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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/halfway-there).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 534 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at midpoints, that murky middle of the movie, where writers and audience both ask where are we, where are we going, and how soon will we get there.

First we have a ton of follow-up from listeners about previous topics, and new questions that will no doubt prompt more follow-up. Craig, we will never escape. Caught in a loop of provoking and responding.

**Craig:** Good. I think that that’s a good sign. You’re right, the more we talk, the more follow-up and, I wouldn’t call it push-back, but people have interesting things to say. People respond and react because they are … I don’t know if I’m going to go so far as to say they’re all in a parasocial relationship with us, John, but they are in a parasocial conversation with us.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. I like that you’re working that parasocial, keeping it up. I don’t know, at graduation, did anyone launch a beach ball at your high school graduation, and the beach ball bounced over the top of it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I feel like that’s what you’re doing with the word parasocial. You’re just keeping it up in the air a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Keeping it in the air and trying to just stay connected to the Millennials, even though the Millennials are now, I must say, old. That’s how old we are in Generation X. We think the young people are who Generation Z thinks of as the old people. Hey Megana, did you know that, that you’re old now?

**Megana Rao:** I identify with Gen Z.

**Craig:** You can do that if you want. You can identify however you want, but factually …

**Megana:** I’m old, I get it.

**Craig:** Do you? Because I don’t think you do yet. You’re going to get it. It’s actually super freeing, Megana. You should really embrace this. It’s amazing.

**Megana:** I spend most of my day complaining about neck pain, so I get it. I’m there.

**Craig:** Yeah, but when you get a little bit older, that will be totally justified. You won’t feel weak about it. You’ll be like, “Yeah, like all of us, my neck hurts.”

**John:** My gift for Megana this … As we’ve established on the show, I’m not a good gift-giver, but I did give Megana a blanket thing to keep her warm. It feels like a gift you give not to a young person, but to an older person.

**Craig:** Young people don’t want wraps to stay warm. That’s absolutely true.

**Megana:** Yeah. My cold bones.

**Craig:** You’re going to be the best old lady. Fun.

**Megana:** I already am.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about NFTs, because I always want to talk about NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** In particular, these three really great articles that really shine spotlight on what is so dumb about NFTs.

**Craig:** So dumb.

**John:** We’ll get into a little bit of that. We’re going to put it in the Bonus Segment so when people come after me, they’re going to have to actually pay for the Bonus Segment to hear about it first. Actually, we’ll profit from-

**Craig:** You should sell it as an NFT. That whole segment should be an NFT. Just for fun.

**John:** Going to be great.

**Craig:** Just to get meta.

**John:** First, Craig, we have to establish the Chekhov’s gun on this podcast, because about 100 episodes ago we started talking about COVID. It was actually in a Bonus Segment talking about COVID. Chekhov’s gun finally went off this last week for us on the show.

**Craig:** Boom, right in my face. Yes. I had COVID, or really COVID had me. I test constantly, because I am in a production. I tested positive for COVID, and my symptoms were nothing. I have to just take a moment to salute the scientists and researchers and everyone, honestly everyone who worked to create the Moderna vaccine, which is the only one I’ve taken, but I’m sure that everybody at Pfizer deserves the same, and all the other places that have worked so hard to do this, because I’m not going to bother with the anti-vax people. Basically eff off. For the rest of us who are normal and smart and understand facts, this is miraculous. It’s just an incredible thing. This was a disease that was indiscriminately killing people. Now it mostly discriminately kills people. If you are vaccinated, and particularly boosted, especially with Omicron, which I suspect is what I had, as it is incredibly-

**John:** 99% of all COVID in North America is that.

**Craig:** It really was a nothing. It was a big nothing. I’ve had mosquito bites that were more vexatious than this bout of COVID, if I can call it a bout. I just followed the rules, isolated, which was for me not a big deal, because I like staying inside. I really do. That was fine.

**John:** Craig, let’s talk about how you run a show that’s in production while you’re doing that. Let’s be a little practical here, because you actually had tools at your disposal which a couple years ago you wouldn’t have had.

**Craig:** The primary tool that we use now for remote viewing is called QTAKE. QTAKE is tied into the video playback system. On a set, all the cameras are sending a signal to the video playback system, the video playback operator. Ours is named Amanda. She is wonderful. Manages the signal from all the cameras, and also has the functionality to broadcast that signal via WiFi or network to stream it to whatever the QTAKE, that is the brand that does this, the QTAKE server, which then sends it right back out to anyone who has the username and password and has been invited, and I can watch. I can watch on my monitor at home or on a laptop or even on a phone if I wanted to, although I don’t, all three cameras. I can select one camera to zero in on if I’m really interested in A camera or B camera. I can of course hear everything. In this way, I was able to do pretty much the job I would’ve done there.

The part that makes it harder is, when you’re present you can be there for the parts that don’t include the camera, blocking rehearsals and things like that. It’s more efficient. Right now Liza Johnson is directing this episode. She’s fantastic. Liza and I were able to just text each other. Jack Lesko is there as well, so maybe we’ll text with Jack and then I can call them on a phone if I want to go over a specific thing. We absolutely managed it, no real problem. It was nice. It was nice to be able to do that and not have to put pants on.

**John:** Perfect. I’m glad it worked out. That system you’re describing reminds me of conversations I had with Dana Fox about her season of her show, which is shooting up in Canada, which she could not be there, because it’s the lockdown. Phil and Matt also came on to talk to us about the systems they were using when they had to shoot the first season of their show without being present on their set. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible now, which I think is fantastic. You were able to be safe and keep your crew safe by staying home.

**Craig:** It’s a strange thing to be like the eye in the sky. Obviously you want to be there. No major issues. It was a terrific week, honestly, of shooting. It was some really cool stuff. I’m excited for folks who have not experienced the story The Last of Us to see what we shot this week. I know that the people who have seen it will appreciate it a lot, and people who haven’t seen I think will also really, really enjoy it. It was a good one.

**John:** This past week, Craig, I got to do something that I know you enjoy almost as much as playing D&D, which is to tell writers to fire their representatives, to fire their agents.

**Craig:** Of course, that’s the rule.

**John:** That’s the rule. I was talking with an upper mid-level writer, so a guy who’d staffed on TV shows, had a good career going, but had about a year break where he just could not get staffed on a show and was having a hard time getting stuff set up. As I was having this phone call with him, he was doing all the right things. He was writing new stuff. He was finding new ways to generate his own material. He was getting stuff in development, but just couldn’t get a thing to land.

I asked him, “I think it’s probably your agents. I think there’s a real problem here.” He was already going to probably fire his agents. When you do, and you’re going to go to the next place, talk to the people you’ve been dealing with and ask them what they think of your reps. He did, and everyone hated his reps. That was actually part of the problem. Now he is staffed on a new show that he loves. He’s a co-AP. I was just very excited for that advice to pay off and for him to have done the work to actually say, “My reps were not helping me. They were actually hurting me,” which I don’t think we talk about enough on the show.

**Craig:** I think we have said in the past that a bad agent is worse than no agent. They can do harm. When you have a bad agent, but you don’t know they’re bad, you are trusting that someone is taking care of something, and they’re not. There is a natural thing that can happen I think for some writers with their agents, where over time you can be taken for granted. You’re the person that they have, so they don’t have to worry about you. They’re worrying about signing the new person, or they’re worrying about getting the next thing for the person that makes more money than you do. When you have a new agent, it’s new, and romance is in the air, and everyone’s trying hard. The new agent has never gotten you a job before. They really want to get you a job. That’s embarrassing if they don’t.

I don’t think you should ever feel like it’s a massive, major career thing to fire your agent. It’s really not. It’s not. Getting a great agent is a massive career thing for you. Getting the right agent, that’s the big career change. Firing a mediocre or bad one is meh. As long as you have a new port to steer into, you should be fine.

**John:** Agreed. Also this last week, there was a tweet by Bo-Yeon Kim. She’s reading Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother script and marveling how different Korean formatting is from the US. We’ve talked a lot about script formatting on the show and had a special episode about it. It’s fascinating looking at this. Craig, as you open up this tweet, you’re seeing two pages, probably essentially the first two pages of the script. What do you see when you look at these pages?

**Craig:** It’s in Korean, so even if we spoke Korean, but didn’t read Korean text, we would still not know what’s going on. It looks really similar. It’s not wildly different. When they number their scenes, they put the number there, and it’s a very short scene header. Incredibly short. Then there’s a bunch of action, which doesn’t look too far off from ours. The character and dialog blocks are combined. Instead of a character, and then underneath, dialog, they do, in the dialog, what we would call the dialog block, character colon, I’m assuming, dialog, including a parenthetical. Occasionally there are two exclamation points, which may have a meaning in Korean that is different than one. I do not know.

**John:** We shared this with Bo Shim, who works with you, who verified, yes, this is just a thing you would see in a Korean script. I think it looks beautiful. It looks like our Western format, just in Korean. A lot of white space. A lot of white space on the right-hand edge. They look beautiful. It’s fun to see stuff that you can’t read, so you’re just appreciating it as the form of it. I was surprised it was actually as recognizable as a script.

**Craig:** I’m not super surprised, because the modern film business was invented here in the United States. The modern screenplay format was invented here in the United States. It does stand to reason that other nations, as they begin their own industries, will probably look to the very successful original one as at least inspiration, if nothing else. This script format, for all of our gripes, has functioned extraordinarily well for over a century, so makes sense.

**John:** Makes sense. That’s a perfect segue into an email we got from Richard. Megana, do you want to share this Richard email about Casablanca and early screenplays?

**Megana:** Richard wrote in, “Like you two, I enjoy giving back and sharing as I try to be the teacher I never had. Honest, Craig, all film schools aren’t the same, as I’ve actually taught in the John August Room in the Writing Department at USC. Plus, I would never advise my students not to use we see in their action lines.

I’m writing in regards to Episode 531 that dropped January 4th. In it you discuss the history of screenwriting and screenplay format and mention that Casablanca was one of the first scripts to use a format that’s close to what scripts look like today. Actually, that format had been in use in Hollywood for much longer, at least a decade. As a movie lover and film nerd, I’ve read quite a bit about writers of the Golden Age, and have read their screenplays. Those screenwriters, such as Samson Raphaelson and Oscar winners Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht, and Frances Marion, all wrote in a style we’d recognize today. I recommend checking out classic screenplays at the WGA Library. There’s also a terrific book, Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin, for an example of how the Capra Touch started on the page.”

**John:** I love when someone writes in to say, “Actually,” but then actually provides the details. Yes, there were scripts like this before Casablanca. I just didn’t know about them.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know what Casablanca looked like. I didn’t even know what that script looked like. Thank you, Richard. Yes, all film schools aren’t the same. Certainly NYU and USC are the ones that people aspire to the most. In theory, if there’s going to be good film school experiences, it will likely happen at one of those two places, or certainly at least in the John August Room. I can’t imagine anything untoward happens in the John August Room, the worst room at the strip club.

**John:** Don’t get champagne in the John August Room.

**Craig:** No one ever goes into the John August Room in the strip club. That’s always a good idea to check out classic screenplays if you’re interested in how things have evolved over time. Robert Riskin’s certainly one of our greats. I note that Richard put Capra Touch in quotes, no doubt because he is implying, as I will state overtly, that directors have been credited with things that screenwriters have been doing for decades. The Capra Touch is the thing where Frank Capra shot the script that Robert Riskin wrote. That’s the Capra Touch.

**John:** What we talk about with a modern screenplay is that sense of there are scene headers and you move into scene description that’s actually very full, very full compared to what you find in a play, that the dialog is important, but it’s not the only thing you’re seeing in this. When people read plays and they read screenplays, they’re like, “Oh, there actually is a big difference here.” That difference is how full the scene description is, how important it is that we are moving from location to location, just because film is a different medium than a play. You’re not just in one space and you’re not going to have these 20-minute scenes in general in film. You’re going to be moving from place to place. You have to have a vocabulary for what that looks like on the page.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right, let’s get back to more follow-up here. Matt wrote in about QR codes. He says, “While listening to John and Craig’s discussion of updating the screenplay format, I was reminded of this tweet I saw earlier in the week about a writer who included a QR code in their script. How do you guys feel about the inclusion of a QR code that links you out to additional material?” I guess like songs or images. “I only fear that the reader would go into their phone, would disrupt the flow of the read, and potentially end it with distractions from the phone entirely.” Craig, a QR code in your script?

**Craig:** That is an odd-looking thing. My concern wouldn’t be that the QR code would disrupt their flow of the read. If it led to something really cool, then I think it’s fine. It only takes a second or two to grab your camera, see it, click on the link, and look. My problem about the inclusion of a QR code is that the QR code itself aesthetically is such a downer and it’s ugly. It’s just this big ugly blob on the page. I would so much rather that there was something where people could read and just simply tap on something and understood that it would take them to a little image, then they could tap it away. It’s ugly, ugly thing.

**John:** Here’s where we need to introduce Megana’s innovation, because she’s working on a musical and she’s including the songs in the script. Megana, talk to us about how you’re doing that.

**Megana:** I just included them as a link, which is something that’s very easy to do in Highland. I reference these songs that are on YouTube, because the song’s told in the same style, and so it’s like, click here if you want to listen. Then it just takes you to Safari and opens the link in YouTube.

**John:** I think what’s smart about this is it’s recognizing that most people are not going to be reading this screenplay printed out, the way that screenplays used to be. They’re going to read it as a pdf, and pdfs can include links. Just make that clickable and it’s a good stopgap. It doesn’t give you all the way what Craig wants, where it’s actually embedded within the document itself, but it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** That sounds like a perfectly good solution. I think that that’s a really smart way to go.

**John:** Craig, you use Fade In. Does Fade In allow you to put active links in your documents?

**Craig:** It does. Fade In, actually at my urging, there’s quite a few things that you can do in Fade In that are really cool. You can embed alts, which is a really interesting thing. You can create links. Because I’m working on something that’s proprietary, I don’t do that, but yes, Fade In does have the ability to do that.

**John:** Here would be my argument for maybe a QR code is, we always talk about the title page and then you can stick a dedication page or a first page before the actual screenplay starts. That might be a page where you could say, if you would like to see images related to this, or this thing, click here or scan this. I could understand why you might want to do that, because that way if someone is looking at the script in a way that didn’t have the clickable link, that QR code would be a way for them to get to it. I wouldn’t put a QR code in the middle of a script page.

**Craig:** It’d be a bummer.

**John:** That’d be bad. Hattie wrote in to say that, “I find Celtx is great for editing between multiple people. I use Celtx Educator, as I’m studying for a master’s in screenwriting. You can share your script with anyone who has Celtx and an email address, and those people can edit the doc.” We’re talking there about shared screenwriting experiences. I still have an old Celtx T-shirt from a zillion years ago, because I never throw out T-shirts. I never really dug Celtx. It was just web-based, and I found it kind of janky. The advantage of a web-based ting is it’s very easy to do that multiple user thing. If it’s working for you, great. Craig and I know nobody who actually uses Celtx in a professional way.

**Craig:** I have not heard the word Celtx in, I don’t know, a decade. WriterDuet I think does a very good job of this. There is a free version of WriterDuet, so definitely take a look at that. Celtx, it’s like Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**John:** This last week I had a run-in with Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**Craig:** A run-in?

**John:** I did have a run-in. I had a dark encounter with it. This last week when I posted the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory script, that was an old FDR, Final Draft, old format, that is able to reformat and put it on a proper pdf, so it’s up there in the John August Library. I had these other scripts that I was like, crap, these are so old. They’re Movie Magic Screenwriter things, because you used to ping-pong them back and forth between Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. There’s not an app to open these. I didn’t have Screenwriter. It wasn’t even clear that the build of Screenwriter, which works on a Monterey system, because you can open these old files. I was involving nerd friends to help me crack these things open.

What was so embarrassing is that there’s a Barbarella script that I was trying to open up, was that I spent maybe three hours wrestling with this file, only to realize that it actually was a Final Draft file, that if I just actually added dot FDR, it would just open, because you remember back before OS X that files did not have extensions on them, so you had no idea what that file was. I just assumed it was a Movie Magic file, and actually it was a Final Draft file.

**Craig:** I remember when OS X came out that there was this hullabaloo about the fact that these file extensions meant that Mac was turning into Windows, and no, it was turning into Unix is what it was turning into. There were always file extensions. They just didn’t show them to you.

**John:** All that meta data was buried into the file system.

**Craig:** You have the option now of automatically seeing file extensions or not, depending on the kinds of files. I tend to want to see the file extensions myself.

**John:** I do too. Here’s an example. It’s that if I have Barbarella first draft dot fdr versus dot pdf. It’s good to see, oh, the one that ends in dot pdf is the pdf. That’s just good to see, if I see it in a list view. I could see the icon would be different, but that’s not the point. You just want to see in the list which one is the pdf.

**Megana:** When you click in to look at your files, it would give you that information, even if it wasn’t …

**Craig:** You can always Command I, but I don’t want to Command I.

**John:** I don’t want to Command I.

**Craig:** Command I means something’s gone really wrong, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Megana, I hope you have some stamina in you, because this is a long email, but I think it’s actually pretty good. This is the one from Jules.

**Megana:** Jules says, “I enjoyed listening to your discussion in Episode 532: Mistakes of Yes, about the importance of suffering and seeking meaningful work, rather than signifiers or supposed hallmarks of success in the path towards happiness. Your conversation made me think about a statement written by Albert Camus, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ When we think about mythology, Sisyphus epitomizes infinite, unrelenting torture, pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat it again once he gets to the top. Camus in this essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, posits that life is inherently absurd and filled with bizarre routines and habits. We could be distressed or discouraged by how little anything really means or not want to live as a result, but Camus says we must revolt and not let that get us down. Sisyphus is constantly completing a task that challenges him greatly, and he achieves it, all while knowing that it will not get him anywhere, but he can find meaning and purpose and joy in the struggle. He could be happy.

“Sure, life can suck sometimes, even if you aren’t Sisyphus, but we can choose what we focus on as motivation. For any of us with ambitions, that applies that any striving to achieve comes at the expense of our happiness. I think the solution is to learn to love the struggle, no matter how successful you supposedly are, or even if by all accounts you’ve achieved nothing. No one can stop you from struggling and striving. If you truly embrace and enjoy the struggle and process of creating a script, a story, a book, a podcast, etc, I think that may be the best path towards happiness for those of us cursed with ambitious goals. If you can love writing when it’s the worst, then writing can make you happy.”

**Craig:** Yes. Amen, Jules.

**John:** Yeah. It struck me because this was also the week that, I’m going to butcher his name, so I apologize in advance, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a Buddhist monk who died this past week, but who often wrote about the struggle and being present in it, and not putting off to later to be happy, but being present in it. That’s what I think Jules is writing here, is that it’s about understanding that the work you’re doing is not about the end goal, but about the actual work itself.

**Craig:** Yes, and that the struggle, and pointless struggle, is not a problem, because it’s all you’re going to get. I’ve always identified with the existentialists, but probably more Camus than Sartre. Sartre was such a downer, because Nausea. Camus, The Plague had a huge impact on me when I read it as a young man. Boy, if you want to read a book that drives home what we’re dealing with now, read The Plague again. What is the point? Especially if you’re a doctor and you’re working so hard, and there is an inefficient or stupid government and there are people who are moronic, and there is a disease that is destroying innocent and evil alike, and all you can do is stem the tide slightly until you just inevitably fail and also everyone dies anyway. Now what?

The answer is that’s where the human experience is. That’s the point. The point is the experience. The more we can disconnect ourselves from some notion that there is an answer to all of this, that there’s a right way, and that you’ve done it and you’ve achieved something, and therefore you have arrived at the end goal of all this, then the better off we’ll be, because none of that’s real, none of that’s true.

I think our culture, particularly American culture, is so goal-oriented. Everyone’s walking around feeling rather bad about it all, because what is the goal? Is the goal to be Jeff Bezos? You couldn’t pay me to be Jeff Bezos. You couldn’t pay me what Jeff Bezos owns to be Jeff Bezos. I don’t need, what, I’d say about $14 billion, probably 80 billion. I don’t know what it is.

**John:** It’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** I don’t need any of that. Honestly, the guy, I look at him and I just think, I don’t understand you at all. At all. I don’t know what you’re doing. I know what his ex-wife is doing. She’s doing good. I don’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know why and I don’t care. People show us who we’re supposed to be, and I don’t want to be that person. I’m stuck in my meat suit. I’ll just try and do this as best I can. I think that was a great thing to write in about, Jules.

**John:** The thing I want to distinguish between though is there’s suffering and things being difficult and needless suffering, or suffering that’s pointless. I do find people who are torturing themselves for no good reason. If it’s torture for you to write and you cannot enjoy writing and you don’t enjoy the end results of writing, I think it’s okay to stop writing. I think one of the things we try to be honest about in this podcast is there’s people who it’s just not going to be their thing. I see people who struggle to do it for no good reason. There’s no joy that they find in it. If you don’t find any joy, maybe look for something else that you can find joy in the actual process of doing, because that’s going to be more rewarding for you in the long term.

I just worry sometimes that people misunderstand. It’s like, enjoy the suffering, and they’re like, “Oh, then I have to suffer. There’s some reason why I need to beat myself up.” That’s not what this is saying.

**Craig:** I think we got into the notion of satisfaction, as opposed to happiness. I brought up Professor Scott Galloway and this thing about not following your passion, but rather finding your passion inside of the thing you’re really good at, that’s what makes you passionate about it. If you feel a sense of obligation, you’ve made a promise to someone that you’re going to be a great writer, or you’re supposed to be a great writer, and you’re not enjoy it at all, then no, you are not doing what you want in any way, shape, or form. That’s not even real struggle. That’s just a general sense of pointless obligation. If there is no sense of satisfaction in what you’re doing, then yes, absolutely, move on to another thing. You will not find something truly existentially purposeful to do, because there is no such thing. You will find something, I think, that is satisfying to do. Look for that.

**John:** Agreed. On the last episode we asked our listeners to write in their suggestions for read-aloud software, so software that could read a screenplay aloud and do a good job with the screenplay format, opposed to other things. We have a couple suggestions. People mentioned an iOS app called Tableread, which I’ve played with and I didn’t love, but it may be useful to some people. VoiceDream was an often suggested app. It does a pretty good job. It doesn’t know what a screenplay is necessarily, but it does a pretty good job of reading things aloud. Obviously most of the Mac and PC software programs can do some version of reading stuff allowed. On Windows and on Mac, you can find ways for your screenwriting software to read what’s on the screen aloud to you.

The most classic things that are designed specifically for people who are blind or have vision issues are JAWS and ZoomText. JAWS is having challenges with the current version of Final Draft, which is why Ryan Knighton and other folks are looking for better solutions for screenwriting software for blind users. These are all things that are out there that are helpful for people.

I think it’s always worth remembering that when you create things that are accessible for people who have specific issues, generally it ends up helping everybody, because just the same way that closed captioning was specifically designed for people who couldn’t hear, and it being tremendously useful for everybody around, especially when you just have a TV that didn’t have the sound turned on. I think as we look for solutions that are good for specific audiences, they tend to generalize out. Let’s just keep looking for ways to read scripts aloud and also make the work we do more accessible for everyone.

**Craig:** I did hear from Guy Goldstein, who is the founder and CEO of WriterDuet, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago. They have a new app called ReadThrough. It’s free, or there’s a free version. I watched their little demo videos. Rather impressive sounding. Another thing to throw on there. It is free. At the very least, if you are interested in text-to-voice, check out ReadThrough for free and maybe write in and let us know what you think.

**John:** Great. Megana, do you want to take Nicholas’s follow-up here?

**Megana:** Nicholas wrote in and said, “I really enjoyed the script breakdown this week of the select scenes from awards contenders. I had a question as I was going through them myself. Do you think the script is manipulated after the film is completed in order to ‘match’ the final product more perfectly? The reason I ask is because back when Borat’s subsequent movie film came out, the script was released as best adapted screenplay, and the dialog matched up perfectly, despite it being an improvised film that was made without a script and with real people. What’s up with that?”

**Craig:** What’s up with that?

**John:** What’s up with that?

**Craig:** What’s up with that? I wonder, do you think that just happens magically, or maybe there are-

**John:** It’s a magic thing.

**Craig:** Maybe there are people that work really, really hard to do that.

**John:** We could tell you that we actually know people whose job it is to match the final official script with the film as it is released. Generally when you’re getting those FYC scripts, someone has gone through that process and made all the dialog match up and stuff, taken out the scenes that got cut and that kind of stuff. I think Borat would be the most extreme example of that, where they basically had to write a screenplay that could encapsulate all these things. There was a script for Borat before it was filmed, but there was so much improvised stuff in the middle of it that they were writing that stuff after it had been actually filmed.

I do think that the For Your Consideration scripts are useful to read, because you’re seeeing what the author intent was, but you should always be mindful that you’re seeing the highlight reel, you’re seeing the perfected version of it. You’re not seeing the stuff that’s changed along the way. That’s why it’s also great if you can get early scripts of things and then compare them to the final shooting script to really see what drifted and what changed. I know reading Cameron’s original script for Aliens and then seeing the final film, you really can see, oh, this is how it shifted and expanded and changed to get to where we got to. When we did Big Fish, the Big Fish For Your Consideration script was actually the script that we went out with, we started production with. Not a lot had changed, but there were scenes that were different and things like that. I liked that. I think it’s always great to see small changes between what was on the page versus what was filmed.

**Craig:** Same with when we had to send in the scripts for Chernobyl. It was the same way, just sent the scripts. They were pretty close. They were very close. They were extraordinarily close. In fact, there was a couple of moments here or there where I was like, “Oh, that’s really, really cool,” and I don’t think I put them into the script. When the soldiers are walking along and we hear that eerie Russian tune, Black Raven, that was an improvised moment by that actor, who was Russian and had remembered that song. He just sang it and Johann recorded it, and then he put it over that little moment of those guys walking. I don’t think that’s in the script, because it wasn’t in the script. I agree with you. That’s interesting to see what’s new and created and what’s not.

**John:** Yes, those scripts tend to be a little bit optimized, but even looking back at the Sorkin script, that had weird page breaks. I think that really was the script they shot, because there’s no reason why they’d leave the A and B pages. They would’ve just taken that stuff out. If you see stuff that looks like leftover things from production, if you see stars in the margins, that’s more likely to be the script that was in production.

**Craig:** A and B pages, weird page breaks, and omitteds are a sign that you’re looking at an authentic, unadulterated production script.

**John:** Last week we talked about we see and we hear. Phil wrote in to say that, “John and Craig were right. The we see rule is number 15 on this list from Screenwriters University.” Let’s look through here, Craig, because that was 15, so that’s got to be a few other rules that really are-

**Craig:** Let’s see if they got anything right. First of all, sorry, I got to know, what is Script University? What is this?

**John:** We should look and see what they are. They have testimonials. We Have Questions. Click on We Have Questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have questions.

**John:** First question is, what is your refund policy?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** What is this? It’s an online screenwriting university featuring affordable instruction from well-known film industry professionals. Basically you pay for it. It is what it is. Let’s take a look at those rules.

**John:** This is just all-

**Craig:** It’s all bad.

**John:** It’s all umbrage bait.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Here’s the thing. It’s not worth going through.

**Craig:** Aw. Come on.

**John:** Slug line versus scene header. Craig, what do you call the thing that starts with INT or EXT? What do you call that?

**Craig:** I call it both, slug line and scene header.

**John:** It’s a murky, middle ground thing. A slug line can also be the thing that doesn’t have that, that is breaking up inside stuff within a scene that’s like, “Over at the corner,” and that kind of thing. Slug line, scene header, sure, they’re both the same thing. This has a lot of rules about what you can put in a scene header and what you can’t put in a scene header. I think you figure that out in context, don’t need all these rules.

**Craig:** Slug lines have no times of day. Did you know that? Because I put that in all the time. I put in afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. I put in all of it. It says, “Writers do it all the time.” You say, “Yes, we do. Before a script gets shot, someone has to change it to day/night.” No. I do that, and they don’t change it to day/night. Idiots. Script University, idiots. “Don’t put years, detailed locations in the slug line.” I do that all the time. Idiots. What is wrong with these people? Why would they dare do this?

**John:** “Dialog never follows a slug line, not ever. Action always separates the two.”

**Craig:** It’s rare, but I’ve done it.

**John:** It’s rare, but it’s done. Here’s why you do it, because if you’re ping-ponging back and forth between places, then there’s a reason why we’re shooting in a new place, then you could do it. It’s not a not ever. It’s rare.

**Craig:** “Don’t use cut to.” Normally I don’t, but sometimes I do.

**John:** Sometimes it’s really helpful.

**Craig:** Because I want to. “Don’t use we see or have strange reveals.” Screw you. Screw you, Script University? Script University, oh Lord. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. What is this nonsense?

**John:** Someone actually just put this page up to annoy us. That’s really what it is.

**Craig:** “On sound effects.” Whatever. I hate this. I couldn’t hate this more. Script University, shut it down. Shut it down. You’re bad. You’re bad and you should be ashamed of this. It’s stupid.

**John:** Craig is requesting his refund.

**Craig:** I hate it. What is wrong with these fricking people? What is wrong with them?

**John:** Hey Megana, help us out of this tailspin here. What did John write in here?

**Craig:** Yeah, help us out.

**Megana:** John says, “After I wrote my first script in 1999, I went starry-eyed and fresh-faced to the internet for help, and boy oh boy, there were a lot of those ‘never write we see because whoever’s reading it will literally throw your script across the room and furthermore it means you’re a terrible writer’ kind of people. There’s an attitude so many aspiring writers have of, you’re not allowed to write like a professional until you are a professional, but in my experience when you’re dealing with professionals, they don’t care at all about any of those things. I’ve never had a TV writer, showrunner, producer, or rep who have mentioned any of those things ever, and I do them all the time, and I’m still aspiring. Write for the job you want, not the job you have.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t care, and we never cared. I never cared. I never cared about whether or not I should say we see, ever in my life. I had never heard of anyone caring about it until the internet came along to explain to me that I was doing it wrong. Where? How? Why?

**Megana:** I just don’t understand who all these people are who are throwing scripts across the room.

**Craig:** Script throwers.

**Megana:** They just have to pick that back up.

**Craig:** Do you know how fast you’d get fired if you throw a script across the room and then one year later they’re like, “That script just won an Oscar.” You’d be like, “Oh, but it said we see.” “Okay, let me eject you from our life.” That’s crazy. One last thing.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** One last thing that I think people need to hear. You need to hear this, people, because there’s a lot of Script Universities out there, but there are even more people on the internet doling out advice, for whatever reason. I guess it makes them feel good. People love to deal out advice as if they have achieved something worthy of advice dealing. I see this on Twitter constantly. People that I literally have never heard of, and no one’s ever heard of, and have accomplished almost nothing, almost nothing of note in our business, are cross-legged, floating in air, like an elevated yogi, delivering the wisdom of the ages to us. They don’t know anything. Who are they? Don’t listen to any of them. You don’t even have to listen to us. If you’re going to listen to somebody, you should pretty much start with us. We at least know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before.

**John:** We do know what we’re doing.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, I think we’ve reached the midpoint, but also you said that perfectly, because exactly what you described there was in a midpoint tweet that actually prompted this whole conversation. We’ll link to this actual tweet. It’s not actually that important. Adeep tweeted, “For newer writers, these can happen at the hashtag #midpoint. A false victory/defeat, a story reversal, new tactics, full commitment to the journey, the stakes are raised, discovery of new key info, a major ordeal, main character switches from reaction to action, the story’s most significant emotional moment.”

If they’re talking about the midpoint, I’m sure we’ve talked about the midpoint on the podcast before, but I don’t think the midpoint is as much of a thing as this tweet might make us believe that it’s a thing, because I understand the end of a first act, I understand the change that goes at the end of the first act. I understand the worst of a worst for a third act. The midpoint is not really a thing to me. In most of the scripts that I’ve written, I couldn’t point and say, “That’s the midpoint.” It’s not a thing that I’m writing towards or even necessarily mindful of as I’m putting together a script. Are you?

**Craig:** No. I don’t agree with any of this. How about that? Or rather, I agree with all of it. This is like, “For newer chefs, the following can happen while you’re cooking: food can get hot, food can get cold, things can boil, stuff can congeal, dough happens.” All of these things can happen. Yes. Congrats. What does any of it mean? This is what I talk about when I did the how do you write a movie. So much of this stuff is from the point of view of, it already happened, let me look back at it, not it has to happen, how do I write it.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s so many movies I can think of I would have a hard time pointing to the midpoint. Here’s a movie that has a midpoint. Gone Girl. I know what the midpoint is, because we have a dramatic shift of POV in the story. That’s the midpoint of the movie. I got that.

