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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/seattle-live-show-2019).

**John August:** And we’re done. Yes.

**Craig Mazin:** So great.

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

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

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

We are here in Seattle for our first ever Seattle live show.

**Craig:** Hear that, John? The sound of people that have been freshly enriched by a higher minimum wage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** They’re excited. They’re caffeinated. They’re full of their legal marijuana and they’re excited. Excited.

**John:** They are excited and why would they not be excited?

**Craig:** No, of course.

**John:** So, the Northwest Screenwriters Guild has been gently stalking us for several years to try to convince us to come up here and they finally succeeded, so a good lesson is to just stalk somebody for a very long time sometimes pays off. So Northwest Screenwriters and TheFilmSchool, all one word apparently, got us up here. I was here on my Arlo Finch book tour. You generously agreed to like hop on a plane and fly up here.

**Craig:** What happened was – thank you – John said come to Seattle and I said OK.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** I don’t really do a lot of thinking or what I would say independent thinking or decision making.

**John:** No, it’s not planned.

**Craig:** Normally just John tells me what to do. Earlier I didn’t know where he was and I got scared. So, just so you guys understand, and you probably do, how this works. It’s that.

**John:** Yeah. I text Craig like meet me in the lobby in five minutes and he’s like OK-K.

**Craig:** OK. Yeah. And I was on time.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Do not show up late for John August.

**John:** So let’s just get a general sense of what’s happening in the industry overall because we’ve done a live show in New York and a live show in Austin, which are both big film towns, a lot of film happens here. But not a lot of film happens in Seattle. So I was curious why Seattle wanted us up here. And so we got a chance to talk to the Northwest Screenwriters Guild at dinner and a lot of the folks who are in this guild who are doing stuff they want to be writing movies. They want to be telling stories cinematically and it’s a group that got together to help them figure out how to do that. And some of their members have gone on to do big cinematic stuff.

You know, there’s cinematic storytelling that’s not just about making big movies. It can be about video games. It can be about animation. There’s lots of other things that involve some of those characteristics as qualities.

**Craig:** Everything is kind of smooshing together these days which is nice. You guys are also kind of on the backdoor of one of the largest production cities in the world. And it’s something to think about. I know you have to sneak across the border. Obviously it’s a little trickier these days with the wall.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] The wall between us and Canada. Ridiculous.

**John:** International listeners might not understand that Seattle and Vancouver are just next door neighbors.

**Craig:** Kissing cousins.

**John:** And they are so close together but so much production happens in Vancouver. So little production happens in Seattle because of tax breaks and exchange rates.

**Craig:** And also the general politeness of Canadians. I mean, we should give them a little bit of credit.

**John:** Give a little more credit to the Canadians because the Canadians deserve–

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not saying you guys are rude. It’s not a “Hey!” See, it’s like “hello, how are you.” Oh, dual citizen? So you’ve learned to be rude?

**John:** So she’s a Canadian today but other days she’s an American.

**Craig:** Yes. Your alternate side of the street parking with your Canadians. Well, anyway, the point is you’re very close but I would imagine also that means there are probably a lot of training and educational resources here that you might not find in another city of Seattle’s size. I happen to be a huge fan of Seattle. I think it’s an amazing city.

Not every city has the spirit of art running through its veins. This one clearly does. So, I think–

**John:** It’s got a spirit of art and a lot of money. These are good combinations for a town.

**Craig:** Art and money.

**John:** Art and money.

**Craig:** Most of the people making art on the street do not appear to have the money. However, there are opportunities here. And so this is actually of all the places I think this is one of the – I don’t know, I think you guys are in a pretty great place. That said, you should probably move to LA.

**John:** At some point.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You should move to LA. So this was a Twitter thread that I actually got into today. And so I was retweeting some folks about when do you stop your day job which is a really good question. These were novelists who were talking about when you quit your day job, but as screenwriters it’s a tough question of like when do you stop working your day job.

For people who get staffed on a TV show, well, the choice is made for you. You’re now a full-time employee on a TV show so you’re not going to go to your day job anymore. But for screenwriters it’s a much tougher call. And so Shannon and Swift who are a writing team who do a lot of stuff they were saying like they were on the front page of Variety having sold their script and they still went to work that day because you just don’t know. You just don’t know when that next job is going to come, when you’re actually going to get paid. So, that idea of you made it, you didn’t make it, when do you stop working your day job is really tough.

**Craig:** I went through the same thing. The first thing I sold was in I think 1995 I want to say, possibly. And I don’t think I actually quit that job until late in 1996. So for a long time you’re just sort of waiting, which is smart. I mean, honestly a lot of people sell a script. Not to bum you guys out. You guys will sell many scripts. But some people only sell one. Boo those people.

And so I was kind of scared, but it was a weird thing to be – because you feel like you’ve made it. You know, you and I have talked on the show there’s no making it. There’s no breaking in. It’s not a thing. There’s just this strange progression. And then one day someone says to you, “I need you working on this now. You can’t go to your safe job anymore.” And that actually is a scary day.

**John:** It is a scary day. And if you get staffed on a TV show, well great, so you have 20 weeks of work, but then what happens – or hopefully 20 weeks, maybe it’s 10 weeks of work. But what happens after that? And a thing you guys should understand is that as television has gotten just shorter and shorter seasons, well that’s great for a viewer. I like a short season. I like being able to get through all of it. But as a writer that can be really tough because if you’re only working on those 10 weeks, those 20 weeks, well you’ve got to get on another show. You’ve got to find ways to fill a whole year.

And so I think we’re going to see writers having to do a lot more scrambling as they jump from show to show to show, or trying to find the next show down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah. So maybe just quit now.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe just stop. That’s really our message. Or our anti-message.

**Craig:** The crazy part is there’s more jobs than ever before. It’s pretty awesome actually. You guys are in a pretty great time. There are more jobs than ever before. Almost all of them are in television, but that’s OK because television is more movie-like than ever before. But it is true. There is a certain pressure now on the way you live. That said, people are living that life quite successfully and some people are living it incredibly successfully. And I would add that aside from money there are other parts of this job that are so fulfilling and so lovely that they’re worth almost as much as money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which you don’t hear very often, but they are.

**John:** So, so much of this conversation we could have every day in Los Angeles. We do sort of have it every day in Los Angeles. But when we decided to come up here to Seattle my first question to Craig is like, well, who should we have on the show? Who is a special Seattle person we could have on the show? And Craig was like, oh, oh, ooh, I know exactly who we should have on the show. So tell me what was your instinct behind having Emily.

**Craig:** So Emily Zulauf is somebody I’ve known for many, many years. I met her when she was working at Pixar. Pixar does this interesting thing where – so they’re Oakland. I was going to say up in Oakland, but it’s down in Oakland. And they are always looking for people to write. You’d think like, oh, they’re Pixar. But the way that animation is done, some of you may be familiar with this, there are so many people creating and so many people writing that a lot of times they’re looking in places for writers that you might not think. And a few years ago Emily came down with Mary Coleman, another development executive from Pixar, to meet some people who they had read some scripts and liked and I was one of those people. And I’m a huge Pixar fan. And we had this lovely lunch. And then I guess about a year later we ran into each other again at the Austin Film Festival which is a fun thing. I don’t know – has anybody gone to the Austin Film Festival?

**John:** There’s some hands up. Great.

**Craig:** Look at all you. Good for you. So we ran into each other there and we just decided – she was like we decided that we would be friends, but mostly I was like I don’t like anyone, so when I meet somebody that I like I’m like, OK, we’re friends now and they don’t have a choice because it’s hard for me to meet people that I like. Because I’m a bad person full of umbrage.

So, we became friends. And she’s got a remarkable story mind and she also came out of this place that is legendary and has created some of the most incredible stories of all time. And, in fact, is one of the few institutions in the world that I think is mostly just obsessed with pure storytelling. And she’s actually in a different endeavor now. She’ll tell you about that. But maybe we should welcome her down.

**John:** Emily Zulauf will you please come and join us here.

**Emily Zulauf:** Hey guys.

**John:** Emily, so at dinner I was trying to figure out how I should introduce you. Emily Zulauf is a blank – but you do so many things. Talk to us about what you’re doing now and how you would describe yourself on a resume.

**Emily:** Oh god. So right now I am running story for a new video game company that I can’t talk about.

**John:** She’s under so many NDAs.

**Emily:** I’m so scared.

**John:** There’s like a red dot aimed at her forehead right now.

**Emily:** I know. It was my honest reservation about doing the podcast was I can’t talk about any of this. So that’s what I’m doing right now in secret. And, yeah, prior to that I did some freelance writing. I was the executive director of a nonprofit for a hot second. And I was at Pixar for almost eight years. I was the script supervisor on Inside Out and I was in creative development for about 3.5 years.

**John:** That’s great. You are also a friend of Tess Morris.

**Emily:** Yes.

**John:** Who is a very frequent Scriptnotes guest. And so I always think of you with Tess Morris, because I always see you at the Austin Film Festival right with Tess.

**Emily:** Yeah. That’s a great association. I totally appreciate that. I want to keep that going.

**John:** You know what? We’re happy to have you by yourself. So, when we have–

**Emily:** Yeah. No more Tess.

**John:** No more Tess. This is a Tess-less episode. So, there’s so many things about what you’ve worked on that I want to get into because they’re different than what we normally experience as screenwriters. First, I want to talk about process because Pixar is just a very different story and creative process than what we’re used to as screenwriters because Craig and I we just go off in our little rooms and we beat ourselves up and we write our stories. That’s not the Pixar way at all.

I remember going up to a meeting at Pixar where I gave a little talk, gave a little class, and then they were like, “Oh yeah, and then we’re going to do a two-day offsite to work on this one moment at the end of the second act.” I’m like I would kill myself. But it works for Pixar. So, how does it work and why does it work?

**Emily:** Like how do people not kill themselves?

**John:** How do people not kill themselves?

**Craig:** There’s actually quite a high suicide rate there.

**Emily:** It’s a very tall building.

**Craig:** They’re dropping like flies.

**Emily:** It’s a very tall building.

**Craig:** There isn’t. No there’s not.

**Emily:** It’s totally a joke.

**John:** People hanging themselves from a little lamp.

**Craig:** So touchy here.

**Emily:** Starting dark.

**John:** So what is – I mean, that two-day offsite was probably a real thing and you probably do that.

**Emily:** Yeah. We didn’t make that up.

**John:** That actually does happen. So, what is the process? So something like an Inside Out, is there a script at the start or is it just an idea that – tell me.

**Emily:** Yeah, so usually what it has been traditionally, and I guess I want to caveat this by saying I’m not there now. They’re obviously in a transitional period and so this might be changing a little bit. But sort of traditionally what it has been is that the director is identified first by some group of the executive team. And that director is responsible for coming up with three different pitches of stories that that person wants to do. And so part of what we do in creative development is sort of support them as they’re trying to figure out what that is that they’re interested in. And coming up with sort of a rough pitch for all of those. And then they pitch that to whoever is in charge.

**John:** Whoever is in charge. Let’s stop though for one second though. When you say a director is pitching three ideas, they’re really pitching sort of three story areas, or they’re pitching three like I want to do a story that’s about this, or about this idea, but it may not have the exact characters or sort of what’s going to happen.

**Emily:** For sure. Yeah, it’s definitely like the roughest outline. It would fit on probably a page or a half a page depending on how much they fleshed it out. And it’s usually trying to find three areas that feel distinct enough and different enough that the president of the company can say I like this direction. You’re certainly not – you know, when they buy off on an idea they’re certainly not buying off on something that looks like a full treatment or definitely not a full script.

**Craig:** And they’re basically saying go ahead and take some time to dig at this little vein in the mountain and see if there’s stuff there.

**Emily:** Exactly. Like run that direction. But certainly not at the point of like this makes perfect sense.

**Craig:** I heard a story that Finding Nemo just began as – was it Andrew Stanton?

**Emily:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Saying “fish.” Just started with fish. And everyone was like, yes, of course, fish.

**John:** We’re going to do fish.

**Emily:** There’s a pretty wide variety in how much people have prepared for those pitches. And some of it has to do with how comfortable you are. You know, we’re asking people to – I mean, with any director you have a lot of different skillsets that have to exist in one person. But certainly we’re asking somebody whose job is not pitching to figure out how to get up and pitch effectively.

**John:** To how big of a group would that person need to be able to pitch?

**Emily:** Well, ultimately – and this is where I’m going to fudge around on it again – historically that was just John Lasseter. I assume now that is mostly Pete Docter. But there certainly are other people who will show up in those meetings. But ultimately there’s sort of one decider at the studio. It’s just sort of how the hierarchy is structured. And depending on how comfortable you are makes a big difference in how you pitch.

**Craig:** I mean animation in and of itself has so much pitching from moment to moment that at some point I assume people just get over whatever kind of baseline of fear they had because story artists are constantly pitching.

**Emily:** Yeah. And the majority of our directors come out of story, too. So most of them do have a baseline of at least being comfortable enough to get up and talk about story. But there’s always a process that everybody goes through when you’re new at anything. And pitching to the head of your company is not the same as pitching to the rest of your story team.

**Craig:** Right. When you know like I have a job now, so the worst thing that happens is I have to just keep doing my job.

**Emily:** Right. Exactly. And then I think they’re doing I think a really wonderful job right now of starting to pull from other places more. So, if you’re coming and I’m totally making this up, I don’t know that this is true. But if you’re coming out of lighting for instance like that’s not necessarily going to be your area. So part of what we would do in creative development is just pitch prep, is just help people get comfortable to talk about their story and how to do it and what the beats are.

**Craig:** I had no idea. That’s so nice.

**Emily:** Isn’t that nice?

**Craig:** You’re a good person.

**Emily:** We’re very nice.

**John:** There’s a whole department that does not exist at a traditional studio at all because–

**Craig:** I feel like this is the opposite department where they teach you – they just remind you repeatedly before you go into a room that it’s quite likely you’ll fail.

**John:** That you’re all terrible and it will never get past here.

**Craig:** But good luck.

**John:** So because we’re in Seattle, Amazon headquarters, I know that Amazon has this policy of when they’re going to start on a new project one of the first things you have to do is write the press release announcing the finished version. And it feels so different from what you’re describing. So these directors who are pitching these story areas they don’t really know what the final movie is. They don’t even know what sort of happens in it. They’re just describing an area, a vision, so it’s not a specific kind of thing.

When Craig and I go in to pitch something, like we’ll get called to the mat on details about like well how do you get to the second act moment.

**Craig:** I just tell them, I’m like shut up.

**John:** Shut up.

**Craig:** It’s a pitch.

**John:** Shut up Sean. I can do it.

**Craig:** Just shut up, Sean. I’ve never said shut up to Sean. He’s a nice guy. Super nice.

**Emily:** In fairness I think they do usually have a story sketched out. I think the difference is that it will change–

**John:** They know it’s going to change.

**Emily:** So dramatically. So a lot of times even though you go in and you pitch a story you’re really pitching the world. And you’re really pitching like do you want to live in this space for a while.

**Craig:** And you’re pitching to a creative person. You know, most of the time for us – not that producers aren’t creative, but we’re pitching to people that don’t write. So a lot of their expectation is tell me a story. But when you’re pitching to people that do write, when a writer friend pitches something to me, sometimes it is just fish because a question that I will always ask somebody, like somebody says, “OK, can you read these first 20. I’m lost. What’s happening here?” Sometimes the question you just ask is what made you feel fascinated in the first place and maybe that’s kind of what happens in those meetings is someone just shows this little piece of spark because they want to tell, there’s like a little thing. Well let’s go back to that seed.

**Emily:** I think that’s totally true. And I think that’s also sort of what our job was in creative development too is to start poking at those questions and help you articulate why does this matter to me so that when you walk into a meeting that’s what you’re–

**Craig:** When they ask you why does this matter to you.

**Emily:** And you’re like I don’t know.

**Craig:** I need my healthcare. That’s not a great answer.

**Emily:** I really enjoy money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I bought a car I should not have bought and…

**John:** Well, Emily, here’s a crucial difference though is these folks who are coming in to do this, the people you’re working with, they’re already working for Pixar so they’re already getting a paycheck. So it’s not that like I’ve got to make this happen or else I’m dead. They’re already working there. So you can support them because they’re already part of your family.

My question though is how many people are pitching their kind of project at Pixar? Because you’re only making two or three movies a year. How many folks are trying to get one of their movies up and running? Is it 20? Is it 30?

**Emily:** No. You have to be invited to pitch a feature.

**John:** OK. And to be invited you probably were a super star on some previous project.

**Emily:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Or you get a Golden Ticket.

**Emily:** Right. Or there’s a line outside the studio and one person comes in a year.

**John:** One person gets the ticket.

**Emily:** But if you want to make a short it’s a much more open process. So that ends up being more of a training ground. And then there’s some people who made a short and did it successfully and then moved on to features. But, yes, if you’re getting to pitch a feature it’s a small group.

**John:** Now, one of the rare things that you get to do which I don’t hear other people talking about is Pixar brings in writers to work for a time on a project and it was part of your responsibility to find those writers who would come in to do that stuff. And so we have a lot of people who want to be writers in animation or writers at all and how would you find their scripts and what are you looking for in those scripts that might say like oh this is a person who could help us out. What are you looking for in scripts?

**Emily:** It’s a lot of matchmaking because we’re trying to match with a very specific director. Right? So it’s matchmaking also in the way that, you know, if your friend asks you to set them up with somebody you have to read between the lines of what they think they want and then what they actually need. And there’s a little bit of that that goes on as well.

**Craig:** That’s why I keep failing at that. I just do what they told me.

**Emily:** Like, OK.

**Craig:** That’s not what they really – argh!

**Emily:** No, I know. Wants and needs, Craig, we’re going to talk about it later.

So a lot of times it’s sitting down with a director and talking about what they think they need for the project. And then, you know, knowing who they are and understanding how they traditionally worked. And so sometimes the people that you filter to them are actually a little bit more informed.

But generally we were looking for people – it sounds sort of cliché because we’ve said it so many times – but it’s smart with heart. People who can write in this space that is both funny and where the character – where the humor is really coming from the characters and driven by the characters.

The thing that we get a lot that we don’t need is people who’ve written children’s animated scripts. Because we make children’s animated movies it’s a really logical idea that this is what we would want to see. And, in fact, we’ve never hired anyone off of a script like that. We’ve only ever hired people off of – you know, we hired Mike Arndt off of Little Miss Sunshine, for instance, which it would be hard to say that that’s like children’s animated.

**Craig:** Talk a little bit more about the heart part. Because I think sometimes people struggle as they’re starting out or continuing their path as a writer to figure out how to be emotionally moving without being formulaically saccharine or sentimental. Can you see what the difference is? Where is the line? And what makes something proper heart as opposed to formulaic sentimentality?

**Emily:** I wish I had like a really easy answer for that.

**Craig:** Take your time. We’re on radio. Take an hour.

**Emily:** I’m just going to sit here.

**John:** I think we’re done. I do have a theory though and maybe you can expand upon this. Is that when you see sort of false heart it’s just spread over the top of it. It doesn’t feel like it’s earned by the characters and it doesn’t feel like the movie itself is generous, that the movie is generous with its characters. That it’s letting them struggle but ultimately overcome some of the things that they’re doing. It doesn’t let them make bad choices and learn from them. It’s just kind of spread over the top of it like frosting on a cake.

**Emily:** And it’s also easy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well that to me, because the thing about Pixar movies that’s always fascinated me is how brutal they are to their heroes.

**Emily:** Totally.

**Craig:** Tortuous. Brutal and mean. And when they figured out how to be terribly mean to a character then they add one more thing on to make it awfully mean. And in a weird way I think sometimes when people are aiming for heart what they’re aiming for is happy. They’re aiming for like a happy cry and a wonderful moment. But in fact heart comes from misery.

**Emily:** Yeah. And I think – and I agree with you. I think they do [laughs] – that’s the end.

**Craig:** So you guys got a shot at this.

**Emily:** Heart comes from misery.

**Craig:** Heart comes from misery. Well, because I don’t really care in the end if something nice has happened to somebody whose prior experience was a little less than nice. I want it to be awful. I mean, that’s classic literature.

**Emily:** I totally agree with you. And I think obviously they’re not afraid to let their characters, you know, hit that point. I will say not to – I feel like I’m pitching Michael Arndt today.

**John:** Well Michael Arndt is fantastic.

**Emily:** He’s fantastic.

**John:** He’s a good guy.

**Craig:** We love Michael Arndt.

**Emily:** But when he did – I watched his Endings talk that he did which I guess this is now just a pitch for his Endings talk. But I thought that was also really, really insightful about just this idea that you can’t just flip one set of stakes at the end. You really have to flip the sort of philosophical stakes of what your movie is saying and what it’s about.

**Craig:** Which means you have to know that your movie is supposed to be saying something in the first place.

**Emily:** Well, yeah, there’s that, too.

**Craig:** Your movie is supposed to be saying something in the first place.

**John:** Your movie should have a point.

**Craig:** Yeah. There should be an arguable point. An arguable point.

**John:** Yes. It’s sort of like what we always say. Your question at the end of this has to actually be a question. Your movie actually has to make a philosophical argument that it actually answers at the end of this.

