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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 275 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We are coming to you one day earlier than usual because Tuesday, I’ve heard, is the Election Day in the U.S. Craig, is that right?

**Craig:** Oh, is it? I don’t — they should probably say something about it on the news.

**John:** I heard a rumor of it. So I thought maybe we’d get this episode out the day before the election. Also in the theory that some people may be a little bit stressed out about the election–

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** And may want to hear about anything other than the election, so we will not talk about the election whatsoever in this podcast.

**Craig:** No, I would honestly would love it if somebody could just knock me out until the day after, just put me under. I can’t take this anymore, I can’t.

**John:** I’m sorry. I can’t either.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So today on the podcast, we are going to be looking at how movies and TV shapes the English language and how writers should think about their role in all of this. And we’ll also examine the uncomfortable overlap between rom-com characters and stalkers.

But first a reminder, t-shirts, today, this Monday that you’re listening to the podcast, is the very final opportunity to buy one of the two Scriptnotes t-shirts. There’s the blue shirt, there’s the gold standard shirt, they are both lovely but this is your last chance to get them. And when I say it’s your last day, I mean, daytime because at 5:00 p.m. today Monday Los Angeles time, they are closed forever. You will not be able to buy a t-shirt after 5:00 p.m. today on Monday.

**Craig:** I better buy some shirts.

**John:** You better buy some shirts. I think, Craig, we will find you a special friend of the show magic cohost discount. I think you’ll get maybe like $0.50 off. So–

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Whoa.

**Craig:** I was not expecting that kind of generosity today.

**John:** Well, I’m feeling very generous today.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** But everybody else, you need to like click the links that are on the show notes and buy your shirts because if you don’t buy your shirts you’re going to feel really sad when you’re wandering around the Austin Film Festival without a Scriptnotes t-shirt.

**Craig:** I mean, it does seem, honestly, like a lot of people have those shirts on. It’s the must have. It’s the must have wear of Austin.

**John:** It proves that you’re part of the inside crowd. So I want to thank everyone who bought a shirt or two shirts, you guys are awesome. I want to thank people for buying enough shirts that we are now on the wall of fame forever at Cotton Bureau as one of the most popular t-shirts ever made at Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** You guys are the best.

**Craig:** How many — so they made like, what, four or five different kinds of shirts there?

**John:** [laughs] They did, yeah. They’ve made a whole range of different shirts and our two shirts are both on the wall.

**Craig:** You know, again, I’m reminded of this fact that often slips my mind that people listen to this. There are more than just you or me.

**John:** So last week, we crossed 100,000 listeners–

**Craig:** My God.

**John:** In a week, which is nuts.

**Craig:** That is insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so, god, the amount of money you’re making, it just keeps going up, right?

**John:** You know, I feel like I should do a blog host that like lays out exactly what money comes in because there’s this whole idea that this is a money-making venture.

**Craig:** Where do you think that idea comes from? I don’t know where.

**John:** I think it comes from you, Craig.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What? So anyway, the t-shirts are a lovely thing. They will start to pay for some of Matthew’s time.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** That’s really what it will do.

**Craig:** It start to pay for some. I assume that we remain a money losing operation, you know, we — is that right, or–

**John:** I think we are. We approach breakeven. It really depends on how much of [unintelligible] salary you want to throw towards this podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** Well, that really comes down to, you know, how much nonsense you have been doing throughout the day. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah, there’s plenty of nonsense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s plenty of scaring ducks away from the pool.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s the best job ever. Have you given him a firearm?

**John:** I have not, but Stuart gave him like the best techniques in terms of like tennis balls can be effective, you could just–

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Go out there and wave your arms. Basically, you don’t want the ducks to root in your pool because they will stay in your pool and that is not good for the pool or for the ducks.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t even–

**John:** The podcast becomes extra relatable when we talk about our swimming pools.

**Craig:** Listen, man, I haven’t mentioned a thing about that. I live in a very modest home.

**John:** You really do live in a very modest compound.

**Craig:** [laughs] Rich-guy laugh right there.

**John:** On last week’s episode we were talking about one of our listeners who we believe to be Martin Sheen, and we wanted him to do a voice over for us on a future Three Page Challenge. Literally moments after we recorded the episode, I found out that it wasn’t Martin Sheen, it was Michael Sheen, another incredibly talented actor but not Martin Sheen. This is Michael Sheen who is the star of Frost/Nixon, Masters of Sex, the Twilight series. He’s great on 30 Rock. He’s Welsh. We love him. He’s apparently a listener. So we actually have audio for this.

So Michael Sheen was on a podcast called My Dad Wrote a Porno and this is how he came to find about that show.

Michael Sheen: I think it was one of your guests, one of your previous guests. I think it was Rachel Bloom.

Male Voice: Right.

Michael Sheen: Who I heard on another podcast called Sciptnotes, which is about screenwriting.

Male Voice: Yes.

Michael Sheen: And they do a thing at the end which is One Cool Thing and her One Cool Thing when she was a guest on it was this. That sounds interesting.

Male Voice: That sounds ridiculous.

Michael Sheen: I’m going to have a listen to that.

**Craig:** He was in the Underworld. He was in — he was the head of lycans, he was the head werewolf.

**John:** I have not seen Underworld, but come on.

**Craig:** Oh, you haven’t. Those movies are good.

**John:** So the one movie Craig has seen that I have not seen.

**Craig:** Well, there’s a bunch of them.

**John:** Well, not the one movie.

**Craig:** There’s–

**John:** There’s a bunch of movies but like the–

**Craig:** There’s the–

**John:** Craig, your shtick is that you’ve not seen any movies.

**Craig:** Well, here’s the deal. If you put good-looking people in leather and have vampires fighting werewolves, Bill Nighy as an ancient vampire. Ooh.

**John:** Oh, that’s pretty great.

**Craig:** Yeah. Plus they have guns. Here’s the genius of Underworld. They were like we like vampires and we live werewolves and we like the idea of them fighting but we also like the Matrix. Let’s do all of that.

**John:** Let’s do all of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, just do–

**John:** Let’s do all the scenes.

**Craig:** Do all of it at once.

**John:** Kate Beckinsale. Done.

**Craig:** Yes. Kate Beckinsale–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Moving around in like super tight leather, it’s great. The whole thing top to bottom, incredibly entertaining movie series, super geeky. If you — I mean, you’re a D&D guy, you would actually probably enjoy the – oh, and then there’s some Interview of the Vampire kind of stuff thrown in there.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** It’s like 12 different movies that they just blended together in a smoothie. And Michael Sheen — so first of all — sorry, Michael Sheen. That’s really embarrassing although it can’t be the first time, right? I mean, he’s had this before.

**John:** I mean, better than Charlie Sheen. If we had confused him with Charlie Sheen.

**Craig:** That would have been a little weird. And also it’s not fair because Michael Sheen’s real last name, I’m assuming, is Sheen and Martin Sheen’s real last name is Estévez. So Martin Sheen, that’s not even he’s real name, right. So we should have known.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We should have known it was Michael Sheen. Michael Sheen is fantastic. He’s one of those actors that’s never bad. You know that kind of actor that’s never bad. Because even like — look, Robert De Niro is an amazing actor. He’s been terrible at times.

**John:** Yeah, he has been.

**Craig:** Miscast, wrong role, didn’t seem to care, whatever it was, just he was bad, you know. Michael Sheen, never bad.

**John:** Do you think Michael Sheen is blushing right now as he hears you extoling his many virtues?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t – is he a blusher. I guess, you know, Welsh people probably — they’re — you know, they’re fair skinned.

**John:** Yeah. So a little blushing could happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that’s fine. I mean, I think it only shows how great of an actor he is that he lets that emotion come through.

**Craig:** Especially when he’s the werewolf guy.

**John:** Yeah, for sure. Oh, so he’s a werewolf not a vampire. That’s crucial distinction.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I don’t even know how you could have thought he’d be the vampire. He’s clearly–

**John:** No, but I think he’s a vampire though in the Twilight series.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, he is. Maybe that’s why you thought that, yeah.

**John:** Maybe–

**Craig:** Okay. Now I can understand why you would think he’d be a vampire because he played a vampire in an incredibly popular film series. He was–

**John:** That’s how talented of an actor he is. He could be both a vampire and a werewolf.

**Craig:** He’s so much better as a werewolf, I’m telling you. So much better.

**John:** Well, regardless of, we’re lucky to have him as a listener and we’re lucky to have our 99,000 listeners as well. So thank you everyone who listened and bought a t-shirt.

And now on with today’s show.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So back at Episode 260, we implored listeners to stop using the phrase begs the question. You remember that, Craig?

**Craig:** I do, I do. We begged them.

**John:** So we begged them to stop using begs the question because beg the question and begging the question really means to use circular logic, it doesn’t mean to raise the question or to invite the question. And my theory, which I had no evidence to support actually, was that the misuse of begs the question probably came from film and TV writers who were trying to use legal terms in courtroom dramas and didn’t really know what it meant and then they started using the same terms in places that really had nothing to do with legal situations.

So I — my theory, which I really can’t prove and I’m not going to do like the sophisticated data analysis to figure out like when it happened, but my theory is that we are kind of partly to blame for how begs the question has become misused and how it doesn’t mean what it kind of originally was supposed to mean.

**Craig:** Well, there’s no doubt that we, we meaning Hollywood, right, what is that? Is that a synecdoche when I make we into Hollywood, but I don’t know what it is? But we–

**John:** Charlie Kaufman would know what that meant.

**Craig:** He would know. Hollywood essentially powers the great bulk of American culture, let’s call it nonmusical American culture, and then by extension an enormous amount of global culture. And the way that we present language absolutely matters and it does impact things. Look at, for instance, one of your favorite movies and I love it, too, Clueless.

**John:** Oh, yes.

**Craig:** So Clueless, like Valley Girl before it, it popularized certain little local expressions that suddenly then become everywhere. “As if” became–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A thing. What I just said, “Start a thing,” that’s what Mean Girls made a thing a thing. Stop trying to make the blank a thing, right? So–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It is actually kind of remarkable how much influence movies do have on popular language even if movies aren’t inventing that language, in fact, they rarely invent any language but they do gather up bits and pieces of things especially when they’re making movies about young people, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and on and on and on, and then they megaphone it and amplify it. And sometimes in their megaphoning and amplifying they get it wrong.

**John:** Yeah, sometimes they do and sometimes they lock in some weird mistakes and changes that really are not part of the normal way that the language is used. So writers have always been doing this. So going back to Shakespeare, Shakespeare was using the language he heard around him but he was also inventing new language and a lot of things he was inventing and putting on stage for the very first time became parts of our language. Similarly, the language as spoken, the language as written for a long period of English history have been very different things but eventually as the written language started to more resemble the spoken language, the spoken language kind of drifted towards what the written language was doing and vice versa.

And so I think when we look at sort of the changes that movies and television make on our language, you have to be in mind like, yes, people may have been speaking that way but because it’s now on a fixed form and that dialogue is frozen in that movie, we start to think like, “Oh, that’s how people speak,” which in the case of Valley Girl or Clueless, that wasn’t necessarily how a large population was speaking, but now everyone was hearing it and everybody was imitating it, consciously or subconsciously.

**Craig:** Yeah, and this is, of course, the problem that we have when we watch old movies, I mean, movies from the ‘30s or ‘40s or ‘50s and we think, “Oh, that’s how people all spoke back then.” No, no more than the world looked black and white back then. It was a crafted presentation. Movies have always been special amplified presentations of reality. So it’s a mistake to look back at old movies and think, “That’s how people must have spoken.” Not at all.

**John:** So here’s a great example, so let’s listen to a clip from The Philadelphia Story. This is in 1940 and just listen to the language that they’re using.

Cary Grant: I suppose you’ll still be attractive to any man of spirit though. There’s something engaging about it, this goddess business, something more challenging to the male than the more obvious charms.

Katharine Hepburn: Really?

Cary Grant: Really. We’re very vain, you know. This citadel can and shall be taken and I’m the boy to do it.

Katharine Hepburn: You seem quite contemptuous of me all of a sudden.

Cary Grant: Not really. Not of you. Never of you.

**John:** So this Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn talking in The Philadelphia Story and where are they from, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, they’re from a magical land that’s right between the United States and England. It’s called Middle Atlantic Land.

**John:** Exactly. It’s a really peculiar accent that has features of British English and some Briticisms but it also has other weird special characteristics. And so, we’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Dan Nosowitz for Atlas Obscura which is talking about how people in movies before 1950 spoke so strangely. His article is called How a Fake British Accent Took Hollywood by Storm. And that’s kind of what we’re hearing. It’s like they’re not trying to be British but they’re trying to not sound American and they’re trying to sound kind of fancy. There’s just like there’s no other kind of good word for it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s sort of rich, it’s fancy. It’s a highly cultured way of speaking, but it’s really off.

**Craig:** It is really off. I mean, you have words like, for instance, I think he says challenging in there and it’s challenging, challenging. And I don’t even think the British would say challenging and the Americans certainly wouldn’t say challenging. And then really, really, really. It is a reflection, I think, of Hollywood’s desire to aim high and present a classy product. The people involved were beautiful, classy people that we would aspire to. They weren’t non-Americans because we’re Americans and we need to be American, see, but better. And this was at a time when I think there was a sense that class mobility was more of a thing, that you would aspire to speak that way and wouldn’t you be putting on the Ritz if you did.

**John:** Yeah. So imagine, this is the movies after all, this is the pinnacle of sort of like everyone watching the same bit of culture together. Everyone is watching people speak this accent and, yes, this accent may have existed in pockets before and people may have been trying to speak in a fancy way. But like this was kind of an invention. This was an invention and in 1942, like two years after this movie, there’s actually a very famous book by Edith Skinner who has a book called Speak with Distinction where she defines “good speech” and it has basically these characteristics that we hear these actors speaking, which is non-rhoticity, which basically means dropping your Rs. And so words like here and Charles, you don’t hear the R in there. There’s no scrape to that R. There’re weird things that she wants you to do with the tempo of words and how you’re hitting your accents on things. It’s a very peculiar way of speaking that lasted for quite a long time in movies even though it didn’t like necessarily break out into the larger world. I think people still aspired to that accent.

**Craig:** There was a time before, really before sound came in, where acting was incredibly performative. Nobody was meant to be acting naturalistically. If you look at a movie like, say, Nosferatu. Everyone is what we would call emoting, overacting. It was a kind of act that you might do on stage in a big, big theater house where people all the way in the back needed to see that you were scared. And you had to act things really big because you couldn’t say words, right?

And then when sound came in, Hollywood understood, “Wait a second. There is a more naturalistic way to be. We should start acting the way people actually act.” And so you have this wave coming in and, you know, very famously, James Dean is one of the — and Marlon Brando, this kind of naturalistic acting. And you could see how it wasn’t like a — there was no revolution. It was just a gradual thing that occurred. And just as that happened, when you watched the motion from — in the way people talk, just dialogue and sounds from ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, even ‘60s. And then by the time you get to the late ‘60s, it’s already disappearing. And you have, you know, you’re looking at movies that are heralding the coming ‘70s era, you know, a movie like Easy Rider. There is no interest in putting on airs. If anything it is how can we be the most real and normal that we can be.

**John:** Yeah. And normal is often a code word for authentic. It’s basically, it’s how do you make it feel like these people are actually really in this space and they are the characters that they’re portraying. Which in The Philadelphia Story, that wasn’t — I mean, that wasn’t the urgency. It wasn’t about like getting the perfect voice for like where that person was supposed to come from. Everyone sort of spoke like they were in this magical kind of movie world. And I think a lot of people kind of wanted to be in that magical movie world. I think this woman, Edith Skinner, she was being a prescriptivist. She was talking about good speech was trying to sound like you’re in this kind of movie. So I want to talk about prescriptivism as it relates to sort of language overall and English overall because I think the greater trend, and I think something we all notice as writers is there’s all these rules which are applied to us that we learned from grade school on about how English is supposed to work.

And many of those rules are really arbitrary. They really are just things that have come down over the years from people who want English to be something that it’s not at all. And so, this isn’t quite our gold standard episode where we talk about like the history of gold as an economic tool. But I want to take a little bit of time here to talk about like why English is the way it is and sort of clear up some misconceptions about how English came to be because I don’t think we’ve never done that in our 275 episodes.

**Craig:** Well, I just thought it came to be when Americans invented it.

**John:** Well, we did invent it. We kind of perfected it. I mean, other people had tried but we just — we nailed it.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** We just got it done. Nailed it.

So let’s go through the very short history of English. Because I remember when I was in high school, I watch like this — I think it was Bill Moyers’ PBS series which was like the 10-hour version of the story of English. But here is the sort of a few minute version story of English so you can be a little bit smarter than some of your other friends at a cocktail party.

So a root language that most of the languages that we are familiar with in Europe is called Indo-European, and no one actually speaks Indo-European right now. But they could trace it back and they can figure out that it’s the origin of English, Spanish, Hindi, Portugese, Bengali, Russian, Persian, Punjabi, so a huge chunk of our currently spoken languages trace their way back to this Indo-European language. The branch that we ended up on was Proto-Germanic. And so that’s Dutch, German, Swedish and the original English that was spoken in the Isle of Britain by the Anglos and Saxons was very much like sort of how German works now. It had a lot of those — Craig, did you ever learn German? Did you ever take German?

**Craig:** No. I grew up fearing Germans. I can’t imagine why.

**John:** That’s fair enough. But, you know, German does a lot of things. When you first start learning German, you take a German class, they’re like, wow, you have to — it feels like you have to conjugate everything. It’s because there’s declensions on nouns and nouns come in different cases and they do a lot of special things. English used to do that or at least Old English used to do that, the stuff that was spoken by the Anglos and the Saxons in the Isle of Britain. So if you look at the original poem of Beowulf, it’s Old English but it’s basically unintelligible to us now because it does all that old difficult stuff. It’s written in a language called West Saxon. And so the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, verbs, everything has these special endings and forms. And so if you’ve taken other languages, you know, that in Spanish or in French, you have to modify the ends of words to match up with things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I hate that.

**John:** Yeah. Isn’t so rough like it’s — all this extra work. And basically, we used to do all that in English and then we just sort of stopped. The reason we stopped is probably, mostly because of the Vikings.

**Craig:** Thank you, Vikings.

**John:** Thank you, Vikings. So Vikings spoke a language that was sort of Old Norse, which was very much — it was one of the old Germanic languages but they had different endings on their nouns. And so when they came to Britain, as adults, they were trying to speak this language that was being spoken here and they could sort of do it but they couldn’t do it very well.

**Craig:** They were just too dumb. They were literally too stupid to learn the language. They’re like, “We’re not learning your language. We’re changing it. It’s too hard.”

**John:** So as someone who is currently living in Paris, I have so much sympathy for the Vikings because I spoke some French before I got here. But a lot of the parents at my daughter’s school showed up here like not knowing a word of it. And it’s really tough as an adult to sort of get up to mastering things. So you end up sort of just like getting by and I think that’s probably what the Vikings were doing is they would show up as adults and like, “Argh. Okay, we’re getting by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And what they basically did is they kind of just — they were like ordering at a restaurant where they didn’t quite speak what was there and everyone could understand them but they couldn’t quite make it all work.

**Craig:** I’m not sure that’s what the Vikings were doing but, okay.

**John:** Yeah. There was also raping and pillaging, too. There’s probably a bit of that.

**Craig:** Touch of it.

**John:** Touch of that. They showed up, their nouns had like the same root but they had different endings, so they just sort of stopped using the endings of the nouns. They brought a lot of their words relating to ships and things like that and everyone just sort of got by. Meanwhile, also in the Island of Britain, there were the Celtic peoples who were already there and they had some impact. Probably the biggest impact they had was, you know how in English, we do this really strange thing with the verb, “do.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Really kind of a verb, how we use it. Nobody does that. But the Celts sort of did something like this, which is that we use did and do in order to form questions. Like, “Did you go to the park today?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But we also use it in negatives in ways that’s really strange. So this is a sentence that should make sense in English, “I no go to the park today.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We can’t say that or, “I not go to the park today.” You can’t say that. You have to put the did in there. It’s a useless did but you have to put the did in there, “I did not go to the park today.” And that’s a really weird thing in English and the linguist, John McWhorter, thinks that probably came from the Celtic people who are already there in the England.

**Craig:** Yeah. They might have been drunk when they were coming up with that.

**John:** Yeah. But you know what? It’s part of our language now. It stuck around. So that’s how we do it.

**Craig:** Hey, it’s — you know what? I love it personally because I speak it. I’m really — I’m so good at English. I have all the best words.

**John:** I have all the best words. Well, our best words came from the French. So the Norman invasion of the Island of Britain happened in the 11th century and they brought in all of their words. In a lot of cases, we had the same words already kind of from the same roots but then we ended up using the French words as well. And so we sort of — we didn’t quite double our vocabulary but we got a lot of like duplicate words. And so that’s why in English, we have both the word royal and the word regal which are from the same root but we sort of got both of them, and, hey, bonus words.

So the French was the last sort of big impact of like new words. Then in the 15th century, we start with modern English. We start with printing presses. We start with the King James Bible. There’s the great vowel shift which I barely understand but essentially all of our vowels shifted sort of one notch on the sort of the loop of vowels. And it’s part of the reason why all of our spelling is so strange because we used to pronounce things very differently and we used to pronounce things the way that they were kind of written down and everything just shifted because our vowels shifted and the letters that we pronounce shifted as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. You end up with these bizarre cases like — was it Ogden Nash who famously said you could spell the word fish, G-H-O-T-I.

**John:** Yeah. That’s so great. So let’s see if I can remember, it’s the GH from enough, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The O from —

**Craig:** That’s the tricky one.

**John:** I don’t remember what O sounds like in–

**Craig:** Women.

**John:** Oh, you’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then the TI is the TI in like question and a lot of those words.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, that obviously is bananas. And somebody — I was talking to somebody who — I can’t remember who it was or where he was from but English was not his first language. And I said, you know, is it hard to learn English? Because everyone across the world, you see people learning English. It is becoming the most global language. And he said, in his experience, it was actually quite easy because there were so many quirky things. So you understood like, “Oh, that word just sounds like this.” It’s not like I have to —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, continually apply certain things. Like it’s easy for me to learn the word women because it’s just distinct. It’s women. That’s it. Boom. Done.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And no feminine or masculine or things like that.

**John:** Well, yeah. There’s a lot of simplifications that happened. So we lost our genders on all our nouns, great, helpful.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We also basically stopped conjugating at all. So we conjugate the first person plural. And so I speak, you speak, he/she/it speaks.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we speak. You all speak. They speak. So it’s only that third person is singular that we–

**Craig:** How great is that?

**John:** Yeah. It’s so simple.

**Craig:** That literally — that would turn, like I took French in high school. That would have been — that’s like three-quarters of it is gone because you’re not conjugating.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, oh my god, it’s not enough that you have conjugate everything. And then there are irregular conjugations. And then there are the imperative conjugations. If I want to command somebody to speak, I say, “Speak.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. It’s as simple as that. No wonder people are learning this language. It’s not hard.

**John:** So one of my husband’s friends is an English teacher here in France. And so, it’s so fascinating to hear his explanation of like how things work in English because I don’t think he’s actually right a lot of times because he will say like, “Oh, you don’t have this form but you just do this.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s actually accurate but I think it actually makes sense most of the time. So, fine, it’s fine for you to say that.” Like we basically don’t —

**Craig:** [laughs] He is a bad teacher.

**John:** We really don’t have the subjunctive in English.

**Craig:** Yes, we do. We have the subjunctive.

**John:** We have subjunctive but we use it so rarely. So it’s not a crucial thing for you to understand.

**Craig:** I use it frequently.

**John:** So give me an example of when you love to use the subjunctive in English.

**Craig:** Well, the most common use is following an if. If I were to go to here, if I were to do this, if I were to do that. I wish — if and I wish are probably the two most common. I wish that I were a little bit taller. I wish I were a baller. I wish I — that would be a bad version of that song. I agree. But accurate subjunctive. I’m a fan.

**John:** I’m a fan of like the hortatory subjunctive. Like, may we all be so lucky.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that.

**John:** So that’s, we be.

**Craig:** Yes. May we all be, yes, there but for the grace of God go —

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** No, that one doesn’t quite work.

**John:** Yeah. But we don’t have to think about it nearly as much as other languages do, which is kind of great. Other sort of weird advantages to English that have come up is like we’re very phonetically rich so it’s very easy for us to bring in words from other languages and sort of make them fit and work. Other languages tend to have fewer phonemes and so it’s harder for them to sort of get a word — to be able to pronounce a word that’s not a native word for them, but they make it work. Every place can sort of incorporate words. But English seems to be especially greedy at taking in new words.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t think of too many — in French, I think we can cover everything. I mean, there’s the — there’s, you know, the kind of nasal thing or the back of the throat R.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But we’re capable. Those are really just, you know, little sprinkles on top of sounds we already have. In Italian, there is a sound that we do not have.

**John:** All right. What is it?

**Craig:** It’s this particular kind of plural case or sometimes you’ll see in some words they’ll also have a GLI. So GLI, which sounds like glee. In Italian, it’s actually LYE. It’s hard. I can’t quite…LYE. It’s LY-combined together-E. LYE.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a weird sound.

