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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).

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

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

Craig is over in Europe and forgot his microphone. Luckily we have screenwriter, novelist, and TV showrunner Derek Haas here with us to fill in.

**Derek Haas:** This is my fourth time on the show.

**John:** Yeah. And we can see why, because your credits include film and television and books.

**Derek:** Yes.

**John:** You’ve written Wanted, 3:10 to Yuma, the Chicago Fire television universe.

**Derek:** Yes.

**John:** Welcome back Derek Haas.

**Derek:** Thank you, John. Thanks for having me.

**John:** And Happy New Year.

**Derek:** I’m so excited to be here. Happy New Year to you.

**John:** The reasons why I wanted you on the show is partly because I think because it’s been a New Year people have this goal, this perhaps resolution to do more writing this year. And you do more writing than almost anybody I know. You accomplish more.

**Derek:** I love to write. I love to write so I’m always saying yes when somebody gives me a challenge. And so I’m excited that people are making those resolutions because I think you can do more. You can have it all.

**John:** You can have it all.

**Derek:** You can have a job that you work all day in, and I know it because I’ve done it, and then you can get up early, or you can stay up late and you can write. And you can write for you until you’re writing for somebody else.

**John:** Very nice. The second thing I want to talk with you about is professional realism, so basically how we portray people’s jobs on screen. And we talked about this in the medical profession but I want to talk about it in other professions as well.

**Derek:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Tiny bit of news and housekeeping. Craig and I are doing a screening of The Princess Bride to celebrate William Goldman’s momentous achievement. So it’s a screening at the WGA Theater on January 27th at 5pm followed by a discussion with me and Craig talking about the movie that everyone has just watched. It is free and open to everybody, not just WGA members. So, I think this is how I understand the door situation is going to work. I think doors open at 4:30pm. WGA members get first seats. Then at 4:45 it’s open to everybody. So, come see us at the WGA Theater where we talk about The Princess Bride.

**Derek:** Great movie.

**John:** I like the movie, too. Craig loves the movie.

**Derek:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think we’ll have some good discussions.

**Derek:** I remember seeing it for the first time in the movie theater and being blown away because I didn’t know what it was. And then it was so much funnier than I thought it was going to be. And all those characters have stuck around for a long time now.

**John:** I think I first saw the movie in an after-prom party junior year.

**Derek:** Perfect.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good. That’s how wholesome my prom situation was.

**Derek:** I was going to say.

**John:** Because the after-party is we’re going to watch The Princess Bride.

**Derek:** Mine was just like that.

**John:** Just like that. No kegs involved. All right, Derek, you have Chicago Fire and I just have a basic question. How much writing are you doing on an annual basis or weekly basis for Chicago Fire? Like what are your responsibilities writing-wise?

**Derek:** So I’m the showrunner of Chicago Fire, by myself, and I have two great head writers, Michael Gilvary and Andrea Newman who have been on the show since episode one, or 102 I should say since they didn’t do the pilot. And they are fantastic. So the three of us pretty much manage the day to day of the show, including all of the writing staff. And I write – well, last year I wrote nine of the 23 episodes that we did last year, either wrote or co-wrote. And then this year I’m probably going to write, I think when the time is all said and done I’ll have written five or six.

But generally speaking the scripts will go through my computer at some point. Gilvary and Andrea, when they write scripts I really don’t do a lot on theirs. They know the characters very well and we’re just kind of kismet together, the three of us. And then we also have a writer, Michael O’Shea, who has been on four years. And rarely do we end up having to polish up his scripts. Now, some of the newer writers we might end up doing a polish or helping out on. But I do a lot of writing.

**John:** So total number of words is still a huge number of words.

**Derek:** Yeah, I mean, when you think each script is probably 50 pages, 51, right in there, that I do. And then we also have outlines that we write that are 12-page, you know, single-spaced outlines. And then on top of that I write books that are – every two years I come out with a book that’s around 65,000 words. And then there’s the occasional, you know, write a – you know, help somebody out on a movie or one of those kind of things.

This year Dick Wolf asked me to help out on his other new show, FBI, so for episodes eight on I’ve been helping do that one. I’ve written a couple of those.

**John:** Just as spare time, as your hobby.

**Derek:** Spare time.

**John:** All right. So I think there’s a perception though that showrunners tend to be people who say yes or no, or people sort of see the big picture stuff, but you’re actually really getting in there, rolling up your sleeves and typing stuff.

**Derek:** Yeah. I don’t think that’s true at least amongst the showrunners I know. It’s less of that and more of you are the final arbiter of what’s going to be shot, which means the script, and the casting, and it’s a less of yes and no and more of let me get in there and do the nitty-gritty.

The actors, they like it when the showrunner is writing the show. They’ll look at the script and say, “Oh, this is a Derek script.” So, yeah.

**John:** Let’s try to offer some practical advice for writers who are getting started on their year’s work. And so we can talk about some macro ideas for getting stuff written and some micro ideas.

So, on the macro level, really like how are you planning your year ahead of writing and your months and then your weeks? But on a yearly level you guys have a sense that there’s going to be 22 episodes of the show.

**Derek:** Right.

**John:** And so you know that there’s probably eight, nine months of solid writing to be done there. And so you know you cannot be planning on – you’re not going to be able to do a feature during that time.

**Derek:** Right.

**John:** 100% of your time is spent doing that.

**Derek:** Right. So, because of that – I have a rigid structure that I have to do. I mean, the great thing about television and the hard thing about television is that you’re in prep on one episode, you’re shooting one episode, and you’re in post on another. And the train doesn’t stop from June 1st is when we start in the writers’ room ’til the end of April. We have about two months that we don’t work. Well, a month and a half.

And so we’ve written, we’re on episode 14 starts shooting tomorrow of 22. We know we’re going to have 22 this year. So we have eight to go. And I’m already thinking like in my head, oh my god, get one more done. One closer to the end.

We’re confident but not counting our chickens that we’re going to get another season. So I can usually put that – I know that six weeks I’m going to be free and then June 1st it’s going to start over again and we’re going to have a new season to go.

But, I’m also going to write a book this year. So–

**John:** When will you find time to write the book? Is it before you start your day?

**Derek:** Yeah. I’ve always done it that way. I get up early in the morning, super early, 5 o’clock a lot of times, and I’ll have an hour and a half that I know before my kids get up that I’m going to have to myself. So if I can get up at five and I’m at my desk at 5:15, which is generally what I do, I’m a pretty good wake up and go kind of thing. I don’t need my coffee or any of that stuff. I’m already thinking the night before what I’m going to do. And then I try to write a thousand words in an hour and a half. Which for me is, I write freehand in a Moleskine book. And if I do four pages writing pretty small – I’ve just got the system down. I know four pages is about a thousand words. It’s about 250 words a page. And I generally try not to complete an idea and even sometimes not complete a sentence so that that next morning when I wake up I can start fresh again.

