Search Results for: parenthetical

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 298 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at how characters move and how screenwriters can use character movement to their benefit. Then it’s another round of Three Page Challenge where we take a look at reader’s submissions and diagnosis what’s working and what could be improved. So, this is usually the spot where we have follow up, but there’s not really a lot of follow up. I mean, we’re in this weird place because we’re recording this on a Thursday, so all of our listeners are way ahead of us. They’re living in the future and we are far back in the past. So, by the time people are listening to this, we’ll have more insight into what’s happening with the WGA negotiation. The live show at the ArcLight will have already happened.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So whatever Craig said about me I don’t know yet, but you as listeners might possibly know if you were one of the 400 people in that theater.

**Craig:** Right. Like they may know as they’re listening to us have this discussion that you and I aren’t talking anymore. Like that’s it. They heard it. This is the last camaraderie we’ll ever have. By the way, the last time we had this whole you all are living in the future discussion, it was because of the presidential election.

**John:** Yeah, oh great. That turned out really well. So, that’s a good omen.

**Craig:** How do we get back to the past somehow?

**John:** Yeah. Some time travel would be good. I actually did a post about time travel today for the blog. I rarely write on the blog, but I did a post about time travel because I was working on a project a couple years ago for a studio and it never happened. I never actually fully wrote the whole thing. It fell apart for other reasons. But, in that time travel movie, it was – you’re traveling back and forth in time, but you’re always physically in the same place. And so you’d be in Los Angeles but it would be, you know, 20,000 years ago. But, that’s as much of a cheat as anything is. And so my sort of thing that keeps me up at night sometimes is if I were to travel back in time, and the time machine broke, or I was sort of set back in time like how Kyle Reese would be in the Terminator and landed someplace in the past, how would I know where I was and when I was if I didn’t have any of my stuff to tell me that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I speculated a little bit in the blog post, but I really asked people to contribute their own thoughts for the best ways to figure out where and when you are if your time machine breaks down. And people have already had some good suggestions. That was just this morning and people had some good thoughts.

But, Craig, you’re a smart person. What would you do? How would you figure out when and where you are?

**Craig:** I suppose I would just follow what movies and television have told me to do, which is to either grab the nearest newspaper or ask somebody, “What year is it?”

**John:** Yeah. You seem like a crazy person then. In my head, I was always thinking back to there’s no one else around, or if there are people around, it is like a primitive civilization.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So like I can’t just go up to a person. I could go up to a person, but they wouldn’t speak my language most likely. So how would I–

**Craig:** You don’t.

**John:** Figure that stuff out?

**Craig:** No idea. None.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, stars? I wouldn’t know.

**John:** So, apparently stars are useful because I don’t know if it’s the Big Dipper or Little Dipper, but you can actually chart to see where you are at in periods of tens of thousands of years based on what the Dipper looks like.

**Craig:** If you knew that–

**John:** If you knew that. Yeah. You got to know a lot. So, in my post I said like a biologist would be able to look around and see what was nearby. And then Nima, my friend, who is a biologist actually said like, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Because biologists don’t necessarily know what the ecology is of a place.” So it’s an ecologist rather than a biologist I needed.

**Craig:** Yeah. And even then, ecological periods are incredibly long. So, you might be able to say, “Well, I’m clearly between 8000 and 4000 BC. Well that’s not very useful.

**John:** Yeah. If there were trilobites running around then I would know that I’m back in a time, but I wouldn’t know where I am in that time.

**Craig:** You’d know you’re screwed. That’s the deal. You’re screwed.

**John:** You know who are really smart people? Are our listeners. So, if you have a good suggestion for me on how I can figure out when and where I am if my time machine breaks, I would welcome that.

**Craig:** You know what I’m going to do, what I always do in these hypothetical situations when I’m faced with very difficult odds and a challenging circumstance like arriving back in time at some unknown time and place, I just immediately give up. I curl up into a ball and I pray for death. Pray for the sweet release of death.

**John:** Yeah. You protect your internal organs from the predators coming after you.

**Craig:** Or just let them take me.

**John:** Or just let them take you. Yeah. Just jump off the cliff. Find a cliff that you can fall off of it.

**Craig:** Find a cliff. Leap. That’s it. Not realizing that five minutes later they would have picked me up. They would have found me. Or that I didn’t even go back in time.

**John:** They were looking for you the whole time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I didn’t go back in time at all. I was just having a mild stroke.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like the ending of The Mist where you think everything is at its absolute worst and then if you’d waited another 30 seconds everything would have been fine.

**Craig:** Oh, you wait – that by the way is a theory I’ve heard from people regarding our prior strikes. [laughs] We just needed to strike one more day and we would have gotten everything.

**John:** Everything you want.

**Craig:** Everything. I don’t know about that. Oh, dear.

**John:** I’m realizing at this moment we actually do have one piece of follow-up. In last week’s episode, we talked about – we did a bunch of follow up. And at the very end I said that if we were a podcast that had music, this would be the place where we played the music to close out the follow up. And so Jonathan Mann, a very talented composer, created a piece of music just for wrapping up follow up.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, let’s take a listen.

**Craig:** [music plays] Well that sounds exciting. I think that will be fun. I’ve had enough of follow up. I think follow up is done. Follow up is done. [music ends]

**John:** Follow up is done. And now let’s get to our first topic. So, this is something Craig proposed. So, kick it off.

**Craig:** Well, I was thinking about this because I was watching something and there was a character who was so physical and was doing so much physically. And it occurred to me that one of the things that you and I like to do when we talk about crafty issues is pull out little things that maybe writers don’t think about as tools in their toolbox. We’re so textual and I think for a lot of people we tend to focus down on action and dialogue. And you and I have talked about the importance of place. And we’ve talked about the importance of sound. And we’ve talked about the importance of transitions. And nonverbal communication.

**John:** And hair styles. And wardrobe.

**Craig:** And hair and wardrobe. All these things are part of our palate. But when I don’t think we’ve talked about is physicality itself. Have you ever taken an acting class?

**John:** I’ve taken no acting classes.

**Craig:** I took an acting class when I was in college. And it was really instructive. And I took it because I was trying to write and I thought if I want to write things for actors I should probably have some sense of what the hell they go through. And the thing that surprised me the most about class number one was the fact that we spent the first ten minutes stretching, breathing. These are things that every actor is like, yeah, dumb-dumb, that’s what we do. Our bodies are an enormous part of our instrument.

And the first acting assignment we had, and I will never forget this, because it was mean and it was cruel. And it was exactly the kind of lesson you don’t forget. Our teacher said, “OK, first acting assignment, each of you, you’re going to sit in the chair and what I’d like you to do is perform sitting in a chair. And you have one minute to do whatever you’d like to perform sitting in a chair.” And each person, including myself, performed some sort of remarkable little mini drama while sitting in the chair.

Waiting nervously for somebody. Shooting up drugs. Crying. Remembering something terrible. Yeah. And then when we were done she goes, “OK, now it’s my turn.” And she sat in the chair and she sat there, believably, for a minute. And we were all like, gulp, because that’s a huge part of what you do.

And I never forgot that. So, I thought today we would talk about how we as writers can employ this and think about this while we’re writing. Whether it’s something we’re calling out specifically as we’re writing, or whether it’s something that we’re using to inform what we’re having our characters say as opposed to not say and so forth.

Do you do a lot of thinking about this sort of thing when you write?

**John:** I would say in general as I’m sort of looping through the scene, sort of in the pre-writing process where I’m seeing what the scene is like, that’s where I’m sort of doing the blocking for characters and figuring out where they are and sort of what they’re generally doing in the scene. And so some characters are not – they’re not running around. They’re standing there. They’re sitting there. I’m placing them within the mental set I’ve built for them. And because of where I’ve placed them, that will inform their choices definitely.

But I would say in general I don’t think a lot about this consciously. And so when you proposed the topic, I went back and sort of retroactively looked at the choices I have made in different movies and some of those were really helpful choices. So, I’m eager to sort of have the discussion about thinking through what character movements could be and when it’s helpful to call them out. Because I think a lot of time I’ve seen them in my head, but I haven’t bothered to describe them on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s normal, because the truth is it’s not always something that is necessary. I will always be necessary for each individual actor to make a choice about their own physicality. And I’m talking about everything – how they stand, how they sit, how they walk, how they move through a space, all of that. But in key moments, it’s important for us to think about it. And you can kind of break these things down into two large categories. One is situational and one is I’ll say constitutional.

So, you think about a character like – you watched Breaking Bad, I presume.

**John:** I did not watch Breaking Bad. I’ve seen episodes, but I did not watch it as a whole series.

**Craig:** All right. Have you ever seen Giancarlo Esposito’s character, Gus Fring? Have you ever seen any of those?

**John:** Absolutely. And I perceive him to be a very active and physical character, even when he – if he’s listening to you, I think it’s a very active listening.

**Craig:** Right. So, he – that character – that actor, and the writers together have made a choice that this person is going to exercise total control over his physical self. He stands rigid. His posture when he sits is always perfect, to the point where it’s almost unnatural. When he talks to you, he tends to put his hands flat on the surface, palms down, evenly spaced. It’s a remarkable series of choices but it says so much about who he is, which is an intense control freak to the nth degree.

That is a kind of constitutional decision. This is who this guy is. But then there are these moments characters can respond to something and then how they respond physically can sometimes tell you so much. So, I guess, first we could about just motion. How actors are moving through a space and what it means for us as writers. These are simple things like how fast are they going, or how deliberate are they. Are they in control of their physical self at that moment? Are they clumsy or are they graceful?

They can also indicate things to us, I mean, the physicality of a character can indicate things. For instance, like I mentioned, posture. But there are also things like strength, general strength and weakness. You can tell when, and these are questions that actors will ask. And if they ask a writer, it’s good for you to know. Is this person weak? Are they physically weak? What does that mean for them? Do they have a disability? Sometimes a slight limp does this remarkable thing.

We know, for instance, watching No Country for Old Men, and you see Anton Chigurh, and that–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Odd limp. It’s the strangest thing. And it’s so important. So important to his character. 99% of writers will not really go there. But they should. It doesn’t mean you always want to do something like that, because it can quickly tilt into affectation. But when you’re creating a monster and then giving him a slight imperfection like that that almost harkens back to Frankenstein or something, it can be really interesting.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think if you’re calling this kind of detail out on each character, it loses its unique quality for the characters it’s actually important for.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it can also feel like you’re setting something up that you don’t mean to be setting up. So you have to be really mindful of it, but for I think Anton Chigurh is a great example of a character whose menace is amplified by this perceived weakness.

**Craig:** Precisely. And there are also little behavioral ticks that all people have. If you – you know, we sometimes say if you want to learn dialogue, I mean, I do think there’s a certain innate talent for that. It’s a little musical. But we’ll say, listen to people right? And sometimes we’ll suggest record two people having a conversation, with their knowledge, of course. And then just listen to the rhythms and see how that works.

Similarly, just watch people with the sound off in your head. Watch their bodies. Watch what they do. Watch how they fidget. Do they bite their fingernails? Do they chew gum? Do they pull on their pants? What are those things that they do? Those little things sometimes tell us so much and the audience tends to enjoy learning these things, like little detectives who are spying on somebody. Because we’re watching a character on screen and while they’re talking they’re nervously fiddling with their shirttail. They feel – the audience feels a satisfaction. It’s a voyeuristic satisfaction. They know that that character isn’t really aware of it. Right? That’s what kind of an unconscious habit is.

So, we’re kind of titillated by the fact that we’re learning something about them that they don’t necessarily want us to know.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, I think what you’re talking about is you’re giving them a specific differentiation from all the other characters in the world. We often talk about that first moment where you introduce a character. So, they get their uppercase because it’s the first time they’re showing up in the script. And you can sometimes cheat a little bit and like give an extra line of description that isn’t really necessarily filmable, but it helps sort of anchor for the reader who that character is.

But sometimes a movement is a fantastic way, really what one of these constitutional movements, is a great way to sort of anchor that for the reader. Because you’re giving them something specific about, you know, in the case of the Breaking Bad character, how precise and measured he is. And sort of how he sits so ramrod straight.

That’s useful. And it’s a thing that actually can help inform the actor. Help the director understand the character’s role in the thing. But it helps the reader see that character in his or her head.

**Craig:** It also starts to help you as the writer cast. Even if that’s not the cast that you end up with, in your mind you’re saying this character has this kind of physicality. Who fits that? You know, I remember in that acting class I told you about in college, at the end of the semester we had to partner up with one other person in the class and perform a scene. And she assigned the scenes and the characters. And I got True West, which this other guy, and I was the hard ass brother. I was the tough brother.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Because she said, and you know, it’s so funny, she said, and she’s right, and this is why I’m not a good actor and why I can’t do it well, because I’m in my own head too much. She said, “You have this physicality you will not access, and I want you to access your own body. I want you to get in this guy’s face. I want you to intimidate him. I want you to be scary.” Which I don’t feel, in my head, but I have the kind of physicality – it’s not like I’m a super heavy built guy, but if I were a bad person I have the kind of body that helps that out. You know? Got some broad shoulders and sort of barrel-chesty.

And so as you’re thinking about the physicality of these characters, you also then start to think well who could play this and who does this physicality match up to? And a lot of times where that takes you, and this to me is maybe the most important aspect that I think about routinely is this kind of relational physicality. Two people are in a space, how is their physical presence impacting each other?

**John:** Classically, if you ever take a class in negotiations or sort of like interpersonal communication where you’re trying to convince somebody of something, there’s that process of mirroring where you sort of do back what they’re doing to you and then like you can sort of change the dynamic. Even like those sort of gross things about how to pick up women, they’re all about the interplay of space between you and the other person. And so how you put those two characters in the scene and how you sort of suggest that they’re going to be moving in the scene really will influence the dynamic.

If a character is approaching the other character, that can be read as they’re entering their space for a positive reason or they’re trying to control that person. And you have to make those decisions.

And just even that line of dialogue or the parenthetical honestly, like approaching, changes the read of that next line of dialogue.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And similarly you have a choice of how to respond. In this way you can have a fight without ever throwing a punch. Someone can lean in – you know, sometimes instead of saying he gets it – like I will read in scripts, “He gets in his face, or he gets in his comfort zone.” But to me that’s not very specific. I mean, if somebody, you know, juts his head in, these are things that people do to get into your space without just weirdly walking close to you and specific. And then how does the other person respond? Because if they don’t flinch, that tells me a lot, too. And then the other person maybe starts their – their performance starts to fall apart. Their performance of being strong.

And there are all these body language things that people just do traditionally and I think it’s good to think of about those things as well, even if you don’t spell them out. If in your mind your character is arms crossed and eyes down, it will affect how you have them say things.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, in that sense it’s not always necessary to spell it out, but you should be thinking about it.

**John:** Well, the general rule for sort of everything we’re talking about in scene description for the scenes that we’re writing is you have to know what all the things are and be very judicious about the things you’re actually saying because screenwriting is an art of economy. So, you’re not saying 90% of what you know about the scene. You’re only saying that 10% that’s actually crucial for the understanding of the intention behind the dialogue and the intention behind the actions, the crucial actions that they’re taking in the scene.

So, you know, the scene may really not be about sort of where those two characters are or sort of like how they are physically interacting, but if it’s helpful for the reader to understand the intention and for the actors to understand the intention, you’ll make the choice about like, OK, I’m going to be very specific here. And, again, there’s always that worry like, oh, I’m directing from the page. Well, sometimes you’re actually just directing the reader’s attention to what’s important in the scene. Moments that might be lost if you hadn’t actually called them out.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And if you think about the comparison to dialogue as music, that there’s that rhythm and melody and the rests and the notes, then the equivalent comparison for physical motion is dancing. And I do think about these things like little dances at times. And that doesn’t mean to say that they have to be arch. But how people are leaning and moving back and coming together, whether it’s out of intimacy, or threat, or fear, frightened people are the most wonderful dancers in movies. It’s so much fun to watch them.

I remember another Coen Brothers example, Miller’s Crossing. What’s his name, The Schmatta, that’s what the character’s name is? When he’s begging for his life. “Look into your heart.” He’s so folded over and pathetic. It’s like they took his bones out or something. It’s really amazing to watch what servility looks like, and fear, and it’s similarly I’m always impressed by truly scary people in movies. Not fake, fighter, corny ones, but those live wires that are dangerous like Begbie in Trainspotting. I mean, Begbie, the character, what, he weighs like 120 pounds maybe. And he’s, what, 5’8”? And he’s absolutely terrifying because it looks like electricity is in him. And he leads from his, in surprising ways, like explosively from his neck. You know? And that’s amazing to me. It’s such a wonderful dance to watch.

**John:** Well, that idea of dance, I think, is a crucial reason why – and I’m curious what your take is on this, because I almost never have characters sitting down. I think it’s because of the dance aspect of that. So, even in situations where in the real world they might be sitting down, I’ll almost always put them up on their feet. And so now that I’ve said that, people will watch movies and TV shows and they’ll recognize like, oh, you know what, it’s really kind of weird how rarely people sit in movies and TV shows. But it’s because you want people on their feet. People pay more attention to people who are standing up. And it’s a strange thing. But if people are standing up then anything can happen. If people are sitting down, less can happen.

And the transition from being seated to standing up is a big change. And so you can do that, but you’re also sort of taking up time to do that.

Conversely, I think one of the reasons why people are often standing is then when you have somebody sit down, it really does change the dynamic. And sitting down can be a major power move to sort of say like, no, no, we’re not going to hurry. I’m going to sit down.

Or, like Hannibal Lecter, you have a character who is mostly sitting down and he’s eerily calm, which is, again, a powerful position.

**Craig:** Actually, I was thinking of him as standing. That’s interesting.

**John:** Well, sometimes he’s standing, leaning against the wall, but I think in a lot of those conversations he’s seated in the chair opposite Clarice.

**Craig:** Oh, is that right? Well, yeah, because the first time we meet him, not only is he standing in a Gus Fring ramrod way, but he’s floating in the middle of the space. By the way, as good of a time as any way to say rest in peace, Jonathan Demme. It’s very sad that he passed away.

**John:** 100%. Yeah.

**Craig:** But also an amazing example of what body control and defining a character by body movement is. But I agree with you, sitting is a fascinating choice. And this is where you know you’re talking to screenwriters, because anybody else would just say, what, they’re sitting, who cares. So to me sitting is always about negotiation, or intimacy. Or exhaustion, literally exhaustion. But when people are sitting across from each other, I think that there’s either a negotiation going on, which I think is very typical. We think of that as across the table, or an intimacy where two people are kind of together and sharing something quietly that is in a so-called safe space I guess is how I would put it.

But when one person is sitting and one person is standing, that’s always fascinating to me, too. Because then there are times when the seated person is the one in charge. Then there are times where the seated person is the one in trouble. And you’ll see that dynamic quite a bit.

**John:** I think back to Star Trek, and you look at the bridge of Star Trek and its different incarnations, and obviously the caption has his seat and in the Next Generation there were seats next to him, but it always – you could tell the actors never really wanted to sit there. They always wanted to be up. And even from the initial Star Trek, they found a reason for why Spock had to be standing to look into that little monitor thing. There’s no reason why that monitor thing couldn’t be like seat accessible, but I think they wanted him standing up because if he was sitting down he was sitting down. And the characters who were sitting down were kind of less important.

There’s a reason why Spock was standing, because he was the second most important person on the bridge and Chekov, Sulu, and Uhura, they were sitting down. And while we love them, they were not the driving force in the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. When people are standing, there is a chance that one of them will attack the other one. Physically. Or there is a chance that one of them is going to kiss the other one, physically. And so that is exciting. There is – you’re absolutely right about that. And it is good advice I think to ask yourself, because I fall, and we all fall into this trap, ask yourself do they need to be sitting here? And if they don’t, what would be going on if they were standing? Because you also don’t want them to just stand dead, you know. And then this leads you down the path of what other kind of discussion could occur.

And this is the challenge of the screenwriting. I always feel like writing a script is a little bit like those old school printers that had to run through a color, then come back and do another color on top to get to the final colors, you know. So they’d do one color at a time. And oftentimes I feel like there’s only so many layers we can do at once. But, it’s a good exercise to go back through on a rewrite and ask yourself why are they sitting, should they be sitting, and how are they sitting, and if they’re not sitting and they’re standing, what can I do with their bodies? What can I think about with their bodies?

The more you give your actors to do physically, the more they will be able to be real. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. All right, I think that’s a great discussion on some movement. Some physicality. So, if you have suggestions about physicality or movement, write in with those ideas.

Before we go, one last actually really concrete example I can think of, from The Crown, so the Netflix series, The Crown, a big sort of plot point is that Churchill doesn’t want to sit down. Churchill always wants to be standing to give his information to the Queen. And she makes him sit down at one point. And it is a very clear sort of power move. When I’m telling you what you have to do, and making you sit down, I’m taking away your agency. And it’s a really interesting moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, we go through this – I mean, you and I, we’re getting older. Every now and then you tweak a little muscle or something. Even just being aware, body conscious, we are conscious of our own bodies. Ow. You know, if you have a scene where someone sits down and they just wince a little bit, that’s interesting. I’m already interested. They seem real.

**John:** Even as we’re recording this, I think you are sitting in your chair in Los Angeles. I am standing at my desk in Paris. It’s the difference between us.

**Craig:** That’s right. I am incredibly lazy. [laughs] So lazy. Slouched over. Basically I’m Charlie Kaufman’s character in Adaptation. I am. I’m just like – my posture – I’m the opposite of Gus Fring. I’m basically a comma.

**John:** I am some other Nicolas Cage character in some other movie.

**Craig:** Let’s go with The Bad Lieutenant. And…? Three Page Challenge time.

**John:** Perfect. So I just reached back and picked up my iPad to talk through our Three Page Challenges. So, as always, when we do a Three Page Challenge, we’ve invited listeners to write in with the first three pages of their script. So they have gone to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, they have read a little form. They have attached a PDF and said that it’s OK for us to talk about these on the air. And, in fact, if you would like to read along with us, we strongly recommend it. So, in the show notes for this show, or just go to johnaugust.com, you can download the PDFs and see what we are seeing, what we actually have in front of us.

So, if you feel like pausing the episode and downloading them, it really is good because we’re going to talk specifically this week about very specific things on the page that could be looked at for a rewrite.

And we also love to have a wonderful not us person to read aloud the descriptions. So, if you’re listening to this in your car you have a sense of what we’re talking about. So, we’ve had Jeff Probst, we’ve had Elizabeth Banks. This week–

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** We went international. And so it is Rebel Wilson who is going to be reading our summaries.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Rebel.

**John:** Rebel. So, she was so generous. We tweeted at her last night and she did it right away. And she’s just the best. So, if you would like to hear more Rebel Wilson, she was on a previous episode. We’ll have a link in the show notes. She was actually on two episodes. So we had a normal clean episode, then we did a special dirty episode which is in the premium feed for subscribers. And the premium episode, if I recall correctly, involves a hat and diarrhea.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of course it does. Of course it does. By the way, now, so we’ve had Elizabeth Banks, Banksy, and we have Rebel, I feel like we should just keep rolling through the Pitch Perfect cast, you know?

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** I think that’s the only people that we should have doing these, other than Jeff Probst. We should just have Pitch – we should get Anna Kendrick. And we should roll through.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right, let’s do our very first of these. And Rebel Wilson, if you will please introduce our first script so we can discuss it.

Rebel Wilson: OK. Hey guys, it’s Rebel Wilson here. OK, first up we have Alice by Ted Wilkes. Oh, I feel like the person at the table read that reads out all the stage directions. We open in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant where a toad and a cat are hard at work. We are in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland reimagined as a sprawling metropolis with a Victorian twist. A perp races through the kitchen, chased by Rabbit White, aka, the white rabbit, now a hard-nosed bail bondsman.

In voiceover, Rabbit tells us why the perps always run, even though they know it’s pointless. Then, in the alley, Rabbit catches the perp as he’s about to climb over a fence. He cuffs him. As Rabbit muses on how things have changed in Wonderland, the perp reveals that he knows where she is, the one Rabbit is hung up on. Enraged, Rabbit knocks the perp out. At the WPD, Harry Mad Hatter Harrington, balding and fat, watches Rabbit. He confronts Rabbit about smoking inside the station and warns him about beating up suspects. And with that, that’s the bottom of page three.

**John:** And thank you Rebel Wilson. Craig, do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. So, this was a little challenging for me. There’s a choice that’s made here. And I understand it. There are times when you want to – your action description wants to be a character in and of itself. And there are times when you want to impart things to the reader quickly and efficiently so they kind of get it.