**Craig:** What’s your movie about? Brotherhood. No.

**John:** No, no, more than that. There’s not a challenging thing there.

**Craig:** Family. Hmm.

**John:** Oh, no, no, no.

**Craig:** No. Sometimes the best thing you can do to show love to somebody is to let them leave you. Possibly permanently. When they are all you have.

**Emily:** Which also I have to say–

**Craig:** Doesn’t that feel like a movie? They should make that movie but with fish.

**Emily:** I’m a real sucker for movies that don’t end like “happily,” where you get the emotional catharsis of the film but you don’t–

**Craig:** If at the end of Finding Nemo the mom came back. Like it turned out she wasn’t eaten at all.

**John:** Oh, Nemo.

**Craig:** Oh look, and she’s here. And Dori remembers everything.

**Emily:** Right. I mean, genuinely I think one of the things that Pixar does really well is they do set up that hurt at the beginning. And they don’t undo it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Emily:** So, once you set it you let that–

**Craig:** They lean into it.

**Emily:** You lean into it. And you let that be the thing that’s guiding your character. And so I think you know, when I read scripts I’m also looking for that. I’m looking for people who are willing to let bad things happen to their characters.

**Craig:** Let bad things happen.

**Emily:** And then let the character react to it.

**John:** So Emily tell us about, like these scripts you’re reading, where do those scripts come from? Because Pixar is not a WGA shop so you don’t have to be a WGA member to be writing for Pixar. Where are you finding scripts that have this smart with heart that work for you?

**Emily:** Well this is the news that I feel like nobody is going to like, which is they’re mostly coming from big agencies. They have–

**Craig:** Well they’re all represented at big agencies.

**John:** Oh absolutely.

**Emily:** Yeah, no everybody. Like me too. You know, mostly they are coming through that way. But we also look at the Nicholls and we look at Austin.

**Craig:** What about short films that come, so not scripts, but rather little films, short films or any kind of expressed art that is coming in not from an agency but something that you just find out in the wild?

**Emily:** I think those are always sort of exciting little gems but they have to be – for us – backed up with written words. So, we have to see, you know, a lot of what we’re asking a writer to do is we have this incredible team of people of story artists who are all dedicated to making the story great. So you’re not by yourself, but you are – if you’re the writer you’re the person who is actually putting words on the page and like dialogue in the mouths of the characters. And so even if you’ve made an amazing short film, unfortunately part of what we’re looking for from a writer is to make sure you can do the structure. Make sure that you understand–

**Craig:** But that’s kind of fortunate in a sense because what you don’t get is fooled by auteurs and directors that aren’t really – because I think sometimes there are people that can make beautiful shorts that aren’t really writers. They’re just doing this little impressionistic wonderful thing. But these people are writers. So that’s a good sign.

**Emily:** Yeah. And I think that the truth is, I mean, anybody who has tried to write a short and then tried to write a feature knows that those are two different beasts, right? And so if you can write a great short but when you try to go expand it into a feature it very quickly–

**Craig:** Jog around the block/marathon.

**Emily:** Yeah. And so I think if you can make a beautiful short I think that’s fantastic and I think that’s an incredible thing to have and it’s another thing in your portfolio. But for animation you’re going to have to have an actual script.

**John:** Emily, my question is like let’s say you meet with a writer and is it a phone call first to talk with her about the script you read and then you bring her up to see if she’s a good fit? What is the dating process like for–?

**Emily:** Thank you for saying her John.

**John:** But you’re trying to get this writer to work on this project and see if it’s a good match. Obviously there’s a personality thing. Let’s say you all agree that this is the writer. This is the one we want. But what is she actually going to do? Is she going to write a full script or is she going to work on some scenes? Because that’s the thing I never really understood about Pixar is does any one writer actually finish a whole script or is everyone just working on little sections and it’s all getting assembled over the course of years?

**Emily:** At the beginning, like when you’re first in development, you probably do have one writer who writes a script all the way through. And it’s like the first draft and it’s really rough and no one will ever see it. But once you get into production everything becomes a big jigsaw puzzle. So everything goes out of order. You start boarding the sequences completely out of order which means you’re rewriting the sequences out of order. Sometimes depending on the project sometimes that writer will be the only person who writes. But a lot of times on a lot of projects there’s either a story artist who also writes or a director who also writes or a co-director or head of story. And so while the writer is still the writer and is still sort of the main person watching the full script you will often have people sort of come in and touch things along the way. But, yes, it’s a big giant jigsaw puzzle. And one of the most difficult things I think for our writers is that you do have to, you know, here’s all these moving pieces. They’re changing all over the place. And yet you still have to have the whole thing kind of in your head, which is–

**Craig:** That’s the job.

**Emily:** Just like a–

**John:** But it’s a very different job than what Craig or I usually do.

**Craig:** Well, it is, but I would say–

**John:** Well, in production I guess.

**Craig:** When you get in production that’s happening.

**John:** So that would happen, I mean, it happens for you on Chernobyl. It happens for me on a Charlie’s Angels where everything is just crazy. But you’re like, oh no, no, this is actually the movie we’re trying to make and you’re trying to remind people. But, there’s a lot of voices. So when I talk about that like we’re going to do a two-day offsite about this thing, so who would be in that two-day offsite? There would be storyboard artists. There would be the writers – writer or writers who are on. The director. And is everyone just pitching ways to get through this moment or new things? What happens?

**Emily:** It would depend on the nature of the offsite. Most of our off-sites are actually brain trust off-sites. So that would be all the other directors at the studio.

**John:** OK, great. So it’s like a council of elders looking at this project.

**Craig:** Nothing creepy about that in any way, shape, or form.

**John:** A brain trust. So they wheel out the brains in jars. They all stare at the project.

**Craig:** We are offsite.

**Emily:** We give them a little special–

**Craig:** Why do they have to go offsite? That building is amazing.

**Emily:** I know. It’s huge.

**Craig:** Where do they go? Like a La Quinta or something?

**Emily:** Denny’s.

**Craig:** Denny’s?

**Emily:** We go all over the place. It’s just sort of wherever the producer finds. But it’s like the idea–

**Craig:** That’s what happens when every movie makes a billion dollars. You’re like we’ve got to spend some of this money. Literally it’s coming out of the pipes. Uh, let’s go to Yosemite.

**Emily:** I don’t think we’ve ever been to Yosemite.

**Craig:** See?

**John:** Yeah. Good idea.

**Craig:** There’s an idea.

**Emily:** Somebody is going to hear this.

**Craig:** Mountains!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh no, you already did – volcanoes did it. Pixar did it.

**John:** So, coming out of one of those sessions you would have new ways to sort of get through this thing. But the brain trust thing is really interesting. So we had Jennifer Lee on the show to talk about Frozen. And she talked about the brain trust and like the Disney brain trust that you’re showing these early cuts and all of the other directors and all of the other big powerful people are watching this and seeing this thing which is not very good in front of them. And having to figure out how we get it to this next stage. And she actually stepped up in Frozen because she had the answers and she became the writer of Frozen.

Because they had all these pieces and she’s like, oh no, the way you do this is to do that. Here you go. Let’s make this movie. And I’m sure–

**Emily:** It’s her own fault for talking.

**John:** It’s her own fault. Now she’s running Disney.

**Emily:** What a tough path.

**John:** It worked out pretty well for Jennifer Lee.

**Craig:** It can happen to you.

**Emily:** Speak up.

**John:** It can happen to you. Speak up with the right ideas.

This brain trust thing is a kind of thing that I think could only really happen in animation because animation is the only cinematic art form where you have this constant iteration. So even on live action features we go through cuts and stuff but there’s only so much we can change in a cut versus a Pixar animated film. You could change fundamental things. That sidekick character could become the main character. You can really revise stuff.

**Craig:** Well in live action there are people whose job is simply to get everyone to stop changing things. There’s an enormous compelling force once you start spending money to stop changing things. And very typically as the writer you’ll come on set and someone will walk up to you and say, “You didn’t change anything, did you?” Well, that’s what they’re paying me to do. “Ugh, OK. But now we have to figure things out. We were going to shoot here. Now we have to shoot here. This person was going to wear this. Now they have to wear that. They’re not even available on that day.” And so on and so forth.

Whereas in animation, change it.

**Emily:** Yeah. I mean, in fairness there’s a schedule in animation that–

**Craig:** That they blow through constantly.

**Emily:** That they blow through constantly. There’s still poor long suffering people whose job it is to keep us on schedule who like–

**Craig:** No one listens to them.

**Emily:** They try so hard.

**Craig:** They’ve been moved offsite.

**Emily:** They’re having a permanent offsite.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Emily:** It’s a Denny’s.

**Craig:** And not in the United States anymore.

**John:** So most of the animated features I’ve done have been stop motion, which is a different beast because in stop motion we can’t tweak anything. So we’ll do cinematic sketch versions, but once we shoot a frame it’s just done and we can’t fix or tweak anything.

**Craig:** Well it’s like live action animation.

**John:** All of the challenges of animation with all of the challenges of live action, just put together. How difficult can we make it?

**Craig:** The South Park guys who did Team America.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** On day three: why did we do this? This is a nightmare.

**John:** This is a terrible, terrible choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we’re stuck. We have to keep going.

**Emily:** It’s true. If you are an indecisive person animation – like computer animation is your jam. It’s a great idea for you.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** I think we’re going to go out of sequence here because this feels like a good moment to introduce a brand new game. So, when we come back from this I want to talk about naïve characters, but before we get to that I want to try this new game. So, as I flew in here last night I had this vision for a game. And it partly came from sometimes – and I’m curious what you guys do about this – when you have an idea in the middle of the night do you actually get out of bed and write it down or do you just like, oh no, I’ll remember it in the morning. Craig, do you write down the stuff you think at night?

**Craig:** Yeah. My iPad is over here so I might email it to myself. That’s my quickie note thing. Except it so rarely is any good.

**John:** No, it rarely is any good.

**Craig:** A lot of times it’s just Ambien talking, I’ve got to be honest with you.

**John:** Sometimes I have no idea what the idea was. I just see these things together and I’m like I have no idea what this is. Emily, do you write your stuff down?

**Emily:** Yeah. But I have Evernote on my phone and then I type things. But also I’m really tired so I don’t check to make sure it’s spell-checked, made sense or anything. So, very, very often I open it like a couple days later and it’s actually nonsense words. I did it too fast and it didn’t autocorrect correctly. And then I’m just staring at orange sofa couch and I’m like I don’t know what that is.

**John:** Yes, but it was very important to you at like 12:30 in the morning.

**Emily:** It was so important at the time, yeah.

**John:** This idea kind of comes from that, but it also comes from a very Hollywood concept which is the open writing assignment. And so what an open writing assignment means is that there is a project that a producer or a studio has and they’re looking to hire a writer on this open writing assignment. And it can be just a very vague idea, but they’re bringing in writers to pitch their take on this open writing assignment. And so new writers will spend a tremendous amount of time coming up with takes so they can pitch on an open writing assignment. It’s one of the things you do a lot as a new screenwriter.

And so I thought tonight we’d do some open writing assignments and we have a great audience here who have helped us figure out some of the things we need to incorporate into this open writing assignment.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** I gave some people some homework in here. Raise your hand if you did the homework that’s on the slide up there. Oh, a lot of people did this. All right. I’m going to pick six people at random and I’m just going to come to you and ask. And I’m going to ask each of you one piece of what you did up here. So, raise your hand, someone in the second row. What is the genre of the movie that you wrote down?

**Fe**Male Audience Member:**** Drama.

**John:** OK, so we have to write a drama.

**Craig:** I can do that.

**John:** OK, we need to write a drama.

**Craig:** I’ll email it to myself.

**John:** What is the general setting of this drama we’re writing?

****Male Audience Member:**** Los Angeles.

**John:** So it’s a drama set in Los Angeles. All right, I’m going to come up here. I feel like a game show host here. What is the profession of the hero in the movie?

****Male Audience Member:**** Weatherman.

**John:** OK. It’s a drama about a weatherman in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** They’ve made this movie, but OK. Keep going.

**John:** How about you right here.

**Fe**Male Audience Member:**** Find out what is killing people.

**John:** Oh, it’s a drama about a weatherman in Los Angeles who has to find out what’s killing people. And who is the villain? You right there, who is the villain in our story?

**Fe**Male Audience Member:**** Classicism.

**John:** Classicism. Classicism is the villain. Oh, this is really good.

**Emily:** Oh no.

**Craig:** Someone has been to college.

**John:** Right here, I need a big trailer moment.

**Male Audience Member:** A meeting of gangs in the parks.

**John:** A meeting of gangs in the park.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, what was the last category?

**John:** A big trailer moment. It’s a meeting of gangs in the park. So I think what we need to come up with a pitch on is a project that is a drama set in Los Angeles about a weatherman who has to fight classicism–

**Craig:** And find out what’s killing people, which is classicism.

**John:** Find out what’s killing people, which is classicism, obviously. And there has to be a big meeting of gangs. So I kind of have a vision of The Warriors a little bit. Emily, talk me through—

**Emily:** No, I had a little moment of like wondering if you get some sort of weird like weather patterns that are only affecting certain areas of Los Angeles.

**John:** Microclimates.

**Emily:** Microclimates if you will.

**Craig:** Like douchebaggery is causing sleet over Brentwood?

**Emily:** And killing people.

**Craig:** And killing people that we want to die.

**Emily:** It’s a really short movie.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Well, how about actually–

**Craig:** It’s like over Howard Schwartz’s house.

**John:** But like lightning bolts. Like a lightning bolt could come down–

**Craig:** Schulz. His name is Schulz, right?

**John:** Howard Schulz, yes.

**Emily:** Also, he’s here.

**Craig:** What’s that?

**Emily:** He’s here.

**Craig:** Howard Schulz is in the audience?

**Emily:** No, no. Here in Seattle.

**John:** Hello! Please don’t run for president. Thank you.

**Craig:** I know. He employs most of the people here.

**Emily:** Do you think he listens to your podcast? Wouldn’t that be great?

**John:** Oh, it would be amazing if he did.

**Emily:** Wouldn’t it be amazing.

**John:** What if we were the people who convinced him, no, no, no, stop this right now. Crazy.

**Craig:** He should.

**John:** He should stop. I mean, he should stop.

**Craig:** I mean, he has four billion coffee stores. That’s good. You did it, man.

**Emily:** You did a good job.

**John:** You won. You won the race.

**Craig:** You win. Right.

**John:** Stop running.

**Craig:** We don’t open coffee shops.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** We don’t do that. Anyway.

**John:** Is it a Howard Schulz kind of character one of the villains, like the classicism thing?

**Emily:** Oh.

**John:** I think we have a little thing going here.

**Emily:** Interesting.

**John:** The hero is the weatherman, so maybe the weatherman hero is trying to figure out why these weird lightning strikes are killing certain people, or there’s some sort of–

**Emily:** They’re killing all of Howard Schulz’s primary opponents.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** This is called Geo Storm. They made this movie, again.

**John:** That’s right! It’s Geo Storm 2.

**Craig:** What if there’s like a science fiction kind of thing where as the weatherman realizes that in areas where income inequality is growing the weather starts getting more and more severe.

**Emily:** Which is actually what I was pitching.

**Craig:** That was? No, no, it’s not crashing down on rich people or anything.

**Emily:** No, no, you said the rich people thing. I was saying, I agree with you, I think it should have to do–

**Craig:** Well what you’re actually saying is I agree with you.

**Emily:** No, I really agree with you. I think we’re the same person.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Ah. I was wondering if you were doing the thing–

**Craig:** Shush.

**John:** You say the exact same thing the woman said and you take credit for it.

**Craig:** No, I thought I was saying a different thing.

**Emily:** You said a different thing.

**Craig:** I thought I was saying a different thing. I really did. Your circuit is misfired.

**John:** Oh OK.

**Craig:** But I agree with you. I think that’s awesome. But the meeting of the gangs, now it feels like there’s two groups of people that know the truth. And the weatherman gets pulled into one group that’s like we’re going to use this to bring the system down. And then another group is like, no, we have to stop this from happening. The system needs to keep going. And so there are two gangs and they meet in the park.

**John:** The park.

**Craig:** That’s a rough one.

**John:** Parks are a natural open environment. Weather happens in parks.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Also fascinating that the Weathermen were like a big gang of the time. So, that is an historic. Nothing said this has to be present day.

**Craig:** Can we switch it then? Yeah, so make it the Weathermen. Because that will really make this a lot easier.

**John:** Also it would make so much more sense that they were called the Weathermen if it was actually about weather. Because history is really confusing.

**Craig:** Here’s what’s killing us. Classicism rather. That’s not a villain. That’s a problem. It’s not a villain.

**John:** It’s very abstract.

**Craig:** It’s abstract. Your villain can represent something abstract like classicism, but it has to be someone. Let’s make it Howard Schulz.

**John:** A thing I want to stress here is that as absurd as this is so many projects that you will encounter are kind of like this.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So I think we talked about this on the show before. For about 20 years there was an Imagine project called Clipped. And it was about a guy who got a paperclip shoved up his nose or in his ear or something and Brian Grazer is like well that’s got to really change a person. And so we all had to go in and pitch on Clipped. I pitched on Clipped. You probably pitched on Clipped.

**Craig:** I refused.

**John:** All right. Let’s get another open writing assignment going here. I’m going to go in the back of the audience here because I like walking around.

**Craig:** I’ll write this down again. I thought we did all right with that one.

**John:** We did pretty well. I think it was a good start.

**Craig:** We tried.

**Emily:** Shameless applause.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a pity clap if I ever heard it.

**John:** Who up here did your homework? Can you please tell me the genre of the movie we need to write?

**Female Audience Member:** A rom-com.

**John:** It’s a rom-com! We love rom-coms. We saved rom-coms. I don’t know if you remember that. But Tess Morris was on the show and she helped us save rom-coms.

**Emily:** I’m going to be the poor man’s Tess Morris on this.

**John:** The general setting of this rom-com we need to write?

**Female Audience Member:** England during the Regency period.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** England Regency rom-com. I like this very, very much. Who else up here has – please tell me the profession of the hero.

**Male Audience Member:** He’s an assassin.

**John:** Ooh, an assassin. This is so good.

**Craig:** Well at least you didn’t say something like an electrician because that would have been hard.

**John:** That would really be a tough thing. All right, so we have a rom-com set in the Regency period of England about an assassin, that’s his profession or her profession. Right here, can you tell me what is the main goal of this assassin character?

**Male Audience Member:** It’s a rescue mission.

**John:** Oh, an assassin has to make a rescue mission.

**Craig:** As they do.

**John:** As they do. Anyone else back here, right here, can you tell me the villain of this story?

**Male Audience Member:** His old mentor who ruined his career.

**John:** Ooh! An old mentor. I like that very, very much.

**Craig:** An old mentor.

**John:** Finally I need a big trailer moment. Who has got a big trailer moment for me? Going once, going twice – oh right here. Tell me what your big trailer moment is.

**Male Audience Member:** It’s anachronistic. Jumping from a horse onto a tank.

**Craig:** A tank? A tank. In the regency period.

**John:** A tank in the regency period. We’ll get jumping from a horse. I’m not sure we’re going to get to tank. All right. So we’ve got this Regency rom-com. That feels really promising. Assassins are good.

**Craig:** Everything is good except rom-com at this point because that’s, yikes.

**John:** Think about like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you could take that.

**Craig:** No, you know what? You can do this.

**Emily:** Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

**John:** You can do this.

**Craig:** Or, or, or – all right, so we have an assassin, oldie England, and he’s been trained by his mentor, but then he does the thing that mentors want you to do which is to become great. He becomes so good that the mentor gets jealous and blinds him. Right? He blinds him. And so now our blind assassin has to be led around by this – let’s make the blind assassin a woman. She’s a woman and she has to be led around by a guy who becomes like her eyes. And then they’re separated and she starts killing people because the guy helps her to kill people. So they start falling in love while she’s killing people, but then he gets taken away and she has to go rescue this guy. But he is her eyes. She’s blind. And she has to find her eyes in the dark.

And…and…has to jump on a horse. [laughs]

**John:** OK. These are fascinating choices. But what I will say–

**Craig:** Did I not get the job?

**John:** So, Craig, we really liked a lot of what you did there, but I would say–

**Craig:** Congratulations on the first–

**John:** Congratulations, yes. But what I will say that in a romantic comedy the villain, the antagonist, often is the other person in the romantic comedy. So I’m wondering if this other mentor character actually is a romance about that which feels very good for like Regency period. It could be sort of like an Emma. It could be like an Emma like this character who you don’t ever think of as being a possible love interest because they’ve always been older or a teacher figure, like oh this is the person. So maybe a young female assassin falls for her assassin–

**Craig:** Daddy figure.

**John:** Daddy figure.

**Craig:** Well, this is getting problematic.

**Emily:** Can we make it a woman?

**Craig:** Can we make it a young woman who falls for an older woman?

**Emily:** Yes.

**Craig:** Why not.

**Emily:** Takes away a little bit of the problematic-ness.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re going to come up with other problematics.