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s — we’re not perfect. We don’t sort of have everything. But we have just like a huge range of things. And so even as I listen to some adults here mispronouncing something in French, I want to tell them like, “No. No. We really do have that sound, you’re just try apply the wrong vowel for that.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like, you know, just like your ghoti-fish example, like we really do have that sound to make that. You’re just thinking of the wrong letter for it. And if you could think of the right letter for it, you’d make it to be able to work.

But English has some significant downsides. And I think it’s worth pointing what’s not so great about English. Because we got rid of all of our endings on words, word order ends up mattering a lot more in English than in many other languages. So you have to put things in a certain order for them to make sense. In some languages like Latin, for example, you can put stuff in kind of whatever order it pleases you because it’s very clear what that noun is doing in the sentence. Here, we have to use helper words and a lot of word order for sentences to make sense.

**Craig:** I like it that way.

**John:** You like it that way?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because we’re used to it. It’s natural to us and it’s a hard thing for some people to learn from other languages.

**Craig:** Tough.

**John:** We have strange ambiguities and we’re sort of missing some things that other languages have. So, an example which I already used when I was trying to lay out the conjugations is we use the same word for you, singular, and you, plural. And it doesn’t trip us up that often, but there are weird cases where you’re talking about more than one person and if we had a different form of you for that would be helpful. We used to have thou, which was that second person singular and it just — it disappeared. You took its place. But it was useful.

**Craig:** Well, you can see how colloquially people fill it in themselves. So where I grew up in New York, there was “you’s.” And obviously, in the South, in huge swaths of the South and even to the mid-South, it’s “ya’ll” which is incredibly common, and then, there’s “you all” which I hear all the time. I hear that out here in California. So, people will add little zippitys on there to kind of get themselves into a second person plural as opposed to second person singular.

But there’s also cases in, for instance, in French, you know, they have the formal and informal which we do not have. So, “vous” could be second person singular if you’re talking to somebody fancy.

**John:** Yeah. And the explanation behind the “vous” being formal in that situation is it’s also like of a royal we. It’s the same kind of idea where like you’re giving somebody extra respect as if they’re kind of two people by using the “vous” form with them.

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** We also lost our version of a sort of — or we sort of use you for. We don’t have the thing to say like a generic person like sort of not anyone specifically, but a general person.

**Craig:** We have one. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. We have one. Yeah.

**Craig:** Which doesn’t quite work, but then, there’s — but we often do use “you” to mean you, a person who’s not here who but like one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You can’t get there from here. Like, who’s that “you?” It’s not literally you.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Because of how our language evolved, we ended up with a ton of words that are misspells and hard to figure out how to pronounce. And so, one of the great advantages of English, I think, is that we have a huge dictionary and a huge range of words you can choose from. But if you’re trying to learn the language, man, that’s a lot of words.

And so, we have “tree” and we have “arbor” and there’s no apparent connection between the two of them, but they are connected and there’s just a lot more to sort of master if you’re going to try to master English as a language.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love vocabulary. I do.

**John:** You’re a crossword player. So, like, for you, it’s great.

**Craig:** We prefer puzzler or solver, sir.

**John:** I’m so sorry.

**Craig:** Solver, yeah.

**John:** You’re a solver.

**Craig:** I don’t play crosswords.

**John:** I’m a giver-upper on crosswords.

**Craig:** I’m going to get you started. I am. I feel like you would be great.

**John:** I literally tried the New York Times this afternoon. I tried the Thursday Puzzle. Is the Thursday Puzzle hard? Because it was hard for me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this Thursday had rebus. So, that can be tricky. I don’t know if you – a rebus is when one square holds more than one letter.

**John:** Yeah. And today’s, one was AG, and it just completely stumped me.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Thursday — start with Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Just work on those.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Get your sea legs, feel good about yourself, and then just know that Thursday will always have a gimmick.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** So, be looking for — always, Thursday, there’s always a gimmick.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Friday and Saturday are tough ones. They are just difficult, usually gimmick-less, but difficult. And then, Sunday is like a Thursday. It’s like a big Thursday.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, now, I know.

**Craig:** But, yeah, go Monday and Wednesday. You should be able to do Monday easy-breezy.

**John:** Cool. I will try a Monday puzzle when Monday comes.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Because I will be looking to do anything other than focus on Tuesday.

**Craig:** I know, seriously. You may not be able to come home.

**John:** Ugh. We won’t talk about that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right. So, let’s get back to our discussion of English. And so, just like we had the woman who was talking about the accent that everyone should speak with, we have a lot of people who are talking about like how everyone should write and the words that people should use. And these prescriptivists for the English language, a lot of them are coming from Latin because they were church people. And, church people, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Craig, but church people like rules and they want an orderly universe. So, it comes from–

**Craig:** Like commandants even.

**John:** Yeah, even that. Like, divinely inspired texts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they’re reading the bible or they come from a background where the bible is in Latin and Latin is a very orderly language. It has a lot of special rules. And so, they’re looking at how cool Latin is. When you look at English, it’s like, well, English should be more like Latin or at least we should try to make English a little bit more like Latin.

And so, a lot of the rules that we’ve been taught over the years come from these prescriptivists who are looking at English saying like, “But in Latin, you do it like this. So, therefore, the rule should be that you do it like this.” That comes up a lot in cases with our pronouns because even though we got rid of most of our cases for nouns, we still have them for “he” and “him” or “she” and “her” for “I” and “me.”

A lot of the rules you see people trying to apply to English come from Latin where they’re trying to say like, “Oh, well, this is how you do it in Latin. So, you should do it this way in English.” And when we mess things up in English or when we are chastised for things in English, it’s often because people are looking at how we should be doing things because they were done a certain way in Latin.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a — I mean, I will freely admit that I’m a grammarian. And the joy of grammar for me is not one of any kind of metaphysical superiority. There is no significance in and of itself to grammar. The joy is in — it’s in the fastidiousness itself. It is a joy of joyfulness. I am begging the question here. I like the specificity. I do think that there are a lot of cases where being grammatically correct actually does better express intention and meaning, but not always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Most of the time, I just like grammar because I like being in control of the algorithms of speech and of writing.

**John:** Absolutely. And so, the kind of grammar you’re describing is how people use language and how to use language effectively to communicate the meaning that you’re trying to communicate which is great and like there’s reasons why, I think, it’s important to understand these rules, as they’re set down as rules, to make sure that what you’re trying to communicate actually is getting through on the other end and to be able to anticipate.

If you break any of these rules or tenets, the person on the other end may perceive you in a way that you don’t want to be perceived or perceive your ability to use the language negatively because of a choice you’ve made not to follow a certain set of rules. And so an example would be, “Craig and I host a podcast.” Great. “Me and Craig host a podcast.” Well, that actually is not wrong, per se. There’s lots of good defense for using “me” as a subject in that case. But most people would say no. And if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to be aware that people are going to assume that you’ve made a mistake there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a signifier. I mean, what we often look at with grammar is the signifier of education.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the thing about “Me and Craig host the podcast”, I mean, my sister texted me the other day. She’s a brilliant attorney and she wrote, “Me and this other guy did a blank, blank, blank.” And I understand, when you’re casual and when you’re texting, when you’re chit-chatting, it’s totally fine. But, if you were to write something and publish something, it is essentially saying, “Me hosts a podcast” and now, you sound like Tarzan or Cookie Monster and it’s ridiculous.

So, it really does come down to signification for most, but for me, also, there is a certain beauty to the sound of “Craig and I host a podcast” because it flows and it flows into my understanding of how I host a podcast should sound. There’s an assonance to it as opposed to dissonance. I feel dissonant. Similarly, I’m the person that gets irked when people make the mistake when it’s the — when it’s an object and they’ll say, “She went to the store with John and me,” right? That’s correct.

“She went to the store with John and I.” I hear that all the time. Now, the signification is you’re trying to sound smart, but you actually screwed it up and now you sound dumb. So, it’s about — it’s a weird thing. It’s like music to me and just the notes sound wrong if you’re using “me” when you should be saying “I.”

**John:** Absolutely. So, I would point listeners to a great podcast hosted by John McWhorter who’s a good linguist who talks about specifically the “Billy and me” sort of problem. And it’s a weird thing. He actually makes a very compelling case that “I” is actually the special case and there’s a weird thing with “I” that you basically — “I” has to go right before the verb. And if there’s really anything between “I,” it breaks.

And so, basically in English, it’s evolved to be the case where the “I” has to be right next to the verb, otherwise, you have to use “me” or something else there. Because, think about a sentence, like, “Craig and I, not knowing what we wanted to do decided to blah, blah, blah…” The most space you put between “I” and the verb, the more the whole sentence breaks down. Another example he sort of gives is that “Who’s there?” You don’t say, “I.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I is never the answer to the question. “I” is basically only the pronoun that goes right before the verb when you’re talking about yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s a strange case.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the — and by the way, speaking of crosswords, a common crossword answer is “Is it I?” So, there’s a famous bible quote, “Is it I, my lord?” and that is correct. So, “Who’s there?” “It is I.” That is grammatically correct. Almost no one says that because he’s absolutely right. I is demanding the verb following the — you can do in a positive. That’s when you have a little phrase set apart by commas that work like parenthesis. So, you can say “I, angrily, went to the store” or–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “I, in need of a book, went to the bookstore”. The longer that a positive comes, the more broken down the sentence is, and frankly, almost no one will put in a positive in there because it is ugly-sounding. Again, it’s musical.

**John:** It is absolutely musical. So, that’s where I want to get to the whole point of this discussion of English is that the writing that we are doing for screenwriting is very musical writing. And, so, the same reasons why you would not want to have a character say, “It is I,” are the reasons why you need to think about the grammar choices you’re making when you’re writing screenplays.

So, let’s talk about it. So, first, let’s talk about screenplays as a whole form. They are written in the present tense. I’ve read screenplays that are written in the past tense, more like a book. It feels weird that the standard has become that we write screenplays in the present tense and that every moment is happening sort of right in front of you. They’re a reflection of the experience of watching the movie. The same way the movie is flowing right in front of your eyes, the screenplay is flowing right in front of your eyes in the present tense. Craig, have you read any scripts that are not present tense?

**Craig:** No. I’ve never seen that and I can’t imagine how that would feel because it seemingly clashes with the dialogue. Now, there are books where, you know, most novels are written past tense, third-person past tense. And then, when people are speaking, but then, that’s why when people speak in books where the prose is third-person past tense, the novelist is constantly adding to the dialogue “He said,” “She said,” “He asked,” right? To put the dialogue in the context of the past. Sometimes, there’ll be cases where an author will make dialogue very present feeling and they will often — like, Stephen King is famous for this. He will set some dialogue apart in italics as a kind of stream of consciousness or thought which does feel very present. And, so, it’s set apart from the book by its italicization.

But, with what we’re doing, everyone is speaking in the present and there is no “He said/she said,” because there’s no narrator. So, I can’t imagine how that would feel to say, “John walked outside. He took a look around. John, ‘This is wonderful right now, but so wrong.’”

**John:** Yeah. So, the thing I want to point out though is like we say it’s the present tense, but it’s also not only the present tense. So, in previous podcasts, we’ve talked about the present-progressive which is that like “He is sitting,” “He is doing something.” It’s that interruptible form of the present that English has that a lot of the other languages don’t have, by the way, which is useful and delightful.

And we’ve been strongly encouraging people to use it when appropriate because it’s not passive writing. It’s actually writing that reflects ongoing states in ways that movies are about ongoing states. And so, it’s a very useful form of the present tense to be using.

**Craig:** Completely, completely. We should be able to use all tools in the present tense toolbox.

**John:** Every once in a while in scripts, you will also see the future tense used and they’ll often be in callouts to the reader saying like, “We will come back to this later on,” like they tend to be parentheticals, you know, not parentheticals over dialogue, but parentheticals to the reader in scene description that’s reflecting the sense that like you are in the present tense right now where I am, but trust me. There is a future coming and this will become important.

So, you will occasionally see breaks out to the future, even breaks out to the past where we say like, “We met this character on page such and such,” but those are not the normal flow of screenwriting. They’re very special cases.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Those tend to indicate some kind of meta awareness where we are now breaking the reality of the movie. You could say in the description something like, “Vanessa is unhappy with her job. One day, she will be a billionaire, but not now, and not for a while.”

So, you know what I mean? And that’s a direct communication to the reader that is floating above the reality of the movie. It’s understood that people in an audience will not have that experience. It’s there so that that reader can get closer to the movie experience because, of course, we are trying to make something audio-visual with text only.

**John:** Absolutely. I think that also ties into why we say that screenplays are written in the third-person, but really they’re often written in a sort of a second-person plural. That’s why you’ll see “we’s” in screenplays and I some people hate “we’s” in screenplays. Craig and I are fans of “we’s” in screenplays because it is a collective experience. We’re going through this process together. So, it feels very strange to see an “I” or a “me.”

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be weird.

**John:** But I think I’ve seen it in a Shane Black script, but in general, you will sometimes see a second-person plural “we” to describe this experience of what’s happening and what we’re doing together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, we hear, we see.

**Craig:** Again, if you were to say “I” or “me,” you are making a winking comment to the reader. You are not doing something that could possibly be shown on screen because you, the writer, are not there. You don’t exist for the audience nor should you unless there is, again, some kind of special case — so, yeah, no question.

**John:** Right. So, that’s all the stuff that’s not the dialogue, but, really, I think the crucial thing I want to get to here and the part that actually has an influence on culture is the dialogue because that is the writing that the audience is taking with them.

And so, let’s talk about sort of the things you’re doing in the writing of dialogue that are going to impact how people are using their language 30 years from now. So, well, a lot of the mistakes you see listed on websites are spelling mistakes. Guess what? People can’t hear your spelling mistakes. That’s the lovely thing about being a screenwriter. It doesn’t mean spelling is not important. It’s incredibly important. But like a spelling-mistake in dialogue is just a spelling-mistake in dialogue. It’s not a thing that the viewer is going to encounter.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. But it can snag the reader.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Typically does snag the reader. So as the writer — I think it’s — you want to spell things correctly not for the audience but for the readers so that they understand that you are — well here is the illusion that you’re creating for the reader. As opposed to all the — I mean, the mega illusion of a movie for an audience, the mini illusion for a reader is that you the writer are in complete control of the story. Every word, every moment has been carefully designed with intention and purpose and that they’re in good hands. And when something is misspelled, particularly when something is misspelled in a way to indicate that the writer just didn’t know the real word, they stop and think, “Oh, this person is not that smart or didn’t take the time to proofread, or literally doesn’t know what a word means.” And that can get shaky for you. It hurts the read.

**John:** It does hurt the read. So, I sort of deliberately set you up for the like spelling doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. And if you’ve listened to our Three Page Challenges, we will single out on spelling mistakes because that is the first experience the reader is going to have with you and your script.

But let’s take a look at what else is communicated in dialogue. Well, can the listener understand what the character is saying? You’re trying to balance accuracy to, like, how the character would speak, and clarity so the listener would actually understand what’s happening there. And so, you know, if you’re doing an historical drama there’s going to be a balancing act between how that character really would have spoken in that time and what a viewer in 2016 will actually be able to understand that character saying.

**Craig:** Correct. We had a Three Page Challenge where somebody was faithfully reproducing Jim’s dialogue from Huckleberry Finn and the problem was it was unintelligible essentially. And what may have been intelligible to readers in the 1800s no longer so the case here for a reader of the screenplay. I mean, you know, English class you have a teacher working you through it but we don’t want to make a screenplay work. We want it to be something that is absorbed freely, without effort by the reader. So that’s where our effort comes in.

This also becomes tricky when people are writing dialectically for characters in whose skin they do not live. Very frequently — well not as frequently as it used to be and happily so. But I would read scripts where writers who clearly were not black were writing black characters with black dialogue. And it was just hard. It was hard to get through. It felt fake and weird and way too confining and it’s not great. I remember early, early on in my career, I wrote a movie for Shawn — I’m sorry for Marlon Wayans and there’s so many Wayanses I was bound to maybe slip up and say the wrong one.
Shawn was in the movie but smaller part. And I remember before I started writing Marlon said to me, “Oh and by the way, don’t write it black. Don’t do that. Just write it. I’ll make it black, don’t worry.” And I said “You got it buddy”. It was a weight off my shoulders because I’m not black.

What happens is there is this weird circular feedback where white writers will watch movies written by white writers pretending to be black people and they’ll think, “Oh, that’s how black people talk then.” But really what they’re doing is an imitation of white people imitating black people. And at that point it’s just a mess and it becomes a self-serving and self-fulfilling prophecy, and it’s no good. So you have to make these careful judgments about how you’re going to present dialogue when you are trying to alter your grammar or pronunciation to match the style of another person that you are not.

**John:** Yeah, but at the same time, Craig, I want to make sure we’re not giving — we’re not letting writers off the hook for even — I don’t want to say attempting to reflect the voice of a character because there’s a way that a person could misapply what you’re saying there. And say, like, well I should only write — I should only put white people in my movie. Or I shouldn’t try to make the African-American characters in my movie sound like human beings who are living in 2016.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In the situations where I have encountered this, my focus has always been on writing the dialogue that reflects what the character is saying and then understanding that there will be a discussion about the actual words that the actors are going to be saying no matter what their background. That stuff may change based on what’s going to be comfortable coming out of their mouth. And it’s the same kind of discussion no matter what background of actor you’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to — part of what we do is, because no matter who you are as a writer, you will be writing people that you’re not constantly, almost all of them. And when I say people you’re not, I mean, obviously, you’re not any of the characters that you’re writing but if you are let’s say a Latina woman, you are sooner or later going to be writing characters that are not Latina women.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So part of our jobs is to understand the music and cadence and rhythms and patterns of all different kinds of human speech. But where I think it – you kind of have to draw an interesting line. For instance there’s a colloquialism among African-Americans where they’ll say I’m — where you or I might say, “I’m getting ready to do something” there’s a colloquialism where they’ll say, “I’m fixing to.” Right?

Now, in very colloquialized African-American speech, that will get contracted down to “I’m finna” and you can — and I see like on Twitter, like, on the very famous Black Twitter you’ll see “I’m finna” sometimes people say “I’m F-I-N-N-A” or F-I-T-N-A or — and, you know, so, for me if I’m writing character and I hear that pattern, I might want to say, you know, “I’m fixing to dah, dah, dah” I don’t know if I would write “I’m finna to” because it’s starting to get a little — I don’t know. It’s weird. You have to draw this interesting line you know?

**John:** Yeah. You don’t want to go into pantomime. You don’t want to go into this place–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where you’re sort of aping a culture that you don’t really understand. You’re using words that you would have no business ever using. So that’s absolutely true. But I think what your example is with finna is a great example of this other thing which we noticed which is — we talked about with Clueless, we talked about with Valley Girl where you like you see speech happening and then you’re reflecting that speech. And if you had a movie that was using that throughout, people would start using that more often, and at a certain point it would become commonly accepted. That same thing happened with like, and the way that modern people use like to mean a bunch of things that have nothing to do with like. Where she was like this, or it takes the place of “said” or it takes the place of any kind of filler word, “like” is there. And same with literally which means not at all what literally is supposed to mean.

**Craig:** It means the opposite now.

**John:** But people say literally. So, the thing that I find myself being careful of but using more often than not is “wanna, oughta, and gotta,” which is basically the shortened versions of “want to, ought to, and got to,” because spelling out got to, in most characters’ dialogue feels really bizarre and it actually is not the right sense and tone for what a character would say.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there are characters who are educated and fastidious and prickly. And they might say, “I have to,” or “I am going to.” But “gonna” I’m constantly using “gonna” and “gimme” you know. Yeah, and those are perfectly common. And nobody reading a script is going to stop and say, “What, it’s ‘going to’ you cretin”. Like, everything that we discuss on this show, because we are so anti-rule, it’s about having the skill to go far enough and not too far. It is — dialogue and how to manipulate speech, how to break speech and grammar on purpose to match the way people naturally speak as opposed to the way people unnaturally write is the hardest and perhaps impossible thing to teach. You either got it or you don’t.

**John:** So let’s bring this all the way back around to how this all started off which was begging the question, which was my plea for writers to stop using “begging the question” incorrectly. And really ask the question like when is it okay to use the phrase incorrectly, because you know what, that’s what the character would actually say? And so examples are “who” versus “that.” “Which” versus “that.” “Less” versus “fewer, farther, further.” “Between” and “among.” All the examples I just gave, I’m actually kind of fine with a character using the incorrect version of that. Like you’re supposed to use between two things and among several things, whatever, nobody necessarily does that. So I’m fine with the character doing any of those things. It’s when you’re trying to pull a strange esoteric phrase in and use it incorrectly that my hackles go up.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, we’ve said a lot on the show that one of the best ways to think about characters, and create or achieve verisimilitude, is to think of them as liars, because people are liars. People are constantly lying, and people are constantly bending and breaking language. So what it comes down to is what’s going to draw more attention, more unwanted attention, using between incorrectly, or using among correctly.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s really what it comes down to, where do you want attention to fall? I think of grammar all the time, in a way with my characters, to divide them by class and education. And just as to bring it back around to the non-rhoticity, strange Middle-Atlantic accent, that was seen as a sign of erudition, education, class, money. So people who have those things, I try and write in that way, even between — look, I have a movie with talking sheep. The smart sheep’s grammar is perfect. It’s perfect. She actually — she corrects somebody who says, “Who?” asks the question who, and she says, “Whom?” Because of what it refers to.

The other sheep just speak, and some of them have terrible grammar, but she’s the smart one. She has excellent grammar. So that’s how I think of these things. When you’re talking about how to write characters in relation to grammar, the tricky part for writers is you can’t manipulate the rules and break the conventions, and differentiate between characters based on how they speak if you don’t know the rules.

**John:** Absolutely. And what you just said there, you as the form that does not exist in English. That’s English for us.

**Craig:** Right. That’s right. If one does not know the rules.

**John:** Our language is crazy, but it’s good, I love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our next topic will be shorter. This is an article that you posted in the outline called, how – actually what was the actual real title of the thing?

**Craig:** It’s called “How Rom-Coms Undermine Women” by Megan Garber. This is an article in The Atlantic. And it runs through something that I think has probably occurred to all of us. You know, there’s a convention in romantic comedies that a boy is in love with a girl, and she is in love with somebody else, usually the wrong person, and he is the good guy that only if she could see how wonderful he is, and how truly he loves her, she would be in love with him. And he tries, and he tries, and it’s not working, and somebody at some point says to him something like, “If you want her, you got to go get her.” And so he does some grand romantic gesture like for instance showing up at her house, and holding up a boom box in front of her window, and playing, you know, a wonderful song, or showing up at the airport where she’s about to leave the country, or showing up at her workplace to sing a song, or showing up at her home to show her the cue cards with his devotional written on it.

But the point is, he’s showing up somewhere he’s not supposed to be and doing some big thing and in real life that makes you like a creepy stalker.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so the question is, are we teaching this really bad thing to people as normal? And the hard part is, I think that, well, I’m kind of curious about what you think, but my personal feeling is that these things do happen in life, rarely, but they’re not stalkery if they work and they super are stalkery if they don’t. So, it’s kind of a weird thing. What do you think?

**John:** I think it is absolutely valid to point out the trope of it. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to the TV tropes guide to stalking is love, which is basically all the situations in which someone is calling out like — someone’s love behavior is actually really kind of stalking and a little bit crazy.

Another recent article was about how to talk to a woman who’s wearing headphones, which was such a great example of like this really clueless male behavior, and just like really offensive, and yet, we would sort of get a pass in movies a lot which is not cool either. So I think sort of like the discussion of language, it’s one of the situations where screenwriters are culpable to some degree for perpetuating these ideas, and yet I agree with you that they are out there because they also do sometimes exist.

The thing which I disagreed is, or at least a short coming of this article to me was that I don’t think she recognized that the female characters in romantic comedies also do these kind of things as well.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You look at Rebecca Bunch in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, you look at Nancy in Tess Morris’s movie, Man Up, they are deceiving the men around them, they’re doing things that are not good or appropriate, and things that would seem like a dangerous person would be doing if they were not in the genre of romantic comedy. So I think it’s troubling.

And maybe it’s just a thing to be aware of the same way we should be aware of the messages we send out with our action movies and with all sorts of other genres of movies, where we portray a world that is not accurate and which if these things happened in the real world would be hugely upsetting.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think actually audiences are very good at understanding that movies aren’t real. I do. If you were to make a list of things to write about, of concern, that audiences were taking seriously, I think far before you got to, you know, Lloyd showing up and holding up a boom box, you would get to people shooting each other in the head. Now we do have a bit of gun violence going on in our world, no question about that, but certainly not to the tune of what you see in movies. Fist fights even. There’s constant fist-fighting movies. I’ve never been in a fist fight in my life. Never. Not once.

**John:** That’s true. People break bottles over heads, which you should never do. It’s a horrible thing. Head injuries are terrible.

**Craig:** You’ll kill someone. You’ll kill someone if you do that. People are breaking chairs over each other’s heads, they’re punching each other in the head all the time. In the head. Car chases. Have you ever been in a car chase, John?

