m looking for both options of partnering or hiring somebody to write the book or reviewing books that people have already written.”

So, sort of in my wheel house here. “Book writer” is usually what you call the person who is writing all the stuff that happens in a musical, a stage musical, the stuff that isn’t sung. So, the book is all that stuff. So, for Big Fish I’m the book writer.

Stuff that happens for Broadway tends to be centered around New York. Dramatists Guild is the organization that sort of loosely represents the interests of people who write for the stage. It’s not a guild the way that the Writers Guild is a guild. It’s a looser sort of association. Doesn’t have like collective bargaining power.

The Dramatists Guild is where you probably first want to check out because their house magazine is actually really good and has good interviews with book writers, and musical writers, and playwrights who are working on all this stuff, and will get you started there.

In terms of reading books, you can find published versions of some of the musicals you would want to see. And that’s going to get you started. There’s not the same kind of script libraries that you’ll find for screenplays. But you’ll figure it out. And I figured it out. I didn’t have great firsthand examples to look at, but you sort of figure out like what gets said and sort of how it fits in with everything else.

**Craig:** Can you tell me what is the difference between a book writer and a dramaturge? Or is it dramaturgue?

**John:** I think you can probably say either one of those. And, again, I may be slightly wrong here, so if I speak incorrectly someone will write in and correct me. A dramaturge is a person who is responsible for working with the playwright, and eventually the director, on the dramatic engineering of a piece. And so if it’s an existing work it can be working with the director to figure out how to mine all of the goodness out of it. If it’s a new play, it’s someone who is working with the playwright to facilitate things.

So, it’s not a writer per se, but it’s in some ways like a creative producer I would say.

**Craig:** I see. Got it.

**John:** A person who’s helping out that way.

**Craig:** Got it. Okay, great.

**John:** Cool. Our next question comes from Hamish who writes, “In podcast 67 you and Craig talked about how hacky it is to establish a character’s backstory via magazine covers. The same day I read the shooting script of Frankenweenie and spotted the following…”

**Craig:** [laughs] I love it already.

**John:** “Burgemeister unfolds the newspaper to read the front page. INSERT NEWSPAPER: The headline reads MAYOR BURGERMEISTER TO KICK OFF DUTCH DAYS. A photo shows Mayor Burgemeister complete with sash and hat.”

**Craig:** That’s totally different.

**John:** “Burgemeister is pleased with the photo.”

**Craig:** That’s totally — how do you not see that that’s totally different?

**John:** I think it’s similar enough that it’s a valid criticism.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. Here’s the deal. The difference is expositing — am I allowed to say “expositing,” by the way?

**John:** Absolutely. Totally. It’s your podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to invent it if it’s not actually a word.

It is creating the exposition for an event or fact as opposed to creating exposition for a character’s essence or quality. That’s the difference to me. I don’t want — and I would presume this isn’t the opening of the movie of Halloweenie. [laughs] I’m going to call it that forever.

You know, when you’re meeting a character in the beginning of a movie it is super hacky to give us key bits of information on a magazine cover about them. It is all too common to use every day news delivery sources in a film to deliver actual news. That’s fine.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think sliding back towards the hacky column, it is in his first reveal. So, you’ve revealed that you actually haven’t seen Frankenweenie, but I’ll tell you that the paper arrives, you see that he’s meticulous with his lawn, he picks up the newspaper and we see his face in the photo and it’s also revealed that that is his face as well. So, it’s meant to be the joke that it’s exactly the same shot as we’re seeing is the photo that’s on there. But, it is hacky backstory in the sense of, like, that’s how we are establishing that he is the mayor.

**Craig:** Well, you know what I like though is that you took something that has the potential for hackiness and you put some spin on it so that there was more than just the information. You made a joke out of it.

**John:** Yeah. So, there’s a little bit of a spin. But I don’t want to run away from the criticism that it is a little bit hacky to do it. And I feel that in Frankenweenie the nature of our world and sort of how it all works, it’s less awful than it could be in other situations.

The truth behind why I did it in Frankenweenie is that there’s so few frames and minutes and seconds in that movie to get crucial information out, it was the only time that we were going to be able to establish that he was the mayor of the town.