And then if I write 15 days in a month that’s 15,000 words. So I don’t have to write every single day and the weekends you can take off from doing the book and get my head together. But I already know what I’m going to write, so I’ve started planning that out in October. OK, here’s the beginning, here’s the middle, and here’s the end. I don’t write a full outline for a book. I’d rather just kind of let the writing flow. And that’s how I do it.

**John:** So you segued from macro to very micro, sort of like the big picture down to the micro. But I want to stop and think about the macro a little bit more because you are on a set schedule that’s being dictated by other folks, and being dictated by production that you have to be in this time. Back when you were just a feature writer how long were you blocking out for writing a feature and how did you deal with problems of being stacked up on work or having like there’s a slot free but then there’s other stuff you need to do? How did you balance that out?

**Derek:** Yeah, because I always liked writing more than – I know there are screenwriters who get super in their own heads about it and they talk about it as being painful. But I was never that way. I like being behind my desk and writing. So if I could – if we had more than one thing going on it was priority of, OK, they’re expecting this outline in three weeks so I need to work on that. Whereas the other one is expecting a first draft in two months. OK, then I will take my day and I will look at it like a work day. And maybe if I can just say that I’m going to have four solid hours of writing as opposed to just thinking or going out on, you know, walking.

You’re always – as a writer – you’re always thinking. I know you’re like that. You’re at night, at 10:30 at night, and you’re thinking about what you’re going to write the next day. But I can have four hours where I’m just sitting behind my desk and the phone is not going to ring and I put a stop sign outside my door so my kids know don’t come in and bother me, then I can concentrate on that job.

**John:** So you are looking at – if I can do that four hours a day, if I can guarantee it myself I can get a script done in how many weeks?

**Derek:** Oh, for a full script would be two or three months. I mean, look, if push comes to shove and you’re up against a production deadline then you can do anything in any amount of time. I mean, you’ve done it and I’ve done it where it’s–

**John:** I do find that that’s true for features. And so if I need to write a feature in two weeks, you know what, I can get that feature done in two weeks. You cannot do that with a book.

**Derek:** That’s true.

**John:** That’s one of the things I’ve really noticed about Arlo Finch is that even though it seems like a book and a movie are similar things, the number of words is just so vast.

**Derek:** It’s daunting. Right. Yeah, no, you couldn’t write a book in two weeks. Maybe if you were just, you know, going around the clock. I know that Stephen King has his lost years of the ‘80s where he was cranking them out. I couldn’t do that. But for a movie or a TV show I’ve found that writers generally, it’s like putting water in a bowl and it expands to the size of the bowl. So if you tell a writer you’ve got four weeks you’ll get that script in four weeks. If you tell him, man, I need a first draft in four days, wow, suddenly the water expands to the bowl and you get the draft in four days.

It’s never – it’s not going to be your best, but I think also writers freeze up and they get lazy and they say, “Oh, OK, they’re not expecting this first draft for six months,” and then they put it all off. And it’s the same two months that they would have spent on it, but they put it off. And so I don’t think there’s a quality equivalent to how quickly or how slowly you do something.

**John:** I agree. I think people can – obviously if you’re rushing through stuff you can kind of read rushed writing. And there have been times where I’ve read scripts where it’s like you can kind of feel the whiteboard marker there. You can say like this is the broad strokes of this and you get what that is. It’s harder to say that this is a 30-week draft versus a 12-week draft.

**Derek:** I couldn’t agree more.

**John:** So generally in town, you know, for a first draft of a feature eight weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks are standard terms. When we were building the Start Button for the WGA those were the kinds of things we put in there for first drafts because that was a common–

**Derek:** It makes sense.

**John:** Common default. A thing I’ve had to do more recently is just look at my calendar and print out 12 months and say I’m blocking off these weeks to write this thing because if I don’t do that I can’t.

**Derek:** Great. That’s smart.

**John:** The challenge is sometimes I’ll say like, OK, well I should be able to start on this project at that point, but then the rights didn’t come through for that thing. So I’m waiting – I don’t want to start a thing that I don’t know if I can really write.

**Derek:** Yeah. You’re calendar, it’s tough to match actual dates as opposed to blocks of time. And so once they say go, then you’ve got 10 weeks, but the go might move two weeks or, you know, you try to plan your spring break and all of a sudden that’s when everybody wants to meet, you know, and it’s hard as a writer. Everybody thinks you’re flexible at all times and you’re not.

**John:** You’re not. There was a project this last year that I did genuinely want to do and it became clear that, I’ll say it, this was a Fox project and Fox couldn’t wait for me because they weren’t sure that they would be around in April when I’d be free.

**Derek:** Right. Well, that’s, I mean, once you’re as advanced as John is you actually have slots and your agent will say, “He’s got a slot coming up in October,” and studios will move their stuff around for a writer like you. But when you’re just starting out your slot becomes whatever they say it is.

**John:** But increasingly I think it’s not just writers at a certain level because so many of us are going back between features and television, like if that show does 10 or 12 episodes that person needs to go back on that show. So Megan Amram is going to go back on The Good Place, and so she’s available to do something until The Good Place starts and then she’s not available again. So that’s the challenge.

**Derek:** Right. That is a challenge. Good for Megan though.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s try to make advice that’s applicable to most listeners. I would say it’s going to take eight, 10, 12 weeks, but put some edges on that and say like within these three months I’m going to write this script. And to write this script I’m going to have to block off a certain amount of time every day or every other day to get there.

**Derek:** Yep.

**John:** A number of pages per day is useful. So three pages, four pages, five pages. You’ll get there. If you’re writing prose, a thousand words I think is a really good benchmark. And I aim for a thousand words a day and if I do that I finish a book. If I don’t do that–

**Derek:** And a thousand words, that’s not crazy.

**John:** It’s not as much as you think.

**Derek:** That’s not crazy. It’s not asking too much. Like I said, I can do it in an hour and a half generally speaking.

**John:** A thousand words is a short chapter.

**Derek:** Right. Oh, for me it’s not even a chapter, you know, because I only write 10 chapters.

**John:** Middle grade versus–

**Derek:** Yeah. Exactly. But the other thing I think as a writer you can say to yourself is give yourself a time limit for the actual outline or germination of the idea before you start writing, but with a time limit. And then set your dates from there so that part of your say two months you have to write your draft does not include all of the thinking that goes on. Otherwise you’re just going to be floundering. You always use that analogy that I liked about painting the lines over again. You can’t do that and expect to get a draft done in two months. Which is when you write five pages and then instead of picking up page six the next day you go back and you’re writing page one again, and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, and then starting, you only get to page six instead of to page 10, which is a bad way to do it.