**John:** Not a one, I’m delighted to report.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I’ve never pursued somebody in a vehicle. People are pretty good at understanding the difference between these things. One thing that mitigates all of this stuff is that when we go to see a movie, a romantic comedy, there’s a contract before the movie even begins, between the movie and the audience, and that is that these two people could be wonderful together. That they are not bad people. They’re good people, and fate has torn them apart, a la Romeo and Juliet. The enemy in a weird way is not the woman who’s resisting stupidly this man’s advances, nor is the enemy the man who is perhaps going to somewhat extreme measures to get this woman to see how wonderful and deserving of love he is. The enemy is fate. Fate has gotten in the way.

Now, occasionally, you’ll get a romantic comedy where it’s the anti-romantic comedy, and you know, they don’t end up together and that’s fine, too. But that’s our understanding of these things. That said, the problem with the romantic comedy stalking behavior is similar to the problem that I think people have in real life, anyway, men and women, which is what is the line between being passive and quitter, and being obsessive and stalkery?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a hard thing to navigate. Courting, courtship is difficult.

**John:** Yeah. The lesson we learned on today’s Scriptnotes. I don’t know that I have more to say, other than I think, it’s useful to be aware of it, be aware of it as a trope, and if there’s a way to hang a lantern on it so it’s clear to the audience that you’re in on this, the troubling aspect of this behavior, too, maybe do that. But I agree that like we don’t go to movies necessarily for lessons about how to date and marry. We end up taking them in, just the same way we take in language by accident. And that’s I guess one of the things about our culture. It’s how we get some of our education.

**Craig:** Yes. And another one just came to mind is While You Were Sleeping. Remember that movie?

**John:** Oh yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** She’s just like completely is obsessed with this dude, completely obsessed with him. And then when he is hit by a train and goes into a coma, she like insinuates herself into his family’s life and poses as his girlfriend, as his fiancé.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s definitely, if you did that in real life, you would have to go to the bin.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when Sandra Bullock does it, we’re like, aww.

**John:** Aww. That’s actually one of the reasons why I love the new opening to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend this season, where basically it just explains like she’s just a girl in love, and like you can’t call me crazy because I’m an ingénue. And an ingénue in love is crazy, so therefore, I’m just an ingénue. Just a girl in love.

**Craig:** It’s kind of like, we’re now kind of at the fun part of our culture where we can take these things apart, but keep the little bits inside that are true, get rid of the junk that is like, look, part of this article is like Hitch is really screwed up, and the movie, the premise of Hitch is screwed up. This is a guy who’s basically the pick-up artist who is teaching men how to consciously and insidiously manipulate women into being with them. That’s gross. And you know, they’ve been trying to develop that pick-up artist book for years, as a movie, which I just think is atrocious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They shouldn’t do that.

**John:** They shouldn’t do that. So if nothing else, maybe we’ll stop that movie from getting made, and it will all have been worth it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think so. We don’t have that power.

**John:** We have none of that power. We have the power to talk about cool things. So my One Cool Thing this week–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Is Time Travel: A History, by James Gleick, is a book that is — I’m reading right now that I think is just delightful. So Craig, how long back ago do you think time travel was invented?

**Craig:** You mean the concept of time travel?

**John:** The concept of time travel.

**Craig:** Or actual time travel?

**John:** The concept of time travel.

**Craig:** Because actual time travel was developed 14,000 years from now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The concept of time travel, oh, I would say, I don’t remember anything like that in Shakespeare, like maybe turn of the century like 1800?

**John:** Yeah, 100 years ago, H. G. Wells. So what’s so fascinating–

**Craig:** Oh, 20th Century then.

**John:** 20th Century, so it’s — the time machine, it’s his story, is really where you can start to think about time travel as you and I think about it now, which is that a person develops a way to go forward or backward in time. So there were other stories in which people like with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, they get hit on the head and they show up–

**Craig:** Wait a second. Yeah, what about Dickens and A Christmas Carol? He goes back, the Ghost of Christmas Past. He goes back in time.

**John:** It’s not a conscious choice.

**Craig:** It’s a ghost.

**John:** It was not a conscious choice to go back in those times. So there’s been many situations like a dreaming of previous times, a dreaming of alternate time lines, that – Fantasias have happened, but that sense of like the future is a place that you could travel into is actually a brand new concept. And we didn’t use to have a sort of space to think about like the future as this new area out in front of us.

And so all the paradoxes of like, you know, like what if you can go back and kill Hitler? We’d never thought of that before. There was never like a what if you could go back and kill Caesar? That was not a thing. It’s only because — and Gleick makes a very compelling argument for the only reason why we have our current thought of time travel and Terminator and sort of all the iterations of timelines and stuff like that, is because of the inventions of this last century and the scientific discoveries of Einstein and everything else that sort of put it in the public culture, but also the acceleration of culture so that it’s only when generations started being born where they recognize like, wow, my life is nothing like my parents’ life, and my kids’ lives will be nothing like my life. That’s when we started to have a future, and started to think about the future as something different than the present.

**Craig:** That makes total sense, yeah, because like back in the old days they’d be like, well, why would I want to go into the past? It’s like now, but just a little bit lamer.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The future will be like now, but like a little bit better.

**John:** Maybe, hopefully, who knows?

**Craig:** Yeah. Ish.

**John:** So I’m quite enjoying this book, so I’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Well, keeping on track with Science, my One Cool Thing is a young woman named Maanasa Mendu. Maanasa Mendu is 13 years old. She lives in Ohio. She’s a middle school student. And as part of a competition, she created something that’s kind of amazing. She was looking at the shaking branches on a tree in her yard and thought, as we often do, you or I, boy that reminds me of the action of Piezo-electrical materials. And it turns out that she created with, I think it was like 10 bucks worth of Styrofoam and plastic, created a device that essentially captures naturally occurring vibrations in the environment along with solar and wind, and creates electricity from it, and was able to power a small light bulb with this little $10 thing she made, hanging off of a tree. It’s incredible.

So she won this prize from 3M, the Post-It company, among other things, and I’m just fascinated by there’s this potential that we have in this country that just blows my mind constantly when I think about somebody like Maanasa Mendu. She’s 13 and she might have actually invented something amazing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just think of what’s going to happen, you know, when she’s 25. It’s just amazing. So Maanasa Mendu, you are my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Very, very cool. So that’s our show for this week. Our final reminder that this is your very last chance to buy one of the two Scriptnotes shirts, so click on the links in the show notes, or just go to johnaugust.com, there’ll be a link on the side bar there for where you can get your shirts. So thank you to everyone who bought shirts. We’re excited to make them, and send them to you.

As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Eric Pearson. If you have an outro you’d like to send to us, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions for us to answer. I think next week we’ll try to answer some of your questions.

On Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. That’s a great place for short questions. You can find us on iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes and while you’re there you can also download the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to all the back episodes of the show.

**Craig:** Fancy.

**John:** Fancy. So scriptnotes.net is the place for that. There are also USB drives available at store@johnaugust.com that have all the back episodes.

One of the questions, Craig, we have to figure out is, the new MacBooks do not have USB drives. Or not USB-A drives and so do we still make drives anymore? I don’t know if they are going to continue to exist.

**Craig:** Well, if you connect them through the dongle, it should be fine, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, there’s, like, a — because I ordered the new MacBook Pro, and with it I also ordered just a little USB-C, regular old USB adaptor.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In case, you know.

**John:** Okay. They’re available with Craig’s dongle and if you would like–

**Craig:** You know Sexy Craig has a dongle for you.

**John:** Probably the dongle is as much as the drive so–

**Craig:** You know, like, you like the drive of the dongle?

**John:** Ugh. We almost got through the whole episode–

**Craig:** Ooh, yeah, almost got through it.

**John:** If you listen to the transcripts, you won’t hear Sexy Craig’s voice at all. That’s a thing actually–

**Craig:** Not even a little bit.

**John:** On Twitter last week, people were saying, like, I listened to the show for the first time after only reading the transcripts. I didn’t understand what Sexy Craig was, and now they understand what Sexy Craig is. And they’re horrified.

**Craig:** If you can even wrap your mind around it. I mean, can you ever understand it? I don’t think so.

**John:** Apparently both of our voices are completely wrong for how we sound in print.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I wonder how people think I sound.

**John:** Yeah, probably authoritative, but I don’t know.

**Craig:** Crazy, sexy?

**John:** If you’re a person who mostly experiences the show through the transcripts, and only heard our voices recently, we’d be fascinated to know. So tell us on Twitter what you thought we would sound like before you actually heard us. That would be interesting for me to know.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Cool. Craig, have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You, too, John, and I’ll see you–

**John:** On the other side.

**Craig:** See you next time on the other side of the wall. [laughs]

**John:** Oy. All right. Take care.

**Craig:** Bye.

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* Megan Garber in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/its-rom-coms-fault-too/505928/)
* [Stalking Is Love](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StalkingIsLove)
* [“How to Talk to a Woman Who is Wearing Headphones”](http://www.themodernman.com/dating/how-to-talk-to-a-woman-who-is-wearing-headphones.html)
* [Time Travel: A History by James Gleick](http://amzn.to/2enAeEb) on Amazon
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The oringinal post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2016/buckling-down).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 271 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at ways to buckle down and actually finish writing something. We’ll also be tackling a listener question about autism spectrum disorder and how it might impact a screenwriting career.

Craig, I’m so happy to be back with you on the air. It was lovely to hear you and John Lee Hancock do the episode last week but it’s nice to be back with you in person.

**Craig:** It’s always nice. You know what? I feel like sometimes it’s nice we get a little bit of a break from each other.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then we appreciate each other all the more when we return. A brief absence does in fact make the heart grow fonder.

**John:** Indeed. It’s always so fun when you do an episode without me because you actually do all that work of all the boilerplate stuff and all the segues and transitions. You really can do it, Craig. So it’s very nice. It’s sort of like when Mom goes back to visit the relatives on the East Coast and Dad has to like, you know, drive the kids to school do all of that stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Look, oh, Dad can actually do that. Dad just doesn’t usually do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s definitely — it’s — I felt like Mr. Mom a little bit, you know, like I can make breakfast for you kids, I can. You know, but then it is exhausting. Although, look, to be fair, it’s just reading. That’s all it is. [laughs] I mean, I’m not like some sort of, you know, brain-damaged monkey.

**John:** No. Mostly it is reading. And it’s gotten to the point where there is actually boilerplate that we can copy and paste from outline to outline. So it’s nice that we’re this regularized in our systems that we can do these things.

But it was great hearing you and John Lee Hancock because you guys are old friends and so it’s like hearing a conversation between two old friends, talking about the business that I love. So while you were talking, I was down in the south of France. I was actually at a café table in Avignon finishing up Arlo Finch, part of which we’ll talk about today.

But this week was actually really strange because I made a choice, which was that, it was right before the big debate, the presidential debate and I was kind of stressed out by all of the craziness, and so I just left. And so I took all of the apps that I use to obsess about news, I put them all in a folder, put them on the very back screen of my phone including Twitter, and I didn’t look at it or check it for the entire week. So I had no idea how the debate went, I had no idea sort of how the polls were going.

It was actually lovely. But in some ways it was hard, like when I had to announce that the episode was out and available, I had to like not look at Twitter while I was actually putting a tweet out. It was really strange to be using Twitter just to tweet out and not actually read anything.

**Craig:** Well, I think you actually did a smart thing there. A lot of people are experiencing great anxiety over this election in a way that I don’t think I can recall in my lifetime.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Look, there’s always been some anxiety, people get worked up. I’ve always been kind of a guy in the middle, politically, you know. So I cannot think of a single election prior to this one where I thought, “Oh, my God. The country is at stake.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In this one, however, it appears that the country is at stake. [laughs] So anxiety is normal but, of course, completely unhelpful.

**John:** Completely unhelpful. Especially, you know, I’m on the other side of the world, there was nothing that I was going to be able to do other than obsess about it and lose sleep about it. And I had a deadline and this was a great excuse for like, you know what, I’m just checking out, and it was actually terrific to check out. So I would say I’d recommend to our listeners if you feel like you need to check out of this little process for a while, that’s okay and nothing is going to — things could go horribly wrong but like there’s nothing that you’re going to be able to do to affect what’s going horribly wrong if you need to decide to check out for a little while.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, what we forget, and because we think — we are under this delusion that we can actually affect how other people vote by tweeting and facebooking. And I think maybe the only time in my life I was able to maybe change like four people’s votes was when it came to Ted Cruz.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I had personal experience with him. But beyond that, you’re mostly just talking to people that agree with you or talking to people that don’t agree with you. And really the only thing you can do is show up and vote. And I assume that you are going to vote from afar if you have not done so already.

**John:** If you’re in Los Angeles County, you can register for it and they send you your ballot material. So we actually already got those things and we will be faxing our ballots back in. You actually fax them through a fax service. So it’s not an anonymous ballot anymore because clearly they can identify you or the person who sent that ballot, but I will be delightfully faxing through my ballots in the weeks before the election comes.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So what’s strange though about Los Angeles County, so I don’t know if you’ve seen the voter book yet? It’s so huge. There’s so many referendums and things at this time.

**Craig:** It’s a phonebook.

**John:** Especially because of pot legalization. So there’s a lot to read.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, there always is. And of course, no one reads it. They just show up and begin voting willy-nilly. Perhaps maybe a day or two before, what they’ll do is they’ll get a pamphlet from one of the major political parties saying, “Here’s how we think you should vote.” And, sadly, I think a lot of people just go, “Oh, okay. Well, check, check, check, check.”

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. That’s how it goes. Or they vote based on what the name of the ballot initiative is. And that’s why naming of things is so crucial because that affects what you think about it. So the same proposal with two different names would pass or not pass based on–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** How it’s titled.

**Craig:** Yeah. For instance, religious freedom sounds great.

**John:** Doesn’t it sound so good?

**Craig:** Yeah, it sounds–

**John:** People should have religious freedom. We should restore religious freedom. I’m 100%–

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** In favor of restoring religious freedom.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s really for like — for those people who are like oppressed, those like — those, yeah, absolutely 100%. That’s the one about head scarves, right? That’s what it’s really up for.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, for sure. I mean, the proper — they had a choice. It was either we can name things religious freedom or no wedding cakes for you, homos. [laughs] They were like, “Hmm. Uh, let’s go with religious freedom. That’s probably — we probably have a better shot.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We do somehow. So listening to the episode that you recorded with John Lee Hancock, I was nodding through a bunch of it but I was yelling at my podcast player for one moment because you guys answered a listener question about background audio tracks for like ambience for when you are writing things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I had immediate experience with that because these last four weeks I’ve had to use those quite a bit because I’ve been writing in a small apartment or like really busy places with a lot of noise around me and I found them to be an absolute godsend. So for writing Arlo Finch, a lot of what I was writing in this section of the book is like very cold and snowy and winter stormy and I needed to be in that head space. But when I got to Paris, it was like 95 degrees without air-conditioning.

And so, what I found to be so incredibly helpful were these three tracks — I’m going to put up links to in the show notes for. They’re all from YouTube and they’re just eight hours of like winter storms or forest ambience, and they were so incredibly helpful in just like being white noise and sort of like shutting out the chatter around me, but also making me feel like I’m in a cold snowy place when I’m actually sweating in a Paris apartment.

**Craig:** Well, I get that. I mean, you know, neither John Lee nor I write in busy places. We literally are two floors apart from each other in a building where I guess the most noise is the occasional bus, or as all of us know, the sirens. And this will come up, by the way, later when we talk about autism spectrum disorder. But when the fire trucks go by, I put my fingers in my ears and I stop.

**John:** I always do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I always do. And I feel like I’m a child when I do that, but you know what, it hurts my ears and I don’t like it. So if my fingers can stop the hurt, I like my fingers to stop the hurt.

**Craig:** Even if it doesn’t — even if — because I’m inside, it’s not this level of noise where it would physically hurt, but it upsets me. I don’t like it. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so I put my fingers in my ears. But no, I understand how if you are writing in a busy café in France and you’re writing — you know, one thing about novels as opposed to movies is you tend to live in a space for a much longer amount of writing time, you know. Like if there’s a whole sequence set in the winter, you’re going to spending more days in the winter than you might on a movie where maybe there is, you know, three scenes in winter or something like that. So it absolutely makes sense that you would want some kind of white noise to drown out the chatter and I don’t know what the sounds of France, the baguettes hitting each other and accordion music.

**John:** There is some accordion music. Just in the subway today, we had the guy step in and play his greatest hits on the accordion, which was kind of charming and also really annoying. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So — yeah.

**Craig:** Did you put your fingers in your ears? [laughs]

**John:** It didn’t quite get that bad. [laughs] Let’s do one more bit of follow-up. This is actually way back to Episode 267, that was How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The one that we were like, well, this is absolutely going to be a movie was the PTA mom and the crazy married lawyers who were trying to bring her down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we were like, “Well, that’s going to absolutely be a movie,” and it looks like it’s going to be a movie. So Julia Roberts is now set to produce and star in a film based on those events but not the article we read. The film is based around a book which the victim, Kelly Peters, wrote with a New York Times writer under an alias of Sam Rule. The book is called I’ll Get You! Drugs, Lies, and the Terrorizing of a PTA Mom.

So as of two weeks ago, there was no screenwriter on the project but it looks like it could be George Clooney and Grant Heslov from Smokehouse producing the film. So it’s a bunch of familiar people coming together to make a movie perhaps.

**Craig:** Well, I think that that — I’m actually encouraged by the fact that they aren’t basing it on that article. Not because that article was poorly done. It was brilliantly done. It’s just that I didn’t see an ending in that article that made me think I’d follow this movie from start to finish, I understand how this all works. Perhaps the book offers more of that. And of course, the fact that the book is being told from the point of view of the victim implies a certain different kind of movie as well.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to cast Brie Larson as the wife and the lawyer. This is — if anyone asks, Brie Larson.

**Craig:** Okay. All right. But what about Julia Roberts?

**John:** Julia Roberts is playing the mom, apparently. She’s playing the victim.

**Craig:** She’s playing the victim.

**John:** Yeah. Which doesn’t seem to be a great part, but maybe there’s something in the book that sort of shows why that’s a great part.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing. I’m starting to think like there’s a whole other movie here with that woman that we don’t know about.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I don’t know. I kind of just want to hear about the villains in this one.

**John:** I love the villains in this story.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our first main topic which is buckling down. So the last 40 days have been sort of like the most intense writing period of my life. And I guess I’ve done TV show stuff which was intense for other reasons, but this was the most days continuously where I had to write a lot every day. So the book is about 60,000 words. To give you a sense of that, like a screenplay is about 20,000 to 25,000 words and a lot of those are like the characters’ names and INT/EXT and all of that stuff.

So it ends up being a tremendous amount of words and just a tremendous amount of volume to be sort of typing into your computer at a time. So it was such a different thing for me but I felt like we could have this discussion about really any time that you have to just buckle down and actually write something that’s really long. So screenplays, pilots or the TV staff writer who’s sent out of the room to like actually write the draft, that’s really sort of a buckling down situation.

Obviously, a book or a novel, we have people who are starting their projects for NaNoWriMo at the start of November. But even if you’re not a screenwriter and you’re writing a dissertation, it’s the same kind of thing where like you can plan for a long time but eventually you have to sit down and actually write this thing. So I want to talk about how you write really long things and how you sort of get it done, which we haven’t really done. We’ve done a lot of sort of little bits of scene work and we talked about outlines and treatments and sort of other things, but the day-to-day, day after day work of getting one project done, we haven’t really touched on in, you know, these 270 episodes.

**Craig:** Kind of crazy that we haven’t, considering that it is the thing that people kind of struggle with the most.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, of all the sub header things that we struggle with, getting the work done. And I love your phrase, buckling down, which is exactly what it requires, is the most common problem for all of us and it doesn’t, by the way, get easier. That’s — it’s — you’d think that with the exercise of the muscle there you — that that pain would start to go away. It does not.

**John:** Yeah. Well, I think what’s tough about it is that so often the experience of being a writer is the experience of like thinking through stuff and figuring stuff out. But the actual verb of writing isn’t necessarily the bulk of your day. And so it’s sort of hard to tell when you’re writing and when you’re not writing. And so only in those situations where something is actually really due, there’s like a ticking clock and you have to get stuff done and there’s just a whole bunch of stuff you have to get done that you really feel it. And so, I want to talk about like those times in your life and some general structures for like how you plan out that work and how you plan for how you’re going to really achieve it and how you’re going to get it done.

So I would start with, it’s really just making it the priority. It’s like, it’s recognizing that there’s always going to be stuff in your life, there’s going to be family stuff, friends, travel, there’s going to be parties. But I remember when I first got to know Lena Dunham, I had met her right after her movie Tiny Furniture and I thought it was great. But then I got to hang out with her a little bit more up at the Sundance Labs and she was co-writing a movie up at the Sundance Labs, which is the winter labs, and while she was up there at the labs she was also starting on this HBO thing which was sort of like something she was thinking through which ended up becoming Girls.

But what impressed me about her was like not just her talent, which I’d already seen, but her work ethic. And so she was the kind of person who would leave a party early because like “I need to go and write” or you know, she would skip out on things because like “I need to go and write.” And she wasn’t just using that as an excuse, she really had to go and write. She’s the kind of person who, you know, would take a vacation to an exotic place but spend a fair amount of that time, you know, in a room writing the stuff she needs to write.

And I’ve always admired those people who can sort of make their writing life a priority. And there’s only certain points in my life where I really felt like I could do that sort of cleanly. And this — and writing the book here was one of those situations where I really could sort of prioritize. I could say, “Listen, there’s all this stuff I know that needs to happen but I need these four hours of the day to be clean so I can write,” and that’s been kind of a great experience to go through.

**Craig:** Well, part of the challenge is that when we you say, “I need these four hours of the day to write,” sometimes those aren’t the four hours where you’re actually going to be writing, you know. Because one of the problems is sometimes you have it and sometimes you don’t even at different times of the day, which is why work ethic is so important.

To me, I try and look at it like this. Work ethic is about making sure that at the end of some reasonable chunk of time you’ve done the right amount of work, whatever that is for you. We all move at different speeds. So I think of it in terms of a week. When this week has elapsed, this much work must have occurred.

That said, there are going to be days where more happens than less. And I have to listen to myself. So like Lena, if I’m at a party and the back of my head’s going, “I kind of feel like I want to write,” leave and write. Listen to that voice because it might not be there the next day.

**John:** At the same time you have to be aware that writing is honestly going to be one of the — your last choices of like fun things to do. And so it’s showing up even when you kind of don’t want to show up.

My situation here in Paris is my daughter would go off to school and I would sit down and I would write. I would write for a solid hour. Then I’d take a break then I’d go for another hour. And having a routine where like I literally — like, if I didn’t get that 9 o’clock hour worth of work done, I knew that I would be kind of messed up for the day. It did sort of force a — that regularity was incredibly helpful.

So I’m not going to necessarily do this for the rest of my life, but for those periods where I needed to buckle down, that was really good. It was good to recognize that stuff needs to get done. Even if it’s not going to be the perfect stuff, there were days where I could sit down, like I really had a hard time getting it going. But what I could at least do is like synopsize the things that needed to happen in this chapter. I could work through some of the other, sort of, more piddly things that needed to get done somehow.

In screenwriting, I often would sort of do these things where like sometimes there’s a scene I just didn’t really know how to write, I didn’t really want to write. But if I was sitting down for a session to write, I’ll write that other scene. I’ll write that like sort of less important scene, the things that are sort of people walking through doors. So at least something would get done. And so it’s recognizing that there’s always going to be some things that are bit more challenging for you, but you’ve got to sort of focus on getting some stuff done because if you just always wait for the muse to show up, you are going to be waiting kind of forever.

**Craig:** I completely agree. There is a push and a pull required. Let’s call the muse the push. That’s something from within you that you have an instinct to want to create and want to write. And those times when you feel that push from within, it’s wonderful, but you need a pull. You need something on the outside that is demanding that work come out of you. And that is not — I don’t think anything you can really teach people. I think that is baked in to who they are. It is a huge part of splitting the world between writer and not writer. That writers just have an innate understanding that there’s a requirement and it needs to be fulfilled, like we’re working for a boss who isn’t there.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Even when we actually have a boss, that’s not the boss.

You know, right now I’m writing a script for Disney. I know who my bosses are at Disney. I know who my producers are. But they’re actually not the people I’m thinking about when I go, “I have to get something done today.” I’m thinking about this just need. And it’s almost like a weird external need that is yet created internally.

**John:** Absolutely, you’re envisioning this other person of you who’s going to be really upset with you if you don’t get this work done.

**Craig:** Right

**John:** That’s a strange thing. You’re trying to please this master who doesn’t exist who is actually you.

So let’s talk about some of the obstacles that are sort of getting in people’s way from finishing things or at least from like really being able to crack the back of the work that they’re doing. And let’s talk through some of the things that are sort of common experiences in our lives that have been in the way of writing.

