Search Results for: parenthetical

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/are-two-screens-better-than-one).

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

**Craig Mazin:** No, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 108, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Impressed with your elocution. [laughs]

**John:** I’ve been criticized for my elocution, so I am trying to pronounce things a little bit more clearly, partly because it is four o’clock in the afternoon as we’re recording this rather than 10:30 at night. So, I am actually a little bit more awake than I’ve been for several weeks.

**Craig:** I don’t think you should let the nattering nabobs — One of my favorite expressions. Thank you, Spiro Agnew. — I don’t think you should let the nattering nabobs tell you how you should sound. I think you sound just fine.

**John:** Well, thank you very much, Craig. Your vote of confidence will inspire me. And, yet, I will still try to pronounce a little bit more clearly.

**Craig:** As long as it’s coming from you.

**John:** It’s coming from me. It’s a desire to improve myself, not from anyone else’s notes.

**Craig:** Good. Good. Fantastic.

**John:** So, Craig, this is our last Skype podcast before our live show on September 23.

**Craig:** Very exciting. And I’m to understand that we have sold out, or nearly sold out, or…?

**John:** I believe we sold out. I just got the email this morning that I think there were like seven tickets when I last heard, which were the newly released seats. And by the time this podcast goes up they will be gone.

**Craig:** Wow. Amazing.

**John:** So, if there is some possibility that we’re going to do a standby line we will tweet that. I don’t know that to be the case. I suspect that people who have tickets are the people who will see the show. But, I’m very excited to see the show.

So, it will be you, and me, and Andrew Lippa and we will be talking about writing things together which is interesting and different for me. We will be singing some songs at the piano. It should be a good, fun time.

**Craig:** That sounds great. I’m very excited.

**John:** Other bits of news I have for us. Highland, which is this app that I make, Quote-Unquote Apps makes, is releasing the new version 1.5 this week. So, if you are a person who uses Highland or curious about using Highland, it will be in the Mac App Store this coming week.

And it does some new things. It can always, just like it always did, it can melt down PDFs to plain text. It can open Final Draft files. But it can also do more things. It has a manuscript function. So, a certain famous novelist wanted to use it for writing books.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** And so we put that in there. Mr. Michael Chabon uses it.

**Craig:** Ooh!

**John:** We have the ability to do stage plays and musicals which is because I needed it. So, it’s been a very useful tool for me. I think it will be useful for many more people. And it can also automatically highlight your syntax, so if you are typing something with some notes in there it can put notes in a nice, pretty format. It can do section headers and all sorts of other fancy new things.

So, if you are interested in that, visit the Mac App Store today.

**Craig:** Amazing. What can’t you do?

**John:** There are many, many things I can’t do. I can’t do a backhand flip, or hand spring. I’m pretty bad at most gymnastic things. Even my cartwheel is poor, Craig.

**Craig:** Not surprised. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, can you do any of that stuff? Can you do any gymnastics? Could you ever?

**Craig:** When I was a kid I was very good at the somersaulting. I remember that. And now as an adult, I’m frightened to somersault.

**John:** Yeah, I can do it in a pool.

**Craig:** Oh, sure.

**John:** But I can’t do an actual —

**Craig:** I’m Superman in a pool.

**John:** Yeah. Without true gravity, it’s much simpler. But with — no, with bones and things that hurt, I just can’t do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. By the way, speaking of Gravity —

**John:** That looks so good.

**Craig:** Not that we ever talk about upcoming movies and stuff, but god, I can’t wait to see that movie.

**John:** I’m so excited to see that movie. And for people who have seen it, they tell me that it’s one of the few things like spend the money and see it in 3D because it’s actually amazing in 3D, which I can believe.

**Craig:** I’ve heard that.

**John:** Space looks great in 3D.

**Craig:** I’ve heard that. And I trust Alfonso Cuarón.

**John:** I do trust Alfonso Cuarón deeply.

**Craig:** Yeah. Trust him.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Today, Craig, two things on the agenda. I guess we are going to talk about this Disney plan to have kids bring their iPads into movie theaters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we’re going to look at some Three Page Challenge entries and talk through how wonderful they are and how they can be even more wonderful.

**Craig:** That sounds great. I’m game for both of those topics.

**John:** Great. Why don’t you start us off with the Disney thing.

**Craig:** This is a fun one. So, Disney created a little bit of a mini firestorm this week. They announced that for the return of…is it Little Mermaid?

**John:** The Little Mermaid. Our favorite of the — well, one of our favorites of the Disney animated movies. We discussed it at length.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, perhaps because we talked about it here on the podcast, Disney is bringing The Little Mermaid back to theaters. But there is a twist. They are providing a free app that parents and children can download onto the iOS system, not Android, because Disney and Apple have a very close relationship.

And they are encouraging kids to use the app during the movie to kind of have an interactive experience with the film in the theater. Somewhat predictably, a bunch of grump pants people freaked out. [laughs] And the arguments go like this. Argument one: “Oh my god, this is a sacred space where we’re supposed to turn off all of our devices and not allow light in and all the rest. And this corporation is ruining that.”

Argument number two: “Oh my god, kids are obnoxious and awful enough in movie theaters and now they’re going to be even worse.”

And argument number three: “We are training a generation of zombies who will not understand what it means to watch a movie as it’s intended to be seen, but rather we’ll demand somehow to engage with the movie with apps. And no one will ever watch movies again. And it’s the end of cinema.”

**John:** Yes. Strangely, Craig Mazin, I find myself agreeing with those three points much more than I would have predicted.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** That I do think it’s actually a really bad idea and a bad precedent to set to have young children coming in there with the expectation that in a movie theater is an appropriate place to be watching a lighted screen. [alarm sounds in background]

**Craig:** [laughs] The Pasadena Fire Department totally disagrees with you.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** They’re like, [Craig makes alarm noises].

**John:** They buzzed me out.

**Craig:** They’re trying to buzz you out. I couldn’t have done better. Thank you Pasadena Fire Department. That’s the sound I wanted to make while you were saying that. I totally disagree.

**John:** Go for it, Craig.

**Craig:** I totally disagree. Look, here’s the thing. This is a movie that is 25 years old. It is a movie that has been seen a billion times. Every family that is going to attend this screening owns the movie. The children have already seen the movie. This is entirely about having some fun with children and representing something that they already know by heart. So, why not?

There is no way ever that Disney would be so stupid as to do something like this for a movie that wasn’t something that was already beloved and repeatedly digested by the audience. Because then they’ll never get to the place where it’s beloved and repeatedly digested by the audience. They know that. They’re not dumb.

This is sort of akin to like, I don’t know, you know, the way that every year they’ll show Nightmare Before Christmas at the El Capitan here in Los Angeles. And there’s a show beforehand, and then they show the movie, and then there’s a museum. And it’s just a big fun thing.

All the people that are grousing about this I suspect have probably at some point in their lives enjoyed a fun showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Come on. This is just Rocky Horror Picture Show for kids.

**John:** Here’s why this is not at all like of Rocky Horror Picture Show and why you are so wrong, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** This is exciting.

**John:** With Rocky Horror Picture Show, or a sing-along version, which I support sing-along versions, that is audience participation where the audience is there together in a shared space to interact with the movie as a group. And where your being there live and in person with other people is part of the experience. This is putting kids back into, “I’m going to stare at my little screen while there is other stuff happening around me. I’m not going to look at the big screen. I’m not going to participate in what’s going on in front of me. I’m going to participate in what’s going on in the little screen in my lap.”

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** I think that is not a good precedent to set.

**Craig:** That is so Amish. I could hear the sound of the barn being raised.

Children interact with their iPads so much differently than I think we do as adults. It is something that they share. I watch them together. They hand it back and forth. They look over each other’s shoulders. It’s not about devolving the experience of this movie into just a zombie-ish staring at your little miniature screen.

And by all accounts, that won’t work anyway because the whole idea is you’re watching the movie and then you’re looking for something on the screen. It’s really just about turning a movie that is really old, really old, about I would say five or four times older than the average audience attendee, a movie that they’ve seen a billion times into something else. It’s just a different way of enjoying the film.

They’re not — Disney isn’t saying, “This is it, we’re not going to show the movie normally anymore.” So, I just think, I think the fears are overblown. It actually sounds like a lot of fun to me. I kind of want to go do it myself. And even though my kids are too old for it now, I think they would have loved it. And why should we be so scared of entertaining people?

**John:** Because I think we are breaking the seal and you are saying the next movie that you take that kid to, it’s like, “Well why can’t I have my iPad there? I was able to have my iPad at The Little Mermaid.” And so the good parent will say, “That was The Little Mermaid. That was a special case. This is not The Little Mermaid. This is not a special case.”

But, there are a number of good parents and a number of bad parents. The ratios aren’t quite even there. And so you will see more and more kids with glowing devices at movie theaters.

**Craig:** That is incorrect.

**John:** And it’s going to suck.

**Craig:** That is incorrect because this is especially designated as an iPad allowed zone. I have no doubt that the Disney people will very smartly say to every kid as part of the app and part of the audience thing that this is a special thing and that this isn’t something you do in the theater normally. They’re very good about that sort of thing. And, I also — and I also know that movie theaters and other audience patrons are very good about policing these things.

So, no, I don’t believe children will be bringing iPads anymore because of this into any other movie. And the slippery slope argument is — it’s a fallacy. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, I know slippery slope is a general fallacy. And, yet, I will ask Stuart at this moment to flag in the follow up file. Five years from now…

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** …we will discuss whether there are more children trying to use electronic devices in movie theaters.

**Craig:** I am totally in support of that.

**John:** And whether they’ve become an issue. Fantastic.

**Craig:** That is a great point. And I’m a big supporter of that.

In fact, two years ago to this very day Brian Koppelman — one half of the screenwriting duo of Koppelman and Levien, who are most notable for Rounders — two years ago he told me in a communication, a written communication — a written, dated communication — that the Jane’s Addiction song, Irresistible Force, was going to be a classic, on par with their best tunes. And I disagreed and he said, “Come talk to me in two years.” That’s what he said.

And today is, in fact, the two-year anniversary. It is not a classic on par with their best songs. And I let him know because I put it in my iCal and I’ve been waiting for two years. [laughs]

So, let’s put this in our iCal, Stuart. Five years from now John will say, “Craig…” Wait, I’m going to try and do my John impression.

“Craig. You were right.” That was as close as I can do.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, basically your impression of me sounds exactly like you.

**Craig:** I know. But, “Craig,” there’s a little short cut off name. Yeah. That’s the best. You’re actually hard to imitate without just slurring words and then you just sound drunk.

**John:** I just sound drunk. And I do want to point out to listeners that I often will take the devil’s advocate point of view in these discussions just so we can have discussions, but I actually kind of believe this in a way that surprises even me. That I genuinely think it’s a bad idea, partly because I am a parent, and partly because I like going to movie theaters and being in dark places and not being around all the lighted devices.

**Craig:** I am excited. I’m excited to see in five years that I was right.

**John:** Great. I’m excited for our Three Page Challenges today.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, let’s get to those. We have three. Again, if you are new listener to the podcast you may not know what the hell we’re talking about: Every few weeks on the podcast we invite listeners to send in three pages of their screenplay that we will then take a look at. We don’t actually pick them. Stuart picks them out of all of the entries that are sent to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you want to submit your own entry, there’s actually rules about this, and there’s like a special boilerplate language we make you put in the email when you send it to us so that you won’t sue us and you won’t get angry if we pick your piece apart.

So, if you are interested in submitting your own, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and there are the rules for how we pick these things. Stuart picked thee nice ones for us to look at today.