**John:** And it’s actually much more of a problem in books than in features because it takes an hour to read the book up to that point.

**Derek:** Exactly.

**John:** In a feature if you have to you can reread it, but you sort of can’t in a book.

**Derek:** But I’d rather get a draft done and then start the revision process. And even if that means that I’m not correcting things as I go than to keep working on the same 30 pages for a month.

**John:** Yep. I would say that the first script I ever finished was back when I was interning at Universal. And it seemed like I was working a fulltime job, so how did I have time to do it, but the thing is I had a completely mindless job. I was like filing papers. And it required no brain usage at all over the course of the day. And so I could come home and still have a tremendous amount of creative energy. So I would spend those nights handwriting pages and I would type them up during my lunch break the next day. And I got a lot of done during that time.

**Derek:** That’s great.

**John:** And so if you have a kind of BS job, that’s an advantage to that. Because people always ask like, oh, do I need to get a job in the industry, something with connections and all that stuff? Those are great, but it’s very hard to find time to do the stuff you need to do if that’s the kind of job you have.

**Derek:** You need some thinking time.

**John:** One last thing I will say is that a thing I’ve done a lot more of over the last couple of years is what I call sprints. And so you have basically a sprint, because you’re trying to get four of your Moleskine pages done in an hour and a half. I have 60-minute sprints. And so I will set 60 minutes, hit the clock, start the timer, and for 60 minutes I will do nothing but write. And what’s nice about the 60-minute rule is it creates boundaries for myself, but also creates boundaries for other people. So if I get a text saying like, hey, can you do this – I can get back to you in 37 minutes. And it clears that off. It’s like putting up little stop signs saying like I’m not gone forever, I’m just gone for the next little bit here.

**Derek:** I’ve seen you do that on Twitter and there’s no run up to it. You say I’m going to do a 60-minute sprint in two minutes. And I’m like well I would have done it if you give me some notice.

**John:** I’m trying to be better about that. So I usually do it at the start of the hour and I’m trying to give at least 20 minutes warning.

**Derek:** Yeah. I’ve seen it. I’ll do it at some point with you.

**John:** Cool. Let’s move on to topic two, professional realism. So this came up this morning because Sloane Crosley had a piece in the New York Times. She’s the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake. But she points out that when she was working as a book publicist she would see her job portrayed in films and it was really crazily inaccurate that didn’t resemble reality much at all. And she points to things like The Proposal and the TV show Younger as being good examples of this.

And Derek, I was thinking of you because you have a show that’s all about firefighting. You also have shows about doctors and lawyers and other Chicagoans. So how much are you thinking about the realism of that job versus what your dramatic necessity is?

**Derek:** Yeah, I read the article after you sent it to me and shout out to Sutton Foster who is a good friend of mine who is the star of Younger and her picture was in the article. And I was laughing to myself because somebody in the industry of publishing was complaining about the portrayal of the way publishers are portrayed. And all I think about is the show successful, is the drama good. And for firefighters we have a big firefighting following. Firehouses around the country watch our show live and then we hear about it on Twitter.

We have a consultant in both paramedic and a fire chief, Steve Chikerotis, and Michelle Martinez who do their best to give us as accurate as they can a portrayal of what it’s like working in a firehouse with the parameters knowing that I’m going to overrule them if the story merits overruling. For instance, a firehouse, if you were typically in it for 24 hours, twenty two of those hours might be boring. We don’t have that luxury to be boring on the show. And so we might fudge how many calls, especially death-defying calls, that one firehouse would show up in a particular day.

Now, when we get to the actual art of firefighting we try to again be as accurate as possible. Here’s a problem John that you may not know. If a firefighter is in an actual fire, you wouldn’t be able to see anything. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Smoke is zero percent visibility. Obviously you can’t do that in a television show. So we cheat that. We make it smoky. We make the fires fierce. But we have to have our firefighters being able to move around, talk.

We actually redesigned the helmets that the firefighters wear so you can see their faces, otherwise it would just be their eyes. It would be like the storm troopers or the pilots in Star Wars, you know. So we designed clear masks resembling more like diving masks and put the breathing apparatus at the bottom so we could see the actors act inside the fire.

But I do think realism helps, you know.

**John:** So with your experts are you going to them early on in the process saying like what would the reality of this be, or are they vetting scripts later down the road?

**Derek:** Both. And in fact we talk to them prior to the season about any interesting – they’re still working, well the fire chief is retired now, but had a 35-year career and is one of the most decorated firefighters in Chicago. And then our paramedic still goes out two times a week. So they have 72-hour off and then 24 on. And so in a week she can give us 10 calls that we could use in an episode. But so they tell us anything interesting that they can think of before we start the season. Then as we do an outline they respond to the outline. Oh, actually we’d have three firefighters respond in that area of the fire. Somebody would be on the roof, venting the roof. These kind of things. And then we’ll put them in the script if it works for what we’re doing.

Then they read the script and they’ll comment on dialogue. Just little things you wouldn’t think about that a firefighter might say or a paramedic might say, or something you didn’t know wasn’t available in a firehouse, you know. That kind of thing. And so then they vet the script and then they’re on set. And so if the actors have any questions as they’re performing the duties–

**John:** Or how to put on this piece of equipment.

**Derek:** Exactly.

**John:** That kind of stuff. Great.

**Derek:** Now we’ve been doing it so long, we’re in our seventh season, that most of our actors can tell other firefighters how to fight a fire at this point. Yeah, there’s a learning curve but the consultants are key when you’re writing this kind of a show.

**John:** So that’s Chicago Fire and there have been other sort of emergency shows like that before. You’ve also down like 3:10 to Yuma. So in a situation like that how are you doing the research to figure out what exactly the mechanics of the town were like, sort of like how stuff would work. And to what degree did you stick to that versus like this is a story and we’re in this universe?

**Derek:** That was more book reading where obviously we didn’t have as many people that we could talk to. But at the time that we were writing that script the book came out right before, by Stephen Ambrose, that was about the transcontinental railroad and where the two points came together of the railroads. And in reading that book we were doing the research of what a town would look like that had sprung up to satisfy the workers of the railroad, which was where the ultimate third act was going to be in that script. And what we discovered was that these places were pits of people trying to pry railroad workers from their money, so it was gamblers, and whores, and conmen, and those kind of things. And that’s what we ended up using as the spine of the book.

Elmore Leonard had written the original short story, so that was already – he had crafted who the posse was and the sheriff. And then Jim Mangold who directed the movie, who probably could be a historian himself, did a lot of the research once the movie was going.

**John:** And for Silver Bear, so Silver Bear is an imagined assassin. How much are you limiting yourself to things that would be possible in the real world versus like these are things that happen in books with assassins? What’s the balance there?