**Craig:** There’s a wonderful midpoint in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where they have an intermission. It’s wonderful. I talk a little bit about the midpoint in that episode, whatever it was. It doesn’t have to happen in the middle. It’s rather I think what people often point at. It’s just that at times the character begins to question how they’ve been living and start wondering maybe if they ought to change. That is a very subtle thing. It can be a line. It can be a word. It can be a look. It can be a moment. Or it doesn’t have to happen at all. That’s the thing. It doesn’t have to happen at all.

**John:** I would say main character’s journey, somewhere around a midpoint would be there’s no going back, or we’ve crossed so far that there’s no way to get back to the earlier point, which is a little bit different than having your village burn down at the end of the first act. We’ve gotten to a place, only way out is forward. Sure, but that’s not going to be for all characters and all stories.

**Craig:** No. Some of the things, like main character switches from reaction to action, if your main character’s been reactive for the first half of your movie, oy vey. “Story’s most significant emotional moment.” If the story’s most significant emotional moment happens in the middle of the movie, can we walk out after that point, because what are we waiting for? Story reversal, new tactics, all of that should’ve been happening anyway already.

**John:** This week I dusted off an old stage musical that I’d been working on 10 years ago and then took out and updated. I’m really, really happy with it. It has two acts, because it’s a stage musical. I absolutely love the midpoint. I really love the act breaks in stage musicals, because they have a very specific form in terms of closing up some things and asking really big questions that you’re going to be discussing during the intermission, and you’ve obviously been drinking your drink, and you come back in the second act with new energy. There really is truly a midpoint that’s so important in a stage musical. That just is not a thing that happens in most movies, in most normal screenplays.

**Craig:** Maybe, if I may, let’s just stop talking about the midpoint. Let’s stop talking about the midpoint the way we should honestly stop talking about first acts, second acts, third acts. Really? Everything’s integrated. Generally speaking, also, just stop making lists on Twitter. Stop. Stop making lists on Twitter.

**John:** I get it. I probably won’t give up first act and second act breaks, just because they are useful in terms of thinking how it starts and how it ends, because every movie has a beginning, every movie has an ending, so you’re talking about how does all the beginning work, how does all the ending work. You’re going to have those things, but what the middle of it is going to be, eh.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting how liberating working in the hour-long drama format is when it comes to that stuff. Now the substantive difference between one hour of drama and 90 minutes of drama is, drum roll please, 30 minutes, but for some reason those extra 30 minutes require us to have this intense structural conversation about what happens in the middle and what happens at the end of the first act and what happens at the pinch point leading to the first act and what happens halfway through the third act. When you’re writing for 60 pages instead of 90 pages, none of that is discussed, ever. Ever. There is no first, second, third act discussed in an hour-long drama. At least I don’t discuss it. Maybe other people do. Maybe commercial break folks do, but I don’t.

**John:** They do. I would say in one-hour procedurals, they really will talk about this kind of stuff, but that’s not what you’re doing.

**Craig:** At this point I think it’s become the standard in our business, a streaming style or cable style, one-hour-long, uninterrupted drama. No one ever talks about any of that, ever. They just talk about the totality of the story you tell. I think that’s a nice thing. I think that all of this crap that gets pumped out there into the world is pumped out there generally by people who are trying to charge you money for something. They’re after something. I really do. In the end you scratch slightly, and underneath is a chart showing you how much money it costs per these services offered. It bums me out, because it’s unnecessary.

**John:** We’ve been addressing some follow-up and addressing previous things from our listeners. Let’s bring in some new stuff so we can keep the cycle going.

**Craig:** Yeah, new stuff.

**John:** Let’s start with a question about omitted scenes. Megana.

**Megana:** JP asks, “At which point in a script’s life do scenes start getting marked as omitted? Is it only after it’s entered production when scenes have been numbered? Is it when conforming the script to the final product? Otherwise, why leave a bread crumb trail saying, hey, there used to be a scene here, but now there isn’t, instead of just cutting all evidence of the bastard scene and letting the story flow?”

**John:** What a great question. I love a question that actually has an answer.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is answerable.

**John:** Here’s the answer, is that once you have a production script that has numbers in it, if you need that omitted there, just make it clear to everybody else that there was a scene here, that scene no longer exists, let’s not talk about that scene, because that scene is not there and we’re not going to shoot it. It’s gone. It’s erased. We still have some evidence in the script that we really did cut this out, we’re not forgetting to shoot it.

**Craig:** JP, you’re absolutely right. It only enters into play once production’s begun and once scenes have been numbered and a white script has been issued. The white draft is the first draft. The pages are locked. The scene numbers are locked. At that point forward, if you do delete a scene, yes, you have to say omitted. Maybe the biggest reason is because if you don’t, then at some point, a thousand people are going to email you saying, “Wait, what happened to scene 83? Because it goes from 82 to 84.” You have to say, “It was there.” Because people show up after that happens. It’s not like everybody that works on the movie or the show was there when that white draft was issued. It’s a smart thing to do.

One nice thing also, I assume they have this in Final Draft, they certainly do in Fade In, and I bet you have it in Highland, if you omit a scene, there is a special thing to say Omit Scene, which turns it into an omitted but keeps everything. If you have to un-omit it, or if you just want to peek and see what was in there, it’s easy to do.

**John:** We have a whole format for doing that, which is basically commenting it out, which is helpful. Now a thing also about omitting scenes, and also sometimes the meat of what happened in that scene is still there. The story point is there, but the scene has changed so much. There’s a different location. There’s different characters in it. There could be a discussion about, are we just going to change the scene or are we going to omit that scene and put a new A scene in there to replace it? That’s a discussion writers and directors and first ADs might have. Craig, where do you come down on that? If the scene changes so radically that it’s really a different scene, will you keep the scene number for it, or will you omit it, put a new scene in there?

**Craig:** I just talk about it with the first AD, script supervisor. Because scene numbers are really there for everyone else, I just will do whatever they ask me to do in that regard. I’ll ask them, “Would you want this to be a new scene or do you want me to just change it around inside of the scene?” It seems like the general rule of thumb is if we’re changing a location, absolutely it’s a different scene. If we’re staying in the same location, but we’re changing a bunch of things, or the location is sort of the same, but not the same, then I just ask them, “What do you want me to do with it?” Then they tell me.

This happens all day long, by the way, when we’re shooting and it comes to lettering up. When you’re shooting a scene, every new angle and size gets a letter. You’re shooting scene 12, okay, the first shot is shot 12-A, and so on and so forth. Sometimes if you change a lens, but you keep things exactly where they are, and the lens doesn’t change dramatically, the camera system folks will come by and ask the script supervisor, “Are we lettering up or are we just calling this take 6?” Then the script supervisor will make that call. It’s all about, just generally speaking, what’s going to help everybody else down the line.

**John:** While we’re speaking about letting up, on your show, if let’s say there was a scene 19 and a scene 20, and there’s a new scene being entered between the two of those, is that new scene A-19?

**Craig:** No, it’s 19-A.

**John:** That’s a difference of opinion between different productions, because 19-A makes a lot of sense. The problem with 19-A is it gets confusing then on the slate. It’s like, “This is scene 19-A, take A.”

**Craig:** We just call it 19 Apple Apple.

**John:** Apple Apple.

**Craig:** That generally isn’t a problem for us. They do it differently in England. I think it’s the other way. I can’t quite remember theirs. There are different methods for that sort of thing. I don’t tend to have a lot of those, to be honest with you. I don’t.

**John:** Because Craig writes everything perfectly the first time and it just happens.

**Craig:** Yeah, or at least I get my scenes generally. I have some A scenes, I have some B scenes, but there’s not that many. Honestly, because I am in control of the flow of the screenplay, when you’re getting into production on movies and 15 different writers are coming in because Frank Capra needs 15 writers to give him the Frank Capra Touch, then yeah, you can get a big ole mess. It can get really weird. There are things like what happens when you’re putting a scene between 19 and 19-A? Then that does become 19-A or whatever the hell, I don’t know what they call it, or 19-a-A I think is what it would be. They start using lowercase versus capital. You can customize all that. The only real thing that I think is important to pay attention to is to not use I or O, as those look like one and zero.

**John:** Exactly. In the memo that I put out for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if you want to look on the pages for that, I actually call that out in the memo, because it’s a natural question for why we’re doing it, is that’s why we’re omitting those things. Another thing you should keep in mind is that it’s not unheard of to put out a new white script. If a lot has changed between the production draft and the draft we thought we were going to production with, and then a bunch of stuff changes, a production might choose to say, “This is the new white draft, basically. Throw out your current script. This is the new script and this is what we’re using for the numbers.”

**Craig:** What we don’t want is every single page to be not a full page and 5,000 colors and we’re into salmon 8 and whatever it is. Yes, at some point, if it’s changed super dramatically, everybody just … There’s a point of no return. The point of no return really is when people get married to scene numbers. Crews and production teams really do talk about scene numbers constantly. I have to remind people all the time, I don’t know any scene numbers. I don’t remember any of those. I’m like, “Can you just tell me what that is? Because I don’t know what that is.” That’s the danger point is the scene numbers.

**John:** I have found my experience, especially on more complicated productions, some story stuff does get messed up when things go through multiple rounds. It’s not just bad writing happening, but when there have been so many revisions and so many colors stacked up on top of each other that a scene is being split between four different pages of different things and it’s just not clear, it’s hard to really focus on what is the point of the scene and what is actually happening in the scene, because it’s split across so many pages. That is a real thing that happens, because of production drafts and I think sometimes just bad choices from other people. I’ve been in circumstances where trying to do arbitration on a project that we were looking at the final shooting script, and you couldn’t even parse what the scene was, because it was divided between so many different things. That really is a challenge.

**Craig:** There’s a little trick that you can use sometimes. When it gets really bad with a scene, you can just say, “Okay, I’m just going to cut all the stuff from page 20-A, page 20-A-a, page 20-B, and just re-paste it into page 20 and just get a nice 20 and 20-A, and get rid of the other ones.”

**John:** Absolutely. Especially back in a time when we were putting out physical pages to production, you will have made some decisions about what’s going to make the most sense for a person reading this thing. It’d be better off to delete some pages and combine some stuff. Often it is just so people can actually see this is a scene, rather than a couple different paragraphs on a couple different pages.

**Craig:** Yah.

**John:** Yah. Let’s end on a question that you and I will actually love to discuss. This is Lydia’s question.

**Megana:** Lydia from New York writes, “My almost-10-year-old son has a great immersive imagination. I would love to introduce him to Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know how I never had any friends who played it growing up, but I’m thinking it would be amazing for us to do it together. Where do I start?”

**John:** Oh Lydia, you are just the best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** That’s mom of the year. Best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** It’s awesome that your son has a great imagination. He would probably dig D&D. I’ll put links in the show notes for ways to get started playing D&D with your kids, because there’s good starter adventures that build upon each other and get their feet wet, without overwhelming them with too many stuff about the character sheet all at once. I’d also say keep your sessions short, keep them fun and involved, but not overwhelming. Try to find some kids his age who could play with him also, because you as a mom is fantastic, but it’s more fun when the kids are playing with their own age.

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes 10-year-old boys who have great immersive imaginations also don’t have a lot of friends. These can go hand in hand. If your son is challenged in that area, if he has some social issues or has just a limited amount of friends, then just know there are a lot of 10-year-old boys just like him who are also limited and don’t have a lot of friends and would love to get to know him. My guess is that there are a lot of really good resources out there for parents. Maybe his school can help. There might be some guidance counselors who can identify some other kids like that, or if there’s some local neighborhood community organizations. You’re in New York, so there’s everything everywhere. Check out some online resources and put out the word. Put out the word on, I’m not on Facebook, but if there’s something like that or if you are on Facebook, to just say, hey, if you’re interested in putting together a group.

There are also some professional dungeon masters out there. They know exactly how to pitch and tone a session to the kids who are playing, and they might be a great way to introduce a group, because they will know everything, and they’re also really good at teaching. That’s part of what they do is teach kids how to play. The goal, Lydia, is for your son and the kids that he enjoys playing with to then not need that guy and to move on and one of them DMs and they do it themselves, which they absolutely can do.

I think it’s really important, Lydia, actually that you don’t play with him. I know. I know. I know you want to. I know you want to, but I think John is absolutely right. I’m just saying, as a former 10-year-old boy, and as somebody who raised a former 10-year-old boy, that there’s something that is irreproducible and magical about four or five 10-year-old boys with great, immersive imaginations doing it themselves, without parental supervision, and being free to explore and enjoy themselves and to find their own identities in that way. It’s really important. You can host it in your apartment or your home. Like I said, there are some really cool people out there that do these things professionally. That’s probably a good place to start poking around and looking.

**John:** I started playing when I was 4th grade, 5th grade. The DM was Diego Rodriguez, who had an older brother who played, and so we had picked up how to play from him. It’s going to be one kid or someone who has a little bit more experience about how it all works who is going to DM, but eventually you’re all going to get into it and get going. I think there’s a natural tension between people who are obsessed with the stats and optimizing the characters’ numbers and the players who are really focusing on role-playing the characters. That’s fine. That’s going to be a natural tension between the two of those. Whatever gets them wanting to sit down at the table is great. Just let them have fun.

**Craig:** Let them have fun. I think it’s a really great thing. Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing games in general have always been a terrific, I’ll say safe space. Why not? Safe and nurturing space for kids who otherwise don’t have that elsewhere, whether they’re neurodivergent or they’re just a little nerdy or shy. That’s a place where they blossom, and where a bunch of them together can blossom. It’s a beautiful thing.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Flee, which is an animated documentary that is up for all the award considerations this year. I watched it yesterday. It’s fantastic. It’s just really, really great. It’s the story of an Afghan refugee who’s trying to get out of Afghanistan as Afghanistan fell, and ends up on this wild expedition to try to get to safety. So well done. The reason why it’s animated is because to protect his anonymity, they animate all of his stuff. There’s live-action stuff in there as well, but he’s always an animated character, which works so well in terms of being able to move back into his childhood. It’s flawlessly done. I strongly recommend everyone check out Flee.

My other One Cool Thing is the Wikipedia history timeline game, Craig, which I sent to you earlier this week. Did you try playing it?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s really good. What it’s doing is it gives you a card at the top of the screen, which is some event in history, so either a famous person’s birth or death, or a company being founded, and you have to drag it into this timeline. It just keeps putting up new things for you to drag into the timeline. At first it’s really easy. Something happened in the modern era or it happened in BC times. Then it gets really tough. It’s basically how long of a streak you can keep going of getting these things right. You can play it endlessly. It’s not like a Wordle where it’s just one thing a day. It could be a giant time suck, but if you like history and organizing things, it will be great for you.

**Craig:** I do like history. I don’t love organizing things.

**John:** I think that question of, did this happen before or after this other thing, it’s not organizing. It’s just putting stuff in order.

**Craig:** This game is a nightmare for the kids who would be like, “Do we have to know dates on the test?”

**John:** Yeah, you have to know dates. You have to know dates-

**Craig:** “Do we have to know dates?”

**John:** … for this to work.

**Craig:** My one cool thing is ancient. It’s a game called Papers Please. Have you played it, John?

**John:** I recognize the title. I’m looking through here now to see what this actually was.

**Craig:** Papers Please. It was the first game by Lucas Pope. Lucas Pope is the guy who also did Return of the Obra Dinn, which I think was a One Cool Thing as well. This was his first game. It’s been around since 2014. At least on iOS it’s been around since 2014. It is the weirdest, most addicting and depressing and interesting game.

The functionality is very simple. You are a border patrol officer for some kind of obvious Eastern Bloc, Soviet era country. Your job is to decide whether or not to let immigrants in. The mechanics are you have some rules and then they give you documents, and then you have to check their documents, make sure that the documents comport with the rules, and then you either reject them or accept them. The rules get more and more complicated as things keep happening. It functions on days. That part is fun and tricky. The more people you process through accurately, the more money you make, which means your family will live, because they keep reporting on, you have this much money for gas and for food and for medicine. Also, interesting things start happening. People start begging to be let in, and they make really good cases, but their papers aren’t right, or there’s some sneaky spy people that want to overthrow the government. It’s all set against this very pixelated, brutalist background. Very simple, very fun to play. Gets really tricky really quickly. Strongly recommend. Works excellently on an iPad.

**John:** It feels like a perfect device for it.

**Craig:** It’s a weird one. I really enjoyed it. It’s old. It’s ancient, in terms of the internet. Papers Please.

**John:** Actually it’s a very good matchup with Flee, which is all about papers and documentation and fake passports.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Perfect. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Actually this week it’s by William Phillipson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on NFTs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** I am the person who talks about NFTs on this show. I think my first conversation about NFTs was pitching that Disney should absolutely do NFTs, and they have not done NFTs yet.

**Craig:** Good. Has a technology ever had a heel turn quicker than NFTs? They are loathed out there.

**John:** They are generally loathed. This last week Twitter announced people who have NFTs can use those as an avatar profile. They’ll have hexagons around them. Then obviously people writing scripts would block anybody who has a hexagon thing. They’re not well-loved.

**Craig:** No, they’re loathed. There’s a couple of reasons why. The first reason is I think an incredibly reasonable reason, which is that any of these things that require blockchain technology are prone to causing environmental disasters, because an enormous amount of energy can get used up by people who are trying to basically game the system. They want to mine a whole lot of Bitcoin or they want to process a whole whatever fricking NFT crap.

**John:** Ethereum.

**Craig:** China has just banned it all entirely. They just banned all that stuff, because it’s sucking up a mass amount of energy. Russia is about to get involved. Even Russia is like, “I don’t know, this feels janky as hell and also bad for the environment.” The other reason of course that NFTs are loathed is because fundamentally they’re stupid. At this point, what are they buying? They’re buying something that says, “I own a thing that everyone else can appreciate and experience in the exact same way that I, the owner, can.” That’s just stupid.

**John:** I’m going to link to three really good articles that came out in the last couple weeks that were talking about NFTs and bring up these criticisms. What I like about these articles is they point to these are the things that are more promising about them, and these are why the promises are not actually being kept.

One of the things that NFT or crypto proponents will pitch hard is that it’s decentralized, no one can shut it down, no one can stop it. The thing is, it’s actually not as decentralized as you would think it would be. Everything still is funneling through these different small deciders of OpenSea, which would say we’re going to show this piece of art or we’re not going to show this piece of art. It runs into all the libertarian issues of just, what are you going to do about child pornography, what are you going to do about actual criminal behavior that happens on here, what are you going to do about actual theft. When there have been thefts, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll cancel that thing.” Then was it really decentralized? Was there really no authority behind things? It’s trading on people who cannot be held accountable on some levels, but are very accountable on other levels.

**Craig:** All of it is nothing. No one’s even pretending it’s something. Just so I’m clear, if someone sells an NFT of a photo that is online, it’s a digital photo, and I buy that NFT, I now own that digital photo, or I own the file of that digital photo. That digital photo’s out there and everybody can look at it. The thing like that, a piece of art that Booble made, or whatever his name was. Was it Booble?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Boogle?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that it, Boogle?

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** Beeple.

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** I like Boogle better.

**John:** He was a previous One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Booble, I’m just going to keep calling him Booble, because it’s funny, somebody paid, whatever, $14 trillion for his picture, but I can look at it. It’s the same thing. It’s literally the same thing. I’m looking at the same thing.

**John:** Craig, yes. I think we need to acknowledge that all art has similar kinds of issues there, because I could sell you a painting, I sell you a van Gogh, and you’re like, “Okay, I own the van Gogh,” but you can also own a picture of it.

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s different.

**John:** It is different, but then the question of, how about a photograph, if I sell you an Ansel Adams photograph. There’s a limited number of them. There’s only a limited number because Ansel Adams chose to put a limit on things. Art is always this conflict between artificial scarcity and-

**Craig:** The problem is it becomes instantly different when you’re dealing with digital stuff, because digital stuff is reproducible flawlessly. If there was a technology where I could go into the Louvre, point my ray gun at the Mona Lisa, and have a copy of the Mona Lisa, a physical copy that was exactly the same, down to the atom, then I have another Mona Lisa, without question. That is exactly what’s going on with NFTs, so I don’t get it, and I’m never going to get it, ever. I’m old.

**John:** Can we think about another system that’s been designed to deal with the problem of reproducibility and artistic worth?

**Craig:** Copyright.

**John:** Copyright, yeah. Also this past week, a thing that happened, or it’s two weeks ago, some folks bought a copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune book.

**Craig:** No, these guys. They don’t listen to our show.

**John:** They set up a DAO, which is basically a collective financial organization to purchase this copy of the book. It’s like, okay, you bought it, and then they had these plans for what they were going to do with it, including develop spin-off merchandise and a TV series and stuff like that. Craig, is there any problem with that? I think they could see there being an obstacle there.

**Craig:** There is. There is.

**John:** What’s that?

**Craig:** The problem is that what they purchased was a derivative work. That derivative work was theoretically licensed by the Frank Herbert Estate to create a derivative work of his copyrighted original work, Dune. However, purchasing a book does not give you any underlying rights to anything in that book, much less anything in the books that it was based on. What they have is a book.

**John:** Craig, I have a copy of Harry Potter on my shelf, so I should just be able to make a new series.

**Craig:** JK Rowling, she has one handwritten copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s out there, and I paid a billion dollars for that handwritten copy, which in and of itself would probably be worth something, but now it means we’re going to start now creating our own new stuff based on the handwriting. Oh my god. How? You said that this was an organization of people, so more than one idiot?

**John:** Basically it’s a bunch of people who came together to form this organization called a DAO, which could then go out and make this acquisition. They’re all putting in money basically to buy this thing together, and then they all have a share in it. It’s like a corporation. It’s like the closest equivalent to what a corporation would be in a purely NFT crypto space.

**Craig:** Nobody in that organization had even the slightest understanding of how copyright works? No one?

**John:** Apparently not.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Tell me, John, surely they didn’t spend more than $100,000 on this.

**John:** We can Google this now.

**Craig:** It’s $3 million.

**John:** $3 million.

**Craig:** They spent $3 million.

**John:** Whoever owned that physical copy of it in theory made $3 million, and good on them. We should also point out that Jodorowsky also has copyright on his unique interpretation of that underlying material too. Even if you bought the one copy of the thing that he did, that’s not necessarily granting you the right to reproduce it, just to do any other things to it, so that’s all done.

I was having a good, long conversation with a guy who’s in the crypto NFT space who’s also developing original story material. I was just really curious where he saw the opportunities here and what he thought could happen. What [inaudible 01:08:32] he thinks this is basically just a form of wealth transfer from really rich people to artists and writers. It’s like, oh, okay, on that level I kind of get it. The same way that MoviePass was a wealth transfer from venture capitalists to people who wanted to see movies. That’s basically assuming that it’s going to be failure. It’s assuming that it’s going to be a MoviePass 2.0. That’s all it is.

**Craig:** It’s going to be MoviePass 2.0. What am I missing, John?

**John:** I think what you’re missing is that there is enthusiasm and exuberance from people coming together to do a thing which feels exciting. I saw this when I was doing Kickstarter stuff. It’s like you get people together like, “Let’s make this thing happen.” It’s like, yeah, that’s really cool. The thing about a Kickstarter is at the end you have the thing. You have these really cool books that you and I have, like D&D books that we’ve gotten off Kickstarters, or cool figurines. There’s a thing I wanted that I actually got at the end of it. Here it’s just not clear whether people are enthusiastic about it because they want the thing to exist or because they want to speculate that it’s going to be worthwhile at the end.

**Craig:** I think it’s pure speculation, because how could you possibly be excited about any of this, properly excited? Is there anybody really that is getting a thrill, a tingle down their spine from the availability of an NFT? All those financial things, like whatever, credit default swaps, where somebody has to take time to explain to you how it works, and really what it comes down to is people are just betting money on money to see if money happens in a money way. It’s just math. At that point really the only excitement is purely financial. It’s just purely financial. This is all nuts and weird and empty and soulless. I honestly do hope that the general anger that is fire-hosed at people who announce that they’re now involved in NFTs will work, that people will just go, “Okay, yeah, sorry, I’m not … “

**John:** Here’s my last challenge for people. If you’re going to come to me with a thing saying it’s this great, innovative thing that’s going to be using NFTs or crypto, I want you to tell me why it needs to use NFTs or crypto, because in so many cases I see, oh yeah, it’s exciting to build this community, to do this thing, but couldn’t you do this in a web 2.0 way that doesn’t involve crazy servers in Malta to do this thing? Ultimately, I can’t find those reasons. I just feel like we’ve built out a web that works. We’ve built out copyright law, which is crazy, but works. You’re trying to reinvent something for no good reason other than there’s ways to make weird money on it.

**Craig:** It’s like they said, “We’re going to recreate the tulip market of old Holland,” which as we all know, was a speculative bubble that ended up crashing and destroying people. That’ll happen, but along the way you might be one of the people that makes a lot of money off of these fake tulips, that they’re just saying it kind of. Oh god.

**John:** You were ranting about Jeff Bezos earlier. Jeff Bezos, to his credit, he built a thing. He built a thing that works really well. There’s actually a company that the world is different because of the thing he was able to build. He built something with the money that he was able to raise.

**Craig:** It exists. It employs a whole lot of people. It does a thing. It is an integral part of our economy. It has purpose. We can all debate whether or not it has changed things for the better or worse, and probably has done both, but it is not just a shell game of nonsense. I think people hear NFT and blockchain, and their minds go somewhere. I don’t know what it is. They start to just go, “Yeah, blockchain.” Blockchain’s a great phrase. It sounds great. It’s got the word block and chain.

**John:** Doesn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Both. You have two Wordle words in one combination. Perfect. Love it.

**Craig:** Block and chain. Five, five, as we say in the puzzle business.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Thank you, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Bo Yeon Kim’s Tweet on Bong Joon-Ho’s [MOTHER Script](https://twitter.com/extspace/status/1482482121335734273?)
* Script University’s [20 Common Sense Script Rules, in No Particular Order](https://www.screenwritersuniversity.com/pages/20-script-rules-1)
* Read Aloud Software Suggestions [Table Read](https://www.tablereadpro.com/), [ZoomText](https://www.zoomtext.com/), [JAWS](https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/), [VoiceDream](https://www.voicedream.com/)
* DnD for kids [Level 1 Geek](https://www.level1geek.com/dnd-for-kids-guide/) and [Being a Dungeon Master for Kids](https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/being-dungeon-master-kids)
* [Flee](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8430054/) animated film
* [Wikipedia Timeline Game](https://kottke.org/22/01/wikipedia-history-timeline-game)
* [Papers, please](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please) by Lucas Pope
* NFT Articles [Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excited-about-web3/) by Tim O’Reilly, [My First Impressions of Web3](https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html) on the Moxie Marlinspike Blog, [Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are](https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchains-are-not-what-they-say/) by Molly White
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by William Phillipson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/534standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 533 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are so many screenwriters worried about the word ‘we’?

Craig: Why? Why?

John: Craig and I will hopefully drive a stake to the heart of the “we hear/we see” prohibition, as we talk through some screenplay fundamentals, before looking at some of the scripts up for awards this season.

Craig: We will see some of those scripts. We will see them, we.

John: We will see them.

Craig: We see.

John: And if we were listening in a room, we could hear them-

Craig: Yes.

John: -because we can hear and we can see. We have the sensors.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Then, we’ll get into some listener questions. And our bonus segment for premium members, we will discuss what is the screenwriting equivalent of bootcamp?

Craig: Ooh, that’s interesting.

John: We talk about soap operas being like actor bootcamp. Is there a boot camp for writing?

Craig: Oh, I see what you mean. Got it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Understood. Okay.

John: A place where you’re doing so much work that you’re really picking up your skills, you’re developing your craft.

Craig: Mm-hmm. All right. [crosstalk]

John: I like it.

Craig: That’s only if you pay us.

John: If you pay us, you can listen to us talk about that.

Craig: Yeah.

John: If you pay enough money, you could own The CW, which is apparently up for sale.

Megana: [chuckles]

Craig: [chuckles] Wait, what? [chuckles]

John: Yeah.

Craig: The CW is for sale?

John: It was announced this last week or the week before that a CW may be up on the auction block. CW in the US, for our international listeners, is the home to a lot of great programs, including where Crazy Ex-Girlfriend used to air. It was a joint partnership between Warner Brothers and CBS. So, there were some shows that were CBS shows which was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and some things. There are a lot of Warner Brothers shows that were there. Now that Warner is more focused on HBO Max stuff, and CBS is focused on Paramount+ stuff, it’s not quite clear how The CW fits in. So, it may end up becoming a new thing, it may change. But anyway, the head of CW said, “You know what? Yeah, we’re probably up for sale.”

Craig: The sentence you just said there, if we had just rolled back to when we started this podcast, would have made utterly no sense to us.

John: No. [crosstalk]

Craig: The HBO Max and– What?

John: Paramount+.

Craig: Paramount– CBS with Par– what? What? Para+. But it’s remarkable how much things have changed. I guess, similarly, it’s remarkable how oddly adaptable we are as human beings. We are terrified of change, but we’re really good at absorbing it and accepting it when it happens. We’re odd little creatures, aren’t we?

John: Obviously, it feels everything’s accelerating, but I think at any given moment in time, we would probably feel it’s accelerating to all these new things. It’s always strange to think back to 100 years ago, cars were new, the time between the first flight at Kitty Hawk to man landing on the moon was so much shorter than you think it would be.

Craig: Yeah. And that’s right. We are witnessing the acceleration of things in our lifetime. But everything that happened before us just feels like history that took forever.

John: Yeah. We’ll see what happens to The CW. One of the discussion points is that CW airs on a bunch of local stations, obviously, and the local stations are part of bigger groups. And that group might just buy out The CW instead of [crosstalk].

Craig: Do you have any interest in it?

John: Honestly, I don’t. I feel at this point, I’m all in on streaming. The normal linear broadcast and stuff is just not so appealing to me.

Craig: I mean, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was on it, right?

John: It was. It was great.

Craig: We could own that.

John: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was originally going to be a premium cable show.

Craig: Showtime. Yeah.

John: And then, they retooled that. You can go back and listen to the episode where we talked to Rachel and Aline about the show back when it was a Showtime show before it became The CW show. It was filthier. There used to be a handjob in it and then the handjob became a kiss.

Craig: Ultimately, you’ve summed up the difference between Showtime and The CW.

John: I did.

Craig: It’s just that whatever mathematical equation converts a handjob into a kiss, that’s it.

John: That’s what it is.

Craig: That’s it.

John: That’s the difference between a broadcast and premium cable.

Craig: You’ve got it.

John: Do you remember Stuart Friedel?

Craig: Sorry, who?

John: Our first Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel?

Craig: I mean, Stuart’s a part of our lives.

John: He is. Stuart is the reason for a lot of how Scriptnotes used to work, and of course, the reason why Scriptnotes t-shirts are so soft is because-

Craig: Yes.

John: -Stuart is so sensitive and has this Stuart’s sense of softness. Stuart talked to me last week. He said, “I just had a mentor conversation with a Nebraska kid, who is my mom’s hairdresser’s nephew,” which is classic. “This guy mentioned the movie that he wanted to write. And he described the opening as a Stuart Special. He doesn’t know why it’s called that, but that’s what it’s called on Scriptnotes,” he says.

Craig: [chuckles]

John: He has no idea that it’s called a Stuart Special because of Stuart Friedel.

Craig: How did he miss that?

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s a kind of amazing that there’s a generation of people who are going to call that a Stuart Special. The way in lore, the last shot of your day is the Martini. But the second to last shot is called the Abby or Abby Singer, because there was a first AD named Abby singer, who would call for the martini and he was always one shot off. And so, the second the last one became the Abby. And people will call it a Stuart Special, and then every now and then somebody, “You know why it’s called that by the way?” That’ll be a bit of trivia for people.

John: Yeah. And, of course, it’ll be like, it’s named after Stuart Friedel, who used to be a producer on Scriptnotes before he became a titan of children’s television.

Craig: Before he became the CEO of The CW.

[laughter]

John: Before he bought out The CW and turned it into–

Craig: I want to know what the Megana maneuver is?

John: Oh, yeah. Well, it has to be a term that Megana will coin here. But, Megana, I’m curious, do you know what the Stuart Special is? How would you define it as Stuart Special? Or, is it just all alien territory for you?

