Search Results for: parenthetical

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/Two-Things-at-the-Same-Time).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 370 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’re going to take a look at simultaneity which is a difficult to spell word for two or more things happening at once. Then we’ll hopefully be applying what we learned to three new entries in the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Ah. Our old friend.

**John:** Yes. It’s back to basics. Just me and Craig. No special guests. It’s a craft episode.

**Craig:** Good. Because you know what? It’s enough already.

**John:** Enough.

**Craig:** Enough. I mean, we are like County Kitchen Buffet, or Perkins Cake and Steak. I don’t even know if that’s really a restaurant anymore. I’m coming up with comfort food restaurants. We provide a certain comfort food experience to people. And while every now and then they might like the fancy breakfast, mostly they just want the Root and Toot and Fresh and Fruit’n or whatever that stupid thing is called.

**John:** I feel like this is more like the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. You know exactly what you’re going to get. That’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a conversation about a topic in craft. You’re going to have some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s going to be some stuff we love, some stuff we think could be better. There will be spelling mistakes.

**Craig:** Probably a little bit of anger somewhere in there.

**John:** Maybe. There could be some anger. We’ll see.

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting about the Quarter Pounder with Cheese? It’s a very good example of getting what you expect, except it’s never a quarter pound. I guess it starts as a quarter pound and then something happens to it. So you actually never really know what it weighs. I’d be interested. Somebody should put them on scales and see.

**John:** I know exactly what a Quarter Pounder with Cheese tastes like, but I’ve not eaten beef in 25 years.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** But I still know what it takes like. I lost a tooth to a Quarter Pounder with Cheese growing up. It was a tooth that was going to fall out. I was losing my baby teeth.

**Craig:** Ah, OK. It wasn’t like the white whale coming to take your leg.

**John:** Not a bit like that.

**Craig:** OK. You’re not on some lifelong revenge crusade against Quarter Pounders.

**John:** What if I were? What is that were really my thing?

**Craig:** It would explain a lot.

**John:** It would explain so, so much. Last week, or the week before we talked about how we’re going to do a special episode that is just random advice for people who are premium subscribers. And so these premium subscribers have been writing in with their questions. So, here’s a little sampler platter of some of the questions we may be answering from our listeners. So, we’ve gotten a bunch in, but these are three ones that I thought were really good. I’ll start with one. Craig, what’s your take on traffic calming, such as narrowing streets or reducing lanes, adding bike lanes, etc. to reduce crashes between drivers and pedestrians or cyclists? How do you feel about that?

**Craig:** I’m pretty sure the robot cars are going to solve that problem for us.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Because the robot cars will just plow over those cyclists and pedestrians because they’re the enemy.

**Craig:** They’ve been taught to prize other robot cars. That’s in the hierarchy of who they should murder. First must protect self, then other robot car, then pets, then property, then human beings.

**John:** I think, I mean, Elon Musk is their first priority, isn’t he? Like must protect Elon Musk.

**Craig:** Like I said, the robots are going to protect themselves first. He’s – what’s going on with Elon? He needs to adjust the dosage there. Something has gone a little wacky.

**John:** The dials got a little bit off there. People who don’t sleep can kind of accomplish a lot, but they also can make some bad choices.

**Craig:** It’ll kill you in the end.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, here’s one. I like this one. One of the questions that we’re going to be answering is “Did John have a roommate in college?”

**John:** I’ve had many roommates in college. And I will talk about them I think on our special episode. None of them are as notable as Craig’s. But actually the last roommate, so by roommate I’ll define like a person I shared a room with for an extended period of time who was not my husband Mike is a famous person. So I can talk about that as well.

**Craig:** OK, well there you go. So we’ll have a little bit of that going on. What else are we going to be talking about in this – this is going to be a great episode by the way.

**John:** So another question is my partner and I have a theory that only one member of a romantic couple should enjoy pickles. Do you eat pickles? Does your significant other eat pickles? Are we speculating uselessly based on anecdotal evidence?

**Craig:** That one is not going to take a long amount of time.

**John:** But I mean yes or no. So we’re happy to answer your pickle-based questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I would also encourage people to write in with questions that are suitable for our vast intellect and enormous reserves of practical wisdom.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say that some people have been writing in with genuine screenwriting questions and it’s like you know what that’s probably not what we’re going to prioritize in this episode because we do that every week.

**Craig:** All the time.

**John:** All the time. So this is going to be a special thing. We’re going to really try to emphasize random advice, not screenwriting advice.

**Craig:** Yeah. John and I are trying to spice things up over here. Don’t bring us the same old thing.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re in a long relationship here. This is going to be sort of our weekend getaway.

**Craig:** Right. Come on. You get what we’re doing? Let us just have fun. Don’t – ugh, these people. What else is going on? You know what? I sense, just because I have a certain telepathy, that there’s some kind of t-shirt news in the offing.

**John:** There are three great t-shirts up. And so you were actually gone for when we announced these t-shirts, but there are three new t-shirts that are available at Cotton Bureau. The first is Colored Revisions, so it is a helpful guide to the order of colored revisions if you’re doing that in your script. Next we have a Highland 2 shirt. And finally we have a Karateka shirt, which we’d actually done years and years ago, but people asked for more of them so we made more of them. So, they are selling nicely. They’re available right now at Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Now, John, do we happen to have a revisions t-shirt that is Europe only?

**John:** Tell me about European revisions. Tell me what is different.

**Craig:** They flop pink and blue. So they go white, pink, blue, not white, blue, pink.

**John:** That’s crazy.

**Craig:** I. Know. Trust me I know. I mean, there’s a couple other weird ones down the line, but the big shocker right off the bat, I mean, because we’re so ingrained here in the US. It’s like after white comes blue. And they’re like, wait, what, blue, what happened to pink? I’m like what do you mean what happened to pink, pink is next. No it’s not.

**John:** I don’t remember that from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but I believe you. So I’m sure that’s just the order they use.

**Craig:** They may have let you do what you do. But because we had so many different countries and it was exclusively European, I mean, the production was entirely housed in Europe. It wasn’t like we were shooting stuff over from – I mean, you guys were at Warner Bros right?

**John:** We were.

**Craig:** So Warner Bros can sort of say we’re in charge. Do it American. But no, not for this.

**John:** That’s a good point. Because Warner Bros insisted that we keep the script formatted for 8.5×11 even though we were on A4 paper.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** There you go.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Last bit of news is that you and I are both doing some stuff in October. I am starting off in October in Frankfurt. So I’m doing an Arlo Finch event at Hugendubel an der Hauptwache at 11:30am.

**Craig:** That’s a great place.

**John:** On October 10th. It is a very cool bookstore based on how the website is set up. So I’m doing a tour of Germany and Scandinavia and so that is one of the public events in Germany there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Then after the Austin Film Festival I am going to Boulder, Colorado. And so I’m going to be doing a 6:30pm reading event kind of thing at the Boulder Book Store which is my hometown bookstore. So come check that out. That’s October 29th at 6:30pm.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But we’re both going to be at the Austin Film Festival, which should be great. We’re confirming our guests for the live show. It’s going to be a fun time.

**Craig:** Yeah. And based on the guests that I already know we have, you’re going to want it. And we now have a pretty decent multi-year track record of delivering some pretty awesome live shows. So, you’re going to want to see it. I don’t know what else to say. You’re going to want to see it.

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to say a little bit more of the entertainment burden for this show is on Craig’s shoulders this year based on an idea that we’re going to try to do. So I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit of an entertainment. I like to think that the entertainment burden is always on my shoulders because I’m vivacious.

**John:** Yes. You are vivacious.

**Craig:** And I’m a human.

**John:** You are. Yet, to pull this off you’re going to have to do some work ahead of time. And I’m usually the person who is just like Mr. Organized thing, but you’re going to have do some organize-y stuff.

**Craig:** After we conclude recording this podcast I will give you an update on that.

**John:** I’m so excited. All right. Let us get to our feature topic which is simultaneity. So this came up with some stuff I was writing this week and I thought it was something we could talk about in this episode because a lot of times in scripts you have two events need to be happening simultaneously. And it’s a weird thing about how text works versus how images work. So, when you see an image you see the whole image at once. And you can take in all of it at once.

When you are reading a sentence you don’t know how the sentence ends until you get to the end. And as a writer you have to arrange your sentences in priority of what you want people to see in the frame. So, here being an example. Let’s say you have a burning clown being chased by a polar bear in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

**Craig:** OK. Seen it, but fine.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a cliché image, I know.

**Craig:** Trite.

**John:** You can only do so much in one sentence so you have to prioritize do you start with the clown, or the man on fire, or the bear, or the setting? Basically each sentence is going to do kind of one thing, or you’re going to have to basically arrange those objects and those things in the importance you want the reader to see them. Versus on an image, like if you just saw that as a frame, you saw this as a scene in your movie, you’re going to get all of that at once, to the point where like a director may have to make choices about what he or she is going to focus on in that frame so we can actually see not the whole thing all at once.

And so this kind of simultaneity, like we’re always wrestling with sort of the order of things and sort of how we’re seeing stuff. But it becomes especially challenging when two things are supposed to be happening at the same time and on a script level you have to figure out how you’re going to show that these things are happening simultaneously.

**Craig:** And it’s where the screenplay format does let us down a bit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** The very first writing job I ever had was for an advertising agency. And they gave me a format to use for, you know, you’re writing a 30-second ad. And their format, which I think is fairly common in the advertising/copywriting world is basically a paper that’s divided into two columns. And the left column is for text. That’s dialogue or onscreen text or voice over. And the right side is visuals. So right off the bat they have created a sense of simultaneity that we simply don’t have in screenplays because we’re reading them top to bottom and we’re separating what we say from what we see.

**John:** And so we make certain exceptions, like dual dialogue, where people are speaking at once. And, sure, but you’re still going to always read the stuff on the left before you read the stuff on the right. So as a writer you’re making choices about who gets to be the left hand column because that’s the stuff that you’re going to read first.

You know, text, it’s inherently limited in its ability to do a lot of things at once. It’s always going to be – it’s always linear. It’s always going to be left to right, or right to left if you’re in a different language. But it’s not going to be everything at once.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, certainly everybody is dealing with this when they’re making the movie as well because we experience time in a linear fashion. So no matter what we do, no matter what funky games we play, we experience things linearly. In movies where we call them non-linear, for instance like a Tarantino movie. So Pulp Fiction gets all loopy and funky with its time and you realize that the thing you saw at the beginning is now at the end. And in fact it’s not really the end. The end is in the middle of the movie. But we experience all of it in sequence linearly and then the movie goes, oh wait, by the way imagine that that actually already happened or something. Right?

So, we’re always struggling with this, whether we’re writing or we’re shooting, but what you’re right to say that one thing the camera can do is witness things at the same time. We cannot witness for the audience, meaning our reader as writers, we cannot witness things at the same time. And this is why sometimes you will – if you listen to us a lot and we talk about these things and it may come up in our Three Page Challenge analysis – we harp on the way people write their action. Because in a very real way your return key, your enter, your paragraph break is you essentially saying this is where the end of a thing I want you to experience happens and now you’re going to see another thing.

So for instance, in your example, if I want to see the clown first I describe the clown. Then I hit return and then I describe oh my god look he’s being chased by a polar bear. But if I want to see it all at once, if I want to see the clown, the bear, the fire, the post-apocalyptic landscape, I just lay it in one tight little paragraph to say, “See, you experience all this before I hit the return key.” That means you’re kind of getting it all at once.

**John:** So if we want to separate those ideas out, like if we want to give a sense of how it’s going to feel on the screen you would probably say a man is running. We notice his oversized shoes. The man is a clown. Widening out we see what he’s running from. It is a polar bear charging on all four feet. Widening further we see the post-apocalyptic landscape of this thing. So that’s giving the sense of like by breaking out into those smaller sentences and putting them in that order we’re getting a sense that, OK, we’re probably kind of pulling out here. Basically we’re focused on this and we’re coming out.

If we did want to see the whole thing all together we’d keep it together as one sentence. And that gives a sense of like all of this is going to be sort of one shot. Sentences aren’t exactly one for one matches with shots. But we do as a reader tend to think about an image that goes with a line of scene description.

**Craig:** No question. And similarly when people are talking we either can say, look, this is what they’re going to say and you’re going to listen to it, or this is what they’re saying and while they’re saying it I want you to notice another thing happening. So, in that case you will break their dialogue up on the page. That is essentially how we create simultaneity between speaking and seeing is by carving up the dialogue. And the reader understands that it’s not like we look at the person talking then look away to see the thing then look at the person talking. It’s all at the same time.

**John:** An example being like a man and a woman are having a conversation at a table. She finishes her dialogue. She picks up the bottle and refills his glass. And then they keep talking. As a writer you may have put that there just to sort of break thoughts up. But it’s also going to change the energy of that moment. It’s basically signaling that there is a shift here. If we were in one type of coverage we may have moved to a different type of coverage. Something has happened here. And sometimes you see especially new writers they’ll throw that kind of stuff in without recognizing what it actually feels like from the reader’s perspective. Or that by breaking out a separate line versus sticking some of that stuff into a parenthetical they are really changing the texture and feel of how that scene is playing.

**Craig:** No question. And good point for all of you that are starting out. It may seem a bit random like why do you carve up this bit of dialogue. Why do you put a return thing here? Why don’t you? There’s no hard and fast rule to this except that you must always imagine how people might feel reading it if they don’t know what’s coming next. And think impressionistically. What is it that I want them to feel in the moment? Simultaneity is a very exciting thing to be used in a movie. You can use it sparingly. There are plenty of movies that have very little of it. But when multiple things are happening at the same time it’s exciting.

So, for instance there’s a scene in Chernobyl I’m thinking of where a character is listening to other people talking. And he knows something that apparently they do not. And he keeps waiting for one of them to say the thing that he thinks is so obvious but none of them do. And he’s growing increasingly nervous. So there’s simultaneity there because people are talking and I need to be also with him and see his experience of this. So, I have people talk and then in between I start writing bits of dialogue for him that’s in his head that he doesn’t say that’s in italics that’s in action.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s like I’m creating simultaneous dialogue between what is spoken by the talkers and what is being thought by the thinker. Anything you can do to kind of get across – and there’s no screenwriting book in the world that will list that as a thing you can do. And nobody taught me to do that. I only did it because it just seemed like it made the most sense to convey what I wanted people to experience. Simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. So what you’re describing is, well, maybe we can talk about three kinds of simultaneity you’re going to find in screenwriting. There’s at least three, but let’s talk about these three. So this first one is I think kind of what you’re describing in Chernobyl, also the example of the clown running from the polar bear, which is a simultaneity where everything is happening all at once in a frame and yet we are having to focus on certain things. And so a thing that often comes up in these questions that people write in is like I have this big party and there’s different conversations happening at different places in the party. How do I show that?

Well, that’s a thing that you do all the time and as you’re recognizing that while these people are having this conversation over here other folks are having a conversation over here and it’s all happening in a shared space. And maybe it doesn’t matter that they’re all exactly synchronized, but there’s going to be a reason why you’re moving from one conversation to another conversation. So, they’re all in a space and they’re all happening at the same time but there’s not a great degree of interaction between the two.

A second kind of simultaneity that you see is people in different places that have to be happening at the same time. So, it can be examples of parallel action but with interaction between the two. So like there’s two sides of a phone call. So you and I are talking, we’re not in the same space, but we can cut to either side and it’s one conversation. Or a car crash where you see we’re in two different cars and we realize like, oh, they’re going to crash into each other. Like they’re headed towards each other. That’s a kind of simultaneity that’s common and it’s generally set up through parallel action, parallel structure between what one character is doing and what another character is doing. And when it’s done really well can have a tremendous amount of suspense. If there’s no interaction between the two then we as the audience have information that the characters don’t and that is stressful in a good way.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re putting your finger on, particularly with the party scenario you described, you’re putting your finger on one of the main struggles that both writers and directors and editors have in transmitting narrative that’s like real life and that is that there is a certain kind of mundane simultaneity we simply cannot do. We are incapable of doing it. Because at a party three different conversations are happening exactly at the same time in different places. We don’t know how to do it.

**John:** Yeah. So often like those conversations are happening literally just across from each other, so like you and I are having a conversation and the people next to us are having a different conversation and somehow we’re able to keep it all straight. That’s actually very hard to do on film. I’m sure people can find good examples of places that have been able to pull that off, but when I’m talking with you at a party I’m able to tune out everybody else and just focus on what you’re saying. That’s really hard to do in film and in television because we’re used to like if there’s people talking we should be understanding the people talking. So to push out that other noise is really a challenge.

**Craig:** Neurologists have been studying this issue of attention for a long time because the human brain is remarkable. We can actually pick out if we choose to one person’s voice among 40 voices. If you were at a party, everyone is talking at once, you can still have a conversation with one person. Because your brain decides I’m just going to focus on you. In movies our attention devices are literal focus and then the levels of sound. So you can sort of simulate things by rack focusing. That means, OK, I’m looking at these people in focus, I’m hearing them, and then I rack and I realize that these people are also talking. They’ve been there the whole time but now I can see them and hear them because the other audio has gone down.

It turns out that this sort of thing is actually quite distracting and oddly artificial. Because in a weird way it’s closer to how our minds process. So therefore it ends up a little bit in the uncanny valley of attention setting. And that you may very frequently be better off just simulating the simultaneity by listening to one conversation and cutting and going to another corner of the room and listening to a different one. And it doesn’t matter – only if it’s really important that they happen at the same time. And if it’s really important that they happen at the same time then you get to play tricks like this person’s conversation is going on and then it gets interrupted by somebody coming in through the door and going I’m Here and everybody cheers. And then you cut over to the other corner and they have their conversation. And theirs ends with that same person coming through the door and going I’m Here and everyone cheers. And you go, oh, I get it. Those were happening at the same time.

But the rack focusy, gimmicky fade in/fade out stuff, sometimes it’s not worth it.

**John:** Yeah. My year living in France I saw a bunch of movies in French and generally I can do it. If I am watching a movie and I can see the actors talking I can follow, even without subtitles, I can follow what’s going. It takes sort of every brain cell. But if you try to do that and you also have a voice over, like that kills me. My brain can’t process both them talking and a voice over. I need to be able to see the person speaking the French or I am just completely lost. And to the point where like I saw a movie with Mike and I was like, oh yeah, that was good. And he’s like did you understand what happened in the last five minutes? I was like no. He’s like the little girl died. And I’m like the little girl died? I had no idea. And it’s because my brain could follow people talking. And the same thing happens at parties if people speak to me in French. I can follow one conversation in French if 100% of my attention is focused there. But everything else around the sides I can’t deal with it. It’s just too much noise and too much information.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so we kind of do our own weird approximation of simultaneity because we can’t actually handle it ourselves. There’s only so much information we can take in. So, it’s not cheating. It’s just sort of an acknowledgement that what we’re doing is we are approximating reality but we’re doing so in a very unreal way. Reality is not two-dimensional. Reality does not have edits. Reality doesn’t have a score. So I don’t get too hung up on the fact that we can’t achieve perfect simultaneity and I think it’s probably a dragon that certain fancy directors are more interested in slaying than writers.

But as writers our job is to convey a sense of simultaneity.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so apart from whatever simple kind of things we have at our disposal like the shift key and breaking of dialogue, it’s really about honestly keeping the reader in mind.

