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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 218 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So last week we talked about the business of screenwriting a lot. And it was sort of inadvertently one of those all business episodes, so this week is going to be all about the craft of screenwriting.

We are going to talk about how writing features is much different than writing television. And how those differences start at inception. We’ll also be looking at a couple of new Three Page Challenges.

But first and most importantly, Craig, you did not kill the entire party at the last Dungeons & Dragons game. So I am thankful to you.

Craig: Well, it was an effort, actually, to not kill all of you. You know, the thing for a dungeon master is you want to make sure that the party experiences the thrill of danger and the very real possibility of death without going overboard and just wiping the floor with them.

John: Yes.

Craig: So, that’s a funny thing. I don’t want anyone to actually die-die by the end of the session, but I do want you to maybe almost die, or at least a couple of you almost die. And that’s exactly what happened. I got it just right. It was a very exciting one. And I can’t wait for our next session, because I got some good stuff planned for you.

John: I’m excited to do it. So I was looking through the dungeon master’s guide last night because that’s a thing I do before I try to fall asleep. I noticed there’s a page buried deep in the dungeon master’s guide which suggests another way that you can play the game in which characters have what’s called a plot point. And players can spend their plot point in order to change an aspect of the story, which would be a fascinating way to play the game.

So, at a certain point we could say like I’m going to spend my plot point in order to find a secret door that takes us into that room.

Craig: My guess is that as clever as you guys are, your plot points would likely break the game.

John: Indeed. The danger of six screenwriters playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. And smart ones. And the real challenge for me is that one of our players is not a — well, he is — I think he does some writing, and he’s involved in Hollywood. I believe he does a lot of coverage and stuff. And he is a very well-seasoned dungeon master.

John: Yes.

Craig: He knows the rules inside and out. So, I have the ultimate table lawyer constantly checking on me. So, it’s good. I actually feel like I’ve held up okay under his withering attacks.

John: You’re discussing Kevin Walsh, who I actually saw at a WGA function just this past weekend. The day after our near total party kill, I saw Kevin at a screening of Black Mass. And I did a Q&A right after Black Mass. And I had a chance to talk to Mark Mallouk, one of the film’s screenwriters, about the journey to the screen of that.

And so as I’m trying to do more often, whenever I talk to screenwriters in that capacity, I record it. And so if you are a Scriptnotes Premium Subscriber, you can actually hear the audio from that session. It’s in the premium feed. So there’s a bonus episode for all the folks who are generous enough to pay us $2 a month.

Craig: How thoughtful of you.

John: We’re headed off to Austin. We’re going to also be doing a bunch of screenings for Academy Award consideration things. So, we’ll try to do more of those over the next few months, because they’re really fun, and we’re already having the conversation so why not record it.

Craig: Exactly. And I’m glad you mentioned Austin, because it’s creeping up really, really fast. I guess we’re officially in October now as you folks are listening to this. And Austin is just four weeks away. So if you haven’t already arranged to be there and you want to be there, do it now.

And I’m not sure if they’ve got the whole schedule up yet, but I do know for sure that both our live Scriptnotes and the live Three Page Challenge will not be at ungodly hours like 9AM. I think they’re at reasonable hours.

John: Yeah. You can sleep off your hangover and come in and see us.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Scriptnotes will be on the first day. And so we will have a live Scriptnotes with special guests and it should be really fun. And then the live Three Page Challenge, we are going to be selecting from a group of finalists at the Austin Film Festival and be going through those pages with those people in the audience. And then coming up on stage to talk us through what we just talked through. So, that should be a fun time. It’s the third year we’ve done that. And it should be a good time.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Cool. Some corrections from last week. You had one about Rachael Prior.

Craig: Yes. There’s something in the back of my head saying — I don’t know if she’s — I called her a development executive at Big Talk. She’s actually the head of development at Big Talk and also a producer there. So I didn’t want to shortchange her on her full nobility and title.

John: Fantastic. A development executive I guess would cover it, but it is not actually as specific as you’d want to be.

Craig: No, it makes it sound like she’s working for the person that she actually is.

John: That’s true. That’s a good way to describe it. Also, as I was looking through stuff this past week, there was a new review up for the Scriptnotes app. So, in the iOS App Store there’s a Scriptnotes app which allows people to listen to all of the back episodes. And a guy named Paul Horne left a comment that says, “Ridiculous format for an app. It’s an all-premium app. You must have the premium subscription. But there’s no way to subscribe within the app, so you’re on your own. What a stupid company.”

Craig: Hmm.

John: And Paul Horne is right. Well, not about us being a stupid company, but he’s right about it being frustrating that within the app there’s no way to actually subscribe to the premium feed. It’s because of the weird way that Apple works within app purchases. And Libsyn who actually makes the app, and it’s all their stuff.

So, yes, as a person who makes apps for iOS, we could theoretically make our own app that would be much better than it. It’s just a matter of time and resources. And we just don’t have the bandwidth to do it. So, I’m sorry. I am frustrated as you are. But if you want to subscribe to the premium feed, it’s just Scriptnotes.net. There’s a clunky website for which you can enter in your detail information. But once you do and sign up for an account, you can get to the premium feed through the apps, or any other way you’d like to listen to those back episodes.

Craig: That sounds great. Am I — do I have an account? [laughs] I should probably check and see.

John: You should probably check and see on that.

Craig: I should probably check and see.

John: If I dig through the website carefully enough I could either check whether you’re a subscriber, or maybe even give you as one of the podcast hosts a free premium subscription.

Craig: Ooh.

John: But I’m not even sure I can do that. It’s like that’s how old and janky the website is.

Craig: So you actually pay $2 a month?

John: I do just to make sure that it actually comes through and updates properly.

Craig: Well, if you do it, I should do it. That would be strange. I’m going to do it. You know what? I’m going to give us $2 — I’m going to give you, let’s face it — I don’t get any of this.

John: Yeah, unfortunately you’re actually giving Libsyn more of those dollars, because we split the money with Libsyn. So, it’s all crazy.

Craig: Good, I’ll give you a buck.

John: All right. Let’s talk about writing features, because this last week I had the pleasure of going in and talking to my friend Dara’s writing class. So, Dara teaches a small group of writers from USC. And she is mostly a television writer and she wanted me to come in and talk about breaking features and sort of like what it’s like to go in and figure out how you’re going to break story on a whole feature because it’s not just sort of two pilots back to back. It’s a very different beast.

Previously on the podcast we’ve talked about, you know, are people feature writers, are they TV writers. We’ve, I think, strongly urged that anyone who is aspiring to have a career in Hollywood should be thinking about writing both, because both are valid. And a person who can write a feature probably also can write TV, and vice versa. But they are very different things. And I think we’ve never actually discussed what is so different about features than writing a one-hour drama for television.

So, that is our big topic du jour.

Craig: It’s an excellent one. I think that on first blush people might think, well, the difference is that television has episodes and a movie is just a movie. But there are certain narrative implications that go along with that. And there are character implications. And I do think that while it would be great if you could do both, there are some people that are particularly well suited to one kind of storytelling or another.

John: Yeah. And, well, before we get into what’s different about the nature of stories between these two things, let’s talk about what might be different about your personality as a writer that might make you gravitate towards one or the other. Do you like being all by yourself and having complete control over everything? That is more of a screenwriter mentality, because you are a person who gets to go off in his or her little room and write the screenplay. And, yes, you have to deal with producers and executives and other people along the way, but the writing process is sort of your process.

In television, that’s not the case. In television you’re having to work with other writers and you’re having to sit in rooms and figure out what story is and that can be fantastic for many people and many people thrive in that environment. But it’s worth knowing what you are good at and what you are not good at. And maybe you won’t figure that out until you’ve actually tried.

Craig: Yeah. I think also if you’re the kind of writer that gets very excited by the new, by beginnings, and by endings and conclusions, then you would probably want to consider features more strongly than television. But if you would prefer to kind of live within a space, and have that familiarity, and write versions and variations, then, yeah, I would think television would be the path for you.

John: Absolutely. And there’s a problem solving quality I think to doing one-hour dramas, particularly one-dramas that have a procedural aspect which can be very rewarding. Like if you are person who likes to make crossword puzzles, it’s that challenge of how you’re going to fit all of this within the restrictions of both what you can say, how much time you have, what your act breaks have to be. Some people will love that and thrive in that. And that can be a great situation for many people.

Most feature people who try to do their first TV job become very frustrated when they’re first attempting to do a television pilot.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, obviously there’s more television now than not that is commercial-free. But for people that are writing network or commercial-supported cable, I mean there’s that issue of just breaking your story and stopping it and starting it again.

John: So let’s start at the inception of story and what kinds of things are different approaching a feature versus approaching television. First is repeatability. So, movies I think are fundamentally stories that can happen just once. A movie can be expressed as this is the time when this thing happened. It’s about events that occur once. It is a change that happens to a character just one time.

So, in television, you might have a one-time setup. You might have the plane crash on Lost that gets the whole series started, but you begin Lost with the idea of what is daily life going to be like on that island and that is the question of the series. The question of the series is also are they ultimately going to leave the island. But week to week it is about the interaction of those people on the island.

In movies there’s not that sense of repeatability. Or you don’t start with that idea of repeatability. There are movie franchises. So we have Fast & Furious 7, but each of those is considered its own movie and it really was thought of as its own movie. And there’s not this underlying desire from inception to create something that can regenerate itself, that can keep growing into more and more stories. It’s not a machine that keeps spitting out more ways to race cars.

Craig: Well, it’s interesting because when we talk about this, we’re talking about what makes these things attractive from the start to us. And when we think about what becomes an attractive movie idea, we’re thinking about an idea that burns itself upon completion. It is a resolvable idea. It’s a circle, you know. We begin here and then we end in our narrative circle.

In television, the ideas that excite everybody are the ones that do seem inherently endlessly productive. So, what is the story of Cheers? It’s the story of people who show up at a bar where they find camaraderie in a way they don’t anywhere else. There’s nothing about that that suggests movie.

John: At all.

Craig: And everything that suggests this never-ending pool of generation for television.

John: Yeah, I mean, Cheers or Lost or many of the things we’re talking about, they are characters in a place. And every week you’re coming back to see those characters in that place and the adventures they will have in that place.

Contrast that — we talked in previous episodes about Pixar story rules. Emma Coats had this list of really smart things that Pixar talks about when they talk about story. This is her rule number four: “Once upon a time there was blank. Every day blank. One day, blank. Because of that blank, because of that blank, until finally blank.” So, filling in those blanks is what makes it a movie.

And inherent in sort of how she’s structuring that is there is a change. You’ve started in a certain kind of world that worked a certain kind of way, but then one day something changed and because of that change, nothing could ever be the way it was again. And that is a movie story. And television — things ultimately are back to somewhat like they were before. In movies, ideally, they are not.

Craig: Yeah. The focus of a film narrative, a feature film narrative is once upon a time there was blank, until finally blank. And that word finally says a lot. In television, they’re really concentrating on every day blank. So, movies are about shattering the everyday in such a way that it cannot it be returned to. And a new normal is created at the end. And we understand that the dramatic flaw has been cured and the hero is solved. Every day of the rest of their life after the movie should probably be quite boring and stable.

John: Yes. And if there’s a sequel, then you are going to reignite that flame. But there’s an expectation that a new normal has been reached at the end of your movie journey. And the character is different for it, but the character has come to a new place of rest. And that is not the experience of television at all.

Craig: No, in television, the normal is what is interesting. So, if you watch — I mean, procedurals do this the best, every week the district attorney sits down with his associates and says we have to win a trial. That’s our normal. And that’s what we do each week. There are serializable things that can happen over the course of a television series, but even when you look at those you’ll see in soap operatic fashion that those changes are just as undoable as they are doable.

So, in a movie, let’s say a woman is in love with a guy and he doesn’t know she exists. And that’s her normal life, until one day, right, a thing happens. And that destroys the normal fabric until such time as she either ends up with this guy or comes to some other resting place that is satisfying for her. Done.

In the serialized things that happens across episodic television, people get married, they get unmarried, they break up, they don’t break up. I mean, look at Friends. Every single one of them was in love with one of the other ones of them at some point. They mixed and matched and they got married and unmarried and together and not together, because the point was it can’t end. It’s not supposed to ever end. Which is why, by the way, the last episodes of television are incredibly hard to pull off. They are fighting the nature of television in the way that a lot of movie sequels are fighting the nature of movies, which is why sequels are hard to pull off.

John: in the outline you have this described as the difference between life-changing and life-living. And I think that’s a very smart way of making the distinction. Movies are about life-changing events in these character’s lives. Television is about these characters living their daily lives. And in living their daily lives, there are ups and downs, there are peaks and valleys, there are big things that could happen to them. But it is just their daily life. It’s their ongoing story, rather than the one epic that took them from this place to that place.

Craig: Which is why, I think, narrative television in the last 10 or 15 years has done such a remarkable job, because in the embracing of the narrative of the everyday, they have found a way to connect to common experiences we all have in nice, subtle, interesting, realistic ways. Somebody spends an entire episode dealing with a thing in a way that is not meant to be buttoned up or solved. And that very closely mirrors our experience of life.

The truth is that for all of us living on this planet, most of us never actually have a movie moment in our lives. Every now and then you do. But those are special.

John: Yeah. You may have five movie moments in your entire life. And you could look at — even if you take a very famous person and you’re trying to make a biopic about them, you are going to pick sort of those few movie moments, or you’re going to try to decide what is the movie story to tell of this person’s life, because their daily life was a lot of ordinary. And if they’re an extraordinary person, their ordinary life is probably kind of too ordinary for a movie.

Craig: Yeah. It’s one of the reasons that when we do biopics we tend to gravitate feature wise towards people that die young, because it is an end. And what isn’t quite as satisfying is a biopic about somebody who just keeps on living. And then they live some more. And then more.

There was a little bit of that feeling, you know, I got that feeling when I was watching J. Edgar Hoover.

John: Yeah.

Craig: He just kept living.

John: Yeah. I honestly had that frustration with Theory of Everything. I think that Stephen Hawking is still alive, but I didn’t like that he was still alive in the movie, because you end up with a sort of two little title cards at the end that says sort of what people are like now, and then you’re just — you keep going.

Craig: Great example. Because you could make a fantastic television series about the life of Stephen Hawking because it is ongoing. And there are these things that happen all the time with him. And there’s also the progression of his disease, which frankly is more interesting, I would think, in sort of presented in a way that’s realistic.

Now, Turing, on the other hand, he died young. And so that’s a movie.

John: Yep.

Craig: It’s one of those funny things. Harder to do. I always struggle with — and it’s not fair, in a way, but I struggle with biopics where people just keep on living.

Now, sometimes the end of a narrative isn’t about death, but about a rebirth. So, for instance, What’s Love Got to Do with it is one of my favorite movies.

John: I was going to bring that up as well.

Craig: Love it.

John: I mean, it’s such a — and one of the rare examples of like they found the right place to end the movie on a highlight and just brilliantly done.

Craig: Right. Because the movie moment of her life, so she had a movie moment by being discovered. She had a movie moment by becoming famous with this man. She had a movie moment by suffering through domestic violence. She had a movie moment by breaking free of him. And then she had a movie moment of becoming a star all on her own. And when she does, we’re done. We’re good. The rest — Tina Turner is still alive. Nothing interesting is happening with her right now that deserves a movie. That’s why that was a movie.

John: I agree. In my conversation with Mark Mallouk about Black Mass, we were discussing Whitey Bulger who was a fascinating character, but as he was writing the story he just disappeared. He was just a dot-dot-dot. And there was no sense — the movie had a sense of closure. And his script had a sense of closure, but not really closure.

And so as they had a director attached and as they were starting to think about production suddenly he got the email that, oh, they found Whitey Bulger and he was living in Santa Monica, which was in 2011. And suddenly he had a very different ending for his movie. And that was in a weird way his capture made it a movie. And it provided a closure to it in a way that was absolutely necessary.

Craig: No question.

John: And there had been talk about trying to do that same — to adapt that same book into a series, and you could imagine what that series was. It could have been a great sort of limited series for HBO or Showtime. But it’s harder to imagine it as a movie without that sort of framing.

Craig: Movies end.

John: Movies end.

Craig: And television doesn’t. I mean, even when you talk about television with a built-in end, when I think about some of the limited series, when I look at those I think it’s just a super long movie. But proper television is meant to go as long as the creators feel like doing it. They could have done another 12 seasons of Mad Men, another 15 of Sopranos. They could have done MAS*H forever. Obviously they have to gauge the interest of the audience as the years go on. And they have to gauge if creatively there’s any juice left in it.

But without an ending, you don’t really have a movie, or some kind of limited run.

John: Agreed. Let’s talk about what else is different — size. So, movies are about extraordinary events. And often those extraordinary events are huge events. So, obviously if you’re doing a movie like San Andreas, you’re going to have the earthquake once and that’s going to be the fundamental thing that changes everybody’s life.

But in movies that don’t have that sort of big scale event, where there’s no alien invasion, it is a life-changing event for the main characters that you’re facing. It’s the day — I think we go back to the way it was before. In 12 Years a Slave, you follow Solomon Northup’s kidnapping, his ordeal, and his liberation. So there was more to his life. You could have picked it up at different points, but the movie wanted to be about his journey, about his effort to get home.

He had a very clear want and desire which was to be reunited with his family. And so once he was reunited with his family, that’s the end of the movie. And there’s no more movie to make at that point.

Even When Harry Met Sally, you know, it’s about two characters who have sort of an extraordinary first meeting where they both confess their true feelings about what they think relationships can be, and once that premise is established the movie version of that has to be them getting together or finally not ever being able to get together. It’s not set up in a television way. You couldn’t extend that out in a repeatable way across 22 episodes of a season.

Craig: Correct. There’s really no fun in watching television characters burn through a relationship or consummate a relationship. When they do it, they’re usually doing it I think because they feel like the status quo that they’ve established to that point is getting a little stale. So they’re not actually beginning or ending things. They’re creating a new status quo that they can then continue with for another five years.

So this is why characters get divorced, or get married, or fall in love, or fall out of love. Not the case in movies. Size wise, I think a movie is capable of expanding or contracting to any size, because it’s really about the depth of focus. How deep are you going to drill down into something?

Episodic television I think does not handle size well, because there is an exhaustion that occurs. And I think a little bit of that happened with Lost. The massivity of what they were proposing and the fact that it continued to be massive at some point became unwieldy. And it started to collapse in on itself. So, you can say, well, science fiction episodes can get big in a sense, but that’s just a trick of effects. I mean, Star Trek was not big in terms of scope of drama. It was as episodic as anything. It might as well have been a western in that regard. Or The Twilight Zone in that regard.

And a lot of the episodes do fit into those patterns. Television, I think, is less adaptable to huge swings of large events.

John: I think there’s a suspension of disbelief that happens with a movie where you can say like, oh, well this happens once. I can see that happening. But when you’re on your 5th season of 24 and Jack Bauer has to save the day from nuclear Armageddon yet again, that becomes a real challenge. And it feels like it violates the contract you made with your audience that like it can’t just keep happening again and again.

Heroes is another example of a show that burned so bright out of the gate and when it came time to try to repeat what it was doing, you weren’t up for it. It achieved this giant scale and really smart storytelling, and you didn’t want to see it do that same thing again.

Craig: Yeah. It starts to struggle under its own bigness. And actually an interesting exercise is to look at the difference between the way Star Trek episodes are structured and their narrative nature compared to Star Trek movies. So, one of my favorite Star Trek movies is First Contact. And so that’s about the Borg, the evil alien race, incapable of defeating humanity in the future, has decided to go into the past to our — well, sort of near future us now — to destroy the earth or actually destroy the ship that’s going to go faster than the speed of light for the first time, because that’s what essentially kicks us off and creates our connection to the rest of the galaxy and makes Star Trek possible. That feels very big. And very endable. There’s an end in sight from the conception of it, which is are they going to do this or not.

Star Trek episodes don’t really work that way. It’s a good way to kind of make the comparison.

John: As we talk about scale, I also want to stress that movies can be small and quiet, but still have a scale to them. So, a movie from this last year, End of the Tour, which I just loved, the story of David Foster Wallace and the journalist interviewing him, from the David Foster Wallace’s character perspective, this isn’t sort of the day that everything changed. It was sort of every day for him. But for the journalist interviewing him, the Jesse Eisenberg character, this was a fundamentally important shift in his life.

And so even though the move didn’t have earthquakes and rocket ships, it was incredibly important to this character, and it had stakes for that character in ways that television wouldn’t have.

Craig: Boy, it’s just amazing to consider this. It’s a simple thing, and it may seem a little morbid, and it may seem a little cynical, but I think it’s true — you don’t make that movie if David Foster Wallace doesn’t commit suicide. There’s no end.

John: That’s probably true. I mean, I think the whole movie becomes framed in a very different light. And if you go into the movie knowing that David Foster Wallace is still alive, and has an opinion about the movie you’re about to sit down and see, it does feel very, very different. You’re right.

Craig: It’s one of those things. You need some kind of end. And, again, I don’t want to harp on death as the only kind of ending, because there are lots of endings and lots of rebirths. But something has to break there permanently.

John: Well, I think when we talk about life and death, even if it’s not literally death, it has to be this sense that there are — that the lead characters could fail and there would be horrible consequences for their failure. And that’s movies.

In television, you sort of as an audience don’t believe that these lead characters are going to do, or that their failure could be so devastating. That’s one of the reasons why Game of Thrones I think is so shocking to watch is because we don’t expect to have our television characters killed off suddenly and for seemingly no reason.

Craig: Yeah. They do a great job of shaking us out of our, what I’ll call, soap opera complacency. And yet, nonetheless, it is a soap opera. I mean no disrespect to the show by that term. I think most episodic drama is soap opera. I love Game of Thrones. I think it’s the best soap opera ever made. It’s right up there with The Sopranos, which was also a soap opera.

But, yeah, they’re willing to kill characters as The Sopranos did, by the way. But also there is an ongoing process there. Now, it will be fascinating to see how it all lands, because we now know for sure that they’ve run out of books, so they’re now moving past George R. Martin. He himself, I think by his own account, is two books away from the end. So they’re now heading into what would be the penultimate book. I don’t know how many seasons that will cover, one or more. But at some point it will need to come to a landing. And at that point, there will start to take on — the show will start to take on some movie narrative aspects, inevitably. There will be permanent changes. Things will happen that will seem somewhat un-Game of Thrones like in their permanence.

John: Which I’m excited to see how that pans out. Let’s talk about characters and the choices the characters make in movies versus in television shows. In movies, you see characters making big, bold, and sort of irrevocable choices. I’m going to fight the world heavyweight champion. They’re stating their goals probably really clearly and boldly and in way that you can actually see in the trailer. And that is what they’re going for. So you’re making the contract with the audience that like this thing that I say I’m going to do, you’re going to see me try to do that.

In television, characters might pine for somebody. They might want a better life. But there’s not that expectation that we’re going to see them do that and become that over the course of watching that show. It’s informing what kind of character they are, but not necessarily what they’re doing on a daily or weekly basis. And it’s very rare that you’re going to see characters in television essentially burn down the house, like basically destroy the place of safety that they have in order to move onto their new world. And in movies you see that quite often. That’s what you end up doing at the end of your first act often is burning your whole previous life behind you, so you can move forward into this next phase of your life.

