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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/alt-universe-panels).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, episode 61, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** “In-ter-esting.”

**John:** Yeah. So, Aline Brosh McKenna will not let me live down the fact that I kind of swallow the T in “interesting.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna, who was our fantastic guest, who we need to thank again for last week at Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** She was excellent. And I like it when we have other people on because I feel like they can notice things about you and me that we probably notice but never say to each other, you know, because we’re such good roommates. So things like “interesting.”

**John:** “Interesting,” yes. No spoiler, but we will have some more guests in the future, and we’ve actually reached out to some people, so I think it’s going to be a fun new addition to the new year of the podcast.

**Craig:** For sure. I thought the stuff that we did in Austin that is still in the pipeline is some of our best podcasting work.

**John:** I agree. Now, Craig, people may notice that you sound a little different, and that’s partly because you just woke up. We’re recording this at 7pm, but you just woke up because you are off on location making this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I’m off on location with Hangover 3 in an indeterminate place. We — boy — we had a hell of a night. So, you know, I think at one point we talked about shooting splits, which is what they generally think of as the worst possible production thing when you’re on a crew, because you’re not shooting all night, you’re not shooting all day; you’re shooting sort of half night/half day, and it messes everybody up.

But, yesterday we did a deal where we shot dusk, so we shot sundown, dusk, night, dawn, sun up, morning. [laughs] That will mess you up.

**John:** That will definitely mess you up. Sorry about that. Sometimes that’s the only way it works. There’s no other good way to get those shots that you need. And when you need that sort of in between light that is going to happen, those sunrises and those sunsets. — Curse the screenwriter who put that into the script.

**Craig:** Well, you know, there was much discussion of that. And it turns out it wasn’t me, on this at least. I think that the director and the DP had a plan to… — You know, I tend to write things like morning, although I have to say, until I had this discussion with Larry Sher, our DP, last night — and I didn’t know this — I always thought that dusk and sort of evening and sundown were the same thing. And dawn and sunrise were the same thing. But they’re not.

Did you know that?

**John:** No. Tell me the distinction.

**Craig:** Okay, see, and he made me feel so dumb about it. So, Dawn is the time right before the sun comes up, so it’s when the sky starts lightening but the sun hasn’t peeked out over the horizon. And dusk is the opposite. It’s the time right after the sun goes down but there is still light in the sky.

**John:** So, there is residual light but there is no direct light?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Okay. Makes sense.

**Craig:** Learned something.

**John:** You do learn something new every day.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My day was going really pretty well today. I had a good notes call. The thing about writing for television is you have these notes calls where they read these documents and they call you. And there are like ten people on the phone call and you hope that everything goes okay. And this time it went really well, so it was great.

But then I was rushing to get sort of other stuff during the day so we could make this podcast scheduling work. And so I’m giving my 7 year old daughter her shower before we could record this, and like mid-shower she goes, “Papa, did you know that people flew planes into building?”

**Craig:** Ouch.

**John:** Literally, you’re going to do September 11th on me like when I have five minutes? And so we had the five-minute September 11th conversation.

**Craig:** Wow, I mean, I love it. I sort of feel like I want to play Name that Tune with you and see if I could do a September 11th conversation in four minutes.

**John:** [laughs] Oh, yeah. It’s tough. It’s important to have factual information, because she’s asking very specific questions about like, you know, “Well how did they get knives on the planes? Where would they hide the knives? Why weren’t the scanners better?” And all these things.

And so it’s a really strange thing, like, “Oh — that was 11 years ago.”

**Craig:** I know. I remember my son was just a baby. He was about five months old. No, that’s not right. I’m the worst dad.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** He was two months old. He was two months old, and I remember I was sleeping in a different room because, you know, Melissa would wake up and feed him and I just wanted to sleep that day. And I remember, and my sister woke me up, called me because she was in New York.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh, now, see now we’re turning into a September 11th podcast.

**John:** It’s a September 11th podcast. I will say that Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant at that time, called me and said, “Man, we’ve got to wake up. Some people just flew planes into the Sears Tower in Chicago.” And I’m like, “Really? That’s so odd.” It’s so odd that he thought of the wrong tower.

**Craig:** And the wrong city.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so you fired him that day…

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** …so, for him September 11th has a totally different —

**John:** And then he went off and made Dodgeball, so it was all good.

I thought we could actually do a little speculative reminiscing on today’s podcast, because while Austin was really fun, we could only participate in a limited number of panels there. There were like 60 different panels there, and we were only part of very few of them.

So, I didn’t even look honestly at the catalog for Austin Film Festival until I was on the plane flying back from Austin. And I was looking through it and I was like, “Oh, those sound like really interesting panels. I would love to have been on those panels.” But we couldn’t have been.

So, I thought today maybe we’d read the description of some of these panels and we could talk about what we would have talked about had we been on those panels. But it will actually be a much faster, more condensed version, because we don’t have to wait for moderators to ask questions or to go down the row of what people would say. Does that sound fun?

**Craig:** I like it; a very good, compressed way for us to embarrass all the other panelists there by just outshining them now.

**John:** I think it’s a nice choice. So, first panel we’ll talk about is Setiquette. “In addition to being able to write quickly and well, the successful television writer, or film writer, must also be versed in how to navigate the complex and often stressful social climate of the show. This requires a skill that empowers the writer to make quick and intelligent adjustments while being able to master the art of communication with actors, directors, and producers. Understanding and respecting the laws of social etiquette on the set, Setiquette, is essential for those who aspire to break into and stay in the writer’s room.”

The other panelists who would have been on this fantasy panel with us: Christine Boylan, who’s lovely; Matthew Gross, a producer; Kyle Killen; and Meta Valentic, who I don’t know who that is.

So, Craig, talk to me about Setiquette, because you’re making a film right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I deal with it every day. I can’t speak at all to television Setiquette, but I can talk certainly at length about film Setiquette. It’s quite rigid actually. Making a movie is very military. Everybody has their jobs. All the jobs have a rank. And everybody is busy and respects each other’s space.

So, it’s not just a question of etiquette; it’s even a question of union rules. You know, if you’re not a grip, don’t pick up stands. If you’re not an electrician, don’t plug stuff in. There are real simple things to do like that. But the most important thing is to have something to do on the set. If you do not, then you are a visitor and you’re in the way.

I try to not be on sets where I don’t have things to do. If I am there with something to do as the writer, then I think it’s just important for me to know the basic protocol. The biggest rule of Setiquette is: Do not direct actors unless you’re the director. Don’t even talk to them about the work. You know, if you want to sit in a chair during a turnaround and chit-chat about the weather or whatever, feel free. But simple rule of thumb: Actors need to be directed by one voice, and that’s the director’s voice.

So, if I have any thoughts or notes or suggestions, I relay them quietly and privately to the director. And another big Setiquette note is don’t talk to the director about directing things in front of other people. Pull them aside and talk to them quietly. So much of directing a movie is about maintaining authority and control of the set, because if you don’t, it just all starts to fall apart. It’s for the best of the movie. It’s not about fulfilling some sort of Emily Post definition of what good behavior is. It really is pragmatic.

Be respectful. Be kind. Don’t get in people’s way. And do not interrupt.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Those are some of the big highlights of Setiquette for me.

**John:** I would definitely underline that sense of, “if you don’t have a job on the set, your job is to stay out of everybody’s way.” And that honestly means kind of stay back; either you stay back, or you stay into a little place they’ve assigned you to stay, which is probably kind of near the producers who are watching at a video village. Don’t sort of wander around, because you’re just going to get in people’s way.

If you don’t have an assigned place to stand or be, somewhere near the makeup people is often a pretty helpful place, because they’re going to be close enough to set that they can actually watch what’s happening, but they’re smart enough to never be in anybody’s way. So, that’s a usually good bet, because they’re not going to be in the way of the grips, or the gaffers, or anyone else who is like hauling stuff to and from the set.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** A little bit I can talk about in television, having shot some TV pilots. If it is your TV show, it’s your pilot that’s shooting or your episode that’s shooting as the writer, many of the same rules apply, but you are going to have a little bit more active hand in saying, like, “That’s not what I think we need for this moment. We need to do that again.” You shouldn’t be directing the actors, but you’re going to probably be directing the director in the sense of like, “This is what I need for this because this isn’t going to make sense with that.”

And you are also going to be responsible for getting this to make sense in the editing room, so you’re going to have a little bit stronger sense there.

One of the things I think you brought up when we were just chatting in Austin is that you kind of have to be careful about things you ask for on a set. Because if you’re an important person on a set — the writer, the producer, the director — you say like, “Wow. I wish we still had more of those Red Vines,” and they’re out of Red Vines at craft service, they will get on the walkie talkie and it will be someone’s job to run out and get those Red Vines for you.

So, don’t casually wish for things unless you really want them.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, and by the way, one of the tricky things about being a screenwriter on a set is that we — it depends. Your job depends. It’s one of the only jobs I can think of on a set that varies depending on who the writer is and what the project is and who the director is. Because every other job is very rigid and very clear. Some writers are on set because they are asked to be there, and they need to be there, and they have a job there.

And some writers are there visiting. Some writers are there and think they have a job there, but are actually just visiting. And it’s important to know which one you are. And if you’re just visiting, you just sit like a visitor and be happy. If you’re there working, it’s a different deal, and you get to know people.

I will say that a great person to get to know if you’re a writer and you’re going to be spending a lot of time on a set, a great person to get to know is the video assist guy. Because generally speaking you’re going to be in what they call Producer’s Video Village; there’s a video village for the director where he watches the monitor, for playback, and then typically there’s a second video village for the producers, because the director doesn’t want people breathing over his shoulder while he’s working.

But, on the other hand, he wants the benefit of his trusted people to be watching the footage as well, to be able to confer with him after take five or take six to say, “Hey, did I get it?” And the video assist guy is the one who sets up your video village, and he can take care of you and let you know what’s going on. And it’s a good person to be friends with, I think.

**John:** I agree. I would also say make some eye contact, make some friends with whoever the sound recordist is, because you’re going to be asking that person for context — the little ear pieces that let you actually hear the dialogue that’s being recorded.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And invariably your batteries will run low. There will be something — you’re going to have to talk to him several times a day, so you might as well get to know his name.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And if you notice something strange in sound, often the director really won’t notice that, so you may be a second set of ears there that are helpful.

**Craig:** In fact, come to think of it, I’m going to make a little noise for a second. I’m sorry, because I’m doing this on my laptop. But our video record guy, John Trunk, who is the greatest — and what a great name, by the way, John Trunk. I’m sorry as I make noise here because I had to search his email. So, John told me that he has a friend who listens to us in Ireland — and here he is — and apparently is the biggest fan of our podcast.

**John:** That’s so great.

**Craig:** And he wanted me to mention his friend’s name. So, so now this is Setiquette. Here’s the way sets work. People take care of you, you take care of them. So, John Trunk, this is a shout out to your Irish friend, Darren Finnegan, Darren Finnegan. Hey, Darren, thanks for listening to us out there in Ireland.

**John:** Oh, so good. Now, another panel we could have gone to, it’s not even really a panel, but it’s here in the catalog so I thought I’d bring it up, would be a conversation with Marti Noxon.

**Craig:** Hmm. I’ve had those.

**John:** I’ve had those, too. And so “Take part in a conversation with Marti Noxon, a prolific television and film writer whose credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men, Glee, and the recent films, I am Number Four and Fright Night.” That was moderated by Barry Josephson.

And so I actually had a conversation with Marti Noxon there because I got to go out to dinner with her and Kyle Killen and some other people who I sort of knew, or didn’t know that well, and got to sort of talk with them some. She’s great. And so, by the way, if you have a chance to have a conversation with her you should have a conversation with her.

I suspect that in the Driskill Ballroom she couldn’t have been quite as revealing about some of the shows that she’s worked on as she was with me. But she has really good stories. And it was fun to sort of hear when things go really well and things don’t go really well. Because when things go badly in television it’s such a uniquely, bad, wonderful crashing down of things, so it’s fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I get the sense in television sometimes things go bad but you have to still keep showing up. At least in movies when they crash and burn it’s over. [laughs] You don’t go back to the ruins.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. I mean, television is just a war, like it just keeps going on. Film may be a battle, but this is you’re going back, you’re going back, you’re going back. So, yeah, I’d recommend a conversation. But, at the same dinner that I had a conversation with her, I had a conversation with Kyle Killen who did the pilots for Awake and Lone Star, a very talented writer, who told me stories of when he was doing his shows for Fox, he lives in Austin but he was working on the Fox lot. And so he decided — originally he was staying with a friend who lived in Silver Lake which is a long drive from Fox. And ultimately he decided, “Well, screw it; I’m just going to stay in my office?”

And so he just set up air mattress. And so he lived in his office at Fox for several months while making those shows.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, the other secret he told me is apparently there is one shower on the lot in like this grips’ area, and so that’s where he would shower.

**Craig:** I don’t like that. [laughs] I don’t like going…

**John:** You don’t like showering below the line.

**Craig:** I don’t like going to Silver Lake, but then showering there is just outright ridiculous.

**John:** That just feels kind of crazy. The other helpful thing that sort of made me feel warm and fuzzy is he was saying when he was writing his TV pilots, people kept asking him for these documents, like his outlines, his pitch documents. And they said, “Well, where do I find them?” He’s like, “Oh, go to John August and he has the things he wrote for the show D.C.” And so he said that he used those as the templates.