**Craig:** Right. So I think perhaps the most common, the king of all obstacles, is the double-sided coin of fear and regret. When we don’t necessarily know it’s happening. It happens so fast in our minds and so subconsciously that sometimes all we feel is just a lack of desire to write. We don’t understand that that is actually a symptom of a process that just occurred in a split second. And in that split second, what’s happening is we think about writing and then we are confronted instantly with, “Am I good at this? Am I doing it right? What will people think? Have I already made a mistake and wasted my time and my energy?” And that cascades to, “I’m no good. I don’t know what I’m doing.” And we don’t hear any of those words. All we get is, “Meh.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “I’m going to go watch TV.”

**John:** Yeah, because no one fails at watching TV.

**Craig:** It’s so true. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. It’s absolutely a true thing, because we worry that we set the stakes way too high for the thing we’re about to write. And like, “Oh, if this scene isn’t perfect. If this sentence isn’t perfect, it’s all going to be disaster,” when in fact, it’s not going to be a disaster. You know, every scene and every sentence is going to be rewritten several times. So you’re much better off writing the version of the sentence that is pretty good and moving on. And then, like, being able to go back and say like, “Oh, you know what? I have a better way of doing this.”

But actually starting the process is really key. You know, on a previous episode we talked about how perfectionism and procrastination are really the same thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Is that procrastination is a way of protecting us from fear of being less than perfect. Well, you have to accept that things aren’t going to be perfect right out the gate. That’s why I think it’s so important to, you know, just start writing. And then at a certain point, something often clicks. It doesn’t always click, but it often clicks. It’s like, “Oh, okay, now I get what this is.” And those first things you wrote you’ll fix and it’ll get a lot better.

At the same time, you may encounter problems in — story problems, word problems that you’re not able to sort of justify and like you don’t know how to actually deal with them. But just deal with them as best you can and know that you’re going to have the opportunity to go back and fix them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think that sometimes we sort of — we wait so long because like, “Oh, it’ll come to me eventually how I’m going to solve this problem.” We would, generally, be much better off like moving on, acknowledging that it’s a problem, moving on, and then finding a way back into that problem later on.

**Craig:** Yeah. We tend to judge our work and progress against completed works, which is a mistake. It’s simply not possible that any half-finished first draft of anything is going to match the standards of completed works. Not possible.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And yet we don’t have any other basis of comparison, right?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** It’s not like the Internet has a bunch of half-written first drafts, because they don’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For novels or for movies.

**John:** Yeah. If only Steve Zaillian would like publish like all of his sort of like aborted scripts, everyone would feel so much better. [laughs]

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, you know, here’s a bad scene that I threw out and I didn’t know it was a bad scene until two weeks later and I’m embarrassed by it and here it is. And I think the solution here is to stop comparing your work to anything because the comparison is useless.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It will not make you better and it will not make the work better, particularly when you’re trying to be honest to your own voice.

**John:** And I think sometimes on the podcast, we may say things that would lead people the other way. It’s like I do generally think that, you know, trying to break into screenwriting or trying to break into writing, ultimately, you are going to be compared against the people who are doing this professionally for a living. So like, that’s fair at the end of the process. But to hold yourself to that standard in the middle of a sentence is not going to be productive for you or for anybody. So you have to recognize the two things, like allow yourself to be imperfect in this moment and strive for perfection in the finished work. And you can’t do both simultaneously.

**Craig:** You can’t. And let other people handle the judging business because, first of all, their manner of judging is so foreign to your manner of judging. And based on wildly different criteria. You will be undervalued and overvalued at various times by people. And that’s what they’re going to do. And you honestly can’t — you can’t anticipate it. You can’t game that. The best you can do is just write honestly to yourself and not compare to other people, because inevitably what ends up happening is you subject yourself to the tyranny of the unattainable. There’s always somebody better, there’s always something better, and you’ll just get lost.

Similarly if you’re facing a problem, you know you have a problem in your story, your screenplay, or your novel. Sometimes the existence of it feels so daunting because it was really hard to do the work that got you to the place that you now think is a problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it isn’t so hard to fix it. It just feels so hard to fix it because you don’t know how. And it’s okay to stop and say, “I acknowledge the following. I made a mistake. I’ve wasted time. I’ve wasted energy. I’ve wasted effort. No problem, that is inevitable. So now let me just think about my problem and allow myself to be free to come up with anything. Even if it means tearing everything up. Even if it means that my grand plan to have a novel at the end of a month didn’t happen, right?” And once you free yourself, you’d be amazed how quickly you can solve things. And actually, oftentimes, how rapidly you — the fix is done.

**John:** Absolutely. Once you get past that sort of sunk cost fallacy, like I’ve done all this work and it has led me to this horrible place, and to try to fix this problem would be undoing other things. Once you sort of let yourself go from those previous things, a lot of stuff becomes simpler.

The other thing to remember is we talk about like you’re comparing it against perfected works you’ve seen. If you were actually to talk to the people who wrote those things, those movies you love, those books you read that you loved so much and you said like, “Oh, well this part was so graceful and effortless, how you did the stuff,” that may have been the author’s most hated and most challenging thing. And maybe the thing that she doesn’t actually love about her book because she knows how much hard work it was to go in there and it doesn’t feel easy and natural to her, but it ultimately worked. And so just because it’s hard work it doesn’t mean it’s going to be a struggle in the end. It may actually be the right thing for you to be having to face through to get to.

An example of my own stuff is Big Fish. The first ten minutes has to set up so much stuff, and that was probably the hardest ten pages ever to write because there’s so many little balls to get moving in the air at once. It took like three weeks to do. A lot of the other script was so much simpler, and yet you wouldn’t know what was easy and what was hard based on, you know, the end result of the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t really have experience of that on the other side of it. As movie goers or novel readers, we don’t get a color coding that shows how much effort went into any particular part. And in fact, because our job as writers is similar to the job of the magician, we’re constantly disguising that effort as best we can. We’re hiding it from people. And if we do it really well, it should all look easy.

**John:** Yeah, that’s the trick.

**Craig:** You know, it should look inevitable and easy. And what a shock then that when we sit down to actually write we go, “Wait, this the opposite of inevitable and easy.” And in fact, one of the great obstacles that we face and one of the things that pulls us off the track sometimes is the paralysis of choice because we’re used to seeing things that follow one track inevitably to an end. But when we’re writing, there is no track.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** We can do anything, and that can be very frightening for people.

**John:** Absolutely true.

So let’s talk about the actual process of getting those words on the page and sort of how you get it done. So especially when you’re like buckling down, let’s say you have a big thing to write. So it could be a book, it could be a screenplay, it could be your dissertation that’s finally due, you have a lot to do. So the thing you have to recognize is that it’s going to be a marathon of many, many days to write this thing. And so if you try to stay up all night and just power through it, well, staying up all night is going to set you back the next day. So you have to recognize like the amount of work you can do in a day and try to be able to repeat that work day after day, and that way you’ll get through it.

So a lot of times I think that sometimes as writers we’ve been very clever, and so we would just like pull an all-nighter to write that like 10-page paper for a term project. That doesn’t actually work when you’re trying to do a 120 pages or you’re trying to do, you know, a 300-page dissertation. You can’t just stay up all night and power through it. You actually have to plan for how you’re going to do it.

So I like to say it’s like — it’s planning to run a bunch of sprints that ultimately add up to a marathon. And so for me, a sprint is sitting down and I’ll spend about 20 minutes reading through the previous day’s work. Just sort of get a feeling for it again in my head. I may rewrite some stuff while I’m doing it, I’m just changing stuff around. Just sort of get it back under my finger so I really feel like the story is — I’m back in it. Then I’ll set a timer and I’ll write for 60 minutes, and I won’t let myself get up from the desk until I’ve really written for 60 minutes.

Sometimes I run out of juice a little bit during that time, but I still stick at it. And if I don’t have anything great to like add to the scene itself, I’ll just synopsize the next things that are coming up. I’ll sit in that chair for the 60 minutes until I get as much stuff done as I possibly can and then I’ll walk away and take a break.

Craig, do you find yourself doing that at all?

**Craig:** Yes, although not quite so intentionally. I don’t set a timer or anything like that. I definitely begin by reading what happened yesterday. I give myself as much time. Sometimes I read the whole thing. You know — and I mean, you know, I’m on page 67. Sometimes I sit down and say, “Okay, I’m going to start on page 1,” and I’m going to read up until page 67. I want to — I just want to watch this movie again and feel all of it, and then I’ll be ready to add on one more brick.

**John:** That’s the great thing about screenplays, I will say, is that there have definitely been times where like I just start back at the beginning and read through, because the experience of watching a movie is going to be starting at the beginning and reading through. I can’t do that every day or I wouldn’t get a lot of work done.

**Craig:** No, no, no, no, no.

**John:** For a Monday when I’ve been off that script for a while, it’s not a bad idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. I used to just sort of read 10 or 15 backwards, you know. And when I was working with Lindsay Doran, I was amazed by her insistence every time that she — so I would — you know, I’d move forward and I’d send her some pages, and every time she would read from the beginning. Every time, which I thought was remarkable, and then I started doing it, too. [laughs] And it actually helped quite a bit. But not necessary — I mean I just think, you know, reading back what you have puts you back in the world of the movie. It certainly helps you connect forward.

And then what happens is I begin. And when I begin, naturally, I will write for a certain amount of time. I don’t actually know how much time. I’ve never looked at the clock. I don’t know. What I do know is somewhere between three and six pages are going to come out. That’s seems about right for a screenplay. Now, novels are different.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But for a screenplay, somewhere between three or six pages are going to come out and that’s what I can do. Now, if you put a gun to my head and said, “You need to write 20 pages,” I could do that. But the goal, as opposed to say writing a term paper, the goal in writing something creative is that it be creative, not hitting a length. So, I know that I am probably best — my optimal page delivery is somewhere between three and six pages. That’s what the day looks like for me.

**John:** Yeah. So writing the book, my optimal day was between 1,000 and 1,500 words. And like that was a good day’s work. If I was able to stay on that schedule, I knew I could finish the book. I knew everything would be good.

Because books are so much longer, it wasn’t possible to sort of like go back to page one and start rereading the book. It would have taken four hours to do that every day. But what I could do is read through like the last chapter or read through sort of where I’d gotten to in this chapter and sort of move forward from there. So I could remember sort of like where the characters were at, what the world was feeling like.

I can also make sure that I wasn’t repeating language again from earlier in the chapter or from the chapter before, because that’s a thing you definitely notice. In a screenplay, you don’t notice repeated language nearly as much, but in books, the way things are phrased, you kind of can’t keep doing the same things again and again. So I had to sort of be a little bit aware of like things I had just done so I wouldn’t sort of be repeating myself.

So I found myself doing the 20 minutes of sort of recapping, sort of getting back up to speed with it. A one-hour sprint, some time off, another one-hour sprint, some time off, another sprint if I needed to. But that way I was actually getting most of my work done while I was actually sort of sharp and focused in the day. And like the afternoons, I was sort of spent and couldn’t do anything else, but it was nice that I could, you know, sort of really focus on just doing writing stuff during those sort of morning hours. It’s sort of the luxury of this life.

**Craig:** Well, if we divide our day into writing and then after writing, the after writing part of the day is very, very pleasant if you’ve written.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And if you haven’t, not so great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So think about that when you’re wondering whether or not you should actually sit down and just do the damn thing at 10:30 or 11:00 or noon or 1:00. As the day goes on, you’re eating up more of your not writing part of the day and you may — now, there are days when you don’t have it and you don’t write. And I’ve learned to forgive myself for those days. That is, you know, it’s natural, I think.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you hope that those days are balanced out by some of those wonderful days that come out of nowhere where you just — you’re on fire.

**John:** So some general lessons here. It’s to try to be I think both strict with yourself and also forgiving of yourself, to try to really treat the work like the work. I mean, no one ever sort of like looks at a farmer and says like, “Why are you working so hard, Mr. Farmer?” It’s like, well, the farmer has to work hard.

You are a farmer who is growing words, you’re growing stories, and so a lot of that time is sort of spent in the field with your little story as its growing and making sure that you’re actually spending the time doing it that, you know, writing isn’t just an identity for you but it’s actually a verb. It’s actually a thing that you are doing on a daily basis to get stories told and on the page.

I think sometimes, as screenwriters, because our lives get to be so busy doing all the other stuff, a lot of the stuff you guys talked about last with John Lee Hancock, which is sort of the putting together of a movie and making people feel comfortable and trying make all the stuff work, ultimately though it comes down to like can you tell the story on with those words on the page. And making sure that you protect the space that you need to be able to do that hard work.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Lastly, I’ll put a link in the show notes to some great blog post by Chuck Wendig who’s a really good writer. I had recommended his book, Invasive, a couple of weeks ago. But he writes about writing really well. And so he has a really good blog post, Here’s How To Finish That Effing Book, You Monster. Craig will enjoy it a lot because he’s very foul-mouthed–

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** About sort of like good advice for sort of like getting through that book or really, any long piece of writing. So I certainly recommend that to anybody who liked this conversation.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to a question from a listener. This is Matthew from Los Angeles who wrote in. We don’t have audio for it. Craig, would you mind reading it?

**Craig:** I would not mind. It would be my great pleasure.

Matthew from Los Angeles writes, “I am writing to you because I’m in a situation where I’m in need of supportive words or harsh truths. I’m about to graduate from college and begin my entry into the job market. I’d like to become a writer of film and television and I’m fortunate enough to have the advantage of living in Los Angeles. However, I am on the autism spectrum.

“My disability is not to the point that I can’t communicate with people but I do have a noticeable impairment when I’m interacting with others. As I’m a fan of several podcasts that focus on writing and regularly interview working writers, I am well aware that the ability to communicate is essential to the job and that my desire to become a writer may be unrealistic due to my disability. I was wondering what your opinions are on this issue and in a broader sense, hoping you can address how having a disability might impact one’s potential for a career in the film and television industry in general.

“If you’re unable to speak to this issue, I was hoping you could encourage people in the industry to speak out in the same way you did for writers living outside major entertainment cities. I feel that disability often gets overlooked when talking about inclusivity as I often hear more about gender, sexuality, and race. I think it would beneficial to speak about disability as it relates to the industry so a person with a disability, like myself, can manage their expectations and set realistic goals when it comes to working in film and television.”

**John:** That is a great question.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And I love it for so many reasons. First off, he’s asking – he has a specific situation, but there’s a universal question here as well, which is how will the facts of my life impact my ability to achieve my goals? How will the situation I find myself in change how it’s possible for me to get the career I want?

Everyone listening to this podcast has a set of circumstances that makes some things easier or harder so it’s important to look at those conditions honestly so you can anticipate the challenges ahead. So it’s also a really good question because it’s a little bit terrifying. I don’t know how you feel, but there’s a pretty good chance that you or I will say something that will upset someone, so before you email in, when we say something dumb, please assume that we’re trying our very best to answer Matthew’s question and not defend the status quo of the industry or society as a whole.

**Craig:** I will not be cowed by the tyranny of the offended.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It’s not that I’m incapable of offending people or incapable of being outrageously wrong. We both know I’m incredibly capable of both of those things. [laughs] But we must proceed fearlessly here if we’re going to have any chance of actually helping anyone, helping Matthew, because, you know, I’m pretty sure that Matthew could probably write the platitude version of this for himself. He wouldn’t need to ask us.

**John:** So Craig, you are the person who knows more about the DSM, so can you tell us what we are talking about with autism spectrum disorder? Because especially I think we have a lot of international listeners who may be using some of these terms differently, so let’s talk about what we’re talking about first.

**Craig:** Well, autism spectrum disorder is actually kind of a newish term. We used to have a different — and we call these disorders, even that term, you know, is under scrutiny right now. But we used to say, okay, well, some people had autism and autism was — at least when you and I were growing up as children in the ‘70s, autism was basically narrowed down to a fair — actually a smaller amount of children who had some difficulty with being verbal or severe averbality, difficulty in motor coordination, difficulty with rigidity and thought patterns. Oftentimes, there were associated physical issues like gastrointestinal problems.

We — in the ‘70s, I remember in school there were classes for kids and those classes were called “for the emotionally disturbed,” which is kind of a crazy term, but there was emotional disturbance going on with some of the children with autism. And then as time went on, Asperger’s syndrome emerged and that was kind of a milder version where there were issues with social interaction, again, some verbal issues, eye-contact issues, rigidity of thought. And there’s a lot of symptoms for this.

And then there was this other thing that came along called PPD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, which is a very bureaucratic way of saying, “Well, this is sort of autistic-ish or Asperger’s-y.”

**John:** Here’s a bunch of symptoms and we’ll stick them together.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re pervasive so they’re not acute, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is who you are, but they’re not otherwise specified.

Now, I think in — yeah, I’m looking here in 2013, when they went from the DSM 4 to DSM 5, and DSM is the Diagnostic Statistic Manual, it’s the big diagnosis manual for Psychiatry and Psychology. They decided everything — let’s get rid of those distinctions, everything is now called autism spectrum disorder. And so the idea is there is a spectrum of behaviors, and all the way on the extreme end, you have what used to be considered severely autistic and all the way kind of on the more mild end, you have some of the behaviors that would have probably fallen under PDD-NOS.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s important that we say like these are kicking into varying degrees. So like no two people are going to have the exact same kind of situation with this diagnosis. It’s a spectrum for a reason. So there’s — I have two people in my family who are both on the spectrum and they could not be more different, so it’s important that we don’t like sort of stereotype people based on a diagnosis. Everyone is clearly an individual and there’s — while there can be some consistency of patterns between different things, there can also be huge variations between people.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. I mean, this is one of the issues. I mean, I have probably in my extended family more people on the spectrum than I can count. I probably as a child would have been diagnosed with PDD-NOS. I mean, I had like certain behaviors that the doctor was concerned about, a lot of weird finger motions right up against my face, which I found made it easier for me to think and imagine and you see very typical with people on the spectrum. Especially towards the autism end of the spectrum, there can be flapping behavior where their hands flap around or move in strange ways.

So not only is it important not to stereotype, it’s essentially impossible to stereotype ASD. And that, in its own way, is part of the challenge because if you cannot — I mean, let’s take the word stereotype and remove it from its stereotype which is, you know, you’re a racist and you’re categorizing people and just use it in its purest form, you have collected a pattern of behaviors and are now ascribing it to one kind of syndrome.

The question for ASD is not just what is neuro-atypical, but you have to first ask, “What is even neuro-typical?” In short, “What is normal and who gets to define it as such?”

Here’s one of the challenges here with ASD. When you look at most neurological disorders, for instance, epilepsy, there’s really no upside to epilepsy and we know exactly what epilepsy is. And we can stereotype epilepsy, right? We can say, “Okay, well, this is what happens. You have seizures. This kind of electrical pattern occurs in the brain. It can be mild or it can be dangerous. There’s petit mal, there’s grand mal.” We know these things, right? And nobody with epilepsy says, “It’s super awesome having epilepsy.” But unlike those kinds of standard neurological disorders, ASD often correlates with advantages.

Now, this isn’t causal but correlative, right? We know that people with ASD often do have superior visuospatial ability, mathematical ability, and music and art. So many, many years ago, some people were called idiot savants, right? The idiot part was, “Oh, they don’t know how to talk and they can’t look you in the eye and they can’t read faces and they have no emotional quotient and sometimes their hands flap around,” which actually is not idiotic at all, it’s just part of the symptomology of ASD. But then the savant part was, “Oh, he can” — for instance, there’s a famous case of a man who, upon seeing an image of a city from high up, like an entire city for like five seconds, could then be brought into a room and draw that city and all of its buildings nearly perfectly. Well, that’s extraordinary. And you find people with ASD overrepresented definitely in the fields of visual art and certainly in mathematics.

**John:** Absolutely. But at the same time, again, going back to the other sort of lucid definition of stereotype, you don’t want to stereotype people with ASD. It’s like, “Oh, then you should have some sort of superpower to make up for other issues that they may encounter.” So that’s one of those sort of rare double-edged swords where there could be an expectation like, “Oh, well, there’s something else that you’re really amazing at because of this.” Maybe. That could be great, that could be fantastic, but I don’t want to sort of like fall into the trap of stereotyping people with ASD or people like Matthew. It’s like, “Oh, well, then he’s probably really good at this thing, so he should do this thing instead.”

**Craig:** 100%. Yeah. There is — you can presume that just as extraordinary ability in the – let’s call it the neuro-typical cohort is rare. Extraordinary ability in the neuro-atypical cohort is rare. It’s just slightly less rare percentage-wise likely than it is in the neuro-typical community. I mean, the other part of the double edge here is that the term itself has benefits and costs. When you say, “Okay, we’re going to diagnose you — give you an official diagnosis of spectrum disorder,” on the positive end, this often will get people the assistance they need, particularly children in educational environments, and it helps people understand how they might function differently than others which gives them, I would imagine, a great bit of comfort and clarity, especially for people who are struggling or taking care of people with severe debilitating symptoms. But on the negative end of things, saying, “Well, you have an autism spectrum disorder” essentially stigmatizes behavior that in some areas on the spectrum I think could just as easily be considered what I would call alternative normal rather than abnormal.

**John:** Absolutely. What you don’t want to do is sort of stigmatize something that could be perceived as personality. Like you don’t want to sort of medicalize or put a diagnosis around just the way a person is if that just is the way the person is. And that, I think, is sort of at the crux of where I’m going to get to with Matthew and his specific question.

So Matthew writes in and says, “Listen, I really think I want to be a screenwriter. Is that a realistic goal for me?” And I think we could tell him, “Well, based on the information we have, there’s nothing that suggests that it’s not a realistic goal for you.” This was a well-written email into us. We don’t know anything more about your writing ability other than this one email, but this is a better email than a lot of the emails we get in so far.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs]

**John:** You’re just in college, you already have a strong interest in screenwriting, you already are listening to a bunch of film podcasts. You seem to have a real interest in it. But do you have a talent for it? We don’t know that yet. Some people do, some people don’t. But there’s nothing about your specific diagnosis that would indicate to us like, “Oh, you should not even consider pursuing this.” I think you should consider pursuing it and you should look at sort of what’s going to be possible for you in it.

So we had Peter Dodd on to talk about, he was the agent who came on the show. He said like, “Well, why do I sign a client?” Well, 80% of it is the writing. 80% of it is how well does this person write, and you’re going to be writing this script by yourself. And so the person on the other end who’s reading the script, they have no idea of sort of like what you’re like in a room. They’re just looking at your words. And if you can write those words well, if you can write those words really, really well, there’s a chance that you can make it as a screenwriter. So I think a screenwriter is a relatively good way for a person who has some troubles interacting with people, as you described in the email, to consider a career in the film industry.

And there’s also a precedent for like people who are really good writers who are not great around other people. That’s a useful stereotype for you to consider is that like a lot of really good writers have not been the most comfortable around other people.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Again, I would probably use the word, correlative, not causal and not a guarantee.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But there is a correlation here. I mean, one thing about autism spectrum disorder is that it implies a certain amount of internality that your mind is inside and less about connected to the outside or not — or connected differently to the outside, let’s say. And you know, some people may say, well, if you have like, for instance, Matthew, he says, “I have a noticeable impairment when I’m interacting with others.” Now, some people might say, “Well, then how can you be a writer? Because a writer is all about how people interact with each other.” But there have been some incredible writers who weren’t necessarily soaking in emotionality or sentiment. I mean, consider Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. In fact, their writing really has all the hallmarks in a way of ASD. It’s intricate and it’s mathematical and it’s well-put together and kind of beautiful in its plotting and its rationality. And even the characters are — they are princes and princesses of rationality.

Now, that aside, here’s the best news of all, Matthew. I personally know so many writers in this business who either have been diagnosed with ASD or could easily be so if they bothered to get one. And this has been this way for as long as I’ve been in the business. The Simpsons, famously, especially in the early years when the show was being formed, the principles, the main key writers, the geniuses that made that all work, they were famous for being, well, what we used to call back in the early ‘90s: weirdos, nerds, geeks, strange.

And here’s the beauty of Hollywood, for all of its awfulness, the one thing you can rely on is that Hollywood is a money-eating machine, right? They just want to eat everyone’s money. And anyone that helps them eat other people’s money is their friend and all of the pejoratives that people with ASD can unfortunately hear in their lives, like geek and nerd and weirdo and creep and all the rest of it, in our business, if you are writing material that helps Hollywood eat other people’s money, those words turn to brilliant, unique, genius, authentic, original. You see?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And so I think that for you, this should not at all be a problem. You may have other problems. You may not be a very good writer. Right? We don’t know. [laughs] But this, I don’t think is a problem for you.

**John:** I agree. It’s not a problem.

And I also think the kind of feature screenwriting that Craig and I do, we tend to be able to work more by ourselves. If you’re in a busy TV writing room that’s not The Simpsons, some of those rooms may not be as great for a person who needs to like — there’s politics, there’s all sorts of stuff that sort of has to happen in a room, and sometimes a person who has a hard time reading a room might have more of a challenge. But that’s not the whole business. That is not the only way.

And also, before we sort of wrap up this discussion, I want to talk about the other sort of aspects of the film industry, because I’m sure people who listen to this podcast are not just writers but there’s people who are interested in other areas of filmmaking. I personally encounter directors who I’m certain would be on the spectrum if they chose to be identified.