Craig: Yeah, interestingly, television characters are often punished for attempting to be different. They try and change. And they are punished for it, or they come to an understanding that they were better off the way they were. So, television has trouble with change. Television does much better with situations.

John: They do.

Craig: And by television I don’t mean the series that have ends, but rather television that’s meant to go on and on. So, characters will say, “I’m quitting my job and I’m changing my life,” and at the end the lesson is don’t do that.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Because we have to do another episode next week. And that’s not our show.

John: In many half hour comedies you will see a lead character make a fundamental choice that would change and upset everything. And by the end of the episode they’re back to where they are before. And that is the nature of television and we’ve come to sort of accept that.

So let’s say you have an idea for something, and you’re not quite sure if it’s a feature idea or a television series idea. And let’s run through some ways to try to suss out whether we think this is a TV idea or movie idea. So, these aren’t hard and fast rules, but just some frameworks for thinking about like which way you should take this idea.

Craig: Okay.

John: For starter, the simple one, length. Is this a story that wants to be told within about two hours, because then it’s a feature. If there’s not a real way to tell the story you want to tell within two hours, it’s not a feature idea, and maybe it’s a TV idea.

Craig: Yeah. And you can now take advantage of this middle ground. So the thing that I’m writing for HBO is far too big to be a movie, but it’s a really long movie. So it’s a six-episode movie. And those are interesting. I like that world that now exists. It used to exist, and then it went away for a long time. Now it’s back.

But, yes, you have to ask yourself is this something that I can encompass within two hours or so. And then the flip side of that is — is this something that would actually be most enjoyable on an ongoing basis? Because it feels that way length wise, that’s where you want to go.

John: Yeah. Is what’s interesting about this idea the world and to some degree the characters, or is it the specific plot and story that you have in your head? If it’s the world, more likely what you’re describing is a TV show and if it is the specific plot and the incidents that happen in your story right now, that is probably a movie.

So an example would be I had this idea for a crime thriller set in Alaska. And I knew basically how the police and sheriffs and everything works in Alaska is so different than how we have it in the lower 48 states. And I loved that world. I thought it was really fascinating. But mostly I loved the world. I loved sort of the strange way it all worked. And I had an idea for like what the plot would be with the pilot, but I also felt like this feels repeatable. This feels like a thing that could be down week after week.

And so I pitched and I set it up at ABC and we shot the pilot. And that was a pilot I wrote called Alaska. And it didn’t go forward, but that was very much a TV idea. It was repeatable.

The feature version of that idea was a Christopher Nolan movie called Insomnia. And that was a very specific crime story that kind of happened to take place in Alaska. His story was very specifically a movie and the setting was just an interesting place to set the story.

Craig: I think that’s a great instinct that you had to think about world versus incident. I’m a huge fan of Northern Exposure, one of my favorite shows, and that was absolutely about the world. Certainly there were characters and certainly there were events that occurred, that’s what the episodes were about individually. But the enjoyment of the show, the reason you kept coming back week after week was to go back to that place. We are all constantly going back to the Cheers bar when we return for another week of television. There is a familiarity that we wish to reengage with.

And movies are the opposite. Movies are entirely about destroying familiarity and jostling you out of that. And then creating something new at the end. So, that was a smart call. And interestingly Alaska movies don’t — you struggle with Alaska movies. I mean, Mystery Alaska was another one that was kind of tough. Because Alaska does feel like it’s about the place and about exploring it over time.

John: Yep. Something I’ll call trailer-ability, is like is there a way to tell what is unique and interesting about your specific story in like a 90-second trailer. Or is it something that is more like a long slice that you’d have to really see a TV show to sort of — to understand what it is.

The details of your story, could those fit into a 90-second trailer? Or do you need to actually have a full season for that to make sense?

The same with Lost, the plane crash in Lost could be in a trailer. And you can sort of get ideas from it, but you couldn’t really get a sense of what the show of Lost was going to be like in a 90-second trailer. It was just beyond the scope of what you could imagine sitting in the theater and watching up on a screen.

Craig: In part because there was no designed end game, but you could absolutely have decided at the point of conception to not make Lost as a television show, but to make it as a movie. And you could have made a great trailer, the promise being “and this ends.” You’ll find out.

When you look at a show like The Sopranos, the promotional materials were basically saying you’ve never seen a mob family like this before. And, look, it’s mobsters dealing with the existential dread of everyday life. Well, if I saw that in a movie theater as a trailer I’d think, okay, and then what happens? What’s the thing? Why is this a movie?

John: Yeah.

Craig: So, you’re absolutely right. There’s a good test there right off the bat. Can you feel the entirety of the trailer in your head? And if you can’t, you might be dealing with a television show.

John: This is actually a note that you will hear if you ever go in to pitch a TV show. They will ask, “What is episode 12?” And by that they’re saying like once you’ve burned through this initial sort of set up of your world, what is a normal episode of your show going to be like? And that is a real criteria for whether this is a TV show idea or if it’s just an interesting pilot that doesn’t actually have sustainability.

So, if you have a real sense of what episode 12 is like, that’s probably a TV show. If you don’t, then maybe what you’re really describing is a feature and you need to think about it as a feature.

Craig: Yeah. The shows that I truly love manage to make me feel like they were all designed intentionally from the start, even though they weren’t. I know for a fact that when Vince Gilligan and his writer’s room were making the first season of Breaking Bad, they had no idea what was going to happen in season five. Maybe they had some vague senses of it, but certainly not moment to moment.

There were characters that came around in season three that they had no clue that they were going to invent. But it all feels of a piece. What they did know was that at the very least, they knew how to extend this out as far as a year.

And if you can extend it out as far as a year and then end your year on some kind of cliffhanger that promises more gasoline in the tank for your engine, then you’re in good shape.

John: Yep. Does your story want to keep coming back to the same sets? If your story mostly takes place in certain locations and you feel like you would be back seeing those same places a lot, that feels more television. And if your story is a road trip — you’re someplace new every scene, that does not feel like television. Not just for the logistics of production, but also for kind of audience expectation. There’s a familiarity about coming back to the same places with the same characters repeatedly over the course of time. Even shows like Mad Men, shows like The Sopranos, great shows. They do go back to their sets. And that’s an expectation in television that’s natural. And so if you find your story keeps wanting to go back to familiar locations, that’s probably a television idea.

Craig: It’s either a television idea, or it’s a small independent film.

John: Yes.

Craig: And small movies can live within very confined areas as long as narratively they feel like a movie. But you’re absolutely right, for television, we’re desperate for the familiar. There’s no reason that the guys in The Sopranos needed to always meet in the backroom of the Bada Bing, or in the back room of the deli store. But we crave it, because that is what television is promising us. It’s promising us more verisimilitude than movies. It’s promising us the small but meaningful dramatic quests of the every day. And for all of us moving through every day, we have a house, we have a hangout, we have an office. That’s our deal. We’re creatures of habit.

John: My final criteria is how many characters do you need to tell your story? And if you have a bunch of characters in your world, that’s probably television. If you have a very small number of characters, that is more likely a feature. And so, yes, we can think of features that have tremendous numbers of characters. You can think of the Godfathers where there is a bunch of people you need to keep track of, but in general you have more people on television and you’re going to have more minor characters who are going to resurface.

More often in television you’re not going to be locked to a character’s point of view, so you’ll be able to see things from multiple character’s point of view. You’ll be able to wander off with that woman and see what she’s doing during her day and not always be focused on your one main lead guy. That’s television and that’s our expectation of television. In features, you tend to have smaller, more focused character sets. And generally as you’re crafting a feature, you find yourself combining characters down so that there are not more speaking parts than you absolutely need.

Craig: Yeah. There are always exceptions, of course. Big epics can expand to include more characters, but often need to be more than one movie. You have the Richard Curtis model, where you’re doing a Triptych, or you’re following four or five different characters in their own mini stories. But those are all like little short films connected to each other and then interrelated in some way. Actually some film student somewhere should do a paper on the similarities between Richard Curtis films and Quentin Tarantino films, which are remarkably similar in this regard, that they tend to create — Tarantino intends to encompass lots of small mini movies in one movie, as does Richard Curtis.

But, again, done in such a way that they don’t cross. If they’re all mingling together, if you have 12 people moving in and out altogether, all following the same plot, very difficult to do in a feature film.

John: Agreed. Compare the difference between Office Space and The Office. And The Office is a television show with a lot of characters. Office Space also is set in an office, has characters, but it’s narrowing down to fewer people because that’s what the feature can actually focus on.

All right, let’s talk about some properties that actually cross the divide. Properties that are both features and television and talk about sort of what happens when things do cross that divide. An example, Mission: Impossible. Mission: Impossible was a TV show. It was a procedural. It was on every week. Every week they would get a case. This message would self-destruct. And people loved that show, and then it was off the air for many years. It came back as the Tom Cruise franchise. And it did most of the things we just talked about, which movies need to do. They focused on many fewer characters. Rather than being the team, it’s really a Tom Cruise movie. He’s very much the focus.

The scale got much, much bigger. It was a once and a lifetime thing for him. Even each time it feels like this is the one he could die in. The scale was increased greatly.

Craig: Yeah. Same thing with the James Bond series. Same thing with the Fast & Furious series. You could argue that certain long-running movie franchises are actually massive television shows that have one episode every three years, or every two years, because that’s kind of the way it feels. Especially with Bond. Bond has been going the longest of all of them. And I’m a big Bond fan, so I’ve seen all of them. And putting aside the oddity of the casting changes and just suspending your disbelief, they’re just — each one is just an awesome episode.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Those are interesting hybrids.

John: So, with Charlie’s Angles, Charlie’s Angels was a very successful TV show. When it came time to make it into a feature, we really had to think about sort of what does this want to be on the big screen. And how do we tell a story that feels like it is Charlie’s Angels, but is also a movie version of what Charlie’s Angels would be.

And one of the things we came to is like, well, they work for this mysterious boss. This should be the closest they ever come to finding out who their boss is, that their boss is in danger, that they’re saving their father/their boss, the king. That they’re doing things that they would never have been able to do before. And we literally blow up the talent agency. So we sort of see the iconic home. The home was destroyed. It can never be made back the same way.

Those are things you do in the movie version of Charlie’s Angels that you would never do in the TV show version of Charlie’s Angels.

Craig: Right. But you could have then considered that the pilot episode of one of these new mega series that comes out once every two years, and —

John: That was absolutely the goal until — as I described it during the initial press for the first Charlie’s Angels, I said like, “I really think of this as a pilot that, you know, for a TV show that takes four years between episodes and costs $100 million.”

Craig: There you go.

John: And so the second episode should have been that episode that was like so much better than the pilot, where we sort of fixed all the problems. And instead it was a not good episode of the show, and the show got canceled.

Craig: That’s why these are so rare. Because one bad episode early on could be enough. In fact, if you look at the history of Fast & Furious, after the third one they were kind of in a wobbly place. Vin Diesel wasn’t in the second one, or the third one, and so they didn’t seem like it was going to be one of those television series. It seemed more like it was just going to be what it is.

They brought him back and revitalized it and got the series back on track. There are movies out there that continue on in this series like fashion a lot of times right under our noses like The Transporter. You know, another Robert Kamen joint.

John: Nicely done. Let’s talk about examples of shows that have done the opposite thing. So, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. This is taking The Terminator, and what we loved about The Terminator is like, well, what if we looked at Sarah Connor and sort of what daily life is like. And so her daily life is incredibly heightened. What Josh Friedman was so smart to do is really look at like what is it like to live under this threat of constant death, where there’s always going to be someone out there trying to kill you. How do you establish a normal life in that situation? So, that’s the fundamental question of the TV series, Sarah Connor Chronicles. Which I loved. Which got canceled way too soon.

And also The Muppets, the new Muppets that’s on right now. Yes, there was the Muppet TV show before, but this really feels more to me like the Muppet movies. And if you took those characters from the Muppet movies which were always having some great adventure and instead you put them in an incredibly familiar locked down TV environment where they’re talking directly to camera and uses all the conventions of The Office or Parks & Recreation, what would that feel like.

And so it’s designed to not be the one time that this thing happened. It’s meant to be like The Larry Sanders Show. It’s everyday life.

Craig: It can be a tricky affair, because when we see a movie, sometimes what we have fallen in love with it is not translatable to television. And we’re just not as interested in the more mundane or drawn out or existential aspects of that idea. That said, occasionally it works brilliantly. Perhaps the best example is MAS*H.

John: Yep.

Craig: MASH, the movie, is wonderful. MASH, the series, not really like the movie, but made all the right changes it needed to to be a fantastic television show.

John: Yeah, you look at MAS*H, the movie, and it had Altman’s huge cast and sort of those kinds of questions that were very appropriate for both an Altman film, but could translate nicely to a TV series. But they had to translate. They had to really think about sort of what the show was going to be like with a laugh track, with standing sets, on a weekly basis. And they made very smart choices that were right for the time.

Craig: We should throw Altman into that term paper on Tarantino and Curtis.

John: Yep. It’s sort of the, you know, when you have giant casts and each character has the ability to take the narrative reins, what happens?

Craig: Right.

John: All right. Let’s see what happens with these Three Page Challenges. If this is your first time listening to a Three Page Challenge, what we do is every once and a while we open up the mailbag and look at three pages of scripts that people have sent through. They’re not sending their whole scripts. They’re only sending these three pages.

And if you would like to read along with us, go to the show notes at johnaugust.com, look for this episode. And you can open up the PDFs and read along with us as we take a look at what these writers have sent in.

If you’d like to send in your own pages, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and there are instructions for how you do that and a little form you attach your PDF to.

So, let’s start with Dan Mauer. Is it Mauer or Mauer?

Craig: It looks like it’s Mauer.

John: Maurer. All right. Dan on the cover page says that he is a 2015 Austin Film Festival Three Page Challenge submission. Please note that I will be attending AFF. So, perhaps we will meet Dan there and be able to talk more about his pages.

Craig: All right.

John: Do you want to synopsize this?

Craig: Sure. So we open in a cellar at night. There’s just a little bit of light coming from an old kerosene lantern. And we hear the sound “Tap…Tap, Clang…” sort of a metallic sound. Door creaks open. It’s clearly bad weather outside and the distant wail of a police siren. And in comes a boy, a 12-year-old boy, named Billy. He’s in snow boots. He steps over to the lantern and revitalizes the lantern by pumping. It’s some kind of pump-operated lantern.

John: Coleman lanterns do that.

Craig: There you go. And he hears maybe a footstep. And we see a super, by the way. This is January 1975. And by moving the light around he discovers a dead body. A body of a boy. And then he realizes he’s not alone in the room. There’s another boy in the room. And that boy’s name is Tommy. And tommy whispers to Billy, “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

Billy looks back at the body. Tommy is also 12, by the way. Looks at the body. And then makes the connection that perhaps Tommy did in fact do something wrong. And this his fault. And under all of this, the continuing mysterious noise, “tap…tap…clang…clang.”

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: And that’s the bottom of our three pages. My initial reaction to this is I am interested and intrigued by these boys in the body in the basement. It was a lot of shoe leather to sort of get through for where I got at the end of these three pages. I felt like I could have gotten there faster for what his was.

And there were a few specific things that sort of stuck out for me. The reveal of the super, January 1975, fine for us to do that. But if you’re going to call that out at a specific moment, it needs to be really a revelation that needs to be a very specific time and reason why you’re showing that title right when you’re showing it. And there really wasn’t for me. It was, “Billy grabs the lantern, stands, and holds out the light. Exposed beams, pipes and dusty floorboards hover over head. SUPER: ‘January, 1975′”. There wasn’t an incident that told me, like, oh, this is why it’s important for me to know this is 1975 versus a different time. That sort of stuck out.

There were some choices on sort of how we’re — just some word choices that sort of stuck out for me. “Billy looks around, his lantern pushing back the darkness only a small dim circle at a time.” The circle frustrated me a little bit because while lantern light would cast a circle, that’s not the force that’s pushing forward. It’s like you only see the circle looking down. The geography threw me off a little bit in that description.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Craig, what is your first opinion of this?

Craig: Well, overall I thought it was really well done. I liked Dan’s general use of language. It was incredibly evocative. I could draw the room for you. I felt and heard everything. I could almost imagine colors and things and palettes. So, what was happening was a really good use of cinematic writing. I enjoyed the sound aspects in particular.

Some things to consider. I agree on the super. I’m not sure why we didn’t see it at the top. It does emerge oddly there on the page. Obviously it’s not something that’s determinative. It will be done in post, but for the reader, everything should be intentional. The introduction of Billy, the first kid, says, “REVEAL BILLY STONE, 12, fair-haired, open-faced. A young boy eager to leave childhood behind, if only he knew how.” No.

John: No.

Craig: No.

John: That’s unplayable. It doesn’t help us.

Craig: No, he’s fair-haired and open-faced. He could be scared. He could be realizing he’s completely in over his head. I’d love to see how cold he is in his face. I think cold is a great thing to be evocative about on film. I love that he’s well-dressed for the snow, but wears only one knit glove. That’s a great little detail. And that he’s cut on his hand. He sees that.

A little odd that he’s looking at that now. Maybe if it were clearer that he is using the lantern specifically to look at his hand. It seems almost like he just happens to go, “Oh, and by the way, audience, here’s my cut hand.”

So, a little something to think about there. There is, story-wise, I’m certainly intrigued. I want to know what Tommy did. I want to know what Tommy’s problem is. I want to know what’s down in the hole. I want to know what’s making the noise.

I did get a little confused about some direction. When Billy discovers the body he looks toward the hole, trips over something, staggers, and then sees — we see — a balled up gym sock, tattered underwear, wadded up jeans, a child’s barefoot, young dead fingers reaching from beneath loose soil. Cool.

“Billy panics, steps back and trips over a shard of concrete.” That’s the second trip. “He drops the lantern and goes down hard. The light hits the ground, revealing the bloodied and disfigured face of a DEAD BOY.” I was a little confused. Like, wait a second, if the fingers are reaching from beneath loose soil, where’s the head, where’s the face, where are the feet. I got a little confused about how that worked.

John: Yeah. I did, too.

Craig: But certainly the introduction of Tommy is really cool. The third page is the one where things get a little flabby. Once Tommy says, “I didn’t do nothing wrong, Billy,” you could just as easily have Billy look at the body and go, “No,” and then clang, clang, clang, clang. You could remove a lot of page three.

John: I think you could, too. Let’s take a look at the description of Tommy Schneider. “TOMMY SCHNEIDER, 12. He’s fragile; damaged goods. Stringy red hair, blotchy freckles, and an oddly shrunken ear complete the picture of a kid no mother could love.” A kid no mother could love? I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what that means.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, if he’s creepy or, again, I’m not a huge fan of these kinds of baroque character descriptions anyway, but if you’re going to do it, give me something that I think a kid could play.

John: Yeah. Fragile and damaged goods I think are both useful. Joined by semicolon, damaged goods doesn’t help me with fragile. And so if you wanted to put that damaged goods after the shrunken ear, sure. I mean, there’s that sense of he’s a fundamentally broken kid. I totally get and understand that.

Like you, I got confused by the geography within the space. Circling back to the 1975 of it all, until I got to the 1975 I wasn’t sure if we were in present day or like in a western, because there’s nothing here — the kerosene lantern made me think like, well, this is a long time ago. But I didn’t really know. So, putting that 1975 up earlier would probably help me just get a sense of place and time and sort of who these kids would be. I sort of have a 1975 kid template that would have been really helpful to apply at the start.

Craig: Yeah, I had the same confusion from the lantern. I thought maybe we were in the 1800s or something.

John: Yeah. So I guess on the whole I would say interested, intrigued. I think we can do the stuff that these pages do faster. But I’m curious to read page four.

Craig: Yeah, for sure. And I really think that Dan’s got a good control over his writing and good control over the — I can tell that he watched this scene before he wrote. And that’s absolutely crucial. So I thought he did a really good job and is very promising.

John: Cool. All right, next up, let’s look at Kate Jeffrey’s pages. This is Into the Bazaar. Bazaar like a shopping bazaar. Not a strange place, although it could be strange.

We open on the streets of New York where the sun is low. We follow a delivery boy on a bike as he zooms by. Honks as he’s racing through traffic. He’s in a fancy neighborhood and arrives outside a brownstone on a quiet block. He rings the buzzer. Buzz. Buzz. And then we’re inside the apartment where a small girl, Jane, 14, hears the buzzer.

She sitting on the bed. There’s an untouched glass of chocolate milk on the bedside table. In the living room at the same time, Eleanor, 38, is laying on a chaise lounge. She’s wealthy and dying. There’s an empty container of pills and a glass of water. She hears the buzzer but she does not respond to it.

Jane, he daughter apparently, shows up. Asks he if she drank the chocolate milk and apparently has not drank the chocolate milk. We stay with them as Eleanor dies. She has apparently taken all the pills and she dies there in the scene.

Jane calls a man and we hear on the other end the man answering, yes. And it is her father. And the father is saying, “For Heaven’s sake, speak up.” The daughter, Jane, asks, “Can you come home? Mom has…”

And the father says, “Sorry, hun, I gotta go. Ask you mother.”

And that is the bottom of page three.

Craig: Right. So, I can sense you were struggling to synopsize this because in part it’s written in a way that defies synopsis, which is not a good sign. Here are the good signs. Again, I liked a lot of the language. And I could see what was going on. And I think that Kate has made this really remarkable choice right off the bat to present this suicide in such a, well, in such a bizarre manner. And so I really like that.

But let’s talk about where Kate is kind of getting in her own way here. First off, we have the first half of the first page is not about Jane, the daughter, or Eleanor, the mother. The first half is about the delivery boy. And, in fact, it’s presented as if the delivery boy is going to be the hero of our movie. Even has an interaction with an old man crossing the street. The old man gets a line. And then the delivery boy arrives and is buzzing and waiting, and buzzing and waiting, and buzzing and waiting.

Well, I’m not sure any of that is necessary at all, unless the delivery boy becomes a real character, in which case don’t call him delivery boy.

John: That was my first instinct, too. It’s a red flag the delivery boy doesn’t have an age, so you call him a boy. But is he actually a boy or is he a young man. Is he a delivery guy? Like, there’s no detail provided for him, and yet we’re spending the first half of our first page following him through the city is frustrating.

Craig: It was frustrating. I think that timewise Kate has set us in New York at evening sunset — already to go down, so actually it’s not evening, it’s more like whatever you would call dusk.

Then Eleanor seems to have this expectation that Jane would be asleep by now. That doesn’t quite add up.

John: Yep.

Craig: So —

John: Well, so I took this to mean that the mother has drugged the chocolate milk, and so that Jane is supposed to be dead, too.

Craig: Okay, well, so then I start to draw some conclusions, including that one. So let’s talk about, again, Kate kind of getting in her own way a little bit here, because she’s got some really cool stuff and she just needs to button up a few things.

When we meet Jane, she is 14 years old, and she’s in a room with an expected array of teddy bears and decorative pillows, which is, you know, an array of teddy bears for a 14-year-old girl is actually not expected. So, I wasn’t quite sure if that was meant to be ironic or informative. If it is, call it out as being unexpected. Don’t call it expected.

And then there’s this chocolate milk. Jane also looking at a doll. Again, is she 14 or is she nine? What’s going on here? I like the buzzing. By the way, if you cut the delivery boy out entirely and there was this buzzing, that would be fine, too.