**Craig:** Oh, see you have been sowing the seeds of greatest in so many for so long.

**John:** I’ve been trying.

**Craig:** You’re the Johnny Appleseed of screenwriters.

**John:** Aw. That’s so sweet. Thank you. It does feel good that people find helpful things.

Another panel we could have gone to, but we didn’t go to, was Writing for Video Games.

**Craig:** Oh, I would have liked to have done that one.

**John:** Yeah, so we’d meet some of the people on this. “With the success of crossover writers behind such game-changing titles as Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3, FEAR: Extraction Point, FEAR: Perseus Mandate,” I’ve never heard of these.

**Craig:** Me neither.

**John:** “…and Fracture, it has become increasingly clear that video games area popular and lucrative new area for screenwriters. Learn to understand the industry and skills involved in writing non-liner stories for an interactive medium.” And on this panel we would have known Dalan. Is it Day-lan or Da-lan?

**Craig:** Day-lan.

**John:** Dalan Musson.

**Craig:** Day-lan Musson.

**John:** Musson? Wow. I just completely butchered his name. He is a very nice but very intimidating looking writer who we got to hang out with a little bit at Austin.

And writing for video games is fascinating, because it’s one of those things that I’m not going to end up doing a lot of in my life or my career, because I just feel like that’s not likely to come up for me often. But it’s, I think, where many of the next generation of screenwriters are going to be spending some of their time.

And writing for these huge projects where the script can be 700 pages because there are all these different possibilities of things that can happen. And you have to figure out a narrative flow that’s really a web, it’s not a straight line. It is so complicated. And some of them are going to do it really well and some of them are going to do it really poorly.

**Craig:** Yeah. I tend to play narrative video games, so I see a lot of video game writing from a consumer point of view, and a lot of it’s pretty good. The area where I feel they need to improve, frankly, is in direction, because for whatever reason the guys who direct these actors don’t understand pace at all, and oftentimes don’t understand emotion.

They tend to write very reportorially, so everyone is sort of laying out something calmly, usually because a lot of the dialogue takes place in gaps in the action. So, you’ll complete a chapter of action and now you’ll do a cut scene where people will come and talk to you to describe what happens next. And those scenes tend to then be very languid, and we’re all sitting here and chatting.

Rockstar is a grand exception to this rule. Not only do they write massive amounts of dialogue, but they actually understand how to write dialogue for action, or even when people are sitting around, how to make it intense. They’re very good at directing their actors.

**John:** I agree. I really loved StarCraft which I thought had some — granted a lot of it did happen in cut scenes, but the cut scenes were really well done, and then the way that tied into the missions that you would go onto felt really well done. The same Blizzard folks who did that also did the new Diablo, and I criticized that because it felt like you were just standing around and watching other people talk about the plot a lot. It was frustrating. They were like cut scenes.

**Craig:** That’s exactly what’s going on in Dishonored.

**John:** Yeah, I’m sorry about that.

**Craig:** Well, no, the thing is the actual game play of Dishonored is really well done. I like it a lot. I love the world that they’ve built. And they have very good actors doing the performances. It’s just that they put all of them in stand-and-talk situations and frankly they all talk at roughly the same pace with roughly the same intention and immediacy.

So, it just gets sort of kind of dronish. I think they need to think how to goose that a bit.

**John:** Now, another panel we could have attended but we were doing live Scriptnotes at that point was The First 10 Pages, a panel with Lindsay Doran. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we sat down for a conversation with Lindsay Doran? That would be great if we ever talked with her.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “Join Academy Award-nominated producer Lindsay Doran (Sense and Sensibility) as she explains — using the first ten pages each from pre-selected Second Round feature screenplays — what producers and moviegoers look for in those crucial first 10 pages that either hook audiences or send them running for the hills.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. How true. And I can actually report back from her seminar last year, some of her tips, one of which is so obvious and yet is eschewed by so many: don’t make the first page a big block of text. Because — and her point was actually very simple — Lindsay has a way of portraying things that we might otherwise find offensive in very humane ways, and suddenly we get it. Because it’s a little offensive as a writer to hear, “Look, if you wrote a fantastic script and the first page had no dialogue but was kind of heavy on important, necessary description that was actually well written, still it would be tossed aside.”

It seems vulgar. But her point is: Listen, we’re people. We have a stack of scripts we have to read tonight. We have eight of them. We also have a husband, or a wife, we have children, we have lives. And so we pick up that first script and the first page looks daunting and we put it down, and we pick up the next one and there’s lots of white space and we start reading.

And her point wasn’t that that’s fair. Her point was that’s reality. So part of designing those first ten pages isn’t to punch somebody in the face with a big, huge fist full of Courier right off the bat.

**John:** Yeah. You want to make sure that, especially in those first ten pages, the reader feels like you just can’t put it down. They’re fascinated to see what happens on the next page, and the next page. And so planning for that is crucial. And you want to make sure that you are…yes, you have to do all the work of setting up your world and introducing your characters, but it has to be a great, compelling read in those first ten pages or you’re not going to get them to read to page 11, or to page 33.

**Craig:** Yeah. And she talked a lot about sort of grabbing somebody with something that is interesting, surprising them, be unexpected, make a really sharp character, make that first line of dialogue a challenge — anything really to sort of say, “This script unlike the other 2,000 you read this week might be good.”

**John:** Because here’s the thing: The first thing that a reader comes across that feels like, “eh,” is a reason for them to put it down. So, if the very first line of dialogue is like, “eh, whatever,” then they can stop. They get permission to stop reading. Maybe they get three things, like the third thing that feels like, “eh,” they’re going to set it down and they’re not going to care.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think writers need to understand, and it took me a long time to wrap my mind around this: People who read scripts, buy scripts, and hire writers are looking for interesting, unique voices that are breaking the mold of what they normally read, who are pulling them in and exciting them with something that feels fresh.

On the other hand, they don’t make fresh, interesting, unique voicey movies. Now, you may say, “Well then, explain the discrepancy,” and all I can tell you is they want people with fresh, unique, strong, interesting voices to make the movies that they think people will want to go see.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, don’t be fooled by the product into thinking that’s what you ought to be writing. It’s so important for you to understand that. And I’m not making a judgment on this. I’m not saying, “And that’s a great way of approaching the movie business.” I’m just telling you that’s the way it is.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing to always remember is that whatever script you’re writing, yes, you want to see that become a movie, but at the same time if it’s not a movie it’s going to be a writing sample. And so you want anything that has your name on it to be the best possible thing you could write. And the most interesting thing, and the thing that people are talking about, and the thing that will end up on the Black List.

**Craig:** Now more than ever.

**John:** Now more than ever.

Now, a panel that I did not get to attend but I heard many legends about this panel after the fact was the Popcorn Fiction panel. So, Craig, can you give me a recap of the Popcorn Fiction panel, because it sounded like it was not one of the calmer panels.

**Craig:** Well, [laughs], you know, part of the fun of Austin is that I’m there with my friends. And we spend all year torturing each other, and then we go to Austin and we get to torture each other in front of people.

All right, the Popcorn Fiction, let me just — it was the last panel of the weekend. We were all a little giddy, a little goofy. The panel itself was ridiculous. There’s no reason to have a Popcorn Fiction panel at the Austin Screenwriting Conference. It’s not about screenwriting. It’s about writing fiction. And, frankly, anybody that wants to submit a story to it can, because Mulholland Publishing has that, so you just submit it, submit a story if you want.

And there’s really nothing to say. But when you add a very volatile combination of myself, Derek Haas, and Jeff Lowell, who we basically spar 365 days out of the year with each other. And then poor Eric Heisserer and Christine Boylan, who was great, and her husband, poor Eric Heisserer, who just did not have the ability to control us. We were — we really lost it.

**John:** Really, who was going to be able to control you?

**Craig:** We attacked each other, attacked people in the audience. We had the best time. We laughed. It was great. It was just a free-for-all. It was madness. It was madness.

**John:** Could Aline Brosh McKenna have controlled you?

**Craig:** Well, Aline would have gotten angry and, yeah, probably control. You know, I am scared of her.

**John:** You don’t want to disappoint her, too.

**Craig:** I don’t want to disappoint her because I’m afraid of her.

**John:** Now a panel that we also did not attend but we actually got a good report back from, well not a good report, but a thorough report back from — Amazon Studios had a panel about Amazon Studios, and sort of what it means for writers and what it means for the industry.

So, neither Craig nor I attended, but a reader was generous enough to write up his notes from the panel, and that’s on the blog right now, so there will be a link to that in the show notes. Essentially — we talked about Amazon Studios on the podcast many times — their business model is that any screenwriter in the US, or the world probably, can submit their script to Amazon. They have this process by which they get a free option that can be extended into a very low cost option.

If they like a project, they can do iterations of it. It’s changed somewhat; they’re not having like any random stranger rewrite it, but it’s a very test-driven kind of process for it. And we have questioned whether it makes a lot of sense for most screenwriters to do it, and whether it’s a good thing for writers overall, and if it’s a good thing for the industry.

And it didn’t sound like much of what got said at this conversation at Austin would have changed my perspective on that.

**Craig:** Same here. The big change that happened for you and for me many months ago, or I guess about a year ago, was that they finally dialed into being a union production company. So, people who are in the Writers Guild could continue down a guild path with them, and that’s important.

What’s unfortunate is that frankly they just don’t make much sense for a real screenwriter or — you know, I always look at these things as if you’re good enough to win that, if you’re good enough to make it through that, you’re good enough to make it through Warner Bros., or Fox, or Universal, and you don’t need them.

The philosophical issue that the Amazon rep mentioned that I want to bring out is his notion of testing. He says, accurately, that when movies are completed they’re put in front of test audiences who not only score the movie but sit in focus groups and talk about the movie. And then the filmmakers go and try and fix it then based on the feedback, or maybe don’t get a chance to fix it at all. And his point of view is: Why don’t we do that at the script stage and then we won’t have to do it at the movie stage? And all I can say is: Dude, you’ve got to go make some movies because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

**John:** Yeah. That’s not how it works.

**Craig:** All we do during screenwriting is that. Constantly. It’s shown to so many people. It’s given to readers, it’s given to agents, it’s given to every executive, all the production, their assistants, then the actors. It is read by so many. There are endless comments. Endless feedback from it.

That’s not why the movies go wrong. Movies go wrong because a movie is different than a script. It’s kind of an ignorant statement from somebody that’s running a “production company.”

**John:** I’ve been thinking about where the Amazon Studios business model might make sense, and it occurs to me that, like, children’s animation — there’s probably something good to be done in that space.

**Craig:** I lost you.

**John:** Where you could do, like, a low cost partial pilot for something and see, “Do people like this? Is this the right kind of style for us? Are these the right characters?” Where you can do that sort of like it’s just sort of silly putty that you’re modeling, and you need to have like actual little kids watching something, because little kids can’t read scripts, or you can’t describe things to them.

There are probably models, probably for television, probably for young audiences, where I could see it working out for them. But feature films of the size and scale that we’re talking about, I just don’t see it panning out.

**Craig:** No, because the point isn’t that 100 people out of 100 like the screenplay. We don’t go to movies to read. It’s an entirely different thing. They just — so many people don’t understand that the screenplay is meant to disappear into the movie. The art of judging whether it will translate in the disappearance and consumption process into a great movie is a skill that so few people have.

And I’ll tell you, because it’s so specific, and it’s such a difficult skill, the notion that everybody is sort of walking around born with it is insane. We do walk around being born with an ability to like or dislike a movie. That’s the point. We’re the audience of the movie. But we’re not the audience of the screenplay. I would no rather be interested in most people’s opinions of blueprints as opposed to a building than I would most people’s group think on a screenplay in anticipation that that would somehow forestall problems in production. It will not.

**John:** And the argument that, “Well, we’re going to shoot scenes from it and that’s going to help us know whether people are going to like it” — no, that’s not going to work at all, because you’re going to shoot scenes with like different actors and with scenes out of context. And people are going to give their feedback on stuff. No. That’s not going to help them.

**Craig:** Of course not. And it’s just a scene. We don’t go to movies for scenes. Every bad movie has a great scene in it. Every one of them. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** So, television networks go through phases where they will shoot presentations rather than shooting a pilot. And so a presentation for people who don’t know — a pilot is a theoretical first episode of a series. So this is what we think the series is. This is going to be the first episode. This launches the show.

A presentation is like a pilot but cut down, so it’s a shorter version. So, if a pilot is a 45-minute, 50-minute piece of film, this is a 20 to 25-minute piece of the show. And they’ll do the shorter versions to save money. And so the idea is that, “Okay, it gives us a sense of what the whole thing is going to feel like without spending all the money for the whole thing.”

The problem is it hasn’t worked out very well for most shows. And I shot a pilot presentation for D.C. and we learned some things, absolutely, but what we mostly learned is that maybe we shouldn’t be making this show, and then when we tried to make the show it was frustrating. And then we had to go back through and like piece in the missing scenes from the pilot to shoot the rest of it. It’s kind of a frustrating mess.

And this feels like trying to shoot presentations.

**Craig:** Sometimes in our desire to save us, save ourselves from pain and woe we create pain and woe. There is — there are too many examples of things that initially seemed glum and turned around to be wonderful. You can’t evaluate something by dipping your foot in the pool. You make it or you don’t.