**Emily:** Slightly.

**John:** There will be problematics.

**Craig:** The presence of the tank will definitely be problematic.

**Emily:** Carry on.

**Craig:** All right, so this is a lesbian romance in Regency England between two assassins, a December-May romance between assassins, but one of them is – so the older one has ruined the young one? No, the young one has ruined the older one’s career, what about that? That’s a natural kind of thing. You trained me to take your place and I did. And now the older one does not want to let go.

**John:** Yes. It’s an All About Eve.

**Craig:** I just got rehired.

**John:** Yeah. Craig brought it back through.

**Emily:** Turned it around.

**John:** So here’s what’s good about that is their relationship is fascinating and why am I forgetting the name of this movie that’s the Rachel Weisz movie—

**Audience:** The Favourite.

**John:** The Favourite. Like that’s sort of The Favourite is what you’re pitching. It’s a funnier version of The Favourite.

**Craig:** Yes. I’m getting replaced by the younger, newer thing.

**John:** Yes. And so that’s a good dynamic and that tension is really interesting between the two of them.

**Craig:** And it’s also something that is always relevant. I mean, doesn’t matter what time period and doesn’t matter what their jobs are. Doesn’t matter what their sexuality is. The notion that you are going to be eclipsed by somebody that you love is something every parent probably on some level considers.

**Emily:** I feel like I’m putting on this development hat and I have so many questions.

**Craig:** Do it. Go.

**John:** Go. Ask your questions.

**Emily:** What is the driving plot thing of our story? Has our older assassin been pushed out at the beginning of our story and it’s a story about them – what’s our driver there?

**Craig:** I think they’re in love in the beginning of the story. I think it’s perfectly good. But there’s a little bit of a thing, right, where the older one feels that the younger one isn’t ready, and the younger one is kind of thinking the older one is holding them back. And then the older one realizes that the younger one is better than her, everyone thinks the younger one is better than her. That’s a terrible moment. She retreats. And now she has to prove herself. But she doesn’t want to let on.

But then she’s going to try to kill the person that the younger one has to kill. So they’re both racing to kill that person. And then I think where it has to go is she has to ultimately probably sacrifice herself because she loves that younger person somehow.

**John:** So I’m going to be Tess Morris here.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** I worry we’re losing the rom-com quality of it.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** That’s the only thing I want to say here.

**Emily:** I think that’s fair.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re pitching didn’t feel especially comedic. So–

**Craig:** I don’t like rom-coms. [laughs]

**John:** Ah, after all this you don’t like – we saved rom-coms and Craig still doesn’t like them.

**Craig:** No, you guys saved them. I mean, I was happy for it, but it’s not like my jam. You know, I’m like, meh.

**Emily:** I feel like maybe if you don’t have her pushed out at the beginning but she’s starting to feel like a little instable – unstable/instable? Why can’t I? You know, all of those things. So that the journey is like a lighter journey between two people who are–

**Craig:** OK, so then here’s the question. So then comedy wise what’s – so when we’re talking about a comedy between two characters and a situation. What is the thing between them that now starts to be this fuel for funny situations? What’s the funny fuel? Because if they are – if one of them is helping the other – if one of them is the person the other one has to kill and they know that but they don’t want to get killed, then you could see some farce happening maybe. Or–

**John:** But I think we don’t want to just make a farce most likely. I think we want some real emotional stakes there.

**Craig:** I agree. Where’s the machine? Where’s the machine of the funny?

**Emily:** I also sort of feel like from a rom-com perspective we either need them to – you need some – like they’ve just broken up at the beginning or it has always been a very strict mentor/mentee relationship that is like–

**Craig:** Or it’s in that bed-death phase where they had it but they’re losing it and they’re on their way to losing it.

**Emily:** Yeah. A little bit like – I feel like that’s hard. That’s a hard place to–

**John:** Well it’s interesting when you have characters who are part of Regency England. They have a very rigid social structure. And yet they’re also assassins.

**Emily:** I forgot about the Regency England part. [laughs]

**John:** But they’re also assassins so they’re already outsiders.

**Craig:** And don’t forget the horse.

**John:** And the horse. So they jump off the horse onto the water tank. It didn’t say a tank-tank.

**Craig:** Rejection. It’s not exactly a great trailer moment. Like wah!

**John:** Yeah. Can you turn the tank and water it now. It’s not so good.

**Craig:** Whilst is there a tanketh in our midst?

**John:** At dinner we were talking about sort of naïve characters and so we were talking about Inside Out and the Joy character in there is so – she’s just – I don’t want to say she’s one note, but she has one drive, one focus, and she’s so naïve. And yet she’s not annoying and she’s not dumb. How do you find that balance? And that feels like the kind of situation where on a weekly basis you’re asking like does this actually make sense. Is this actually going to track? I want to talk about naïve characters because I think Pixar has a lot of those naïve characters.

**Craig:** Buzz Lightyear.

**John:** Buzz Lightyear. Wall-E.

**Craig:** Wall-E.

**John:** They’re very naïve characters, and yet they’re not idiots.

**Emily:** Although Buzz is not like the driver of that story, so his naiveté is sort of there for humor and there for comedy as opposed to him being sort of the emotional drive of the story.

**Craig:** Until that moment where he actually has to come face to face with the fact that he is naïve.

**Emily:** Right. Right.

**Craig:** That’s the one value I think of naïve characters is that they always provide that moment. The same thing happens to Joy. This is Pixar. God, they define a terrible weakness that would just ultimately murder this person emotionally and then they do it to them. That’s kind of the gift of those characters I think. I think Pixar does them really well.

**Emily:** And I will say with Joy especially like that character didn’t work for a long time because she was – I guess I can say she was really annoying. She was so happy and peppy and then we played with a whole bunch of different versions of her where she had more edge and less edge. I’ve never been a part of a project that noodled with a character that much. And really honestly the difference was Amy Poehler signed on and Amy Poehler has a level of joy and enthusiasm to her that is kind of infectious. And she’s peppy but she is like pumped about it in a way that we weren’t able to find on the page. And then when she walks in the room and you’re so rooting – like it’s so earnest and it’s so genuine and so even when it’s like over the top and if somebody else did it you’d want to punch them, when she does it it’s like you’re with her and you feel the joy and infectious energy she has.

**Craig:** Well she had this thing in her performance, but I also give all the writers and animators credit for also putting it there in the character and the conception of the character, that Joy isn’t just happy and naïve and loves to be joyful. There’s a desperation underneath all of it which is I’ve got to keep dancing because the second I step dancing I have to look at some painful things I don’t want to look at.

**Emily:** For sure.

**Craig:** And that was fascinating to me. It’s a little bit of a cheat, right? So one of the things about Inside Out that was a little cheaty and it had to happen—

**Emily:** Am I going to be mad at you?

**Craig:** No! Is that you’re taking a human being and you’re fragmenting them into these parts of their personality. But we’re with those parts of the personality and inevitably what we need is to see that that individual part has parts inside of the part. It just has to be there otherwise it doesn’t work.

**John:** Because Joy has to get sad in order for–

**Craig:** Joy has to be aware of it. Joy has to almost be joyful because if I just stop being joyful, whereas Sadness also kind of needs to understand – Sadness is sad that she’s sad. That’s a different thing, right? So that I thought was kind of fascinating. I mean, obviously you have side characters where they can just – Anger is anger, just be angry, it’s funny.

**John:** So we had Pamela Ribon on the Christmas episode and she was talking about–

**Emily:** Oh, I love Pam.

**John:** She’s so great. And she was talking about Ralph Breaks the Internet. And so during the process of that she played Penelope. She played that throughout the whole process. Does a similar kind of thing happen in Pixar where you have temp voices and you’re just trying to do stuff?

**Emily:** Yeah.

**John:** And so somebody else had to play that character who wasn’t Amy Poehler and is that part of the reason why you couldn’t find the voice and the approach?

**Emily:** I don’t think so. I mean, the woman who did Joy for us is a woman named Alyssa Knight who is fantastic and actually a very good actress in her own right. Sort of the thing that you’re talking about – we didn’t have a lock on Joy. We couldn’t figure out what was happening inside of her that was – it just took a long time. Literally I think I was on that project for four years and it took us – yeah, which is like oh my god.

**John:** Four years on a movie.

**Emily:** It took a good two of those years just to find where her center was.

**John:** So I want to talk through this part because during those two years of trying to find her, you know, how she was going to work you did have to map out the rest of the movie. So there were people whose job it was to figure out set pieces and all this stuff. But you still weren’t sure if you had the right character at the centerpiece of this movie who is in almost every scene.

**Emily:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s got to be scary.

**Emily:** Yeah. Almost all the movies hit a point where they hit the skids and it’s really – they’re bad, and they’re really, really bad. And we’re totally lost in the woods. Like quite literally, I mean Pete our director would spend two weeks walking in the woods like at some point.

**Craig:** Oh, he was legitimately lost in the woods.

**Emily:** Legitimately he went into the woods.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Emily:** And he walked around.

**Craig:** He knows that’s just an expression though, right? He doesn’t have to go out there.

**Emily:** He’s a very literal person.

**Craig:** Fair enough. Works for him.

**Emily:** It worked. It worked really well.

**John:** But talk me through that it’s bad because at this point is it bad in a way that there are reels of temp animation that you can look at and it’s like well that doesn’t work and everyone can see that that movie is not actually a movie? You’re looking at a real thing and not just words on a page?

**Emily:** Yeah. What we’re looking at is storyboards that have been edited together with music and sound and voices and all that kind of stuff. And we’re watching it through. You know, the big reboot – we did a giant reboot on the middle of Inside Out where the primary relationship changed. And I think I can say this because I think it’s on the DVD. It used to be Joy and Fear. And the main story was between those two characters which felt like it made sense for a really long time. And it wasn’t until Pete sort of had this revelation that the movie was going to be about connection and the way that we get to connection is allowing ourselves to be vulnerable around people. And that we have to go through sadness sometimes to get back to joy. And it fundamentally shifted the primary movie.

And it shifted those two characters. And so that was about the time that Meg LeFauve came on and she was sort of part of that reboot of rebooting our story so that it was about Joy and Sadness and that being the central relationship.

**Craig:** This requires an enormous amount of creative bravery.

**Emily:** I think so.

**Craig:** Because everybody who has ever written anything I think in part is desperate to believe that they’ve got it. Because writing is hard. So the last thing you want to think is, well, my job was to dig a hole and I dug the hole and oh my god this is not a hole. And you have to do it again. Nobody wants that, but sometimes you just have to do it again.

**Emily:** Well and I found it really – I mean, he’s going to get tired of me singing his praises, but I found working with Pete I found that to be the gift of working with Pete is Pete will do that. He will say I don’t have it and he will go spend the time and the energy and the cycles to find it. And you know I also think there was a gift in there, too, to work on you know this movie that ended up being this huge movie for the studio and to know firsthand that the middle of the movie – somewhere in the middle it was not a movie that any of you would have paid to see. I find that really comforting actually. I find it really comforting to remind myself time and time again that the creative process takes time and it does take that bravery. It takes the bravery to say I don’t have it.

**Craig:** I don’t have it.

**Emily:** And I’m going to go ask people to help me find it.

**Craig:** And isn’t that kind of the story of Pixar. The movie that launched them, Toy Story, was just a different movie. And then they went, no, you know what – animating which was enormously expensive, to dump actual animation was unheard of. And they just said we don’t have it yet.

**Emily:** And we talk about the creatives a lot which we should, but I think there’s also enormous bravery that’s sort of shouldered by the producers because they are at the end of the day the bottom line matters for them. And that is their responsibility. And yet I think they’ve sort of assembled a group of producers who are willing to sit in that discomfort – I sound like Renee Brown. But they’re willing to sit in the discomfort in how messy it is to make something good and creative. And they’re all really, really there for their director.

**John:** That’s so in a world that’s completely different than any live action producer we’ve known.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “What do you mean it’s not right?” They’re freaking out at all moments. And an animation producer just can’t do that.

**Emily:** Well, I mean, in fairness there’s a point in every process where it’s like, OK, like we’re done.

**John:** We got to release the movie here.

**Emily:** We’re done. It’s going out like this. We don’t have a choice. But, you know, they really do do a remarkable job of shielding the directors when they need to be shielded. And I think it’s one of the most remarkable things about that place.

**Craig:** God, I wish that they would learn this lesson – Hollywood.

**Emily:** Oh, Hollywood.

**Craig:** If you treat the people that make the stories well then they will have a chance to make the stories well. That’s it. It’s so simple. And they don’t – thank you. They don’t do it. They refuse to do it because they don’t – I think on some level they’re cynical and don’t really believe it matters. Like, ah, you could do it twice as fast. Doesn’t matter. Who cares? They all talk like this. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. Stereotypes.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** Argh.

**Craig:** You know what.

**John:** We’re going to do our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We should do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is really simple. It is the third season of Man in the High Castle, which I had let sort of sit back for a while, and then I watched the third season and it was just terrific. And so if you have fallen off watching that show, I wasn’t nuts about everything in the second season. There were a lot of pieces sort of moving around. But the third season they did really well.

And this is a very live action thing I’m about to say here, but I watched the first episode and I’m like, wow, that’s a really expensive set. I hope they use that set well, and they use those sets really well. They build all new sets and every character of that show gets dragged through almost every of the new sets they built. And as a person who has seen those line items on a budget they knew what they were doing. They planned that very carefully. They block shot.

**Craig:** I bet you they did not plan it carefully and then someone said, “If you want us to build this go back—“

**John:** And make sure every character walks on that set.

**Craig:** Through this set that we paid for.

**John:** It was really good. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is, so you know I’m a big escape room fan. And there are a lot of sort of escape room in a box things that they’re selling now, which are kind of fun. It’s not the proper escape room experience of course, but in its own way it’s actually really entertaining. Some of them are better than others. There’s a series of them called Exit The Game that I really like. There’s a lot of them – they’re great if you have kids and if you have kids that aren’t dummies, you know.

**John:** You know if your kids are dumb.

**Craig:** I’m just being honest. You know if your kid is an idiot. They don’t like this. Just send them out there to play their sports. But, no, shut up. But roomful of writers. “Oh, you’re being mean to the jocks.” All right. But if you have a smarty in your house the Exit The Game series are great. They have a very interesting mechanism where as you think you’ve solved a puzzle there’s a little wheel and you enter a code and that takes you a card and it shows you a thing, and then success. It’s fun and you don’t have to worry about the timer. Take your time.

And it’s put out by a company called, well I guess I would pronounce it like the River Thames, but it’s spelled Thames. Thames and Kosmos. That’s with a K. So give it a shot. And they rank the games by level of difficulty. So, you can start with one of the easier ones. That’s actually a way to figure out if your kid is smart or not, so try that.

**John:** Yeah. A little IQ test. Nice.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Emily, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Emily:** Yes. So I watched, this isn’t my One Cool Thing, but I watched one of those Fyre documentaries which was just–

**John:** Fyre Festival.

**Craig:** Fyre Festival.

**Emily:** Insane. But it made me think about the book Bad Blood. Has anybody read this book? Oh my god, OK, it’s amazing.

**Craig:** Do the voice. Do the voice.

**Emily:** No, I can’t do the voice. So it’s a story about Theranos which was that start up that imploded in spectacular fashion and the book is totally riveting. It’s fascinating. It’s like the best beach read you’ve ever read. And it’s all true. It’s insane.

**Craig:** Great villain.

**Emily:** Great. Oh my god, it’s amazing. And they’re going to make it into a movie, so go read it before you watch it.

**John:** Figure out how you would do it and then see how they did it. And yours is probably different/better.

**Craig:** Probably won’t be as good. I’m just being honest. They’re going to get somebody amazing. It’s going to be Sorkin.

**John:** They’ll get Sorkin probably.

**Craig:** I can’t – you can’t–

**Emily:** Yeah. They will get Sorkin. It’s a very Sorkin.

**Craig:** I mean, I’m just being reasonable. Come on.

**Emily:** Anyway, go read it. It’s fantastic.

**John:** Great. We are going to do some questions from the audience. So you questions are going to be fantastic. What’s your question?

**Female Audience Member:** It’s going to be fantastic. OK, my question is you told us at the beginning to go to Hollywood and learn how to do it there and what do you want us to do when we go there? What kind of job would you send a writer from here down there to go do? Because I’ve heard other shows where you said you need to go and you need to make sure that you are on a set. And you want to learn how to write for real actors and write for people who are actually going to be using your stuff. So what kind of a job would we look for even if we were doing an internship or any kind of work? What would we do?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, I don’t know – it is incredibly useful to be on a set, but you got to – you don’t just get there right away. I mean, you can, but that’s more of like a production assistant job where you’re running around and you’re on the walkie-talkie and you’re learning the basics of film production. I’ll tell you what I did, because I didn’t know anybody. I drove out there and I went to a temp agency. Actually I went to three temp agencies. And I took their tests, which is mostly typing. And then they started sending me out for jobs.

But there’s a few of them in Los Angeles that service the entertainment business essentially exclusively. And one of them placed me in a position where I was mostly a file clerk at a little ad agency. And I did that. I did that and then I kind of found an opportunity to write something and show somebody. And then they’re like, OK, you can be a writer now. Sort of like that.

But just get a job near somebody and maybe you’re also in an apartment building where other people are just like you. And then everyone is talking. Things happen. But you’ve got to be there.

**John:** Emily, you live here. So tell us about that kind of experience living here. Two microphones.

**Emily:** Do you remember the Lady Gaga performance from the Super Bowl where somebody held the microphone like this for her? That’s what I’m into. Could you just hold it for me? No, I’m kidding. I do live up here. I’m from up here. I lived in LA for like a hot second and I did actually exactly what Craig just described. I went to like three temp agencies. I took typing tests. And they placed me at Creative Artists Agency where I was like a probably very abysmal assistant for a while. I would recommend that, too.

From up here that’s I think the best thing to do. Because unless you go down and you have all the connections in the world, which you probably don’t, I think temp agencies are the way to do it. And frankly assistant jobs turn over like left and right. So there’s always, always openings. And I would recommend that.

**John:** And I will also say when we recommend people move down to Los Angeles a lot of times it’s folks who just graduated from college. And so we say you’re going to start your life somewhere, start your life in Los Angeles if that’s what you want to do. That’s not always the same advice for somebody who is in their 30s or 40s who is looking for a career change. That’s a different thing. And I know in previous episodes, we’ll try to find a link to it, but we’ve talked about how do you know when it’s time to leave that place. It’s a different equation when you’re not at the very start of your life. 20s isn’t the start of your life, but you’re not at that transitional point.

Another question from the audience?

**Female Audience Member:** Hi. I don’t hear you guys talk much about advising screenwriters to make their own movies and what kind of exposure and success can come from that.

**John:** So I’ve made a movie for myself. You’ve directed a movie. It can be a great thing. If you are aspiring to be a writer-director you need to do both parts of that job, and so directing something you’ve written is a fantastic step.

If your goal is to be a writer, to be a television showrunner or be a television staff writer, having directed a thing may not help you out a tremendous amount. And I’m actually thinking back to even Megan McDonnell who is the Scriptnotes producer, she directed a really terrific short, and it was great, and really showed that she could direct. But that wasn’t sort of her main goal. And so it’s gotten her some attention, but it would get her more attention if she really wanted to be a director. And she really wants to be a writer. So I wouldn’t recommend somebody spend a year of their life directing a movie if that’s not their goal. Thoughts?

**Emily:** Yeah. I agree with John. I think it kind of depends on what your end goal is. And if the thing you want to do more than anything in the world is direct then you should do that. And there’s ways to do that here. There’s a lot of independent movies that do get made up here, even though I know it’s not a huge independent film town. But I agree that it’s a lot of money and it’s a lot of work if your ultimate goal is to get your writing out there.

I mean, as somebody who read a lot of scripts I can tell you there’s a lot of people out in Hollywood reading a lot of scripts all the time. So if that’s the thing you want to do I would just focus on that.

**John:** I think we can take one more question here before we wrap up.

**Female Audience Member:** So this is actually more of a craft question probably. I don’t know why I throw myself in the way of these arguments but I do. And I see the most common response to I’m having a problem with my plot/with my character/I don’t understand this that I see that drives me up the wall is, “Oh, you need to nail down your theme.” I don’t like that.

But I also understand that that means something different to every different person. So, my question is when, 1, is theme the correct solution that is something you need to look at, and 2, when is not the correct solution? When is the wrong thing?

**John:** This is a great question. So when do we need to think about themes. And you just gave a great example of that because Inside Out you had these character who represent these big thematic ideas and you had the wrong two ideas clashing together. So–

**Emily:** I will say I’m probably one of – so I’ve done a little bit of script consulting and I’m probably somebody you would hate to work with because while I don’t always call it theme I feel like theme is at the core of almost everything I’m poking at when I – I think that when you go to ask questions about what your character is doing and what it’s about and what they want and why do they really want that, I think all of that at the end of the day is theme.

So while I totally agree with you that the general note of “work on your theme” is super unhelpful.

**John:** That’s not an actionable note. You can’t–

**Emily:** It’s not an actionable note. But what is an actionable note, which is your theme actually if you dig down into it is about what is your character expecting. What do they want to have happen? What do they expect it’s going to do for their life?

So, all those questions about what your character and what’s motivating them, those are all theme questions. So I feel like when you’re getting that note what you’re actually getting – like when somebody is saying to you, “Oh, you’re theme,” what they’re actually trying to poke at I think probably not very well is that they don’t understand what your main character is doing. What do you think, Craig?