Now we go to Eleanor. Now, here’s what it says, “ELEANOR (38), lies on a chaise lounge. Wealthy and dying. Her silk robes splay open, revealing a lace nightgown, and her graying auburn hair is fanned around her head.” At this point at the end of page one, Kate I guarantee you 99.8% of writers will think, oh, I see, Eleanor has cancer. Because that’s pretty much what that means.

“She stares up at an ornate chandelier. An empty container of pills and a pessimistic glass of water sit on a wooden coffee table next to her.” Now, I loved “pessimistic glass of water,” by the way. It was great. I did not like empty container of pills. Pills are not easily viewed as empty. Pill containers — the pill containers we all know are those orange plastic things and they’re kind of hard to see. And usually they’re covered by labels and you can’t see what’s in them at all.

If it were spilled over. If we saw some better indication. If we saw her finishing the last of them. Something. You’ve got to give us a little bit more so we’re not completely lost. Because really it took me a while until at the bottom of page two Kate says, with Eleanor having been interrupted by Jane, “An awkward silence. How embarrassing to be walked in on during your suicide.” Well, that’s not — that’s cheating.

I need to know it’s a suicide from what I’ve seen, not from you telling me. So that was one.

“You didn’t drink your chocolate milk I made you” is another one where I think people are going to have to wonder did she really drug her kid. How did she do that? Why didn’t the girl drink the chocolate milk? Why is a 14-year-old girl — why would she think that a 14-year-old girl would want to drink chocolate milk? Is this girl mentally disabled? Is she — she seems regressive to me. She doesn’t seem like a 14-year-old girl.

Then, on page three, the most curious of things. Jane appears to understand that Eleanor has killed herself and is dying. “Jane stares at Eleanor. Then nods. It’s a moment of honesty, and Jane appreciates it. She watches, frozen, as her mother slips away. Eleanor’s alert eyes rove her daughter’s face once more before closing. Jane’s stoic demeanor lasts only a second longer before crumbling.” So, the implication is Jane understands that Eleanor has killed herself. Jane understands her mother is dying. Eleanor understands that Jane understands all this. Jane is attempting to be stoic during it, which is fascinating to me, and really interesting, but also that’s such a puzzling thing that for anything else to be puzzling around it creates confusion.

John: Yep.

Craig: And then, of course, once her mother dies, she then begins to behave the way somebody would normally, without a puzzling circumstance. She calls her father, desperate for help, and can’t speak. And finally when asking him to speak the father says, “I don’t know what’s going on. Go ask your mother.” Because he has no idea that anything important is going on.

That in and of itself tells me that this was not something that was expected or normal or anything that Jane should have been anticipating. So, I have so many logic questions about what’s happened in these first three. And yet, I have to say, I am emboldened because there’s a lot of beauty inherent in what Kate’s doing here.

So, just got to work on making some of these choices to help us appreciate what she’s doing.

John: Yes, I am like you admiring sort of the choices that she’s made in terms of setting up the story and setting up this mother killing herself so early in the story and sort of what the life is like for Jane. But I had to keep rereading character’s ages because I kept thinking like, wait, no, something is wrong. Like the wrong number got typed. Because “A small girl looks up at the noise. She is JANE (14), brown hair, pale and plain.” Well, you’re going to say she’s a girl, okay, and she’s 14, that’s the upper edge of what I would say is a girl, but fine.

But then all of the stuff with her room and all the animals, the stuffed animals, it felt so little girlie, that for you not to hang a lantern on it and let us know like, no really, this is really what it’s like. There’s something about this girl that it is unusual for her to have this stuff is important. Because otherwise I feel like I made a mistake.

Similarly, “ELEANOR (38), lies on a chaise lounge. Wealthy and dying.” An 88-year-old woman, wealthy and dying on a chaise lounge, I sort of get what that is. And then “her silk robe splays open, revealing a lace nightgown, and her graying auburn hair is fanned around her head. The graying hair and the 38 didn’t all track with me, too.

I just was having a hard time picturing who this woman was and what age I was supposed to think. And I knew that she probably was her mother based on those ages, but it all — the pieces weren’t connecting right for me as I was going through that.

Craig: Yeah, that gray hair was why I thought cancer. I just think like, okay, if you’re 38, you’re still relatively young. You’re lying there dying. You have medicine near you. And your hair is gray? You’re sick. You’re not committing suicide.

John: So Craig likes “pessimistic glass of water.” I hate pessimistic glass of water.

Craig: I loved it. I just loved it.

John: A glass of water can’t be pessimistic. I mean, a glass of water can be ominous, but like pessimistic is a personality trait that a glass of water I don’t think can have.

Craig: I know. But I just liked — I don’t know, it seemed evocative. Look, it’s ridiculous and poetic. Obviously glasses of water can’t be ominous or pessimistic or anything. They’re just glasses of water. But there was something about it that made me think, well, the glass of water is pessimistic because she’s —

John: The glass of water is pessimistic because like, oh, no, no, I’m not going to be tasty for you. I’m not going to be —

Craig: No, it’s just more like I thought that it was a good way to imply — the whole mood was pessimistic. You know, like Eleanor had just given up. I liked personally. It’s not the kind of thing, by the way, that is going to help you sink or swim.

John: No.

Craig: Do it rarely.

John: Another issue I had on page one, I think we’re advocating cutting all of this bike messenger running through the city because it’s not helping us here, but I want to call out, “The chaos of the deep city mellows as he gradually makes his way to the upper echelons of New York. The fancy hood.” Echelons doesn’t mean that. Echelons is actually a class of society. Echelons isn’t a location, it is a social stratus. And so I sort of get what she’s going for her, but like it was enough to bump me, that echelons isn’t the word she’s looking for here.

I’m trying to imagine ways in which we could do some of the same things that she’s doing here and even better land these ideas. If we see Eleanor place the glass of chocolate milk and then leave the room and then start to do things with pills, that’s incredibly ominous and evocative. If we see the moments before this has all happened. To come in so late to all these things, I just think we’re missing out on characters making choices. Like all the choices have been made before we came upon the scene.

Craig: Yeah, I agree. And if there is — look, the pages are strongly implying that Jane is not a developmentally appropriate 14-year-old girl. That she can’t even speak when she calls her father. She has trouble. She’s so frustrated by her inability to speak that she stomps her foot. This all seems off. If that’s the case, let us know. Let us know clearly and right off the bat.

In terms of the chocolate milk, I would probably have her just bring it in.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Just bring the chocolate milk in and put it down next to her mother, so that when her mother sees it she goes, “Oh no. You were supposed to drink that. You were supposed to be asleep.” Let me know what’s going on. Little bits because, look, I love mystery. But we’ve talked about this before. There’s a fine line between mysterious and what the hell is going on. And the second you cross into what the hell is going on-ville, well you’ve lost me. You don’t get any credit for your wonderful mystery. So, this feels like something that would — Kate would actually benefit strongly I think from listening to the script being read by other people because she would then see like, okay, this is the actual information that’s coming out.

Forget the script. Here’s what people will actually see and hear. And it will help her.

John: Agree.

Craig: All right. We’ve got one more here.

John: One more.

Craig: This is a script written by Sehaj Sethi. And, by the way, I checked because I was curious. Sehaj may be a man or a woman. It is a unisex name. So we don’t know. But the title of Sehaj’s script is C.A.S.S.P.R. And that’s an anagram — C.A.S.S.P.R.

Okay, so we open, it is outside the orbit around Kepler 438B. And hovering lifeless in space is the long, slender Archimedes, a space ship. And Kepler 438B looms in the not so far distance. It could be earth’s pale rocky twin.

Inside the Archimedes space ship we see that there’s been some kind of problem. There’s nobody in view. But everything is a wreck. Things are broken and shattered and sparking.

Then we go — that’s the main deck. Then we go to the crew quarters, same deal. Bedlam. Illuminated by one lone reading light that’s been left on. And then into the kitchen. Again, same deal. Everything is smashed and tumbled all over the place. And here is where we meet Akash, a slender Indian man, mid-40s. He’s unconscious with a thick gash on his forehead. And then he comes to and looks around bewildered.

We then go to the engine room. Alarms blaring. And similarly, there is a woman here named Monica, late 30s, muscular and opposing, picks herself up. She, too, has been injured. A big bruise on her head. She turns the warning off and we see that the engine has been stalled. Akash is at the main deck trying to restart the ship and failing. Monica stumbles in. And the two of them have a conversation about her sprained ankle. And in that conversation, by looking at each other’s badges, they identify each other. Akash is a biologist, Monica is an engineer. But neither one of them remember anything.

That’s what it says, “I don’t remember anything.” They’re identifying their own jobs based on what they’re wearing. At that point, Monica asks about the nature of the ship. He says navigation isn’t working. She looks outside at Kepler 438B and asks, “Are we here for that?”

Akash says, “We’re just out of orbit. I’d say so.”

She says, “It’s just like earth.”

And he says, “Probably why we’re here. Second chances.”

And those are our first three pages of C.A.S.S.P.R. by Sehaj Sethi.

John: Yeah. I enjoyed these pages very much. I was very curious to read page four and see what was going on. So, this idea of characters waking up not knowing who they are is a trope. We’ve seen it in other films before. We’ve probably even seen it in other space films. I still like it. It is an interesting way to begin because we as the audience have the same amount of information as the characters. And we are trying to find out about the world and the situation as the characters are trying to find out about the world and their situation.

I thought the writing on the page was nice. Archimedes is described as “a space ship with more curves than angles. A metal salamander…The enormous curve of Kepler 438b looms in the not-so-far distance. It could be Earth’s pale, rocky twin.” It felt confident about sort of its ability to describe what was going on.

Where I lost a little faith in our sci-fi of it all is as we come upon Monica. And so she picks herself up, she looks around completely confused. “In front of her is a control panel with a flashing green button. She presses it. The geyser of steam stops, as does the alarm.” That felt so, so too easy and so, you know, sort of early Star Trek where there’s like steam shooting out of a little pipe someplace that it made me not trust some of the sci-fi of it all.

I wanted a more specific kind of confused, because as I read this I was like, well, she’s confused at sort of what happened. But for her not to really understand at all what’s going on, I think that was an opportunity for her to really not know what she should do or what is the appropriate action to take. Because once we actually get to the two characters being together and talking about — and figuring out I’m a biologist, you’re this, that is interesting. And that’s the kind of stuff I love about the genre.

Craig: Yeah. I’m a little less happy about these than you. Let’s just start with some simple stylistic things. The very first slug line says, “EXT. OUTSIDE ORBIT OF KEPLER 438B.” That’s not really an exterior. Your exterior is space. And particularly I think since your first visual is the Archimedes, the space ship, and it is described well, just say space because then you get to the enormous curve of Kepler — and I would capitalize Kepler 438B looms in the not-so-far distance. So we understand, okay, there’s our ship, and there’s a planet.

Fine. Now, we have this — we go through the wreck of the ship and we meet Akash. And that’s all fine. Now, I’m going to note, he presses a hand to his gash and looks around utterly bewildered. Utterly bewildered. Now we go into the engine where Monica groans. Akash also groaned. But she groans exactly in the same way and then she is completely confused. Utterly bewildered. Completely confused.

So, basically I’m seeing the same damn thing twice. No Bueno. Do not like. So, you’re going to come up with another thing. If somebody is waking up slowly and looking around, utterly confused, fine. The next person should wake up with a start in a complete panic and start punching at the air. Like give me a completely different dynamic. I want to have separation.

Also, we do have a little bit of the default white issue here. Akash is a slender Indian man. Monica is late 30s. Well, I’m guessing that means white? Don’t know. So, it’s a thing. Generally speaking, if we’re going to be calling out ethnicities, let’s call them out.

I totally agree with you on this flashing green button. And it’s a bit worse than you’re stating. Because there’s a flashing green button that she casually presses that apparently is the stop steam and alarm button. But the screen on the panel is a bright yellow warning blinking that says Engine Stalled. What is this, a ’78 Chevy? [laughs] This is a space ship. There’s no “engine stalled.” What? Engine? Stalled?

Then in the next scene, Akash is looking at the computer bank and it says, “Flashing, navigation system failure,” which again I assume this is just running on Windows ’95 or something. It just feels so fundamental and boring and not cool. It’s just not cool.

Now, I like the fact that they’re both identifying each other in terms of who they are by their badge. Then Akash says, “You don’t remember.”

And she says, “I don’t remember anything. You?”

And he shakes his head. I have a big problem with this. What do you mean you don’t remember anything? Yes you do. You remember how to press a button. You remembered to go to the bridge. You remembered to check the thing. You remembered some basic things.

So, what is it, is it like I remember — I don’t remember — and they remember their names. So, define remember. I don’t know what happened. I was just, blah, blah, blah, and then where is everybody? I think that there would be natural questions that people would be asking of each other in this moment of panic.

I almost laughed in a bad way when she comes in. This is the first time they’ve seen each other. She stumbles into this room, which she apparently remembered to go to. And then Akash helps her and she says, “It’s my ankle.” [laughs] And he says, “Looks like a bad sprain.”

You know, if I woke up on a spaceship that was completely wrecked and dead and everyone was gone, and I couldn’t remember anything, you know, the sprained ankle wouldn’t be necessarily the first thing coming out of my mouth. It just doesn’t seem like it’s super-duper important.

Lastly, and again, this is all about what would people realistically say in these moments, or at least what would we buy dramatically. She looks out at the planet and says, “Are we here for that?” And he says, “I would say so.” And she says, “It’s just like earth,” apparently another thing she remembers. And he says, “Probably why we’re here. Second chances.”

Well, I mean, that was pretty poetic for a guy that just woke up on a wrecked ship. I mean, people don’t stop and get all thematic and poetic in moments of crisis.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So there was a lot about this that just rang false.

John: So, let’s talk about the possibilities here, because I agree with your complaints on really all of those specifics. Where I think I was excited by was the possibility of what was here. So, let’s get the script a little closer to what it can be. Let’s look at the doubling of the action. So, I agree that you can’t have characters — you shouldn’t introduce two different characters responding in the same way to the same situation. That’s not going to be fascinating. And so we need to see behavior that would let us know that this person is confused and not sure what they should be doing or where to even start and where to begin.

I think there is dialogue to be done, but I would be fascinated to see these three pages if they didn’t have any dialogue at all, and we just had to see only through actions, characters trying to figure out what was going on and trying to figure out how to shut off that warning. And that question of like once they get it shut off, wait, should I have shut off that warning? What’s actually happening?

Craig: Right.

John: Once we get to the dialogue, the crucial question should be how much are the characters assuming that the other person is in the same situation? Basically, how are they interacting with each other, assuming the other person actually does know what’s going on?

Craig: Right.

John: And so if I have amnesia, I’m going to assume that you don’t have amnesia and you’re going to tell me who I am. And then you’re both in the same boat. And then it becomes an opportunity to talk about like, well, what do you remember? What do you know? And I think it is reasonable to assume that there is some body of knowledge, some common corpus that they both kind of have a sense. They knew how to get around the ship. They knew how to do some basic things. He knew that her ankle was sprained and not broken.

But, something fundamentally bigger is happening here. And that might be more than three pages worth of time, but that is I think what the possibility is of meeting these two characters.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, you’re talking about priorities. Characters have to follow priorities. And the priorities have to be priorities that are recognizable to us as sensible. So, if I were rewriting this, I would start with Monica. I would have her come to in the middle of this mess.

I would have her be utterly confused about what’s gone on. I would have her be competent enough to do something interesting to shut off the alarm and the steam as long as I understood that she wasn’t just quieting the alarm because it was a nuisance, but rather she was stopping something bad from happening.

Then the next thing I would have her do is make her wade through the ship. I would have her experience the wreckage of the ship through her eyes, rather than the blank narrative of an unmoored camera. And then I would have her move into the room, see some guy hunkered over this thing. He’s the only one alive. And she pulls out here gun and says move away from there, because she’s paranoid that this is the guy that did all of this. And he’s like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”

And she goes, “Who are you?”

And he goes, “I don’t — my name is Akash. I think I’m a biologist.” You know? And they start off like who are you, I don’t know, you’re hurt. Sit down.

You’ve got to create dynamics. There’s got to be a sense of struggle and conflict and interaction. This was just like, hey, ankle, yeah. Who are you? What’s my name? Ooh, look at the planet.

John: Yeah, what you’re describing is because these pages right now introduce the characters on the same level, we have no sense of who we should be rooting for or what their equivalent power struggle would be, or what natural conflict should be there.

If we stuck with Monica until she meets this other person, our allegiance will always be to Monica. And that is going to be interesting. And if we only meet Akash through Monica, or you could do it the other way around, we’re going to stick with the person we know first. And that’s just sort of how we relate to characters and stories.

Craig: And how I think we want to absorb information. We want to experience information with our characters and through our characters. We don’t want to experience all of it and then have them wake up and move through and ask questions of things that we’ve already seen. And we just don’t want it to be so flat.

These two people seems almost lobotomized by their injuries. They’re preternaturally calm.

John: Yeah. And that could be fascinating. And, I mean, perhaps that is actually to some degree a deliberate choice that is being made here. But you’ve got to call that out if that’s the case. And you’ve got to have that sort of dumb struck quality really being brought to the surface.

Craig: Yeah. Like if you had this weird conversation where these two people were behaving so curiously and you were like, “Well this is a bad movie,” and then one of them turns around and goes, “Oh…” And one of them sees the other one turn around and says, “Oh, you’re hurt.” And then we pan down and we see that they’ve got a gash in their side and there’s robotics in there. We’d go, oh…

John: Oh…yeah, that’s fascinating.

Craig: Oh, that makes sense, right?

John: It would be great if they were robots. Or, I mean, the simpler version is just like there’s a head injury that we’re not aware of until the other character points it out. It’s like, “Oh my god, you have like a horrible…” That gash in the head which is written on the first part, if that was actually hidden away, that would be great.

Craig: I’m actually looking through your head. That can’t be good. I’m a biologist. I know for a fact that that’s not good.

But you just can’t have both characters inexplicably being so flat and there’s just no spark between these two. There’s no fun. I’m not enjoying the interactions here.

John: In all of our Three Page Challenges, I don’t think you’ve ever so successfully talked me out of liking three pages.

Craig: [laughs] I’m so sorry. I feel bad.

John: You shouldn’t feel bad at all. And none of our three writers who were so brave to send in their pages should feel bad, because we are obviously pointing out things we would love to see improved. But on the whole, these are some of the better pages we’ve looked at. There certainly there was a lot to sort of like here.

We didn’t talk about sort of paragraph length and sort of flow on the page, but in all these cases it was easy to get through the pages and there were no sort of stoppers, except for the little things we singled out.

Craig: Yep.

John: And Stuart always wants me to remind listeners that as he goes through every submission into the Three Page Challenge, he really deliberately does pick for us things he thinks are interesting for us to talk about on the show, but also some of the better ones. And so these really are some of the better ones that come into the account. So, thank you to everyone who writes in, but especially these three writers for letting us talking about their pages.

Craig: Indeed. And we hope that we were helpful to all three of you.

John: Wonderful. It is time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is A24 Pictures, which is a movie label that I see — I see the banner in front of certain movies, and I didn’t really know what it was until I read this piece by David Ehrlich writing for Slate in which talks about the tiny little production and distribution arm and the movies they’ve released. So those are Mississippi Grind, Ex Machina, Under the Skin, Spring Breakers.

And on the show we often talk about the frustration that there are only teeny tiny movies and giant $200 billion movies. And A24 is a production company and releasing arm that is aiming to make some of those smart movies that are between those two poles. And so I thought it was a great article. I’ll put that article in the show notes, but also just I want to see more companies like A24, like STX, like Annapurna that are trying to make interesting movies and finding ways to release them both theatrically and in some cases on demand at the same time.

Craig: And they have had some success. I mean, Ex Machina did really well.

John: Yeah. It was a great movie.

Craig: I enjoyed it.

John: And the movies that aren’t sort of big studio blockbusters, they’re able to find ways for those to actually make money and that’s important, too.

Craig: Indeed. My One Cool Thing is a soundtrack album that you can all buy now. It was released this week, this past week. And it is the Broadway Cast Recording of Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s spectacular. I’m going to see the show in the end of the year. I’m going to be in New York at the end of the year. I’m going to see the show there. I can’t wait.

What I love about it is, well first of all, I happen to be a huge fan of Alexander Hamilton, the man, and his work and his philosophy. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten into arguments about people about why I think Thomas Jefferson is why overrated. But regardless, topic for another podcast. What I think is fascinating about what Miranda did was he basically delivered a hip hop opera. And what I love is that it encapsulates the very best of what hip hop can do in ways that no other musical form can. It’s so smart. It’s lyrically so aggressive and so ambitious and brilliant.

And it’s also hip hop without the parts of hip hop that I think are so bad. It’s not the hip hop of celebrating violence. It’s misogynistic hip hop. It’s old school hip hop done right. And about a guy that deserves his story to be told.

Just wonderful. I mean, up and down, every single song. All the performances, amazing. I can’t wait to see the show. And for those of you who aren’t going to be in New York, and a really hard ticket to get, just go ahead and buy the album. It’s not that expensive and you can listen to it in your car. And you’ll get the story.

John: Cool. Yeah, I’ve held off on buying the soundtrack because I do want to see the show and there are times in which I’ve listened to the cast album beforehand and then when I see the show I’m sort of frustrated that things aren’t matching my expectations, or that I sort of knew too much. So, I’m going to try to get to New York to see it soon enough that I’m going to hold off, I think, listening to it until I’ve actually seen the show.

Craig: Well, I’ll just start singing it to you when you least expect it.

John: Ugh, that’s so dangerous. Our show as always is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. Thank you, Rajesh. You’ve written so many wonderful outros for us.

Craig: Yeah, he’s very good.

John: He’s prolific. If you have an outro for our show, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to your outro. But if you have a question, that’s also a great place to write your longer questions. We answer them on the air pretty frequently. For short questions, Twitter is best. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re also on Facebook. We check that occasionally, but not as often as Twitter.

Our bonus episode that I mentioned, the interview with Mark Mallouk from Black Mass, that is on the premium feed. If you’d like to subscribe to the premium feed, go to Scriptnotes.net and that’s $1.99 a month. And you can get that and all the back episodes, including the dirty episode.

We have our show up in iTunes. So, if you want to subscribe to the normal feed, just got to iTunes and click subscribe. That is really helpful. You can find the Three Page Challenges that we talked about and other things in our show notes for the episode, johnaugust.com/podcast.

And that’s our show. Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Premium Bonus episode, with Black Mass screenwriter Mark Mallouk
• Austin Film Festival 2015 panel schedule
• Sign up for Scriptnotes premium access
• Emma Coats’s Pixar Story Rules
• Submit your Three Pages
• Three Pages by Dan Maurer
• Three Pages by Kate Jeffrey
• Three Pages by Sehaj Sethi
• A24, and Slate on The Distributor as Auteur
• Hamilton, the Original Broadway Cast Recording on iTunes and on Amazon
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/rewrites-and-scheduling).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 216 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, for a second I thought you weren’t going to introduce yourself as Craig Mazin but rather as Louis B. Mayer because that is the name I associate with you having heard you on Karina Longworth’s podcast.