**John:** Yup. It’s also interesting that you don’t hear many stories of the movies that were disasters that turned out to be great big hits. You keep track of — obviously the ones that become the world class blockbusters, you hear of those, and you hear about the disasters. But the ones where you’re like, “Oh, that first cut was actually dreadful and they just worked, and worked, and worked, and then it turned out really well.” Rarely do you hear about those.

**Craig:** I’ve heard about them. [laughs] And it’s very common, frankly, in comedy because comedy is so reliant on a sense of trust in the filmmakers that they’re funny. So, when you run a first cut of a movie and half the jokes aren’t funny, the whole thing collapses. Airplane, the first preview of Airplane was a disaster. The first preview of Naked Gun was a disaster.

I remember talking to David, and Jerry, and Jim about it. They were just aghast. And they thought their careers were over and they didn’t know what they were doing. And then you just edit and take out the stuff that doesn’t work and suddenly they become two of the funniest movies of all time.

**John:** Yeah. When I say that you don’t hear about them, I think in popular culture you don’t hear about them. We hear about them because we are involved with the same filmmakers.

So, the first cut of Go I did want to kill myself. It was just absolutely — I was just praying that maybe they can never release this movie. Because at that point I was starting to get hired for things based on my script, and I thought if people see this movie I’m done. I’m dead for it. And it’s never going to work.

And then we just went back and we cut. We recut, we did some reshooting, and suddenly all of the stuff that wasn’t working fell out and the stuff that was working was better. And it was good.

$3,000, which was the movie that became Pretty Woman, is another situation with an incredibly difficult production and then sort of the opposite situation. I think they had an incredibly good test screening and people were like, “Oh, this movie is really funny.” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s right. We made a comedy.” And then it becomes this thing where now everybody is like, “Well of course, it was Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, how could it go wrong?” But she was nobody. He was a risk.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I mean, the one that always comes to mind in terms of an audience hearing bad things is Titanic. There had been just enormous amount of buzz that Titanic was becoming the world’s most expensive movie, and it was difficult production.

**John:** Fishtar.

**Craig:** Well, Ishtar, and that didn’t happen.

**John:** I know. But they called it Fishtar.

**Craig:** Exactly. I’m sorry. Yes, you’re right. They called Titanic “Fishtar.” So, I mean, that tells you a lot. And you know what’s funny? I was talking about Waterworld today with somebody because we all think of Waterworld negatively because there had been so much bad publicity leading up to its release about how expensive it was and how the star and the director were at war, which is true.

The movie actually made money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, every now and then we — every now and then it happens, but you’re right. It’s fairly rare. Usually bad process leads to bad movie, and vice versa.

**John:** So, the last panel we’ll talk about today which we did not attend is called The Throw. “Terry Rossio will lead a presentation on the Throw, otherwise known as the transition between scenes. He will discuss very practical, actual writing techniques, and show film clips to demonstrate good and bad throws. When shooting scenes and working with a director a lot of thought goes into the transition between from one scene to another, generally ending the scene is harder than starting one. And it is ideal for transitions to be seamless and logical. Take part in this journey exploring numerous types of throws and how to implement them in your own script.”

So, have you heard of this called a “throw” before, or is that something he made up?

**Craig:** I have never heard that called “the throw” before, I just call it “transition.”

**John:** “Transition.” I like it as an idea. Terry is a smart guy and he clearly has an interest in sort of sharing what he knows, which I’ve always respected that about him.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But I thought, you know, without knowing anything about what he actually talked about, I want to sort of speculate and sort of reverse engineer what he might have talked about.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So, I would agree with the thesis that how scenes end is in many ways as important as how scenes begin. And a problem that I notice in many new writers’ scripts is they have a hard time conserving energy across a cut.

Really and honestly, when screenwriting is working well every time you cut you should be gaining some energy from the cut. You’re taking the energy that you had going into the scene, and the fact that there is a cut is giving you a little extra momentum going into the next scene that sort of keeps building your energy.

When I read newer screenwriter’s scripts, too often I feel like I’m reading a play where characters are entering and exiting. And there is sort of like there is a ramp up to action and then there is action, there’s conversation, and then there is a ramp down, a sort of decrescendo as it goes in. You sort of feel like the lights would fade and the lights would come back up on the next thing. That’s not how movies work. And movies have the ability to have blunt cuts from one thing to another.

And figuring out where the right place to jump out of scene into the scene is crucial. So, some things that came to mind for me in terms of how I tend to look at getting out of a scene is trying to answer a question across a cut. So, the horrible example you shouldn’t try to do is, “Well then, who could have murdered him?” And then you cut to the guy with the knife standing there.

Or, “But who is Mrs. Dalloway?” And you cut to Mrs. Dalloway. But, more often it’s that you are asking a question that can sort of be answered in a very general sense by the next thing you’re cutting to. So, “How long will it take us to get to Vegas?” And then we’re on the road to Vegas. The fact that you’re cutting to the next thing is telling you that you’re looking for the answer to that question.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m very specific about my transitions. And I was glad to see that Terry did this, because I think frankly the reason most transitional moments in early screenplays are bad is because they are not transitional moments at all. That the screenwriters don’t even think in terms of transition. But ideally when you’re sitting in a movie theater you don’t notice that you’ve even transitioned per se; the idea that it’s the next scene isn’t something I want you to think about any more than I want you to think about the reel change mark.

I just want you to be in the story. And moving through the time that I’m creating with my intention and purpose, not thinking, “Oh, okay, that’s over. This begins.”

Obviously music across scenes helps a lot in that way. We’re always using music to pre-lap, and drift into the next scene to kind of create a sense of narrative continuity. But I like transitions to be alive in the scene. I like to use noise. I like to use the environment.

Sometimes two scenes have nothing to do with each other and so part of what you do is accentuate how jarring they are with each other by having a train go [TRAIN NOISE], just to startle you into the fact that you’ve shifted. You’re always looking to just feel like you’re not boring. You know, a boring transition is one in which one scene ends and another one politely begins.

**John:** The terms you’re using and sort of what you’re describing, it feels like you’re talking about things you would do at the Avid, and that it’s sort of the sound and shots and things like that. But it honestly does translate back down to how you’re writing on the page, which is if you’re ending on a quiet moment and then you cut into a train barrels down the tracks, that’s energy.

**Craig:** Right. And I do like those things. I write them all in. And, oh, here John, do you feel umbrage coming? Because it’s about to come.

**John:** Go. Umbrage up.

**Craig:** Are you ready? There’s this thing that some screenwriter guru baloney types talk about that makes me crazy. And it’s this deal that screenwriters shouldn’t be directing the movie. We shouldn’t write “we see,” or talk about where the camera is, or create noise. That is insane.

Our job is to make a document that reads in such a way that the reader sees a movie and hears a movie in their head. We’re not directing the movie through the script. We are directing our intention through the script. Frankly, movies would be better if directors — a lot of whom do this, but some just don’t — actually looked for the clues that the screenwriter had put in to manage those transitions.

But we must write that way. Anybody who tells you, “Dear podcast listener at home, don’t direct your script.” Of course, don’t be obnoxious about it, but if you have a moment that means something to you, put it in. Put it in and make those moments interesting.

The worst thing you can do is be boring. That should be the most fearful outcome for you.

Umbrage over.

**John:** Yes. It is a screenwriter’s goal to evoke the experience of watching and sitting in a theater which just 12-point Courier on the page. That’s a very difficult thing to do. But, that’s why you’re a writer. And it’s writing the same way that a novelist is writing in some cases where you’re creating a universe with just your words. And part of that universe is what it feels like and what it sounds like.

And even though you don’t have the ability to describe tastes and textures and things like that, you should almost kind of feel like you’re in that world. The most flattering thing I’ve ever heard someone say about my work, I think it was like, “Oh, I really loved watching that. Oh, no, I guess I just read it, but it felt like I’d seen it.” And that’s what you want.

You want the experience of, like, “Did I read that or did I watch it?” And it should be equally vivid because I’ve created those images in your head and I’ve made this character seem alive to you in those moments.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So other sort of simple techniques to look for is — I don’t want to say exit line too loudly because that’s sort of hacky, but look for what is the last line somebody says before the cut. And there can be cases where that’s going to be a joke, and that joke will help propel you to the next scene. And if it’s done right, that’s fantastic. There will be cases where it won’t be the joke line, it will be the line that comes after the joke that helps get you to the thing. Or you’ll put an extra little layer on it.

But looking for what is the last thing that said that’s going to get you to that next moment. Now, someone is going to say, “Well, I sat down at the Avid and you always end up cutting — you never end up doing sort of what you had on the page there anyway. You end up cutting out of scenes early or you do other stuff.”

Well, fine, you do other stuff, but you have to have a plan for how you think you’re going to get out of this scene and in this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I tend avoid orchestrating elaborate transitions on the page for precisely that reason. Transitions that are elaborate really then become tricks that everybody needs to work on in production to perfect and make happen. And you’re doing it with the hope that it will be just a super awesome transition.

But, then again, you also know in the back of your head, having made a bunch of movies, a lot of times you find that shorter is better, and there is a quicker and easier transition. So, I tend to write transitions that are actually very low key in terms of producibility. Very simple things to do.

Sometimes I also think a transition that might indicate something, even if the scene starts dryly from the next scene. Let’s say you and I are in a car. We’re talking. And you’re saying, “We have to go see mom. She’s not doing great.” And I say, “Oh, okay. I’m sure she’s fine, you know. I’m sure she’s fine.” And then our car just wipes through frame, and then we see a coffee cup. You know? And then somebody, and there’s sugar going in the coffee cup. Sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar. And then we pull back and we see an old lady just pouring sugar into a coffee cup. Way too much sugar for her. And she’s big. She’s a big lady.

And then she puts the sugar down. And then we realize that she’s sitting in a food court now. And everybody is busy with their families and she’s alone at her table like kind of a weirdo bag lady. That’s a transition to me.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** And it’s small, but I just think that if you can, in the moment of starting the scene you can actually do the work of the scene, you’re already halfway done.

**John:** Yeah. So much of how you’re coming out of scene is based on where you think you’re coming into the next scene. And so by setting up and establishing that shot with a coffee cup and all the sugars, you’re giving yourself a nice way into that.

The other thing you’re doing there is by mentioning the mother you are — you put that in our head that the mother is a character that we’re going to be looking for. And so when we see her, like, we’re excited to see her.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In Go, an example is Claire is sitting with Gaines in his apartment, and she keeps getting texts from Ronna. So, naturally the next thing we’re going to cut to is Ronna. And we’re ready to see her again because we’ve been reminded that she’s in this world and we’re curious about where she’s at and why she’s not back in the apartment.

**Craig:** Yeah. You see, one of the nice things about working on transitions — and again it’s why I was very happy when I saw that Terry was doing this, because it’s important; I think it’s important for screenwriters to see this — is that it also starts to remove bad options from you.

For instance, I know that I want to make a point about a character in this scene, so I guess they could be talking to somebody or somebody could be talking about them, or maybe they’re writing it — well, how about no more words. So, let’s just put the words away for a second and just describe in a moment, in a transitional moment what it is I want to get across. And then the scene really is about making me feel it with her.

Now, the scene isn’t about information. The scene is about emotion. Am I connecting with her? Is she making me angry? Is she making me sad? Much more interesting and fun to write that than “I live alone, don’t you understand sir? I live alone! I can’t afford this.” Ugh. Gun shot.

**John:** The last thing I’ll say on transitions is I’ve described it to other people and I didn’t have good words for it. And I think I was reaching for something kind of like a “throw,” but I always describe that the cut out of a scene sort of needs to slant forward. It needs to sort of fall into the next scene. And too often they just feel like blunt cuts, like it’s just like a stack of scenes. Like, “There’s that scene, and now there’s that scene.”

And it’s what we talked about in the Austin Film Festival podcast where scenes need to be connected with a “and because of that,” rather than an “and.” It’s like, you know, it’s the “so” that gets you to the next thing rather than an “and.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Very much so.

**John:** And it’s building.

**Craig:** If you end a scene in such a way that all the characters can sort of sigh and go, “Okay, that’s…well, I guess we said.” Why even — just go. Just leave the theater.

**John:** In grammatical terms, most scenes probably shouldn’t end with periods. They should end with some sort of punctuation mark that lets you continue the sentence into the next scene. So, some double dashes, some commas, some other stuff.

And even on the page, that’s why sometimes you don’t end up completing a sentence at the end of scene. You let it bleed into the next thing. You might bleed across the cut in a sentence. I’ll do that all the time.

**Craig:** And think about size. It’s a funny thing to say, but when I end a scene and when I begin, for the following scene on that transitional moment, I like to change the size of whatever it is I’m doing. If I’m looking at a face I want to look at park. If I’m looking at a park, I want to look at a small pin. I like changing sizes.

I think that’s another helpful way to kind of not make you feel like you’re just lost in a stack of scenes.

**John:** If you’re coming off a 1.5 page scene which is two characters talking sitting down, your next scene should not be two characters talking sitting down.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** You want somebody running through the scene on fire if possible.

**Craig:** Exactly. Or you want a jet plane from the ground, you know. I mean, look at the movies you like and I guarantee you will see very few scenes that move from the same size to the same size.

**John:** And sometimes those are just those one-eighth of a page, like “Tires screech as a plane lands at JFK.” And it’s like, “Well why is that there?” Because you need to change the energy, because you just came from this thing — you need the jolt of that to get you into the next thing.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, that was our Austin Film Festival that didn’t happen. But it was fun to sort of talk through some other extra panels.