Megana: Stuart Special, I think, it’s something I encounter a lot when I read threepage challenges, which is flash forward in a script, and then, by the end of two or three pages, it’s like one week ago or six months ago.

John: Right. Absolutely.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s the Stuart Special.

Craig: Yeah. It’s showing the moment right before the climax. And then going back like one month earlier. Exactly.

Megana: Right.

John: Record scratch. I bet you’re wondering how this all happened, and let me talk about this.

Craig: [chuckles]

John: Flashing back to just a few weeks ago, we had Jack Thorne on the show. We had a great conversation with him. He was talking about disability and also invisible illnesses. This last week, Annie Hayes wrote in. Annie Hayes is a friend of Scriptnotes. She has helped us out at Austin Film Festival. She had such a great letter that I thought, “Oh, it’s much better as a blog post than for us to try to read it on the air.” But Annie Hayes writes about her experience. She’s a staff writer on The CW show In the Dark, and she’s had cystic fibrosis this whole time since [crosstalk] she had cystic fibrosis. And writing about sort of the challenges of living with a chronic illness and working with a chronic illness, a lot people can’t see that you’re fighting this. She started off as an assistant. I think she was assistant at Verve before she started working as a staff writer, but it’s a great overview of what her experience has been.

One of the things she really stresses is that she’s been very open about it, but she also tries to make sure she’s always presenting a solution rather than a problem, which seems good advice in general.

Craig: That is. It’s funny, a little bit after that show, I talked with Jack, because he was curious, because I did mention that I had been dealing with chronic pain for a long time. He was like, “What is it?” He was actually, I think, maybe the first person I’d really talked to about it, because I’m me. I’m not that guy. It’s not related to any feelings about disabilities or physical challenges as much as just my general sense that, “Just shut up, Craig,” [chuckles] is mostly what I struggle with all the time, but it is interesting that you have to make choices when you have an invisible disability or illness or challenge. Whereas you don’t have that choice when it’s visible, at all. Both things come with their own unique difficulties. So, I appreciate Annie writing in about this.

John: Megana, we got another question from a listener about the Jack Throne conversation.

Megana: Great. Alok wrote in and said, “Your recent episode with Jack Thorne was amazing. I love Jack’s Edinburgh TV festival speech. As a person with invisible disabilities, I find his advocacy work really empowering. But I’m looking for a recommendation. My disability forces me to read text documents while simultaneously listening to them using a text-to-speech software. The one I use is called Read Aloud, which is a Chrome plugin. It’s a free software with minimal options that reads documents back to me in a deathly robotic monotone.”

Craig: [laughs]

Megana: “It’s not at all suited for reading scripts.”

Craig: No.

Megana: “I was wondering if anyone at Scriptnotes was familiar with text-to-voice softwares that professional writers with disabilities could use to read their scripts. Again, it is text-to-voice that I’m looking for, not voice-to-text. If there is something on the market that you recommend suitable for script reading, I don’t mind shelling out some money to purchase it.”

Craig: Oh, that’s an interesting thought there. John, this seems like something you would probably know, if you knew you would know. Not me.

John: A couple things I can point you to. I do have friends who will listen to scripts in the car with some read aloud software. I think having similar experiences where it’s a little bit awkward, because it has no idea that you’re reading a script. Some things that could be helpful. In Highland 2, we have what’s called a narrated script. And what it does is, it’s looking at the same script, but it’s changing it to rather than like:

Tom: Welcome to my house, Mary.
Mary: It’s so nice to be here.

It says, “Tom says, ‘Welcome to my house,’ Mary says this.” It’s adding in the says and things, and it actually has the sense of like int and ext become interior and exterior, that may help you. It might make it a little bit easier for you to read. So, it’d just be a matter of throwing that PDF in there and exporting it as a narrated script, that could be a little bit better solution for you.

The Weekend Read beta has text-to-speech that’s actually really good, where you can actually set voices and do things so you can set the male characters to a certain male voice, female characters to a certain female voice. That’s great. It’s still in beta. So, I can’t offer that to everybody. We’ll send a copy to Alok, who can test it. And we’re also doing some new stuff in the new Highland beta that should be a little bit better for folks who need some accessibility things. We’re working with Ryan Knighton who’s our blind friend about making sure that’s fantastic for blind writers to use.

Craig: Well, that’s all sounds pretty useful information there. Turns out, you had all the answers right there, John.

John: I don’t have all the answers though, because I feel we probably have other listeners who are in similar situations. So, if you are like Alok who needs stuff read aloud, scripts read aloud, write into us and tell Megana what you’re using, and we’ll share that on a future episode.

Craig: It’s good idea.

John: Fantastic. All right. Well, let’s talk about screenplays in general and screenplay formatting, because this feels such a giant, fundamental question that we’ve addressed many times over the years. But even just this last week, Craig-

Craig: Hmm.

John: -you and I were both a little bit dumbfounded by someone who wrote to us and said like, “Hey, can you explain why you’re so upset against ‘we hear’ and ‘we see’?” And you replied with a GIF of–

Craig: [chuckles] Not sure if serious.

John: Not Sure If Serious. He just had fundamentally like mis–

Craig: Misunderstood, yeah.

John: -what we’re talking about here. So, just to make sure we will reiterate this a thousand times during the podcast. It’s absolutely fine to say “we hear” and “we see” on the page in screenplays. It’s also fine to not use it. You can be a writer who chooses not to use it, that’s great. But it’s an available tool for you, and you should not feel at all bad about using it. And if anyone smacks you down for using it, they’re being dumb.

Craig: They’re bad.

John: They’re bad.

Craig: Yeah, I use it all the time. Like John says, it’s not that we recommend using it. It’s just if you like it, great. I find it to be a useful tool. We’ve talked quite a bit about why it does something unique, that other presentations of actions do not so that it’s not simply a stylistic choice or a bit of decoration, but it has–

John: It’s not lazy. No.

Craig: No, it has purpose. I am mystified. I wish I could go find the patient zero of no one should ever write “we see” in screenplays. I don’t know who started this terrible virus, but it’s wrong. And it is metastasized throughout all of these mediocre schools. And the mediocre schools, I mean [chuckles] they’re all mediocre when it comes to this sort of thing. Waves of human beings have just keep arriving on Reddit, like teeming onto Reddit shores to explain to other people why you can’t use “we see.” And the two of us have just been standing there trying to rescue people from this nonsense because, I guess we can’t. But let’s try one more time.

John: We’ll try one more time. As we get into this, we’ll answer a bunch of listener simpler questions, and that’ll hopefully stack up together to a broader understanding of what we’re trying to do here on screenplay page. Megana, if you start us off with Adrian in Dublin here.

Megana: He asks, “I’ve been writing for years, but I’m still puzzled by the question when to use action in the quote ‘action section’ of a script and when to use it as a parenthetical.”

John: Adrian’s wondering, and this is a thing that every writer still makes choices, kind of every line is like, “Okay, is this going to be better as an action or scene description on the left-hand margin? Or is just the kind of thing that it’s better tucked underneath the character, the header, in parenthetical saying a small little thing that as part of that character’s direction or as a part of the overall scene direction?” You’re always making choices? for what that’s going to be. Craig, what general guidance are you thinking through when you’re making a decision about whether to use parenthetical or an action line?

Craig: Almost always, I’m going to use an action line for action. Parentheticals are the orthodoxies. Parentheticals are for terms that influence the way the line is read, or are there to imply that there’s a pause. However, every now and then, if there is an action that is super tiny, and is necessary to understand the dialogue properly, and the dialogue would be best served if we didn’t chop it up into two bits, then I will use the parenthetical. If I’m running a bit of dialogue and between two lines, someone lights a match, I might put that in parentheticals (lights a match).

John: Absolutely.

Craig: And then, they keep going. But it would have to be, we’re talking about an action that could easily be described in a couple of words, and more importantly, would feel really dumb and tiny if it were its own action line.

John: Agreed. It’s how short the action is both in screen time and in words, because parentheticals that go on for 6 or 7 or 10 words, that should have probably been an action line. In my whole writing career, I’ve probably written two parentheticals that were that long and it was for some very specific purpose that I needed to keep them together as a parenthetical, rather than moving them in as an action line. Parentheticals, if it’s affecting how that line is going to be read, it’s really affecting the tone, the tenor, the intention of that line, that’s great for a parenthetical. If it is something that a single character is doing that is breaking their dialogue block, like a sneeze, that can fit great in a parenthetical, but anything that’s between multiple characters, beyond offering a handshake, that becomes action.

Craig: Yeah.

John: One of the reasons why you may mix it up occasionally or decide to make something parenthetical versus a longer line is, you and I both have a preference against long columns of just two characters talking. Therefore, we’ll both look for opportunities. It’s like okay, this is a dialogue scene, but I would love to have some moments where over on the left hand margin in an action line, just to break up visually on page and not make it feel like this is just a tunnel of text.

Craig: Yeah, I call it ticker tape. Ticker tape screenplay page where it’s just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and just run out of things down the middle. If you require that you break it up, it forces you also to start thinking about, “Well, where are they? What are they doing? How are they moving in the space? Is there anything I can do to make this visually interesting?” Otherwise, it’s just going to be bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong.

John: Great. Another question for us, Megana.

Megana: Nick in LA asks, “Over the last few months, I’ve been listening through all the back episodes of Scriptnotes, and there was a string of episodes in 2014 where John and Craig brainstormed ideas for a top-to-bottom reimagining of the screenplay as we know it. This new format included things like embedded music, images, more clickable links, etc. In general, a more interactive and dynamic document than the current standard. My question is, now that we’re sevenish years later, do you still feel the same way about the standard screenplay format? Has any progress been made in terms of what is permissible to include in your script, and is changing anything a fool’s errand? What you described in those episodes sounds great and made a lot of sense to me, but it seems little has changed since 2014.”

Craig: Yeah.

John: Very little has changed. I do see links in screenplays more often. I have seen clickable links in PDFs of screenplays that will link out to an image or something that explains something more fully. But no. I think you and I both had a little bit more utopian idea of this is what’s going to change, and it didn’t.

Craig: Well, I think we thought this is what we would like to change. This is what we would hope for change. But no, it hasn’t happened, and I think it’s still a great idea. It hasn’t happened at all. Part of the problem is Final Draft. It’s just this monster that sits on top of Hollywood and keeps this entire format back. I really do believe that. No one is sitting there at HBO or Universal or Disney saying, “We really love this 100-year-old method of putting screenplays down.” They don’t. Unfortunately, Final Draft, which is now owned by a payroll company, which is perfect, has essentially cornered the market on the format of screenplays as connecting into the format for budgeting and scheduling. There’s just no appetite for it, because everyone’s just stuck using it. It’s the Windows problem.

John: It’s the Windows problem. I’m not going to put all the blame at Final Draft’s feet, because I do think if Final Draft were to suddenly just explode and go away, it wouldn’t change quickly, because I think everyone’s just so used to scripts looking a certain way. You’re doing your show right now, and you could do your scripts a different way. You could choose to do something different. You’re not using Final Draft, you’re using Fade In, and you could do something different. But it’s easy to keep people doing the same thing they’re doing and it’s working for you. What I do think has changed since 2014 is, and this is also, I think, because the pandemic, because of Zoom, I see screenwriters doing a lot more work in Keynote or PowerPoint. A lot of early presentation stuff is now being done as slides. I think slide decking has become a more important part of describing a project early on. It’s not like I’m turning in a script and add a deck for things. But for some stuff, I might because it would at least show this is what this is meant to look like.

There’s a big world-building project that I may or may not do. I think if I were to take on that project, my script might be accompanied by, “Here are the images that go with it,” because everything I can describe on a page, so helpful. But to me being able to show it to you, it’s going to be more instructive.

Craig: I would do something else. I would write my show now in a different way if the tool were available. It’s not.

John: Okay.

Craig: There’s just no tool, and I don’t think there’s going to be a tool available until someone feels the amount of time, energy, and resources to create something like that would be rewarded, because it just takes a lot. If Final Draft disappeared tomorrow, there would be a period where people would have to use other things that would basically be the same thing. But there would also be a massive opening. I think you would see a lot of people trying to become the next Final Draft, and figure out how to fill that space, but do it better. If there were a tool while we were writing, there was a way to create a document that wasn’t a PDF– by the way, that’s the other issue is that PDF that format is just kind of useless. It’s useful, but useless.

John: Yeah, the good thing about PDF is it’s baked in and locked down. The bad thing about it is it’s baked in and locked down, and it’s hard to do anything else with it.

Craig: It’s a printed piece of paper, except it’s on your screen. That’s all it is. It’s static. If there were a software platform that created a document that people could open and view that was dynamic, that would be amazing, and I would use it all the time, but there isn’t.

John: I will tell you that for Late Night and Variety comedy writing, especially the daily shows, they are sometimes now using fully online writing software where you can– the monologue, it’s constantly updated by everybody all at once. It’s a better version of Google Docs.

Craig: Yeah. What’s that, Script 2.0? Ah, what’s the one–

John: It’s lot like WriterDuet.

Craig: WriterDuet, yes.

John: It’s like that, but very deliberately multiple users can really work on it. It’s not just you and your writing partner. Everyone can tag in. You can see who’s made what changes. And it works, but it’s very specifically set up for that kind of show to do. I think Colbert’s show does that. Some of those changes are working in places where they really need. They have very specific, very time-based needs. And so little of what we do is urgent in that way. But I will say, Craig, you’re working on a show right now that if you could update everyone live in terms of, these are the changes, it would be fantastic. But you’re probably doing some version of this just distribution lists of things go out.

Craig: Well, it’s Scenechronize. Scenechronize is the other big behemoth, and Scenechronize is the standard distribution software for things. Scenechronize could distribute anything. I think it’s just that there is the file format that I would love, the kind of method of creation of a screenplay document that I would love just doesn’t exist. Where when you’re talking about a song, there is a little note icon, you click it and it starts to play that song, and brings it up in a soft window, up to the right, that you can minimize or get rid of, or just click away if you chose to. There are little icons and things to say, “Okay, I want to see what this looks like.” We can’t do that, because there’s no document that we can release that other people can look at that works like that. That’s the biggest issue.

John: Okay. Yeah, as a person who builds the software for a living, I can see some of the solutions, but I can also see some of the issues. It’s what the shape of that container document is. Are you sending the document? Are you sending a link to something that lives on a server?

Craig: For privacy purposes and all the rest of it, whichever would be fine, whichever people would want. But the problem is, there isn’t the receiving thing on the other end. It’s going to be hard to create that because you’re asking people to download and they don’t want to [chuckles] and you’re asking them to try a new format, and it’s new. Change is hard. Tip of the hat to the screenplay format, as we’re talking about it, it has lasted longer than most human beings. In fact, it’s lasted longer than almost every human being.

John: Absolutely. I think we should also stress that what we’re describing in terms of changes to screenplay format is not the words on the page. We’re not talking about the “we hear”, “we see,” we’re not talking about the job of the writer. We’re talking about the container in which this is going out there so that your words can be accompanied by other useful material and be updated in real time in ways that aren’t so torturous. Because right now, how we handle screenplays, especially as we go into production, with star changes and such is so linked back to when we had to xerox pages and send them out, that it’s maddening.

Craig: Yeah, it’s pretty weird.

John: Another question for us, Megana?

Megana: Scott asks, “I’ve been working on a spec script based on a true story that feels like it’s taken on the scope of a Godfather-esque crime epic. The question of whether to expand this into a longer miniseries-type structure has come up before. But my producer and I both agree this feels like a feature film. As we’ve gone back and forth on drafts, the length of the script has fluctuated from 140 pages at its longest down to 125. I’ve always been taught no one wants to read a spec from an unproven writer longer than 120 pages and I’ve tried to reach that magic number, but the notes we keep getting from colleagues is to dig deeper into the characters and to explore more, not less. So, my question is this. In our current climate with the line between film and TV forever blurring, is the 120-page rule the end-all and be-all, or 132 pages reasonable for a decade spanning crime saga? Follow-up question, why are gangster movies always so long?

[laughter]

John: They do seem longer as a rule. Let’s take this last part first. I think because we have expectations of the genre, that it’s going to be a bunch of characters and there’s going to be complicated family dynamics in addition to the A plot, that there’s just going to be a lot happening, and so we just allow them to be long, and also because the Godfather is long.

Craig: Yeah. It may have something to do with the fact that the directors who have made these things have come out of a school where length wasn’t a problem. There have been mobster movies forever, but the big ones were coming out in the 70s. But then again, you look at like Martin Scorsese’s first movie, Mean Streets, I think that was his first movie, it’s under two hours. So, it’s not necessarily always the case that they need to be super long, but I think John is right. If you’re telling the Godfather saga, then it is marked by an epic nature. They’re very Shakespearean in this regard. They are telling long family dramas, and they’re telling involved crime plots, and we seem to enjoy– otherwise, it becomes an action movie. Part of it is the opera. It’s opera. By the way, Godfather III is that– you’ve seen Godfather Part III, I assume.

John: I have seen it. I have seen all of them now.

Craig: Yeah. I love that operatic third act. It’s just lovely. Anyway, I think that’s what it is. Scott, here’s the deal, man, if the first 10 pages are awesome, people will keep reading, they really will. Especially these days, I just think the rules are not the rules anymore. They’ll be reading it wondering, “Well, maybe I could turn this into a limited series.” You never know what they’re going to be thinking.

John: Craig is right. Obviously, if it’s good, they’ll keep reading and you should not worry about that much. A 125-page script is a lot different than 140-page script. 140-pages, people start to go, “Oh, okay, wow. This could be a problem because it’s going to probably be longer when that one’s actually shot.” I would say that my expectations of movies are things you can watch in one sitting and we always had a sense of like it’s a story that can only happen once.

But as we look now at limited series that also feel like they’re things that can only happen once, maybe there’s nothing wrong with thinking about, does this story really work best for me sitting in a chair for two hours watching it? Or does it have natural parts in installments that build out in ways that it could fit a limited series? If the first 50 pages or 60 pages of what you wrote has a natural cliffhanger, it can be a phenomenal writing sample for you, and a phenomenal spec to take out there in the world for people to see like, “Oh, this person can write really well.” And they’re more likely to read that one-hour thing versus a two-and-a-half-hour thing, because the one-hour thing can get made because people are hungry for the one-hour thing.

Craig: Yeah. Also, we’re in a weird time, you could maybe make just two-hour longs or three-hour longss. You say, “Okay, it’s at 140 at its longest.” So, you’re talking about 45 pages-ish, 43 pages-ish per episode of a three-episode thing. Well, you’re probably squeezing yourself in 140 anyway. Expand a few things here and there, write some endings so that each episode has an ending and each episode is beginning. So, there you’re filling some things out. Before you know it, you’ve got three-hour long episodes.

John: Yeah. My one cool thing this week is going to be a six-hour thing that feels like a movie. It is cinematic and tightly focused, but it could only work a limited series, and it works really well as that. Keep that in mind.

Craig: Yeah.

John: All right. Let’s take a look at some movie movies, like actual movies that showed up on big screens this past year.

Craig: What?

John: I saw many of these but not all of these. But the good thing about 2021-2022 is you can read the scripts for all these movies online for free because they put them out there for award season. We will have links in the show notes to all the scripts that we’re talking through. I really encourage you, if you’re a person who’s interested in screenwriting, to read through these. You don’t have to finish them, but just look at what they actually look like on the page, either before or after you see the movie because you’ll get a real good sense of, this was the intention on the page and this is how it translated.

In most of these cases, these were the writers directing. In a couple of cases, there’s different screenwriters and directors. But they’re all really good and interesting in different ways. They’re all chock full of “we hears” and “we sees.” And we’ll not just cherry pick the ones that had them. Most movies, I would say probably do use “we hear” and “we see.”

Craig: Yeah, because it’s incredibly useful.

John: It’s incredibly useful. I want to start with a young writer named Aaron Sorkin.

Craig: Who?

John: This early work, this is called Being the Ricardos. This is a story of behind the scenes of I Love Lucy. I actually really enjoyed this, I actually tweeted a little screenshot of a scene that I really liked a few weeks ago. This is all a backstage drama of an imagined week on the set of I Love Lucy and the conflict and controversies behind the scenes. The thing I tweeted about was, there’s a scene on page 5 that goes on for a long time. And it’s all OS, it’s all off screen. Basically, we are focused on a radio while Lucy is off screen and she’s listening to this thing, but having conversations with other people, and we don’t see people’s faces for a long time. It’s a deliberate choice on Sorkin’s part just to not show Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem for a long time, so we’d be invested in them as characters before we saw their faces and had to make a judgement of like, “Oh, does she look enough like Lucille Ball?”

Craig: Yeah. What I love about these pages, and well done, young writer Aaron Sorkin, is how much whitespace there is. Even in scenes where there’s huge blocks. For instance, on page 5, the announcers has just got this big huge– what is it nine-line bit of dialogue all because he’s reading advertisements, and he’s doing an intro to radio stuff. All fine, because then there’s just these wonderful seas of white, as Lindsay Doran would say, “Like milk.” And it’s so useful. It’s really useful. Interesting choice, by the way. This is what the Academy voters see, is that correct, John?

John: Mm-hmm, it is.

Craig: Interesting choice. When you go into production, inevitably, they’re going to be revisions that you want to do. Just as a holdover from the old days where people would have to have binders where they would insert pages into, there are A pages and B pages, and there are pages where there’s only stuff on half a page, because they get rid of the rest, but the page numbers don’t change. I would imagine that a lot of people would just do a collapsed page unlock version. But he just sent over the other one. He also does something that I don’t do, which is at the top of the page, it says “Continued:” and then the scene number, which I don’t do.

John: Which we don’t. This is a thing that Final Draft and Fade In can do for you. I’ve never found it especially useful. It’s never tripped me up. So, I’ve never done it. I want to get back to the scene where we have this radio announcer talking and we’re not seeing their faces. We come out of it, and the broadcast continues as we hear the front door open.

Craig: What?

John: The next minute or so, we’ll see no faces, just out of focus arms and legs and other shards of movement as they pass through the frame, which remains on the radio, the only thing in focus. We hear and we see in the same paragraph from Mr. Aaron Sorkin, who’s won many, many awards for being a good writer.

Craig: How else would you even do this? I’m top of page 6, “We HEAR his face being SLAPPED–” In this case, Aaron Sorkin has capitalized word ‘HEAR’ just to stick it to all of you, ding dong “professors of screenwriting,” because how else was he supposed to describe that? Someone hears his face being– the sound of a face being slapped? Like what do you say? Of course, we hear it. We hear it.

John: Love it. I think that Sorkin does, which another one of our writers that we’ll to talk about today, he capitalizes every character’s name, even in scene description. You can do that, that’s not common. I would say that’s maybe 5% of scripts I would see do this, but he does it. And you know what? It’s fine. But I wouldn’t leap on that as an example, but you could do it.

Craig: Clearly, and because the truth is I read through some of this, and I didn’t even notice it, because it just doesn’t matter.

John: He doesn’t use a ton of seeing description in his things. And there are ticker tape pages where it’s just all dialogue down the page. You know what? It’s really good dialogue, that helps.

Craig: It does help. And if you do have pages of ticker tape, for instance, page 12, the lines are short. The longest line is three lines long. Then, okay, actually, in a weird way, that’s a ticker tape conversation, snappity, snap, snap back and forth. I like it.

John: We were talking about A pages and B pages. An example is page 22A. At scene 24, and it’s just one line goes over the edge of this. Lucy has a single block of dialog there. It’s a good reminder that this all comes from a time when you were distributing physical pages. So, rather than having to send people a brand-new script, when there’s a tiny change, you just send in the pages that changed. But if there was too much to fit on one page, you create an A page or B page, and it would fit in between. So, his script would go page 22, 22A, a 22B if there needed to be and then there’d be a 23. That’s historically how we’ve done it. We could still do it that way. Craig, on your show, are there A, B pages, how do you do that?

Craig: You know what? There are. I’m starting to wonder why I’m bothering, because I have not seen anyone with a printed script on my set. Everyone used to carry binders around, but our script supervisor, the incredible Chris Roufs, he uses an iPad, as I think almost every script supervisor at this point uses an iPad or laptop. The first AD isn’t walking around with a binder with pages in it. I’m starting to wonder if I should just get rid of that. And just [crosstalk] do it anymore.

John: Here’s the issue. If you were to then unlock pages, you’d have to talk about what scene it is and never talk about the page numbers again, because the page numbers will keep changing.

Craig: But we never talk about page numbers anyway, we just talk about–

John: Yeah, because they’re [crosstalk] scenes.

Craig: And we talk scene numbers which never change. By the way, it’s so weird. It’s been a while since I’ve worked just a couple of years now on a feature script in production. Scene numbers here looks so tiny, because in television shows you start with scene 101, because that’s Episode 1, scene 1. And then, by the time you get to your 10th episode, it’s starting with scene 1001.

John: On these shows, do you have scripts that have more than 100 scenes?

Craig: No, that would be insane. I don’t even know how– [crosstalk]

John: Yeah. I was just thinking really complicated Game of Thrones episodes where you’re constantly cutting back and forth between a bunch of different things, but you’re not really-

Craig: You would just sort of–[crosstalk]

John: -picking those individual scenes, because they’re all a part of–[crosstalk]

Craig: Yeah. I’ll just pull a random script here. I’ll take episode 5. Let’s see what the number is of this particular– how many scenes I hit. 56. I have a feeling that’s probably pretty standard for me.

John: Yeah, that makes sense.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Last thing I want to say about Being the Ricardos, this is on bottom page 23. The scene description reads, “We’re going to start to go in and out of LUCY’s head as the reading goes on. She’s imagining what each beat will be like in its final form the way a chess master can see the board twelve moves ahead. She can also see and hear what the audience is going to laugh at.” Basically, so the idea is, we’re intercutting between the table reading of a script, and Lucy’s imagination of how it will actually be staged. It works really well in the movie, but it’s done very simply on the page. And Sorkin trusts that the reader is going to pay attention and follow what’s happening here, and you do.

Craig: Yeah. This is an area where– because sometimes people will say, [in mimicking tone] “Well, if you’re directing–” and that’s yes, to an extent, that is true. He can shorthand things somewhat, because what he doesn’t have to worry about is a director coming along and going, “I don’t know what the hell it is. I guess I’ll just make something up.” When you’re writing for other people directing, and I typically am, I will at least try and put things in there to make sure that the stuff that I need to happen or want to happen is there. That said, there’s always some amounts of confusion or things that can be cleared up. And that’s why we have 4000 meetings [chuckles] before we start shooting. So many meetings. Oh, my Lord.

John: [crosstalk] -obviously, there’s a tone meeting, which is really talking through what are we actually going for scene by scene? What does this need to feel like? But we have so many logistical production meetings to just figure out every department what do they need? What is the intention behind this? What does Craig want? What is the director need? All these things.

Craig: Yes. There are questions that are legitimately, “Can you explain this?” There are questions of, “Okay, we think you’re saying this, but are you saying that?” Then, there are questions that fall into the general category of, “I don’t want to be yelled at on the day.” It says here that he stabs him. Is that meant to be through the clothes, because if it’s not, then we have to build a prosthetic. And on the day, I don’t want you to show up and be like, “What the h–?”

John: Yup.

Craig: They ask, and it’s reasonable. They should ask. [chuckles] Making television and movies is basically a game of how many questions can I answer today without falling apart?

John: Let’s move on and take a look at The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal. This script is based on the Elena Ferrante novel. Obviously, she has that to draw from. As I’m looking through this, especially this opening sequence, there’s not purple prose, she’s not painting every sunset, but it’s very effective, especially in terms of describing the house that the character is renting, the house that she’s moving into, and giving us a sense of the geography inside the space. I felt like, “Oh, I can see where things are.” I can feel how would I generally get from one place to another, and how this character specifically is approaching this space. I really liked what they did there.

There’s also a man who’s like a– I was in the movie, so I think it’s interesting, a supporting character man, but I liked his character description is just his white hair. From the initial description, I felt I could see him, but then he was doing very specific things along the way and saying specific stuff. That was helpful for grounding him but also the space, this [unintelligible [00:38:22] that we’re staying on.

Craig: Yeah. This is an example of a script that generally does things differently than I do, and I don’t care. I like to bold my scene headers. Maggie doesn’t. I like to keep my action description chunks really tiny. She will occasionally roll off one that’s 12 lines long. I don’t care. As long as it’s interesting and I can make it through it, then I’m fine. She uses CONT’Ds. When a character talks, then there’s an action description, then the same character talks. I don’t do that, don’t care.

John: I generally do that if it’s going to be unclear. So, I will do that.

Craig: Yeah, I don’t it. It just doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the point is you set yourself free, people, it’s all good. Everything works fine if the script is good. The other thing that Maggie will do, she puts up– getting back to our parenthetical question from earlier, she puts a lot of stuff in parentheticals. She’ll have two-line parentheticals, and that’s fine. There is nothing better than a good script. And there are no formatting issues that a good script can’t overcome.

John: One small thing that I would do if I’d had access to the script, is do a search and replace for double spaces and make them one space because there’s places where there’s one space and places where it’s two spaces, and it’s just a little bit off. That’s a personal little pet peeve of mine, that does not influence the quality of the writing.

Craig: Well, yeah. Look, the very title page, there’s a comma after the word ‘based on’ that shouldn’t be there. [chuckles] I would say, Maggie, John and I are available for basic stuff like that.

John: Punctuation consultants, that’s all we’re asking.

Craig: Mostly, we just want to hang out with Maggie Gyllenhaal. [crosstalk]

John: Yeah.

Craig: We just want to hang out. We want to be your friend.

John: I met Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal a zillion years ago back when they were children because they used to live down the street from me.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: It’s nice to see that they’ve made something of themselves.

Craig: They’re doing all right. They’re doing all right, those crazy kids.

John: The other thing I’ll say it’s important about, as we’re reading through the script, is right from the very start, it sets up the rules of how this movie is going to work, and that we are going to be going back and forth in time, and that is important. It’s important to do that early enough in movie, so we get a sense of like, “Oh, this is this kind of movie where the back and forth will matter.”

Mitchells vs. the Machines is a film I’d love from this past year. It’s written by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe‎. I just really adored it and I was happy to see that so much of what I adored, starts on page 1 of the script. It is one of the busiest first pages I’ve encountered. And yet, I could follow it and really get a sense of what this movie was going to feel like. It was chaotic, but ultimately with a point.

Craig: The script on the page feels like it’s on cocaine, which is correct.

John: Yes.

Craig: Lord and Miller as producers have a really good record of both kinds of paces and things, but this has that kind of fantastic growing up in the 70s, we ate way too much sugar cereal in the morning, and then just sat down and watch these strobe lights of terrible cartoons, and our attention spans are shortened to nothing. Obviously, here’s just this wonderful quality that Mike and Jeff have put down on the page, but it does also have that just crazy snap to it.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s almost exhausting reading these pages. You can feel yourself like, “Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.” [onomatopoeia] [chuckles]

John: And then the movie does really trade on that. In the end, the movie eventually does settle into some quieter moments so it’s not this frenzy all the time, but it does kick off with a tremendous amount of energy. There are so many exclamation points on this first page, but none of them feel gratuitous. The word “we” is used constantly because we’re always there with them. Basically, it’s inviting us to be a part of this journey with the characters. I really dug it.

There is a shotgun introduction of all of our main characters. In one paragraph on page 2, “The VERY stoppable “warriors” are: RICK (40, Bearded, nature-loving Dad), LINDA (38, colorful, yet nervous Mom, worn out from trying to keep everyone together), AARON (8, nerdy blonde Muppet who wears exclusively dinosaur shirts), delightfully round pug, MONCHI. And KATIE (17, exploding with creative energy- nerdy now, but will be cool in college).

Generally, shotgun intros are not my favorite, and it works really well here because they boldfaced all the character names, so you see that, “This is important, pay attention here, we’re really going to see these people. This is our movie, is these four characters, plus this pug that looks like a loaf of bread. That is who we’re going to follow in the course of the story.”

Craig: The introductions feel they’re part of the tone. If you stop and did standard introductions, you’d be like, “Oh, what happened? Did you guys get tired?” Because, they’re just like, “Bah,” on page one, and then page two like, “Bah,” and then they’re like, “Okay, now let’s talk about dad is a–.” It’s wonderful, because they’re going to make a point of stopping this madness on page 4, when it literally says, “We go from this manic energy to,” boop, “a quiet, boring suburban neighborhood.” And that’s where they slowed down a bit, because they can.