**Craig:** Yes. Now and forevermore, Louis B — so I’m playing Louis B. Mayer on her new series of You Must Remember This. So her last series was about the Manson family and how they were intertwined with Hollywood. And the new one is about the history of MGM, which is kind of the most classic of the classic movie studios. And Louis B. Mayer was the guy who ran it.

And so, I don’t [laughs] — I keep joking like I got the job because I sound like a quietly angry Jew.

**John:** [laughs] Seething with rage. And I really loved hearing you affect a voice on a podcast. So I want to make it clear to all our audience that sometimes I love it when Craig does voices. And this is a voice you just did spectacularly well. And it’s a great podcast. So we’re going to highly recommend people listen to it.

So Karina Longworth is a film historian. Her podcast, you can go back through in iTunes and find all the episodes she’s done. This new series she’s doing, it’s just about, you know, really the birth of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you can’t think about Hollywood history without thinking about MGM. And so she’s tracking not just how the studio came to be but sort of all the changes throughout the generations. And MGM is still a label that exists today but is not sort of the same —

**Craig:** It’s not the same.

**John:** Kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know specifically where the next episodes are going but I have recorded lines for the next one or I think it’s the next one. From the few lines that I do, I get a sense of what it is and she’s going to get into some interesting things, you know.

The shocking difference between the Hollywood that Hollywood presented to America and the actual Hollywood and the stuff that was going on is just startling.

**John:** You know, I’d be a little bit jealous except I have exciting news of my own, is that I just signed on to be the killer in the next season of Serial.

**Craig:** Ah, great.

**John:** So at least that way we’ll both be doing other podcasts and, you know, sort of raking in money for ourselves.

**Craig:** It’s not going to be much of a mystery. If someone’s named John August, they did it.

**John:** I probably did it.

**Craig:** It’s a killer name.

**John:** It’s a great name. It’s a good name.

**Craig:** What’s your middle name?

**John:** It’s my original last name which is Meise.

**Craig:** Oh, so you made that —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You pulled that in. But did you jettison a prior middle name?

**John:** I did. It was Tilton, T-I-L-T-O-N.

**Craig:** Oh, my god. [laughs] That’s the most —

**John:** Which is a family name but wasn’t really related to anything.

**Craig:** I mean, John Tilton August. Ugh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Shivers.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like, you know, who was that Arkansas serial killer? Oh, it was John Tilton August.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. [laughs] You listen to that name you can smell the mold in the basement in which he is keeping you.

**John:** Yeah. There’s also a distant banjo playing.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Today on the podcast, we’ll be talking about the anatomy of a rewrite. We’ll look at how production schedules work and we’ll answer some questions from listeners. We have so much to do on the show this week that we should probably get started.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s go.

**John:** And so first some follow-up. We need to thank everybody who bought a Scriptnotes T-shirt. And we had a whole bunch — this is the biggest order we’ve ever placed. Dustin and Stuart are at the printers right now, placing that order. We will be packaging and shipping these out to all of the people who bought them probably the second week of October so everyone will have them in hand for Austin Film Festival. So, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Next up. Last week we talked about the odds of making it in the NFL versus making it as a screenwriter. And Nathan wrote in with some good statistics. Do you want to share those?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. So he mentions that there are 32 teams in the NFL and each has a regular season roster of 53 players. This I did not know. I’m more of a baseball guy. So the total number of players in the league at any given time is 1,696. Let’s call it 1,700. So you could say that the number of people playing in the NFL is slightly larger than the number of people who are feature screenwriters in a given year, assuming the 1,500 number you gave for 2014 is representative.

Granted the yearly numbers for the NFL are slightly higher than 1,700 as players are added and dropped from rosters but 1,700 is a good ballpark number. And I agree. So we are, I think, under that number, clearly. I think the 1,500 number is correct. And mind you, that 1,500 number also includes our version of pickups and drops, you know, people who maybe worked for a month and then didn’t again.

So, yeah, I think we’re right on in saying that it’s harder to be a working screenwriter, at least statistically speaking, than to play in the NFL. And a lot of people on Twitter pointed out also that there’s another major difference in that if you’re trying to become a professional screenwriter, you’re competing against all people that want to be screenwriters, including women.

In the NFL, there are no women. Women cannot play in the NFL. Not by rule but just by physical reality. So men are only competing with men.

**John:** Oh, Craig, you’re going to get so much email just for that one sentence you just said.

**Craig:** You think so? That —

**John:** That physical reality? Yeah.

**Craig:** Because women —

**John:** By tradition —

**Craig:** It’s not tradition. [laughs] They physically can’t — I mean, I can’t compete in the NFL physically. I mean, you would have to be just an incredibly roided up woman. Yeah, I probably will get [laughs] a lot of letters but I don’t —

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** I’m not judging. It’s just that there’s a reason why we haven’t seen a woman in the NFL, just physical realities. But that’s not the case happily for screenwriting. Anyone with a brain can be a screenwriter. So the competitive pool is quite a bit larger. So, again, tougher to be a screenwriter than to be a football player.

**John:** I think it’s a very useful statistic for your Aunt Sarah. So if she has in her back pocket like, “Oh, my nephew is a working screenwriter in Hollywood, like it’s harder to be a working screenwriter in Hollywood than it is to be an NFL player. It’s like less likely.” And that’s actually probably true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another crucial difference is that anybody who — that 1,700 people who are in the NFL, those people are all making a living. Their whole job is to be in the NFL, by definition. Of the 1,700 screenwriters, a lot of those are also doing other jobs because they are not making a real living as a screenwriter. So they might be getting paid something over the course of the year. That doesn’t mean that that’s enough to actually support themselves.

**Craig:** Yes. So we continue to crush everyone’s dream with remarkable efficiency.

**John:** So as we crush people’s dreams, let’s go on to lawsuit time. So we’ve talked a lot on the podcast about the Gravity lawsuit. We’ll never talk about that again.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But there was another lawsuit this week settled or at least another development on the lawsuit. This is over The Cabin in the Woods. That’s a movie directed by Drew Goddard, with a script by him and Joss Whedon. So Peter Gallagher was suing, claiming that Cabin in the Woods was based on and inspired by or took from his novel, The Little White Trip: A Night in the Pines.

And so this week, it came down that Judge Otis Wright II who’s just the best name ever for a judge.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right up there with John Tilton August.

**John:** He wrote, “The few alleged similarities that are not grossly misstated involve unprotectable forms of expression, such as the group going to a cabin or the alpha male character attempting a risky escape plan to bring back help. A list of random similarities only further convinces the court of one thing. After thorough analysis of both works and application of the extrinsic test, The Cabin in the Woods and The Little White Trip are not substantially similar.”

So we’ll have a link on the show notes to his whole ruling. It was the first time I’d seen this extrinsic test mentioned, so I went through a little Wikipedia hole on what extrinsic test and intrinsic tests are. But they’re ways of judging substantial similarity.

**Craig:** Right. Well, first we should make it clear. This is not the actor Peter Gallagher. This is —

**John:** But wouldn’t it be great if it were?

**Craig:** It would be [laughs] fascinating, to say the least.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It would be a weird move by Peter Gallagher.

**John:** It would be like Sex, Lies, and Videotape 2. It would be great.

**Craig:** It would just be like Peter Gallagher sitting down, he’s like, “What could I do that would be the worst possible thing for my career? I know. I’ll sue Joss Whedon. That’ll be fun.”

**John:** Good choice.

**Craig:** This is how all of these end. I don’t know how else to put it for people. This is how they all end. And we’ve said this before. The feeding frenzy and excitement and, “Yes, stick it to the man-ism” that happens at the advent of these things is never matched when they all inevitably fall apart because it’s just not true. It’s just not true every single time.

And when he says something like “grossly misstated”, yeah, I mean that’s basically what we see all the time when you and I look at these things. We see that things are grossly misstated.

**John:** The reason why I want to bring this up at all because we hadn’t mentioned this lawsuit in the first place is that I do feel like we only see the news of these things being filed and we never see the outcomes of them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I just want to sort of highlight the outcomes. And I think there are actually three possible outcomes. There’s the outcome where the plaintiff actually wins, which is very, very rare and it’s so exceptional that we actually note when the plaintiff won like the Coming to America case was a rare case where a plaintiff won something there.

We sort of note sometimes when these things come down with negative opinions and the plaintiffs say they’re going to take it to another court and they’re going to appeal or whatever and they just sort of disappear. But 90% of these cases just magically disappear. And they never get to any sort of meaningful state or they get to a sort of pre-trial finding and there’s some sort of settlement that happens that doesn’t acknowledge any fault but basically says it would be cheaper just to make this all go away.

And that’s the other thing that happens frequently.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the statistics are when you compare, say, in we’ll call it somewhat failure, the difference between cases that are dismissed and cases that are settled. I suspect that if it’s already going to trial and they’ve gone through discovery and there’s a judge that the studios have decided, “No, we’re not giving this guy a dime or this woman a dime. We’re fighting this because, you know.”

Look, if they just routinely settle, just because, all they’re doing is inviting more of it. It becomes a gold rush.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** So I think actually a lot of times what happens is these things get dismissed. I don’t know what the ultimate stats are but I do know that in our lifetimes, I can think of only one case where it was a win and that was Art Buchwald in Coming to America. And he was Art Buchwald. And he wrote a treatment and they definitely ripped the treatment off.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that was it. I mean, everything else either if someone has a real case, they do quietly settle. They don’t even bother with the — the last thing they want is this being written about in the media. So I always feel like by the time we’ve heard about it, it’s a loser.

**John:** Yeah, I think you’re right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Alex in Miami wrote in to say, “During the Deflategate portion of the podcast about how would this be a movie,” so we talked about Deflategate and Tom Brady, “you mentioned it might be best to just create new characters that represent these people to avoid conflict.” So rather than use the real people, create new characters that sort of take the place of those real characters. “Can you guys explain what the difference is when compared to a film like Game Change which portrays real people like Sarah Palin and John McCain? How did they get away with it?”

So, yeah, let’s talk about what the difference is between a movie based on real events like Game Change was and what we were talking about you might want to do with this football movie.

**Craig:** Right. Well, when you’re dealing with public figures, you have a lot more latitude. When you’re dealing with private individuals, that is people that have an expectation of privacy and don’t live their lives on the public stage, they have a right to their own life story. You can’t just tell someone’s life story. You have to actually buy their life rights.

But if somebody’s a public figure, then essentially what the law says is the part of your life that’s lived in public and the things that we know from public disclosure, they are public already. So you don’t have to buy it.

Now, obviously politicians, a lot of their lives are lived in public. Similarly, Tom Brady’s life and Deflategate was lived in public. So it wasn’t a question of life rights. What concerned me about the potential movie adaptation was in fact this issue of how to deal with the fact that you want to show logos and you want to be in the NFL and you want to say, “Well, he plays for the Patriots,” and use the names of all these people, some of whom are not public figures.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you cited a really interesting article from Business Insider. So tell us about that.

**John:** So this is something that another listener had sent in. I think several listeners sent in. Business Insider wrote a piece about Ballers, the HBO series that stars Dwayne Johnson. And that uses real football logos. And that seems surprising because we think like, “Well, how can you use those football logos because they’re trademark things. NFL is going to come after you.”

And they just did it. And the explanation they give in this article, I don’t completely buy. I think they’re saying like, because we weren’t portraying the NFL negatively or in an untrue manner, we can get away with doing it.” I think they basically just felt like, “You know what, NFL try to come after us and you’re not going to succeed because NFL doesn’t have the ability to allow somebody to not show, you know, their logo on screen. It’s a real thing that exists out in the world.”

And they basically just had the courage to say, “You know what, this guy plays for the Dolphins and we’re showing a Dolphins logo.”

**Craig:** Yeah. There is always a space in between the obvious yes and the obvious no. And every studio has a different tolerance for playing in that space in between, because being sued is a problem. It’s expensive and it’s embarrassing in the media. And if you lose, it could be disastrous.

I think for Ballers, I think they were like, “Please sue us. This would be amazing publicity.” And it’s not like HBO is a lightweight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that was exciting. And I think also that they felt from a legal point of view that in that gray space, they were way closer to yes than no.

**John:** I was thinking like the counter examples, like you show character opening up a bottle of Coke and saying like, “This Coke is poison,” and they drink the Coke and then they die from poison, that would be an issue where Coke would probably come after you and would have a little bit more ammunition that you are lying about their product.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And showing their product, you’re associating their product with death.

**Craig:** Correct. In the case of our prospective Tom Brady movie, the problem is that the movie would need to make some kind of statement and take some kind of position to be at all interesting. And all those facts are disputed. And we just saw how the report was disputed and the penalty was overturned by a judge.

So you make your movie and you’ve got people wearing NFL logos doing things like actively cheating, Tom Brady actively cheating. Yeah, you’re going to get sued because he’s going to argue, “No, I didn’t do that, so you’re defaming me.” You can’t defame public — the only thing you can do with public individuals is satire them in such a way that it’s obviously satire. And that goes back to The People vs. Larry Flynt and the Jerry Falwell stuff.

**John:** So, circling back to portraying real people and the difference between Game Change and what this movie was describing, a good movie that sort of falls in the middle of that is The Social Network. And so Social Network shows Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg does not come off especially well in The Social Network. And those are real people and many of those people are real.

But I have a suspicion that as they were thinking about making the movie and as they looked through the people who were like less and less famous, they were actually much more careful about how those people were portrayed. And in some cases may have changed the names of some people just so they weren’t going to run into problems.

And like you said that I did this thing but I never did this thing and I’m not a public figure. Mark Zuckerberg is such a huge figure that he’s sort of impossible to libel. The smaller people have a much greater claim to protecting their own rights to privacy of their own life story.

**Craig:** I suspect that Mark Zuckerberg was a little jammed on this no matter what. Even if some of the aspects of the movie could be considered defamatory or libelous and he had a case or could make a case, the costs of disputing the movie would be the Streisand effect. You’re familiar with the Streisand effect?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So for those of you who are not, Barbara Streisand once sued some random guy who had basically published a picture of her home on the internet and said, “This is Barbara Streisand’s home.” And Barbara Streisand went after this guy. On a website nobody even knew about. And suddenly because she went after him, everybody knew about it and everybody now knew where she lived.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, sometimes I think that’s the wedge against a guy like Zuckerberg because he’s just like, “Ugh, let me just ignore this until it goes away.”

**John:** Yeah. For sure. Our last bit of follow-up, this is actually just a nice email that somebody wrote in. And we get a lot of these and we get some nice comments on iTunes, too, but this was a guy who’s been listening to the show who had some good stuff happen. So I thought we would just read one of these.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Robert writes, “You don’t know me. I’m an avid listener to the podcast and the advice you’ve given to listeners since its inception has been incredible. It’s been such a pleasure and honor getting insight into the industry from you two and the fact that you both generally seem like standup guys makes things even better. I was recently hired by [big company] and started my first job as a staff writer on [big television company’s] show. I’m only on week three but I had to reach out and tell you that your guidance and advice has been absolutely priceless in helping me find and navigate the choppy waters of executives, showrunners, and other writers.

“I use something I picked up from the show probably every day. So I guess the reason I’m messaging you guys is because I wanted you to know that you are making a difference and doing something good for every writer out there who listens. So from all of us little guys who will hopefully be the big guys, let me write something in all caps for emphasis. Thank you. All the best, Robert.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s just wonderful. I mean, that’s why we do what we do. I really do believe that we are training an army of people. An army. And then one day —

**John:** An army.

**Craig:** When we need them, [laughs] we will call upon them.

**John:** We will rise. They will rise. [laughs] But I think part of the reason why I like to have this conversation with you every week is that it’s just talking about sort of the way things are and the way you sort of wish they would be and finding that balance between the two things. And so, hopefully, Robert is entering into a job at big television show where he can both do the work in front of him but also chart a path forward for himself and for writers like him that is at least as good, and maybe better than what we have.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the dream is that as people start to enter the business and people in their 20s, so they’re new, that maybe a writer is sitting in a room with a producer and a studio executive and all three of them maybe have listened to the show and have heard some things about how to behave and how to be kind to each other and how to help each other in the middle of this very difficult process, and how to put themselves in the other person’s shoes.

And who knows? Maybe things will get better. Nah, probably not but that’s when we —

**John:** [laughs] Probably not.

**Craig:** That’s when we mobilize the army and then —

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And then, my friends —

**John:** That’s the goal.

**Craig:** Oh, buddy.

**John:** Yeah. So, we won’t know if it gets better but hopefully it won’t be any worse for it. And hopefully there’ll be some people who know not to do certain things because of what they’ve seen on the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And this is going to be a great sort of object lesson in this because you’re going to talk us through this idea about rewrites and the anatomy of a rewrite and sort of best practices both for managing it psychologically and for the words on the page.

**Craig:** So this topic was suggested by a listener and it kind of shocked me because I thought — I don’t think we’ve actually done this and it’s kind of crazy that we haven’t. So she wrote, “I know you guys have touched on the etiquette of reaching out to writers when you’re hired to rewrite, but I wonder if you guys could discuss the creative process of rewriting. Maybe it’s too broad of a question but I’m curious how your approach is different compared to starting from scratch or compared to each other.”

Excellent question.

**John:** Very good question.

**Craig:** How do we go about this thing called rewriting? So first thing’s first, we have to figure out what the actual scope of the gig is. And sometimes the first thing that happens is you engage in a kind of a triage. You take a look at the material and then you start asking questions of yourself and others. How extensive is the perceived problem? Is this something where we kind of need to go back to scratch and start from page one and write something new? Or is the problem that there are sequences that aren’t working? Is the problem that the story is in good shape but maybe this character needs help or the climax of the movie needs help?

The first thing that you have to do when you’re rewriting a script is to get everybody to agree on a diagnosis of the problem.

**John:** That’s really smart. I think it’s a question of what do I think needs to have happened. But more importantly, what does everyone else who has a stake in this think needs to happen and can I convince them of my vision, if possible?

**Craig:** And sometimes, you find that you’re the only one who thinks there’s a major problem. And that is a great indication that this is probably not a job for you. And that’s good information. I need to know if I’m a good match for what they think is required.

**John:** This happens to me a lot. And tell me if you’ve had this similar experience where I’ll get sent a script and I’ll read through it and like so, “Wow, okay, wow. I just don’t — I mean, I think I know where to start but like I’m starting really kind of from scratch.” And then I’ll get on the phone with my agent and it’s like, “Yeah, I think this is like maybe a week or two of work.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that mismatch, it’s just like it’s so fundamental that I know that like there’s no reason for me to try to pursue this project.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. And in fact, that becomes one of the initial questions. What’s the timeline here? They always seem to give you one. Sometimes, if something is in early development stages, there isn’t a timeline. It’s just, “Look, we really love this project. We would love for it to be something. We don’t like where it is now. What do you think? So sky is the limit. Let’s just figure this out.”

A lot of times, there’s a timeline. The movie will be getting made. Or more commonly, “We need to get this movie in a place where we can show it to this actor by this point or this director by this point because that’s when they become available.” So I always ask, “How much time is there to do this work?” Inevitably, when you hear about these jobs from studios, they’re going to lowball you on the time every single time.

It’s not because they want to pay you less. It’s just standard wishful thinking.

**John:** Yeah. In terms of time, sometimes they’ll come to you with, you know, “We think it’s two weeks work. We think it’s a significant amount of work but, you know, we want to hit the certain date or time.” There have been jobs where it’s like, “Literally we’re shooting this next week, so you have days to get this done.” And you’re getting on the phone with the crucial people right away. And that’s where you have to really be able to discuss exactly what you think you’re going to be able to do and be honest about sort of what’s possible and what’s not possible in the limited amount of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good rule of thumb. When they say it’s a week, it’s two weeks or three weeks. When they say it’s three weeks, it’s six weeks. When they say it needs a rewrite but it’s not a page one, it’s a page one. Just upgrade every single thing [laughs] because that’s what’s going to be true.

You do then have this new challenge, which is you’re coming into a process that pre-exists you. When you start something new, you sell an original or you’re the first person on an assignment, a team is assembled and starts to gel. And you have time to figure out who’s in charge. “See, I know he’s saying he’s in charge but I think she’s really in charge.”

When you come in on a rewrite, that team is there. And you need to figure out pretty quickly who the real boss is. And just as important, you need to figure out how things went wrong before because they did. That’s the one fact for sure you know coming in on a rewrite.

So there was a problem. And the problem may entirely rest with the writer. More often than not, it’s a combination of wrong writer for the project and then problems with the process. As much as you can, if you can try and clear the mines off the field before you start marching through it, you’ll be in better shape.

**John:** And this is a mistake I’ve made before where I would come in to a project, it was a page one rewrite. We were starting over from scratch. And, you know, I had forgotten that like, “Oh, that’s right. They’ve actually been through this all once before.” And it wasn’t until I was like four meetings in on a project and one of the producers said something that was referencing the previous draft. I’m like, “Wow, you still think we’re making that movie that was that movie, you know, six months ago.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And I had forgotten that there actually ever was something before because it was such a fundamental rewrite. And so, clearing the field is exactly the right idea. But even if you get all the mines off the field, you have to remember that they’ve fought a war before you even got there.

**Craig:** That’s right. And there are going to be areas that are emotional for them. In the way that for us, when someone casually says, “You know what, why don’t we just get rid of that line?” And you look at that line and think, “Yeah, fine.” Or, “You know what, why don’t we just get rid of that line?” You look at that line and think, “But that’s the line that I wrote that made me love this. That’s the line that made me feel proud to be a writer.”

We are attaching emotional weight to something that can’t bear it and shouldn’t have to bear it. Well, they do the same thing. So they’ve had fights. And when you come in and you sit in that room, just be aware when you say something like, “Well, I just have no idea why Joe is being mean to Sue.” That’s not motivated. You are taking a side in an argument that’s happened. Somebody is getting angry [laughs] and there’s nothing you can do about it except to be as impartial as possible. It’s not like you wrote it. So, you get that benefit.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. I find those conversations I’m always trying to phrase the possibility of what the next thing is going to be rather than crapping on what is there right in front of me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can acknowledge that things aren’t working but don’t try to be specific about like, you know, this was a mistake or a fault or a problem. Rather it’s like, “Here are the opportunities for how we can get to this that we all want to get to.” Always talk about the movie you want the make, not the script that’s on the page.

**Craig:** And with that in mind, when we are asked to rewrite something, part of what we need to accomplish is rekindling the spark of the thing that got them all excited in the first place. Somewhere before you showed up, people got excited and they fell in love. And then something went wrong.

So, yes, you can say, “Look, here’s what isn’t working here but here’s what could be working.” But you need to recognize that once there was love. And you have to figure out what that is because what you love about it needs to connect with what they love about it. That’s how your movie will get made. That’s how your version of this will get made because, and this is maybe the most controversial thing I’ll say about rewriting.

Rewriting is not really the right word for what this is. When we say we’re rewriting, that’s like an employment term. We’re writing. Because, look, when we write something, we write a draft and then we rewrite our own draft. Fair. But when we’re rewriting somebody else’s work, it’s the first time for us. It’s not a re anything. It’s new for us. It’s a new write.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So the rest of the world can call it a rewrite, but it’s a new write. And as part of a new write, and this goes directly to the question, you have to be concerned about all the things you’d be concerned about if it were not a rewrite. That is, theme, character, narrative, tone, scenes. All the things that you bundle up to fall in love with, you need to bundle those up into this because it’s new to you.