**Craig:** Alt-universe Austin in which I didn’t get drunk and wasn’t hung-over for our live podcast.

**John:** You smoked a lot of cigars there, too, I noticed.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it happens in Austin. You know, apparently what happens in Austin doesn’t stay in Austin. Apparently it ends up on a podcast.

**John:** [laughs] It gets out. I would say this was my most fun Austin podcast ever though, Austin Film Festival ever in that I talked with a lot more people than I ever talked with before in terms of sort of writing peers and hung out with more people. And it was just really fun. It was a good time.

**Craig:** It’s a great time. I try and balance my time there between friends I haven’t seen for awhile who are there with me and then just interacting with people. And I mentioned as much in the live podcast, the fact that we do this podcast now, people were walking up to me and saying thank you for this and we are very welcome. We love doing it.

And if you guys in Austin weren’t there appreciating it then it would be sad for us and we would just stop.

**John:** Yes. Craig, I know you’re really busy so do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do. No, I don’t; I take it back. [laughs] I don’t. I do, but I can’t talk about it. It’s in my head. Oh my god, it’s so cool.

**John:** So maybe by the time I’m done with mine you’ll have the words to express it.

So, my One Cool Thing this week is actually very appropriate for this sort of alternate universe Austin in that it’s called What If. And it’s this great website that is a physicist who goes through and answers questions about these hypothetical situations. And so he’ll actually do the math to tell you what would really happen if you were to do these things.

So, two example things I read recently. What if you exploded a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the Marianas Trench?

**Craig:** Hmm?

**John:** Yeah, it was like, “Oh, what would that do? Would it cause an earthquake? How bad would that be?”

**Craig:** Can I guess?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** If you exploded a large nuclear device at the bottom of Marianas Trench I suspect nothing would happen.

**John:** Very little happens. Because as powerful as a nuclear bomb is, the Marianas Trench is very, very big. And so it would create a giant bubble, but it wouldn’t cause a tidal wave. Because the disturbance is right there.

**Craig:** It’s so deep that the force that — the sideways and upwards force would just be dissipated underneath the weight of the Pacific.

**John:** Yeah.

Another question. If every person on earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time would it change color?

**Craig:** I’m sorry, if every person on the earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time would it change color?

**John:** Yeah. Would it change color — the color of the laser pointer?

**Craig:** I’m going to say no, it would not.

**John:** It would not. And so he goes through sort of some of the challenges there. At any given time not that many people on earth can actually see the moon, so that becomes a challenge.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But the issue is like laser pointers, even the powerful ones, they’re pretty powerful, but they’re not powerful enough to overcome the moon’s brightness or darkness which is the sun shining on it.

So, then he sort of amps up in a very good screenwriter way, it’s like, “Well what if we had a — well, we need lasers big enough to actually aim at the moon and light up the dark side of the moon. So, if it is a crescent moon then you want to light up the dark side of the moon, the part that is not lit right now.”

And the laser that would be powerful enough to make that glow would also incinerate the earth. The atmosphere would catch fire.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, we shouldn’t do it.

**John:** No. We couldn’t also generate enough energy to —

**Craig:** It’s funny. I remember years ago I worked on a script at Dimension called The Spy Next Door. And I think eventually they made a movie called The Spy Next Door that was a different company and a different script. And it was sort of a James Bond sort of comedy James Bond thing. And I needed a villain. And I always believe that your villain has to be a real villain with a real plan.

And I love Bond movies and I was trying to think of a good Bond plan. And for a while I was toying with the idea of blowing up the moon.

**John:** I had a whole thing where I wanted to blow up the moon. Everyone wants to destroy the moon. The moon sucks.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everyone wants to blow up the moon. You know, here’s the thing. I found a book on this pre-internet days when you couldn’t do this sort of thing. And I had to find a book. And there was actually a book called What If You Blew Up the Moon? [laughs] I think that’s what it was called.

And the whole book was just chapters of, “Okay, well what if we made the moon smaller? What if we made it bigger, what would happen? What if we blew it up? What if it crashed on earth?” And basically the deal is this: If you change the moon at all, we all die. You make it bigger, smaller, blow it up, move it backwards — it’s like everything just goes kablooey. So, I couldn’t do that one, so I came up with another one which I thought was actually kind of interesting.

My idea was that the villain found evidence of a large fault running underneath the United States in a place where we weren’t familiar. It’s a little bit like the New Madrid Fault, which they say famously could lead to a huge earthquake. And that back in the ’60s, the Soviets discovering this put a large nuclear device in that fault with the idea that they were losing the Arms Race and if they were attacked that would be their Doomsday device in retaliation and America would split apart.

And then they sort of forgot it, you know. [laughs] And so now it’s 1998, or whenever I wrote this movie, and someone has figured out that it’s still there, and they have the codes and they need another code. And if they do then they can blow up — Blow Up America!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of fun.

**John:** Yeah. I like it. It’s tough to find — a villain plot for a comedy is tough because an apocalyptic villain comedy plot is challenging because it has to be absurd yet have stakes so that it actually means something.

**Craig:** Yeah, unless you’re doing a spoof, you know, like Dr. Evil’s plan was ridiculous because he was spoofing the ridiculousness of James Bond’s villains who already larger than life. So, you have these levels of villains. You have Dr. Evil which is the most ridiculous. Then you have Donald Pleasence from, I think, You Only Live Twice, which is also quite ridiculous, [laughs], because he lives in a volcano.

But, serious ridiculous, you know. And then underneath that you have your, I guess, your Bourne Identity style villains and so forth.

**John:** Yeah. But I’m trying to think of who the villain could be in a comedy. That can be challenging, too. An apocalyptic comedy villain is a sort of unique set of requirements.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always like the villain in Naked Gun. Ricardo Montalban’s deal was that he was basically going to charge people to use — he was a hit man broker. So, he figured out a way to hypnotize famous people who have access to kill other famous people and charge money for it.

It’s ridiculous but he was quite serious about it.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a good choice. It offers comedy potential. It’s threatening enough that there are actually enough stakes that you could go through.

So, Phineas and Ferb, Doofenshmirtz often has the most absurd kind of things where like he’s going to destroy all the banjos in the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s interesting when they sort of talk about like evil and it’s like, “Well, yeah it’s evil.” It’s actually sort of like you would be really annoying but you’re not actually evil.

**Craig:** Doofenshmirtz Annoying Incorporated.

**John:** I like it.

Craig, did you think of anything more or are we all done?

**Craig:** Are you kidding? I could go for hours.

**John:** You could go for hours. But you can’t go for hours because you have to work tonight.

**Craig:** No, tonight we’re off.

**John:** Oh, this is your night off.

**Craig:** We’re on a weird schedule. So, tonight I’m off, but now what do I do? And, okay, you know where I am, so there’s plenty to do. [laughs] The thing is I really don’t want to do anything. So, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do a crossword puzzle.

**John:** Crossword puzzles are good. All right, Craig, thank you so much for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir, and I’ll see you next time.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes).

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

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

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

Now, Craig, something feels different today. Is it an earlier time?

**Craig:** It’s definitely early. I’m feeling it. But I also feel like we’re not alone.

**John:** Oh, there’s an audience. [Applause] Hello! This is our first ever live Scriptnotes…

**Craig:** That was great.

**John:** …and people who are listening to this at home, they think like, “Wow, that is a huge crowd.” And they are exactly right. I cannot believe how big this crowd is.

**Craig:** I can’t believe how much noise 12 people can make.

**John:** Yeah. People were waiting in line. People have been camping out since 5 in the morning. So, thank you guys all so much for coming today.

**Craig:** Welcome, lucky ticket holders!

**John:** Yeah. Because, you know, it’s one thing when you see the download numbers, and it’s like, “Oh, that seems like a lot of people.” But when you actually see all of these people in front of us.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. All 800,000 of them. It is a…

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, this is our first ever live episode. But we’re also going to treat it like a normal episode, too; we’re going to do the kind of stuff we would normally do. So, we’re going to talk about some news. We’re going to talk about the craft a little bit, and answer some questions. The different thing is that we’re going to have some questions live here in the room, which is exciting.

So, in the news this week, one thing that came up a lot on Twitter, people have asked: What is the deal with the Black List? The Black List made some changes and it’s now a very different kind of thing. And so we’re going to talk about that. We’re going to welcome our first ever special live screenwriter guest.

**Craig:** I’m so excited.

**John:** And she’ll be up here on stage with us. Her name is Aline Brosh McKenna, and she’s kind of great. And we’re going to do these questions. Let’s get to it. Craig —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Black List. Have you heard of this thing called the Black List?

**Craig:** Sure. So, I’ll tell you what I know about the Black List…

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** …and then you tell me if I’m wrong. The Black List is basically the product of, well, Franklin Leonard started it, who’s an executive producer guy in Hollywood. And the idea was that assistants, and I guess some development people, read everything in Hollywood. They read all the scripts, and he basically decided that each year they should vote on the scripts they liked the most. Not necessarily the best scripts, or the ones that would sell, or the ones that didn’t sell, just the ones they liked the most, some of which I think haven’t even been bought, some of which have, some of which even were heading into development.

I think the deal is just that they couldn’t have been produced I guess in that year. And Hollywood loves lists. They love it. They’re obsessed with ranking things. And this really caught on. And I guess normally I’m — I don’t know, lists and rankings I go, “Ew,” but the great thing about it is that it helps scripts that otherwise would not have found homes, because Hollywood is obsessed with lists.

If you are one person in Hollywood and you read a script and you think, “Well this is very good, but no one else seems to have heard about it,” or “I’m just not going to talk about. It’s not on the list.” But suddenly it was on a list. And then a lot of scripts, and more importantly the screenwriters of those scripts, gained access inside of Hollywood. Malcolm Spellman and Tim Talbott who are here sort of famously got work because a script of theirs, which was completely unproduceable, was on the Black List.

**John:** That was the Robotard 8000 script.

**Craig:** The Robotard 8000 script. Exactly.

**John:** So, a crucial thing to understand about the Black List and its original incarnation is that executives are reading these scripts anyway. And so they had informal ways that they were always talking with each other about the things they were reading, and this was a way to sort of formalize it, but also anonymously sort of come to aggregate that information into sort of one master list of what the people who are actually reading those scripts and making those decisions thought were the most interesting things of the year.

And so it was very helpful to people to show up on the Black List, because that was a real mark of a possibility for them. So, this last week the change that happened is Franklin Leonard announced — and he actually tipped us off first he was going to be doing this — is changing the access, expanding sort of the mission of the Black List so that writers who wanted to submit their scripts to the Black List — to a site, a website for the Black List — could have their scripts read by executives who wanted to see it. People could read scripts on the Black List, rank them, rate them, contact those writers. It was a way for writers to be discovered through that process.

The issues that sort of immediately came up and sort of why people wanted us to talk about it is there was a fee to be listed on the site.

**Craig:** And you know how I feel about fees.

**John:** You love fees. You’re a fee-based person.

**Craig:** I’m going to get angry. It’s early.

**John:** I sense there could be some umbrage coming. That’s why everybody wanted us to talk about it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And there’s also, you could have a professional reader associated with the Black List read your script and provide ratings for it to tell you sort of what they thought of the script.

**Craig:** I wish that this guy were here so we could ask him exactly…

**John:** Yeah, ask exactly those questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, just so we could grill him and make him uncomfortable.

**John:** That would be good.

**Craig:** Is he here?

**John:** He is in fact here.

**Craig:** He’s right over there?

**John:** So, let’s welcome up Franklin Leonard to talk about it.

[Applause]

So, this is again the luxury of being live in a place, and right now we’re in Austin; we can actually ask these questions of a person. So, Franklin, tell us sort of what the impetus was to create this new site/service that changes things.

**Franklin Leonard:** Well, I think the biggest one was probably the fact that everywhere I went — whether it was the Austin Film Festival, anywhere in Los Angeles, when I was on a plane and told someone what I did in Hollywood — the first question that I got was, “So, I wrote this screenplay. What do I do with it now?” And I never really had a good answer.

You know, there was “send query letters,” there was “enter the Nicholl, and the Austin Film Festival Screenplay competition.” And as I thought about it, those really seemed like inefficient ways to sort of get your script to the people who would actually read it. And in the cases where even that was successful, it created a situation I think for writers that was sort of less than ideal, or less than what could be ideal for the writer’s position.

And so I began to think that, “Hey, the Black List sort of aggregated this conversation around writers that people were liking — wouldn’t it be great if you could do the same thing for writers that weren’t necessary part of the system yet, and put them in a position of power where all of a sudden if their script was really strong they had one, five, a dozen people pursuing them, and then they could chose multiple options?”

**Craig:** And to be clear, what you’re offering now is separate the Black List, which still continues on and has nothing to do with who sent a script in or anything?

**Franklin:** That’s absolutely right. And that distinction I think is critical because a lot of people are like, “Oh, the Black List has lost its way.”

**Craig:** “They sold the Black List. Argh!”

**Franklin:** Exactly. No. We have not at all. The annual Black List remains a separate and distinct thing that will be voted on using the exact same process that was used for the last seven years. It has born a lot of really positive results. And it will still exist as the annual Black List. And I don’t think that there will be, at least in Hollywood at least, much confusion about the difference between this annual list that goes out and this new sort of website ecosystem community that will allow people access that they might heretofore not have had.