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to stand in stronger defense of your work than you have here.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Mike in Los Angeles writes, “Let’s say hypothetically I have 12 weeks to write a script from idea to finished first draft, like my thesis script for example. How do you or Craig break down your work into daily goals to make sure you hit that deadline? I understand once I get into the writing that I can divide it out in a daily page count, but I’m more interested in how you do it prior to the writing. How are you breaking story, working with characters? How do you do it?”

**Craig:** Well, for me I am, because I outline very thoroughly, I am less concerned about how much time I’m taking during that process. I sort of feel like if I get that right then I look at what I’ve got left. Presumably it will be at least half of the remaining time. And the process of then dividing pages by 5 days a week to give myself a couple days off isn’t going to leave me with some crushing burden.

Sometimes I will sort of work backwards. I’ll say, “Okay, I have 12 weeks. I know I don’t like writing more than four pages a day. I feel like that hurts. That’s 20 pages a week. Presume that the screenplay is 120 pages and then I’ll narrow it down a bit, so we’re talking about six weeks. So, I have six weeks to break this outline out.”

And then I take a nice breath and I feel like I have lots of time, but I don’t do that so I’ll waste it — don’t waste any time. I start right away. And I begin — we talked about this before — everybody has different ways in. I like to begin with some big basics, the premise of the movie, a protagonist who is appropriate for that premise, a theme that is appropriate for that character and that premise, and instigating a beginning that is appropriate for that person, that matches to the end that is appropriate for that person.

And then sort of laying out the second act as a proven ground for that individual to go from where they are in the beginning to that very different character place at the end. And then what happens in between is writing. Even if you’re not actually writing, if you’re just doing cards or scene ideas or thoughts, that is truly where half of — 70%, 80% of what matters goes.

So, that’s my method.

**John:** In the question he’s saying, “from idea to finished draft,” but I honestly feel like the ideas phase can be a very long, amorphous period. So like for the ABC thing I just wrote, the idea phase was, you know, there was the idea, and then it was talking to Josh about it, and going to pitch it. And so by the time I was actually writing an outline everything was really, really fleshed out. So, at a certain point we had it up on the board and I had act breakouts and then I had to write up this outline. So, it’s really hard to say sort of when the clock started ticking on it.

But that was a case where TV — a lovely thing about TV is because there are act breaks I can say, like, “I’m going to write an act today,” and then it’s just done. And that was really simple and it’s very quick to write a TV script for those reasons. And actually the last acts are really short, so it goes even faster than that.

For a feature project I try to give myself daily page counts. Once the clock is really ticking and there are 12 weeks to turn this thing in, I will give myself daily page counts. And if I do set myself to five pages a day you get done really early. And so some days you won’t actually hit that, but other days you will hit that and it will all get finished.

What I will tend to do is a little carrot and a stick. And so I’ll make some deal with myself at the start of the week saying that if I write five pages every day then I get to buy myself something that I really want. And if I don’t actually hit those five pages a day then I don’t get that thing.

Other times I’ve had to sort of punish myself where if I don’t hit — any day that I don’t hit my pages I will have to make an anonymous donation to an organization that I despise.

**Craig:** Ha!

**John:** So, I try to sort of get the work done and feeling good, and feeling great, but sometimes it is just a matter of like cranking through the pages so you can get something finished.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, our last question is from Adam Pineless. Pineless, like a treeless mountain. He writes, “I’ve heard some films have 10 to 15 other writers come in and punch up a script. What’s up with that? What actually happens?”

So, punching up is a thing that happens largely on comedy scripts, before they go into production. Craig and I have both been part of comedy punch-ups. Are they a good thing, Craig?

**Craig:** I do think they’re good things. But it depends on what kind of punch up session you’re describing or punch up employment you’re describing. Very often on true comedies that are very joke driven, there will be one day where eight or nine comedy guys will be invited to sit in a room with the screenwriter, and the director, and the producer, and typically a studio representative, and you’ll go through the script.