John: It’s an animation script, and writing is not different than normal writing, there’s no fundamental difference here. This could be a live action script as well. So, we just reminded that animation writing is writing. The only thing you may notice is that parentheticals, here in this case, have been tucked in to the first line of dialogue, rather than having their own separate line. You see that more often in animation. Nothing would change if we were to do normal parentheticals here, you could absolutely do normal parentheticals in this case, and nothing would break or change. We’re not seeing scene numbers here. Numbering scenes and sequences in animation is its own special, unique beast. My advice is to do whatever they tell you to do.

Craig: Yeah, because it’s practical. There’s no magic to that. If you find yourself as you’re writing, dwelling on these issues of formatting, just make a mental note that you are trying to avoid writing.

John: 100%.

Megana: [laughs]

John: A film I greatly enjoyed watching was Passing. This is a film by Rebecca Hall. She adapted it from a novel by Nella Larsen. Here’s what I want to point out about Passing, is that the movie and the script have this kind of hallucinatory, too bright, kind of uncomfortable, kind of stagey artificial feel to it. That really works for the film. There are moments in in it I felt like, “Wait, is this somebody’s 16-millimeter project from the 90s?” And then, you realize like, “Oh, no, it’s actually the incredibly well-made best version of that film aesthetic.” I really dug that the film, partly for just how strange it is, and it feels strange on the page too. It radiates from the page to how they actually shot it.

Craig: Lots of little short bursts of things, then there’s longer stuff. There’s an interesting thing that happens on the bottom of page 1 where there’s a scene header.

John: Yeah, I saw that too.

Craig: Then the same starts in the next page, which we never really do. We always combine the scene header with at least the first line of the scene itself.

John: And who do we have to thank for that? Final Draft. Final Draft, honestly, one of the few things Final Draft did well early on in its incarnation is, making sure that scene headers don’t flow at the bottom of pages, so they always carry through the next page. It just automatically does that, and so is Highland and so does Fade In. Everyone does that.

Craig: That wasn’t something about the steno pool of Warner Brothers and– [crosstalk]

John: Oh, the steno pool did it, but, I think-

Craig: Oh, okay. Final Draft turned it into an automatic–

John: Automated, yeah. You and I don’t think about it because you and I never have to manually do that.

Craig: We don’t manually do it, which made me wonder if Rebecca had written this in Microsoft Word or something, because [crosstalk] notes, which is totally fine. Again, doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

John: It just doesn’t matter. And she’s capitalizing all the character names like you might in a play. It works fine.

Craig: Also, in the second paragraph of the first page, it says, “Dissolve to Light flaring in a static frame.” She’s capitalized the word ‘light.’ Not all caps, just the L. Um, okay. [chuckles] It’s fine.

John: Yeah. If we’re doing a three-page challenge [crosstalk] we’d then point out that’s unusual.

Craig: It’s unusual. It doesn’t kill anything, and maybe it’s intentional. I can’t tell if it’s intentional or just Rebecca is one of those people– because there is a whole generation of people, they don’t care about capitalization or punctuation. That’s all fungible to them.

John: We’ll see.

Craig: We’ll see.

John: I’ll quickly get through Belfast. This is a script by Kenneth Branagh. He’s a person who’s done some [unintelligible 00:46:40] movies, it’s not his first here. This is labeled as “Shooting Draft.” It’s also in Gill Sans rather than Courier. I strongly suspect that this is something that some studio put out and said, “Oh, it shouldn’t be in Courier.” I’d be willing to bet $100, this was a Courier script that’s somebody down the road ultimately put it to Gill Sans for us to read, because it’s weird that it’s in Gill Sans. I don’t think it’s helpful that’s in Gill Sans.

Craig: It is odd, only because of all the things that people can and can’t do, Courier is the one that just about everyone does, 99.9%. So, when it’s not in Courier, there’s a little bit of a, “Oh, so I guess you don’t need to get in line like the rest of us.”

[laughter]

Craig: Special, feel special, do we?

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s a little tricky, but it also makes me yearn for a different time or a different day where we wouldn’t have to necessarily be in Courier, because actually on the page, it’s rather pretty. It’s just different.

John: It is. I wouldn’t have picked this typeface. I love a sans-serif typeface. This, I think it’s actually a little bit hard to read. I think Gill Sans is a great face for certain things. All uppercase doesn’t look great in Gill Sans. Some things are harder to read than they necessarily need to be. Again, character names are being uppercased through the whole thing for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a British thing. Maybe that’s why Rebecca Hall is doing this as well. A thing I really did appreciate about this though is there’s on page 3, the description, “The camera is high above and behind BUDDY as he starts to walk down the middle of the street. You can see clearly all the way down to the other end, where it meets a road going horizontally across, making a T junction.” Great. I can see that. Also, weird, we got a “you” rather than a “we?” Sure.

Craig: Yeah, I’m fine with it, because “you” and “we” are doing the same thing. They’re just saying in the audience, whether you feel like you’re a part of an audience, perhaps at this point in his career in life, Kenneth Branagh, when he watches movies, just buys up the entire thing. [chuckles] [crosstalk] So, he just presumes that everyone watches it alone.

John: Yeah. He doesn’t want to share armrest with anybody.

Craig: There’s no one else there, but you see the following.

John: It’s also important should point out that, we’re following a young boy through this, all the action is character limited to what he can see and experience until a certain point. Basically, there’s a mob that’s descending, and we’re only getting limited information from what he’s encountering until the mob is upon us. And then eventually, we break that limited POV and see everything, but that’s just good technique. It’s a technique that works on the page, that translates really well to visual medium. [crosstalk] -thinking of that.

Craig: Yeah. There’s another thing that happens on page 7, which is cool. He’s doing a montage really. It’s not so much a montage, it’s just a rapid sequence of things, and he uses CUT TO: for each one of them, which he doesn’t use for other scenes. It makes everything spread out really big on that page. But in a sense, that also helps me see each one of those things. I actually quite liked it. Generally, I don’t do it even in something like this, because I’m always scrambling for paged count time, but the truth is, this is probably more accurate. Again, no problems. It’s fine.

John: No problems. Last one I want to look at is Tick, Tick… Boom!, a film I really enjoyed. This script is by Steven Levinson. It’s based on Jonathan Larson’s musical, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. On page 1 and 2– the thing I think the film does really crucially, and you see this here on the script, is it has to set up, okay, this is who Jonathan Larson was, this is why he’s famous, and we’re not going to get to that stuff at all. This is all going to take place before then. And that’s a lot to do in two pages, and it does it really, really well. Basically, framing this is how much of the story we’re going to tell, and only this part of the story is really important. I thought they did a very effective job here, starting off with making sure you understood why you’re watching the movie, and what movie you’re going to watch.

Craig: Yeah, totally agree. Quality-wise, obviously, great. There’s an interesting choice here that I struggle with a little bit format-wise on a script that is only 104 pages. So, you have the time, meaning you have the space, to not put that extra line break before each scene header. It just makes everything– and to not bold, the scene headers, it’s harder to read. I just find it harder to read. I get confused a little bit as I’m going through or the transitions don’t feel quite as crackly or sharp because it’s just a smudge. For me, and this is really a pure readability thing, I think people should put that extra line break before the scene header or bold the scene header, but to do neither is rough. That said, doesn’t stop things from working.

John: It could work. Your choices are one or more of extra line space before the scene header, underlining scene header, which some people do–[crosstalk]

Craig: Yup, that works.

John: -are choices. There’s underlining here which I think it’s really important in top of page 3. “NOTE: Throughout the film, we move back and forth between Jon in 1992 performing at the show, and the events he is narrating as they occur in 1990.” This is something that is completely obvious when you’re watching the movie, but could be perplexing as you’re reading the script. What the script does, INT – LOCATION – DAY, and then will say either 1990 or 1992, because they’re two different timelines and we can see it when I watch the movie. But on the page, it could get confusing. So, it’s important to put that note out there for the reader.

Craig: Great.

John: Great. These are some pretty good scripts. So, congratulations to all of our writers here. I think you did a good job, I think you have promising careers ahead of you.

Craig: [chuckles]

John: But I really do strongly encourage our listeners to click through the links and take a look at the pages that we’re discussing and describing because that’s how you learn, is by reading scripts and reading good scripts is a great way to learn how some good writers’ work.

Craig: Great.

John: We have time for maybe a question. I see one here from Johnny. Megana, can you ask us that one?

Megana: Johnny asks, “I have this question for John about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie inherited the chocolate factory from Wonka because of his good nature/personality/traits, honesty, kindness, compassion, etc. However, in the beginning, he bought the chocolate using the $10 bill on the street. He didn’t try to find the owner or turn it in. Does this behavior contradict his good nature?”

John: Craig, I have a question for you before we get into the actual script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you find $10 on the street, do you have an ethical duty to find its owner?

Craig: How the hell are you going to find the owner?

John: That’s my question.

Craig: No.

John: Money is fungible. I can’t tell you whose money that is. If I find a wallet, I’m going to find-

Craig: Yeah, of course.

John: -the owner of the wallet.

Craig: Of course. But if you find money on the street, there’s literally no way to identify who that came from. None. If somebody came rushing back around the street was like, “Oh, my God! Did you find a $10 bill on the street?” I’d say, “You know what? I did. Here it is.” Because there’s no way they would have known that it was a 10 or on the street if they weren’t there. But otherwise, no. That’s that’s a weird question.

John: It’s a strange question. But I wanted to point to Johnny to say, just go to the library, go to my johnaugust.com Library, and you can just read the script, that’s not actually what happens. And I realized like, “I’d never actually posted the scripts for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I posted the working scripts, and then a final script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And just like our Aaron Sorkin script, I put in the change pages so people can see this was the white draft, here’s the blue pages, here’s the pink pages, and here’s the final script all together so you can see how this fit in. I also put in the memos that go out with those distributions so people can see like, “Oh, this is why these things are changed.” And this, again, back in the time of physical pages going out. I would put a list of, “This is the order of pages that you should see,” because sometimes it gets confusing. All those things are out there.

The reason why I point to the original script though is that doesn’t say like you won it because you were good. He says, “I invited five children to the factory, and the one who is least rotten would be the winner.” Charlie doesn’t have to be good, he just has to be the least rotten. It’s also important to share my version of Charlie and Chocolate Factory. Wonka is going through this existential crisis and self-doubt and all sorts of weird things are crashing down on him. He doesn’t really want to give up his factory. So, that’s the point of like, Wonka is protagonating over the course of this and really going through this crisis. He’s not even quite sure why he’s invited these kids in here. But it’s not because he wants to find a good-hearted kid, because that’s not even how Wonka is wired.

Craig: Other than getting everything wrong, Johnny’s question was great.

John: What Johnny’s question did, is it did motivate me to actually finally put up the scripts, which I’m not sure why I didn’t put up the scripts before, so people can read how Charlie and Chocolate Factory looked on the page. All right, I think it’s time for One Cool Things.

Craig: Okay.

John: As promised, my One Cool Thing is a limited series that I enjoyed and really loved called Vigil. This is a British show that in the US is on Peacock. I guess this is on Peacock, you don’t even have to subscribe to Peacock. Even the free Peacock would have it. It’s created by Tom Edge. Personally, I follow him on Twitter. George Northy described it as “Mare of Easttown on a nuclear submarine.” And that’s actually probably what it is. You have a female police detective investigating a murder. It’s on this British nuclear submarine, but she has family custodial drama. There’s just a lot happening in her personal life [unintelligible 00:56:11] being a claustrophobic character on a submarine. I just really dug it. I love everything that has a submarine, but I really thought it worked especially well. The twists and turns were great. There’s that classic sense of Mare of Easttown. At a certain point, you suspect that every character you’ve seen on screen somehow was involved in these murders. That’s the show, and I really, really dug it.

Craig: Fantastic. My one cool thing this week, is the MIT Mystery Hunt, which you cannot– Currently, it’s a week later now when you’re hearing this or five days later, and it will surely have been solved by some group of incredibly brilliant people. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with the MIT Mystery Hunt, John.

John: I don’t know what it is.

Craig: MIT Mystery Hunt has been going on for quite some time, maybe 20 years. It was always a physical hunt that took place on the MIT campus that involved solving lots and lots of puzzles, which would feed into meta puzzles. It’s like an incredibly complicated, long version of the thing that David Quang and I did at The Magic Castle that you attended.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It would take place over the course of a number of days. It would involve moving physically around the campus and finding a coin, and then you won. If you found the coin, you were the team that won. Over the years, it’s become more and more complicated. The last couple of years, it’s been virtual for obvious reasons, including this year.

One of the interesting things about the MIT Mystery Hunt is that the team that wins is responsible for creating the mystery hunt for the next year. When I tell you that this is like a full-time job, I’m not kidding. Last year, a team named Palindrome or Team Palindrome, they won, and they have won before, a couple of times, I think. Some of my friends are on it, including Dave Shukan and Mark Halpin. There’s also a guy that I’ve occasionally solved puzzles with named Eric Berlin, who I think was their captain. These folks, along with dozens of other people, this is a very large team, by all accounts created quite the hunt, and I think it legitimately took them all year to create this huge event that teams are currently working on and solving right now.

To give you a sense of how complicated it gets, the team last year, Galactic Trendsetters, they were the ones that won the year before us, they created the puzzle hunt last year, they literally created their own MMO for this event. Because you’re dealing with MIT people. They can do anything, anything. They’re coding. They created their own proprietary software for this. Anyway, it’s very exciting. I’m a decent solver. I’m just not at this level. I can solve the first tier of their puzzles, but the later tier, beyond me, definitely beyond me. It’s going on right now. I don’t think anyone’s won yet. But my guess is probably by– we’re recording on a Saturday. Probably by Sunday, there will be a winner. So, I just wanted to say one cool thing to Team Palindrome for creating all that working, so hard. It’s not a paid job. And then, congrats to everyone that solves it and participates in it. And of course, a special congratulations to the team that wins. I don’t know who they are yet.

John: I was going to say, I wonder why someone would do something like this when they aren’t getting paid for it, and all they could do is have some sense of satisfaction of how they made a thing, after– [crosstalk]

[laughter]

Craig: Well, we get to do this one hour a week. The sense I got was that this was practically a full-time job that required its own organizational structure and methods, and just review– I actually test solve quite a few puzzles for them. I think they were nice to only have me test solve the ones that I was capable of solving, but they were all really interesting. There are rafts of test solvers that are being worked on. They have this point system for evaluating. It’s incredibly com– it’s like producing a show. It’s something else. Great work on that, everyone. I’m hoping everyone’s enjoying it. I’m sure they are. Dave Shukan has told me that he will send me a collection of good ones that he thinks I [chuckles] can solve that I haven’t already solved. So, thanks, Dave. I appreciate that.

John: Fantastic. Also, it might be a good moment to shout out a congratulations to a friend of the show, David Kwong, who is now engaged.

Craig: That’s right. David Kwong is finally going to be an honest man.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: We’re incredibly happy for him.

John: Yeah, please don’t saw your wife in half. That’s all we’re asking.

Craig: Those are the people that are doing all the hard work on stage. You know that, right?

John: Yeah, of course. They’re the contortionists.

Craig: Yeah, exactly.

John: Yeah. And that’s our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Brink. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you can also find the links to some of the scripts we talked about today. You’ll find the transcripts there. And you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts, and they’re great. They have Stuart’s sense of softness. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The hoodies are great. Now, Craig, did you pick up your hoodie while you’re in town or not?

Craig: Oh, I don’t think I did.

John: Okay. Well, we’ll ship it to you up in Calgary so you can keep warm.

Craig: Oh, thank you.

John: They turned out really well. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record, talking about the screenwriter equivalent of bootcamp. Until then, relax, stay chill. And we’ll see you next time on Scriptnotes. Bye.

Craig: Bye.

[music]

John: Hey, Megana, we got a question from Andrew. Read the question that Andrew has?

Megana: Andrew asks, “I’ve heard many former or current soap opera actors refer to working on the soap as a bootcamp for them, mainly because of the production schedule and the need to get everything right the first time. Soap actors who find work elsewhere are praised for their ability to memorize and always get things right quickly. Is it the same for writers? Do writers who worked on soap operas have an insane work ethic and the ability to turn out content? If not, what is the writing equivalent of a writing boot camp?”

John: All right. That’s an interesting question. There obviously are. There are actors who started out soap opera actors who are now some of our best actors out there. Not everyone who works on a soap opera is going to be the best actor out there. But that sense of being able to show up, do the work, get it done, get it right the first time, memorize a bunch of lines, that all feels great and crucial. Craig, can you think of examples of high pressure or writing jobs where there’s so much quantity that you actually do pick up good skills?

Craig: Sure. I think I went through it, and it’s called advertising. Copywriting in advertising is pretty brutal. You have to do a lot of different kinds of writing, is to do a lot of idea making, which is important obviously. You have to talk a lot about how to get into something and what the purpose of something is, so you learn about purposefulness. And then you have to write a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of versions. Versions, and versions and versions. And they all have to fit to time. You’re dealing with a very limited amount of time to get your idea across, the purpose, the point, structure, beginning, middle, end. And then, you have to do it again, but for a shorter amount of time to do multiple versions of it. When you’re cutting things together for marketing like trailers and things, you need to start asking which of this stuff is emerging as important or salient or notable. And you also learn which movies are harder to market because they don’t know what they’re about either. All of that is pretty great bootcamp. You learn audio, you learn visual, you learn how to write, purpose, revisions, rewrites.

When you come out of it, you’re pretty well set up to go on to the next thing. I’m not recommending that people go seek it out as the basis for a screenwriting career, but having gone through it, I think boot camps is a pretty darn good term for it.

John: My freshman year of college, I was a journalism advertising major. My J54 was the basic news writing class I had to take. It was famously difficult class, it was exhausting class, because it was 8:00 in the morning, you’d show up and the professor say, “Okay, I need each of you to find a story on campus and it needs to be delivered in the next 90 minutes.” So, you’re like, “Argh.” You’re running around, trying to find something to write about. Get introduced, get notes, get back, sit down at a computer and write the story. And then, he would hover over you as you’re writing. It really made you focus in on just getting it done, getting the words out, thinking about that pyramid style, like the most important stuff at the top and being able to cut off the story at any point, and breaking some of your preciousness are the way that you can get in your own way with stuff. So, I had to learn how to write those kinds of news stories. And yeah, I did learn a lot there.

But that kind of news writing is different than longform journalism. When I would actually have the time to actually do more work and to do more than just reporting, but actually think about synthesizing and putting stuff together, those classes were much more useful in terms of my actual screenwriting, in terms of thinking about how I’m going to go from, “Here’s a bunch of ideas,” to, “Here is the way I’m going to structure and tell these ideas in a way that is interesting.” I think we have to have both. I just stayed doing news writing, it would be like when I was working at Tristar and having to write coverage on two scripts a day. It would burn a hole in your brain and limit you from doing other kind of writing.

Craig: That’s one of the downsides of working as a young person in something like advertising, is that the people who have remained, you can tell that they have been scarred and changed by it.

John: Yeah. [chuckles]

Craig: It’s because there is something brutal about writing that isn’t about the writing itself. That whatever you write is in service of a purpose. You learn to write with purpose, but only purpose. Whereas when you’re writing things to entertain people, there is its own intrinsic value. The point is watch this, not watch something else, or learn about something else. When are in your 20s and you’re working at these things, you often are working for people that are maybe a little roughed up. I remember meeting some wonderful people. It’s possible also that my experience and your experience was strongly informed by the year it was. The 90s, people were meaner in the 90s.

[laughter]

Craig: They really were. People were mean.

John: Well, let’s think about things that are closer to what we are actually doing for a living. People do write soap operas obviously, and soaps are covered by the WJ. There’s WJ writers who are writing soaps. I don’t see a lot of people who are moving from writing soaps into other things. It feels almost like game show writing. It’s a very unique specialty, because you’re just having to crank out so much and there’s just not time to do the kinds of other work you could be doing. But there’s obviously people write on network one-hours that are like procedural shows, and there’s a whole way procedural shows work. There’s TV sitcoms, which have a very different vibe in how it’s all geared up towards the weekly taping of the show. Those are very differing experiences, but you are on the hook for generating a lot of material each week. And it’s going to get you out of some of your preciousness about everything having to be perfect at all times.

Craig: Yeah. You can pick up skills in these things. Accountability is a big one. It would have been really hard as a 21- or 22-year-old to start writing a screenplay with no sense of accountability whatsoever. When you are paying your bills because of the stuff you’re writing, you learn accountability. You also learn frustration.

John: Yes.

Craig: The frustration of being a writer, I don’t want to say it’s a good thing, but it’s a helpful thing that we get frustrated so frequently, because we get better and better at dealing with it. There are other categories of artists in our business that I don’t think have been exposed to the frustration we’ve been exposed to. It’s harder for them to deal with. We are weathered.

John: We’re talking about these early jobs as being you’re accountable for doing stuff, and you haven’t just turned stuff in. Schools can be accountability mechanisms, where basically you are having to turn stuff in and therefore having to get work done on a regular basis, and be able to show it to people and actually have a conversation with people, which could be great. But, Megana, I’m thinking about the writing groups that you’re a part of. A large part of that is accountability, where you’re getting better because you’re being forced to generate stuff for each week’s meeting.

Megana: Absolutely. I think the social pressure of it is really helpful too. I think you lose your preciousness really fast. One thing my writing group implemented, which has been helpful during the pandemic, is that you have to say what your goal is for the next session, and if you don’t meet that you have to contribute a certain amount into a pot that we use at the end of six months to take ourselves out. So, there’s a financial repercussion if you’re not meeting your goals.

Craig: Yeah. That’s right.

Megana: That is helpful. It’s like, “Ah, okay, well, I’ll send something in that I feel unsure about because I don’t want to spend 20 bucks on missing this deadline.”

Craig: Hmm. You don’t want to give me that option of buying my way out of writing though.

[laughter]

John: Well, let’s talk about– Craig and I have been bought many times. I want to think about when we do weekly work, and I’m not doing as many weeklies as I used to, but for a time I was doing a fair number of weeklies, and it wasn’t very classically that pick two motto. Something could be fast or cheap, or good, and you’re going to pick two. They would pay me really good money. I was not cheap, but I was fast and I was good. It was my ability to recognize what they needed, to be able to deliver what they needed within this short period of time that they had. If I could write great pages but I couldn’t turn them in on time, that was not helpful to them. If I was fast and I wasn’t delivering what they needed, it wouldn’t have worked. So, I did learn a lot having to generate pages that could shoot tomorrow on that timeline.

Craig: Everybody has their own internal clock. If you find yourself in a situation where writing has to be done really quickly and really well in a short amount of time, it may not be for you. You may not have the ability to write well that quickly. You may not have the emotional ability to write that well that quickly. One of the things that happens when you’re working on a weekly, and it’s very similar to when you’re working on short term, impulse projects like advertising and so forth, is you’re also going to be getting the same amount of compressed reviewing and critiquing in the short amount of time. So, you work on something for a week, you’re readily expecting to be rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and hearing and talking and back and forth and back and forth for the week, it’s intense. And you need to be able to do all that, and have the emotional fortitude and the mental stamina, and your mind just has to work quickly. It’s not for everybody, it really isn’t.

I love doing weeklies because they actually don’t have the level of accountability that other things have. And I don’t mean to imply that I write a bunch of crap and walk away laughing. I care very much. But it’s focused, it’s so focused, I’m not responsible for the entire movie. I’m just trying to fix the first act. And then, I’m gone. I’m doing everything I can in that moment to help, but I am not raising this child. I’m just watching them like a grandparent for three days.

John: Absolutely. It’s more like you’re the emergency room doctor who’s keeping the patient alive and stabilized and getting them so they can walk out of the hospital, but you’re not responsible for like, “Oh, that other thing which we detected,” you’re not going to fix all those problems.

Craig: I did. There was one project I’m working on where I was like, “I’m not the emergency doctor trying to stabilize this patient. I am the undertaker just trying to get you into open casket funeral.”

[laughter]

Craig: That’s all I’m doing. This thing is dead. I just wanted the parents to be able to see it when you wheel it out there because right now, oh, my God.

John: Yeah. We’ve all been there. We’ve seen some of those movies and early things. I say yes, there are some bootcamp situations. Do you need to enroll or list yourself in a bootcamp situation? I would say to our friend who wrote in, Andrew, assess what you need. Is your problem that you’re just not getting stuff done? Is your problem accountability? Then, signing up for a class or getting into a writing group might be good interest in terms of getting you to generate more pages. If the problem’s that you’re just not generating a lot, that’s great. If you’re a person who’s generating a lot of stuff, it’s just not very good, maybe what you don’t need is a bootcamp. Maybe you just need some quality control. Maybe you need to slow down a little bit more and focus on refining some stuff, and getting some people to read you, who can really help talk you through what’s working, what’s not working, so you can actually polish rather than just generate the most you can generate.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. Thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

Megana: Thank you.

LINKS:

• The CW is for sale!
• Annie Hayes on Writing with an Invisible Illness on John’s blog
• Being the Ricardos by Aaron Sorkin
• The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines by Mike Rianda And Jeff Rowe
• Passing by Rebecca Hall
• Belfast by Kenneth Branagh
• Tick, Tick, Boom by Steven Levenson
• Willy Wonka Script at the johnaugust.com library!
• Vigil show
• MIT Mystery Hunt 2022
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by William Brink (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin:
My name is Craig Mazin.

John August:
And this is Episode 529 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do screenwriters balance the needs of the scene versus the needs of the story? The two are of course interlinked but in practice are often at odds. We’ll wrestle with how and when to prioritize one over the other.

John August:
Then it’s another round of the Three-Page Challenge where we look at scenes submitted by our listeners and offer our honest feedback. And in our bonus segment, for premium members, what do you do when you get bored with what you’re writing? Is that a sign to bail or buckle down?

Craig Mazin:
We’re going to give excellent advice and terrific feedback. And overall, provide tremendous value to our listeners.

John August:
Right. Provide tremendous value to both our free listeners and our premium members who we love a little bit more.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. I just feel like you we’re a value proposition.

John August:
100 %.

Craig Mazin:
I’ve been watching Succession. So, I have all these nerdy business phrases in my head. I think sometimes they’re just making stuff up.

John August:
Sometimes, they probably are. But someone said all those things.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. Someone said it somewhere.

John August:
Someone said that I don’t love you but I love you.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, I didn’t know what that meant. I got to be honest with you. Sometimes, they are legitimately over my head.

John August:
I love succession. And so, we’re going to talk just a little bit on about Succession. I love Succession. But I do feel like that which the intimacy in the tabletop and the next slide dialog will be like, “What the hell did you just say to me? Why would you say that? That was the worst thing you could possibly do.” And yet somehow, they continue on with their lives.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, it is really interesting that they haven’t all just left. I think normally, especially if you can just be bought out of a company, why would you stay?

John August:
Why would you stay?

Craig Mazin:
If you’re any of them?

John August:
So, were of course having a conversation on Friday before Sunday, the finale. So, for all we know, everything’s changed.

Craig Mazin:
Do you all love each other now?

John August:
Yeah, so my theory going into it, which I can spoil now, is that I think that Tom was wearing a wire through a lot of this season. And that will hopefully be revealed on Sunday’s episode, but it might not. I may have ruined it for other people.

Craig Mazin:
If that is revealed, then I assume the government will have to figure out what I love you but I don’t love you.

John August:
That’s what it is.

Craig Mazin:
I said it backwards. I don’t love you but I love you. Which one was it?

Megana Rao:
I don’t love you but I do love you.

John August:
Okay. Well, now that just clarified.

Craig Mazin:
What?

John August:
Yeah. Regardless of interest.

Craig Mazin:
I know the difference between I’m not in love, I love you but I’m not in love with you. Is that what they mean?

John August:
That’s how I feel about you, Craig. I’m not in love with you. But I do love you as a friend.

Craig Mazin:
Sure. I don’t know. It’s a little weak. I don’t like the way you said it.

John August:
So, we can have this banter because we are three feet away from each other. For the first time, you’re no longer in Calgary for a brief period of time.

Craig Mazin:
Yep. Little hiatus over here.

John August:
Yeah. So, we’re here back in our Hancock Park abode. Let’s talk through some news. This is news. Craig, can you tell me what an open writing assignment is?

Craig Mazin:
Of course. An open writing assignment is a job that the studios have. They need a writer to write something. It’s often a rewrite. But sometimes, it’s a first draft of some property that they already own.

John August:
Or it could be something like how would this be a movie if there was an article they bought, that becomes-

Craig Mazin:
That becomes an article. And so, they go to the agencies and they say, this is… and each agency has an agent that covers that studio. And they say to that agent, “We have an open writing assignment. This is the job. This is the producer. And we’re looking roughly for this thing.” And then, the chum is in the water and everybody starts going for it.

John August:
Absolutely. And so, in some cases, they may be going out to certain writers, and I say like, oh, we’re out to this writer, this agency, and we’re waiting to hear back this writer. Or, it could be like, this is the thing we’re looking for. Who do you got for us? And the agents reach out to clients and say like, “Is this a thing you’d be interested in pursuing?”

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. When they have an open writing assignment, it usually means they aren’t pursuing anyone in particular. They’re looking for people to come in and impress them.

John August:
When an assignment is out there, there are emails exchanged back and forth, or phone calls. And this last week, the WGA introduced this thing called the Project Page, which is a one sheeter that essentially collects all that information about a future project in one handy document. It’s shaking it in front of him. So, we’ll put a link to this in the show notes. But it’s just a simple PDF you download.

John August:
The idea behind it is that the Product Page is for the producer, executive, to give those critical details about where the IP rights have been secured, who else has written on the project, if there’s talent attached, who are the producers, and hopefully, at some point, get to a place where you can say, “Can you send me the Project Page?” And that’s the summary of where the project is at this moment in time. Will they fill this out? We’ll see.

Craig Mazin:
Because you might as well have a big box on here that says, “Are you lying?” The question are the underlying rights secured. They just lie about that all the time.

John August:
They will. And so, I had a conversation with some agents about this, this past week. And all of them want this to happen and also feel like it may be hard to get the producers and studios to agree to do it. And yet, I think it’s very useful for writers and maybe we could talk through what’s on the sheet because I don’t think you should be considering taking a job unless you could answer these questions. So, in some ways, I want to have this by the computer to actually check all these boxes, like do I know this information? Because so many times I’ve actually had to call my agents, email my agents to get clarification on like, “Wait, tell me who the producers are because I have a feeling I know who one of the producers are and I will never work with that person again in my life.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, it is a good checklist for stuff that would be nice to know as long as you understand that you might not… let me revise that, that you will be lied to at least to some extent. So, for instance, when it says, how long has the project been in development, they’re going to lie. The names of the previous writers, they’re going to lie. This is a rewrite, number of previous writers, that’ll be a lie. Can you briefly describe the project’s development history? This is a fresh project. We’re looking for an exciting new voice, lie. So, they’re just going to do all that because it’s Hollywood. But the part that I think is helpful is at least putting them on notice that you’re asking the question. Once an agent starts to ask, then the problem for the studio is, if they lie to that agent, and then another agent comes along, and they hear a different thing, then they have an agency problem. So, it’s a good conversation to have. This is maybe the most useful version of this is one that you put in front of your agent and say, it sure would be good if you could tell me the answer to these questions.

John August:
That’s what I really think we should be our first and lowest goal is basically say like, before you come to me with this project, I want to be able to know these answers because I want to know the IP rights are not all secured. Great, but what’s happening here, like is it really based on thing? You and I have a common friend. I don’t think she’s ever shared this story publicly. But she wrote something that she thought was an original that ended up being based on something and wasn’t, so she got to arbitration that she found out like, “Oh, this was actually based on a book.”

Craig Mazin:
Which they will do.

John August:
They will do that. And so, this will not preclude that. But at least you have some conversation. At some point, they said it was not based on something else.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. Once you get hired, they do have to list all the assigned material to you. So, at that point, you should know, it should be in your contract. But certainly, if they don’t have the underlying IP locked up, then not only is there risk for you, but also they’re using you to get the IP.

John August:
Let’s also talk about why this is important for any writer considering one of these projects. Because if you are going to go after this thing, that could be not just hours, but days or weeks of your time putting together a pitch, figuring out like is this worth your time to pursue. In many cases, you won’t know if you didn’t have the answers to these questions.