So, here we start in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, and then we’re already a little meta because Ted Wilkes says, “Because that’s where chases always take place.” I haven’t seen a chase yet, but I guess I’m going to, which I don’t really love. Let the chase unfold. Let me actually watch the movie. But he says, “However, there’s something different about this one. We’re in Wonderland. The place where Lewis Carroll’s novella was set. However, it’s years after the hallucinations of Alice Liddell which gave birth to that narrative. Turns out that the place is actually a sprawling noir metropolis (with a Victorian twist) when you put the book down.”

Now you’re just pitching me the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s not what screenplays do. So much of what we want when we read a screenplay is to discover. And I understand at some point you may need to clarify. First, just lay it on me. And then let me discover it. And I think that choice is kind of infecting even the way the scene is working, because we have a film noir voiceover from the Rabbit who is clearly basically a film noir detective. Or in this case bail bondsman, which we know because he tells us in the action. “The white rabbit from the stories became a hard-nosed bail bondsman.” Again, before he’s even said a word. So we’re pitching. He has some voiceover and then they start to run.

And understand what’s going on here. And we see a lot of these in Hollywood. I mean, Travis Beecham wrote a spec called Killing on Carnival Row which was sort of like fairy creature world, you know, noir gumshoe. So this is Alice in Wonderland noir gumshoe. It’s a very similar sort of thing. But it seems to me that I kind of need to get one thing at once, like maybe just give me the white rabbit. And I think it’s Alice in Wonderland and he’s checking his thing, because he’s going to be late. And then he looks up and he sees somebody running by. And then he runs out after them, chases them down, catches them, and knocks their teeth out, which is a very similar thing to what’s happening here.

And then I discover, oh my god, Wonderland is not the way I remember it. But it seemed like I was getting too much before it happened. So, by the time I was done, and this is sort of just a global problem with these three pages, by the time I got to the end of the third page, I thought to myself I don’t need to see this movie. I think I get it.

**John:** Yeah, I felt like I got it, too. And I had a lot of the same objections you did in terms of it didn’t feel like it was presenting itself fairly. It didn’t feel like it was actually a screenplay. It felt more like a pitch document for the idea rather than the thing itself.

The idea of like combining two different genres together to make your own unique thing, that’s great. I have no issues with it. And, you know, an Alice in Wonderland noir drama, I’m fine with that. I think my concern is that it didn’t seem particularly interested in being a noir genre. I didn’t sense that this actually cared about the chase. It was just – the chase was just there to set up stuff. And I didn’t feel invested in the action, partly because let’s see, so we’re talking, you know, in the kitchen there’s a toad washing pots by the sink, and a cat is cutting onions in the corner.

But then we have this Perp, 40s, races through the kitchen. We never get any description of what the perp is. Is he human? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it wasn’t – yeah, I don’t think – if Ted had an answer for it, he wasn’t giving me the answer because it didn’t seem like it was important to him. And so I didn’t know whether to invest my attention on any one detail of all this.

So, the voiceover from the Rabbit, it feels like gumshoe voiceover, but it didn’t feel like specific to this world of a gumshoe voiceover. It felt like it could have been in a different movie and it could have been in a different movie. And that’s where the gears started to not fit very well for me. Is that we visually see that he is the White Rabbit, but nothing he’s actually saying or doing feels like Lewis Carroll’s world at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, if you want to start with that classic noir vibe, and again, this is my theory of do one thing at once, so show me some dirty streets and some fog and the camera is moving through. And a dog is barking and there’s sounds of clatter and garbage cans. And we hear a voiceover. And the voiceover, I’m just reading from Ted’s pages here. The voiceover, we don’t see anyone. We just hear someone say, “They always run. They know that it’s pointless… I always get them. It’s just something to do with the nervous system. You see a threat coming your way and your feet start turning in the direction of the nearest exit…”

And now we move through a window and we arrive at an ashtray and a glass of scotch. And we hear, “… It’s the amygdala. The place where our brain gets all its emotional signals from. Once it kicks in, it just takes over and no matter what you were just thinking about, you’re not in control anymore.” And then a hand reaches in, takes a cigarette. And then you hear, “And that’s where I come in,” or something.

And then we reveal it’s a rabbit. You see, somehow or another we need one thing at a time. I’m also thinking about, I love Men in Black. Boy, that’s another movie we should deep dive into. And Men in Black, one of the things that I love the most, when I knew I was going to have a great time in that movie more than anything was after the chase scene where Will Smith chases down this purse snatcher. And the guy–

**John:** They race up through the Guggenheim and–

**Craig:** Right. And then that guy is doing things that you couldn’t really do. And then his eyelids do this weird blinking thing, like there’s eyelids inside of his eyelids. And then he jumps. And later Will Smith is saying, “Yeah, his eyelids were doing this weird thing.” And the cops are like, “You’re out of your mind.” And then in comes Tommy Lee Jones and he says, “They weren’t eyelids. They were gills. He was out of breath.”

And you go, whoa. This is cool. Right? Like he knows stuff. And they’re taking it seriously. They live in this world. It’s not cute. It’s not meta. It’s real to them.

This all felt like it was – it had that glaze of a pitch. There was like a weird meta thing sitting on it, so that I wasn’t really in a movie. I was just more getting hit with a lot of flash.

**John:** Yep. I agree with you. Let’s take a look at the words on the page and see if there’s things that screenwriters in general can look at here and learn from. So, a thing which bugs me a lot and I suspect bugs you, too, is when scene headers go more than one line. And so here we see, this is bottom of page one, EXT. DARK ALLEY, BEHIND THE CHINESE RESTAURANT, WONDERLAND – NIGHT, and the night breaks over to the next line. Don’t do that. I’ve never had a good outcome with multiline scene headers. Find a way to shrink that down. EXT. DARK ALLEY – NIGHT. Done.

Like I know we’re in Wonderland. You don’t have to keep calling it out every time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you’re going to keep the same Chinese restaurant kitchen opening, I would have gotten rid of the first scene header all together, because he’s repeating it in the second line. So, it just says, “It’s the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant because that’s where chases always take place.” That line bugs me less if I didn’t just see it in the scene header.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** A general thing, but in screenplays, two dashes are the sort of punctuation dash. So one dash by itself just looks like a minus. This was inconsistent. So that would be helpful.

He’s got a voice like gravel in a mixing bowl. Sure. That worked for me. I could hear what that sounds like.

**Craig:** And it’s a little cheesy, but true to noir. That’s kind of how they talk.

**John:** That’s why I liked it. Bottom of page one, “Chiaroscuro light fills the alley as two shadows run up the wall, just about visible through the thick fog circling around the place.” Really close, just a little too long. So, you can get the Chiaroscuro and the fog, great, and the shadows running up the wall, but then it just went on too long.

But in general, I felt the noir vibe there. Great. Just little less would have helped me there.

Page two, there’s a semicolon that’s not really a semicolon. “The Perp CLATTERS against it; then tries to climb as fast as he can.”

**Craig:** Right. That should be a comma. Or take out the then.

**John:** And I share you concern with we are told that he’s a bail bondsman, but nothing we actually see him do really sells that idea. And so it looks like he’s just a cop arresting him. And even when we got to the station, I was really confused sort of what his relationship was with everybody there. It took me three times on the third page to really understand like, oh no, he doesn’t work there. He’s just returning this guy who ran away. So that was confusing to me as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. There is a disconcerting spelling error on the bottom of page two. “A rye smile from the Perp.” You want to say W-R-Y there. Not rye as in the drink. And the reason it’s a little disconcerting is because, look, mistakes happen, but I like it when my writers read. And it just – you don’t want to shake anyone’s confidence. You never want somebody to look at that and go, oh, this guy is just not well-read. Because I’m sure Ted is well-read. This is probably just a think-o instead of a typo. But you got to check these things. It’s really important. And that’s something a spell checker is not going to catch, obviously.

**John:** Top of page three, “Rabbit tees off on the Perp’s face.” I didn’t know what that meant. Did it mean slug him?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What does tees off mean?

**Craig:** Tees off means take a big swing at basically. Like a golf club. I was a little more confused by, “I’ll have a vowel please.” I didn’t quite get the joke there. Because the perp–

**John:** He’s got a vowel.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, the perp, the rabbit has caught him and the perp says, “I know where she is.” And the rabbit says, “What did you say?” And the perp says, “You’re the one they keep talking about. Hung up on that girl. What’s her name?” Now, that’s just not real. It’s forced exposition. It’s forced drama. That’s not the sort of thing that you would just calmly toss out. What is he trying to achieve exactly in this moment? He’s trying to get away from a guy? What is he doing? It seemed ill-motivated.

Then the perp says, “…A…”

And then the action says, “I’ll have a vowel please,” in italics. “Rabbit tees off on the perp’s face. Goodnight, Scumbag.”

I mean I understand the vowel, like I guess it’s a Wheel of Fortune thing. But what? I didn’t quite – I was confused.

**John:** Yeah. It didn’t work for me either. Let’s talk about this as a concept in general, because I got confused about the tone and sort of who the target audience was for this. Because it felt like a – I think there’s some F-words in there. I didn’t know who this movie was aimed at. And it could be OK to not necessarily have a perfect audience, but if this landed at my desk and I was a studio executive, I wouldn’t know what I was supposed to be doing with this. Because I wouldn’t know is this to our children’s division, or is this to – it felt expensive, but adult.

I didn’t know sort of who this was aimed at.

**Craig:** Yeah. This would really function best as a sample. Once you have a talking rabbit, any producer or reader or executive is immediately going to think, well, this is going to be expensive. And it will be. Well, if it’s going to be expensive then that means a lot of people have to come see it. This doesn’t seem – I mean, the whole gimmick here is we’re going to take something with an enormously wide appeal, the classic Alice in Wonderland story, and narrow it down, which is fine to be niche and cool. Just no one is going to spend the money to make it.

But, you know, OK, so maybe it’s mostly just for the writing, but then the writing has really got to be just wonderful.

**John:** Got to be great.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s got to be great. And let’s take a look at the very last bit here between the Hatter and the Rabbit. And I get a little confused here because the Mad Hatter is a police officer. And I thought, OK, the Rabbit chasing somebody has a general connection to the traditional role of the Rabbit, because I assume partly here what we want to do is see, oh, there’s a dotted line – even if it’s thin – between the character we know and the character that’s being presented to us.

So the Rabbit runs a lot in Alice in Wonderland. And here he is running again. OK. It’s just a different kind of running. Interesting. But the Mad Hatter is not a cop in Alice in Wonderland. There’s nothing he does that’s cop like. And yet here he is. So, I start to wonder what exactly is the connection to Alice in Wonderland other than the names and maybe some of the clothing. Makes me a little worried.

**John:** It makes me worried, too. Have I ever talked about this on the podcast, that Go was originally an Alice in Wonderland story.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting. No.

**John:** Yeah, so Go was originally conceived to be an Alice in Wonderland story. And so the yellow Miata which hits Ronna was supposed to be a white Volkswagen Rabbit. And so there was a bunch of things that if you kind of squint you can see that like, oh, this is a thing I was trying to do. But along the writing of it I was like, you know what, I’m trying to force people into these roles and they don’t naturally want to be in these roles. And so I gave up on that as a concept and the movie is much better for that.

I did feel like, you know, in this case the writer is trying to force these people into these zones. Granted, it’s only three pages, so maybe it does make more sense later on, but I share your concern that Hatter doesn’t feel like he any relationship to the Hatter I know from the stories.

**Craig:** Yeah. And like I said, you feel like, well, at some point he’s going to be talking to the caterpillar. And then there’s going to be the Queen. And, you know, Alice in Wonderland is not really something that hasn’t been imagined or reimagined I should say thoroughly many times before. It has. Many times before. So, that makes me just think, hmm, the gimmick may be a little played out here. This may feel a little, well, you just don’t want to feel like it’s homework to go through it.

So, I think that there’s some conceptual issues here and some character issues. But the most important thing I would say, Ted, is let’s just give you the benefit of the doubt. This works out great from here on. You really have to think about how you’re introducing us to the world. And how you’re introducing the audience. It can’t feel like a pitch. It will just never, ever work that way.

**John:** I agree. But you know who knows something about pitches? That would be Rebel Wilson. So let’s turn back to Rebel to talk us into our next Three Page Challenge.

Rebel: The second Three Page Challenge is called Black Leather Jackets by Gerald Decker. Nighttime in Arkansas. A man who looks like fat Elvis jumps off a semi and goes inside an Astro Burger. A character called Rambling Man, the only other customer in the restaurant, pops some pills and downs them with coffee. Elvis orders a Fatty Fat, a chocolate shake, and some fries. Rambling Man approaches Elvis and offers him a lift.

In the truck, Rambling Man asks Elvis on why he chose to be fat Elvis rather than one of the other incarnations. Before Elvis can answer, though, a ball of light shoots past and disappears over the horizon. The truck suddenly stalls and rolls to a stop. The two men exit.

The ball of light reappears and now lands in the middle of the road. It’s a saucer-shaped craft. Rambling Man laments how no one is going to believe him and how no one will believe Elvis either. The craft then opens up and three Nwabalans are, again, I don’t know whether I’m saying that correctly. Nwabalans. OK. I’m guessing kind of like alien creatures exit on Harley Davidsons. The lead alien reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small silver object. He tells Elvis he’s a sight for sore eyes. Elvis then says, “Why, thank you. Thank you very much.”

That was not a bad Elvis impersonation when I’ve never done one before. All right, OK, and then that’s the end of page three.

**John:** All right. So, this is by Gerald Decker and this is written in a way that’s different than a lot of the Three Page Challenges we look at, so I’m excited to see this.

So, most screenplays you read are going to have INT/EXT as scene headers, but you will come across some scripts that are sort of written in a continuous voice. Basically it’s just one continuous flow. And the slug lines or sort of scene header thing is just, you know, a general indication of when we’re inside and when we’re outside. Ultimately, if these movies go into production they get scene headers like everything else and it works out fine. But this one is written sort of like just one continuous flow.

And so it’s an interesting thing to look at if you are curious what that looks like on the page.

**Craig:** And it works for me. You know.

**John:** It works for me. Yeah. So, this one starts, “ONE NIGHT OUTSIDE THE ASTRO BURGER ON ROUTE 64 IN ARKANSAS,” which is essentially the scene header. “A semi drives away, leaving a man who looks suspiciously like ELVIS at the restaurant. This first paragraph brings up one of my biggest frustrations with how this was written is that there were just a lot of run-on sentences that I think hurt the read. It was actually harder to sort of get through and figure out what was really going on the sentences kept going on a lot.

But the flow of getting in from place to place, that actually worked kind of fine for me, despite the sort of strange style.

My overall general take on this is that I was certainly surprised by the things that were happening in the first three pages, but I didn’t have a tremendous amount of confidence that this was going to be a movie that I was excited to keep seeing. Because it was going through a lot of tropes really quickly. And I wasn’t convinced that I was going to be taken on a better journey than things I’ve seen before.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, what we’re talking about here is three pages in which Fat Elvis, who we presume is Fake Fat Elvis, turns out to be – it seems – real Fat Elvis. And real Fat Elvis does in fact have awareness and knowledge of aliens. And we’re meeting the aliens now. So, sort of a National Enquirer pastiche into a movie. And that can work. I feel like we’ve seen similar kinds of things. The territory of all of the crazy stories about Elvis are really true is something that has been mined. But I will say that Gerald has written something that is consistent.

The tone feels consistent. Which that is an indication that you can write. And something like this, the tone is very specific. And I felt at home with it the whole way through. It’s odd. But it’s odd in its own way. And it stays odd in its own way. And I could see it. I could see every single thing that happened, which I really liked.

When that happens, it’s so much easier to forgive things like, OK, you’ve capitalized the word Chewing in chewing gum in a parenthetical when you don’t start those things with capitalizations. You know, stuff like that. There were little mistakes like when they’re in the truck Ramblin, who is the name of the truck driver, Rambling Man, who is giving Elvis a ride says, “As Ramblin sings along, Elvis eats his Fatty Fat Burger and his skinny fries. RAMBLIN (Shouting over the music) So tell me.” Well, is he singing or is he shouting?

So, there are these things like this. And, you know, that’s fine. But I could see all of it, which I really enjoyed. When you look at page three, you’ll see that there’s actually an overdose of something that I generally love. I like to use white space on a page and I really like to break up my action lines. Sometimes the best way to get across a vibe, a feeling, a mood is to not write paragraphs of action, but single lines.

However, if you do it too much, then you start to get a little bored visually. I think you could probably combine lines like, “The three lights stop in a line, one next to the other. Behind the lights are three Harley-Davidson motorcycles. On top of the motorcycles are three dark FIGURES.” That could be one paragraph, right?

But, you know, I mean, the last line put a smile on my face. And I thought to myself, well, I don’t know where this goes, I think there’s a possibility that this script becomes something like a Buckaroo Banzai which is amazing and specific and bizarre. And it’s the kind of movie that doesn’t give a damn whether you like it or not, or understand it or not, because it understands itself. I love things like that.

Or maybe this sort of never gets there. But, there is real promise here and there’s an interesting love of – and an evident love of language. Elvis is drinking a shake that’s called a Fatty Fat while he eats Skinny Fries. It’s just fun. I mean, I feel like Gerald is in control of his pages here.

So, by and large I thought there was a lot of promising – there was promising execution if maybe the topic itself wasn’t the freshest thing.

**John:** I agree with you. A few moments of dialogue did not click for me. So I wanted to call them out. So, I’ll start at the end. On page three, Ramblin says, “You ready for this?” “I was born ready.” I did not understand this at all. I didn’t understand why Ramblin wasn’t freaking out more. This is where I think the character underwriting was hurting it. Because I just had no sense of who Ramblin was in this moment.

On page two, Ramblin says, “You see that?” Ramblin’s voice fades away as the ball light reappears. The line was too short to fade away. So, I think it called for a longer line. There’s more stuff happening. So, give us that longer line. Give us something that can actually fade away. Give us a dot-dot-dot to come out of it.

This is personal choice, but on page one Elvis looks over the menu selections. Yeah, give me a Fatty Fat. One of the chocolate shakes and some home fries. Waitress says, “We just have Skinny Fries.” It always kind of annoys me when a character speaks who hasn’t been called out yet. And so there was, you know, if he’s looking over the menu selection as the waitress sort of leans on the counter or taps on her pad, you know, let us see her first. Because then I think stuff is going to work out better. We understand sort of the scene around him as he’s talking to her.

I didn’t understand why Ramblin was giving him a lift. That seems like an obvious thing, but the timing of it all felt really weird. Like, did his fries come? Did they not come? Why is Ramblin giving him a lift?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** So, all these things are helpful. The last thing I want to single out, and this is because a copy editing thing that Arlo Finch made me think of it. So bottom of page three, it says, “It is not human. This is a NWABALAN. His skin is deep blue, his eyes are huge.” And so it an “its” or is it a “his?” And so once you give even a non-human character a gender, stick with it, and don’t be switching back and forth.

**Craig:** Right. I think those are all very, very valid observations and Gerald would be wise to take all of those suggestions. Check also, you know, little things. Put periods at the end of sentences. The sound of the Allman Brothers’ Rambling Man plays, period. You know, if you don’t want to – I don’t care if you underline or italicize song names. All that stuff. None of that stuff matters.

**John:** An example of the Allman Brothers’ Rambling Man plays, that’s his running on sentence. So the Allman Brothers’ Rambling Man plays inside the cab at a deafening volume. So, that’s his style. And so, you know, his scene header is still a part of the same sentence.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. So, it’s inside the cab, at a deafening volume. OK. Yeah, so in cases like that, I like to do a dash-dash to let me know.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** And then a dash-dash back in. So, plays, dash-dash, then inside the cab, then dash-dash, at a deafening volume. Just to help connect people.

But that’s again, that’s not going to sink you one way or the other. Like I didn’t care that you were capitalizing the parenthetical. None of that stuff really matters. I mean, you know. I mean, fistful is not two words. It’s one word. Stuff like that. I don’t know. Whatever.

But I will say that when I meant it’s consistent at least to itself that this style of no INT/EXT and a kind of flowing, informal moving around felt quirky in the same way as the characters and the dialogue. It all felt very quirky.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** So, you know, in that sense there’s an intelligence behind this which I think is important. I don’t know how it turns out. I hope it turns out well for Gerald’s sake. There is a mind at work here.

**John:** All right. Let’s go back one last time to Rebel Wilson to set up our third and final Three Page Challenge.

Rebel: Now the third Three Page Challenge here is called Thicker than Blood by Phillip Rogers. As a ’69 Mustang drives through the desert, Vince Sutter voiceovers complaining about how heroes in movies are always running off into the sunset without an explanation what happens to them afterwards. Vince we see is in rough shape, missing a finger. His passenger, a sharply dressed man named Kim is spooning a duffel bag in the backseat.

Banging comes from the trunk. At the side of the road, Vince opens the trunk to reveal a pissed-off and bound Nick. Nick was scared someone would kill him. After making him promise not to freak out, Vince tells Nick they stole $5 million from Cheung. Nick freaks out. Vince shuts Nick back into the trunk, declaring he’s not ready to come out just yet. They’re headed for the border. Vince says there is no plan B.

Kim suggests they stop and work on plan B, but Vince is worried that Nick’s girlfriend will soon realize he’s missing. Kim then tells Vince to not worry about the girlfriend. He took care of it. And that’s the end of the third page. All right, thanks guys. Thanks for letting me read this. It was fun. OK, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Oh, bye.

**Craig:** Bye. God, she’s the best.

**John:** The best. Craig, start us off with Thicker than Blood.

**Craig:** Well, we have another voiceover beginner here. Now, I must admit that when I started it, every orifice puckered as I sensed the arrival of a Stuart Special, or perhaps a Jabangwe Jump. Is that what we call them?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The Jabangwe Jump?

**John:** I don’t think that is the situation.

**Craig:** It didn’t happen, so I was really thrilled about that. But then also kind of wondering why the hell I needed the voiceover at all. I’m not sure what it was giving us here.

Here’s the thing about these voiceovers. When you start with a voiceover. Voiceover is pompous. Now, sometimes pomposity is exactly called for, because you’re telling some sort of serious tale. So Lord of the Rings has this wonderful, I mean, Galadriel deserves pomposity. She’s the Queen of the Elves and she’s telling you a tale.

That’s not really what’s going on here. And the tone of it doesn’t have the kind of zippy devil-may-care feeling of say Ray Liotta’s voiceover in Goodfellas which is ping-ponging against lots of fun things and these wonderful images. Instead, it’s very ponderous. Very serious. Very philosophical. And then we get what is essentially a scene we’ve seen many times before. There’s a guy in a trunk. There was nothing particularly special about any of this. It all felt very generic to me. We have two characters in the car, Vince and Kim. Kim is a man. And Kim is asleep while Vince does his voiceover.

And they’re driving. And then there’s a banging from the trunk, which again, Goodfellas, and many, many other movies.

**John:** And Go.

**Craig:** And Go. And circa 1990-something. We’re now in 2017. Says, “BANGING comes from the trunk. Vince’s eyes dart to the rear view mirror. Kim shifts awake.” Kim: Sleeping beauty must have finally woke up.

No. That’s not what you do when you wake up. You don’t wake up and immediately speak a scripted line like that. That’s not human. That should be something either Vince says after Kim wakes himself up, but then I would be confused about who he is talking about. Or, Kim should wake up and just go, “Ahh,” right, because he’s hearing the banging and realizes why he’s just been woken up.

That’s such an alarm bell to me, because it means you’re not really writing people, you’re writing lines.

**John:** You know, I think I took this in a very different way, because I enjoyed this much more than you did. And I took the voiceover as sort of hanging a lantern on that this sort of a very classic scene. This is the moment we’ve seen in a lot of these stories before. And the Vince character was sort of aware that we’ve seen this scene in things before.

And so, you know, this is generally the kind of moment that happens later in the story, but we’re sort of starting here. And we’re going to be filling in sort of what got us to this point. I thought there was a kind of meta quality to it that didn’t come through for you. And I think we’re just seeing different movies here kind of.

**Craig:** Well, I understand. Here’s my problem. What he’s saying is in his voiceover, I don’t like it when movies end off with the good guys just riding off into the sunset. Essentially what happens to them next? We’re just supposed to assume everyone lives happily ever after.