**Craig:** He did.

**John:** I thought we start with one by Erin M. Bradley.

**Craig:** All right. Very good.

**John:** And I’ll summarize this one for us.

**Craig:** Go for it.

**John:** We start in a hospital corridor where we meet Mallory who is 42. She ‘s in a nightgown, cardigan, wedding band. And she’s talking with Dr. Verus, who is saying that she should reconsider, presumably like being discharged. And she does in fact leave the hospital.

We see her on a city bus, New England suburbia. She has sort of a panic attack on the bus. She takes a puff from her inhaler. The bus driver lets her out. There’s sort of a strange exchange with the bus driver who says, “Ain’t nothing for you here.” And as we read this I’m not sure quite how to take it, but she gets off the bus.

She goes to her house. She runs into a stray cat who scratches her. Inside the house we go through her kitchen where the faucet is dripping. She is calling out for someone named Peter, telling Peter that she’s home. But he is not there. And, in fact, when she goes in the bedroom there’s a conspicuous lack of photographs and personal effects. The closets are empty.

She takes a deep breath, reaches for the telephone, dials, and calls Dr. Verus. And then hangs up the handset and that is the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** A lot going on in these three pages. There is some good stuff in here. I think we’re looking at the paranoid mental illness/supernatural genre, which is a genre on its own.

**John:** Oh, that’s interesting. I did not pick up supernatural.

**Craig:** I’m sensing a whiff of it. But it could be — remember there was that movie with Halle Berry where it was like are you crazy or are you seeing ghosts.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Gothika. Anyway, it had a bit of a Gothika vibe to this. I think a lot was done correct here. What’s interesting is that then there were moments that lost me completely and I was requiring myself to reread multiple times.

**John:** Yeah, I felt the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, so right off the bat the — well, first of all, just as a minor spelling thing, fluorescent is actually Fluo-rescent. It is a word that whenever I type it I force myself to put that U in before the O.

**John:** I usually just wait for the squiggly lines and then realize.

**Craig:** Oh, see, just as a side note, I turn the squiggly lines off. I like writing without a net. I think it makes me a better speller.

**John:** Bold choices.

**Craig:** Yes. So, it’s institutional lighting, fluorescent bulbs flickering. She’s in a nightgown, cardigan, wedding band. She’s not — she doesn’t have bandages or IVs or anything like that. And here’s this woman in a lab coat studying her anxiety. So, I just get the vibe of a mental institution of some sort.

It was a little difficult for me to figure out what the space was like. They’re in a corridor. Across the hall, I didn’t know if that meant width wise. Is she at the end of the hall? I was just having trouble seeing what Erin wanted me to see here.

**John:** I think I had the same issue. Because it sounded like she was trying to be specific, and yet it wasn’t specific in a way that I could actually visualize.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Honestly, if it were a little less specific and a little bit more generalized, just whatever I formed in my head would probably be fine.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, Dr. Verus is with her. You know, that’s the sort of thing that would help us out here. “Hinges shriek as the door swings open.” This is the door that she’s been studying. She’s in a seat. I don’t understand what the seat is. And, I don’t mean to pick at these little things, but this is sort of indicative of the problems with the way Erin wrote this.

It’s not so much the intent or the content, which is interesting. It’s the style. So, even then I’m like so there’s just a seat in a hallway and why is she sitting in it? If she wants to get out of the door wouldn’t she be standing waiting to get — ? Little things like this.

She’s on the bus and she has a panic attack. Okay, fine, it was well described. I like the way it matched with the sound of the bus brakes. She hears the bus driver say something, “Ain’t nothing here for you,” that startles her. But when she turns to him and says, “What?” he doesn’t even look at her. He doesn’t even seem to have said anything. He just says, “Watch your step, ma’am,” as he opens the door.

So, the idea here is that maybe he didn’t say that at all. But the problem is she had him saying it off-screen. So, if I’m the director and I’m trying to make this moment where she has a delusion maybe that the bus driver said something, the problem is he’s never spoken before and his line is off-screen, so how do I know it’s him saying it? How do I know it’s not a guy that’s just right behind the bus driver? A little tricky there.

So, I wasn’t quite sure that that was done properly. She comes home, she goes in the house, I like the way she described the house. There’s the drip…drip…drip of a faucet and she’s giving us space on the page. Very specific about the unlit candle which I love the touch that the candle is called Caramel Pecan Pie, or pecan pie, depending on what part of the country you’re in.

Her hand is bleeding. I had to dig back like an archeologist to figure out why.

**John:** It’s from the stray cat. But it wasn’t clear at all that it was the kind of interaction with the cat that would cause bleeding.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And blood is a big deal in a movie. And if a cat is going to scratch you hard enough to draw blood, I need to see it there because it’s happening there. And then if you want to talk about how she addresses that issue a page later, that’s fine.

But there’s a good mood. I like the description here. And then we’re off and running. Obviously a troubled woman. So, a lot of cool things going on here. I just felt myself getting lost quite a bit.

**John:** Yeah. I want to circle back to the bus driver conversation because this is a thing that you’ll need to do in movies sometimes where something is deliberately ambiguous. But if it’s ambiguous, give the reader a sense that it’s supposed to be ambiguous. And so it’s fine to do a follow up line like, “Did he really say that?” Or sometimes you put that in italics or whatever. If it’s meant to be that you’re not quite sure what happened there, but hang a lantern on that so we know that it’s supposed to be that way. And that the reader isn’t misreading it. It’s actually meant to feel that way.

And you can’t do it too much, but if you’re going to do that it’s a helpful way of sort of letting the reader — making the reader feel smart. Making the reader feel like, yes, what you just saw is the way I intend you to see that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Granted, we don’t know what’s happening after these three pages. My first instinct was that we did not need the hospital at all. And that if we started on the city bus and she has her hospital band on and she’s freaking out, that’s actually a more compelling image to me than starting in a hospital.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s a very good idea. I think you’re right about that.

**John:** Thank you. But I enjoyed the overall feel of it and things like on page two, the drip…drip…drip, it’s like, well, you’re wasting pages to do that, but that’s actually kind of the way things feel in real life.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** So, single words on a line, that’s great and fine.

People often ask us about if you’re moving around inside a house do you have to do slug lines for each room in the house. No. You don’t. This is an example of a choice, a style for how you move around a house where it just goes living room, bedroom, hallway. If a character is moving through a space, you don’t have to break out each individual space that way. That can be a good choice for showing us a location.

Now, here’s the con for describing the inside of the house this way. Let’s say most of the movie takes place inside this house, this is going to become very frustrating if you didn’t actually break this into slug lines. So, here it worked really well because the character was moving through the space and we were just giving little small slug lines for where we are in this. But if you’re going to be spending most of your movie in this house you’re going to need to do real scene headers for the different locations, otherwise it’s going to get confusing. It’s just going to feel like a play, that we’re just in this one space the whole time. And the scene headers will help you structure and let us know really what’s a scene and where scenes begin and where scenes end.

**Craig:** Agreed. At the very least I thought what Erin helped us out with was not making the mistake of using these mini slugs to start paragraphs, but rather they rest on their own line. So, she’s appropriately breaking that up so we can follow with our eyes and we know we’ve moved into a different place.

Yeah, the “drip…drip…drip” thing is great also because it helps the reader get a sense of pace, that the facet isn’t going “drip-drip-drip,” it’s going “drip…drip…drip.” That’s good. So, these are the things that are well worth using the white space for.

You know, our little test of just looking at the way the page looks, these pages look right.

**John:** They do. And, you’d be more likely to read that page at a glance because like, oh, well there’s some white space. It’s not so daunting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If everything were jammed up tight — there’s nothing like flipping a page and seeing that there’s a big, giant, dense block of test, like, “Oh god, I have to make my way through this page.” These pages would be a delight to read.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, okay, I think that overall we were positive towards this and there are just some questions of orientation and clarification which is good.

**John:** What should we look at next? Unaccompanied Minor or James and the Wolf?

**Craig:** I don’t know. What do you think?

**John:** Let’s do Unaccompanied Minor.

**Craig:** All right, Unaccompanied Minor. I’ll go ahead and summarize this one.

**John:** This is by Jess Flower.

**Craig:** Jess Flower. So, we begin in an airport and we’re looking at the feet of a seven-year-old boy. He’s an unaccompanied minor. And he hops off the bench. He’s clearly alone. Walks with his little rolling suitcase with the face of Jack Skellington on it, which I love. And he checks the departure board and then he’s — and we see that he’s also with a flight attendant. And we’re just looking at feet now. No faces. No people.

We now go to gate B4 where we meet Kim, who is in her 30s, waiting to leave. And she’s been crying. Fixes her face. And then sees that there is his unaccompanied minor standing right near her, very close. He’s wearing a SARS mask, one of those little breathing mask things. And he just stares at her. She asks him if he’s with his mom or his dad or does he even understand English, because we see that he’s Asian.

And he says, “Nothing.” She tries to take his hand to lead him to the counter when the flight attendant shows up. She is also 30-something. Looks a bit worn. She checks to make sure that Kim is the person who is sitting next to this boy and explains that he is Korean and he does not speak English and that he is an unaccompanied minor and he is going to be flying next to her and she just likes to know who he is sitting next to.

She finds out that the boy is seven. And Kim expresses that she is impressed. The little boy reaches — also that she is a little bit afraid to fly herself. And the little boy reaches out and grabs her pinkie and gives a little smile.

**John:** And that’s our three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I liked a lot of the stuff here. And I like the idea of starting on just the feet and sort of you see this boy sort of piece by piece. And so you see his little shoes and you see his little rolling bag. And you’re gradually getting to know him.

I liked — I liked the idea of meeting this woman, Kim, and sort of her strange interaction with this kid. She doesn’t know sort of who this kid. She seems like a good person who is like trying to sort of figure out where she should take this kid when the flight attendant comes back and says — sort of gives the set up in terms of like this is the boy who is going to be sitting next to you on the plane. So, I am very curious what’s going to happen on the next ten pages, which is a very good sign on page three.

That said, I felt we got a little bit too much writing in that little first block. I felt like we were watching a title sequence. And maybe we were supposed to be watching a title sequence, but I got a lot of feet in that first section.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then when we got to Kim, I wanted more from her. I wanted some more information about her, because it felt like she’s a major character, but why does she only have a first name? I would love some sort of color line given to her because right now I don’t really quite know enough about her other than she was crying.

**Craig:** I think I like these a bit more than you did. Let me talk about what I thought should be amended slightly and then I’ll talk about what I liked. The thing about, that we all know, anybody with kids, or just if you’ve had the experience of sending your kid on their own, which I did once recently with my son who’s now old enough to do it. They’re never alone, ever, ever, ever.

So, there’s this thing where we understand that the flight attendant is the one who is essentially accompanying him. I believe that the rules are that if you have an unaccompanied minor you are actually allowed to, as a parent, go with them to the gate. So, there’s something a little off about this already in terms of facts.

But that aside, even if you wanted to go with a flight attendant because, for instance, the parents aren’t here, which may very well be the case, the flight attendant can’t ever be away from him. So, we start with just the boy and his feet. He even starts walking and then he’s joined by the flight attendant. Well, you know, now I’m a little confused because I don’t know is that just random or is she really with him?

When we get to Kim, she sees that suddenly this boy is there with her and the flight attendant is once again not there. And then the flight attendant comes back. So, she left him, which you don’t do either.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or, if she left him because she was working her job, she’s a flight attendant, we would need to see that she’s left him just for a brief moment and is looking at him and then we see Kim. Somehow or another we just need to explain the logic of this boy and his custody, even in a small way.

But here’s what I really liked. I love the specificity. We always talk about it. There’s this little boy. He’s got something sticking to the bottom of one tiny sneaker, which is such a nice little detail. And he’s wearing this mask and he’s got his Jack Skellington thing on the side of his luggage. These little things help me see the move and they also oddly enough create a mood of a little boy who has little boy things in a very grown up world where you are alone and you’re checking departures and you’re wearing SARS masks.