**John:** Yeah. The last kind of simultaneity I want to make sure we talk about is that sense of a shared clock, or sort of like you’re in movie mean time. Everybody in the movie is on the same clock. And by that I generally mean like if it’s day for me it’s also day for you. That we’re all in the same time space. And so soap operas are sort of a classic example of this. In college I used to watch Days of our Lives, and a thing you notice about soap operas is like all the characters they’re in the same day. So, you never sort of jump to the next day in soap opera. Every soap opera happens within a day. And really most movies and television they’re pretty explicit if we’re going on to a new day, time has changed. And every scene that happens happens after the scene that happened before it. So even if there’s different characters you’re going to default to the assumption that this scene has happened after the scene that happened before, even if it’s completely different characters. You’re going to assume that time movies forward. And it becomes jarring if you and I have a conversation and it’s sunset and the next conversation we see with the other characters it’s still afternoon. That feels weird. And we want to believe that it’s always going to go from morning to afternoon to evening to night to morning again.

And so sometimes as a writer you’re going to have to make choices about like, OK, when are we starting night and when are we going to believe that it’s the next day, or time has moved forward?

**Craig:** I told you about the crazy thing they made me do with the timeline writing in Europe right?

**John:** Yeah, so they want you to number every day and hour? Basically give a clock time for every scene?

**Craig:** Every single scene header had to have a time. An actual clock time. And I mean I gave it to a woman who works with me and I said please take the first pass at this because my whole thing is there are three times of day in movies – bright, dark, and in between. That’s the time of day. And, yes, sometimes you do need to know the time of day. And I had already called out those scenes. Like, yeah, you need to know this is 4:05. This is 4:10. Five minutes have passed by. But they’re insane about it. And it really wasn’t particularly useful. I don’t know why they do it that way. I will rail against it for the rest of my life. But they are very, very, very concerned about that sort of thing.

**John:** I would assume that their logic behind it is that it helps all the other departments figure out what day it is, what will have happened before, so if they need to make choices or changes. And literally so that the set department can move the clocks on the walls to the right time.

**Craig:** And yet somehow the largest motion picture and television industry in the world has managed to get by without this for a century. By the way, the way to deal with clocks: don’t show them. Don’t show clocks.

**John:** Don’t show clocks.

**Craig:** There you go. Problem solved. Because clocks are a continuity nightmare anyway.

**John:** Maybe we can find this episode online or a clip online from it, but I do remember an episode of Studio 60 which is all about the clock, because it’s all racing up to put on their Saturday Night Live like show. And there’s this meeting between two characters and they’re talking and the clock on the wall changes every time they cut back to the character. And you just can’t believe that they left it in. And so the clock is important as a story element but why they wouldn’t have stopped the clock is crazy to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stop the clock. Yeah, that’s like a rookie mistake. There’s that and the scenes where there’s one that Melissa always gets crazy about in Thelma & Louise where Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are in the, I think it’s the bar, it’s right before the big confrontation where they kill somebody. And they’re having drinks. And every time you go back and forth the level of liquid in each glass goes up and down, and up down, and up and down.

**John:** The prop people are just like killing themselves when they see that.

**Craig:** You know, at some point though I guess you look at that and you go whatever. Like it’s important and then it’s obviously not important because Thelma & Louise is an institution. I don’t think that that glass scene harmed anyone’s appreciation of a classic film.

**John:** It was an important movie about women taking control of their lives. But the glasses. Oh my god! I can’t get past the glasses.

**Craig:** I always thought it was a movie about the strange behavior of liquids.

**John:** It really is. The fluid dynamics of that movie I just couldn’t put up with that.

**Craig:** It’s my biggest problem. I just thought that they kind of got away from what mattered.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, obviously evaporation in that universe works completely differently.

**Craig:** And condensation.

**John:** Indeed. So.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Amazing.

**John:** Magical.

**Craig:** We’ve got some three pagers here that we’re going to have to deal with, huh?

**John:** We do. So let’s wrap up our simultaneity saying like if there are situations where you have to signal simultaneity, Craig really hit on one where it’s that sort of repeated moment, so the guy walks through the door and everyone says welcome or like surprise, to signal that those two moments really did overlap, they happened at the same time. So characters reacting to the same thing is a good way to do it.

Just really repeated scenes. So that’s what Go does. It repeats the exact same scene three times. And when we first shot Go we didn’t have that scene. We were repeating a different scene, two different scenes. And it didn’t work. Like the audience couldn’t track it. So that’s why I had to write a new scene that could be the one scene that we’d always go back to. And then finally like just communication between two characters can signal that people are in the same time space. And so classically now a text sent between people lets us know to connect where they are and that we’re in the same time. Because otherwise if you just cut to somebody you don’t know is it right now, is it hours after that last scene. So some kind of communication between the two of them can signal this is happening now and not slightly in the future.

**Craig:** Excellent summary, John, and an excellent topic of something that is a challenge but also an opportunity I think for writers.

**John:** Agreed. Let us take this opportunity to look at more writing. This is a Three Page Challenge–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** A segment we do every now and again. The next time we’re going to do this segment is at the Austin Film Festival, so we’re going to do a live version of this at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So starting today if you would like to submit your three pages you can submit them specifically with a little tick box that says I will be at the Austin Film Festival and I am happy to come up on stage with you and talk through these three pages.

**Craig:** I feel like we’re extra nice to people in that venue. So if you want the nicest possible treatment, that’s the way to go.

**John:** And we always have special guests up there to help us talk through things. It’s a fun time to do it. So if you would like to submit to that you can. But in a general sense these are the first three pages of movies or pilots that listeners have sent in for us to take a look at. This is not a competition. This is just an exhibition of screenwriting craft. And we talk through what’s working and what could be better. So if you have three pages you want to send in you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. If you would like to read the pages that we’re about to discuss they’re attached to the show notes or just go to johnaugust.com.

Craig, do you want to start us off with Collective Outcasts?

**Craig:** All right. I will do that. This is Collective Outcasts. This is a pilot written by Angelique Gross. And so we begin with Jack, he’s 25, kind of a buzz cut military guy, waking up in the morning to his alarm. Meanwhile in her own bedroom is Amy, 24, a slacker who does not want to wake up at all. And we kind of go back and forth between them. He’s completely on point, gets up, gets dressed, he’s clean, he eats a healthy breakfast. She refuses to get up. She drinks some wine from last night. She’s kind of a big hot mess. And then she eventually gets going a bit late.

We see that they’re both on the same campus. She is – it’s some sort of art campus I believe, an art college, and she’s talking to her mother and explaining that she’s registering for her classes right now. And Jack, who is former military, walks through this very sort of squishy liberal campus to arrive at this faculty adviser Richard, who is surprised to see that this is their first student who has ever been here on the GI Bill. And Jack explains that he has in fact been in the military since he was emancipated at the age of 16. He served in Iraq. And now he wants to meet people with similar interests. He did not make any friends in the army. And those are the first three pages of Collective Outcasts. John, what did you think?

**John:** Well, let’s start with the obvious relevant topic which is the parallelism. So, this first page is all parallelism where it’s the exact same time we’re seeing Jack, we’re seeing Amy, we’re seeing them going through the same time. It literally says 6:00AM, 7:00AM, 8:00AM in the scene headers there to show us that these are happening simultaneously. It’s a very classic structure to show two characters with very different reactions to the same kinds of everyday things.

Where I was frustrated by this set up is – I think we talked about sort of like the showing hitting the alarm clock when you wake up in the morning is just such a cliché beat that you have to really put some spin on that or else it’s going to feel just really cliché and it’s going to start you off on a bad foot. This kind of does that.

The bigger problem for me was moving from Jack’s side to Amy’s side to Jack’s side to Amy’s side, the transitions really weren’t built there. It was just basically contrasting, but there was no sense of flow between them. And the good versions of these sequences it really feels like you’re moving forward every time you’re moving between the characters. It can be as simple as like he opens a door and then she opens a door, or she walks through a door. That sense of like there’s a visual feeling of moving through a space. And here it was just like a bunch of shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, which got me a little bit frustrated.

Craig, I had a hard time understanding this campus. And so our initial description of the campus, I think the reason why you sort of wonder like is it a private art college, so “Amy walks across a small but fancy university campus pathway. This school probably wasn’t like your college. There are no frats or grades but there are workshop nights with copious amounts of alcohol and ever present judgement from the anti-commercialism students.” But you didn’t say private art college. You didn’t give me a sense – give me a name. Just be specific about sort of where we’re at. I didn’t know where we were at sort of in the world. So, you gave me a lot of context without telling me what I’m actually looking at.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, let’s talk about the simultaneity in the beginning. I think you’re exactly right. The best of these things work where one side of the simultaneous action is commenting on the other. So it’s simply the contrast of I got up on time, I didn’t. I’m clean, I’m going to take a drink. But there’s something a little bit more commenty about it. It seems like – well first of all I thought they were in the same place for a while. It’s a natural thing to presume that if we start with an interior of a bedroom and then we cut to an interior of a bedroom and they are two people in their mid-20s and they are both waking up at the same time that they may be roommates. They could be living in the same house. I don’t know. So partly I also wanted to make very sure, or I would suggest to Angelique that she make sure that there’s a little bit there to make it clear that this is one kind of space, this is another kind of space. This one is on the ground floor of a tiny thing and this one is in the high rise of a large dormitory. Whatever it is, just so I know they’re in different places.

It is very cliché. And it’s not giving me much other than this. This guy is a straight-shooter and she’s a mess. Which kind of, hmmm, we’ve seen it. We’ve just seen the wake up sequence many, many times. It’s hard to get excited about it. And I’m not sure it’s the best way to introduce somebody like this, meaning Jack. Amy, yes. Right?

So let’s get to John’s point about this college. Here are the things that Angelique describes about the college at the top of page 2 that we will not see. We will not see that it is small. We will not see that it is fancy. We will not see that it wasn’t like our college. We will not see that there are not frats or grades. And we will not see that there are workshop nights, whatever those are, with copious amounts of alcohol. And we will not see the ever-present judgment from the anti-commercialism students. What are they anyway?

We will see none of that. Here’s what we will see. We will see a 24-year-old woman walking across some sort of quad. So, therefore what Angelique does later down is exactly the kind of thing she needs to do right away. “Jack walks down the hall taking in all the posters and art. One flyer reads: ‘WANT TO JOIN AN EMOTIONAL FIGHT CLUB?’ Another: ‘JUNG DEMOCRATS MEETING TONIGHT!’”

So, you need to build the space. First of all, give this place a name. Tell me that it’s an art college. Tell me that it’s super snow-flakey. Whatever it is that you want to do so that you want to set up a situation where Jack is a fish out of water. Go for it. But then you have a fish out of water. So, introduce him as the fish out of water. He walks into a place and people presume that he’s someone’s dad, or that he’s lost, or that he’s security. Do you know what I mean? Like what could possibly happen when this guy walks in. But just to see him wake up and approach his adviser just feels sort of like a pretty boring way to introduce this character.

When he meets Richard, who is his adviser, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think about Richard. Richard seems to be both interested and not interested. He announces exposition. He says, “That’s right, Jack. Nice to meet you. I just wanted to touch base before the semester started. You’re our first student here on the G.I. Bill!”

What? No. No one says that. Ever. In the world. And nor would he want to touch base with him just because of that, especially because right after that it says, ”Richard doesn’t really care about what Jack is saying.”

So, it just seems like Richard is here for exposition. He’s Professor Exposition and it’s not working.

**John:** I agree. It’s not working. So my bigger macro concern isn’t really Richard. It’s Jack. Because Jack doesn’t feel like a guy who just spent eight years in the military. He feels like unfrozen Boy Scout. Like what I’m getting right now doesn’t feel like a person who has lived and done stuff. It feels like he’s just naïve in ways that you wouldn’t be if you served eight years in the military. So, you’ve seen some stuff if you’ve served eight years in the military. And so, yes, I think the general idea of a guy on the G.I. Bill going to an art college, that can be some good interesting tension. I buy that as a concept. And ultimately I assume this is a romantic comedy, so they will become a couple.

But this isn’t the right way for me to meet him and I’m nervous about how we’re setting up this character because I can sort of feel his arc and the thawing of his soul and I’m not loving it.

**Craig:** I agree with you. And another thing that always concerns me is when fish are out of water and seem to be really excited about it. You should be gasping for breath when you’re out of water. You don’t belong here. You want to get out of here. You didn’t want to be here in the first place. And the good news is you don’t have to stay. You’re only there for a week to do something. And then you get stuck, or you meet someone you fall in love with, or something.

But there’s no conflict inherent in the idea that he really, really wants to be there. So, I’m not sure where this goes. But I would say to Angelique that while these pages are laid out nicely and–

**John:** And they use Courier Prime which is a beautiful font.

**Craig:** Courier Prime, which as you know always butters John up. I think you need to go on cliché patrol. I think you need to go on exposition patrol. I think you need to really think about how you want to introduce characters. And you definitely, definitely want to manage information flow, because right now what you’re doing is you’re just kind of dumping information on us either through clunky dialogue or clunky action. But you’re not actually providing the filmmakers, whether it’s you or another person, with the tools that are required to convey this to the audience.

**John:** Yep. The last really small thing I want to point out is as Jack and Amy are introduced, “JACK (25), he’s a buzzcut military man but socially awkward,” so you can lose the pronoun for he and for she on this. When you’re introducing a character let them be their own noun. Let them carry the sentence. So, I just think you could lose the he’s and the she’s. Jack is a military buzz cut man, but socially awkward. Just let that be the thing. Don’t double up your noun and your pronoun.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can also drop the verb. Jack, 25, buzz cut military man. You don’t even need A. Buzz cut military man, socially awkward, endlessly curious. I like a nice bip-bip-boop. But yes, Amy, “she’s a feminist slacker.” It starts to feel a little bit like he – it’s like The Dating Game.

**John:** He’s a/She’s a. Yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. What’s next?

**John:** Let’s go to Yohannes Ashenafi. This is The Foster House Part 1, GPS. So, let me read a little summary of this. Mr. Kenny, 40s, is a raging hillbilly in every way. He’s driving recklessly while drinking a 12-pack PBR, Pabst Blue Ribbon, listening to a college ball game on the radio, and angrily trying to navigate through the Pocono Mountain backroads.

Toby, 17, with the brains of a genius but the accent and vocabulary of a hillbilly, is surrounded by his younger foster siblings watching a nature documentary on VHS. Hearing the screeching approach of the car the kids all jump, Toby signaling for them to keep quiet. Mr. Kenny enters in a rage, kicks the dog, meanwhile Toby warns the kids to stay quiet. Lucy, who is 11, wets her pants and asks him not to leave, but he must. And that’s the end of our three pages.

Craig, get us started at the Foster House.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not The Foster House. There’s about three different foster house movies in three pages, so let’s go through each one of those and maybe Yohannes can figure out which one he or – I guess it’s a he – wants to write. Because we have tonal problems throughout here.

Here’s what we have in the beginning. We have by the way a fairly well described scene where a goofy redneck weirdly in a neon blue Nissan, which already I was like, wait, what, OK but fine, is yelling at his radio because there’s a game going on and he obviously bet on it and it’s not working. That part was a bit cliché. And the radio broadcaster does not sound at all like a radio broadcaster. Sounds like movie radio broadcaster.

What I thought was really true to life was the way he started yelling, Mr. Kenny started yelling at the GPS navigator voice. That felt true and comical. Honestly comical. And then we go to at the same time this foster house where children are watching a nature documentary and they’re really excited by this and most of it is occupied by the narrator’s voice over for the documentary. And so the kids seem to really be enjoying this movie where animals kill each other, which is this whole other different vibe. And then things take a real hard turn once more when Mr. Kenny, who was presumably just a hapless goofy idiot who yells at GPS woman, comes home and now you realize, oh god no, he’s like Bill Sikes from Oliver and he’s going to beat or sexually assault them. And they’re terrified. I don’t know why they’re suddenly terrified. Because apparently they live with him all the time.

He kicks the dog which I got to tell you if you literally kick a dog on screen some people are just going to get up and walk out, FYI.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you actually kick a dog, without warning, with no warning. You can show violence towards animals as something that a cruel, terrible person does, or you’ll see in the case of Chernobyl something that soldiers are required to do and it’s very sad, but it is explained. But there’s this sudden shocking moment of really awful violence. And then we have Toby speaking in a very kind of cornball approximation of an Appalachian accent or something telling these kids to be quiet because he is going to essentially beat them up or something.

And one final bit of confusion, a little girl, 11, which is not little by the way. 11 years old they have iPhones and a bunch of them are vaping at this point, but fine. 11 years old, it says, “She has soiled herself.” Which one is that?

**John:** That’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** I didn’t want to know. And she says sorry to Toby, who is one of the older kids, “Please don’t leave us.” Why would he – he’s 17, he lives there, he’s their brother, their foster brother, where is he going?

**John:** So my hunch is that Toby has left the house and is probably living out in the woods and sort of watches over the kids. So, there’s a lot to unpack here.

Let’s start with our sort of marquee topic of simultaneity, which is part of the reason we picked these three pages.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So hillbilly guy is driving back, the kids are watching a nature documentary. We sense that he’s probably headed towards them just because we’ve seen movies before. We know how movies work. But there was an opportunity here that if we were to intercut between the two of these a little bit more we could have a little bit more tension. If we really establish that he’s coming to them before they know he’s coming that is a possibility. I don’t know if it’s necessarily what we want, but it’s a possibility of escalating tension which could be good.

I agree with you that this sort of initial like he’s driving and he’s bet on the game, there’s too much, but I like sort of what it gets to. Where I wanted more is on page two, “Mr. Kenny slams on the breaks, the car fishtails to a stop. Fueled by petulant tantrum he trashes his car.” I want to know what trashes his car means.

**Craig:** Did he get a sledgehammer out?

**John:** But if you actually describe what that is, that is a really good revealing character moment. He’s just the kind of guy who beats up his car can be funny but it can also be really kind of terrifying. And it would be great to know that it crosses from funny to terrifying at this moment, because then I have a very different feeling about him coming into this house.

What you said about the dog, it drives me crazy. And so it’s not even about violence to animals, it’s just that, you know what, racist hillbillies, they love their dogs, too. And I think there’s a much better version of this scene where he’s this maniac but he still pets his dog or something. He doesn’t at least kick it. I think there’s something about that which is I just checked out of the movie because I didn’t believe that moment and I didn’t sort of want to keep going with it.

My probably biggest problem with these pages is there’s a bunch of foster kids. I have no idea how many. I don’t know what ages they are. I don’t know how many kids are in this scene. And that was frustrating to me. They’re not even uppercased when they appear. And so I don’t have a sense of am I looking at three kids, am I looking at ten kids. What is the nature of this scene we’re headed into? And if I don’t have those details I don’t know what to be anticipating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is an unacceptable level of ambiguity. At the very least you need to know how many actors you’re hiring to put in a scene, if they’re children in particular, and people need to know the size of the family. Similarly, there’s just basic logic things. If this is the sort of guy that kicks his dog, the dog – this is what we have here, “His dog knowing no better comes running towards him bearing love.” No, dogs don’t do that to people that kick them in the face. They cower. You know, it’s just like stuff like that where it’s just – it feels like this is one of those things where we have a writer who wants to do things but doesn’t necessarily want to be accountable for them. I mean, even soiling themselves. Like now what? Are you going to just let her stand there in that? You know what I mean? You have to be accountable for everything.

**John:** So, I have no idea whether English is Yohannes’s native language or not. There were some things in here that made me believe that either it wasn’t carefully proofread or this is not sort of his first language. I would say that simple things like repeating hillbilly a lot doesn’t give me a lot of faith. You’ve got to be more specific. I think you can say hillbilly once. You can use it as a noun. Then you don’t get to use it as an adjective again. You have to be more specific about sort of what specific things we’re seeing.