**Craig:** When we are stuck trying to describe these very nebulous things we come up with a word. And so of course when someone gives you this word it’s normal to say this isn’t – it’s not that you’re angry at them, it’s just more like you’re not helping me. What I always think about with this is what is the point of writing this. In a big way, not even inside of the characters. So like why would anybody want to go see this in the first place? Why does this deserve to be made? Why should 1,500 people in various jobs all assemble to create this thing?

And that comes down to something important to you that you’re saying. That’s you. That’s not the character. That’s not this character, or that character. It’s not about the sequence or anything. But you. That thing – that needs to be there.

And if you know what that is, this argument you’re making, this thing you want people to understand, the raison d’être of this, then I think what ends up happening is you find a way to start unifying things. So rather than having characters do things that make sense over here, and a character that is doing a thing that makes sense over here, but they don’t have necessarily some kind of relation, it’s because these things aren’t connected to the point that you’re saying the whole reason to show up is this. And once you know the whole reason to show up it actually becomes really easy to start making decisions about why people should do things. Well what should the ending be? The ending should be the opposite of the beginning and those two things are connected to this thing that you’re trying to say to everybody. This is why people should show up.

Forget people showing up in a theater. This is why people should show up to actually make the damn thing. So that’s what I think about.

**John:** And I think also there’s other useful words that are sort of thrown around that mean the same kind of thing as theme. When people talk about the conflicts, or I don’t feel like these conflicts are really advancing what the character needs, you may have thought of these great set pieces but they don’t actually do anything that your characters need to learn or achieve or accomplish. They’re just interesting set pieces that aren’t really connected to the central idea.

Sometimes we’ll talk about that central dramatic question. The thesis statement. We often talk on Scriptnotes that television sort of never fully answers that question but a movie does answer that question. As an audience member you sit down and you watch a movie expecting that it’s a character’s one-time experience that is going to transform them. And so if you’re not transforming a character, if it’s not that one unique experience then there’s something that’s not really quite figured out yet.

And what you may want to do is kind of what you’re describing here is look at what are the things we have here. What seems like they’re related? What’s the most interesting thing here? How can we bring that forward and build conflicts around it that can really explore that issue?

**Emily:** I also think it’s worth pointing out that a lot of people don’t find their theme on the first draft. So, I think sometimes we want to make it really clean and we want to say my movie is about this blank. And I think for a lot of writers I know they know they don’t have it on the first draft. So part of what you’re doing is you’re poking around and you’re trying to find out where the character wants to go and what the character wants to do. And it doesn’t even quite present itself to you until a draft or two in. And then you go, oh crap, my movie is about this. I get it. Like I had to go in this weird circuitous path to find my center, but you’ll find it.

And I guess that’s what I’m pointing out of like when you’re floating around in theme land and you can’t find it, and I think Craig is 100% right about – it’s the first time – but I think he’s 100% right about theme and that it being more about this larger question. But if you can’t find the question and you’re like, “Blech, I don’t know what it is,” I would go back to your main character and know that it might take you – you might have to just literally write a couple drafts and then it will show up.

And it might be somebody else reading your draft and saying, “You know what I think this is about? I think it’s about this.” Which is why even though this is this sort of isolating process to write something, it’s so good to have other people that you trust who can look at your stuff and help you identify those things because sometimes they’re not apparent.

**Craig:** Seems like a great advertisement for the society that has put this on.

**John:** Absolutely. Brain trust revealed. That is our show. As always our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

We need to thank Seattle.

**Craig:** Nice job, Seattle.

**John:** And there are several people in Seattle we need to thank. Certainly Jeremy and Kristen for bringing us up here. The Northwest Screenwriters Guild. TheFilmSchool, all one word. Thank you so much for having us up here. This was really fun. And have a great night. Thank you all.

**Craig:** Thank you.

Links:

* Thank you, [Northwest Screenwriters Guild](https://nwsg.org/) and [TheFilmSchool](http://thefilmschool.com/programs/) for making this event happen!
* And thank you to our incredible guest: [Emily Zulauf](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1637392/)!
* [Scriptnotes, 225: Only haters hate rom-coms](https://johnaugust.com/2015/only-haters-hate-rom-coms) with Tess Morris
* [Michael Arndt on Endings](https://johnaugust.com/2018/michael-arndt-on-endings)
* [Amy Poehler](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K25d7QIC27c) as Joy in INSIDE OUT
* [The Man In the High Castle](https://www.amazon.com/Man-High-Castle-Season/dp/B07FDKRJQC)
* [Exit The Game](https://www.thamesandkosmos.com/index.php/kosmosgames/exit-the-abandoned-cabin)
* [Bad Blood](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549478/bad-blood-by-john-carreyrou/9781524731656/) by John Carreyrou
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Emily Zulauf](https://twitter.com/emilyzulauf) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) “Jazz Waltz” by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/38720-20Seattle20Live20Show202019.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/plot-holes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 384 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to talk about plot holes and why sometimes you’re better off leaving them than trying to fix them. We’ll also be answering listener questions about things that screenwriters notice that normal people might not. And sequences and outlines and sort of where to fix those problems when they come up.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. So it’s pronounced plot holes and not plotholes. It looks like plotholes.

**John:** So I was looking at the word plot holes and I realized today, and maybe I’m just dumb and never noticed it before, it’s based on pot holes, like pot holes the holes in the street.

**Craig:** Is it? Is it?

**John:** I bet it is. I bet that is the derivation of the word.

**Craig:** You think, because to me even if there weren’t pot holes there is a hole in your plot. It makes sense. You might be right. I don’t know. Who can answer this question for us?

**John:** I think John McWhorter can answer this question for us.

**Craig:** Oh, god, I would love to have him on the show. You know I’m like obsessed him?

**John:** You are. Because he’s also obsessed with musicals and you guys are pretty much separated at birth.

**Craig:** Musicals and language and language usage. He’s the one that turned me on to the whole – what is it – I can’t remember the word he used to describe it, but it’s the thing where people will add an “ah” at the end of a word to indicate emphasis, like No-ah.

**John:** Yes. Stop-ah.

**Craig:** What are you doing-ah?

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It’s that extra little shwa, that little shwa.

**Craig:** So weird. Anyway, he’s a genius.

**John:** He’s a genius. We also have news. So our news is about three upcoming events.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s almost too many.

**John:** The Princess Bride, January 27 at 5pm. So, I think the rules are that the doors will open at 4:30 in which case WGA members can go in and get their seats. At 4:45 everyone is free to get their seats. The movie will start at 5pm at the WGA Theater. And then afterwards we will discuss it in a very classic let’s take a deep dive on this movie, except we’ve just watched this movie. So, that is the plan for January 27th.

**Craig:** Awesome. I think that’s going to be – and it’s going to be fun. And it’s in celebration, of course, of the great William Goldman. I happen to love the movie. I think most people do love the movie. It’s one of those movies that a lot of people sort of memorize, but I love digging into these things and finding these little bits and bobs that are just so gorgeous that make it work the way it does.

**John:** I agree. We have a live show coming up in Seattle. It’s long been rumored. It now actually has a date. It is February 6 at 7pm. It’s going to be at the Northwest Film Forum. There’s information in the show notes about how you get tickets, if there are tickets, or if you just show up. We’re recording this ahead of time so I don’t really know what those rules are, but Megan will have the information and those will be in the show notes. But we look forward to seeing Seattle on February 6 at 7pm.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s going to be fun. I love Seattle.

**John:** Seattle is great. I love it, too. Finally, this second Arlo Finch book comes out in February and there’s a launch event February 9 here in Los Angeles at Chevalier’s Bookstore. It is at 12:30pm. And you should come see me and I will sign your books. It’s your first chance to buy the book in Los Angeles. And you can come. I will probably read a chapter from it. And I’ll offer answers to questions that might come up. So come, bring kids who might be able to read the book, but also just come and say hi because I’ll be there and I’ll happily sign your book.

**Craig:** I mean, I kind of feel like when people see you in real life there’s a little bit of squealing now.

**John:** There might be. A little bit. I might spark joy for certain people.

**Craig:** For certain people.

**John:** Certain people. Not all the people.

**Craig:** No. Select people.

**John:** Select people. I’m going to segue into sparking joy for just a second because I blogged this week. I don’t blog very often. And I’m going to spoil who actually said this. There was a project that I was considering doing, it was a pretty big project that would be more than a year of my life to do. And I had a phone call about it and I was thinking about it and Megan, our producer, asked me, “But does it spark joy?” She’s using the Marie Kondo phrase. And I ended up blogging about this. And I thought it was actually exactly the right question. Because when I admitted to myself that while I admired the project and I was intrigued by it, it didn’t actually bring me joy. And if I were to lose the project I wouldn’t really feel that sad. It was a good signal to me that I probably shouldn’t pursue the project. And so my new thing when I’m considering a project is asking myself if it sparks joy.

**Craig:** It’s a great idea. And I’ve been going through this a lot myself. The danger is that sometimes if you’ve been working for a while without concern for joy sparks, you know, you’ve been working because it pays well, or because you felt it would kind of move things forward to a place where you could work on things that are just joy-sparkers, then you almost are unfamiliar with how to measure your own potential joy in something. The other issue that I have always, and have always had, is my joy, my spark of joy, will always be followed by a spark of panic.

So, I love something, I’m so excited about something, and I can’t wait. And then about two days later I’m suddenly suffused with dread. That this thing that inspired joy in me is now this dead thing. Just lying in the street like a big, I don’t know, dead side of beef and I want nothing to do with it. This goes on all the time – this may just be me.

**John:** No, it’s not that way. There’s instantly a kind of regret, like once you’ve gotten the thing, it’s the dog who is chasing the car and finally catches the car. It’s like, oh no, oh no, is this really what I want?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recognizing that if I had caught this project I might not really want the project. And I remember a conversation with you, this was off-mic so it was maybe before we were recording an episode, there was a very, very big property that was coming into your universe.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And you asked my advice – you don’t often ask my advice – but I said the equivalent sort of thing is like but do you really want to be writing blank project? And is that a dream of yours? And you’re like, oh no. Then that’s your answer.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. You know, it’s funny. I asked a few people advice on that one because I was really unsure of my own instinct I think. Because it seemed a little crazy to say no. And I asked Rian Johnson as well and I got, I think, halfway through the title and he just went, “No.” And by the way that’s the kind of advice I like. So it’s just like, oh good, you’re not actually even giving me advice. You’re just providing me the comfort of your certainty. I like – thank you. That’s really nice.

But that’s a great example of something where it seemed to me that I would not experience joy. And, in the end, you’re not simply protecting yourself. You’re actually also protecting everyone else. Because in the end they are relying on you to carry them through this incredibly important phase, writing, with your passion. And if you run out of it they can smell it pretty quickly I suspect.

**John:** Yeah. So I want to circle back to one thing you said is that at certain points in your career that question of like does it spark joy is not going to be the most important question. The most important question at certain points in your career is will they pay me money, is this a paid job I can take and actually deliver. And so I don’t want to sort of skip over that because that is such an important part of your early career is chasing all those projects and landing those projects even if they’re not the ones you really love. And you have to fake that you have that spark of joy on a lot of projects to land those projects. That is totally valid and true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I think we’re both recognizing though is sometimes you can get so caught up in chasing things you start realizing like, oh wait, I shouldn’t be chasing these things anymore. I should actually probably doing the things that are meaningful to me.

**Craig:** Exactly. You know, John Gatins has such a great term for this, because he recognizes that there are times when you write things that you are in love with and then he says there are those other jobs that are Geisha work. And I love that. It’s Geisha work. Meaning it’s not just tawdry. It’s not this kind of empty thing. There’s an art to it. There is a care. There is a craft. There is a loving attention. But it’s not love. It’s Geisha work.

**John:** Yeah. It’s Geisha work. Let’s get to some follow up. So Joel wrote in to say he was hoping we could do some follow up on something we mentioned in a recent show. “In Episode 383, John while discussing the film Mortal Engines, said something like, ‘They set themselves some interesting story challenges.’ I found that an intriguing idea because I often wonder how much of the work that people do can only be appreciated by fellow crafts people. Can you name some other films or TV shows that fall into the category of interesting challenges that might go unnoticed by the general public?”

And I thought it was a good question because there definitely are things which we talk about in terms of like, oh wow, that was a really hard thing to try to do, and you might not notice that if you’re just watching the film. Some things which occurred to me that I saw, things with very limited dialogue because as a screenwriter if there’s not much dialogue it can be very hard to externalize ideas. And so *A Quiet Place* has very little dialogue in it. *The Hush* episode of Buffy has very little dialogue.

Likewise, shows that have too many characters or movies that have too many characters. So the first *Charlie’s Angels* is a huge writing challenge and I don’t think people noticed that enough that you have three characters who each have their own storylines that have to fit into the bigger storyline. They still have their villains. There have to be twists and reveals. So to keep all those balls in the air is a real challenge that you wouldn’t have if you had a single protagonist.

You worked on the next Charlie’s Angels movie, so you encountered the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s definitely an interesting thing to keep those balls in the air because you feel, well, I think if you’re doing it responsibly you feel an anxiety when a particular character hasn’t spoken in a while. And I think we talked about this in the last podcast. And you also feel an anxiety if the characters have these little arcs that are either too small or too out of whack with the other characters or not interlacing with the other characters. So there is a lot of craft that goes into that stuff.

That said, I would rather write a movie with a group of three or four “normal” people than another spoof movie where one of the biggest challenges in writing spoof is your characters have no internal life whatsoever. And there’s never a moment where anyone just stops and thinks. Ever. It is excruciating. It’s like taking away – we say to people you’re going to run, just remember to breathe. And with spoof it’s like you’re going to run, also you can’t breathe. Not allowed. It’s really annoying.

**John:** No breathing is possible. Another movie with a lot of characters which I think screenwriters really acknowledged was a real challenge was *The Big Short*, because *The Big Short* you have a ton of characters who have to give really important information. They need to feel like real people because in some of the cases they are based on real people. And yet you don’t have time to sort of give meaningful inner lives and challenges that are going to be resolved in a normal way. So it’s making sure that those people feel like they have weight even though they’re not going to do normal movie character things over the course of the two hours.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in those movies, too, you have a certain challenge of instruction. If a movie does this well, or if a show does it well, you don’t notice. That’s kind of the hallmark of these challenges is that when it’s really nailed you don’t even realize that they’ve done something incredibly hard to do.

I don’t think when people first saw, I don’t know what the first Disney animated movie was that had that multi-plane technology to it, but I suspect that they didn’t realize just how difficult it was to get that small bit of depth, that little bit of parallax motion. It was enormously difficult. And that’s a sign that they did it well.

**John:** And so I think narratively sometimes we don’t recognize that like, oh, there’s a lot of work happening to make it feel like – so you don’t notice that this thing is happening in front of you.

**Craig:** Which is good, because I mean in the end that’s a big part of our job is making it look like nobody did a job. You know? But it can be tough. Certainly when I see a movie like *The Big Short* I really admire the way that they went about instructing us, but instructing us in such a manner that they knew confidently we would understand.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that was pretty great.

**John:** I could have put this under limited dialogue, but shows and movies with limited characters can be really challenging. So, Castaway. So often you have to externalize Tom Hanks’s thoughts, and so you create Wilson, you create other ways to sort of get us into his head even though he has no other character to talk with. So, if it had been a book then we could be just directly in his head. Because movies don’t let us do that, they have to find ways to externalize those thoughts.

Same with Gravity. So much of Gravity is just Sandra Bullock. So how do we know what she’s trying to do, what she’s feeling, what the next thing is for her? That’s a real storytelling challenge. In addition to all of the technical challenges of making that movie, the storytelling challenges are great in a movie like Gravity.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then Alfonso Cuarón’s latest, Roma, is a similar kind of thing in a weird way because even though there’s plenty of characters and there’s plenty of dialogue, your central character is not a classic protagonist and it’s kind of from her point of view, but it’s also kind of from an omniscient point of view. It’s a really – he created really fascinating challenges for himself in how he was letting us into this world. It’s almost the place is more the protagonist and we’re following a character but not necessarily seeing the world through her eyes. And I thought it was brilliantly done, but a really difficult choice.

**Craig:** You know, it occurs to me that a lot of the challenges that you’re describing in live action are things that animation has a very easy time with. For instance, expressing internal thoughts. *Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse* was able to kind of create a little bit of a new animated language so that you could see and hear people’s thoughts as they desired. But then of course in animation the problem is just making someone take one step is incredibly painstaking.

**John:** Lastly, I think the thing to talk about is movies that involve animals or children. So there are huge production challenges with animals and children, the number of hours they can work, or sort of the trainers that do that. But when you think about those as a writing challenge it’s how do we get in the head of this dog that is in front of us or this young character who may not be able to speak, so so much is going to rely on us looking in their face or their eyes and what we’re setting up about the world around them, how people are interacting with them. The order of events is going to be dictating our understanding of who these characters are. And those are narrative challenges that you probably don’t recognize until you actually have to do it and you see what the work is on the page to get you there.

**Craig:** I mean, just a simple thing like a drama in which a child witnesses a terrible event. Well, can they be there on that day? Will they actually see the terrible event? If not, how will they know what to say or do if they don’t know what the terrible event is? Do you describe it to them? Are you the first person to describe to a six-year-old what sexual assault is? These are real issues that people tangle with all the time when they’re making movies or television when you’re dealing with children because children are being asked to portray other children who have gone through some sort of trauma, sometimes. Not all the time.

**John:** A classic example is Kubrick on *The Shining*. And so he knew he was going to have these horrifying images. He also knew he was going to have this young kid. And so he would have conversations with the young kid about like, so, you’re seeing this thing. He wasn’t describing what the actual cutaway shot was going to be, but the thing that would get the kind of reaction that would be appropriate to intercut with. And that’s a thing you do all the time. You do as-if kind of substitutions for those things.

You can’t do that with a dog or a cat. And so you have to figure out what you’re going to do to get you into that place.

One of the biggest writing challenges I had was a movie that was never made called Fenwick’s Suit. And the central character in Fenwick’s Suit is this suit that comes to life. And so I had to think about like, well, how are we going to know what the suit is thinking? It has no face. It has lapels which can sort of function like ears. We can see its general body language. But it was a real challenge. And it would have been a challenge for the director and special effects people, but like to show that on the page was really tough because he couldn’t talk to anybody. And so I had to be able to find sentences that would describe exactly what the action was he was trying to do and how people would understand that.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that’s something that we might be able to help you with post-facto when we start talking about breaking rules. Because I’ve been thinking about that very topic a lot lately.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to Jim’s question. Do you want to take that?

**Craig:** Jim writes, “I’m 82 nonlinear pages into a script that features seven notable characters. Altogether they’re split across either three or four threads within the story. I’m trying to tie everything up while giving the characters their appropriate exposure and screen time. Would you, John August, have any advice from a technical standpoint on the best way to map out stories like these? Do we know how they tackle the stuff on Thrones?” He means Game of Thrones, by the way.

**John:** Game of Thrones. Talking the lingo.

**Craig:** Jim, go ahead and say Game of Thrones next time.

**John:** Just a few extra syllables. So, I would say the script that Jim is describing is probably an ensemble piece, there’s multiple characters doing multiple things. They may be in different timelines. It may be more like Go. It may be a more straightforward thing. But he’s describing a situation where different characters have different goals and different agendas and we’re not following a single character through the whole thing.

I think this is a situation where you’re using cards or a whiteboard or some other form of visually displaying who all the characters are and what they’re trying to do and figuring out where they intersect. Because if you could pull back and take a look at it you might see like, oh wow, this character doesn’t have enough to do. It’s not feeling rewarding. And you might be able to find some good balance between the characters.

The toughest thing you’re going to probably find in getting all these storylines to fit together nicely is that every time you’re cutting from one character’s storyline to another character’s storyline that it really feels like progress and that you’re not just like putting a pin in that and going off to someplace else.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m sure I don’t know the Game of Thrones writing process, but I’m sure quite early on in the breaking of stories they’re really thinking about like, OK, what is it going to be like to have these two scenes back to back and how is one scene going to inform the next scene? Might they switch some things around in post? I’m sure they do. But in breaking the script they’re always thinking about like what is it going to feel like to go from this character’s storyline to this character’s storyline and what are we gaining by making that cut right there?

**Craig:** They’re also making episodic television and it sounds like Jim is maybe making a feature because he’s 82 pages into a script, singular. So Game of Thrones can just simply stop following a character for two episodes. They can just stop and then they can come back to them later and sort of catch up. In a movie, not really. You can’t just stop. I mean, you can take a break. It’s a small break. But then you’ve got to come back.

So, one thing to ask yourself, Jim, is does your script actually feature seven notable characters or does it feature four notable characters and three sort of notable characters? Can you compress? Obviously if you can’t compress then you have to kind of stack your characters in terms of importance and complexity. Maybe character six and seven are just sort of thin, maybe a little bit more types as opposed to full people that require a lot of attention.

But the best way to map out stories like these, I believe, is to map them out the good old fashioned way from the point of view of your protagonist, or if you have a dual protagonist, two people, what they want, what they need, what’s wrong with them, what do they have to become. How does your plot help them or hurt them? And then these other people involved need to be looked at as allies and enemies and obstacles and assistants.