**Craig:** Right. Got it.

**John:** So, my kneejerk reaction — I think a lot of people’s kneejerk reactions — was that it felt weird that the business model was based around charging fees for people with dreams. Essentially there’s that mentality of making money off the backs of people who are trying to get into the system versus, you know… — And also the question of who is really the user of this thing: is it aspiring writers or is it producers and development executives who are looking for talent? Tell us about that.

**Franklin:** Right. I have the same level of discomfort with it, I suspect, as you do. And we designed it that way for a few reasons. The first of which is if the goal is to aggregate as many possible eyeballs from the film community as possible on the possible screenplays of aspiring writers, the best way to do that at least initially would be to have an incredibly low price point for the industry members that were coming on to join.

Anecdotally when we were in beta and developing the site we actually did charge industry members a very small fee which was in part designed to prevent us from taking sort of third party financing of venture capital, which would have prevented us from actually sort of staying very close to this goal that we have of creating opportunity.

And when we made the transition from charging industry folks to going free we quadrupled our membership in 48 hours. And so by being free it means that we can have the most possible sort of eyeballs on your possible scripts and that they’re good.

And then in terms of why we charge writers, I mean, first of all we do need a business model in order to function, in order to allow this thing to exist. But I also wanted to provide a slight disincentive for sort of throwing everything up against the wall and hoping it sticks. It’s really important that you believe in your script enough to pay some small amount of money. And we’ve kept the price point far lower than I know we could have charged for it because the price and elasticity of demand of something like this is actually very, very low.

And so as much as I would like to have the business model be different, I think this is the one that is sort of optimal in terms of making sure there are as many industry people as possible looking at these scripts. And making sure that we get a higher quality of material that we’re then going to wade through and have readers read.

**Craig:** I mean, look, you know how my thing is: screenwriting is the last free thing to do. I don’t hate this. I really don’t. I like a lot of it actually. And the part that — here’s what I hate most of all about, not about your thing, but about…

**Franklin:** It’s that you hate me, right?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t like you.

**Franklin:** There you go.

**Craig:** I love you.

**Franklin:** I love you, too.

**Craig:** Thank you. There is a world of charlatans who prey on you folks out there. And they prey upon you in the worst way by promising you access and insight that they simply don’t have. They don’t have access; that’s pretty much easy to see. They certainly don’t have insight. It’s a simple rule of thumb: If they had insight they would probably be doing what John does or Franklin does. They don’t. They’re doing what they do which is buying business cards for $14 and then convincing you that they have insight.

And even worse, they charge you a lot. They charge you $500. They charge you $1,000. And then they charge you by time, or by read, and then they promise you improvement. And so you just give them a little bit more, and a little bit more. And suddenly it’s like a therapist that keeps telling you, “If you just keep paying me, one day you will be better.”

But, also as is in the case with therapists, that’s not true. You’re not going to be better necessarily from them, because they don’t really know what they’re talking about. Here’s what I like about this — two things: One, it’s a flat fee per script. And that fee is?

**Franklin:** $25 per month.

**Craig:** $25 per month. So, $25 per month and your script will be read by industry readers who actually have access, because the people who go to the site for free, who aren’t charged, are basically people in the actual business, in your business, who are looking for scripts.

**Franklin:** Absolutely. And there are a lot of them. I mean, we have at present 1,150 industry members ranging from agency assistants to studio presidents in production.

**Craig:** And the way the system works is you submit a script for $25, it’s read by the industry readers, and then it is ranked.

**Franklin:** Well, not exactly. So, the way it works is you upload a script for $25 a month. That makes it available to our entire membership, and it is indexed along a number of different metrics that you provide. And then for $50 you can pay for one of our readers that we’ve hired to read it…

**Craig:** Oh, now it’s $50. Okay.

**Franklin:** No, no, let me explain.

**Craig:** All right.

**Franklin:** And that reader will evaluate the script. I think that’s another thing that differs between us and a lot of coverage services for example. We’re not offering you — we’ll give you an evaluation and you can take with that evaluation maybe insight into how to improve your script, but this is not something that you should be using to identify the things wrong with your script so that you can then improve it and sort of keep coming back to us for that.

**Craig:** It’s just a tool for the other people who are on the site to see what someone thought?

**Franklin:** Right. And the data that is generated by those evaluations we can use to create sort of a Black List of non-professional scripts, sort of a real time, that is sortable by genre, subgenre, words that feature in the log line. And then we also built a recommendations algorithm similar to what exists on Netflix and Amazon so that based on all of our 1,150 members’ individual taste, in the event that a script is particularly suited to one of those members’ taste we can send them an email and say, “Hey, our algorithm thinks that you’re going to love this script. You individually are going to love this script and you should check it out.”

And the reality is, and you guys know this, there are not a lot of great screenplays out there. The vast majority of the screenplays that are submitted to our site are not going to get discovered and create screenwriting careers that last a lifetime. But, for the people who have written great scripts, this is a fast track to getting it to the people that love it. And it is a far more efficient way I think than anything that currently exists to match those great scripts with people who can make them.

And hopefully put the writers in a situation where people are competing for their services and that people aren’t just taking the first option and the first phone call they get.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, a question about the evaluation. You have professional readers who are reading these scripts. $50 seems like a really low amount of money, not to write a check for $50, but $50 isn’t a lot of money to get paid to read a script, and they’re not making all that $50. So, what is that book report like? It’s not really coverage…

**Franklin:** It’s not coverage. And I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re able to pay far lower than what would be expected to pay for coverage. Because the vast majority — look, the reading of the script is not really what you’re paying for when you’re paying for coverage. You’re paying for the hour or two of sitting down and writing three, four pages of notes that require not only writing well but sort of giving intelligent, critical assessments of someone’s work.

Our evaluation includes an overall rating of 1 to 10. A rating of 1 of 10 along five different metrics, including dialogue, structure, setting, premise. And then three short answers to questions about the script’s greatest strengths, weaknesses, and commercial viability. And that’s I think why we’re able to do that is because ultimately for our readers we’re asking them for an hour and a half, at most two hours of their time instead of the five and six hours.

And I actually think we’re probably paying more per hour to our readers than a lot of coverage services are.

**John:** Okay. A question about sort of… — I can see how it makes sense for an aspiring writer. I can see how it makes sense for a development executive. Does it make sense for a writer who is actually working to have their scripts anywhere near this site?

**Franklin:** I think it can. I’ll admit that it remains to be seen exactly how it does. And one of the things I’m very excited about is being able to make available a lot of the quantitative data around how people are using the site, once the gears begin turning and sort of moving smoothly.

I think that there does exist that potential. I think there is a sort of site that exists alongside this and is part of it that basically the script titles and authors of professional scripts are also rated by these development executives and sort of moved through a real time Black List and recommendation engine as well. And I’ve already spoken with a number of development executives who sort of return to it daily to find out if there is a script that they didn’t know about that they need to know about.

It functions essentially exactly the same way as the annual Black List does, except instead of once a year in December everybody being able to find out the scripts that may not have known about, they’re able to say in the middle of May, “What are the most liked comedies that don’t have a director but do have a producer attached?” and that list is auto-generated. Or, “Which comedies without a director am I likely to like based on my tastes?” And then they can call the agent and get a copy of it.

And our industry professional membership is limited to those people who basically would have access to make those phone calls to those representatives or producers so they can get a copy of the script. We’ve had over 5,000 people apply for membership and have accepted less than 1,200.

**Craig:** I mean, look, we don’t endorse anything; that’s not our gig. But I do spend a lot of time attacking things.

**Franklin:** So, the not-attack I’m very proud of.

**Craig:** I’m going to give this a not-attack, which is pretty great. It’s my highest award.

**Franklin:** And it is immensely appreciated.

**Craig:** No, no. I think that what I like is that ultimately for — that you are providing access, true access. The thing that drives me the craziest about these services is that they fake access. Like when you go to the LA Convention Center and you meet people. None of those people can do anything for you except take your money. So, this is legitimate access. And, also, you guys don’t make a dime in their success.

**Franklin:** No, not at all.

**Craig:** You make money, you make your $25 a month. You make your $50 per evaluation.

**Franklin:** That’s right.

**Craig:** If they sell the script for $1 million you get zero of that $1 million. And that’s a really important firewall, because all of these pitch festivals and things that are actually — they’ve got their hand in one pocket, they’re reaching into that other pocket if you should actually do something. So, I think — I give this my highest rating of I-don’t-attack-it.

**Franklin:** But we do ask one thing in return is that if they find that success that they email us and let us know so we can join in that celebration.

**Craig:** I think they can do that.

**John:** They can do that.

Franklin, thank you so much for doing this.

**Franklin:** Thank you so much for having me.

**Craig:** Thank you, Franklin.

**John:** Thank you for coming here.

Just like all of our other podcasts, there will be show notes for this one at johnaugust.com/podcast. So, we’ll have a link to Franklin’s site. We’ll have a link to some good follow up questions that Franklin answered after the thing was announced. I did really respect that he took the time to sort of figure out, “These are the things people keep asking and I’m going to answer them in detail.” So, thank you very much for doing that.

And we have our first screenwriter guest. I’m so excited.

**Craig:** You don’t seem excited. [laughs]

**John:** I’m excited. I’m excited.

**Craig:** Did you just simulate excitement?

**John:** I’m excited because I know who she is. It’s a neighbor. These are good things.

So, we’d always talked about having guests. Like even from the very first episodes we were like, “Oh, we could have a guest on,” because we thought we wouldn’t have enough to talk about.

**Craig:** Well, but the truth is the two of us are so weird and we’re very… — You know, I was making fun of John for being so consistent about the way he starts every podcast, but I’m the same way. I think we’re both very happy just doing it the way we do it. And then I think somewhere around Episode 20 the thought of change started to freak me out. [laughs]

So, but this is great, because we’re in a different place. So, it doesn’t matter. It’s a road game.

**John:** New rules.

**Craig:** We can do anything, man.

**John:** Quite early on when the idea of coming to the Austin Film Festival and maybe doing the first live Scriptnotes, we were like, “Well who would be a great guest to have up on stage with us?” and we both though of…

**Craig:** Derek Haas.

**John:** Derek Haas.

**Craig:** But he was not available. So then…

**John:** [laughs] So, our second choice was this writer who worked on — who wrote The Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses, Morning Glory, a movie that I really dug which not a lot of people saw, but I really liked it a lot. And I Don’t Know How She Does it. And We Bought a Zoo. She wrote all these movies, and she’s kind of awesome, and she’s a neighbor. And she’s the only woman who I think really intimidates Craig consistently.

**Craig:** Dude, like you have no idea. Scares me to death.

**John:** So, if you could all welcome Aline Brosh McKenna.

[Applause]

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Hi guys!

**John:** Hello! And welcome.

**Aline:** How are you?

**Craig:** See? Scary.

**Aline:** Lovely to see you. Terrifying.

**John:** A terrifying person.

**Craig:** Very.

**John:** How is Austin so far for you?

**Aline:** Oh, it’s been great. I’ve really been having a good time.

**John:** Is this your first?

**Aline:** I came here five years ago. And this is the first time I’ve been back since then. And it has been fun; I love being here. It’s great.

**Craig:** Oh, I feel like you’re going to hit me. I really do.

**Aline:** Except that Craig’s here!

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. See?

**John:** All good except for that. This is my fourth time at the Austin Film Festival and I really enjoy it. The weird thing is I’m much more recognized now and that is — it’s lovely. And everyone is super, super nice, and so thank you; you can please feel free to say hello. But, it’s a little exhausting.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** I hosted a party the first night and first off I had to say, I was supposed to welcome everybody to it, but it was so loud that I was like standing at the bar and I had a microphone, and everybody could see that I was up there and had a microphone but couldn’t hear me.

**Craig:** Were you there? It was awesome.

**Aline:** It was.

**Craig:** This is what it sounded like at first, because, so you stood up there, because I was in the back, so I had a great view of this. And you had a microphone. And you were going — and then you realized nobody could hear you, so then you went [muffled indecipherable speaking]. And then nobody could hear that, either. So, then you realized, okay, well that’s not going to work, so I’m going to pull back a little bit. And then you just went back to — [audience laughs]. And you seemed happy with that actually.

**Aline:** John, the reason people are coming over to you is not the writing fame, it’s just sheer sex appeal. That’s it.

**John:** There’s that, too. Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re you talking to me?

**John:** Craig, do people recognize you here that much?

**Craig:** Yeah, people do. You know, they talk this year more about the podcast than anything else, which is very cool. You know, if I do a panel in the morning then they’ll come and they’ll say, “Hey, bad job,” or whatever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, no, people are listening to the podcast and so they say that a lot. They come up to me and say, “Cool podcast, man,” which is nice. I like that.

**John:** And, Aline, part of the reason why we wanted you on the show is because you actually listen to the podcast.

**Aline:** I really wanted to come on and talk about things that are [pause] interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** You’ve noticed that, right?

**Aline:** Interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah. Interesting.

**Aline:** What is that? What regional diction is giving you interesting?

**John:** Interesting. The way I leave out the T? Yeah, interesting.

**Aline:** No, I love it. I love the podcast. I love the Cool Thing. That’s what I listen to when I work out. Hmm, embarrassing.