**Derek:** Right. Well, when I first had the idea for the book Michael Brandt and I who – Michael Brandt was my partner for a long time – we went to visit Quantico and the FBI headquarters to do research for a project for Universal. And when we were there one of the FBI, one of our consultants, was talking about how he had been on a contract killer case. And I just remember that contract killer idea. It seemed fake and it’s not. There are people who are hired to kill people.

And so I was just grilling him with questions and that sort of fed my original sensibility of what it would take to be a contract killer. And then I just let imagination take over. And now most of those books when I write them feature cities that I’ve visited and spent a lot of time in and so I can draw real descriptions. I’m trying not to be fake about – in fact, I try not to set anything in a location I haven’t been to, because I don’t want it to be inauthentic.

**John:** I get that. So let’s talk about why sometimes a person’s job in the real world isn’t portrayed that same way on screen. You talked about the boredom problem. That most people’s real lives are kind of boring and what they’re doing at work is kind of boring. So you can’t just sort of sit in that space because that would be boring. It’s like showing up at a boring party. Nobody wants to be there.

But I think the more important thing to remember is that we are showing a character who has a job. The job is not the character.

**Derek:** Right.

**John:** And so while the job is an important aspect of the character, certainly with challenge it’s a very important aspect of the character, it’s not ultimately what we’re there to watch. And so if it’s a matter of what’s the most interesting for the character versus what is most realistic for the job, as writers we’re always going to pick what’s most interesting for the character.

**Derek:** And it would be the death of drama if you – in fact, I can feel the complaint from that article because whenever you see screenwriters portrayed in Hollywood on the screen it’s nothing like what our jobs typically are. In fact, Hollywood is nothing like typically–

**John:** Isn’t it really crazy how unlike it it is?

**Derek:** Yeah. So I think you’d have that complaint if there were a show about plumbing and you were a plumber. There would be a million plumbers going, “Ugh, we never use a three-quarter wrench when we undo the pipe.” But there’s a reason why we chose that in the…

I don’t know about you, I generally don’t like movies about Hollywood.

**John:** I like some movies about how. But I take it in general. I enjoyed the, I think it was the Showtime series Episodes, the one with Matt LeBlanc.

**Derek:** I watched the first season. It was funny. It’s heightened.

**John:** It’s heightened. It’s realistic and then just pushed into a place where it’s like that’s nuts where you got to, but I get it. And what I think they did is that they recognized what the natural conflicts were and just turned them up to 15. And what the natural absurdities were and just turned them up a lot.

**Derek:** Exactly.

**John:** Which is fine. The same way that Frasier Crane is not a very good psychiatrist probably. But is an enjoyable character to watch.

**Derek:** But all you’ve got to do is get 10 screenwriters in a room and realize their Hollywood is totally different from your Hollywood anyway. And I think that’s probably true of somebody else in publishing might watch Younger and be like, “They nailed that. They nailed that.”

**John:** So, a couple of years ago for Legendary I did a pilot. Did you ever read that pilot? I did a pilot about Hollywood.

**Derek:** No.

**John:** It was about a fictitious studio. And so it was going to be one of Legendary’s first TV shows and so I wrote it. And we never actually got it set up. And Billy Ray’s show, which was about another studio, a historical studio, got made. But mine was a present day show. And it was really interesting writing about real life because I knew sort of exactly what those conversations were. I knew sort of like what the things around this would be.

But I remember Kelly Marcel had read it. She’s like, “I can’t believe you included that anecdote.” And I’m like what? “Well that’s about those two actors.” I had no idea what that story was. Those same things happen again and it always feels like, oh, that’s an absurd thing that can only happen in a story.

**Derek:** We’ll get that a lot where I’ll get an email from somebody in the Denver fire department and say, “Oh, did you read about our fund drive?” No, they were doing that also in Chicago, or Miami, or wherever. Yeah, we have to tell people we’re not stealing stories.

**John:** I can understand why being in the Dick Wolf universe like they’re used to Law & Order where like clearly you can see–

**Derek:** Ripped from the headlines.

**John:** Ripped from the headlines, yes. But you’re not ripping from the headlines.

**Derek:** No, I mean, I will – in the summer when we’re gearing up for the first part of the season I’ll look through the Internet really for interesting calls, what we call calls, or when the bells go off. And I saw in Japan or somewhere there was a woman whose foot had been run over in a revolving door. And I had childhood fear of revolving doors.

**John:** Oh totally.

**Derek:** And anytime we can do something that’s suspenseful or – so I saw this picture and I just took the picture, put it in my story folder, and then when we got out and in the middle of the season it was like we need an interesting call. I remembered that picture and we put that in. So, yes, it’s ripped from the headlines, kind of. It definitely jogged my memories of fears I had as a kid.

**John:** I would say that the last reason why I think our onscreen jobs and real screen jobs don’t match up so nicely is that our conflicts in the real world aren’t as clean. They aren’t as interesting. And so we suppress things a lot. We don’t vent the way that we want characters to able to vent. People don’t express themselves in ways that we need characters to express themselves. And by necessity onscreen we’re winnowing down the number of people who are actually speaking parts. And so you can’t sort of have relationships with 20 people over the course of your job.

**Derek:** And they don’t resolve as easily as we need in an hour and 45 minutes.

**John:** Or even over the span of 10 episodes. Most of your conflicts don’t really resolve.

**Derek:** No. Like I saw somebody out on Larchmont which is close to John and my house who I hadn’t seen in, I don’t know, nine or 10 years. And I didn’t have a problem with that person. Just they faded. When we had kids it kind of went in different directions. And that wouldn’t work very well in a TV show.

**John:** Yeah. Like who was this person? You didn’t set him up? What is this?

All right, let’s get to some questions. We have listener questions and some of them were from the TV bucket and I figured you’d be the perfect person to answer them.

I’ll start with Paige. Paige writes in, “This is a topic that never seems to be addressed no matter what combinations of words I Google, so I’m hoping to encourage a discussion. When someone gets their first job on a show that ends up getting canceled, how do they make money if they don’t get staffed again right away? I’m truly at a loss about this. I got my first staff writer job last October with about $300 in bank account, having quit my day job. And after 10 episodes of WGA minimums, paying out three reps, and the $2,500 WGA entrance fee, I’m down to almost nothing.

“Obviously this is a very specific situation, but again, is this natural? My reps get very uncomfortable when I mention my financial situation which I find weird. Does everyone in Hollywood have a trust fund? My parents suggest I go back to working in retail, but is that normal? What is normal?”

**Derek:** That’s a tough one. There is no normal, as John and I were just talking about. Your situation has probably been shared a bunch but then there’s each individual is going to be different. I think, look, if you get a staff job you want to get to the next step. If a show gets canceled nobody is guaranteed anything. That’s the problem.