And I like the way that we that we learn things. I like that we learned how old he is. I like that we learned that he doesn’t speak English. I like that there was a little comedy in which Kim attempted to — she said, “Well, look for your Mamasan.” I mean, that’s kind of funny.

And then there’s little back stories that I feel like we’re building in. And here is why I disagree with you a little bit on Kim. I like actually that I almost know nothing, because I’m guessing that Jess Flower is going to reveal a whole bunch of things on this flight. I’m just guessing.

And so in a sense I like almost starting with “woman who was crying.” And now let me start to uncover things like last names, purposes, back stories, drama, and all the rest.

**John:** I didn’t even need like the full cheat and sort of like who she is or something specific. But I don’t know how she’s dressed. I don’t know, sort of, does she look like a business traveler, or she just looks like a casual traveler? I just wanted to have some picture in my mind for her. And I sort of had nothing. And so in a weird way I picked Kim Dickens as sort of like the actress who jumped into my head, which she might be fine, but I wanted some way to form an image.

Because I felt like I got a really picture of who this little boy was and I didn’t have a good picture for Kim.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s true. There may be a couple of details there that would help. But I thought the dialogue flowed really well. I thought it was good. Not quite sure what happened here with, “Uh…(looks at her phone)…yeah.” That parenthesis is misformatted. So, that’s the television way of doing it where you keep the parenthetical expression within the dialogue block and not on its own line. We tend to not do that in film. And by tend I mean we don’t do that in film.

**John:** Yeah. So all the other parentheticals were fine. So, I think it was just a random fluke.

**Craig:** It must have been a typo. Yeah, a fluky thing.

**John:** But I would say I actually did like this more than you think I liked this. I was genuinely intrigued. And one of the things I definitely noticed is I felt I could hear the music underneath it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Which is a strange thing to say, but couldn’t you sort of hear the little bouncy kind of thing that is underneath?

**Craig:** Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. It is a good example of how pages can do very little but do a lot. And they were confident pages and they were quite pages, but I learned a lot and I actually started — the best thing I could say about what Jess did here is that after three pages of learning how old these people are and the fact that they’re about to fly somewhere, I’m already caring about them.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s a great sign. So, good job I thought, Jess. It sounds like John did, too.

**John:** Yay. Our third and final entry in the Three Page Challenge today is James and the Wolf by James Smith. So, I wonder if James is the James in the story. Maybe it’s all autobiographical.

**Craig:** [laughs] I hope it’s not, based on page one.

**John:** So, our story opens, a Malibu, California beach. And we find “James Morris, 32, (devil may care),” waking up stark naked on the beach, hung over. There is a handwritten note taped to his chest. The note says, “It was great meeting you. Thanks for the car. I called you a cab. See you on the other side.”

He finds his clothes. Inside the pocket he finds a credit card, his New York State driver’s license. And then drinks the last little bit of whisky out of a bottle. Lights a cigarette, coughs, spits up some blood, and then he sees something in the distance, a nebulous figure approaching. He can’t tell what it is yet. We’re close on James — astonishment mixed with fright as we smash cut to Motor City Bar, Lower East Side of New York. The title over says, “One month earlier.”

**Craig:** Cue Stuart’s squealing. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, one month earlier…mm. And it’s a conversation between James and his best friend Ivan who is 32. And they talk about a 12-year-old kid who went swimming in a lake and probably had a crush on a girl. They’re just chatting. It’s sort of a strippy strip club, or at least you can tuck dollar bills into garter belts.

And they’re talking about this kid who ended up picking up a protozoa, an amoeba while swimming in this lake and went right up into his nose and sucked out his brains and presumably killed him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that is the conversation that ends on page three. Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** Well, not a bad idea to start a movie with a hangover, right?

**John:** Well, at least it’s fresh.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] I think that, a couple of things, nothing wrong with the way these pages were written in general. Things are happening here. Certainly painted a picture of this guy. He seems to be a total degenerate. Spitting out a little blood to me is something that, again, let’s just all agree together that blood is a thing, right? You don’t just casually spit up blood and go, “Eh.”

Is he dying, in which case he spits up blood and doesn’t seem to care, because that’s the same old thing? Or is he like, “Oh, I’m spitting up blood!” Let us know his reaction to the blood. It’s sort of important for us in the audience to know.

And then he sees something in the distance. We can’t tell what it is, but he seems to. And he’s, “Oh, no,” And then we smash cut to — personally I find that a weird place to smash but, but maybe not. Because when we come back to him I guess that thing is going to be running at him. But, that’s fine.

So, we do Stuart’s favorite thing, “one month earlier.” “Chryon”, which is a typo for Chyron, which is a retro —

**John:** An ancient term.

**Craig:** Yeah, an ancient term for subtitles.

**John:** For Title Over.

**Craig:** Yeah, Chyron was never used in film anyway. Chyron was only for television. It was a video tool. You know, those goofy old video titles. So, let’s not use Chyron or “Chryon.”

**John:** So, let’s give what the appropriate choices are. Title Over is fine. Super is fine.

**Craig:** Super. Subtitle. I guess subtitle is really more for dialogue. So, Title, Super, exactly. I usually do Title is what I say.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, we’re in this bar and it’s one month earlier. Sometimes it’s hard to go — a lot of times it’s hard to go from a person to a person when you do the “one month earlier” game. Because it’s just, you don’t know — even though we’re saying one month earlier, I just find it — I just find it TV in a way. And not to put TV down; it’s just small — it’s sort of like, “We only have one character in this movie. Let’s see where he was a month ago.”

Instead of sort of establishing a bar outside, seeing people walking around, setting the scene a little bit. You know what I mean? Then following Ivan in, having him sit down, and then we see James. And we reveal that James looks great. You know, find some information there to give us other than them just sitting.

They have this — this kind of discussion is a tough one to pull off. It’s a little purple. It’s a little pushed. It’s vaguely Tarantino, where two people are talking about something that’s very specific and really articulate and kind of the content is already very vivid about a kid dying. But we don’t know why they’re talking about it. It seems like such a weird and unrealistic random thing for two people to be talking about.

And while they’re talking about it he’s sort of hitting on this girl across the room, and doing coke, and tucking dollar bills into the garter belt. It felt a little fakey to me.

**John:** So, here’s an example of where I didn’t believe the dialogue:

**Craig:** “Pernicious protozoa.”

**John:** Yeah, and protozoa is capitalized. It felt a little, you know, like Oscar Wilde’s Tarantino I didn’t — not even really knowing these two characters — I didn’t believe that they were having this conversation. Because the world wasn’t pushed enough that we’re truly in Tarantino territory. I just didn’t — it didn’t click for me.

**Craig:** Even when you are in Tarantino territory, there is — and you’ve just decided to be the person that’s going to rip him off like so many people try and do, this is not the way to do it anyway. It’s just hard to — these pages — this time in a movie is so precious. I don’t want to hear this kind of rambling pseudo hip story. I want to know about this person. I want to know about what’s going on in their head.

And if it’s — I mean, for instance, let’s say Ivan is rambling about this stupid story about — not that the story is stupid, but the movie suggests Ivan’s story about this kid is stupid and boring. James is staring at this girl, sees her do some coke. He’s even more interested. She’s interested in him. And James is barely saying enough to follow along with this insane story. And then finally just says, “Dude, honestly, no one gives a shit.” Gets up and walks over to the girl.

I’m engaged, I’m learning. You know?

**John:** Yeah. Yeah, if it’s two characters talking about a third thing and that third thing is supposed to be what’s interesting, that’s not a good use of page two.

**Craig:** Right. It’s not a good use of page two. And, also, either you want me to understand that the character — characters have intension. The actors, you know, we talked last week about intentions in a moment. Actors need to know where their attention is going. You can’t play being attentive to two things at once. You can’t. In real life, maybe theoretically some people can do it, but not really. Really we’re concentrating on one thing, and sort of concentrating on another, and that’s why people crash their cars when they’re texting.

I can’t tell if James is concentrating on this girl, or James is concentrating on the story. If he’s concentrating on the girl, then he story is hyper literate for a guy that’s not really, you know, and also why would he even be telling a story while he staring at the girl. That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s take a look at sort of if you were to use that same story and you want to do what Craig is describing where one person is telling a story, the other person is not really listening. Don’t have it be a dialogue. I mean, literally just keep one person talking and don’t keep interrupting it because you’re just taking up a lot of time and space to do that.

So, if James started telling the story and just sort of plowed through it, and then let Ivan be the guy looking at the girl doing coke or whatever else you want to do — that can work. And that way we actually see what the intention of both people in that scene is. Like one wants to get the other one to hear the story. The other one wants to pay attention to that girl down the end of the bar. Then at least that’s interesting. There’s a conflict happening there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Back to page one. About two-thirds of the way down the page:

That’s at least two sentences too long.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** No one wants to read that much in a movie.

**Craig:** Correct. And not because we hate reading. It just stops the movie and thus takes you out of the movie. It’s a weird thing.

**John:** So, I would say the most you get by with is, “Thanks for the car. I called you a cab.” That’s all you need.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would also take a look at this first page and it’s essentially all two lines together. And so I made my way through the page. I didn’t have any problems. But if I’m just looking at the page from a glance, there’s nothing breaking up my vision. And I feel like I could kind of skip to any line in that page.

Granted, like no one is really talking in the scene, but some better way to break up the page could be very useful, even if it’s like a single word line to sort of break this up a little bit could be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m also a fan of one page one starting just a little bit down from the top, which I just like, where I don’t start page one right at the very tip top of the page, just to let people sort of ease into the page.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Not a must at all. But I’ll give myself an extra inch at the top, a few extra returns at the top.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. Also, I have an issue with the blurry POV that happens in the middle of the page. You can kind of start with a blurry POV, but you can’t insert it. Because we’ve already seen the beach, we’ve already seen where we are. And so it’s just going to be odd to then be inside of his POV. We don’t need it.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. I mean, think of the opening of Lost. It starts blurry, but then it sharpens up. And that’s what you need.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, it’s sort of you start that way, or you don’t do it.

**John:** Agreed. One last comment just going back to the tile page. James and the Wolf, written by James Smith. I can’t look at that and not think, well, is “James” James? And maybe that’s deliberate, but maybe it’s not. And so if you as the writer are writing something and the lead character has your name, they’re going to associate that.

Just like, Craig, if you wrote a movie where there’s a guy named Craig who kills his wife and two children, people might be little concerned.

**Craig:** Does he get away with it?

**John:** [laughs] Ha! We won’t know until page 110.

**Craig:** Hmm. It’s funny. I totally agree. It caught my eye. And the other thing that — this is a marketing thing now, so let’s just put on our market notes hats. James Smith may be the most boring name possible. It’s not your fault. It’s — I mean, you yourself James Smith are probably a very exciting and interesting, unique person. But James Smith sounds like John Jones.

For you, since if you go on IMDb I’m guessing that they’re up to 20 James Smiths, many of whom are in the electrical department and so forth. You are a candidate for using your middle name. And normally I find that sort of a little pretentious and whatever, but especially if you have an interesting middle name, throw it in there. Throw it in there.

**John:** I fully agree with Craig Mazin on this. Craig, what’s your middle name?

**Craig:** Lawrence.

**John:** Ah, Craig Lawrence. That actually feels like a fancy writer.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s why I don’t use it.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Because I haven’t earned.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Do you have a middle name?

**John:** Well, I do, because you know that August is not my original name.

**Craig:** Right. You’re original name is Meise.

**John:** Meise.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** Ah-ha. That’s why I changed it.

**Craig:** Wait, is it M-E-I, or M-I-E?

**John:** M-E-I.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** It’s German. So in German it’s Meise [pronounced Mei-sa].