**John:** Absolutely. There have been jobs where I’ve come in where I’ve just done incredibly surgical craftsman work to fix one little thing. And those I was literally just applying my skills to a small little bit. And they never felt like my movie.

But if I’m going in and doing a real draft, that is now my movie and I have to think about it on a fundamental level on answering all those questions. What does this movie mean to me? Who are the characters to me? What are the voices? And really start from scratch. That’s no slam on the previous writer. That’s just, you know, the process. It’s how you write a movie is to write it from the inside out.

**Craig:** No question. In many ways, when we take on what’s called a rewrite, what we’re really doing is adapting in the way that we adapt a novel. So I get a novel, I read the novel, and then the first questions I have are, “How faithful am I going to be to this novel? What parts of the novel should I keep and what parts should I not keep? What did I fall in love with? What’s great but probably not right for a movie? How could I change the ending to make it work better with the beginning in a movie?” You know, all those things.

Or should I touch nothing and just really do what the book — all those questions are the questions I ask when I get a screenplay because I’m adapting it. That’s how I think of it. I’m adapting it into a new work. Yes, there are times when you’re only there for a week or two and that’s not adaptation. You’re literally writing lines. “Give us five lines for this.” Or “Write a scene that does this.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when you are working on something that’s lengthier, for instance, I don’t know about you but even if it’s not a page one, and when we say page one, we mean we are keeping the rough idea of the prior movie, prior screenplay and just starting over. Even if it’s not that, even if it’s kind of a half a “rewrite”, I start a new document in my software. I can always go back and take things from their file and put it into mine. But I need to do the thing that I do when I’m writing, which is I imagine what’s the opening image, what’s the first thing, what’s the first person, what did they say, what does this mean.

I go through that same process. How do you approach that?

**John:** Exactly the same way. So anything where it’s a fundamental rewrite of something, you know, I guess a new write of something, I do start with the blank document. And then I bring over the stuff that’s actually working really well and I’ll look for the stuff that’s great. And if there’s stuff that I don’t need to rewrite, I will happily keep every little bit of it.

You know, the original writer made choices and often those choices work terrific. And if I can make those same choices, I will make those same choices. So I’ll make the same choices of especially character names. If those character names are right and those characters feel like the right characters for the story, they stay. If the locations and settings are the locations and settings that we feel like we want to make for this movie, all that stuff stays.

So often, it’s really the storytelling. It’s the order of how things are happening. It’s all the new stuff is what I need to do. And so, a lot of what’s in that current script I shouldn’t even try to bring over. And if I find that if I just try to rewrite within that other writer’s original document, it’s going to just feel weird and forced because I’m trying to park in too tight of a parking spot. I’m trying to make my stuff fit into their stuff rather than just make my own movie.

**Craig:** And it just won’t work. It’s important to acknowledge that there are times when, as part of our adapting choice, we are taking things from that existing script and porting them over because they’re consistent with our vision of what this is supposed to become. But it’s just as important to note that you need to give yourself room to be the writer that you are. You need that room. There’s no other way for you to express yourself freely and interestingly.

And after all, they didn’t hire you to squeeze little new things in between the existing stuff. They hired you because of your voice and your expression. So you have to essentially approach it as an honest broker but give yourself the room to write your version because that’s why you’ve been hired.

**John:** I think I’m very mindful of it. It’s like I won’t change something just for the sake of changing it. Something will change because I need something different to make this movie work. And I need to get from this place to that place in a different way. Or the way this works in my brain is different than the way it works in the previous draft. And that’s okay. I don’t feel a responsibility to anyone as much as the audience. Like, what does the movie want to be, and it’s my job to sort of be a conduit to getting us to that movie.

**Craig:** Well, that sort of brings me to some basic dos and don’ts because you’ve outlined a really good one. And I guess we’ll start it as a positive thing. What you do want to do is be an impartial judge. There’s no honor in saying I obliterated the other writer. And similarly, there’s no shame in saying I preserved the stuff that worked.

I think sometimes people that have a rewrite assignment feel like, “Well, they’re paying me money. If I just take this scene over then it’s cheating,” it’s not cheating. They don’t mind that. They don’t care. What they want is a movie that works. And believe me, you’re going to new write plenty of stuff.

Similarly, don’t be squeamish about what you have to do to get there. The greatest gift you can give the prior writer is a green light. And the deal is this. And there used to be a lot of strife between writers over this stuff, less so now because I think everybody’s been on both sides of the coin enough.

That writer got fired. They didn’t get fired because you got hired. They got fired. They’re done. Their script will not get a green light. Those are facts. Yours might but you need to give yourself the freedom to do what you think needs to be done to get there. So you can’t operate in fear and you can’t misinterpret respect for another writer with a preciousness about what they did, nor can you misinterpret my duty as a writer with, “I got to get rid of everything they wrote.” You just have to aim towards what’s going to get this movie made.

**John:** And I will say that my relationship with some of my favorite writers came because I was being rewritten by them or I was rewriting them. And we had that conversation when the handoff happened and we were grownups to say like, “I know that I’m not going to be the person to get this movie made. Maybe you can be.”

And when you approach it that way, like please take care of my child and see it to, you know, the safe shores of moviedom, that can be a real gift. And when you can have that conversation openly and honestly with the person who’s going to be writing next, that is a terrific joy because you get to first explain all the stuff we said before about who the stakeholders are, where all the bones are buried and sort of, you know, you guys know sort of what went wrong because something obviously went wrong. But something went right. And to sort of get to know what was it that was so fantastic that sort of got this whole process started.

And that’s true, I’ll say because, you know, she’s our podcast Joan Rivers. My first conversation with Aline Brosh McKenna was about this kind of situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And neither of us was particularly excited to be on that phone call but it was a good phone call to have because it made it clear sort of what was really possible with this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes people will say, “Do you really do the thing where you call the prior writer?” They don’t believe me. And I just, yeah, I do it. I do it. I don’t do it if there’s been 20 writers because then it doesn’t matter. But, yeah, I mean if there’s been very few, absolutely. Of course I do it. And it always works.

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes I’ll do the even more awkward thing which is when I’m being rewritten, I will reach out to go to that writer who’s replacing me. And that person is usually terrified that I’m reaching out.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But I assure you, I’m only doing it because I want them to succeed and I want them to know sort of what things are really happening. And I will say that with the advent of Twitter and social media and just general accessibility of emails, it’s much easier to make that conversation, that connection happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was very hard in the days where I had to go through their agent and then it’s like, god, this is awkward for everybody. But it doesn’t have to be awkward for everybody now.

**Craig:** No, it doesn’t. It’s just a nice collegiate thing to do. It always helps. Some other dos and don’ts. Don’t change the character names unless you have good reason. That’s something you already mentioned. What’s good reason? I mean, I just don’t do it if I don’t have to.

Even if I don’t really like the name, I just don’t do it because, eh, it just feels cheap. You know, it just feels cheap.

**John:** If there’s some fundamentally bad or confusing choices, I will change a character’s name. Like there have been scripts that I’ve gotten where like two characters have the same first letters of their name and it actually is just genuinely confusing —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Then I will do it. But I’ll always think twice about doing it because I don’t want to be the guy who just changes names to make it seem like it’s a different character when it’s not really a different character.

**Craig:** Yeah. You change names if there’s a gender change. You change names if there’s a nationality change. You change names maybe if there’s a racial change or a class change. But, you know, if it’s the same person, don’t just go, “Ah, I just hate Denise. I just hate that name. It’s stupid. She’s, you know, Sophie now.” Don’t do that.

**John:** There have been situations where I’ve gone in on a rewrite and the character who was taking the place of that — taking that function was so vastly different than the character before, it was helpful to change the name just so that there wasn’t the baggage of that previous character being there. But that’s honestly one of those situations where you’re changing it almost as much as changing the gender.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s just fundamentally different characters serving the same function that I don’t really consider that being changing the character’s name. I put a different character in that place.

**Craig:** Right. That’s a different thing. So if you have, you know, a script where somebody is married and you say, “Look, the character of the wife is just not working at all. I propose an entirely different character.” Then you’re not renaming that character, you’re making a new character. That’s fine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really more about like, come on, why did you change his boss’ name? [laughs] It’s the same guy. He doesn’t even say it that much.

**John:** Here’s a good litmus test. If you’re changing all the names and mostly their dialogue is staying the same as it was in the previous draft —

**Craig:** Then you’re a dick.

**John:** You’re probably making a dick move.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re a total douche. Similarly, another douche move, don’t think about the arbitration. It’s not a common thing, but every now and then somebody will tell me, “Well, you know, I just took this job and I’m going to be rewriting this thing. I wonder if I’m going to get credit.” I’m like, “Stop. Just stop.” It’s like, you know, when they bring a reliever out in the middle of the baseball game, as he’s walking to the mount, he’s not wondering like, “Well, let’s see, if this works out, who’s going to get credit for winning the game? I mean he went six innings but I might go three.” Forget it, just do your job. Just do your job. Don’t worry about the arbitration. Later on. [laughs] it will happen one way of another.

**John:** But, Craig, I will admit to myself and to you and to everybody listening to the podcast, there have been jobs where I’ve gone in for where I just know from the start, there’s just no possibility I would ever get credit. In some ways, that’s really liberating, to not even have to think about sort of like — I don’t have to think about the future. I can only just think about this work in front of me and doing the best work that gets this movie made. And that’s actually kind of liberating too because it frees from the burden of possibility and wonder and indecision. Like I know for a fact there’s absolutely no chance my name will be on this. And that is sometimes really good.

**Craig:** Yeah. To me that is the ultimate expression of not thinking about the arbitration because you don’t want credit. You’re not there for credit. There’s never going to be an issue. If there is an arbitration, you’re going to say, I don’t want it. Those assignments are nice sometimes because you get to feel like a ninja.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nobody will know, you know. I like that. A couple of other dos and don’ts. Don’t blame the prior script for your current problems. If you are rewriting something and you’re struggling, the last thing in the world you want to do is to say, “Well, you know, the script before me — I mean all this stuff.” You know, you took the job. Shut up and fix the script.

**John:** That’s why you have the job.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s probably the reason why you’re doing this job, is because the script had problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll tell you a little story without names. A little blind item story. So once I was hired to write something and then someone was hired to rewrite it. And that person, I heard from a reliable source, said well, you know — when the people were unhappy with his work, he said, “Well, I mean look what you gave me.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** I just filed that away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then when he was fired —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I was brought back. And then —

**John:** There you go.

**Craig:** There you go. It’s not a rational, supportable argument to make. If you take a gig to rewrite something, you’re saying you’re paying me and I can help, not you’re paying me and, “Well, yeah, but the script is bad. And he — ” Shut up.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. If you’re taking only easy jobs, you’re not really doing your job.

**Craig:** No. No. And also, if you take — it doesn’t matter whether it’s easy or hard, [laughs] you took the job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. Stop blaming the other script. Lastly, do be a calm voice. This is one of the few times in our business where we actually begin with a good hand because everybody is nervous and upset and something hasn’t worked and in you come to save the day.

You may not end up saving the day. But at least in this early moment, you have a good hand. People are looking to you. And this is the time to project back confidence and coolness. Nobody is blaming you for what’s there because you weren’t there. So as best as you can, try and be a soothing presence. You don’t want to sew panic. You don’t want to come in and say, “All right, so you guys — I’m going to be rewriting this but I go to tell you, it’s in bad shape. And I know that you need it for six weeks from now. And there’s just no way. This is going to be bad because still — because this is — ” No, no, no, no, no. Don’t take the job then. [laughs]

**John:** No. Don’t take the job. Run away.

**Craig:** Don’t take the job. Just you got to come and say, everybody, it’s going to be okay. I got this.

**John:** Yeah. So the advice we’ve just given you is I think really good advice if you are the writer who’s being brought in to work on a project that is not crazy town. And so if it’s like, this is a movie that’s going to be made or is it that, you know, it could be made but you’re the person who is going to get it into production.

If you have a movie that is speeding down the tracks at 1,000 miles per hours, some of the stuff may not apply quite as much because you’re on an insane trainful of explosives. And so we have friends who are working on those insane trains full of explosives. And I think you can aspire to the kind of things we’re about here. You can certainly aspire to be calm, you can certainly aspire to be gracious and generous and never trash the earlier stuff and be the hopeful problem solver.

But sometimes you’re just going to be the person who’s like chugging through pages and emailing them in because they’re going to be shooting them in two hours and it’s just crazy town. So I would say, if you are in one of those situations, just know that — just do the best you can and be the best, most generous respectful writer you can be, but also know that you’re in a war and it’s a war to sort of get this movie made.

**Craig:** You know, when you were talking about that, it occurred to me that one of the things that trips new screenwriters up is that they don’t understand that there’s one name for job, screenwriter, there’s five different jobs that —

**John:** Yeah, you’re right.

**Craig:** It’s the weirdest thing to say, yeah, you know, the same person that sits down and creates an idea and writes 120 pages and invents a world is the same person that has three hours while they’re on a plane to fix dialogue that’s being shot six hours from now. And then when they land, they got to get to a set and rewrite something to bring the budget down. Two different jobs, but often times, same person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you just need to be able to shift those hats around as you go between the various kinds of rewriting.

**John:** Yeah. And I would just say, don’t confuse those two roles and don’t try to be that crazy, mercenary person when you have, you know, three weeks or you have, you know, time. The gun is not always aimed at your head. You don’t always have to act like the gun is at your head and that it’s always a crisis situation. Most times, it isn’t that. And most times, you have days or weeks to get the stuff done and being that calm, cool presence is really crucial. I want to make sure I’m offering some sympathy to the writers who do find themselves in just those nutso situations.

Reaching way back so it’s not anything shooting right now, but like the first Charlie’s Angels had a bunch of writers who worked serially and so I know that each of those people who’s coming in was coming in to just crazy town. And so for them not to reach out to me individually to get my feeling on the script, that is totally cool. I knew what they are going into. How I met the Wibberleys is they were brought in do the second Charlie’s Angels and we had that great phone conversation and it was so useful because it wasn’t crazy town yet.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. You just have to kind of suss out, am I one in the line? Is this is a mill? You know, some of these movies turn into like, what I call, a weekly mill.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where they just start paying people’s weeklies one after another after another. Less so now in the 2000s, more common — it was the —

**John:** At some point, they got — the studios got really smart and they would make all services deals for writers who they thought could carry it to the finish line. And so then they would pay a flat fee to these writers and keep them as indentured servants on these runaway productions.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I think they also started to look at the quality of the patchwork of seven different writers on a movie and think, eh, big ticket items, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not quite knitting together. So yeah, but if you’re one of a procession, nobody cares. Everybody gets it. But if you’re not, yeah sure, give a call.

**John:** Give the call. All right, our next topic — this is something that occurred to me because it occurred to me this week is I just finished up a script that is hopefully a script that I will direct at some point in the future. And one of the things I needed to do is figuring out like, well, how much would this even cost? And so I went to a line producer friend who is fantastic and I asked her if she would take a look at it and figure out for me how much this might cost.

And so one of her first jobs is to figure out a production schedule. And so I want to talk through what a production schedule is and sort of what is involved in figuring out how long it takes to shoot a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, good idea.

**John:** So production schedules, the reason why you need to do it first is that your budget is so dependent on how many days it will take to make a movie. That’s probably the single biggest factor in how much a movie costs is how long it will take to shoot it.

**Craig:** Right, shooting days.

**John:** Shooting days. Time equals labor and labor equals money. And so if you are at Sundance Film Festival and someone raises their hand and says, “How much did the movie cost?” Everyone will shutter because you’re never allowed to ask that question. But what you’ll hear people ask is how many shooting days did you have? And people will happily answer how many shooting days. And shooting days is a useful proxy for how much the movie costs.

When I’m talking to a friend, he says like, “Oh yeah, we’re shooting it in town. It’s 30 days.” Like, wow, you are racing and that budget is much lower than I would have guessed for that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, the amount of pages that you can shoot in a day vary wildly, so, you know, television they’ll sometimes shoot all the way up to nine pages in a day. But they’re shooting certain kind of material that can be done that way. For feature films, big studio movies, page-and-a-half to three pages a day is about the normal thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Some pages take three days to shoot because it’s an action sequence and, you know, some pages take — you can get four pages done before lunch because it’s two people talking on a bench.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re doing it as a oner. So that’s what a line producer can kind of help figure out. But overall, yeah, if somebody says, “Oh, how many days did you shoot?” “42, 45.” Oh, it’s average. Okay, it’s typical. “How many days did you shoot?” “30.” Fast. “18.” Oh my God. “79.” Whoa. [laughs] You know, you —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Work around. I always just work around 50, seems like — that’s sort of the —

**John:** 50 seems like just a solid, you know, studio feature.

**Craig:** Yeah, 50.

**John:** And so Go was a movie shot in town, shot in Los Angeles and was 30 days. And that’s become sort of my benchmark sort of like it’s not a total indie, but it’s not a big studio feature either and so I sort of keep that as my threshold.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Nines was also about — it was 22 days and that’s not a crazy amount of time for a small indie feature. So talking with this producer, I sent her over this script, but I also sent over a list of kind of assumptions. And this is a helpful way for her to think about the schedules she’s trying to build.

So some of the assumptions that are useful for her to know. Which scenes do you think are practical locations versus sets? And the difference is when I say sets, that’s stage work. Those are sets that you’re building in a black box to do certain things. And that can be really useful for anything with visual effects, you can sometimes move a lot faster on sound stages. Cheaper movies tend to use a lot more location work, but also expensive movies use location work, too. You can get production value by using real locations and not having to build things.

If you look at most television shows, they have what’s called in days and out days. And in days means that they’re on their standing sets. They’re on the police precinct headquarters. They are at Central Perk in Friends. Those are the days they’re shooting inside the studio and that can be a huge difference for a line producer is just figuring out your schedule.

**Craig:** It’s kind of remarkable how much sets cost, just to build — because it’s not like they’re building a real house. I mean you can’t live in it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But it costs a lot, like just a wall costs a lot.

**John:** So to help people figure out like what is a set and what’s not a set, in the movie Go, almost everything is a practical location. So we’re in Todd Gaines’ apartment, that’s a real location. It’s a real apartment off of Western.

But there are certain things we had to build sets for because you couldn’t do it in a real location. So an example is Simon sets a hotel room on fire. That hotel room — the inside of the hotel room had to be a set because we had to have fire control there and be able to light it all on fire and put it all out.

There’s a sequence where Ronna tries to flush these pills down the toilet. We had to build that bathroom and the toilet because the real location wasn’t big enough. And it’s just actually very hard to get flushable things and make a bathroom big enough. Bathrooms are sort of weirdly a thing you end up building a lot because they’re hard to control.

**Craig:** Right, you can’t fit equipment into a bathroom. I mean more than anything, how do you shoot inside a bathroom?

**John:** Yeah, walls are your enemies.

**Craig:** Right. So on sets, walls can fly in and out. And this how you get stuff done. That’s half of the time you’re doing stuff like this is because of that. Sometimes you’re doing it because you can’t find something practically. Sometimes you can, it’s just too expensive or arduous. There are always — I mean in the end, they’re always trying to decide what’s going to be the most efficient way to do something in terms of time and money. And there are times when you get jammed and you have to build something you wish you didn’t have to build. But, you know, hey, look at it this way, at least, it’s cover. Every now and then, you need somewhere to go if it’s raining.

**John:** Yeah. And so that idea of rain cover becomes crucial specially later on as you’re budgeting to figure out like, what happens if it rains. And so Big Fish was a movie we shot in Atlanta. And it rained all the time. And so the crew could be out on location, it starts to rain and they could suddenly pull back to our sound stages which was built in these warehouses and shoot these interior scenes. And that was because it was cleverly constructed in a schedule that there’s always stuff inside that we could shoot if we needed to.

The next thing we’re talking about with the producer is locations and which locations in the scripts could we shoot at other places? So you may have experience with this with like your Hangover movies and also with Identify Thief, you had to decide like how much flexibility is there between going to the real places and faking it.

**Craig:** Well, so much of it comes down to budget. There’s also a general feeling of, well, why are people coming to this movie? This is one of the bummers. You know, everybody that writes a screenplay imagines in their mind the place. If they’re going a good job, the place is its own character, it has a vibe, it has a feeling. And a movie like Identify Thief which is a road trip, the terminal points of the trip are really important. And then if you have a travel movie like The Hangover Part II, which takes place in Bangkok, good luck faking that. You’re going to Bangkok.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the point, you know. Now, on Identify Thief which cost, I don’t know, what fraction of Hangover II — I think it cost I think $30 million or something like that, all in. The original plan was that the road trip would be from Boston to Portland. I liked the idea of taking the Northern route because I hadn’t really seen that travelled in a lot of road movies. It was just a different look.

**John:** Yeah. I saw your movie and they didn’t take that route.

**Craig:** [laugh] No, they didn’t. So the initial suggestion from physical production, so at a studio, physical production is the department that handles budget-making and all the rest of that. So their suggestion was, what if it was from Miami to Orlando? [laughs] I kid you not?

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Then they expanded to Miami to Atlanta. And I was like, “Look, guys, Miami to Atlanta is a day. You can do that in a day. Forget Miami or Orlando. That’s not a journey. That’s just a day. That’s like saying, ‘Oh my God, we’re going on a road trip from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo.'”[laughs] It’s like who cares?

So when all was said and done, they’re like, “Look, fancy pants, we’re shooting this movie in Atlanta entirely for tax reasons and budget reasons, so figure it out.” And what we ended up doing was starting the movie in “Florida,” which was not Florida. We faked Florida, you know, so we shot Georgia for Florida.

And then the other area was Denver because Denver is — I mean —

**John:** It’s generic.

**Craig:** It’s just generic. I mean that’s the thing, it’s like a generic skyline. People in Denver and people in Atlanta, I’m sure, looked at this and went, “What?” Everybody else was like, “Yeah, okay, I guess that’s American city.” I hate it. I mean I hate, hate, hate it because it just cheapens the movie.

And what happens is when people watch movies like this, they don’t realize it necessarily but they’re quietly going generic America, did they not care? No, no, no, trust me, there were fights and fights and fights. We, making the movies, care very much. The people spending money on them, they’re a little more calculating. And look, hard to blame them. They’re like, people aren’t showing up for the awesome cinematography of Portland. So yeah, we’re faking it for Denver. And that’s basically what happened.

**John:** And so that conversation starts right at the scheduling thing. So this is the email I sent through to the line producer said, “These are the locations that I think are important. There’s a section of the movie that takes place over there. I would be fine shooting that some place different all together. So I can tell you where it’s actually set, but I would be happy to move that somewhere else. Also, I’d be happy to break the interiors from the exteriors if that becomes a helpful thing, too.” So I just let her know where the flexibility was.

I had to tell her which characters were minors and how old they would be, not miners with a hat, but like young people —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that would affect how many days they could work. And I’m sorry, how many hours they can work per day. And that could be a real factor. And so for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, those kids were really young. And in the U.K., they could only work like four hours a day or something. And so they had to build their whole schedule so that they would have the Oompa Loompa stuff to shoot in the afternoon. So they have kids in the morning on stage, and their whole schedule is built around the Oompa Loompa numbers. And so that becomes a factor.

**Craig:** And don’t forget, you’re also paying — you’re paying for teachers because they have to go to school when they’re working.