Sometimes you go through the script and just talk about the script itself and kind of get the collective wisdom of people who have written comedy scripts before who can give you advice on character, plot, theme, things that don’t work, things that do work. And sometimes it’s literally just a page-by-page, “Any ideas for some jokes here?”

And we do this for each other. Typically the pay is somewhere between — it used to be $5,000. It has dwindled as low as $1,000 at times. Sometimes it’s $2,500. And we tend to do this for each other. I go to a lot of these things. And I have a little roster of people that I rely on when I want to do one for something I’ve written.

So, that’s fine. And I should point out that those writers are never eligible for credit. It is accepted from the credit process as not considered writing; it’s just “stuff” really. It’s just thinking, group thinking.

**John:** Yeah, because none of the writers in the room are actually writing anything down on paper. There is no literary material being created. There is just a discussion happening.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Sometimes I’m hired to punch up a script where I’m given a screenplay. It’s almost always very close to production. And I’m asked to go through and fix some dramatic things, fix some character things, and add some comedy here and there. And they usually give you a cheat sheet of where they believe the hot spots are and what they feel needs help. And this is typically done on a weekly basis, one week, or two weeks, sometimes three.

That is where movies can be greatly helped by the right person, but if the studio is chasing subsequent writers and there is a succession of people coming in and doing these things the script becomes a sort of flavorless mush. This is all separate and apart from a general parade of rewriting which can occur in development where people simply don’t know what the movie is supposed to be. It hasn’t been green lit yet and they just keep hiring writers to try different versions of the same idea.

And it’s quite rare that films like that work out well. There is one movie in particular I was asked to write, and I chose not to, and it had been around — this was a couple years ago — and it had been around and in development for so long that the friend of mine who had actually done work on it at one point, the draft that he did work on had the World Trade Center as a major plot point. [laughs]

So, it had been well over ten years in endless rewrite hell. And the movie that resulted was not a particularly good film. It’s just one of those things. At some point studios can’t stop chasing something and they should just stop. But, you know, these punch up groups, these occasional roundtables are actually quite useful, I think, and I always say if you get two really good jokes out of five hours of nine writers pitching jokes, it’s a victory. You got two great jokes.

**John:** I agree. So, the sessions that we’re describing, I hear them called “punch-ups,” I hear them called “roundtables.” Sometimes they’ll be preceded with a reading, so they’ll either bring in the real cast or just funny actors to read through things so everyone can hear it together and see sort of what’s working and also hear what’s not really working.

They mostly happen in comedy because that’s where a day’s work can actually achieve something. It’s finding some jokes. Because if you get two great jokes, and one of them makes it to the trailer, that was money really well spent and time really well spent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, that can be really gratifying. And just sometimes it’s not even like a brand new joke, but just like a slightly better version of a joke can help. A character saying a funny thing can be really useful.

So, I think they’re useful for comedies. You don’t see them very much in dramas. Craig’s point about a long parade of writers over the course of time, I worked on Tarzan which is at Warner Bros. So, recently they announced a new version that they’re trying to do at Warner Bros. And god bless them, you know, maybe there are 15 writers who’ve tried to do Tarzan there.

So, if that movie were to get made at a certain point I’m probably still on the chain of title for that, that long history going back, but I don’t know if a single thing I’ve written resembles what’s in Tarzan right now. And that’s an example of like, well, of course you’re going to keep trying to make that because that’s a great property, that’s a great brand. It’s just a really hard movie to make.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, studios experience internal turnover as well. People who control the development of properties are fired, they’re hired. Producers lose their deals. They come and go. Things go in and out of style. There are movies that are written of a certain kind that are seen as outdated or out of step with what people want, and then suddenly another movie comes along that makes it instep and in line with what people want.

And so these things happen in fits and starts. Personally, if I were running a studio, and I looked down at my development slate and saw a few of these things that had been kind of lumbering along, soaking up development dollars year, after year, after year, I’d kill them. Or, I would hire a writer-director, or a writer-director team to develop it because ultimately the conventional process is just simply not working for this project.