**Craig:** Meise. Yes. Meise.

**John:** And so that’s now my middle name.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** But my born middle name was Tilton.

**Craig:** Tilton?

**John:** And John Tilton is an okay name, but it’s not fantastic.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It feels small.

**Craig:** Yes, John Tilton feels — yeah, he feels like a fuddy-duddy, doesn’t he?

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Like the headmaster, Headmaster Tilton.

**John:** And I did consider taking, before I moved to Los Angeles, I was like, well, I knew I was going to probably change my name. And I considered taking my mom’s maiden name, which was Peters, but there’s already of course a very famous John Peters who is a producer.

**Craig:** Yes. And you could do better in terms of associations.

**John:** Yeah. So, I ended up taking my father’s middle name, which is August. He was Henry August Meise.

**Craig:** It’s too bad, though, because Meise and Mazin, that would be a fun podcast.

**John:** Yeah, the M&M Podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the Z sounds in there. It’s very close. Very close. But, listen, it was not to be.

**John:** In an alternate universe, that’s the podcast we’re doing. But this is the one we did today.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is this really great video I watched today on the Globe Theatre in England, they try to do historical recreations of Shakespeare plays the way they would have been encountered in their time. So, they try to do original dress, original kind of lighting, so it’s all done in sort of full daylight.

And one of the things that they have introduced is they try to use original pronunciation rather than just received pronunciation. So, most of the Shakespeare we’ve heard has been received pronunciation which is that sort of — well, it’s what we associate with Shakespearean drama sounding like. It’s very clear and articulate and very — it’s sort of big English. But that’s not the way it actually sounded back in Shakespeare’s day when the plays were first performed.

And so this video is really fascinating. It’s a father and son, who are both actors, who went back and sort of reconstructed what the original pronunciation sounded like based on what words really rhymed at the time of Shakespeare, and just the notes that writers at the time were making about how things sounded, like how Rs were pronounced and where the vowels where.

And so it is actually really fascinating. The talk about doing one play that they did both in original pronunciation and received pronunciation. And it’s five minutes shorter in original pronunciation.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It flows more quickly and more smoothly. There are jokes which only work in original pronunciation like our word “hour,” like for 60 minutes, was “oar.” And so it rhymes with whore.

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

**John:** So, there’s jokes and puns that only really work in the original pronunciation. So, I found it fascinating. And so anyone who likes words, or English, or Shakespeare, which is hopefully 100% of our podcast listenership, might enjoy this video.

**Craig:** Excellent. I have a follow up on a One Cool Thing and then a new One Cool Thing.

Quick follow up. Writer Duet, which I believe it was last week’s One Cool Thing, I mentioned that when I tried to load an entire script using Safari that the whole thing just slowed to a crawl. But I suspected that the developer would get on that.

Well, boy, did he, like within a day. And it works great now. So, I loaded in the whole script and on Safari it works great. So, really impressed. Writer Duet, they’re doing a great job over there.

This week’s One Cool Thing may get me into a little bit of trouble, but I don’t care. [laughs]

**John:** Craig Mazin does not care about trouble.

**Craig:** Don’t care. Many people know that I am a skeptic. Not a skeptic like, “Pfft,” but a traditional skeptic who believes in the power of evidence, demonstrations, critical thinking. And generally I am a strong and vocal critic of what I consider to be an entire world of flimflam, not limited to paranormal, ghosts, ESP, but also a lot of the “alternative” medicines and theories that are out there, homeopathy, and kinesiology, and all this nonsense that is just not true.

So, there’s a video that’s been around for awhile, but a friend of mine sent it to me and I hadn’t seen it in awhile and it’s just amazing. It’s an animated version — you know how sometimes people go on these rants and then somebody animates it and it just makes it awesome?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, I believe he’s Australian from his accent. A guy named Tim Minchin. And he does this amazing kind of beat poetry rant about an encounter he has at a dinner party with a woman who is very anti-scientific and astrological and alternative and so on and so forth.

And he’s so smart and he’s so clever and he’s so acerbic. And the associated animation is just wonderful. And there’s just some great stuff in it. So, I’m going to send Stuart the link so he can include it in the notes.

Look, if you love alternative medicine, and you love homeopathy, and you believe that science requires just as much faith as religion, don’t watch it. It’s just going to upset you. But if you’re like me, watch it. It’s amazing.

**John:** That sounds great. I will watch.

**Craig:** You will definitely watch it.

**John:** As we wrap up this episode, we are going to have an outro of original music that a listener sent in. And we’ve been doing that since episode 98. And I realized that, you know what, we should actually put all of those listener outros together in one track. And so we did. There’s now a post up on the site which we will put a link to that shows all the outros we’ve used so far.

And I just want to thank our awesome people for sending in outros.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** Because they’re just really fantastic. And I knew we would have some really talented writers listening to us, but I had no- I had an inkling that we would have some really talented music folks listening to us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so take a listen to some of the outros we’ve used so far. If it inspires you to write your own outro and send it to us, we would love it. So, you send a link to ask@johnaugust.com. And people have been sending links to SoundCloud which works perfectly. And so that’s a great choice if you would like to send us a sample of — or an outro that we could use on the show.

We just ask that the outros incorporate some way the theme which is, “Bum, bum, bum, bum, BUM.” And people have done a brilliant job so far. So, you can see what they’ve done.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’ve really done a good, I mean, they’ve all been really good. I’m very impressed.

**John:** Yeah. And that is our episode this week. So, if you like the show and are not subscribed in iTunes, you should probably subscribe in iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes and we are right there. If you’re subscribing there and want to leave a comment, that is fantastic. We love those, too.

If you have a question for me, or for Craig, if it’s short Twitter is by far the best choice. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

If you have a longer question, we sometimes answer those in an episode. Write into ask@johnaugust.com and we will sort through the mailbag every once and awhile.

Next week, Craig, I will see you live in person for Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Live! Live! It’s going to be a fun, fun show. I’m very excited.

**John:** I’m very excited to have you here. And then in October I will see you live again at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Where we will be doing both a live Scriptnotes with you, and me, and Rian Johnson. And very likely a Three Page Challenge live for folks. So, if you are going to be coming to the Austin Film Festival and would like to submit a Three Page Challenge for us to talk about there, and possibly have you up on stage to talk with us about it, send it to Stuart. And follow the same instructions — johnaugust.com/threepage. All spelled out.

But flag somewhere in that email, “Hey, I will be at Austin and therefore could participate in the live show.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because we would love to see you.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Craig, thank you again for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you in New York.

Links:

* [Gravity](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/gravity/) on Apple Trailers
* Download [Highland v 1.5](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) now!
* [The Little Mermaid: Second Screen Live](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpRQ5Mw2lM) trailer
* Scriptnotes, Episode 92: [The Little Mermaid](http://johnaugust.com/2013/the-little-mermaid)
* Jane’s Addiction’s [Irresistible Force](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOi5Hdbd7Q) isn’t quite a classic
* How to [submit your three pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) (and let us know if you’ll be [in Austin](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/))
* Three Pages by [Erin M. Bradley](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ErinMBradley.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Jess Flower](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JessFlower.pdf)
* Three Pages by [James Smith](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JamesSmith.pdf)
* Screenwriting.io on [SUPER](http://screenwriting.io/what-does-super-mean/)
* [Shakespeare with its original pronounciation](http://kottke.org/13/09/shakespeare-with-its-original-pronounciation)
* [Tim Minchin’s Storm](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jason Young

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/adventures-in-semi-colons).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 105 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Yeah, I really miss Moviefone guy.

**Craig:** Moviefone guy was awesome. He was enthusiastic about anything, didn’t matter what. “You have selected Care Bears at 9:40am.”

**John:** [laughs] I think if someone is going to a Care Bears movie at 9:40pm, it’s really troubling. That’s an example — I haven’t even thought about Moviefone, but an example of like technology replacing something. Like who would use Moviefone now?

**Craig:** Moviefone, there must be a word for technology that in and of itself was revolutionary but only occupied a very thin wedge of time before it washed away by even more revolutionary technology.

**John:** Revolutionary obsolescence. So, that tiniest little sliver of time which was very, very important. You had actually sent me a long time ago the David Fincher directed You Will commercials.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Which we’ll find a link to those. They’re so amazing. So, basically this is 1993, I think. AT&T hired David Fincher to direct these commercials about like how in the future these amazing things will happen and AT&T will be the company that will provide them for you.

And the truth is AT&T didn’t really provide almost any of the stuff that they say in the commercials, but a lot of it is almost exactly right. And so like video calling, except they’re using a phone booth and it’s like, what? Or you’ll send a fax from the beach and it’s like, well, you’ll send email; that’s better than a fax.

**Craig:** Right. You’ll send a PDF.

**John:** And I love seeing a young Jenna Elfman tucking her baby into bed on the little video phone.

**Craig:** That’s right. Normally futurists get it completely wrong. In this case they were spot on.

**John:** They were spot on except that David Fincher foresaw a future in which everyone was living inside Blade Runner. And it didn’t happen quite that way.

**Craig:** No. Turns out we just don’t want that.

**John:** No. It turns out we basically want to stare at our iPhones the whole day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But we’re not going to do that right now because we have a lot to talk about.

**Craig:** So much.

**John:** We’re going to do three Three Page Challenges today. But first off we need to like not bury the lead and there is going to be a New York City live show coming up.

**Craig:** Ah yeah!

**John:** There were legends and rumors about it on the last podcast, but it’s actually really happening now.

**Craig:** I’m going back home, to my hometown. We’re gonna do it!

**John:** [laughs] It’ll be Monday, September 23, at 8pm. It’s going to be at the New World Stages on 50th. It’s just amazing that it’s actually all worked out. And so I think we’re going to be selling tickets starting tomorrow. So, if you’re listening to this podcast on the day it comes out, on Tuesday, I think on that Wednesday we’ll be selling tickets.

But, if not, then Craig or I will tweet about it. And so you will see like, ooh, this is the date that they’re actually selling tickets.

**Craig:** Where could we get the tickets?

**John:** You can follow the link that will be on johnaugust.com that will take you to the right place. And so we’ll have the actual click-through code to do that. It’s a Telecharge theater, so we have to sell them through Telecharge. So, tickets are actually $10 rather than the $5 I would love them to be, which was LA, but it’s also New York, so everything is more expensive.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But for your $10 you’re not only getting me, and Craig, and a live show, and sort of the other surprises that come with that; you’re getting actually Andrew Lippa who is the lyricist and composer for Big Fish who I’ve been talking about on the podcast for forever. And there will be a piano there, so I think there’s going to be some singing.

**Craig:** Ahh!

**John:** I think Craig is going to have to do some singing.

**Craig:** [sings] I don’t have to.

**John:** It’s always been rumored that Craig will sing on the show and this time it’ll happen.

**Craig:** Well, just, I mean, if I’m going to be on a Broadway stage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A Broadway-ish stage.

**John:** Did I tell you what stage we’re actually going to be on?

**Craig:** You mentioned that this is the stage where people here songs like, “Everyone’s a little racist, today.”

**John:** Well, see, that’s the amazing thing. So, we’re in this theater complex that is also hosting Avenue Q, a pretty amazing show. Peter and the Starcatcher, another show I love. But, those shows actually have shows that night, so we couldn’t be on one of their stages, so we needed to find a stage that was going to be available on Monday at 8pm. And it turns out to be Gazillion Bubble Show.

**Craig:** Ooh, I don’t know the Gazillion Bubble Show.

**John:** The Gazillion Bubble Show is a popular family entertainment that is designed for people with young kids who should not be going to a show at 8pm. The people who should be going to a show at 8pm on Monday September 23 are screenwriters and people who are interested in things that screenwriters are interested in.