**Craig:** Yes, you certainly have. [laughs]

**John:** But also editors and visual effects artists and cinematographers. The people who are perfectionists, I think there’s — again, it’s not a causal but there’s a correlative thing about those folks and the ability to just really, really dive in on something. I think there’s a natural fit sometimes for people who are on the spectrum to go towards some of those fields.

Now, are those people going to be as likely to be glib producers or casting directors or publicists? Probably not. That’s probably not a skill set that would more naturally tie in to some of these traits, but again, you don’t know. And even when we talked before about sort of like these great writers like Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie who were so mathematical, I don’t want to assume that the way that Matthew’s, you know, ASD manifest, he may have just tremendous emotional insight. Maybe one of those situations where he has a really great gift at being able to see inside people’s–

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Emotional — he may just have tremendous emotional insight. So I don’t want to sort of dismiss those as possibilities either. But as the guy who’s writing in and saying like, “I think I want to be screenwriter and I’m worried about my ability to interact with others,” I would say, “I wouldn’t worry so much about it.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you.

Look, your desire to be a screenwriter is natural to you, Matthew. So you follow that desire, just as somebody’s desire to be a cinematographer is natural to them. And yes, there are probably some desires that are more natural to people with ASD than others, but if somebody with ASD really did want to be a publicist, I would put money on them being a terrific publicist. It’s just where does your instinct take you, right? So we can generalize about what ASD does because it is, in fact, a general spectrum of things and Matthew is one point on that general spectrum. But the good news is, if you want to do this, then you do it. And you will not be drummed out of this business because you’re “bad in a room.” You will drummed out of this business if your work is bad and you’re bad in a room.

Here’s a bit of unfairness. There are some people who aren’t great writers but they’re spectacular in a room. And particularly, in the television business, they can kind of wheedle their way from show to show being everyone’s best friend and maybe being a political animal, and they can kind of succeed longer than they should. And maybe that’s not something that is going to happen for somebody with ASD. But is that really the goal? I don’t think so. I think the goal is to be a terrific writer. And, you know, so in that sense, I think you should pursue this with the comfort of knowing that your diagnosis will not be the reason you either make it or don’t make it.

**John:** Now, Craig, are you aware of any efforts for diversity or inclusivity for people on the spectrum?

**Craig:** I’m not.

**John:** Is that something that anyone is like reaching out to try to fill, you know, jobs?

**Craig:** I have never heard of it. Part of the problem is that — well, I mean, there are certain privacy issues when it comes to health diagnoses.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** But also, I don’t see anyone looking around the writing community at the very least and saying, “We seem to be really short on people who might be on the spectrum.” We don’t seem to be short with people who might be on the spectrum.

Now, again, that’s anecdotal. I don’t have the statistics. And I don’t know, you know, exactly how to get good statistics on this because we’re talking about a diagnosis, first of all, that’s three years old. So how many people have gotten that diagnosis? How many people have actually had a need to go see somebody to get that diagnosis? We don’t know. And of course, when you talk about a spectrum, the range on that spectrum is so dramatic that I’m not sure asking just, “Are you on the spectrum?” would give you the information you’d really want anyway.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re right.

So that wraps up sort of what we know, but there’s a lot we don’t know. So sort of like our question about working outside of Los Angeles, New York or London, if you are a listener who has some insights for Matthew or for anybody who’s like looking at coming into the Hollywood system with a disability and think our listeners should know about it, write in. So write in to ask@johnaugust.com, and if we have some other great stories to share with Matthew or people who are facing other situations like that, we will happily share them.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Good question, Matthew. Thanks for writing in.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. Mine is really simple. It is a website called the wikitravel.org. It’s simply–

**Craig:** I thought you were going to say Wikipedia and I was going to be like, “What?”

**John:** What?

**Craig:** We all know about that, John.

**John:** So Wikitravel is like Wikipedia but just for travel. So essentially, when you pick a city or destination and you type it in to Wikitravel, it tells you like, “Here’s what you do there.” And it’s actually really smart. It’s simple and crowd-sourced. It tells you sort of like — it breaks down like, you know, “Here are the sites, here are the challenges, here are some things to keep in mind about it.” It’s free and open and very publicly done.

So this last week, our daughter was off at a week-long field trip. And so my husband and I decided to go to Avignon in the south of France. And we didn’t know, really, anything about it. So we looked it up in the Wikitravel and it turned out to be great and there were really good suggestions. So we did that, we did [unintelligible] and just really had a great time. So I would just recommend to anybody who’s like traveling to a new place, check out Wikitravel for some good tips.

**Craig:** You know, I actually have Two Cool Things now because I have one that I need to talk about but yours prompted me. Have you heard of Google Trips?

**John:** We were just talking about Google Trips today. So describe it for us.

**Craig:** So I haven’t used it yet, but the idea is that they use an algorithm, essentially, an efficiency algorithm. You say, “Okay, here’s where I am and have this much time. What should I do?” And they basically use an algorithm, base it on your location, even the weather, the time of day, and they’re like, “The most efficient course of action would be for you to go here, see this, spend time doing this, go there, look at that, go here and then come back.” [laughs] I just kind of think it’s amazing. I haven’t used it yet but I kind of want to.

**John:** Yeah. At first, I thought it was going to be like a traveling salesman problem like they somehow optimized like how you could get to all these different destinations at one time. But it’s more sort of like, “Here’s how to have fun.” It’s Google telling you how to have fun. That’s a scary thing.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly, yeah. Soon we just won’t know how to do anything. All right. Well, that’s maybe One Cool Thing.

Here’s my actual One Cool Thing and it is for our friends at the Writers Guild Foundation. They are holding a Texas Hold ‘Em Poker tournament. That’s going to be on Friday, October 21st, from 6:00 to 11:00. I believe it’s going to be at the Guild, is that right? Yes. It’s going to be–

**John:** I don’t know where it actually is.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to be at the — in the library, I believe. And this is a charity event and it is to benefit the Veterans Writing programs, a terrific program that the Writers Guild Foundation does. Veterans Writing Project where they assist veterans who are attempting to break into our business and get writing done. It’s a fantastic cause. And it is $250. $250 — obviously, tax deductible because it’s a foundation. And you know, not paying taxes, John, makes me smart.

**John:** It makes me so smart, right?

**Craig:** It makes me smart. I’m brilliant. I’m a genius.

$250 gets you poker chips, it gets you food, it gets you refreshments. And for the first hour, if you’re familiar with how poker tournaments work, there’s $20 re-buys, which is pretty spectacular.

If you do not play poker, that’s okay. You come a little early. At 6:00 PM, there is registration and poker lessons. They’ll teach you how. I have played poker a long time and what I find is that when people show up who have never played poker before, they are the most dangerous players at the table. [laughs] You cannot read them, they do not do what they’re supposed to do, they end up beating you every time. [laughs] So if you don’t what you’re doing, trust me, you’re in better shape than I am. Show up and donate.

So again, that’s Friday, October 21st, from 6:00 to 11:00, and it’s for a spectacular cause, Writers Guild Foundation Veterans Writing Project. Side benefit, if you show up at this thing, you get to hang out with me, awesome, but also Scott Alexander of Alexander-Karaszewski, if you’re familiar with their incredible work. There’s Glenn Gordon Caron, a wonderful guy, Carlton Cuse, you might know his name, Hasson Brant, Winnie Holzman. Are you a fan of Wicked? Winnie Holzman will be there. Simon Kinberg, who writes all movies, Jay Kogen, who is one of the aforementioned founding writers of The Simpsons, Jeff Nathanson, a huge writer, Dan Petrie Jr., if you happen to like Beverly Hills Cop, and I think you do, oh, and Matthew Weiner, if you’re a Mad Men fan. So you have all these big writers there and you could sit at a table, you can take Matthew Weiner’s money.

**John:** That by itself is the whole goal.

**Craig:** That’s worth the whole thing.

**John:** I would fly back just for that. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Take it.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week. So as always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Pedro Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like Matthew’s today. For shorter questions, on Twitter, I am @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. I do check my replies even though I’m not actually reading the main feed of Twitter right now, which is kind of fun and delightful.

You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. Also, while you’re there, you can download the Scriptnotes app that gives you access to all the back catalogue. That’s through Scripnotes.net. It’s $2 a month.

A bunch of people recently have signed up for Scriptnotes.net, so thank you for all you people, premium subscribers. You guys are getting all the back episodes going back to the very beginning, even the bonus episodes, that dirty episode we did with Dan Savage and Rebel Wilson, all sorts of good stuff there.

You can find this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. And you can find the transcripts up about four days later. You can find the links to today’s episode at johnaugust.com as well or you could just scroll your app to the links below. And that’s it.

So Craig, thank you so much. It’s nice to be back.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. We’re back.

**John:** We’re back. All right. Have a good week.

**Craig:** You too. Bye.

Links:

* [Forest and Nature Ambiance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdIJ2x3nxzQ)
* [Snowstorm Ambiance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u153b2MO5Lg)
* [Howling Wind Ambiance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBUtBrk7yzo)
* [Julia Roberts to Star in PTA Mom Film](http://deadline.com/2016/09/julia-roberts-star-feature-pta-mom-framed-drug-possession-1201825590/)
* [Chuck Wendig Blog](http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2016/09/20/heres-how-to-finish-that-fucking-book-you-monster/)
* [Wikitravel](http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page)
* [Writers Guild Foundation Poker](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/texas-hold-em-poker-tournament/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Pedro Aguilera ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 269 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we will be looking at mystery versus confusion and how you might have more of the former, with less of the latter. We will also be answering listener questions on flashbacks and capitalizing on festival success. Plus we have three new entries in the Three Page Challenge. It’s going to be a big show.

**Craig:** It does already sound, and I don’t want to jinx us or anything, like the best show we’ve ever done and we’ll ever do.

**John:** You know, I’ve been scrolling through the little outline here, Craig, and you’ve got a lot of really good stuff in here. So, we will see if we can — we’ll see if we can finish as strong as we start. How about we start with a correction because I actually messed up in last’s week’s episode? I know this seems impossible because I don’t make mistakes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I did make a mistake in the very first minute of last week’s episode. I referred to Jane Bennet in Darcy. I was referring to the principal characters of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Bennet is a sister, she’s not the principal character. I really did mean Elizabeth Bennet but I think I was conflating her and confusing her with Jane Austin, the author of Pride and Prejudice. So I just wanted to actually get that out of there and make it clear that I have read Pride and Prejudice. I really do know who’s the main characters in Pride and Prejudice.

**Craig:** It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

**John:** It’s a feature. Also, I wanted to make sure that the other Jane Austin, the one who you actually get when you Google it, she’s a professor of political theory in the US and she’s going to be really confused when her name shows up in the Google news alert later today.

**Craig:** Wait, Jane Bennet is or Jane Austin is?

**John:** Jane Bennet. Did I said Jane Austin then?

**Craig:** Yeah. So again, I have to say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

**John:** Feature. So somehow, I have a form of aphasia that is limited to Jane Austin references.

**Craig:** That is so specific.

**John:** It is but it’s all I can do.

**Craig:** You know what? Should qualify you for Make a Wish.

**John:** Yeah absolutely.

**Craig:** Anything you want and —

**John:** I’m — clearly, I’m a dying child in some way. My inner child is dying.

**Craig:** We’re all dying. I have a little bit of follow-up myself. So I believe it was in our last episode where we talked about writers who had broken in from not Los Angeles, not New York, not London. And one of them was Chris Sparling. And he had mentioned in his comment that one of the things he missed was that sense of camaraderie. And I said, “Well, next time you’re out here, drinks are on me.” Guess who I had a drink with last night?

**John:** How nice.

**Craig:** Last night, it’s — very last night, Chris Morgan and I and Chris Sparling all sat down, had a drink. I didn’t even have to pay because Chris Morgan paid, which is great.

**John:** Well, he’s got that Fast and Furious money, so he should kind of always pay.

**Craig:** Yeah, he paid and it’s his own money, too. I mean, it’s got Vin Diesel’s face on it and everything.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** But it’s legal tender. Anyway, great guy, had a terrific evening with him and he got a little bit of it, a little taste.

**John:** Yeah. So do you think you’re going to get him to move out to Los Angeles? Was there any sense of that he’s going to leave Rhode Island to get out there?

**Craig:** I did broach the topic. It doesn’t seem so. First of all, he’s got a six-year-old daughter and a four-week-old son.

**John:** Yeah, that’s young.

**Craig:** So that’s, generally speaking, you’re not going nowhere and, you know, his whole thing is, look, it’s basically working, you know.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** He said every now and then it’s a little annoying, but he was out here pitching a show. And so he can always jump on a plane and get here. But I think he’s very happy living where he lives. His family is happy living where they are and it’s working for him. So I think, probably, he’s going to stay right where he is.

**John:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Before we get to our big marquee topic, which is mystery versus confusion, we have two questions from listeners. So I thought we might bang those out quickly. So first, we have a question from Matt Nai. Let’s take a listen.

Matt: So I’ve written a horror feature that I’ve submitted to a handful of film festivals and screenwriting contests. It has placed as both a finalist and quarter-finalist in four competitions so far. I’m waiting to hear back from a few others and this got me thinking, can this good news be used as any sort of leverage to pitch to studios or do they have to seek out the material? How can you make the most out of a festival win when you don’t have many contacts in Hollywood? Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.

**John:** So this sort of fits with the pattern of people who are able to get started while they were not living in Los Angeles, New York, or London is sometimes they had something that did well in a festival and it sort of started getting them some attention. The question is, what attention could Matt really expect off of some wins in these festivals?

**Craig:** Well, not much. Depending on what the festivals are. You know, we did hear from Peter Dodd the other week who said essentially that winning the Nicholl gets you at least a read. Not much else going on. Part of the problem with these festivals is that there are too many. So, essentially, none of them mean much. Everyone, it seems, has been a semi-finalist or finalist in a contest somewhere. And a little bit like that for films, too. I mean, there’s gazillions of these little film festivals. So every independent film will have 14 stamps on it with laurel leaves but you don’t know what any of it even means exactly. Is there leverage to be imparted because you’ve finished well in some festival? Not really, I mean, no. I don’t think so.

**John:** I think you’re wrong, Craig, because I think the leverage is not with like getting a studio to read it or getting a studio to consider you for other projects. I think the leverage is finding a horror filmmaker to actually make that script. So, Matt’s winning these festivals, they’re probably horror specific festivals. He needs to go to them. He needs like to see who the good directors are. This is all based on the assumption that Matt is not trying to direct this himself. But if he’s looking for a director to direct this script or one of his scripts, this is your opportunity.

So find who are those good directors, who are the ones you think can actually do something and just reach out to them because a lot of times people who are making horror films at these tiny budgets, they are looking for other good new things. And if you are that good new thing, having that stamp of approval from winning this festival might actually mean something to the people who were at that festival. So that, to me, is an opportunity. You also may have a chance to network with some, you know, other writers who actually are represented, who have managers, who have some other sort of next step and it’s a chance to sort of figure out what those options are.

So while I don’t think winning these things is going to get to you the agent, it’s not going to get you the reads at the studio, it may get you some of those early steps with meeting with a filmmaker, a meeting with a manager, something to get you going. And that’s what you should really concentrate on is how do you get something made. And it sounds like you may have written something that could get made, so try.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I can’t quibble with that. I’m just — it’s one of these things where you kind of have to look at the progressive scale of odds and ask where you are on that scale of odds. And are there other things you could be doing beyond the festivals or are things that are unrelated to the festivals that could improve your chances. And to that end, I think, figuring out how to get your script into the hands of that one person who actually can make a difference for you. That person may or may not be at that festival. If they are, that’s fantastic, and absolutely, yeah, leverage your win at the festival within the festival. Sure. But it’s unlikely that that’s going to be as valuable, I think, as, say, being in Los Angeles and handing the script to somebody who can read it or, you know, I don’t know. It’s tough. I take a little bit of a dim view on this. There’s so many festivals. Everyone is a semi-finalist. Everyone. Everyone’s born a semi-finalist of 14 screenwriting festivals.

**John:** So here’s — if a year from now, Matt has a film in production, here’s what I think would have happened, is I think he would have found a director who did something really good, who was like looking for his next thing. And someone who had done a teeny tiny thing, who is stepping up to do like a Blumhouse movie and read Matt’s script and said like, “Oh, this is great. I want to do this.” I think that is the point of inflection that he might be at, and so I think it’s worth pursuing that. But our standard blanket advice is probably accurate for Matt, as well as everybody else, is it’s going to be easier to do all of those things if you’re in Los Angeles. It’s going to be easier to do these things if you have other stuff to show rather than this one script that’s gotten some awards at festivals.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. All right. Let’s hear about Adam Tourney has to ask.

Adam Tourney: Hey, John and Craig. I wanted to get your opinion on a re-playing audio or video from earlier in a film to clarify a character’s revelation later on. Examples that spring to mind, are Steve Martin realizing that John Candy is homeless in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, or the final Keyser Soze scene in The Usual Suspects. Can this device be used effectively today or is it a clichéd cheat?

**John:** Craig, what do you think? Effective or cliché?

**Craig:** Possibly but, well, certainly cliché, possible effective. I think that all clichés are one slight twisty thing away from being okay. Sometimes, and we’ll talk about this in our main topic today, sometimes when those moments happen, they weren’t intended to happen. It’s not that someone sat down and said, “We hear these things now.”

What happens is they show the movie to an audience and people say, “We don’t get it.” And then they go, “We have to do the cliché thing so that people get it.” And if you are properly stunned in a reveal, you don’t really mind the cliché because you’re stunned. You’re like, “Wow. This is cool,” you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And because you’re actually learning what happened and it’s a big twisty surprise to you. Where it gets really clammy is when you know what it is, then the cliché is brutal. I mean, there is a certain value to that. It does work. It works when the twist works.

**John:** Yeah. And I think it has to be the twist. It has to be like look at the magic trick I just pulled on you. And like then, it’s like, “Oh, I see what that is. I see how I was misinterpreting that.” That’s great. Because then when you’re seeing that scene again, it’s not just reinforcing that idea, it’s actually reversing that idea. It’s actually showing you like things weren’t what you thought they were. And so the things he cited are, I think, great examples of replaying previous scenes to give you a new sense of the moment that you’re in right now. And I say don’t be afraid of cliché if it’s really effectively serving that moment in your story. And I think you’re going to be — you will have set out to write the kind of movie that wants to have that scene. You’re not going accidentally back into writing that kind of scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right. I mean, the value of a great twist is that it re-contextualizes everything that you’ve seen. So part of the fun is to enjoy that re-contextualization and the only way to do that is to replay something and just be happy in knowing that you’re replaying it but seeing it differently now. Don’t worry so much about being cliché or being not cliché. You know, I think sometimes people get caught up in that. If you have a great twist and that’s the best way to reveal it, it’s just when it’s clunky that it’s clunky. I don’t know how else to put it, it’s kind of a goofy thing to say but that’s how I feel.

**John:** Let’s talk about what that looks like on the page. So if you’re writing those moments in, you want the reader to have a sense of like, really, we’re still in that current moment or I’m just flashing away to those previous things. So sometimes you might repeat these scene headers from where that thing came from. So if it’s otherwise unclear. But sometimes you’re just going to repeat the action lines or the dialogue, it may make sense for your script to put all that stuff in italics just to sort of make it stand out, make it feel like this is a different texture that we’re really into a kind of flashback moment.

You’ll know what feels right for your script. You want to give the reader sense of like, “I’m doing something special here. Pay attention and it’s all going to make sense when I’m through with this section.”

**Craig:** Correct. Yeah. Anything to echo the dreamy quality of the dream that you’re doing, I mean, right, because all of these moments are dreamy. You’re being very internal to the character. This is something that’s inside their mind so give us that sense and then you’ll be fine. You know, there are ways to do it that aren’t quite so down the middle cliché, you know. Things that you can do or you can even describe in terms of the visuals. They almost look like they’re a water painting or they’re de-saturated or they’re in black and white. You just do something but, yeah, you know.

**John:** You will do it. So a genre which I see this in a lot are sort of the Agatha Christie mysteries, which at the very end, like Hercule Poirot, like piecing together what actually happened and we get to see like all these little snippets from previous things like, “Oh, that’s when all the stuff was happening.” Which ties very well into Craig’s marquee topic which is mystery versus confusion. So, Craig, get us started why should we care about mystery?

**Craig:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers we’re trying to do something and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything?

Well, because, oh well, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things. And we get maybe a little distracted by the word mystery because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative. The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?” Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character,” or “Why did she say that,” or “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more because we want to see what’s happening. And so often they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human, it’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious, we insist upon knowing certain things. If you walk down the street and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, you want to — there’s no decision to want to know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right? So, let’s as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of like the crowd outside the store and it’s blacked out windows, if our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating and we would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing.

Which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered, or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient, and sort of frustrated, and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much and that’s the thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished in general because people are too busy staring at boobs and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part.

So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs because then it just — it’s like, I’m confused, I’m distracted. So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction — and I know you’re distracted, I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery, it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story.

And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then, it’s not really mystery, then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows. This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it and I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways, I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking. I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening and I don’t know why they’re happening so now I’m getting really worried and distracted. And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** If I’m watching a David Lynch film and [laughs] suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be confused — this is abstract, okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think I’m not supposed to be confused right now and I am so confused.

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie and that can be a real thing, that can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved. And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form what moments were you confused in a bad way? Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that like pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for like this wasn’t just — this wasn’t intriguing, this was annoying. I didn’t know what was actually happening here.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. What — there is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away. And that answers will be revealed and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Everything single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful. And what you said before about you feel like if I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion. And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery and after you’ve seen one of these movies you recognize like, in the third act, they will confront the mystery and they will — there’ll be little tiny mysteries but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour you’re going to know who the killer is and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long, arc stories of an Alias or a Lost where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling, that you had a sense of like are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important I think to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment. And so very kind of broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, okay, who’s her? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do? Very simple, very easy, and, you know, then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” Did you do it? I did it. And? It was hard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s it? Oh, I have to know. [laughs] What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our pick a card, any card. People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s a flashbulb. It’s not even a — it’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that will never solve for you. Just like what does Scarlett Johansson whisper — or Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter because you will never know and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to and the situations where I see it is, you enter into like two characters having a conversation and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or like how the actors actually changed some words but it makes it seem like they’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, wait, is — are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is? So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery but if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people, we — I mean, when you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right? You are now involved and that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved. There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that I’m personally — I love this version when I see it and every now and then I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at any, you know, at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something and the character lies, and we know they’re lying because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here and I’m curious what that is. Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all, it’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just like look at the lines and you’re like, oh, wait, he says this but on this page with this and the other page, if you don’t somehow single out that like this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap. I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will like forget like oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there, that’s a lie there. And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.

So this is a case where the slightly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores like that she’s a terrific liar. Something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, like, remember, this is not actually the truth here.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s later on when you want to think, okay, maybe somebody has forgotten or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie, are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, so if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, okay, you’re a liar, why? [laughs] I need to know, right? So this is a good little mini mystery.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** You can have — similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object like the briefcase–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** –in Pulp Fiction. Or, you know, someone is like — you got a camera looking — here’s a little mystery at the end of Inglourious Basterds. You have — I mean, it’s not much of mystery because you can pretty much see it coming but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak actually. I think it’s a–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak, looking up at them, looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa and they’re talking about it and we are the perspective so we don’t know what it is but they’re talking about it and then we reveal the answer to the mystery.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is just — listen, it may seem inevitable to you because that’s how you saw the movie, it was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do and it’s the what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information.

So in this idea, someone asks someone a question and they get an answer and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us and that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it, creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” and the person goes, “Oh, yeah.” And the person asking the question says thank you, walks outside and starts crying.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What? Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Why does George — what — who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things could get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment — like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectation. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” Like no you’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not-not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do — we should do and must do everything we can, to create that movie and if that means that we are directing on the page — in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

Does that mean — I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle — no. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen.

So the short-term mystery, so there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?”

Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person which is okay or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are for some reason slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Well, okay, I — what’s — why are they doing that? And obviously they’re going to light it up but why are they going to light it on fire and what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries — I kind of think of those as like middle of the movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on and there are some characters with relationships who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t, they know secret motivations, they know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it. This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward.

It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So these are good little middle of the movie things. The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident,” you know, but—

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yeah. But typically they are slightly more interesting than that and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term hang a lantern on things and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice like I’m doing something here — so yes you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here and I’m going to be doing something with it later on.

Like — you are like — you are marking this for follow up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. Like you’ve done the right job there because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful and that’s a great way of like the mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or you — your main character has a scar and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, hmm, and then maybe somebody else asked “Where did you get that?”

If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar — it won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to be — then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing, if I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the kind of character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? Like they are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie like we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about like a plot mystery and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little, meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water which is in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it but there’s a long-term mystery that — which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that like you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it.

Like, yes they’re doing it to get money but there’s — there clearly is a specific reason and there’s a plan but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time — like much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s like it’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on like what their actual plan is, is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, like practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s take a look at our Three Page Challenge because two of these actually have that sort of mystery versus confusion issue as I read them, so let’s see what you guys think.