**John:** Yeah. One of the projects — we may have both worked on this. Did you ever work on Scared Guys over at Sony?

**Craig:** I remember reading it at one point. I don’t think I — no.

**John:** So, it’s a project that was at Sony for — it probably still is at Sony, probably someone is writing it right now. Probably it’s like literally on somebody’s screen right now.

It’s a pretty good premise, and when I was brought in to do a rewrite on it it was Kevin James and Ray Romano as two incredibly agoraphobic guys who have to go on this adventure. I don’t even really remember the premise that knocked them out of their agoraphobic little happy niche, but they had to go on a road trip. So, it was two agoraphobes on a road trip.

And it was fine and I enjoyed writing it. It was like a true comedy comedy, which I don’t do very often, but I was just writer 14 out of 29 on it at this point. And it will be fascinating to see if that movie ever gets made.

**Craig:** Did you ever work on Stretch Armstrong?

**John:** I did not. But that’s another legend, isn’t it?

**Craig:** I don’t know how you even have a WGA card if you haven’t worked on that movie. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That movie has had… — I worked on that very early in my career. I think I was the four millionth writer. I believe they’ve hit a billion. I believe they are officially in the billions. And the movie moved from studio to studio to studio. I mean, at some point someone — either someone is going to blow everybody away by figuring it out, or everyone will suddenly realize you can’t make a movie out of Stretch Armstrong. It’s boring.

**John:** The thing is Stretch Armstrong is like two-thirds of a good idea, but it’s that missing third that’s going to be really hard to ever reach. Because it’s sort of a good trailer, but I don’t know that we’re going to want to see that as a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. The version that I wrote back with my partner, and this was sort of I would say 1997-ish, was a Tim Allen comedy, so there you go, it’s 1997. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it was Tim Allen in basically a family comedy where he’s a single dad raising a couple of kids and he gets stretchy powers. And it was very broad and goofy, but it was really about family and stuff like that, you know. And it wasn’t at all — it was so minimally about being a hero because, you know, at least then… I would say now I don’t acknowledge that stretching is a heroic property. [laughs] It’s simply odd.

**John:** There’s a reason Mr. Fantastic isn’t really that fantastic.

**Craig:** No. No. Not at all. It’s such an inappropriately named character. He’s Mr. Vaguely Interesting.

**John:** Ha! Yeah.

**Craig:** So that was that one. And that still hasn’t been made.

**John:** The other example you gave which is where during production there is a series of writers that come through is usually a giant disaster. And the exception would be the first Charlie’s Angels famously had, like a bunch of people came in during production. I was off shooting DC, my doomed television show, and they went into production. And all sort of the A-list kind of people came in and did a week. And they were like, “What is this movie? It’s going to be a disaster. This is going to be the worst thing ever.”

But, god bless them, everyone, like, did the best they could. So Zak Penn was on, and I don’t know if Simon was on the first movie, but everyone — people you couldn’t believe helped out for a week and god bless them.

And the movie was a wreck, but it all kind of pulled together in a way. And it was the weird kind of movie that can actually support the like 15 different tones all happening at once. And then I came back in and sat in the editing room for a long time and we reshot and it worked. So, sometimes it does work, but it’s a brutal way to make a movie.

That’s why you shouldn’t go into production without feeling pretty darn good about how your script is, unless you want to kill yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. Charlie’s Angels is one of those movies that almost its charm is almost in its strange, funky nature. You know? That because the title implied a very kind of drudging remake of what was basically a very bad TV show — I’m sorry, you know, just a goofy ’70s era procedural, very cheese ball show. To kind of come at it from such a wild angle really made it fresh and was cool, you know. Charlie’s Angels was a cool movie. McG did an awesome job on it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you did, as well, of course. And I guess Zak. I’ve got to give Zak credit. You know I hate that.

**John:** Oh, god, the worst.

**Craig:** The worst! I love him.

**John:** Just the worst.

**Craig:** I mean, I love giving him crap. And I love him also.

**John:** Yeah. I think he listens to the show, so right now he’s…

**Craig:** Hey Zak!

**John:** …he’s enraged.

**Craig:** He’s enraged. How can you tell? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] How can you tell when Zak Penn is enraged?