Craig Mazin:
Correct. Also, any open writing assignment is usually fraught with a lot of risk. The reason it’s an open writing assignment is the same reason that there’s stuff in the sale bin. It means that it’s not particularly high on the studio’s priority list. It may be something that a producer is pushing really hard that the studio isn’t particularly interested in, but, sure, make 100 people jump through hoops to bide some time before we convince you. We’re not going to ever do this.

Craig Mazin:
There’s all problems with open writing assignments. They are somewhat dangerous. They’re like junk bonds. Junk bonds can make you a ton of money as many criminals have proven. But there’s a lot of risk.

John August:
Transformers was an open writing assignment at one point. And they came to me with it, like I don’t get transformers, not for me. But it was for somebody and became a huge property. But there have been so many things that across the transom. It’s like, I don’t know.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, the worst version of this, and this is fairly common is they’ll come to you. And they’ll say, “Yes, this is an opening writing assignment. It’s from, let’s pick a studio, Universal, and the producer is, “Let’s just call her Vanessa. And Vanessa has this property that she’s talking to the estate about. And we’re putting a pitch together. The studio is super into this and is a priority for them. And what she’s really doing is laundering things, right? The people who own the rights to the thing, which may be useless, or like, “We’re not going to give you the rights unless we see what the movie would be.”

Craig Mazin:
So, they’re going to you, and they’re saying, “Yeah, we can’t give you the job unless you show us what the movie is.” And then, they’re just looking across, share that stuff. And somehow they get money. But it’s all they’re just lying crosswise to everybody.

John August:
But I’m pretty sure his job though is just like dream about a movie that could possibly exist and convince folks that you’re building stuff out of smoke, and that’s their job, too.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. I don’t want to imply that that is completely morally treacherous. It has resulted in good things. But a lot of times, open writing assignments are a bit, they’re vaporware. And you just have to be aware of that that they can go away.

John August:
I think if I’d had this checklist earlier in my career, there are things that are just like, oh, hell, no, I’m not walking down that road, because I wouldn’t have pursued it. So, if it avoids somehow for some people, it’s a good thing to have them.

Craig Mazin:
When you’re young and you don’t have children, what else do you do? Seems like a pretty good use of your time. Practice your skills.

John August:
And I think you should practice your skills to the degree that you’re not actually stopping writing original stuff for yourself. And that’s, I think that’s the trap that people fall into this. They’re only pursuing open writing assignments and they’re not actually doing new stuff because they have nothing to show for a year of their writing time.

Craig Mazin:
There’s only one writer that’s ever going to get any internal credit from the studio. And that’s the writer that gets this thing, the green light. Everybody else is just somebody that they had to fire along the way. So, odds are that this won’t work out great. So, there’s glum. It’s almost Christmas time. I should probably pep up a little bit. We are out of spooky season, correct?

John August:
Yeah we’re in the holiday spirit. Megana who’s here with us, talk to us about how you’re feeling post-spooky season, like we’re still in cozy season. So, is it still a good time of year for you?

Megana Rao:
It’s still a good time of year. It’s a little too dark for my taste.

John August:
Yeah. My one cool thing is about this darkness. When I asked Siri what time the sunset was and she said 4:45, that’s not okay. A sunset-

Craig Mazin:
Do you guys have a little problem with the sunset down here in Los Angeles?

John August:
Oh, yeah, we do.

Craig Mazin:
Because I wake up in the darkness. And then, I go to lunch in the darkness. And then, I go to bed in the darkness In Calgary.

John August:
Yeah, you picked that place.

Craig Mazin:
It was selected for us for a number of reasons. I love Calgary. But my goodness, the first thing that happened when we got there in May was we realized that at 5:00 a.m., the laser blast of the sun was going to hit your eyeballs through anything. It penetrates through wood, concrete. And, man, now it’s dark. Oh, wow. Is it dark?

John August:
Yeah. People moved to Los Angeles. And I think they don’t… because it’s warmer. They seem like it won’t get dark in some way. But it feels like it gets extra dark here.

Megana Rao:
Yeah, because it’s extra bright during the day.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. No, it does not get extra bright no. It’s actually fairly moderate when it comes to that thing.

John August:
The main thing I want to talk through today is this idea of scenes versus the whole movie, scenes versus the story and the journey versus the destination. And I think one of the things that’s so fundamental that’s easy to overlook. And we’ve talked about this in various ways over the course of the 10 years of the show. But writers are both creating stories and scenes. And if the scenes are like the individual pieces of Lego, the story is what you build with all those Legos assembled.

John August:
But we experience books and movies linearly. So, they are assembled in front of us or watching them be assembled. And the pieces themselves are constructed. They’re little movies themselves are built of these smaller moments, bits of dialogue, visuals, conflict. And so, the tension is that we’re trying to create the most interesting little Lego blocks that are full and joyful to look at and are fantastic. But that will ultimately fit together to build that, the unit we’re trying to build. And sometimes, those are not compatible goals is that we are trying to… both have every moment be spectacular and brilliant and insightful and rewarding and have the whole experience fit together and be what we’re set out to make. And those are real tensions. And you experience it in the movies where you’re experiencing I’m sure the same writing a show right now.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. No, that’s always a challenge. And it’s why I do like to outline early on because it’s the one time where you can engage in very simple scene work like just describing what a scene will be, where is it, and what’s the point, and then look at all of it together. Because what happens when you do all this work is you begin to realize that scenes are always in the context of what came before and what’s coming after. And those things change what that scene feels like to you all the time. You’re guessing how that will work. But it doesn’t always work the way you think. And there are certain things that you… especially once you get into editing, you realize that seems so important. And now, it’s like, yeah, just get rid of it.

John August:
Yeah. I think it’s both a craft of making sure the individual later blocks those scenes, those moments as bits are the best possible versions. But also, do we even need that Lego block? Or, no, it’ll all fit together better. And these hold them stronger without that, that extraneous piece is actually breaking the flow of what you had originally intended.

Craig Mazin:
It’s so hard because you wonder, Am I giving something away that I should hold on to? Is this one of those stories, where if only I’d kept that thing there? And then, you also think, Oh, wait. Am I being precious about this? And does it not matter? You’re making these value judgments all the time. It’s very frustrating. But it does drive home the need for transitions. I do think that as you’re crafting your Lego piece, if you know how it fits with the one before it and the one after it, better chance that it sticks around.

John August:
So, let’s talk about planning versus pantsing. Whether you are carefully outlining and figuring out what the whole story is. So then, as you zoom in on this scene, this scene is to accomplish this thing. This is where I need to get into and this is what needs to achieve at the end. And I’ve done that on movies. There’s also been other movies where I have pants it as it’s grown organically out of like, this is what the scene feels like. This is where the energy of the scene is taking us to the next thing. And sometimes, that works, and you don’t know if it’s going to work. So, it’s probably a riskier way to start. It’s that organic, just like what wants to happen next. But some really good movies have come out of that process.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, certainly. I try and do a bit of a hybrid thing, which I think a lot of people do. I’d like to know, just I like to know what the scene is before I write it. I think some people just start typing and then see where it goes from there, which is a bit like auto writing like using Ouija board. For me, I like to know what I’m supposed to be writing. I like to know what the beginning, middle, and end is of the whole story, of the scene.

Craig Mazin:
But then, once I’m in it, a little bit of auto writing is good for you. You get surprised by things. It’s fun to be surprised. And certainly, I have had moments where something just happens. And it’s the best part of the scene because it even got me. If it can get me, right, then it’s definitely going to get other people I think.

John August:
That’s when writing is working well. We have good writing and somehow, magically, it feels like both these individual pieces and the whole thing, we’re always in unison. They were always going to support each other. But when we experience bad writing, sometimes it really is that tension where like the writing is bad because it was trying to fit this outline, like this outline probably looks really good and you can still smell the whiteboard markers. They were like locked into this thing. And characters are doing stuff that may not feel organic, that the story is moving in ways that don’t feel like the scenes themselves are rewarding. The scenes aren’t funny. They don’t have texture. They don’t have specificity. They’re not unique moments. They’re just functional. They’re just the basic Lego bricks that are going to hold the thing together But they’re not interesting. And we’ve also seen bad writing, which is like, yeah, moment by moment, these things are interesting but it doesn’t go anywhere. And we all have these frustrations of things that just feel like they’re constantly in a loop because these characters are saying brilliant things and yet we’re not actually achieving our goals.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, there is definitely value in occasional wastes of time, all of its precious real estate. But I’m thinking there’s a rambling bit in Shrek, where Shrek goes on about an onion, or the two of them are talking about the onion. It’s just a shaggy dog thing. Everybody remembers it. And it’s an utter waste of time, particularly in an animated film as CG animated film.

John August:
Is watching money burn, yeah.

Craig Mazin:
That conversation cost many millions of dollars. And maybe people would have been like you don’t… you can get away with saying one quick thing there. Or showing it. Show, don’t tell every dumb rule there is. But there is a value in occasionally wasting time because it is a human thing. A little bit like singers who have beautiful pitch. If they wobble a little bit on a note, keep it because that’s how everybody knows it was an auto tune.

John August:
That says a lot.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. So, I think that it’s good to do that. The trouble is when that’s all people have. And then, you just get one of four… I mean, Megana reads how many of these… They’re still doing for Tarantino up there, right? They’re still just blah blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, those aren’t so much scenes as indulgences, which if you are a particular writer and filmmaker can be delicious. But for the rest of us, not particularly.

John August:
Well, there’s the struggle of the screenwriter who’s working on their script. And, okay, I’ve got the idea for the movie. This is how all the scenes are going to fit together. I’m writing a scene. I’m working on this. But then, there’s the whole second level of like, Okay, now, you’ve turned this in, and now you have developed, you have notes. And you have people who are trying to optimize this. And one of the ways they’ll try to optimize this is like, can’t we just do this shorter? Can we get out of the scene faster? And sometimes that instinct is correct. You and I both experienced, they’ve just squeezed all the life and joy and then that just becomes a plot machine. You’ve lost the things in those scenes to actually make those scenes worthwhile. You’ve tried to cut a scene so short, the scene barely starts, and you should just get rid of the scene. And that’s the frustration is recognizing you could have this master plan, you can have these beautiful scenes. And then, stuff will happen. And you have to find a way to make it work without those things. It’s like you’re building a bridge, and they said, “Oh, no, you have 30% less steel than you expected.” Work with it.

Craig Mazin:
Well, that’s pretty much always because I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten the budget they needed. So, even money-wise, this ends up happening, and that’ll impact you as well as the notes. There’s also this thing where you have to be accountable to your own notes because we just talked about sometimes surprises. So, you’ve planned something out, and then you surprise yourself. And then, you go, “Whoa, hold on a second. This now has ramifications for many things. I have to be accountable to those. I can’t just get stuck here.” And then, all of those subsequent scenes need to be considered in the Gestalt. That’s right, I said Gestalt.

John August:
And we’re that kind of podcast. [crosstalk]

Craig Mazin:
We say those things. Everything. I feel like we talk about almost one topic in so many different ways. And that is about balancing competing interests. And in storytelling, you just have to balance the whole with the parts, because the individual parts of the ones that people love, in the moment, but they will only remember the whole after.

John August:
Yeah, they will remember some certain little moments of that little highlights during that thing, but then they’ll have an experience like, did I like the entire thing? Or did I not like the entire thing? And then, that’s the frustration. And I think our shared frustrations also that in teaching screenwriting, there’s such an emphasis on structure, which is the whole, which is basically this roadmap of like how it’s all going to fit together, and not nearly enough emphasis on the actual writing moment to moment. How do we keep all these balls in the air? How do we keep this moment feeling alive and excited? How to make the most fascinating Lego pieces? It’s just about like, here’s how you click the Lego pieces together to build this dinosaur.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, it’s like we make a mosaic. So, we have to have an image that we’re shooting for with all of our little tiles. But each tile has to be really cool. That’s annoying. The Romans just had the blue in the way. And it was fun. And they made a whale. And it was great. But not us. So, to me, the great majority of the work we do is actually inside of the scenes. But the most inspired work we probably do is about the whole, is understanding what is the story that people would care about, why, what tone is it, and roughly, what is the shape of it?

John August:
And that shape is really the journey. So, the other metaphor be the destination versus the journey, like you started here, you got there. But really, the experience of the movie is how you got from point A to point B and what route you took. If it’s a road trip, it’s like the fastest way to drive from LA to New York is not going to be the most interesting way to drive from LA to New York, is not going to be the most rewarding way to drive. But you’re going to have to make decisions about what the choices and compromises you’re going to make, like you can’t see all of America. You’ll have short amount of time. You’ll have a certain amount of gas or electric charge. You’re going to have to make some optimizations. And that’s the choices you’re making as a screenwriter.

Craig Mazin:
And as you go, you have to look and see how it’s going. And sometimes your beautiful route has just too man rivers in a row. And then, you have to change it. You have to be very relaxed in a weird way when you’re doing it, although I find myself very tense. Well, to me, it’s like a tense relaxed. I guess there’s the balance. Again, you just need to be able to pivot all the time in response to what’s happening.

John August:
Yeah, I’m working on two projects now. One of which is the scene work. And one of which is the big macros, or what is the shape of this whole thing want to be? And it’s exciting to have those two opportunities. But even in trying to figure out the whole shape of it, I need to zoom in on certain moments. I feel like, is this even going to be rewarding in those individual moments? I’m imagining myself a few months down the road, am I going to enjoy writing those scenes or not? And that’s a thing you’re always asking yourself.

Craig Mazin:
And eventually become accountable to the world. So much thought and energy is required. And then, people can just go, “Sucks.”

John August:
So, on the show, we often do a Three-Page Challenge, which is where we look at the first three pages of scenes that people have sent in. We’ve given our honest feedback. And I think that some of that’s in response to the pressure of ordinary screenwriting books and such talking about the structure as a whole thing. So, we zoom in on this really tight… We’ll focus on just three pages, like what’s happening on those pages. But maybe we should look for a way to actually talk about the shape of stories overall. I don’t know if we want to read treatments or longer things. But I felt like-

Craig Mazin:
I can answer that question.

John August:
You don’t want to read them at all.

Craig Mazin:
No.

John August:
No.

Craig Mazin:
No.

John August:
Or we could look at, I guess, when we do our deep dives on existing movies, we have a sense of the shape of the whole thing.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. And ultimately, there is not much interest for me, at least in talking about story in the abstract. Whereas doing scene work is lovely. It’s very detailed. When you’re in production, it’s the work of the day. You’re doing scene work and you can talk about all little things. For overall stories, the truth of the matter is if somebody told me the overall story for karate kid, I probably would shrug and go, “That just feels like so rocky” but like little rocky with karate, I guess. And then, you see the movie and you experience all those scenes, and they’re wonderful. And they collect up too much more than what it sounds like. So, I think we are probably doing this right. I think, in fact, it is one of the problems with… Well, there are a number of problems with screenwriting schools, not the least of which is just listen to this podcast. Honestly.

John August:
I do get frustrated when people ask like, “Oh, can you give us some advice on scriptwriting?” I’m like, “Yes, I have a weekly podcast you can listen to. There’s 500 episodes.”

Craig Mazin:
Dude. When people are like, “I just want to take you out to lunch and pick your brain, you don’t have to.

John August:
No. I’ve done it.

Craig Mazin:
It’s picked.

John August:
It’s been scraped clean. There’s nothing left on the inside on the scale.

Craig Mazin:
We are literally. Why would anyone ask us for screenwriting advice at this point?

John August:
No, they shouldn’t.

Craig Mazin:
No.

John August:
No, but they do. They write down the questions. Sometimes, we answer them.

Craig Mazin:
They do.

John August:
So, let’s get started on our Three-Page Challenge. We’ll start with Firebird. Now, if you want to read along with us, these PDFs are linked in the show notes. You can stop now and look at the PDF and get your sense of it before we discuss what we’re reading on the page. But Megana will give us a summary of what it is we’re about to read.

Megana Rao:
Great. So, Firebird by Benjamin Blattberg. The voice of father narrates an animated Russian folktale about a woodcutter who strays from the safe path when he uses his axe to free a trapped crow. As soon as the woodcutter realizes he stepped off the path, the crow opens its mouth, unleashing explosions. We then cut to Stalingrad in November 1942 where 12-year-old Mila steers out of her apartment at burning buildings and bombings. Her Aunt Anya urges Mila to pack and collect her parents’ jewelry, money, and food to help her escape from Stalingrad. Mila refuses saying her Papa told her not to. Anya slaps her across the face and keeps packing. Mila brings a book a fairy tales with an inscription from her father.

John August:
All right. So, that’s where we’re at the end of these first three pages. There’s things I want to talk about in this but I was intrigued. I basically got the setup. I got the situation. I was intrigued to read the next thing. It did feel JoJo Rabbit to me just because that was the most recent movie that I saw that had a similar situation happening. But there’s a lot of stuff here that I thought can work. The animated opening can work, the tie in with a fairytale book. It felt tragic and whimsical at times. These are good combinations. What was your first instinct on this?

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, that was really well done. And in the sense of scene work, regardless of how it might unfold, I thought that there was so much here worth recommending to people who are wondering roughly how should these things feel and flow. It looks great on the page. Lovely, broken up. I was-

John August:
It’s Courier Prime, so it’s already off to a good start.

Craig Mazin:
He’s just a suck up is what he is. But where got me was, I’m following along. I love Russian folklore. So, I’m looking along here and I got a little confused when the woodcutter chops at roots and branches laughing as he frees the crow. The crow flies to his shoulder and they laugh together. I thought, well, that’s very odd.

John August:
I didn’t know whether I was confused or whether it hadn’t been clear on the page. What was your instinct?

Craig Mazin:
I think it was just tonally bizarre, but that’s okay. Because then, something is coming closer. The crow opens its mouth. But what comes out is the sound of next line, all caps, explosions. Next line, lowercase, far off, coming closer. That’s actually quite horrifying. And then, we are immediately into reality and we realize we’re with a child. She is in the middle of World War II. Her city is being bombed. Her aunt, there’s a slightly clumsy introduction to the fact that she’s the aunt, where she refers specifically to her brother, Mila’s father, she just, my brother was too soft on you. That was-

John August:
Well, also, Mila says, “I’m not leaving Aunt Anya.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, we generally don’t do stuff like that. But we’ll figure it out. Eventually, there’ll be a reason to… you don’t need to shove it in right there. I don’t think you can let that develop later. And the conversation between Anya and Mila is pretty good because it’s real. This feels normal.

John August:
It feels heightened and rushed in the way that there’s an urgency to it, which is great. And they’re cutting off lines, things trail off when they need to trail off. They dash dash, cut off, when people are cutting each other off. We can improve a little bit here on the bottom half of page two. We run into a situation where between every line of dialogue, there’s a line of scene description. It’s a little staccatoAnd so, you could get some better flow by figuring out when to break that up and when not to break it up, which of those things that go to parenthetical, but that’s a small criticism.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. For instance, where did your father hide money? Mila looks at her blankly, effing hell, where that could just be in parentheses, no response. So, we can absolutely do a little bit of squishing down here. But I could see the space. I could hear it. There was a point of view. I understood that I was with Mila. Certainly, the general concept that her father had left to this book and the book was important that the father had imparted her with a love of fairytales and the fairy tales in theory would help her survive some of this. All that felt there and good. And so, yeah, I think Benjamin Blattberg can do this.

John August:
Yeah, I agree. You talk about, so that we’re from Mila’s point of view. And I think that’s crucial. And one of the ways in which we’re seeing it right in Mila’s point of view is when we get to this apartment from the next room, we hear drawers being opened and slammed. Mila just fetches with the buttons and follows code so long and heard that it’s him sweeps the floor. That tells us because we’re starting from her point of view. We’re literally only with her and we’re sitting out here and off camera sounds. We know that she’s the one to follow. If we’d seen the aunt first, it would have been the aunt’s story.

Craig Mazin:
Completely, and great use of sound. We talked about transitions. This is full of them. And we’re using all the palette that we are provided, directing on the page, thank God. And also, just like the… things happen with that too much of a Mila being made of them like Anya slaps Mila, that’s a sentence. That’s a perfectly good sentence. Subject, verb, object, done. Great.

John August:
Cool. So, let’s go on to our next Three-Page Challenge. This is The Drawing by Todd William Knack.

Megana Rao:
Ten-year-old Luke draws a mysterious woman on a piece of paper in his bedroom. It’s Gabrielle Lawson, 38, with a power ponytail, calls to him yelling that it’s time to go. Gabrielle speaks with Officer Raymond Carter in the front doorway. The officer shows her the stakes he’s put in the yard and explains the boundaries of the perimeter. Gabrielle asks Luke where his backpack is, but he doesn’t answer. We learned that Luke doesn’t speak. Twenty-four-year-old Scarlet enters carrying Luke’s backpack. She drops it by her feet where we see her ankle monitor and realize that the new perimeter is for her house arrest.

John August:
Craig, start us off here. This is again, we have a story of a young kid. You have a parent authority figure. We have some mystery about what’s going on. How did this work for you?

Craig Mazin:
I spent most of these pages utterly confused.

John August:
Yeah. I was confused too.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, about what was going on. First of all, there’s the view of an oncoming train and then we reveal it’s actually just a toy train, but that’s a reality shift. And it’s so short. I’m not sure what we’re getting from it exactly other than it’s somewhat clever, but there’s not enough of it to make it feel like it’s a thing.

Craig Mazin:
Formatting notes, a ton of capitalized words here in this one paragraph where we see the things in the room. Weirdly, there’s Edward Gorey posters. Edward Gorey is not capitalized, but posters is. Most of the stuff, you don’t need to capitalize like art supplies.

John August:
It’s uppercasing and that doesn’t need to happen.

Craig Mazin:
Right. And then, we meet this kid and he’s scribbling a picture of a shadowy figure and then we hear a woman off-screen, “Luke time to go.” Who is that woman?

John August:
The woman is theoretically Gabrielle, but it’s weird that we don’t identify her here.

Craig Mazin:
But also, if she’s yelling to him, she’s also talking to a police officer at the same time. Interior front doorway, that’s not a location. You could be by the front door. You could be foyer. The police officer, here’s the description, crop dark hair in perfect unison with his short beard. Okay.

John August:
How are things in unison?

Craig Mazin:
Well tidy, I guess, weathered. Never told a joke. But if he did, it would be quality.

John August:
I don’t know how to play that.

Craig Mazin:
What is that?

John August:
I can’t do that. It’s not a playable thing.

Craig Mazin:
If you’ve never told a joke, how could it be quality?

John August:
So, Ashley Nicole Black, when she was on the show she was talking about, she’s also an actor, and she talks about when she’s going out for a role she reads the character description there and she gets frustrated when it’s just like, that’s not a thing I can actually do or play.

Craig Mazin:
No one can do that. But even if you could, you couldn’t because it’s contradictory. Never told a joke, but if he did, it would be quality. That’s like never drove, but if he did, he would nail it. But no, because you’ve never… what?

John August:
Yeah. So, never told a joke period. I get that. That’s a playable thing.

Craig Mazin:
Yes. So, the sticks in the yard, again, not really sure why they need to be there exactly. But that’s fine. And then, Luke shows up and she says in the pantry, honey, but wasn’t she just calling him telling him to go?

John August:
That’s what I’m confused about too.

Craig Mazin:
So, if she’s telling to go, but was it maybe, was it Scarlet that was saying time to go? I don’t think so. Because Gabrielle eventually says, “Ready? Where’s your backpack? So, Gabrielle yells, “Time to go.” We don’t identify her by name. And then, she does not seem to have any sense that it’s time to go. Still not a word, huh? Just more drawings. No. No.

John August:
You’re setting up too much that this is the fundamental thing. That’s strange about this character. We don’t know how long he’s been involved in their life, which seems strange to. So, let’s talk about the stakes because the literal stakes have been put in the ground by Officer Carter. They’re already in by the time it started. If you were putting the stakes in, that would be intriguing to me. What is he doing that? And then, I was like, “Oh, the fact that it’s about her house arrest and the perimeter, then we’re in the middle of something that’s great.” But they’re just standing having a conversation about a thing that’s already happened. I don’t know the context of it.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. And it’s putting a lot of pressure on this reveal. She’s under house arrest. But there’s probably a more interesting, casual way to drop that in there. I do struggle when characters have this openness with each other. Someone says, still not talking. Yeah, no, just drawing. Typically, a parent of a child who has any struggles will be far less forthcoming than that. Still not talking, huh? No.

John August:
Let’s also talk about point of view. So, in the last thing we were looking at, it was clear that we own the little girl’s point of view. I’m not sure who’s…. We’re not in the boy’s point of view.

Craig Mazin:
We’re no one’s point of view. So, I don’t know whose scenes belong to. If I were directing the scene between Officer Carter and Gabrielle, I’m not sure what they want. They don’t seem to want anything actually. This is a problem. So, in scenes, typically, people are trying to achieve something. Is he hitting on her? He’s not doing a particularly convincing job of it. Does she want something from him? Does she want him to leave? She doesn’t seem like she does, nor does she want him to stay. Everyone’s mild.

John August:
Yeah. And mild is usually not a good sign for a first scene.

Craig Mazin:
No.

John August:
So, let’s go back to our earlier conversation about the Lego pieces. And it’s like it’s entirely possible that Lego piecewise that this is actually building up, stacking up something interesting in the fact that they’re under house arrest, the stakes are going to be useful down the road, but the actual scene work that we’re seeing, the Lego pieces that we’re looking at, they’re confusing, and that’s not helping us.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, even if this exists just to set up that there’s somebody under house arrest and there’s a kid and he’s drawing a weird picture. And maybe there’s some, who knows what’s with the picture. The problem here is the conversation between the cop and this woman. The two of them don’t seem to have any reason to be talking to each other. It’s almost like we’re watching aimless small talk, which you tend to avoid like on planes and in lines.

John August:
So, we actually have a logline for this one. So, we now ask for a logline. So, here’s the logline for the whole thing, which I do believe this Lego thing. After mysterious and tragic incident, artist Scarlet finds herself on house arrest at our strange aunt and silent 10-year-old cousin’s big empty house. Soon she begins to experience supernatural events, all of which she suspects is linked to her cousin’s artwork.

Craig Mazin:
Sure. And you get a supernaturally vibe from the description of the artwork itself.

John August:
But I don’t feel like she’s the central character of the story. It’s showing on the three pages you’ve given us.

Craig Mazin:
No. No, this would be… There’s the answer. This should be from her point of view. She’s the hero. Everything that’s happening here is boring. So, if she’s watching all this and she’s watching a cop describe the perimeter and her looking at it-

John August:
That’s interesting.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, that would be interesting, yeah, perspective. I would feel like she would have feelings about that. She’s trapped. So, that’s a good thing. And she’s trapped and then she turns and there’s that little kid staring at her. That would be scary and weird. There’s a lot of ways to go. But the key is her. And we get nothing from her except this very bit at the end, which is like-

John August:
Her description is-

Craig Mazin:
Cold and distant but without angst.

John August:
I don’t know how to play that either. I could play cold and distant without angst.

Craig Mazin:
Well, angst is incompatible with cold and distant, right? So, I don’t know what the word but is doing. So, I just think cold and distant would be enough. And then, he adds detached, which I think was covered by cold and distant. And she’s-

John August:
But also, cold and distant is a hard thing to stick on your central character. That’s the hard first thing to give us a character who is the one we’re going to actually be following through the course of the story.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. I think it’s also something that is the thing you can get from the execution of the character in the scene with the kid. So, if the kid walks in there and he’s like, “Hey, can I… and she just says one word answer or doesn’t answer at all, but just looks away, that’s cold and distant. Better to do that probably.

John August:
Yeah. And use that character description line to give us some visual, some specificity about who this character is versus anybody else who could be in this movie.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. Last thing, Todd, I would say just on when you’re on mild patrol. On page three, Officer Carter chuckles and tips his hat and then at the end of the page, Scarlet chuckles. Chuckling is just for like grandpa. Yeah-

John August:
As Megana laughs.

Craig Mazin:
And then, you like to chuckle. That doesn’t count as chuckling. That was a proper laugh. I was thinking of chuckling as like [demonstrates chuckling].

Megana Rao:
I see. I see.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. Usually, your ruffle a little. Your grandson’s hair because he took him fishing and he said something funny and you go. Chuckling is mild.

John August:
Yeah, it’s very mild. All right, let’s get on to Perdition by Terry Rietta. We’ll get a summary from Megana.

Megana Rao:
We’re in Cullman, Alabama in the 1830s. Thirteen-year-old Duncan narrates the pastoral setting as he comes upon, strangled 16-year-old Eily’s body by the creek. His father, Loren tells him to go get Pastor Haig. As Duncan runs to the pastor’s house, he flashes back through memories with Eily. Loren and Pastor Haig discuss next steps as they look at the body.

Megana Rao:
The sheriff is too far away to reach that day, so they take the corpse to Eily’s home where her mother Eustace falls to pieces at the site of her daughter’s dead body.

John August:
Alright. So, yet again, we have young people and dark things happening around them. There were moments here that I like. I liked the idea of finding a body in an older time. We have a sense of what a modern day kid finding a body is. But I liked that it was awkward. And there wasn’t a natural thing to do. There wasn’t police to call. I liked all of that. And yet what I was actually seeing on the page didn’t feel like the best version of this scene in the sequence to me, and there are a lot of small things on there I want to talk about in terms of showing vernacular dialogue, showing accent, showing regionalisms in a way that is suggestive, but not annoying to read, and sometimes just got a little annoying to read in terms of the “gittins” and the “aint’s and the “gahs.”

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. And I don’t know, Megana, if these are all linked together by little fantasy moments perhaps because this is the third one in a row now, where there’s a slight fantasy aspect to it because he sees himself playing with the girl when they were younger, and she was choked to death, which I found confusing.

John August:
I am confused too. And I don’t know how…. So we’re talking about on page two as he’s running. He sees these things as like, I don’t know that as a viewer. I would get that he was seeing an earlier version of this. And also, it’s weird how the, a teenager, a young person that’s imagining a younger version of himself. That doesn’t happen.

Craig Mazin:
It doesn’t happen. And generally, people aren’t looking at themselves in memories. They can see other people in memories perhaps, but happy memories just seemed like we were hit with a pretty tonally shocking thing. And then, on top of that, we were hit with this gimmick. And then, writing over all that is voiceover.

Craig Mazin:
So, we have three competing interests. And I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look and feel, but I can tell you what I wanted. To me, what’s really cool is this, a peppercorn snail, and I don’t know what a peppercorn snail is [crosstalk]. But I loved it, a peppercorn snail.

John August:
Daddy, I want a peppercorn snail.

Craig Mazin:
I want it now. A peppercorn snail crawls up her porcelain shoulder, revealing deep purple bruises around the girl’s neck. I didn’t love it was her and then the girl’s because it sounded like two different people. But what I loved was that there was a snail on a person, and that’s how we find out they’re dead. And that’s really cool and weird. And I wanted basically the kid to shut up. Now, I don’t have anything against voiceover. Sometimes it’s brilliant. In this case, it’s turning everything rather corny.

John August:
It is. So, let’s read through the voiceover here. So, it’s labeled as Duncan’s voiceover. I’m confused whether this is Duncan, the 13-year-old kid or an adult. And as I read this aloud, I think you’ll be confused with me. “Cullen, Alabama, was a pretty place anytime of day. Old oaks leaning down, big moss feathered slabs of stone, soft grass will take the print of your foot and hold it. In the spring, the bubbles don’t seem to rise but rather hang like a string of beads. And Eily Jurdan looked the part of it just lying there like a girl in a tale.

John August:
Now, in a book, great. I love that. I actually think that’s good writing. And I really do enjoy it. I don’t believe a teenager can say that. So, it has to be an older version.

Craig Mazin:
It says a boy, 13, speaks with a soft southern accent.

John August:
Yeah. So, I guess that’s him talking but it doesn’t track for me.

Craig Mazin:
It doesn’t sound like what anyone would say to anyone. It does sound book-like. It is an omniscient narrator description of things. But if I were describing my town to you and I started talking like this, you would walk away. There’s something wrong with me. Soft grass, it’ll…

John August:
I’m going to start doing that.

Craig Mazin:
Take the print on your foot and hold, you’d be like, “What? What are you talk… what? Just where are you from?” Staten Island. I think that it’s a bit purple in terms of its prose, which again, in a novel can work. But coming out of someone’s mouth will sound corny. And on top of that, a 13-year-old boy who talks like this should be studied in a lab because it’s just too much.