Then the banging from the trunk. And the scene is there’s somebody in the trunk who is screaming and we know that Vince is hurt and the guy in the trunk is screaming. The guy is Nick. Nick had been taped. His mouth is taped. He’s freaking out. They’ve killed somebody. And they put the tape back on.

This doesn’t feel victorious at all. It doesn’t feel like the scene he just told us he doesn’t like to see. So, it doesn’t seem like they’re taking off on that at all. There was a clash there, so I just – I didn’t feel it.

**John:** I get that. The three pages end on a discussion between Kim and Vince. And right now it’s all done OS, sort of like as the car is driving away. I had real questions about whether it can sustain that long of an OS.

**Craig:** It can’t. The answer is it cannot. No. Nothing can.

**John:** You would shoot this on camera and then make a decision down the road where it juts out the car. But I actually liked the play between Kim and Vince here. So let’s just read this last couple lines here. I’ll be Kim. Kim says, “I really think there should be a plan B. What if we stop for a drink and come up with a plan B? Or– just– stop for a drink anyway?”

**Craig:** Can’t. The girlfriend’s gonna realize he’s gone soon.

**John:** Don’t worry about the girlfriend. I took care of it.

**Craig:** What d’you mean you took care of it?

**John:** I took care of it.

**Craig:** KIM! WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!

**John:** So, that was at least intriguing enough to me to make it clear that I had assumed that Vince was the person in control of the whole scene, because he was the person who had all the information. He was the person who was missing a finger, who was driving the car. So that got me curious enough that I’m going to read another ten pages of this script.

Now, am I going to love it? Is it going to set my world on fire? I don’t know. But all this felt confident and competent enough that I was really curious to read what was going to happen next.

**Craig:** Interesting. Yeah, you see, to me everything that I’ve seen and heard tells me we’re in the middle of a story, not at the end, which is why I was struggling with the voiceover.

And probably why you really can’t do what he says you’re going to do, because it’s not the end of their – the good guys aren’t just riding off into the sunset because they haven’t won because they’re still in the middle of something. Someone has been killed. Someone is in their trunk. One guy has been hurt. They need to come up with a plan B. They have a goal which is to cross the border, but they don’t know if they can do it or not. That just does not feel reflective.

But here’s the thing that I would love to see. If Kim is in control, I don’t actually know who is in control. It seems to me like this is more of a kind of Hangover vibe where it’s just buddies. But if they’ve killed someone, maybe one of them is a little more dangerous sounding than the other. They both just have that kind of bro patter going on here, which is fine. But one you have one guy basically implying I killed her, then that’s not a bro. That’s a killer.

So, am I supposed to be rooting for this guy? I have so many questions and I wanted it to be more specific and I wanted the characters to be drawn better. It’s well laid out. Believe me, it’s well laid out. Phillip did a good job of that. I think this VO should be tweaked, personally, or eliminated. And I think just whatever you can do to avoid what I would just call generic “we’re in trouble, bro” patter.

**John:** Yeah. I get that. But I’m curious sort of what happened on page four and page five. And where that’s going to go. Because I like that even by page three my assumptions about sort of what the power dynamic was was proven incorrect. So, that was exciting to me. But I will say, I agree with you that of the three of these things we read, this is the most classically put on the page. It looks the most like a normal screenplay.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And reads well. There’s very little here that I could object to. It’s Courier Prime. It looks beautiful. The italics look so nice.

**Craig:** [laughs] You know, take note, people. If you want to butter this guy up, Courier Prime.

Hey, I have a question for you. What do you – I have since abandoned the CONT’D for character lines. Do you still use it?

**John:** I use CONT’D, so we’re describing when a line of action interrupts – the next person speaking is the same character who spoke before. That’s what you’re describing?

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So like Tom, intermediary line, and then Tom again. I still do the CONT’D in most situations. Because I won’t – I hate when Final Draft automatically does it, which is why we don’t do it in Highland. But I only will do it if I’m typing it myself. Because the automatic version is terrible because sometimes you have like three paragraphs in between, but then it’s a CONT’D? That’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I will do it if it’s like a line or two and it’s really one continuous thought and I’m using that intermediary line basically like a parenthetical. The reason why I find the CONT’D helpful is that sometimes literally as an actor is reading it they just won’t connect the dot, like, oh, I’m still talking. It just helps them see that. And I think the actor in the reader’s head, it just makes it clear that it’s the same character talking the whole time through.

So I still do use it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can see that. I’ve basically just chucked it because I just got tired of looking at it. And, I don’t know, it just seemed a little archaic. In here it’s fine that it’s being used here by Phillip. However, when you get into off-screen stuff, for it to then be also attached to the off-screen, that just looks ugly. Kim (OS) (CONT’D). It’s not even continued because he’s not even on camera. I don’t know. That’s a picky thing, but it seems like Phillip is into formatting because he’s done a nice job here, so.

**John:** It is. So, I used to do cont’d as lower case. And I gave up on that. I really liked how lower case looked. It was like sort of less pushy. But I’ve given up on that, too.

I was going to say on Ted’s script, the first one we looked at, had or doesn’t have a CONT’D, and I found it jarring. Because I kept expecting – here’s what it is. Is if there’s two characters in a scene and they’re talking to each other, and the one character talks twice in a row, I will still put the dialogue in the other character’s mouth, because I’m not really looking for who is talking.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** And so that’s where I think it’s really useful to do that.

**Craig:** Well, I’m screwing up there. But you know, I’ve planted my flag and I don’t like change.

**John:** But you are a single spacer now, aren’t you? Or are you a double spacer?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. No, no, I’ve been a single spacer for well over a decade now, sir.

**John:** Very, very nice.

All right. Those are our Three Page Challenges. So, thank you again to all three of our entrants here, people who wrote in with their three pages. And thank you to everybody else who has written in with three pages that we haven’t gotten to yet. Mostly thank you to Godwin Jabangwe, our producer, who has to read through all of them and pick ones that he thinks are going to be interesting for us to look at. So, again, you can read these PDFs. Just go to the links in the show notes, or at johnaugust.com.

If you want to submit your own three pages, it can be a feature script. It can be a pilot. Hell, I’ll probably even take a play if you want to send us three pages of a play. Send it in. You attach a PDF to the little button and send that through to us. And we’ll take a look at those in the future. But mostly thank you to Rebel Wilson. You’re the best.

**Craig:** She is the best.

**John:** I’m imagining hugging her right now.

**Craig:** Bye!

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. My One Cool Thing is a very tiny, tiny thing. And it’s only for people with mustachios, John.

**John:** Never me.

**Craig:** It is the Kent Saw Cut Handmade Mustachio Comb.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I know. I think it’s the 81T model. Yeah. I can’t explain how good it feels to comb your mustache. [laughs] It is the stupidest thing. I feel like – I’m doing it right now. I feel like some, I don’t know, like Poirot. Like look at me, I’m combing my mustache. But it feels really good.

**John:** So, Craig, I haven’t seen you for eight months now. So, you’ve shaved the whole beard and now it’s just a very long handle bar mustache?

**Craig:** No, no, no. I still have the beard. But the mustache is connected to the beard. I mean, the mustache is – you still have the sections of mustache, of beard rather.

**John:** But what happens if you use the comb on the beard part, rather than mustache part? Does it all fall apart?

**Craig:** It gets stuck. Gets stuck. Yeah. Because the mustache hair is very different than the other beard hair.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Have you – you’ve never – can you even grow a beard?

**John:** I can grow stubble, but nothing that you really want to – nothing that anybody wants to see.

**Craig:** No, and Mike doesn’t look like he can grow a beard.

**John:** Oh, he can grow a beard like tomorrow.

**Craig:** No way. Really?

**John:** Yeah. But he hates it.

**Craig:** Oh, well you know what, I get it, because it itches like crazy for a while, but then it stops and then it’s great. So anyway, there you go. For those of you with mustachios or perhaps those of you who aspire to a mustachio, the Handmade Kent.

**John:** Great. So, if we were a podcast that took ads, then that could be a podcast sponsor because it’s always like the razors and things.

**Craig:** I know. By the way, the great thing about this, I made it sound like it’s really expensive, like it’s a $98 mustache comb. I think it costs like five bucks. You can get a 12-pack on Amazon. I think it’s – I don’t know, it’s $0.12.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is actually a research paper that I read a couple weeks ago and loved and I just thought about it again because of stuff that came up in my life. It is titled A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams. It was done by three researchers at Stony Brook University. And it’s interesting because I’ve heard of tech support scams and I’ve read articles about this, but this was actually a scientific research paper where they looked at sort of like how tech support scams worked. And they went to their ethics department to get permission to participate in this study, because they were having to record these conversations without people’s consent. And they just did a deep dive into sort of how tech support scams work.

And generally it’s people visit a website that they shouldn’t visit and it leads them to a page that says like your computer is infected. Contact this number. They call into a “tech support site” that gets these people to download software that then takes over their computer. And then they charge them the money to get free of it.

**Craig:** Ransomware.

**John:** It’s Ransomware basically. I first learned about this because it happened to my mother-in-law.

**Craig:** Of course it did.

**John:** And it was horrible. And it preys on people who are not tech savvy. And so anyway it’s a really good paper, but I also really like the recommendations they make at the end of this, particularly about ways that browsers like Google Chrome or Safari could really help the situation by just giving people a panic switch. Basically like click this button and it will close all the tabs and wipe everything.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That would have saved everyone so much time and hassle. So, I recommend people check this out. It was also just fascinating to see sort of what a modern university paper looks like on a tech topic. So I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** How great would it be if this paper were a scam?

**John:** Oh, wouldn’t that be great? Basically clicking the link in the show notes leads you to one of these devastating pages.

**Craig:** That would be amazing.

**John:** So my mom is – she’s not great with technology, but she can still do some basic things. And so when we had our weekly Facetime call, she’s like, oh, and can you take a look because something is wrong with my switchboard. I’m like, what switchboard. It’s like, oh, it’s what I use to look stuff up. And so switchboard.com was a site that people used to use to look up things a zillion years ago.

And so–

**Craig:** Switchboard?

**John:** Switchboard.com.

**Craig:** I’m going there right now.

**John:** If you go to it right now you will see that it comes in with a very scammy-looking like Click Here for a Survey kind of thing.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s this nonsense. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And so I said, mom, don’t do that. Just Google it. And so I was looking at her browser and right next to the Switchboard, that URL in the bookmarks little bar there was MapQuest. And she still uses MapQuest to like find directions to places.

**Craig:** Aw, that’s so cute.

**John:** I’m like, oh, that’s MapQuest.

**Craig:** Is she, that’s it, like the MapQuest Board of Directors, every day they have a meeting about your mom.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Like how do we retain our customer?

**John:** Absolutely. Nancy is crucial for our ongoing survival.

**Craig:** How is her health? [laughs]

**John:** Indeed. [laughs] They send her flowers every year for her birthday. Because they know all her personal information.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They know exactly where she lives because she’s always getting directions from her house to someplace.

**Craig:** From MapQuest! Oh my god.

**John:** So anyway she wanted to keep MapQuest, but I got Google Maps on the toolbar right next to that, so she has another modern choice. And I showed her how to use it. And I’m like it’s just so much faster and better.

**Craig:** Well…yeah.

**John:** Once again, it’s all time machines. She’s living in a slightly different time period. That’s how I get – if I went back in time, I could check to see, go up to a person and ask, “Hey, how do you get directions to this place?” And if they said like, well, check MapQuest, then I’d know, oh OK, I’m in like–

**Craig:** It’s 2003.

**John:** I’m in like early 2000s.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And they’re like, I don’t know, why don’t you look it up on Excite. [laughs] I remember when Excite was the bomb, dude.

**John:** That was the best. Here, let me load up Netscape Navigator and we’ll take a look at where that stuff is.

**Craig:** Let me crank that sucker up and get on, jump on AltaVista and let you know what I think.

**John:** This last week I’ve been playing quite a fair amount of Star Craft, the original Star Craft, which they just made free. Blizzard made it free. And it’s still a really good game. There’s a few things that are annoying, but the basic dynamics of it still work very, very well.

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve been playing – I’ve been trying to play Zelda, the new one, Breath of the Wild.

**John:** Yeah. It’s beautiful.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing. I don’t like it. I don’t know what to do?

**John:** You don’t like it?

**Craig:** I don’t know what to do.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Like, if there were ever somebody that was supposed to like it, it’s me, because I’ve loved all of the Zelda games. I’ve played them all. And I love big sandbox environments. And I love all of – and I love quest-based adventuring.

**John:** It’s not working for you.

**Craig:** It’s tedious. I find it so tedious.

**John:** But, Craig, you can climb anything.

**Craig:** Slowly.

**John:** So slowly.

**Craig:** And for a short amount of time before your endurance runs out and then you just fall. Also, they have the most insane weapons mechanic in this. Basically every weapon you have, doesn’t matter what it is, doesn’t matter how special it is.

**John:** It breaks. Yeah.

**Craig:** Breaks. Like within, I don’t know, two encounters. So, you’re constantly picking up weapons and putting down weapons. I just – and you run around for days and you find nothing. [laughs] I’m so depressed.

**John:** Except for sadness.

**Craig:** I’m really depressed by it. I don’t know what to do. I’m supposed to like it, and I don’t.

**John:** I don’t have the new Nintendo, but Jordan Mechner came over to visit and he had the new Nintendo. And we were so excited to plug it in and play it on the big screen, but it requires more power than a Macintosh USB-C cable can give it. So, we couldn’t actually power it. So we had to play on the little screen. And so I enjoyed my ten minutes of playing on a little screen, but I could see how it would be frustrating. I think many, many weeks ago I talked about how I really wanted my daughter to play Portal 2 and I was bummed that it wasn’t available on PlayStation 4.

I don’t know why I didn’t think that actually available on Steam. So, she’s been playing on her MacBook.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** And you know what? It’s still a remarkably good game. And the voice acting in that game is just so top-notch.

**Craig:** Cake is a lie.

**John:** The cake is delicious. So, you never made it through the part where you got the cake? Oh, you should play that game again. Because the cake, when it actually comes, it’s the best chocolate cake. We were sitting there and I came to the piece of the best – the best chocolate cake.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, you don’t get chocolate cake in Zelda. But you can make a wide variety of foods which are the only way to restore your health, so you’re cooking a lot. I can’t, I mean–

**John:** Did you cook at all in Skyrim? I never cooked in Skyrim.

**Craig:** Not once. See, that’s the thing. It’s taken all the things that actually annoyed me about Skyrim and it’s only those things. And it doesn’t have all the awesome.

And again, I loved the Zelda games. I loved Twilight Princess. I mean, obviously Ocarina of Time. Everybody loves that. But I don’t – meh. Bummed out. I know everyone is going to tell me I’m wrong.

**John:** All right. That’s our show for this week. As always, it is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Andres Cantor.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send longer questions. But for short questions, we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We’re on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on the iTunes Store, or whatever they’re calling iTunes by the time you’re listening to this. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us your review while you’re there, because at least for right now that helps us out a tremendous amount.

You can find the show notes and all the PDFs we talked about today at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, which I think are now back up to speed. And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net, including the two episodes of Rebel Wilson which are definitely must listens.

**Craig:** Mm. For sure.

**John:** Craig, have a wonderful time in the past with the live show. I hope it will go/did go very well. And I will talk to you again next week.

**Craig:** See you soon, John. Bye.

**John:** See ya. Bye.

Links:

* Three Pages by [Ted Wilkes](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/TedWilkes.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Gerald Decker](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/GeraldDecker.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Phillip Rogers](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/PhillipRogers.pdf)
* [Kent Handmade Moustache Comb](https://www.amazon.com/Kent-Beard-Moustache-Sawcut-Ounce/dp/B004K3J6H6)
* [A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams](https://www.securitee.org/files/tss_ndss2017.pdf)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andres Cantor ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 297 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at the future of James Bond, script-reading robots, and the realities of overhauling a movie in the editing room. But first, we have quite a bit of follow up.

**Craig:** So much follow up. Let us follow it up. Two weeks ago, Malcolm and I answered a listener question about ellipses in dialogue. And you’d think, John, that that would have gone smoothly. But, no, no.

**John:** No. There were pauses.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there was an issue. And the issue was raised by big shot movie director, former Scriptnotes guest, friend of the podcast, friend of me and you, Mari Heller. And this is what she wrote. “I totally disagree with Craig.” John, I’m tempted to just end the follow up there.

**John:** That basically does it. On any issue, she probably disagrees with you.

**Craig:** Probably. And I feel like it’s going to happen a lot. But no, she says, “I totally disagree with Craig. Craig said that actors don’t worry about the punctuation of a line and it won’t affect the rhythm of their performance. I just finished working on a movie with two wonderful actors, who had a lot of respect for the script. Often we would get into conversations about how the script was written and where the punctuation was guiding them. They took each clue laid out as a guide and tried, unless we decided to dismiss it, to follow the breadcrumbs that the script gave them.

“What’s more, when I got into the edit I realized the editor was also using the details of the script as a guide in creating her assembly. If a beat were indicated, or it was written that an actor hesitated or trailed off, she went to great lengths to find takes that matched the script. I believe when we write scripts all of our choices, like punctuation and parentheticals should be viewed as clues for our collaborators about the rhythms we intend.”

**John:** All right, Mari, thank you so much for writing back with us. First off, it sounded like you had a great experience with really dedicated actors and editors. I would say that your experience has not been classically my experience. But, Craig, I’d love to hear what you think.

**Craig:** I agree. I think this speaks very highly of Mari and her cast and her editor. More often, what I find is that people will come to me – this actually happens all the time – people will come to me and say, “There’s a mistake. There’s a problem.” “What?” “Blah, blah, blah says so and so’s name like they know them, but they haven’t yet met.” “Yes they have.” “No they haven’t.” “Yes, see, here. On this page.” “Oh, you know what? When we did it that day we did it a little differently, so they didn’t meet.” “OK, fine, I understand. However, the script is full of clues.” It’s full of them.

Editors, in particular, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve sat in an editing room and watched something and I’m like, well, why not just do it this way. And they’re like, “Ooh…” and I said, “You know, that’s the way it is in the huge binder next to your keyboard that has this clue book.”

So, the truth is what is Mari is describing is like writer heaven. People are actually paying attention. I guess what you and I were saying about punctuation is given the general state of affairs where people don’t, it’s probably not that much of a thing. But, yeah, ideally it would be.

**John:** Yeah. So, I do like your description of punctuation and parentheticals being the clues that you are leaving to the next people to touch your thing. And it’s great that she has the ability to not only direct this project, but also hire really smart people who are looking for those clues. So, congratulations once again Mari Heller.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. So I was there for the first part of that episode and we addressed a listener questioner about why there was so little non-penetrative sex in movies and TV. Basically where are the handies and blowies? And so while we were having that discussion we left out like one really obvious movie which was Moonlight, which features a very crucial handy there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a mistake.

**John:** We weren’t thinking clearly. We were recording this late. I was in London. I lost a microphone. But there is an obvious Oscar-winning movie that has a non-penetrative sex moment that the whole story hinges upon.

**Craig:** It’s an Academy Award-winning handy.

**John:** Yeah. It’s quite a good one. And just a few days later, like this is always the situation where like the minute you notice something you start to notice it everywhere. So, I was watching an episode from this season of The Americans and Keri Russell’s character receives oral sex in a way that I had not seen certainly on TV before, and it was actually completely on story and on point. So, I would like to once again congratulate The Americans on being a fantastic show. And just put a spotlight on my own ignorance to these acts that are in these shows that I’m just not seeing.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is probably going to happen, right? We say that something doesn’t happen and then of course it happens. We just didn’t see it. We missed it. Or sometimes we do see it and then we just forget about it. Really, I’m arguing that we just end the podcast. We’re so close to 300. How great would it be if we just ended it at 299 and we’re like, Nah.

**John:** Yeah. There’s days I definitely think about that. Just going out in a blaze of glory.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. 300 podcast episodes is like having 300 wins as a pitcher. That’s a big thing. I think that that gets us into the podcasting Hall of Fame automatically.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s sports metaphors all over the place.

**Craig:** You’re always lost when I do this. It’s wonderful.

In a previous episode, John, we talked about movie clichés for expressing shock or bad news. Zack from New York writes, “I’m proud to say that I splashed water on my face today, possibly for the first time ever. I did not receive bad news or experience something terrifying. But I did take a 20-minute nap on my couch and woke up discombobulated. After staring at the wall for a few minutes, I went into the bathroom and threw water on my face. I think it half-worked. I’m awake enough to write this email, but still sort of discombobulated. However, I’m out of ideas.”

**John:** What I love about Zack’s email is that it’s so present tense. It’s right about this is the moment I’m experiencing right now. And I like that he thought of us first in that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I just want to salute Zack for writing in to ask@johnaugust.com to let us know that he splashed water on his face, which we had singled out as a movie cliché that no one does in actual life, but it seemed to sort of help Zack in this moment. So, again, just like with handies and blowies, we’re often wrong.

**Craig:** Oh, god, are we ever. Well, what about this whole situation with you and Lindelof?

**John:** Oh, it’s the worst. So, Damon Lindelof and I talked about the notion of idea debt and we thought like, oh, we’re being clever. But you know who else was clever? Chekhov.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, he was pretty good–

**John:** A little writer. A little writer named Chekhov. So, this is what Chekhov wrote in 1888. So, for the record, that was before we recorded the podcast episode.

**Craig:** Just a little bit, yeah. Just a little before.

**John:** Chekhov wrote, “Subjects for five big stories and two novels swarm in my head. One of the novels was conceived a long time ago, so that several of the cast of characters have grown old without ever having been put down on paper. There is a regular army of people in my brain begging to be summoned forth, and only waiting for the word to be given. All I have written hither to is trash in comparison with what I would like to write.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s Chekhov.

**Craig:** I mean, that is succinct. It’s beautifully said. He did really put you to shame there. And Damon. I think the both of you should feel bad.

**John:** We do feel a little bad. I want to also single out Jason who wrote in with that Chekhov quote to make us feel a little bad. But also I do want to thank everyone on Twitter who said that it was one of the best episodes they’d ever heard of the podcast. So, Craig, at some point–

**Craig:** I’m going to read it.

**John:** If you were to listen to it or read it–

**Craig:** I’m reading it.

**John:** You might enjoy that episode with Damon Lindelof. Finally, we often do segments about How Would This Be a Movie. So, in Episode 214 we did an episode about the French train bros. These were the three American tourists in 2015 who prevented a terrorist attack.

**Craig:** We’re calling them bros? [laughs]

**John:** Well they’re bros. They’re three guys traveling through France. They’re bros.

**Craig:** I guess. Sure.

**John:** They prevented a terrorist attack on a train from Brussels to Paris. They overpowered a guy who had an AK-47. So we said like, well, this could be a movie and Clint Eastwood agreed. So this last week it was announced that he is going to be making a movie based on the book The 1517 to Paris: The Trust Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes, which was written by the eponymous American heroes, along with a guy named Jeffrey Stern. The screenplay version is going to be written by Dorothy Blyskal, and from what I looked up it seems like this is going to be her first screenwriting credit. So, congratulations Dorothy. You answered the question How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s one that people will see. You know, boy, I wish I could be on a Clint Eastwood set. I’ve just heard so many amazing things. You know, just the speed. We’ve all heard the stories. I wish I could see that. I’m not going to be able to.

**John:** Are you? Is there some sort of secret thing where you actually will be able to see that?

**Craig:** No, no, never going to be able to there. I’ll just be in my office reading about it. Well, that sounds exciting. I think that will be fun.

**John:** It will be fun.

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve had enough of follow up. I think follow up is done.

**John:** Follow up is done. So, if we were a podcast ahead, like musical interludes, then we would put the music here and then move on to the next thing.

**Craig:** Follow up is done. Yeah!

**John:** So the big feature topic which we obviously have to talk about this past week because everyone on Twitter wrote to us about it. And follows ScriptBook. Well, what is ScriptBook? Well, back in Episode 232, so it’s kind of follow up, we talked about ScriptBook and I actually remember this conversation. I remember the setting of this conversation because I was in Australia at the time and we were talking about this sort of ridiculous AI thing that would read through the scripts and figure out how successful this movie would be. Basically it had digested a bunch of screenplays and it was pitched towards financiers to help them figure out is this a movie to be investing your money into.

But this last week, someone else decided to use ScriptBook and it didn’t go as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, Franklin Leonard over at the Black List worked out some sort of deal with the ScriptBook people where he was offering to his customers an opportunity to get their analysis, the ScriptBook analysis of their script, in exchange for $100. And it did not go over well. You know, he put it out there. And seemingly put it out there in good faith. It certainly wasn’t anything he was requiring people to do. If they wanted to use the other parts of his service, which you and I generally quite like.