So, Pabst Blue Ribbon, great. I buy it. That’s good. But you’re going to have to keep providing details that are not just hillbilly.

**Craig:** Agreed. One quick typo at the top of two. Mr. Kenny is yelling at the GPS woman but he refers to her as women, plural, but it is a woman.

**John:** It is a woman.

**Craig:** A woman. All right, well.

**John:** Great. Let’s do our third and final Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** This one is Token Genius, also a pilot. The title of this particular episode is Andre and Aggy and it is written by J. Gordon.

So, we begin with Andre Brown, 30s, black nerd, addressing an audience we do not see. And he’s there to tell them about what it is that he does. His research is to create humanity’s last invention. And he talks about how at some point technology is going to render human beings completely obsolete. You might as well just give up because the super intelligence that Andre is going to help create will kill all of the people on the planet in their sleep.

And then we reveal that he’s talking to a group of five year olds in kindergarten under a career day banner. And that ends our teaser. When we come back the students are watching an animated lesson, which is some sort of thing on the television about the body and the brain, and how the brain is sort of like a computer. And while that’s going on Andre is talking with the teacher, Janice, a young Jane Goodall sort, and she’s trying to explain to him that he didn’t quite exactly fit the bill of what career day was. And she points out he looks terrible. And he says, “Yeah, late nights.”

And the animated computer on the little video that they’re watching crushes a brain, a regular tiny cartoon human brain, and the video is over, and Andre is confused – or not confused. He understands they didn’t applaud because they didn’t get it. He knew they wouldn’t get it. And Janice reminds him that they’re five.

**John:** They’re five years old.

**Craig:** Those are our three pages, Token Genius.

**John:** I’ll start. So the simultaneity in this one is these kids are watching a presentation while the adults are having a conversation. And it works here. I believe that we can cut back and forth between the two of them. We can hear walla-walla while the adults are talking. Works great. And the two sides inform each other and that’s lovely.

I thought the writing was really great and also these pages just look really good. There’s just generous white space on the page. I was never sort of frightened to read stuff. What was bolded made sense. It all really invited me to sort of keep reading through it. And that’s worth a fair amount. I would keep going into this script because it was funny, because it was very specific, and I was curious sort of what else was going to be happening in this story.

I loved the description of Janice so much. So here’s the full description of Janice: “JANICE (30s) young Jane Goodall; frizzy bun, empathetic brows, counselor’s smile and speaks with the calm confidence earned after over a decade working with irrational creatures.” And that’s a very set up for her next line. There were a lot of really smart choices here and I really dug it.

Craig, what did you think?

**Craig:** I’m a little harder on it than you. Although I do agree that the character descriptions were great and if you look at Andre’s black nerd is brilliant. Says a lot right there. And there’s a certain confidence to that. And then it says, “He cleans his thick lenses with the hem of his cardigan.” Well you know me. Wardrobe, hair, makeup. It’s my favorite. So we’ve got thick lenses. We’ve got the hem of a cardigan. We’ve got a frizzy bun. We’ve got empathetic brows. Love it. So I can see these people.

Here are my issues. First, this set up where the sort of crotchety, curmudgeonly scientist doesn’t understand that delivering some kind of anti-human scree to five year olds won’t work. That feels very broad. Broad to the point where I just think, OK, we’re not in real-ville at all. Because I don’t get it. And at the very end of it for a teaser definitely doesn’t work because we reveal that these kids are sitting there and then the last line says, “SPOOSH – a juice box EXPLODES in the back row and we…END TEASER.”

What? I don’t understand. Meaning like a kid squeezed down on something? But that’s not what they do. And even then it’s just not that funny. So the kind of set up is not – it just feels very clammy to me.

Second problem. I agree with you that the simultaneity that was handled really well. When we come back and they’re watching an animated lesson, first of all I’m like what’s this? So is this from him? Did he bring this? Maybe at the end of his little speech when he realizes he blew it he could say, “Maybe I should just show the video,” and Janice says, “Just show the video.”

When we see the video though it seems like the video is just reiterating the stuff he said, which is odd. And doing it now, again, it’s the same joke. Computers are going to kill us. And you just don’t want to repeat that vibe again. It just doesn’t quite move the ball forward. It just seems like we’re doing the same thing again. I’m not even sure why Janice is letting this continue.

I like the fact that J. Gordon allows me to determine that Janice and Andre have some kind of relationship without telling me that they do. I just get it. They know each other. I don’t know what that relationship is. If they’re friends, if they’re lovers, if they’re exes. Doesn’t matter. I just know that they know each other. And again at the end when Andre says, “No one clapped. I knew they wouldn’t get it.” “They’re five.” Dude, it’s like you’re just not a real person at that point. You know? You’re now repeating the thing from the beginning. Do you still not understand that they’re five? What?

So, it got clammy. It got broad. That part I thought was not great. But the general flow of things I agree with you is really good. The descriptions are good. I just would say to J. like, OK, you hit the broad one, now do better. You can do better. I can tell. Just be a little smarter about this and just presume that we’ve already seen this joke done this way on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel sitcoms. Don’t Zack and Cody me man, you know what I mean? Give me better, right?

Couple of big typo-y think-o things in here. Meet and greet he spells “meet and great.” That’s greet, not great. And there was another wacky one early on.

**John:** You should route for me to win?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, root is R-O-O-T, not R-O-U-T-E.

**John:** There was also an its/it’s problem on page three.

**Craig:** There you go. These things matter.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the clamminess because, yes, that page one is a giant clam. And where I think you have to be really careful about it is it also feels like a cheat if you didn’t establish the background behind it in a way that could work for both what we’re supposed to think it is and the real thing. And so Crazy Rich Asians which is a movie I loved so much and saw it twice, one of the things it does really well quite early on is it establishes our heroine in the middle of a poker tournament or poker game and she’s against an opponent. And it’s a very dark space. And it looks like it could be some sort of backroom at a club or something. And then as the lights go up we see it’s a lecture hall. Is it a bit of cheat of a lecture hall? Sure. But we believe that it could possibly happen. And I want to make sure that in this script we believe that in that initial shot we can believe that we are in someplace like a Ted Talk or something and then it’s revealed that he’s actually talking to a bunch of kids.

So I want to make sure that that is a possibility. Maybe this doesn’t have to happen at the school also. Maybe there’s some other place where he could do the same presentation.

I also agree with you about the video. It’s like I think the idea of showing a video because it would be fun could be good, but like what was the video actually made for? And if the video was a sales presentation or some other thing that he’s just, well, it’s got animation and kids love animation, that may be a reason why we believe he’s showing it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You make such a good point. I mean, it did occur to me that if someone said to me you must direct this I wouldn’t know how. Because a kindergarten classroom isn’t like only a kindergarten classroom in one direction. There’s colorful baloney everywhere. That’s kind of the nature of it. And you could say, well, you could be really close on him. Not for an entire half a page of a monologue. It would become bizarre. And understand also, J. Gordon, the longer you are on somebody talking without showing who they’re talking to, the more people, with every passing second, more and more of your audience will go, oh, there’s going to be some sort of funny reveal or crazy reveal of who he’s talking to but it’s not who I think it is.

And by the time you get about halfway down the page that number goes to 100%. There’s literally nobody who doesn’t see it coming at this point. And then if you turn around and you see it’s a kindergarten classroom and they go, whoa, whoa, hold on, it wasn’t behind your head, now you’ve just cheated. So, it’s a clam and you actually cheated to do the clam, which is the worst clam.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s one of those bonus clam strips that you get at a second rate fast food seafood company.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just batter. There’s not even a clam in it.

**John:** Just batter. There’s no clam inside.

**Craig:** Right. I actually like those.

**John:** Yeah, I do too. I kind of loved Sea Galley fried clams. I mean, it’s just fried fat. It’s delicious.

**Craig:** We just love fried.

**John:** Fried anything. Love it.

**Craig:** Fried. We love fried.

**John:** Tempura fried stuff. Tempura fried is delicious, but of course it’s just fried.

**Craig:** It’s just a different kind of fried.

**John:** It’s all good. So let’s recap what we learned from these pages. So we had examples of simultaneity, of parallel structure, of people in the same space experiencing different things. We had simultaneity of someone approaching and sort of the tension you can build from that.

I want to thank all three of these people for writing in with their Three Page Challenges. And basically everyone who has written in, because to pick these three Megan went through, god, like a 100 of these over the last couple of days to get these down. So thank you to everyone who sends those in. Thank you to these people for being so brave.

Megan did point out to me that she estimates that about 6% of the things she looked through were written by women. And so we’ve talked about this on previous episodes is we’ve gotten as high as like 30% I think in past years. So I don’t know why we’re down to 6% right now, but–

**Craig:** Wait, 6% of the submissions?

**John:** Of the submissions.

**Craig:** What is going on?

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on. But, at different times the ratio has been up to like 30%. And obviously, yes, sometimes people are using initials. Megan is Googling to see if she can figure out who these people are to see if they’re male or female or don’t identify as male or female. But we would just love to have some non-guys in here. So, if you are considering writing in this thing and you think like, oh, they never pick women. Yeah, we do pick women. We really do try to. So send those in.

**Craig:** Apparently wildly disproportionate to the submissions we get.

**John:** Anyway, we would love to have–

**Craig:** OK, so you know what? We should just say, you know what, for the next two months only women submit. Literally. That’s it. Just women. Because this is crazy. And it’s nothing against guys. It’s just that, OK, you’ve been getting kind of a free ride here off of the reluctance of women to send in script pages. Well, let’s just cut that out for a while. Just women, come on. We want to do this.

**John:** All right, so Craig, are we going to say that for Austin it’s only women? Or for the next ones we do in a non-live panel? Because I don’t want to sort of–

**Craig:** No, Austin is special. Austin is special.

**John:** So right now send in your three pages to Austin or to other stuff. There’s basically a tick box if you’re coming to Austin. But for the next one we’re doing just as a normal show, it’s going to be all women. So, we’re going to be looking for those submissions.

**Craig:** Yeah. So your odds of being selected have just skyrocketed. Maybe women aren’t sending these in because they realize that it’s just a terrible experience.

**John:** But I think it’s mostly a good experience. So we’ve done previous live shows where we had I think all three of the entrants were women. I don’t think that’s been the case. I hope it’s not the case.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a video I watched on “How to Beat Any Escape Room,” by Mark Rober. And I thought it was pretty good. So I’ve done a bunch of escape rooms. You’ve done a bunch of escape rooms. I thought this guy’s advice he wasn’t an expert at all, but he went to talk to people who have done a bunch and people who design escape rooms and I think his basic advice makes a lot of sense. And so the first thing that Rober is going to tell you is that communication is key. You have to be speaking aloud about the things you’re finding and also crucially what inputs you need to solve a problem. So make sure that everybody in the room understands what you’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** A thing that Mike pointed out, which I’m glad to see this video points out, is you need to clean up after yourself. And so once something is done, find a place to put all the stuff that’s finished because you will waste so much time picking up a thing, a puzzle, that’s actually already solved. And so there are these kind of suggestions, but also other suggestions in here. So if you’re interested in escape rooms I think this would probably help you.

**Craig:** I’ll watch that. I mean, I did escape rooms in Lithuania.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I did escape rooms in Latvia. How about that?

**John:** I’ve never done a Latvian escape room.

**Craig:** It was quite good.

**John:** It’s just a hotel room.

**Craig:** It’s called Latvia. No, I like Latvia quite a bit. The bit of advice I always give people beyond I mean the things that you said are absolutely true. I mean, communication is always the big one. But I always say to people ask yourself what could pair with this. Because it’s very rare for any escape room to give you a self-contained puzzle. Like here’s a lock and the stuff around it will answer the answer of the lock. No. It’s going to be something somewhere else that you’re going to have to go, oh wait, that plays back to this. So think about an escape room as a series of pairs of things. And puzzles are in pairs. And if you can figure out what the pairs are a lot of times you’re well ahead of the game.

**John:** My other bit of advice which is not covered in this video, but understanding how to do tangrams is genuinely useful for many escape room situations which are those – like how you arrange the pieces, the little triangle pieces and things to fit into puzzles. I’ve seen that in multiple cases in multiple places. So knowing how to do that will save you some time.

**Craig:** That is literally an automatic minus star for me. Because I just – tangrams, it’s just a waste of time. It’s busy work. It’s a busy work puzzle. It requires no insight. It’s just sort of doing it. So I don’t like it when they do stuff like that. I much prefer the insight.

**John:** I guess the other problem with the tangrams is that like really only one person can do it at a time. And so there’s no teamwork.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s like, oh, let’s put that guy – just randomly start mushing these triangles around until you find. I think it’s lazy. I don’t like the tangrams. There was a tangram in one of the Escape LA rooms which I think you were saying they were converting to a different room which it was their worst room by far I thought. The cavern.

My One Cool Thing this week, I mean, you know I’ll go on and on. If I could make 1Password my One Cool Thing every week I would. But what I really love is the combination with – so in iOS 12 they now, you know, it was a big thing when they allowed you to use the share functionality to kind of go over to another app, get something, and pipe it into a thing. But now you can literally – and it’s with a bunch of different password managers – when you are on a field on your iPad or your iPhone and you need to fill in account information and you put the cursor in that thing it will bring up your keyboard. But above your keyboard it already says something like, hey, do you want to pull in your information on this website from 1Password. And you hit that and off you go.

**John:** Bloop bloop.

**Craig:** So it’s just getting much, much faster and zippier. I really like iOS 12. I think there’s a lot of cool stuff.

**John:** Yeah. One of the new features that’s in Mohave I think is it’ll show you all of the saved passwords you have for various things and it will put little yellow triangles if you’ve repeated a password for multiple sites. And it’s a very useful way of thinking like, oh, shoot, I should not actually be using the same password on multiple sites. And so you can see which ones you’ve done and then change them on those sites.

So, credit to Apple and to everyone else working on the problem of passwords.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re trying. 1Password has something called Watchtower where it will both analyze all of your passwords to make sure that they’re not weak or even just good but strong, and they’ll also reference everything against the Have I Been Pwned database to say, oh you know what, you need to change this one because there’s some evidence that there was a hack and some of that information might have gotten out.

**John:** We got an email in here that said like, oh, this was your password for this and I have evidence of you doing these terrible things and it was because of just one of those LinkedIn kind of password things that got broken years ago. And so it’s scary when you get an email that says like your password is this. And it’s like, yeah, but you know what because I use a different password for every site I know exactly which one that was and, nope, you’re just a scammer.

**Craig:** Yes. If anybody sends me your password is this, it’s just going to be a big long string of garbage. What do I care?

**John:** You don’t care.

**Craig:** I don’t care man. I don’t know my passwords to anything.

**John:** All right. This is our show. And our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, longer questions are great there.

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Craig, a pleasure.

**Craig:** As always.

**John:** And have a great week.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 360 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about relationships and how writers let the reader know what’s going on between two or three or more characters in a scene. Then we’ll be looking at three new Three Page Challenges to see how these suggestions might help.

**Craig:** You said this is Episode 360?

**John:** Yep. Gone full circle.

**Craig:** Wow. We have gone full circle. And in five days we will also have a year, five days, five weeks. We will have a year of podcasts.

**John:** Yeah. The math doesn’t really kind of work the same way. Well, I guess, I think if you count the bonus episodes you could listen to an episode a day and fill a full year.

**Craig:** Right. Except the leap year.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t really count those.

**Craig:** No, we don’t count those.

**John:** But looking at calendars, I do have some things to put on your calendar for listeners.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Yes. I have a couple of Arlo Finch things coming up. August 25 I’ll be at the San Diego Festival of Books, talking about Arlo Finch and signing some Arlo Finches. September 22 I will be at the Orange Public Library Comic-Con. So there’s Comic-Cons in other places. So this is the City of Orange. And then the start of October I am headed to Frankfurt, Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen for the German and Scandinavian releases of Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** So if you are in any of those cities or countries you can track me down.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. I kept meaning to get up to Stockholm at the very least because Lithuania, we’re right up there, you know. We’re right there.

**John:** Stockholm is amazing.

**Craig:** So like our director Johan Renck and our DP, Jakob Ihre, and then Stellan Skarsgård, they just zip back and forth as they need to. It’s easy for them to go home. It’s not so easy for me to go home when I’m there. But, yeah, so I want to go to Stockholm and Oslo would be pretty great, too. And Copenhagen. I mean, actually they all would be pretty great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll have a great time doing that. And just out of curiosity when you are on tour promoting Arlo Finch do you try and shorthand it to ArFi? Do you do ArFi? ArFi?

**John:** Sorry about that loud bang.

**Craig:** Did you just shoot yourself?

**John:** I did. I shot myself.

**Craig:** That question was so horrifying to you that you just – that would have been the most amazing way to end this podcast.

**John:** Boom!

**Craig:** Yeah. John? John? John?

**John:** Episode 360.

**Craig:** John?

**John:** I never shorten it down to ArFi. He’s Arlo Finch in every market. That’s the only thing that hasn’t changed. So in France they changed the subtitle of the book to Le Mystere des Longs Bois. But otherwise it’s just Arlo Finch, something about Valley of Fire.

**Craig:** That French cover for the new book is great.

**John:** Yeah, it’s cool.

**Craig:** Love that cover.

**John:** And you and I will be together doing live shows in the Austin Film Festival. So that is October 25 that that starts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And while I’m there that’s actually coincidentally the Texas Book Festival, so I’ll be doing events both for Texas Book Festival and Austin Film Festival at the same time.

**Craig:** Can we call the Austin Film Festival AuFi?

**John:** Yes. We can. We will officially change it to AuFi.

**Craig:** We are going to have a great Austin show this year. Some awesome people are going to be coming. We’re going to pack the stage as we usually do. And we’ve been talking to the Austin folks and I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. And I did not realize this but apparently the live show, they had to turn people away. So, we’re working on maybe a way that we don’t have to turn people away.

**John:** A bigger venue would be a great thing. So we’ll see if we can get that to happen.

**Craig:** Correct. Oh, and I should mention to those of you who are thinking about going to Austin Film Festival to participate in the pitch competition.

Apparently there was a little bit of I guess some feedback that the judges last year may have been altogether a little too easy on the contestants. And apparently the request came in that I return to provide a little bit of, I don’t know, a little more of that Simon Cowell je ne sais quoi. So I believe I will be judging the final pitch competition at Austin this year. So, you know, you want to do that, right? You want to be in that. So be in it.

**John:** Be in it.

**Craig:** Be in it.

**John:** Do it. Do it.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Do it. Our episode this week is about relationships and Lawant on Twitter actually asked, “I started going through the podcast from episode number one. Do you guys happen to know if there’s an episode going into how you two met?”

And so I was thinking back and in Episode 100 we do talk about the emails that led to the creation of the podcast, but I’m not sure we’ve ever discussed on the show sort of how you and I met, sort of that backstory thing. And I think I have one memory of it, but you may have a different memory of it. So, my memory of it is that you were starting Artful Writer, your blog, and you reached out through David Kramer, my agent, who was also your agent at the time to see if we could get on the phone to talk about setting up the blog. Is that your first instinct of how we met?

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I remember thinking that there were certain technical things. I noticed, I believe, that you were using – were you using Word Press for your site or were you using Movable Type? Remember Movable Type?

**John:** Yeah. I remember Movable Type. Movable Type is I think entirely Pearl-based, and it generated static pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. It roamed the earth once, like the dinosaurs. And has gone the way of the dinosaurs as far as I can tell.