**John:** Nice. So, today I thought we might talk a little bit about — a little crafty in the sense of I think I have noticed starting this summer I described some movies that I saw that I really liked, but I didn’t love, and I described them as “a stack of scenes.” And as I was thinking back to these movies, I liked a lot of stuff that happened in them, and I liked the things that I could sort of tell you, the things that happened, but I didn’t really feel like they held together as movies. And I want to talk about the difference between good stuff in a movie and a movie that holds together well.

And I thought you were a good choice for this because I look at the movies you do, and I was describing them yesterday as “want-coms.” People want to say they’re romantic comedies, but they’re not really romantic comedies. It’s usually a character who is very proficient who wants — is aiming for something. In Morning Glory, she wants to run this show, and there is romantic stuff that happens, but it’s really about her journey there. Same with Devil Wears Prada.

So, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that makes a movie story hold together.

**Aline:** Am I allowed to use profanity on this show?

**John:** Uh, yeah, you can use some profanity.

**Craig:** [Sighs]

**John:** We’re going to lose our little Clean rating in iTunes, but that’s okay.

**Aline:** Here it goes…

**Craig:** Just remember that Jesus is listening to you.

**Aline:** [laughs] I’ll give you the profane and then I’ll give you the airline version.

**Craig:** Cool.

**Aline:** My term for movies like that is Shit Happens movies. But for airplane purposes you could call them Crap Happens movies.

You want all your scenes to have a “Because” between them and not an “And Then” between them. And it’s something that you learn and get better at which is having everything cause everything, and everything build on everything. But I have noticed, particularly in the action genre, it seems like things have gotten very episodic. And there’s been episodic movies — have been around for a long time.

I don’t do it primarily because I can’t do it well. I can’t keep myself… — When you’re writing a script you don’t want to feel like these things could be in any order. And if you can, then that’s a problem. Another way to think about it is what you’re constructing is a story which should be as entertaining a story as you would tell to someone at drinks. It should be, “And then this happened, and then this, and then this,” and it has distinct causality, and if you told it in a different way it wouldn’t be entertaining. And that’s something to remind yourself of: Can you put the script down, can you look away from Final Draft and turn to someone and say, “This is the story of the movie.” And it’s particularly challenging in the second act.

And that’s what I find is a lot of movies have a ramp up, and they have some sense of where they want to go, and then in the middle you get scene salad.

**John:** Yes. And so I don’t want to slam on any particular movies, but I want to offer some concrete examples. So, this is not to slam on these movies or these screenwriters, but these are the movies I said a stack of scenes about.

The Master, which is really well made, but a few days later as I was thinking back to The Master I couldn’t tell you what order most of those scenes happened. And I felt like you could have rearranged a lot of that stuff in that movie and it would have been largely the same movie. There’s a sequence where Joaquin Phoenix is walking from the wall to the window, from the wall to the window. And it’s a really interesting sequence but it didn’t actually end up changing — you could have moved it to other places in the movie; it wouldn’t have changed the nature of the movie.

Prometheus is another movie where a bunch of stuff happens, but it could have happened in a lot different order. And I really like your “because” versus “and then.” It was a lot of “and thens,” “and thens,” and it was like every moment I was like, “Well, what is an interesting thing that could happen now?” It’s like, “That is an interesting thing that could happen but it didn’t change the nature of the movie. There wasn’t a ‘because’ stuck in there.”

**Craig:** You know, my thing about this, because if you just look at a plot it is “and then, and then, and then,” and hopefully there is a causality between those two that creates the “because” or “and so.” But, let’s say you’re writing a road trip or any kind of movie where it seems like the flow of the plot requires episodes. Then really the thing that connects these things together and makes them a story is theme and the characters.

**Aline:** And character.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, theme and characters. So, you can have, “and then, and then” episodes, but if the theme and the characters are evolving through those then I feel like there is some glue. How do you approach that when you’re dealing with that?

**Aline:** That’s a really good way to put it, because a lot of the stuff I’ve written, the plots are not exactly highly propulsive. And so you have to find propulsion, and it’s almost always in, “Okay, this character starts here and what don’t they know? What do they think they want but they don’t know they want this other thing? What is the trajectory of the goal they think they’re heading towards but the actual goal they should be heading towards — what is the tension between those two things?” And that is really what’s providing you your arc.

You know, the story stuff needs to be… — And in some ways what’s interesting is you can take the same plot elements, and it might be a good exercise, you can take the same plot elements of story and rearrange them, as long as you’re repurposing them character or theme wise. Do you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** Like you could say, “Craig and I had breakfast, and played Scrabble.” But if it’s like, “And that’s when I realized he was a serial killer,” where you place those revelations…

**Craig:** It’s a weird place to finally say it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** [laughs] Where you place those revelations, where you place the character on their journey in the events. And what I’ve noticed — And I can’t speak to it for The Master, because I feel like The Master is doing something else, and I feel like part of what The Master was doing was addressing this issue of do people change? do they progress? So, I feel like it’s slightly different. But — I have noticed that there are movies where they have now decided that it’s cool to dispense with setting up a character at all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** So, things just start and you’re in motion, which I appreciate. You know, I like a movie where you get into the story pretty quickly. But sometimes I don’t know anything about the character. I don’t care. I’m not invested. I don’t understand where they’re starting psychologically. And so it is hard for me — I just feel like I didn’t get on the train. So, I’m not on the train; I’m just watching the train go by.

**John:** Yeah. The most recent Bourne movie is another movie I described as a stack of scenes in that each set piece is really lovely, but I felt like I was watching a video game that sort of like moves to the next section. And all the stuff that happens within that little section is like, “Oh, that’s all smartly done and really good. But I didn’t know who those characters were beforehand.” I couldn’t track that anything had progressed or anything had changed because I didn’t know where we really started.

**Aline:** Do you think video games have a lot to do with that?

**John:** I think there’s an aspect of it.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, the truth is, because I do play a lot of video games, and frankly it seems like they are more invested in narrative and setup now than some of the movies. The really good ones at least are getting very cinematic and very narrative and they seem actually really obsessed with character.

I mean, obviously they play out in very different ways. The one thing that video games do that I don’t like, and I will see in movies, is they create segments that are entirely about the cleverness of the action, which I understand because it’s a video game and you need to play the game. But it does seem to me like sometimes screenwriters forget that clever is not good.

You may have a really cool idea for a scene in the flow of your plot, but frankly the only value of any scene, for me at least, even in action movies, is: What does it mean for the character? And what does it mean for the theme? I think one of the reasons we love Die Hard is because we’re watching a guy suffer. And each time he suffers he seems to be enlightened from the suffering. And we don’t like Commando as much because Arnold Schwarzenegger just seems to just get on a plane, shoot, get on a plane, shoot, get on a chopper, shoot.

So, I like to think about these things, like what the episode should be really should be the test for what the character needs at that moment to then move forward.

**Aline:** Right. I want to bring up something else which is a little slightly off-topic but I think interesting is: I think television is a huge part of this. And I think we consume way more television at this point than movies; I think that’s correct. But, anyway, we’re all consuming tons of television. And one thing I think is interesting is there is a trend now, a lot of feature writers are going into television, and a lot of people do both. But I have this belief that they’re fundamentally different types of storytelling.

I think TV and film are completely different. There are many people who have equal mastery. But I feel like I have spent so much of my career training myself to write something that could only have happened this one time. It has to be — it’s a cumulative thing. This is a singular thing that happened to this character and the stakes are as high as possible.

So, I have not trained myself to tell stories that can generate themselves over at the end. And some people do that extremely well, and a great television series often is something that can kick out iterations of itself. Now, some TV series it seems to me, like Mad Men seems to me to be a 100-minute long movie. And that’s an amazing skill to do, because he doesn’t repeat, he progresses. But I think that a traditional, in particular a procedural or a sitcom, is something that needs to be able to be repeated. And I think that’s a huge part of how people process stories now.

**John:** You’re really talking about: what is the engine? And so in television there is an engine for the self-contained one hour. There’s an engine for the 30-minute sitcom. And there’s also this sort of new engine for this sort of mega novel series, like the way that Lost is: every episode has its closure but there’s a bigger ongoing cycle.

And I feel like my frustration with some of these movies recently is I felt like they haven’t had good movie engines to them. And in the movie engine, like natural consequence, characters trying to go through things. Even simple things like, “Tell me where the characters think they’re trying to get to,” which I think is — your movies point to — your characters clearly state their goals in terms of what they’re trying to do. And they may not reach those goals, the goals may change, but you know what the character is trying to do over the course of this movie. And you are invested in them because you want to see them — are they going to make that thing?

You talk about, it’s a race; it’s like we’re a very specific kind of runner. We’re not a sprinter. We’re not a season-long marathoner, but we run like a 10K. And some of these movies aren’t running their 10Ks the way you kind of hope that they could.

**Craig:** Well, the other thing, and this is something for you guys to keep in mind when you’re writing, is that all the pressure to reduce will be on the first act. I love first acts. I’m obsessed with them. I love setting characters. My favorite pages are the first ten pages. I care about them more than anything. And not in the script stage — I think in the script stage I think they all really appreciate it. It’s when they’re making the movie, or when they’re cutting the movie and they’re like, “Can we just get into this faster?” That’s their thing.

Once they’ve read it once — Sorry Franklin, I keep saying “they,” but it’s “they” — once they’ve read it once they forgot that they read it and so when they read it a second time they’re like, “Eh, oh yeah,” so they just skip past it because they’ve read it. They don’t realize that no one else has read it. The audience hasn’t read it yet. They’re only going to read it when they see the movie. But all the pressure then becomes like, “Well, I’m bored; I’m sitting here. I just watching you guys set up. It’s boring, it’s boring, it’s boring. Let’s just go, let’s just go, let’s just go.”

So, when you’re writing, because setup is everything, be tight. Be compact. Those first ten are precious. And when we read the first three pages, sometimes the first three pages seem so, I don’t know, just…

**Aline:** Purposeless.

**Craig:** And really just spendy. They’re spending their pages.

**Aline:** Right. And it’s such precious real estate.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** I’m going to stand up and argue for the last ten pages of a script, too, which is another challenge. You get to the end of some of these movies and it’s like, “Well, we got there? Was that a rewarding place for us to get? I trusted you with two hours of my time and I thought we would get to a more interesting, better place than that.” And the movies that I love tend to have great beginnings, but they tend to have great endings, like you really got to someplace really meaningful.

**Aline:** One screenplay I would recommend, and I think it’s pretty easily available online, is the True Grit screenplay, which is a clinic on both of those things. I mean, they set up the tone, the story, they get you into the magic of that movie instantly, and then they have this beautiful epilogue/coda ending. And it’s also for people to read, it’s just as a reading experience. They don’t use — have you ever read it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** There are no slug lines.

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

**Aline:** It’s beautiful.

**Craig:** Don’t do that, by the way. But I do like it.

**Aline:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** The Coen brothers can do that. The other ones don’t do that.

**Craig:** When you’ve made like 20 films, and you’re a genius, and you’re writing for your brother, then you can do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** But in terms of getting into, there are some scripts that are — it’s very deft if you can do that, get in, and have it feel purposeful because there’s a lot of hitting an alarm clock in the beginning of scripts. You know, there’s a lot of, “They start their day, they take a shower.” You know, generally there are a lot of tropes in the beginning. And you want to find some way to start that the audience thinks, “Oh, this is — wow, what’s happening here?”

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I mean, you know, it’s interesting, because it is the first ten and the last ten that I always think about. When you start screenplays — I don’t know if you’re like me — I need to know the beginning, and I need to know the end. I need to know the theme. I need to know why this story for that character is interesting. Do you always know the beginning, and the end, and the middle?

**Aline:** I always know the end. I always know the end. Because the end, I mean, the end is why you’re there in a lot of ways. The end is what you’re doing.

I love writing first acts. And they usually come very quickly because this is sort of the — they’re really fun, I think, to write. And if you’re set up properly the third, though it might not be fun, should be pretty quick.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** I think second acts are the bear. And I think second acts, you know, separate the men from the boys. And I feel like it was Ted Elliott…

**Craig:** Sexist.

**Aline:** Yes. The boys from the men, or the Boyz II Men.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Oh!

**Aline:** I think it was Ted Elliott who said the second act is the movie you wanted to write. It’s the thing that people came to see. It’s what is on the poster. You know, if you’re going to see ET it’s the part where there is an ET and they’re interacting. But it is that thing of it is hard in the second act not to stack scenes in exactly that way you’re talking about.

And I think what happens is in a pitching, in a development process you will find when you pitch a movie, if you’re pitching for 12 minutes you pitch the first act for six minutes. And you pitch the setup, and you know the setup, and you really worked on it. And so you sit down and write the script, and you bust out the first act, and you feel awesome, and you feel like a regular person. And then you get to the second act and there are parts where you go, “We never talked about this!”

**John:** The vast wasteland in the middle of the movie.

**Aline:** It’s a lot of real estate. And you have to construct it. And so I actually try and blow through the first act quickly so that I can focus on that stuff. But I always know, and sometimes it shifts, but I have to know where I want the character to end up at the end and what sort of ending I have in mind, even if you end up joojing the particles.

**Craig:** Joojing.

**Aline:** Jooj.

**John:** I will write the last ten pages really early on in the process. I will tend to write the first act, then write the last ten pages, and then sort of paint in towards the middle. Partly it’s just a work process. Those last bits of things you’re going to write you’re always going to have to sort of rush to get done I find. I’m always sort of behind on a deadline. And I’d rather be painting towards the middle of the room rather than sort of painting towards the edge. I don’t want those ten pages to feel rushed.