Boy, it just didn’t go well for him. I mean, certainly both you and I felt that ScriptBook was stupid, and fake, bordering on completely useless. And therein is the problem. Because there’s two ways of looking at it. One way is this is potentially useful for people. And the other way is this is absolutely useless.

If you believe the former, then you can see where, OK, he’s offering a product. You either like it or you don’t. But if you believe the latter, if you believe it’s truly useless, it starts to feel a little bit scammy. Like you’re selling me snake oil. And I personally do believe it is utter snake oil.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And a lot of other people seem to agree as well.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the minute sort of the word got out about it, you and I were on a long email thread with Franklin about it, but there were also threads on Reddit and there was a lot of sort of hubbub on the Internet about what this was and what it was doing. So, I think we should sort of spoil the punch line here by saying that Franklin has pulled the product, so it is no longer a thing that the Black List is offering, and so we will put a link in the show notes to his original explanation for what the product was and then his email out and sort of his letter about sort of why they were removing it and why he listened to the community and pulled it out of there.

So, I want to talk about two things, which is that question of like is this potentially useful. Like in a perfect world, if this were free, is this a thing you would want to exist in the world? And then the concern of like, well, is this a thing that we feel like screenwriters should be paying $100 for?

Let’s talk about in the perfect world where it’s free, Craig, did you see any value in the product?

**Craig:** No. None. Well, net zero value. Because where there may be little bits of possible potential usefulness in the free version of this, there’s also potential problems that it causes. And that really was the biggest issue for me. So, you know, some of the stuff you go, well, I guess the AI is saying that my predicted genre is half sport and half drama. It’s a sports-drama, but how did I not know that? Um, there’s a predicted MPAA rating, which again really what it comes down to is it’s telling you everybody knows what G is and everybody knows what R is. So, then somehow tell us if you’re PG or PG-13. Nobody in the world cares about that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is stuff about your character likeability. That to me is just dangerous. Because you might think, oh, my character is not likeable enough. Nobody – what – no, that’s not how it works at all.

Predicted target audience. Absolutely useless to you. The marketing department will tell you what the predicted audience is. And then there’s production budget. Potentially useful if you were maybe trying to produce this on your own. Or you were maybe considering to whom you ought to submit the work. And you know, OK, well these people are looking for movies in the $10 to $20 million range. Well, ScriptBook tells me that my script has a 46% chance of being in that range, which ultimately isn’t really very useful either. Because nobody is going to make a budget based on what ScriptBook guesses. They’re going to make a budget by breaking it down and making a budget.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. So, in the show notes we’ll link to a file that the Black List put up which was a sample report for Fences, the Academy Award-nominated script from this past year. And so as you look through it, it’s a nicely presented report. It’s three or four pages long. It talks about rating, genre, the Script DNA, character sentiment, character likeability. I had concerns with all of these things for the reasons that Craig laid out.

Where I think this is actually interesting was there’s this grid where it shows movies that this is like. And I think the axes as they’re labeled are really unfortunate. So it says Audience Rating, in this case from 3 to 10. And creativity from 0 to 1. So looking at this you would say that well Fences is more creative than Hope Springs, or Sideways, but it’s less creative than The Iron Lady or The Verdict. And it’s also more creative than Beasts of the Southern Wild, which seems kind of remarkable.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** So, that was troubling to me. And yet if I were to take away the lines and the axes and just say like this is a cluster of other movies that feel kind of like this, that I could actually see being somewhat useful. Because I would never think of Fences as being like Milk or like The Iron Lady, but in a way that the people who like Milk would probably also like Fences, or the Iron Lady, that actually seems to make some sense.

So that is reasonable to me. And I was actually a little bit impressed that the AI was able to match these up to some degree. Now, I would love to see it matching Identity Thief and seeing what are the movies around that and see if it actually has a good sense of what that is. I thought that was somewhat interesting. But I don’t think it’s $100 interesting for an aspiring screenwriter. I don’t know what an aspiring screenwriter who is putting a script up on the Black List gets out of knowing that it’s like these things. I don’t see how that’s actionable information.

**Craig:** It isn’t. And it’s also information that you as a human are layering your own insight upon. Because the truth is we don’t know – you can say, well, Fences is – I guess in a strange way Fences and Milk are somewhat related. Are they? Really? Well, they’re both dramas. They’re both about adults. They both take place in cities. They both have middle-aged men kind of at the center of it. But, are they really? I mean, I guess anybody could just – at that point you could just say any movie with people like that and go, oh, that’s interesting. I guess those movies are sort of like…

Fences and Sideways are nothing alike. Nothing, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** But I would say they are both in terms of who they are appealing to, I think they’re actually more common than you might necessarily believe. Though the fact that it recognized that Fences was potentially an award movie seems interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But again, we don’t know. We’re looking at exactly one example. So I don’t know how much to read into this. But I found that at least interesting. I put the T in there for Aline.

**Craig:** It is vaguely interesting. But anybody who just scrolls through a list of award movies, right, you have Fences. That’s based on a brilliant play. So you’re making an award movie. Just run through a list of award movies then, I guess. I mean, this is not – I don’t understand these metrics. So you have this creativity metric and, well, you could say Fences and Milk are equally creative sort of, I guess whatever that means. But apparently Raging Bull is less creative than Hope Springs. What?

**John:** I don’t know what that means.

**Craig:** Wait. The Usual Suspects is less creative than Malibu’s Most Wanted. That’s right. Let me say this again. That’s the Jamie Kennedy movie, I believe, where he’s – isn’t that right – where he plays a rapper?

**John:** I think it is. Yes. He’s a rapper.

**Craig:** The Usual Suspects – here are the movies that are less creative than Malibu’s Most Wanted: The Usual Suspects, Cool Hand Luke, Heat, Michael Clayton. [laughs] What? And The Avengers.

**John:** Yeah. The Avengers and Catwoman down there at the bottom there.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. Computer, you’re wrong. And Malibu’s Most Wanted shouldn’t be on this. It makes no sense.

**John:** It should not be on there at all.

**Craig:** I also don’t understand the vertical axis of Audience Rating. So, how do we have the audience rating exactly for Cool Hand Luke? What audience? I mean, the audience of over 30 years? Or then? Beasts of the Southern Wild less creative than The Blind Side. And, I mean, I don’t understand this.

**John:** I don’t understand it either. But here’s what I would say zooming way back. I mean, is it clear that there are AI things that can actually find patterns where we wouldn’t see patterns? Absolutely. Do I think this is a case where the kinds of patterns it is finding are going to be useful for the target audience of this service? No, I don’t. I just don’t think that sticking Milk and Fences close to each other on a graph is helping a writer. And a lot of people seem to feel the same way.

So, let’s segue to the scamminess of it all. Because you and I both know and like Franklin. He’s a smart, good guy who is not scammy. And so in our conversations with him, we wanted to sort of make it clear that this felt scammy, but we didn’t think he was scammy. And that we were concerned for him and for the brand because that’s not the way we want to see him out there in the world.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And he did the thing that people so rarely, rarely do. He listened.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** He listened. I mean, Franklin is a humble guy. He’s a business man and he’s an aggressive business man, but he’s not afraid to say, OK, I made a mistake. And in this case what happened was it wasn’t about you or me. We hadn’t talked about his involvement with this on the air prior to his decision that he made to remove it. But he listened to writers on Twitter. He listened to writers on Reddit. Keith Calder, a good producer, who really went after it on Twitter I think made an impression. And he said, “OK, you know what, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t like this. I did. And I thought people would like it and I think some people still could get use out of it. On the other hand, I hear you. So, we’re dumping it.”

And that’s a big boy grown up thing to do. And in today’s world, it is a rare thing. And so–

**John:** It is. Yeah.

**Craig:** I had a lot of respect for that. And, you know, again, you and I, we like the other part of what Franklin does, which now that we’ve gotten rid of this thing, that is what Franklin does. We like him. He’s our friend. And I think that his general service is a good one. So, it looks like we’re back to a good situation.

**John:** Which is a very good thing. All right, next topic is the battle for James Bond. So, this was – I’m going to link to an article from the New York Times by Brooks Barnes. I’m sorry, Craig.

**Craig:** You know, Brooks Barnes, I had to correct him the other day. He wrote an article about the strike and referred to the long strike of 1998, which did not exist.

**John:** Did not happen.

**Craig:** Oh, Brooks.

**John:** So I can’t verify that all the facts in this article are true, but I will say that in a general sense it raised an interesting issue of what happens when you have a franchise that is essentially a free agent. So, that’s James Bond. When you see a James Bond movie, the opening credits are United Artists, MGM/United Artists. But that’s not actually who releases it. And so for the past four James Bond movies they’ve been released by Sony. But that contract is up. And so now five different companies are competing for the right to make that next James Bond movie. The companies being Warners, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony, and Annapurna, which is the little small label that mostly does fancy award movies.

So, that’s kind of an interesting and unusual thing to happen in Hollywood is to have this franchise sort of up for grabs.

**Craig:** It is. And it’s sort of up for grabs, because the truth is they’re not really going to be making it. What they’re going to be doing is giving MGM/UA the money or a big chunk of the money to make the movie, and then they’re going to be advertising the movie and distributing the movie. And therein is the problem, because when you actually look at the way the deal has been structured, if we’re to believe what Brooks has said here, there’s not that much profit really coming back to you. In huge success, you’ll make a pretty good amount of money. You won’t make as much money as say they’re making off of Get Out, because your profit is capped. It’s seriously capped.

So what he describes as under the previous agreement, and I can’t imagine in a bidding war why the new agreement wouldn’t be even more favorable to the Bond folks than the previous one. But, in the previous one Sony paid half of the production costs. So, you pay half of what it costs to make the movie. That’s just to make the movie. And in return for that, you get one-quarter of certain profits, once costs are recouped. That’s probably the certain costs there for those things may involve taxes and insurance and things like that. And obviously, you know, you’re only getting your share of the ticket price and so forth.

**John:** It’s also unclear if Sony is releasing this internationally, like what distribution fee do they get to charge for their distribution services. The math behind this can be very, very complicated.

**Craig:** Extremely. Yeah.

**John:** So it’s not a matter of the film itself becoming profitable. They’re getting money in at every step of the process.

**Craig:** Well, they’re putting money in and they’re taking money out all the time. So, you’re right. For instance, they’ll say, well, we’re going to spend $60, $70, $80 million of the total marketing spend. We’re going to be accountable for that. So we’re spending $80 million. But we’re going to charge you $20 million in marketing fees. So it’s always this weird game. But in the end, here’s the truth: all these people want it because it’s kind of a sure thing. And there is the potential for many more movies. We live in an interesting time.

So, you say to a studio, “You have a choice. Roll the dice on a $20 million movie. It will either make $4 million, or it will make $120 million, but there won’t be another one. Or, make this movie. You will make $30 million off of it. And you can do five more of them. And each one will make you $30 million.” They’re going to go for that second deal all day long.

**John:** Yeah. I think so. And I think it’s as much about the psychology as the actual dollars coming in. So in think about it if you are the head of one of these studios. If you make the Bond movie and it just does OK, no one is going to call you an idiot for making the James Bond movie. It was a safe bet and everyone is going to acknowledge it was a safe bet.

Also, you are keeping the entire machinery of your studio engaged to do it. I mean, one of the weird things about a studio is you have these whole departments that have nothing to do unless you give them a movie to work on. And so a lot of times when studios are in crisis it’s because they actually don’t have a movie. And so they have these huge divisions that have nothing to actually do. So this is a thing to do. It’s a reason to keep all those people employed doing their jobs. Bond is one of those few kind of known brands that whether it’s a fantastic James Bond movie or a just an OK James Bond movie you know you’re going to clear a certain bar with it.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And you know that you’ll have the right to attach one of your other movies’ trailers to that, because studios can do that where they’re like, OK, if you run this movie you have to at least run our trailer with it. And you know that you’re going to be attracting a certain amount of talent which then if the relationship goes well you might be able to transition into a different movie, filmmakers. You’re keeping people close.

The difference with Bond is the people that control Bond are notoriously protective of it and really they do it. You actually don’t really do anything when, as a studio, other than you sell it and you distribute it. So you’re not really getting much back. It’s an interesting thing that all of these studios are so into it. I mean, it just goes to show you that they make more money and they make it more consistently than we know.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** Because if they can make consistent money off of this arrangement, and they want to do it again, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. They’re doing OK.

**Craig:** They’re doing all right.

**John:** Let’s look at some of the other reasons why you don’t want to make the Bond movie or why you don’t want to chase it. It has a limited upside. So, you’re capped at sort of how much you can get out of it. Including you’re capped on this movie that you’re making, but down the road if like let’s say you reinvigorate the Bond franchise, well another studio could make the next movie. And it’s like you’ve helped them, but you’re getting nothing for having helped them. So, that’s a concern.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have limited creative control because the Broccoli family controls it so tightly. Also, you’re weirdly forced to make it. Like, let’s say you get the script and got the director and you’re reading this and you’re like I don’t want to green light this. You have not choice basically. You have to green light this. That’s part of the deal you’re making right now. So these guys are pursuing the rights to Bond, but they’re not looking at a script right now. There is no script right now, I assume. They’re just talking about the idea of making a Bond movie. Maybe with Daniel Craig. Maybe not with Daniel Craig. So, it’s a mystery. And they’re on the hook to make it kind of no matter what happens.

And, finally, there’s an opportunity cost. So, if you’re making the Bond movie, that’s another movie you’re probably not making, either because you don’t have the resources to do it, you know, money wise, or there’s just not a slot in your schedule for another movie right now. Which for some of these studios is probably a good thing, because they’re just looking to do the minimum it takes to sort of keep them in their jobs.

**Craig:** Well, I think that the – you know, it’s so interesting when you talk to people that run studios, one of the things that I’ve heard from a number of them, and it’s very sad actually is that they never really have any moments of victory and joy because when they make these movies, and this is a perfectly good example, they run a spreadsheet and they go, “Well, we are expected to make between this amount and this amount in terms of profit.” The movie is made. It comes out. It either hits that target or it doesn’t. Maybe it exceeds it somewhat. Usually doesn’t.

So, let’s say they have predicted that the movie is going to be quite a success and it’s going to make them $80 million in profit. Two years later, someone says, “OK, yeah, you did it. Check. You did the thing we asked you to do.” There’s no dancing around. There’s no big “oh my god, it’s a huge hit, wow.” Because that implies that they are all just guessing. They’re not.

Unfortunately what also happens is if you miss that target on the low side, the studio bean counters and overlords will say, “Hmm, well, you’re going to have to make it up on one of these other ones.” So even when you exceed expectations, even that triumph is muted because really somebody is going to say, “Well, all right, you should bank that because one of these other ones might miss.” Either way, by the time we get to see the movies it’s like an afterthought for them, because they’ve already priced it and thought about it. And, in fact, they’re now worried about what’s coming out two years from now. And you never get to enjoy it.

**John:** I think if you’re a studio executive, maybe you’re trying to build a hand of three different kinds of suits. You want the guaranteed hits, like the things, you know, Fast & the Furious 9. And, yes, there’s already a spreadsheet for how much that is supposed to make, but you want to be able to hit that thing and hopefully exceed it. You want a couple of cards that are just like they could break out. They have low expectations but they have possible of a lot of upside. You want the Get Outs. The things that could become a Get Out.

And, finally, you want a few of those things that could win awards, because if you’re looking at whether you’re going to be able to reup your contract in a few years, I think you want to be able to show all three things. That you’ve done the expected hits, some surprise hits, and you’ve also gotten the studio some awards. And that’s a lot to try to manage.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is. And I don’t envy them. Honestly, I don’t. I know right now we’re in a bit of a contentious period between writers and the companies, but in terms of the people that I know and I work with, I don’t envy them their jobs. I’m sure they don’t envy me mine. I think everybody that isn’t a screenwriter is horrified by the thought of having to write a screenplay, and I don’t blame them.

But, that’s a difficult gig. And it’s scary. And there’s so much that’s not in your control. That’s the part that’s hardest for me to get my mind around, because you know at the very least we have this wonderful period where we’re in control. And it’s when we’re writing. They never really have that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a strange part of their job is they seem to be the decision makers, and yet they don’t have ultimate control of the thing they’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Before we wrap this up, let’s take a look at some other franchises and just look and see where they fall on sort of this matrix, because the James Bond is like one of the most free-agenty kind of things out there. At least in terms of how MGM partners up with a different company every time.

But Terminator strikes me as a similar situation, because that was made by Carolco way back in the day. It keeps I think passing through different sort of financiers who own the rights to it, but it could end up different places.

**Craig:** It has a home now.

**John:** OK, where is it now?

**Craig:** It is at Skydance.

**John:** OK. Well, Skydance I would sort of count as sort of an MGM type situation where they’re a place with a lot of money, but they are not – they don’t have their own distribution deal.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They just distribute through somebody.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Marvel for a while was sort of like the James Bond situation where they have a bunch of properties and some of them are at Paramount, some were at Fox, some were at Sony. Spider Man was at Sony. Ultimately they all ended up over at Disney, except for the X-Men universe at Fox, and for Spider Man at Sony. But even then they sort of reached back in and sort of reinvested in Spider Man. But for a while they were doing what James Bond was doing. They could move their movies from studio to studio.

**Craig:** They could. And then they got purchased by Disney. So, once Disney bought them, you can see there is just a general effort now to hold all of that in. And the only ones that are left straggling out there are the X-Men, so you have the X-Men part over at Fox, and you have Spider Man at Sony, which they are now co-producing. I don’t know how long that X-Men – I think the deal with the X-Men is they keep it if they keep making X-Men movies, or something like that. I read something like that.

**John:** That’s my understanding is like they’ll keep making X-Men movies because that’s how they keep their rights to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finally, Star Wars was for a while Lucas Film owned it, so Fox distributed it. But I think Lucas Film really owned the first three prequels that they made, and now of course Disney owns that whole franchise as well. So, again, sort of bringing it in house.

**Craig:** And Disney has been kind of brilliant about this, you know. They just buy the whole company, you know. So, you can negotiate with MGM/UA about the rights to distribute James Bond movies. But if you really want a James Bond movie, just buy MGM/UA. Right? The problem is that’s all they have. They have that. They have the Bond, right? And Bond is very narrow. It’s a fascinating franchise. I’m a huge Bond fan. I’ve seen them all. But it is a very narrow franchise. There I don’t believe there has ever been a Bond spinoff. The entire point is you have James Bond. And then you have a couple of villains that repeat every now and again. Your Blofelds. But there’s a new woman that comes in each time. She comes in, there’s sex, she leaves. Next movie. You know, you have a character like Felix Leiter who is a CIA buddy. No one has ever gone, you know what, now there’s a Bond universe where we’re going to have a movie just about Q and we’re going to have a movie just about Felix Leiter. I’m sure they brought it up at some point or another. But as far as I can tell, nobody on the Bond side of things seems interested in that. So–

**John:** I do remember speculation about Halle Berry’s character being spun off from her movie. Jinx, or whatever her name was.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There was talk of that, but none of that ever came to pass. And it does feel, I agree with you though. Like if another person were to come in and buy that whole franchise, if they bought out the Broccolis for some reason, you would see a universe being formed. Because we know a lot about that universe and it feels like there’s something more you could do with that if you had it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know like if they had an extended Bond universe, you know the movie I would want to write?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** I would want to write the movie of M. Young M.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And how M is a spy and it is WWII. I would do a period piece. And sort of the early days of spying and the creation – the notion of why you create the Double O. There’s a great story to be told about why you decide as a person and as a government we need an agency where certain people are allowed to murder. Not shoot in self-defense, or be a soldier on the battlefield. Just kill someone. That is a fascinating question. Licensed to Kill.

**John:** Absolutely. I also think you look at some of the classic villains and, yes, they are people who are up to their own – they have their own plans and devices, but like there’s an Elon Musk-y kind of character who is sort of right on the border between a villain and a hero who could be a fascinating centerpiece to a movie. Who ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. There’s something great about that kind of character as well.

**Craig:** And there is really room there. There’s room there. But for now–

**John:** For now it will be Bond. Our next topic was also suggested by many of our listeners. So, this past week there was a video put out by Nerd Writer on recutting Passengers. Basically proposing the question of what would happen if you did a major cut on the movie Passengers where you sort of limited it to Jennifer Lawrence’s point of view, at least for part of the movie, so she wakes up first. So essentially like she wakes up and Chris Pratt’s character is already walking around the space station. And you and she don’t know that he woke her up deliberately.

And, Craig, I don’t know. Have you seen the movie?

**Craig:** No. But I know the story of the movie. And so I understand the purpose of this change. I’m not really sure – I mean, it would be different.

**John:** It would be different.

**Craig:** I don’t know if the people’s primary objection to that – I mean, no matter how long you delay it, at some point you find out that he woke her up and then you’re asked to believe in their romance. And that seems to be the problematic part for people.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I think it’s an interesting idea. I enjoyed the movie, but I think my problems with the movie were sort of the problems of they had to work really hard to sort of keep Chris Pratt likeable, even though he was doing an unlikeable thing, and it sort of strained under that weight. So, this would be a way of addressing that. But I don’t want to actually get into so much the creative solution proposed here, and just talk about what would happen and what does happen when you are facing a movie and you have this idea for a massive restructuring after it’s already shot.

So, let’s say that you saw this movie before it came out and you were the studio executive, or you are the producer, or the director, and you say like, “I think I want to try this thing.” How would that actually come to pass and what are the realities of trying to implement a change like this?

**Craig:** Well, the first thing that has to happen is a general decision about the scope of the work. Because they’ll make a movie, they’ll test the movie, and then they will discuss – let’s just presume it doesn’t go well, OK? So, the question now is what are we talking about here. Do we need a couple more jokes in the movie? Do we need this one scene that would help improve that? Should we fix the ending? Or, do we have something fundamentally huge going on here and we need to do a lot of work? We need to do two weeks of shooting and shoot a lot and recast a couple of parts?

So, first triage.

**John:** Yeah, and a triage moment only happens if there really is a disastrous test screening. If people really just do not like this movie. And I don’t think that was the case with Passengers. My suspicion was, from people I’ve talked with, the movie tested pretty well and the movie was like pretty well and they were surprised by the reception it got, which wasn’t as strong as they’d hoped.

So, I think you would have to have that bad test screening. The studio panicked. The producer panicked. You have to have a director who is on board with making big changes, or a director you can replace.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Those are the only situations in which you’re able to do big things. But, you’re often doing small things. And so what I will say is that even after a good test screening, you are talking about recuts, reshoots, looking for things that aren’t working, finding your jokes. That happens all the time. And I’ve never worked on a movie that hasn’t had changes based on those early screenings and people’s reactions to them. So, but what’s not common, and you and I have both been in situations where they have done the big recut, that is sort of an emergency all hands on deck. You’re really talking about big brand new ideas. Like, what if we were to rethink how this all works?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’ve done that. I’ve done that. And it’s hard. It’s hard because first of all it’s a rare thing for the people who are involved in the creation of the movie up to that point to continue to be involved. So, we have a huge problem here. We’re probably going to need a different director to come in and do this work. And we should bring a different writer in to come in and do this work, otherwise we’re at risk of repeating the same mistakes, plus there’s just a lot of emotions and defensiveness. And it’s understandable. It’s a mess.

So, when I come and do this, I sit – I watch the movie. And then inevitably after that there is a discussion of here are the things we just can’t do. We can’t change this. And we can’t change that. We have this much that we can change. How should we best do it? So, it is a very tricky puzzle. This is very Rubik’s Cubey. Figuring out how to fundamentally change a movie without touching a whole bunch of it. And it’s rarely perfectly successfully. It can make a huge difference. And it does. I mean, you can see it in test scores. They run the movie and they’re like, my god, look at the difference.

And I always think, well yeah, but there’s still something just – this movie is still just not right. It’s alive. Very tough to do.

**John:** Yeah. When I come into these situations, I always sort of start with like what is actually working. Are there moments of the movie that actually work that sort of suggest the movie it wants to be? And oftentimes it won’t be at the very start of the movie, it’ll be some moment in the middle where like, OK, just for a moment there you kind of found what the movie was. And it’s possible just through cutting and through moving stuff around, you’ll be able to find more of that movie and sort of get us to that place. But in general I find you want to let the movie be one thing rather than the three things.

When a movie is really not working, it’s trying to do too much at once, and it just loses its focus and its tone. It’s just not a consistent experience. So figuring out what that experience should be is really important.