**Craig:** Great. I am super excited. Just so excited. I really am. I mean, it’s a big deal to see my peeps and your peeps. Hopefully given that it’s a city of 14 billion people on a small island, that people will show up.

**John:** Yeah, you’re exaggerating a little bit, but I think people will be able to come. Los Angeles we sold out in four minutes. I really don’t think we’re going to sell out in four minutes, but I would say that it would be useful to follow Craig or I on Twitter so that we can tell you if there’s something, there’s a reason to move quickly on tickets, because we just don’t know. We have no idea how many people are coming to that show.

**Craig:** If we sold out in LA in four minutes, I think it’s fair to say that we might sell out in New York in eight minutes.

**John:** I would hope that just for everyone wanting to be able to come that everyone can come who wants to come, but I do want people to be able to come who want to see it. Plus Andrew Lippa has like a bunch of people who want to see him for Broadway reasons, so that’s going to create seat competition too.

**Craig:** I would like to make one request: No weirdos.

**John:** Yeah. No weirdos.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what I mean, I don’t mean quirky. I mean, if people just don’t like you, don’t come.

**John:** So, there won’t be a bar in our actual facility, but there will be a cash bar down the hallway. And so you can go and hang out and see people who saw Avenue Q at the same time, too. And so we’ll go down there and it’ll be fun.

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** Like all things, it will be tighter and more packed because it’s New York City, but it should be a good time.

**Craig:** Tighter and more packed. More expensive. The usual.

**John:** Usually. Sometimes.

**Craig:** More Jewish.

**John:** Speaking of things that are small and packed full of value, those USB Scriptnotes drives — I’m desperate for segues at all points. That’s really a defining characteristic. I’m always looking for the segue to get me out of this talking competition.

**Craig:** I gave you one. I said more Jewish. There’s so many ways you could have gone with that.

**John:** How could I go from Jewish to a USB drive, Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** So, for those of you looking to save money or perhaps if you’re looking for a good deal… — Oh, you can’t do that; that’s racist.

**John:** I can’t do that.

**Craig:** But you know what? [sings] Everyone’s a little bit racist, today.

**John:** If you’re being specifically anti-Semitic, is that racist in general?

**Craig:** It is. Because, the Jewish people are both people of religion and they are also an ethnic group.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I can’t argue with you because you’re Jewish.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. Ha!

**John:** Trump card thrown.

**Craig:** Finally! It’s the upside. Uh…

**John:** So, can you hear the sirens on my side?

**Craig:** You bet. Oh, and it feels good, man. It feels good.

**John:** Yeah. I’m above a fire station here, which has usually actually not been so bad at all, except for all the tourists who want to like get their photo taken in front of the New York Fire Station. It’s like, I kind of get it, but at the same time, get out of my way.

**Craig:** Right. Well, you are officially becoming a New Yorker.

**John:** Yeah. That’s really what it has come down to is I’m annoyed by all these things. I think I may have already told this on the podcast but for someone who doesn’t live in New York, I live in New York a lot now. And I remember thinking when I was here for rehearsals this last time, “Who should I vote for for mayor?” And then I realized, oh, I don’t live here.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can’t vote.

**John:** I can’t vote. But what I will do, and can do, is tell you that the USB drives that hold the first 100 episodes of Scriptnotes, a bunch of people bought them which is fantastic and we’re so glad you bought them. They’re being made now. And they will be in the mail soon. We hope to get them out the door this coming week. I don’t know that we’re going to quite hit that date, but they’ll be coming out really soon.

And so after we said this is the cutoff and we’re not making any more of them, we really aren’t going to make any more of them, but we made enough that I think we’re going to have some left over. So, at a certain point we’ll reopen the store and sell some more of those ones, because I know that people keep joining the show late and the USB drives are a helpful way for people to catch up on 100 episodes of Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of awesomeness. Sheer awesome.

**John:** Of awesomeness.

**Craig:** Pure awesome.

**John:** You had news, too. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah, a little housekeeping of my own. Last podcast we were discussing the Olympics in one of our little side trips. And I mentioned that the Olympics were started in Greece, cradle of civilization. How strange then that they should be taking place in Russia where they’re strangely being uncivilized towards our LGBT — am I leaving one out? LGBT, yeah, that group.

**John:** That’s the group.

**Craig:** Friends. And Lexi Alexander, a Twitter follower of ours, pointed out in fact I was an ignoramus, [laughs] because while the games did, of course, originate in Greece, when they originated they were religious in nature. They were for men only. The men competed in the nude. And women were barred from watching. And if, in fact, they were caught watching they were put to death.

So, on the one hand, yes, Lexi is absolutely correct — my view that the Olympics were somehow borne of enlightened civilization. No, they were not. On the other hand, the Olympics are even gayer than I thought.

**John:** Yeah, they’re gayer and more horrible than you ever thought. [Crosstalk]

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. So, really, Russia, if you want to be true to the Olympic spirit, which was borne from nude men wrestling, I don’t know, rethink your dumb decisions.

**John:** Oh Russia.

**Craig:** Oh Russia!

**John:** But it’s not like we can even point to like this is a time where Russia was fantastic and like go back to that time. No, there have been problems kind of from the start.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re consistently wrong about stuff. Consistently.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like the US has had some really good strong golden periods where you could point to significant flaws and sort of how some stuff was working, but the overall spirit was really good, like, “Oh, that’s a promising country.” And rarely can you say, “Wow, Russia is where I really want to be.”

**Craig:** They haven’t had their Golden Age, have they? [laughs] It’s been one awful situation after another. And vodka seems to make the pain go away.

**John:** Yeah. I think it was a Simpsons line. “Oh alcohol. The cause of and solution to most of life’s problems.”

**Craig:** “All of life’s problems.” Yeah.

**John:** All of those problems.

**Craig:** In Russia [crosstalk].

**John:** Today we have — did you have more to do business, or can we get to the Three Page Challenges?

**Craig:** Should I come up with something? Nah, whatever. Let’s do it. Let’s just go ahead and let’s do it.

**John:** Stuart did us right this week. And I thought we have interesting things to talk about.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** So, should we start with Oblivion?

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** Or Bury My Heart? Let’s start with Oblivion.

**Craig:** Do you want to summarize, or shall I?

**John:** I will summarize this one.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** This is An Oblivion Prolonged. It’s by Keith Alan Eiler. As always, we need to thank, and I feel like sometimes we don’t — this has gotten to be so routine that we’re not acknowledging and thanking people for their bravery and courage in sending in these three pages of their scripts to us.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Because that’s really kind of amazing that they’re trusting that we’re going to talk about their work on the air and hopefully get productive feedback, but also let the whole rest of the world see what they wrote. Anyway, so thank you Keith for sending this in.

So, story starts, exterior the Mars Space Station. And so this is a space station that is above the planet, but we’re actually inside a psychologist’s office. And Dr. Anderson is doing a consultation and a meeting with a guy named David Troxler, who is 40. And they’re talking about Troxler’s relationship with his wife and just other difficulties on the station. And clearly something is going not great but not terribly. They wouldn’t want to end up like Perkins.

And so Perkins is actually a guy we see running frantically down the space station hallway. We’re watching him from the security camera’s point of view. He’s dressed in pajama bottoms. Like, he’s freaking out.

We’re also meeting some other people on the space station, Jake Martell, who is watching this footage, and Perkins is talking about himself and sort of what he did in the past. “It’s weird just to be watching, seeing it all outside myself through different eyes.” It’s basically near the end of one of their rotations on the station and it’s clearly time to consider whether to re-up or not re-up. And that is about as much as we know of the situation on the station at the end of page three.

**Craig:** I detected that you were struggling a bit to summarize this. [laughs]

**John:** Yes, you did. It’s not just because I read it this morning and now we’re late at night.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It was hard to grab onto specific memorable story details from these three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was, actually all three of the Three Pages that we’re going to discuss today tied back somewhat neatly to our discussion last week about confusing the audience and finding that line between mystery and confusion. And here I think we fall pretty rapidly into confusion territory.

On the one hand I commend our author, Keith, for being ambitious here in the way he’s presenting this. And it is an interesting situation. We’re looking at a space station and then when we go inside the space station we see that there’s a therapy session going on. It reminded me a little bit of the opening scene of Blade Runner where the replicant is being interviewed and it was somewhat disturbing.

But a couple of things sort of jumped out that kept stopping me. A small thing — we don’t use “pre-lap” generally in feature films. We use “off-screen” usually.

**John:** I use pre-lap all the time.

**Craig:** Oh, you say pre-lap? It’s the first time I’ve seen it in a script, but that’s fine. Then it’s a choice. It’s no big deal.

Dr. Anderson, I mean, and the descriptions of things are interesting and well written. I thought the dialogue was interesting. But I couldn’t quite follow what was going on here in this discussion. It seems that Troxler is having issues with his wife, Ellen. He refers to the Kepler problem, which Dr. Anderson doesn’t understand, nor did I.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dr. Anderson is uncomfortable. I’m not sure why. He brings it back to a discussion of the wife. Troxler, “a smirk briefly plays on Troxler’s lips, then fades.” Not sure why. And then Dr. Anderson starts talking about a conversation that he’s had with Troxler’s wife, which also sort of surprised me because generally therapists don’t do that.

Bu then Troxler sort of laughs at the thought that she’s starting to lose it. And now Dr. Anderson is comfortable and now all the weirdness has gone away. I’m not sure why. And then they refer to Perkins. When we go to Perkins, what we’re seeing actually is a video of Perkins freaking out. And then we reveal that he’s in a sick bay room with Jake Martell, possibly a doctor, I’m not sure, or an assistant or so forth. And he’s watching this video with Perkins and Perkins is talking about, “I guess I won’t be joining you out there.

He says, “I bet it turns out to be a latchup with that five series.” I just don’t know what’s happening or what’s going on.

So, by the end of page three I was confused both by the circumstances, I was confused by some of the in jokes that I think I was supposed to get but didn’t. And I was confused mostly about the emotional state of a bunch of these people. So, I’m not sure what to think.

I mean, it could be that by page four through eight everything clicks in and I get it. But, I don’t know, what about you.

**John:** So, yes, clearly I share a lot of your concern that I had a hard time knowing what was going on. And our mutual friend, Rawson Thurber, he has this term which I trot out every once and awhile, is “obscurity for death,” which is like I don’t understand what’s happening and sometimes I worry that this writer is using our confusion as sort of like a smokescreen so we think that more is happening than is really happening.

Some basics, some fundamental things I was confused about, which is just from a writing perspective: how big is this space station? If you’re going to show us an exterior of the spaces station, give us a sense of size and scale because after these three pages I don’t know if there’s 100 people on the station or 1,000 or ten. And so I have a very limited sense of what this is.

I’m thinking it’s a pretty big space station if they have a separate psychologist’s office. And if someone has like — one of them has like a living room. So, it’s like, well, if you’re big enough to have — or Troxler has a dining room. If you’re in a station that is big enough that you actually have a dining room, like not a dining hall, but a private dining room, that’s a pretty big thing.

I didn’t have a good sense of what kind of world I was in. And that was frustrating to me.

All that said, this guy could be Shane Carruth. This guy could be a guy who makes Primer or Upstream Color, both of which are like really hard to follow at the start, but are actually genius.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I want to fully acknowledge that this could be just terrific and it’s just very hard to follow in this Three Page little sample.

Looking at some specific things on the page, though. First off, Craig is right, and pre-lap is not the right word for Troxler on page one. Pre-lap is if a person is going to start talking before the cut, and it’s sort of important that they’re talking before the cut. But that would mean that he would have to be the first person talking after the cut, and that’s not happening here. So, it’s really off-screen is what you’d want there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “EXT. MARS SPACE STATION — SPACE.” Eh, we’re in space twice. To me, I say you can get rid of the day and night kind of thing when you’re in space. You’re in space.