If I’m going to rush I want to rush that —

**Craig:** Can you do that? I can’t do that.

**Aline:** No, I can’t do that. I think of it more like you’re weaving something, and you weave, weave, weave, and you know kind of roughly where you’re heading in the second act, but you don’t really know what you need for — I mean, in the third act — but you don’t really know what you need. And if you’ve constructed the carpet properly you’ll have a lot of cool threads. And what I enjoy about the third act is, like, “Oh, you can pay off this, and pay off that.” And it only works if you’ve woven everything into the second act.

**Craig:** It’s a devastating critique of your entire career.

**John:** Yes, thank you very much.

**Aline:** I do a weird thing which is I sketch the whole story in a very, very rough, unreadable…

**Craig:** I do that, too.

**Aline:** I sketch the whole thing.

**Craig:** I do that on a piece of paper. And I make a line, and I sketch it.

**Aline:** No, I mean, oh, I mean I go through…

**John:** Craig, you’re wrong.

**Craig:** I sketch it.

**Aline:** [laughs] No, I go through and barf out a whole pass that’s legible.

**Craig:** Oh, you do that thing?

**Aline:** I am that thing. I build a skeleton. Because what I have found, early on in my career I would write that first act and then I would polish it, and perfect it, and hang little Christmas ornaments on it. And then it would be like, “Oh! I’ve got all this other stuff I got to do.” And you wouldn’t know, “Hey, the first act needs to be 10 pages shorter!” until you’ve done all this other stuff.

So, for me, I do a skeleton of the entire screenplay and then I go back and I put in the mosaics.

**John:** I will tend to do my last ten pages. I know that I’ll have to change some stuff in the last ten pages because I’ll discover other things along the way, but I tend to do that, filling in the skeleton sort of as part of my process. If I’m writing a scene and I’m basically done for the day, I’ll slug line the next seven things that happen so I can work on those things next, so I actually have —

**Aline:** That’s super smart. Because you want to have something to open up the next day.

**Craig:** I really note card it out. I always know what I’m doing the next day, you know. And my day — we work so differently, so my thing is I go, whatever I wrote for that day, the next day I start by going backwards and rewriting it. Because I just feel like sleeping has helped me. And also it just gives me a running start into the work of today.

**Aline:** But don’t you sometimes end up spending 80% of your time on the rewriting part?

**Craig:** You know, here’s the deal: I don’t work that much. There’s like jobs where people are on the highway working for ten hours. If I write for three hours it’s a pretty good day. So, if I spend two hours polishing and then one hour in a kind of burst of inspiration that that got me running into, you know, it’s hard to beat myself up for it. “Oh my god, I might have to work a fourth hour today!”

So I can’t — I’m okay with that. And my whole thing about the second act is really just to look at the character and their relation to the central arc or the theme. And I have a basic sketch out. And then I really sit — I just feel like even though I deviate from the note cards as I go, I never feel lost. I never hit a moment of despair. I get anxious, you know, I get worried. I stop and I go, “Okay, I’ve got a note card problem here.” But I’m never full of despair.

**Aline:** But for me the outline/note card brain is different from the writing brain. So, the outline/note — that’s why I don’t really love doing extensive, extensive outlines with people, particularly before. I will do a verbal outline of the whole thing that last about 15 minutes where I can pitch you through the whole story. But I find that they’re not very good guides of what it feels like to be in the movie.

And so I feel like it’s very theoretical information and often I’ll have in an outline or a note card, and then I’ll be in the scene and be like, “Oh, nobody wants to do — none of the characters want to do this thing that’s on this card.”

**Craig:** That, you know what I do, because you’re right — and so I have actually two rows of notes. More note cards is the solution. So, I have my this is what happens note card, but next to that note card, in a different colored note card…

**John:** Wow.

**Aline:** Wow. See, serial killer. I said that.

**Craig:** Okay. What I do — well, first I tell the people in my basement to shut up.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m working! And then — and then — next to the what happens note card is a why, a why it happens note card. Because I feel like that is important. If I know why things are happening, how their relationship is changing, what it means, what they notice, then frankly the what can change to 100 different things. But really what I’m outlining is my intention as opposed to plot.

And when I outline my intention then I feel like the second act isn’t so scary anymore.

**Aline:** I like that.

**Craig:** Well thank you. You’re free to go.

**John:** [laughs] No, you’re actually free to stay. We are going to open up for some questions. And so if you have a question that you wanted to ask us…

**Aline:** Wow. The crowd has like doubled since we got here.

**Craig:** I know. It’s like The Birds.

**Aline:** There’s at 17 or 18 people here now.

**John:** Let us take, the jacket right here. Question?

**Male Audience Member:** What about openings? Can you talk about character introductions and really crafting the first time the audience meets our protagonist?

**John:** So, I’m going to repeat this just in case it didn’t get recorded well. The question is about introducing characters and how to handle that the first time we meet somebody.

**Craig:** Didn’t we do a podcast on that?

**John:** We did talk about it, but we could talk about how Aline does it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The first time you meet a character in one of your scripts, how many words do you give them?

**Aline:** I don’t do a lot, I don’t do a ton, because I feel like you’re going to want to learn from behavior. And you want to have them behaving right off the bat in some way that tells — you want them to do something that tells the audience everything you need to know about the character. But I really do, I was very influenced by the William Goldman book. And so I really do do that thing where picking out a detail about a character the way you would say to someone, sort of like if you met someone at a party and you were going to describe them to your friend, you would say, “Oh, he’s the guy who… He’s the type of person who… She’s the kind of person who would say this/wear this/be friends with this/live here.”

You’re looking for the salient detail. What I would avoid is things which are — the character descriptions should be as purposeful as your story. So, I would not include a lot of extraneous stuff, descriptions about clothing, or hair, or whatever unless it really is…

**Craig:** No hair.

**Aline:** Unless it is germane to the story.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m not a big fan of these character introductions where you tell me stuff that I haven’t seen in the movie yet. I hate that. Yeah, I’m getting there. You know, “When Jim walks in the room he’s had a life of woe, but he’s about to meet…”

**Aline:** “He thinks of his mother.”

**Craig:** All I really try and do in a character introduction really is convey immediately non-verbally or sub-textually, “What is this character’s strength and what is their problem, the problem that they’re not aware of yet?” I just want to know what that is. I want to know what they’re good at and I want to know what they’re bad at.

And by “bad at” I mean just that they’re maybe misaligned, maybe priority out of whack, something tiny. But I think that’s ultimately what we hook into on characters is their strengths and their weaknesses, what they want will emerge naturally from the circumstances of the plot, but I want to know why they’re going to have a problem getting it. I want to know why they don’t already have it. But I want to see what is good and unique about them, because I’m with them, you know.

**John:** I agree very much with what they’ve said. The only thing I’ll add is use character introductions, use the extra sentence you might give to a significant character’s introduction as a way of distinguishing between the important characters and the less important characters. So, if it’s your hero, feel free giving an extra sentence or two to sort of setup, “This is your hero — yes, reader, pay attention — this really is your main person.”

Don’t do that for the person who is only going to be in the one scene, or the unimportant person, because it will throw the reader off and make them think this character is much more important than they really are. And so that’s why I don’t tend to give really minor characters individual names. They might be Agitated Guy versus giving him a name. Because the minute we see a name we think, “Oh, that’s an important person I need to keep track of.” And it sort of goes in your little mental checklist, like, “What happened to that guy who had the name?” So do that.

Another question from the audience. Here.

**Male Audience Member:** How do you guys feel about interactive storytelling, like the YouTube videos that allow the audience to make decisions that impact story. Have you seen it done well?

**John:** So, the question is about interactive storytelling that YouTube videos have, the ones where you can click and sort of fork through different paths. Have you guys done those at all?

**Craig:** No, I hate it. I mean, to me, that’s a game. I mean, I remember reading those books when I was a kid, Choose Your Own Adventure, and they’re a goof. But the point is, that’s not why people watch things. That’s not why people read things. They don’t want to play Choose Your Own Adventure beyond just a party game. They want a voice to carry them through a story. We love narrative.

That’s why the Bible continues to — it’s not Choose Your Own Bible. People actually want a narrative. And I’m not a big Bible fan, but the Bible does have impressive sales numbers.

No, I mean, I just don’t think — people will occasionally say, “Well, it’s the new thing, that’s where it’s going because people want to be involved.” They don’t. Going to the movies, watching TV, the engagement that we have is one in which we are accepting an artist’s intention or rejecting it, but not participating in it.

**Aline:** But it’s also telling you about, how a story turns out is your education about the world. It’s how we get information about what could happen, should happen, does happen. So, if you’re saying, you know, “this could happen, or that could happen,” to me it undermines the fundamental — I was never interested in those books, and it always seemed like a giant copout for me that you’re not giving anyone any information about your narrative. So, taste wise it’s not for me.

**Craig:** And it could only be about plot. Because what are you suggesting, that this character from the beginning somehow should live or should die, or should get married, or should have the kid, or shouldn’t? Oh, I guess it could be anything, so it doesn’t matter.

**John:** So, a little counter argument here. I would say…

**Craig:** Ugh.

**Aline:** No.

**John:** I’m saying in the video game world — and Craig, you play Skyrim.

**Craig:** I do, yes.

**Aline:** Wrong.

**John:** So, I would say there’s a kind of cinematic storytelling that’s happening mostly in video games that is very much: You’re choosing your path, but you really are the character. And that’s the thing that is happening in video games where the lead character is the person who’s playing it.

And so my friend Jordan Mechner often talks about, “You have to make sure that the story moments are playable,” that it’s not like you’re watching a cut scene where that cool thing happened, where you made that cool thing happen. And that’s an incredibly complicated, different, new kind of world to move into, that’s not sort of what we do. But the sense that you have changed the world in this way and because of what you did everything is now different is challenging.

**Aline:** One of the things that’s really interesting about writing a screenplay is you’re balancing, it has to feel completely ineluctable, but surprising.

**Craig:** That’s a great word.

**John:** First time it’s ever been used on this podcast.

**Aline:** That is what you’re doing. It has to be like it was destined to be this way and yet I was surprised that it happened that way. That is your job number one. Because a lot scripts you read that are not successful, that are proficient, tell you a story in a way that just seems like it could have been ordered in any way, or they tell you something where it does seem relatively organic but it doesn’t happen in a surprising way. Those are the two — a really satisfying movie satisfies those two things.

So, I think we’re the wrong people to ask because we’ve sort of dedicated our lives to making a story seem ineluctable, and that the characters don’t have choices.

**Craig:** Good stories can only be that way. Even video games… — Look, I played Skyrim a lot. The truth is, those moments are playable, but those are the moments you get. You don’t get other moments. You need to follow their story. It must end a certain way or you keep dying and you have to restart. You know what I mean? They won’t let you off those rails.

What video games do, and I actually hate it, is they will build in these silly choices like, “Well, if you were chaotic then you’ll get this cut scene ending, and if you were cool you’ll get this one.” It’s dumb. There’s really one ending. You can tell which one the ending is. Even then you can tell, “Well this was the ending they wanted. This is — ” Like I’m play Dishonored right now, and you have choice: As you go through you can be stealthy and just choke people out and let them sleep, or you can kill them. And if you kill them…

**John:** I think Craig kills people.

**Craig:** Wrong.

**John:** Ah!

**Craig:** Because I’m escaping from my normal life of killing. So, in the video game I just choke them out. Because I can tell the game wants me to. I can tell that that is the narrative, that’s the right one. This is the whole point — intention and purpose, they are the bedrock foundation of good storytelling and narrative. Without it, shh. I just made that up. It’s my version of ineluctable.

**John:** Another question please. Over here.

**Male Audience Member:** If we have a lot of ideas about sound design… [Inaudible].

**John:** So, a question about writing and sound design and sound in movies. And music.

**Craig:** Put it in. I mean, look, don’t get annoying. You don’t want to have a cue for every scene, because that can be annoying, unless your movie is about music and then in which case, okay.

You’re not stepping on anybody’s toes. By the time it gets to post-production your toes have been lopped off, chopped, fed back to you anyway. Everybody is going to have ideas. Music costs money; that’s obviously one of the factors. The director is going to…

**Aline:** I’m going to counter that just a little bit, which is I would only do it if it is something that your reader is going to recognize and understand the purpose of. Because I have a pet peeve about reading scripts where it’s like, you know, “This jangly song by obscure band,” and it means a lot to the writer and it means nothing to the audience. And I don’t want to go to iTunes.

So, if there’s a reason that you want to put in something, and it’s super specific. And I understand clearly it’s…it has to be what?

**Craig:** It’s got to be Free Bird.

**Aline:** If it’s so motivated by the story, and it’s so integrated in the story, and I’ve certainly seen it done well, but it starts to feel like non-sequiturs that are done to either demonstrate your groovy taste or because you’re insecure about your through line.

If you can take it out and it doesn’t make a difference in your story, then don’t do it. But if the audience is going to understand you’re using Brown Sugar here because you’re trying to evoke something specific and maybe you’re quoting a lyric, then by all means do it.

I think — if there’s one thing I could say that’s my recent, more recent, obsession is: Put less stuff in there. Just put less stuff in there. You probably have 20% too much stuff. And I notice when I first write, there’s just too much information. You want to be as — and I’m not saying write at a minimal style, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you want as much information as is necessary to move your story where you need it to go. And sometimes stuff like your cool Snow Patrol song is just cluttering. That’s just my opinion.