The first Charlie’s Angels was notoriously a very chaotic production. It was chaotic in post as well. But I remember when I came back in on that movie, one of the first things I really worked on was the opening title sequence, which shouldn’t seem that important, but it was really helpful for setting the tone.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** We’d shot all these scenes, but figuring out what it felt like and sort of what the right kind of goofy was. And so I was sitting with the editors working on do the wipes across and make it feel like the TV show in ways that are fun and right. And once we got that and sort of got that locked, we could sort of step back and say, OK, let’s look at the rest of our scenes and see how we can be a little bit more like that in our style, and that was really helpful.

But ultimately there were reshoots. There were simplifications of logic. They were getting rid of things that didn’t need to be there. Classically, World War Z is a movie that had a much, much bigger ending in its original form. This big assault on Moscow. And the movie did not want to be that. The movie ultimately wanted to be a more intimate movie with Brad Pitt and his family and his own survival. And so that was that whole new third act that Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard had to figure out how to do.

**Craig:** And Chris McQuarrie.

**John:** Chris McQuarrie as well. So, it’s a bunch of hands on deck, really smart people. Looking at what’s there. Looking at what was great, which there was a lot that was great in the first two-thirds of World War Z. And finding a way to carry that through to the end, in that case incredibly successfully.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, those situations are not – thank god – common. It is more common that what happens is – I did this recently. You watch a movie and everyone says, “Here are the things that we’re kind of getting back from the audience on some spots.” And I’ll say, yes, I had those same reactions myself. So that’s good news. It means everybody is kind of in agreement.

Maybe all we need to do here is add a line. You know, so two people are talking and maybe this person says something that just isn’t quite right. It’s causing confusion. So, let’s just have them record a new line and we’ll just be on the other person’s face. And it’s just one line and suddenly that all makes sense now.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The disruption of experience through poor logic is so dangerous and happily, typically, easily fixable. My least favorite call is come and make the movie funnier with some lines. That’s not going to work.

**John:** Yeah, to try to joke it up. And that will never work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** What I think you’re describing though when you’re adding in a loop line to sort of make something clear, is you talk about people being on the ride or off the ride. And it’s like when did they fall off the ride? And they fall off the ride, they fall off the – they stop believing in the movie when enough things just don’t add up for them. When they start getting confused and sort of confused and annoyed and then they just check out. And so if you can keep them from checking out, if you can keep them engaged, and curious about what’s happening next, you’re probably going to keep them at least somewhat of a fan throughout the rest of the movie.

It’s those moments often in a first act, early in the second act, when people kind of give up on your movie. And if you can keep them from giving up, you’re going to be able to make a lot of those things which weren’t working are suddenly going to feel a lot better.

**Craig:** Exactly. And this is somewhere where a new person coming in is of great help. Because when you’re there from the start and you’re making the movie, you have certain things that you believe. Making a movie is essentially making a million guesses. And you may make almost all the correct guesses, except for two. But, the audience is saying we don’t understand why she’s saying this now but before she said this. And you say, well, it’s because of blah, blah, blah. Right? And somebody else will say, “Well, I didn’t quite get that. I think maybe somebody should say that.” But the people who have been involved, sometimes their feeling is, “But that’s just so on the nose.” Because in their mind it’s in there already. And a new person can say, “It’s kind of not.” And so this is one area where I know it’s going to grate you, because it sounds like it’s on the nose, but for the audience it’s not going to feel – it’s going to actually be interesting, because they’re not getting what you have.

When you do these jobs, you’re actually – this is where being a feature writer feels great, because everybody is, I think, incredibly grateful to the writer who comes in at this point and helps.

**John:** 100 percent. So, let’s wrap this up by talking – go back to Passengers. And so let’s say this is an alternate history version of all this, where they saw the first cut of Passengers, and it wasn’t working. It was sort of like the final movie. And they said like, “You know what? We have this idea for a wild experiment.” What they would actually do next? And we live in a time of wonderful digital editors, so a lot of what the video suggests trying to do, you could actually just do. You could do that in your non-linear editor. I don’t say Avid anymore, because people yell at me when I say Avid.

You would actually chop it up and if there were things that didn’t make sense, you would put in little cards to explain what would happen in this moment. But it’s a day or two to sort of build that cut of the movie and sort of see what it feels like. And maybe it feels great. It certainly would change a lot of your experience of the movie. And then you would have to get buy-in. And that’s where I think they would have a hard time with this radical rethinking, because suddenly your two big movie stars you’re paying $20 million each, they’re not playing the same characters they signed on to in the movie. And they may love it. They may like it a lot more. But suddenly you’re going to be sending them out there in the world to promote this movie which wasn’t at all what they thought it was going to be. You may have already put out a teaser trailer that promised this romance, but the movie that you’re cutting sort of feels more like a thriller.

That can be a real problem as well. So, it’s not honestly as simple as just like, we’ll make the best movie. Make the most compelling movie. There may be reasons why you can’t do some of the things you want to do.

**Craig:** That is precisely why I get frustrated with things like this. Because there is an implication that we out here are just smarter than you. You dumb-dumbs couldn’t see, but we can.

Almost always, no offense to the people that make these videos, they are not thinking of something that we haven’t thought of. Almost always, it’s been thought of and tried and didn’t work with audiences, or it’s been thought of and tried and rejected by the very large number of competing powers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The one thing that people don’t quite understand is it doesn’t matter if something is right. If the movie star, who is going to promote this movie, doesn’t like it. And you may say, “Well, hold on a second. Before we just surrender, can’t we…” And I just want to put my hand up and say, “You’re describing my life. You’re describing my career. That’s half of my job.”

Half of my job is to figure out what to do and get people to agree. The other half is to figure out what to do when the one person who we really need to agree doesn’t agree. Now what do I do? That’s the world we live in. This is collaborative. And some people have an enormous influence on the work.

Sometimes you wish they wouldn’t. But that’s the deal.

**John:** All right. Enough of recutting movies. Let’s go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, I actually have two. I’m cheating. My first is a newsletter put out by Quinn Emmett, a friend of the show. It’s called Important, Not Important. And it’s just a weekly recap of the things you may have missed in the news, but also sort of other headlines. Sort of a little bit deeper than what you could get on Twitter.

I find it delightful. I’ve been reading it for months. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

The other thing I loved this week was this Brazilian artist named Butcher Billy. And what he does is he takes a serious of ‘80s pop songs and he reimagines them as Stephen King book covers. And so if you click through the link in the show notes, you’ll see what I mean. Like Careless Whisper or How Deep is Your Love. There is a Light Never Goes Out. It’s sort of like if you take those titles, they actually can be really good Stephen King books. And so he does the artwork for what that Stephen King book would be. And I just thought they were delightful.

So, I always love sort of reimagining things. I love the unsheets, the sort of make believe posters for movies that we’ve all seen and loved, so I thought this was delightful.

**Craig:** This is pretty great. I’m looking at it right now. That’s cool. Love the font.

My One Cool Thing is Pinball Arcade. Are you a pinball fan, John?

**John:** I’m not a big pinball fan. I’ve never been good enough at it to be a big fan, I guess.

**Craig:** Well, here’s your chance to get good. So, pinball is one of those things that actually they can simulate now brilliantly. So, you know, there’s an app and you can play lots of pinball games. But the cool part is that they’ve gone and licensed and recreated a whole bunch of real pinball games, including maybe the best pinball game ever made. Which was the Addams, Family, the pinball game–

**John:** I remember the Addams Family pinball. I have played that.

**Craig:** It’s great. And so it’s based on the movie from the ‘90s, which in and of itself was based on a television show, which itself was based on the cartoons. And it’s fantastic. I play the Addams Family pinball game every day. It’s so much fun.

By the way, John, do you know what?

**John:** Tell me what.

**Craig:** The Addams Family would actually be a pretty great movie for us to do a deep dive into. It’s so well done.

**John:** It’s so, so, so good. I just love The Addams Family. I love the second Addams Family almost more. The whole camp thing is fantastic.

**Craig:** Amazing. Amazing. In fact, maybe we should do the second Addams Family movie.

**John:** Maybe we should do Addams Family Vacation. And we sort of know Paul Rudnick on Twitter.

**Craig:** I know. You know what? We should get Paul Rudnick to come on the show and talk about it. Oh my god, is he brilliant.

**John:** He’s really good.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Circling back to the pinball game. I will say that one of the things I do love about real pinball games is they’re hot. The lights are actually hot. They have a warmth to them that I find just delightful. They smell a certain way. They have a heat. That is a good thing about real pinball machines.

So, I’m sure they cannot duplicate this quite as well digitally, but still.

**Craig:** They can’t. There’s actually a very interesting – so they’ve had pinball simulators for years and years and years. But the Addams Family only recently, because the rights situation was a nightmare. The game – they had to get clearances from the Addams’ estate. They had to get clearances from Paramount, which made the movie. They had to get clearances from Raul Julia’s estate and from Anjelica Huston. And from – just literally everybody whose voice was in it.

Then they had to go get clearances for the music that was in it. And they wanted to do everything correctly, you know. And they did. Finally they did. So now you can play it.

**John:** Fantastic.

All right, so I will not get to see you at the next Scriptnotes, because you are doing a live show. So you are doing a live show this coming Monday. This episode is out on a Tuesday. On this next Monday, you are recording a live show in Hollywood at the ArcLight. I’m so incredibly jealous for you to hang out with Dana Fox, and Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** A guy named Rian. Well, we have Rob McElhenney who is good.

**John:** Oh yeah. He’s good.

**Craig:** And then we have Rian Johnson who is whatever.

**John:** Just whatever. Delightful.

**Craig:** They can’t all be winners.

**John:** He’s a talented photographer.

**Craig:** [laughs] He’s a good photographer. So, those of you who are still looking for tickets, we have a few left. So, this is – I think it’s a 400-seat auditorium and we’re getting pretty close to 400 at this point. So you better rush.

If you go to HollywoodHeart.org/upcoming, then you can buy tickets. The event is May 1 at 7:30pm in Hollywood at the ArcLight. This is all for charity. Hollywood Heart is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins is very involved in. Oscar-nominated John Gatins. And the price of the ticket is $35. And we apologize if that seems a little steep, but again it goes entirely to Hollywood Heart.

Once again, I make nothing.

**John:** Yep. I don’t even make anything on this one.

**Craig:** Even you. [laughs]

**John:** Even I make nothing on this.

**Craig:** God, you’re so rich.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. So, as always, we are produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Big thanks to both these guys because we recorded late this week and they killed themselves to get this out. So, thank you guys.

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 longer questions. But for short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We’re on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes.

Craig, I think the word iTunes is going to go away. I think we’re going to stop saying iTunes.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because I think they’re actually going to get rid of iTunes as a concept completely. My prediction is WWC, they’ll say like Goodbye iTunes. Because they actually got rid of iTunes Podcast and now it says Apple Podcasts. I think they’re just going to call it, I don’t know, Apple–

**Craig:** What are they going to call it?

**John:** Something else.

**Craig:** Whoa. Weird.

**John:** Whoa. But if you’re on iTunes, or whatever they call it next, just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Craig, thank you for a fun show. Have a great show on Monday. I will look forward to good reports.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best.

**John:** Cool. Thanks.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Damon Lindelof](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0511541/)
* [The Leftovers: Final Season Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9w0sz5y83k)
* Jessica Abel on [Idea Debt](http://jessicaabel.com/2016/01/27/idea-debt/)
* [How I Got Out of Idea Debt](https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031) by John Sexton
* [Occupied](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWC_DZj0HE)
* [City Girl](https://thehairpin.com/sarah-ramos-explains-how-she-gave-life-to-city-girl-the-rom-com-she-wrote-at-12-years-old-addd405b56b0)
* John Hodgman’s [Only Child](http://www.maximumfun.org/dead-pilots-society/episode-2-only-child-written-john-hodgman)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 295 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program Malcolm Spellman returns to help us answer a bunch of listener questions, including the most important one of all – what’s Malcolm up to.

**Craig:** Oh, he’s not going to know the answer to that. I’ll fill that in for him.

**John:** All right. So, I sound a little bit strange because I just flew from Rome to London. I made it here, but my microphone did not. My bag got lost, and so I’m on a pair of really crappy white iPhone headphones. So, Craig and Malcolm are going to take most of this episode by themselves. So, through the magic of editing I’m going to be here for the intro and for the outro, but it’s going to be the Craig and Malcolm show. So I am as excited as the listeners are to hear what Malcolm is going to say.

**Craig:** Everybody hang on to your seat. And I guess we should probably mention that when Malcolm is on the show, the chance of us not having the explicit rating is zero. So, folks who are listening in the car with children be aware that we will be using adult language in today’s program.

**John:** I think it’s a very strong bet. Some follow up. First off, the tickets for the live show on May 1 are now up for sale. You can go and find them at HollywoodHeart.org. That is Monday May 1, 7:30pm to 9:15pm, at ArcLight Hollywood. That’s Rian Johnson. That’s Dana Fox. That’s Rob McElhenney. It’s going to be amazing, so you guys should go see that. I will look forward to hearing it myself.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s for charity. Hollywood Heart is a terrific charity that our friend, John Gatins, is involved in. And of all the live shows that we’ve done, this may be the most impressive guest lineup we’ve ever had. First of all, just Rian alone. Star Wars, people. Star Wars. But with Dana, and then you throw on Rob McElhenney, creator and star of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which now is like the longest running sitcom in television history.

**John:** That’s remarkable.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. It’s amazing. So that’s our lineup. And it’s like the tickets are not that expensive. And it goes to charity. So, if there’s even any left, jump on them.

**John:** Sounds good. Next up, one of our very first episodes of How Would This be a Movie was the Hatton Garden Job. So if you don’t remember that, that was a bunch of British bank robbers who carried off a very complicated bank robbery where they broke in through walls. It was a bunch of old geezers. And we figured, you know what, someone is going to try to make this into a movie. The first movie version of Hatton Garden Job is actually coming out. April 14. The writing credits are Ray Bogdanovich, Dean Lines, and Ronnie Thompson, who also directed. Reviews seem pretty good so far, so hey, there’s already one of these movies out there in the world. So, I think it’s our first movie that we successfully made out of the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Craig:** Shouldn’t we have some sort of thing that we could put on a movie like the way the ASPCA puts stuff on No Animals Were Harmed. Like this gets the Scriptnotes Seal of Prediction, or something?

**John:** Well, I think it needed a little special laurel around it that says Scriptnotes. Yeah.

**Craig:** Win. [laughs]

**John:** As inspired by Scriptnotes. As discussed on Scriptnotes. Win, yes.

**Craig:** Win.

**John:** Win. That was a reference to last week’s episode where we talked about the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition. We had another listener write in. This was Guy Poland who wrote in. He says, “I, too, was a winner in said contest. A three-time winner, thank you very much. I won gold for comedy, a silver for a thriller, and I was a finalist for comedy for Meeting Mr. Gimbel.” So, let’s pause here to say why did you enter this competition three times? You won three times, I guess. But wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, after the first time when your life didn’t change, maybe save the entry fee.

**John:** Well, I guess he submitted for all three of these things simultaneously. So, he put three different scripts in in three different categories.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But it’s like $30 a pop, I’m sure. So he writes that “I, too, emailed to ask about prize money. I was not afforded a response and didn’t push the issue because I knew it was all bullshit. They did, however, send me three nice winner certificates in a PDF format that I can print out, frame, and hang on my wall. Note that they misspelled Comedy on the certificates and had to redo it. No prize money or coupons whatsoever. Certainly not $200.”

**Craig:** Hold on a second. This poor guy didn’t even get the coupon to the non-existent software. And I love this. You enter a contest and the contest said on their webpage, Malcolm, they say, “$20,000 in prize money and stuff, or whatever, in prizes.” Nobody gets anything. And I love that when you win the contest you have to email them, “So, can I get the prize?” And they’re like, “Um, no.” And then you go, “OK.” And then they send you PDFs of a certificate that the best part is they couldn’t even mail them a real certificate. They sent him PDFs that he had to print out himself. My god.

**John:** No, he writes there was another option. So they also gave him the option of receiving a winner’s trophy, “Which I would have the pleasure of paying for at the modest price of $150, plus $20 shipping.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Now, the point of a screenplay competition is, of course, to get interest from the industry. It says he got zero read requests as a result of winning these three things. Let’s see, “Oh, a bonus fuck up for you. At some point the competition staff mixed up some of the winning scripts with the wrong writer. Put another way, the scripts were posted on their site, but the corresponding writer was wrong. They finally got that straightened out.”

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s good. They’re on top of it then over there at the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition which appears, from what we’ve heard, to be the worst screenplay competition in the world. And that’s saying something because pretty much all of them are horrendous. This one, though, wow.

**Malcolm Spellman:** It’s the Russian version.

**Craig:** It’s the Russian Screenplay Competition. They’re just mining your data. Amazing. Amazing.

**John:** So, we get to hear Malcolm Spellman in the background, but Malcolm I want you to lean a little closer to the microphone and tell us what you’re up to, because I have not seen you in nearly a year. But listeners haven’t seen you even kind of for longer than that. Last we talked with you, you were on Empire. I honestly don’t know what you’re doing at this moment. Fill us in a little bit on what’s happening in the Malcolm Spellman universe.

**Malcolm:** It’s a big point of transition for me right now. So, I did three years on Empire, which was awesome. And learned a ton. Probably learned more in that three years than the entire 13 years leading up to that I was in screenwriting. And I’m moving on now, but amicably. And I am enjoying Hollywood with some heat for the first time since I first broke in.

**Craig:** Since your fumbled heat.

**Malcolm:** Since my fumbled heat. And it’s very, very interesting to see the difference in temperature when I walk into the room. And it feels like I am now in a position where maybe some shit can happen. You know what I’m saying? We’ll see.

**Craig:** All right. That’s a pretty good position.

**John:** And what is the shit that’s happening? Are you doing TV shows? Are you doing movies? Where’s your focus right now?

**Malcolm:** I’m doing a pilot with a buddy of mine at Hulu. And I have a couple of things. I’m overseeing a couple of writers on a pilot also. And I have a feature I’m writing for Warner Bros. And I think there’s a couple things pending. I’ve got a lot going on, John. It’s popping.

**John:** That’s fantastic. And you’ve also promised that if Craig kills me for some reason, you’ll investigate my death and avenge me if it turns out to be Craig. I have your word on air right now?

**Malcolm:** I’m not that good investigating, but I’m definitely good at avenging, so it gets to that part.

**Craig:** If you believe him, because maybe I already hired him and he’s just doing his job right now making you think that.

**John:** Man, Craig Mazin, you’re really, really good.

**Malcolm:** He’s Russian.

**John:** So, I’m going to leave you guys to talk through, we have a bunch of questions here that listeners have written in with.

**Craig:** Did you just call me racist?

**Malcolm:** No, I called you Russian. But that’s the same thing. That’s absolutely the same thing.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Malcolm:** In Russia, you spell Racist – Russian.

**Craig:** It’s the same word. It’s like the Eskimos have 50 words for snow and Russians have one word for racist. Russian. All right. Sorry about that, John. We’re having fun over here.

**John:** Which is really good. So, I’m going to bow out for the bulk of this episode, but I left you a bunch of really nicely organized questions.

**Craig:** You did. You did.

**John:** In the outline. So I look forward to hearing your answers to a bunch of these questions. You know what? I got to stay for at least this first one because it has some good vocabulary. So I’m going to stay for this first one, and then I’m going to bail, then let you answer some more questions. This was a question we got from Blake. He says, “Why do so many shows, no matter the network or targeted age group, seem to act as if no sexual acts exist that don’t involve full penetration and the possibility of pregnancy. Basically, where are the hand jobs and blow jobs? There are a number of shows that talk about sex in a fairly frank manner, but they’re almost all judgmental and fearful. And most willingly ignore or underplay sexual activities that are less likely to involve a pregnancy.”

So, Malcolm, you come from a show that was a big Fox show. Were there blow jobs and hand jobs on Empire? I didn’t see. So tell me.

**Malcolm:** They fuck. I got to think, and there’s a good amount of gay sex.

**Craig:** But the specific question here is why is it only just fucking. Why in television shows and movies do people not just sit there and watch somebody getting a hand job?

**Malcolm:** Man, I got to imagine it’s because no one cares about – I mean, grown-ups don’t care about hand jobs.

**Craig:** I’m so with you on this.

**Malcolm:** Grown-ups don’t – I mean, you’re not making TV for kids – listen, if there’s a hand job or a blow job and it’s not for kids, and if it’s a grown-up, they want fucking or further.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just feels like kind of funny to me. Watching somebody get a hand job is funny because it’s so lazy.

**John:** So, a couple of perspectives I have on this. So, first off, in the Showtime pilot for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she gives the guy a hand job in the pilot. And it becomes a very funny plot point. And I agree it is sort of funny, because she’s trying to interrogate him while giving him a hand job. And they actually play the fact that her hand is on his dick.

My theory is that it’s very hard to hide a penis. Like, if you’re showing sex, then you’re not sort of seeing the penis. But if you’re showing a blow job or a hand job, it’s sort of hard to hide it. And that may be part of the reason why we’re not seeing them so often in television.

**Craig:** Well, but you can fake it. You could do it in such a way where you weren’t seeing a dick, but the thing is it is funny. It’s just so – and I think that just a natural thing – there’s like a weird narrative short hand. If I see somebody getting a blow job in a movie, I don’t like them. I feel like they’ve done something wrong. And if I see somebody getting a hand job in a movie, I feel like they’re lazy and inattentive.

I don’t know why. Because in real life, of course, blow jobs and hand jobs mean neither of those things. Most of the time I would hope that they’re just mutually happy. I don’t know. Maybe it’s boring to watch?

**Malcolm:** There was a blow job on Billions last weekend.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And how did it come off, so to speak?

**Malcolm:** Someone was fucking up.

**Craig:** They were fucking up.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, the dude was not supposed to be getting a blow job.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Malcolm:** And he was getting one.

**Craig:** See? There’s like this thing where if you’re getting a blow job in a movie or a television show, you’re a villain. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** [laughs] Sucking dick is for bad guys.

**Craig:** No, sucking dick is for good guys. Getting your dick sucked is for bad guys.

**Malcolm:** So, wait, if it’s two dudes–

**Craig:** If it’s two dudes, then the guy that’s blowing the other guy is like a good guy who is probably getting taken advantage of or there’s a misunderstanding.

**Malcolm:** You’re right.

**Craig:** Something is going wrong. He’s being paid–

**Malcolm:** That’s so fucking right.

**Craig:** There’s so many things, right? And the guy getting one is just a bad dude.

**Malcolm:** It’s true. You just cracked the code. Even as you’re saying it as a joke, it’s fucking true.

**Craig:** It’s just true. John, do you agree that I’ve cracked the code?

**John:** I think you may have cracked a trope. I don’t think it’s anything we should aspire to. I think the underlying question here that Blake is writing is in real life people are having sex in ways that are just not depicted on screen. There was an HBO show called Tell Me You Love Me which was sort of notorious for like they had a lot of sex in it and they actually showed penises. And so like Adam Scott was in that show and so he had this fake penis that you saw a lot. And so he would be getting blow jobs and you would see his fake penis getting a blow job. And it was weird just because you’re not used to seeing that part of the body.

Even a show like Girls on HBO, there’s a lot of sex in there, and you see like a lot of anatomy, but you don’t see dicks, really. And it’s a strange thing even in that show where like they talk about everything, but you’re not seeing that specific part of the action.

**Craig:** You know, I think sometimes we forget that sex, like all human behavior, comes in varying degrees of interesting illustration. I mean, like a lot of people eat lunch by hunching over their desk and shoveling it into their mouth as fast as they can. It’s really weird.

**Malcolm:** That’s me.

**Craig:** Like Malcolm. But we don’t really show that in movies and TV, unless we’re trying to make a joke of it. Because even though it’s completely normal and expected, it’s just not – I don’t know, we just don’t like watching it so much.

**John:** That’s true. I don’t know why. All right. I’m going to jump out for a bit and let you guys answer questions about martial arts, about managers, about parentheticals in dialogue. So, those are all going to be great things. Then I’m going to circle back and come to you when it comes time for One Cool Things and our outros.

**Craig:** All right. So, now it’s just down to you and me. So let’s answer some questions here. We’re going to blow through as many of these that we can in the time that we have. I’m just going to tee them up and you’re going to answer them as best you can.