Let’s look at the very first sentence: “We see a faintly lit space station over the desolate surface of Mars.” Well, here’s a case where we don’t need “we see.” It’s just, “A faintly lit space station over the desolate surface of Mars.” We need no subject. We need no verb. Just give us that fragment because that’s what we need. It’s just sort of the noun phrase explaining what this is.

**Craig:** And also say “The faintly lit.” It’s a small thing, but if you’ve established that Mars Space Station exists in the slug line, then I would go to “the.”

**John:** Yeah, “the.” Or, you might just give us space and then reveal. Like, why don’t you be a little bit more cinematic in that very first moment of like how you’re showing what this is? And give us a sense of the size, because right now I don’t know what I’m looking at. And that’s frustrating for the reader who is starting this thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We may title this episode Adventures in Semi-Colons, because semi-colons prop up as a problem here.

**Craig:** Yeah, I noticed this.

**John:** The same first paragraph. “Round and round, never stopping; providing artificial gravity to its inhabitants.” Okay, a semi-colon is almost never the right choice. They’re a very powerful tool but they’re almost never kind of the right thing you want to use, especially in screenwriting.

First off, it’s not even the right grammatical form here because that should be an independent phrase after the semi-colon.

**Craig:** Two independent clauses. The second somehow commenting on the first.

**John:** Yes. That’s not happening here.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** A comma would work here.

**Craig:** Or a dash, or an ellipses.

**John:** Yes. Or, most cases where I’ve seen people try to join thoughts together with a semi-colon, a period would have been a much better friend. Screenwriting is about short sentences. So, keep those sentences short.

We’re inside the psychologist’s office. “This is a practical square room with tile carpeting, plain walls, and an airtight hatch for an entrance.” That’s D&D description. That’s very much like, you know, you’ve entered into a 40 foot by 40 foot room with a pit on the far side. It’s not painting the world in a special way. And so this is not a terrific way to start a block.

**Craig:** I agree. But, I’ll also qualify the criticism a little bit by saying this may be the style of this movie. In other words, this movie may be a kind of very antiseptic, cold sort of thing.

If you notice — Keith, I assume this is intentional. I hope it is, otherwise I’m angry — Keith is constantly commenting on the colors of things.

So, I just wonder if this is part of the vibe. Because everyone seems sort of oddly Valiumed and even the descriptions of the rooms are Valiumed. So, maybe that’s part of the style of it. But, I agree, and unfortunately it makes for a very challenging first three pages.

**John:** It does. And I haven’t read the script for Moon. I really liked the movie Moon. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the very first pages of Moon kind of felt like this, because it’s just like people plotting through a normal routine.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then again you have to be able to get people to read page four. And so there’s always that issue. I agree with you on the Kepler problem. It’s really a challenge when you’re starting off a movie by referring to someone who is not even on screen and like are we supposed to get it, are we not supposed to get it? Now I’m confused. Should I be looking back ahead to see if I’ve missed something? That’s a frustration is when you’re referring to something we have no idea of what you’re actually taking about. And then when the character is in the world, or ambiguous about how they’re responding to it, it’s not going to be your best friend.

On a general character sense, I have a hard time believing this doctor/patient relationship. Now, maybe it actually all makes sense. Maybe there’s a really good reason why these things are this way. And later on in the film I will understand what was actually happening, but in the moment I saw it I didn’t believe it. And so much of screenwriting is maintaining the reader’s trust. And that being confident in the writer’s ability to get me to the next point. Like my placing my faith in you is merited and when I don’t believe this thing that seems like it’s a psychologist/patient relationship, then I’m a little suspicious as I go onto the next page, and the next page.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a tough one. It may be mumblecore in space. And it may be awesome, like you said. These are challenging pages. They’re challenging to the reader. That’s not always a bad thing, but I would say I guess to Keith hopefully that was your intention. Because if it wasn’t, then we have a problem. If it was, well, you’re there. And then you understand that you’ve made your bed a certain way and you’re going to lie in it. And some people are going to be into it and some people are just going to check out and it’s not going to be for them.

But as long as this is what you intended, I would have to say you’ve achieved it.

**John:** Yeah. One thing I actually really liked, on page three, was I really Perkins’ line, “I bet it turns out to be latchup with that five series.” That’s the kind of, like, it’s something that’s out there in the world I sort of believe that they’re talking about. It’s when characters talk about football and I don’t really know what they’re talking about, but I believe they know what they’re talking about. So, like “latchup” is a strange word, but I believe it’s a word that exists in their world.

I’d much rather have that kind of, like I don’t know what they’re talking about, because I believe they know what they’re talking about, than referencing some character who is not there and I need to start thinking about them.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny. I know what you mean, but I didn’t like it here because it felt a little precious, it felt a little forced. Look at me, I’m using lingo that they don’t understand, especially because even what he was saying, to me this was the part where the dialogue got a little chunky. “Guess I won’t be joining you out there tonight, Jake.”

That’s just not a very good line.

**John:** No, it’s not.

**Craig:** And then, “I bet it turns out to be…” Why are you saying what you bet it turns out to be? You’re not joining him out there. You’re upset. You just watched yourself freaking out. It seemed like a weird moment to do that. But, you know, then again, this is… — Clearly there’s a very specific tone here and this is one of those areas where I don’t want to criticize something because I might not like the movie, because other people might love it.

This isn’t a question of the writing that much. It’s just the tone. So, I do know that the “dining room/kitchen area is basic white, but with pale red, blue and yellow accents to give it some color.” That better be intentional. Keith, just let us know that the color thing is something you’re doing on purpose.

**John:** Yeah. I would hope so.

**Craig:** I mean, different colored jumpsuits and everything has a color.

**John:** Aren’t you always — I think I’m just now by default suspicious of anything set in a space/science-fiction thing that’s all going to be some kind of weird dream. This is called An Oblivion Prolonged, but then I saw Oblivion and it’s like I went through that whole movie like, okay, well I’m going to figure out what the twist of this is because there’s clearly a twist, and clearly people are like not talking about something they should be talking about.

I think we need to do something about that. I feel like we need to stop making that movie or figure out a way to get around that.

**Craig:** Moratorium on scary nightmarish space stations. Well, I mean, it’s a good analogy for alienation and existential dread.

**John:** And the police state, I guess, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The sense of constant surveillance.

**Craig:** Yeah. Hell is other people. I mean, yeah, there’s something useful about it, but you’re right, we have seen it and it can verge on pretentious occasionally, hurtling over the line into full pretentiousness. But hopefully this works out.

**John:** Cool. Let’s do Bury My Heart next.

**Craig:** Bury My Heart, written by Minhal Baig. I’m hoping I’m pronouncing that right. Minhal Baig.

**John:** That’s how I would do it.

**Craig:** Okay. Fantastic. So, we open, we’re inside a hotel room. Someone is changing their clothes inside, but we just hear that, and we’re looking at stacks of cash piled inside of an open briefcase as well as a gun and bullets. Then we move away from there. Now we’re outside of a strip club at the same time. A black Mercedes is parked across the street from the strip club as its closing up and the performers are leaving.

Inside the car we meet Max in his 40s. He’s a stoic type. And he’s looking in his rearview mirror, watching women passing by. And here comes Rachel, 20s, texting. She sees the car, stops, and then keeps moving. And then a different girl, also in 20s, a little sloppy and drunk perhaps, leans over the open passenger window and basically sort of propositions Max.

He asks her to get in the car. She sits down. He gives her a black duffle bag. She opens it up and it is full of cash. $50,000 to be precise. She wants to know what’s the catch, why is he giving her this money. He takes out a gun, puts her hands around it, puts the gun against his chest, and essentially is asking her to kill him. She’s scared, leaves, and he seems upset about that.

And this is Bury My Heart. Minhal Baig.

**John:** Bury My Heart. So, let’s talk about — before we get into the specifics of the writing, let’s talk about if this were the first three minutes of a movie, that’s interesting. I mean, I’m curious what his deal is. I didn’t necessarily believe how it happened here, but I think that provocative act of like trying to get a stranger to kill you in the start of your movie is interesting.

So, I think it’s an interesting way to start a story. Is it the right way to start your story? Who knows. But I thought it was an interesting way to start the story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I had a hard time reading these three pages and sort of getting the through thread of what was important, what was not important. And I think the specific words on the page were not helping Minhal to create this provocative image. Because I got confused a lot and had to sort of keep backtracking to make sure I was actually following what I was supposed to be following.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s dig in on that. Right from the very start. We’re in a hotel room. “An empty bedroom, but clearly lived-in. The light from the bathroom streams in.” So, if you’re in a hotel room, are you in a bedroom? Well, it’s a bedroom if there’s a separate sort of room, but then it’s a more fancy thing. Like weirdly bedroom right in the first sentence through me. Because you think of a bedroom being in a house or a bigger place, but it’s just an empty room if we’re in a hotel room.

Or just be in hotel room and then we don’t have to say anything more in that first sentence.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The second block stopped me, too. “There is the sound of someone changing their clothes inside.” We’re in the bathroom. “There is the sound of someone changing their clothes inside.” I don’t know what that sounds like.

**Craig:** I don’t know what it sounds like, either. I’m not sure, inside what? Inside the bathroom?

**John:** Inside the bathroom. “The light from the bathroom streams in. There is the sound of someone changing their clothes inside.” But it didn’t —

**Craig:** No. We could hear zippers. We can hear, maybe, you know, or shuffling around, the sound of somebody shuffling around in the bathroom.

**John:** Then we go to “EXT. STRIP CLUB — SAME.” But is it really the same? I think it’s actually meant to be later that night. I think it’s meant to be that same night.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. I was already really super confused because I’m not sure why we even watched this bedroom — not bedroom — hotel room scene.

**John:** Yup. Well, I don’t know either because, so, in this bedroom we see stacks of cash piled inside an open briefcase.

**Craig:** But, no, but it’s not. Because he gives her a duffle bag later. I actually went back to check. It seems like there are two things of cash. So, already I’m just puzzled. And not in a good way.

**John:** Not in a fascinated way.

**Craig:** Right. Grumpy.

**John:** As we get to the strip club, “As the club closes up, its PERFORMERS file out and AD-LIB good-byes to each other. The bouncers lock up.” Well that’s just under-written. First off, the performers, like performers — I had to think, like, oh, we’re at a strip club, so it’s not like Cirque du Soleil. If they’re strippers then say their strippers, or dancers. Performers felt like a weird word for that.

I think asking for ad-libs in the second block of stuff is not ideal. And so if it’s meant to be small chat, whatever, but just don’t say the word ad-lib because I feel like —

**Craig:** I’ve never written “ad-lib” in 18 years.

**John:** Yeah. I think ad-lib is not your friend. It’s certainly not your friend on page one.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, some line from somebody. Like just let us know who is important. Or, if nobody is important just let them file out and don’t sort of give them non-words to say right there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “MAX, 40s, having mastered cold, emotionless reservation, sits at the wheel.” I don’t know what reservation is. If it’s meant to give us a sense that I guess he’s reserved, but reserved isn’t really reservation. They’re not really the same word.

**Craig:** And, also, he’s mastered it? I don’t even know what that means. Meaning that — we’ll never know that. I guess the point is you can just as easily say, “Max, 40, sits at the wheel, grim, or flat affect, or cold, distant.” But I just hate this sort of like, oh, here’s a backstory that we haven’t earned.