And TV business is rough. I mean, most shows do not go past season one. That’s just the numbers. And certainly don’t go longer than that. This business is not a long term business. It’s more like a circus. And so you have to put money away. You have to work the other job. My first two years here my wife was working. I thought I was going to have to get a job at Starbucks and ended up squeaking out, getting that one little rewrite that could keep me going until we got a movie going.

But I worked in advertising for four years and saved my money before that. There’s no shame. There is zero shame in working another job while you’re trying to get staffed.

**John:** Yeah, but to Paige’s question, is it weird that I was on a show that ran 10 episodes and now I’m broke again. And I was staff writing. And I would say that’s not weird. But I’d say what has changed is because there are so many short seasons. Ten years ago she would be on a show that would go 13 or 22 episodes if it didn’t get canceled right away, but hopefully. But scale, while fantastic, scale is the minimum wage that writers can be paid in the guild. It’s not that much money. And so you’ve got to be protecting that.

Also, she says that she’s paying her three reps, so she’s paying her lawyer, she’s paying her manager, and her agent. Her manager is getting 10%. Her agent is getting 10%. Her lawyer is getting 5%. That’s 25% away from the start. She doesn’t seem to have a writing partner, but if she had a writing partner that would be another 50%.

**Derek:** Half.

**John:** Half of that would be gone.

**Derek:** Plus taxes.

**John:** Plus taxes.

**Derek:** No, it’s a tough business when you’re starting out. I think that’s why people make exit plans and end up back in Texas or wherever they came from. And it’s hard. You have to keep both ears open and be looking for the next job. And it’s not your fault it got canceled as a staff writer. You have nothing to do with that. But, again, this business is way much more like a circus than it is like had you gone into the insurance business where you can build a 30-year career in the same company.

No, I mean, this is the same for John, the same for me. Chicago Fire could get canceled tomorrow and then I’m looking for my next gig. And you sock it away when you can, because you know there’s going to be some lean times. And you’re in a boat a lot of people have been in. So, find the next job. Save as much as you can. Work retail if you have to. And don’t worry about all the doubters. And keep at it.

**John:** Yeah. We have friends who are driving Uber. I mean, just whatever you need to do to sort of keep some liquidity, because that also keeps you able to stay in the game longer. And be available for meetings. Just try to get next staffing.

**Derek:** Yeah. A lot of people do the bartending and whatever jobs at night so that if you have to go to something you can get there.

**John:** Do you want to take Alex’s question?

**Derek:** Yeah, Alex in Brooklyn writes, “How do you typically handle writing dialogue where the characters are cutting each other off, arguing perhaps?” If you just cut the sentence off midline it looks fine on the page, but I find it’s difficult for actors to perform as their intonation tends to come down on that final word when it’s supposed to sound mid-sentence.”

**John:** Yeah. So cutting people off.

**Derek:** Cutting people off?

**John:** Derek, I’d like to ask you a question about–

**Derek:** How do I cut people off?

**John:** In your scripts are you a dot-dot-dot? Are you a dasher?

**Derek:** I’m both. I’m a dasher on cutting people off. But I use ellipses a lot in action descriptions. When I cut someone off, let’s say it’s John and he does a half a sentence and I do the dashes. And then the next person I put in the parenthesis, the Riley’s as we call them, I put “Interrupts.” So it would say Derek (interrupts) “You mean I cut you off?”

Now, what happens when you’re still involved in the production is that the actors will ask you what was the rest of the sentence going to be. And then you tell them and then they do it until they get interrupted. So, you know, they have to find it as an actor. I would much prefer you not put in parentheses the rest of the sentence in your script. Just write it the way it’s supposed to sound and then production is a whole different animal and you can always tell them what the rest of the sentence was going to be.

**John:** Yeah. So you will see some scripts where they do bracket out the overlaps dialogue.

**Derek:** I don’t love it. It’s fine.

**John:** It’s fine. It’s totally a choice. If you do it, do it consistently. It’s not a thing I like to do. What I do like about Alex’s question is pointing out that actors do have a tendency to sort of like drop that last word if they know it’s going to be going that way.

**Derek:** John’s rule that has stuck with me and Craig says this a lot too for as long as they’ve been on the air is just make it clear to the reader. So you can use brackets. You don’t have to. But you can always talk to the actors. You know, the script as Craig will often say is a blueprint for what you’re doing. It’s not published as set in stone. And so you should be able to talk to the actors and tell them, OK, here’s what I was thinking.

**John:** Yeah. Mel from Los Angeles writes, “My agent has just negotiated my first TV staff writer contract.” Congratulations, Mel. “So, if the series is renewed for more seasons, the next three years seem pretty clear as far as TV work is involved. I’m also interested in working in features, both original and open writing assignments, as well as creating a TV show one day. At one point do I really need to get an entertainment lawyer? I also have a manager, by the way? In other words, when would that additional 5% commission really pay off?”

**Derek:** Have you ever been without an entertainment lawyer?

**John:** I was for my very first job I did not have an entertainment lawyer.

**Derek:** So when did you decide?

**John:** I got one when I sold Go. So my first couple jobs I guess my agent just did the deal. They were scale.

**Derek:** I’ve had an entertainment lawyer the whole time, so I don’t know what the – in fact, I found that the entertainment lawyer is the one who does–

**John:** Makes the deal.

**Derek:** A lot of the micro negotiations within the negotiation. So, I would say do it as soon as you can. I think it’s worth it. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. So, I go back and forth, because a lot of writers in Mel’s position where like they’re staff writers, your deal is really boilerplate. There’s not a lot of magic there happening.

**Derek:** The agent can do it.

**John:** With a feature deal it can be a little bit more sophisticated and complicated. I would say that for my experience I feel like my entertainment attorney has more than earned his 5% on every single deal.

**Derek:** Me too.

**John:** Because he’s negotiating up things. He’s making sure that second step is covered. He’s watching out for eventualities. He’s been fantastic. But for a person who is starting in TV–

**Derek:** Maybe wait till the next step?

**John:** Maybe wait till the next job.

**Derek:** If you go from staff writer to story editor.

**John:** Or when you’re trying to sell a feature. I think on a feature it’s really clear that they’re going to be able to see some stuff that’s not going to be obvious to everybody else.

**Derek:** I was thinking about that interrupting question because in the last episode of Chicago Fire we had a woman talking and then the male actor interrupted her by kissing her. It was one of those where it was all heated. And so the director said to, Jesse Spencer is the actor, said to surprise her this time on where you’re going to interrupt her because I want it to be a genuine surprise.