**John:** Absolutely true. And if you are doing something that is sort of more chapter-based, like *Go* is chapter-based, do that for each section and really think about like, OK, who is the equivalent of the protagonist in that section and what is their arc going to be over the course of that section. But if it’s a movie there’s going to be an expectation of progress that gets you to a certain place.

Unless you’re doing The Big Short, like we talked about before, and that’s a real challenge. And in that situation maybe you’re not worrying about sort of the balance of the characters and who has the most screen time, but are we telling the overall macro story well enough and am I using the characters that I’ve picked to tell that story as well as I can.

**Craig:** Exactly. John, do you want to see what Cade from Boise, Idaho wants to say?

**John:** Cade from Boise, Idaho writes, “Today I came across Episode Three—“

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Episode Three. Way back in the vault.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** “In which you discussed the process of outlining. I’m writing a spec TV show for which I recently finished the outline but there are oh so many problems with the story. I don’t know how deep I should go revising based on an outline. What are the things you look for to rework at the outline stage?” Craig?

**Craig:** The outline stage is the story stage, so you don’t stop until you feel quite confident that the story makes sense. That it holds together. This is if you are kind of outline conscious and I am. Some people don’t really like to outline and their process is one more of discovery. But for me I’m a big outliner and this is the time where I get to acid test the story before I go through all the effort of writing the script.

So, if there are so many problems with the story you’ve got to take a step back, ask yourself why, and then maybe start again. It’s just an outline, right? It’s just index cards. You haven’t built a house that you realize now is leaning slightly to the left and you have to demolish the whole thing. It’s just index cards. Don’t be afraid. Do it. Just start again.

**John:** So here’s what’s confusing about the term spec. And so what Cade is referring to as a spec TV show probably means an episode of an existing TV show for which he’s writing an episode for which he’s not being paid. So basically if he was writing an episode of *Game of Thrones*, a spec episode of *Game of Thrones* means it’s an episode of Game of Thrones. Versus a spec script in general means a script that there’s no underlying material. It’s confusing and we should have picked different words, but that’s sort of what it means.

So, I think particularly if Cade is writing a spec episode of Hawaii 5-0 that outline has to be tight and flawless and it needs to completely make sense because that’s a show that is entirely based on the plot of the episode. And so if the plot isn’t making sense on an outline level it’s not going to make sense in the finished script version. So, fix that now.

The outline phase is great for tackling logic problems, for like this just doesn’t make sense. It needs to make sense that way. The outline is not going to get you to sort of the more subtle emotional problems. That may not really become clear at the outline level. So, don’t kill yourself to write the perfect emotional outline because that’s just not the finished thing. And sometimes you’ll find in the development process if you are writing outlines for people they keep pushing for all this emotional detail that just doesn’t make sense on an outline level. So be mindful that you’re not trying to fix problems that just can’t be fixed in that medium.

**Craig:** Yeah. You certainly can’t achieve the emotional complexity of the screenplay. There’s no question about that. What you can do with an outline I think is build and investigate the function of the emotional pieces, like the big gears. If this person feels this way and then this happens and then they end up with that person does this make sense that they would feel the following? Would we feel something there? Has the story and the interactions between these two led to a moment that would create a feeling? That’s something that you could probably figure out from an outline and during outline. It’s certainly something I work on in outlines.

But the deeper stuff, yes, at some point you can just simply remind people, well yeah, you know, this is an outline. And for yourself as well, if there’s a little thing that’s kind of bugging you about it, sometimes you just let that go because in the writing you find a solve.

**John:** Let’s get into our feature topic which is plot holes and I think that ties in very well to this issue of outlines versus the finished product. So let’s talk about what plot holes even are because I think there’s a wide range of things we could describe as plot holes. But for today’s conversation, I’m going to go to the Wikipedia definition, which is of course the definitive definition of anything should be a community-generated webpage somewhere.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They define, “In fiction, a plot hole is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot. Such inconsistencies include such things as illogical or impossible events, statements or events that contradict other events in the storyline. The term is more loosely also applied to ‘loose ends’ in a plot. Sidelined story elements that remain unresolved by the end of the plot.”

Another definition of it which I found, there’s a site called MoviePlotHoles.com, and their tag line is where suspension of belief comes to die.

**Craig:** Well at least they know who they are.

**John:** Yes. And so basically what we’re looking for when we’re talking about this conversation of plot holes are things in the finished product that just feel like, OK, there’s a mistake there and this mistake could bug people. And we’re going to get into whether it’s worth trying to correct this. But in a perfect world, I guess, these things would not exist and sort of where they come from, let’s talk about sort of the general shapes of them and sort of what you do as you encounter plot holes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these are the things that drive us crazy as writers, of course. They are, fair warning to all of you out there who want to be professional, they are also things that studio executives and producers and actors and anyone on set are very capable of seeing immediately. There are things that no one else sees that we do. A lot of times people say, “Why don’t we just move that over there?” And everyone goes, “Yeah, why don’t we?” And then there’s one person in the world, the writer, going, “Oh god, you don’t understand what you just did.” But everyone – everyone – can see plot holes and they will come at you with them.

They will come at you. There will be a third assistant in the costume department will walk up to you and say, “By the way, I have a question for you. Does this make sense blah-blah-blah?” And you go, OK, it does. Here’s why. But you think – see, everyone feels entitled to discuss what they perceive as a potential plot hole.

**John:** Yeah. And so sometimes these are things which wouldn’t have been reflected in the script anyway, but they do have a bearing on story. So for example like that character was carrying their gun in this scene so why don’t they have their gun now? And so these are things where it’s the props department is going to be – as they’re reading through the script is going to be asking that question at every point so that they are not creating these plot problems.

We’re going to focus on it from the script level, but know that every department is going to be thinking about this and trying to make sure that they’re consistently logical. So, it’s not just your responsibility, but you’re going to get blamed for it. So, let’s talk about what this is.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes.

**John:** So, general categories of plot holes – I would define one is problems of information. Which is when characters have knowledge that was never passed to them. So somehow magically they know something that the audience knows but it’s never quite clear how they learned it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Related is characters who don’t know something which we know they should know, or they seemed to know before, or they knew last week. There’s a show that I love very much but one of the characters is a doctor and yet she doesn’t seem to know some very basic things which is frustrating.

**Craig:** Like where the heart is?

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s like – or like they encounter something which is like but we already saw you do that, so this is not a new thing for you. This should not be a challenge for you at all. So, anyone in their position should know how to do that thing. So that’s a problem with information.

Often you find problems of time and geography, so multiple days seem to pass or didn’t pass and it wasn’t quite clear – the timelines just don’t match up. There are eight day weeks. Something is grossly wrong here. The sun never sets or it sets twice.

The plot relies on two things happening simultaneously but the characters couldn’t have anticipated those things were going to happen simultaneously. There’s like a coincidence that just doesn’t make sense.

This is the thing that bugged me all the time on *Alias* which is a show I genuinely loved, but Sydney Bristow could somehow fly to Asia and back in the course of a day. She has supersonic teleportation powers.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one is really good about that, are they?

**John:** Yeah. And I think this is a Too Fast, Too Furious, my friend Nima will correct me if I’m citing the wrong Fast and Furious movie, but there’s an action sequence that’s taking place on a tarmac where a plane is taking off and it’s like a 17-minute action sequence and the plane is moving the entire time. And so that runway would have to be like 40 miles long.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, just to like – is that a plot hole? We’ll get into that. It’s a thing you have to suspend your disbelief in order to get there and some people can’t suspend their disbelief.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there’s a line between, you know what, we’re just going to break the rules of reality to achieve something, and a plot hole which is we messed up. We actually legitimately screwed up here. They shouldn’t be able to do that inside of the logic of our own. You know, in Fast and Furious the logic of that world, the physics of that world, you could have a really super long runway and time is elastic.

But, you couldn’t have something in the Fast and Furious world where somebody simply didn’t know something that they knew 30 minutes earlier and we saw them know. You can’t have a character see someone and then later say honestly, “I’ve never seen them before.” That’s a plot hole.

**John:** That would be a plot hole. Or like they can’t change a tire. You know what, that’s going to come with it. You’re going to be able to change a tire.

And some of what you’re talking about is like, you know, your movies bend the world in certain ways. So Charlie’s Angels, like physics was sort of optional. They could do things that – it was heightened and so you had to sort of go with the heightened nature of it. Many years ago I wrote an article about *Spider Man 3* called The Perils of Coincidence and I’ll put a link in the show notes to that because there are premise coincidences which are – you get one of those for free. Like almost every movie relies on some coincidence that’s why this story is taking place now. But there were so many coincidences in Spider Man 3 that I needed to sort of acknowledge that like stacked together they form a plot hole because no, no, no there’s just too much happening here. It’s just all too arbitrary that these things all happened in the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you put too many together it starts to take on the meme of a plot hole because what I think we presume even if we don’t presume it deliberately is that plot holes happen because the writers got stuck and needed to do a thing and didn’t know how to do it without breaking something. And that is also why I think coincidences stack up. We presume it’s because the writers needed something to happen and they didn’t know how to do it without breaking something.

**John:** Yeah. And in general, we’ll get into fixes later on, but anything you can do that your hero is actually creating the situation gets you out of that coincidence problem.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If something happens because of your hero, then it’s just not random. Or if it something happens because the villain, then it’s not random. So just finding ways to match character motivation to events gets you through most of those situations. Or, if it’s still a little unlikely, you buy it more because you saw a character do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And generally that works in your favor because it feels like it’s tightening things up. It is creating a sense of harmony and the audience gives you credit for it.

One of my favorite kinds of plot holes is the kind that negates the need for the entire story to have happened at all. I love these. And I’m just calling it problems of over-complication, because I don’t know what else to call it. But the idea is that your plot needs to exist so that your movie exists, but it doesn’t need to exist for the actual events of the movie or the goals of the movie or the character. And one of the classic examples is a movie that you and I love that we have talked about many times on the show and that’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it goes a little something like this.

Once Indiana Jones discovers that the Nazis are looking in the wrong place because they don’t have both sides of the medallion, all you have to do at that point is nothing. Just do nothing. They will never find it.

Now, you can argue, of course, well he’s compelled to find it because he wants to see this thing. It’s part of who he is. And that makes sense. But the movie never really says that, so like in a perfect plot hole address somebody would say, “That’s it, we’re done. Let’s go home.” And he says, “No, I can’t. I just can’t.” And then you would say, OK, at least the movie understands that that’s a thing, right? But what they went for in Raiders was no one is ever going to comment on that, let’s just keep going, as if it makes sense that we’re still trying to stop the Nazis who have no idea and never will know where this thing is.

And I love that. I just kind of love that.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say this problem of over-complication often ties into villain plots and villain plans because there’s so many action movies particularly where – or thrillers – where if you step back it’s like, wait, was that really the easiest way to get a million dollars? That was really complicated. There are so many simpler ways to do that that wouldn’t have involved most of what we saw in the movie, but then you wouldn’t have a movie.

And so you can try to sort of lay the track to make it clear why it needed to happen this way. But sometimes in trying to lay that track you are making the answer more important than the question in many ways. Like make it seem like, oh, this is really important. Like, no, no, I was just trying to explain it away. In trying to get rid of the problem you actually made the problem worse.

**Craig:** This comes up I think all the time. When you are in development and the studio or the producer spot a plot hole, their instinct which I think is a normal human instinct is to pave it. Let’s fill the hole. But as writers we understand that that is a treacherous at to undertake because in filling that hole or fixing the hole, patching it over, you can create a problem that is actually worse than the existence of the hole in the first place.

**John:** Yeah. So, before we fix all plot holes let’s bring up a couple more issues of why these plot holes happen, because it’s not enough to say like oh this was a plot hole, but like where did that come from? I think probably the biggest cause of plot holes in movies is like there was a scene or there was something that addressed that issue and so what you see in the final film doesn’t make sense but that’s because something got cut or changed in the process. So either scenes were reordered, which is why the timeline doesn’t make sense, or they just took something out and that is the reason why this happened.

An example I found online was The Lost World: Jurassic Park when the T-Rex is on the ship, he’s in the cage but all the people on the ship are dead, so how did he kill everybody and then get back in the cage and lock the door? And the answer apparently is that there was supposed to be this velociraptor stuck on board and there was a whole scene and it just got cut.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That happens. And that’s a classic thing and you and I both have movies where like there really was an answer there, but the movie was running long, that wasn’t an important scene, it got snipped out. And so whether it’s timeline problems or some logic problems or like how that person got that piece of information, where was that phone call, we never saw that phone call, it’s because it wasn’t interesting and therefore it got dropped.

**Craig:** And I would argue that maybe 80% of legitimate plot holes that you spot in movies are not the writer’s fault. They were addressed or dealt with and then either there was a legitimately good reason that a scene had to come out of the movie. It was infected with a bad performance, or it just seemed to not really be what the audience wanted at that moment in the movie. Whatever the reason is, it had to go. And so everyone watches a movie and presumes that every single piece of film that was shot is in the movie. It’s not even remotely the case.

And I would say also there are times when the problem – in movies in particular – the problem is that the director made a mistake. Directors change things all the time in features because they are entitled to by our system. But occasionally, oh so very rarely, they do so in a capricious manner that actually does overturn an apple cart and cause a plot hole to occur.

**John:** Yep. It can be a situation where, oh, I really wanted this scene to take place at night rather than daytime, because it’s going to look better in this location. And maybe that makes perfect sense and maybe it truly does look better, but if these people are supposed to be on two sides of a phone call and they’re in the same time zone, why is night in one place and daytime in the other place? That happens all the time.

**Craig:** Happens all the time. Or, you know what, I want this guy to stand here when he sees him come in there because it looks awesome. And then later the writer watches and says, “Um, if he’s standing here and they’re standing there, neither one of them can see this third person that they’re both supposed to be noticing.” So there’s a plot hole now. We saw them not see that person and later they’re going to say how they saw that person in that place. Plot hole. Yeah.

**John:** Plot hole. Another reason plot holes happen I think sometimes, especially in series, is when it’s a moving target and so Harry Potter is the classic example. They started filming the movies before the books were all finished, so there’s some things which show up in the books that don’t quite match up to things that are going to happen later on in the books. They sometimes have to explain around that. So even though JK Rowling was involved in both, she was ultimately more responsible for making logic happen within her books and she didn’t necessarily know that that one thing that was happening in movie two was going to be a very difficult thing to pay off later on. The rules of where you can apparate. And they would need to do some things – they would need to make some choices that weren’t going to be paying off later on. So, characters could show up in places that didn’t make sense or an adaptation might establish one relationship that is not actually the same relationship in the books.

So the moving target of it all is a real problem. So you see that in both series but also in movie series.

**Craig:** It is a shame that series and movie series and television series that do this well I think get extra penalized when they stumble.

**John:** Yeah. True.

**Craig:** I mean, JK Rowling created this remarkably consistent world over seven books. Very few what you would call plotty mistakes. You may not enjoy a certain aspect of her plotting, but it was well thought – it was really carefully well thought through and done.

Similarly Game of Thrones, right? I mean, they have all these characters. They’re all interlocking/interlacing. And then, OK, so there’s one scene where a dragon shows up somewhere a little too quickly and people lose their mind.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they are relying in a sense, they become comfortable with the notion that they’re in good hands. That the show is going to take care of them. And so when you have a movie that’s a little more fast and loose with things no one really cares. They’re just like, meh, you know, it’s fine. It’s all good.

**John:** Yeah. Finally, I would say that some cases the reality would be either not cinematic or would be really gruesome. A thing I found online was pointing out that like when *Ant Man* is tiny, when he punches people, the force with which he would punch people would be more like a bullet. It would rip flesh and bone. So it shouldn’t knock somebody down. It should rip through them. And they could choose to show that in *Ant Man* movies. But that would be gory and disgusting, so they don’t do that.

Sometimes the expectations of the genre steer you towards certain solutions that aren’t entirely logical but are logical for the kind of movie you’re making.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the physics of all of it is absurd. They will play around and say, “Well, you know, we’ve got the physics of him doing this,” but you look at it and you go if you are going to jump from there to there, or if you’re going to push off and fly from there to there, you will create this massive crater under you because for every action there’s an equal–

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Like when there’s a moment in one of *The Avengers* movie where – maybe the first one – where Tony Stark is falling as regular Tony Stark out of his skyscraper and then the suit catches up to him and he turns it on and repels upwards about 20 feet above people. And I always think they’re dead.

**John:** They’re dead.

**Craig:** They’re dead. Forget even heat. Even if you have a heat-less thing, the fact that it is stopped that amount of acceleration means that they would be crushed. Crushed.

**John:** Yeah. Crushed.

**Craig:** Crushed.

**John:** All right. So let’s take a look at fixing plot holes. If we have identified plot holes let’s fix some of them.

So getting back to that earlier question, the outline stage is the perfect place to notice some of these plot holes and fix them before you start writing. You will do yourself so many favors if you recognize like, oh, these things are supposed to be simultaneous so therefore it needs to be daytime both places. Or how would she get from this place to this place? If you are outlining this is a time where you will catch a lot of those things.

The third Arlo Finch I outlined much more extensively than previous ones and I did save myself probably a week’s worth of work of torture about how to fix some things because, oh, on an outline I can see this is going to take this amount of time. I can fix some of these problems before I write the problems.

**Craig:** A hundred percent. I don’t have problems when I’m writing a script that are torturous for me ever because I’ve already tortured myself in the outline phase. And I will. I will walk around for weeks trying to solve a problem because it feels wrong and it’s so brutal. But then when you solve it you feel great. And you know you’re going to be OK when you write.

Don’t think for a second when you’re outlining that the cleverness, brilliance, beauty of whatever it is you are imagining is going to be able to overcome the plot hole that it is creating. It will not.

**John:** Nope. It will not. Another general piece of good advice I’ve tried to implement in sort of everything I’ve done, especially when I’ve gone and done rewrites on things which you’ve sensed some plot holes there is whenever possible take away the question rather than trying to pave over it.

So, don’t have a character give an answer to something. Try to preempt the question so the question is never asked. So the audience will never ask that question. And so there was a very complicated thing I was doing that involved time travel and I needed to have a character quite early on establish one rule that took away 90% of the questions that would come up. And so, you know, if you can eliminate questions it’s much better than answering them.

**Craig:** And this is an area I think people who come in to rewrites have an unfair advantage over people that have written before them because when you come into rewrite you have license to say, “You know the solution here is to just get rid of this entire thing. Everybody apparently has fallen in love with it and is dancing around it like it’s the golden calf, but it’s destroying everything around it. It’s creating this need for endless explanations and bendings and contortions to justify it and cover up the damage it’s causing. How about you just get rid of it? And then you have problems whatsoever.”

Nothing feels better than a movie that moves in a nice, clean, elegant way without ever stopping you in your tracks to go, wait, wait, hold on, what? Nothing.

**John:** Nothing. Another good solution sometimes if you are looking at a cut of a movie and there’s a plot hole is to always ask yourself could I solve this with a single shot. If a single thing was there and inserted would it take care of it? And this comes from the women who edited one of the *Star Trek* movies. They were talking about how there was a thing they were encountering in one of the movies and they just pulled out their iPhones and shot one shot and it’s actually apparently in the movie but it solved an issue. It was like a cutaway to a thing, I don’t know if it was a sign that said something, but it made it clear like, oh, it connected some pieces. And sometimes it’s just a single shot or two, three really quick shots to get you over that hump so like, oh, that thing happened. Basically I’m asking for what is the simple solution that gets you through it so you don’t have to explain more.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that sometimes what you can do is take a look at the plot hole you have and ask yourself does it even have to be a hole? Maybe this is plot help. Because let’s say – for instance I’m working on something right now and in the story I got to a point where I thought you know what would be very helpful story wise in terms of establishing rules, boundaries, difficulty is if a certain thing were true. The problem is that that thing feels a little plot holey. So, I thought about it for a while and then I thought, OK, I’m going to have somebody say this like it’s true. And I’m going to have the character question it. And in the end we’re going to find out that it was a lie. But I get all of the benefit of having it.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** And the lie also made sense, like why this person lied about it. And then you’re the winner. The plot hole suddenly is not a hole at all.

**John:** Yep. So the TV Tropes people will call that a Hand Wave, but it’s actually a very specific Hand Wave. So Hand Wave is when somebody says something that distracts you from the problem and it makes the problem go away. And it sounds like you did an Advanced Hand Wave which is it was distracting you but then ultimately it paid off that the character was lying. So, brilliant. And that’s why you win all the awards.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s yet to happen, but I did essentially have the character express what I thought the audience would be expressing at that moment which is you know what you’re saying doesn’t actually make sense. And somebody going don’t worry about it, I’ve thought it through, trust me. Which I think for an audience they go, OK, if the character on screen that I’m identifying with is questioning this the movie is aware. This will be explained at some point. And it is.

**John:** Yeah. A related term which Jane Espenson will use, you’ll see in TV Tropes, is Hanging a Lampshade, which basically is like having the characters call a thing out and point out the unlikely nature of it. Basically saying like this is one of those premise kind of things that this is – you got to give me this one, because without this the story doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** Right. And what you are playing is a psychological game with the audience. You’re saying to them please beat me up a little bit less over this because at least I’m admitting it. I’m not trying to fool you. I’m not insulting your intelligence. I’m just saying, “Hey look it’s happened.”