So the Three Page Challenge, if you’re new to this, every couple of weeks we take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts that they send in. So these are scripts written by listeners. They’re almost always features, sometimes they’re TV pilots. If you’d like to send in your own, you can visit johnaugust.com/threepages and there’s a whole set of rules for like how you submit your pages.

If you’d like to read along with us, the PDFs of these pages are attached to this episode. So you can go to the show notes at johnaugust.com or just scroll your little player and you’ll be able to click the link and like read along with us as we take a look at these.

So most weeks, you and I read aloud these descriptions, and it’s honestly one of my least favorite things to do because it just feels so boring for us to be just reading these descriptions aloud. So I thought it’d be fun to have somebody else do this for us and so I wanted to turn to a familiar voice — a trusted voice — a voice who is beloved by Americans for many, many seasons now, it is Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor. So he offered to read these descriptions aloud, let’s start with On Tic by Gabrielle Mentjox.

**Jeff Probst:** We open on a door. Crystal, a woman in her 20s, opens the door and exchanges cash for two small tinfoil packages. This repeats a few times until one dissatisfied stoner charges inside the apartment claiming he’s been ripped off. Crystal tries to get him to leave but the stoner isn’t budging.

Crystal’s roommate, Chantal, overhears the chaos. She turns on the stereo and joins Crystal in the hallway. She asks what’s going on. And as they argue back and forth, a dog starts growling in the background. Chantal mentions how Bruce is hungry and doesn’t like strangers.

The stoner bolts. Trouble averted, Crystal and Chantal smoke weed from a homemade bong.

Outside, a crappy Nissan drives on the streets of small town New Zealand. Chantal rummages through the kitchen for food while Crystal messes about on Instagram. A car pulls up. An orthopedic shoes steps onto the pavement and we reached the bottom of page three.

**John:** How cool is that?

**Craig:** Well — I mean this is the best version of Survivor there is, right? I mean, it’s better than people on an island. These are — they’re writing things to survive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you and I may take their torch away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ah, Jeff Probst.

**John:** Jeff Probst. Craig, what did you think of On Tic?

**Craig:** Right. So first all, I’m fascinated by Gabrielle Mentjox because I’m trying to figure out like how do you pronounce Mentjox? It can’t just be Ment-jox. It’s got to be — I don’t know — something else.

One thing that was really interesting was that Gabrielle, I believe, is from New Zealand and her story takes place there. And she includes a little mention of the specific slang on the cover page to describe what a Tinnie is. And a Tinnie is 20 dollars’ worth of marijuana wrapped in aluminum foil, which I actually thought was kind of helpful.

And a good example was somebody going like, “Oh, I don’t really care what the orthodox nonsense is. I need people to know what I need them to know.” So generally speaking, I thought this was pretty good. I mean it was — I saw everything. I really enjoyed the description of Crystal. It hit all of my hair, make-up, wardrobe notes.

So I could see people and the scene moved in an interesting way. I was moving around the space in an interesting way. I was feeling and seeing things. Ultimately my issue with the scene is just that I have seen it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ve just seen this. There is something generally dissatisfying I think about overpowered heroes. And this situation where it’s like, “Well, we’ve got a dog. So beat it.” And, “Oh, God. Okay.” It doesn’t feel very dramatic. It just feels kind of, you know.

**John:** So Craig, here’s a mystery versus a confusion question for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The way I read it is that there is no dog and that she was turning on the stereo and have a recording of a dog but there’s no actual dog and that’s why Gabrielle like singles out that the roommate Chantal goes into the next room and turns on that stereo. I think that was what was actually playing is the recording of the dog. Is that not what you read?

**Craig:** I didn’t know that. I didn’t understand that at all. Because dog — maybe it’s – the problem is — I mean, I suppose that’s possible. But she turns on the stereo. What year is this? Maybe that’s part of the problem, like who has a stereo that they turn on and then there’s — that’s the dog recording on the stereo.

I would have to see — I would have to hear the sound of it right then and there for the reader, at least I think to know, “Oh, okay the sound is coming out of that.” Especially because the dog sound gets louder as they’re talking. So–

**John:** Yeah. So my belief was that Chantal as she was coming into the room, she turned that on and it’s basically they have a plan. They basically have this dog recording that gets louder and louder that they can use to freak out people who are like thinking about breaking in to the house.

So I read these pages with that in my mind and like, “Oh, well, that’s kind of clever. Like these girls are smarter than, you know, your average young drug dealers.” Maybe. Or at least they have a plan. But if you didn’t catch that, and you just thought like was there a dog there somewhere — meh — it’s lost its spark.

**Craig:** Yeah. To be honest with you, now that I’m reading it this way where that’s what’s going on, I’m also a little bit meh about it because it feels frankly like a very thin plan. What it does is it makes their foe, angry stoner, not quite formidable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If now I live in a world where people are easily faked out by stuff like that. And I don’t know. You know, here’s the thing — I liked all of the writing, you know.

**John:** Yeah, so do I.

**Craig:** So I think that the good news is, Gabrielle writes characters well. They were — they were distinct. It moved around. It was visual. It’s really what it is that I think the scene is missing like plus the concept now. You just want to plus that concept.

So if the idea is how can I show that these two women are really good at dealing with problems, even problem they cause, like ripping people-off, I want them to be smarter than this. This just isn’t that smart. So I need more clever, you know?

**John:** Cool. I do want to single out some of her good writing. So, this is on Page three, and this is a description of the residential strait.

“A hypnotic doof doof base blasts from the stereo. We’re in a beat-up Nissan, cruising up a typical street in small-town New Zealand. We pass paint-chipped state houses sitting atop bare quarter-acre sections.” Great, I got a visual there, I got a sense of what this feels like. I like the doof. This felt good, this felt competent. I do think Gabrielle can write. I’m just curious to see what would happen next, and where is this all going? It reminds me a bit of Go, my first movie, in a way that I really like. I love sort of young plucky dealers. It’s sort of my thing.

**Craig:** Young, plucky drug dealers are great, New Zealand is great. By the way, I started watching Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Yeah, Kate & Kate, one of the Kates’ One Cool Thing.

**John:** I do want to single out some things on page one, which needs a re-look. So first paragraph, a “young woman’s face peers out, eyebrows raised. This is CRYSTAL (20s, skinny, eyebrows plucked super thin.” Just repeating eyebrows twice, didn’t feel like the best choice. Like we’re only three lines in and we repeated a body part.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The same thing happens about midway through the page. Angry stoner’s parenthetical says, “Arms folded, staunch,” and then like Crystal stands up, staunched trying to block this guy. Staunch is sort of weird word anyway. So to use it twice in such close proximity, find some different adjectives there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. And even if staunch weren’t a weird word, you kind of have to do put separation between these things. No big deal. There are a lot of arms folded, and standing tall.

So the angry stoner has his arms folded, staunch. And then, Chantal has arms folded standing tall. So there’s quite a bit of that. And I don’t think that’s probably that necessary. There are ways to do these things sometimes, for instance — and sometimes, you I think about how the lines are falling. On the bottom of this first page, the action says, “Chantal strides down the hallway towards Crystal and angry stoner.”

Now the word stoner has spilled over to the second line. Wonderful, we now have the rest of that line to do stuff for free. [Laughs] So Chantal strides down the hallway towards Crystal and angry stoner. She gets big in the doorway, as big as she can in the doorway, you know, stares him down. And then, we can get rid of that parenthetical and just have what seems to be the problem here.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That sort of thing. So yeah. You should be on duplicate patrol as you’re going through. You know, just again, take a look at this dialogue in the middle of page two, and if you’re going to stick with the dog, when they’re talking about the dog, maybe it would be better here if they weren’t so on the nose about their own rouse, or by the way, not rouse if it’s not a rouse. I think Bruce is ready for his walk, or was it his feed. Oh, oh god, the dog is going to eat me. Isn’t it more of a con artist-y thing, if one them was like, what is wrong with the dog? And like — I don’t know. Well —

**John:** Did you feed him?

**Craig:** Exactly. No I didn’t feed him. Did you fed him yesterday? Oh my god, I didn’t feed him yesterday either. Oh, oh, sorry. We got a very hungry, very big dog in there. I’m sorry what were you asking about? You know, like there’s got to be a more — they just got to be smarter I think. If they’re going to be pulling one over on this dude because then I’m more impressed. Because right now, really, instead of being impressed with them, I’m just unimpressed with the angry stoner.

**John:** The last thing I’ll say is if I’m reading this correctly and the dog is just on the stereo, let us know that’s actually the case, because right now there is nothing to indicate that. So I would say, she turns on the stereo, oddly, there’s no music, like you can say like oddly there because it gives us a sense of we’re going to hang back a bit and it’s weird like that there’s no actual music playing, or at some point there’s a cut away to the stereo and we see like the little bars going up and down. That the dog is just on a stereo.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Otherwise, there’s no pay-off to something that, I think, your setup that could be quite clever.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s go back to our favorite host of a reality TV program. Jeff Probst who’s going to talk us through The Beast with 1,000 Faces by Jesse Gouldsbury and Brendan Steere.

**Jeff Probst:** 17-year-old North Stewart is confused why his parent are sending him away to space camp. His mom explains that North needs some time away. His dad says they need a break, too, especially from North‘s 19-year-old sister, Triss. Triss teases North for getting sent to space camp until she finds out, she’s going too. She’s pissed but she knows there’s no way out of it.

After a bus ride, we find North and Triss in a space shuttle. They’re in space, yet it all looks quite ordinary, much like a standard airplane, passengers sleep with their windows down. At the bottom of page three, we arrive at a common room in the dormitory.

**John:** Great. So Craig, this to me had some real confusion issues. Not mystery, but confusion. I didn’t know where I was at as the story ended. I didn’t know if I was in space or on a bus and that’s really a problem on page three.

**Craig:** I got that I was in space. And, well, first, I was on a bus and then I was in space.

**John:** I don’t think you’re in space at the end there, Craig.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** So we’re going to skip to the end here. So let me talk you through – I’ll actually read aloud what happens on page three. So North and sister are being sent away to camp. So then we’re exterior, road — day. North rides along, looking out the window of a school bus. Match cut. Interior, the shuttle — day. North is looking out the window of a space shuttle, in space. He’s sitting near his sister in what looks like a run down, but very commercialized space shuttle. Things look no more extreme than people flying in an airplane. Most people are sleeping, windows are down, etc.

North listens to his headphones, our camera rotates 360 degrees around his face as we hear J-pop beats.

Title card: “The Beast With 1,000 Faces”

We push back into North’s face. Match cut to INT. COMMON ROOM — DAY. The middle point of the ships with four walls, each side with a door. Looks like a dormitory common room designed by that RA who loves Star Trek.

So I read this as the match cut to the shuttle was his sort of fantasy version of like being on the bus, and then we’re in the common room of the ship’s four walls. Then like, this is all like a set basically. This isn’t real. That was my confusion three pages in, partly because I didn’t believe we’re in a world where they could be in space, because the first paragraphs felt so real world grounded.

**Craig:** Okay, you may be right. Now, I read it as he’s going to space and that going to space is a very mundane thing like taking a plane to study abroad in Madrid. And so, now, I would have made a bigger deal out of the reveal of space because — I mean, I think it’s okay to show that the characters themselves don’t give a damn. But we need to make clear like, just throwing on “in space” at the end of a sentence is probably not great also. I don’t like it when people talk about day and night in space, because it is very confusing to everybody. Really. If I start a slug line with INT. THE SHUTTLE – DAY, I think, okay, they’re on a launching pad. They’re going to be launching.

So I think that that’s what going on. I think that the idea here is we live in a time in the future when going to space is no big deal, it’s like going to camp.

**John:** But see, I’ve got no evidence that we are in the future whatsoever at the start. I think that’s my frustration is that if we are truly in space, there was nothing to tip me off to the fact that we could be going into space in the first two pages. Because what we’re given is INT. NORTH’S LIVING ROOM — NIGHT. Close on his face basically. We have his mom and his dad, but we have no information that this could be something other than present day. The most that we have is that, the room around them looks like it was decorated by someone raised in 2005. Okay, I guess that could be a person — I guess, we could be in the future– maybe that’s how they they’re trying to tip me off that like, we are in the future, but there’s nothing else that’s telling me that I’m in the future. So then when I’m suddenly in space, I’m not loving it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you are definitely dealing with confusion there. So mystery is why are these people talking about sending their child into space? And the child is reacting like petulantly as opposed to with shock and fear. Okay, this is going to pay-off certainly. They are in the future and people go into space in the future. What is confusing is when you decide that it would be funny if your future people had retro-style because now it’s just — now, you know what a room that looks like it was designed by people raised in 2005 looks like? It looks like right now. Because we don’t know what the hell that means. It just means now.

**John:** Yeah. So the writers could totally choose to do that, but at some point between leaving that room and getting on the bus, at some point you got to show me something. We’re like, we’re driving by like, you know, in the first Star Trek movie, the first of the new series of Star Trek movies, like the motorcycle goes by this giant like quarry kind of thing where they’re building a spaceship. Like, that tells me like — oh, okay we’re in the future. But nothing here was telling me the future until I’m suddenly in space, and I don’t believe that I’m in space.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also there’s this thing that happens I think where Jesse and Brendan are trying to get this across again, on page two, when North’s sister Triss says, “You listen to classic rock, North. You like that turn-of-the-century crap, you weirdo.” But, you know, classic rock wasn’t turn-of-the-century. It was like ‘60s and ‘70s, so did they mean, turn of the century, the next century? But then, that wouldn’t be — is that what the classic rock is? Because then she says, Wheatus and I don’t know Wheatus. So maybe it’s a hundred but that’s a lot of math you’re asking me to do, and I don’t want to do math. I just want to absorb and engage as I can.

**John:** Don’t make me do math.

**Craig:** Don’t make me — here’s another thing that happens on page two. Again, these are the choices about how to indicate to us what’s going on. So they’re trying, right? It’s just not quite landing. Triss is complaining about the camp, the space camp that they’re being sent to. And by the way, space camp can’t possibly be what people will call space camp in the future. Space camp is what people that don’t have space camp talk about space camp. So she’s going to —

**John:** It’s like a tautology. It’s actually completely true and brilliant, but like you know, space camp is only for people who don’t have space camp.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. Once you have space camp, it has a name, that’s a more interesting name than space camp. Because presumably, there’s more than one space camp. Even they say, there’s more than one space camp. So how could you possibly call it space camp? It’s like going to shopping mall. But she’s complaining about the space camp that they’re sending her to. And North says, she’s kind of right, though. It has the lowest FLERP score out of the orbital camps. Okay, so I get it, we’re in the future now. There’s orbital camps, but —

**John:** Craig, Craig. By the way, Craig is right. I’m reading this now, clearly, we are supposed to be in the future.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re in the future, but FLERP score is not good. Because it’s not funny, but it’s definitely not serious.

**John:** Yeah. It has a joke-oid problem where it kind of feels like a joke, but it’s not actually funny. So therefore, it feels like a joke that didn’t work.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it also has a tone problem and these are — remember, we always say that these are the pages where you’re instructing the audience how to watch your movie. And what you’re telling them here is, this is a silly movie. The reality is silly. It’s so silly that they call space camp “space camp.” And there’s a score called the FLERP score. Nothing matters here.

**John:** So let’s talk about stuff on page one and this runner about things. And so mom says, “Well, we thought it would be fun for you and your sister to have some time away from things. And for us to have some time away from things, too. Mostly your sister.” So from this point forward, things is referring to the sister, but I think we’re going to need to stick in some quotes for a moment there, because otherwise it’s too easy to miss what they’re actually trying to say. So when dad’s line says, “Well, you’re a responsible young man, and when you’re both up there, we’d like you to keep an eye on things.” You have to break that word things out, it could be like with dot dot dot. It could be with some quotes, but you have to indicate that we’re not saying things as a throwaway place holder, it really is meant to refer to the sister who’s sitting right there.

**Craig:** Yes. Part of the struggle that I think you were having and I had, too, in terms of placing this in a sense of time is that this discussion that they’re having is so mundane and weirdly 1950s. That you’re so confused about the time of it all. They are talking like 1950s parents. Weirdly, there are these little subliminal problems that are occurring. His mom and dad (50s — Janeane Garofalo and John C. Reilly). So already the word 50s is in my head, which is a bad thing for a movie that’s set — I got 50s then I’ve got 2005. Also, you keep telling me who these actors are.

Now in general, I’m not going to freak out about this when people say think this person, think that person. But if you’re setting a movie in the future and you’re trying to play a little bit of a confusing mystery game about what year this is with people, this will not help you.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Because when you get to Triss and you say think Anna Kendrick in Pitch Perfect, I’m now thinking it’s 2015, that’s who I’m seeing in my head. Plus she has headphones on. Do they have headphones in the future? I mean we don’t even have headphones now, right?

**John:** Yeah, yeah. Here’s the issues, like the writers are trying to have it both ways. So like you say Janeane Garofalo and John C. Reilly like, oh, okay, those are maybe people you would actually cast in this movie, but you can’t cast Anna Kendrick as 19 years old because she’s not 19 years old. So are you sort of giving us the casting suggestion? Or are you showing us a type? And you kind of can’t do both. You’ve got to make one choice here and like this is not a realistic choice. So like Triss, 19, like the world’s worst Disney princess. Like give us something like that that give us an overall type for her. But I would not like try to give her an actress call out because it’s just not going to make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. So we got some problems here.

**John:** We got some big problems here, but guys, thank you for sending it in.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s go to our final Three Page Challenge this week and hear what Jeff Probst has to say about this untitled script by Mitchell LeBlanc.

**Jeff Probst:** In the vastness of space, we encounter a large derelict starship. The quarters are empty, as are the crew quarters, and the social area. The only sign of life is Atom, a humanoid robot. Atom tinkers with a disassembled computer, ripping out fried parts and using a replicator to produce new ones. He puts it all together and it works. Sad music plays throughout the ship. Atom moves on to the upper quarter, where he cleans the observation deck, then back to the social area where he makes a meal he can’t eat.

Later Atom plays ping-pong by himself, and chess. He paints a perfect copy of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. His battery runs low, time for sleep. He turns off the music, hours pass, then another day begins.

**John:** So Craig, I kind of loved this. I’m hoping that you liked it as much as I did. My biggest concern which I suspect will be everyone’s biggest concern is that I saw the movie WALL-E.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it kind of feels like Mitchell also saw the movie WALL-E. And so that is a reasonable concern that you have a robot who’s just going about the business of trying to live a normal life. And yet, I really enjoyed these three pages. And I was curious to read what was going to happen next. And I liked Mitchell’s overall writing style. It was a very spare kind of thing. It felt kind of like animation, but in a way that I kind of dug. What did you think of these pages?

**Craig:** Listen, I’m with you. If I had not seen WALL-E, I would be dancing a jig right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And listen, it’s not like there isn’t value here, but so much of the value does feel borrowed. I’m struggling to give as much credit as I would here, because it just feels the pace, the moments, the tone, it all feels borrowed. It feels like I’m watching a copy of another thing.

Now, I love how much white space there is, I love it. I love this kind of writing, I love the way that Mitchell uses bold to best effect and puts little dashes in, and onomatopoeia, and italics, and lot and lots of hitting the return key, I love that. I love, love, love. These were a joy – actually, these three pages read so easily and breezily. But, I’ve seen this movie.

**John:** But the thing is we may not have seen this movie because like at the bottom of page three, we’re just setting up the basic world of this character. And so like Sam Rockwell in Moon is sort of like in a WALL-E type of situation. There’s other movies where like, you know, we’re in a spaceship and things are kind of this way. I mean the start of Passengers, I haven’t read the script, but it might feel similar kind of way. So we’re only seeing through page three, so I think my good news for Mitchell is I really want to see pages four through 10 to see if your movie is WALL-E or if it’s actually very, very different. And it could be delightfully different, it could be a romance, it could be something I’m totally not anticipating. And I’m very curious to read those next pages because I really liked what I have read so far.

**Craig:** Well, sure. And I agree with you on that. I mean, look the WALL-E problem isn’t — you’re right, there are a lot of movies about someone alone in isolation, sadly whiling away the time. What set WALL-E apart was that it was a robot. That was the thing, right? So it’s — that’s this. Even if it’s not WALL-E after this, it’s a problem that it’s WALL-E now, pages one through three. Because anyone in the world reading this script is going to go, oh, it’s WALL-E. That’s not what you want, you know, when you’re starting to read a script. You just don’t want that.

**John:** You don’t want that. So if you’re concerned about the WALL-E, which I think you should be aware that it’s going to be a concern, I would look at sort of like removing like the sad music playing. Pick certain threads and like, you know, look at sort of how WALL-E sets things up and like just go a different direction. And so like take out that sad music, take out a little of the art, take out a little of something. Make us curious about this character more than just sort of like marveling at this person’s beautiful loneliness.

**Craig:** Yeah. Precisely. It just felt so, so WALL-E. I will say this is a great example of what I think of as good mystery, that we’ll call is a good short term mystery.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The vastness of space –first of all, in the black, the vastness of space, not space — day. So thank you. In the black, the vastness of space and then clink. Then interior, bios II, echoing through the large derelict starship, which by the way is clever in itself. You interior something, what the hell is that for the reader. And then, you answer, large derelict starship. The corridor is empty. Clank. Nobody in the crew quarters. Clink. Or in the medical bay. Clink.

I know what you’re doing here, I can see the movie, I see these big like Kubrick-style wide shots of just empty rooms with a little electrical hum. But then, there’s this noise, what is that noise? Who’s doing the noise? And then we find Atom. It even sounds like – like Atom, Eva, WALL-E, clank. A humanoid robot tinkers. His casing resembles a white spacesuit. Cute. A digital panel for a face, but it’s powered off. I wasn’t quite able to see what that meant, a digital panel for a face.

**John:** I think it basically has an iPad for a face, but there’s not – it’s just a black glass.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. WALL-E. WALL-E

**John:** WALL-E. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if I have any of like word objections, it’s literally the second line of clink. The minute I hear clink — what do you think of a –what clinks?

**Craig:** Ice cubes.

**John:** Glasses, ice cubes, it’s all about like a drink. And so if it started with a clank rather than a clink, I know this seems like so petty and minor, but if it went clank, clink, like starting with a clink makes me think like someone is toasting with Champagne. And so it pulled me out of the next couple of lines, because I thought like, oh, wait, is it glass? No, it’s something else. So I know that’s so tiny and unimportant, but literally starting with a clank would have helped me out here a little bit on page one.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I like a nice clunk.

**John:** Yeah. Clunks are good too. The other places where I wanted a little bit more — and so all of this is so spare on the page. If you are not reading this, you know, because you’re driving your car, it’s worth pulling this up as a PDF because almost everything we’re seeing here are single lines. On page two, the daily routine. Atom, gardens in the oxygen garden, cleans glass in the observation deck, analyzes readouts on the bridge. These were the only places where I felt like I was being shortchanged a little bit. What does an oxygen garden look like? Throw us a line about the oxygen garden, throw us a line about the observation deck, throw us a line about the bridge.

We need to have a little bit more painting of our world here because at this point you’re just like, you know, what? Are we supposed to look at the storyboards? Like, gives us a little bit better sense like what is specific about your ship versus the sort of Kubrick ship that I’m picturing in my head.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. Also, if you can avoid the — on top of page three, passing an old photo of Atom with the crew. Where are they? If you can avoid the photo, if there’s another way, even if it’s just a wall that shows captain, dadada, like you know, employee of the month kind of wall, something. There’s something about the old photo that is very cliché. So if there’s another way around it.

**John:** I would love to see like a burnt section of the wall like even if he just goes pass that. Like something to say like, oh, something really terrible happened here. I’m not trying to write his story for him, but like something that indicates like, oh, there’s something really bad that we could go to.

**Craig:** Atom, drifts through a blood soaked room.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Finds his way to a ping-pong table. Very good.

**John:** I really hope — I hope Atom killed everybody on the ship. That’s my secret hope.

**Craig:** Well, listen. Clink.

**John:** Then it’s not WALL-E.

**Craig:** Clink.

**John:** I heard the first cut of WALL-E was much darker, a lot murder.

**Craig:** There’s just blood everywhere.

**John:** All right. So those are our Three Page Challenges for this week. Thank you to all the writers who wrote in. And thank you for the people who have written in with samples that we have not gotten to on the air. You’re all fantastic. Godwin does read all of them, so he picked these three, but he might pick yours next time through. Extra special thanks to Jeff Probst for reading aloud these descriptions. That was so much fun. And again, if you have your own Three Page Challenge that you want to send in, it’s johnaugust.com/three page. And if you want to read what we just talked about, those are in the show notes for this next week.

It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing this week is a book that I’ve been reading for forever. And I kind of put it down, I pick it up, and I’m like, oh, I could still keep reading this book. It is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s already a bestseller, you know, Obama recommended it. And people compared it a lot to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Did you read that, Craig?

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** Yes. Did you like it?

**Craig:** Nope. [laughs]

**John:** Everyone likes it except Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I found it weirdly — I didn’t like it. I won’t even go into why. I was unimpressed with its lack of self-critique.