**John:** I’m still on Word Press now, but I think I might have been on Movable Type at that point. I remember you asking a very specific question about my little brad logo and how it floated over–

**Craig:** Yes! You know what it was? I remember, so I had started up this Movable Type blog and I had just a general design, but then there were certain things I was doing to customize it. And I looked at your site and like how the hell – there’s got to be some simple, easy plug-in or something he’s done to make this logo like this. I remember talking to you and you were like, “No, that took hours,” somehow like trimming around the brad and coding it in to float and all the rest. And then I realized that I just didn’t want to spend hours.

But I think that was the first time I ever spoke with you about anything. It was just computer stuff. It wasn’t writing stuff.

**John:** No, it wasn’t at all. And then I think the first time I remember actually meeting you was at Huntington Gardens. You were there with your family. I was there with my family.

**Craig:** That was the first time?

**John:** I think. We may have met in person one time before then, but I just remember it was really weird and random that we were at the same gardens in Pasadena at the same time. And I’d only been there like twice or three times in my life, so it was a rare overlap.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember bumping into you there. So that was a long time. But we were just, you know, not friends or anything, we just knew each other and so forth. But then we got involved in this little boondoggle we invented for Fox, but how did that start?

**John:** I think you probably called me about that, because you’d already started talking with other writers. So, for folks who don’t remember, no one would remember this history, Craig had this idea of trying to make a deal at one of the studios for a small group of writers to get real meaningful backend on their projects. And so he pitched it to me. I said it sounded like a great idea. We brought in a bunch of other writers. Craig and I went and pitched it to a bunch of studios. Fox bought into the idea. And very little actually became of it ultimately.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was an interesting thing. I remember specifically the genesis of it was I read about what they had done at Warner Bros. John Wells had put a group together at Warner Bros. And so I called John up and said, “Hey, describe this whole thing.” And he did. And it sounded like a pretty good deal. So then I was like well why don’t we do this. And the problem is I think they all went the same way. They all, every version of this has never gone well, whether it was through Sony or Warner Bros. or Fox. I think those are the three places that have done them. It just ultimately never really works. McQuarrie did one like this as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nothing ever comes of them.

**John:** And I don’t know if we can say definitively why. But I will say one of the challenges is that studio leadership keeps changing, and so it becomes hard to sort of kind of not really even force the deal but sort of like keep the deal active and going when leadership keeps changing.

**Craig:** It does. And it was I think problematic in part because it required the material to come from the writer. And as we were putting these deals in place the studios’ interest in material they didn’t control kept plummeting. So ultimately you couldn’t really apply a deal like this to any project that relied on underlying property. And, well, that turned out to be essentially all they ever wanted to make.

So that was – there were a bunch of reasons why it began. I think another factor in that is just simply that the writers who qualified for consideration for these kinds of things were so freaking busy and never had a day off, ever. And somebody had always lined up some other thing with them that there was very little time for them to do the sort of work that would lead to success with one of these things.

So, all sorts of reasons why that didn’t work. But you and I went around. I think that was really when we got to know each other. Because we were kind of rowing together in a little canoe. And we made a great little team, I thought.

**John:** Yeah. I thought so, too. And so when we first started doing the podcast I remember there was some episode early on where I said like, “Well it’s not like you and I are friends outside of this podcast,” and you were really offended by it. And I remember I was like, oh, I hurt Craig’s feelings. And Craig has feelings. And we’ve become much better friends over the course of doing the podcast, but also–

**Craig:** Do I have feelings? I guess I do.

**John:** You do have feelings.

**Craig:** I guess I do.

**John:** But we weren’t playing D&D at the start. Like all that stuff came.

**Craig:** No, we have become friends through this podcast. I mean, whether I was legitimately hurt or not. You had a fair point. We weren’t really that close or anything. But our relationship is a function of the work that we do together. That’s how it’s happened. And that’s by the way how relationships must happen, if I may Segue Man myself into our main topic–

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Relationships have to be functional. I think sometimes people make a mistake and they think a relationship is just two people who like to chat together or sleep together. That in and of itself is not enough function.

**John:** Yeah. So in framing this conversation about relationships, I think there’s two challenges screenwriters face.

One is how you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started. And so this is trying to figure out like literally letting the audience know how these two people are related. Are they siblings? Are they friends? Are they a couple? Are they ex-spouses? Getting a sense of what are the underlying conflicts that started before the movie started. And really who wants what. That’s all stuff that you as the writer hopefully know and you have to find ways to expose to the audience if it’s going to be meaningful to your story.

The second challenge screenwriters face is how do you describe the changes happening in a relationship while the movie is going on. And so it’s really the scene work. What is the nature of the conflicts within the scene? How are we showing both characters’ points of view? What is the dialogue that’s exposing their inner life and exposing the nature of their relationship?

And they’re very related things but they’re not the same things. So what Craig and I just described in terms of our backstory, that’s kind of the first part is setting up the history of who we are. But so much of the writer’s work now is to figure out how within these scenes are we moving those relationships forward and providing new things to study.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right. The screenwriter has certain tasks that are homeworky kind of tasks. You do need convey information. We have this wonderful opportunity when a movie begins to have fun with that. The audience is engaged. They’re leaning forward in their seat. They haven’t yet decided that this movie stinks. So, you can have fun and tease along or misdirect what relationships are. And then reveal them in exciting and fun ways. And that’s I think really enjoyable for people.

So there’s an opportunity to maybe have – maybe it doesn’t have to be quite busy work when we’re establishing how people relate to each other factually. But the real meat of it, as the story progresses, is that fabulous space in between two or three people. The relationship I generally think of as another character. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. But when they’re together there’s that other thing between them. And if you think that sounds a little foofy, well, just consider the word chemistry and how often we use it to apply to actors who must perform these relationships. Because when it’s there what do we describe it as? Sparks, or whatever. It’s that thing in between.

And when it’s not there, there’s nothing.

**John:** Yeah. Chemistry is fundamentally the mixture of two elements that by themselves would be relatively stable. And you put them together and they create something new. And that’s what we’re really talking about in a relationship is that new thing that is created when those characters are interacting and challenging each other.

So, let’s talk about establishing these characters and I think you’re right to describe at the beginning of the movie the audience does lean in because I think partly they’re trying to figure out who these people are and sort of what slots to put them in. People approach movies with a set of expectations and there are certain kind of slots that they want people to fall into. And they’re looking for like, OK, well what slot are they falling into? And if you are aware of what the audience’s expectations are that can be really helpful.

So, some of the slots people are looking for is, well, who is the hero, the protagonist? Who is the love interest? Who is the best friend? Who is the rival? Who is the mentor? Who is the parent? That’s not to say you should have stock characters, but it’s to be aware that the audience is looking for a place to put those folks essentially. A sense of the relationship geography of the central character and the people around them.

And so be aware that the audience is trying to find those things and help them when you can. And if you need to defeat those expectations or change those expectations be aware that’s a job you’re assigning yourself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That you have to make sure that the audience understands this isn’t quite what you think. You think that this person is the father, but he’s actually a step-father who has only been married to the mother for a year. If that’s important, you’re going to have to get that out there quickly so we understand.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And similarly there are times when just like you and the audience, one of the characters onscreen will also not quite understand the nature of the relationship, and so it’s important then to tie back to our perspective and point of view episode. If I’m in the perspective and point of view of somebody who has a basic understanding of what a relationship is, and if I want to subvert that I first must lay the groundwork for their wrong understanding. And create their expectation.

So, in Training Day, we have an understanding because we share a perspective with Ethan Hawke that he’s been assigned the kind of badass older veteran character who is going to train him and be his mentor. And so that’s his understanding. And then the guy just starts doing some things that are a little uh, and he goes eh, OK, and we’re all a little bit like uh. And then it gets much, much, much, much worse. And we understand that we, like Ethan Hawke, completely misunderstood the nature of this relationship. And then a different relationship begins to evolve.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about some of these expectations. So Ethan Hawke had a set of expectations going into it. I think so often as I read through Three Page Challenges or moments in scripts that aren’t really working I feel sometimes the screenwriter is trying to do a bunch of work to explain something that could have just been done visually. And so they’re putting a lot of work into describing something that could be done as sort of a snapshot, as an image.

So, I want to give a couple snapshots of things you might see in a movie and as an audience you see these things and you’re like, OK, I get what’s going on here, so all of that work is being done visually and therefore the dialogue can just be about what’s interesting and new and is not establishing these relationships.

So, here’s the first snapshot. You see four people seated at a table in an airport restaurant. They’re all African American. There’s a woman who is 35 and putting in eye drops. There’s a man who is 40, a little overweight, who is trying to get a six-year-old boy to stay in his seat. There’s a girl who is nine and playing a game on her phone.

So, you see these four people around a table, you’re like, OK, they are a family. They’re traveling someplace. That’s the mom. That’s the dad. Those are the kids. That’s your default assumption based on the visual I described. So therefore anything you want to do beyond that, or if you need to clarify exactly the nature of these relationships between people, that there’s like a step relationship or one is actually a cousin, you can do that but that visual sort of gave you all that stuff for free. And so therefore you can spend your time in dialogue on doing interesting things with those characters rather than establishing that they’re actually a family and they’re traveling someplace.

**Craig:** Yeah. You suddenly don’t need to do things like have a character say, “Mom, or “Son,” or any of those annoying things that people do to hit us over the head with this sort of thing. But you’ve put some thought into how to create a relationship in a realistic way.

The fact of the matter is that many writers who struggle with this only struggle with it when they’re writing. If I take any of those people and bring them to an airport and walk them through the airport and just say you quietly look around and then describe to me the relationships you infer from what you see, they’ll get it almost all right.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** That’s how it works as humans. Therefore that’s what we need to do when we’re writing. I wish that writers would spend more time in their visual minds, I guess, rather than trying to just begin or stop with words, if they could maybe walk through the space in their heads and experience it. It’s amazing what you see when you do that. And then you don’t have to use dialogue.

**John:** Yeah. All right, so here’s another snapshot. So, next table over there’s a man and a woman. They’re sitting across from each other. They’re both early 30s in business suits. He’s white. She’s American-born Chinese. He wears a wedding ring which we see as he drinks his scotch. His eyes are red and puffy, maybe from crying. She doesn’t look at him. All her attention focused on the spreadsheet open on her laptop. So that’s the visual we’re giving to an audience at the very start.

We know there’s a conflict there. We know that something has happened. Something is going on. The nature of their relationship between each other is probably fraught. There’s something big happening there. And I think we’re leaning in to see what is the first thing that somebody says. What just happened that got them to this place?

Are they having an affair? Are they business colleagues? Something big has happened there. And you have a little bit of an understanding about their jobs, or sort of that it’s some sort of work travel. So that visual gives us a sense of who those two people are before we’ve had any words spoken.

Again, if you saw those people at the airport you would probably get that basic nature of their relationship and you’d be curious. And so I think the thing about sort of establishing people visually is that you want there to still be curiosity. You’re not trying to answer all the questions. You’re just trying to give a framework so that people are asking interesting questions about these characters in front of them.

**Craig:** You’re building a mystery. Right? You’re giving us clues. I have clues here. OK, these are the clues you’ve given me and I’m looking at the situation here. OK, I’ve got this man, I’ve got this woman. He’s wearing a wedding ring. He’s drinking scotch. He’s crying. He’s sad. She doesn’t seem sad at all. That’s a huge clue to me. Whatever he’s crying about, it’s not about her, because she’s looking at a spreadsheet. It’s not that she’s looking down nervously and shutting him down. She’s busy. She’s looking at a spreadsheet. This guy seems pathetic. I’m guessing his marriage has blown up and he’s crying about it for the 15th time to his associate who is subordinate to him therefore can’t tell him to shut the hell up.

She meanwhile is trying to get the work done that they need to get done so they both don’t get fired by the boss above both of them. I don’t know if that’s true. And I don’t know if you even thought it through that far.

**John:** I haven’t.

**Craig:** Right. It’s just that’s the bunch of clues there. And that’s how fast we start to assemble clues. Here’s the good news for all of you at home. What I just did is something that you can use to your advantage if you want people to get what you want them to get. It’s also what you can use to your advantage if you want people to assume something that is incorrect.

For instance, in the first scenario we see a man, a woman, two kids, they’re all sitting together in the airport, playing on a game. They’re all the same race. They all therefore technically can be related. It feels like a family. And that’s a situation where at some point you could have the nine-year-old, turn, wait, see somebody pass by and then hand 50 bucks to the man and the woman and say, “Thanks. We weren’t here.” And then she takes the six-year-old and they move along, right?

Like what the hell? Who is this little spy? But that’s the point. By giving people clues we know reliably we can get them to sort of start to think in a way. We are doing what magicians do. It’s not magic. It’s misdirection and it’s either purposeful direction or purposeful misdirection. This is the way we have fun.

**John:** Absolutely. And so the example you gave where they pay the money and leave, it would be very hard to establish the normalcy if you actually had to have characters having dialogue before that. We would be confused. And so by giving it to us just as a visual, like OK we get the reason why everyone around them would just assume they’re a family. But if we had to try to do that with dialogue or have somebody comment on that family, it would have been forced. It would have felt weird.

So, you have to think about sort of like what do you want the audience to know. What do you think the audience will expect based on the image that you’re presenting and how can you use that to your advantage?

Most times you want to give the audience kind of what they’re expecting so the audience feels smart. So they feel like they can trust their instincts. They can trust you as a storyteller. And maybe one time out of five defeat that expectation or sort of surpass that expectation. Give them a surprise. But you don’t want to surprise them constantly because then they won’t know what to be focusing on.

**Craig:** Right. Then they start to feel like this really is a magic show and they lose the emotional connection to things. So, in the beginning of something you can have fun with the details of a relationship because those are somewhat logical. And you can mess around with that. The more you do it, the more your movie just becomes a bit of a puzzle. And, by the way, that’s how whodunits work. But those are really advertising nothing more than puzzles. And that’s why I recommend all screenwriters spend time reading Agatha Christie. Just pick a sampling of two Poirots and two Marples. And just see how she does it. And see how clever she is. And see how much logical insight and brilliance is involved in designing these things, particularly in such a fashion where it works even though you are trying to figure it out while it’s happening.

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s not like those characters are realistic, but those characters are created in a very specific way to do a very specific function. And they have to be believable in doing their function the first time through and then when we actually have all the reveals you see like, OK, that’s what they really were doing. And I can understand why everybody else around them had made the wrong assumptions.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the beauty of it is that you start to realize by reading those whodunits how much stuff you’re filling in that isn’t there. You make these assumptions that that girl must be that woman’s daughter. That’s just a flat assumption you made and at no point was that ever stated clearly and why would you believe that? So, it teaches you all the ways that our minds work in a sense. So, that’s always great. But I think once you get past the technicals of portraying and conveying relationships, then the real magic and the real fun is in watching two people change each other through the act of being together, whether it is by talking, or not talking, or fighting, or regret. Whatever it is, that’s why I think we actually go to see these stories.

I don’t think we go to movies for plots. I think maybe we show up because the plot sounds exciting. We stay in our seat for the relationships. Lindsay Doran has an amazing talk about – did we – that’s going to be my One Cool Thing this week for sure. I mean, I’m sure I’ve said it before, but Lindsay Doran has a Ted Talk she’s done. It’s available online for free. That goes to the very heart of why relationships are what we demand from the stories we see.

**John:** Yeah. And too often you think about like is this a character moment or is this a story moment. And, of course, there is no difference.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have to make sure that the character moments are married into fundamental aspects of story that are moving the story forward. Because if you have a moment that is just like two character having a witty conversation but it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual forward trajectory of the plot, it’s not going to last. And if you have a moment that just moves the plot forward but doesn’t actually have our characters engaging and interacting and changing and their relationship evolving, it’s not going to be a rewarding scene either. So, moments have to do these two things at the same time. And that’s the challenge of screenwriting. It’s that everything has to do multiple things at once.

**Craig:** That’s why they’re doing them, right? I mean, the whole point is you’re in charge. You can make anything happen. You can end the movie right now if you want. So, why is this happening? And if your answer is, well, it’s happening because I need it to happen so that something else happens, no. No. Stop. Go backwards. You’re in a bad spot.

**John:** So often I think we have an expectation of what the trajectory are going to be for these characters also. Because we’ve seen movies before, so we know that the hero and love interest will have a fight at some point. They will break up. They’ll get back together. We can see some of these things happening. And that doesn’t mean you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to be aware that the audience sees it coming. And so if the audience sees it coming and kind of feels that you’re doing that beat just because you’re doing that beat, like, oh, now they’re going to break up because of this misunderstanding and, ugh, I saw that happening way ahead of time, that’s not going to be rewarding.

They’re going to have an expectation that attractive people will fall in love. That families will fight and splinter but ultimately come back together. So, all that stuff is sort of baked into our expectation of these stories from the start. So, be aware of that and so if you get to those moments understand what the stock version of that moment is and figure out how you push past that. How do you get to a new moment between these two very specific characters, not the generic archetypes of these characters? What is it about them that makes this scene, these two people being in the scene, so unique and special?

And when you see those things happen, that’s what makes your movie not every other movie.

**Craig:** It strikes me that nobody really talks about relationships when they’re doing their clunky, boring screenwriting classes and lectures. I mean, I’m sure some people out there do. But so often when I skim through these books they talk about characters and plot. They don’t talk about relationships. And I guess my point is I don’t care about character at all. I only care about relationship, which encompasses character. In short, it doesn’t matter what the character of Woody is until Buzz shows up.

**John:** Completely.

**Craig:** Woody, until Buzz shows up, is – well, his character I could neatly fit it on a very small index card. Woody is the guy who is in charge and has sort of a healthy ego because he knows he’s the chosen one. So he’s kind of the benevolent dictator. OK. Boring. Don’t care. That’s why movies happen. We don’t want that to keep on going. What we want is for Shrek to leave the swamp and meet Fiona. Then the characters become things that matter because there in – go back to our conflict episode. Everything is about relationship. They should only talk about plot and relationships as far as I’m concerned. We should just stop talking about character. It’s a thing that’s separate and apart.

I think a lot of studio executives make this mistake when they take about character arcs. I hate talking about character arcs. The only arcs I’m interested in are relationship arcs.

**John:** Yeah. Shrek is not a character, but Shrek and Donkey together is a thing. Like that’s–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s no way to expose what’s interesting about Shrek unless you have Donkey around to be annoying to him. So you have to have some thing or person to interact with. Yes, there are – of course, there exceptions. There are movies where one solo character is on a mission by him or herself and that’s the only thing you see. But those are real exceptions. And I agree with you that so many screenwriting books treat like, “Oh, this is the hero’s journey and this is the arc of the hero,” as if he or she is alone in the entire story. And they never are. And it’s always about the people around them and the challenges.

**Craig:** Or an animal.

**John:** Or an animal.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? There’s some relationship that mattes. And the only place I think you can kind of get away with learning and experiencing something from a character in the absence of a relationship in a kind of impressive way is in theater and on stage and through song, but in that sense you’re there with that person, the relationship is between – so when Shrek sings his wonderful song at the beginning of “A Big, Bright, Beautiful World,” the beginning of Shrek the Musical which as you know I’m obsessed with, he’s singing it to you in the audience. And you’re with him in a room. So that’s a different experience.

But on screen, then when you watch – OK, great example if I can get Broadway for a second, Fiddler on the Roof opens in the most bizarre way any musical has ever opened. The main character walks out and starts talking to you in the audience, immediately breaking the fourth wall. And he does it occasionally and then sometimes he talks to God. And he’s alone. And then there’s the song If I Were a Rich Man. He’s alone the entire time and he’s singing it to himself and to God, who is not visible.