**Malcolm:** OK.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve already heard from Blake and we already discussed blow jobs and hand jobs. How could we possibly top that? We can’t. But, we do have something from Alan, South Carolina. And Alan wants to know, “When writing a spec feature or series that would rely heavily on specific types of martial arts, like Kung-Fu, Highlander, Badlands, etc., how can the writer convey this emphasis without assuming the mantle of the fight choreographer or bogging the story down in specific fight details that would likely be ignored anyway?”

**Malcolm:** It’s a dance. It’s definitely good to flavor a script, especially if you have expertise in it, because I know one of the things – like when I was first coming up as a writer, I used to love reading action scripts where someone had done enough research that like, oh, this dude knows his guns. Or this dude knows the physics of what’s happening to play out here. So, if you can quickly reference why – naming a specific martial art is important to the scene, meaning this, like this form of martial arts specialize in weapons, so this dude is going to be picking up every single thing in the room. Then you ain’t getting bogged down in it, but you understand that a different dynamic is at play and you’re getting a different set piece.

**Craig:** Yeah. That to me right there is the key. I don’t think I particularly care about where on the body you’re striking somebody unless it’s sort of a signature move or something like that. And I think it’s probably boring to sit and read, you know, “Reverse kick, then rib punch, then…he ducks the leg and then turns around.” It’s really about the character moments, right? Every fight has a choice or two in it. Something that means something dramatically. Getting up off the ground when you think you don’t have enough left in you, but you do anyway. Doing the thing you were taught to do that you weren’t able to do before but now you can.

Whatever it is, those choice points are what matters. Technically speaking, if there’s something like whatever the heart of the particular martial art is, show it. Yeah, makes total sense. You know, if you’re like sword master, do sword stuff. So, early Steven Seagal, like before Steven Seagal went crazy.

**Malcolm:** Before he got fatter.

**Craig:** Right. But in the early days, the three word days, where it was like Above the Law, and Out for Justice, and whatever there was. You know, the typical Steven Seagal scene is he would walk into a pool hall full of thugs, and he would beat them all up using the things that were there, like his moves were you can’t punch me because I slap your hands out in the air and then I pick up a pool ball and I hit you with it. And then I pick up a cue stick and I hit you with it. And I use the environment. Those are the important things.

**Malcolm:** I think like also if you’re facing off with a martial art form you’ve never seen before, then that’s going to evoke a feeling in your lead character. You know what I’m saying? Like oh my god, this dude is using the crane technique. I have no counter for this. And it’s not just about no counter. It’s how it makes me feel. All of a sudden my confidence is bleeding out.

**Craig:** Character. As always. So, I would say, Alan, the key there is to think about character. If it’s something that is a specific fiddly thing that a fight choreographer can change without impacting the character or the scene, then perhaps it’s not the most important thing to put in the pages. All right, next up, Sasha writes, “Up until–,” oh, you’re going to like this one.

**Malcolm:** Oh shit.

**Craig:** You ready? “Up until about three hours ago,” now I don’t know exactly when Sasha was writing this, but let’s just say recently, “up until about three hours ago I was working with an extremely unprofessional and volatile manager. I never signed a contract as I always had a bad feeling about him. Today, after he threatened to assault my writing partner…”

**Malcolm:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “…I sent him a very calm email explaining why we should no longer work together. Duh, the dude repeatedly used the phrase, ‘I’m going to punch him in the fucking face.’” That’s the manager to her writing partner. “The manager is now firing off a series of missives demanding commissions on projects that have yet to sell. He wrote, ‘As is customary in our business,’” we’re going to be challenging that in a second, “’if a job or a sale on one of these projects happens in the next 12 months, I am entitled to a commission on it for the life of the deal.’”

Sasha continues, “I’m guessing he’s just peacocking, trying to scare me into submission, but is there any validity to his claim?”

**Malcolm:** No, but also how the fuck do people meet these kind of people? Like, I think more importantly fuck that manager and he can’t do shit to you. And don’t ever – when you do sell something, you will have a lawyer and then he’ll deal with that manager. So that’s the answer to that.

But I do think like, you know, on the board or whatever, I’ve been hearing more and more stories about writers of various levels, some who are pretty high level, dealing with slightly abusive or reps that take you on. And I think for writers who are coming up, you have to have a sense of destiny or you’re going to – there’s no way – I know a ton of fucking up-and-coming writers who haven’t made it yet who would not be dealing with a manager like that for one fucking minute.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And that’s because they believe they’re going to make it, and therefore it allows them to actually behave in a way that will get them to a proper manager more quickly, because they ain’t wasting a minute with a motherfucker like that. You can’t.

**Craig:** It’s pretty crazy, right? Well, let’s talk about the legal stuff for a second. Malcolm is right. What he said here is complete bullshit. In fact, I got to tell you, Sasha, that if your manager has done anything to violate the Talent Agency Act, which would include for instance procuring you work or attempting to procure you work, then not only do you not have to pay him for the rest of your life now that he’s fired, on anything you make, but you could file a grievance against him with the Labor Commissioner of the State of California and actually get him to cough up money that you have paid to him. Which I’m sure he wouldn’t want.

I strongly recommend that if you do not have an attorney now, you get one. And that you have the attorney state to that person in no uncertain terms, “Fuck off. You’re getting nothing.” The rules on how managers work in the State of California, I believe a lawyer once told me that it’s called On the Wheel, Off the Wheel. So, the deal is that unlike agents who earn 10% for the deals they negotiate, and who collect that money even if you fire them the day after they close the deal, they collect the 10%. Because their 10% is based on what they negotiated.

But managers really are service employees. You are paying them while they service you as a manager. They’re on the wheel. When you fire them, they’re off the wheel. They are not, even though they collect commissions, they are not entitled to the money that keeps coming out. The idea is that the commission is simply paying them for the work they’re doing while they are your manager, and not one minute after.

**Malcolm:** But also, you know what, that dude is threatening to hit people. Call the fucking police. You know, if you got time, make him pay. You know what I’m saying? He shouldn’t be doing that.

**Craig:** All right. So then let’s talk about this other issue, which is how writers deal with abusive people. And first of all, why? Why are there so many abusive people? Look, I think every business has abusive people. Every business has bullies. But, in Hollywood I think there are certain kinds of predators who understand that artists – and I’m talking about writers, and directors, and actors – come out here because they’re looking for validation. They’re looking for love. And they take advantage of it. And I think it’s in their interest to make us feel afraid. And most importantly, it’s in their interest to make us feel like we need them. And so, you know, it’s an abusive spouse situation when it gets like that.

You actually don’t need any single agent or manager or lawyer. You need an agent. You need a lawyer. Maybe you feel you need a manager. But there is no specific individual one that is going to change your life or make a huge difference. Your work will. Your work got you this manager, your work will get you another manager. If you’re listening, and anybody in your professional life is treating you in any kind of abusive way, get out. And they get nothing. Ooh, that felt good.

All right, let’s move on to Seth. Seth says, “In addition to being a writer, I’m also a voiceover director, and I find that when I write dialogue I lean heavily on the use of ellipses and other punctuation to create specific rhythms and flow. Do you think that’s micromanaging the actor’s potential performance? How much use of punctuation to control the flow of dialogue is reasonable?”

**Malcolm:** I am just starting to wean myself off that. So, he probably is micromanaging, but it’s also something you learn over time. Like I use less parenthesis than I used to. I like some ellipses though. I do. I do. It really is an effective tool.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**Malcolm:** You know what I’m saying? So, yeah, he’s probably micromanaging a little bit and you will as you write become more and more confident in the fact that your readers, especially if you’re fucking with pros, are going to know – they’ve done this a million times. They know how it shown be flown. You know what I’m saying? And you start to wean yourself off of it. I’m almost done with exclamation points. Not quite. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Yeah, I use those pretty rarely.

**Malcolm:** You know who killed me on that?

**Craig:** McQuarrie?

**Malcolm:** Yes. Worst thing ever.

**Craig:** He’s the devil.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** McQuarrie is too obsessive about exclamation points. But you get a couple per episode, you know.

**Malcolm:** His quote was every time you use an exclamation point it’s an admission of failure. [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s a little strong. Look, I used ellipses all the time. I use dashes all the time. When I do, I like to take a moment to stop and go, do I need it? It’s always more elegant without. Of course. But I think that Seth’s focus on micromanaging the actor’s potential performance is off the mark. Actors don’t give a damn about any of that stuff. They remember the lines and then they start acting. It’s not like they sit there and go, “Oh god, there’s a dash-dash, I got to respect that.” They don’t. They perform it how they perform it. And the director works with them and it becomes – it’s entirely about the reader. It’s about the reader getting the scene and feeling the pace and feeling a trail-off.

See, the dot-dot-dot at the end of a line isn’t anything an actor is supposed to perform anyway. It’s the way almost every sentence ends. I just did it.

**Malcolm:** You did.

**Craig:** Right? Very few sentences end with a period.

**Malcolm:** Mine do. I make people uncomfortable with that shit.

**Craig:** OK. Maybe you do. But most people kind of – there’s an invitation to continue the conversation. So I think people worry too much about this stuff. I wouldn’t be too concerned about it. I do think that if a reader is saying I got distracted or thrown off by the mass of punctuation and other stuff, take that seriously because that’s who you’re trying to put a movie inside of. You know? Inception.

Jeff in San Jose, California writes, “In Episode 134…” You remember, Malc, right? Episode 134?

**Malcolm:** Yeah, I listen to all you guys’ podcasts.

**Craig:** “Craig takes umbrage with Oscar winners who neglect to thank their writers in their acceptance speeches.” Fact. “To paraphrase Craig, without the screenplay nobody working on a movie can even begin to do their job and all Oscar winners should thank their writer first.” It’s true. “My question is do you have any sense of how many writers who win the Oscar thank the other writers, if any, who worked on the screenplay but did not receive credit?”

Damn, Jeff has got a pretty good – this is a nice shot here.

**Malcolm:** It’s getting weird.

**Craig:** But it’s a good shot. I like it. “I don’t recall any Oscar-winning writer actually saying during the ceremony, ‘I’d like to thank Jane Doe for her uncredited writing on my screenplay.’ Then again, perhaps those uncredited writers are among the names rattled off during the winner’s speech.”

All right. So, Jeff is calling us out on the mat a little bit here. You got an opinion on this?

**Malcolm:** Well, for starters, Jeff’s got to understand 90% of writers think they wrote everything, so they wouldn’t be – in their mind whatever is on there is all them. You know what I’m saying? So, they can’t go through that. On top of that, I would imagine it could get weird legally if you start naming people, like if people ain’t getting credit on a movie, you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** I don’t think there’s a legal problem. If you were trying to erase somebody’s name, maybe then, you know, there would be an issue.

**Malcolm:** OK, well maybe not legal for a lawsuit, but I don’t think that the graciousness of doing that actually would have the effect you think it would be.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Malcolm:** Because you’re calling in ghosts and shit who didn’t make it past the threshold of an arbitration that had nothing to do with any of you guys. And you’re giving them credit. You know, that’s weird. You know what I’m saying? But mostly all writers think they wrote everything, so why would they do it?

**Craig:** I think that’s a huge part of it. I mean, if you have credit on a movie and somebody else did not receive it, then they couldn’t have done that much. And, no, you’re probably thinking to yourself this Oscar belongs to me. I’m the one that got the credit. I did all the work. And maybe that’s true. The other thing is that I’m not sure other writers would necessarily want that. If I worked on a movie for a couple of weeks quietly like that. I suppose if somebody thanked me I would feel really nice about it, but the studios would hate it.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** The press people would hate it. The people representing the movie would hate it, because all you’re doing now is calling into question the illusion. And it is an illusion that a person did everything. Right? So when directors get up there to – you know, a film by blah-blah-blah, what a joke, right? But that’s movie magic that they’re using to sell stuff. So I think the studios would hate it. That’s probably why I’m guessing.

**Malcolm:** But mostly it’s because the writer who is up there believes he did it all.

**Craig:** I think that’s probably the lion’s share of it, too. Greg writes, “What if the first three pages don’t grab you? Are there movies that went on to be successful that due to complexity or weirdness or something else didn’t grab the agent/director/studio/or producer in a compelling way in the first three pages if there was something still that made it worth reading just a little further?”

**Malcolm:** Yeah. This whole culture that’s happening online and like sometimes a professional writer or a big time producer or director will tell you you got to grab them the first three pages. And that is a good thing to do. And they’re not thinking that they just made that statement that they’re going off to work on a script that deliberately meanders for 20 or 30 pages and then takes off. They don’t even realize that off that statement, a bunch of novice screenwriters are thinking you always have to do this.

And you absolutely don’t. Yes, it’s good to grab someone in the first three pages, but the other thing is usually within three pages you know if a motherfucker can write. That’s really what’s happening.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** And so that’s the next threshold. And if you can promise that you’re going to go somewhere, then you don’t have to grab someone because you’re promising. You know what I’m saying? You’re saying, hey, in these first three pages it’s very clear that this writer has a handle on what’s going on and is leading me somewhere and wants me to be kind of a little bit mundane or whatever. You know?

**Craig:** I could not agree more. In fact, I think the problem is what people think the word “grab” means. I think they think it means everything has to explode on page one, and then on page two the planet collides into another planet, and on page three you find out that your dad is really your mother. That’s just plot. I am not grabbed by that ever. I’m grabbed by that intangible thing.

I can read three pages where nobody says a word and nothing is happening and yet while I’m reading it I think I’m in the hands of somebody. They’re doing something. I’m fascinated by this. I want to keep – I’m grabbed.

So, that’s the problem. When they hear the first three pages got to grab you, they think, oh my god, let’s just get out the clowns juggling, the chainsaws, and people on fire and all. No. No, no. It means just write something that makes me want to keep reading. That’s it. And usually, at least for me, the thing that makes me want to keep reading is it’s good. I can’t define it any better than that.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s good. There are plenty of movies where, I mean, god, can you imagine sitting down and reading the first three pages of Unforgiven, which is one of the best screenplays ever written. And I’m pretty sure it starts with a guy just feeding pigs while his kids watch, and then he can’t get on a horse. And he’s old and he’s tired. And there’s a grave there. Right? Zzzz.

Except it’s written so beautifully. And you wouldn’t know from the first few pages what’s coming.

All right, let’s get to our next question. Heather from Agora Hills wonders, “If I have a specific scene from an old movie that I would like to play alongside the end credits, how do I write it? Do I put it in before Fade Out and before The End, or in between those two? The only examples I’ve been able to find simply state Roll or Over Credits, then whatever it is the writer wants to show. They didn’t write Fade Out or The End at all.”

This feels like a question we can just solve right here permanently. This feels like it has an answer.

**Malcolm:** Give it.

**Craig:** My answer is you get to the end of the movie, you want to do stuff over credits, you can say Fade Out if you want to Fade Out, or Cut to Black, and then you write Roll Credits, and then you describe whatever the hell you want. And then instead of saying the end just write End Credits. And you’re done.

**Malcolm:** Yes.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve answered that. Heather, that’s the answer. That’s literally the answer. Damon writes, “I’m currently working on a sci-fi spec and I’m getting into some complicated storytelling territory. It’s not a time travel movie, but I can compare it to that kind of created world with lots of moving parts, difficult to understand science, and multiple timelines. Some of these elements won’t show up in the film, but I need to understand them to make sure I have all of my bases covered in the final story. Do you have any suggestions or tools for keeping complicated details in order as you figure out how the story will play out?”

Malcolm, any suggestions for Damon?

**Malcolm:** I will say that in general being complicated and messy is probably my biggest weakness as a writer. And I advise people to bat that shit down and get it to where you can express it verbally very, very cleanly.

I saw a movie, I’m going to go ahead and name the filmmaker. There are films in which when you start doing world-building if your rules aren’t neat and tidy, you have to constantly keep resetting the rules and explaining a new rule. Right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And that can become exhausting.

**Craig:** It is. Well, it’s exhausting because you feel like all they’re doing is constantly moving the goal posts. Why should I believe anything you’re telling me when ten minutes later you’re going to say, oh, but only if blah-blah-blah?

**Malcolm:** Yep. And M. Night did it in that movie there’s a pool in it. You couldn’t see the people.

**Craig:** Lady in the Water.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. And it’s like, so, rules and world-building really need to be reduced to what is active and matters, because honestly one of the things I learned about sci-fi writing in general – you may know this already – but this was a revelation to me. In general, when you pick – like let’s say you’re writing something that’s set in the future or whatever, right, where there is some sci-fi dynamic. Usually there is one thing that is different about the world than that is kind of the main thing you’re exploring.

So, if you look at Minority Report, it is this is how crime is solved in the future. And yeah, they’ve got flying cars and shit, but that’s the main thing, and that’s what you keep coming back to. And when you’re just doing a world in general, which I’ve seen, I have a buddy who has a history, he does this a lot, right? And it’s not one thing you’re investigating. It just becomes a sprawling mass – it’s like a comic book.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a comic book or maybe it’s, you know, a very involved miniseries. But, yeah, I mean, if you look at Star Wars, other than the space ships and things, what’s the thing, the force. That’s the thing.

**Malcolm:** Inception you’re entering the brain. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Exactly. So, I would say tools-wise, Damon, I’m not sure what to recommend here. I know a lot of people like this program, Scrivener, because it apparently lets you organize all sorts of things and then tag them back and forth together and connect them to a screenplay. I’ve never used it. My main tool is a corkboard. Corkboard and index cards.

**Malcolm:** So unsexy.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like you get the work done by getting the work done. So, you write everything down, you put it up on the board. Things that are related, you connect them together. And what ends up happening over time is you just know it. You just know your world. You know what’s going on, especially because you’re inventing it. But the complicated things and the feedback, I know that Rian Johnson when he was writing Looper was really careful about that. And he had very carefully worked out diagrams so he understood. So anybody asked him a question, he has an answer for it. So, I think maybe the tool is your brain and the suggestion is work hard, which you’re going to have to because it does sound kind of complicated.

We’ll do one more. What do you say, one more?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll done one more.

**Malcolm:** One more.

**Craig:** Lucas, he’s going to give us our last one of the day. Lucas writes, “I just finished a revision on a screenplay and here’s the thing. The screenplay has no dialogue. It’s something like the first half hour of There Will Be Blood.” Love that movie.

**Malcolm:** All-timer.

**Craig:** All-timer. “Do you have any advice or experience on restricting yourselves this way? Do you have any specific things you do when trying to tell the story visually? Any general advice on telling a story like this?”

There’s a couple of things, I mean, WALL-E comes to mind, that very long extended no dialogue section. And our forefathers who started screenwriting, they didn’t have dialogue, right? They weren’t talkies. So they had to write almost everything like that and then just little cards of dialogue.

When you’re writing extended sequences with no dialogue, are there some tricks? Some tips?

**Malcolm:** Be efficient. You know what I’m saying? Because you’re asking a lot. And that will actually probably help you clarify whatever the purpose is in any given scene. And I think personally, I don’t know, this still feels like something that would drive some screenwriters crazy. I think it’s OK to cheat. I’m not someone who believes in never do anything that you can’t film or whatever, especially if you’re doing something like this. You might have to write a sentence that lets the audience know what they need to be expecting moving forward through this scene. You know what I’m saying? Like in this scene Tom is about to confront his inner most fear. Because you ain’t got no dialogue. You know what I’m saying?

In this scene Tom is going to – like you can cheat like that, I think. Especially in a situation like this.

**Craig:** I agree, but I’d do a little differently, and I don’t think it’s cheating at all, in that what I think is if there’s not going to be dialogue, but I want the audience to understand what the character is thinking, then I am OK with writing their dialogue in italics in action. So, they look at something and it’s like we’re reading their minds kind of. But we know it’s not going to be spoken. But I get it. I know that an actor can perform that face.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** And I know that that face is something the audience can perceive. So to me, that’s all right. That’s completely all right. The cheating that drives me the craziest is when people introduce characters and tell us about their life story when all I’m doing is looking at them sitting at a bar and nothing else, so that’s cheating. But this is different, right?

So, if you have a character, he turns the corner, and he sees a man holding a gun to his brother’s head. And so let’s say our character here is Charlie. Charlie stops, stares. And then I might put in parenthesis, (Please don’t, please). He can act that. Charlie can act that. So, I try and think a lot about that, because it can become very technical and it can get boring, I think, for people reading.

You know, when people read scripts, I think a lot of them just read the dialogue.

**Malcolm:** Damn right.

**Craig:** And so I perversely then spend so much time thinking about the not dialogue, because I want them to read it. So I try and make the not dialogue entertaining, and interesting, and fun, because if they’re not reading it, then they’re just getting the dialogue and they’re not seeing the movie.

You know, I think we’ll hold back a couple of these other questions for next time. I think we got a good show in.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they don’t all have to be two hours long.

**Malcolm:** Nah, they don’t, Craig.

**Craig:** No. They don’t.

**Malcolm:** It’s OK.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if you and I did this show together, let’s say we killed John.

**Malcolm:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Keep talking.

**Malcolm:** No, I understand exactly what you’re saying.

**Craig:** I think the show would be – it would run 45 minutes, right? That’s not the end of the world.

**Malcolm:** It would run hot, too, though.

**Craig:** It would run hot. See, that’s the thing. The 45 minutes would be fiery.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** Fiery. People would talk.

**Malcolm:** Right. There’d be occasional falling outs between us in the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, and when we say occasional we mean every single episode something would go wrong. Well, with that being our last question, I think we should probably go to One Cool Things.

All right, so let’s bring John back to wrap our show up now that we’ve answered those questions expertly. Mr. August?

**John:** Pleasure to be back. My One Cool Thing this week is Patrick Lenton’s story of the Dog in Skyrim. So, this is actually a Twitter thread he did a year ago, and someone put it back up in Twitter this last week. And I just remember how much I loved it. So, it’s this guy who’s playing Skyrim and he basically tells this long story of how in Skyrim he’s sort of adopted this dog. And the dog was just an incredible drain on his life, because he was always so worried about the dog dying that he had to sort of do all these things to try to keep the dog alive. And to like build a house where he could have a family and have an orphan who could adopt the dog so the dog wouldn’t be killed.

And it just reminded me so much of playing Skyrim, but also it felt very much like how life actually is, is that you end up becoming attached to this one thing and then you sort of focus all of your energy on saving this one thing, even if it’s not your real goal. So you end up not fighting dragons. You end up sort of worrying about mining ore and saving this virtual dog who you don’t really care about, but you just don’t want to see die. So, that was a great recap of the experience of trying to save a dog in Skyrim but also sort of go through your life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I play Skyrim, of course, and I play every Bethesda game. Fallout 4. And one of the first things I do when I play those games is I just make a choice. No companions. Don’t want them. Don’t want them near me. Don’t want to care about them. Don’t want to bring them with me. I got that dog in Fallout and I immediately sent it home. Just stay at home.

**Malcolm:** That’s fucked.

**Craig:** Everybody that was like can I walk around with you, no you can’t. Yes you can until I get the quest that that unlocks, and then I’m sending you home. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** That is awful.

**John:** So, I’m playing Skyrim right now, so I’m playing the up-res version of it and really enjoying it. So, I do have like one companion I go through and I did kill my first companion and I felt just horrible about it. This guy who I am playing with now seems really sturdy, but I’m not going to be upset if he dies. But I’m definitely not adopting any orphans. I don’t care about my little house and breeze home. I’m trying not to play that. I’m actually just playing the quest.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. I can’t remember, I know in Fallout 4 you can fall in love and sleep with your companions, but I don’t think you can do that in Skyrim.

**John:** You sort of can. There are companions that you can marry and companions you can’t marry, but I married the first time and I completely lost interest in the game once I got married.

**Craig:** Just like life.

**Malcolm:** Just like life.

**Craig:** Just drains the color out of everything, doesn’t it? It’s amazing.

**John:** [laughs] Why are there no blow jobs in Skyrim? That’s the real question.

**Craig:** Why are there no blow jobs? I almost had the first gay sex of my life in Fallout 4. Almost. I came close.

**Malcolm:** And you ended up having it in real life. You were like, fuck it, didn’t happen in Fallout 4, so I decided to in real life.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was like, exactly, like that guy turned me down, so I got to get Grindr. No, I came close. I came close. But what can I say? I got to be me. I ended up sleeping with the newspaper editor lady. I don’t know. She had a way about her. But I got close. I got close, John. I’m getting there.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Give me time. All right, my One Cool Thing is a super short One Cool Thing, but it’s also videogame based. Every year San Diego Studios puts out MLB The Show for the Sony PlayStation platform. And this year they are up to MLB The Show 17. MLB The Show series is fascinating because of the weird way that licensing worked for a long time with Major League Baseball. They had given their exclusive rights to I think Electronic Arts and the only way that you could get the rights to baseball player’s names and likenesses is if you made a game for your specific platform, but you couldn’t cross platform games.