Now, it is not even close to being as good as not being there.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But it is preferable to suggesting to the audience that what you just told them makes sense when it clearly does not.

**John:** Agreed. Final bit of advice on plot holes is often you are better off just ignoring them. And so rather than trying to fix them it’s acknowledging that some things that a certain percentage of your audience will point out as mistakes, most of your audience will never notice and trying to fix it will actually cause more damage.

We said before when you try to fix things you can sometimes call more attention to them and the audience will assume that that patch is more important than the actual material around it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And fixes often just feel like fixes. You and I are probably particularly attentive to looped lines, ADR. We’re looking at character B, but character A says something even though they have their back to us. And it’s clearly just a line that was thrown in there to address some problem. Sometimes it can be done really well and it’s seamless and smooth. But, man, sometimes you just really feel it.

**Craig:** Well, best option is get rid of plot hole. Second best option is turn plot hole to your favor. Third option is fill plot hole somehow. And you’re right, sometimes it’s better to just leave it be, depending on the size of it.

The danger, and you will see outside people – non-writers – do this almost exclusively is you decide that the way to fix the plot hole is to layer it with other stuff that solves the immediate logic problem. It’s as if they’re saying we have a problem right now not in the movie but in this room that we in this room don’t believe this moment. What can we say in this room to solve “that problem?” And you can come up with something, but it stinks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And therein is the danger. Because you can begin filling these things only to realize you were in it and you’re burying yourself under these layers of solution that have absolutely nothing to do with good storytelling, emotions, intentions, theme, adventure, feeling. They literally exist only to answer some dumb question. And if you even sense for a second that’s what’s happening, stop immediately.

**John:** Yeah. You and I have both been in rooms with filmmakers who have made really good movies and a lot of movies who do get tripped up on really frustrating things that they should not be getting tripped up on and are asking for solutions to things that aren’t problems. And that is just really disheartening but it’s also the reality. And so you hear them, you talk through it, you try not to fill the perceived plot hole, but actually design a path that’s not going to take them where they see that plot hole and we’ll still deliver the movie to where it needs to go. It’s really frustrating.

**Craig:** It is. And this by the way is actually one of the more annoying parts of writing anything. Because we are attempting to create a simulation of reality and reality is really complicated. And also reality is reality. So, it is not here to deliver narrative excitement or drama on any given day. It’s here to just function the way it normally functions. So what we’re doing is doubly hard. We’re trying to create reality and we’re trying to create reality on a crazy day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so therefore we want crazy things to happen on the crazy day. But when crazy things happen in reality they happen in accordance with reality. It’s incredibly frustrating. Reality is slow. It unfolds in real time. People aren’t changing in the middle of it. Sometimes there is no particular challenge. It doesn’t care about our storytelling needs. And so we have to figure out how to tell a story in a matrix that doesn’t care about our needs as writers.

**John:** Absolutely. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What’s yours?

**Craig:** Great question, John. Very, very simple thing that I find myself using constantly. And I don’t know if you do. It comes with the iPhone. It’s the Measure App. Have you used it?

**John:** I’ve used it only once or twice. I always forget that it’s there.

**Craig:** Exactly. You always forget it’s there. Many, many times I’ve gone hunting around my house looking for the tape measure, looking for a ruler. In fact, the Measure App is better than both of those things. The Measure App, which takes about I would say 15 seconds to kind of get going because you need to move your phone around to let it orient itself in space and time, allows you to just place a dot anywhere you want and then you just start walking. And it’s just making a line on the screen using your calendar to lay the dot of the line over reality, AR style. And then when you reach the point where you want to know, OK, how far is this from my first dot, you hit it again, and it tells you.

You don’t need another person at the end with a tape measure. You can measure anything this way. It is incredibly useful. And I don’t think it existed until this recent iteration I think of iOS, or nearly recent. So, I use it all the time and I think now that I’ve put this bug in your ear you will too.

**John:** I probably will use it more and more. My belief is that some version of it existed from a third party developer and then Apple just made their own and Sherlocked it. But I agree it’s a really well done thing.

My One Cool Thing is an article in Lifehacker by Nick Douglas called Install These Apps on your New Mac. And it’s just a list of the apps you should maybe consider putting on your new Mac. And I liked it because I use most of these apps and it’s a convenient way for me to show some useful things that people should try to put on their Macintosh and at least experiment with.

So obviously we use Slack for everything around the office. Dropbox is essential for me. I feel like we need to do a little sidebar on Dropbox at some point because I see people who use Dropbox but they don’t use it to its maximum capability. So I think we’ll save that for a special topic bit. I cannot imagine my life without Dropbox.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, neither can I.

**John:** If you use multiple computers it is just–

**Craig:** Essential.

**John:** Incredibly important.

**Craig:** And we all use multiple computers because at the very least–

**John:** Our phones.

**Craig:** We have a phone and a tablet at a minimum, right? Or a phone and a laptop. So, they are computers and I was very happy to see my beloved 1Password on there as well.

**John:** Oh yeah. Crucial. And so I only was aware of this article because he uses Highland2 for writing and so that was the little new alert that showed up. But I thought the whole article was good. So, anybody who uses Highland2 for their main writing is clearly a genius and so therefore you should take all his other suggestions to heart.

Craig, you have a change in your life that you wanted to talk to our listeners about.

**Craig:** I do. I have a big life change coming. I have been in my office here in Old Town Pasadena for I think seven years.

**John:** Your office is terrific. I love your office. It feels old fashioned in the best way.

**Craig:** Well, I need a little bit more space for some things that are happening. And I love this part of Los Angeles. This is Old Town Pasadena. I found a new office just a few blocks away that is even more kind of old school and nifty and LA detective circa 1938. And so I need to help the folks who have this building, I need to help them rent the place that I’m leaving. So, hey, do you want to rent Craig’s office? You can.

If you are in the market for an office in Old Town Pasadena, it’s about 500 square feet. It’s got two rooms, separated by a door. You could do worse.

**John:** You could do worse.

**Craig:** So if you’re looking for something like that go ahead and email us at ask@johnaugust.com. And we’ll connect you up with the folks that are showing the office. I will not be in it, so don’t expect to see me there, but that’s sort of the good news. You won’t have to deal with me.

**John:** It’s very, very good news. And it is a beautiful office and I think it would be good for a writer or writers who wanted to use it for offices, but it would also be good for like a psychologist or somebody. Because it has a front waiting room and then a closed back office. So it’s good for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. It can be all sorts of things.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch and Jim Bond. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions, or requests for Craig’s office space.

For short questions we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, which I think will be redesigned by the time this episode comes up. We did a big relaunch of the site. So if it’s not up Tuesday when this drops, it will be up shortly thereafter. It will look nice. I think you’ll like it.

**Craig:** It’s going to be a whole new johnaugust.com?

**John:** It’s pretty different, so I think you’ll enjoy it.

**Craig:** No, I don’t like change.

**John:** No change at all. So here’s one of the things I’ll say one of the goals. Because Scriptnotes posts are so big it just looked like a site that was only about Scriptnotes. And so Scriptnotes have their own column but they’re not the main topic of the site.

**Craig:** Hmm. Feels backwards to me. I think it should be all Scriptnotes with a small, tiny digital ghetto for whatever your personal musings are. But, yes, I believe Scriptnotes – I have a new vision. Somebody must own Scriptnotes.com I assume, right?

**John:** They do. Yeah.

**Craig:** Jerks.

**John:** Jerks. But on johnaugust.com you’ll also find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes at Scripnotes.net. And you subscribe there and you get all of the back catalog episodes. The first 381 episodes of the show. And the bonus episodes.

**Craig:** I mean, what a deal.

**John:** What a deal. Thank you for another fun week.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Join us for the WGA’s [Princess Bride screening](https://www.wga.org/news-events/events/guild-screenings) on January 27th.
* [The Seattle Live Show](https://nwsg.org/events/) is on February 6th!
* You can now [preorder Arlo Finch in the Lake of the Moon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/162672816X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) or come to the [launch event](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/john-august-2019) on February 9th.
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 383: Splitting the Party](https://johnaugust.com/2019/splitting-the-party)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 3: Kids, cards, whiteboards and outlines](https://johnaugust.com/2011/kids-cards-whiteboards-and-outlines)
* Plot Holes on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_hole) and [TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotHole). You can find examples at [Movie Plot Holes](https://movieplotholes.com)
* [The perils of coincidence](http://johnaugust.com/2007/perils-of-coincidence)
* [Measure App](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbLe4rHQI_I) on iPhone
* [Install These Apps on your New Mac](https://lifehacker.com/install-these-apps-on-your-new-mac-1831687258) by Nick Douglas for Lifehacker
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch and Jim Bond ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_384.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/splitting-the-party).

**John August:** Head’s up, this episode will absolutely have some bad language. Not apologizing, just stating the facts.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 383 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be talking about the trope of never split the party, and why in fact as a writer you often want to and need to divide the party up. We’ll talk about how to do that and what you gain, plus we’ll be answering listener questions on sequences, working with an author, screenwriter websites, and we have some umbrage fodder to kick off the new year.

Craig, Happy New Year.

**Craig:** Happy New Year, John. We did it again, by the way. We made it through another loop around the sun.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I feel super good about it.

**John:** The longest loop around the sun in my memory.

**Craig:** It was in many ways the most challenging and yet also rewarding year of my life. It was quite a thing. But there is something nice about arriving at the end because the flat disk that is the earth has managed to kind of do this circle around what I presume is also a flat disk of the sun. And it just gives you a nice feeling of accomplishment even if you specifically haven’t really done anything except stand still on the flat disk that is the earth.

**John:** Yeah. You made a TV show. That was fantastic. Hurrah.

**Craig:** I made a TV show. Feels great. We’re trucking along there, getting close to showing it to people which will be fun. Although you know it’s funny, I was talking to – I won’t say who, but a famous filmmaker friend of ours – and we were saying how the dream, the real dream, is to make a television show or a movie and when it’s finally done and it is perfect and you’ve got everything the way you want it, you show it to no one. You just put it away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s like, ugh, it’s the showing of it.

**John:** I’ll tell you, with The Nines, that movie I made with Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy, I kind of feel like I did that, because I’m really happy with the movie and no one saw it. So, it wasn’t a deliberate choice to have no one see the movie, it just sort of worked out that way.

**Craig:** Well that can happy, too. I suppose it’s sort of involuntary lock-away-ness.

**John:** I’ll tell you that the project I’m thinking about directing next, I originally had envisioned it as sort of an indie feature, sort of more on the Destroyer model, and now I’m just like, you know what, maybe I’ll just make it for Netflix, because Netflix at least it’s out there in the world all at once. Everyone can see it and then you’re done. And that will be Chernobyl. Everyone will see it all at once. Well, they’ll see episode by episode, but the whole world can see it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The whole world within some reasonable limitation, yeah, can see it. But at least, I don’t know, there’s something about television I suppose that’s, I don’t know why, that’s a little more acceptable to me in this regard. Because it’s like opening weekend. There’s a thing in movies, it’s like you feel like there’s a blade that’s swinging towards your neck.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s all make or break. And then in television it’s like, you know, Cheers and Seinfeld, I think, were both like the lowest rated television shows of their debut season. And then, you know, then you kind of come around. But in movie terms, it just feels like you’re always under the gun. So I like this new kind of relaxed TV deal. It’s nice.

**John:** Yeah. So there will be ratings for your program, and so if people want to support you in 2019 they can support you by watching your show. That would be fantastic. So it’s not like you get extra dollars if people watch your show, but people notice when shows have high ratings, which is great. If people want to support me in 2019 they can pre-order the second Arlo Finch. That’s actually the single biggest thing you could do for me this year would be to pre-order the second Arlo Finch because if all the people who bought Arlo Finch the first go around by pre-ordering the second book it would be on the top of the charts. It would do fantastically well.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** Yeah. So that would be great. If people wanted to do that–

**Craig:** I’m going to do that because my daughter is a big fan. She loved the first book.

**John:** That’s right. And I didn’t give you the second book. I’ll get you the second book. She’ll like the second book.

**Craig:** Well, you just cost yourself a sale.

**John:** No, no, no, you should still buy the book.

**Craig:** Well, eh, I mean, you know, you’re giving it to me. I don’t know. I don’t get this.

**John:** How’s this – I will give you a copy of the audio edition which she can listen to, because the same guy did the audio edition, James Patrick Cronin.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** I just approved the artwork minutes before we started recording.

**Craig:** Ooh, exciting. I always love it when things like that are happening behind the scenes.

**John:** Behind the scenes. Some news, so people know about our Princess Bride screening that’s taking place on January 27 at 5pm at the WGA Theater. Some details on how you get into the screening. So this is apparently how it’s going to work. The doors open at 4:30pm. WGA members get in first. They get first choice of seats. And then at 4:45pm it’s open seating for everyone else who wants to come in and see The Princess Bride and then stay for our discussion of the terrific movie that we are going to be looking at that night and celebrating.

**Craig:** And, John, correct me if I’m wrong but the idea is that we’re going to record our discussion as one of our deep dive podcasts essentially?

**John:** That is exactly it. And so if this goes well I’d like to do this several times more even this year.

**Craig:** Great. That’s fun. It’s a way to get me to see movies.

**John:** Yeah. But also sometimes like some classic movies, too, would a great thing for us to see. I think that’s another goal I would like for us to do this is like we do the Three Page Challenge but we never really look at whole screenplays, and so maybe we’ll pick a screenplay, sort of like a book club thing where you and I will both read the screenplay and we’ll assume that our listeners have read the screenplay, maybe even for a movie that hasn’t been shot. So we can actually look at what it looks like on the page, from a really good screenplay.

**Craig:** All right. I’m down with that.

**John:** Cool. We also have another live show to announce. This is breaking news. So, we’ve been trying to do a Seattle show for about as long as the podcast has existed. We are finally doing a live show in Seattle, February 6. Details will be coming soon, but assume that it will be in the evening. We are going to do it someplace at a venue that will be appropriately sized for the people who come in Seattle. We don’t know how many that’s going to be. But I’m doing my Arlo Finch book tour. Craig, you’re flying up just for this. So it should be a fun time.

**Craig:** Yeah, come on Seattle. Don’t make us look stupid, you know, because I love you. I love Seattle.

**John:** I love Seattle, too.

**Craig:** We have family in Seattle.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s great. I have friends there.

**Craig:** So come on. I’m just saying to Seattle like, hey, guys, you have a reputation for being super cool, but you don’t want that to tilt over into we don’t care ism, right? You still want to care, like you want to show up. So my goal is 40,000 people.

**John:** Yep. And while we’re doing our tour of the United States, back when we were at the Austin Film Festival I recorded a special episode of Studio 360, which is a Slate Podcast, and that episode aired this last week and it’s actually pretty nice. It’s sort of a recap of how I got into being a screenwriter. So if you don’t know that history there’s a link in the show notes to an episode of Studio 360 I recorded about my history as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s get into some 2019 with something that can really get us going. You’ve been gone for a while.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** So let’s get into this. We got a letter from a listener named Mark, and so I’ll read Mark’s letter and then we can discuss what Mark brings up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Mark writes, “I’m baffled as to why you are not railing against the Golden Globe awards. Did you not hear Lady Gaga whining about how hard it is to be a female musician while fondling her $5 million necklace? Did you miss the entire article that the writer may make $218 for a song that makes the artist $34 million? By your silence you are supporting a platform that denigrates writers while promoting the self-indulgent delusions of those who believe they are entitled by the measure of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs.

“I really thought your podcast was about earning your way and working to get the skill set necessary to make it happen. Wow. You really had me fooled.”

Craig, I mean–

**Craig:** It appears we had him fooled.

**John:** Yeah, Craig, you fooled Mark. I mean, so let’s get into Mark and let’s really take a look at ourselves about–

**Craig:** What an idiot? I mean, it’s so stupid that I can’t even feel umbrage. I’m almost happy. It’s almost made me happy because I’d forgotten that there can be people this stupid. And, yeah, I’m OK calling Mark stupid. Mark, you’re probably not a stupid person but this is a stupid thing you’ve done. It’s a stupid thing you’ve written.

And the reason I guess primarily that I would say so is because you’ve made this insane logical leap that because you didn’t hear us talking about the Golden Globe awards we therefore support it. By the way, I have no opinion about the Golden Globe awards. I didn’t watch them. But why would anyone presume that if you don’t say something about a topic that, I mean, it’s not like either one of us were at the Golden Globe awards. Neither one of us are a member of the Foreign Hollywood Press Association.

I also didn’t mention something about Yazidi Christians being slaughtered yesterday. That doesn’t mean I support that. That is the dumbest premise for any stupid letter I’ve ever encountered. That’s crazy. Why would anyone think that?

**John:** Yeah, what I liked about it is it sort of reinvigorated a spirit that I’m trying to sort of feel for 2019 which is that in 2019 I’m sort of done being outraged. I’m not going to let myself get provoked or baited into sort of arguments. That includes Twitter, but also in the real world. I think I kind of felt sort of your calm. I also sort of felt nothing other than sort of a vague like sort of frustration. But I’m just not going to take Mark’s bullshit. I’m not going to be outraged enough to be outraged by it.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**John:** And I think this also extends to politics overall. Because I was having lunch with Tess Morris today, who is obviously fantastic and a big friend of the show, and we were talking about politics and upcoming democratic stuff. And I said that I’m not going to sort of sit around and listen to like, “Oh that person is too progressive, or that person is too liberal, or that person is too whatever.” No, no, you can have your own opinion but you don’t get to tell me what my opinion is anymore. And you don’t get to tell me when I should be outraged or should not be outraged.

**Craig:** Yeah. I haven’t seen something quite this stupid since like 15 minutes ago on Twitter. This is a very kind of Twittery way of talking.

**John:** Yeah. He did long Twitter. He did long Twitter.

**Craig:** He did long Twitter. And listen, everybody knows the difference right? The funny thing is it used to be that a guy like Mark would write something like this, you would go oh my god, like I have to combat this point by point. And there are so many Marks out there who do this that you realize like you know what actually I couldn’t possibly rebut all their stupidity, so nah, go ahead. You know what? Mute.

The Twitter mute function has been such a joy for me.

**John:** Oh, isn’t it so nice.

**Craig:** Yes. So like in my mind I read this and I’m just like mute.

**John:** Yep. So you and I both used to have comments on our blogs and I remember when I turned comments off people were like how can you possibly silence the conversation. It was like because I just don’t care anymore. I literally don’t care what your response is to this. This was my opinion and you can have your opinion. But you don’t get to come into my living room and sort of tell me your opinion. And so getting back to the Golden Globes of it all, it’s like I think – oh, I didn’t watch the Golden Globes because I was at your house playing D&D.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We didn’t discuss the Golden Globes once. At the very end of the night we said like, oh my god, Phil Lord won for Spider Verse.

**Craig:** Spider Man. Yeah, Spider Verse.

**John:** Fantastic. You know what? I did not email him to congratulate him because I had already congratulated him on making a great movie and that’s all that mattered. I am a voting member of the Academy. I don’t give a shit about the Academy Awards. I genuinely don’t. I don’t care who hosts them. I don’t care who wins the awards. I’ve gone to the Academy Awards because it’s nice to get dressed up and go to a big fancy party. And that’s what I wish awards really were is like a big fancy party to celebrate the cool movies over the course of 2018. And then we’d sort of like put down our drinks and go back and make movies for 2019.

But this whole long season of award stuff is just such bullshit. And I’ve been through it before and I’m just not having it this year.

**Craig:** Good for you. I mean, obviously my position on awards is a fairly consistent position all this time. The notion of awards for art has always been troubling to me. And, of course, look, Mark isn’t making points that haven’t been made before. These aren’t fresh points. Yes, shocker of all shocks, a lot of actors will talk about poor people while they themselves are making a lot of money and wearing expensive things. And also people that sometimes make a lot of money and wear expensive things donate more to charity than Mark could ever imagine donating in his lifetime.

There is always an easy kind of – you could just sort of easily go look at this hypocrisy of the whole thing and I get that. it is easy and it’s sort of fun to punch up I guess at incredibly beautiful rich people who are going on about their beautiful art and so on and so forth. But it’s also a bit boring now I think. Everybody gets it. Like we all understand. If Lady Gaga weren’t also kind of a nice – she seems like a very nice person. I’ve never heard her say or do anything where I felt like, ugh, yuck. She’s not R. Kelly for god’s sake. Shut up Mark, you idiot. [laughs]

Oh, and you know, please stop listening to the podcast. This is also this new thing of like people who have a complaint about the podcast and I’m like well let me get your address so I can send you your refund. You jerk.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Fun. Fun. I couldn’t even get umbrage over that. I feel robbed.

**John:** No you couldn’t. I felt a little more umbrage than you did on this. But it’s my own special thing. I need to figure out what that word is, but it’s just that little snap of something. It’s like, you know what, I’m not dealing with that. I’m not having it.

**Craig:** I ain’t having it.

**John:** I’m feeling the clap emoji kind of. I’m underlining my words with claps.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m trying to hit mental mute as much as I can these days. Just mental mute. That’s the thing. They don’t even know you muted them. That’s the best part.