**John:** I mean, just like he’s Ryan Gosling in Drive, but older. I’m of the school that I’m fine cheating a line of description on an important character the first time we meet them because it — someone who’s watching a movie gets to see an actual real person there and gets to make their generalizations about them through that. Because we don’t have an actual person in front of us, I’m okay cheating a line of dialogue that gives you a little bit more than you could actually see or hear. I’m fine with that.

But this didn’t do it for me.

And, the next block we have our adventure in semi-colon there. “From his rearview mirror, he sees a few DRUNKEN WOMEN pass by; one talks loudly on her phone, another walks in a helpless zigzag on the sidewalk.” That semi-colon should be a period. There’s no reason to — the second clause is not commenting on the first clause. They’re separate thoughts.

**Craig:** Also, we’re writing movies, so we don’t say things like, “from his rearview mirror he sees…” We say, “In the rearview mirror, drunken women pass by. Max eyes them.” Or, “Max checks his rearview mirror. In the mirror…” Make it visual. Let’s not get prosy about this sort of thing.

Also, I should also add, shooting things in a rearview mirror is annoying. It’s not just annoying to shoot, because you’re now spending time lining up extras to hit a mirror reflection, it’s also annoying for the audience because a rearview mirror is tiny. A lot of times they’ll take the rearview mirror out of the car anyway because when they’re shooting through the front they don’t want a rearview mirror in front of people’s faces. So, just be aware of that, also. Imagine this in your mind and imagine an audience watching it.

**John:** Yeah. The bigger challenge we have sort of in this page is like Minhal needs is INT/EXT Car, because basically we’re moving back and forth from perspective of being inside the car and watching what’s outside the car. You can make the argument like once we’re inside the car we stay inside the car, once we’re outside the car we stay outside the car. I think INT/EXT Car would be more helpful for him, where he’s actually split the scene header. You describe we’re going to be moving freely back and forth inside and outside the car, especially because on page two someone comes up to the window.

And right now he has it as “INT. CAR — CONTINUOUS.” But really that girl has come up to the car and is outside the car. That is your friend is INT/EXT Car.

**Craig:** Right. He jumps to “EXT. CAR — CONTINUOUS.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t let you go past, “RACHEL, 20s, fresh-faced, sharp and prurient.”

**John:** I circled prurient, too.

**Craig:** Prurient is the wrong word, sir. You do not mean prurient.

**John:** What do you think he meant? Do you think he meant prudent?

**Craig:** I do not know. I know that he didn’t mean prurient because that’s impossible based on what she’s — so prurient means sort of sexually licentious.

**John:** And I don’t think of a person being prurient.

**Craig:** No. It’s an attitude.

**John:** Thoughts being prurient thoughts.

**Craig:** Right. Prurient attitude, prurient thoughts, prurient display. But she’s texting on her phone. There’s nothing prurient about it. I just think he doesn’t know —

**John:** [laughs] You don’t know what she’s texting. She’s texting some really dirty stuff on her phone.

**Craig:** It’s not the right word. It can’t possibly be the right word. Again, all this happening in the rearview mirror.

And, of course, Rachel — who is called out in all caps, so she’s somebody that we’re supposed to care about — just is texting, stops, she’s caught like a dear in the headlights, but he’s looking at her in the rearview mirror so she’s behind the car.

Really, just I’m so confused.

**John:** She’s caught in the taillights, Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] She’s caught in the taillights, I just… — And then she moves on, so I guess she, what does that even mean? Why? What is she caught by? She’s just behind a car. There’s nothing to catch her attention at all.

**John:** Yeah. So, I get what Minhal is going for here, it’s just it’s hard to follow on the page. Essentially, like, so she recognizes that car, she recognizes who must be in that car, and goes the other way. But that’s not what we actually got on the paper here. And that’s not good.

**Craig:** No. And we need to shift to her perspective for that. We’re not going to see that from his perspective of her. We need to see her approaching the car, see something off with it, stop —

**John:** Stops. React.

**Craig:** And then move away in fear.

**John:** And you know what would really help us know that Rachel is an important character is if she said something to anybody in these first couple of paragraphs.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Because she clearly just left this club, so let her say something to somebody so we actually establish like, oh, she’s an important character who has a voice and is not like all the other people who are here. But then it’s frustrating because the one who actually is doing the work in this next scene is just called “Girl.”

**Craig:** Girl.

**John:** And it’s like, but she has lines? And so really if a character has more than two lines they should never just be generic. They should never be girl.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For many reasons. First, like for reader’s clarity, this is an important enough character that this person should have a name. But also think about casting this person. Like, “Oh, I’m going up for Girl.” It’s like, well that sounds like you’re an extra, but no, you actually need someone who can act in this moment because it’s going to be a weird thing where like this guy is giving you money to kill him.

This isn’t an extra. This isn’t somebody you’re spending a week trying to cast. And you’re not going to find the right person by trying to go after Girl.

**Craig:** And my impression was that she’s a prostitute and she’s getting into a car with a man because she presumes he’s out there looking for a hooker. They have a sort of interesting chitchat.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Although she seems a little oblivious to the fact that he’s creep, which generally isn’t — hookers are sort of good at noticing creepy.

**John:** Good radar.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they deal with this sort of thing all the time.

**John:** But, not this girl because she is “full of youthful sloppiness.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** That’s her line of description.

**Craig:** By the way, all kidding aside, Minhal might have intended that she’s not a hooker and that in fact she’s just a girl who is sort of interested in this guy in a car. But I have no reason to believe that. I mean, he’s in his 40s and she’s in her 20s and it’s night outside of a strip club and he’s alone, grimly, in a car.

So, one way or another this stuff isn’t matching up, and I’m not sure which is intended.

**John:** Yeah. So, what you’re referring to on page two, which is actually my favorite part of the whole thing, is she’s looking at the empty passenger seat and she says, “That taken?” He unlocks the door for her in reply. She opens the door and sits down next to him.

Great. That was an interesting way to get her into the car. And so I liked that moment. I wished the whole thing had moments like that because that would be awesome.

And I didn’t buy, on page three, I liked it up until the point where there’s the gun. “He takes out his gun and clasps her hands around it.” And she says, “Gunplay, huh? I like that.”

**Craig:** No she doesn’t. She’s scared out of her mind. First of all —

**John:** Who would say that?

**Craig:** Before he pulls out the gun, where a normal person would start peeing, he puts a bag on her lap. And her, “What’s this?” That’s all. This is a weird guy you’ve never met and he’s put a black duffel bag on your lap and her response is, “What’s this?”

**John:** You were expecting that there would be a head inside, weren’t you? Weren’t you expecting body parts inside?

**Craig:** Well, no matter what I’m expecting, I don’t think the girl would say anything at all. I think she would be puzzled. And I think then Max would say, “It’s yours. Open it.” And now she would be concerned. But maybe I should open it because I’m scared, and she opens it, and there’s all this money. And I don’t think she would say, “Jesus Christ, there must be like,” I mean, she’s like, “Good golly gee.”

No, I don’t think she’s going to say anything here. This is an example of a scene where you really have to think about the notion of who’s in charge of the scene, who’s driving it, who has power, who is afraid, who is not. Because this is potentially good stuff here, but she’s just yapping away throughout the whole thing here.

And then when she finally gets to “Gunplay, huh? I like that,” we’re like, well, this is not a human.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s envision together the scene I kind of think that Minhal set out to write, which could be actually really kind of cool. And I think that would actually start with there’s a guy parked outside a strip club, women are coming out, at the end of the night they’re doing their normal stuff. Probably a little chitchat between them in a way that’s actually meaningful so we have some sense of who they are, a little bit of the reality of the world.

One woman knows not to go to that car and goes the other way, but another girl who we’ve established a little bit before she got to the car does go to the car. And in that car something like this scene happens where this guy puts the gun to his chest and basically wants to die.

**Craig:** Yeah. If I were doing a quick rewrite I would actually not start with the car at all. I would start with the strip club, it’s closing, and strippers are coming out. And I would give them little bits of bye-bye dialogue. And I would be following Rachel, who is the person we’re supposed to care about. And I would have her walking and texting. And then I would have her stop and notice the back of a car parked there on its own. And then something about that, she turns and walks the other way, a little frightened.

Then, I would show another girl, one of the other girls who is chitchatting or smoking or something, seeing that car, and sort of walking over to it curiously. And that’s when we would meet Max.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. I think it’s a much better way. Because your characters are taking you to the source of danger and you’re not splitting your focus. You’re focusing on one thing and letting that thing that you’re focusing on carry you to the next thing.

**Craig:** Right. And it’s just also a way for, when we have — let’s rename girl. Let’s call her —

**John:** Veronica.

**Craig:** Veronica. Veronica, by seeing the car, and seeing the man, and making a choice to walk over, tells me a ton about Veronica. Before she ever opens her mouth I know that she’s smart, calculating, a hooker, making a decision about a guy, could probably use the money, weighing things and, “Eh, screw it, let’s do it.” But, this is a business transaction for her. The other way is just some girl I don’t know who goes, “Hey Mister. What you doing out here?” [laughs] Well who the hell are you? And why?

So, multiple issues here for Minhal. But, you’re right, the story bones here are promising. So, I think Minhal, man or woman, not sure, either way, Minhal, you have a good idea here for how to open a movie, which is a man propositioning a hooker not for sex but to kill him. And that’s an interesting mystery to start with, why, and all the rest of it.

Not so sure that the plan is very well thought through. I’m not sure what hooker would actually go along with it. But that aside, the issues that we have really are issues of structuring and introduction and revelation and staging.

**John:** I agree.

Let’s go onto our third one for today which is from Brie Williams. We don’t have a title but we know it’s from Brie Williams. So, Brie Williams, thank you for sending it through.

I’ll synopsize here.

We start exterior of Tolly’s BBQ Drive-Thru. And there’s a big plastic pig and a car is there to place an order apparently. And the woman’s voice inside says, “Two rapes and a murder.” And the drive-thru speaker person is confused. “Can you repeat?” “And grand theft auto.”

And then we actually come around to see that Claiborne is the person inside. It says, “BUNNY CLAIBORNE (40s), dark flyaway curls and a white button-down shirt.” And she’s on a car speaker phone. So, she’s talking about two rapes and a murder. She’s not trying to order two rapes and a murder. She’s talking about a grand theft auto charge and talking stuff down. Making some jokes. And then she finally orders a small rib bucket.

In the car she’s actually gotten the BBQ, she’s gotten it on her shirt, she’s gotten it on her bra. She’s like taking the shirt off as she’s going through apparently to work, which is at the exterior of the Harris County Criminal Courthouse where we find her. Establishing shots where we get then to a voiceover which is really truly a pre-lap, where she talks through the defense of her client.

And she makes the point that this guy is clearly squirmy and not a guy you’d want to have around, but just not being the kind of guy you want to have around doesn’t make — is not a reason to send someone to the death house.

Leaving that Claiborne has conversations with a guy named Lonnie, the armed guard, about his wife and her skin disease. And that’s the end of our three pages.

Craig, what did you think?

**Craig:** Well, this was trying to be interesting and it was trying to be funny and I’m afraid I wasn’t very interested and I didn’t laugh.

Now, I want to talk about some of the mistakes that I think happened sort of tonally and some structural mistakes, because I have no idea where this is going to go, but not a big fan here.

Some issues right off the top. I had a real, real problem with the first page, just figuring out what the hell was going on. And once I understood what was going on, it would still be very difficult to actually execute. The idea is that we’re opening on the drive-thru window speaker and we’re hearing Claiborne and then in parenthesis underneath, (OS — from inside car), which is a no-no, “Two rapes and a murder.” And the drive-thru speaker says, “Excuse me? Two apple pies?”