And when you’re in a theater watching it it’s fun, and it’s great, and you get it. Then you watch the movie, which is not a bad movie at all. I like the Fiddler on the Roof movie, but when that song comes around you’re like what is happening.

**John:** Yeah. Who is he talking to?

**Craig:** Why is he? Who are you talking to? Why are you doing this? Why are you standing in a field singing? It’s bizarre. It doesn’t work in a movie. You need a relationship.

**John:** Yep. You do.

All right. Let’s take a look at the relationships in our Three Page Challenges. So, for folks who are knew to the podcast, every once and a while Craig and I take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts, sometimes features, sometimes pilots. We’ve invited them to send these things in. These are not things we found online. These are not random things we’re criticizing. People have submitted these first three pages for us to look at.

So, Megan, the Scriptnotes producer, looks through them all and picks some that she thinks are going to be interesting for us to discuss. So if you want to read along with us the PDFs are going to be attached to the show notes, so go to johnaugust.com/shownotes. Look for this episode. And you can read along with us.

If you would like to submit your own Three Page Challenge you go to johnaugust.com/threepage and there’s rules for how you sort of put stuff in. So, again, not a competition. Not a contest. No one wins anything except hopefully listeners gain something from us talking about these brave people who have sent in their three pages.

**Craig:** Everybody wins.

**John:** Everybody wins. So, producer Megan McDonnell is actually going to read a summary of the things this time, so we will listen to a summary of the first script and then discuss. So the first script is Convenience by Jonathan Brown.

**Megan McDonnell:** Dee Brown and Sasha Thomas, both early 20s, avoid speaking as they shop in a convenience store. Sasha insists on undressing the unspoken issue. She’s your best friend. She can’t be so mad over some guy. Dee warns her that they’re being watched, but the cashier just reads a magazine. Sasha asks him to pick a side in their argument, but he stays out of it. Dee makes her purchase and exits. Sasha trails her out.

Sasha scolds Dee for being rude and immature saying it isn’t fair. Dee challenges her. What, that she’s not entertaining Sasha’s pity party or that she always has to be the one that pays at the register? Sasha admits that she didn’t notice whether or not there was someone else in the store. Of course she didn’t. She has a focus problem. They put on hoodies. Dee confirms that they are not friends anymore and she doesn’t care. She pulls out a gun. They put on masks and run back into the store.

**John:** Craig, talk me through Convenience.

**Craig:** OK. So, good summary by Megan. We have I think an interesting sort of scenario going on here. I understand that these – I assume that Dee is female. I believe Dee is female. So we have two women, two youngish women in their 20s, and they are both casing a joint. They’re shopping, arguing, and casing a joint and preparing to rob it, which feels like a very sort of Tarantino-y kind of thing. This reminds me of the opening of Pulp Fiction where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are having a chit chat in a diner and talking about hopes and dreams and then it ends with them announcing that they’re robbing the place. So that part is kind of cool.

The trouble I had with this ultimately is that it felt a bit rambly. There was a point in here. I think the point is that Sasha has done something to betray Dee. I think maybe stole a boyfriend or something, whose name is John.

**John:** John.

**Craig:** That’s a whole lot of words for what is somewhat mundane. And the relationship as we went through didn’t really change. In other words, it stayed on one level which is Sasha keeps yammering to try and get Dee to be OK with things. And Dee keeps pushing back and saying no. But it doesn’t get physical. It doesn’t get quiet. It doesn’t get stony. There’s no change in tactics which I always find troubling. I think in general people are very, very good at changing tactics when they’re trying to get something from somebody. There’s certainly plenty of conflict on display here which I think is a good thing.

Just technical things. There’s a few just odd bits in here. For instance, Sasha says, “You can’t seriously still be mad about it.” And then Dee says, “Seriously? We’re being watched.” So they’re using seriously twice but in different ways. They’re not necessarily echoing “seriously.”

Sasha says, “I’m your best friend. You can’t stop talking to me over some guy.” Nobody says that really like that. It’s a bit cliché. And I’m your best friend is just a weird thing. When we talked earlier about how to get across the specifics of a relationship, there are cooler ways to do that information than just somebody announcing it. We’re missing an apostrophe on “friend’s feelings.”

There’s a bit where they involve Bill who is the clerk in this convenience store. I assume he’s going to be important because he gets a name. The names are really generic. I don’t know quite what to do with these. Dee Brown. Sasha Thomas. Bill Frank. So I’m not sure where we are. I’d love to know also where are we in the world.

And lastly it appears that there’s some duplicated dialogue on page three where Dee says, “Look. I don’t care about John. I don’t care about you.” And then in the next line she starts, “Look. I don’t care about John. I don’t care about you.” I assume that’s not intentional. But a lot of this felt on the nose and exclamatory. And I think there’s a version of this where two people are whispering/arguing with each other in an aisle and we’re trying to suss out what they’re talking about but we can do a better job of uncorking that this is what they mean. And then one of them pulls out a gun and says “Just shut up until we’re done,” and then they rob the store.

I don’t know. It just felt very – this did not feel like an efficient use of the first three pages. What did you think, John?

**John:** I would agree with you there. So, talking about the relationship here, I think the reason why I didn’t understand the relationship well or didn’t click into the relationship is I don’t have any sense of who these two women are. I don’t – they’re just names. So, “Dee Brown, early 20s, and Sasha Thomas, early 20s, are walking through the convenient store aisles shopping.” That’s all we get for who these two women are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I don’t have any sense of who they are individually. I’m not given any bits of flavor to help me tell them apart. And so as I’m reading through the dialogue I had a really hard time remembering like, wait, no, who had the affair with who? I couldn’t tell them apart. And their voices are the same. So, there was really no way for me to click in on sort of what I should be looking for.

So, we talk about expectation. I didn’t really have any expectations for them because you’ve given me nothing to sort of grasp onto at the start here. Same with Bill Frank. “BILL FRANK, 20s, the cashier is flipping through his magazine.” Well, there’s a lot of cashiers and I don’t know what kind of person this is. So give me some flavor here so I have some sense of who this person is and what the nature of it is.

Specificity overall – I don’t know what kind of convenience store this is. I don’t know where we are. I don’t have a sense of the season. I don’t have a sense – just visually I’m given very little to grasp onto, so I’m just trying to listen to the dialogue and I can’t actually pull anything useful out of this other than Sasha did something bad. But I don’t know why we’re talking about it now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And what is the inciting incident that got us to talk about this moment?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, it’s that the writer wanted to. And this is what I mean. Like, you got to come up with better reasons than this. By the way, I love what you just said about seasons. There is this fricking thing – am I aloud to say fricking without violating?

**John:** Absolutely. 100%.

**Craig:** Fricking thing where writers just – we talk about default white in screenplays. How about this? Default spring. Writers will write default spring. Because the second you actually get involved in production, somebody somewhere who has to dress these people will say when – what part of year is it? And most writers go, “Oh, uh, May.” No. May is boring. Give me the heat of summer. Give me the chill of winter. Come up with some cool stuff. And maybe if it is May it’s May, but then it’s hay fever. Whatever. Do something so that the weather matters. So that clothes are interesting. So every time the door opens there’s a wind that blows in and knocks a thing over. Use the world.

**John:** Use the world.

**Craig:** Use the world.

**John:** Other things that were just frustratingly unspecific to me, midway through page one, “Fiddles with items on the shelves. Dee continues to look around the convenience store and picks up an item to buy. Sasha follows her.” Picks up an item to buy. Got to pick up something. It’s no more words to actually say what that is that you’re buying. And anything would be more interesting than something to buy.

**Craig:** Anything. Anything. Like, somebody is stock piling the weirdest item. You know, like just ChapSticks. Just one after another after another after another. But whatever they’re doing everything has to be a choice. You’re absolutely right. And I think so much about what happened to these two girls with each other and their relationship could be helped along by just – is one tall and is one short?

**John:** Yeah. Give me something.

**Craig:** Punky haircut? Regular haircut? Give me something. It all felt incredibly bland and generic.

**John:** I had real geography problems when they left the store. And so I think what’s supposed to be happening is they’re basically doing a loop around the entire outside of the store and they’re coming back in front. But I had no real sense of where I was. So I couldn’t tell if they were still out front, where they were in terms of this. It makes sense to do the loop, but just give me the loop because I didn’t process it.

And I wasn’t ahead of the writer in terms of knowing this was going to be a stick up really. I mean, I assume they were shoplifting or something. So, I was a little excited by the, OK, now they’re going to rob and that’s the bottom of page three. But, I didn’t feel it.

And here’s the thing. If you’re going to do the reversal like, oh, they’re going to actually rob the place, the conversation leading up to that still has to be interesting. So, the thing we talked about with Pulp Fiction is like that conversation in the diner was fascinating.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** Before they pulled the gun.

**Craig:** That’s why pulling the gun was such a shock. It’s not a shock here that they pull a gun because really what I get is two fairly bland, generic people are also doing a fairly bland, generic movie thing which is robbing a convenience with a bland weapon. It’s not even an interesting weapon. They haven’t even bought a can of bug spray and a lighter to use that as a flame torch. You know what I mean? It’s just, oh, here’s the usual gun. And I don’t know, it’s all just so…

One last little bit on that geography. I think sometimes if you want to do something that might be confusing to a reader then just use it to your advantage and say we’re not really sure where they’re going now and then, surprise, they’ve ended up right back at the front. Except this time they pull their heads down and pull out their – you know what I mean? Be impressionistic about it I guess.

**John:** Last little thing I will say is at the bottom of page three you commented how there’s dialogue that’s repeated. So it could be intentional. But if you’re going to repeat dialogue that way, because sometimes people do say the same thing again, give us something different in how you’re presenting it so that we know that it wasn’t a mistake.

So, the second time, like, “Listen, I don’t care about John.” Underline something. Uppercase some things to make it clear that this is not a mistake. She really is saying the same thing again, just with different emphasis, or really nailing it home.

**Craig:** Or even a parenthetical. Again. Just so that you’re letting the reader know, yeah, this is purposeful. I didn’t just screw up.

**John:** Final thing I will say is sometimes a character speaks and then there’s a line of action and the character speaks again with a continued. That can be a powerful thing, but I got confused a couple times here where I thought like we should have switched to the other character. If you’re going to do that, there has to be a real reason for why you interjected there. That there’s more happening after it. There were a lot of cases here where I felt like you should have just kept all that dialogue together and then done the action line, or put stuff in as a parenthetical because there’s a lot of cases of CONT’Ds and stuff that just confused me.

**Craig:** Yep. All right, well why don’t we move onto our second Three Page Challenge for this episode. It’s Plunder Cove by Paul Acampora and Erin Dionne. So let’s have Megan tell us a little bit about Plunder Cover.

**Megan:** A beat up car parks near a warn Plunder Cove amusement park billboard. Elliot Marker, 17, and Lilly, 9, gather their belongings from the car, her horse-shaped backpack and his hockey stick. He points out a small snake on the ground and warns Lilly to watch her step. Watching her step is the biggest part of staying safe.

Elliot pries open a hole in the chain link fence and props the gap for he and Lilly to climb through. He calls this their special family pass. They joyfully run through the amusement park and get caught by a guard just inside the wall. Elliot claims that they were just looking for a bathroom for Lilly. She asks why she always has to be the one who needs the bathroom. It’s because she always does.

They plan to meet when she’s done and go to the Merry-Go-Round. She gives him a big hug. He is an excellent big brother.

**Craig:** OK, John, what did you think of Plunder Cove? This is a pilot for a TV series.

**John:** So this is one of the most interesting Three Page Challenges I think I’ve encountered in this whole thing, because some of the writing in this was actually really nicely done and really thoughtful and the nature of the relationship between the brother and sister was interesting. The visual world of it was interesting. And yet these writers, it feels like they have not seen any other screenplays. Like they’re coming in from just some completely other universe of writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because they just didn’t seem to have any sense of the standard ways that things are formatted. So maybe we’ll talk about the relationships first and then we’ll go into like OK this is how things actually need to look on the page, because the actual – some of the writing was good and would have been so much stronger with proper formatting.

So, I want to talk about our expectations of these two characters and what’s working and what could work better. What I liked about, so Elliot, age 17, and his nine-year-old sister, Lilly Marker, exit sedan. “ELLIOT, solid and tall, is a little too serious for his age. LILLY is high-energy, no patience, wild hair and untied shoes.” Great. Those are good descriptions of those people. Like I get what those people are. I get what the dynamic is. With that description I’m eager to see what is actually happening.

Then what’s actually happening, they’re sneaking into the park. He uses a hockey stick to pull open the chain link fence. Cool. I got it. I get all this stuff. I get a little sense that the home life is messed up. The mom is always in a box of wine. That the brother is a little annoyed by the little sister, but also very protective of the little sister. I basically got and believed their relationship in these three pages which is an accomplishment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked the wardrobe, hair, and makeup of the character introductions. I mean, look, the – and I’ll ignore the formatting, because truthfully I was thrilled. To be honest with you, thrilled to see something that people had typed that had absolutely no concern whatsoever for normal formatting. Because I just thought, oh good, finally a test of this thing I keep saying which is it doesn’t matter. Well, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter to me. I’m sure that for other people they might look at this and go, nah, these people don’t know what they’re doing. But for me, they were an enjoyable three pages, so I stopped caring about that other stuff because in the end it doesn’t really matter.

I mean, if they could keep consistent within their own mad system that would be great. So, for instance, “park guy” is a character and he’s not capitalized, but everybody else is capitalized. So there are things like that. But by and large, you know, I got – here’s the truth, after the second page I stopped caring about that stuff and I was just inside of the scene.

So, let me talk about how that works, Paul and Erin. Pretty well. I think, relationship wise, again going back to the let’s not give away stuff that we don’t have to give away, they do this all the time. Right? We have an understanding that this is not the first time they’ve done this. Correct?

**John:** That is correct.

**Craig:** Lilly is sort of talking like she’s never done this before. That a lot of these things are new. “The biggest part of staying safe is just keeping your eyes open” is what he’s saying to her. Why is he saying this to her now after they’ve done this a bunch of times? You know? And then why is she asking what’s the other part, and “How come we never use the main gate?” That was the line that implied that they do this a lot.

**John:** Yeah. And so that exchange actually worked pretty well for me. I would cut out Lilly’s talk back line at the end. So, “How come we never use the main gate?” “We’ve got a special family pass.” He uses the hockey stick to pry it open. I didn’t need her line that says, “Our family pass looks a lot like a hockey stick.”

**Craig:** Precisely. Because you’ve seen the hockey stick many, many, many, many times. And then when she says, “Why do you always say I need to use the bathroom?” that makes sense, right?

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Frankly, the first exchange, too, “Watch your step. The biggest part of staying safe…What’s the other part? Dumb luck.” I’d cut that, too. I would just have him pull out the hockey stick and she’s like, “Can’t we – how come we never use the main gate?” “We’ve got a special family pass.” Then I get that.

She’s a little precocious for nine and we’ve seen that character many, many, many, many, many times. But, you know, it’s not the worst of it. And I liked their whole chitchat about the carousel and demoiselle and all that stuff. It felt nice.

I mean, look, there’s absolutely nothing in this teaser that qualifies as a teaser.

**John:** No. This isn’t a teaser for a TV show at all.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s kind of a scene. Here’s what we should say about a teaser. A teaser sets up a question. Sets up a mystery. Sets up this is the start of a journey and it was just the end of three pages. It wasn’t anything.

**Craig:** Yeah. For this to be a teaser you do this scene and then at the end of the scene you realize they’re ghosts. That’s a teaser. There’s nothing here that goes, whoa, it’s just a lovely, nice little moment and then off they go. It feels like the first scene of an independent film, not a teaser to start you off and make you gripped by a television show.

So, look, in terms of formatting and stuff, honestly Paul and Erin, here’s the truth. You guys write well enough that you probably should give yourself the advantage of writing things in the “normal” format. And you can do that for free. You can do that for free using, well, Highland, there’s a free version of Highland but that’s only–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK. So there’s free Highland. WriterDuet. There’s a free version of that. Just start there. At least you’ll get a sense of how the format works. But this was pretty well done.

**John:** Yeah. So a couple things, you know, using the write application will solve most of these problems, the weird way that dialogue was centered rather than blocked properly. If you’re going to do a pilot, that’s fine. Plunder Cove is the title of the series. You put the Episode on the title page. So, Episode One, Merry-Go-Round Broke Down. Teaser would generally be centered over the top of page one of the actual script. And then the application can take care of the rest of the stuff for you.

But here’s why I think it does matter. Here’s why standard formatting, or at least a semblance of standard formatting is if Megan hadn’t picked this as a Three Page Challenge and I was just like skimming through a bunch of them, I would have immediately passed over this because it didn’t look like a screenplay at all. It looked like some person who typed a play once and had never actually looked at it. And people are going to dismiss something that just looks so weird. And it’s not even consistent in how it is done. It’s not like they came up with some other system for how it was all going to be done. It just felt kind of random. And so you want everything to feel deliberate and you’ve made really good choices with words. Make really good choices in how you’re presenting those words so we actually will read your story.

**Craig:** I would have gravitated toward it. I’m just so bored of like, oh here it comes, INT…

You know, but that’s me. That’s me. I’m nuts.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to our third Three Page Challenge. It’s Savorless Salt by Mathieu Ghekiere. He’s from Belgium. I looked him up.

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** Megan, take it away.

**Megan:** Months are ripped from a calendar. Lucas, 10, sleeps. Hannah, 42, looks over a shelf of canned food with homemade labels. She selects a can and as she prepares a meal she’s careful to wipe down the containers. Jeff, 43, rides a stationary bike furiously, earning credits. Dylan, 5, wakes Lucas with excitement. It’s Christmas. Lucas looks at his wall covered in tick marks. He wipes them away with his sleeve.

Over their modest feast, Lucas challenges his mother’s assertion that it is Christmas. It’s been 412 days since last Christmas. Surprised that he’s been counting the days, she counters with an explanation that time is relative and leaves the table in a huff. Jeff encourages Lucas to keep counting and stay curious.

**John:** And we’re back. Craig, talk me through your experience with Savorless Salt.

**Craig:** What a strange and interesting title. Well I knew that Mathieu was not a native English speaker pretty quickly in. There’s something very lovely – in a lovely way it’s very backwards, the way that German is often backwards. Where he says, “Every month ends in the trash until December.” He’s talking about a calendar on a wall. “With a black marker every day before December 24th gets crossed.” Meaning every day before December 24th gets crossed off with a black marker. So it took me like three times on that sentence, but I was like, OK, I get it. And this is kind of actually awesome. I love the crazy syntax.

So generally speaking I thought this was pretty fantastic. I was gripped by the description. And I could see the space I was in. I understood, even if it said INT. BUNKER I understood that it was definitely bunker-y. That there was no need for me in the audience as it were to see the word bunker. I felt the bunkerness. I really loved that when we met Hannah she’s doing this interesting kind of ritualistic preparation of canned food. And then we get to Jeff who we, I guess are going to assume is her husband, and he’s biking. And you just infer that he’s generating energy and that the energy is measured in credits. So they have these obligations. And she throws powered bleach in the pot before putting in the vegetables. Lovely little details. I’m fascinated by what’s going on here. Fascinated.