**John:** Oh, so good.

**Craig:** God, I love it. All right, moving on.

**John:** Moving on, our feature topic today is splitting up the party, dividing the party. It’s that trope that you often see in – well originally in sort of Scooby Doo things. Let’s split up so we can cover more ground and so therefore everyone gets into trouble because they split the party. But it also happens a lot in D&D where it’s that idea of you don’t want to divide up the party because if you divide up the party you’re weaker separately than you are together. And it’s also just really annoying for players because then you’re not – you’re just sort of waiting around for it to be your turn again.

But as I thought about it like dividing the party is actually a crucial thing that we end up having to do in movies and especially now in the second Arlo Finch just so that we can actually tell the story the best way possible. So I want to talk about situations where it’s good to keep characters together, more importantly situations where you really want to keep the characters separated, apart, and why you might want to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a really smart idea for a topic because it’s incredibly relevant to how we present challenges to our characters. And the reason that they always say – and it’s maybe the only real rule, meaning only real unwritten rule of roleplaying games – is don’t split up the party. Don’t split the party is really in response to just a phalanx of idiots who have split the party in the past and inevitably it doesn’t work because as you point out you are putting yourselves in more danger that way. But that is precisely what we want to do to the characters in our fixed concluding narratives because it is the very nature of that jeopardy that is going to test them and challenge them the most. And therefore their success will feel the most meaningful to us.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about some of the problems with big groups. And so one of the things you start to realize if you have eight characters in a scene is it’s very hard to keep them alive. And by alive I mean do they actually have a function in that scene? Have they said a line? What are they doing there? And if characters don’t talk every once and a while they really do tend to disappear. I mean, radio dramas is the most extreme example where if a character doesn’t speak they are not actually in the scene. But if a character is just in the background of a scene and just nodding or saying uh-huh that’s not going to be very rewarding for that actor. It’s going to pull focus from what you probably actually want to be doing.

**Craig:** Whenever I see it it kills me, because I notice it immediately. And it’s so fascinating to me when it happens and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this great video. Patton Oswalt was a character on King of Queens. He was – I didn’t really watch the show, but I think he was a neighbor or something, or a coworker, so smaller part.

So there were many times I think where he was included in the scene in their living room, which was their main set for the sitcom, but other than his one thing to say at the beginning or the end he had nothing to do. And he apparently did this thing where through this very long scene he held himself perfectly still like a statue on purpose in the background. And you can see it on YouTube. It’s great. He’s amusing himself because the show has absolutely no use for him in that scene other than the beginning or the end.

**John:** That’s amazing. A situation we ran into with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in Roald Dahl’s book Charlie Bucket gets the Golden Ticket and you’re allowed to bring two parents with you. And so Charlie only brings his uncle, but all the other characters, all the other little spoiled kids bring both parents. And that would be a disaster onscreen because you would have 15 people at the start of the factory tour. And trying to keep 15 people in a frame is really a challenge of cinema and television. There’s no good way to keep them all physically in a frame.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that is a real problem. So what we did is basically everyone could bring one parent and it turned out the original Gene Wilder movie did the same thing. We made different choices about which parent. But then even when you get into like the big chocolate river room I’m splitting up those people and so they’re not all together as a pack because you just can’t keep them alive. You can’t get a group of more than four or five people together and actually have that moment be about something. And so they’re immediately splitting apart and going in different directions just so that you can have individual moments.

**Craig:** Even inside a group of characters where you haven’t technically split the party in terms of physical location, as a writer you begin to carve out a weird party split anyway because someone is inevitably going to lean in and have a quieter exchange with somebody else, or whisper to somebody else, or take somebody aside, even though they’re all still in the same room, because ultimately it is impossible to feel any kind of intimacy when you do have 15 co-equals all yammering at each other. Or, god forbid, three people yammering at each other and then 12 other people just standing there watching. That’s creepy.

**John:** Yep. The last thing I’ll say, the problem in big groups, is that there are conversations, there’s conflicts that you can really only see between two characters, maybe three characters, that just would not exist as part of a larger group. You’re not going to have an argument with your wife in a certain public place, but you would if it’s just the two of you. And so by breaking off those other people you allow for there to be moments that just couldn’t exist in a public setting.

And so that’s another reason why big groups just have a dampening effect often on what the natural conflicts you really want to see are in a story.

**Craig:** Even beyond the nature of certain conversations, there are certain aspects of basic character itself that change based on the context of who you’re around. Sometimes we don’t really get to know somebody properly until they’re alone with someone else. And then they say or do something that kind of surprises us because they are the sort of person that just blends in or shies away when there’s a lot going on. And they only kind of come out or blossom in intimacy.

Quiet characters are wonderful characters to kind of split off with because suddenly they can say something that matters. And you get to know who they really are. By the way, I think people work this way, too. We are brought up to think of ourselves as one person, right, that you’re John. But there’s many Johns. We are all many of us and we change based on how big of a group we’re in and who is in the group. So don’t be afraid to do that with your characters.

**John:** Yeah. So that ability to be specific to who that character is with that certain crowd and sort of the specificity of the conflicts that’s something you get in the smaller groups. But one of the other sort of hidden advantages you start to realize when you split the party up is that enables you to cut between the two groups. And that is amazingly useful for time compression. So basically getting through a bunch of stuff more quickly and sort of like if you were sticking with the same group you would have to just keep jumping forward in time. But by being able to ping pong back and forth between different groups and see where they’re at you can compress a lot of time down together. You can sort of short hand through some stuff. Giving yourself something to cut to is often the thing you’re looking for most as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** It is incredibly helpful for the movie once you get into the editing room of course, because you do have the certain flexibility there. You’re not trapped. There is a joy in the contrast, I think. If you’re going back and forth between let’s call them contemporaneous scenes. So they’re occurring at the same time, but they’re in different places, they can kind of comment on each other. It doesn’t have to be overt or meta, but there’s an interesting game of contrasts that you can play between two people who are enjoying a delicious meal in a beautiful restaurant and then a third person who is slogging her way through a rainy mud field. That’s a pretty broad example. It can be the tiniest of things.

But it gives you a chance to contrast which movie and film does really well and reality does poorly, because we are always stuck in one linear timeline in our lives. We never get that gift of I guess I’ll call it simultaneous perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So I mean a thing you come to appreciate as a screenwriter is how much energy you get out of a cut. And so you can find ways to get out of a scene and into the next scene that provide you with even more energy. But literally any time you’re cutting from one thing to another thing you get a little bit of momentum from that. And so being able to close a moment off and sort of tell the audience, OK, that thing is done and now we’re here is very useful and provides a pull through the story where if you had to stay with those characters as they were moving through things that could be a challenge.

But let’s talk about some of the downsides because there’s also splitting up the party that’s done poorly or doesn’t actually help.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you have a strong central protagonist, like it’s really all on this one character’s back, if you’re dividing up then suddenly you’re losing that POV. You’re losing that focus of seeing the story just from their perspective. And so the Harry Potter movies, the books and the movies, are all from Harry’s perspective. He is central to everything. And so if they were to cut off and just have whole subplots with Ron and Hermione where they’re doing stuff by themselves it would be different. There’s a way it could totally work, but it would be different. You know, if you’re making Gravity you really do want to stay with Sandra Bullock the whole time through. If you cut away to like on the ground with the NASA folks that would completely change your experience of that movie. So, there are definitely times where it does make sense to hold a group together so that you can stay with that central character because it’s really about his or her central journey.

**Craig:** Yeah. In those cases sometimes it’s helpful to think about the perspective character as a free agent. And so you still get to split the party by leaving a party to go to another party. And going back and forth. So Harry Potter has the Ron and Hermione party, and he has the Dumbledore party. And he has the snake party. And so he can move in between those and thus give us kind of different perspectives on things which is really helpful.

I mean, I personally feel like any time you’re writing about a group of people, basically you always are even if it’s a really small group, you should already be thinking about how you’re going to break them apart. Because it’s so valuable. It also helps you reinforce what they get out of the group in the first place. Because a very simple fundamental question every screenwriter should ask about their group of friends in their show or the movie is why are they friends.

We are friends with people who do something for us. Not overtly, but they are giving us something that we like. So, what is that? What are they doing for each other? And once you know that then you know why you have to break up the party. And then if they get back together what it means after that has been shattered.

**John:** Yep. I think as you’re watching something, if you were to watch an episode of Friends with the sound turned off most of the episode is not going to have the six of them together. They’re going to go off and do their separate things. But generally there’s going to be a moment at which they’re all back together in the course of the thing and that is a natural feeling you want. You want the party to break apart and then come back together. You want that sort of homecoming thing. That sense of completion is to have the group brought back together. That is the journey of your story. And so you’ll see that even in like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another example of like let’s split up, let’s do different things. But you are expecting to see Xander and Buffy and Willow are all going to come back together at the end because that’s sort of the contract you’ve made with your audience.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that is something that’s very different about recurring episodic television as opposed to closed end features or closed end limited series. You can’t really break up the party in any kind of permanent way. Whereas in film and limited series television sometimes, and a lot of times, you must. You must split up the party permanently. I mean, there’s a great – if you’re making any kind of family drama it’s really helpful to think about this, the splitting of the party concept. I’m thinking of Ordinary People. Ordinary People ultimately is a movie about what happens, you know, the party and whether or not the party is going to stay together. And, spoiler alert, it breaks up. The party splits up permanently and you understand that is the way it must be.

**John:** You know, Broadcast News. And so if you want to take that central triangle of those three characters, they could stay all working together as a group, but that would not be dramatically interesting. You have to break them apart and see what they’re like in their separate spaces so you can understand the full journey of the story.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** So let’s talk about how you split up a party. The simplest and probably hoariest way to do it is just the urgency thing. So the Scooby Doo like we can cover more ground if we split up, or there’s a deadline basically. We won’t get this done unless we split up. There’s too much to do and so therefore we’re going to divide. You do this and then we do that. The Guardians of the Galaxy does that. The Avengers movies tend to do that a lot where they just going off in separate directions and eventually the idea is that they’ll come back together to get that stuff done.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** That works for certain kinds of movies. It doesn’t work for a lot of movies. But it’s a way to get it done. But I think if you can find the natural rhythms that make it clear why the characters are apart, that’s probably going to be a better solution for most movies. You know, friends aren’t always together. Friends do different stuff. And friends have other friends and so they’re apart from each other.

People work. And so that sense of like you have a work family and a home family. That’s a way of separating things. And there’s people also grouped by common interest, so you can have your hero who is a marathon runner who goes off doing marathon-y stuff, marathon people, marathon-y stuff, who goes running with people which breaks him off from the normal – the group that we’re seeing the rest of the time. You can find ways to let themselves be the person pulling themselves away from the group.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also all sorts of simple easy ways where the world breaks the party apart, walls and doors drop down between people. Somebody is arrested and put in prison. Somebody is pulled away. Someone dies. Dying, by the way, great way to break up a party. That’s a terrific party split. Yeah. There’s all sorts of – somebody falls down, gets hurt, and you have to take them to the hospital. There’s a hundred different things.

And I suppose what I would advise writers is to think about using a split method that will allow you, the writer, to get the most juice out of this new circumstance of this person and this person together, which is different than what we’ve seen before. So where would that be and how would it work and why would it feel a certain way as opposed to a different way.

And you can absolutely do this, even if you have three people. I mean, you mention Broadcast News so let’s talk about James Brooks and As Good as it Gets. Once you start this road trip it’s three characters and the party splits multiple times in different ways.

**John:** Yeah. The reason I think I was thinking about this this week is I’m writing the third Arlo Finch. And the first Arlo Finch is a boy who comes to this mountain town. He joins the patrol and there are six people in his patrol. His two best friends are sort of the central little triad there. But there’s a big action sequence that has six characters. And supporting six characters in that sequence killed me. It was a lot to do.

In writing the second book, which is off in a summer camp, you got that patrol and that is the main family, but I was deliberately looking for ways to split them apart so that characters could have to make choices by themselves and so that Arlo Finch could have to step up and do stuff without the support of his patrol. But also allow for natural conflicts that would divide the patrol against themselves and surprises that take sort of key members out of patrol.

And that was the central sort of dramatic question of the story is like will this family sort of come back together at the end.

And then the third book is a chance to sort of match people up differently. So you get to go on trips with people who are not the normal people you would bring on a certain trip. And that’s fun to see, too. So, you can go to places that would otherwise be familiar but you’re going into these places with people who would not be the natural people to go in this part of the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. You get to mix and match and strange bedfellows and all that. That’s part of the fun of this stuff. We probably get a little wrapped up in the individual when we’re talking about character, but I always think about that question that Lindsay Doran is lobbing out to everybody. What is the central relationship of your story? And thereby you immediately stop thinking about individual characters. OK, this character is like this and this character – that’s why maybe more than anything I hate that thing in scripts where people say, you know, “Jim, he’s blah-blah-blah, and he used to be this, and now he’s this.” I don’t care.

I only am interested in Jim and his relationship to another human being. At least one other and hopefully more. So, I try and think about the party and the relationships and the connections between people as the stuff that matters. Because in the end mostly that’s what you’re writing.

**John:** Absolutely true. All right, should we get onto some follow up?

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** All right, do you want to take Daniel in Nashville?

**Craig:** I do. Daniel writes, “Guys, I know screenwriting scams are all over the place, but I would appreciate some public shaming,” oh, here we go, “directed at this particular one that just popped up here in Nashville. It’s especially disgusting because it’s hosted by something calling itself The Nashville Filmmakers Guild. Breakthrough screenplay competition where the winning screenplay becomes a major motion picture.” Well that’s a promising slogan. Let’s see where this goes.

“They take your money, have a robot read your screenplay,” oh, John, there’s a job in this for you, “real life producers evaluate the algorithm and make the winning screenplay into a ‘real movie.’ There are zero details for how the movie gets made. Worst of all, they will send you a Save the Cat book. Please help me make this go away.”

Oh my god, it’s like someone invented the thing that would make me the most nauseated.

**John:** So let’s try to do some backstory here. We’ve not done extensive research. We don’t know who is really behind all this. There’s some names on the website. I don’t know how much they’re really involved in it. Craig, you and I have both been to the Nashville Screenwriters–

**Craig:** Conference.

**John:** It was a zillion years ago. I think that organization is not around anymore.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I had a good time at that Nashville Screenwriters Conference. But this is not that. I think Nashville is great, but my blanket recommendation of don’t enter screenwriting competitions, don’t enter these things that like “we’re going to make your movie” because they don’t. There’s just not a track record of any of these things happening.

And the things that feel more legitimate would be because they’ve been around for a long time or they are with producers who have made real movies. And I’m not saying that the folks involved in this haven’t made movies, but I don’t understand why they would be involved in this project.

**Craig:** Looking at their website, this is absolutely horse shit in my opinion because of specifically, oh my god, first of all they say, “The hype, the false promises, the gate keepers. The Breakthrough Screenplay Competition is the only competition where you have a chance to turn your script into a fully funded motion picture.” Shut up.

You want to talk about hype and false promises, they love talking about gate keepers. This is what they do. They say “those people are keeping your genius out because they’re stupid or bad or mean or just Hollywood-y, we’re the way in.” No they’re not. No they’re not.

And here’s what happens. When you send your script in, he’s right, it’s a robot. “The American Film Lab Software scores and ranks 78 script elements with an algorithm that analyzes over 3,500 points of data to reach an overall script score.”

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** You die in a fireplace, you go to hell. You go to hell and you die. It’s outrageous. It’s outrageous. Dumb. The regular deadline fee is $99. That is $99 too much. And, yeah, they’re not in a guild. This isn’t a union. What a dope. God, it makes me puke.

**John:** So American Film Lab if you click through their website it’s the same, really beautiful design, but the same folks are behind it. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, this is all – it has the look, appearance, and whiff of horse shit.

**John:** Yeah. Nicely designed horse shit.

**Craig:** Yeah. The website is really quite good.

**John:** It’s really nice. I don’t want to slack on the website because the website is really well done.

**Craig:** The website itself is fine, but yeah, I mean, what does this mean? The executive director, so this is the guy in charge, is a guy named Bobby Marko. And please don’t write to these people or tweet at them. Don’t be a jerk. It says, “As a producer, director and cinematographer, Bobby has been fortunate to work on many types of productions with many in the film community.” I think he means with many people in the film community. But, I’ve never heard of Bobby Marko. Have you?

**John:** I have not. I looked up Derek Purvis. He has some credits, but certainly not things I’ve heard of. So.

**Craig:** Bobby Marko. I’m looking up Bobby Marko right now. Let’s just do a live look up on Bobby Marko.

**John:** Because really quality podcasting is about Googling things while you’re recording.

**Craig:** It’s not good. And listen, I’m not judging people on their credits. My credits are a whole big fascinating pastiche. But it’s not about quality it’s really about access and size. If I’m sending something to a film competition and paying money then I want to know that the people running it are able to provide the access that they promise. Based on the credits that I’m looking at here, we’re looking at essentially shorts that I’ve never heard of.

**John:** They’re shorts.

**Craig:** They’re shorts. And so, no. No. It doesn’t cut it. And, listen, I don’t mean to insult. Everybody should be doing what they’re doing. And it may be that the people that are running this thing next week will sell something, write something, create something that is the biggest thing of all time. And I would salute them. But until they do they shouldn’t be taking other people’s money as if they can do stuff for them.

**John:** Also, I feel like when they do make that thing that is absolutely amazing they won’t want to be taking other people’s money to be doing stuff because they’ll have a career making the thing.

**Craig:** [laughs] They’ll be a little busy. So, yeah, once again my recommendation is do not spend your money on this.

**John:** Great. Dave from Los Cruces, New Mexico writes, “Thanks for bringing us the interview with the double ampersand team of Walsh and Jackson and Boyens.” So that was my interview with them after Mortal Engines. “Such an impressive collection of talent. Do you have any comments about the incredibly negative critical response to the film? My wife and I enjoyed it and were surprised by the roasting it got and sad to see it’s a commercial failure. John saw the film prior to the interview and I was wondering if he had any feeling from the audience’s response that it was going to be poorly received.”

So, we ran this over the break as sort of a little extra episode. I think it was Christmas Day this came out. And so I had agreed to do Q&A with them after the WGA screening of it. And so I had not seen it until the WGA screening of it and I kind of didn’t know very much about it other than it was about cities that moved around and ate other cities. And so I watched it and I was like, oh, I don’t really full – I could never fully get onboard with the premise. But, I could also sort of say, OK, you know what, but let’s say I did buy the premise, is this a good version of that movie? And I think the answer is yeah. It’s a pretty good version of that premise of a movie.

And it’s the kind of thing that felt like it was adapted from a YA novel which it was. And it had sort of big epic themes. But as I was watching it and as I sat down with them to ask questions about their process and the thing I had a sense that it was going to get the reception that it got, which was not a big glowing reception.

If you listen to that interview I talk with them about why they got started on it and the long process it took to get it to the screen. And there’s an interesting moment where I ask Peter Jackson about why a big screen versus doing it for streaming. And he’s like, and I think they were all saying like there’s just a thing you can do in a big theater with the sound and sort of the size and spectacle of it all which is amazing, yet Peter Jackson also said like, “But the things I love most right now are streaming, or they’re Game of Thrones kinds of things on HBO.”

And I do genuinely in my heart of hearts believe that this product would have been much better served as a made for Netflix, made for HBO, that kind of big epic scale thing than as it was done as a movie.

But, they made the movie. And I think it’s worth seeing because it actually has some really cool pieces. And I think it’s also worth noting the story challenges they set for themselves. Talk about like a big cast of characters. They’re having to split the party a lot just to get storytelling done. And I hope people will go to it now that it shows up on Netflix and other places and appreciate some of the things that they were able to do, because some of it was really cool.

**Craig:** I always feel like when you’re talking about people that are incredibly talented, and I’m a huge Peter Jackson fan, and thus by extension a Walsh and Boyens fan as well, that there is a certain inherent – it’s like a fingerprint, right? And it will express itself very frequently in ways that you appreciate, but it is inevitably going to express itself in a way that you don’t.

I can’t think of anybody where I go, “Oh, I’ve liked everything they’ve done.” Because it’s just not going to work that way. So, sometimes I think people get hung up on this stuff and they go, well, oh my god, how could they make something that everyone thinks stinks? Well, A, they obviously don’t think it stinks, and B, it’s the way things work. You know? It’s just part and parcel. You don’t get all of these things if you don’t get that.

**John:** Yep. You know, I always applaud sort of like the big wild swings of things. And it felt like a big wild swing. And it didn’t connect with audiences and I don’t think it was quite what the project ultimately wanted to be when it was released in 2018. But, I love them and I actually really loved talking with them because they are literally the only double ampersand team I can think of that has stayed together through so many different projects. I know I think at least Philippa listens to the show, so hi. And I thought it deserved better because there’s some really good stuff there.

**Craig:** I just, you know, you know my whole critics thing. Here’s the thing, Dave from Las Cruces. The real thing is what does it matter? I understand why you’re asking. You’re asking John do you have comments about the incredibly negative critical response to the film. But I kind of want to get underneath your question and sort of explore why you’re asking it in the first place. Because I think sometimes there’s this car crash on the highway thing that goes on where people want to rubberneck at bad reviews, except that they are not car crashes. No one has been hurt or died. It’s just a bunch of critics that didn’t like a thing and it in and of itself doesn’t mean anything.