**John:** I suspect you would like parts of this book and disagree with parts of this book. But the parts I liked so much about it were really getting into the origins of humankind. So a hundred thousand years ago, there are a lot of competing strains of humans running around the world. So like we know about the Neanderthals but there are other kind of humans that could have come to the foreground and they didn’t. And so he’s really looking at sort of why our little branch of this big tree became so dominant. And it wasn’t just our hands and our brains and our language. But he makes a compelling case that it’s our ability to hold metaphor is a crucial aspect to sort of why we were able to organize into such large societies.

So if you have a small group, a tribe, like it can only get to a certain size because there could be a leader, and if that leader is not there, it sort of all falls apart. But with our ability to have metaphors, we can think of a king who we’ve never met. And that we can be in service to a person we’ve never ever seen before. We can have these bigger structures.

And he makes the case that our ability to have metaphor is something really unique of all animals, and that’s probably the reason why we’re able to do so many things we’ve done in such a very short period of time. So as I was reading it, I kept thinking about sort of the acceleration of culture and how as screenwriters and storytellers, we are so responsible for pushing things forward and pushing things faster, especially in our science fiction. We keep describing these things that don’t quite exist and I think because we describe them, we sort of pressure them into existence even faster. So I really dug that section of it. So if you have it on your Kindle and you’ve not read it yet, I would say, open it up and take a look at it. So Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

**Craig:** Excellent. Sounds good. I’ll check it out.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Jeff Probst.

**John:** Jeff Probst, all right.

**Craig:** Jeff Probst. [laughs]

**John:** Are you watching the new season? I just started last night. So he sent me like a code for like an all access thing, but we already bought the season on iTunes, so we’re watching it here in Paris.

**Craig:** No, but I believe my wife — I don’t watch TV, John. I think we’ve established that. [laughs]

**John:** I always forget. That’s right. Yeah.

**Craig:** Or listen to podcasts. [laughs]

**John:** This season is Millennials vs. Gen X. And I will say that after the first episode, I found it strange that like it’s as if Gen X is like the greatest generation. Like it’s as if like we fought a war or something. Like we’re the ones who work hard and do all that stuff. It’s like, no, we were kind of lazy and entitled in our own time, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just compared to Millennials, we’re the greatest generation. [laughs]

**John:** Ahhh.

**Craig:** Millennials.

**John:** Our show is produced and edited by two Millennials, Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And our outro this week comes from Matthew Chilelli, our editor.

If you have an idea for an outro — not an idea for an outro — if you have actual music as an outro, you can send it in to ask@johnaugust.com. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. I’m on Instagram, also @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this and all episodes at johnaugust.com, just search for the episode title. It’s also where you’ll find our transcripts. I think we are going to get the transcripts back on schedule in a week or two. So if they’re not there, hold tight, they will be coming. You can find all the back episodes on scriptnotes.net, which is $2 a month for all the back episodes and all the special episodes, and the dirty episodes, everything we’ve ever done is basically at scriptnotes.net. You will find it there. There’s also a USB drive, which are now back in stock. There’s a link in the show notes, but it’s just store.johnaugust.com. And we’ll send you a USB drive that has all that stuff on it as well.

And Craig, I think that’s our show.

**Craig:** Fantastic show.

**John:** Fantastic. Craig, may your torch not be extinguished in the spirit of Jeff Probst.

**Craig:** I know what that means. [laughs]

**John:** Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

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* Three Pages by [Mitchell LeBlanc](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/UntitledLeBlanc.pdf)
* Send us your [Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind](http://amzn.to/2d3iavK)
* [Jeff Probst](http://www.jeffprobst.com/)
* [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)
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* [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_269.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/stranger-things-and-other-things).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 266 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we will be looking at the Netflix series Stranger Things and the writing choices that made it work so well. The WGA elections are upon us again, so Craig will tell you who to vote for. Finally, we will be tackling four recent articles in the news and asking our favorite question: how would this be a movie?

For the first time, all the stories we’re looking at come from listener suggestions, so thank you.

And, Craig, we’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back. You are currently in Europa.

**John:** I’m in Europe.

**Craig:** We are now separated by how many hours? Nine?

**John:** Nine hours. So it is nine in the morning as you’re recording this. It is 6PM as I’m recording this. I guess that’s our first bit of follow up. At the last episode, I was about to get on a plane to Paris. And I didn’t chicken out. I did it. So I’m now here. I’ve been here 10 days. It’s all going really well.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. And you at 6PM and me at 9AM, we should be roughly the same amount of tired.

**John:** It should be. I’m about ready for some dinner, and then some winding down, and heading into bed. And you’ve got a whole day ahead of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. But also probably ready for wine and a wind me down. I like to wake up and immediately start winding down.

**John:** One of the things I found challenging about being in Paris this time is usually when I’m here it’s vacation, so like, sure, let’s have wine at lunch. Sure, let’s have ice cream every day. And actually living here, that’s not a sustainable lifestyle, at least for me. So, I’m having to learn how to pace myself. And what living in Paris John is like versus vacationing in Paris John.

**Craig:** God, you know, I never thought of that. But it’s true. You’re in a different country and you think, all right, well, it’s the weekend. Let’s go do four things until we’re deadbeat. Eat way too much. And then have somebody clean our room. Nah. That ain’t happening.

**John:** Exactly. There’s none of that. I’ve had to learn how to do very basic Parisian things, like go to IKEA to buy the desk I need that I’m recording this podcast at. I’ll be sure to include a photo in the show notes of the desk setup I got, because I had to buy a children’s desk, because all of the desks are too big. I could only use a child’s desk in this apartment.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Your little, little child’s desk.

**John:** I’m a little child.

**Craig:** Is it the [Sturmfuhrer]? Is it the–? No, what is it called?

**John:** It’s the Pahl desk. It’s the P-A-H-L, but with a circumflex – not a circumflex, the two dots above the A. The Pahl desk is what I have.

**Craig:** Pahl.

**John:** So, you know, I had to go shopping for school supplies. I’ve had to do lots of really normal Parisian things.

**Craig:** And how are you doing language wise? Are you hanging in there?

**John:** I’m getting by. It’s slowly coming back to me. So, I can get by in French, I’m just not a natural French speaker. And so the goal is to be able to sort of answer back more smoothly as people talk to me. But people can speak at me full speed and I can usually understand what they’re saying.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s pretty good. For folks who are kind of familiar with Paris, there are all the Arrondissements, which are sort of confusing. They’re laid out like a snail. The easiest way to think about where I am in the city is you know how you see those tourist photos of people near the Eiffel Tower. There’s like a great big lawn and they’re usually taking a photo where it looks like they’re pinching the Eiffel Tower or plucking the Eiffel Tower through forced perspective. You know all those really annoying photos?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I live right near where all those people take those annoying photos. So, that’s who I see every morning as I cut through the park.

**Craig:** Every morning you see Tower pinchers?

**John:** I see Tower pinchers.

**Craig:** God. You start yelling at them out your window now.

**John:** Tourists!

**Craig:** Go back to your country! Swine!

**John:** Swine!

**Craig:** Because, you know, French people speak English, but with a French accent. I don’t know if you knew that? That’s what French is. It’s accented English. Yeah.

**John:** Very true. Well, actually, you know the British accent is just American English and they just change a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. They make it silly.

**John:** They make it silly. Yeah.

Two episodes ago we had Peter Dodd on, the UTA agent. And he said that agents read the Nicholls finalists, but they don’t necessarily read the semifinalists and quarter-finalists. And he said there are thousands and thousands of semifinalists. Greg Beal from the Academy wrote in and sort of gave us the real numbers. So, here’s the actual numbers of how many semifinalists there are.

So, he said, “In a single year, the most Nicholls semifinalist scripts ever was 140.” Which is a lot of scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “That means in the history of the competition there’s approximately 3,000 screenplays that have been semifinalists but were never finalists.” So, considering that some writers might have had two scripts, that’s at least 2,000, 2,500 people who can say like I was a Nicholls semifinalist. So that’s a lot.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** But he also sent a list of the people who were the semifinalist but not the finalist, and there’s some really good names on that list. So, I thought we would end on an inspiring note and say who some of those people are. Names like Michael Arndt. Ava DuVernay. Mark Fergus. Vince Gilligan. Gavin Hood. David Levine. Damon Lindelof. Josh Marston. Melissa Rosenberg. John Spaihts. Frank Spotnitz. Meredith Stiehm.

So there’s a lot of really great writers who were semifinalists but not finalists. So, that’s encouraging.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the implication – I don’t think Peter’s implication was if you don’t become a Nicholls finalist, and you only are a semifinalist, you’re never getting an agent. I think his implication was you’re probably not getting an agent because of the Nicholls. The script may find its way to him some other way. Or, you may write another script that is more attractive that people find you via. But, you know, our general thesis in that discussion that contests are perhaps overrated and the notion that writers have that contests are their ticket to the big time is probably more of a myth than a reality.

**John:** I think there’s also a correlation versus causation thing here. The fact that those writers who I listed there were finalists, well, that was because they were really good writers. And they were successful because they were really good writers. But, being a semifinalist was not the cause of them becoming successful. It was a correlation because they were already really good writers.

**Craig:** That is the rule that is overarching all of this stuff. Because, in the end, if you’re good enough to be a finalist, you don’t need to be a finalist. You’re good enough to be a finalist. It’s one of those things. Somehow or another the good should be borne out. And the cream should rise. And great scripts will be found. So, I guess the advice to people is to think, you know, everything good that might happen because of this script will happen because of this script. I am not trying to use this script to have something else happen. And that’s the thing that makes the good things happen.

**John:** Yeah. The good writing is the good writing. That is the ticket.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** We had a question from Andrew in Maryland. And so he was good enough to send in some audio. So, let’s take a listen to what he asked about that episode.

Andrew: Hi John and Craig. I’ve been a faithful listener since the early days of Scriptnotes and have always found the podcast entertaining and extremely helpful. However, I was deeply discouraged by two episodes – the One with the Agent, and Sheep Crossing Roads. It seems you’re saying there is really no hope for those of us who love screenwriting but live in other parts of the country and world.

I have a hunch the burning questions on the minds of your listeners not in LA are what does this mean for us. If we can’t move to LA, do we just hang up our spurs and write novels? I have a young family, so it’s not feasible for me to move to LA anytime soon. Should we even bother pressing toward our goals of becoming career screenwriters? I would love to know what you think we should do, if anything. Your faithful listener, Andrew from Maryland.

**Craig:** Well, this is a question we get all the time. And the answer, Andrew, is no. We’re not saying there is really no hope. We’re saying there is little hope. But then again, there’s little hope for people here. [laughs] You know? I mean, the deal is, I think I’ve said this before, if it’s a million-to-one shot in Los Angeles, and it’s five times worse in Maryland, then it’s a five million-to-one shot in Maryland. Those are all terrible odds.

So, you know, the problem of course is you have to think that you’re the one in the X million. And then do what’s best. But, it’s tough. We can’t sugarcoat reality here. It’s tough.

**John:** I wonder though if there’s a reality that we don’t actually appreciate, because we just haven’t found the writers who have actually broken in from outside the system. So, we have so many people who listen to the show, including working professional writers. I’m wondering how many of them actually broke in from some place outside.

So, basically they were Andrew from Maryland, and they wrote a script that somehow got the attention of people here. And now they’re working as a screenwriter or as a TV writer. So, if you’re listening to this and you are a working writer who started someplace else and got it all to work sort of from Andrew’s situation, could you please write us and let us know. Because we’d like to talk to you. I don’t know a lot of writers who have had that situation, but it must happen. So, write in to us. Write into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll try to get your story out there. Because I really feel for Andrew.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do, too. I would say if you are in New York, excuse yourself from this exercise. That doesn’t count. But the only one I know of is Diablo. I don’t know anybody else that kind of just shot in here from a non-New York or California, or Southern California location.

**John:** Yeah. Gary Whitta doesn’t live in Los Angeles, but I think he might have been living in town when he started working.

**Craig:** You know what? Let’s also excuse London. That’s a great point. Because London has its own industry, and they make their own films. So, I would say, because we do get a lot of London writers who come over here because they initially work on London productions.

**John:** Like Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Right. Like Kelly Marcel. Well, there’s a ton of them. I mean, Tess Morris. And Kelly Marcel. And Gary Whitta, I assume, is a London guy, because he sounds Londony to me.

So London doesn’t count. New York doesn’t count. I’m going to accept every other place in the world.

**John:** Great. So we’d love to hear your stories if you have been able to start a writing career in film or television from someplace other than Los Angeles, New York, or London. Write in. Let us know. Because we could be wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re often wrong. We love to be wrong.

**Craig:** I mean, John is often wrong. I don’t recall ever.

**John:** Yeah. We cut something out of this segment just now.

**Craig:** John was literally wrong seconds ago. [laughs]

**John:** One thing I’m not wrong about is Stranger Things, which is a terrific show on Netflix.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Even in France, I am Segue Man. I’m l’homme de Segue.

**Craig:** L’homme de Segue. [laughs] Stranger Things, so, so much fun. Who doesn’t like this show? Nobody doesn’t like Stranger Things.

**John:** I found one person on Twitter who I follow who doesn’t like it. And he could be wrong. Craig, I was just so happy you watched it, because I watched it a couple weeks ago and I thought, well, Craig won’t watch it because Craig watches nothing. And then you surprised me by watching it.

**Craig:** Well, my wife said, “You’re going to watch this show now.” And I said, OK. That usually works. When the boss tells me to watch, I watch. And, frankly, what’s great about my position vis-à-vis watching TV is to me TV is the greatest medium of all time because I only watch the absolute best of shows. That’s it.

I’ve seen Breaking Bad. I’ve seen Stranger Things. And Game of Thrones. That’s what TV is to me. It’s an amazing machine.

**John:** It must be so intimidating when you try to do television yourself, because you assume that everything on TV–

**Craig:** How is that possible?

**John:** –if you turn on any random channel, it’s going to be just a masterpiece.

**Craig:** Actually, I weirdly assume that television is nothing but advertisements and then Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones. How else do they fill their day?

So I was talking to Mike Birbiglia the other day, and I said you’ve got to watch Stranger Things. Because, you know, and I hate telling people watch a show, because I know how I feel when people tell me to watch a show. And that’s basically angry.

But it goes down so smooth. It’s like drinking chocolate milk. It’s just, fooop, it’s in you. It’s so easy to watch. So easy to watch.

**John:** Now, there’s a good chance that some of our listeners have not watched the show yet. So, what we’re going to do is Godwin, when he listens to this episode, he will note the timecode of when we start hitting spoilers and then he will give you a timecode for when we’re done. So you can just read in the show notes about what you should skip to.

Obviously we have chapter breaks, but if you’re listening to this on a player that doesn’t have chapter breaks he’ll also give you the timecode so you can jump to the next segment if you don’t want any spoilers.

But I think on the whole we’re probably not going to go too spoiler heavy. We’re mostly just going to celebrate the things it did really well.

We could talk about the casting. We could talk about the production design. The terrific direction by the Duffer Brothers. And Shawn Levy who also stepped up and did a great job as well. But I really want to focus on the writing, because what I thought was so remarkable about the show is it took this premise, which to me felt like if we could have a Stephen King book, or an early Steven Spielberg movie, and do it as an eight-hour show, what would that feel like. And they pulled it off so geniusly. They were able to take that idea for a story and break it out over eight episodes in a way that didn’t feel tedious or padded. I was just really impressed by how they managed the control of information, the reveals of character details. It just all felt like it was of one piece. And so it was smartly done.

**Craig:** Well, you can see how much planning went into it. And this is a good lesson for anyone writing anything. I do think certainly for people writing films. But when you look at these limited series, an eight run series like this, it’s just a long movie is what it is, right, broken up into bits.

And what they did so wonderfully was carefully ration out information in such a way that you never felt under-informed, nor were you ever over-informed. You just wanted more. And that is a tricky balance to strike.

**John:** One of the other realizations I had is that this show, because it was dumped all as a block, you got to see all the episodes in one sitting if you wanted to. There wasn’t that week-to-week fan engine of curiosity or theories about who this character was or what was really going on. I think they knew from the start, because they were doing this for Netflix, that a person might watch the whole thing all at once. And they built it in a way that was rewarding if you were to watch it all at once, and didn’t feel like it was a show that you had to watch one week at a time.

**Craig:** I actually loved the fact that it didn’t come out one week at a time. Maybe a little counterintuitive, but because you may think from an executive point of view, a Netflix point of view, we have a problem here: if we dump all eight episodes of the show out, and this is a mystery, with multiple reveals throughout, what’s going to happen after day one when people just go online and start saying, “Here’s what happened. Here’s how it ended.”

In fact, in today’s culture, I feel the opposite is true. I feel that people respect that and don’t do that anymore. What they don’t respect, however, is the time in between time-lapsed episodes. So, if you do release an episode once a week in the traditional way, between your Sunday and Sunday, you have a week of people going bananas online attempting to explain things and guess.

So it’s like watching a movie with somebody next to you constantly whispering saying, “I think I know what’s going to happen. I think that that means this. I think that this is going to happen.” And you just want to kill them. And I don’t like that over-analysis, the interstitial over-analysis that goes on. So I love that this thing just went bloop and nobody had a chance to post endlessly long, boring theories about what you were about to see.

**John:** Agreed. So let’s take a look at what might have been on their whiteboard as they were mapping out these eight episodes. We obviously don’t have time to dig into the individual things on each individual episode, but what are the big macro notes as they were figuring out who the characters were, what was going to be revealed about each character in which episode, and sort of how the flow of the eight-episode season was going to work.

So, we start with episode one. The whole thing centers around the disappearance of a boy named Will Byers. And so Will Byers is obviously a key character. His mother is a key character. His brother is a key character. His best friends are key characters. And so we’re going to need to establish all of them.

We need to establish all of them. We need to establish the town. We need to establish the sheriff who is going to investigating his disappearance. That he’s not just a functional investigator, but he’s actually a flawed hero kind of character himself. And then there’s one other family that’s going to be very important. And so it’s his best friend, and his best friend’s sister. The family to some degree we’ll get to see. Am I leaving anybody else out of that initial sort of tableau?

**Craig:** The only other thing that you get early on is they establish a villain. They establish something dangerous and murderous that we can’t see. And they establish a bad guy with very stark white hair.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s also in the first episode that we meet the girl we’ll come to know as Elle. We first meet her on the run. She goes and she sneaks into a diner. She meets the owner, a guy named Benny, who seems like he’s going to be a useful, important, sympathetic character. He gets killed off very gruesomely. Let’s you know this is the kind of show where people will die suddenly. And that her life is in real danger.

By the end of the first episode, we’ve connected Elle with the boys. And we’ve pretty much established what the show is going to be like. That the engine of the show is the girl and the boys, the cops, Joyce, the mother played by Winona Ryder, searching for her son, and the bad guys.

**Craig:** Yeah. And what they’ve done is set up a bunch of questions. These are good burning questions, but we’re not overdosed on them. Question, what is in that laboratory? Question, what is the dangerous thing that kills a scientist in the laboratory? Question, it seems like that’s the thing that came after young Will Byers, but instead of killing him, young Will Byers just vanishes. Where did he go? Why would it do that?

And, lastly, the strange little girl, who we presume probably comes from the same lab, I guess, this girl doesn’t talk, and she seems somewhat traumatized. What’s the deal? All great questions. And not too many. Not not enough.

**John:** Exactly. And I thought it was very important that they show you that, you know what, we’re going to connect threads. This is not going to be one of those shows where people are going to be working in parallel forever. The girl is going to meet the boys by the end of episode one. And it feels, OK, you see what the shape of this is going to be by the end of episode one.

You get a sense of what the series is going to feel like. So, episode two, Barb – who is everyone’s favorite character – she is Nancy’s best friend. I should have explained that this is essentially a John Hughes movie that’s happening kind of in one frame of this. And it’s about her virginity. It’s all very kind of classically ’80s teen stuff, played pretty straight, although I would say some of that stuff goes a little broader in a kind of fun way.

But Barb is just this amazing character who disappears at the end of episode two. Joyce sees something climbing through the walls. This is where the supernatural things have started to intrude into our world. And so it clearly isn’t just the mystery of the disappeared boy. This is something that’s going to keep going on, and people are going to keep being in danger from these supernatural forces.

**Craig:** Right. And, again, for every bit – and this is what these guys are really good at – every time they gave us answer, they would then give us another question.

So, they give us an answer about this girl, Eleven. One answer is that, yes, she is from the hospital, and yes, bad people are chasing her, and no, she’s not a bad person. She’s a good person. But we also learn that she can move things with her mind. How? And yet still more questions. And she gives, I think, the boys the ultimate question at the end of this episode when she attempts to explain to them where Will is.

And she does it by taking – silently, no words – she shows that – they are all on their little Dungeons & Dragons game board. And then she flips the board over, puts Will on the back of the board, and puts him near a monster.

So, that’s a ton of questions. What the hell does that mean, right? But it was great. We learned a lot. And then they’re like, uh-huh, did you enjoy that information? Here comes more questions. Same thing with Barb. Barb vanishes. We get a little bit of information. There is some blood involved. And then she’s gone again. And someone has taken a picture – Will’s brother has taken a picture. So there’s a little bit of evidence now of something. And we also have this wonderful story of a mother who we all believe, and no one else believes, and that’s always just fun, you know. That’s just fun tension for us.

**John:** Absolutely. One of the things so crucial here is as an audience we are basically caught up with the characters. So, Eleven obviously has more information than we do. The bad guys have more information than we do. But everybody else is basically where we’re at. In some cases we have more information because we’ve seen multiple perspectives on things. But we’re never given a lot more information than what the characters themselves have. And I think that’s part of the reason why we can relate so well to the characters because we understand their confusion and frustration because we are confused, too.

We’re really wondering what’s happened. We’re wondering whether Winona Ryder is crazy. We’re wondering what the next best thing is to do.

The boys are great, but they’re also cocky and confident in a way that really helps propel the story. And I feel like other probably older, more rational characters, might have taken a step back and really looked at it more objectively. I love that they just went for it. And because they were kids, they just plowed right ahead.

**Craig:** That’s the gift here. And it’s a great writing lesson. When you have something that’s a problem, you can easily convert into an asset. It’s a problem like to say, well, a policeman or a 30-year-old will look at this in a certain way and just grab this girl by the shoulders and say I’m going to have you now explain to me carefully.

But they don’t want that, so they use 12-year-old boys, who are Labrador puppies. And that’s so much more fun. Similarly, you have a moment in this episode where we see a flashback from Elle where she is remembering her past life with this white-haired villain character played by Matthew Modine. And he’s having her thrown into a little solitary confinement cell. We don’t know why. We don’t know why she’s having just that little scrap of a memory. We don’t know why she won’t speak.

But you know what we do know? She’s clearly been traumatized. And so they’ve taken this problem – why isn’t this person telling us everything she knows – and made it an asset. She’s traumatized. She can’t. It’s very smart.

**John:** Plowing episode, episode three, we see Joyce communicating with Will, but also Will’s body is found, which was a big shocker. That was sort of a – if this were a week-to-week episode kind of series, you would be stunned by that having happened. At the end of the episode, his body is pulled from the lake. After watching that episode, we took a break. We didn’t watch it anymore until the next night. And I thought for a while like, oh, so I guess he really is dead and maybe it’s a ghost. I mean, it really does change your perspective on the things you’ve seen up to that point, because you’re expecting like, oh, well, they’re going to find him somehow because he is somewhere. His spirit is somewhere. They’ll find him. His body will somehow come back.

And the answer is no.

**Craig:** This was the only thing where I stumbled a little bit because at this point in the show they have setup Elle as a kind of moral and informational authority. She’s right always. And she has superpowers and she’s been there. And she’s already told them he’s not dead.

So, the part of the show I liked the least was the character of the three boys, it was the skeptic character, because there was no damn reason for him to be skeptical. Once she closed a door with her mind, yeah, I’m in. I’m in. You clearly know what you’re talking about. And the fact that she literally got them to hear Will’s voice very briefly through a walkie-talkie and similarly Will’s mother is experiencing a kind of communication with Will through lights, which is really beautiful and interesting. So, I never believe for a second that that was actually Will’s body.

And I was shocked that even one of the boys believed for a second that that was Will’s body. Regardless, we have certainly more questions. Even if you don’t believe that that’s Will’s body, and I never did, why is there a fake Will’s body in the lake? [laughs] That, to me, is a really good question. And if the obvious answer is because people want to fool you into thinking he’s dead, the question is but why. So then they know where he is. We also – we get an answer to Elle. That this man put her in – that flashback – he put her in solitary confinement because she refused to use her powers to hurt a cat.

But what comes out of that, which is so – then this other question is why is he making her hurt a cat? And why does she call him Papa? And what is going on? You know, you want to know. And what is the extent of her power?

That’s the other thing that’s so interesting, you know.

And then, lastly, the creature who has made little hints that maybe he could come into our world, now very clearly is showing that it can come into our world. And so there is now the question of the threat will this happen again.

**John:** Yep. I was a huge fan of both Alias and Lost. They were great shows. I watched every episode of both. But one of the challenges those shows had is because they were longer series, and because they had to go on for multiple seasons and the creators didn’t even know how long they were going to be going on in some cases, the mysteries, the little things they would seed, you weren’t sure when they would pay off or if they would pay off.