So, the Electronic Arts game was not very good, but MLB The Show is spectacular and it’s just getting better and better. And the reason that it’s my One Cool Thing this year is because this version of the game does this – there was something that was making me crazy about this game for so long, but I understood it was hard. Baseballs have stitches on them. That’s why you can throw curveballs and sliders. You can make them do things. But similarly when you hit a baseball really hard, it will not travel in a straight line. It will curve. It will bend. Sometimes it almost seems like it takes off in the air mid-air because of top spin and air pressure. All this stuff.

And, of course, in videogames it’s hard to do. Well, this year they nailed it. It just looks so good. When you hit a baseball coming off the bat it just bends and it drops and it hangs. It does all the things that baseballs do. So, I love that. Love this game. If you’re a baseball fan, like I am, and the season has begun, MLB The Show 17 for Sony PlayStation 4. Highly recommend.

Malcolm, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Malcolm:** I do. I thought of it. My One Cool Thing is Fantastic Negrito is opening up–

**John:** I knew it.

**Malcolm:** He’s opening up for an artist named Sturgill Simpson. And it’s a big deal to us. We wanted to get on tour with him for a while. When you bring up other musicians, it’s very hard to find people who, for Negrito anyway, are like, oh yeah, I’ve been watching that guy. You know what I’m saying? I’m into his shit. And what Sturgill represents, and the fact that Negrito already knew about him, and that we tried to get on his tour before, it’s a big deal for us because it represents something. Like it’s not about this is an established artist so much as this feels like a connection in the trajectory of this dude’s career that is meaningful. Like I said, it represents something. So, that’s a cool thing. He’s opening up for Sturgill all over the country.

**Craig:** Well, pretty much everything this guy is doing is working these days. So, I have to assume that’s going to work, too.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Jeff Bayson. 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 Craig and Malcolm tackled today. For short questions, though, I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Malcom is @malcolmspellman.

**Malcolm:** Yep.

**John:** We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there leave us a comment or a review. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. You can listen to them through the apps you can find on your applicable app store.

So, Malcolm, thank you so much for being on the show this week. You were fantastic as always.

**Malcolm:** Thank you for having me this week.

**John:** And Craig and I will be back next week. Hopefully my microphone will be back and I can join for an entire episode. But until then, have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Thanks guys. Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Live Show Tickets](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/)
* [The Hatton Garden Job](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5351458/)
* [Patrick Lenton’s Dog Story](https://twitter.com/patricklenton/status/717163582115307521)
* [MLB The Show 17](http://theshow.com/)
* [Fantastic Negrito](http://www.fantasticnegrito.com/)
* [Malcolm Spellman](https://twitter.com/MalcolmSpellman) on Twitter
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jeff Bayson ([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_295.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 292 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program, we’ll be answering listener questions about credits and casting, pilots, and professional experience. But first, Craig, we have some follow up.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Let’s follow up.

**John:** So the biggest announcement in last week’s episode was about the live show and we have news about the live show.

**Craig:** Yeah. So maybe people were wondering, hey, when will the tickets go on sale so that I could see Craig talk to Rian Johnson. And the answer is not yet because we have been postponed, not indefinitely. The folks that are running the charity asked for a little more time because they’re trying to find the right venue. So, I think probably instead of at the end of this month, which is what we were talking about, we’re looking more towards the end of next month. So, calm down, take a deep breath. We promise we will give you plenty of lead time to purchase tickets once we know where it will be.

**John:** Because we do have people who like fly in from across the country to do this. So I hope no one actually bought the tickets for that time, but if you did buy tickets to come at the end of March, maybe come anyway. I mean, if you look around Los Angeles carefully enough you’re likely to find Rian Johnson somewhere. He’s got to be here somewhere, right?

**Craig:** Well, or people that look like Rian Johnson, and there are so many.

**John:** That’s really true.

**Craig:** There are so many.

**John:** A baby-faced genius is what you’re looking for. That’s Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Baby-faced blond genius with circular glasses. Basically, you remember Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch?

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Of course.

**Craig:** Cousin Oliver, age him up, stick the glasses on. You got it.

**John:** Yeah. Rian Johnson ruined The Brady Bunch but he saved cinema. So, it balances out.

**Craig:** You know, to defend Oliver, The Brady Bunch ruined The Brady Bunch. And I say that as a Brady Bunch fan and aficionado. But Oliver didn’t make it worse.

**John:** I apologize to Cousin Oliver, because of course he did not ruin it. It was just a late season addition. It was the Pucci of the show.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And you can’t really blame Pucci. It was just a bad addition.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pucci died on his way home to his own – I also have to apologize. Because last week during our Three Page Challenge I made an error, a grammatical error, which as you know hurts me so. But important to correct these things. You know, because we live in a time when our leaders make it clear that when you mess up, you should fess up, right?

**John:** Yep. Completely.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s obviously what’s going on. So, a gentlemen named Richard Komen called me out on Twitter and he was correct when he said that I was wrong to say that nervously cadenced should take a hyphen. This was in Carne, I believe, was the Three Page Challenge that we were reading last week. And he said, no, it shouldn’t take a hyphen. It’s an adverb modifying a noun. That’s that. And I checked. So I checked, because I was like, hmm, that does sound compellingly true.

And here’s what I found. The Chicago Manual of Style, which is a pretty good reference, says you should only hyphenate combinations like that if the adverb doesn’t end in LY. Sorry, it’s adverb/adjective, so for instance much-needed takes a hyphen, but nervously cadenced does not. So, in the adverb/adjective combo, if the adverb doesn’t end in LY, you stick a hyphen in there. Otherwise, you don’t. I was wrong. I apologize Thank you, Richard. You were right.

**John:** I want to just open this up a little bit. So Chicago Manual of Style is a good reference source for writers looking for how do I actually get this thing on paper and make it make sense. But Chicago Manual of Style is not the end all/be all of everything. And so I believe you will find other references or other authors, other works that do put the hyphen in there. So I don’t think you were necessarily wrong to suggest that a hyphen could be put there. It’s all style and usage. Again, it’s like there are no hard fast rules here.

So the Chicago Manual of Style does not call for a hyphen there. I would not be upset to have a hyphen there. I can see sort of why your instinct was to put the hyphen there. I don’t know. And the difference between an LY adverb and an adverb that doesn’t have the LY is really a very arbitrary distinction. Would you agree?

**Craig:** Well, so much of grammar is arbitrary. And I know that ultimately clarity prevails. But in this case, well, at the very least I was wrong to say that it was wrong to not have it. So, yeah, sure, if you say, well, it’s my preference. Nobody, just to be clear about this, because people do get really wound up about this stuff when they talk to ding-a-lings and charlatans and frauds about how to write screenplays that no one is going to grade your screenplay like a test paper in tenth grade English.

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

**Craig:** So, clarity should rule the day. But I was wrong to suggest that it ought to be that way. If anything, it probably shouldn’t. But, yeah, I agree with you. If you want to throw a hyphen in there for funsies, because you feel like it makes it read better, throw it in.

**John:** I have a hunch that if people went through all my scripts and looked for those situations where I was doing this, I probably was putting the hyphen in there and I suspect you were, too.

**Craig:** Well, it was clearly my instinct. Yeah. So I’m sure I did. And you know what? John, it hasn’t slowed us down, has it?

**John:** No. Somehow we’ve been successful despite our over-hyphenation.

**Craig:** So successful.

**John:** Another thing we sort of referenced but is not actually available in the world from last week’s episode, so Roman Mittermayr is a guy who has written I think outros for us. He’s also a coder. He’s done some great things called FRUJI, but he also created this app for Amazon’s Echo. So, I don’t have Echo because they don’t work here in Paris. Craig, you don’t have an Echo, I believe. Is that correct?

**Craig:** No, I’m a little – I don’t like it. [laughs] By the way, let me just say, I don’t – my problem with the Amazon Echo and all the rest of it isn’t that I’m worried about surveillance, although I am kind of excited about this new crop of crimes that are being solved by Amazon Echoes. But that aside, my problem is I just hate talking to the Internet. I feel like such an idiot to say, “Hey Siri, Hey Alexa.” I just feel so dumb. I feel dumb.

**John:** Yep. So what you did just did there just annoyed a bunch of people because they were driving in their car or they’re at their house and you now activated a thing. So, we’re going to let that one pass. But we’re not going to do that anymore. So any future instances where we accidentally do it, we’ll have Matthew bleep those out.

So, I end up using Siri on my phone a lot for certain things. I use it for setting timers. I use it for starting exercise on my watch. I find it really good for that. It’s now on my computer. I don’t use it at all. So, I’m not a person who is used to being in my house and sort of using it for things, but I’m used to using it on the go or like when I’m in my car.

But Roman most crucially has built a skill for Amazon’s Echo. So, you can now say, “Lady in a Can, enable Scriptnotes.” So, Lady in a Can is the name of the – it’s the ALEXA word. I’m just saying Lady in a Can so you don’t actually, it doesn’t trip it on your–

**Craig:** Why don’t you just say Aloxa?

**John:** Oh yeah, just mispronounce it. So, Aloxa, Enable Scriptnotes. If you do that, it will install the skill. And then you can say, “Aloxa, ask Scriptnotes for latest episode,” and we will start playing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m never going to do that. I’m just being real clear.

**John:** You’re never going to do that, but you know what? People with this Lady in the Can, they might do it.

**Craig:** Maybe can we call her Malexa? What about Malexa? Does that trigger it?

**John:** That sounds a little evil.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But, yeah, it’s so interesting how you have to name these characters and make them seem like they’re helpful.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So Alexa I think is always female, but Siri is actually male in certain markets. And so I think in the UK Siri is default male.

**Craig:** My son has rigged his Siri to be an Australian man. [laughs]

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** I don’t know why. Every time. And by the way, kids, I will say, well–

**John:** They love it.

**Craig:** I’m going off of my sample size here of one teenager, because my daughter is not yet a teenager, but my son and his friends, they talk to their phones all the time. It’s terrifying.

**John:** I mean, and dictation on the phone has gotten so much better that I will sometimes find myself starting to type and realize like why am I typing? This is going to be so much faster if I dictate it.

**Craig:** I love typing.

**John:** And 80% of the time that dictation works great.

**Craig:** I love it. I love typing.

**John:** You love typing on your phone?

**Craig:** I do. I love it. I just love typing in general. I feel like–

**John:** I hate typing with my thumbs.

**Craig:** Really? I’ve trained my mind to think through typing. I mean, right now I’m not typing, so I can speak. But when it comes to composing something intentionally, my fingers just start to go. The neural pathways have been wired so directly to the manual activity of typing that I just have to do it.

**John:** That’s absolutely true when I’m at a real keyboard, but on the phone it just does not work the same way. And so a lot of times I’ll be so far ahead of where my thumbs are at with my thoughts that speaking aloud is a much better case.

**Craig:** I want to write that song, by the way. I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**John:** [laughs] It could be a song about typing or about hitchhiking.

**Craig:** Well, it just sounds like a great show tune. It’s an 11 o’clocker. You know? It’s a big song.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s like you finally realized I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**John:** I don’t think it’s an 11 o’clock number, Craig. I think it could be an I Want song in a certain way, about the vision you have.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think so.

**John:** Or it could be an end of the first act. [sings] I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**Craig:** See, I think it’s more like [sings] I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are. Anyway, we’ve lost listeners. We’re losing listeners in droves.

**John:** So many listeners. Who has two thumbs and no listeners? This guy.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Let’s get to our questions this week. We have a whole bunch of questions. We’ll try to speed round some of them. Other ones we’ll dig in deep. Owen writes in to ask, “How long should it take your agent to read your script?”

**Craig:** Exactly 3.7 days. Next question.

**John:** I say a week. And if you haven’t heard back in a week, then you should ask, “Hey what’s up?” Because your agent should read within a week. And a week needs to include a weekend, because basically no one reads anything except over the weekend, which because Hollywood is messed up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s about right. Basically the first weekend they have available. They’re your agent. They should read it. If you are – look, you got to know your place in the world. If you’re the lowest man on their totem pole and you’re a brand new client and you’re just starting, it may take them two weekends. And that’s fair. I mean, the larger question is who cares what your agent thinks about your script. But I know it matters. I know it matters because they’re the ones that have to go and sell it and they have to understand it.

But as I say to my agents all the time, “Yeah, you can read it if you want to.”

**John:** Let’s pause here for a second, because it is interesting like how much more important it was for our agents to read our scripts when we were new. And now it’s like it’s good that they read them, because that way they can have meaningful discussion with people about next steps on things. But like it’s actually not that important that they read them. And so [Cramer] calls, like, “Hey, do I need to read this?” Not really. It’s sort of the thing you read before. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Sometimes my guys will be like, “Can we read this?” Yeah, if you – oh, yeah, of course. It’s not like you can’t read it. But it is true, at some point their purpose really does shift out of advocacy for you and into more of they’re mediative. You know, they’re about getting you a deal and then handling problems along the way as they might crop up. But they’re not really advocating for you specifically about things as a writer.

They never stop being advocative for talent, you know. I mean, I hate that word, because writers are talented, too. But we’re called literary and then on the other side is talent. So actors, they’re constantly advocating for actors. That never stops.

**John:** Yeah. Because they’re trying to make sure the actor is positioned properly for this kind of role. Or you might not have thought of her for this, but she would actually be great as that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because writers like ultimately people can read us. They can see the movies we’ve done. They can talk to the people we’ve worked with. It’s not the same kind of thing. And so once you are established, there’s less of that need. So, there may be a reason why let’s say you’re a writer who has been writing low budget thrillers and now you’re trying to segue into something different, then yes they need to be able to read you and sort of position you differently. But that’s kind of the exception. That’s not really–

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Where most people are at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And by the way, it’s the same with directors, too. They advocate for directors. I got a call the other day from an agent saying, “Hey, for this thing you’re doing, have you considered my client blah-blah-blah to direct?” And they do that because directors and actors both are to some extent waiting for script material. Whereas we’re not, because we’re writing it. But you’re right. When you’re trying to break out of a mold, and particularly when there is an open assignment, your agent can lobby for you and make a case. And in that sense it’s good that they know what you’ve written.

But that was a very long answer. Owen, oh, a week or two. How about that?

**John:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** All right. We have Thomas writing in who says, “On the poster for Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford has two credits. Screenplay by Tom Ford and Directed by Tom Ford. I realize the writer on a movie gets a credit on the poster in the same font size and weight of the director, but did they have to be separate for any reason if it’s the same person? For instance, on There Will Be Blood, the credit is Written for the Screen and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Both appear to be screenplay credit.” I’m not really sure what they mean by that.

“Or, does Tom Ford just like seeing his name on things over and over?” John, do you have guesses about this?

**John:** I believe the answer to the question is that if you have the director’s name on the poster in a certain size, you have to have the writer’s name on. You can say Written and Directed by, but the challenge with Tom Ford’s movie is that it is based on preexisting material, so therefore he cannot have Written and Directed by because Written by includes both story and screenplay. So, it has to say Screenplay by Tom Ford. There can be an exception for Written for the Screen. And so we’ve seen it here in Paul Thomas Anderson’s credit. I’ve seen it also for the Coen Brothers.

So, I believe his credit could have read Written for the Screen and Directed by Tom Ford. Is that your understanding?

**Craig:** Not sure about that last one. I have to check on that. Written for the Screen and Directed by may refer to somebody who has gotten screen story and screenplay credit. Or that may just be an alternate way of saying Written and Directed by. I have to check on that. But I think you’re absolutely correct though that when you say Screenplay by Tom Ford and Directed by Tom Ford, this is not Tom Ford’s choice. It’s because he does not qualify for a Written by credit.

Unless maybe Written for the Screen does qualify as screenplay and maybe he could. I don’t know. I have to check into this. The truth is I’m not sure.

**John:** So, I was pulling up this Written for the Screen and Directed by Coen Brothers, which I think was off of True Grit, which was a remake, so therefore they wouldn’t have gotten story credit, but they could have gotten screenplay credit. So that’s my assumption for why that and for Paul Thomas Anderson it made sense. I agree it looks just weird. And so you would love to be able to combine things in ways that are nicer, but it’s here because the WGA is trying to protect writers from getting knocked off the poster.

And the WGA is very particular about what things you can combine. So, you can combine written and directed. You can’t combine written and produced. You’re not allowed to sort of stick those guys together. So I was a writer and a producer on Go, so we asked if it could say Written and Produced by John August. You cannot. Written by has to be its own thing.

**Craig:** Yes, you definitely can’t combine producing credits with that. So, we’ll double check with our intrepid credit staff and I will get the firm answer on this one.

**John:** If you’d like to know more about sort of the politics of credits, not sort of the business of credits, but sort of like why directors and credits are such a complicated thing, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this Vanity Fair article by Margaret Heindenry, where she talks through the history of A Film By or A Blank Film, and sort of how complicated it has been in Hollywood and sort of the arguments between the DGA, representing the directors, and WGA for the writers. And the mess it has become.

So, that’s another sort of in depth look at sort of where we’re at in terms of possessory credits for filmmakers on their movies.

**Craig:** What a dumb – I hate that credit.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s try Sue in the UK’s question. She writes, “I’m reasonably clear about how writing credits for features are worked out, but what if a producer buys a feature spec and then develops it as a TV show instead? What credit would the original writer be entitled to in that scenario? If they’re not involved in writing the TV show, might they get some sort of producer or creative consultant credit instead?”

Craig, what’s your instinct here?

**Craig:** If they develop it as a TV show, and I guess what Sue is saying is that the person writing it for television is somebody different. So, Sue, let’s say they buy Sue’s feature spec, and then they just turn around and hire somebody else and say, “Start writing a pilot that is based on this.” I think that’s kind of what she’s getting at, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, a couple things. First, the question is, because Sue is in the UK, was the spec script written under the WGA? If it wasn’t, then we have an easy answer: it becomes source material. Just like a novel or anything. And in fact I don’t think you’re really guaranteed much of anything at all in this circumstance.

But if it was done under the WGA, and then the next person goes and turns it into a television script, I mean, first of all usually when you sell feature scripts there is a deal that says that you get the first shot at writing a television adaptation. But I don’t know. That’s a tricky one, too.

**John:** So, I do know. And I know that the answer is complicated. So, I don’t want to reveal which projects are involved here, but there are recent shows that have been based on films. Sometimes produced films or sometimes not produced films. And this issue of whether the underlying script was literary material, that it’s an adaptation from that, or that it was actually sort of WGA material, that it was actually script material became a very important issue in arbitration.

So, ultimately arbitration did happen. And there had to be sort of pre-hearings. It becomes quite complicated.

So, I can talk through sort of my own experience. If you look at Charlie’s Angels, so Charlie’s Angels is based on a TV show. But at the time I came onboard to write Charlie’s Angels, it was an adaptation of this underlying piece of property called Charlie’s Angels. And so therefore the original writers were credited as like having created Charlie’s Angels, but they were not credited – they weren’t part of the overall arbitration process. It wasn’t like they had screenplay material in the final thing. Other properties along the way, and more recently, they have been found to be actually part of the chain of title that led up to the script and therefore have gotten some WGA credit, which is a thing that can happen.

**Craig:** You know what I like about these two questions is that they’re the Writers Guild equivalent of Stump the Ump. Have you ever – yeah, why I am asking you if you’ve read a Stump the Ump?

**John:** I know Stump the Ump.

**Craig:** OK. So, I mean, there was like a book, I remember as a kid where they would say, OK, here’s the situation. What would the ump, what would you say if you were the umpire? And they’re really complicated. These are like a couple of those. These are definitely a couple of those. They’re tricky. And they depend. So, sorry, ish questions.

But you know what? I’m going to run both of these by credits staff to get firm answers. How about that? We’ll follow up with those next week.

**John:** You know what? A more sophisticated podcast might have like looked at these questions and actually gone to the staff ahead of time and gotten the right answer. But we’re not that podcast.

**Craig:** [laughs] You say sophisticated and I say boring.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** That’s a boring show. This is more exciting. We have a cliffhanger now. Let’s go from England to Canada. Mark in Toronto writes, “I’m looking for an efficient way to make it clear that some pieces of dialogue are basically unimportant. The dialogue is only there so the actors have the words to say, but what they say is intentionally throw away and irrelevant to other things that are happening in the scene. Does it need to be spelled out in the action preceding it? Something like Jill launches into an irrelevant and boring story that no one listens to, followed by her dialogue? Or is there a parenthetical that would work? Something like (irrelevant) or (throwaway)?

So, John, how would you handle that situation?

**John:** I think trying to – the challenge with irrelevant or throwaway, like throwaway I could see as a parenthetical. That means the actor is meant to be throwing those lines away. But that’s not really what you’re telling – that’s an instruction to the actor, but it’s not really an instruction about the scene. I think your better instinct is to set it up in the action ahead of time and set it up in the reactions of the other characters so we can make it clear that it does not actually matter that much what the speaking character is saying.

And that’s a fine line because you have this temptation to sort of underwrite what the speaking character is saying, but you shouldn’t do that. You need to actually think about what can I have her say that is actually not crucial or germane and will let us tune it out so that we can focus what the other characters in the scene are doing. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** Well, when I was working with David Zucker and Jim Abrahams, they had a word for this, because in their style of comedy a lot of times people are just rambling in the foreground while funny things are happening in the background. And the rambling is part of the point of it all. And they had this Yiddish word for it called [Flucher] dialogue. And I’m not even sure if that means anything. Somebody will let us know. [Flucher] dialogue means anything. But they would call it [Flucher] dialogue. But you would write it. You would always write it out. It was actually very important because you wanted to make sure that the actor was saying it in such a way that the story was clearly intentional from them, right? They weren’t aware that they were just rambling. Otherwise they’re going to run out of words and then the gig is up, or the jig is up.

So, you would always write that out. What I would do in those circumstances is I would put a parenthetical in and it would usually be (drones) or (droning). And then they would start writing. But it was clear that therefore that wasn’t important. And then the next time they would talk, (still droning, still droning). So I would say droning. That was my word for how to kind of get across that they were performing this essential foreground but unimportant task.

**John:** Absolutely. What I think is good about that parenthetical is make it clear – it’s something for the actor to be aware of. That it’s not just a meta scene kind of thing. Because irrelevant or throwaway is not a playable moment in a weird way, but droning kind of is a playable moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like you’re commenting on its purpose in the movie, and I just want the actor and that character to do what they’re doing. Because the truth is that’s what they’re doing. They’re droning. They’re droning on. And oblivious. The other thing is sometimes I would say (oblivious). Because that was also important that they not notice what was going on in the background, otherwise that dialogue isn’t funny anymore. You know, its function isn’t funny anymore.

So, there you go, Mark. A couple of different ways to handle that.

**John:** Cool. Next up we have Mickey Fortune which is, again, an impossibly wonderful name. I don’t’ know if it’s a real name. But Mickey Fortune writes in, “If I am writing an original pilot as a writing sample, can I use the first episode of a limited series, or should I try to focus on creating a more traditional pilot for a series that would have multiple seasons?”

So, Craig, you are not a person who staffs TV writers. What’s your guess on whether what Mikey Fortune is trying to do is a valid choice?

**Craig:** Well, we certainly talk to plenty of showrunners, and every last one of them tells us that what they want is some kind of original work. They want a pilot of an original series. I’ve never heard any of them say and it has to be intended to be an ongoing series. Not one of them. I think if you wrote the first episode, of what was intended to be a six or ten episode series, well first of all, I’m not sure they would know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And second of all, who cares? Right? They’re not really evaluating you on your ability to generate a premise that could last 12 years. That’s what network executives might be looking for. But they’re just looking for good writers. So I don’t think it would matter at all.

**John:** I don’t think it matters one iota. You have to write the best 30, best 60 pages of scripts you possibly can write that will keep them incredibly intrigued. And if that is for a limited series, fantastic. And if anything, you know, the fact that it could be a little bit ambiguous whether it’s an ongoing series or something short, that’s something you can talk about in the room if you’re so lucky as to meet with this showrunner, this executive. You can talk about what this pilot was and what it might want to be.