And even now when you say, well, the movie did not work commercially, it didn’t work commercially yet. It may never work commercially. But then again there have been movies that didn’t work commercially initially and then they just kept making money.

**John:** Yeah. Kept chugging along. Austin Powers.

**Craig:** Austin Powers is a great example. Just, you know, it was a video hit. It was a hit after it was not a hit and then it became a hit. So, I just feel like it’s just not a question that’s worth asking in a weird way.

**John:** Well, I want to get back to he does say that like my wife and I saw it and enjoyed it and were surprised by the roasting it got. And so I know what that’s like, too, because there’s definitely been movies that I saw and then it’s like, oh, I really liked that. Like I’ll see it on a plane and then when I can turn on my phone and I pull up Rotten Tomatoes I’ll see it got like an 18%. I’m like, wait, was I wrong to think that? And so the message I want to give Dave in 2019 is that you are not wrong to love something, or like something, or think it’s better than what everyone else says.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Don’t let other people’s opinions sway your opinions on what is good.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s not like you’re looking at an X-ray of a tooth and thinking it looks OK and then a whole bunch of dentists are say no that is not a good tooth. You are no more or less valid than anybody else watching a movie or a television show regardless of whether or not they have some column on a website.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** All right, let’s answer some questions. Do you want to take Kevin?

**Craig:** Yeah. Kevin writes, “I saw a copy of John’s Big Fish sequence outline. And I wanted to know two things. One, how do you determine how many sequences to put into a script and how do you know how many pages they would take to write? Is this learned over time or do you have an intuition of how much page space they would take? And, two, what is the significance of the rectangular border around certain sequences?”

**John:** I can answer these questions. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but it’s also just at johnaugust.com/library. You can see most of my old scripts and supporting documents. So this Big Fish sequence outline was something I did early on in the process for Big Fish. Like after I sort of set up the book at Columbia but before I started writing it, because there was like what is this movie going to be because the book is really slender. And I had to sort of describe what things were going to be.

So, in terms of the number of sequences, I don’t know how many sequences there are in a movie. I don’t know how many scenes there are in a movie. A hundred? A hundred scenes maybe? But I will say that you just get a kind of sense of like is this enough story, is this enough things that are going to happen. And so you might guess at sort of how many pages it’s going to be, but what’s more important is like these are the moments I need to tell this story.

So for this Big Fish outline you’ll see that certain sequences have a box around them. Those are for like the fantastical things. So I was just trying to give the people reading this document a sense of like, OK, this is the real world, this is the big fantasy world, so people could see what the mix was between the fantasy world and the real world. So that was that kind of document.

I don’t always do those. I would say it’s actually pretty rare. This project I just did that’s not announced yet I did something kind of like that but that’s because there were very specific sequences that were going to involve a lot of other people, and so I needed to warn people ahead of time that these are some big things we’re going to have to do in addition to the script.

**Craig:** Finally I think after Chernobyl airs I’ll be able to put all the scripts and outline material and bible stuff up on your website.

**John:** That would be great. That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s funny, I was thinking to myself like why is that something that I can easily handover as opposed to all the other stuff and I realized it’s because it was mine. So, I was able to control that process and outlining and scripting the entire way through. I am the only person that was writing it. And in everything else there was always something else. I was rewriting somebody, or production changes and all that crap. So, it just became this like very messy archive of 12 different movies.

So, it’s in a neat package. I’ll drop it off on your doorstep digitally when it’s time. When it’s time.

**John:** Susannah writes, “I am a writer/producer and I have been approached by the author of two fascinating books to develop and produce into a TV series. I’m going to write the bible and pilot and I’m looking for a writer with TV credits interested in joining me as I have no experience in television, although I have experience in film. The author would fund the development. The question is how should we split the ownership of the IP and what are the rights credits for each one? Should we sign a collaboration agreement or a coproduction agreement? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you so much.”

Craig, where should Susannah even start? So she has this project that exists as books. She’s going to come in and do a bible. I feel some sort of agreement between her and the author is going to be very important to do right now. Because if the author is funding development, so it’s not like Susannah is optioning it from the author. They’re going to have to have some sort of working agreement on how this is all going to go.

**Craig:** Where she should start is in a lawyer’s office because this is a complicated arrangement. I mean, the author is funding the development, so Susannah is the author commissioning the script as a work-for-hire? In other words will the author control the copyright of the screenplay? Or are you writing a screenplay based on the author’s IP and they have granted you permission to do so and are also paying you to do so, to do so so that you have the copyright on it until such time as you sell it to a studio?

As far as the other writer, it sounds like what you’re talking about is a partnership in which case you would be both have 50/50 ownership of the screenplay, unless you don’t own any of the screenplay at all because the author does. And then I don’t know what to say. This is a complicated one because you’re not doing it the way anybody does things, which should be a red flag in and of itself. So, I definitely recommend that you talk to an entertainment lawyer about this. It will save you a lot of – it’ll cost a little bit of money now and save you a lot of money later.

**John:** Yeah. And so I would say if this author is successful enough that she can fund development on stuff then it’s entirely possible that she has a lawyer who is going to be preparing these kind of contracts now. It does sort of sound like she’s hiring you to do this and therefore it is a work-for-hire. There’s going to be some control over the rights of something, but you’ve got to figure that out. So, good luck.

**Craig:** Good luck!

**John:** Good luck.

**Craig:** Good luck, Susannah. That’s the way we should end all questions. Shia – Shia? Shia?

**John:** I’d say Shia.

**Craig:** Shia, because of Shia LaBeouf. But I feel like it could be Shia. I’m going to go with Shia. Shia writes, “As an experienced but not yet professional screenwriter of eight feature scripts, a dozen short scripts, one feature rewrite, and one produced short, I was told by an accomplished friend that my greatest challenge is that people don’t know I’m here. As I contemplate ways to up my networking game I am strongly considering a website. In the day age of Twitter, Facebook, and IMDb listings do you think they’re helpful?” What do you say?

**John:** Yeah, so as a person who has a website, I don’t think they’re super helpful. I do think you need – I think some sort of landing page that can have your stuff is probably a good idea, just so that you’re Googleable and if there are things you wanted to show, you have your short. You can have that on there, like the YouTube or the Vimeo clip of that. You can have samples. So some sort of landing page with your name on it is fantastic. As far as a real full on website, I don’t know that it’s going to serve you.

What Craig and I will both tell you is that actually running a website, like a blog where you’re writing regular things and posting, is a tremendous amount of work and time. And so if you’re going to do that just know that it’s a tremendous amount of work and time that you’re not going to be doing other stuff.

Tomi Adeyemi who is the author of Children of Blood and Bone, she had a great website that built a big following before her book came out, and so I think it did help sort of her exposure and as that book became – I mean that book became a giant blockbuster. But it did sort of help her get notice and get traction early on. So, there is some history of that, but not so much for screenwriters I would say. I think it’s more of a book kind of thing.

Craig, what do you think? Beyond a simple website does she need anything?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got an accomplished friend telling you about your greatest challenges. Maybe your accomplished friend could, I don’t know, hook you up with somebody here or there. I mean, the truth is that I’m a little nervous because, yes, there are times when you are limited by your inability to get out there I guess you’d say or talk to people or know people, but you’ve written a lot. And the writing should be the thing that opens the doors. And if the writing is not opening the doors I just don’t want you to fall into the trap of thinking that your limitation is networking.

You’ve written a lot. So, at this point you should feel free to question how to network and how to self-promote, but you should also be questioning whether or not you need to refresh some of the material. Write perhaps in a slightly different way. Take a look at what’s kind of inspiring you right now and keep it fresh. So, just don’t forget about the writing part because I actually feel like that’s the part that matters the most.

**John:** Yeah. There certainly is a moment that happens where if you’re a funny writer Twitter is a great place for being funny and getting noticed for being funny and Megan Amram obviously did that. I don’t think Facebook matches writing especially well. I don’t think Instagram matches writing especially well. IMDb listings, if they’re just showing your shorts, OK, I mean, if they’ve actually been produced. Remember, IMDb is for produced things that people could theoretically see somewhere out there in the world.

So, I don’t know that just digital online networking is going to be your next thing. I think it’s trying to make sure that people who actually are in position to do something with your script get your script and that may be sort of more old fashioned leg work. Or if you’re in a position to be in Los Angeles working in the trenches and meeting folks, you know, handing them the script.

**Craig:** Yeah. Completely agree.

**John:** So, one last question. A Gal in LA writes, “I was at a holiday party the other night and met a nice lady who wants to introduce me to a friend who makes made-for-TV movies. They’re looking for female writers to do horror, which is me. The thing is their movies are awful, but I need cash. Do I: 1, pursue the job and hope that people will understand that sometimes we do bad things for money? 2, write under a pseudonym and never speak of it again? Or 3, just say no to Hallmark Horror.” Which is probably not the real brand but I get what she’s talking about.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Craig, should someone take a job working for people who make schlock?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And here’s the deal. First of all, the list of great filmmakers who started in schlock is long and remarkable. Roger Corman has given quite a few filmmakers their start. James Cameron’s first film was Piranha 3 I think, or Piranha 2. And a lot of great–

**John:** Ron Howard.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of great writers started doing that stuff. So, the point is no one really – look, I’ve worked on a bunch of junkie things and nobody looks at me and says, “You’re a bad person. You’ve done something immoral.” You know what’s immoral? Being able to make money and be a productive member of the economy, generate some tax for the community, and just not doing it because you think you’re above it all.

Until you’re above it all you’re not above it all. And furthermore I would say any time you work with a company and you get paid you learn something. You learn a little bit about how the meatloaf is made. You get a little bit of experience with politics. A little experience with notes. And also, Gal in LA, if you’re good, well, your movie might not be so awful, right? I mean, the writing is kind of important.

**John:** It is important.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, did I ever tell you about my experience writing for porn?

**Craig:** Uh, no. Hold on. We’re at Episode 383 and…?

**John:** I don’t talk about it a lot.

**Craig:** You’ve just now decided that you’re going to tell me you wrote for porn. Hold on. Let me get my popcorn and proceed.

**John:** So, this is early on, so I’m guessing this is probably ‘96/’97. So I had not been hired to write for anything. I probably had done the novelization of Natural Born Killers, which was the thing that got me free of my assistant job.

I had an agent. And the agent was sending me on normal meetings, but he also sent me to this meeting with this company that was doing porn essentially. It was like CD-ROM porn. And so they would have preexisting scenes from other porn things, but it would be sort of a choose your own adventure thing which you would navigate yourself through a maze. You could make different choices that would you lead you to different porn scenes.

**Craig:** Was it called Bandersnatch?

**John:** It was not Bandersnatch, but that would be a great title for it.

**Craig:** Would be.

**John:** That Bandersnatch was great, by the way. So we’re going to try to have Charlie Brooker on the show to talk about it, because it’s–

**Craig:** Yeah, but don’t get derailed from the porn story. So…so you’re writing porn?

**John:** So, anyway, so I go in and I talk with them and I’m just like – I needed a job. I was looking for things. So they sent me home with a bunch of these CD-ROMs to look at and this wasn’t my kind of porn at all. So I’m watching these things and thinking like, OK, so basically they needed someone to write the scenarios for how you get from place to place. And there would be some filmed bits between the things, sort of green screen stuff to get you through things. And I had one follow up phone conversation with them, but then it ultimately went nowhere.

But I bring up the writing for porn because I did meet with porn producers to write porn segues because I wasn’t above that. That was a thing. And so that would be like writing for videogames or writing for E! True Hollywood Story. Whatever. If someone was going to pay me to write I was not above that. And so A Gal in LA, don’t be above writing for schlocky horror place if you are a person who wants to do great horror because you’ve got to start somewhere.

**Craig:** You got to start somewhere, man. I mean, I was young, I needed the work. It’s a great phrase. You say, “I need cash,” well shit, do it. You say write under a pseudonym and never speak of it again. Ugh, good luck. It doesn’t matter. The truth is it doesn’t matter. If you’re destined to be a really, really good writer then what’s going to happen is people are going to go on your IMDb page one day and go, “Wait, did you realize that her first movie was Blood Sausage. Nobody even saw it. It was made by some weird company.” No one will even see it, so it doesn’t matter.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing. Think about that as like, you know, you get an interesting starting place in your career life. Oh, the journey becomes more clear. Because if you just come out of the gate with a brilliant thing no one knows anything about you. But if you have credits like, oh that.

Sandra Bullock has really questionable early credits. Look at her now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Exactly what I’m saying.

**John:** Hollywood loves that. Hollywood loves an underdog. So, write that great horror movie for the schlocky place and you’re golden.

**Craig:** I mean, I do think that Blood Sausage is a pretty decent title.

**John:** I think it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah, as far as titles go. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

**John:** For sure. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a little video that Entertainment Weekly posted. Sarah Silverman doing her recording for Slaughter Race from the amazing Ralph Breaks the Internet. I love this movie. I love this song. Craig, I put a link there. Actually, there’s a link in your folder. Why don’t you take a listen to it? We’ll listen to it together. We’ll play a little under here.

So this is a song, music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Phil Johnston and Tom MacDougall.

[Clip plays]

So I find that just delightful. And I love seeing Sarah Silverman actually do the voice, because it sounds kind of like her, but then when you actually see her singing in character it is just a tremendous joy. So I loved the movie but you should also check out this video of how they recorded it.

**Craig:** That’s great. I’m going to look at that movie. God, she’s good.

**John:** She’s so good.

**Craig:** She’s just good. Good people are good at stuff.

**John:** Good people are good. And obviously a very well-written movie. We have Pam Ribon on to talk about it. But I loved the movie, but her performance is just spectacular.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And I’m sure Pamela Ribon actually probably played that character in all the rehearsals. So a little Pamela Ribon in that moment as well.

**Craig:** Yes. Well I always said Sarah Silverman is the perfected Pamela Ribon. Yes, always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have Two Cool Things, because you know what, I’ve been gone for a while.

**John:** Absolutely. Save them up.

**Craig:** And the people have been clamoring for my Cool Things. So I have two. The first one is sort of an educational thing only. It’s called This is Your Brain on Pot. This is a website. It is something that the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, put out. It’s not about pro-marijuana or anti-marijuana. It’s purely scientific. It is the first and only really good thorough explanation I’ve ever seen about what neurologically happens when you get high and how THC actually works in the brain. It’s fascinating.

And they did a gorgeous job showing how it works. Take a moment, whether you smoke pot or not, it’s just interesting I think to see how these things work. It’s like you get to step away from the whole oh-ah of drugs and just look at how medicine of a sort works. Fascinating.

**John:** So, I would say I think it’s also totally worth checking out. I would say that it makes it feel like it’s the definitive answer on what’s actually happening and the actual research on how marijuana affects you is not great because there haven’t been enough studies. So I think it’s a good conjecture about what they think is happening in terms of uptake and receptors, but I don’t think it’s the full picture. And obviously it doesn’t account for CBD and the other compounds that are in there which are probably doing their own thing.

**Craig:** That is true. It is not definitive by any stretch. But it’s certainly more information than I’ve ever seen. So I was pretty impressed.

The second thing, this is pretty cool. It’s called TripIt. TripIt.com. TripIt. And there is an app called TripIt. And here’s what they do. You sign up, it’s free. There’s a subscription possibility. Personally I haven’t seen much of a value in it, so I’m happy to use the free version.

And what you do is you register your email address and you could register two or three of your email addresses with them. So now they know if you send them an email who you are. When you book a trip somewhere, for instance John I’m going to Seattle. So I booked a flight I believe on Alaska Airlines and I booked a room at the same hotel you are in. When you book things online like an airfare, what happens next? You get something in your email box, right? You get those little confirmation reservation blah-blah-blah. And then I never know what to do with it.

Well, dig it. Just forward it from one of your email addresses to I think it’s plan or something like that at TripIt.com. That’s it. Just forward. You don’t have to do anything else. Just forward the stupid email that you get. They get it. They see it’s from you. They know it’s your trip. They suck the information out of it and then pipe it in nice beautiful itinerary form into the app on your phone, including reservation numbers, that stupid six letter thing that airlines use.

**John:** Confirmation code, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s great. It works like magic.

**John:** It’s great. So my husband Mike has been using it for six or seven years I want to say.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Because he’s ahead of all things travel.

**Craig:** Are you serious?

**John:** I’m serious.

**Craig:** Seven years?

**John:** It’s been around for a very long time.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** And so I will say that you don’t have to use the app on your phone for all that information. It will also generate a calendar feed so it’ll just show up in your normal calendar as well. And so we have a feed called TripIt which is basically anything that is a travel thing just automatically shows up there.

**Craig:** I’m not coming back to this show.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** I don’t know, I’m not doing anymore cool things.

**John:** No, no, it’s good. I never used it as a cool thing before, so it wasn’t like one of those games where like a year later you’re like, “Oh, this is a great game.” It’s like, yeah, I played that game.

**Craig:** You know what? Maybe what I’ve done is I’ve rekindled a certain spark in your marriage.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** You appreciate something now that he was doing that you realize now is cool.

**John:** Now it’s cool. It’s quite cool. Going back to the marijuana thing, I’m just going to put in a tiny little rant here. So people who don’t live in Los Angeles or a place with legalized marijuana may not be aware of this, but in Los Angeles all the billboards in Los Angeles that are not for Netflix programs are marijuana/legalize pot billboards. And it’s really annoying.

And so I just want someone, State of California, somebody to sort of say whatever the restrictions are for tobacco have to be the same restrictions for pot because it’s ridiculous how many pot billboards there are right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, technically cigarettes are – they kill you. You know, marijuana doesn’t appear to kill you. By the way, I sound like a big pot head. I don’t smoke pot. I don’t smoke pot. I’m just sort of like–

**John:** But here’s what I’ll say. While I would say that marijuana is not a dangerous substance to the degree that other things can be, we have restrictions on alcohol and on tobacco. I think similar restrictions are – obviously there are restrictions on who you can sell it to. So, you shouldn’t be able to – here’s what I’ll say. I don’t think you should be able to buy a giant billboard for this product if a kid who is walking by it couldn’t buy it. It just feels dumb and stupid to me. And it feels like a weird mismatch of rules and laws.

**Craig:** Do you think it’s dumber and stupider than that letter that Mark wrote us about the Golden Globe awards?

**John:** I don’t know. It’s a whole different category of bad.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. I don’t think so. No. No chance.

**John:** Anyway, that is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, it is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. People, you have been sending us amazing outros. We’ve got just some great ones. And Craig you’ve listened to a couple of those.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. There’s some really good ones coming up.

**John:** There’s some good ones coming up. But we always need more, so send those in. Ask@johnaugust.com is also the address for when you’re sending these longer questions or follow up things like we addressed today. But on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re happy to answer your questions.

I feel bad about the guy I kind of put on shout about sort of the pre-roll language warning thing. That wasn’t my intention. It’s just sometimes I will do the quote-reply to things just so that everyone sees the answer, so I can answer the question once rather than a bunch. But I do kind of apologize. Eh, I kind of apologize for that.

**Craig:** Kind of.

**John:** Kind of.

**Craig:** If you call that an apology.

**John:** I apologize for putting him on blast when that was not my intention. I was just trying to answer the question once.

**Craig:** I hear you. I hear you.

**John:** You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this right now. If you’re there, leave us a review. It’ll be a new thing for 2019 is to leave us a little review. Tell people how much you like the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll see in that links to preordering my book. Our Seattle show when we have details about that. The live show for The Princess Bride. You’ll see all that stuff there.

You’ll also see transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all of the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net, or you can buy seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, we’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back. Yes!

**John:** It’s good to be back in our zone.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yeah. So we had great temporary hosts, but Craig you are the only Craig.

**Craig:** I mean, you know what I mean? You feel me?

**John:** You’re Craig.

**Craig:** I’m Craig. See you next week John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Join us for the WGA’s [Princess Bride screening](https://www.wga.org/news-events/events/guild-screenings) on January 27th.
* You can catch John on [Studio 360](https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/john-august-the-host-of-scriptnotes-explains-his-approach-to-screenwriting.html).
* [“Let’s Split Up the Gang”](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LetsSplitUpGang) and [“Never Split the Party”](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverSplitTheParty) are topical TV tropes.
* Watch Patton Oswalt when he’s not being utilized in a [big scene](https://www.mediaite.com/tv/hilarious-patton-oswalt-reveals-strange-prank-he-pulled-in-old-king-of-queens-episode/).
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 381: Double Ampersand](http://johnaugust.com/2018/double-ampersand) with Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens
* [Big Fish sequence outline](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/bf-outline.pdf)
* [Sarah Silverman recording Slaughter Race](https://ew.com/movies/2019/01/07/slaughter-race-ralph-breaks-the-internet-sarah-silverman-song/), music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Phil Johnston and Tom MacDougall
* [TripIt](https://www.tripit.com)
* [This Is Your Brain On Pot](https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/thc/)
* You can now [preorder the next Arlo Finch](http://www.amazon.com/dp/162672816X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_383.mp3).