John August:
A very specific on the page note here. So, in that block of dialogue I just read, this voiceover, and Eily in parenthesis, it says rhymes with highly. I like that we have that clarification here. But I was so tempted to read the parenthetical aloud. So, maybe put it in brackets, put it above this if you need to. I didn’t mind knowing how to pronounce it. We also run into problems with Eily on page three. We’re in this open cart and Duncan is in the back. Duncan sits with Eily holding her head in his lap and I had to think like, “Wait, is she dead?” So, I think Eily’s body is really what we needed to have here.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah.

John August:
On page three is also where we see, the first line is, outta get the sheriff. It should be an oughtta to get sheriff. That oughtta is spelled differently. Half days ride to Huntsville and it’s getting dark. Animals will get at err if we just leave her out. You don’t need the errs in that situation. I think at a certain point you have to stop dropping on all the “g”s. We get a sense of what the sound is supposed to be. But it gets to be frustrating to read that all the time.

Craig Mazin:
Yes, you don’t need it. And the actors will generally do that. If you give this to them, you run the risk of really getting a lot of-

John August:
But things like animals will get her if we just leave her out. The animals’ll, I like that.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. The animals will get at her. You can say that too. It’s just the err. It does seem a little much… I get immediately confused on page one. First of all, he’s describing things as if they were in the past. But he’s there looking at them in the present. So, I don’t understand quite how that functions.

John August:
I don’t know when we are in time.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. And then, Loren is this guy who is staring at her. Now we’re going to presume that unless Duncan sounds like a boy boy, that’s who it is because that’s who’s staring at this girl. And it’s the first person we see. Loren it says blends into the setting, granite face, stoic and sporting blood on his pants. Okay, a couple of things. That does not going to blend into the setting, too. You don’t really spurt blood on your pants, blood-stained pants. But when I see a dead body and then I see a guy next to it with blood-stained pants, my mind goes to weird places.

John August:
Pretty natural connection. They’re somehow connected that there’s blood on that. Yes.

Craig Mazin:
And yet after reading it over a few because I get very disturbed. And then, he said, “Oh, a few freshly caught rabbits dangle from his belt.” Okay.

John August:
Maybe start with rabbits.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, maybe start with the rabbits because right now, oh, bloody pants. Nobody wants that.

John August:
Page one. Afternoon sun kisses the foothills of the Appalachians, dangerously purple but okay, I’ll allow it. Next slide, hills, pastures, pines, and hardwoods. You said foothills in the previous sentence. I don’t think you need to say hills twice.

Craig Mazin:
Yes, I agree. And when we go into this next section, there’s the promise of Eustace. Before we get to Eustace, there’s a preacher. Duncan has been told to run to get the preacher. And Duncan says, is she dot dot dot? And obviously she is. She’s dead. Clearly. He’s 13. He’s not nine, right, or eight. He should know that she’s definitely dead. She’s not breathing. She’s pretty dead-looking. Regardless. And because it’s always this fake-ish. He finally gets to the preacher’s house. He pounds on the old oak door, a weathered… this is second weathered. The other script had a weathered.

John August:
Everyone’s weathered.

Craig Mazin:
Everyone’s weathers. Kindly man opens it. A cross around his neck and round spectacles on the end of his nose. A bit central casting there for the old person. This is preacher Haig. The preacher’s face falls at the sight of Duncan standing there, tear-stained and out of breath. What happened? Duncan throws himself in the preacher’s arms. Well, this is a whole different type of movie now. What? So, I think maybe he meant collapses into.

John August:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m not buying that either. I’m not buying that moment. I don’t mind buying that as an out. So, what happened is a good exit line in general.

Craig Mazin:
You don’t need what happened. How about just uh-oh, right? He reacts to this kid standing there. And then, the two of them are chit-chatting. And then, they get to Eustace who I assume is his mom.

John August:
Eustace is a man. Eustace looks past the preacher and sees his little girl. So, last thing I want to talk about is there’s a dedication page. So, after the title page before the real script, definition of the word perdition in Christian theology, a state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unpenitent person passes after death. Great. I’ll take it like, yeah, I’m fine with that. And that’s a good use of that dedication page.

Craig Mazin:
I did not like that perdition was printed out in syllables.

John August:
I’m going to allow it because I could see people pronouncing it strangely or getting tripped up on it. If it weren’t for the Road to Perdition, the Sam Mendes movie I wouldn’t know.

Craig Mazin:
You wouldn’t know about perdition. So, I think Terry, less novelistic here probably less than general seems like you’ve got a great eye for visuals. You can really see this place and I can see it with you. You probably are over describing in spots. When I say probably, I mean definitely. And given that you have such a good eye for visuals, don’t clutter it quite so much with extra stuff.

John August:
I will be fascinated to see the version of this that basically has no dialogue which is all just visuals telling the story and then fill out the scenes you need to. Here’s a logline, 1830s Alabama, after discovering that a small town’s golden girl has been strangled by in a creek and her friend Isaac, a boy 18 with down syndrome has run off with a stolen horse.

Craig Mazin:
What?

John August:
It’s a confusing logline. A posse is organized by the girl’s wealthy father to bring back the boy to account for the crime they think he committed.

Craig Mazin:
I see.

John August:
So, it sounds like there’s a posse going after the presumed killer of this girl.

Craig Mazin:
Sure. And that’s fine, but that’s not what this is giving me.

John August:
No, it’s not.

Craig Mazin:
And it feels a little bit, Terry, like you’re forcing To Kill A Mockingbird on us here. It just feels To Kill A Mockingbird-ish. It’s that vibe. And that’s that vibe. And honestly, it’s an old fashioned vibe.

John August:
Yeah, to strangle a sparrow.

Craig Mazin:
It’s a great book but it’s an old book. We honor the things that come before but then the fact that they get popularized and then recycled and redone a bunch, you got to move past that and I think this feels a little too Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Megana Rao:
Can I ask you a question?

Craig Mazin:
Sure, of course.

Megana Rao:
On page two where Duncan’s sprinting and as he passes the field, he sees himself much younger with Eily playing in the high grass .Say Terry did want to keep that, would you recommend doing another logline or like a flashback? Would that help?

John August:
Yes, I would recommend keeping our kid out of it and just seeing the younger version of the girl. I have a hard time imagining how that’s going to help tell the story. I don’t think it works with the Lego piece but I don’t think it’s going to actually help him and the entire thing is trying to construct is to have flashback moments.

Craig Mazin:
That’s also the wrong time for this information. I just saw her dead. Give me a moment or two. Let me learn a little bit about… let me at least hear what supposedly the deals with her before you start showing me things that are maybe private things like her kissing some guy behind the barn. At a church, he sees Eily kissing a man behind a barn. Maybe there’s a barn near the church, usually aren’t.

John August:
No, shouldn’t be.

Craig Mazin:
No. Regardless. It’s too soon. Oh, I see. He’s running by the church. And then, he sees Eily kissing a man behind a barn. Now, how would you do that?

John August:
I don’t know how you do that.

Craig Mazin:
I don’t know how you do it.

John August:
So, we’re having a hard time visualizing what we’re actually going to see on screen. And that’s a real problem, especially on page 10.

Craig Mazin:
Plus, why is he thinking of this at all right now. He’s got a job to do, which is to get to the preacher.

John August:
Do your job. Get to the preacher.

Craig Mazin:
Throw himself in the preacher’s arms.

Megana Rao:
Okay, second question. So, in the last script and maybe in this one, it feels like a thing that you guys are bumping up against is the fake reveal, like false suspense. So, do you think in this script, like with that line is she dot dot dot, if they just said is she dead, that would have been better?

Craig Mazin:
Yes. Yes, that actually would have been better because then you would have had an opportunity for the other character to look at him like, what do you think, idiot? And then, that kid could hang his head because that was a stupid question. It gives you an opportunity for humans to interact.

John August:
Yeah. And the “is she…” doesn’t… it’s false. Doesn’t feel real. You could say almost anything else would make more sense in that moment. She’s dead, right? Or what do we do? I really don’t have anything. It’s probably better than like the is she because we’re just assuming she’s dead.

Craig Mazin:
Is she?

John August:
Yeah.

Craig Mazin:
Yes.

John August:
Is it time for the next sample? Let’s take a look at Helen Sedwick’s pages for Ten Million.

Megana Rao:
We open on the San Francisco Bay and close in on an upscale home at Dawn where Patti Wendecker rushes down in her bathrobe to greet a SWAT team of FBI agents pounding at her door. Patti reminisces about the old days in voiceover as we watch federal agents restrain her and storm her home. Patti’s teenage daughters Abby and Monica are escorted downstairs where they’re seated next to Patti. Patti insists the agents have made a mistake until they dragon her husband, Sam, 45, an attorney, whom the agents caught trying to escape in the backyard. Sam apologizes before he’s escorted away. The dFBI asked Patti if she has any firearms in the house.

John August:
Great. I like these pages. And I like the situation that was being created here. I’m going to have a lot of very specific notes about things I think could be improved. But meeting this character in this situation, I think feels interesting and right and appropriate. I was a little confused about the time period and start. For some reason, I assume it’s modern day, but it feels like could also be ’80s or ’90s. So, I was a little curious about that. But I was with it moment by moment, which I think is a good sign for these pages. Craig, what was your first instinct on this?

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. There is a good reveal here, which I liked. Because she sold me on the fact that they were in the wrong house. And then, turns out they’re not in the wrong house. And that’s interesting. However, there’s a little bit of a thing that happens here early, which lost me a touch and that is Patti in voiceover says, and this is what we hear first as she’s coming downstairs. “If you ask me, the FBI should let you finish your first cup of coffee and run a brush through your hair before they pound on your door with warrants, rifles, and bulletproof vests.” Pound pound pound.

Craig Mazin:
Then she opens the door, shakes her head in disgust. “I told them right off you’ve got the wrong house. By noon, FBI idiots would be trending on TikTok.” Now, a couple things, one, shaking your head in disgust. Nobody shakes their head in disgust at the FBI unless they’re like a mob wife and this is the 12th time. This is new. This is weird. Second, by noon, FBI idiots would be trending on TikTok. That makes it sound like that’s exactly what happened. But it isn’t what happened. And also, I don’t see them say you’ve got the… I don’t see her say you’ve got the wrong house. They slam her to the floor. She says sometimes, “I miss those days” in voiceover which I was okay. So, something is interesting.

Craig Mazin:
But I was already nervous that I was disconnecting from a normal human reaction to a situation. And I got particularly nervous when the daughters were taken. And towards the end, the agent says to Patti and her girls… and how old are the girls?

John August:
They are 16 and 14.

Craig Mazin:
Sixteen and 14. Monica is 14. And Daddy has already been dragged off by the FBI and apologizes. Something’s gone terribly wrong. The agents say to Patti and her girls, “Now, don’t move.” And Monica says, “What? And missed all the fun?” Excuse me?

Craig Mazin:
You’re 14-year-old mouthing off to the FBI that just apparently justifiably dragged your dad out. And you guys are all on the floor and tied up. No. So, tone was a problem for me. But the layout of things was really interesting. It was a cool scene to start with.

John August:
Yeah, I agree. So, I think let’s talk about the daughters because this is about what we hear. Girls scream, Patti’s daughters Abby, 16, and Monica, 14, stumble down the stairs, their hands bound behind them and a behemoth in a black helmet on their tails. Patti tries to stand but with their hands tied behind her, she topples over. The behemoth sits the girls beside Patti and tips her back up.

John August:
So, I love Patti trying to stand up. I love the daughters coming down. I don’t know if I believe that they had their hands behind them. Maybe they do. Maybe not.

Craig Mazin:
No.

John August:
I don’t see it. They’re juveniles. But then, being freaked out is great. But I’m only seeing them as this collective unit. I don’t know anything specific about who they are because they’re not going to be the same girl. And so, give us some visual that distinguishes this. So, who they are, what are they wearing? Are they still in their pajamas? Well, just what’s happening here? Because these are supposed to be important characters I’m taking and I am just getting names for them.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. And they screamed, and they are tied up. And yet they’re sassing the FBI. It just didn’t seem to make sense. This is more where the scene ends. But there is a fairly chunky description at the end of this about what’s on the walls.

John August:
Let’s about that because I think there’s actually some good stuff there. And maybe it is the right time to wait and hold back where we can sit for a second where we can actually see some of the stuff. The way that their home reflects affluence, but not true wealth, a wall of glass facing the San Francisco Bay, other walls are lined with shelves holding a chaotic assortment of art and mementos, handmade pottery, Mexican alebrijes, bolga baskets, most of which has been tossed to the floor.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, they were tossing stuff earlier. I think it probably would have been better to integrate that into the action. So, it didn’t feel like we stopped things just to get a little cataloging.

John August:
Let’s talk about the difference between how Patti is responding in her voiceover and what she’s doing in real life. Because that’s some of the tension that I think you hit on it at the start. She’s not actually saying, “I told them right off, you’ve got the wrong house. She’s not saying those things. And maybe it’s okay that her reporting of what actually happened is different than what we’re seeing, but maybe it needs to be more dramatically different that she actually didn’t really is freaked out and crying.

Craig Mazin:
Which she’s not because she’s having it both ways. It’s like, you guys don’t belong here. You have the wrong house. None of that should be happening, which normally, first of all, why is she… when she opens the door, she’s not surprised. So, I’m confused by what her context for them is.

John August:
If this felt like a home invasion almost from the start, which is probably what it would feel like, then her natural reaction to that is probably going to be interesting and compelling. And I can imagine there’s a version of this voiceover that is a good counterpoint to it. But I think to reveal the husband can be done better, because right now the husband’s coming in, for whatever reason. It’s morning, but he’s already dressed in a suit. I don’t understand where he was.

Craig Mazin:
And he was in the backyard. Right? That’s where they caught him, in the backyard.

John August:
Yeah. He’s trying to get out.

Craig Mazin:
Right. But how did he even know to get out like… Anyway, there’s a lot of logical issues here. Patti is incredibly not forthcoming with these agents. And I’m not sure why. Everything that she’s describing here sounds like she’s a mob wife, like she is…. So her husband is a criminal. And she knows it. But she’s getting sassy with the feds. This feels Carmela-like a little bit. But that’s not what she’s saying in the voiceover, really.

John August:
I’m going to cheat and look at the logline. Because we don’t look at the loglines before we do this. The logline is a woman’s safe suburban life has shattered when the FBI raids her home and arrest her husband, a high price attorney, for stock fraud. So, it’s not a mafia situation.

Craig Mazin:
Then this is not correct. Just tonally speaking. Helen, you’ve got a really interesting situation here. But what you’ve done is you’ve shoehorned in an attitude that doesn’t necessarily comport with even if Patti is just that person who’s got that cold ice water in her veins. Her freaking daughters couldn’t be like that. And plus, if your mom and your two daughters have been tied up and thrown downstairs by the FBI, you’re going to be emotional. She’s just very-

John August:
Yeah, so I’m going to take this moment to, again, talk about how amazing Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers is, but one of the things that Hustlers did so well is the characters comport themselves when they’re being interviewed in formal situations. And they present the story of what happened in a very different way than what we actually see in them happening. And so, I would be fascinated if the voiceover that we’re getting in that character that should present yourself at the end, we’re going to learn through how she became that thing. And it doesn’t match up with the character seen at the start. That can be really-

Craig Mazin:
That could be really interesting. Unreliable narrator being proven right in front of us.

John August:
Yeah. All right. So, as always, we want to thank our four writers who sent in their Three-Page Challenges. But also, everyone who sent us a Three-Page Challenge. Megana will read through how many for this session.

Megana Rao:
A bunch, yeah.

John August:
A bunch, a bunch. So, thank you, everyone who sent them in.

Craig Mazin:
Five.

John August:
If you have pages you would like us to look at on the show, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. And you’ll see a forum, which you can fill out the information and click to attach your script. And it goes into a magic mailbox that maybe we can look at and pick things for our next Three-Page Challenge. But, again, thank you, everyone who sent that stuff in.

John August:
Now, it’s gotten dark as we record it and it is time for one cool things. My one cool thing is this cool little thing that I got this last week that I found very helpful. Craig, can you describe what this is?

Craig Mazin:
Oh, this is one of these things. So, this is a flexible strip that you can snap onto your arm. And it lights up. That’s cool.

John August:
Yeah, so it’s like a slap wrist.

Craig Mazin:
Slap wrist bracelet.

John August:
This bracelet thing, but it has an LED inside of it. So, it reflects but also it glows. And so, if you’re running at night or walking your dog, I find it actually really helpful because cars can see you. It can be set to just be a steady light or it can blink and so people can see you because I just find that this time of year, both as a driver and as pedestrian or a runner, it just becomes a little bit dicey because you don’t know that people can actually see you. So, I recommend this. This is cheap. I’ll put a link to it on Amazon. This is the Nite Ize SlapLit, SlapLit.

Craig Mazin:
Sorry. SlapLit.

John August:
SlapLit, LED Slap Wrap.

Craig Mazin:
SlapLit.

John August:
Yeah, there’s other ones that-

Craig Mazin:
Oh, SlapLit.

John August:
SlapLit.

Craig Mazin:
I thought it was Slap Let.

John August:
SlapLit.

Craig Mazin:
Like a Slap Let like a bracelet.

John August:
SlapLit.

Craig Mazin:
So, SlapLit.

John August:
So, I would just recommend this if you’re going to be outside walking in a place where a car can hit you.

Craig Mazin:
How much does that cost?

John August:
It’s really cheap.

Craig Mazin:
I’m looking up right now. The SlapLit is currently going on Amazon for $10.59.

John August:
So, to not be hit by a car, I think it’s money well spent.

Craig Mazin:
My one cool thing is slightly more expensive than this.

John August:
All right, tell us.

Craig Mazin:
If you’re in the market for a new computer. And we are writers, it is our instrument. I don’t necessarily recommend this for everyone, of course. It’s a bit of a budget buster. However, in the sense of the technological aspect, the new MacBook Pro 16 with the Apple, this one has the Apple M1 Max, is spectacular. It said return to a chunkier MacBook Pro, which I actually like. I never needed it to be the MacBook Air. I never needed it to be slender. It’s a little heavier. They got rid of the glowy bar that was a wonderful gimmick that literally nobody wanted or liked. The screen is brilliant. But my God, the speed on this thing is remarkable. And the fan doesn’t run. It also uses way less energy so the battery lasts way longer. It’s just everything you would hope for has been put in here. I was telling Megana that the thing that I use that’s the most processor-intensive is when we play Dungeons and Dragons.

John August:
And so, last night when you’re playing you were using on this machine and your ability to hang on an app, which is much, much faster.

Craig Mazin:
Oh my god. And so, did it read faster-

John August:
Oh, yes. Faster, yeah.

Craig Mazin:
Because normally it would be like wuuuuuuuuh, and now it’s like poink, which is awesome. And my side, because I’m the DM, my side is always going to be the hardest one to run because it’s seeing everything. So, it’s rendering everything all at once all the time. And it’s also showing me all of your lines of sight. So, it’s basically doing five or six times the work that your computer’s doing. Plus we’re running Zoom. It’s great. So, just a huge thumbs up on these suckers. My favorite computer.

John August:
On my home office here, I have an iMac which is my main one. But of course, the MacBooks are much faster than my iMac is at this point, which is frustrating. Megana and I both have the M1 MacBook Air, which have been great. They’ve been super-fast and reliable. Again, you don’t appreciate how nice it is to not have your fan run for anything but the battery lasts forever. It’s smart and good. It’s good.

John August:
That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by added by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask @johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send the longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have t-shirts and they’re great as well as hoodies, too. You can find my Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes @johnaugest.com. That’s also where you find the Three-Page Challenges that we talked about today. You can find transcripts and can sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptsnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. And starting this week, you can also listen to us on Spotify.

John August:
So, if you’re a premium member and want to listen to it through the Spotify app, there are instructions for that. We emailed it to you but you could probably figure it out. It’s not that hard. But if you’re confused, we’ve sent you an email. So, search your email history because we sent you screenshots on how to sign up in Spotify, if you want to listen to the premium feed in your Spotify. Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

Megana Rao:
Thank you.

Craig Mazin:
Thank you.

John August:
All right. For this bonus segment, this is a question we got from Kyle in New York City.

Megana Rao:
I’m an amateur screenwriter who started writing during the pandemic.

John August:
We don’t believe the word amateur screenwriter.

Megana Rao:
I’m represented but hope to eventually get to the point of being paid for my work. I’ve encountered an issue where I can write really well when I’m excited about a project. But I tend to get bored easily. And once something bores me, it’s nearly impossible for me to find the energy to keep hacking at it. I could be wrong since I’m new to the craft. But I imagine one of the traits that separates amateurs from professionals is the ability to keep going even if you’re not feeling what you’re writing. We can’t all be on 100% of the time.

Megana Rao:
Do you have any mental tools or tricks you’d recommend for getting back to a place of energy around a project to make sure you give it its due diligence? What do you do when you need to finish a project but are sick of it?

John August:
Kyle, I have to embrace you. You’re the only person who’s ever felt this way. Literally from the moment I start a project to the moment I finished project, I fall more in love with it. I start out really liking it. And I realized, no, I’m deeply, deeply in love with it. This is the best thing I’ve ever written. And I cannot wait to get to it every morning.

Craig Mazin:
Do you have more sex with your spouse now than you did when you first met?

John August:
100%.

Craig Mazin:
Through the roof.

John August:
It’s crazy.

Craig Mazin:
There’s not enough time in the day and it gets worse year after year.

John August:
So, it’s the right equivalent, where I just can’t get my hands off the keyboard. I’m so eager to get back to this project and just keep writing it. I have hypergraphia is really what it is, is that compulsion to write is really this one idea that is just so good. And really everything I’ve ever touched, it’s been that experience.

Craig Mazin:
Well, Kyle. So, look, good and bad news. The good news is, yep, you’re like us. You’re like human beings. I don’t know if there’s necessarily anything you can do to get back to that original feeling of excitement. Nor should you need to or want to. Because the original feeling of excitement is a fresh romantic vibe. It means your brain is buzzing because something new has collided into it. The work that we do is to execute carefully and steadily. And that is sometimes rather boring. It’s certainly rigorous. But you’re not going to get that excitement. It’s gone, it’s over. And it will never come back. And like I said last week from beloved Polish poet, even success feels like failure. So, really, this is a goal-oriented process. It is a process process and that you need to learn how to sustain yourself through the process, which is not particularly exciting. But you must be driving toward the goal of finishing.

Craig Mazin:
The difference between professionals and amateurs is not that we have the “ability to keep going even if we’re not feeling what we’re writing.” The difference is we’re paid. That’s literally the difference between professionals and amateurs. And it turns out that when you are paid and there are lawyers and contracts, you don’t have the option. You have to do it. And this is actually quite valuable.

John August:
There have been times on projects where I’ve just been so frustrated that actually I calculated. This is early in my career when I wasn’t making much money, but I was like, I’m going to calculate how much I am being paid per page. And that’ll get me through this day’s work.

Craig Mazin:
But there’s also times where I thought, what would happen if I just gave the money back, every writers had that moment. And lately, sometimes I’ll just think to myself, if I’m in an elevator in a tall building, I’ll just turn to… if I’m with Jacq or Bo and I’ll just say, “Well, if the elevator just plummets, I won’t have to write these episodes,” just get out of some writing, which should be nice. This is the deal.

Craig Mazin:
But then, you have moments where you do well. And you will not have those moments until they have happened. They do not happen before they happen. So, you have to do the work to make them happen without having them happen.

John August:
So, Kyle’s experiencing intrinsic validation, where he was loving the product, he’s loving doing this because of the excitement about the idea and it was all internally generated. And eventually, it just faded away. And he’s waiting for that moment where there’ll be external forces that will tell him like, “No, no, it’s good. It’s exciting. You’ve done a good job. “And that hasn’t kicked in yet. That’s the reality of being a new person at this.

John August:
The other thing I will say is that as you have more experience and no one’s an amateur screenwriter. You’re a newer screenwriter. You don’t have the experience to be able to tell like, “Oh, is this a crush, or is this a possible relationship”, when it comes to a project idea. And so, sometimes you have a crush, like, “Oh my god, I’m so excited about this.”

John August:
But Craig and I, you and I both have enough experience to know this is a crush that will pass and I can see what the problem is going to be. And I will fall out of love with this versus there’s some ideas because you’re like, “Oh, that’s a genuinely good idea that I can build a relationship with this project.” This is a thing that can actually sustain and build.

John August:
And so, the choice of whether to buckle down or bail, we can make a different calculation because we know how this all goes and we know where this is. But we can only do that because we’ve been in other writing relationships with other projects that know how we react, how projects react. We just know how it all works.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. And I think Kyle probably like most people, his relationship with movies and television is he sees finished products. He doesn’t have a finished product. And even worse, he has to dive into every little grain of this thing over and over and over and over again. It becomes mind-numbing. I can be maddening. And wait until you get into the editing bay. And then, you’re really going over and over and over and over.

Craig Mazin:
It’s just the nature of the gig. It’s very foreign to everyone. I think nobody experiences this for the first time it goes, “Is this process been my whole life?” It’s grueling.

John August:
Let’s go back to a word he says. I get bored easily. So, let’s talk about boredom. And so, boredom is it happens when it’s no longer new. It’s no longer exciting. It’s no longer fresh. But also, it’s because you don’t know what to do. It’s not intriguing, or the problems in front of you are not interesting, solvable problems, are actually just difficult problems you have to grind on and get through them.

John August:
And so, I would say try to look for ways to make that day’s work less boring. Make some challenges for yourself. How can you approach this scene, this Lego piece, and make this the most interesting Lego piece it can possibly be? And once you tackle that, then you get on the next one, the next one eventually. You might fall back in love with it because you see something in this that you didn’t even see when you were first crushing on it.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. Megana, do you have any tricks for yourself when you’re feeling bored or unmotivated?

Megana Rao:
I usually have a playlist associated with a project and sometimes listening to that helps, or getting external feedback can help me, I don’t know, relive excitement about certain parts of it. Okay, I have a question for you guys. So, in talking about having a crush on a project versus a long-term relationship. So, I was recently working on a project where I felt like I was banging my head against the wall for so long. And it just felt like endless and I should just walk away from it. Because I’m never going to figure out these problems.

Megana Rao:
All of a sudden, it felt like the wall broke open and there was sunlight, and I could see my way out. I’m just confused how I make that differentiation. Do I trust that that’s going to happen always because it happened this time?

John August:
I don’t think you can necessarily trust. There’s been projects like that for years. Where I just got to a certain point I just couldn’t quite crack what that was, or that there’s something that I knew was not working quite right. And it just was wrong. And so, even though we have experience with these writing relationships, we can’t know how it’s all going to go or work and how it’s going to really be on the page.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah, again, balance. You just wait and hope. But there is a difference, I think between a project where you are stuck but you wish you had the answer, and a project where you stuck because you don’t care what the answer is. And if you’re in that space-

John August:
You can stop writing.

Craig Mazin:
… it’s over.

John August:
Yeah. So, I think the only case you made for finishing that project is if you’re pretty close and you just think you need to have the experience of having finished the things, that makes sense.

Craig Mazin:
Which is-

John August:
Something.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. There is a resilience that’s required, obviously, to do all of this. But I think if it gets hard, don’t confuse hard with bored. Don’t confuse I think I’m maybe not good enough to do this with bored. Boredom is an all-purpose term for dissatisfaction. But you have to interrogate a little bit why you’re dissatisfied with this. And here’s the tricky part for people who are starting out, a lot of their ideas are bad.

Craig Mazin:
And a lot of times, even if the idea is good, their method of executing is bad. So, they should stop because it’s bad. But then, if you don’t finish, you don’t get better. So, balance.

John August:
Yeah. You got to work through it. There’s a case we made for finishing those things. The other thing I’ll remind people is that a lot of times, newer screenwriters were always really good at school, for example. They’re always really good writers. And everyone’s like, “Oh, you’re a good writer.” And so, they approach this thing. And they have the sense of like, “I know what good writing is. People tell me I’m a good writer.”

John August:
And then, something that’s been comparatively easy for them versus other people, they’re in the middle of it like, “Crap, it’s really hard to write. This is actually exhausting. I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I’m just bad. Or maybe it’s this project.” And you’re just not used to struggling.

John August:
And sometimes, what you’re saying is bored, it’s actually you’re just struggling and it’s new and it’s uncomfortable and you’re not used to be uncomfortable writing. But that’s what writing is.

Craig Mazin:
And our culture encourages everybody to be a jerk. So, everybody grows up. If you’re interested in film, if you’re interested in TV, perversely, you are encouraged by culture and like-minded people to crap all over everything all the time. So, you become rather convinced that it is easy, because look at all the garbage. This is what Ted Elliott has always called crap-plus-one, your job, you think is to just write one better than all the crap out there.

Craig Mazin:
But the truth is, with the rarest of exceptions, if you are a new writer, you are actually not good enough to write the crap. That’s how bad you are. And that’s how hard it is. It’s so much harder than they think. So, when they get into it, there is a cognitive dissonance between this thing that’s supposed to be so simple and how hard it is.

Craig Mazin:
And I think maybe the brain convinces you that you’re just bored. Because the only other explanation is, you’re not good enough. But you’re not until you are. And unfortunately, you’re never good enough, because you’re just as good as you could be on that day. You try and get better. And then, it’s over.

John August:
I’m thinking about Megana and Megana’s metaphor for you and your writing group has a chance of accountability. And so, where you have to do stuff and that might be actually a humble thing for Kyle to find at some group of people who he can be accountable for. So, he’s actually getting some work done. And he also recognized like everyone is struggling at the same time in the same ways. And he can get a sense of how it all fits. And if you could find the right group that might get him on board.

Craig Mazin:
Yeah. And you can always pick somebody that if you vibe with that person and say, “Look, we’re going to spend two hours. For one hour, I’m going to talk to you about my problems about this script. And then, for the other hour, you’re going to talk about your problems with the script.” And the only ground rule is that nobody can say, yeah, I thought of that but. Or, yeah, I tried that but. Because that’s just annoying to everybody. Just pretend you didn’t talk it through. Talk everything through.

Craig Mazin:
Sometimes just talking makes it clear. If you write alone, you can go deep into your own weird mind and get totally lost and you can confuse feelings with facts.

Megana Rao:
One more pitch for writers’ group. There have been times where I’ve gotten so bogged down in the weeds and really unexcited about a project but the people in my writers’ group who have seen it since the inception have reminded me what excited me about it and that can be really helpful.

Craig Mazin:
Yes, something was there. You had something that made you do all of this. Certainly, Kyle, if you are writing by the seat of your pants and you feel you have a tendency to get bored, I would strongly recommend plotting the whole thing out first. It’s hard to get bored when you know exactly what you’re supposed to write that day,

John August:
Yeah, if you had a good outline and then you could really approach how to make this piece the most awesome scene it could possibly be and not going to waste the work, that might help him.

Craig Mazin:
Precisely.

Links:

• WGA Introduces Project Page check out the pdf here.
• Follow along with our Three Page Challenges: Firebird by Benjamin Blattberg, The Drawing by Todd William Knack, Perdition by Terry Rietta, Ten Million by Helen Sedwick
• Nite Ize SlapLit LED Slap Wrap
• The New 16 inch MacBook Pro
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! You can now listen to Scriptnotes Premium on Spotify!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Ryan Gerberding (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/how-to-forget).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 519 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I don’t have a cold but I sort of have a little bit of laryngitis, so we’ll see how I do this week, Craig.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** Aww.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** I really, I actually feel, feel fine. But just in case we suddenly cut out that’s going to be the excuse for why we’re not continuing the podcast.

**Craig:** You died.

**John:** I died.

**Craig:** From laryngitis.

**John:** Then John died. I went home to my home planet.

**Craig:** You went home to some planet. Megana, do you know what we’re saying there? Do you know that reference?

**Megana Rao:** I don’t.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s, it’s Poochie.

**John:** It’s a reference to the Simpsons. But while you’re googling that, today on the show, while there are many techniques for plotting out your story and really knowing your characters, only Scriptnotes will we teach you how to forget those things so you can write proper scenes. So that’s right. It’s a craft episode.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** So sharpen your pencils. Craig loves a craft episode.

**Craig:** I do. I do.

**John:** But first, Craig, we have so much news to talk through.

**Craig:** Let’s do that.

**John:** We have Scarlett Johansson and CAA. We got Netflix. We got The Wizard of Oz.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** We’ll also have a follow up on Spooky Season and IATSE. So, time permitting, we’ll also get to some listener questions because I know you love listener questions.