**John:** Yeah. And the last thing I had to tell here was how much of the things that’s felt like visual effects in the movie were meant to be visual effects and how much was supposed to be done on the day in camera.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because it’s really expensive to be in production. But post-production is really expensive, too. And I wanted her to know what I saw being a visual effect and what I saw not being a visual effect. So those are some of the assumptions I had to send through in email with the script so she would have a sense of how to being scheduling this movie.

**Craig:** Well, I mean it’s all magic to me how they do it. I mean I know that it’s not magic [laughs], but — yeah.

**John:** So Craig, you’ve never had to physically make a schedule —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** For a movie, have you?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So I had to do it. I had to do it in film school.

**Craig:** Oh my God.

**John:** And so for my master thesis, we had to actually do a breakdown of a schedule. So I will talk through what that process is. Not that a writer will ever have to do this herself, but to know what the thing is really kind of magic. So back in the day, this is back in film school, this is, you know, the 90s, this was still done by hand. So you’d have these cardboard strips and in order to get the information to put on those cardboard strips, you’d go the script, carefully number each scene, you’d number each character and which characters were in which scenes, not just the characters who speak, but the characters who are present in a scene because those are the actors we’re going to need for those scenes.

Then you would measure how long each scene was. And you measure in eights. Craig, do you know why eighths of a page came to be?

**Craig:** No, why? Why did they do that?

**John:** You know, I’ve heard different explanations but I think it’s essentially, it’s very easy to conceive of half a page and when you get to a quarter of a page, like, “Oh yeah, I can see a quarter of a page.” And then at an eighth of a page — well, an eighth is about as short of a scene as could possibly be. And if you actually look at a script, an eighth of a page is essentially a scene header and like two lines of action.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s an eighth, and so that was a small as they decided they ever wanted to make a portion. But every scene is measured in eighths which is just nuts, but that’s just how it’s done.

**Craig:** It’s so annoying.

**John:** We all know as screenwriters that because of how we write screen description, you know, a scene that’s three pages long could be really short in terms of actual screen time or could be incredibly long in terms of screen time but we still measure in pages and eighths of pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s one of the first things I do when a movie is about to go in production and they issue that schedule. I go through and I’m like, “Hmm, let’s see. Let’s see if they’re right,” [laughs] and they’re almost right. But every now and then, I’ll go —

**John:** Yeah, they are.

**Craig:** “Hmm, you know — ” and usually, what it is, is that I think to myself, they’ve said this is two days, I bet it’s one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they’re being fooled by the fact that it’s five-and-three-eighths, you know.

**John:** And back in the day when this was on cardboard strips, you would literally pad the strips. So you’d, basically, on each cardboard strip, there’d be a different color for whether it was day or night, interior, exterior. On that strip, you would write and code whether it was interior or exterior, who is in the scene, there’s like coding for which characters are in the scenes, where the scene is and sometimes you would even squeeze in like a description of what the scene was. You would have all these strips of paper of cardboard that were flexible enough that you could slide them into a binder and literally slide them up and down. And then you’re trying to group them together to maximize and sort of optimize how you’re shooting this movie.

So now this is all done with software. But it still mimics the way that it was done when it was cardboard strips.

**Craig:** You’re so old.

**John:** I’m so old. It was really fun to do it. I was really happy to do it once because, as you know, Craig and I both wrapped sign posts or wrapped strike placards once.

**Craig:** We did.

**John:** And I was really good at wrapping stuff with duct tape. I’m really good at like physical crafts and it felt fun in a very physical craft kind of way.

**Craig:** [laughs] Do you remember what mine looked like?

**John:** Mine were prettier.

**Craig:** I mean I have always feared arts and crafts class. When I was in school and I would get to arts and crafts, something would always go disastrously wrong. And you think like how could it go that wrong? All you had to do was just assemble the Popsicle sticks. You just had to glue the things.

I remember, we were given an assignment. Collect some local foliage, bring it into school and we’ll make a winter scene on construction paper. And so people brought in little bits of things.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And they glued them on and made little winter wonderlands. And I was like, “Okay, so I just gathered up a bunch of vegetation without any concern [laughs] whatsoever, sat down, started gluing it on. It all smelled. There was something about like the weeds I had picked up. Like they were smelly weeds.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** It wasn’t marijuana, it was just nasty weeds. And then I thought, “Well, this looks terrible. I know what I’ll do. I’ll cover it in glue because glue is white and it’s like snow and it will look nice.” But when glue dries, it’s clear. So what it ended up being was just this horrendous pile of nasty street mulch covered in a crisscrossing of clear crust.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is how I do with arts and crafts.

**John:** Like it could be art. You never know.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s a possibility you made art.

**Craig:** No, it could not be art. It was not art or a craft. It was neither.

**John:** So the line producer has all this information now broken down into strips, either real strips or in this case, virtual strips in her software. And there’s a specialized software. Movie Magic Scheduling. What’s the big one? I’m not sure what people are using these days. But then she’s trying to arrange a schedule. And she has a bunch of competing goals. And that’s where it becomes less craft and really an art and really knowing how to make a movie.

So she’s trying to keep her days together and her nights together as much as possible because it’s really brutal on a crew when they have to be shooting — it’s actually impossible for a crew. Like a crew can’t shoot all night and then turn around and shoot the next day.

**Craig:** No, you’re protective — like what it is, like 12 hours in between or something?

**John:** Yeah, that’s called turn around and so that’s, you know, going from night to day, you have to have time off. And so what you’ll find is that usually, let’s say, your schedule runs from Monday through Friday, you’re shooting five day weeks in town and you’ll start shooting early on Monday morning and then your schedule will drift a little bit later and later over the course of the week. And so your start times will be later and later each day until you reach what’s affectionately known as Fraturday, which is where you have a really late call on Friday and you’re essentially shooting into all of Saturday night and then driving home on Saturday morning. That is a pretty common schedule.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But you would never start your week as nights unless you were shooting nights the whole week.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there are the dreaded splits. So splits are when you’re going to be shooting half day, half night. Nobody likes those.

**John:** It’s just the worst.

**Craig:** It’s just terrible. It’s just terrible.

**John:** Craig, have you run into situations where you’ve had to shoot interior at night, but as daytime? So I’ve been on movies where if you had to like blast —

**Craig:** Oh my God, are you kidding me?

**John:** Bright lights in through the windows to make it seem like it’s daylight but it’s, of course, it’s like three in the morning?

**Craig:** Always. And it’s so distressing to your circadian rhythm. You have no idea what’s going on. I mean people talk about how casinos don’t have clocks. And I mean a sound stage is the ultimate casino that way. It’s a huge windowless box where no noise or light can penetrate.

So yeah, you’re shooting on a set. There’s some huge ass light on a thing shining through a window blasting light and it’s — I’ve shot scenes that were morning scenes in the middle of the night. And morning is the worst because it’s like, your brain is really getting fooled because it’s the color temperature of morning light. You’re like, I should be waking up. I want to go to bed. This is all wrong. It’s terrible. It’s really bad for you. It’s bad for your health.

**John:** It is really bad for you, I agree. And for me, it’s always that I will be on the set and it would seem like daylight and then I’ll go out and realize like, “Oh, that’s right, it’s three in the morning.” Like it’s just night and it’s cold and you hear the crickets. And like, wait, what, what am I doing? And then the worst is always like driving home like as the sun is coming up, that’s just the worst feeling.

**Craig:** Well, it’s also a real problem because there have been deaths and no doubt there have been quite a few accidents that were less than fatal, but still serious. It’s just dangerous. I mean the way we shoot movies is so — and I understand why there was that flirtation for a while where big directors were drifting towards all mo cap, you know, Spielberg did Tintin that way and Zemeckis disappeared for a while and only did those, you know, like Beowulf and The Christmas Train. [laughs] I don’t know the actual name. I want to call it The Christmas Train.

**John:** Polar Express.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s called The Christmas Train in my house. Because you could actually have a normal day. You could show up, you shoot your time and you go home. It doesn’t matter what time the movie — if it’s a night scene, you’re still shooting it during the day. And morning, you shoot — and you have total control. And I understand that because the way movies are actually made is just distressing. It’s brutal. Every time I do it, every single time, I will stop at some point and think, there’s got to be another way. Nobody would believe that this is how we do this. It’s so dumb and inefficient. But I think it’s the way and I don’t think there’s another way.

**John:** I don’t know if there’s another way either. So this smart line producer, she is creating the fantasy optimized schedule and the optimized schedule will have less brutal situations like that. It’s only over the course of the production and things go wrong that the schedule has to shift and you run into those jam situations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she’s trying to optimize for not moving between days and nights or being smart about that. She’s trying to finish off all the work at a location because you don’t want to have to go back to a location. Once you’re done — ideally, you want to shoot all the scenes at a location and then move on.

But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe you want to have, if it’s a lot of scenes at a house, an interior house, maybe build that as a set and then it becomes your cover set for rain or for other disaster so you can always shoot something there in case something goes wrong out in the field.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, also you want to avoid the dreaded company move, which is when you have two different locations on the same day and they’re not right next to each other. So you’ve finished shooting at the first location and everybody piles all the crap up into their trucks and drives over to the new thing, just a day killer.

**John:** Yeah, that’s terrible. She wants to finish all the work with one actor, ideally, to the degree it makes sense you want to finish all the work with one actor. So if an actor has six scenes total in the movie and it’s possible to schedule those scenes together, you will try to schedule the scenes together so you can “shoot them out”. And there may be reasons why you can only get that actor if you can compress all his days down to a certain window of time.

There may be just budgetary reasons why. It can sometimes be very expensive to drop an actor and pick up an actor. There’s weird union rules about sort of how you do that. So sometimes you have to have an actor who just sits around a lot and that’s just the nature of it. But ideally, you try to get through all of an actor’s scenes in one chunk if possible.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** She will ask me and I will tell her how important it is to stay in sequence. So there are movies in which characters go through physical transformations where you actually need to shoot them in order. Most movies are shot wildly out of order. But for both performance reasons and for just like logic reasons, sometimes you have to stick closer to order.

In my movie, The Nines, Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy have wildly different hairstyles in the three different sections. They look very different. And so we had to shoot those basically in sequence. Once we started one of those chapters, we had to stay in that chapter and we couldn’t mix and match things. And that meant that we had to come back to some locations three times which was a production nightmare, but it was just the nature of the movie.

**Craig:** They hate stuff like that. They hate it.

**John:** They hate it.

**Craig:** They hate it.

**John:** The last thing which she may need to factor in is maximizing the use of certain equipment. So let’s say you have a techno crane, like a really fancy crane and there’s like three scenes that need it, there may be a reason why you want to board those together so that you can rent that thing for one day and be done with it.

Or if you have like a boat sequence or there’s some reason why there’s special equipment you need that might drive sort of how you’re doing stuff. Even like a camera package like, let’s say, you have a high speed camera that’s used for these two moments, you might want to put those two moments together so you don’t have to rent this incredibly expensive camera rig for, you know, two different days over the course of your shoot.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Yes, no. I mean —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Everything that they’re doing is to save money, everything. Sometimes they come to you and then they’re like, “Is there any way we could not have him wear his hat? It would save us $400,000?” [laughs] It’s like sometimes they have these little things and you’re like, “Wait, what? Of course not. Yeah, no.”

**John:** Wait, yes.

**Craig:** Burn the hat.

**John:** Burn the hat. You don’t care about the hat, whatsoever. Like who said there was a hat? Like there’s —

**Craig:** I mean exactly. But then sometimes they come to you and they’re like, “Is there any way they could all be 20 years older and in one room?” No.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can’t.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah, sorry, the multiple classrooms of second graders can’t be one group of 25-year-old post collegiate — no. Yeah, they — it’s amazing the things they ask. And I’m always shocked by how much you — sometimes you can save so much with tiny little things. So I don’t blame them for asking.

**John:** No. So usually, a screenwriter will not have to get super involved with a schedule, but when it comes time to make a movie, you will see what that schedule is. And what I find so helpful about it is like it’s that first glimpse of like, how will this be made as a movie? It’s that first snapshot of this is what it’s going to take to move from what I have on the page to actually going into production. And you see it like, “Oh my God, that is so much more than I thought,” or like, “Oh, that’s actually much more achievable than I thought.”

In the case of Go, it was my first moment of horror/revelation, like, “Oh my God, I wrote a script that takes place entirely at night and we’re going to be outside at night for like 20 days.” And that was terrifying and it made me rethink [laughs] how I use night in movies that I want to be part of because it is just a debilitating condition to be outside at night all the time.

So I’m looking forward to what she says with this script and what the schedule turns out to be because it will be my first indication of how possible it will be to make the movie I have on the page and then she may be able to come back to me with some suggestions for the things that are making this crazy and impossible are these things and think about whether any of those things could change and where the flexibility is because it will make your life happier and easier.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly.

**John:** And on the subject of time, we went way over time. So once again, we’re going to kick to the curb two other great questions that came in from our listeners. But we will get to them in a future week.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’ll be real brief. My One Cool Thing is called Escape Room LA, the Detective. Escape Room LA is one of these outfits where you go downtown and they stick you in a room and they lock it and it’s full of puzzles and you have to solve all the puzzles to find the key to get out and you have an hour.

And the detective is one of the themes they have. I believe it’s their hardest one. And I did this with my wife, Melissa, and Alec Berg and his wife, and Megan Amram and her boyfriend, and David Kwong, and Chris Miller of Lord and Miller. This is a powerhouse team. I just want to point out, of this team, three Harvard grads, two Princeton grads, and a Dartmouth guy, okay.

**John:** So all idiots.

**Craig:** All idiots and we failed.

**John:** Oh, Craig.

**Craig:** And we were so — and it’s actually heartbreaking how we failed. We were flying through this thing. Like the record I think was something like 48 minutes. At minute 50, we had just one thing left to do. So we were close to even the record. And then we just died on the shoals of this one problem. And once it was revealed to us at the end, we were like, “Oh my God.”

**John:** So I think we skipped over a little bit of the set up of what this actually is. So they are locking you in a room and you’re trying to get out of the room?

**Craig:** And it’s full of puzzles. So all the clues are leading to other clues. They are leading you to unlock things. And the puzzles are all different varieties, there’s logic puzzles, math puzzles, there’s Morse code puzzles. There’s so many different ways. So you have to solve something like probably 13 or 14 major problems to finally unlock the thing that gets you the key to unlock the room.

And so much fun and it’s designed to be for anywhere up to 12 people. We were a little small. I think we were eight. But that’s a good —

**John:** But I have a hunch that 12 people wouldn’t actually necessarily improve it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Maybe like that one more man problem actually like slows you down.

**Craig:** It will. And I think — yeah, I imagine every group of 12, one person is going, “Yeah, I’m lost, I’m going to sit down.” [laughs]

**John:** So Craig, after we wrap, you could tell me who the dead weight was in the group and how it slowed you down.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ll throw many people under the bus.

**John:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is a television program called You’re the Worst. It’s on FXX. It’s actually on its second season, but I just last night watched the pilot from the first season which is on Hulu. And I really enjoyed it. And I would highly recommend people watch it just because it’s such a fascinating look at how you do the anti-romantic comedy and sort of how you take the tropes and play against the tropes.

So the show is created by Stephen Falk. And the natural comparison is with Catastrophe which I think was a previous One Cool Thing which is another great show you should watch on Amazon. Like Catastrophe, weirdly, it involves this one American and this one British person. They’re falling in love. They seem like a terrible couple. Catastrophe takes place in London. This takes place in Los Angeles.

What’s so different about You’re the Worst is the characters in it seem like they are the sidekick characters in other romantic comedies. They’re like the hyperactive, terrible like slutty people in the other romantic comedies. Like you would have the upstanding, like the Meg Ryan, but then she has her slutty best friend.

**Craig:** The wacky friends.

**John:** Sort of the slutty best friends.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. It’s nicely done and does some interesting things and there’s moments where I worried it was going to just be pushing buttons to push buttons. But it actually manages to find some humanness underneath there. So again, I’m basing this off of just watching the pilot. But I would recommend people watch the pilot because it’s a very great exercise and sort of like thinking about how you take the tropes of a genre like a romantic comedy and really play with them.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll put that on the list.

**John:** Craig is not going to watch it. Craig won’t watch anything.

**Craig:** Put it on the list of things I won’t watch.

**John:** It sounds very good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Who is off ordering t-shirts right now. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did the outro this week. Thank you, Matthew. He got a new cello so you’re hearing his new cello. If you have a question for me or Craig Mazin, we’ll eventually answer your questions, ask@johnaugust is the email address you want. Craig on Twitter is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We are on iTunes, so subscribe to us there if you wouldn’t mind and leave us a comment if you would like to.

We also have all the back episodes available at scriptnotes.net. If you sign up there, you get the whole back catalog for $2 a month. And you can find those episodes in the Scriptnotes app which is available both for iOS and for Android on their respective stores.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [You Must Remember This: MGM Stories, Part 1](http://www.vidiocy.com/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/9/14/mgm-stories-part-one-louis-b-mayer-vs-irving-thalberg-ymrt-56) guest starring Craig Mazin
* [Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard & Lionsgate Get $10M ‘Cabin In The Woods’ Suit Tossed](http://deadline.com/2015/09/joss-whedon-drew-goddard-cabin-in-the-woods-lawsuit-lionsgate-chris-hemsworth-1201526687/), and [Substantial similarity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity) on Wikipedia
* [Here’s why The Rock’s new HBO show, ‘Ballers,’ can legally use NFL logos without the league’s consent](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-rocks-ballers-can-use-nfl-logos-without-consent-2015-6) on Business Insider
* [Streisand effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) on Wikipedia
* [Movie Magic Scheduling](http://www.ep.com/scheduling/)
* [Escape Room LA](http://escaperoomla.com/)
* [You’re the Worst](http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/youre-the-worst/episodes) on FXX, and [on Hulu](http://www.hulu.com/youre-the-worst)
* [Catastrophe](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00X8UKEEQ) on Amazon Prime Instant Video
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/no-one-makes-those-movies-anymore).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 204 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, as you know, I’m watching these two dogs for this summer and really enjoying it. I’m enjoying my life as a dog sitter. But as I was putting them to bed last night, I had a sudden flash of this one dog, who’s 12 years old. She’s, you know, she’s the Maggie Smith of these two dogs. She’s older, the dame —

**Craig:** The dame. The Dame Maggie Smith of dogs.

**John:** And so, while I want her to live another 20 years, that is just not just likely, and so she is at the — nearing twilight of her life. And I suddenly had this horrifying thought, like, what if people only lived as long as dogs? And whether society could even exist if humans did not live as long as they live?

**Craig:** I think so. It would look very different.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There would be so much more sex.

**John:** Oh, yeah, it would have to be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, except you would have sex with teenagers though.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s all weird.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, is that…

**John:** I guess, what I’m postulating is, what if humans developed as quickly as dogs do so they could actually, like, you know, that a four-year-old could do something useful and productive. But would you actually have society if people only live such a short period of time?

**Craig:** I think so. I think so — I mean, look, we’re the weird ones in the animal kingdom, you know. I mean, most four-year-old animals are perfectly capable of doing everything that animals must do. We’re born stupid because we have to be born too early because of our huge heads.

**John:** That said, you know, we are the weird ones, but we’re also the only ones who developed speech and culture and the ability to build cities and roads and do all sorts of other things. So I wonder if the other postulate would be, if we could live twice as long or three times as long, would society be vastly different?

**Craig:** It would be crankier, the driving would go downhill, just the overall quality of driving. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a farmer’s market, I’ll tell you that much.

**John:** Yeah, there would be so many slow shuffles

**Craig:** Oh, God. Just, you know, it would get — I think we’re in a decent spot now. They keep telling us that sooner or later, they’ll be able to take our brains and put them in a computer and we’ll live forever. Here’s my question for you, John. This is what keeps me up at night.

**John:** All right. I want to hear.

**Craig:** All right. So the brain is a big network of neurons, and though we can’t do it now, it’s — at least, let’s stipulate that one day it will be possible to take a scan of your brain, see every neuron, analyze every connection and then replicate it technologically.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** Okay, fine. Stipulating that, what happens when I take you, copy your brain, put it in the computer and then I turn it on while you’re still alive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s two of you now.

**John:** Well, you’ve made the world significantly better.

**Craig:** But here’s my question, which one is you? Is the computer you? Are you you? You don’t see through the computer’s eyes at the same time, so there’s two you. So, if I kill you — you, you, you’re dead. But then this other you is alive, so are you still alive?

**John:** Oh, no. You certainly committed a murder because you killed a human being. I think the other interesting question is, if you turned off that computer, did you — is that the same kind of murder as murdering a living, breathing human being?

**Craig:** But even putting aside murder, you don’t really live forever in that circumstance. What happens is your clone lives forever. But you, you, with the experience that you have, you’re going to die.

**John:** Yeah. You know, you’re fundamentally asking the question of, is a person the body and the organs and the everything else, or is the person the processes — is the person the hardware or the software? And that is a question that has been wrestled with by philosophers even before there was a real distinction between hardware and software.

**Craig:** Well, especially because the brain is both. You know, the brain is hardware-software. So I wonder about that. To me, really, what I’m hoping for here is that they figure out a way to take my brain and keep my brain alive forever because that’s me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So then I’m good. I’m covered.

**John:** All right. In the first two minutes of this podcast, we’ve outlaid a number of premises for a sci-fi movies that Hollywood won’t make. But we can talk through the day’s work ahead of us, which is, the question is, is Hollywood making too many movies overall? What does Apple music mean for screenwriters? And we will also take a quick run-through a screenwriter’s job from pitch to premier. Those are big topics for today’s show.

But before we get to it, we have exciting news. So way back in Episode — I don’t know — 201, we asked our listeners whether — if we had a USB drive that had all of the episodes of Scriptnotes, all 200 episodes, plus the bonus episodes, would they want to buy such a mythical USB drive? And people said in a loud chorus, yes. So we are making those USB drives and we will be shipping them starting next week.

So if people would like to buy a USB drive with all the episodes of Scriptnotes and all the Three Page Challenges and all the other supplementary things, The Dirty Show with Rebel Wilson and Dan Savage, they can do so now. So it’s at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** And would you say that’s like a $70,000 value?

**John:** It is — probably, you know, as we’ve gone through the ways that people could spend their money on screenwriting, I think it’s a pretty good bargain at $20.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great bargain at $20, yes.

**John:** But, Craig — I mean, do you want to offer any incentive to our long-time listeners? Is there anything we’d want to make sure that the people who actually listened to the show, who listened through our two minutes of philosophical ponderings about death and immortality —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Should we cut them a break? Should we give them a discount?

**Craig:** I hate discounts, but yes.

**John:** All right. So you can pick whatever words you would like and that can be the word that they can type in for a discount because we haven’t set this yet, so it’s your — it’s up to you, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m going to go with “singularity.”

**John:** Wow, that’s a challenging word but I like it. “Singularity”. So at checkout, if you type in the word “singularity” in a special little promo code box field, you can save 10%, so —

**Craig:** That’s $2. Totally worth it.

**John:** Totally worth it. That basically covers your shipping. So shipping in the US is like $2.79.

**Craig:** “Singularity” has saved you money.

**John:** Singularity has saved your money. Yes, so they’re brand new. If you bought the 100 episode one way back when, you’ll recognize it’s a similar kind of thing. So this one is white, it has our signatures on it, so, yeah.