So he goes in for the kiss surprising her and her tooth bangs into his lip and splits his lip. And we had to call lunch for the first time ever on the show. We had an injury that resulted in we had to stop shooting because he split his lip. I said how bad of a kisser are you, Jesse, that you can’t–

**John:** Wow.

**Derek:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s not good. So, how do you fix a lip like that? Is that a super glue situation?

**Derek:** I don’t know. I think the makeup people have stuff, so maybe they did.

**John:** A little styptic pen or something.

**Derek:** They came back from lunch and got the scene. I know that.

**John:** That’s nice. So we have a question from Anonymous Anonymous. It’s long. But I think it’s useful. So maybe we’ll split this one up. Why don’t you take the first half?

**Derek:** “A friend and I have collaborated on a series together. We’ve written a pilot, built a show bible, and broken a three-series arc and want to get it out there. My friend has previously written, directed, and sold a well-received independent feature and has an agent and manager, while I do not. Because of this, his agent and manager are pushing for us to change the Written By line on the pilot to his name only, with both of us attached as Created By.

“When we inquire about the motivation we get one of two common answers. A, if you are co-writers then you are splitting the fees of one across two people. So it’s not worth your time. And, B, we can’t pitch something with two writers attached due to common industry expectations.”

**John:** “So why should they care if they’re splitting our fees, they’d still get the same cut, right? Is it too cynical of us to think they might be pushing to split us up and then sign separately so they can get twice the deal?

“The second part is more nuanced and something that my friend and I have discussed at length. There are numerous examples of co-writers/co-creators from Lord and Miller, Benioff and Weiss, Coen Brothers, Duffer Brothers, Duplass Brothers, the Wachowskis. So the notion that ‘Hollywood doesn’t like pairs’ feels like bunk. And what they’re really talking about is their inability and desire to market or sell us a pair. Should we hold our ground and maintain the dual writing credit? Are the agents being shady here? Is there a compelling reason why we should follow their advice and change the byline simply for the sake of getting the script into the right hands and the potential for development?”

**Derek:** OK, was trying to analyze this in my mind. One thing I don’t like is when representatives are trying to change what actually happened, which is if you’re partners you’re partners. If you wrote this together, you wrote it together. Created by is a separate thing anyway. That’s who created the story. Of a TV show it’s generally if there’s an outline. That’s created by. If there’s a screenplay that’s written by. If there’s no outline and it’s just a pilot spec script that’s both. And so if you both did the work you should both have your names on it. And let the rest of the chips fall where they may. I don’t know why that would affect them one way or the other.

The only way where I can see where they’re coming from is when Michael and I were partners and we did television the first time and we got paid on that very first season we got paid the amount of what one person would get paid. We were taking up one spot so to speak in the writers’ room even though we were the creators of the show.

So, when season one ended and I realized I’m getting half of what some of the other writers are getting because we’re splitting our fee I said we’re not doing this as a team anymore. We’re going individual. So you can make more money that way. That doesn’t really affect why you should split this up on the pilot.

**John:** I don’t get splitting this up at this point. If they come back to you with sort of Derek’s explanation I can kind of see that logic, because I do know of other writing teams who have split up because they just make twice as much money. But I don’t think that’s really the case here. My hunch is that they represent this other guy and they want that person to be the marquee name on this thing that they’re sending out.

**Derek:** And make sure that the other guy isn’t behind your back – I hate to say this–

**John:** Yeah. But I think it’s true.

**Derek:** But they could be talking to the agent and saying, “Look, maybe I can get sole credit on this and we can move it.”

**John:** Our next question is a screenwriter question. Sean from Canada writes, “Generally speaking, how much work does someone need to do to get a Story by credit? Or is it impossible to generalize about this? And secondly does the amount of compensation match the work hours? For instance, what if two writers have a two-hour story meeting where they hash out the basic plot of the movie, but then one of those writers goes off and puts 200 hours to write the actual screenplay? Would the compensation reflect that difference in time spent working?” Generally.

**Derek:** I just did a WGA arbitration where I was an arbiter and so I’m familiar with the story credit and the way it works. Now, the very first thing you should know is it’s only about writing. It has nothing to do with the 100 hours you spent thinking about it or the two hours you spent thinking about it. If there’s an outline that you wrote, or you wrote the first draft of the script and that becomes the story of the movie, and I forgot the exact definition – you can look it up in the credits manual – but it’s basically things that aren’t endemic to the final shooting script but are endemic to the story if I’m using endemic correctly in terms of the plot, the character descriptions, those kind of things.

So, it has nothing to do with time. It only has to do with the document. And then generally speaking if the story that is the final shooting script came from that early draft then that merits credit. And you can only have two credited story by writers. So I would assume, or presume, it’s got to be a significant part of the story.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Derek:** There’s no percentages on story, but you can only do two. So typically it’s 50/50 or 70/30 if it’s significant.

**John:** Yeah. So the important thing for Sean to know is that story is written words.

**Derek:** Yes.

**John:** It’s how we’re basing it, and so it’s based on either outlines that were written, and so in arbitration we’re reading those outlines, or the underlying material, or we’re reading that first scripts, or other scripts that are providing the story for things. And you can look up the WGA credits manual for exactly what the definition is, because we don’t want to mangle it here.

But that’s what we’re actually basing it on is those words. Now, an interesting thing that does come up is increasingly some of these movies are being broken in mini rooms. And so they’ll put together a room to figure out like we have this piece of property and we’re going to figure out how to make three movies and two TV shows out of this property. And so as a room they’re breaking a story and creating an outline for this movie. That’s not a thing that we’re well set up to deal with.

**Derek:** No.

**John:** And so we’re encountering situations where it becomes really tough to figure out who deserves story credit when this document about sort of what the story was is really the product of a bunch of people working together.

**Derek:** I don’t know what the WGA rules on that are, but I was invited into one of those – this is a few years ago now – but we had to sign something at the beginning that said that you, no matter what your ideas are that you’re contributing are now pooled into the first writer’s draft. So that writer, you took the job and you got paid a daily rate to go there, but you got paid knowing that whatever idea you contributed was going into somebody else’s pocket. You couldn’t submit written material afterwards. It was all just talking.

**John:** Yeah. It was all just talking. Again, if it’s all just talking then that’s not–

**Derek:** Covered by the WGA. Right.

**John:** Do you want to take Sara’s question?

**Derek:** Yeah, Sara in LA writes, “Any advice for working with directors who are new to scripts? My bosses are veteran television commercial directors, but are new to features and working with a writer. Me. I’m trying to find the best way to communicate ideas, get feedback, and develop realistic expectations around the writing process, example first drafts are not perfect.”

**John:** Absolutely. I think that’s a good question. So whether your bosses are coming from TV commercials, music videos, other short form stuff, they’re probably not used to working with long form narrative. They might not have read many scripts. And so this may all be kind of new to them.