That was, I felt good at that moment. [laughs] I thought, okay, that’s actually quite clever. I like where this is so far. And then it went kind of downhill because then we go inside the car, we meet Bunny Claiborne, the drive-thru speaker is inside her car now saying, “Could you repeat?” Then a phone voice says, “And grand theft auto.” And I’m like, wait, oh, and now she’s on the phone. She’s having a discussion with this guy on the phone.

Her discussion, her character is revealed in this little paragraph, and I’m going to read it: “Oh please, the grand theft charge is bullshit. He moved the car to transport the body. It’s not like he killed her for the car. I mean, have you seen the car? (laughing),” on the same line. “It’s a fucking Dodge Dart.”

Now, am I supposed to hate her? [laughs] Because I hate her now. I find this to be false bravado. It’s very put-offish. And so I’m finding her icky. And also, frankly, the staging of this, again, doesn’t work because people don’t do this.

If they pull up to a window they put the person on hold. They say, “Hold on one sec.” Blah, blah, blah, and a blah, blah, blah, and then they go back to their conversation. They don’t keep talking while the drive-thru speaker guy is talking. It just doesn’t work. I didn’t buy it.

Now we’re heading down, we’re in her car, we do a bit of physical business where she’s unbuttoning her shirt because it’s got BBQ stains on it. She’s swerving around. Okay, so she’s a bit of a mess, I get it. And then we get to the courthouse and over an exterior shot establishing the courtyard plaza of Harris County we have this endless pre-lap.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Generally speaking, you get a sentence in. This has three sentences, the second of which is quite long. So, you have an eight-line long dialogue brick that is meant to be read off-screen.

And then we go inside and we have her delivering the rest of this speech, which frankly I didn’t find very good. I wasn’t — I thought she was making a point that wasn’t particularly sharp. And what was concerning to me was that clearly the movie means for us to believe that this is a sharp, smart argument that she’s making. But all she’s really saying is, “He’s a squiggly guy, but it’s your job to look at the evidence.” You’ll see that everything the prosecution has presented doesn’t amount to capital murder, it amounts to Zacharia Lee is a bad guy.

Now, but surely they presented something else. [laughs] It couldn’t just be that. This is not a great defense she’s mounting. And then people laugh at her line, “Being squiggly.” It just seems like everybody is kind of broad and goofy here. And we finish with this conversation where we spend half of our precious page three chitchatting with Lonnie the armed guard, even though she’s walking on her out, they have this eight-line long exchange that doesn’t particularly go anywhere.

And we do have a — you will point out the completely incorrect semi-colon on the third line as well, but I just couldn’t get a handle on this. What about you?

**John:** Craig, I don’t know how many Three Page Challenges we’ve done — maybe 60 do you think?

**Craig:** A lot, yeah.

**John:** A lot. I’ve never heard you be more wrong about three pages.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** In the entire history of our podcast. If this were a video podcast people would see me being dumbfounded at your responses.

**Craig:** Really? Exciting!

**John:** Yes. I thought these were incredibly promising pages. And so all the technical things you pointed out are actually true. And so parentheticals don’t belong within the block of things. And parentheticals with character names belong up on the line with the character name. Those are simple, basic things that Brie should know and embrace and it will take her five minutes to internalize and she’ll never make those mistakes again.

I thought the first bit was funny. Not like hilariously funny, but here’s what it was: It was funny in exactly the kind of way of like a Kyra Sedgwick TBS show kind of way, where she’s like a tough Texas defense attorney who has a messed up personal life. And I thought for what that was, and I got what that vibe was, I thought it was actually a pretty good job. And so the squiggly thing that you thought was terrible, I actually marked, I wrote in my little erasable pen I wrote, “Terrific. I really liked it.” Except I scratched that “Scattered LAUGHTER in the courtroom,” because it’s not true and it shouldn’t be there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because it’s not there. It should be cut.

And, I agree with you, again, about sort of, this felt like a walking into the courtroom conversation rather than a walking out of the courtroom conversation. Because if you’re leaving a building you’re not going to have a long conversation with somebody.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But if you’re going through security and have to like put your stuff through the bag stuff.

**Craig:** Right. You’re slowly dealing with the nonsense of putting your crap through the thing.

**John:** Then four-eighths of a page on that I totally believe if its helping establish what this is. I thought like here’s the dialogue in this:

I get what she’s going for there. It’s just like that guy who’s like over-engaging, over-sharing information. This feels like it’s a comedy/drama designed for TNT. That’s what I was getting out of this, or an adaptation of one of those detective novels that I would never read.

**Craig:** Okay. [laughs] I…

**John:** You disagree?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Which is fine.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. And, l mean, listen Brie, the good news is that you got one of us here for sure. I get sent things like this a lot. There is something off about the way the character is being presented. It doesn’t — it feels a little forced. It feels a little fakey somehow. There is a fake brassiness to it.

I mean, I could see Melissa McCarthy playing Claiborne, but not like this. Yeah…

**John:** Yeah. I think this is like Erin Brockovich as a defense kind of attorney, or that kind of idea. And that’s a reasonable idea. It’s not going to be to Craig Mazin’s taste. But, I thought —

**Craig:** Which we all know is horrendous. [laughs]. I mean, look, yeah, I don’t know. The technical issues that I have, that you have as well, and those are all technical issues, really my issue is I just didn’t like it. And that’s not really, I mean, in the end that’s not why we do these. So, I have to say, Brie, not everybody will like it. Or maybe just I won’t. [laughs] No.

**John:** Because here’s the thing: I bet if we read the rest of this script, and I’m really curious now at this point whether it’s designed as a one-hour or designed as a feature, because I could see either way out of these three pages what’s going to happen here. But my hunch is that if it’s all this quality and actually has a story with a structure, if she can really tell a tale with this character, not just like have this character enter into situations, I suspect it will interesting. Doesn’t mean that it gets made, but it has some kind of voice to it which was nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you. There is a clear voice here and I actually think that this could be — I could like this, actually.

**John:** Also, my hunch is given the obvious technical mistakes here that Brie may be new to screenwriting and may be learning sort of how it all works.

**Craig:** And also to be fair to Brie, I sort of write things like this, vaguely like this, so sometimes I think — we rarely get this kind of sort of R-rated character-driven comedy kind of thing for Three Pages, so I may just be harder on it because —

**John:** It’s in your ballpark.

**Craig:** Maybe because I’m hard on myself, so when I read things and I go, okay, well, there’s no way that she would be having this discussion while the drive-thru speaker guy was there. That’s psychotic. Nobody does that. So, then I’m just grumpy about that and I’m not really paying attention to the fact that actually you could probably fix that very, very easily.

**John:** Yeah. And I think when I was listening to your critiques I was like, well yes, but those are really easy things to fix. And so it doesn’t mean that they’re not actual problems, because you’re not wrong about sort of these technical things, but they were in no way the deal killers that they were for me that they were for you.

**Craig:** Yeah, it may be that I just get fussier about this kind of screenplay stuff.

**John:** I get it.

**Craig:** Sorry Brie.

**John:** I hope Brie knows that one of us loves her.

**Craig:** I do. [laughs] Yeah. I do.

**John:** [laughs] It is time for One Cool Things. I’ll start.

This is a book that’s structured as a website. So, you can either look at it as like an e-book or you can look at it as just a website that you go to. Regardless, I think it’s worth literally almost everybody going to.

It’s called Practical Typography. It is by this guy named Matthew Butterick who is a typeface designer. And this website/book advertises itself as typography in ten minutes. Basically if you just read this little page, it will take you ten minutes to read, you will do a much better job than 90 percent of people who work with type because it has very simple guidelines for like do this, don’t do that, really straight forward things about like this is how long a line of text should be. And if it’s going to be longer than this it’s going to be very hard to read, which is absolutely true, and so much of what we do in print and on the web would be improved if everyone just followed some of these guidelines.

So, it is a simple website that you can go to, click right through, and follow the links. And I think everyone will benefit from it.

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** Neat.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week was a recommendation from one of our Twitter followers and it’s a game called Gone Home. It’s by an independent game company called the Fullbright Company, I believe, and not only is it a good game, and it’s available for — it’s not a mobile game. It’s for PC or for Mac. And I think it costs $20.

And it’s a game that you could probably play in two or three hours. Theoretically you could blow throw it in an hour if you want. Very simple set up. You are a girl who is coming home from a trip overseas to your family’s new home that they just moved into and no one is there.

And you start to move through the house and it is creepy and scary, but I will tell you the following things without spoiling anything. It’s never what you think it’s about until sort of two-thirds of the way when you realize what it’s about. There is no shooting. It is a discovery. The game is a discovery. And it’s beautifully done. Beautifully done.

And it struck me when I finished playing it that for the first time I thought to myself there could be a real future in this as just a genre. The genre of a story, like an episode of television, or a movie that you walk through and discover as a game.

Because we’ve always struggled with the notion of interactive movies, or interactive entertainment because it’s authorial. We’re presenting a story to a passive audience. And I believe that. And similarly games struggle with it, sort of famously BioShock, the existence of BioShock is to provide a commentary on how you who play games think you’re engaging in an interactive narrative. You’re really on rails being forced to do what the game demands you to do.

What this really surprised me with was its ability to just let you, in your own way, experience a story. Let you walk around and find it and uncover it like a detective, almost like if you’d imagine piecing together… — And, you know, naturally it’s contained in a house. But, I thought, you know, I could see people actually making movies like this where you walk through the movie on your own.

And so I was very inspired by it. I thought it was really well done. And if you have twenty bucks lying around and feel like trying this game out, please do. It’s called Gone Home and we’ll throw a link on for you.

**John:** Fantastic. Now, Craig, while you’re in New York City for the live Scriptnotes taping, have you already seen Sleep No More?

**Craig:** Last time I was in New York I tried to go see Sleep No More and it was sold out, so I’ve made — I’ve got to figure out what night I’m going to go, what night I’m free when I’m there and jump on tickets early, because, yes, it’s life-changing from everyone’s review.

**John:** Your description of Gone Home really reminds me of Sleep No More in the sense that you are just wandering through a space and you can sort of construct the story that you want to construct based on what you discover. And you can open books, and read things, and piece together what’s really, well, maybe what’s really going on. These scenes will just sort of like drift through and you can see them. I think you will dig it.

**Craig:** Awesome. Yeah. I’m going to go for sure.

**John:** Great. So, recaps and reminders for this episode. There will be a live Scriptnotes on September 23 at 8pm here in New York. Tickets will be going on sale probably tomorrow. We’re positing this on Tuesday, so they should be up for sale on Wednesday. But follow me, I’m @johnaugust on Twitter, or Craig, who is @clmazin on Twitter, and if there are differences or new details we will tell you about them on that.

If you have a question that you would like us to address on the show, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and Stuart will filter it appropriately. If you have a Three Page Challenge of your own that you would like to submit there are instructions for how to file a Three Page Challenge. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and you’ll see the instructions there. There is boilerplate language we ask you to put on there so you will not sue us and not be angry if we don’t get to your submission, or don’t like your submission, or whatever.

But, that’s it, I think. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you. See you next time.

**John:** All right, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* David Fincher’s 1993 AT&T [You Will ads](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TZb0avfQme8), and on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will)
* Follow [@johnaugust](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) and [@clmazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) for Live from New York details
* [Andrew Lippa](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lippa) on Wikipedia
* Screenwriting.io on [pre-laps](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-pre-lap/)
* The Oatmeal on [semicolons](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon)
* Three Pages by [Keith Alan Eiler](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KeithAlanEiler.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Minhal Baig](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MinhalBaig.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Brie Williams](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BrieWilliams.pdf)
* Matthew Butterick’s [Practical Typography](http://practicaltypography.com/)
* [Gone Home](http://thefullbrightcompany.com/gonehome/), from the Fullbright Company
* [Sleep No More](http://sleepnomorenyc.com/)
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Stephen Moore