Then I meet the brothers. I don’t know how old Lucas is. I know that his little brother Dylan is five. I’d love to know–

**John:** Lucas is 10.

**Craig:** Oh, where is that?

**John:** At the start there’s a weird scene that is underwritten. So, “INT. BEDROOM KIDS,” again.

**Craig:** Oh, there it is. Yeah.

**John:** “LUCAS, 10 years old, is sleeping”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that was a situation where like we had no framing around that at all, so Bedroom Kids is reversed but also I don’t – what does that look like? That was an opportunity to show how this space is different than our expectations of what a bunker space should be, or the degree to which it matches those expectations.

**Craig:** Yeah, probably, Mathieu what you’d want to do is just cut that out. You can see the calendar on a concrete wall if you want. And then if you want to give us little glimpses of the space without drawing attention to people, and then go with Hannah, go with Jeff on the bike, back to Hannah, and then if you want to do the kids again. So just help us out there because I couldn’t remember from that little bloop. It didn’t even register in my brain.

So, his brother jumps on him because it’s Christmas. And in a very small bathroom, “Jeff washes himself with powder and the tiniest amount of water.” Another great little – I feel like I’m learning how whatever post-Apocalyptic nightmare these people live in, or if it’s not, regardless, I’m learning about bunker life. It’s kind of cool.

And then there’s this conversation that happens and Lucas is complaining a little bit that even though it’s Christmas the last Christmas happened 412 days ago. And this disturbs Hannah for some reason. I love the little mystery of this. Why is she upset that he’s been counting the days? She doesn’t like that, but Jeff does like that. Jeff, who is the dad-ish, kind of is pleased about this. And Hannah kind of loses her appetite. She’s having this emotional response to what seemingly is this just happy little family conversation. And smashes her elbows on the table. I’m pretty sure we want hands there. It’s very hard to smash your elbows on the table. Marches off and Jeff basically says to Lucas, you know, promise me you won’t stop counting.

Well, what I love here is I know so much. In three pages I know these people live in a bunker. I know roughly how bunker life works. I know that there’s something really creepy going on with Hannah. I know that the amount of days that they’ve been done there is at issue and that lies have been told. And I know that Jeff likes it and wants his kid to keep doing that because there’s conflict between him and Hannah. To me, that’s great.

So, you know, I say great job Mathieu. I really enjoyed these three pages.

**John:** Yeah. I was confused in the wrong way about Hannah. So I did up underlining on page three, “Her appetite is gone.” It’s like, well why I write. Because I didn’t see enough stuff there to give me a clue whether I was supposed to know that or not know that. And so, again, it’s being aware of what the reader is going to infer or not infer. I felt like Mathieu suspected I was a little more caught up than I actually was at that moment. So, that moment didn’t quite work for me. But I did like that you’re establishing these characters with a conflict already there.

It wasn’t spending a lot of time like everything is happy and now everything is fraught. This is a family that’s already in crisis even within this bunker context which is good. And that the nature of counting the days is important. I think the problem was, as a reader, I couldn’t imagine any scenario for why Hannah was acting the way she was. And so that left me a little bit frustrated.

**Craig:** Right. And I get that. I stopped a little bit when – when she lost her appetite I was a little confused by why it happened in that moment and not a little earlier. I think maybe when he makes the counting thing, maybe that’s when she puts her fork down. The losing your appetite also is a little funky one just because Mathieu makes a big deal about how this is a feast and yet it’s not a lot of food, which makes me think that they’re on rations and are hungry a lot. So, but there’s something also a bit scary about Hannah, which I like. The unpredictable emotionality was putting me on edge, and I like that.

**John:** Yeah. So in our previous episode we talked about point of view and I think one of the things, especially this last scene, could benefit from is a little bit more clear point of view. Because we established all of these characters, but whose point of view are we seeing this dinner scene through? Is it from Hannah’s point of view? Is it from Jeff’s? Is it from one of the boys? And I think making that choice will inform how the scene plays and how we as an audience are reading this moment.

If we’re supposed to be seeing this from Hannah’s point of view, that’s frustrating because we don’t understand Hannah’s point of view. If we’re seeing it from Jeff’s point of view, which seems a little bit more likely, that feels a little bit more grounded. And the boys’ point of view could be equally valid. But I think we need to give the boys a little bit more screen time and weight beforehand and see everything kind of from their POV, which might mean cutting out the Jeff in the shower and stuff like that. Just so we’re really seeing it from the boys’ point of view.

**Craig:** That’s fair. I think there’s a little bit of confusion in there about who we’re with. But I was impressed by the amount of information that I got without being smacked in the face with it. So, it was interesting.

**John:** Let’s talk about Mathieu’s English. Because his English is pretty good, but there’s things that he messes up that you’re going to mess up as a non-native speaker.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so if he’s really writing this in English rather than French or another language, I think it would serve him well to have a native speaker just do a quick run through and just flip some of the words around so it reads a little bit better as standard English. Because sometimes we stop and we trip on things like, wait, what did he actually mean there? And if it was smooth and effortless it would serve him better.

**Craig:** No question. I mean I can go through this and practically every single paragraph there is some kind of mistake in English and they are somewhat subtle. We generally call – it’s canned food. We don’t refer to them as metal food cans. We don’t say big pearls of sweat. We would say big beads or droplets of sweat. He’s eyes instead of his eyes. There’s a lot of things like this. She wipes the plastic with a paper cloth. I think in English we would say paper towel.

So there’s all these little idiomatic things. And, by the way, this is something that I had to do, even though I was writing in English for English people, for Chernobyl because it’s essentially a British production and actors and crew were sort of used to reading a certain thing. We just decided we’re just going to go with British spellings and we were going to go with British words to not confuse people. So, for instance, no more flash lights but they have–

**John:** Torches. Yep.

**Craig:** So Jane Featherstone read through the whole script and sort of went, no, no, yes, yes, change that. Colour. You know. It was all – and it doesn’t change anything, Mathieu. I mean, that’s the point, is that it’s still your writing, you’re just making it what you actually intended it to be.

**John:** Yep. All right, thank you again to our three brave entrants to the Three Page Challenge. I guess it was actually four because there was one writing team.

If you would like to read these pages, they’re at johnaugust.com. Just look for this episode and you can find the PDFs to download. Or if you want to submit your own it’s johnaugust.com/threepage.

It has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Things are these books which you’ve seen in a bookstore, I assure you, if you live in the United States. They’re these sepia toned books that are about local history. So, the first one of these I read was on Larchmont which is the little shopping street in my neighborhood by Patricia Lombard. It was a great history of this weird little shopping street in Los Angeles. But doing research for this new project I’ve been pulling up a lot of LA history. And some of these books are fantastic. Another one I’d recommend is African-Americans in Los Angeles by Karin L. Stanford.

So these books, there’s a company that makes them called Images of America. There’s really a very set template. There’s a ton of photos. Some are really well written, some are not well written. But they’re so fascinating in their very, very, very local history of a place that I’d really encourage you to check them out for wherever you are living right now or wherever you grew up. But if you need to do research on a place, historical research on a place, they are great because they just have a ton of photos of a place that, yes, you could probably find online but you couldn’t find in context. So, I’m going to recommend these Images of America books.

**Craig:** I picked up one of those for La Cañada, the town where I live in. You know, La Cañada in many ways is an incredibly boring little town. That’s kind of why we like it. But when you read the history of La Cañada you realize it’s always been a boring a little town.

**John:** Nothing’s changed.

**Craig:** No. My One Cool Thing is the aforementioned Lindsay Doran Ted Talk. I apologize if it’s been my One Cool Thing before but I don’t care. It’s that good. It’s an evergreen. You should absolutely listen to this. It’s brilliant. It’s not long. It’s 18 minutes and 25 seconds. And in that 18 minutes and 25 seconds Lindsay Doran, who is a brilliant, brilliant producer, legendary producer, manages to convey precisely what it is about movies and relationships that draw us in. And it is such a refreshing antidote to a lot of the garbage advice that I think is handed out, particularly about endings to people, in which endings become loud, stakes-building crescendos of explosions and nonsense cacophony. And miss out on what an ending really is.

And she does this wonderful job of explaining to you through movies you’ve already seen whose endings you may have forgotten what the endings are really about. So Lindsay Doran Ted Talk. Link in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. So that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael O’Konis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answer on the show.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. That’s a good place to go for little small questions about things.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a comment. That helps people find the show. But you can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

We have now seven seasons of Scriptnotes available to download. If you go to store.johnaugust.com you can download them as big files that have all the mp3s. All the related materials. And the bonus episodes. So they are $5 per season if you want to go back through those.

We also have Scriptnotes.net which is $2 a month and lets you load and download any of those episodes of the first 359 that we’ve done, plus the bonus episodes.

So, Craig, thank you again for a fun show about relationships.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. My relationship with you is better than ever.

**John:** Better than ever. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Talk to you soon. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Arlo Finch covers](http://johnaugust.com/2018/youd-hardly-recognize-arlo-finch-overseas) look different around the world. You can catch John at the San Diego Festival of Books on August 25, at the Orange Public Library Comic-Con on September 22, at the Texas Book Festival on October 25th, or in Frankfurt, Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen in early October.
* The [Austin Film Festival](https://austinfilmfestival.com) is also coming up on October 25th.
* In a musical, the relationship can be with the audience, like in Shrek: The Musical’s [“Big Bright Beautiful World”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sqopU4V60w) or Fiddler on the Roof’s [“If I Were a Rich Man”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_XeHLrkwTY) — as opposed to [the movie version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBHZFYpQ6nc).
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CONVENIENCE.pdf) by Jonathan Brown
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/PLUNDER_COVE.pdf) by Paul Acampora & Erin Dionne
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SAVORLESS_SALT.pdf) by Mathieu Ghekiere
* You can submit for the three page challenge [here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage).
* [Images of America Book Series](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/series/images-of-america-books?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5Izfyqis3AIVjeNkCh1gSANLEAAYASAAEgLEB_D_BwE&ef_id=W1EenwAABGOU1CD9:20180719232831:s)
* [Larchmont](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467134118) by Patricia Lombard
* [African-Americans in Los Angeles](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9780738580944) by Karin L. Stanford
* Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk – [Saving the World vs. Kissing the Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=752INSLlyf0)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael O’Konis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_360.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/putting-words-on-the-page).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 349 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll be talking about the tools we use to get things written. For me that’s Highland 2, the screenwriting app that is finally coming out of beta. But there’s also outlining and treatments and all the other peripheral things that writers write. We’ll be talking about that. We’ll also be answering questions from the huge stack that have piled up over the past few weeks.

But first, Craig, we have guests for our live show finally.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s going to be a good one. Now these live shows, these are the ones we do to benefit Hollywood Heart. These tend to be our kind of biggest live shows. These are the live shows where we’ve had our Rian Johnsons. And we’ve had our David Benioff and Dan Weisses. And we’ve had all sorts of big fancy–

**John:** Our Jason Bateman.

**Craig:** We got our Jason Batemans for these. And this one, no exception. Maybe honestly our best lineup yet.

**John:** So what I love about this lineup is they are people doing very different things but also kind of similar things when you think about it. So our guests are Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan, they are the co-creators and showrunners of Westworld, an HBO show that is fantastic. It’s one of my favorite shows because I am a robot and therefore I am rooting for the robots.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But we didn’t stop there. We also invited Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. They are the co-creators and showrunners of The Avengers franchise. So they are the folks who are writing the Captain America movies. They wrote the most recent Avengers movie, upcoming Avengers movie. So, we are going to be talking with all four of them about writing big cinematic stories that take place over multiple episodes that are hugely complicated that have spoilers and secrets. They’re under intense spotlights. I think it’s going to be a great conversation.

**Craig:** Just to point out that Christopher and Stephen, their movie Avengers: Infinity War I believe had the biggest opening weekend of any movie of all time.

**John:** Yes. So it is superlative in many senses. And I should stress that we are going to spoil things. So you’re buying a ticket that is three weeks from now, or a little less than three weeks from now when the episode comes out, so you’ve got to see the movie. You’ve got to understand what’s happening on Westworld because we are going to spoil things. So this is not going to be one of those like oh cover your ears. No, no. You are buying this knowing that we are going to spoil things.

**Craig:** Well, and if you are familiar with the Avengers movies and you’re familiar with Westworld, I’m going to go out on a limb and guarantee something, OK. Even if we have to cut it out of the actual episode that airs for all the poor saps that don’t show up, if you show up one of these folks is going to give you a piece of juicy info that you can’t get anywhere else.

**John:** Yeah. Right after we finish the show one of these four will pull us aside and say, “Can you please, please, please cut out the part where I said this thing?”

**Craig:** It’s inevitable. Happens every time.

**John:** And we will.

**Craig:** But if you’re there in the audience and remember this benefits kids, and I believe they’re nice children. I don’t think it benefits like jerks.

**John:** We only let the nice children benefit from these shows.

**Craig:** And so if you go to Scriptnotes.brownpapertickets.com, you can help these kids and also help yourself. And honestly even if Markus and McFeely hadn’t written the biggest movie of all time, and even if Joy and Nolan hadn’t written this incredible TV show, you would get to see me. Also John will be there. Yeah, no, John will be there.

**John:** I’ll be there as well. Yes.

**Craig:** But you’ll get to see me.

**John:** The show is May 22nd. It is at the ArcLight in Hollywood at 8pm. You cannot buy tickets through the ArcLight. You have to buy them through Scriptnotes.brownpapertickets.com. There’s also some special VIP tickets we found out about, so there’s going to be a little VIP after-party show thing. So if you want that that is a chance to talk with us and get more information about the things that were spoiled in the course of the episode.

**Craig:** I’m so excited.

**John:** I’m very, very excited about this. All right, next we have some follow up. So Jack wrote in about default white. Do you want to take what Jack wrote in?

**Craig:** Sure. Here we go. So he says, “I’ve worked in casting for more than ten years, both inside the company that releases the majority of the casting breakdowns for the industry, and as a casting director. Right now breakdowns are generally prepared in one of two ways. A casting director either submits a fully prepared breakdown ready for release, or production sends the script to the breakdown company where an in-house writer will read it and create the character breakdown which is then sent back for approval.

“If the character does not have a defined race in the script, the role is listed on the breakdown for all ethnicities.”

**John:** So this is a topic that Christina Hodson and I got into on Episode 346 which is basically how much should the screenwriter be defining who those characters are in the script so that the breakdown comes out the way you want it to. So, let’s continue with what Jack says.

**Craig:** So Jack says, “Once the breakdown is released, agents and actors begin submitting. The casting director will receive an overwhelming number of white submissions for ‘all ethnicity roles.’ Part of the reason is because the database of actors is primarily white. Another part of the reason is that agents will always submit their ‘best’ first. That’s defined as the people who will make them the most money. These actors have historically been white. And, finally, casting directors will reach out to actors they know and trust first, again mostly white.

“So if the role is ‘all ethnicities,’ chances are very good that a white person will be hired. There is no conspiracy here. No effort to deny anybody anything. It’s just people doing what is familiar and easy. I understand that it is uncomfortable to define race. If you select one race you are eliminating all others, including white, and that’s not fair. But the reality is that the odds are stacked against people of color. That’s not an opinion. It’s a numerical fact.

“If, however, a writer defines a character as Asian, agents will submit Asian talent. Casting directors will audition Asian talent. Producers will hire Asian talent. It’s that simple. Those best lists will start to change as more people of color are hired. If you cannot bring yourself to define your lead roles, please consider at least defining your day players. Describing that under-five lines’ Chatty Waitress as Asian will make a difference. And why not throw in Over 40 while you’re at it.

“There’s a Japanese actor who hasn’t had an audition all month who will thank you.”

All right, well that’s a pretty good summary there. What do you think about all that, John?

**John:** I thought it was great. So first off, we have fantastic listeners. So, Jack, thank you for writing in with that because that is a perspective we wouldn’t have known. So, telling us basically how breakdowns are happening and urging us as writers to just be more explicit on race because it does actually make a difference.

Now sometimes I’ll say that if we define a race in a script we can get called out for it. Basically like why are you being so specific? This gives us some ammunition on our side for why it is useful to be so specific for races in scripts because it’s going to help change things a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s another axis that I want to bring up just because it often gets overshadowed in the discussion about race and gender. We have something like 108 speaking parts in Chernobyl. There’s a lot. And everybody – every character – is a citizen of the Soviet Union from one of the many various republics, but primarily we’re talking about Ukrainians and Russians and Belarusians. And because we’re casting out of the UK and Scandinavia, one of the inherent biases in casting came up immediately. And that was that actors tend to be really good-looking. So when we talk about sort of historical biases, actors – both men and women – tend to be people that are attractive, they have facial symmetry, they have good hair. They don’t have – well, the quirkier facial features that you see in what we’ll call just regular people. And, of course, they are typically in good shape.

And for us we thought a lot of this is about having believable people as part of this cast. And that doesn’t mean that we’re saying we wanted a cast of people that are not attractive. It’s not about that. But it’s rather we want a spectrum of people and we’re not going to allow traditional facial attraction be our definition of what attractive is. Nor are we going to limit ourselves to certain body types. So I think as we’re writing and we’re listening to people like Jack telling us how this actually works, how the food is cooked in the kitchen so to speak, to think about body type as well and facial types. Even things like hair and hair color. All these things – anything to kind of add some flavor and get yourself out of a lot of these default positions.

You know, if we kind of come up with a bunch of defaults, let’s start pushing against them where we think it will help us out and, I don’t know, set us apart a little bit.

**John:** Yeah. Another way to sort of reach beyond sort of the usual people that we’re always seeing for these kind of things might be to early on bring in some folks who are interesting for a project. I’m really more talking for the writer-directors out there. But Mike Birbiglia when he was doing his movies he does these table readings – not even table readings, just like sit around in his apartment reading through the script. And it’s a useful process for him to hear his script and figure it out. But I think it’s also useful for getting a sense of what if we tried to mix things up. What if I tried some different people in these roles? What if I consider this actor who sort of seems like a reach or a stretch for this, but I can see what they can actually bring to that role?

This last week I was at a table reading for Alan Yang’s new script. And he brought in these actors who were fantastic. And it was a chance for them all to sort of hear each other and for everyone in the room to sort of experience these actors. And I made notes of some of these actors who I never would have encountered before. And like, wow, I want to write something for that person because they are great.

So, just reaching out and broadening past the first instinct on casting can be a great thing. And that can start by what you’re specifically saying about that character in the script.

**Craig:** No question. By the way, funny, I went to one of those readings in Mike Birbiglia’s place and one of the roles was being read by this lovely gentleman, he was an older guy, and he seemed familiar to me and his voice seemed familiar. But I don’t think he’s an actor, so I think he might just be a friend. But he did such a good job and I just thought, “Wow, Mike Birbiglia is so lucky that he just has a friend who is like a 65-year-old guy who is just really good at being a guy at a table read.” And then afterwards I found out it was Frank Oz. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Because I didn’t know exactly what Frank Oz looked like. You know, I know what he sounds like. I know that he’s Miss Piggy and that he’s Yoda and Grover. And obviously he’s a wonderful filmmaker, an amazing filmmaker. And I was just like “This guy is so great. I wonder who he is. Oh, he’s Frank Oz, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.”

And another interesting story like the one you were just describing with Alan’s table reading was a table reading that we had all the way back in 2003 for Scary Movie 3. And when you are pretty early on and you’re still casting a lot of times casting agents will help you fill your round table by bringing in actors that are just there to read for the roundtable. That’s it. And this young actor that no one had ever heard of named Kevin Hart showed up. And we thought Kevin was just the funniest guy. And I was like let’s just make him – this guy is him. Let’s just keep writing it for him. And so we cast him in Scary Movie 3, and in Scary Movie 4, and in Superhero Movie. He’s just great.