Especially in an era where there are so many great limited series happening, there’s nothing to be avoided about having a limited series as your writing sample. People are making those all the time, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I am making one right now. Steven in Los Angeles writes, “I try to be mindful of representation when describing characters in terms of race. However, in my current project the characters races don’t play any significant role in the plot or interactions with other characters. They could be played by an actor of any color, despite how I’ve described them. Is it better to simply describe the character in colorblind terms? That is to say bright eyes and flirty smile? Or with racial implications, like dark skin and dreadlocks?”

OK, John, how do you approach this?

**John:** So I think the crucial thing to start off here is there’s no sort of perfect answer to this. And you’re always going to be wrestling with two sort of competing instincts. So, if you as the writer say nothing, the reader will likely default to thinking of these characters as white. Unless you’ve done something in the universe of your script to make them reach a little bit beyond white. So if the other characters in your world are diverse, they might be thinking more diverse about this character. But in general you can kind of safely assume that people are going to think these characters are white unless you give them some other reason not to think that they’re white.

The second thing to keep in mind is that every choice is a choice. And so the more specific the choice, the more important the reader is going to think it is that you’ve made that choice. So, they’re going to be asking like why is the boss Jamaican? They’re going to feel like there’s going to be some good reason why that boss is Jamaican. It’s going to pay off in some way. And so you might be sort of over-signaling things you don’t mean to signal.

So, you have these sort of weirdly competing things where you’re trying to be both specific about who your characters are, and also not just go back to default white on all these things. So, as an example, let’s think about a character in your script who is like a paralegal. And do you specify a race for that paralegal who is in like two or three scenes? It’s really hard to say. Craig, where do you come down at defining race for a character who is going to recur but whose race sort of by nature is never going to be a crucial aspect of the plot?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t call it out, but when I don’t call it out I am aware of something which is that I have a certain influence over these things, at least now in my career. So I can say to – when I submit, a lot of times when I submit the script to the producer or the studio, I will say, “By the way, here’s some of the people I was thinking about.” And in that email I will include people who obviously have race. Everybody has a color of some kind, right? White, black, or whatever. And so as I call people out, some of the actors will be what they are. And they will get a general understanding, OK, that there is no default white in this script, at least I didn’t write it as default white.

If I call it out specifically in a script, it’s because that character needs to be that race for a reason. So, for instance, I’m writing a movie for Disney and there’s a character who is largely CGI, so we’re really talking about a voice. And I’ve recommended somebody who is not white. But I don’t say that they’re not white in the script, because they don’t have a race at all. Similarly, there’s another character who is a human being and I’ve sent in a couple of recommendations that are different races, because the race is not important. It’s really about age and gravitas and other things that are just more important than skin color.

So, I think it’s fair for you, if you’re writing – especially if you’re writing a spec script to include here are some general ideas of who I was thinking when I was doing this, and that gives a general sense. Even that, that small thing, will unlock people from default white. They can start to see a more appropriately reflective cast to actual humanity.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s also worth looking for how do you sort of try to figure out race when you don’t have any more information, and what you probably are looking for is description, like as you’re reading through books how you’re trying to figure out race or to what degree are you aware of race as you’re reading things. And some of the things that tend to tip people towards certain choices are character’s names, their first names and their last names. So if you’re giving a character a first name and a last name, or however you’re identifying that character, that’s going to signal something about race. And so you can choose to be explicit by giving somebody a last name like Kim that strongly suggests that they are Korean, but you can also be mindful of like don’t give them a name that makes it sort of very difficult to imagine them as something other than that race.

And so if everybody in your script has a very Swedish or Norwegian name, those characters are unlikely to be cast as anything other than sort of white people. And so be mindful that you’re not putting up weird roadblocks in your script by naming characters certain names. And so it’s a balancing act.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** To the degree you can suggest people, you know, outside of the script for things, then you’re doing your job to sort of help make sure that the world of your movie is diverse and inclusive and representative of the world you’d like to see. But you’re always going to mindful of what you’re putting on the page there, so you’re not over-limiting your choices.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I think sometimes what ends up happening is people start to get nervous. And it’s white people that are getting nervous. Let’s be clear about this. White writers get nervous, not all of them, but some of them about seeming racist or falling into some kind of trap. And so they overthink. And they start to suddenly pepper the script with all these racial descriptions to signify look at me, look at me, I’m not default white. Which is fine, except that you’re actually doing something somewhat artificial at times. Because it doesn’t really matter.

If you have a waitress and her job is to look up and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you forgot your credit card,” that’s not necessary to call race out there. The script starts to feel almost pedantic in it’s like everybody gets a race.

Race is – you know, my whole attitude towards race is the ideal world is nobody gives a crap, right? And that’s the ideal world where it’s just like it doesn’t matter. Now, it does matter in the world today, so we have to be aware and conscious of it. But you don’t want to be artificial about it. It starts to remove the reader from the experience. I think it’s better to just think broadly in your mind about actors who are not just white or male.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then write and then let people know here are some of the people I was thinking about. It’s just a more artistically honest way of approaching it. I guess that’s how I would put it.

**John:** Yeah. I would say as I’m working on a project I’m trying to do a lot of diverse casting in my head as I’m writing it. So this sounds like what you’re doing for your Disney project as well. You are trying to envision the world of your movie as a diverse place and having lots of different kinds of people in it. And so I’m thinking about certain roles and certain actors in certain roles. And that may naturally sort of tip sort of some of the choices I’m making writing towards that theoretical actor. But you want to make sure that in writing for that theoretical actor, hopefully a whole range of actors could play that. And the degree to which you have influence over the process of actually making the movie, try to make sure that, you know, good choices are being made by everybody else.

**Craig:** There you go. I think that’s the perfect way of putting it.

**John:** Cool. Greg in Los Angeles writes, “As I listen to Episode 285, specifically the discussion about Sea Monkeys’ creator, I couldn’t help but think of the Spirit of St. Louis. It may seem like an odd connection. But when writing that film, Billy Wilder chose to ignore the racist aspects of Charles Lindberg’s life. Obviously when writing a film based on a real life person, we cannot include every aspect of their life. But would you consider it amoral to ignore such a defining characteristic, especially when considering such a crucial part of someone’s personality could to some degree affect the general public’s historical understanding of that specific individual?”

Craig, what do you think? So we talked about this, you know, on that episode where we talked about Sea Monkeys, like do you go into the racist stuff or do you not go into the racist stuff? What’s your thought overall about historical people?

**Craig:** It’s tough. You know, when I was a kid, I read – my dad had that book, The Spirit of St. Louis. So, I’ve never even seen the movie. I’ve just read the book. And it was pretty good. It was a good book. It’s a good story. An impressive guy. And also a Nazi. [laughs] So there’s that.

Yeah, you know, do you ignore these things? Let’s put it this way: it’s getting harder and harder. We live in a time now where no one is going to be turning a blind eye to any of that. If anything, people are looking for it. And I don’t think you can really get away with it anymore. It’s just about the culture. I think it feels too salient. So there are people still that because I guess they’ve been grandfathered in – Roald Dahl notoriously said some terrible things about Jewish people and, you know, we’ve kind of grandfathered him in, you know, function of his time and all that.

Then, you know, Lindberg you could argue function of his time. So, yes, the Founding Fathers were slave owners, but it’s so widely known and understood and people have contextualized it as, OK, yes, so George Washington clearly was a slave owner. And Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. And they’re on our money. And we have had a long national discussion about that. When you’re introducing new people that people aren’t quite as familiar with, like for instance the Sea Monkey guy, I don’t see how you can avoid it. Because somebody is going to dig it up and go, “Uh, did you not think this was worth mentioning?” You know?

**John:** Yeah. I completely agree with you. So, there is a different responsibility when you’re being the first sort of movie to introduce the world to this person. And especially a person who you could frame as a hero, it’s really problematic if you’re framing this person as a hero and the reality is they did some horrible things. That will come out. There’s no clean way to do that.

But I want to circle back to the Founding Fathers, because I think it is actually a really challenging time to make a movie about the Founding Fathers, because you sort of can’t ignore the slave stuff now. I think 20 years ago if you made a Washington movie, oh, you could sort of like do a little lip service to it. But you sort of can’t get away from that stuff now. And I don’t know that we really have had sort of the thorough national discussion about what slavery was like. I think it continues to sort of – more stuff does continue to get out. We still are grappling with sort of how we’re going to deal with that.

So about two years ago I went to Mt. Vernon and I’d been there as a kid, but going back there as an adult, they completely changed everything around and about it, so they were very much more upfront about sort of here’s Washington’s slaves’ house, and this was what it was like to be a slave on Washington’s plantation.

And so there was still the pretty house, and there’s still the family, and still sort of the normal Washington stuff, but it was all in the context of like these are the slaves and this is sort of what the reality of their life was like. And I have a hard time imagining a movie about Washington right now that would not go back and explore that. So, you look at Hamilton and Hamilton was able to sidestep some of that, but by making the racial aspect of it both a focus and sort of a recontextualization.

**Craig:** Yeah. But even in Hamilton, someone as brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda has to at some point submit to the demands of narrative. So, he makes a point of Jefferson being a slave owner repeatedly. Jefferson even says, “Sally, be a lamb,” refers to Sally Hemings, famous slave that he had an affair with in the first song that he sings, What Did I Miss? And it is to Jefferson that Hamilton says, you know, talking about the south, “Keep ranting. We know who’s really doing the planting.” And they talk about slavery a lot.

Washington is never mentioned in the context of slavery. And Washington is presented really as a pure hero in that musical. That’s part of the problem with slavery is that it unfortunately unwinds all heroism and all goodness. So, choices have to be made even in a show like Hamilton so that you can root for someone. And it doesn’t start to feel like it’s nihilistic because these are very difficult things. And when you’re creating a narrative, you are forced to simplify. And you could make a good argument that simplification is an inherently amoral act. It’s a very complicated topic, to say the least.

I would love to talk with Lin-Manuel Miranda about that very thing. I’m very curious how he approached that character of Washington given the circumstances of how – because the show is so clearly – goes out of its way, not just through the casting, but through the subject material itself and the lyrics to comment on slavery repeatedly.

So, interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let’s see. We’ve got Jason writing in. “For an aspiring screenwriter, how much weight does the industry give toward professional experience in a given field? Me, Jason, I have 19 years in law enforcement, specifically detective work. If I write something that uses that experience, a crime thriller for example, would my biography and background give me an advantage beyond hopefully a sense of verisimilitude? Basically, do pieces speak for themselves, or is the writer as a person taken into account?”

That’s an excellent question, Jason. John, what is your answer?

**John:** So I think Jason has a leg up in a couple ways. So, he definitely has experience. Hopefully he’ll be able to translate that experience into the words on the page. If he can’t translate that experience into the words on the page, his real life experience is not so helpful. But I think he’s starting from a great place in that he actually does understand what the real life is like. And that should help him in his writing.

Secondly, the degree that he actually gets in the room with people, that’s fascinating. And so I think that sort of experience would help get him staffed on a TV show or help get him a certain assignment to do a police thriller because it’s like, oh, this guy actually knows what he’s talking about in a way that’s incredibly useful.

In general I would say that if you have a lot of experience as like an emergency services dispatcher, that’s going to be less valuable than sort of a cool cinematic experience like being a police detective. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no question in my mind. No question at all. If you have this kind of background, I think people love that in Hollywood. They actually love it too much. So, it is a great calling card. They will immediately grant you a certain legitimacy as a writer. Definitely if you are writing something that draws on that experience, it’s a great calling card. It’s a great way in. If you’re writing something that doesn’t, obviously it’s irrelevant. But there are some writers who were physicians and then turned to writing. Zoanne Clack, for instance, is one. And they tend to work on medical shows. I think David Shore–

**John:** He’s a real lawyer.

**Craig:** Oh, he was a lawyer. Because he worked on House and–

**John:** Oh, maybe he was a doctor.

**Craig:** But, no, he also worked on Law & Order, so he might have been a lawyer. Look, there’s a ton of lawyers. I think there’s so many lawyers that turn to writing that that doesn’t mean anything anymore. But, being a detective in law enforcement I think would absolutely grab people’s attention. So, I would encourage you if you’re interested in writing material based on that, you should. Yeah, I think you use the phrase leg up. Perfect phrase for it.

**John:** David Shore. Prior to becoming a writer, Shore was a partner for a law firm in London, Ontario.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Canadian there. Where he practiced corporate and municipal law. But yeah, people coming from law firms who then write legal thrillers, the John Grishams, that’s a really common experience. For you to go from being a police detective for 17 years to then writing those things, that could be great, but it’s ultimately going to come down are you a really good writer? Because that’s going to be more important than your experience really?

**Craig:** We should get Zoanne Clack on this show. So, Zoanne Clack worked on Grey’s Anatomy and – is that show still on the air? Is that on the air?

**John:** Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air. Yeah.

**Craig:** Maybe she still works on it. Sad, I don’t watch the television. But, she is a real doctor. Real doctor. She actually worked even for the CDC. So that’s obviously a huge boon, certainly if you’re going to be writing a medical show. Can’t beat that. So, yes, Jason, go for it.

**John:** You know who we need to get on the show? Shonda Rhimes. I know she’s been a fantasy guest for a long time, but we know people who know her. I don’t know why we – maybe when I get back to Los Angeles, that will be a goal. We’ll get Shonda on the show.

**Craig:** I feel like we don’t need to know people that know her. We just call her up. Just say hey.

**John:** I went to film school with Shonda Rhimes. I used to hang out with Shonda Rhimes way back in the day.

**Craig:** Then you know you who knows her.

**John:** I know me who knows her. But it’s been years. But it would be great to catch up with Shonda Rhimes.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Let’s go to Sam in Australia who writes, “How do you implement a broad ‘make it funnier’ note? For example, you submit a scene and the reader doesn’t think it’s that funny, so they say, ‘Make it funnier.’ On one hand, it’s your audience, so you should try to appeal to them. On the other, you love it and you think it’s hilarious.” Craig, make it funnier.

**Craig:** No. [laughs] That’s not a note. That’s stupid. That’s a failure. Look, that is an indication that something has gone terribly wrong. Either you’re not as funny as you think you are, or there is a mismatch of sense of humor here. Or mismatch of tone. Now, sometimes comedy technicians can get together and say, OK, here’s why I think this isn’t as funny as it could be, and here’s what I think we would need to do to make it funnier. That’s different. That’s the sort of discussion that – and I call them comedy technicians. I’m one of them. Because if you write comedy, and I’m talking about comedy-comedy, whether you’re on a sitcom or you’re writing like heavy comedy movies, like comedy-comedy-comedy, jokes-jokes, jokes, there is technique involved. There is a lot of machinery involved. It is a science.

And so that’s one thing. But if you’ve got some note-giver, a producer or an executive sitting there going it just needs to be funnier, well, you’re done. There’s no – I don’t know what that means. So, no.

**John:** Well, I do know what it means. I’ve never actually given the note Make it Funnier, but I definitely have thought the note Make it Funnier, where like I see a scene that sort of feels like it’s jokeoid-ish. Like it has the – it feels like it wants to be funny, but it’s not actually funny. And sometimes I can be specific about like this is why it’s actually not working for me. But sometimes it’s just like this just isn’t a funny way to do it. Or like you’re trying to make a joke out of something that’s not really a joke.

And so I will never give the note make it funnier, but I will try to focus on why this is not making me laugh. Now, this note that you’ve gotten, if this is the third time they’ve read the script, that Make it Funnier may be partly because they’re just sick of it. Jokes aren’t funny like the third time through. And so it’s hard for you as the writer to remind them that like, you know what, that is actually funny. It was funny the first couple times they read it. It’s just it’s not new to them anymore. And I’ve encountered that with real life stuff where like a movie that’s been in development for a year and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, it would be great if like this relationship was funnier.” It’s like, “Well, it actually is funny, but you just don’t remember it being funny because you are seeing it for the 15th time. And when you stick actual actors saying those lines, it will be funny.”

And that’s hard for you as the writer to say. But sometimes that is the reality.

**Craig:** Look, comedy is the hardest. The hardest. And the truth is we don’t really know. I mean, even the best – best, best comedy people – are guessing, all the time. That’s what writing comedy is. It’s an endless series of guessing that you are going to put this combination of words and actions together and shoot it and edit it in such a way that people are going to have this involuntary physical reaction and start laughing at it. You’re guessing.

And nobody bats a thousand, right? I mean, that’s why things get cut out all the time. You just want to be batting as high as you can. But I can’t tell you how many times I have been surprised by how strongly people have laughed at something. And then also on the other hand, people just, no. Nope. That doesn’t work at all.

You know, most of the time you get the response you expect. But there are those things on either end. So it’s just very, very difficult. Sam, the truth is you may be really, really funny and this person may just stink.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Or, you may not be that funny and they’re just telling you. Or, something in between. There’s really no way to know. But if you think you love it and you think it’s hilarious. That’s it, right? That’s what you think. And now really what it comes down to is does anyone else agree? And if you can’t find anyone to agree, then there is a mismatch between your sense of humor and the rest of the world, which happens.

**John:** It does happen. This last week I posted a long blog post and someone pointed on Twitter, which was absolutely true, like you’re blogging a lot. Are you avoiding other work? I’m like, yes, I’m avoiding other work. I’m trying to avoid starting on something, and so therefore I’m blogging a lot.

But I blogged about this Twitter joke which I thought was just fantastic and was so clearly destined to become a clam, which is Hold My Beer. So, one of the first times I remember seeing this joke set up on Twitter was around the election. And so this was a Tweet from Brian Pedaci. It says, “BRITAIN: Brexit is the stupidest, most self-destructive act a country could undertake. USA: Hold my beer.”

So the structure of the joke is basically like, you know, speaker A says something outrageous and impossible to top and speaker B says, “Hold my beer,” like I’m going to get in this, I’m going to be able to do this.

And so I wanted to sort of look into why is that funny and why does it work and why does it not work? Because one of the great things about Twitter is you can search for phrases or exact matches of phrases and figure out like how are people trying to use this joke and sort of what are the actual requirements for this to be funny?

So, I say this not to our Australian friend to encourage him to study the structure of comedy jokes and try to figure out why his jokes aren’t working, but there can be sometimes clear reasons why a person’s joke is not working. So, for the Hold my Beer joke to be funny, you have to know who speaker A is. And that’s sort of a fundamental thing in most jokes. Everything about the premise has to be incredibly straight forward for us to be able to understand it. So, you have to understand who speaker A is, the thing that speaker A says has to be reasonable for who speaker A is. Speaker B has to be recognizable. And the Hold my Beer has to relate to something they’ve just done, or something they’re just about to do.

And so almost all jokes, whether they’re like this sort of Twitter joke, or the kinds of things you’re setting up in your scene, there is a fundamental kind of logic behind them. There has to be a very simple believable way to get into it and the payoff, the surprise, has to be related to it in a meaningful way. And so this is a long discussion of like spoiling a really funny Twitter joke that was very clearly destined to become a clam.

**Craig:** I think you just killed it. [laughs]

**John:** As I sort of wrote the post, I recognized that like it was destined to die anyway. So, I just wanted to actually look at it and also a lot of times in a dead joke beautiful things grow in the bones of that dead joke. And so I’ve seen already some really good second wave of those, which is like, “Girlfriend: I’m sick of people barking patriarchal instructions at me. Me: Hold my beer.” That was a Tom Neenan joke.

So people who use the format of the joke to make sort of a meta joke. And that’s the delightful time we live in.

**Craig:** We do. We do. Yeah, that one has been around for a while. I feel like that one has been around for a while. It’s kind of the grandson of Now Watch this Drive, which was based on a George W. Bush moment.

Yeah, but Hold my Beer, it actually goes way back to – it used to be just something that dumb people said before they did something stupid and then hurt themselves.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And now it’s evolved into this thing. But I’m pretty sure you just assassinated it.

**John:** Back in 2014 it really was the setup. It was the frame around a stupid thing that someone was going to do. And so by putting it as the punchline though, I think it’s actually a much better form and a much better form for Twitter. It’s going to die, and so I think I hastened its death, but that’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I also loved the variant forms of it. So like there’s obviously Hold my Drink, or Hold my Juice Box, but I also love Hold my Earrings, because just the idea of a woman taking out her earrings because she’s going to like go into somebody.

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s a whole different thing. Yeah.

**John:** That’s an amazing – because you can see the action when someone is taking out their earrings. It’s just great.

It’s come time for our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is an episode of Girls from this season called American Bitch. And so it is written by Lena Dunham. It is directed by Richard by Shepard. And it’s a two-hander. It just stars Lena and Matthew Rhys, the guy from The Americans. And if you’ve not watched Girls or if you’ve watched a few episodes of Girls and sort of stopped watching it, it’s absolutely worth going back and taking a look at this one episode, because it’s all self-contained. It’s two characters on a set talking. And it is remarkable.

And it deserves all the acclaim it’s gotten. So, I’ll link to an Emily Nussbaum article. She wrote about it in The New Yorker. But I think it’s just actually a great study in how much you can do in a short basically real time piece of two characters in a room talking. So, in this case you already know Hannah’s character, the character Lena Dunham plays. But to set up a character and set up the conflicts to allow the viewer to sort of fill in the details of what must have gotten them to this place, it was just great. It started in the middle of an action. It was just a really well done episode. So I strongly encourage everyone to watch American Bitch from this last season of Girls.

And while you’re falling back in love with Matthew Rhys, you should watch the new season of The Americans because it’s a great show and he’s great on that.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll put that on my list of things that you know I’ll not get to.

**John:** Craig, I would argue that you would very much like this episode. And doing the things you need to do in television these days particularly, it’s so remarkably well done.

**Craig:** What if I hate it? What if I hate it?

**John:** If you hate it, it’s 25 minutes of your life.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** 25 whole minutes.

**Craig:** Do you know what I normally do with those 25 minutes?

**John:** We know exactly what you do with those 25 minutes. The door locks. Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. John. Locks from the outside so you can’t get in.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That doesn’t make any sense.

**Craig:** No. I don’t have to make sense. I just have to make love. Oh, Sexy Craig, beat it. Well, my One Cool Thing is – this is not at all what you said. It’s totally different. Yes, it’s another app.

You know, I’m on an app kick lately, but my son introduced me to this one. It’s one of these games that you can play with your friends and it’s called Stop. But it’s very, very clever. So the game, Stop, that’s what it’s called. And it’s essentially just like a category game where you spin a wheel, a letter shows up, and then you have five categories. And you just have to fill in a word that fits that category that starts on the letter that you’ve picked.

But, the little brilliant twist to this is that at any point if you’re the first person, so if you won the last round you get to go. You can hit stop. So, if you look at the five categories and you’re like, oh god, I only know one of these. I’m typing in real fast, I’m hitting Stop. That amount of time you spent is the only amount of time the next person gets. But they don’t know how much time they get. So, when you’re going after somebody, part of your equation is like, oh god, how much time do they take? How much time do I have? How should I prioritize my answers?

Very clever little game. Lots of fun. You should play it.

**John:** Very good. It sounds like there’s some game theory involved in the game itself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Nice. Cool. Before we wrap up today, I want to thank everybody who submitted their reviews for the listener’s guide, or the Scriptdecks, or whatever we’re going to call this big compendium of user reviews for Scriptnotes. Basically what episodes do you think are the “can’t miss” episodes of Scriptnotes for new listeners.

So, we’ve gotten more than a hundred now of people writing in to review sort of which episodes they think are crucial for listening to. And surprisingly few repeats. I mean, there’s some which I sort of knew were going to be really popular. But like from all seasons from all years, there are things that have been singled out. So thank you very much for everyone who has contributed. Please continue to do so. Whenever we have enough of these, I don’t know what enough is going to be, but we’ll figure out some good form for those. It could be a book. It could be another site. Some other way for people to experience Scriptnotes. So thank you for that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And that’s our show this week. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Boom.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Pow.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Boom.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s where you can also send questions like the ones we answered today on the podcast. On Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We love to answer your short questions on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Also search for Scriptnotes in the iTunes store and leave us a review there. That’s lovely when you do that.

We have an app for both iOS and for Android. That lets you get to all the back episodes, all nearly 300 episodes of the show, including some bonus episodes. To subscribe, you go to Scriptnotes.net. And it’s $2 a month and is a bargain at that price.

**Craig:** Bargain.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this week’s episode and all previous episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the transcripts. They go up about four days afterwards. And that’s our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Let’s do this again next week.

**John:** We will.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** End of Recording.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Listener Guide](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The Vanity Credit Turns 100](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/03/vanity-credit-a-film-by)
* [“The Cunning “American Bitch” Episode of “Girls””](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-cunning-american-bitch-episode-of-girls)
* [Stop](http://www.stop-fanatee.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_292.mp3).