Going into this series that was eight episodes long, I could see things like Will’s body, is that really a fake body. What’s going on here? And I knew like, you know what, it’s eight episodes. I have a strong hunch that it’s going to pay off. And I think I gave the creators a little extra pass on some things because I knew that they only had eight episodes and that there was a plan for it.

I always felt confident that they knew both where the whole series was going, but also how they were going to structure the information within the episodes. And that’s a very tough thing is how do you make this one hour really enjoyable, but also be a great puzzle piece for the whole eight episodes.

**Craig:** 100%. And, you know, look, I like the genre of serialized mystery. I really do. But when it isn’t closed ended, it inevitably turns bad. I loved Twin Peaks. I loved it. But at some point it became clear that they were in a space where they were not writing backwards from an ending. And that’s a dangerous thing, because theoretically you’ve lost all sense of unity. And a mystery, unlike other serialized shows, like action shows, cop shows, procedurals, a mystery has an ending. And so it is a dangerous thing to write an open-ended mystery.

You eventually will run afoul of setups that don’t pay off. It’s inevitable. And so, yes, I would not have started watching this if I didn’t know that it had an end. Wouldn’t have done it.

**John:** Once you know who killed Laura Palmer, there’s no reason to keep watching Twin Peaks. It’s not entirely true, but you can’t frame Twin Peaks as who killed Laura Palmer and expect us to watch after you’ve revealed the answer to who killed Laura Palmer, or sort of a murky half-answer to who killed Laura Palmer.

**Craig:** It’s like listening to a song, and the song has this interesting build, and there’s going to be a reveal. I’m listening to the Pina Colada song. And what’s going on? He’s taking out a personal ad. He’s going to cheat on his wife. He’s going to meet her in a bar. And she walks in and IT’S HIS WIFE. But, what if it weren’t? What if it’s like, well, and she didn’t show up, so I’m going to try a different thing. And now I’m going to try to meet another lady. And this song is never going to end.

No! End. [laughs] End. You know? And that’s the problem. Twin Peaks, once Laura Palmer’s murder is revealed, you begin to realize they’re vamping. This show has now turned into vamping. And nobody wants to watch vamping. Nobody. Unless you’re going to like an improv show, and then give me a three-minute sketch and get off the stage.

**John:** Yeah. Challenging. There will be a new series of Twin Peaks coming on Netflix soon. So, we’ll see if they’ve learned that lesson.

**Craig:** I hope they have.

**John:** All right. Quickly powering through, episode four, the boys really contact Will, so that’s the radio episode. We connect Nancy with the monster through Jonathan. And that’s the first time you feel like, oh, these different characters who aren’t really interacting about the monster, everyone is starting to have the same kind of information about things.

It’s also where we reveal that the body was fake. And so you can sort of feel like, OK, all of these threads are coming together in the way that a Stephen King novel, like those threads would start to come together, like in The Stand, or these things where you’ve been following these separate people doing their separate things. Now everyone is starting to understand that they have a common enemy, and they’re coming together.

That continues in episode five. That’s where Hopper sees what’s going on. We establish the geography of our world and the other world and how one is the shadow of the other.

We see Nancy cross over. And we also see Elle in the depravation tank in the flashback. And you see like, oh, that’s how she does her thing and establishing that’s probably how the monster got in.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you start to see an acceleration of answers here. Episode four isn’t really giving us too much new information, other than that Will is definitely alive, and that body is definitely a fake. So episode four was a little bit of a holding pattern, although it did have some fun character stuff with Elle and the boys. Because, remember also, while they’re telling the story of information and mystery, they’re telling a love story between Elle and Mike.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And it’s an adorable love story. They also in episode four, they begin to relieve you of some of the burden of frustration. It’s a small town. There are six or seven characters. All of them know things that would help the other one, and they’re not talking, which is normal to create tension. But at some point you can’t keep it up. And in this episode they say no more of that; let’s start connecting our dots together. That really happens in episode five where everyone is sort of now becoming one big team.

But what’s great about episode five is it also gives you a huge answer. And that answer is what the hell is this other place? We don’t quite know until they very clearly show Nancy actually entering it, and then coming out. And then we go, oh, I get it. It is like upside-down our world. I get it now. I get exactly what’s going on.

And all the way back in episode two when she flipped that board over and stuck his little figure on the back of the board, that was actually incredibly accurate.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So, you’ve gotten all of these really interesting bits of news, and you also now can position Elle’s origin story. We know that she has these powers. We know that she started by being used by the military to listen to spies. Now she’s going to be helping to kill spies. But while she’s in that zone, right, she was never meant to contact this creature. She was just traveling this other dimension to help spy, but while she’s in there she discovers this bad, bad thing.

**John:** Yeah. And that bad, bad thing follows her out. So, in episode six we learn more backstory on Elle. We learn about how she came to be. We learn why she calls the man because Papa, because her real mother was part of this secret government program. They did acid and tried to do sort of psychic experiments. She was pregnant with Elle during that time. So, this man who she calls Papa probably raised her. And that is all very, very troubling.

So, it’s not just a name she’s given him. She actually sort of does see him as a father figure. If I have a qualm with sort of how some stuff played out, there was opportunity to see some real affection between the father and the daughter figure, and it was never there. And I don’t know if they just sort of ran out of time, or they decided it was not a thing they wanted to see. But I didn’t have a sense of Frankenstein’s love for his monster, or any of that really manifested through the end of the show. Do you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** I totally agree. And part of it is that Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Elle, is such an extraordinary actor that she was frankly more convincing than everybody else at any given time. When she’s crying out to Matthew Modine, our villain, and crying for his saying Papa, like please don’t hurt me and put me in, you know, don’t punish me, I believed that it was the anguish of a child not to someone that she was scared of, but somebody that she loved.

And I needed – I’m so with you – I would have loved to have seen that he had some of that for her. And instead you mostly just get that he’s kind of a stock government sociopath. And I would love if he’s – the implication is he’s no longer with us, but if he does return in season two, that’s something I would love to see explored.

**John:** I agree with you. If I have any other fantasy wishes for a scene that wasn’t able to fit in here, Winona Ryder I think is terrific in the show, but she has to play sort of one emotion, and she gets to dial it between nine and 11, which is sort of the panic/anguish of a mother who has lost her kid. If she had a flashback, had some other moment to give us some other flavor of who she was. If they’d given us a little bit of whatever her and Hops relationship was back in the past, that would have been fantastic. Because I missed seeing another flavor of Joyce, who in this show only gets to be panicked mother.

**Craig:** True. But I will give Winona Ryder all the credit in the world. What a difficult task. You have to be basically completely strung out and realistic as a woman whose son is gone and who everyone is telling you is dead, and yet you believe he’s not dead. You deny the fact you’re going crazy. You’re talking to him through your lights. You’re crying all the time. And I believed her. And that was amazing.

I could easily see that in the second season she kind of goes through a Sarah Connor transformation. Like Sarah Connor in Terminator was basically damsel in distress. Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 is transformed by the experience of Terminator 1 into this ultimate hard-ass warrior, which I love.

**John:** Yeah. I think I just wanted Winona Ryder to have her Emmy reel. And I wanted one more scene for her Emmy reel there, which would have been great.

**Craig:** Well, she’s got some good ones. I’ll tell you the one that I would put in, which I loved. It’s such a little scene, but she goes to the store where she works. We’ve never seen her actually working her job. She just goes there, confronts her boss–

**John:** And takes stuff. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. She needs two weeks advanced pay. And she needs a telephone. And she needs a pack of Camels. I mean, that was great. So well done.

**John:** All right. So episode six, we got our backstory. Episode seven is where everybody comes together. So essentially all these characters who have been in different spaces, they’re now all under literally one roof. We’re in the gym. They’re building this giant bathtub thing so that Elle can float and find where the missing boy is. It was nice.

It was a thing that you sensed needed to happen at some point. Like everybody had to get together and be working together to do things. And there was still conflict between the different characters. Each of them had some slightly different agendas, but they were all generally on the same page.

We also could really feel the ticking clock that the bad guys were out there and they were going to find them sooner or later. So, everything was coming to a head.

**Craig:** Yeah. And good writing lesson here. When you need to create obstacles for your characters, try and create them out of elements of the world that you have organically put in there that nobody would expect would then become an obstacle.

So for instance, we have these flashbacks where we’re seeing how Elle first contacts this other dimension and a monster. And to do that, they’re putting her in this isolation tank. And we don’t really understand why, although it seems pretty quickly like, OK, it helps her concentrate and it helps her access her full power. How smart then for them later to say, oh, if we’re going to win the day, we need to reproduce that with her as good people so that it becomes this fascinating obstacle that no other show would have ever had.

We need to fill a bathtub up with water and salt. And how do we do it. How much salt do we need? And where are we going to do this? Very, very smart. It’s a really good lesson, I think, to take the things that you have, that only you have, and turn them to your advantage.

**John:** Yeah. Being specific rather than being generic. And then finally we get to our eighth episode. And the series has basically promised this from the start. We will go in and we will save the boy. And so Hopper and Joyce go in to save Will Byers. And it’s all cool. It’s all actually really well done. And so we have the tension of them being in this other world, whether they’ll get to the son in time. We have all the bad guys in the real world. We have the monster crossing over to face the boys. You knew that had to happen, but you weren’t quite sure how it would look, or where it would take place.

I mean, the boys at the very first episode, they’re fighting this monster. And now they’re fighting the monster for real. So it was nice to see it all coming together.

**Craig:** Here’s where all of our big spoilers are. It was not at all surprising to me that she sacrificed herself to destroy the monster and save Mike and the boys. That seemed inevitable from the start. I love my Christ figures so much, so when I see one walk into a movie I think, well, you’ll be dead. And that’s fine. Although, of course, in Stranger Things fashion, you get all of these answers. And the day is done, and then more questions are raised at the end to tease you ahead for the second season.

Maybe she’s not dead. And maybe Will Byers isn’t exactly OK. And the good questions to keep us posted for it.

Now, it’s interesting, when I watched it, it didn’t seem to me like a series that needed to continue with those characters, by the way. I could easily see a second season where it’s an entirely different story with different people.

**John:** And they haven’t promised one thing or the other, have they? So, there’s no guarantee they’re coming back.

**Craig:** They have implied, actually, so let’s talk about Barb for a second. So, Barb, the perfectly pitched friend character, the Jiminy Cricket character for Nancy, who’s saying don’t sleep with the boy just because he’s cool – and accurate. She disappears. She’s discovered to be dead on the other side, so that’s sort of the stakes for Will. That helps us know that Will is in legitimate jeopardy on the other side.

That’s really all that ever happened with her. Her mom answers the phone at one point. We never see the mom again. People on the Internet were a little upset. I mean, hold on to your hats everyone: the Internet got upset. Because they felt that she had gotten a short shrift.

Some of the anger came from the corner of gender/queer politics. That she was probably gay and another gay character died. Although, I don’t see why they thought that, just because of her haircut? I mean, I didn’t get that jump. I mean, look, from a writing point of view, Barb existed so that we understood that Will Byers could die. That’s why she existed as a character. But they did say that they heard some of the criticisms about Barb and that Barb would get some kind of justice in season two, which implies a continuity here, yes?

**John:** Not necessarily. It could be a more metaphorical justice. Like basically the bad things that were done to her will be avenged. Or that maybe Nancy will go out there and take down the bad guys. So we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** I leave it to them. But let’s talk about what’s next for them, because I don’t know the development process on Stranger Things, the first season, but I suspect they pitched the pilot. At some point they wrote up a document that was sort of what we were describing. It’s basically the talk through what happens episode by episode. And I’ve had to do those kind of outlines. Craig, you probably had to do the same kind of thing for the HBO show you’re doing, right?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so the kinds of things we’re talking about today, really the broad strokes about what’s happening in a given episode, after you sell a series you’re going to be writing up that document. And that’s the kind of thing you’re going to be talking about with the people who are writing the checks for your show about what’s going to happen in given episodes. And sometimes there’s negotiation. I don’t know sort of what degree they had to wrestle over what things were going to be happening in which given episodes.

But those documents exist before there are ever scripts. And so they’re very important places for planning the big broad strokes of the story. And I thought in those broad strokes documents, I don’t know if they’ll ever be published, they were really good.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I would love to see their show bible. We call it a show bible. Because inevitably things change. I mean, it’s funny. I’m in the process right now of conforming my – so I’ve written two episodes of the HBO thing. And they’ve asked me to kind of go back now and make changes to the bible to reflect how things changed in those first two episodes, because as they’re talking to other broadcasting partners, they just want all the materials to match up. And things do change. And I’d be fascinated to see where they kind of deviated from their plan, their initial plan.

But I suspect that the big points, in concrete. Have to be, or else I’m not sure how you survive writing a show like this.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. So if you skipped over our discussion of Stranger Things, please go back and listen to it when you’ve had a chance to watch the show, because we thought it was great. But now let’s get to the WGA election. And Craig will tell you who you should vote for.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll do my best here. This is what we call an off-year election, so no officer candidates this year. It’s just board members. We’re losing a bunch of incumbents, a bunch of good incumbents. I’m sorry to say we’re losing some feature writers. We may soon find ourselves with a board of directors that has no feature writers on it. It’s just horrifying to me.

Regardless, here’s who is running. Matthew Weiner of Mad Men fame. Glen Mazzara of Walking Dead fame. Zoanne Clack, who is medical doctor and a big TV writer. Jonathan Fernandez, who is an incumbent. Chip Johannessen, who is incumbent. Marjorie David is an incumbent. Courtney Ellinger, I’m not familiar with. Ligiah – I think it’s Ligiah Villalobos who interviewed me and Chris Morgan one evening at the Writers Guild. I can’t remember what it was about. Ali LeRoi, who is a big television writer. And Patric Verrone, evergreen Patric Verrone.

Look, some of these people I don’t know. But I figure probably the better thing is to say who I do know and who I definitely support. I definitely support Glen Mazzara. Glen is fantastic. I can’t believe he hasn’t been on the board yet. He’s hugely active in the Guild. He’s incredibly active in the showrunner’s training program, which is of vital importance. He is a great guy. He is super active in diversity efforts at the Guild. And he’s a practical, smart dude who listens. I love Glen. I love, love Glen. He’s terrific. So, please do vote for Glen.

I don’t know Zoanne Clack, but she’s a medical doctor and I just feel like people that – unless they are–

**John:** You know who else is a medical doctor?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Dr. Ben Carson is a medical doctor.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I get it. But, see, she’s never said anything cuckoo like Ben Carson. And I’ve got a good feeling about her. Medical doctor. Also, it just seems like she does seem to have approval from a wide swath of people in the Guild. So, I am supporting Zoanne Clack.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Jonathan Fernandez, incumbent, terrific guy. Very, very pragmatic, again. Good and moderate and smart. We should absolutely get Jonathan Fernandez back on the board.

**John:** So I know Jonathan Fernandez from the picketing group. Back at the last strike, he was part of my picketing group. We picketed in front of Paramount Pictures. Every morning at like 5:30 in the morning. And so it was a small group of us and he was one of them. And since that strike he’s been sort of my go to person to ask questions about like, hey, what’s really going on here with these issues in the Guild. He’s very smart about younger writers and sort of the struggle of actually bringing home enough money that you can afford to be a writer. And so he has TV experience, feature experience. He seems like a great choice to get back on that board.

**Craig:** For sure. I can’t really speak to any of the other ones. That doesn’t mean they would be good or bad. Except for Patric Verrone. And Patric Verrone actually finished in ninth place in the last election. So, theoretically he should have been not elected. But one of the people who won an office position was Aaron Mendelsohn who was a board member. So there was a board member vacancy which meant they took and filled that position with the ninth vote getter, which was Patric Verrone.

I want to point out how extraordinary this is. Patric Verrone was the two-term president of the Writers Guild and he is so un-liked that he couldn’t finish in the top eight of board member elections last year. There’s a reason for that. He is a very, very smart guy. He is completely misguided on Guild politics. He has always been completely misguided on Guild politics.

He has one gear. And that gear is in moderation as a virtue. And Patric Verrone’s time is over. It should stay over. And he should find something else to do. So don’t vote for Patric Verrone.

**John:** Craig, I will guarantee you that I will not vote for Patric Verrone. So, if you are a WGA member, you got an email this last week that invited you to cast your ballots. So, do cast your ballot. It is important.

What Craig was saying is that this is an off-cycle election, so this is not the election where we also elect the president and do all of those other things. But these are quite important decisions you’re going to be making, because these are the people who are going to be taking us into this next negotiating cycle. So they’re not the negotiating committee, but they’ll be setting some of the agenda for going into that, so it’s important because it’s always important. And let’s pick some good people this year.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s important, too, that we have voices on the board who are actual voices. My experience on the board and my experience since in dealing with board members is that nine times out of ten board members do what they’re told to do. They’re told to do by the officers and they’re told to do by the executive director. And they have unanimous votes. And what they quickly become is large, boisterous discussion group that spends an hour or two yammering about stuff and then voting as they’re told. And we don’t want that.

We actually want a group that probably doesn’t spend as much time yammering to hear themselves speak, but also doesn’t rubber stamp things. We want thoughtful, independent, specific voices who are setting policy for our union.

**John:** I would agree with you. So, Craig, I’m looking at our recording time and it’s clear that we are not going to be able to get through these How Would this be a Movie. So what I propose to do is there are four different things we were going to talk through. And since we know what they are, let’s do that for our next episode. And we can actually put the links to these things in this week’s episode so people will see what they are, and they can read ahead.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And actually know what they are. So the four things we want to talk about, first is Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise. It’s a story by Joseph Curtis writing for Male Online. It’s about Dr. James Barry. And, no spoilers, but Dr. James Barry had a very interesting life. And that was a submission by listener Craig Mazin, who occasionally listens to the episodes.

**Craig:** Rarely.

**John:** The second one is The Perfect Mom, submitted by Brett Thomas in Sacramento. It tells the story of Gypsy, this girl with a litany of debilitating diseases. An incredibly inspirational story of a mother and a daughter who really struggled against a million possible odds. And the community that supported them. And, wow, things go dark. Things go very, very dark.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, the story we’re going to have you read is by Michelle Dean writing for BuzzFeed. Our third one was submitted by Rachael Speal. It’s about an amateur sleuth. This is 12-year-old Jessica Maple. Her home was burglarized, but this pre-teen took it upon herself to find the scoundrels and bring them to justice. So, we’ll give you an article that is from ABC News that you could look at for that.

The final one, and it’s maybe kind of good that we’re pushing this back, because new pieces are still coming out and I haven’t read all of it, was submitted by Phil Hay who is a screenwriter friend of ours. One of the writers of The Invitation who was on a previous episode. This is called Revenge in Irvine. It’s a series of stories in The Los Angeles Times about a PTA mom and drugs and accusations. And it seems just great. It seems like a Desperate Housewives kind of story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s wild. Yeah, this guy, Christopher Goffard, is the writer. And I think he’s done four segments so far, and maybe two more coming out. I’m not sure.

**John:** So by the time we’re recording our next episode, maybe everything will be out and we can discuss the whole thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** I thought it was just fantastic. So, we’ll have those up for next week we’ll discuss them. So if you want to read ahead, go read ahead.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is oddly related to something we discussed. It is Angelo Badalamenti explaining how he wrote the Laura Palmer’s Theme for Twin Peaks. It’s so great. The music for Twin Peaks is so incredibly important for Twin Peaks. So it’s Angelo Badalamenti sitting at his piano with David Lynch as David Lynch is basically trying to evoke this feeling in him and Angelo Badalamenti is creating the music that matches that feeling.

It’s just a great description of the process for trying to create any piece of art, especially a piece of collaborative art. So, I really loved it. How he worked with composers. It’s one of those really strange things where you’re trying to describe something that you can’t really describe, so you end up using a lot of poetry, a lot of just imagery to try to evoke something. And yet it’s the responsibility of the composer to make that be music. And it worked out so brilliantly here.

So, I recommend everybody watch this.

**Craig:** Such a great theme. I mean, that theme song does so much to help you watch the episode that comes after it. The Game of Thrones theme song has a similar thing. It just puts you in a certain place, in a certain mood. There aren’t a lot of themes that do that for me for television shows. But, I mean, look Twin Peaks came out when you and I were in college and I can still, you know, I can hear it.

So, awesome. That’s excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing, how could it not be HD 164595? Now, HD 164595 is a star. And it is kind of flipping people out a little bit, because it may be the first time that we’ve actually picked up a signal from space that may not be natural, but rather alien-made.

So, this is our Contact movie story here. And so what they’ve done is they’ve found these particular kinds of spikes of signals that seem like they could be artificial. And it happens to be the case that this star is very much like our sun. It’s really close to the size of our sun, so it seems like maybe it’s in that Goldilocks zone for a nearby planet.

And so they’re now pointing all their stuff at it. Pointing all their stuff at this thing.

Now, to put some – to put a little damper on it. There is one possibility that this is not at all extraterrestrial. One of the things that’s concerning is that the frequency matches military frequencies. So, what we may be picking up is ourselves and we may be picking up some classified military signals from some satellites bouncing back that we just didn’t know were there. And, of course, no one is going to tell them.

But, I don’t know, because the thing is the Russians picked this up first, and now we are looking at it. If it’s not the Russians, and it’s not us, maybe it’s an alien.

**John:** It could be. Now, in the past when they found these strange signals, sometimes it became part of a revelation of other things out there in the universe. My understanding is like pulsars or quasars, one of those, like we thought at first that signal is too regular, too perfect, that must be the alien contact. But it turns out like, oh no, there’s actually these rotating stars that do cool things.

So, if nothing else it’s worthwhile to explore interesting things to see what’s there. Same situation with that star where it looks like there’s stuff circling it that could be something that people built.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tabby’s Star.

**John:** It may be nothing, but it shows us that there’s something we don’t understand about how stuff around stars can form. And so that’s useful to pointing out telescopes out as well.

**Craig:** They did say that if it is artificial, that it is of such a nature that this would be a very, very advanced civilization, because of the strength and the type of signal that it is. So, I’m always reminded of this thing that Neil deGrasse Tyson once said. He said that on our planet we have, I think, 99% genetic overlap with chimpanzees. And so it’s that 1% that make us so much smarter than chimpanzees and account for everything that we’ve done to our planet and all of our technology that chimpanzees don’t do. And if we meet an alien species and they’re just 1% different than us, which is really close, but their 1% is to us that we are to the chimpanzees, we have a problem. [laughs]

So, you know, hopefully they’re nice, if they are real.

**John:** Well, I think the encouraging thing is as a world we function very well together, because we have very sensible leaders who really think through about all the possible repercussions of every action. And so I’m sure we would be completely reasonable and act in a very unified manner about these kind of situations.

**Craig:** What we’re going to do is we’re going to build a wall. And these people from HD 164595, they’re sending rapists. They’re sending murderers. We’re going to build a wall, folks. It’s going to be the greatest wall. And they’re going to pay for it. [laughs]

**John:** Totally going to pay for it. With their advanced technologies, they can pay for it.

**Craig:** That’s right. From 94 light years away, they’re going to Venmo us a payment for the wall.

**John:** Yep. It’s going to be nice.

So that’s our show this week. Hey, it worked.

**Craig:** It worked!

**John:** All the way across the ocean and the whole US, we recorded the episode. The show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from John Venable, and oh, it’s a good one.

So, if you have an outro you can send it to us at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the great place to send your experiences if you are a working writer in film or television who started someplace else and actually was able to start a career not living in LA, New York, or London. We’d love to hear from you.

But we’d also like to answer your questions like the question we answered at the head of the show. So, send those to ask@johnaugust.com.

Short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find the show notes for this episode, including how to skip over the Stranger Things information at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about three or four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. You can also find them on the Scriptnotes USB drive and on the Scriptnotes app which is in the App Store. So, Craig, thank you so much.

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

**John:** Have a great week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [John’s desk in Paris](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/JohnsDesk.jpg)
* [The Nicholl Fellowships](http://www.oscars.org/nicholl)
* [Stranger Things Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWxyRG_tckY)
* [WGA Election](http://www.wga.org/news-events/news/press/2016/2016-final-board-candidates-announced)
* [Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise – suggested by Craig Mazin](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3750328/Top-army-doctor-told-Florence-Nightingale-performed-successful-caesarian-hiding-amazing-secret-WOMAN-disguise.html#ixzz4ISGE4GUd)
* [The Perfect Mom – suggested by Brett Thomas in Sacramento](https://www.buzzfeed.com/michelledean/dee-dee-wanted-her-daughter-to-be-sick-gypsy-wanted-her-mom?utm_term=.taGexxnz2n#.hsy0PPR1WR)
* [Amateur Sleuth – suggested by Rachael Speal](http://abcnews.go.com/US/jessica-maple-atlanta-girl-12-solves-robbery-police/story?id=14341277)
* [Revenge in Irvine – suggested by Phil Hay](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/)
* [Angelo Badalamenti on writing “Laura Palmer’s Theme”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgXLEM8MhJo&app=desktop)
* [HD 164595](http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/30/health/seti-signal-hd-164595-alien-civilization/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by John Venable ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Episode_266.mp3).