**Craig:** I do. I love them. I love them because –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have to do the least amount of work for them.

**John:** Mm-hmm. But you will actually have to do some work because in our bonus segment for premium members, we’re going to talk about fame.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Not the movie musical, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Or the series, which is also good.

**Craig:** Loved it.

**John:** But what it means to be famous in the 2020s.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not great.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Spoiler.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s not great. Ah, but some good news did happen this past week, Scarlett Johansson and Disney reached an agreement on Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit about the box office bonuses she’s owed for Black Widow.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We don’t know what the actual dollar amount was. We probably never really will.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But everyone is happy and singing and joy has returned to the Mouse House.

**Craig:** Yeah, as was inevitably the case, it was –

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** This was always what it would be. The only question was, you know, like, how much is it. And we don’t know. And also I don’t care. That’s their business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the good side is that an artist got taken care of. The bad side is these kinds of settlements actually don’t benefit anybody but individuals.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There is structurally speaking, for Hollywood, nothing has been resolved. But good news for Scarlett Johansson at the very least.

**John:** Yeah, I think the lawsuit did shine a spotlight on the need for us to be thinking about what we’re going to do and movies are debuting on streaming that were originally supposed to be debuting theatrically. So it got people to pay attention to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. But we need systemic solutions, not a settlement after a settlement after its settlement.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That sounds great.

**John:** Now, while the Scarlett Johansson lawsuit settlement was probably inevitable –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I wonder whether the CAA acquiring ICM was inevitable. Did you see this happening before it happened, Craig?

**Craig:** Didn’t see it happening. Didn’t hear about it happening. Was absolutely shocked when I read it. Not shocked in a bad way, just surprised.

**John:** Yeah, I would say surprised but not shocked was sort of where I fell in. It’s like, oh, yeah, that’s the thing that could happen. But I hadn’t heard anything about it before. So then it happens, like, oh, well, this happened.

So ICM in the, in terms of writers, was the fourth biggest agency in town.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** CAA was the second biggest agency. So the number two bought number four.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And so, they’re gonna merge them all together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It has to go through regulatory approvals and antitrust.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But they’ll make it through that because it’s not bigger than the biggest one, so consolidation.

**Craig:** Yeah, sort of inevitable and I guess I just didn’t realize that it was gonna be these two agencies. So I guess now – are they changing the name or it’s just everybody is CAA now?

**John:** I think the plan is for everyone to be CAA –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I’m not sure it’s been announced.

**Craig:** I do like this quote that you put here in work notes from Ariel Emanuel. So Ariel Emanuel runs Endeavour. “ICM has not been what it used to be 15 years ago. I think what CAA bought was five incredible TV writers, a very good book business, and a very good soccer rep business out of Europe.” So obviously diminishing the purchase of ICM as best he could but what I kind of liked that he’s like, I think what CAA bought was like five people that generate like a billion dollars business and also a great book business and also apparently a great soccer business. I don’t know. Like those aren’t great things.

**John:** Let’s talk about sort of these five TV writers because it’s not like those TV writers are bound to ICM and are now bound to CAA. They can choose to go wherever they want to go. And as can any other client of ICM. No one is contractually obligated to stick with that agency, and move over to CAA. So everyone has these choices. Some of those clients will choose not to move over and they’ll go to other agencies, which is fine. For writers, ICM was much smaller than UTA was and we really – we talk about Big Four, but really, it was the Big Three plus ICM. If you were a writer at ICM, you’re now at a larger agency.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Assuming you’re making the transition. If you were a writer at CAA, maybe have a little bit more competition for some of those things, like, maybe a little bit harder to get attention there. But noticeably nothing changes with the WGA agency agreement. Like this new merged agencies still has the same cap on what they can do and what they can’t do. So it doesn’t really affect any of that?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I don’t really think that there will be much in the way of competition changes. You’ve always competed against other writers to an extent, for jobs and things. Whether it’s inter- or intra-agency competition, even within a single agent’s roster –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There are going to be clients that are competing for things. The squeeze, I think, though will be real. I would be surprised if I don’t think that when this sort of thing happens that everybody at CAA and everybody at ICM gets together and has a big party. I think a bunch of people just get pushed off the ship.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So when agents get pushed off the ship, so too do assistants, and so do, of course, clients. So it’s going to be interesting to see how the consolidation functions for everybody other than the people who are running the show.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if I were UTA, I’d probably be looking around for a dance partner right about now.

**John:** Yeah, I wonder about that. I don’t necessarily know that they need to. I mean, because – would they look for a bigger dance partner? Or would they try to take a smaller person or do they even –

**Craig:** Smaller.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know if they need to, but they might.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So –

**Craig:** I could see that. But then –

**John:** Yeah, I could see it happening too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Consolidation is the trend.

**Craig:** It’s the way it goes.

**John:** Also this past week, the Academy Museum opened up. So this is a brand new museum on Wilshire Boulevard. I got to go to an opening, a preopening thing this past week. It’s really nice. People should go visit. If you’re in Los Angeles and you like movies, come visit the Academy Museum, because you’ll see cool stuff from the history of the movies, cool exhibits, artifacts, pieces of equipment, original costumes, all that stuff is really neat. There’s a really good Miyazaki Exhibit there right now. But I think I found especially cool, which I tweeted about was they had a whole room section for The Wizard of Oz, like sort of making The Wizard of Oz. And they had this page from the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz. And I had never seen the script for The Wizard of Oz. And this was kind of cool. So Craig, as you open up this tweet –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you’re seeing this photo –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What is your reaction to this script page?

**Craig:** Well, on the one hand, it’s amazingly similar to what we do now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The font is the same. The general layout is the same. There’s a scene number, which appears to be 319, possibly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is a rather – it’s on page 122.

**John:** The script’s long.

**Craig:** It’s long, but it’s at the end.

**John:** Yes. Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s about right. The margins are a little funky. And the action is actually sort of pushed to the right and also oddly centered. So it kind of – it’s hard to tell the difference between action and dialogue. But the characters names, which are not capitalized, are above the dialogue like we do.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There’s even a bit of parenthetical like Dorothy turns around, right there, you know, apparently, you are breaking that rule of don’t put action in parentheticals in 1939.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, yeah, kind of like weird to see the continuity of what we do today with what they did then.

**John:** Yeah, so what I check from this is like, while some stuff is different, and like the overall layout of dialogue and action is a little bit more how stage plays work than how modern screenplays work in terms of margins –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It really does look like a script, like you can hand this script to, you know, a director and he’s like, could shoot this page.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like they would know how to do it. It’s completely normal and reasonable. Even stuff like the cut back to is over on the right-hand margin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It really does feel like a modern script page way back in 1939. But some stuff has evolved and changed. And that’s okay. Things do evolve and change and things do move on. And the screenplay format was never handed down by the gods as like, this is how screenplays shall be. They’re just like, it was evolving and this was a stage in the evolution and pretty close to sort of where we ended up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I really dug it.

**Craig:** I do like a couple of things on the page and a specific one is medium, Glinda and Dorothy. And the other one is keep the camera on Dorothy as she follows Glinda’s directions. So as you can see, screenwriters have been directing on the page since the beginning of Hollywood.

**John:** Yes, they have been.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yeah, it was.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Also, famously, The Wizard of Oz was written by a zillion people –

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** On – a whole bunch of people worked through it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, like, that’s not a new thing that’s happened either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So –

**Craig:** It was also directed by multiple directors.

**John:** Yes, it was. And like the studio was super involved in every little phase of it. So, if you get a chance to go see The Wizard of Oz exhibit, fantastic. If all you can see The Wizard of Oz is this page and the original movie, you’ll have some sense of what the connection was between this is what started on the page and this is the final movie you saw.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Also, this past week, Netflix put out a data dump, or at least showed some numbers on their biggest series and movies, like what is actually the top hits on Netflix, which I found kind of surprising, because they’ve always been so cagey about sort of like kind of what people are watching and what are the most popular things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But for some reason, they chose to put out some charts. So there’s two different charts we’re talking about. So the first is most popular series and films as determined by the number of accounts that have watched at least two minutes of that title in its first 28 days on Netflix. So you never see the whole thing. You had to watch at least two minutes of it.

**Craig:** So if you watched two minutes and then – oh, screw this, you apparently watched that show. Oh Netflix, come on.

**John:** Oh, Netflix.

**Craig:** Really? Two minutes.

**John:** So the second one is actually – it is actually a little bit more useful for us.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a little bit more what we’re expecting.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So this is total view hours per title in the first 28 days on Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** So either and they could be longer things or more people are watching or people rewatching them, but it’s probably more what we’re kind of thinking, like, oh, this thing is really popular because people are really consuming it.

**Craig:** Correct, Bridgerton, very popular.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So Shonda Rhimes has done it again. You see a couple of things. And The Witcher, the first season was very popular.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But Stranger Things 2 and 3. Still rolling big time.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Those were kind of – so Stranger Things sort of peaked, I guess, in season two and three.

**John:** Well, season four hasn’t come out yet.

**Craig:** Oh, there you go. So I guess maybe season four will be even better, as true as would I know. I started to see them too.

**John:** I really, really enjoy seeing number seven on the top series –

**Craig:** You.

**John:** Is You Season 2.

**Craig:** What the hell is that?

**John:** So which was, of course, so You is that show that was on Lifetime that Lifetime canceled and – but Netflix picked it up and it became a giant hit on Netflix. And so –

**Craig:** What is it?

**John:** So You is a story – it’s a romcom about a serial killer.

**Craig:** Okay, I never heard of it.

**John:** Or sort of a stalker serial killer person.

**Craig:** I really never heard of it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good. It’s pent actually. It’s nice.

**Craig:** Okay, so 457 –

**John:** Megana – Megana Rao, have you watched any of You?

**Megana:** Yes, I’ve watched a lot of it.

**Craig:** A lot of it. Okay.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Have you watched Ginny & Georgia?

**Megana:** I had a friend who wrote on that show. And so I did watch that, too.

**Craig:** Money Heist?

**John:** Money Heist is a big international hit. So –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s Spanish and it’s done really well everywhere.

**Craig:** Looking at the films, we knew the Bird Box was this sort of Netflix film phenomenon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s Extraction?

**John:** Extraction is the Chris Hemsworth, Russo Brothers’ movie –

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Where he plays a guy who gets people out of dying situations I believe.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** The Irishman obviously was a big Scorsese movie. Kissing Booth 2 which I know my daughter was a big Kissing Booth fan.

**John:** Mm-hmm. 6 Underground was the Michael Bay, Ryan Reynolds movie.

**Craig:** Right. What Spenser Confidential?

**John:** That was Mark Wahlberg –

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Playing Spenser like the Spenser detective.

**Craig:** I like seeing Enola Holmes on here. That’s our buddies Jack Thorne and Harry Bradbeer.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve discussed Army of the Dead.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Tig Notaro thing. Charlize Theron and The Old Guard.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And Murder Mystery was the –

**Craig:** Sandler and Aniston.

**John:** Yeah, Jennifer Aniston.

**Craig:** Sandliston.

**John:** Yeah, Sandliston. So many of the top films are the big budget ones.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The sort of, like, oh, well, that’s a giant hit. I think it’s really fascinating with Kissing Booth 2 which was not expensive but had such an amazing viewership.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s just important to remember that sometimes on Netflix, the more money you spend doesn’t necessarily mean the more eyeballs you’re gonna get.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m just still giggling over the – if you watch two minutes you’re considered a watcher. Oh, it’s just silly. Yeah, pretty amazing though. I mean, Netflix has – this is their first kind of brief glimpse behind the screen. I’m still – I’m curious about this.

**John:** Craig, why? Why do you think they shared these numbers with us this week?

**Craig:** I think that the Netflix business model is curious. Where we are on our side of things, Netflix is fantastically successful. Everybody talks about it constantly. They make more content than anybody. Everybody has a subscription. That sounds pretty great.

On the other side of things, they do spend a lot of money, obviously, and I think they sort of keep spending more than they make. So some of this has to do with proving to the market that people really are watching stuff and it’s not just Netflix pretending, because there are no commercials here. So it really just comes down, I suppose, to subscriber retention.

**John:** Yeah. And that number they’ve always had to sort of disclose to investors to show like what their churn is and how much they’re able to grow. My theory behind why they’re releasing this information now is they feel Disney+ closing on their heels and obviously being indexed with the success that it’s become and they want to sort of show how dominant they are and how dominant they are worldwide, and so they have a new show, Squid Game, which is like, you know –

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s going to be their top, by far their top performer. It’ll top all these charts as they publish them now. So I’m guessing it’s just because they now have competition and they feel the need to sort of show how successful they are on their big titles.

**Craig:** Yeah, you might be right. I mean, they certainly now have really serious competition from multiple outlets and there’s more coming, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It seems like every day there’s another streamer coming on board. So you have Apple. You have Amazon. You have HBO Max. You have Disney+. You have Paramount+?

**John:** Paramount+ yeah.

**Craig:** Paramount+.

**John:** Yeah, all CBS shows. All your Star Treks. All your Survivors.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got Peacock.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Hulu. So now we used to have 500 cable channels. Soon we will have 500 streamers. So yeah, I don’t know why.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** This is above my paygrade.

**John:** So here is where I think it’s so fascinating is it shows that they actually do have all this data and they could share this data whenever they wanted to. So as we start talking about like maybe you need to pay, you know, folks, proper residuals for the things they do, it’s not hard for them to crank out these charts and they really do know how many people have watched what. And so –

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the thing they can do. And that data is there and accessible. It reminds me of my One Cool Things from last week I talked about how in the music streaming business, how weird the numbers and accounting really were. And again, you can always learn from like what happened in music streaming to what’s happening here. Let’s make sure that as we look at these numbers, they really are kind of measuring what we want to measure, which is, how much is my work being used and exploited.

**Craig:** Yeah, and maybe that’s why they’ve been holding off for so long because they didn’t want people like, say, Jack Thorne and Harry Bradbeer to know that 190 million hours were spent on Enola Holmes. That does imply that they should get paid more for, you know, the next outing. And this is true for all of these things, you know, if you get paid nothing in residuals for, I don’t know, 6 Underground, well, what does that mean? Because 83 million people watched at least two minutes of it.

**John:** No, because –

**Craig:** I don’t know what that means. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what that means.

**John:** Because I was only a talking head and not an actual writer on Hollywood clichés, which debuted on Netflix this past week, I wouldn’t have gotten any residuals that I wrote anyway.

**Craig:** Oh, yes.

**John:** But the writers to that show, if it’s a huge success, I don’t know where it’s going to be a huge success, yeah, I want them to be rewarded for the hard work they did.

**Craig:** I mean, I have a legitimate question I wish I could ask Ted Sarandos dose in all seriousness. Why would they set two minutes as the thresholds for saying that an account has watched a series or film in terms of its popularity when I think that number is kind of a joke, right? I mean –

**John:** Yeah, that feels too low. It feels like you want – like 15 minutes is like you’ve sort of given it a try.

**Craig:** And I think it’s a failure. I mean, not one of these things is 15 minutes long. I mean –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you watch, I don’t know, two thirds of a movie, then I guess, you know, I would say you watched it, you didn’t bail out. And if you watched a single episode of a series, in its completion, meaning, you know, or 90% or more, then that’s a watch. What does this two minutes get you other than derision? It’s a very strange choice.

**John:** All right. Well, Ted can write in and tell us.

**Craig:** Yeah, Ted, explain this to us.

**John:** Why two minutes?

**Craig:** Yeah. Why two minutes, Ted?

**John:** Why two minutes?

**Craig:** Yeah, we’d like to know.

**John:** We got some follow up.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So last week on the show we talked about IATSE, which is the stage and theatrical employees.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You can say all the bloodline folks who actually make our movies and TV shows. They are right now, as we’re recording this, in the middle of their strike authorization vote. So by the time you’re listening to this, we’ll, we may know the outcomes of this vote. So we are living in the past and you don’t know what the results were. They would have to achieve 75% on that vote in order to –

**Craig:** Oh, they’re going to.

**John:** Go on strike.

**Craig:** They’re going to.

**John:** I think they’ll easily hit that number.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s not surprising.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** We got a lot of good emails in. I want to highlight one from Dan. Dan writes that creatives like Craig often approach production as a crunch time to power through, and I definitely am guilty of this versus like, okay, we just sort of head down to get through this. It’s going to be exhausting but we’ll get through it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And Dan points out that it’s easy to forget that the trials in production are not a temporary situation for your crew. We spend far more time there than anywhere else in our lives. And so, what’s a crunch time for us is just normal time for them. That’s an interesting perspective that I hadn’t really considered.

**Craig:** Certainly coming from features, absolutely, I think, writers and directors do view production as here we go, and then it’s over. Whereas crews are doing all year round. Now, running a television show, I can tell you now this is my life.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it is –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no specific end in sight. I mean, obviously, there is an end in sight. I just don’t want to see what it is, but point being, we’re gonna be in production for a long time. And so, I now feel that life and it becomes all the more important to make sure that people are being, at the minimum, not bullied and not pushed around and not made miserable and not treated poorly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And ideally treated well.

**John:** Yeah. Dan also points out that script coordinators and production office coordinators, who are also IATSE, they are paid so little compared to other folks on a set. And so, he’s saying he’s paid really well but other folks are not, especially office workers. And that the production office coordinator is not an entry-level job. A multi-million dollar production literally could not function in a day without them. And some of them are making less money than a retail clerk, and that we as a union have never stood up for them until now. So, hurray.

**Craig:** That is a great point. And one area to take a careful look at are the places that are controlled by the people who control budgets.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The people who control budgets are always looking for places to save money. That’s their job, I suppose.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But there are jobs that people like you and me don’t see, for instance, production. I’m not in the production office, because I’m on set or I’m on location. And those jobs there, that’s areas where there can be situations like this where they’re just being underpaid, and that’s why a union is so essential.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I hope very much that IATSE gets what they want out of this and what they need. And I would say – I didn’t say this last week. I want to say it now. This is my weekly message to Carol Lombardini. Carol, you don’t want to let this genie out of the bottle. If IATSE strikes, now they know what it means to strike. And they’re gonna feel it. And that’s a taste that you can get real used to. The Writers Guild talks about striking every three years because we’re kind of a strike-y union. We haven’t struck a lot during my time and John’s time. We’ve only struck once during our time. But prior to that, we struck multiple times. There was a run in the ‘70s and ‘80s where we’re striking every couple of years, because we liked it. And you don’t want IATSE to get used to striking, Carol. Give them what they want. You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to go down this road. I know you don’t want to go down this road. You need to take care of them. Also, what they’re asking for is ultimately about what is morally correct. And I can easily make the argument why wealthy feature writers don’t deserve another penny on the DVDs or whatever. Harder to make any kind of moral argument against what IATSE is asking for, these are people who have put their hearts and souls into this, a lot of them as Dan writes in, are being paid barely anything. You got to give on this one. They’ve got to.

**John:** Yeah. As we acknowledged last week as well, if a strike happens, it won’t shut down all production because there are –

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There are some places working under a different contract. And so, they’re like, it’s going to be a weird situation because it’s not like the whole, everything shuts down. It’s like, everything shuts down on certain shows.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But some shows made for HBO and other places that are on different contracts, which feels like an extra strange place for the AMPTP because suddenly some of their members are like not hurting me. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. And again, this I think we mentioned this last week, this is about Netflix. This is flat out about Netflix. The amount of production that Netflix funds, therefore the amount of employment for which they’re responsible is very outsized, compared to everyone else. And yeah, it’s gonna have to – it’s gonna have to get fixed.

**John:** Also, last week, we discussed a murder that took place in a small town in remote Australia. Jason from Brisbane, Australia wrote in to say, “I was excited to hear that you were discussing the Larrimah story for how this would be a movie, but I was surprised to hear you were citing a Medium article by an American writer. The story was covered and reported by two Australian writers, Caroline Graham and Kylie Stephenson. They created a great podcast that came out a few years back and have just released a book.” So we’ll put links to both of those resources in the show notes for this episode. I didn’t know that they had written it. Basically, I think my first exposure to this story came from a reader who sent in the link to this article, but it’s great that there were some people on the ground during that first person recording.

**Craig:** John, I think this makes you a bad person.

**John:** Aye, yeah. That’s a moral failing.

**Craig:** You’re bad.

**John:** Bad.

**Craig:** Shame.

**John:** Oh, but I don’t feel nearly as much shame as you should –

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Because we got another piece of follow up.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Really follow up about your criticism of the autumn season.

**Craig:** Here they come. Here they come.

**John:** Uh, Megana could you chime in here?

**Megana:** Yeah, so we got this really thoughtful feedback.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Megana:** Megana notes. “When we were –

**Craig:** Oh.

**Megana:** When we recorded our bonus segment on fall last episode, I was at a farmhouse in Maine and I was cold and hungry, and got distracted by the thought of sweaters and stew. I want to make clear that the reason I love fall is Halloween, and if there’s any marketing campaign to blame for the popularity of the season, let’s just say the call is from inside the house.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**Megana:** “When I was five years old, the Fox Family channel which then became ABC Family, and is now Freeform launched its 31 Nights of Halloween programming campaign. So each night in October, they play a family-friendly scary movie. That’s when I was introduced to some of my favorite movies like The Addams Family –“

**Craig:** Great movie.

**Megana:** “Hocus Pocus,”

**Craig:** Fun.

**Megana:** “Aliens,”

**Craig:** Scary.

**Megana:** “Ghostbusters,”

**Craig:** Amazing.

**Megana:** “And … the Corpse Bride.”

**Craig:** Never saw it.

**John:** Ah, I know that one.

**Megana:** “And guess who has a writing credit on the Corpse Bride, ring, ring, the prince of Halloween himself –“

**Craig:** Oh, lord.

**Megana:** “Mr. John August.”

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**Megana:** “Also, guess what movies my brother would steal the remote and flip the channel to you?”

**Craig:** He sounds cool. Which ones?

**Megana:** “That’s right. Scary Movies 3 and 4.”

**Craig:** Okay, your brother is awesome.

**Megana:** “So I just want to point out that if any institution is to blame for the rise of Spooky Season, it is not CBS –“

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Megana:** “Not Nancy Meyers. It is in fact Scriptnotes.”

**Craig:** I –

**John:** Wow, I feel like the mirror was just turned like back on us and you recognize like we are the problem.

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** And also, we’re the solution.

**John:** Maybe we should just surrender to Spooky Season and just say, like, you know what, it’s great. I actually never really mentioned you Yuck Someone’s Yum, if people like it, great. It’s just, I find it a little too much.

**Craig:** Yeah, I, I don’t, I like Halloween, you know, and I just don’t like the phrase Spooky Season actually. I think I like the idea of what Spooky Season represents. I just want a different name for it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But I’m sure everybody else agreed with me, right Megana? No? What?

**Megana:** I just think it’s rich as the co-architects of the situation that we find ourselves in, you guys are all of a sudden bowing out of Spooky Season.

**John:** Okay, co-architect is probably overstating our role on this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As just –

**Craig:** Just a little bit.

**John:** As small day laborers on the project of creating the Halloween complex.

**Craig:** I was young, I needed the work.

**John:** And by the way, Craig was mocking the Halloween complex in those two movies.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s exactly correct.

**John:** And really, by the time it got to Scary Movies 3 and 4, they were barely about like, you know, Scary Movies at all.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** Where they? They were basically just like pop-culture movies. I didn’t – I didn’t see them.

**Megana:** But they’re still played all October.

**Craig:** Yeah, we, we were – Scary Movie 4 is where the wheels started coming off because Bob Weinstein was fully raging. But on 3, we kind of kept it to the ring, which was, which was the Scary Movie.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And Signs, which was sort of a scary movie, and Saw. Saw actually was 4.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** So Saw was scary. Yeah, but then it got stupid.

**John:** The Ring is such a genuinely scary movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s still really unsettling for me.

**Craig:** It’s terrific, excellent.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s get on to our craft topic this week.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** And so set up for this, Megana and I went down to Howard Rodman’s class at USC. He’s teaching a graduate screenwriting class, and once a year, I go down there and talk with him as they’re going through their index cards on their films. And so, basically, they’re laying out all their cards on a table, and then in about 10 minutes they’re sort of pitching me the story and sort of pointing to the cards and sort of show where they’re at. And it’s a good exercise. But before we started, I wanted to talk about sort of their backgrounds. And so, two of the six were actors. They had come from an acting background. So we were talking about the way in which actors approach characters versus how writers approach characters, because actors have a very different understanding of sort of their motivation with the scene, because they’re hopefully just thinking about where they are in that moment versus the writer thinks about that character over the course of the whole journey.

And that really is the same situation with index cards versus the script you’re writing, because these index cards are sort of like a roadmap for the story that you’re gonna be telling. And you’re really figuring out, like, “What is this map?” Like, “Where are we overall going?” But characters, of course, are never actually, on the whole journey. They’re just in one scene. And they don’t actually know this whole map. They don’t know what is happening around them. So it’s this weird thing that writers have to do where we have to know so much. And then at the same time, forget it all, when we actually start doing the work of writing scenes. And so for this segment, I want to talk about how important it is to forget what you need to forget, and some techniques for sort of doing all of that memory loss as you’re writing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s a really good point. I’ve never thought of it this way. But that’s pretty much what’s going on. You have to know everything. And then you have to pretend you don’t know everything. One thing that actors do have to do is both be the person in the scene and also take care of certain technical aspects that they are aware, have everything to do with the artificial nature of making a movie or television show. They are being a person. Also, they need to hit their mark. And they need to put their eye line slightly off from where they think they should put it because the camera operators asked for that. And they have to remember to pick the thing up with their left hand at this word.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there is this weird melding of authenticity and absolute fakery. And –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We kind of do the same thing, but in a different way. We do it in terms of scope, what we know versus what they know.

**John:** And if we’re not doing that job properly, we’re gonna end up with characters who are functional, but not real. They’re gonna work like robots. They’re going to sort of do the job, maybe of like, moving a plot along, but they’re not going to feel real in those moments. And that’s really what I want to talk about is like how do you get them to do their jobs without sort of making it seem like they’re just doing their plot jobs? How do they do that artificial stuff, which is like picking up that prop at the right moment and make them feel like, well, that’s what they just wanted to do at that moment?

**Craig:** Yep, exactly.

**John:** So let’s talk through the things you need to forget, like things you know as a writer going into a scene. So you know the theme, you know the central dramatic question, you know what your movie is about, you know what your story is trying to tell, you know what you’re wrestling with. You know all the characters’ secrets, you know why they’re there, what they secretly want, what they could do if they could do anything, you know what happens next. And you know what happens in the scenes that those characters weren’t in. And so you know we’re all – how all the pieces fit together. And these other characters in the scene, they don’t even have a sense that there is a puzzle to be assembled. I got a puzzle reference in there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Because they don’t know what – they don’t know what the shape of this whole thing is. They’re just like one little piece and then they have no sense. They actually have a function overall. So you have to know all these things. And then you have to kind of forget them.

**Craig:** Yeah, and part of creating the narrative and the – let’s call it the overall picture, the big meta story –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where you’re looking down like the dungeon master and you can see everything is –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have to design your story in such a way that it is really interesting to view from very limited points of view.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If everybody can see everything, if it’s, if you’ve built a big open building of story, and everybody sees everything, then it’s gonna be boring. There’s gonna be very little conflict. Mostly everybody will agree that they see what they see. They know what they know. And now what should we do?

But the more you design a funhouse for your characters, where they are seeing optical illusions, where they’re seeing things that make them think x, but truthfully, it’s y, and then we get to see them discover that it’s y, this is the fun. This is the fun part. This is the puzzle part. Everybody inside of your narrative should be able to see only what you want them to see. And what you want them to see should be very purposeful. It can’t just be what they happen to see. You get to shape things so that perhaps they get fooled, and the audience gets fooled.

**John:** Absolutely. And of course, that audience is the third important character here, because the audience is approaching any of these stories with a set of expectations. They have a sense of like what they think is going to happen next. They have information that the characters in the scene don’t have. And so, you’re always remembering as the writer is like, okay, the audience knows this piece of information, so therefore, I don’t want this character to say the same again because they already know it. So you’re always balancing, you know, where your audience is at versus where your character is at versus where you know the story as a whole needs to go. So you’re doing a lot of juggling here. And that’s why I’m just urging people to do is to do as much as you can just sort of forget that you’re juggling and just really experience this from inside the character’s point of view so that it feels alive and natural.

As I was looking at these index cards, they’re all laid on tables, that really was the god’s eye view. And I was trying to mostly focus on, is the shape of the story interesting. Are we actually moving from one interesting place to another interesting place to a new place? Does it feel like we’re progressing through time, through different locations that we’re actually on a journey that’s going to be meaningful, but the same time I wanted to be able to focus down and look at, like, this index card, this scene, is that going to be interesting? Is it gonna be interesting to watch as an audience? Would it be interesting for the characters who are in that moment? And you have to be able to do that macro and that micro looking at the same time when you’re thinking about the big stories. Like, it’s great to like lay out, you know, oh, this would be an epic journey. But are you creating an epic journey that’s going to have space for those fascinating moments inside them?

**Craig:** Yeah. Are you using your index cards to find your story? Or have you found your story and you’re just putting them on index cards? That’s what you ought to be doing. Because if you think your index cards are going to teach you what to do, you’re going to end up with a whole lot of index cards that suck. The work has to be done before you get the Sharpie out.

**John:** Yeah. So what can be useful about the index cards is like I don’t tend to card out a lot of things. But what can be useful about them is recognize that you just have too many beats or that you’re sort of doing the same thing too often, or if you stayed in the same place a little too long; that you need to keep moving. If there’s too many scenes that are kind of doing the same thing, great that you’re noticing this now before you’ve written those scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s a good organizational tool for sure. But when you have index cards, like John is looking at these index cards, and he picks up one of them and he goes, “Well, this one seems not quite interesting. It seems a little bit boring,” there is a big problem underneath that. Every person – every problem is a big problem in a story, when it comes down to story. If you’re looking at index cards, then the human being on the table is completely opened up. You’re looking at organs and bones.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If an organ is in the wrong place, it’s not just, oh, let’s move it over here. There’s something fundamentally not correct because the index cards and those beats should be a function of what your characters want, and should be a function of what your characters know versus what you want them to know or where you want them to be. Or, I really want a scene where this thing happens. If you ever say, I really want a scene where blankety blank happens, just stop, go for a walk, come back, and then think about what would be better for your characters instead of you, if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah, and that overview thing actually come into play with one story I was looking at, and the writer pitched and did a good job pitching. But I said, “Okay, I’m looking at your cards, your story actually starts here. And I think you need to lose the first 11 cards and actually start your story here. Because you and I both believe in a first act that does a lot of work. But that first act was not doing the work to tell the rest of the story. And the actual interesting moment happened here. And you could have to start the story here and it be much more fascinating to learn about these characters in the middle of this crisis, rather than 30 pages, 30 minutes of other stuff, which is not actually going to pay off in the course of the movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the reason why you do these cards is because you recognize, oh, I shouldn’t even write that stuff because that’s not actually going to help me tell the story that I want to tell.

**Craig:** Not necessarily good news here for those of you listening to the podcast, simply hearing us say this is not going to help you do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You kind of just need to know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you won’t know perfectly at first. The more you do it, the better you get at it, until eventually you absolutely know. But it takes time and experience. So just remember as you go through this and we’re talking about what you should and shouldn’t do, you’re going to do a lot of the things that we would look at –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And say, “You shouldn’t have done that,” because we’ve been doing it for 30 freakin’ years, and you maybe haven’t been.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s totally normal.

**John:** Well, let’s focus now on that you’ve done your outline. And now it’s time to actually work on your script, and you’re in a scene. And let’s talk about how you forget all the other stuff you know when you’re in that scene. For me, and we’ve talked a lot about writing process, I need to sort of physically or sort of mentally place myself in that scene, in that location where the things are happening, look around and see what’s there and really center myself in the middle of that action, and not be thinking about, like, what just happened, or what’s happened next. It’s like what is happening in this space, who’s there, what do they want to do, who’s driving the scene and really feel that I’m live there in that moment. Because that’s going to keep me from wandering off and thinking about other moments ahead in the story or behind the story, and really focus on what wants to happen in this scene itself.