What I would encourage you to do is to not get lost in the micro and the macro things at the same time. Because I suspect they’re going to have very clear visions of how they want scenes to work, how they want certain moments to work, but they may have a harder time envisioning the whole overall flow of the story. And so make some conversations which is just sort of like the big white board. Like let’s make sure we’re seeing the whole journey of this character. Take your hero and just follow your hero through the whole story. Work through it that way. Make sure you’re talking about themes, those topics.

Then when they want to drill down to specific moments and their vision for things, or the color schemes of things, or when she says this or this confrontation, let those be a separate kind of conversation because that I think is going to be the hardest thing for a first time director to communicate with a writer.

**Derek:** The key that you said is talking. And I couldn’t encourage it more. We have in television something called a tone meeting before every episode where you just go through the script page by page. And if you have cool directors who actually value writers and your writing partner they’ll want to do that with you. And like John said, you can do that any time in the process. You can do that at the beginning, before you do a rewrite. You should. You can do it after the rewrite comes in. Here’s what I was intending. And that’s a two-way street. They should tell you, “Well I was thinking the camera would be low here. Could you write it more so that I can get that sense?”

Great. It’s all about communication and hopefully if you have good directors you can educate them a little bit about what you’re doing and then let them go.

**John:** Cool. Dan in Australia writes, “I’m currently out pitching a new show. I love this project. It’s the type of thing I’ve always dreamt of making. The first time I pitched it it was electric. I really felt the show as I was pitching it and happily had a great response. In subsequent pitches I’ve noticed that I don’t feel as emotionally connected to the pitch. I guess it’s what an actor must feel like with a play. Any tips on getting yourself to the right spot emotionally for the tenth, or the 20th time you pitch on a project?”

**Derek:** How do you do it, John?

**John:** I would say I always have to find something new about the project to be describing that time. So like a new way in. I try not to be so rehearsed that I’m just a robot who performs the thing. And I also try to make sure my pitches invite places for them to offer feedback and really communicate back in so that it really is a conversation. It’s not just a presentation.

**Derek:** Great advice. It’s funny, my youngest son Augie has gotten into magic. And he loves it. And he practices, like crazy. And he’s 12 years old and he’s probably spent a year now doing card flourishes. And what he forgets is that people are seeing the trick for the first time. And when you go into these meetings, even though you’ve done it eight times, they’ve never heard it. So it’s a performance. You have to pretend this is the first time. And I think the great actors on stage do that. They say, OK, all new audience. I’m doing it. I’ve got to give them my best. Man, you cannot bore yourself. This is your job. So, figure it out.

**John:** I will say for Arlo Finch I’ve had to do a lot of school visits, and so with those school visits I’m giving a keynote presentation and I’ve now done it 50 times maybe. I’ve done it a ton of times. It’s the same slides, same order, and largely the same jokes. And there have been times where I’ve had to look back at the slide and say like where am I – where am I at in this? But I’m still always like live and present for it. Because there is always something different. There’s always different kids in the front row. There’s always something about the environment and the situation that’s different.

And so key into what’s different about you being in this room with this group. Do your research to know who it is you’re sitting across from and what things they’re going to click into. And so in that initial five minutes of sort of BS conversation about movies and weather and all that stuff you can get some sense of what it is that they’re interested and excited about. And you can tailor some of what you say and some of what you emphasize based on who it is you’re talking to.

**Derek:** We always said it only takes one. It only takes one yes and you’re off and writing that project, so if, I mean, there’s really not that many buyers anyway. So it’s not like 50 schools. There’s going to be eight or nine times you’ve got to be able to get up for those presentations.

**John:** One of the things that’s actually the most challenging thing for me pitching is so let’s say I pitch to producers and then we’re going in to pitch for the studio, and so maybe early on I’ve pitched three times to producers, and then you’re going to pitch to the studio. And I know what the producers’ feedback has been and so I want to incorporate that, but also I know I’m talking to these new people, and so I want to both respect what the producer wants but I have to–

**Derek:** I ignore the producers in the room. I’m just, OK, now I’ve got this buyer.

**John:** Not even who I’m aiming it towards. Nothing to do with who I’m looking at, because obviously I’m looking at the most important person in the room.

**Derek:** You just know what their notes were and so you want to say–

**John:** Yeah.

**Derek:** Yeah, if you can give them a nod that they feel good about. My other trick when we were pitching a lot was that you use that five minutes of time where you, you know, how’s the weather, oh my gosh I took a trip to whatever, and don’t you like Sedona or whatever, and then I would say, “OK, before I begin the pitch I just want to tell you,” and I give like four things about the character, or the tone, or the theme. And then I say, “OK, now I’m going to start the pitch.” And they wouldn’t realize that I had already been pitching. You get yourself an extra five minutes and you’ve set the tone of what the pitch is going to be.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I think that you do get that preamble of let me contextualize the thing I’m about to do before you start, “We open on.”

**Derek:** Exactly.

**John:** Let’s do one last question. Jude writes, “Do writers have much if any input regarding the music for the scripts they write? Do writers have the opportunity to speak with directors about the kind of music they envision accompanying the script, or do they not even consider mentioning anything like that because it would be rejected out of hand?” What’s been your experience with music and scripts?

**Derek:** This question comes up a lot. It seems like it’s a super – I’d say put music into your scripts if you feel like it’s intrinsic to the story. It may not end being, you know, Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing. It could be some other inspirational song. But obviously there have been incredible movies where they wrote the movie specifically for the music. I can think of Baby Driver, Edgar Wright’s last movie. But your chances as an incoming first time screenwriter, not high that you’re going to get the actual music that you want.

No reason not to do it and set the tone of what you want to do. But just know it might change.

**John:** Yeah. For Go I did create a mix tape that had a bunch of tracks. None of those tracks made it into the actual movie. And I’m not even sure that the buyers or Doug Liman ever listened to that thing. It was important for me–

**Derek:** It set the mood.

**John:** For me. So it’s OK to do that. It’s not OK to sort of like say – obviously no one burns a CD anymore, but people used to burn CDs and send it with the script.

**Derek:** No, don’t do that.

**John:** That’s gross.

**Derek:** Don’t do any of the razzmatazz.

**John:** I guess links are not as burdensome, so if you have a Spotify playlist for it I guess that’s fine. But it would need to be important. I think what’s more crucial is that, as you’re describing the movie that we’re going to see and hear, describe the music if it’s important to what this is going to be. So there have definitely been times in scripts where over thunderous drums we descend upon a thing.

**Derek:** Yes. That’s great.

**John:** Fair game.

**Derek:** We don’t do a lot of source music on Chicago Fire, almost never. We probably in 7.5 seasons used five songs. But there has been at least three times that I’ve said, hey, I want this band playing at the end of the show. And then we just go and try to make a deal. Now, we don’t have a big budget for it the way like Koppelman and Levien have for their show where they are literally thinking out what the ten songs they’re going to play in an episode of Billions.