**Craig:** Have we discontinued the confederate flag USB drive?

**John:** You know what? It was a controversial choice and it was really a lot of hemming and hawing, but no, we’re no longer selling the confederate flag USB drive that we never sold.

**Craig:** I’m disgusted. We’ve bowed to pressure, outside pressure. We had a tradition, sir. [laughs]

**John:** Yes, we had a tradition of not doing something and we’re going to continue not doing something.

**Craig:** Confederate flag, come on.

**John:** Oh, it’s madness

**Craig:** I know. That’s on our other podcast.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. The old timey racism podcast.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, we have a lot to follow up on this week, and you wanted to start off with something about reversion, which is a topic we covered in last week’s episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, we got a nice comment in from a writer out there whose lawyer had, I guess, reviewed what we said and added one factor that I had forgotten about, and it’s absolutely true. We talked about if you write an original screenplay, you have the chance to get the rights back. It’s involved, you got to pay them the money they paid you and all that.

But the timeline was such that five years after the sale or the completion of your first employment on the project, you have this window. And it was basically a two-year window to get the rights back and set up somewhere else. And the little part that I forgot was that that two-year window has to happen within a five-year window. So you have these two years, but five years after the window begins, it shuts and you lose reversion possibility, I think permanently.

**John:** All right. So in my head, I’m trying to visualize this. And so what I see is a gray bar, and then after that gray bar that was five years long, and there’s an equally sized gray bar, equal size but like maybe a lighter gray bar, and within that lighter gray bar there’s like a red two-year slider that — it has to fall within that two-year slider within that five years. This is why movies are so rarely reverting to the original writers.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ve got a very limited window. But the truth is, I wish that this were the worst part of it, but it’s not. The financials, the fact that the purchasing company has to pay back interest on all the development fees that the first studio paid. Those are the things that really make it very difficult. But the timeline is tough. I mean, look, the truth is, practically, if you haven’t figured out how to get the reversion rights back within, you know, two or three years of the window opening, it’s never going to happen anyway, so.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you. What’s interesting to me is that the point at which the writer had the most leverage to try to negotiate better reversion terms is also the moment which he or she was not likely to push for them. So that moment at which you’re selling this project for the very first time, that was the moment where you could have pushed for really strong reversion rights. But you’re also pushing for a lot of other things, and mostly, you’re pushing for upfront money which is a very reasonable thing to be asking for. And paradoxically, that upfront money that you’re getting is money that would have to be paid back. There’s a whole bunch of other reasons why studios don’t want to pay both a lot of money and make it very easy for you to get the script back.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s true. And there’s also psychologically a little bit of a problem when a studio says, “We want to buy your screenplay,” and you start negotiating with them and one of your big points is, “Now, when this doesn’t work, can I blank, blank, blank?” Just psychologically it’s a little harder to do that and to be really aggressive about it. Everybody on the other side starts thinking, “Why are you so concerned about this failing?” So it’s a tough one, but, yeah.

**John:** Craig, something that occurs to me, which we didn’t really get into in last week’s episode, was what happens when a studio goes bankrupt? So let’s say you sold this to a production company that no longer exists.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Those assets could theoretically be purchased by another studio or — is are there sort of fire sales on intellectual property? What have you seen?

**Craig:** Yes, that’s exactly what happens. Basically, if a company that — and let’s presume it’s a WGA Signatory, because otherwise it doesn’t really matter. A WGA Signatory that owns screenplays goes under, they are either bought by another company in whole or they begin to sell off their assets. The WGA — the minimum basic agreement has many, many, many pages dedicated to assumption agreements.

You’re assuming certain rights when you buy things that have WGA stuff, but it’s very complicated. It’s very complicated and it does come up. You know, I’ve never worked for anyone other than the big studios, so I’ve never worried about it. But interestingly, I had like a weird thing happen when — back when we were doing the Scary Movies.

When we started them, Miramax was owned by Disney. By the time we finished the second one, I think, they had gone off on their own. And when they split, Disney and Miramax kind of decided they would share custody of the Scary Movies stuff as part of the divorce agreement. So we had two employers there at one point. It gets complicated. But honestly, if I talked about assumption agreements, I would be way out on a limb. That is advanced lawyer stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. And part of the reason why assumption agreements are so important is that, sometimes these companies are bought and sold, but the movies that actually were produced, somebody has to be responsible for continuing to pay the money that is owed to those writers for residuals and everything else. So it becomes an important part of our contract.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s like, if you buy a company and they’re selling you things that have liens on them essentially, so, I go out of business, I’m a restaurant owner, I’m selling you all my kitchen equipment, but I owe a bunch of people money for that kitchen equipment. Well, when you buy it, you now owe those people money for the kitchen equipment. And it’s the same thing with movies. They’re assuming responsibility for all the residuals.

Now, there is an interesting thing that happens. There have been cases where companies have gone out of business. The assets essentially don’t get purchased and they become what we call orphan works.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Most of the orphan works are very old but there’s been a real effort between the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild to get the United States government which controls the Copyright Office to recognize screenwriters and directors as co-authors. That means copyright holders of orphaned works that had been owned by other people as part of work for hire, but those entities no longer exist. So it’s an interesting thing. In modern era, it will never happen because everybody now understands how valuable IP is.

**John:** Yeah. Next bit of follow up, back in Episode 201, we talked about the FIFA scandal. And we wondered aloud if it could become a movie. Craig, what is the answer?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, indeed. So this past week, just today as we’re recording this, it was announced that Ben Affleck will be producing a FIFA movie for Warner Bros. all about the FIFA scandal. This is the summary here. Capping off eight days in negotiations, Warner Bros. has won a bidding war for Houses of Deceit, a book by BuzzFeed investigator reporter Ken Bensinger which is being seen as a definitive account of the American FIFA exec Chuck Blazer and his role in the largest sports and public corruption scandal in history.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Gavin O’Connor who recently wrapped the Affleck thriller, The Accountant, for the studio is attached to direct and will co-write the script with Anthony Tambakis. So —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That movie is going to be there. So we were speculating what kind of movie they would make and this doesn’t say specifically, but it gives us some hint about it. They’re focusing on Chuck Blazer who’s an American exec, which is certainly kind of reasonable to make it for an American audience. What else do we see from this summary here?

**Craig:** Well, in terms of the tone, it sounds like they’re approaching it the way we thought a studio would, that is head on. Not from the side as a comedy or something else, but head on. One interesting thing that they had picked up on it, that we just didn’t know, you and I just didn’t know about it, is that this guy, Chuck Blazer, I think was involved in the corruption itself. He became, as far as I can tell, I could be wrong, but he became essentially an informer.

And so what you have now is more of — their take is a little bit more like the movie The Insider.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know if you remember that movie, a really good movie. And they did say, Loretta Lynch, I guess teamed up with this guy back when she was just working at the IRS or something like that, so she has been actually tracking this. Now that’s interesting. Because if you start this character before she’s — you know, we said, “Look, the Attorney-General is too big,” and we were right, but if she’s not yet the Attorney-General and she becomes the Attorney-General towards the end of it, that’s really interesting. So an interesting version of it.

I’m kind of curious to see what the theme of it is. I’m curious to see if the theme is at all related to my thing about America finding its way towards kind of promising American justice again, or if they go a different way and there’s a whole different theme. Very interesting. But note, the movie is about two people, it’s about a relationship, it’s about one who is a soccer person and one who isn’t a soccer person. We nailed it.

**John:** We did.

**Craig:** Not that hard really. [laughs]

**John:** It really wasn’t that hard.

**Craig:** It’s kind of obvious.

**John:** I was curious like who they would pick as the character to focus on. And I didn’t really know about Chuck Blazer’s role in this, but it seems like a very natural fit for the kind of movie we would actually want to make.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Yeah, good luck to them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So obviously, how many movies get announced versus get made? Quite a few. But I think the people involved have a good track record of being able to make movies, so let’s hope.

**Craig:** Also, good object lesson for people out there who are like, “Oh my God, they stole my movie idea.” No, they didn’t. Shut up. Is there one cell in your body that’s like, “We talked about it and now they’re doing it” — even one?

**John:** Not a bit. Oh, God, no. No.

**Craig:** No, no, no. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. I’m now manufacturing umbrage. I’m making something up that isn’t true and then getting angry about it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know why, because it’s been too long.

**John:** Yeah. Now, if next week there is a Hadron Super Collider romantic comedy announced — and actually, it turns out there was, like I think David Koepp had worked on a romantic comedy many years ago, somebody like sent us a link to that. But if all three of our what-ifs became movies, then I would be a little bit suspicious. Or I would wonder whether we were not making the best use of our time. That we should have been out pitching these movies rather than describing them for free on a podcast.

**Craig:** Hey man. Pitching is easy. It’s the writing that sucks.

**John:** Yeah. We’re going to talk about that in our third topic today.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** The next bit of follow-up comes from Joe in Rancho Cucamonga. So in episode 194, you guys answered a question for me about how I would receive credit on an indie movie I co-wrote if I were in the WGA, and now I have another question regarding that situation. The movie did in fact go into production and wrapped a couple of weeks ago.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** I was sent a copy of the shooting script and I discovered that I did in fact receive a written by credit with the director but so did another writing team. There’s really nothing I can do about it. But what I want to know is, assuming the best case scenario, once the movie gets picked up for some kind of distribution, how can I benefit from this movie?

It’s impossible for anyone watching the movie to tell what I wrote, so how will agents or managers or producers know what value I have as a writer? Am I at the mercy of whatever opportunities come to the director’s way and hope he reaches out for me again? I contributed quite a bit to this movie, and if it’s successful, I’d like to be one of the people recognized for it. I’d love your opinion on how to proceed with all of this.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I’m going to make an assumption here because it’s not quite clear in the question. And the assumption is that this movie was not a WGA movie.

**John:** No, it was not. So flashing back to the previous episode, he wrote this thing but it was not a WGA covered movie whatsoever. So he said, you know, “What would have been different if it had been a WGA movie?”

**Craig:** First of all, he’s not allowed to do that. I hope he knows. Not allowed to write on non-WGA movies if you’re in the WGA, I believe, but fine.

**John:** Clarify more. He is a writer who has not joined the WGA.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So he’s a pre-WGA member. So he wrote on this indie film that is not a WGA film. He’s not WGA. So he wrote in asking in his initial question —

**Craig:** Oh, if I were.

**John:** Yeah. “How would it be different if I had been a member of the WGA?

**Craig:** Well, now that we cleared all that up, I have a clear answer for Joe from Rancho Cucamonga. So what happened is they decided on their own what the credit would be. That’s what happens when it’s not a WGA film. You get a written by credit sharing with an ampersand director and then these other two who the producers have stuck their names on perhaps legitimately and who knows also as written by. So written by A ampersand B, and C ampersand D.

What you’re asking is, how am I going to be credited for this in reality inside the business? The answer is that, in my opinion, you will absolutely be lumped in with the director. If people loved the movie, they’re going to immediately want to know who the director is. They’re going to see that the director was writing with somebody. And they’re going to lump you in as the director’s writing partner.

If you want to not continue to work with that director then you have to go and make an aggressive tour to say, “Look, let me explain the narrative of how this movie came to be,” and in that narrative you are the hero. And I’m just going to presume that that’s true.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not that people don’t occasionally tell stories that aren’t true, but presuming that’s true, you say, “Look, here’s how this actually came about and here’s what I think the reality of that movie is.” And if you talk about it in a convincing way, then people will understand that you were clearly a part of it.

But I want to caution you, Joe, that there will not be, unless this movie is literally nominated for an Oscar or makes a hundred times its budget, you will not get waves of attention for this credit.

**John:** I completely agree. You know, we don’t know exactly what genre of movie this is. If it is a small little thriller or a horror film or whatever, if people like the movie, that’s great. And that will only help Joe. There’s nothing in the situation is going to hurt Joe. While he hasn’t taken any steps back with his credit, it hasn’t pushed him very far forward.

So I think he still needs to think of himself as, “I’m a writer who is very fortunate to have something I wrote produced.” And if you were talking with an agent or manager or producer, they can see like, “Oh, he’s actually been through the process to some degree, like words he’s written have actually been filmed.” So that’s useful. But they’re mostly going to be hiring you based on the script that they’re reading on the page rather than this movie that you were one of four writers on.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah, and so that’s fine.

**Craig:** It is. You’re right, there’s no bad news here. I mean, that he’s better off today than he was a year ago. But he does have to be realistic here. And I actually love that he’s asking the question because it’s an indication that he’s already — that A, he doesn’t have a tendency to sort of smell his own farts. I mean, he knows that he has work to do still. And he’s going to have to tackle this.

This isn’t necessarily a clean kill. So he’s right to think about how to circumvent the obstacles that that credit is created for.

**John:** So I would also say that if the movie is good, and he should be really honest about whether the movie is good, what his feelings are and what other people who see the movie, what their response is, and if his relationship with these producers and the director is good, he should try to become involved in the publicity and news of the movie as it goes out there. And so that means to the degree that there are screenings and stuff, try to make sure that he’s invited to those things so he can talk about the movie as a major participant in it.

If the movie is not good, he’s not helping himself by going to those things and he can just stay home and write.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that one.

**John:** Cool. Our first topic today, is Hollywood making too many movies? That is the headline which is usually generally best answered by Betteridge’s law of headlines, in which if the question mark comes at the end of the headline, the answer is no.

**Craig:** I love that.

**John:** So this is an article by Brent Lang writing for Variety. And the central question really is not is Hollywood making too many movies? But it’s looking at the kinds of movies that Hollywood makes and asking the question where are the sort of mid-level movies? Like, you know, we seem to be making a tremendous number of indie films and releasing them theatrically, and we’re also making a huge number of giant movies. We’re not making any sort of mid-budget level movies. And mid-budget but also sort of like mid-performer movies. We’re making very few movies that make between $50 million and $100 million dollars. We’re only making sort of giant blockbusters and things that make $0.30.

So some of the stats he cites, in 2004, roughly 490 films were released on fewer than 1,000 screens according to data compiled by NATO the people who actually track this stuff. Last year, that number ballooned to 563 movies. So 490 to 563. The problem is that the greater profits didn’t follow the influx of films.

In 2004, revenue from films in this sector hit $380 million while admissions topped at $61 million. Ten years later, revenue stood down at $370 million while admissions sputtered to $45 million. So basically, we released a lot more movies on fewer than 1,000 screens but they made collectively less money.

**Craig:** Yeah. John, I am so puzzled by this article. The statistics are irrelevant. They don’t answer the question that he’s asked. I’m so puzzled by Brent Lang’s article here.

**John:** I think this would have been much better served by kind of three different articles because I think trying to address this all in one article is part of where the problem lies. Lay? Lies?

**Craig:** One of those.

**John:** Yeah, either one is great. English is an evolving language, I could say either one.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So let’s talk about this Indie film argument because I think this is actually something I felt is real and true is that this sense of getting your hand stamped by a theatrical release and then going to video on demand. A ton of movies that are sort of put out every weekend to the point where the New York Times and other major outlets have said, “You know what? We don’t have enough resources to actually review every movie that comes out theatrically, sorry. We’re stopping that policy.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a real change the affects people who make smaller movies.

**Craig:** Ish. Ish. I mean, because look, when you say hand stamped, that’s exactly right. So people have to understand something. When financiers make an independent film, they are funding it not with money out of their own pocket typically but rather from foreign presales. So they’re going to all these overseas people and saying, “Would you be interested in having the rights to run a movie starring these three people about this topic?” And they go, “Yeah, we’ll give you this much for that. We don’t even care about the script and who’s in it. Just those names, that, we’ll give you this much money.” “Great, thank you.”

They collect all those pledges of money. Now they have enough to make the movies, sometimes they have more than the movie costs and off they go. But part of the deal is, “But you can’t just give us some direct to DVD movie or direct to online movie, we need it to be an actual theatrical release. And here are the terms of what qualifies as theatrical.” So that gets worked into the whole business plan. And then at times they will go out and do a “theatrical release.” That release is to qualify them to then go and collect on all the money from all the foreign distributors. So it’s not really being released is the point. If we have more of those movies, we will have more of these rubber stampers.

**John:** The scenario that you just described is absolutely true for certain kinds of movies. And I remember a couple of years ago, there was an article about this movie, Zyzzyx Road, that had made the least amount of money theatrically of any movie. And that really was one of those situations where it was completely just supposed to get its hand stamped. It ran like three showings at a tiny theatre somewhere in the U.S and it was that scenario.

What I see more often though now is the movie that was like pretty good at Sundance that used to not get a theatrical release which now does get a theatrical release because of this day and date video on demand releasing, so we’re releasing to theaters and video on demand at the same time. Now, I think an interesting question to ask is, is that theatrical release component mostly just there to please the filmmaker or does it have a true value for the good of the film?

**Craig:** I think, still, that most of the times when you’re talking about — even though — here is why the statistic is so bad. He’s talking about movies that are released on fewer than 1,000 screens. How many screens? 999 or 1?

**John:** Yeah, I think that’s a weird cutoff.

**Craig:** Way too broad of a number there, right? Because, you know, if you’re talking about movies that are released on fewer than 10 screens, it’s all rubber stamping, it’s all to satisfy the filmmaker or an actor or to satisfy the terms of the deal and has nothing to do with a real theatrical release. If you were to say to me, “Look, the world of movies that are released on 800 screens, that’s really suffering,” that would mean something. But I can’t tell that from this number. So I’m going to refuse to draw a conclusion about how movies with smaller releases are actually performing.

**John:** Great. So the more interesting article which I think you and I would actually love to talk about is the article that looks at, what movies are we not making? Because the only movies that get released theatrically are these tiny ones and these super giant blockbusters, the movies that are incredibly expensive, that open super wide, and have to make $200 million for the movie to be successful.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those are genres in which you and I have traditionally written some movies and those movies are, in some cases, much harder to make these days.

**Craig:** That is true. And if only Brent had talked about any of that, but Brent doesn’t talk about that. Because what you’re talking about is budget. What Brent is talking about is how much the movies made, which is the weirdest choice of focus for this article and that question, that the headline questioner is asking or even what the article seems to be addressing.

I don’t care how much the movies make. He’s essentially equating high performance with high budget. That’s not the way it works. There are movies that cost $80 million that make $20 million and there are movies that cost $30 million that make $150 million. So there’s a really good question to be asked about the middle-budget movies.

**John:** So I think there’s sort of two questions that are co-related here. Are we not making these movies because they’re not successful at the box office? Or are they not successful at the box office because we’re just not making them? Is it evidence of absence or absence of evidence for the reason why we see so few mid-budget thrillers, why we see no romantic comedies of a certain size being released anymore?

**Craig:** All right. So now we’re talking about the article that you and I would write. And here’s what I would talk about. I do think that part of the issue with the middle budget movie is that in success, they don’t make enough, which is a weird thing to say. But the cost of marketing has accelerated dramatically as movie studios seek to drag you away not from just three networks but from 78 possible entertainment options at home, plus the Internet, plus whatever the hell else is going on in your life. So it’s really expensive.

If you make a $30 million movie, you’re going to be spending more than the cost of the movie to advertise it. That’s a tough one, right? You know, whereas if you make a $200 million movie, you’re probably going to spend $200 million to market it. That would be overkill. So they’re expensive. And you may say, “Well, the $30 million movie made $150 million domestically,” and they’d say “Great, it was profitable.” It wasn’t. I mean, like I can’t really do a jig that it’s profitable because the studio next door, they just put out Avengers 3 and grossed $2 billion. What am I supposed to be? Happy that my movie made $20 million? Nobody cares. It’s just — so there’s a question of how profitable can that middle budget be.

The other thing that’s squeezing the middle budget movies is that in the non-comedy areas, a lot of the genre that used to live there — thrillers, police stories, what we call adult dramas, not pornographic dramas, but dramas about adult things — television has really come so far and done such a great job narratively in those genres that people seem to be more interested in watching those things play out episodically than they are in a self-contained two-hour format. So there’s the double squeeze that’s happened there.

**John:** I agree with you. The marketing thing is the challenge of — it’s like a switch you flip and you have to spend a tremendous amount of money or sort of no money if you’re sort of just like putting it out on a screen and going to a home video. If you’ve committed to releasing a movie wide, you’re committed to spending tens of millions of dollars, and that’s just the reality of a wide release.

The other thing I think is a factor is salaries. And so if you want to cast Jason Sudeikis in your movie, and you’re making a tiny little indie movie, he does it for free, essentially he does it for scale. If you’re trying to cast Jason Sudeikis in a bigger sort of action comedy, he’s going to full rate. And so there’s — it becomes very difficult to make movies for the sort of inexpensively enough that you’re saving enough money to make it really make sense to make that middle budget movie. Either you’re paying him all his cost or not paying all of his cost. There’s no sort of in between rate for these sort of romantic comedies or something else.

The other thing I would talk about is technology. And so it’s true that it’s never been cheaper to make a great looking little indie film. And that’s because we have amazing cameras, we have ability to do great stuff in computers, we can make things look great. And so we see these demo reels of these sci-fi short films like, “My God, that looks like a full theatrical production.” It’s absolutely true, you can do amazing things.

The challenges on making a real feature film, the cost isn’t in the technology, the cost is in time and days. And that does not scale. That does not get cheaper you know with technology just days or days you’re spending money on actors in making a movie and trucks and all of that stuff. So it’s very hard to realize those cost savings from technology in making these movies. And so if you’re making a romantic comedy, at a certain point you’re still — you know, you’re still doing 40 days of shooting and that’s going to add up.

**Craig:** No question, it’s a really good point you’re making. Bob Weinstein, I remember he used to constantly complain, why does this cost so much? Some guy is doing this on his computer. Yeah, well he’s doing one shot on his computer. You’re exactly right. If you’re making a typical VFX-laden feature film, you’re talking about hundreds of shots, hundreds of VFX shots.

And the only places that can deliver that many shots, and you can’t divide it up between a hundred different companies. There has to be some cohesion, I mean you can use two or three, and plenty of movies do, but not much more than that. Well, the only places that can handle that bulk, are large places. And guess what? They are fully aware that they are in low supply. There are not a lot of companies that can do the work in the amount of time you have. Therefore, they charge you. Of course they do. And you’re right, they are charging you, as they say, good fast cheap pick two. Well, when you want it good and you want it fast, and trust me when you’re making a movie, it has to be fast. Cheap goes out the window. No question. Yes.

**John:** Absolutely true. So let’s take a look at sort of what some of the solutions are for this, because there are some movies and some genres that we’re able to make and make money at. And so I was thinking about the sort of low budget horror film that get released, you know, there’s one coming out this weekend. We have a template for that. We have a template for making those movies inexpensively, releasing them wide, and they make money. And so that’s the thing that we sort of figured out how to do. Tyler Perry figured out how to make movies with predominantly African-American casts that would make money.

There’s a pattern for how you make those things. And I wonder if we can find a pattern for making the mid-budget comedy, a pattern for making the romantic comedy again so that those things become profitable to make. And it may not be that the giant studios are going to be willing to spend the money and time to figure out how to do that because the point that you made is like, “Well you know the guys next door just made $2 billion. We need to make $2 billion.” But if you’re another company that’s making no movies at all, it may be worthwhile for you to look at like, “I would love to make a movie that makes $50 million.”