And it was all because he just was sort of a fill in guy in 2003 at a table reading.

**John:** Yeah. I think what’s nice about table readings is the stakes are just lower. Because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and the world doesn’t come crashing to an end. And it’s a chance to experiment and play a bit. And so I always wonder about sort of you don’t want actors to be exploited by being brought in for table reads where they’re not actually going to be able to land that part maybe. But what you described with Kevin Hart is a great example of you got to know who he was just because of that table reading. And that’s a great bit of exposure.

**Craig:** And they’re aware of the deal. They are told, listen they’re not offering you this part. This is just a show up for the day, make a few hundred bucks, get some exposure in front of some people that are making movies, and that’s it. No promises beyond that. And it’s not surprising to me that Kevin did that because he is just, I know from my own work with him but also just watching him do everything since, he’s like one of those guys that fits the hardest working man in show business category. He never stops. He’s just amazing that way.

So, that’s all pretty great. Just, you know, as people go through this and they’re writing their scripts if they can just think about – I love what Jack said about day players, too. It’s not just the big parts. That you have these roles where people run into a waiter, or a bus driver, or a delivery person and the default is going to be, oh, that’s an incredibly handsome or beautiful waiter or delivery person. But then it almost weirdly takes you out of things. I mean, Hollywood distorts the way people actually look. People don’t look like they do in movies. At all. They look how they look. You know? So what’s wrong with kind of edging back towards that reality? I like that.

**John:** It’s a nice thing.

Our final little bit of follow up on race and ethnicity is you had talked in a previous episode that you and Megan Amram are distant cousins. You found out through 23andMe. I just got my 23andMe back. So we just checked to see whether we are related and sadly we are not.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, to start with I’m an organic life form.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** It was not likely.

**John:** It was going to be a reach. It would be a surprise.

**Craig:** It would have been a real shock. Also I’m Jew-y as hell. And you are not.

**John:** I’m not. So I’m 100% European and British and Irish and French and German. We are on different Haplogroups coming out of Africa. And I am slightly more Neanderthal than you are. That’s sort of a surprise.

**Craig:** I like that. I like that you’re slightly more Neanderthal. I feel that. I got to be honest with you. I sense sometimes there’s a certain kind of club you on the head rage just lurking behind your eyes. I am also 100% European, like you. I am 98% Ashkenazi Jewish. That is incredibly Jewish. That is almost like a weaponized level of Judaism.

I am 0.6% random Eastern European. So perhaps a Lithuanian in my past. And then I love this 1.1% broadly European, so from everywhere. And then 0.1% Finnish.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** Oh I like that.

**John:** I love that Finnish is so specific. Yes.

**Craig:** It is. The Finnish language is very specific. Related to the Estonian language, interestingly enough. But I like that I’m just a little bit Finnish.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I sent through my 23andMe kit a couple weeks ago and in the meantime they caught the Golden State Killer basically using this genetic information, which does give me some pause about like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. Now my genetic information is in a database someplace and they’ll be able to track me down when I do something horrible.” Or not something horrible. That information could be used in ways that I would not like. So that does give me some pause now.

**Craig:** You know, I realize now at my age, and you and I are basically the same age, that our time for doing terrible things is essentially over. I think we would have been doing them, right?

**John:** I could have been doing them the whole time and just blacked them out.

**Craig:** There’s no maybe about that. That’s for sure.

**John:** People are either going to be nodding along or slightly horrified. Sometimes when you hear about a murder do you ever get that little moment like, “Wait, did I do that?”

**Craig:** Oh no. No, John. I don’t. And nobody does except for murderers. I am one of the people that is just starring in horror right now at my own microphone. [laughs] Because you hear about murders and go, “Oh, was that one of mine? Did I do that one?”

**John:** Yeah. Did I do that one? No.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** For the record I have committed no murders that I’m aware of. But I always do wonder what if I’m that character in a movie who has no idea that they’re actually the villain?

**Craig:** If I am that character my villainy is definitely sort of like petty nonsense. Removing the tags from furniture before it is sold. That kind of thing.

**John:** I have seen you sneaking into bedding stores and cutting off those tags.

**Craig:** Oh, that just sent a frisson down my spine in delight.

**John:** Let’s get back to our Neanderthal things because I am a toolmaker and I have a tool that–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Yes. That just came out – well, this week it’s coming out. So it may be out by the time this episode drops. It might be out Thursday of the week this drops. But for the last three years we’ve been working on a sequel to Highland, the screenwriting app my company makes. Highland 2 is still a screenwriting app, but it also does a lot more things. It’s what I wrote both Arlo Finch books in. It’s what I wrote Aladdin in. It’s pretty much the only thing that’s ever open all the time on my computer.

And it’s finally available for people to use and download. And so I want to talk a little bit about that and sort of why I built it and why I love it. But more generally sort of like what stuff we actually use to get things written. Because you’ve talked on the program about Fade In which is your preferred screenwriting app. But I’ve never actually asked you what do you use to write treatments and outlines and the peripheral documents that you’re doing for things like Chernobyl. What are you using for that?

**Craig:** It’s a little embarrassing, but I use Word.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** I know. And the thing is I know I don’t have to. I’ve got Pages for instance which is the Apple version. It’s just become this sort of thing. And especially now, I’m such an idiot because I’m on the stupid Office 365 thing now where now I’m apparently renting software and I can’t even buy it. But when I do treatments and like the show bible for Chernobyl, I did it in Word. Possibly just because I have some sort of blah-de-blah kind of familiarity with it. And unfortunately I do get a ton of stuff in .docx format. I presume that these other applications open .docx files with ease. But, you know, then you’ve got to export it back out I guess for other people. So that part’s annoying.

**John:** Yeah. So I would say Word is sort of the default. I mean, sort of like we talked about casting default white, it’s sort of default Word. So for things that aren’t a screenplay it becomes sort of default Word. And even for Arlo Finch I turn in all my early drafts as PDFs and I get notes back on the PDF. But at a certain point it goes into copy editing and I have to turn in the book in Word. And it’s just so horrifying because a thing I hadn’t really realized until these last two passes on Arlo Finch and having to convert the document is Word is really slow. Word is really slow at long documents. Not even just converting it, but actually opening it and scrolling through it, it lags even on a fast machine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll put a link to the video. I did in a speed test I downloaded from Project Gutenberg the text of War and Peace. And I opened them in Word, iaWriter which is a plain text editor, Pages, and in Highland 2. How long do you think it would take to open War and Peace in Word? Just a plain text document.

**Craig:** Um, what’s my benchmark here? A MacBook Pro?

**John:** A recent iMac desktop computer.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty good computer. Well, just knowing the way it is with all the dumb baloney it has that you never use, I’m going to say it takes eight seconds.

**John:** It took six minutes and ten seconds.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** There’s a link here in the video for it. It took so long that I actually ended up putting a little marker in the video so people can speed through to where it gets done. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** That’s insane.

**John:** So Pages took 47 seconds. iaWriter takes a minute ten. Highland opens in less than eight seconds. And that’s what it should be.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** I mean, it’s just text. It should just be able to speed through it. And that’s – and Arlo Finch is only 80,000 words, but when you deal with big documents you realize like, man, that is just brutally slow.

**Craig:** It is brutally slow.

**John:** It’s just not a good way to work.

**Craig:** I presume it’s because Microsoft Word is bloatware. I mean, it’s the definition of bloatware. It’s essentially offering you every possible freaking thing that you would ever theoretically need and then some. And so it’s got to chug all the text into its own proprietary burdened/over-burdened document format with all of the metadata that it’s generating.

I mean, Microsoft Word is – I find it useful when I’m dealing with tracking.

**John:** That’s the only reason why we have to do the Arlo Finch last changes in it, because it has this track changes and the copy editor will change things and I’ll say yes or I’ll rewrite them or I’ll stet them. And that’s a process, but brutal. Just brutal.

**Craig:** Yeah. Wow. That’s really freaking long. So maybe I should get Highland 2. And how much does that cost, John?

**John:** Highland 2 is a free download.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** And if you like it then it’s a $49 in-app purchase to unlock everything, or $29 for the first week. So it is a much cheaper application. And it’s a one-time purchase. It’s not rental.

**Craig:** So if I buy it today it’s $30.

**John:** If you buy it today it’s $30.

**Craig:** I’m buying it right now. It is on the store?

**John:** It will be on the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** It is on the App Store right now? It is available now?

**John:** Not as we’re recording this, but it will be either by the time the episode comes out or afterwards. But I sent you an unlocked version. So you already have it.

**Craig:** Oh. I should really go through my emails.

**John:** We talked in the episode before on conflict of interest, and this is so clearly I need to disclose a conflict of interest because I’m talking about this thing that I love but also I’m the company that makes it and profits from it. So, full conflict of interest disclaimers here. But I want to talk about why the app is the way it is because it’s just basically I wanted the app a certain way and it’s very particular to sort of my taste in how things should be. But there are also just tools in there that were useful for me.

So, here’s an example. Craig, as you’re working through stuff if you have things you want to cut but you want to hold on to what do you do with those things? Like a scene or a line of dialogue?

**Craig:** Sure. So I used to take that scene or dialogue, open a new file, for instance in Fade In, and then dump it into a new file, retitle that something, some descriptive word, and snip it and keep it in the same folder. But now Fade In, because I asked Kent to do it and he just did it because he’s a cool guy. Now there’s this kind of versioning alt system where I can create an Alt within the document itself, and so it’s holding it there.

**John:** So you’re just doing that for dialogue or you’re doing alts for like a scene?

**Craig:** I can do it for anything. But yeah, if there’s a scene that I’m like oh, you know what, this doesn’t belong in this episode anymore. I’ll just kind of alt it out. So it’s in there but it’s not visible or printable. I have options but that’s kind of what I do.

**John:** So for me I was always frustrated that when you use video editing software you have a bin where you can just throw all the little clips and bits and bobs and stuff. And so we added that for Highland 2.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So you can take any bit of text and just drag it over to the side and it sticks in a bin. And it holds there. So it’s useful for those things you want to hold onto, but it’s also good when you need to rearrange a lot of stuff. Because I’m sure you’ve been in situations where you have to move this scene and this scene and that scene and the copying and pasting of it all becomes quite ornate, because you have to remember what is going where, where are things.

So this way you can just drag that scene over to the bin, then move it and drag it back out where you want to do it. So it’s useful for sort of the rearranging function as well.

**Craig:** I like that. Here’s the truth. There are times in my life where I suddenly go, “Oh my god, if I don’t break out of this rut of some tool, like Microsoft Word, I’m just going to become the annoying person for my kids when they’re an adult.” Like I had to get my mother-in-law off of AOL. And I failed.

But, yeah, I don’t want Jack and Jessie to be like, “Oh god, Dad still uses Microsoft Word. It’s embarrassing.” So maybe I’m just going to switch over and use Highland for like–

**John:** Yeah, use it for that stuff first. And then if you like it for that stuff you might try writing some scenes in Highland. See if you like how it feels for that. Because it’s just very different underneath your fingers.

**Craig:** Now I’m very dizzy.

**John:** So two other tools which I think you might find useful, even if you’re not using it fulltime. Highland’s sort of big marquee feature when we first launched it, version 1.0, was that you can take a screenplay PDF, drag it onto Highland, and it will basically melt the PDF down and give you an editable script.

And so since we did that, I think Fade In can do that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Final Draft still can’t do it. We’re still the best, and I’ll say that pretty confidently, because between Highland and Weekend Read we just do it a lot. So we just have a much bigger database of how to work through those scripts and so our algorithms are just sort of tighter on that.

But a thing we added for this most recent version, which is also fun for people to play with, is gender analysis. And so you can take a script you’re working on, a Final Draft script, a PDF, anything and throw it on Highland and underneath Tools there’s a new tool called Gender Analysis. And so it goes through your script, it takes a look at all the characters. You can flag them whether they are male/female/or undefined. And it will give you a chart showing the breakdown of the dialogue in the script, who has the lines, whether two female characters are interacting with each other in any scenes.

**Craig:** Ah, the Bechdel Test section.

**John:** Yes. And so it gives you a quick look at sort of what that is. So two scripts I looked at recently, first was La La Land. And so where do you think the breakdown is going to be for La La Land? Do you think it’s going to be equal male/female? What are you guessing?

**Craig:** I’m going to say that La La Land edged toward female.

**John:** You are correct. So character wise, La La Land has 20 male characters, 11 female characters. I left ten unspecified. These are people like waiter or things that are just not necessarily clear or it doesn’t have to be one way or the other. But in the actual dialogue spoken it was basically even. Men had 49% of the lines, women had 48% of the lines. When you actually look at words spoken, which Highland can also track, it’s exactly equal. So 49%/49%. That’s a pretty useful thing.

If you take a look at Thor, 2011 Thor, what would you guess the split is there?

**Craig:** It’s going to be weighted quite male.

**John:** Yeah. You are correct. 70% of the lines spoken are by men. So even though there’s two female characters – well, there’s more than two – but there’s two principal female characters in Thor, it’s Thor and he does most of the speaking.

**Craig:** Oh, god, wait until you run Chernobyl through this thing.

**John:** Well, you can.

**Craig:** Well, I could tell you what the answer is. I mean, we’re talking about a situation in a male-dominated society in a power plant full of men and an army full of men. We’ve tried to put women everywhere we can. We really have. We’ve made the best of what we can. We’re also like weirdly by definition the whitest show that’s ever existed because they were all white.

But what I really like about this is in a sense the value that you’re providing with this feature may be in the use of the feature rather than the output of the feature. Just having to do it forces you to think about it and you might even start changing things before you even do it just because you kind of know what you’re in for if you haven’t really, you know, kind of thought it through right.

**John:** Yeah. So I wanted it to be sort of not a scolding kind of thing but actually a tool you can use along the way. So because you can click and change a character from male to female you can say like, “Well, what if I took this character and made it female. Oh, that actually does balance things out a lot more.” Or if you see that the chart is just wildly off and it doesn’t feel like you’re making a Chernobyl where it’s very difficult to adjust those things you might say, “Oh, this is a thing I could do to get you through this.”

This all came from, you know, over the past year there have been these big studies of going back through past scripts and you talk to them about how they actually did it and they were going through and hand-coding all this stuff to figure out whether things are male or female and counting lines individually. That’s something computers should do.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So we’re doing it.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Excellent. What are you using for outlining or do you outline?

**Craig:** I do. Oh, yes.

**John:** I started using Workflowy for some outlining stuff, but what are you using for outlines?

**Craig:** Microsoft Word. [laughs] Well, so–

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Again, one of the things I actually like about Microsoft Word is when I’m doing a proper outline it does have a very simple kind of scheme to roman numeral to number one to letter to little roman numeral. It kind of does that for you. And it does that well with tab and return.

And then sometimes I might make an outline where I just go Act One, and then it’s 1….and then the next 2. And it does lists automatically. And if I go back and stick something between 2 and 3 it knows to bump everything down. So things like that kind of make it easy so that’s what I do for that stuff.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve started using Workflowy which is what we use for our podcast outlines. For some of that stuff and also just making lists of these are the things I need to make sure I fix in this next pass of Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I like it. I don’t love it. It’s not my sort of most favorite tool. So I think I’m still looking for an outliner. Inevitably I’ll probably have the company build it for me, but I’m still looking for a thing I really like for that.

**Craig:** Put Nima to work, you know? He’s just sitting around with nothing to do. Let’s go, Nima.

**John:** Absolutely. A thing we haven’t talked about at all so far is Final Draft. So, if you want to hear the history of John and Craig and Final Draft you can go back to the one with the episode, the one with the guys from Final Draft.

I had to use Final Draft this past year for – I did a small little rewrite on a superhero movie that was in production. And so there was no getting out of just dealing with the Final Draft file they sent. And so I could have converted it and like, nope, it was going to make everything much worse if I tried. So, I did it in Final Draft with revisions on. It reminded me of why Final Draft is so maddening.

**Craig:** So bad.

**John:** To try to move stuff around, it was just not a good experience.

**Craig:** Ugh, the worst. I just went through it myself. I was rewriting something. The director had written a draft and was asking me to do a new draft. And I just needed to stay in Final Draft for them. And, first of all, you feel like you’re going back in time.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** For sure. There were moments where I would delete something, or I would say, “Oh you know what I’m going to do, I’m going to take this line of dialogue here. It’s the second sentence of this dialogue block and I’m going to actually add it in front of the first sentence of this” and it thinks, “Oh, you’re trying to make a character name that’s 14 words long.” And I’m like, what? Why would you think that’s what I want to do? Why would you think that? Who adds things onto a character’s name with cut and paste? It’s the dumbest – oh god.

**John:** Yeah. So in general I find trying – after working in Highland I get really frustrated sort of going back to that stuff because it is – every line has a definition of like what it is and you’ve had to declare like this is a character name, this is dialogue. And it’s not doing any logic about what could you actually be intending here.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that just gets really frustrating. And sometimes trying to delete across things gets to be hard because–

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** Because you’re in different spaces. Or you get stuck in a parenthetical.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s another thing. You delete a bunch of stuff and then it just changes the format of what comes next. Why would it do that? Why would any – oh my god! What’s wrong with you, Final Draft? Why do you do that?

**John:** Yeah. It is maddening. And so these are some of the reasons I made Highland 2. If you want to see it and download it it’s for the Mac. It should be on the Mac App Store this week as we are recording this. So, I hope people enjoy it.

**Craig:** I think that’s fantastic. And I have just downloaded – now I have the beta. But, you know what John? I’m kind of beta. I’m OK with it.

**John:** [laughs] I’ll get you a magic unlock code so you can get the full power version. I will say one last thing about pricing on it is that we were trying to figure out what to price it at. And so the reason why we went from $30 to free because I wanted just a lot of people to be able to use it and try it. And we always had problems where like schools would say, “Oh hey, we want to install it on all of our school computers.” And then it was like, ugh, like we couldn’t find – you had to make a special version for them. It just got to be a whole deal.

So I wanted students to be able to use it for free. It prints a little watermark saying Made in Highland, but otherwise it’s the full app. So I wanted people to be able to try it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So we’re going broad.

**Craig:** Well, I’m rooting for you.

**John:** All right. Let’s do some questions. Noah writes, “I’ve just been reading William Goldman’s screenplays lately and it’s hard not to take note of his formatting, in particular how he writes his scene headings. He doesn’t use INT or EXT, nor does he use day or night. Just whomever or whatever he’s directing the camera to focus on. It’s aggravating when I think about the times I’ve been instructed how to properly format while writing and then see Mr. Goldman’s work.

“There’s even a spot in Princess Bride where a scene heading is Something We Hadn’t Expected, on page 64. When I read that I laughed and swore out loud. But honestly what’s an aspiring writer to do when he’s trying to get the form right and yet he reads that?”

**Craig:** Here’s the truth. Noah, if you write like William Goldman then you just write whatever you want. William Goldman, I suspect when he was writing, as we sometimes write as like service people, you know, so you and I will be hired to help on something and then like we were using Final Draft because that’s what the production was using. When you help you stay in their format. I don’t think William Goldman was unaware of the format. But when William Goldman is adapting his own novel, The Princess Bride, into a screenplay The Princess Bride, he can write whatever the hell he wants.

And it’s also a different situation. That’s a situation where it’s sort of like, “Hey, let’s all make a movie together with this incredibly highly accomplished screenwriter adapting his own novel.” It doesn’t matter. And the truth is none of it really matters anyway. Even if you’re not William Goldman, you’re not adapting your own famous novel, and you haven’t written anything, if you write some amazing – if I just pick up your script, I open the first page, and the first three lines are gorgeous, I don’t care. In fact, at that point if you’ve just decided to reinvent the format entirely what do I care? The most important thing is as I’m reading it I have to ask this question: can I shoot this? Right?