But, really recently on Chicago Fire I love this band Slothrust, and we have a scene at like a night club, like a happening nightclub, and so I said to our music supervisor right before Christmas I said, “I don’t know what it costs, but see if we can get this Slothrust song Double Down for this scene. I’ll let you know.” I’ll let you know if we got it.

**John:** Nice. We’ll see. All right, it’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this Grover meme that happened this last week. Did you see this?

**Derek:** No.

**John:** So I’m going to play it for you here.

**Derek:** OK, sweet.

[Video plays]

**John:** So Derek Haas, do you think that Grover was saying a bad word there?

**Derek:** Oh, I didn’t hear a bad word. “Move the camera. I think that’s an excellent idea.”

**John:** That’s exactly what he’s supposed to be saying.

**Derek:** Oh, it’s like the dress thing? The white dress versus the purple dress?

**John:** It is. And so you are hearing what he’s actually saying, like that sounds like an excellent idea, but my first time hearing it – and other people’s time hearing it – it sounds like he’s saying the F-word.

**Derek:** That’s hilarious.

**John:** In the context. And so I saw this thing and it’s sort of like Yanny and the dress. But it’s actually slightly different. So my One Cool Thing is actually this blog post by a guy named Christian DiCanio who is a linguist who is talking about what is actually happening there.

And so it’s essentially human speech doesn’t break down as neatly as we sort of think it would break down. And so much of what we perceive is really our expectation of what’s supposed to be coming. And so if you read a certain transcription you’ll say like, oh, that’s exactly what he said. You read a different transcription, like oh that’s exactly what he said.

**Derek:** Interesting.

**John:** It was false just in an ambiguous enough space that you could hear both things equally valid. So I can now flip my head, my ears back and forth. So now you’re going to listen to it again.

**Derek:** OK. I’m going to listen for the F-word. OK.

[Video plays}

Now I can’t go back.

**John:** Yeah, now you can’t go back. So it’s not quite the dress situation, where it’s actually kind of genuinely spooky. This is just like ambiguous things. And I will say what’s interesting about it as a writer is that we rely on those sort of ambiguous situations for a lot of our jokes. And so there’s things that fall in the gap between things, like the dad jokes. Like my wife wants me to stop stealing the kitchen appliances, but that’s a whisk I’m willing to take.

**Derek:** Ah, whisk!

**John:** Whisk. It’s a whisk.

**Derek:** Hilarious.

**John:** Derek, One Cool Thing?

**Derek:** My One Cool Thing, I have two. I have Two Cool Things. Because I’ve been a fourth time guest I get to have two. The first one is – I was talking about magic earlier. David Kwong, friend of the show, is a wonderful human being and an incredible magician. He’s doing shows in New York in January at the High Line Hotel, which I know a couple of the nights have already been sold out. And he’s doing a matinee and a later show.

I’ve seen the show. It is incredible. It is mind-boggling. I don’t know how he does anything that he does. I never ask. And it’s a fun interactive show because you’re also – it’s kind of the idea of an escape room and magic. It’s called The Enigmatist.

If you’re in New York in January go see David. You will not be disappointed. That’s number one.

Number two, I did not know this, and John you’re so much more technologically advanced than I am that you probably knew this right when the iPhone came out. But forever I was on texts or on emails on my phone I was trying to highlight, you know, you’d misspell a word and you’d just want to correct one letter. And so you’d try to put your finger on it and then it makes the bigger window. And you’re trying to get – and it was always hard to do to get the cursor to line up with the letter you wanted to correct.

And then somebody told me if you hold down the space bar on the text then the cursor comes up above where you are and you can move the cursor into the text and it has changed my life. And I wish I would have known that a year and a half ago.

**John:** It’s really useful. And also on later model iPhones you can push harder, you can force click, and the whole screen becomes – you can move the whole cursor around with it. I’ll show it to you.

**Derek:** I have to come over here and get lessons from John.

**John:** I’m going to show it to you right now and you’ll see sort of what I’m talking about because it’s a little bit confusing.

**Derek:** Oh, so you don’t have to do it on the – cool.

**John:** Cool. That’s our show for this week. As always our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch and Jim Bond with special guest vocals by Rebel Wilson.

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 like the ones Derek and I answered today. For short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Derek Haas is…?

**Derek:** @derekhaas.

**John:** Oh, it makes it so easy. And Derek sometimes will answer questions from his listeners. Like Sundays you do that?

**Derek:** I do it once a week. Sundays. Seven questions. And it doesn’t have to be about the shows, but that is what it ends up being.

**John:** You should get your questions in early because otherwise I’ll make some sort of prank question and Derek won’t even know I did it.

**Derek:** And Craig sometimes answers as though he watches the show. And he has never, ever seen a single episode. So, they’ll ask a specific question why did Casey do something and Craig will just make up an answer.

**John:** Chlamydia.

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. That helps people find the show. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month to subscribe to that and get all the back episodes and the bonus episodes. We also have seasons that are available in the johnaugust store so you can download them in blocks of 50 and listen back to the early episodes of Derek Haas.

**Derek:** Oh, I could make the five timers club next time.

**John:** Oh my gosh, you get the special jacket.

**Derek:** Do I get a jacket?

**John:** You should get the jacket. I remember you actually came when we were doing, I think it was Chicago because you were–

**Derek:** It was Chicago. I just started Chicago Fire.

**John:** That’s crazy. Way back when I was doing Big Fish.

**Derek:** So go look for that episode.

**John:** Derek Haas, thank you very much for pinch hitting. This was so much fun.

**Derek:** Always great. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Thank you, [Derek Haas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Haas)!
* Join us for the WGA’s [Princess Bride screening](https://www.wga.org/news-events/events/guild-screenings) on January 27th. Seating opens up to non-WGA members 15 minutes before showtime.
* [How Hollywood Gets the Publishing Industry Wrong](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/books/review/hollywood-publishing-industry-younger.html) by Sloane Crosley, author of [I Was Told There’d Be Cake](http://www.amazon.com/dp/159448306X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), for The New York Times
* Is Grover swearing in [this video](https://twitter.com/EvanEdinger/status/1078358697921966081)? This is [Christian DiCanio’s blog post](https://christiandicanio.blogspot.com/2018/12/is-grover-swearing-no-its-in-your-ears.html) about it.
* David Kwong’s [The Enigmatist](https://enigmatistshow.com/)
* Holding down the spacebar on a text so you can move the cursor more accurately on an iPhone.
* 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
* [Derek Haas](https://twitter.com/derekhaas) 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_382.mp3).