**Craig:** Sure, of course I mean that’s the problem. You’re sitting in the office, you’re running a studio, and you’ve got three movies that each cost $40 million. That’s three sets of producers that are driving you crazy, three sets of actors that are insane, three sets of directors that won’t listen to you, three sets of writers that screwed up. All the problems that you have running a studio, there’s three of them right? The best you think — you’re thinking though, “Each one might make $50 million.” That’s a $150 million for all the blood, sweat, and tears that go into managing three movies.

Down the street they’re only making one movie, that one movie makes $1 billion. And they only need to deal one crazy producer, one crazy director, one crazy actor. So you can see how seductive it becomes. And certainly, the world of corporate America is not to find in a binary fashion of make money or lose money. It’s, how much did you make. I can’t keep you on if everybody else in the competitive space is making more in profit than you are. There’s something wrong with you. That’s the way it works, right?

Now, that aside, we know that occasionally there are movies in that $30 million to $50 million space that make a ton of money and are also repeatable. So a film like Pitch Perfect for instance comes along. It’s a smaller budget movie. It doesn’t even do that well box office wise the first time out, but then has this huge second life in ancillary markets, so they can go and make another one and make a ton of money off of it. For comedy, I think the mid-budget comedy is actually still the rule.

**John:** And what would you define as mid-budget in 2015?

**Craig:** 2015 mid-budget is $20 million to $50 million. So between $20 million and $50 million — and really I think $20 million to $40 million is the sweet spot. What you’re trying to do is get one or two comic actors that you know are brand names with the audience. And you are trying to keep the production aspects as manageable as possible because you know from a comedy point of view that people aren’t laughing at stuff because it’s lavish, they’re laughing because it’s funny.

So a movie like Identity Thief is not — it’s far from lavish. I mean, it’s really what it was, ultimately, was an independent movie budget at a studio because by the time you’re done paying Jason and Melissa and me and Seth and Scott Stuber and all the people that are above the line, there’s not that much left to make the movie. You’re kind of making it shoestring, and you’re doing the best you can. And we were cutting corners everywhere. And that was okay, you know. And I’m sure part of what happens, it’s interesting, is when comedy directors have a bunch of hits in a row, they tend to start being able to command larger budgets. Inevitably there is a snap back at them because the larger budgets usually don’t end up warranting themselves.

You know it’s interesting like I’m looking at Spy. I don’t know what Spy cost, but I’m guessing it cost a lot. And it’s interesting because I don’t think it’s going to make that much more than The Heat did, at least not domestically, overseas it’s doing much better. But that’s where comedies get risky when you start getting into that, like the Hangover, the first Hangover I think was $32 million. Now the second and the third started costing a lot because of the above the line but it was understood they would make their money back, and they did. But to go out and make a first — like a first of a comedy, and have it be $70 million, it’s risky. I wouldn’t do it. I’d be nervous.

**John:** So Craig, not talking about any one specific ones of your movies, but let’s say you’re making a $40 million comedy, what is the split above the line versus below the line? And to explain terms, above the line is your top tier actors, it is your director, your producers, your writers. So what is the split between above the line and below the line?

**Craig:** If I’m looking at a $40 million comedy, I would have no problem. Literally no problem with like a 40-60 split, where like 40% of that went to cast, writer, director, producer, and the rest was to make the movie, because I know that people aren’t coming to see a spectacle, they’re coming to see Melissa McCarthy, they’re coming to see Zach Galifianakis, they’re coming to see Jennifer Lawrence. That’s what matter. You know when you’re making a Hunger Games, it’s Jennifer Lawrence. You need Jennifer Lawrence to pay for the spectacle. But for the comedy, you need Jennifer Lawrence so the people go see Jennifer Lawrence. That’s what they want you know. So I would be aggressive about that.

**John:** So circling back, you look at one of these comedies that you’re making for $40 million, and there is the possibility that it breaks out and it becomes a giant, giant hit. And those are wonderful when it happens, but more likely, it’s like well it’s going to make some good money. It’s going to cross over 100 and people are happy?

It reminds me though of a conversation that I was just listening to on StartUp Podcast. So StartUp, talks to a business that’s just beginning and is trying to raise VC capital and grow. And they’re talking about two kinds of businesses, they talk about you know the Twitter, the Facebook, the giant and sort of moon shot corporations, and those are the ones who are trying to become you know, reach a billion dollar valuation. And they talked about lifestyle businesses sort of pejoratively, basically it makes money but like it’s not really interesting to investors because it’s not a good use of their time and their money. And I think in many cases, we dismiss these other types of movies that aren’t going to make you know a billion dollars as kind of lifestyle businesses where they’re just like, “Yes, it’s not the thing we want to do.” And I think, to a large degree, the major studies have been focusing on just these giant hits because that’s the pressure that they’re under.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean I honestly don’t blame them. I think that if I were running a studio, I would hand this off in a way say like, “Here’s a division that makes comedies from this number to this number.” And so then those people understand that it’s not a problem if their movie returns 10% or 20% on investment. And it’s not a problem that the people down the street just made a billion dollars because that’s not their job. Their job is to do this, and to make money this way. And it would be nice to see especially because the hits can really take off and be hits for a long time. And they generate money in the library for years and years and years.

You know I mean look, Vacation, I mean the movie Vacation was made decades ago. It was a risk like anything else. I guarantee you it didn’t cost a lot. Well, now there’s another Vacation and how many Vacation sequels were there? And there will certainly be many Vacation sequels of this Vacation reboot. And you know the upside is real for these things. So that’s what I would do, I would say, “Hey, big studios, make a little — make a little division, you know.”

**John:** You know our friend Billy Ray is directing a movie for this company STX, which I had no idea of what this company was. I saw their logo when I saw a little screening of his film. And it’s a company set up deliberately to try to make adult dramas that no one else is making. And maybe that’ll work, maybe it won’t work, but it was an opportunity for Billy to make a movie for grownups. And that is an exciting opportunity.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s been a lot of written and many tears shed over the demise of the grownup movie. And I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re coming back. I — you know it would be nice, but I don’t know.

**John:** Ben Affleck will make his FIFA movie and maybe that will be a watershed.

**Craig:** FIFA!

**John:** FIFA! By the time this podcast comes out, Apple Music should be existing in the world. It’s supposed to launch Tuesday that this episode comes out. So Apple Music is a subscription music program that Apple has promised and should be unveiling. People can sign up to stream all the music they kind of want to stream. About two weeks ago, Taylor Swift sent an open letter to Apple complaining about their plan to not pay artists during the three-month free trial. Apple reverses course and is now going to pay its artists. So we are not singer-songwriters. Well, Craig sings, and I’ve written songs.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But that is not our main focus of this podcast. We’re mostly talking about things interesting to screenwriters. So I wanted to talk about what does streaming mean for screenwriters and what analogous situations could we find for people who are writing for film and television to the singer-songwriters who are concerned about Apple Music?

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ve been in this situation for a while now. We just have one major difference between ourselves and singer-songwriters. So we’ve had iTunes streaming television shows and episodes for free supported by ads in certain circumstances or Hulu. And of course there’s Netflix. Netflix is the ultimate subscription service. You pay your monthly subscription and it’s all you can eat of the movies they have to offer you. And the difference between us and singer-songwriters like Taylor Swift is that Taylor Swift when she writes a song has copyright, we don’t. So the people that we fight with, all the time, in this circumstance become our best friends and our advocates.

This is the great value of the percentage base residuals formula. The more they make, the more we make. So we rely on the studios to be as rapacious with these other vendors as they are with us. And they are. So they negotiate very aggressively with Netflix and all these other companies to try and get as much as they can for the product that they’re giving them. And interestingly, the networks themselves like television networks will say to writers, “We want to stream. We, ourselves will stream a couple of episodes for free, to get people to sample the show and we’re not going to pay your residuals for those.” And we go, “Okay.” But they don’t let anybody else do that.

It’s not like they let Netflix stream their movies for free for a while. They don’t. So we’re actually fairly well covered in this front. And I’m glad that Taylor Swift did this because the truth is, that Apple can afford to pay everybody while they’re not making money for three months. Apple could afford to pay everybody while they’re not making money for 15 years. That’s the God’s honest truth. So while it made business sense for Apple to do that, I’m glad that they kind of caved to the pressure. It was the right thing to do.

**John:** Yeah, thinking about sort what our situation is versus the artists that are going to be covered by Apple Music, it also reminds me of like authors and their dealings with publishers and their dealings with Amazon. It’s very complicated, the nature of the people who make the work and the people who buy the work and what the relationship really is. And it’s also complicated by the fact that we’re moving to sort of post-ownership society. So traditionally when you or I have written a movie, and someone purchases that movie, they’re buying the DVD, and we get that residual payment exactly once. Now, that person pays to rent the movie, in this case, they’re paying a monthly fee to — the ability to stream whatever movies for sort of all they can eat. And we’re given a percentage of the money that the studio has gotten from Apple for that thing.

It’s just another layer of abstraction and it’s harder to track viewing or units or anything like that. We just know that a number comes to us, and that is the money that we are receiving.

**Craig:** That’s right, and so the guilds will collectively audit the companies every few years. I suspect this is part of it. The companies themselves have to do a pretty good job of the counting because part of their decision about making movies now is, — well, okay, let’s run the model. How much will we get from Box Office? How much will we get from paid TV, from free TV? How much are we going to get from Netflix? So when they get — Netflix says, “Well, we’ll give you this much for this movie. And then these many people stream it and we’ll give you…”I don’t know how it works. All I know is that they have to, the studios have to account for the Netflix money.

It’s not like, “Oh, we just have a bunch of Netflix money. This movie got this much Netflix money, this movie got this much.” So that’s how we get our little piece of it. It’s a pretty good arrangement for us actually, because we don’t have to go toe to toe. We don’t have an ASCAP or BMI that we’re dealing with. But the real question is, and this is the thing that people have been puzzling over is, “What will end up getting us more? The old way where people would buy the DVD or the new way where people will…” — I mean I’ve watched my daughter rent the same movie five times. I’m like “ehh.” But that happens a lot.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** And we actually, our deal on internet rentals is spectacular.

**John:** Talk to us about the deal, difference between internet rentals and internet streaming and sort of which is generally better for a screenwriter.

**Craig:** The best thing you can do to support directors and — well, I don’t know what the directing deal is — the best thing you can do to support screenwriters is to rent on the internet. So, you go to iTunes, it’s not a Netflix deal, you’re going to iTunes and you’re renting the movie and let’s say it’s, I don’t know whatever it is, like three bucks to rent or something. We get whatever the studio gets. So Apple keeps a piece, they send the rest off to the studio. Of that amount, we get 1.2%.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** It’s very good. If somebody buys the movie on the internet and that’s like $9.99 or whatever, Apple takes their cut, they send the rest to the studio, we get something like 0.6%.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It’s not as good.

**John:** Yeah, and it’s not as good also because if your daughter rents the same movie three times in a row, we’ve made so much more money.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just a better deal.

**John:** So basically, our financial solvency is dependent on your daughter making irresponsible choices.

**Craig:** On my specific daughter which I think bodes well for all of us.

**John:** [laughs] She’ll never learn.

**Craig:** She will never learn.

**John:** Talk to us about the accounting for the Netflix model. So Netflix agrees to purchase a bundle of movies, the rights to a bundle of movies that they can air during a certain window.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, if I choose to watch Identity Thief which is while it’s on Netflix, is my individual viewing of Identity Thief at all accounted for you in your residuals, or was it only in the deal that was struck between the studio and Netflix for that window of time?

**Craig:** The God’s honest truth is that I don’t know.

**John:** It’s so complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know for instance when you talk about HBO, it’s not accounted for by viewing. So HBO will negotiate to air a particular movie. They’ll say, “Okay, I want to put Go on HBO. What’s going to cost me to run Go for a year?” And they’ll give you a number and they’ll negotiate and that’s the number and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if a million people see Go or five people see Go. Obviously, the people that are selling Go will try and figure that number out because if it seems super popular, they’re going charge HBO more for the next cycle. I imagine the same thing is true for Netflix but I don’t know. Netflix may even have a situation with the studios where they are apportioning things out by these — I just don’t know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re really secretive about the whole thing. I mean they won’t even publish the viewing data for the shows they make.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** I don’t blame them.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s talk through really quick, we’ll try to do this in two minutes, the process of a screenwriter’s job from the initial idea and pitch to premiere. And just look at sort of what are the stages that a screenwriter goes through, and also really notate at what points in this process are you getting paid? Because I think there’s a misconception sometimes along the way. So, let’s say you have an idea for a movie, Craig, that is about, it can go back to your initial idea of what if people lived for only 12 years and then they were dead.

**Craig:** That was your idea.

**John:** Oh, it’s my idea but you can take it.

**Craig:** Oh, great. Thank you. Okay, so I have this idea, I write up a little pitch on my own, and then I call up my agent and say, “I’ve got this idea for a movie, set me some pitches up.” And he calls around and people say, “Yeah, I like that or I don’t.” And then I have a bunch of meetings. I’d go and I’d pitch it out and I get a call. One or more than that were interested and we agree that’s the one and we make a deal.

**John:** Great. So, at this point you’ve done a lot of work, but you’ve not received any money.

**Craig:** Not a dime.

**John:** Not a dime. But the deal is now made.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so you’ve signed your contracts, the contracts have gone in, and you are starting to write, and you’re writing your first script and ka-ching, you get paid.

**Craig:** Kind of.

**John:** Kind of?

**Craig:** Maybe. So a lot of places will say, especially new writers, we’re not going to pay you until the full long form contract is signed, and we’re going to take months to create that long form contract. Most places with established screenwriters or if your lawyer has a good working relationship with, the company will say, “While we’re working on the long form contract, can we all agree that these are the basic points of the deal? Let’s sign a certificate of authorship where the writer is saying okay, I’m officially acknowledging that you guys own copyright in this, I’m doing it as work for hire, that will get me my delivery money.” So get your delivery money.

The key is, when you’re ready to turn that first draft in, make sure you get your — if you haven’t gotten your commencement money yet, sorry, it’s commencement money to begin with. If you haven’t gotten your commencement money, don’t turn it in.

**John:** Yeah. For people who don’t understand, usually, when you’re writing for a studio, you’re paid half the money upfront and half the money when you deliver the script. So it’s just sort of keeps both sides honest that you’re not doing this for free and that you actually have to deliver in order to get the rest of your money.

**Craig:** So, you’ve written the script, you’ve turned it in, you’ve gotten your commencement money, you’ve gotten your delivery money, now they have a whole bunch of notes and you’re going to move on to your next step. And you’re going to do it again, and maybe there’s a polish and blah, blah, blah, and then suddenly they’re like, “You know what, we like this movie. Let’s go out to a director.”

**John:** Great. And you might have a chance to weigh in on who that director is, you might not. You will hopefully have a chance to meet with that director and discuss your shared visions for what the movie is supposed to be. That doesn’t always happen, it’s just really situational.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. It runs the gamut from, “Oh, did you hear? There’s a director on your movie now, to sit in a room with us while we audition directors.” And I’ve been in both of those spots.

But then they’ll say, “We have our director and we’re going to go into production.” At this point, the director — and I’m just presuming that you haven’t been fired yet. So the director’s like, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of thoughts, let’s sit for a while and talk about this.” So you start doing some production work on the movie. And you’re doing your pages and your asterisks, and your scene numbers if you’re a good-doobie.

**John:** Absolutely, and perhaps there’s even a table reading where all the actors gather around the table and read your script aloud just once so you know they actually did read it once. And maybe you’re doing some work after that because you’ve realized that certain actors cannot say certain words or that there are opportunities that you had not foreseen until you had this cast in front of you.

**Craig:** And God forbid maybe one of your precious lines of dialogue is sucky. It happens. So then you — there’s a big production meeting, the day or a couple days before the first day of shooting where all the departments sit around a big, big table and they ask questions and occasionally someone turns to you and goes, “Yeah, what is that? What did you mean there? When you said a tree, what kind of tree?” So you have that big meeting and then there’s production where you hopefully have some time to be on the set and watch your work being produced.

**John:** Yeah, and that can, again, run the gamut from being there every frame shot to — oh, hi! This is the writer. Okay, bye. And then you’re done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You don’t know what it’s going to be, but you probably have some sense of what it’s going to be based what the process has been up to that point.

**Craig:** That’s right. At that point, by the time production rolls around, you should know where your place is in the world of this movie. And then the movie is done, right? So they’re going to run a screening, you’re probably going to go to the first test screening if you’re still involved with the movie. There may be some additional photography required. You know what, we really need a scene here.

**John:** Yeah. Some of my best experiences in making movies has been in that post-production process where you’re sitting in the editing room, you’re seeing opportunities, you are offering suggestions to help make that movie better because you have some fresh eyes that the director does not have because she’s been starting at this footage this entire time. You can remember what the original intention was. So maybe you’re useful in that point.

**Craig:** And also when you are writing for additional photography, it’s so surgical, it’s so targeted, everybody — you know that you’re writing something that fits right in between existing footage so it’s just easier to do I think. You know, there’s less of a theory about it and more of a fact, a plan.

**John:** Yeah. And I do want to point out one thing. So everything we’ve described, the only times you’ve gotten paid, have been times where we said write.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so, you weren’t getting paid for these meetings about directors, you weren’t getting paid for usually the time that you were in — it depends. The time that you’re in production, contractually by WGA standards they don’t have to pay you if you’re just watching. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah, they have to pay you if you’re writing stuff down on paper. So, if you are going to be doing any writing, what they usually do at that point is make what they call an “all services deal” where you’re no longer delivering drafts, you’re just — they’re just saying, “This is an amount of money for all the writing we need you to do from now until the movie is done.”

**John:** Exactly, so could include these rewrites you did during post-production or additional photography — there’s some deal that you’re probably happy to sign because your movie is getting made. Hooray.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And then they sell it, they make posters and trailers. You usually look at the trailer and you go, “Oh my God.” And then you send some thoughts to somebody that maybe gets listened to and maybe doesn’t. And then there’s a premiere and you get two tickets.

**John:** Ooh boy.

**Craig:** Usually. Sometimes you get more. You go to the premiere, you realize that you don’t know anybody there, you realize that the premiere is not at all for people that made the movie. The premiere is to sell the movie. You are uncomfortable typically at the premiere. There’s a party afterwards. You again don’t know any of the people there. If the movie does really well, there could be an awards thing going on. Most movies, that is not the case.

**John:** Some cases you will have to do some post release marketing so even if it’s not awards stuff, there might be things about the home video release or might be like going in and doing a DVD commentary. They’re may be some additional stuff they ask you to do or other special screenings that they set up after the release. I remember for Big Fish having to go out to the Palm Springs Film Festival and they wanted somebody from the movie to be there, so it’s me and Alison Lohman. And they had these fish balloons for us to stand by, but they were like the Finding Nemo fish.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And so there’s these great photos out there of like, me and Alison Lohman and the Finding Nemo fish for Big Fish.

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

**John:** Yes. So was I getting paid for any of that? No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because as a writer, you get paid for writing, you don’t get paid for anything else.

**Craig:** Correct. Literary material as they say. And then you’re — at this point, you probably never want to think about that movie again.

**John:** The only thing you might want to think about is, if this was your original idea, which in this case it was, you do own the publishing rights to the screenplay so you could theoretically publish the book form of the screen play and you would make absolutely no money in that, but that is a thing you could do.

**Craig:** You mean that’s not valued at $70,000?

**John:** No. It’s not valued at really any money whatsoever.

**Craig:** Bummer.

**John:** That took more than two minutes, but I just wanted to sort of really walk through the whole process and point out that writers only get paid for writing and there’s so many more parts of the job that you have to do and sometimes your life coaches and marketers and other hats you have to wear, all of which are just part of your job but not getting paid part of your job. It’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** So, my One Cool Thing, easy, gay marriage.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** So the Supreme Court, five to four, I don’t think that tally is at all surprising. If anything, maybe it could have been six to three. We didn’t quite know where Roberts was going to end up, but five to four. And you know what, what I kind of — other than the fact that I think it’s a terrific decision and a well-warranted decision, what I thought today was, you know, it’s so American to beat up America. It’s what we do. The rest of the world thinks that we’re all self-absorbed and self-satisfied. Far from it.

We beat up America more than anybody else does in a way that French people don’t beat up France and English people don’t beat up England. We really are this — we think of America like a business that could be doing better all the time. But I have a certain American optimism as well and my optimism is that even though at times it seems like we’re going backwards or down, that over time, America gets better. Over time I believe that. And I think that today was a real sign of how over time, America got better.

**John:** I agree with you. And so I’ve been involved with various versions of lawsuits challenging for federal marriage equality for eight years now?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s a great outcome and so I’m incredibly happy for everyone involved and I liked as people have acknowledged this victory that it was actually the result of many, many, many tiny steps all along the way and little acts of courage. I was gratified to see this and hopeful for what it bodes for the future.

My One Cool Thing is Neil Gaiman’s advice to writers who just can’t get anything on paper. And so I will put a link to this in the show notes, but essentially some fan wrote to ask, you know, I have all these great ideas but I can’t seem to put it down on paper. And Neil Gaiman wrote a fantastic Tumblr post of his advice for how to get those things down on paper which includes in part, “You must catch, with your bare hands, the smallest of the crows, and you must force it to give up the berry. The crows do not swallow the berries. They carry them across the ocean, to an enchanter’s garden to drop one by one, into the mouth of the daughter, who will awake from an enchanted sleep only when a thousand such berries have been fed to her.”

So he goes through this elaborate process for everything you can do if you choose not to actually just sit your butt down in a chair and write. There’s a whole magical way that Neil Gaiman outlines for getting your story written.

**Craig:** That is the most Neil Gaiman-y anything ever.

**John:** I loved it.

**Craig:** An enchanter’s garden, dropping berries into the mouth of his daughter, she has enchanted sleep. Very Neil Gaiman.

**John:** It’s very Neil Gaiman. And this has been our very Scriptnotesy podcast. So if you would like to subscribe to our show, you should go to iTunes and subscribe to Scriptnotes. If you would like a USB drive of 200 episodes —

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Plus bonus episodes of the show, you should go to store.johnaugust.com and you should enter the promo code “singularity” in order to save 10%. That’s Craig’s choice for “Singularity.” Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you have a question for Craig Mazin, you should write to him on Twitter, he’s @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Longer questions you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. And, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** See ya. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 200 Episode USB drives are available now!](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Ben Affleck to Produce FIFA Scandal Film for Warner Bros.](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bookmark/fifa-scandal-ben-affleck-producing-805295)
* [Scriptnotes, 194: Poking the Bear](http://johnaugust.com/2015/poking-the-bear)
* [Is Hollywood Making Too Many Movies?](http://variety.com/2015/film/news/hollywood-making-too-many-movies-1201526094/)
* [Betteridge’s law of headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge’s_law_of_headlines)
* [STX Entertainment](https://stxentertainment.com/) and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STX_Entertainment)
* [To Apple, Love Taylor](http://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/122071902085/to-apple-love-taylor)
* [Taylor Swift Scuffle Aside, Apple’s New Music Service Is Expected to Thrive](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/business/apple-can-skate-by-taylor-swift-but-not-product-missteps.html?_r=0)
* [Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html)
* [Neil Gaiman’s advice for getting idea on paper](http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/107713982316/i-have-been-trying-to-write-for-a-while-now-i)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))