And if you can shoot it, then it works. Something we hadn’t expected is shootable. It’s actually really interesting information. You and I say this stuff until we’re blue in the face and it doesn’t really matter. We are essentially just howling at the moon because there are a million people out there who undo the work that we do on a daily basis. Go, John, just wander over to Reddit screenwriting and witness the weekly conversation about how no one should ever write “we see”. It just blows my mind and there’s nothing we can do to stop it except to just say to those of you out there willing to come along in faith and trust us, this stuff is not that important. OK? It’s just not

If you’re writing a screenplay, probably you’re going to want to stay in the format that everybody is comfortable with. But if you want to experiment a little, or if you want to just pick a moment, a sequence in your screenplay where something wild is happening and you want to unmoor yourself from this stuff, go for it. Be creative. Have some fun for god’s sakes. This is a dumb format invented for stupid typewriters in 1920. You know what I mean? Whatever. Go nuts.

**John:** Yeah. So I would say what is important about the standard formatting is there’s just an expectation. And it’s simple and it’s clean and people sort of get it. And so the degree to which you can just stay in the format that everyone already gets, basically it’s free. Like INT and EXT and all that stuff just come for free and people don’t even notice it anymore, which is useful. So as long as you’re just doing the stuff that nobody notices they’ll actually read your words.

If you are doing something that’s really weird and strangely formatted and it doesn’t seem like you know what you’re doing and you don’t seem confident and it doesn’t seem like this is going to be worth their time, that’s when you have a problem if you’re doing strange formatting stuff. So just write brilliantly and then your formatting just won’t matter as much.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, 99% of people are going to write a bad screenplay and then it doesn’t matter if it’s properly formatted or not. And 1% are going to write to write a great screenplay and it doesn’t matter if it’s properly formatted or not. That’s basically my attitude about this.

**John:** Do you want to take a question from Lee?

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure. Lee writes, “I wrote a dark comedy horror. A guy, someone I know at a management company, liked it and thought it worked as a sample for a director who wants a co-writer on a project he’s already got sketched out. I had a call yesterday. The director is sending a beat sheet my way next week. Question number one: any advice on how to write a draft from someone else’s beat sheet?

“Question number two: they also like the piece I originally sent and seemed like they may be interested putting that together, too, if I can deliver on this one. Any general advice for a person in my situation? I want to take full advantage of this opportunity.

“And, question number three: what should I look out for misstep or danger wise?”

John, we’ve got one, two, three. What’s your answer for Lee?

**John:** My answer for Lee is that the thing that you’re thinking about doing with the director, great. And go with god and try to basically sit down with that person, figure out if there is a common vision for this movie that you’d be writing I guess together. He’s already got this beat sheet. If you agree with the approach of the movie that probably goes beyond just what this beat sheet is, I say go for it. You don’t have a lot to lose from working with somebody who probably already has some stuff happening.

In terms of this management company may want to represent you on this script, that’s great. And so I would just say let that be a separate thread of your relationship with this management company and this manager. They may not be signing you right away as this whole process begins, but get their honest feedback to see if you could work with them as a management company. And let those two things sort of go separately.

A question will naturally come up like if you do decide to write this thing with the director are you guys just working on this together? Is this your joint project? Is that person hiring you? That you’re going to have to figure out. But it’s not quite clear yet how real any of these things are.

**Craig:** Well, yes. So it says that the director wants a cowriter on a project he’s already got sketched out. So, with that in mind I think one thing to look out for, Lee, is you’ve received a beat sheet, but a beat sheet is not tablets from the top of Mount Sinai. It’s a beat sheet. And if you’re going to be a cowriter, you’re a cowriter. That means you’re an equal writer. And that means you don’t have to go down this path if you don’t quite get it.

It’s fair to say, “OK, I’ve read your beat sheet. Let’s just have some conversations. Let’s start talking about this. If we’re going to write together, let’s feel these things out. And let me tell you what I’m loving. And then I have a bunch of questions I want to ask.” That’s the way I always pose, by the way, I don’t talk about problems. I talk about questions. And sort of take that beat sheet and make a new beat sheet that is instead of His, Ours.

And then talk about how the writing is going to work before the writing happens. How does he see that happening? You do ten, I do ten, we swap? Or we sit in a room together? Here’s what you don’t want. “Oh, you’ll write a first draft and I’ll just come and sprinkle some of my magic dust on it.” That’s not actually co-writing.

**John:** That’s not writing, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s something else. So if that’s a situation then it’s story by the two of you, screenplay by you, directed by him. So these are things that are just good to work out. Do not rely on the manager to advocate for you here. If the manager is representing the director then the manager will advocate for the director. You’re going to have to advocate for yourself. Gently, but firmly.

**John:** Yep. And good luck. Again, let us know a year from now what’s happened with this. I’m really curious what happens next.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Nick writes, “I recently finished the first episode of a TV show I’m writing. When I started the second episode I realized I didn’t know if I needed to re-highlight or capitalize the name of the first appearance of already established characters from the first episode in the second episode. Is this something I need to do or can I just leave them un-highlighted or un-capitalized?”

Craig, what would you do? What are you doing in Chernobyl? In Episode two, the first time we see one of those recurring characters are you upper-casing his name?

**Craig:** No. I uppercase the name just the first time we see them in the first episode. I don’t re-uppercase because it just seems silly. But, you could. I don’t think it would be – I mean, in the end what we’re really talking about is one instance of capitalizing, so do it or don’t do it. Generally speaking, no one is going to read the second episode if they didn’t like the first, which means they’ve seen this character and they read about them. No one is going to pick up the second one without reading the first. So there’s no concern there.

Hey, you know something I didn’t know, John? I’ve learned so many things about television all at once because I had to. So, they asked me to number the scripts. Obviously this is quite some time ago. Put scene numbers on. And so I put scene numbers on each script and we had this for all. And then eventually when we had our first AD on he said, “You know, we generally start like in episode three the first scene is scene 301, not 1.” Well, I didn’t know that.

**John:** That would make sense.

**Craig:** I did not know that. And it’s a very simple thing to do in any normal screenwriting program. But it’s so useful. And like, duh. I didn’t know. Silly me.

**John:** So even if you end up moving a scene from one episode to another episode, like that scene 302 might end up in episode two for some reason in post, but it was 302. That makes a lot of sense.

I have two things I want to address with Nick’s question here. So, first off, I want to distinguish the type [unintelligible] he wants to distinguish between capitalization and uppercase. Capitalization is the first letter of a word being capitalized. So you can say “all caps,” but really uppercase would be the better way to describe when everything is the capital letters.

Uppercase of course comes from typography where in old middle type there were two cases, the case above, the case below. The case above had all the uppercase letters. The case below had all the lowercase letters. The capitals and the lowercase. I just think it’s neat that it was actually a physical case.

In terms of uppercasing the names in that script, I bet different series do different things. And I can imagine some series, their house rules are that the first time a character appears in any given episode you uppercase it so you know that’s the first time we’re seeing that character. I bet other shows don’t do it all, more like what Craig is doing with Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Yeah. In the end – you’ll be fine, Nick. Don’t you worry.

Oh, Colin O’Connor tweets – oh, I like this, he’s tweeting. “Do you have good advice for interesting characters who are onscreen but not important yet? How about intro-ing during a heavy action scene when a character is important but you don’t want to take a break from the urgency of the scene?”

All right, so you get what he’s going for here, John, right?

**John:** Absolutely. So basically you’re trying to plant some sort of flag saying like pay attention but not too much attention to this character because we’re going to come back to this person later. Sometimes you’ll end up saying kind of that. Where it’s just like obviously you’re uppercasing their name because it’s the first time we’re seeing them. I would give the quick description and like, comma, becomes important later. Just because you want to clue into the reader like this is the first appearance of that character and it’s helpful if you remember that he existed there.

The scene in which the character is actually doing something important, you may want to actually then do the bigger description of who that person is if you didn’t want to break the flow of the action beat for example to put in a real character description of that person.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s a character at the end of episode four that we meet in the middle of just the final bits of that episode. And there’s no dialogue or anything. We’re just moving around, sort of a montage of different people and different places and we haven’t seen him before. And he’s going to be a big part of episode five. I’m sorry, it’s the end of three, he’s going to be a big part of episode four. And I just write here’s a young man, he’s 21, and then in parentheses “we will see him again.” That’s all.

So, OK.

**John:** Classic.

**Craig:** And then we do. So that’s all. You know, in general, I have to say folks not that – we love all these questions. We love all questions. But you know just general common sense in a weird way. Not that you guys don’t have common sense. I think you do. I think the problem is so many of you are scared of your own common sense because the screenwriting amateur net has freaked you out that you are running through some sort of minefield and your script is going to explode in your face and shrapnel everywhere if you miscapitalize or don’t introduce somebody. It’s not like that at all.

In general, I think you should take some good deep breaths. These things will never kill you. Never.

**John:** Yep. Our final question comes from Josh in Seattle. He says, “I’m reading the script for Logan in Weekend Read and I’m curious if there’s a term for the establishing material that writers insert on page two after the first instance of violence. Here’s the quote, ‘Now might be a good time to talk about the ‘fights’ described in the next 100 or so pages. Basically, if you want a hyper-choreographed gravity-defying, city block destroying CG F-athon, this isn’t your movie. In this flick people will get hurt or killed when shit falls on them. They will get just as hurt or just as killed if they get hit with something big and heavy like say a car. Should anyone in our story have the misfortune to fall off a roof or out a window, they won’t bounce. They will die.’

“I’ve never encountered this type of contextual prose in a script but I really liked it when I read it. Can a first-time screenwriter get away with this type of technique in a screenplay? Are you aware of other examples of this type of creative license?”

**Craig:** No, you can’t. I forgot to mention this is the one mine that if you step on this you will explode. Your family will die. Your pets will drown. Even if they’re not near water. And children all over the world will have nightmares.

You can do whatever – ugh. So, there’s a paragraph that I did like this for Cowboy, Ninja, Viking because it’s a weird concept and you have to explain the cinematic language of what’s going on. When I call the character this, when I call the character this, this is what you’re seeing, this is what you’re feeling. It’s just description. It’s like an aside, essentially.

In journalism sometimes you’ll see a parenthesis and then N.B. for nota bene, meaning here’s a note from the author to you on how to read this. You can do that. I tend to put these things in all italics to discriminate between onscreen action and, oh, I’m talking to you.

Let me rephrase your question, Josh, so I can give you a different answer. Can a first-time screenwriter get away with blank? The answer to you is yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Put anything you want in the blank.

**John:** 100% yes.

**Craig:** That is legal. That does not violate laws. Yes.

**John:** Nice. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing came out of a sort of YouTube hole I fell down in. I’m doing some research for a period movie I may be working on. My first period movie, actually. I’m not a big period movie person. But this thing that I might be working on takes place in the ‘50s. And so I was looking at a bunch of ‘50s videos and I came across this video called Welcome to Southern California.

It is produced by the Santa Fe Railroad. It is a tourism video about how great Southern California is. And I’m going to play one little clip here because I found it absolutely fascinating.

[Clip plays]

So I find this pronunciation of the city I live in, Los Angeles, I pronounce this Los Angeles. And it’s like who is this person talking? And then as you do more research you realize like, oh, that actually was a very common pronunciation of the city at the time. And so obviously this is a Spanish name. It’s been converted a bunch of different times. We’ve finally come to a consensus that it’s Los Angeles. But at this time there was a real controversy over how to pronounce the city. And the pronunciation in this video, which is Los Angle-ease was really common. And it’s just really strange that a city that I’ve lived in all this time is that way.

I also love that he puts four syllables in California. Cali-for-nee-ah.

**Craig:** I know. I love that.

**John:** Cal-eh-for-nee-ah. Oh, five syllables. I’m sorry. California. It’s just so odd. And so he does it through the entire video. And so it’s just so funny – first off, to see these places that I know so well, but to have them narrated as if it’s some sort of alien landscape. It’s just great. I loved this video.

**Craig:** When Barton Fink shows up to the hotel in Barton Fink, the bellhop who is played by Steve Buscemi says, “Welcome to Los Angle-Ease, Mr. Fink.” And I love that Los Angle-Ease. But we have these now in Los Angeles. And my wife points them out all the time because she is fluent in Spanish, so obviously she knows how to pronounce things properly.

And these phrases grate on her all the time. Like, for instance, Los Feliz, that’s just insane. We all know it’s Feliz. There’s the song Feliz Navidad. Why are we calling it Los Feel-Is. That’s nuts. Why do we call it San Pee-dro? That’s crazy. It’s San Pedro, obviously. It’s San Pedro.

Sepulveda is Supple-Veda. We do this all the time.

**John:** And we’re also not consistent about how we change things. And so two major north/south streets in Los Angeles are La Brea and La Cienega. Both of those are “La”s. They’re both “laws.” But we’ve decided it’s Le Brea but La Cienega. Why? Who knows? But that’s how we’ve done it.

**Craig:** Right. Like why isn’t La Brea?

**John:** Because it sounds crazy to say La Brea. You could totally tell somebody does not know the name of the street if they say La Brea.

**Craig:** Do you know when I first moved to Los Angeles I was driving around looking for an apartment in North Hollywood. And I came across this very large thoroughfare and the street sign said Laurel Cyn. And I thought, oh, is this like a Welsh name? And it’s Canyon.

**John:** It’s just short for Canyon.

**Craig:** It’s just short of Canyon. I’m like, “Oh, Coldwater Cyn? Huh.”

**John:** Yeah. Even in sort of your neighborhood is also Cañada or also Canada? Some things have the Ñ and some things don’t. And I don’t know whether the Ñ got dropped off just because of the sign or if it really isn’t there. And sometimes you’ll see the Y put in there to make the sound for the Ñ. So it’s all frustrating.

**Craig:** It’s really weird. So La Cañada, the official name of La Cañada there is a tilde over the N. And usually people will include it, but when people are typing things, you know, filling out forms and such sometimes the tilde will freak out poorly designed forms. And so you’ll see like when they spit your address back it’s got some crazy ass characters shoved in there.

But my street, they just shoved a Y in because I guess–

**John:** Just because.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like back then somebody was like I don’t understand this tilde thing. Let’s just put the Y in. That’ll make it easy. No. It’s made it really hard. It’s really super annoying, because I’d love to be able to just say Canada and be done with it to the people on the phone that I’m trying to order something from. But, no. So, yeah, no, what can you do.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Well that’s excellent. My One Cool Thing is a bit – I’d like to read you something.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** It’s a short little clip. So I’m reading this book called Less. Have you heard of this book, John, Less?

**John:** I have heard of Less, but I don’t know the context of it, so tell me.

**Craig:** It just won the Pulitzer Prize. Well, I’m fairly early on. I’m say about a quarter of the way in. And it’s about a novelist who is suspicious that perhaps he might just be mediocre, but he does write things that have gotten some notice. And he was in this very long relationship with a poet who actually was really, really good, but when that guy dies he’s kind of now – and this guy was much older than him. And now he’s approaching his 50th birthday. He’s starting to panic. His younger boyfriend has gone to marry somebody else. He’s alone.

And, so you know like John we get invited to seminars and these like, “Oh, come to the such-and-such festival and be a judge at the Wichita Best Screenplay.” He decides, “Screw it, I’m going to accept all of these and just go around the world from one of these baloney things to another, whether it’s a symposium or being a judge, or having my book up for an award.” And so that’s where I am in the book.

But there’s this wonderful paragraph that he wrote that I thought was, oh my god, just so beautiful in terms of how it described the torture of writing. And he’s talking about his life living with his former lover who was this brilliant poet who won a Pulitzer Prize in the novel. And this is what he writes. And, by the way, I don’t mean to imply at all that I am saying that I or you are a genius. It’s just that he refers to this notion of a writing genius and I thought there was something fascinating about it. Oh, and the novel is called Less and it is by Andrew Sean Greer. And so here’s this little bit.

“What was it like to live with genius? Like living alone. Like living with a tiger. Everything had to be sacrificed for the work. Plans had to be canceled. Meals had to be delayed. Liquor had to be bought as soon as possible, or else all poured into the sink. Money had to be rationed or spent lavishly, changing daily. The sleep schedule was the poet’s to make, and it was often late nights as it was early mornings. The habit was the demon pet in the house. The habit. The habit. The habit. The morning coffee and books and poetry. The silence until noon. Could he be tempted by a morning stroll? He could. He always could. It was the only addiction where the sufferer longed for anything but the desired.

“But a morning walk meant work undone and suffering, suffering, suffering. Keep the habit. Help the habit. Lay out the coffee and poetry. Keep the silence. Smile when he walks sulkily out of his office to the bathroom. Take nothing personally. And did you sometimes leave an art book around with the thought that it would be the key to his mind? And did you sometimes put on music that might unlock the doubt and fear? Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained. Where did the genius come from? Where did it go? Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you. Someone you’d never met, but whom you knew he loved more than you. Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room despite everything. Something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better. Life with doubt. Doubt in the morning with the oil beating on a cup of coffee. Doubt in the pee break, not catching his eye. Doubt in the sound of the front door opening and closing, a restless walk, no goodbye, and in the return doubt in the slow sound of typewriter keys. Doubt at lunch time taken in his room. Doubt vanishing in the afternoon like a fog. Doubt driven away. Doubt forgotten. Four in the morning, feeling him stirring awake, knowing he is staring at the darkness at doubt. Life with doubt, a memoir.”

Isn’t that great?

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I just love that.

**John:** It also reminds me of sort of the worst of my habits and trying to recognize when I’m veering in that direction.

**Craig:** I know. I know. And I think he really just nails something here in terms of, you know, you and I have talked before about what it’s like to live with us. What it’s like for Mike, what it’s like for Melissa. And, again, not that we’re the geniuses of this particular summary, but I think all writers to some extent, all professional writers share these certain things. We do have these – it’s this addiction where we long for anything but the desired. And I love the notion that there’s for the people that live with the writer they are aware that there’s this other lover that this person is always chasing.

And it’s fascinating. And I just thought it was so beautifully written. I mean, I just – I’m just so enamored by this guy. Andrew Sean Greer. He’s so good at sentences. I just love him. So, I’m really enjoying this book. So I guess the larger One Cool Thing is this novel Less by Andrew Sean Greer. But at least individually and in a small component way, I love this little passage.

**John:** Very nice. All right, that is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. Short questions on Twitter are great. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

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**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Because we’re important.

**John:** Yeah. We are important. And we are European but not related.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** If people ask. We know that now. Craig, enjoy your next week of shooting there and I hope it all goes well.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir. We’ll talk soon.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Our next live Scriptnotes with Jonah Nolan & Lisa Joy (Westworld) and Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus (Avengers: Infinity War) will be Tuesday, May 22nd at the ArcLight in Hollywood. [Tickets are on sale now](https://scriptnotes.brownpapertickets.com) — proceeds benefit [Hollywood HEART](http://www.hollywoodheart.org), which runs special programs and summer camps for at-risk youth.
* [Frank Oz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Oz), in case you’re curious
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* [Scriptnotes, Ep 125: The One with the Guys from Final Draft](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)
* [Welcome to Southern California](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-l13UMBlkM&app=desktop) includes a 1953 pronunciation of “Los Angeles”
* [Less](https://www.amazon.com/Less-Winner-Pulitzer-Prize-Novel/dp/0316316121) by Andrew Sean Greer
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