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** That’s a good sort of a Zen question.

So, that’s the end of our questions from listeners this week. There’s actually a ton more but this is all we have time for today. But you and both had like cool new things come out this last week.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** I just saw your trailer for Identity Thief, like the longer trailer for Identity Thief, and I loved it.

**Craig:** Oh! Awesome! Great.

**John:** And so I love Melissa McCarthy. And I love Jason Bateman, so these are good things. And I can stand you. But I was just really, really happy with it. I’m so happy for Melissa and that you gave her good stuff to do. And a lot of physical violence takes place against Melissa McCarthy. She gets hit by cars, and things are thrown at her, and…

**Craig:** Yeah. We put her through the ringer. I mean, I didn’t love the first trailer that came out, only because as a teaser it really was just about, like, “Here’s a couple of kooky jokes and here’s a basic idea for a movie.” And this longer trailer gives you a better sense of the fact that there’s a cohesive story and that there’s something happening and a bit of a journey.

What the trailer — and I love it, actually, too. I mean, I’m really happy with the trailer. And I don’t mean that in a braggy way because I didn’t make the trailer. Trailers are different things; they live apart from movies. And so I think the marketing guys did a really great job with it. And they are — as they should — they are selling the comedy because it is a comedy and there’s a lot of really funny stuff.

What the trailer won’t impart at all, and I don’t think any TV commercials will, so I’ll just sort of impart it, is that the movie actually has a lot of really touching stuff in it. And Melissa McCarthy, she makes you cry. I mean, there’s a couple of spots where she gets you.

And so I like sort of selling big comedy, which we have, and then kind of surprising people with something that’s quite human. So, I’m looking forward to it, but I’m glad you liked it. I liked the trailer, too, and naturally you will include a link.

**John:** Oh my god, of course.

**Craig:** And the movie is coming out February 8. You’ll be hearing about it consistently until then.

**John:** I didn’t realize it was coming out that soon.

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Wow, that is really quick. So, that’s why you’ve been so busy getting that picture all finished up.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, yeah, scrambling. Sitting with Seth Gordon, our terrific director today, and Scott Stuber, our awesome producer, and it’s been a real family on this movie. Everyone has gotten along and just… — It’s a funny thing, when people like a movie then your romantic notion of how everyone should work together is real. Everybody starts to feel like a family that’s raising a kid together, and everybody is looking out for the kid, and everybody is watching each other’s backs, and respecting each other and what they bring.

And, you know, when it’s not that way, that’s when things can sometimes go completely awry. But in this case everybody’s been just dedicated to it. Melissa and Jason have been just dedicated to it. And on the one hand I’m a little sad that I stole Melissa from you. On the other hand I’m full of glee.

**John:** Yeah. I can always get her back.

**Craig:** Try! You try. [laughs]

**John:** It’s not like she’s not busy at all. She doesn’t have a TV show…

**Craig:** I’m like — I’ve got a death grip on that lady.

**John:** Yeah. She’s just great.

So, people have to wait till February 8 to see the movie though, right?

**Craig:** They will have to wait until February 8 to see the movie.

**John:** Now, what they could do right now is my new thing, which by the time people are listening to this podcast is available on the App Store, which is — finally — Karateka, which I just sent you the download code so you can get an early sneak peek of Karateka.

**Craig:** Yes I did. And even though I know the name is Karateka I will always call it what I called it when I when I was a kid which is “Kerotica,” as in erotica.

**John:** That’s how I called it when I was a kid, too.

**Craig:** That’s what I used to say.

**John:** When Jordan Mechner and I first started talking about making it, one of the first questions I had for him was like, “So, how am I actually supposed to say it?” Because I just remember the box that I got when we bought it, you know, it was a summer gift for ourselves, and I said “Kerotica,” because I didn’t even know what erotica was, but that’s just how you would pronounce.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Jordan says Karateka. His official word is that you can actually pronounce it however you’d like to pronounce it. He will gladly take any pronunciations.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So, we’ve been out on Xbox, and Steam, and PS3, but now the iOS version is out and done and I’m so happy because this is the one I’ve spent the most time myself doing, because while I play Xbox and PS3 they’re not my sort of native things. And I’m very much iPad. And so this is the one I sort of got to sink my teeth into and figure out how we’re going to translate all of the stuff that would happen with controllers, how we could do it in a touch way, and sort of how we could figure out how to make this game feel right and playable when you’re just on an iPad.