**Craig:** I mean, he doesn’t seem like that kind of guy.

**Aline:** Snow Patrol?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The thing I’ll say is: Remember that a screenplay is only what you can see and what you can hear. And so most of what’s going on in a screenplay is the stuff you see, it’s the scene description, and it’s the dialogue, it’s the stuff that you’re going to hear.

If there is something really important that we need to hear that’s not dialogue, you can tell us, and that’s great. But I will very rarely use a specific song, but I might say, “Music swells as we transition to this.” It can also help make it clear to the reader like, “This is a sequence that is going to take us through…”

**Aline:** Oh, definitely. Didn’t you just write a script where there was a “Whomp” or something?

**John:** Yeah. “Woooooooom.” Yeah. Where, “There’s a reason why I’m calling this out, that there’s a song here is because these next couple scenes are one big sequence that all has to hold together.” So, think about these next things with a sound cue under it that’s uniting all those things.

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what I do, too.

**John:** Cool. Another questions. Right here.

**Female Audience Member:** I’m penning a novel version of one of my scripts. And over the last few days of the festival [inaudible]. How to attract interest in your screenplay by roundabout means, including a blog, or a website [inaudible]?

**John:** Cool. So, recapping the question: She is taking her screenplay and turning it into a novel, and what do we think about this sort of reverse engineering to create underlined material?

**Craig:** I mean, you know, look: If it’s a bad script you will successful reverse engineer it into a bad novel.

**Female Audience Member:** That’s not the case.

**Craig:** Oh! Then I have great news. Great news for you! You don’t have to turn it into a novel! It’s a great script! I mean, look, there are some people who — I think on some level there’s some specific material where you think, “Well, if they read it as a book they might like it more as a screenplay.” But, you know, the problem with access, and publishing has become a world of complete open access now where anyone can have a book on Amazon. You just self publish it and voila. Now anyone can have a book on Amazon, so that’s sort of gone away, too.

The agencies in Hollywood aren’t looking through Amazon to see who got the most hits on self-published. They do not care. Their feeling is…

**Aline:** Unless it’s a phenomenon. Unless it’s one of those phenomena.

**Craig:** Oh, but then that’s, yeah. If a sales number, Fifty Shades of Grey hits, but look at the numbers it had to hit — like mind-boggling — before they went, “Oh, okay, well this book that publishing houses didn’t want, people want.”

I personally think that you’d be better served either revising or improving your screenplay if you feel it’s necessary, or writing another screenplay, or being a novelist. But gaming the system by double writing your thing and seeing if they’d like a book and then, “Oh, look, here’s a screenplay!” seems an inefficient way to proceed through our short, brief, blink-like time on this planet.

**John:** What I will say is, there was for a time, people would do comic books or graphic novels. They’d write the script and then they’d actually make the comic book version of it, and then they’d sell the comic book version. And so some of those things sold. I don’t know of any ones that actually got made. And, so, yes, maybe there’s a chance that something could sell, but really your goal is to get a movie made. And I don’t know if that’s going get you much faster or closer to a movie being made.

**Male Audience Member:** Cowboys & Aliens.

**John:** Cowboys & Aliens, all right.

**Craig:** That’s why they don’t do it anymore. No, I mean, it’s true. Cowboys & Aliens was famously bought because of the title and the cover. And it was an amazing title and cover. Very cool. Man on cowboy and horseback, riding, looking back over an alien ship shooting at him. Cowboys & Aliens. And then, you know, you had to write it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was like, “Oh god, there’s still Cowboys & Aliens. Uh…what do we do?”

I have a friend I know who’s a writer, and he had an idea, and this was about six or seven years ago when this was in vogue, and he and his friend just sort of wrote it up quickly as a thing for a graphic novel, and then they got it set up because — they didn’t even write the graphic novel. And this was sort of happening a lot six or seven years ago. Less now. I think everybody was sort of hip to it. They’re like, you know, “Just write a screenplay for us.” They make so many fewer movies now than they did six or seven years ago that their desire to churn through material, it’s been diminished and…

**John:** The only other counter example that just occurred to me is Derek Haas’s Popcorn Fiction. So, Derek Haas has this great site that he set up and other people are now running that does short stories written by screenwriters basically. And so Derek had a story that he wrote there that someone bought. It hasn’t gotten made, so it’s gotten made, so it’s not a good example.

Eric Heisserer did actually write a short story with the intention, but here’s the crucial distinction is he wrote the short story knowing he would love to make a movie out of it, but he wrote the short story first because that was the thing that he could sell, and then he wrote the script.

**Craig:** The short story essentially is a prose pitch, really. The thing is a novel, that’s a novel.

**John:** That’s a novel. A novel is a lot of work.

**Craig:** That’s a lot of work. It’s lot of work to do all of it and, you know what I mean, you might as well just write five pages of it and see if that. Or, you’re screenplay is already done.

**John:** Yeah, done.

**Craig:** You’re done.

**John:** A question from the audience. In back there, you.

**Male Audience Member:** [Inaudible]

**Craig:** Oh, d’oh! No.

**Male Audience Member:** [Inaudible]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah, well don’t put babies in boxes.

**Aline:** Nobody puts baby in a box.

**Craig:** Nobody puts baby in a box.

**John:** Was that all of your question or was there more to it?

**Craig:** Was your question “Should I have done that?”

**John:** How do I get my baby out of a box?

**Craig:** How do you get your baby out of a box?

**Male Audience Member:** [Inaudible]

**John:** Oh, no, you’re basically asking Craig to take umbrage.

**Craig:** Did I pay you to do this?

**John:** …And you’re going to poke him with a stick.

**Aline:** Before, no, but you know what? I’m going to say this in defense of books, which is this: I think you can read one and I think it doesn’t matter which one it is. I think you could also take a six-week writing class. I think if you don’t know anything, if you’re starting from scratch, you need something that familiarizes you with the basic, it’s a three act… —

I mean, honestly, it’s a three act structure. There’s about ten or fifteen, you know, I guess you could call them rules, but ten or fifteen sort of givens that people have when they’re talking about scripts. I think most of the books, and I would just go with what are the most famous ones, will familiarize you with that. That’s all you need. You do not need to follow them. You just need to be familiar with those concepts.

And, what I always say is the good thing about — the best thing about writing is it’s highly, highly, highly subjective practice. So, anything that you do over, and over, and over again you will get good at. And the more you write the better you will write. So, that’s why I like, in an instance with the screenplay/novel thing, I would just say keep writing screenplays. Keep practicing. You’re going to get better.

I think it is good to be familiar with the basic, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. But read screenplays and you’ll become familiar with them. I mean, look, here’s the deal: Very simple solution. Whatever you did to your script, did you like it before you read the stupid book? Okay. So, throw away the one that’s the stupid one now. Go back to the one you wrote and just think about it. And think about, and show it to people that you care about and who are willing to be honest with you. And ask them for feedback. You cannot get through it but for going through it.

And certainly what you can’t do is impose something artificial on top of it, like a fake structure that a million movies defy anyway. And I will point out, as I’ve pointed out a million times: none of those people — none of them — are as successful as her, or me, or John at doing this. None of them.

Don’t you think that if they knew really the secret they would just write movies?

**Aline:** Yeah. But I still think you can pick up Syd Field and just get the basics.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And there are certainly people who write about writing where writing is not the — he’s doing an analysis. I took a class at NYU with a great teacher who was a screenwriter, but one of the things that he said which has really stuck with me, on the first day he gave us a handout and he said, “You know how to tell stories.” You know, the average person by the time they’re 30 has watched something like 20,000 hours of narrative. I mean, it’s something absurd like that.

We have that in our bones. The problem is that what you know in your instinct and you gut is a great story, it gets confused when people start writing. And I’m not sure why that is, but it is sort of — even somebody who’s a great storyteller at the bar will sit down to write and all of a sudden they start violating everything that they instinctively know is a story.

**Craig:** Because it’s a long story. I mean, honestly, no one sits at a bar and tells a story for two hours.

**Aline:** Yeah. But people don’t sit down and write great 20 minute stories, either. I mean, it’s not like it’s easy to find a short film either.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Aline:** It’s just somehow the process of taking what we intuitively understand is a great yarn, and learning how to craft it…

**John:** Knowing the order in which it needs to go so that it actually makes the most sense, like the first time through it all makes sense, so you can’t sort of stop and restart.

**Craig:** There’s our lady.

**John:** Yeah, so we have five minutes, which is the perfect amount of time for some One Good Things.

**Aline:** Aren’t they One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean…

**John:** One Cool Thing/One Good Thing, we change it up.

**Craig:** No, we’ve never changed it until now.

**John:** So, Aline, if you have a One Cool Thing you can share it with us, or you can do what Craig does, when he does not have an idea, and then by the time I finish talking…

**Aline:** I want to hear what you guys do. I want to wrap it up.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is actually a website that I started and kind of forgot about, but then Stuart actually maintains. So, I have screenwriting.io. And so on johnaugust.com I started that site by answering a lot of questions. People would write in questions — actually, I originally did it as part of IMDb, so like people would write in questions about screenwriting, and I would answer the screenwriting questions, and Penelope Spears would answer the directing questions, and Oliver Stapleton would answer the cinematographer questions.

So, I started answering those questions. I started answering them on my site after awhile, and I just kind of sick of it because they were just kind of the same questions again and again. But people still have those questions, and I wanted people to be able to get those answers. So, I started screenwriting.io, and it’s just those answers. That’s all it is is just answers to common screenwriting questions. And like nothing is too basic to ask, sort of like, the old question used to be like, How many brads do you put in a script?” And people don’t really use brads anymore because they send PDFs. But answering really basic questions.

So, if you have a basic question about screenwriting, or somebody asks you a basic question and you’re like, “I don’t know,” you can send them there. So, it’s just screenwriting.io.

**Craig:** Well, I have a One Cool Thing, and it seems like it’s a little bit of a copout, and usually they are because like he says I think of them while he’s talking. But this is really is a Cool Thing. And my Cool Thing is this, is the Austin Screenwriting Conference, and I’ll tell you why.

**John:** Yay!

**Aline:** Shameless pandering.

**Craig:** Yup. Absolutely. Because get so angry, box baby guy, because I get so angry about these books and stuff, and you know, Syd Field, like learning about three acts and all that is great, but the truth is for you guys you are beset upon by charlatans, and thieves, and frauds. It is amazing; the industry of lies that surround the aspiring screenwriter is just so disturbing. And the titles of the books alone, it’s almost like they betray — they are crafted to be the opposite of what they are. How to Make a Good Script Great. Or, How to Make Your Okay Script Shitty. I mean, that’s really what happens.

Everything about it is wrong. And the only way — I do feel like the only way I’ve ever gotten better over the course of my career is by being friends with and talking to writers who are better than I was, and who have been doing it longer than I had been doing it. And who could look at me and say, “Eh,” because they had authority. And the authority came from experience. That’s why I like this.

If you’re going to spend your money on screenwriting, this is where you should spend it, because you hear from people who actually do it. You will get the actual truth, then stop spending money. So, you go here, so this is your money-spending for screenwriting for the year. Do it, and then don’t spend anymore until next October.

But, I think it’s a great thing that they do here and I want to thank them for doing it. It’s terrific and I’m very happy that you guys come to this. This is worth it, so good for you.

**Aline:** Wow. That should have been the last one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s how I roll.

**John:** He’s the closer.

**Aline:** Yeah, well you close.

**Craig:** “There’s an app I really like…”

**Aline:** Yup. It’s going to be like that. I’m done.

**Craig:** No, no, do it, do it, do it.

**Aline:** No.

**Craig:** Do it. Do it. Do the app.

**Aline:** So, I was going to recommend a blog, which is one of the few blogs that I read. Because I wanted to bring some lady energy to the panel, and because I told Craig months ago that I would be wearing my YSL Tribute Platforms, and I wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to be wearing his as well.

**Craig:** Fluevogs.

**Aline:** Oh, I know, you like those weird shoes. There’s a blogger, and her blog is called The Man Repeller. Has anyone heard of Man Repeller? It’s been around for a couple of years. And her name is Leandra Medine. And the reason that I’m drawing attention to it, it’s a fashion blog, but the reason I’m drawing attention to it on the podcast is she’s a really good writer.

And what I think is interesting is that her basic premise is that to dress for men would be a simple thing. You would wear a tight black dress, and high heels, and men would be happy.

**Craig:** Sounds good. Tell me more.

**Aline:** But what she does is use fashion sort of as a means of expressing herself, and being innovative, and mixing classic things with funky things, and really showing what you can do as a woman, not always worrying about what’s going to showcase your butt.

And I think she does it in a way that’s so funny, and so witty, and she’s very young — I think she’ s in her early 20’s. And she’s very clever. And if you guys have an interest in fashion — she’s just a great female writer. I think she has a really unique voice. And so I know that once Craig and John read that, the next time they do the podcast they’re going to be wearing something super cool and man repelling.

**John:** Done. Guys, thank you so very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, everyone.

**John:** Thank you, Aline.

**Craig:** Thank you, Aline. Thank you, Franklin.

**John:** Thank you, Franklin Leonard.

**Craig:** Thank you, Austin.

**John:** Have a good afternoon.

**Aline:** Thanks everybody.