**Craig:** It’s essential. I’m a huge believer in the visual imagination of the space. I need to know what it looks like. I need to know how close they are together. I need to know if the lights are on or off. If there’s a fire in the fireplace, if it’s warm, if it’s hot, what are they wearing? And then, of course, I need to know what they want. And then I really try as best I can to imagine this conversation between two people and include all of the wonderful irregularities that happen between two people when they’re having a conversation. It’s weird. It’s awkward. There are stops and starts. There’s confusions. There is mistakes. We make conversational mistakes all the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And most importantly, reaction. In your mind, as you’re imagining a scene, try and keep your eye on the person listening, not the person talking. And at that point, once you go forward, never stop asking this question, “What would a human being do here?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what would this specific human being do in the context of what she or he wants?

**John:** Yeah. And so crucially, you’re asking that question, while at the same time half remembering and half forgetting what they actually – what you actually need them to do. And so, part of your job as the writer is to find ways to tilt your world so that they will make the choice that you need them to make, so that you can get to the next thing you need in their story. And it’s how you do that without feeling the author’s hand doing that, that makes a scene successful. That it achieves both the dramatic purpose within the scene; that it feels real within that moment. And it also gets you to that next scene, to that next moment that you need to have happen in your story based on your overall outline, your overall plan for it. That’s the challenge is that you’re constantly balancing this need for things to feel incredibly real. And the characters have agency and they’re making their own choices. That it’s not predestined. And yet –

**Craig:** It’s predestined.

**John:** They will. It’s predestined, because –

**Craig:** Well, yeah.

**John:** you are god, and you are setting sort of what is happening in this world.

**Craig:** That’s what we do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the trick of it all, the whole thing. Tchaikovsky definitely wanted to blow some cannons off at the end of the 1812 Overture. And he did, and I’m happy he did.

**John:** He would say, “Wouldn’t it be cool,” he’s like, “It’d really be cool if I shot, shot some cannons.”

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** But then then he walked away and thought about it.

**Craig:** Right, and then he was like, okay, I think what I need to do is think about the voices in the conversation and what would need to happen. If that is the eventuality, how does that become meaningful? How does it become this gorgeous eventuality that we didn’t see coming, but once it happens, we go, of course, everything has led to this moment. And all of the stuff before it makes the cannons good. The cannons aren’t good because their cannons. The cannons are good because of all the stuff that wasn’t cannons.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And that is why every screenwriter should listen very carefully to the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky not only because it’s amazing, but it’s also quite brief.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it is the closest you can get to two or three people talking in a room. That’s called three or four people –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Talking without anyone talking. And in fact, it’s all music. It’s wonderful.

**John:** Absolutely. Now, getting back to our techniques for forgetting. So you’re in the middle of a scene and how do you forget what needs to happen in the scene so it feels you’re germane for like the characters in that moment. Make sure you’re looking at one character’s want. Make sure you’re looking – either one character’s want needs to be driving the scene. An external pressure needs to be driving the scene. Some point of conflict need to be driving the scene. Because if nothing is driving the scene other than you as the writer need to get this piece of information out or need to connect these two pieces, we’re going to feel it. And we do feel it. And we can all think of examples of TV shows or movies we’ve watched where like, “Hey, that scene is just to connect these two things and it doesn’t serve a purpose,” you avoid that by actually setting yourself in that moment and really looking at like, what would this moment actually be rather than what you functionally need it to do.

**Craig:** That’s exactly correct.

**John:** Yeah. And stay curious. And just like I – some of my favorite scenes are the ones where I didn’t quite know what was going to happen. I knew sort of what needed to happen, but I really had no idea how it was going happen and I just let the characters start moving around and doing things. And sometimes they’re doing that and I’m sort of looping through my head. Sometimes it was like, as I was writing and a character said something or did something, I was, well, that surprised me. But if it surprises me, then it probably surprises the audience. And that moment suddenly feels more real. So just stay curious about these things that don’t follow your outline so methodically that it’s just doing the functional job it needs to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, try and apply the art of imperfection so that your characters aren’t speechifying, their lines aren’t perfectly formed, brilliantly clever, right on the heels of each other. We’ve all seen scenes like this –

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Where you might walk away thinking, well, how arch and interesting those two humans were, except that they don’t seem like humans at all, do they? They seem like two, I don’t know, Dorothy Parkers locked in a battle of overly-witted wits. We don’t want that. We want real people. And I’m mostly interested in what real people think and do and vulnerability, and make sure that you allow yourself to have your character sound or behave or act wrong, which is how we do it.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Because they don’t know they’re being filmed. They don’t know that they’re, that everyone is watching them do it. And that’s part of the joy of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. They also may not be brilliant at talking. They may sneeze in the middle of it. They may eat something weird. They may drop something. They may start laughing at a moment they shouldn’t be laughing. These are the things you want to think about. How can I just take all the weird artificial polish off of this and make it real.

**John:** And my last bit of advice, if you find yourself grinding ahead and you recognize, I just can’t, I can’t be thinking about the scene just as a scene and I’m only looking at it in the context of the movie, try writing the scene in a blank document. So try like not make it the next scene that you’re writing if you’re writing chronologically for fitting between two things, try just letting the scene be the moment itself and just start it in a blank document. Let it be its own thing, and then copy/paste it back into the document, your overall script. Yeah, you might need to tweak some things to get the transition and hand off to work. But I suspect you’re gonna have a better scene that feels real to itself if, you know, let that scene not have to squeeze in the middle of a long document you’re scrolling through.

**Craig:** Copypasta.

**John:** Copypasta, love it. Cool. So now we can forget everything we just talked about in terms of how to forget.

**Craig:** Great. Gone.

**John:** Let’s ask some listener questions. Megana, what do you have for us?

**Megana:** Great. So our first question comes from Gary, who asks, “Do you think that the lighting in the room where you’re writing affects your writing?”

**Craig:** No. Easy. No.

**John:** No. I think it does some. It depends on what I’m working on. I do like sometimes to be in an environmental space that actually kind of feels like what I’m writing. And so, if I’m writing something sort of dark and spooky, it’s kind of nice to have the lights be a little bit low. And something sort of creepy playing in the background. I often have like a playlist that sort of gets me into the mood for it. But I try not to be so, you know, freaky about it. Because I think you can so often make those excuses for like, oh, I couldn’t write today because the light was coming in the window wrong. No, you just move a little bit, just get the writing done.

**Craig:** The lighting in the room where I’m writing is the light that’s hitting me off of my laptop. That’s the lighting. It doesn’t matter, bright light, dark, whatever. It’s not to say that some people will be lighting-dependent. We’re all different. But for me, nah.

**John:** When I was finishing off work on the first Arlo Finch book, I was in France during a super heatwave, and I was writing these really cold wintry scenes and we were in this apartment without air conditioning, and we were just melting. And so, what I would do is I would play these – YouTube has these like these 12-hour tracks of like the environmental noises, and I played like this winter storm in my headphones. And it helped me sort of kind of feel cold and in that moment, even though I was in absolutely sweltering heat. So I think it can be good to trick yourself to some degree and sort of remember the environment your characters are in but it’s used for yourself. But no. Don’t freak out about your lighting.

**Craig:** Next, Megana.

**Megana:** Love Lauren from LA asks, “I received an email from a very big manager last week.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Megana:** “He said he enjoyed my work sent to him by a mutual connection and would like to help bring new opportunities to me. What exactly does this mean? And how should I respond? I can already hear Craig chuckling at my naiveté. I’m young with only a few years of experience on a small TV show. I’ve never had a rep and most of his clients are seasoned award winners. Eons ago in Episode Two, you mentioned managers help develop young talent. Is that what this is about? And if so, what does that entail?”

**Craig:** I’m not chuckling at your naiveté.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I am chuckling at you thinking I would chuckle at you. You don’t sound naive at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You actually sound very – normally what we get is, “I received an email from a very big manager’s brother’s niece and she said that, you know, he really liked the title that I told him that you wrote. Am I now an A-list writer?” You know, like, this is the opposite. And here’s somebody that’s working as a working writer with – I like that this particular person says only a few years of experience. So years of experience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And somebody is showing interest in you. It’s quite likely that the big manager would not be your personal manager, if that’s where you are in your career. But big managers tend to employ other managers at their firms. And those managers are looking to develop younger talent. Of course, they are. If you don’t develop younger talent, then eventually you just become like the manager of very old people who proceed inexorably toward the grave. So –

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I would actually respond and say it would, it would be wonderful to sit down and discuss how can we do that.

**John:** I a hundred percent agree with Craig. And this is only good news. So this manager reached out to you and this wasn’t you who sent it into a manager. And he says, like, whenever somebody reaches out to you because they read your stuff that you didn’t even send to them, that’s really good news. Good things could happen and come from that. So yes, follow up with that. Go in there and see what they’re saying. And it sounds like you don’t have anybody repping you at all right now, this could be a situation that you get a new rep.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** You should.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Yeah. Megana, what else we got?

**Megana:** Half of One writer asks, “My writing partner and I have a question about WGA insurance minimums. Currently, a writer has to earn $40,854 a year to receive insurance. This means that if we get paid $44,000 for a treatment, or a non-original screenplay, we don’t qualify for insurance, because we only get $22,000 each. When it comes to paying us, we’re each treated as a half of a writer. But when it comes to insuring us, we have to make twice what a single writer would in order to qualify, which doesn’t seem totally logical or fair. I know the WGA has taken strides to improve the minimums for writing partnerships. But to be honest, we’re less concerned about that than not getting shut out of basic healthcare because we didn’t make twice as much as our non-partnered writer friends. Is there anything we can do about that?”

**John:** So, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re experiencing is a very real thing which I’ve heard for 20 years, and it sucks. And we’re the only sort of industry – I guess, there are some director teams that could hit this, but like, we’re the only part of this industry that tends to have a lot of teams, and teams split the money. And because they split the money, they fall below what they need to do to hit insurance. I know of married writer teams who will very cleverly divide the money in certain ways so that one of them gets coverage, and then the other one gets spousal coverage. There’s ways to do it. But what you’re describing is real, and it sucks. And often entering into fee negotiations, we’ve brought up partner issues and how we’re going to deal with this. And this is one of the things that does come up. To change this so that so writing teams can qualify for insurance at a lower level, or that they both can receive it, it’s theoretically possible. It’s just a matter of making that a priority in negotiations. And we’ll see if it can happen.

**Craig:** So here’s the issue. The issue is we have to pay for our own healthcare. When we say we have to pay for it, the companies are adding money in. But that’s the money we get. And the amount of money that the companies put in for the $40,854 minimum is not enough to cover a single writer’s health insurance for the year. Happily, we have lots of writers that make more than that. The people that earn much more are helping subsidize the people who earn less, and that’s a nice union benefit. If there are two of you together earning, let’s say, as you put $44,000, the problem is our joint health plan that is run by the Writers Guild and the companies together, they don’t even get enough money from that for one person, much less two. So the problem is simple math. And you’re absolutely right. It totally sucks. And this is one of the reasons why our entire healthcare system is failing everyone. And our negotiations have been essentially perverted for the last 20 years by this endlessly escalating series of healthcare costs. This is all we end up being able to ask for. And even though it does seem unfair, our system is vastly better than what the average American gets from their job, or from the government. So there’s really no answer here. The companies are not going to allow two people who are making a combined $44,000 and they’re not going to go for it.

**John:** The joint organization that runs our health plan, they’re not going to drop that thing because they probably couldn’t.

**Craig:** And I got news for you, we’re not going to ask for it either because we don’t want it. And this is the hard part. The Writers Guild doesn’t want to ask for that because if that happens, we will put ourselves, our health plan, in such a situation where we will really be in trouble. And then we’re gonna have to come back and give away more things that we want in exchange for just shoring up that part, and the healthcare overall will suffer dramatically. What we have to really watch out for these paper teams, those are vicious, where production companies put two writers together and force them to be a team, and then pay them this lower team amount, which is unacceptable. But unfortunately, half of one writer, I’m giving you the cold truth here, I don’t think this is going to change. And so, you and your writing partner need to concentrate on getting that number up, because that’s the only way you’re going to get there.

**John:** Yeah, so the two things you can do are get more money, just get yourself paid more so you’re both over that threshold and push for better healthcare system in the United States, because that’s really, that’s ultimately what’s underlying all of this is because everything that talks about sort of union healthcare is really because we don’t have a sensible system in the United States.

**Craig:** Yeah, in terms of probable outcomes, vastly more likely that you will just go ahead and make more money than fix what appears to be an unfixable system. So, yeah, sorry about that. But alas.

**John:** Any new questions on it, on down note, but thank you for everyone who sends me questions. We’ve got a whole big batch of them. So next week, we’ll try to crank through a bunch more.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s come time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I have two little things here. The first is a thread By Dylan Park, which I’m sure you saw, Craig.

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** Dylan was staffed on a military show, along with this other veteran, and this woman served in Afghanistan, had this amazing experience. And so, Dylan was brought in as a military expert, but this woman was like way ahead of him in a lot of levels. And then he started to suspect that she was not who she said she was. And so, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But I’ll put a link in the show notes to the thread, because it’s a very good read. It’s not Zola, but it’s a very good read.

**Craig:** Yeah, I loathe people who steal valor, that’s the phrase.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stolen valor, they’re immoral. That is a deeply scummy thing to do. And I have no sympathy for anyone who does it. It’s hard for me to celebrate somebody ruining somebody else, even if he doesn’t use her name.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I mean, he could have just had one thing. I was on a show. And a lady came in and claimed to be this. And in fact, she was never even in the service. And don’t do that because I have been in service and we don’t do that. And here’s why it’s important to not do that. But the whole thing was sort of like, okay, here we go. I’m going to – and it was that there was a sort of sadistic delight in tearing her apart, which, you know, I don’t know, I just find hard to kind of – I don’t delight in those, I guess, as maybe I should.

**John:** Yes, I get that too. And I don’t think I was feeling like a celebration of this. But I know how frustrating it would be to be in that room with that person all the time, who you know you can’t trust and I feel like that writers’ room is a place of trust. And to have to be sitting next to this person who you just did not believe at all, I get why he was so frustrated.

**Craig:** Oh, completely and, and I mean no offense to Mr. Park, because he’s not – I’m not accusing him of doing anything wrong. It’s just a question of, I suppose do you like that sort of thing or not, but I completely agree. And pathological liars are a massive problem in Hollywood. We deal with them all the time. I am really – so I’m a fairly gullible person actually. I’ve had this happen a number of times where I’ve been talking to somebody and I’ve just been describing somebody else’s behavior and been so befuddled by it, and I can’t, I’m, you know me, I love puzzles and like the puzzle is not working, I don’t understand it. And they just look at me and they’re like, “They’re on drugs idiot, or they’re lying.” And I’m like, “What? Oh.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So –

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Oh. And so the thought that somebody would do this is just mind boggling. I don’t know if you saw this on the similar category of sociopathic people, a woman posed as an ASL translator.

**John:** Oh, God.

**Craig:** Did you see this?

**John:** No, I didn’t see this, but I know it. I know how awful it is.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**John:** I can feel it. It’s just – so cringe, oh, my god.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s super cringe. So she went – she volunteered her services to a police department actually.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they were like, “Oh, okay.” I mean, she wasn’t asking for money. And they had a conference about something and there she was off in the corner signing and basically quite a few people who speak American Sign Language wrote in to say that she was not speaking ASL at all. She was just gibberishing. And what did she think would happen? And similarly with this woman who was posing as this super soldier who had served in Afghanistan, what did she think would happen? I mean, you can’t get away with this stuff. I mean, I’m on it. See? There, I’m gullible. I guess people do get away with it.

**John:** Catherine Tate, a great British actress has a character who is that sort of like falsely confident person. Like, “Oh, I’m great at tennis,” and they’ll hit and that like she can’t play tennis at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s exactly that feeling. It’s like, “Oh, I know a little of this,” like, no, you should not be doing this, and, uh, the worst.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** My other small One Cool Thing is an article by Amy Hoy called How Blogs Broke the Web.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, was it on her blog?

**John:** You and I both had blogs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you and – I think we started – were you in WordPress originally or were you in Movable Type?

**Craig:** I started in Movable Type. And then I went to WordPress.

**John:** Yeah, as did I. And the early days of the internet, we think about blogs, but there was a stage before that. So I’ll put a link in the show notes to my 1996 website. And so this article is really talking about sort of how websites originally like not time-based. They weren’t sort of that reverse chronological thing that blogs did.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And but because the blogging systems became so popular, everything became a blog, because that was just the easy way to do it. And they all had that reverse chronological flow. And all of the internet sort of started to follow that. Because when you and I were first reading the Trades Online, it was Hollywood Reporter and Variety, and they were like the print versions. But then Deadline came along, and it was just a blog. And now it’s still just a blog. It’s still that reverse chronological flow the same way that Twitter is, the same way that Instagram is. And so, she makes a very interesting case for a weird kind of fluke of history that this blogging stuff came along and really changed the shape of like how personal news is delivered.

**Craig:** Yeah, it did break every – everything has broken everything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The web has broken everything, which is I think, what we’re getting into on our bonus segment, so I don’t want to, I don’t want to give anything away there. But yeah, you know what, the theory was great. Everybody gets a printing press in their own home. The result was an enormous amount of narcissistic horseshit in newspaper format. And it hasn’t changed. It was like, you know, when we were kids, did you know anybody that kept a diary when you were a kid?

**John:** I did not know a single person.

**Craig:** Like diaries were plot points on bad TV shows like, “Oh, my god, you read my diary,” like on The Brady Bunch, whatever. But I didn’t know anybody who kept a diary. And the reason people generally don’t keep diaries except for a very select few is no one is reading it. So you’re writing this description of yourself for nobody except yourself, which I guess is vaguely weirdly romantic or sad. But the purpose of the blogs was, oh, good, now everyone will read it. And it was all the same crap. You know what else is the same, every single day, John?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Deathloop.

**John:** Ah, good segue there. Nicely done. I mean, for an amateur that was a really good segue.

Because I know that Deathloop is basically Groundhog Day with a body cam.

**Craig:** And yet so much more.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Deathloop is a new game out by Bethesda. It’s specifically, well Bethesda is this publisher. It’s Arkane, the company that made the Dishonored games which I love. And I love Deathloop also. If the folks who made Deathloop are listening, I’m thrilled with this game. I think it’s incredibly – it’s so much more than the concept of, oh, it’s the same day every day, because that’s not what’s happening. In fact, everything you do changes what happens on the next time you wake up again. So you are constantly changing the world that you keep waking up in on that same day, but it may be – I learned a word, onboarding. So onboarding –

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the process of teaching people how to play your game and teaching people what the mechanics of it are and how to manage their resources and what things mean is really bad, I’ve got to say, I had no idea what the hell was going on for so long. And I finally just read a bunch of articles on the internet and go, oh, that’s what that is. It’s really bad. But once you know what it is, and you’ve read the articles on the internet, so boo on that front to Arkane and Bethesda, it’s amazing. So I love Deathloop. Excellent game. I’m currently playing it on the PlayStation 5. It looks gorgeous.

**John:** Yeah, it doesn’t exist on PlayStation 4, which is all I have.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** But maybe I’ll get a 5 at some point.

**Craig:** I think it’s time for a 5, John.

**John:** Maybe, maybe.

**Craig:** No. Definitely.

**John:** If I sell. If I sell something, I’ll buy that 5.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Inaudible.

**Craig:** What are you? Are you out of money?

**John:** I’m running really low here. So if you want to chip in some inaudible I’m good.

**Craig:** “If I sell something.”

**John:** No, I’m kind of –

**Craig:** Megana is going to get to work and her desk is gone.

**John:** She can pick it up the pawnshop.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Um, sorry, I needed a PlayStation 5. Sorry, Megana.”

**John:** And that is our show for this week.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megan Rao, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin sometimes, and I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find that at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up and become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the once we’re about to record on Fame.

Hey, Craig, I made it all the way through the podcast without losing my voice and I think my voice is actually stronger now than at the start.

**Craig:** Cut to: Oh, my god.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. This article is by Chris Hayes that we’re talking about. It’s from the New Yorker. On the Internet We’re Always Famous. What Happens When the Experience of Celebrity Becomes Universal? So this touches on a bunch of things. It never uses the word parasocial, but parasocial is part of that. It’s looking at sort of how once upon a time there were famous people and not famous people, but the boundaries between them are so much blurrier now. A normal person can become Internet famous all of the sudden. Things kind of suck. Craig, what were your takeaways from this article? What were you feeling as you were reading this?

**Craig:** This was characteristically brilliant from Chris Hayes. He’s a very smart guy. And I’m particularly pleased to see this work written this way just because he’s mostly known for being a talking head on TV. And so you would think, well, the talking head on TV would probably be in favor of talking head stuff. Nothing wrong with being – he’s an excellent talking head on TV. But this is a really well done piece. And it gets to the heart of something that I think is fascinating and important and I don’t know what to do about it and I think he doesn’t know either. Because by the time you get to the end of this I was not feeling hopeful.

And what he gets to is the heart of the fame problem which is that more and more people now can be famous, whether it’s famous briefly or not. But fame, which we always wanted to be a function of recognition, that is to say wide-ranged respect and acknowledgment and like has to turned instead into attention, which is just people staring at you and talking about you. And that is very different. And that so much of the dysfunction that goes on with a lot of the people that we see who are “Internet famous” is the dysfunction of people who are desperate for recognition and receiving instead only attention.

**John:** Yeah. I’m reading a book right now by Jenny O’Dell called How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. And she writes a lot about attention and really interesting phrasing that you say you pay attention to something, and really you do have to pay attention. Attention has a cost. And you are constantly deciding where you’re going to chip in those little dimes of attention and feed those meters to pay attention to a thing. Because also anything you’re paying attention to is by definition you’re not paying attention to other things around you. And so we’ve created this system in which we are constantly being asked to focus on this thing, this person, follow these people who we don’t know in real life, and we’ve created this situation where we’re just kind of functional rather than actual active participants in our lives.

It kind of goes back to our discussion of the note cards, the index cards, because it’s like we just have – we’re these characters who have a function. We’re supposed to be watching this thing, doing this thing, responding to this thing, being outraged by this thing and not being present in the moment that we actually are living in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I have enjoyed withdrawing from that for sure. But there is an interesting aspect of let’s just call it slightly famous. You and I, whether we like it or not, are slightly famous.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And there’s something that Chris says here because he’s also – well he’s famous-famous I would think. He’s not Brad Pitt. So he says, this actually kind of shooketh me as the kids say, I was shooketh. It says, “The star and the fan are prototypes and the Internet allows us to be both in different contexts. In fact, this is the core transformative innovation of social media. The ability to be both at once. You can interact with strangers, not just view them from afar, and they can interact with you. Those of us who have a degree of fame have experienced the lack of mutuality in these relationships quite acutely. The strangeness of encountering a person who knows you, who sees you, whom you cannot see in the same way…”

And what he goes on to say is we’re conditioned as human beings to care for people who care for us. That is the sign of a relationship. But one of the things that the Internet does or being on a podcast or anything is it creates these one-way relationships. So that when you do meet people and they have a response my feeling is always, I mean, it is this weird disorientation of feeling like I should be caring as much as they do, and yet how could I, I don’t know them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I become very awkward and I guess in a sense that’s probably good news because his argument is that for a lot of people the psychological experience of fame he says “like a virus invading a cell takes all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work seeing more fame.” So that’s a terrifying thought.

**John:** It is. He also mentions that a basketball player like Kevin Durant can have an argument in DMs with just some rando. And they’re sort of on equal footing in that conversation which is just weird. It’s one thing to sort of put someone on blast in public which I think is a real problematic thing, but the fact that why are you spending your time talking to this person who you don’t know at all and there’s just a real imbalance. And it’s not necessarily in Kevin Durant’s favor for him to being that.

It is really strange. And at the same time I want to acknowledge that you and I with our little bit of fame, we know how useful it is at times. And so there have definitely been cases where like, oh, I want to ask this person to be on Scriptnotes. I know that if I follow that person on Twitter, if I were to decide to click the follow button they will get a notification that John August is following them. And they will click through and see who I am and they will probably follow me back and then I can DM them.

Is it a little bit weird? Yeah. But that’s just sort of the time that we’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like it. I don’t. I definitely want people to see the things that I make. And I like that people listen to this show. I certainly don’t hold it against anybody or blame anybody for having what Megana has introduced us to is a parasocial relationship with you or with me. But it makes me uncomfortable because I feel accountable and responsible for other people’s feelings and there’s no possible way for me to be accountable or responsible to them. It’s just I’m not equipped to do it.

And I always feel bad in a way like I’m not enough, like if I meet somebody and they feel very strongly about – because they’re a big fan of the show or something and I’m always like, oh, thank you. And I just think you’re blowing it. You’re not saying anything good.

**John:** That’s the experience of Austin Film Festival to the hundredth degree.

**Craig:** Like what I do say here to be awesome? And I don’t know.

**John:** There’s a project I’m considering taking and doing, which is fascinating. It’s this thing I would like to do on many levels, but I am always weighing like, ugh, that is going to be a news story when I do it. And I can already feel what the Internet is going to say. And that sucks that my emotional and artistic decisions are all affected by what I think the Internet is going to say about it. And that is dumb, but it is the reality.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s certainly there. It’s a fear that never used to exist. I think that there have been some nice aspects of that fear. I think it’s probably people used to cavalierly do things that maybe they, you know, after reflection perhaps I’m not the right person to be writing this story or that story. But it is a fear. I mean, look, I’m adapting The Last of Us. The videogame community is not shy. They love and hate in equal parts and with equal abandon, which the love part is the wonderful part. And of course when I was talking with Neil Druckmann about adapting the show I felt the fear of what would be some anger and judgment. No matter what you do somebody is going to not like it, of course. You try and do the best you can. But you also don’t want to keep the Internet’s emotional state as the number one thing you’re taking care of.

The number one thing you should take care of is the work. And then people hopefully will love it. So my advice to you – if you were calling into the show I would say you must do the thing you’re afraid of. You must.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because you don’t want the Internet to win. And also the most important thing is it seems worse than it is. I feel like what happens is we read things and we think that everybody out there is like Alexander Hamilton writing at night like he’s running out of time. And writing these beautiful things like I have the honor to be your obedient servant letters. But here’s why you’re awful. But in fact they’re just smashing their fingers against a keyboard, very briefly, and immediately forgetting what they wrote and did. They’re on to the next thing. It was a nothing moment for them. They did not put a lot of time and thought into it. They’re just shit-posting.

And we can’t tell the difference on our side between the shit posts and the people who legitimately are deeply and perhaps aggrieved. So I would say to you you must do it.

**John:** Yes. The cave you fear to enter holds the answers you seek.

**Craig:** Yes. All right. Megana, do you have a sense of anybody having, now that you are on the show, you talk on the show, do you feel like people have parasocial relationships with you and how do you handle – have you had some fame moments?

**Megana:** I have had people say that they have heard my voice before. But I do not feel comfortable in a role where people recognize me necessarily.

**Craig:** Join the club. I’m right there with you. Which is probably, I don’t want to make a moral judgment about it, but it does feel like seeking fame for fame sake is the sign that something is wrong.

**Megana:** Yeah. And something I’m curious to hear you guys talk about is just like as writers I think it’s so important to have a private life and your private self and to really protect that. And I think for younger writers it seems like there’s a lot of pressure to be on Twitter and to have a really recognizable brand and voice. And it’s just confusing to me how to maintain like a public self and a private self with like nuance complicated feelings that I’d like to put into art and not constantly be generating content with.

**Craig:** Well, you said an interesting thing there which is a lot of people have their own brand now. But I do feel like that is almost counter to what it means to be a writer, to make yourself the thing and not the work the thing. There are some screenwriters that come along and feel a bit branded and they don’t seem to last. The ones who do the work seem to last. And I’m always going to counsel people to put the work first. And if the Internet feels like it’s getting in the way, if social media feels like it’s getting in the way, and if you feel suddenly like you need to be a kind of a person to get noticed or to be talked about then it’s time to step away. Because nothing will matter like a good script.

**John:** Circling back to the note card conversation, we were at this class at USC and they knew who I was coming into it, but they also knew who Megana was because they listen to the show. And that’s just an interesting moment because Megana is a more public voice on the show than any of the previous producers have been and that is interesting. They knew who she was.

**Craig:** It’s the dawning of the age of Megana.

**John:** That’s really what it is.

**Megana:** Well, it’s people saying that they’ve heard my voice before, but not necessarily that they like it. And so–

**Craig:** What? No.

**Megana:** It’s like when someone is like, oh, you got a haircut. And it’s like, yes, I did. Do you feel good about it? I feel OK about it.

**Craig:** Oh, I see what you’re saying. They simply say, ah yes, you are on the show. I have heard you. And then they don’t say, “And you’re great.” Or “I love you.” But this is exactly what Chris Hayes is talking about. You didn’t ask for that.

**Megana:** Or that I’m being rewired to just seek fame.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s exactly what’s happening. People start to rewire you and you begin to try and change your, OK, give them what they want. You know? You used to cook for yourself and people just showed up and started eating what you were cooking. And then suddenly everyone was getting angry at you about the burritos. Instead they were super into whatever the soup. And you’re like why am I caring?

**John:** Yeah. And it’s the same thing with Instagram or anything where you can generate likes is like, oh, which version of me tests the best and that becomes the version you post for.

**Craig:** Oh, my sinking heart.

**Megana:** Can I propose an antidote, because this is also something that I took umbrage with earlier in the show? As a lifelong diary-keeper I think it’s a helpful way to maintain that boundary and maintain a solid public self that–

**Craig:** You’re the weirdo. You’re the one that does it. [laughs]

**Megana:** I know. You just kept going on like weird, freak, yeah.

**Craig:** Bizarre. Probably not a real person.

**John:** Well, and to be fair though there’s always been a gendered quality to diaries.

**Megana:** Today.

**John:** It’s always been a thing that girls do. And even the little gay boys like me, not all of us kept diaries.

**Craig:** Wait, is that a little gay boy thing to do is to keep a diary?

**John:** It’s a little gay boy thing to do.

**Craig:** Is it like that, oh my god, do you know what – I still sometimes will watch just when I’m feeling a little bit low and I want to smile is the Saturday Night Live commercial with the well.

**Megana:** Wells for Boys.

**Craig:** Oh my god, the Wells for Boys is so freaking great.

**John:** Ingenious.

**Craig:** It’s so good. Everything else is for you. This is for him.

**John:** Back to your diary though, because what I think I hear you saying is that lets you actually articulate your thoughts that you would not actually share publically.

**Megana:** Correct. And work out things that feel messy that I think some people who don’t have that outlet turn to Twitter for.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK, well you made an excellent point. And I would definitely say that if there’s a choice between Q-testing and perfecting your brand on Twitter to get the most hearts, which infuse no actual love into your life, or writing a diary that no one else reads but you, I strongly would say definitely go diary. So, I’m with you on that. That makes a lot of sense.

**John:** Do what Megana says.

**Megana:** I have successfully changed Craig’s mind.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Again. This season of Scriptnotes is all about Craig’s changing. I like that for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think only Megana changes me. [laughs]

**John:** True. That’s fine. Maybe that was the missing thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** She is the antagonist to your protagonist.

**Craig:** Whatever studio executive says it sounds reasonable. That’s totally reasonable. Makes sense. Yeah.

**John:** Thank you both.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scarlett Johanssen and Disney Reach Agreement](https://deadline.com/2021/09/disney-black-widow-lawsuit-scarlett-johansson-rsettlement-1234847437/)
* [CAA Acquires ICM](https://deadline.com/2021/09/caa-acquiring-icm-partners-1234844517/)
* [Academy Museum](https://www.academymuseum.org/en/) featuring [Wizard of Oz](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1443330652586143744) Script Page
* [Netflix Data Dump](https://deadline.com/2021/09/bridgerton-stranger-things-scarlett-johansson-netflix-ted-sarandos-code-conference-interview-1234845341/)
* Caroline Graham and Kylie Stevenson’s podcast [Lost in Larrimah](https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/lost-in-larrimah/id1377413462) and book, [Larrimah](https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/true-crime/Larrimah-Caroline-Graham-and-Kylie-Stevenson-9781760877835)
* [Twitter Thread by Dylan Park](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1443729354324779008.html)
* [How Blogs Broke the Web by Amy Hoy](https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/)
* [History of JohnAugust.com](https://johnaugust.com/history) and [John’s 1996 Blog](https://johnaugust.com/1996/)
* [Death Loop](https://bethesda.net/en/game/deathloop)
* [The Era of Mass Fame](https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/on-the-internet-were-always-famous) by Chris Hayes
* [Wells for Boys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BONhk-hbiXk) SNL Sketch
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Owen Danoff ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/519standard.mp3).