So, if you have unwrapped your iPad that you got for Christmas, your iPad mini, and you’re sitting by your tree and you’re listening to this podcast, and you feel like downloading it, go to the App Store right now. Because it’s only $2.99, which is a bargain. And we don’t have sponsors on the show per se, but if you felt like, “Wow, I wish I could give John and Craig a little bit of money to help pay for the costs of the show,” that’s one way you could.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s a good game. The things I like about it: One, I mean, just the nostalgia factor; being able to say I’m playing Kerotica again is really cool. And I don’t play Karateka but I do play Kerotica.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The iOS games that are not puzzle-oriented sometimes suffer from clumsy controls. I don’t like playing shooters on iOS. I just find it really annoying. But the controls here are elegant, and simple, and transparent to you while you play, which is great.

**John:** Cool. One of the things we had to figure out is the interface for — it is sound-based, so as you’re playing the game you can sort of hear the rhythm of like sort of how they’re going to attack. You can figure out your blocks based on the music that’s playing. The problem with the iPhone, or the iPad, too, is like, what if you’re on the subway and you’re playing and you don’t have your headphones on? You don’t want to be annoying around other people.

So, we had to figure out an interface for how to show you, give you symbols that would show you what’s coming up, even if you have the sound turned off. And so that was the stuff that took like the extra months. People kept asking, “Hey, when is it coming out on iOS?” It was figuring out that stuff.

**Craig:** Well, time well spent. And the other thing I like is the — and you talked about this before — a rather unique approach to handling death in a video game, because usually you get unlimited lives and death comes with either no penalty or kind of a setback penalty where you have to go back to a checkpoint.

And here your lives change who you are and your character and the possibility of success. There are levels of success, and if you can manage to play through the whole game without dying you achieve the true success of the game. But if you don’t, your character actually becomes sort of different. And in that way you have also kind of created a very novel approach to difficulty management because the typical scheme is that you start a game with a setting — easy, medium, hard.

In this game there is a setting and as you fail the game gets easier, but in doing so rewards you less should you succeed in the end.

**John:** Exactly. The reward of the game is completing the story with your true love, and that’s the ultimate mission. So, you’re going to be able to keep fighting and keep going, but as a slightly more powerful but slightly less desirable guy. And it was Jordan’s idea, god bless him. And the next thing about a screenwriter, like Jordan, figuring out how to tell game stories is like he really thought about like, “Well, what is the story consequence of dying?” Well, the story consequence is that she doesn’t get to marry her true love. She gets to marry the next guy who comes along who’s not… — but it’s not love.

So, it’s been fun to see that play out and people really respond to that.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** Cool. Craig, it’s time for One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** One Cool Thing!

**John:** Me first or you first?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I actually have one, so that’s already a shocking thing. But you decide who goes first.

**John:** Let me go first. So, my One Cool Thing is a book that everyone can buy. And so, again, if you have your iPad in your hand, the first thing you should do is download Karateka for $2.99 on the App Store. Second thing you might want to do is go over to Amazon, or your bookseller of choice, iBooks, whatever. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan, which is really great and fun and a great Christmas time read.

It’s sort of big nerd adventure story, so adventure story in the sense of like it’s Da Vinci Code or like a Raiders of the Lost Ark, but very, very nerdy in the best possible way. And it involves fonts, and fantasy novels, and Google Books scanners, and it’s just really terrifically well done. And so I think people who are interested in things that screenwriters are interested in, who are listening to this podcast, would probably dig it.

**Craig:** Very cool. I still, in the back of my mind, you’ve told me that I haven’t done this before, and in the back of my mind I feel like I have. But I’m sure one of our intrepid listeners will call me out if I’m duplicating.

But, you and I both attended a party thrown in John Gatins’ honor last night. John Gatins is the screenwriter of Flight, which is getting a lot of attention this awards season, as well it should. John is a terrific guy. And at that party I met a gentleman who used to sing on Broadway. In fact, he played Marius in Les Mis on Broadway.

And I’m a big musical fan. Obviously you are, you’re making a musical. And for awhile now I’ve been listening to SiriusXM on Broadway in my car with satellite radio. And SiriusXM on Broadway has this fantastic — it’s not fair to call him a DJ because he — I don’t know how you would describe him.

**John:** Host. He’s a host.

**Craig:** He’s kind of a host. I guess he’s sort of a host of huge, long, four-hour blocks of programming. And his name is Seth Rudetsky. And Seth is an accomplished musician and he works on Broadway, typically as an accompanist and a musical guy. And he’s been around for a really long time in the Broadway world and he’s amazing. He’s just a really smart, smart guy.

And what I love about Seth Rudetsky is that he combines these things that mean something to me only in combination. He has an excellent grasp of music theory, dramatic theory, and the theory of musicals if we can posit that such a thing exists, so a very good sort of intellectual theoretical understanding of that stuff. He also has amazing practical experience. He’s actually done it. He knows what it means to start a show from start to finish, succeed — he knows what it means to succeed, he knows what it means to fail. He knows how the sausage is made.

And lastly he is incredibly good at actually conveying those insights that he has to the average listener and the lay person. So, when you combine all three of those things you learn so much from him, sometimes in these little short bursts. And it got me thinking that that’s really, I think, what you and I aspire to when we talk about screenwriting are those three things in combination. And Seth Rudetsky is the Scriptnotes of Broadway.

And I am a big fan of his. I’ve never met him. You have met him?

**John:** I feel like I met him. In the travels I’ve encountered him in someplace, and so I think I shook his hand. But I listen to his show as well and I think he’s terrific. And, again, I would aspire that our show could do a little bit more of that. And as we start doing more interviews in 2013, I think that’s a good place for us to be in is to have people talking about the craft in an enjoyable way.

And we can interview people as they talk about their experiences the way he interviews them talking about how they made their shows.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know what he does that I love? Sometimes before he plays a song he’ll talk about a tiny little moment in the song that you would never notice. But he’ll talk about why it’s good. And he has such a passion for it. And so he’ll say, “Just listen for that moment and here’s why it’s important because of this.”

And then you hear it and you go, “Oooh!” Like, for instance, there’s a song You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun. And it was written for a belter. And he was talking about how when you write songs for belters like Ethel Merman who originated the performance of that song, that you want to find those moments in a song that allow the belter to belt.

And he says, listen, you know, in the chorus, [sings] “You can’t get a man with a gun. With a g-uUN.” And that whole like “g-uUN.”

That whole thing is really designed to let Ethel Merman just be Ethel Merman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’d never really thought about that before. And then he plays the song and you’re like, “Whoa, he’s right.” [laughs] “There it is! Brilliant.”

**John:** I second your recommendation. He’s terrific. And that’s on XM. And XM is actually kind of wonderful.

I never had XM until we got this new car and it came with three free months of XM and you quickly become addicted. And so, of course, then you start paying the monthly subscription.

**Craig:** Well worth it, for Seth Rudetsky alone.

**John:** Great. So, those are our Christmas presents for you. We have Mr. Penumbra. We have Seth Rudetsky. We have Karateka. We have Identity Thief. Hopefully some answers to questions people had. If you want more information or links to any of these things you can look at johnaugust.com/podcast where we’ll have the show notes for each and every episode of the show.

And, Craig, Merry Christmas. Happy Early New Year.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I guess we’ll see everybody in 2013.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Unless those Mayans get us.

**John:** By the time this podcast airs won’t the Mayan Apocalypse have already happened?

**Craig:** So this podcast won’t air?

**John:** Yeah, oh my god. We just wasted a lot of time didn’t we?

**Craig:** A lot of our last remaining minutes. Brutal!

**John:** I should have spent it with my family but instead I spent it with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that. Feels right.

**John:** Thanks Craig. Take care.

**Craig:** Bye.